A Critical Articulation of the Existentialists’ Conceptions of Evil and Human Suffering

Abstract

Evil and the phenomenon of suffering have been discussed from various perspectives such as the logical, evidential, Manichean, Stoic, Buddhist, and Epicurean. However, the articulation of existentialists’ perspectives on the problem of evil and suffering have not been given a serious attention. Meanwhile, various existentialists have one or two things to, which may not be immediately obvious, to say about evil and the phenomenon of suffering because evil and suffering are existential problems in that they have their manifestation in the concrete existence of human beings in the world. That is why G. A. Oshitelu contends that the problem of evil is purely an existential question. However, while recognising this, he also fails to demonstrate how this is the case. We attempt, therefore, against this background, to articulate what might be considered as the existentialists’ conceptions of evil and suffering using the method of critical analysis. Some of the existentialists whose views are analyzed here include: Soren Kierkegaard, Karl Jaspers, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger and Albert Camus. This is necessary in order to further shed scholarly light on another perspective on the problem of evil which, till date, remains an unresolved problem in metaphysics, philosophy of religion and theology.