Existential Philosophy

Existential philosophy challenges the contention that philosophy is inherently high-flown; that the search for truth quires a turning away from the world of our concrete experience, as Plato's cave allegory would have us believe. It rejects the Platonic-Cartesian-Hegelian ideal of eternal truth or absolute knowledge on the one hand and, on the other, the positivist levelling which insists on objectivity and calculation. Contending that both approaches are abstract and inadequate for an understanding of our being-in-the-world, existentialist philosophy seeks to awaken us to an awareness of our fundamental involvement in a natural-cultural-historical milieu. It stresses that we are not neutral observers but rather, situated participants in an ongoing, open-ended, socio-historical drama. It claims that truth comes into being in our concrete co-existence with others and cannot be served from language and history. The existentialists declare that a non-situated human being is inconceivable, that the philosopher does not survey the world, and the philosophy is firmly rooted in a situation which has a historical depth. Far fom being the unfolding of absolute knowledge, 'philosophising starts with our situation' and attempts to illuminate it. The existentialist philosophers' central concern is to prompt humans not to live thoughtlessly but rather, to have a keen awareness of their freedom and responsibility in the shipping of a situation in which they are always already involved. ~ ix Preface