Spiritual existentialism: a hope for the 21st century
From the philosophy of the person to concrete engagement: pathways of spiritual resistance in the face of our era's ecological, social, and ethical crises.
This article is the author’s own translation of the original French version.
The diagnosis of an era seeking meaning
Our era is characterized by a dizzying contradiction: never has humanity possessed so many technical means to transform the world, and yet never has it felt so powerless in the face of the existential threats weighing upon it — climate disruption, biodiversity collapse, resurgence of totalitarianisms, dissolution of communal bonds, collective spiritual exhaustion. Instrumental reason, which was supposed to emancipate us, seems to have generated new forms of enslavement: contemporary individuals find themselves reduced to an algorithmic profile, an economic function, a standardized consumer.
This crisis is not merely material or political; it is profoundly spiritual and existential. It reveals the failure of the great modern narratives — indefinite progress, perpetual economic growth, blind faith in technology — to give authentic meaning to human existence. In this context of disenchantment and disorientation, spiritual existentialism emerges not as a systematic doctrine to be passively adopted, but as an existential posture capable of answering the most urgent questions of our time: how do we authentically inhabit our finitude? How do we preserve the irreducible dignity of the person in the face of forces of massification? How do we articulate inner freedom and collective responsibility? How do we recover a living relationship with transcendence without sacrificing critical thinking?
The timeless foundations of a philosophy of embodied existence
Spiritual existentialism has its roots in a philosophical and theological tradition spanning the centuries, from Job crying out his revolt against divine injustice to Kierkegaard asserting that “subjectivity is truth,” through Dostoevsky exploring the abysses of human freedom and Orthodox mystics celebrating cosmic transfiguration. This current immediately rejects any reduction of human existence to abstract categories, biological or sociological determinisms, philosophical systems claiming to exhaustively explain the mystery of being.
At the heart of this thought lies a fundamental conviction: existence precedes essence. This formula, far from being a mere intellectual provocation, means that human beings are not first and foremost a predetermined nature, an assigned social function, a destiny written in advance. They are a perpetual project, freedom in action, infinite responsibility that discovers itself progressively through choices and commitments. Unlike a manufactured object whose essence precedes existence — the knife exists first as the idea of “cutting” before being fabricated — humans exist first in the world, then progressively define themselves through their acts.
This existential freedom is not a comfortable blessing but an overwhelming condemnation, as Sartre affirms: “Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does.” Anguish arises precisely from this consciousness of our radical freedom: faced with the infinity of possibilities, no determinism can excuse me, no given nature can justify me. But this anguish, so well explored by Kierkegaard, far from being a pathology to cure, constitutes the very signal of our access to authenticity, the proof that we are capable of transforming ourselves, of rectifying our trajectory, of becoming otherwise.
Spiritual existentialism, however, distinguishes itself radically from atheistic existentialism by affirming that this freedom does not float in the void of an absurd and indifferent universe. It is rooted in a living relationship with transcendence — whether it be named G-d, the Absolute, the Mystery of the Living, or simply recognized as that dimension of depth that infinitely exceeds our rational categories. Kierkegaard expresses this magnificently with his concept of the “leap of faith“: a total existential commitment to what transcends reason, not through blind irrationality, but through lucid recognition that ultimate truth cannot be grasped by conceptual intelligence alone.
What spiritual existentialism teaches us
The absolute primacy of the person over systems
Spiritual existentialism tirelessly proclaims the irreducible dignity of each concrete person against all abstractions claiming to subsume them — whether in the name of eternal Truth, historical Progress, the Nation, the Market, or any collective Cause whatsoever. This conviction is born from a profound existential experience: singular suffering, ineluctable death, personal anguish cannot be “explained” or “justified” by any rational system. As Ivan Karamazov cries out in Dostoevsky: “If the sufferings of children have served to complete the sum of sufferings necessary for the acquisition of truth, I affirm in advance that this truth is not worth such a price.”
Nicolas Berdyaev develops this intuition by radically distinguishing the person (lichnost) from the individual. The individual is a biological and sociological category: the atomic unit, the specimen of a species, the number in a series. The person, on the contrary, is a unique spiritual reality, irreplaceable, bearer of a singular creative vocation that places them in direct relation with the absolute. Modern civilization — whether capitalist or totalitarian — tends to reduce humans to individuals, that is to say, to a function, a cog in the economic or political machine. This objectification constitutes the fundamental form of contemporary slavery.
For spiritual existentialism, no external authority — State, Church, Party, Corporation — can substitute itself for personal conscience in its relationship to the absolute. Leon Chestov writes forcefully: “No one but oneself can hold one’s own keys. And use them. In this matter, heads of Churches and States often prove to be sad and bad counterfeiters.” This affirmation possesses prophetic resonance in our era when algorithms claim to know our desires better than we ourselves do, when political and religious institutions arrogate to themselves the monopoly of truth, when technocratic experts decide what is good for the masses.
The struggle against objectification and massification
Berdyaev introduces a crucial distinction between spirit (dukh) and objectification (obiektivatsiia). Spirit designates living, creative, free personal reality that relates directly to the absolute. Objectification designates the process by which this spiritual reality becomes fixed, crystallizes into objects, institutions, dead concepts. Every human creation — intellectual, artistic, social, religious — undergoes this tendency toward objectification: living spiritual intuitions transform into rigid dogmas, impulses of creative freedom fossilize into oppressive institutions, persons become interchangeable social functions.
This objectification represents a form of permanent “fall,” a process of alienation constantly at work in our societies. The task of the spiritual person consists precisely in struggling against this petrification, in keeping alive the flame of spirit against forces of uniformization and standardization. It is an endless combat, for objectification is constantly reborn, but it is precisely in this combat that existential authenticity is forged.
Kierkegaard had already diagnosed this phenomenon when he wrote: “The crowd is untruth.” The institutional Church of his era had transformed authentic Christianity — risky personal commitment, direct relationship with Christ, faith lived in trembling — into a comfortable mass religion where everyone is automatically Christian by the simple fact of being a citizen. This critique applies mutatis mutandis to all contemporary forms of massification: social networks that transform singularities into standardized profiles, political ideologies that reduce human complexity to binary slogans, intellectual fashions that impose the conformism of groupthink.
Subjectivity as existential truth
One of the major contributions of spiritual existentialism lies in its rehabilitation of subjectivity against the pretension of rational objectivity to hold a monopoly on truth. Kierkegaard’s formula “truth is subjectivity“ has often been caricatured as nihilistic relativism. But it is something altogether different: Kierkegaard does not deny the existence of objective truths in the scientific domain (laws of physics, mathematical theorems), but he affirms that in existential domains — the meaning of life, ethical commitment, religious faith — a truth has value only if it is passionately appropriated by an individual, if it becomes the foundation of their way of being in the world.
A luminous example: a pagan who prays to his idol with all the passion of his soul, with total commitment of his being, is closer to truth than an orthodox Christian who mechanically recites prayers out of institutional habit. The difference does not reside in doctrinal content but in the degree of existential appropriation, of lived incarnation. This perspective revolutionizes our relationship to knowledge: it is not enough to accumulate information about G-d, about goodness, about justice; one must become what one claims to know.
This existential subjectivity is not volatile sentimentalism or complacent narcissism. It is passion — in the Kierkegaardian sense of infinite interest in one’s own existence, total commitment that puts at stake the integrity of the person. It is the difference between knowing the map of a territory and exploring it oneself, step by step, in the flesh of lived experience.
Creative freedom against the dictatorship of evidences
Russian existentialism, particularly in Leon Chestov, develops a radical critique of what he names “the dictatorship of reason.” For Chestov, the original Fall does not consist in the disobedience of Adam and Eve but in the fact that they chose the tree of knowledge of good and evil to the detriment of the tree of life. Eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge means accepting to submit existence to the eternal principles of reason, to laws of necessity, to the logical order of constraining evidences.
Since this Fall, humanity has lived under the reign of “one must,” of “it is necessary,” of “it is impossible.” We have internalized this servitude to the point of no longer even recognizing it as servitude: we call “wisdom” this submission to rational order. Chestov opposes to this tyranny of reason creative freedom: an ontological power that can radically transform the very nature of the real, undo the past, resurrect the dead, render non-occurred what has occurred.
This conception seems delirious from the rational point of view — and it fully assumes this. But for Chestov, asking the question “how could one undo the past?” already means submitting oneself to reason. Authentic faith does not ask “how,” it affirms: “With G-d, all things are possible.” Benjamin Fondane, disciple of Chestov, writes magnificently: “Well, yes, Chestov glories in being absurd — that goes without saying; and what if the absurd were the only way to find?“
This critique of reason possesses burning actuality in our era when techno-scientific rationality claims to reduce the real to what is measurable, calculable, controllable. It reminds us that there exist dimensions of human existence — suffering, love, death, hope, artistic creation, mystical experience — that irreducibly escape rationalization.
These philosophical teachings, far from being pure speculative abstractions, find their true scope in the responses they allow us to elaborate in the face of the concrete crises of our era.
Existential responses to contemporary crises
Facing the ecological crisis: an embodied spirituality of transfiguration
The contemporary ecological crisis reveals the failure of an instrumental conception of nature that reduces the living world to a reservoir of exploitable resources. Spiritual existentialism, particularly in its sophiological dimension inherited from Vladimir Solovyov, proposes a radical alternative. Solovyov’s vision of Sophia — divine Wisdom as the soul of the world, living link between creator and creation — affirms that the entire cosmos is called to theosis, to divinization, to transfiguration.
This perspective implies that matter itself is not inert, dead, separated from the divine, but that it participates in the spiritual mystery. An embodied existential spirituality does not consist in fleeing the world to take refuge in a pure disembodied spirit, but in recognizing that transcendence expresses itself through creation, that each element of the living carries within it a divine spark. As the Hasidic tradition often evoked in this publication affirms: “There is not an atom of reality that does not contain the divine presence.”
This vision sacralizes the world without however sacralizing its exploitation. On the contrary, it calls for radical ethical responsibility: if the world is a bearer of the divine, then its destruction constitutes a profanation. The creative freedom of which Chestov speaks does not signify technocratic domination of nature but conscious participation in the work of cosmic transfiguration.
Facing the dissolution of bonds: communitarian personalism
Modern liberal individualism has atomized human communities, reducing interpersonal relations to contracts of mutual interest or superficial digital interactions. Simultaneously, collectivist movements — whether nationalist or neo-totalitarian — dissolve the person in the mass, sacrificing singularities on the altar of a fantasized collective identity.
Spiritual existentialism proposes a third way: a communitarian personalism that articulates the affirmation of the irreducible dignity of each person with the recognition of our constitutive interdependence. Paul Ricœur develops this perspective by affirming that our shared fragility, our common mortality, founds a radical equality and a responsibility toward the other that cannot be dissociated from responsibility toward oneself.
Berdyaev insists on the fact that the person cannot flourish in solipsistic isolation but only in communion with other persons, in an authentic spiritual community that respects the singularity of each. This communion is not undifferentiated fusion but mutual recognition of creative freedoms. It requires what Martin Buber names the “I-Thou” relationship — not the instrumental use of the other as means (I-It), but the dialogical encounter where each person recognizes in the other an irreducible presence.
In the era of social networks that transform human relations into quantifiable social capital, this personalist vision recalls that the authenticity of bonds is measured neither in number of “followers” nor in frequency of interactions, but in the depth of mutual presence, in the capacity to see and honor the irreducible singularity of the other.
Facing contemporary nihilism: an eschatology of hope
Contemporary nihilism does not always manifest itself as a conscious and proclaimed despair but more insidiously as a generalized loss of meaning, a diffuse sentiment that nothing is really worthwhile, that all values are equivalent or arbitrary. This passive nihilism feeds on the collapse of the great modern narratives and the revelation of their intrinsic violence: Progress engendered Auschwitz and Hiroshima, Reason legitimized colonization and exploitation, emancipatory ideologies produced the gulags.
Spiritual existentialism refuses both nihilism and attempts to authoritatively restore fixed values. It proposes an existential way: meaning is not given to us from the outside — neither by a providential Nature, nor by a teleological History, nor by an imposed Revelation — but it emerges from our free and responsible engagement in the world. As Sartre affirms, “man is the being through whom meaning comes into the world.”
But contrary to Camus’s nihilism which affirms that we must “imagine Sisyphus happy” by accepting the definitive absurdity of existence, spiritual existentialism maintains an eschatological dimension, a hope that human history is not an eternal recommencement devoid of finality but a drama tending toward transfiguration. This hope is not an easy consolation that would deny present suffering but an affirmation that the last word belongs neither to evil, nor to death, nor to the absurd.
Facing the technologization of existence: the affirmation of the unobjectifiable
Contemporary techno-digital civilization progressively submits all dimensions of human existence to the logic of optimization, measurement, control. The body becomes a set of biological parameters to monitor and improve. Emotions are quantified and monitored by “wellness” applications. Social relations are mediated by algorithms that determine what we will see, whom we will meet, what we will think. The human itself becomes a set of exploitable data.
Spiritual existentialism opposes to this totalizing objectification the affirmation of the unobjectifiable: there exists a dimension of the human person that irreducibly escapes all attempts at reduction, measurement, control. This dimension — which Berdyaev names spirit, which Kierkegaard names passionate subjectivity, which Chestov names creative freedom — constitutes precisely what makes us persons and not things.
Recognizing this unobjectifiability implies refusing the transhumanist fantasy of an “augmented” human who would be improved by fusion with technology. Not that all technology is bad in itself, but because the essence of the human does not reside in measurable functional capacities (physical strength, calculation speed, memory) but in the capacity to freely relate to meaning, to create, to love, to suffer, to hope — dimensions that escape technocratic logic.
Toward an existential spirituality for the 21st century
A spirituality of choice and commitment
Spiritual existentialism calls for a spirituality that is neither passive inheritance of an imposed tradition nor conformist adherence to an intellectual fashion, but free and risky personal appropriation. In an era when religious identities are increasingly chosen rather than inherited, this perspective takes on particular actuality: it is no longer a matter of being Christian, Muslim, Jewish, or Buddhist by simple family or cultural belonging, but of existentially committing oneself to a spiritual path because it resonates with our deepest experience, because it helps us become more authentically ourselves.
This existential spirituality implies what Kierkegaard names “becoming Christian” (or spiritual becoming, to broaden beyond Christianity): a never-completed process where the person progressively appropriates spiritual truths, transforms them into effective modes of being. One is never “Christian” in the sense of a fixed identity that one could exhibit; one is always in the process of becoming so, in a permanent tension between what one is and what one is called to be.
A spirituality of creative uprooting
Paradoxically, spiritual existentialism affirms that uprooting — tearing away from comfortable certainties, inherited evidences, firm lands of rational knowledge — can become the very condition of a deeper rooting. Chestov writes: “Authentic philosophy begins precisely with uprooting, with the voluntary suspension of all belief in the established order.”
This uprooting is not a nihilistic wandering without compass but an active availability to revelation, an openness to what exceeds our pre-established conceptual frameworks. In a world in accelerated mutation where old certainties collapse — whether traditional religious certainties or secular certainties of modernity — this capacity to “hold in uprooting” without sinking into despair becomes an essential spiritual competence.
My journey of spiritual nomadism actually embodies this spirituality of creative uprooting: I have traveled through multiple traditions (Judaism, Christianity, Sufi Islam, Buddhism, etc.), never enclosing myself in any fixed confessional identity, but drawing from these diverse sources to construct my own path as a spiritual seeker. This approach is not superficial syncretism but recognition that spiritual truth always exceeds the particular formulations given by historical traditions.
A spirituality of presence and action
Spiritual existentialism refuses the dichotomy between contemplation and action, between inner life and engagement in the world. It calls for an embodied spirituality where transcendence is not sought in flight from the world but in the very heart of ordinary existence, transformed by intention, love, attention.
The Hasidic tradition, which I frequently claim, expresses this vision magnificently: sanctifying the everyday (kadosh), recognizing the divine presence in each gesture, each relationship, each ordinary moment. Eating, working, loving, creating — all these acts can become manifestations of spiritual life if we accomplish them with consciousness, with total presence, with the intention of participating in the transfiguration of the world.
This spirituality also implies ethical and political engagement. One cannot call oneself spiritual while remaining indifferent to social injustice, ecological destruction, oppression of the most vulnerable. Paul Ricœur affirms that ethics precedes morality: before asking “what are my duties?” one must ask “what life do I aim for? toward what good do I orient myself?” And this ethical aim necessarily implies responsibility toward others, particularly toward the most fragile.
A spirituality of tragic joy
Spiritual existentialism does not promise easy happiness nor beatific serenity. It fully recognizes the tragic dimension of existence: suffering, death, injustice, the absurd are insurmountable realities. But it affirms that in the very heart of this tragic condition can be born a form of profound joy — not despite tragedy, but through it.
This joy does not result from ignorance or denial of suffering but from lucid acceptance of our finite condition associated with the affirmation that this life, despite everything, is worth living, celebrating, offering. Nietzsche spoke of amor fati (love of fate), but spiritual existentialism goes further: it affirms that authentic faith can transform fate itself, that nothing is definitively lost as long as G-d remains possible.
When I propose, in the presentation of these Dialogues of the New World: “Together, let us build a more habitable and joyful future,” I express precisely this fecund tension between lucid realism (the current world is not “habitable” for many) and active hope (we can transform this situation). The joy of which I speak is not escapism but spiritual resistance, affirmation of life against all forces of death.
Conclusion: embodied hope as an act of resistance
Spiritual existentialism proposes to the 21st century not a closed philosophical system to be dogmatically accepted but an existential posture, an art of living that articulates lucidity and hope, radical critique and creative affirmation. In an era when old certainties collapse and when new idols (the Market, Technology, the Security State) claim to occupy the void left by the withdrawal of the divine, this philosophy reminds us of fundamental truths.
First, no human person can be sacrificed on the altar of an abstraction, whatever it may be. Each singular existence possesses absolute dignity that transcends all utilitarian calculations, all ideological rationalizations. In a world that reduces humans to statistics — migrants drowned in the Mediterranean, civilian victims of bombardments, precarious workers — this affirmation possesses prophetic force.
Second, authentic freedom requires the courage of uncertainty. Faced with authoritarian temptations that promise security and simplicity in exchange for submission, spiritual existentialism affirms that it is better to live in the anguish of freedom than in the comfort of slavery. This freedom does not mean doing anything whatsoever but fully assuming responsibility for our choices, recognizing that we are co-creators of the world we inhabit.
Third, transcendence does not distance us from the world but engages us more deeply in it. An authentic spirituality does not flee the urgencies of the present to take refuge in a consoling beyond but finds in its relationship to the absolute the strength to transform the here and now. As I have already written: it is a matter of “contributing to the respiritualization of the world and to the elevation of the ethical level of populations.”
Finally, hope is not naive optimism but existential decision. Faced with announced catastrophes — ecological, social, spiritual — it would be “rational” to despair. But authentic hope is not a calculation of probabilities; it is an act of faith that affirms that the impossible remains possible, that the last word does not belong to forces of destruction, that life can reflourish where death reigned.
Spiritual existentialism thus invites us to become authentic persons: neither atomized individuals subjected to the determinisms of market and technology, nor undifferentiated masses manipulated by ideologies, but free and responsible subjects who dare to think for themselves, love with all their being, create the new, resist forces of oppression, hope against all hope.
In a century that promises to be difficult and decisive for the future of humanity, this philosophy of embodied existence, far from being an intellectual luxury reserved for a few privileged, perhaps constitutes the most precious spiritual resource we possess to avoid sinking into resignation or despair, but to continue building, “together, a more habitable and joyful world.”
Jérôme Nathanaël
© 2026 - Dialogues of the New World by Jérôme Nathanaël
To Go Further:
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
Danish philosopher and theologian, father of existentialism, who placed passionate subjectivity and “becoming Christian” at the heart of his reflection against the Hegelian system and the institutional Christianity of his era.
Major Works:
Fear and Trembling (1843)
The Concept of Anxiety (1844)
Either/Or (1843)
Philosophical Fragments (1844)
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846)
Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821-1881)
Russian novelist whose works constitute veritable philosophical laboratories exploring radical freedom, the problem of evil, innocent suffering, and the encounter with the living Christ.
Major Works:
Crime and Punishment (1866)
The Idiot (1869)
Demons (also The Possessed, 1872)
The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
Notes from Underground (1864)
Vladimir Solovyov (1853-1900)
Russian philosopher, theologian, and poet, founder of sophiology and theandrism, who developed a mystical vision of divine Wisdom (Sophia) as the living link between God and His creation.
Major Works:
Russia and the Universal Church (1889)
The Spiritual Foundations of Life (1882-1884)
The Justification of the Good (1897)
Three Conversations on War, Progress, and the End of World History (1900)
Lev Shestov (1866-1938)
Russian existentialist philosopher in exile in Paris, prophet of the struggle against “the dictatorship of reason” and defender of absolute creative freedom against the constraining evidences of logic.
Major Works:
The Apotheosis of Groundlessness (1905)
Athens and Jerusalem (1938)
Potestas Clavium (The Power of the Keys, 1923)
Kierkegaard and Existential Philosophy (1936)
In Job’s Balances (1929)
Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948)
Russian Orthodox philosopher exiled in Paris, thinker of the person and freedom, who developed an existential personalism radically opposing creative spirit to forces of objectification and massification.
Major Works:
Slavery and Freedom (1939)
The Beginning and the End (1947)
Spirit and Reality (1927-1928)
The Meaning of the Creative Act (1916)
Dream and Reality: An Essay in Autobiography (1949)
Martin Buber (1878-1965)
Austro-Israeli Jewish philosopher and theologian, thinker of authentic dialogue, who developed the distinction between the “I-Thou” relationship (dialogical encounter where the other is recognized as presence) and the “I-It” relationship (instrumental use of the other as object).
Major Works:
I and Thou (Ich und Du, 1923)
The Way of Man (1948)
The Legend of the Baal-Shem (1908)
Tales of the Hasidim (1906-1928)
Eclipse of God (1952)
For the Sake of Heaven (originally Gog and Magog, 1941)
Benjamin Fondane (1898-1944)
Romanian poet and philosopher of Jewish origin, established in Paris, disciple of Chestov, who developed a tragic existential philosophy refusing all rational consolation. Murdered at Auschwitz in October 1944.
Major Works:
Unhappy Consciousness (La Conscience malheureuse, 1936)
Existential Monday and the Sunday of History (posthumous, 1945)
Baudelaire and the Experience of the Abyss (posthumous, 1947)
Ulysses (poem, 1933)
Exodus (poem, posthumous)
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
French philosopher and writer, major figure of atheistic existentialism, who affirmed that “existence precedes essence” and that man is “condemned to be free,” radically responsible for his choices.
Major Works:
Being and Nothingness (1943)
Existentialism Is a Humanism (1946)
No Exit (theater, 1944)
Nausea (novel, 1938)
Dirty Hands (theater, 1948)
Albert Camus (1913-1960)
French writer and philosopher of the absurd, who explored the human condition confronted with the absence of meaning while refusing suicide and affirming lucid revolt and solidarity.
Major Works:
The Myth of Sisyphus (1942)
The Stranger (novel, 1942)
The Plague (novel, 1947)
The Rebel (1951)
Nuptials (1939)
Paul Ricœur (1913-2005)
French philosopher of hermeneutics and personalism, who developed a thought of the person articulating narrative identity, ethical responsibility, and recognition of the other in their constitutive fragility.
Major Works:
Oneself as Another (1990)
Freedom and Nature: The Voluntary and the Involuntary (1950-1960)
Time and Narrative (3 volumes, 1983-1985)
The Course of Recognition (2004)
The Just (1995)
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