54 Existential Essentials |
Existentialism
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Among the thinkers most frequently mentioned here, the concept of the necessity of Being prevails as the basis of their metaphysical or theological orientations. Heidegger has come more and more to insist on the massive presence of Being in the face of human existence, by attributing to Being all initiative and to man only the possibility of abandoning himself to Being and to the things that are the modes of the language of Being. For Heidegger, Being is interpreted better through the etymology of those words that designate the most common things of daily life than through the analysis of existential possibilities. Karl Jaspers has seen the revelation of transcendence in ciphers--i.e., in persons, doctrines, or poems--all of which can be interpreted as symbols of existential situations and above all of limit situations, the insurmountability of which, in provoking the total "shipwreck" of human possibilities, makes man feel the presence of absolute transcendence. In a less philosophically elaborate form, Being has been understood as mystery by Marcel; as the perfect actuality that guarantees the existential possibilities by Louis Lavelle, a leader of the French philosophie de l'esprit; and as the absolute value that man encounters in his own spiritual intimacy by René Le Senne, also of the philosophie de l'esprit. (from Encyclopedia Britannica) |
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Philosophical Movements
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