Continental Philosophy: The Historical Development of Continental Philosophy’s Existentiali

Existentialism’s main themes are the following:
• Traditional academic philosophy is sterile and remote from the concerns of real life.
• Philosophy must focus on the individual in her or his confrontation with the world.
• The world is irrational (or, in any event, beyond total comprehending or accurate conceptualizing through philosophy).
• The world is absurd, in the sense that no ultimate explanation can be given for why it is the way it is.
• Senselessness, emptiness, triviality, separation, and inability to communicate pervade the human existence, giving birth to anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and despair.
• The individual confronts, as the most important fact of human existence, the necessity to choose how he or she is to live within this absurd and irrational world. (Existentialism Chapter 8 p 160)

    Still existentialists do not guarantee that these issues can be solved but to have any meaning in life an individual must confront their existence throughout their lives or they will have no value to their lives.
Many of these themes of course had already been introduced in part by Arthur Schopenhauer, Soren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) differs from Hegel in that Hegel believed a person “dissolves into an abstract reality” (chapter 8, p161). Whereas Kierkegaard was more concerned with the will and need to make “important” choices. Hegel was extremely abstract to the point mostly seen in mathematics. Kierkegaard in contrast was more about how we as humans face up to adversity or uncertainty and the choices we make when faced with such challenges. For Kierkegaard, life was nothing more than ongoing despair and the question for him to resolve was in trying to find out; what can be done to keep us from giving into despair. His answer was that nothing on earth could, therefore we had to look to the other worldly or God to stave away the despair and darkness that was ever present. (Chapter 8, p 161)
     Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) after reading Schopenhauer was convinced that the world was driven by a cosmic will but he disagreed as to Schopenhauer’s theories on what cosmic will was. His view is that the world is driven by the “will-to-power”. Though the world as Nietzsche saw it had become slave like and without any joy. Everyone was just following the norm and had, so to speak, become like a herd following the leader. According to Nietzsche “They were enslaved by a morality that says “no” to life and to all that affirms it.” He developed the concept of a superman or as he termed it Ubermensch, and only this man could break out of the confines of the moral society and live life as it was meant to be. According to him the Ubermensch embraces the will-to-power and uses it to release himself from the enslavement mentality (Chapter 8 p 161).
     Some of the key existentialist were Albert Camus, Jean Paul Sartre “who wrote drama, novels, and political tracts as well as philosophical works” (Two Existentialists Chapter 8 p164). Other key contributors were Gabriel Marcel and Simone de Beauvoir in France, Karl Jaspers in Switzerland, Martin Heidegger in Germany, Miguel de Unamuno and Jose` Ortega y Gasset in Spain and Nicola Abbagnano in Italy.

Phenomenology

     “In brief, phenomenology interests itself in the essential structures found within the stream of conscious experiences – the stream of phenomena- as these structures manifest themselves independently of the assumptions and presuppositions of science” (Phenomenology, Chapter 8 p 174). Phenomenology is mostly associated with philosophers and less with artist and writers. It has influenced and had a huge impact outside of philosophies, for example, it has impacted theology, the social and political sciences, and psychology and psychoanalysis. Most phenomenologists have varied interests and view points. “Phenomenology itself finds its antecedents in Kant and Hegel” In regards to Kant is Critique of Pure Reason, which argues that phenomena is the bases for all knowledge that is objective, phenomena being the information received by sensory experience. With regards to Hegel it is Phenomenology of the Mind which states that beings are treated as phenomena, which in this case means objects for a consciousness (Phenomenology, Chapter 8, 174). Phenomena is then focusing on the experience and ignoring the reality of the situation and in doing so you gain certain knowledge.
Edmund Husserl one of the first great phenomenologists wanted to bring back Europe’s faith in certainty. He did so by proposing a universal phenomenology of consciousness. A ‘science’ that studies what is the same for every consciousness. He named his development transcendental phenomenology “whose purpose was to investigate phenomena without making any assumptions about the world” (Edmund Husserl, Chapter 8 p175) phenomenological reduction is a way of cutting away what we have supposed about what exists or nature of the outside world. “Its purpose is to examine the meaning produced by pure impersonal consciousness and to describe the human “life-world” in terms of those essences (which all human beings share) found within the conscious experience” (Edmund Husserl, Chapter 8 p 175).
     Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) found that he like Husserl wanted to find a deeper meaning and get past what we had presupposed and discover a deeper sense of certainty; however he did not agree with it being in phenomena but in Being itself. According to Heidegger, humans have forgotten about Beings. They have been lost in their own designs and what they call logic but logic is not truth only a means to control things. He believed that it was Humans arrogance that they were the master of nature that is the cause for what ails the twentieth century. He was of the mind that there needed to be a return to Being and to listen to Being. “At the heart of Heidegger’s Being and Time is the notion of Sinn (sense, meaning), the absence to which in life was said to be the problem of human existence” (Martin Heidegger, Chapter 8 p 177).
     A final look at the contributors of phenomenology was Emmanuel Levinas (1906-1995) who was mainly responsible for introducing phenomenology to France. His main writings deal two may areas of concern; “ Talmudic commentaries and ethics, under stood in the broader sense of being aware of what and how we humans exist in the world” (Emmanuel Levinas, Chapter 8, p 179). Levinas wanted to make a complete break from Being and tried to establish “a philosophy rooted in the notions of radical otherness and unbridgeable separateness” (Emmanuel Levinas, Chapter 8, p 179). In his views people exist in this otherness, everyone since birth is other than themselves and God is the ultimate otherness and that the key to human event is to try and interact with the otherness and there by transcend. He views ontology (the study of Being) as a wrong attempt to simplify the complicated to the same thing.