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Noreen Khawaja The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017). Pp. xi + 312. £31.30 (Hbk). ISBN 9780226404516.
The evident fact that ‘Existentialism’ is no longer de rigeur makes Noreen Khawaja's book both a timely remembrance and, perhaps strangely, an important counter-cultural contribution to contemporary philosophy of religion. The wane of Existentialism (if it ever even existed) also marks a lamentable forgetting of key concerns about personal authenticity that seem curiously low on the agenda for our age of apparent self-obsession and self-commercialization. It is especially poignant, in light of this, that Khawaja's outstanding rehabilitation of existentialist thinking appeals, not to the future, but to the past: namely, the venerable philosophical and religious tradition of askesis, or ‘exercise’. Khawaja's book deftly elucidates how, in the hands of existentialists (especially Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Sartre), askesis is translated into the modern idiom of ‘existential authenticity’, or ‘a way of working on the self’ (p. 25).
The Religion of Existence is certainly not a manifesto on the contemporary importance of existentialism. It is in many respects a narrative that retells the story of existentialist philosophy and theology with beauty and refinement. Along the way, the story encompasses the demands of humanism and misanthropy, religion and atheism, exposing many such dichotomies as false and misconstrued. Through its broad yet penetrating lens, existentialism is aptly designated as ‘a tradition, not a movement’ (p. 4). This lack of a ubiquitous ‘essence’ is ultimately the empty eye of the storm around which existentialist thought rages. This raging of thought is stimulated, in part, by the modest renaissance of Kierkegaard's thought following the First World War. Feeding on Kierkegaard's ideals, existentialist tradition is confronted immediately by the Christian piety and passion of its forefather. The question of how to integrate or disentangle itself from the ‘shared semantic horizon’ of Christianity (p. 7) becomes a central concern of existentialists and the immediate focus of Khawaja's critical narrative. Implicit roots of the ‘existential’ are uncovered in Pietistic notions of ‘conversion’: an inflamed concern with the possibility of dynamically changing identity from which existential tradition cannot uproot itself. As such, Khawaja convincingly posits, there is a ‘feel of religion’ even at the most...