The purpose of this paper is to offer a brief description of Existenz-philosophie as it appears in the work of three men—Kierkegaard, Heidegger, and Jaspers—and to make a few critical comments. One special obstacle should be noted at the start. A summary always misses the particular shades of meaning which an author brings out as he develops his theme in his own words, and in this philosophy it is the special nuances which are particularly important. Existenz is in fact as much like poetry as it is like philosophy, and a large part of its flavor is lost when it is translated into plodding prose. It makes less, that is to say, of the appeal to objective, verifiable truth than of subjective experience in its individual aspect. So far as it makes use of universal, communicable forms these are aesthetic rather than intellectual, and resemble more nearly the imaginative projections of a Schopenhauer or a Nietzsche than the logical essences of, say, a Plato. This appears to be true even in Heidegger's case in spite of the fact that he inherited from his master, Husserl, an interest in the bracketed, “reduced” logical essence which is reminiscent of the Platonic form. In Heidegger's hands Phänomenologie by becoming Existenz has turned from the logical to the more imaginative and emotional side of experience. Existenz is thus a poetic and philosophical attempt to describe the subjective experiences of religion, and as such it depends for much of its appeal on its own medium of expression.