On Existentialism & Man's Search for meaning

1. EXISTENTIALISM
AND MAN'S
SEARCH FOR
MEANING

2. •Just as there are many definitions of
philosophy, so there are as many
philosophical approaches to the study of
man.
•The pre-Socratics were primarily
concerned with the basic stuff of the
cosmos, with what constituted the
universe.
•The question on man could not be totally
divorced from the cosmological, since man
was conceived as part of nature.

3. •The Socratic motto "Know Thyself' was
viewed not in isolation from the quest for
some order in the cosmos, (or some
immutable harmony and stability.
•Man was seen as a - microcosm, and the
search for the truth about man was
simultaneously the search for the truth
about the universe.
•Thus, the ancient philosophical approach
to the study of man was COSMOCENTRIC.

4. •With the coming and predominance
of Christianity in Medieval Europe,
philosophy became the handmaid of
theology,
•Reason was the companion of faith;
its task was to make faith reasonable,
if not reconcilable with Aristotelian
philosophy.

5. •Man was viewed still as part of nature but nature
now was God's creation, and next to the angels,
was the noblest of God's creatures, created in
His image and likeness.
•Philosophy became the search for the ultimate
causes of things, eventually leading to the truth
about God.
•Man's ideal was to contemplate God and His
creation, and his action was to conform to the
natural moral law implanted in his reason.
•Thus the Christian Medieval philosophical
approach to the study of man was
THEOCENTRIC.

6. Rene Descartes (1596-1650)
•French Philosopher & the father of
modern philosophy
•Impressed by the progress of the sciences
and mathematics
•started on some one certitude, an
indubitable, that which cannot be
doubted because if it can be doubted,
then all else are dubitable.

7. Cartesian Meditations - a methodic
Cartesian doubt.
"Cogito, ergo sum" (“I think, therefore I am")
Everything was dubitable, for Descartes,
even his own body, all except for one fact -
the fact that he was doubting. He could not
doubt that he was doubting; and
doubting, being a mode of thinking.

8. •From this certitude Descartes proceeded to
establish the certitude of other existents,
including God, by a criterion borrowed from
mathematics: the clear and distinctness of the
idea.
•With the emergence of Descartes Cogito;
philosophy became ANTHROPOCENTRIC.
•The question of man was now the foreground of
other questionings on nature or on God. Reason
was now liberated from nature and faith; and
sufficient to inquire on its own truth.

9. Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) introduced a
Copernican revolution in philosophy:
Rather than reason conforming to the object or
nature, it is the object or nature that must be
subjected to the a priori conditions of the mind,
or the subject.
With Kant, philosophy became a search for the a
priori conditions of knowing (and doing), rather
than for the object itself for the object as such is
unknownable.

10. Anthropocentrism reached its climax in the
philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770-1631)
Built system of the Mind in the process of
evolving itself in a kind of dialectic, of reason
putting an other to itself (antithesis) and coming
to a resolution (synthesis).
It is against the philosophizing of Hegel that
contemporary philosophies are said to have
started.

11. •Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), the
acknowledged Father of Existentialism.
•Kierkegaard emphasized the individual, man who
cannot be place in a “cog in a machine” a part of
a system. Reacting against the rationalism of
Hegel, he stressed the infinite passion of man.
Truth is what is held on with the passion of the
infinite.
•Philosophy became the search for the meaning
of life. The search for truth was now the search
for meaning.