ICAL SURVEY OF EXISTENTIALISM

SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES
PEOPLE BEHIND
PROBLEMS OF EXISTENTIALI
EXISTENTIALIS
NATURE
M OF EXISTENTIALISM
IMPLICATIONS
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES TO EDUCATIO

To be discuss:
 a philosophical form of philosophical
theory which inquiry that explores the
emphasizes the
existence of the
problem of human
existence and centers on
Reality is
individual person as the experience of
thinking, feeling, and
subjective.
a free and
acting..
responsible agent.
 HISTORICAL SURVEY OF
EXISTENTIALISM

PRECURSORS OF EXISTENTIALISM
immediate background and
founders
emergence as a
 PRECURSORS OF
EXISTENTIALISM

FATHER OF
EXISTENTIALISM

19TH CENTURY 17TH CENTURY 16TH CENTURY

“Even from infancy I
“We burn with the desire “If my mind could
remember that I
marvelled at the sense
to find solid ground and an gain a foothold, I
of my existence. I was ultimate sure foundation would not write
already led by instinct whereon to build a tower essays, I would make
to look within myself reaching to the Infinite. decisions; but it is
in order to know how But our whole groundwork always in
it was possible that I cracks, and the earth opens apprenticeship and on
could be alive and be to abysses.” trial.”

ediate background and founders
WWII
OPTIMISM OF ROMANTIC
INSPIRATION
THE DESTINY OF HUMAN KIND
IS INFALLIBLY GUARANTEED
BY AN INFINITE FORCE
(REASON, ABSOLUTE, OR
MIND).
NEGATIVE ASPECTS OF
EXISTENCE SUCH AS PAIN,
FRUSTRATION, SICKNESS,
AND DEATH WERE REFUSED
TO TAKE SERIOUSLY.
BECAME THE ACKNOWLEDGE
MASTERS OF THE EXISTENTIALISTS.
KIERKEGAARD INTERPRETED
EXISTENCE AS “THE SENTIMENT OF
THE POSSIBLE.”

19TH CENTURY OPTIMISM KARL MARX HOLDS THAT THE

INDIVIDUAL IS CONSTITUTED
ESSENTIALLY BY THE
19TH CENTURY ROMANTISM “RELATIONSHIPS OF WORK AND
NIETZSCHE HAD VIEWED THE AMOR FATI
PRODUCTION.”
(LOVE OF FATE) AS THE “FORMULA FOR
MAN’S GREATNESS.”
 emergence as a
movement
MODERN EXISTENTIALISM


Human existence is, for all the forms of existentialism, the projection of the future on the
basis of the possibilities that constitute it.

MARTIN HEIDEGGER
&
KARL THEODOR JASPERS – The existential possibilities, in as much as they
are rooted in the past, merely
lead every project for the future back to the past, so that
only what has been
chosen can be chosen.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE – the possibilities that are offered to existential
choice are infinite and
equivalent, such that the choice between them is
indifferent.

NICOLA ABBAGNANO & MERLEAU-PONTY – the existential possibilities

are limited by the situation,
but they neither determine the choice nor render it
indifferent.
 CONTEMPORARY EXISTENTIALISM

SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR & ALBERT CAMUS

- described the “metaphysical rebellion” as the movement by

which a man
protests against his condition and against the whole creation.
 PSYCHOPATHOLOGY
Allgemeine Psychopathologie
- Inspired by the need to understand the world in which the mental patient lives by
means of a sympathetic participation in his experience.

LUDWIG BINSWANGER
-UBER IDEENFLUCHT (1933;“On the Flight of Ideas”), inspired by the book of
Heidegger’s thought, viewed the origin of mental illness as a failure in the existential
possibilities that constitute human existence.
 THEOLOGY
KARL BARTH
– Romerbrief (1919; The Epistle to the Romans)
- started the “Kierkeegard revival,”the emblem of which was erxpressed by Barth himself; it
is “the relation of this God with this man; the relation of this man with this God – this is the only
theme of the Bible and the philosophy.”
 PEOPLE BEHIND EXISTENTIALISM
PHILOSOPHY

CENTURY
EARLY 20 CENTURY
TH

AFTER THE SECOND WORLD

19TH
CENTURY
SOREN KIERKEGAARD & FYODOR
FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE DOSTOEVSKY
 two of the first philosophers considered  first important literary author also
fundamental to the existentialist movement. important to existentialism.
 They focused on subjective human  His Notes from the Underground
experience. portrays a man unable to fit into society
 they were interested in people's quiet struggle and unhappy with the identities he
with the apparent meaninglessness of life and creates for himself.
the use of diversion to escape from boredom.  some of his novels covered issues raised
 Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were also in existentialist philosophy while
precursors to other intellectual movements, presenting story lines divergent from
including postmodernism, and various strands secular existentialism.
of psychotherapy.
LY 20 TH
CENTURY
MIGUEL DE ORTEGA Y MARTIN
UNAMUNO Y GASSET BUBER
JUGO - SPANISH - the fundamental
- A novelist, poet and THINKER fact of human
dramatist as well as - human existence existence, too
philosophy professor at must always be readily overlooked
the university of defined as the by scientific
Salamanca. individual person rationalism and
- emphasized the life of combined with the abstract
"flesh and bone" as concrete philosophical
opposed to that of circumstances of his thought, is "man
LEV SHESTOV Nikolai Berdyaev
- Had launched an - Berdyaev drew a radical
attack on rationalism distinction between the
and systematization in world of spirit and the
philosophy as early as everyday world of objects.
1905 in his book of - Human freedom is rooted
aphorisms all things are in the realm of spirit, a
possible. realm independent of
scientific notions of
causation.
 After the SECOND
1930 WORLD WAR
Sartre had traveled to
Germany to study the
phenomenology of EXISTENTIALISM BECAME A
Edmund Husserl and WELL-KNOWN AND SIGNIFICANT
Martin Heidegger,[76] PHILOSOPHICAL AND CULTURAL
and he included
critical comments on
MOVEMENT BECAUSE
SARTRE AND CAMUS.
OF
1947
- Camus' earlier fiction
their work in his
and plays had been
major treatise Being
reprinted, his new
and Nothingness.
play Caligula had
1938 1939
been performed and

1943
his novel The Plague
A selection from Being published,
and Time was the short stories in
and had published his - the first two novels of
published in French, his collection The
treatise on Sartre's The Roads to
and his essays began Wall, existentialism, Being Freedom trilogy had
to appear in French and Nothingness. appeared, as had
philosophy journals. Beauvoir's novel The
Blood of Others.
NATURE OF EXISTENTIALIST
THOUGHT AND MANNER
According to Existentialism:
1. Existence is always particular and individual.
2. Existence is primarily the problem of existence .
3. That investigation is continually faced with diverse
possibilities to which he must then commit himself.
4. Because those possibilities are constituted by the
individual’s relationships with things and with other
humans, existence is always a being-in-the-world.
 existentialist doctrines focus on several aspects of existence

 First, on the problematic character of the human situation among which he may
choose and on the basis of which he can project his life.
 Second, the doctrines focus on the phenomena of that situation and especially on
those that are negative or baffling, such as the concern or preoccupation that dominates
the individual.
 Third, the doctrines focus on the intersubjectivity that is inherent in existence and is
understood either as a personal relationship between two individuals.
 Fourth, existentialism focuses on ontology, on some doctrine of the general meaning
of Being.
 fifth place, the therapeutic value of existential analysis that permits the liberating of
human existence from the beguilements or debasements.
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN
EXISTENTIALISM
 The methods that existentialists employ in their
interpretations have a presupposition in common: the
immediacy of the relationship between the interpreter and
the interpreted, between the interrogator and the
interrogated, between the problem of being and Being
itself. The two terms coincide in existence: the person who
poses the question “What is Being?” cannot but pose it to
himself and cannot respond without starting from his own
being.
 HEIDEGGER
- availed himself of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of
phenomenology, which employs speech that manifests or discloses what it is that
one is speaking about and that is true—in the etymological use of the Greek word
alētheia (i.e., the sense of uncovering or manifesting what was hidden).
 JASPERS
- he maintained that existence, as the quest for Being, is humanity’s effort of
rational self-understanding, or universalizing, and of communicating—a method
that presupposes that existence and reason are the two poles of the being of humans.
 Sartre
-existential psychoanalysis tries to determine the “original choice” through which
humans construct their world and decide in a preliminary way upon particular choices.
 Marcel
-the method of philosophy depends upon a recognition of the mystery of Being —i.e.,
of the impossibility of discovering Being through objective or rational analyses or
demonstrations.
 Abbagnano and Merleau-Ponty
- the method of philosophy consists of the analysis and the determination—by
employing all available techniques, including those of science—of the structures that
constitute existence.
 SUBSTANTIVE ISSUES IN
EXISTENTIALISM

NDAMENTAL CONCEPTS AND CONTRA

ONTIC STRUCTURE OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE
 The fundamental characteristic of existentialist ontology is the primacy that
study of the nature of existence gives to the concept of possibility.
 the affirmation of Heidegger and Sartre that “existence precedes essence,”
signifies that humans do not have a nature that determines their modes of
being and acting .
 human existence is the anticipation, the expectation, the projection of the
future.
 existence is also transcendence, being beyond, because all of its
constitutive possibilities organize it beyond itself toward the other beings of
the world and toward the world in its totality.
 MANNER AND STYLE OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE
 Existentialism is never a solipsism in the proper sense of the term, because every
existential possibility relates the individual to things and to other humans.
Sometimes it is presented as humanism in the sense that it places human destiny in
the hands of humans themselves.
 The individual always finds himself in a situation in which his constitutive
possibilities are rooted.
 existentialism fluctuates between the concept of a destiny in which, like
Nietzsche’s amor fati, one accepts what has already been chosen and the concept of a
radical freedom whereby the choices are offered in an absolute indifference.
 a person achieves what he calls “authentic existence” when he understands the
impossibility of all of the possibilities of existence.
PROBLEMS OF EXISTENTIALIST
PHILOSOPHY

HUMANITY AND HUMAN

RELATIONSHIPS
THE HUMAN SITUATION IN THE
WORLD
SIGNIFICANCE OF BEING
 HUMANITY AND
HUMAN
RELATIONSHIPS
• Existentialist anthropology is strictly connected with its ontology. The traditional
distinction between mind and body (or soul and body) is completely eliminated;
thus, the body is a lived-through experience that is an integral part of human
existence in its relationship with the world.

• Consciousness, according to Sartre, is constant openness toward the world, a

transcendent relationship with other beings and thereby with the in-itself.

• According to him, consciousness is not only the nullification of things but also the
nullification of the other person as other. To look at another person is to make of
him a thing.
THE HUMAN
SITUATION INfrom
 When a person decides to escape THE the banality of anonymous existence his
understanding of that nothingness leads him to choose the only unconditioned and
WORLD
insurmountable possibility that belongs to him: death.

 But neither the understanding of death nor its emotive accompaniment opens up a
specific task, a way to transform one’s own situation in the world.

 Our freedom does not destroy our situation, but is engaged with it. The situation in
which we live is open.
 SIGNIFICANCE OF BEING
 the AND TRANSCENDENCE
concept of the necessity of Being prevails as the basis of their metaphysical
or theological orientations.
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.
Marcel
- understood Being as mystery.
Louis lavelle
- as the perfect actuality that guarantees the existential possibilities.
René Le Senne
- the absolute value that one encounters in one’s own spiritual intimacy
 EXISTENTIALISM AND ITS
IMPLICATION IN EDUCATION
Although differences are found between existentialism and
phenomenology, the two have much in common.
 Phenomenology deals with the  Existentialism examines the
phenomena of consciousness from the existence and the role the individual
first-person point of view and studies the plays in terms of his or her feelings,
experience of things as they present thoughts, and responsibilities.
themselves to the observer.

 these philosophies have been used in the

philosophy of education.
 Although have in common and are
compatible in principle, hence many
philosophers refer to themselves as
existentialist-phenomenologist.
some aims of education IN
EXISTENTIALISM

Fostering
Unique
Qualities Becomi Leadi
Developm Foster
and ent of ng of a ng a
ing of
Cultivatin Complete Human Good
g Man Person Values
life
Individua
lities
“I took a test in Existentialism. I left all
the answers blank
and got 100.” - Woody Allen.

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