Existentialism

Existentialism is a philosophical movement that views human existence as having a set of underlying themes and characteristics, such as anxiety, dread, freedom, awareness of death, and consciousness of existing, that are primary and that cannot be reduced to or explained by a natural-scientific approach or any approach that attempts to detach itself from or rise above these underlying themes. It conceives of Being itself as something that can only be understood through and in relation to these basic characteristics of human existence. For existentialism, human beings can be understood only from the inside, in terms of their lived and experienced reality and dilemmas, not from the outside, in terms of a biological, psychological, or other scientific theory of human nature. It emphasizes action, freedom, and decision as fundamental to human existence and is fundamentally opposed to the rationalist tradition and to positivism. That is, it argues against definitions of human beings either as primarily rational, knowing beings who relate to reality primarily as an object of knowledge or whose action can or ought to be regulated by rational principles, or as beings who can be defined in terms of their behavior as it looks to or is studied by others. More generally it rejects all of the Western rationalist definitions of Being in terms of a rational principle or essence or as the most general feature that all existing things share in common. Existentialism tends to view human beings as subjects in an indifferent, often ambiguous, and "absurd" universe in which meaning is not provided by either the natural order or God but rather can be created, however provisionally and unstably, by human beings' actions and interpretations.

Related Topics:
Philosophical - Being - Rationalist - Positivism - Knowledge

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Although there are certain common tendencies among existentialist thinkers, there are major differences and disagreements among them, and not all of them even affiliate themselves with or accept the validity of the term "existentialism", which was popularized especially by Jean-Paul Sartre. In German the phrase Existenzphilosophie (philosophy of existence) is also used.

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