현대 청년의 ‘불안’에 대응 가능한 ‘용기’의 형태 고찰－ 폴 틸리히의  『존재의 용기』 를 중심으로

Abstract

This article contemplates courage that youth in our times can have against anxiety in life. According to Paul Tillich, anxiety sweeping around modern times is the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness. Tillich viewed that it is mental instability, and that its fundamental cause is the loss of God. Accordingly, courage to cope with the anxiety of meaninglessness is not one derived from oneself alone, but one rooted in transcendental existence, that is, God. It is courage of a religious dimension, and, in other word, it is faith. It is difficult for youth in our times to have faith in the existing traditional form. Because modern people were baptized with Descartes’ cogito, Kant’s unknowable things-in-themselves, the nihility and despair of modernity, and atheistic thinking, and youth of these days are under the baptism of postmodernism. In this context, Tillich does not propose the essentialist form of faith prevalent in the Middle Ages. Rather, he opens the way for having faith in the midst of existential anxiety, by taking over the heritage of modern and contemporary existentialism actively. Theoretical grounds for this were secured from his ontological system, that is, the composition of being, nonbeing, and being-itself. And the possibility of applying it practically to existence is explored in his work, The Courage to Be. This article gropes for the form and possibility of courage that we can have against the anxiety of meaninglessness in our times, with The Courage to Be as the main text.