The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling

Traditional philosophizing has generally depended upon reason as its primary access to truth. Subjective experiences such as feelings, the passions, and emotions have typically been viewed as secondary to reason, untrustworthy, or both. The Religious Existentialists and the Redemption of Feeling revisits how the movement of existentialism, via the religious existentialists, has contributed to a rethinking of the role of subjective experience, in contrast to the rationalist and idealist traditions, thus reframing the importance of feelings in general for the philosophical enterprise as a whole. Through the considerations of a variety of thinkers, this collection provides a fresh look at the contributions of twentieth-century existentialists, thereby re-contextualizing the very notion of existentialism, offering a powerful and genuine re-evaluation of the significance of subjectivity, and underscoring the continued relevance of the religious existentialists.

Table of Contents:
1.“One Who Does Not Taste Does Not Know”: Thomas Aquinas on When Affect Constitutes Knowledge of God – Stephen Chanderbhan 2.Intellectual Ascent and Experience in Dante’s Divine Comedy – Antonio Donato 3.More Than a Feeling: Kierkegaard’s Redemption of Love – Michael Strawser 4.James and Nishida: A Phenomenology of Mystical Consciousness – J. Jeremy Wisnewski 5.Nicholas Berdiaev: Towards a New Humanism, Based on a New Concept of Being Human – Emiliya Ivanova 6.Max Scheler’s Concept of Shame as a Preconceptual Revelation of the Ontological Status of the Human Person – Marc Barnes 7.The Necessity of Feeling in Unamuno and Kant: For the Tragic as for the Beautiful and Sublime – José Luis Fernández 8.The Redemption of Negative Feeling: Miguel de Unamuno – Mariana Alessandri 9.“Not a ‘Feeling’ But a Perceived Mystery”: Martin Buber and the Redemption of Feeling in I-Thou Relationships – Eugene V. Torisky Jr. 10.The Bared Self: Levinas and the Hassidic Tradition – Catherine Chalier 11.Beyond Reason: Emmanuel Levinas on Sensation, Feeling, and Morality – Randolph Wheeler 12.Does Faith Trouble Philosophy? On Franz Rosenzweig’s Method and System – Herman J. Heering 13.The Relevance of Karl Jaspers’s Philosophy Of Religion Today – Anton Hügli 14.Philosophy, Prophecy, and Existential Hope: Marcel in the Broken World of the 21st Century – Jill Hernandez 15.The Unifying Force of Emotion: Human Nature, Community and the World – Nikolaj Zunic 16.Love, Leisure, and Festivity: Josef Pieper on the Passions of Love and the Contemplation of God – Margaret I. Hughes 17.Feeling Distant, Feeling Divine: The Transformative Import of Differences in Nietzsche and Irigaray – James Abordo Ong

About the Author :
Anthony Malagon is post-doctoral fellow at the Dominican Studies Institute (CCNY). Abi Doukhan is associate professor of philosophy at Queens College (CUNY).

Review :
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 the key existentialist theme of the relationship between emotion, thought, and experience.