Page History

...

This means, then, that all three of these modern world views – --  existentialism no less than naturalism and idealism(-humanism) -- have one and the same "common basis," which they necessarily presuppose. This basis is constituted by, "in the first place, the world picture formed by modern natural science and, in the second place, our own self-understanding, according to which we each tmderstand understand our self to be a closed inner unity that is not open to the interference of supernatural powers" (6). Consequently, one need not be either a naturalist or an idealist(-humanist) in order to have a distinctively modern world view that presupposes both the world picture of modern science and the invulnerability of human existence to supernatural interventions. One can just as well be an existentialist and still make both of the same presuppositions.

Moreover, one presumably has good reason, in Bultmann's view, to prefer existentialism to both of its modern alternatives. It is, to a greater degree than either of them, "legitimate," and thus "right," if not also "true," by the criterion that "[a] _ 'Weltanschauung' _ . . . is the more legitimated the more it expresses the historicity of the human being" (History and Eschatology: 148 f.).

...