What is particularly interesting about that perennially interesting play is that it does not simply present meaninglessness – it is not absurdist drama. Vladimir says “Suppose we repented.” Estragon’s reply is, “Repented what? Our being born?” The problematic nature of death is also remote for both characters, who on the contrary consider hanging themselves to escape life. As for guilt, contemporary people tend to side with Estragon in Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play Waiting for Godot (another sixties favorite). Finally, Tillich says, the modern period shifts to an emphasis on the question of meaning: ‘What’s it all about?’ Endless life is of little interest if we don’t know what to do with it. Later disputes during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation really got into this theme, under the category of an individual’s ‘justification’. Christianity then deepened the human sense of self and individual responsibility, and by the Middle Ages the focus had shifted to an emphasis on sin and guilt and the avoidance of eternal punishment. The first anxiety, he says, was about death – represented by the detached Stoic and in the more dramatic Christian ways of coming to terms with the Grim Reaper.

Paul Tillich’s popular sixties classic The Courage To Be describes the spiritual quest of the West unfolding historically in three stages of ‘existential anxiety’. Roger Duncan looks at the nature of master-slave relationships in Hegel’s thought. Hegel (1770-1831) had a grand, overarching theory of how history unfolds.

Hegelian dialectic slave