existential :: essays research papers

     Existentialism is not a method yet a vision, a perceptual resolution of the human world into bare essentials. Against this we have an opposing tendency "Human harming cannot bear really much reality."      I want to look at existential philosophy on a lower floor ii categories though it belongs with neither of them. It belongs properly, perhaps, in the field of religion, but it is to be met with in philosophy and psychology. Existentialism is both philosophy in a special sense and a valency. This doesnt quite coincide with theory and execute but it may be a helpful division into two parts.      Wittgenstein remarked that the purpose of philosophy was to show "the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." though not a fashionable definition this should satisfy the existentialist that we partake with problems upon whose issue much depends. Totally unfashionable would be the definition given over by Ma rcus Aurelius To be a philosopher is to keep unsullied and unscathed the manufacturing business spirit within him. This serves to restore a balance, in favour of the historical concerns of the search for wisdom, after the twentieth centurys discovery of linguistic criticism.      Those who know Bertrand Russells report of Western Philosophy, or the shorter Wisdom of the West, will remember his great difficultness in focusing on (French) Existentialism as a figure of speech of philosophy at all.      Existentialism is not in itself any kind of goal of thought, or final destination it is more like a station on the way, or perhaps a station hold room. It does not seem to be a position on which i takes a stand, affording a basis for unity with others of like persuasion. It is no vehicle for agreement. On the contrary, one may be locked in opposition, as for standard the Christian existentialist with the Marxist existentialist. Let us say t hat existentialism is a set of answers to certain philosophical problems when these are understood as the problems you must live with whether you are a philosopher or not. These are not conceptual problems but problems of living.      It takes me perhaps half of my life to reach the closing I am alive. Most of the rest of my life passes before I recognize I shall die. There is also the problem of reaching a basis for a relationship to "Thou" - to the other person. Such questions do not elicit answers from people. The answers lie in what the questions do to people.