character of a human reason which fractures itself when it seeks for a
rational unification of the conditions of experience, we see the inaugura-
tion of a philosophy of finitude. It was not, however, until the advent of
existentialism that this philosophy of finitude found its deliberate and
disciplined expression. Existential thinking as a concrete way of life can
certainly be found in ancient and patristic philosophy--Socrates and
Augustine are cases in point. But existentialism as a distinctive philo-
sophical movement first received its impetus through the reflections and
formulations of the early anti-Hegelians--Kierkegaard, Marx, and Feuer-
bach--who lived and wrote during the first part of the nineteenth cen-
tury. Protesting against the vicious abstraction of reason from existence
in Hegel's rationalism and essentialism, Kierkegaard, Marx, and Feuer-
bach staged a timely return to the realities of lived experience. Hegel had
proclaimed that the rational is the real and the real the rational.The
counter-claim of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Feuerbach was that there is a
qualitative disjunction between thought and reality, between essence and
existence. For all that Hegel had to say about the logical and necessary
mediation of opposites, the fact remained for these anti-Hegelians that
thought and reality had not come together and that existence was still
estranged from essence. Kierkegaard grasped this existential truth most
clearly in his examination of man's concrete ethico-religious existence, in
which he found a continuing estrangement of the self from itself and
from God. Marx expressed the disjunction of thought and reality, and
essence and existence, in another domain-man's concrete socio-eco-
nomic existence. Marx argued that in Hegel's dialectical interpretation
of history the reconciliation of particular existence and universal free-
dom was a reconciliation in thought only; and it was a reconciliation
through which Hegel succeeded in placing himself outside of history
itself. In history as Marx understood it, socio-economic classes warred
against each other, capitalists depersonalized workers, and creative artists
were transformed into paid laborers. And as Kierkegaard elucidated
man's experience of finitude and estrangement in ethico-religious exist-
ence and Marx in the socio-economic sphere, so Feuerbach sought for an
elucidation of man in concrete sensory-biological existence. It was Feuer-
bach who penned the words: "Do not wish to be a philosopher in con-
trast to being a man." Thought, insisted Feuerbach, can never be
dissociated from the concrete thinker who apprehends himself in the
movements of his immediate bodily existence.
The existential reflections of Kierkegaard, Marx, and Feuerbach,

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