About the Course
This philosophical approach begins with the lived experience of actual persons who must choose, act, suffer, and find meaning.
Existentialism
Human beings make meaningful choices, but they do so within conditions they did not choose.
Freedom within Limits
Augustine’s work takes this form because he is not merely reporting facts about his life; he is examining his life before God.
CONFESSION
One form states a proposition plainly; the other uses a story, contradiction, pseudonym, or example to make the hearer personally responsible for understanding.
Direct and Indirect Communication
This is a reorientation of the whole person, not simply accepting a new idea or acquiring additional information.
Conversion
Existential thinkers study the human being as embodied, historical, relational, and personally involved, rather than as an abstract mind.
Whole Person, Concrete Person
Every human life is shaped by limitation, wrongdoing, time, and the knowledge that it will end.
Fallenness, Guilt, Death
Augustine describes the human heart as searching for fulfillment but unable to find complete satisfaction in finite goods.
RESTLESSNESS
Job’s experience challenges the assumption that suffering always corresponds directly to wrongdoing.
Innocent Suffering / Retributive explanation
Kierkegaard uses this idea for situations in which a person must commit without possessing final, detached proof or a complete guarantee.
Objective Uncertainty
This distinction asks whether a person can be completely defined in advance or instead becomes a particular self through living and choosing.
Existence and Essence
Refusing or postponing a choice does not remove accountability because delay itself becomes a way of living.
Decision and Responsibility
The problem is not always loving evil things; it can be loving a good thing in the wrong manner, order, or degree.
Desire and Disordered Love
Job’s accusations and questions may represent continued relationship with God rather than the abandonment of faith.
Lament/Protest/ Faithful honesty
These concepts describe a tension that reason cannot completely resolve and the movement into commitment that thought cannot make for the existing person.
Paradox, absurdity and the leap
This distinction warns us not to study human beings as though they were merely objects that could be fully observed and classified from the outside.
Person or Existence v Thing/Object
This describes the personal appropriation of truth within one’s own life rather than detached knowledge about it.
Inwardness
Augustine knows what he ought to do but simultaneously wants to change and wants to remain as he is.
Divided Will
God speaks to Job from the whirlwind, but God does not give Job the causal account of his suffering that the reader possesses.
Divine Response / Complete Explanation
God’s promise depends upon Isaac, yet God appears to command Abraham to sacrifice Isaac.
Abrahamic Faith and Promise / Command conflict
These four concepts help us distinguish between falsely placing a later idea into an earlier text, noting a genuine similarity, and claiming that two ideas are actually the same.
Anachronistic, Imposition, Affinity
One term names honest ownership of one’s freedom and responsibility; the other names self-deception that disguises one’s participation in a choice.
Authenticity and Bad Faith
According to Augustine, repeated choices can form patterns that eventually feel like chains restricting future choices.
Habit or Bondage
Job receives a renewed future, but the goods he receives do not erase his former losses or settle every moral question raised by the story.
Restoration or Resolution
One involves trust joined to responsibility and discernment; the other treats private certainty as authority that cannot be questioned or corrected.
Faith and Facaticism