ANtedating of "Existentialist"

[Fred Shapiro]

existentialist (OED 1945)

1927 _Proceedings of the Sixth International Congress of Philosophy_ 659
When Professor Ortega pleads like Nietzsche for the autonomy of vital
values, and inserts them in the hierarchy of being, he not only places
himself in a perspectivist attitude, as Curtius has called it, but in an
existentialist, in the sense which the term derives from the historical
distinction between temporal existence and eternal essence; that is to
say, he wishes each hour to live its life with the fullness that makes of
it a distinct, culminating moment in the flow of existence, and to be
understood as its vital and circumstantial essence demands; to sacrifice
the vital to the rational is Byzantinism.

Fred Shapiro


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