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Existentialism, unlike traditional philosophies, does not try to think its way above or beyond man's subjective moods—it glorifies them. Fear and trembling, guilt and death, are valued by existentialists as concomitants of man's encounter with the void around him and his necessary decision to walk forward in the darkness. For existentialism, in spite of all its talk, is a philosophy of action; words by themselves do not count. "One who murmurs in his beer, 'I wish I were dead,' " writes Michalson, "would only be really existing if he were at that moment quaffing poison." Kierkegaard, says Yale's Niebuhr, was much like his hero Socrates, "whose wisdom consisted in the knowledge of his ignorance, whose imperative was 'know thyself,' whose philosophy of life was 'reduplicated in his living and his dying, who was a comic and tragic figure, who was the father of philosophers but the father of no philosophy." Kierkegaard attacked the Christianity of his time devastatingly for standing between the individual and Christ. True Christianity he saw as "a becoming, not being ... To believe is not to be a believer, but to become a believer in every moment, without confidence in the soul's power to believe, but only with confidence now that tomorrow God will give it faith as a wholly new and wonderful act of grace."
"Dangerously irreligious." For Spanish Philosopher Miguel de Unamuno, who died in 1936 at the age of 72, life's true meaning lay in what he called "agonic struggle." His religion, he once said, "is to struggle with God." And he carried on the struggle in a setting of "transcendental pessimism." Man's heart craves God and immortality, he held, but his intellect can never prove their existence. Therefore, "let life be lived in such a way," Princeton's Mackay paraphrases him, "with such dedication to goodness and the highest values that if, after all, it is annihilation which finally awaits us, that will be an injustice."
Harvard's Tillich sees existentialism in three aspects. In part it is "an element in all important human thinking ... the attempt of man to describe his existence and its conflicts, the origin of these conflicts, and the anticipations of overcoming them; it is also a revolt against 19th century industrial society, against the world view in which man is nothing but a piece of an all-embracing mechanical reality"—physical, economic, sociological or psychological. The third aspect of existentialism, says Tillich, is the universal plaint of sensitive human beings in the 20th century. "It became the subject matter of some great philosophers ... of poets . . . like Eliot and Auden ... It was expressed especially powerfully in the novel." And, Tillich adds, at least as much in painting.