Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon logic or reason as its primary or sole access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary, untrustworthy, or both. They have, at best, been seen as accompanying reason, at worse, as clouding our judgments and misleading reason, thus often becoming unworthy of any significant role or consideration within traditional philosophical research. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, specifically, the religious existentialists, has contributed to rethinking the role of subjective experience for philosophical enterprise as a whole, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions. This rethinking of subjective experience is what the book characterizes as the redemption of feeling. Expanding our understanding of philosophical thought to include these subjective experiences opens the door for the possibility of a mode of philosophizing that views human experience as philosophically relevant, thus reframing the importance of feelings in general for philosophical inquiry. Through their considerations of a variety of thinkers, the contributors to this collection provide a fresh look at the contributions of twentieth-century existentialists, a rethinking of the very notion of existentialism, and a genuine exploration of the significance of subjectivity.

The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling is itself a kind of redemption: a redemption of an important part of the existentialist movement that has been somewhat neglected in recent years. This very well written and in-depth collection of essays takes us back to medieval roots, through Kierkegaard, and on to an impressively wide and cosmopolitan variety of thinkers from the past century and a half-- Marcel, Unamuno, Berdiaev, Rosenzweig, Jaspers, Buber, and many more. There are seventeen chapters in all, making for an extremely fruitful read., It is high time the religious existentialists received the recognition they deserve for their profound insights into the existential nature of human experience. This book provides a much needed corrective to their neglect in the movement, which is often mistakenly defined by the pessimism of Sartre. As the contributors to this volume expertly reveal, we have much to learn from thinkers such as Kierkegaard, Marcel, Scheler, Unamuno, Buber, Levinas, Jaspers, Irigaray, and others, on such defining human concerns as shame, hope and love, religious affirmation, authentic existence, and on the key existentialist theme of the relationship between emotion, thought and experience.

Anthony Malagon teaches in the Department of Philosophy at Queens College (CUNY).Abi Doukhan is associate professor of philosophy at Queens College (CUNY).