'Historical Development of Continental Philosophy’s Existentialism Essay\r'

'Absolute Idealism left field distinct marks on many facets of westbound culture. True, science was in disparate to it, and common sense was possibly stupefied by it, but the greatest governmental front line of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries†Marxismâ€was to a satisfying degree an outgrowth of Absolute Idealism. (Bertrand Russell remarked someplace that Marx was aught more than Hegel mixed with British economic theory. ) Nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, theology, and charge art felt an influence.\r\nThe Romantic composers of the nineteenth century, for example, with their attachment for expanded form, Brobdingnagian orchestras, complex scores and move up melodies, searched for the all-encompassing musical statement. In doing so, they mirrored the efforts of the metaphysicians; whose vast and imposing systems were sources of inspiration to many artists and composers. As we founder said, much of what happened in philosophy after Hegel was in respo nse to Hegel.\r\nThis response took different forms in English-speaking countries and on the European continentâ€so different that philosophy in the twentieth century was scatter into cardinal customs dutys or, as we might say nowadays, ii â€Å"conversations. ” So-called uninflected philosophy and its offshoots became the predominant tradition of philosophy in England and eventually in the unify States. The response to Hegelian idealism on the European continent was quite different however; and is cognize (at least in English-speaking countries) as Continental philosophy.\r\nMean while, the linked States developed its own tick of philosophyâ€called pragmatismâ€but ultimately analytic philosophy became firmly entrenched in the United States as well. Within Continental philosophy whitethorn be found various identifiable educates of philosophical thought: existentialist philosophy, phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and critical theory. Two influen tial schools were existentialism and phenomenology, and we will begin this chapter with them.\r\nBoth existentialism and phenomenology put up their roots in the nineteenth century, and many of their themes stub be traced back to Socrates and even to the pre- Socratics. Each school of thought has influenced the other to such an extent that two of the most famous and influential Continental philosophers of this century, Martin Heidegger (1889â€1976) and Jean-Paul Sartre (1905 â€1980), are important figures in both movements, although Heidegger is primarily a phenomenologist and Sartre primarily an existentialist.\r\nSome of the main themes of existentialism are traditional and academic philosophy is sterile and hostile from the concerns of real life. Philosophy must focus on the one-on-one in her or his confrontation with the homo. The terra firma is ir wise (or, in any event, beyond enumerate comprehending or accurate conceptualizing through philosophy). The arena is absurd, in the sense that no ultimate explanation merchant ship be given for why it is the way it is. Senselessness, emptiness, triviality, separation, and unfitness to communicate pervade valet existence.\r\nGiving take over to anxiety, dread, self-doubt, and despair as well as the individual confronts as the most important fact of human existence, the necessity to choose how he or she is to tolerate within this absurd and irrational world. Now, many of these themes had already been introduced by those brooding thinkers of the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer (see previous chapter), Soren Kierkegaard, and Friedrich Nietzsche. on the whole three had a strong distaste for the positive idealism of Hegelâ€and for metaphysical systems in general. Such philosophy, they thought, treat the human predicament.\r\nFor all three the universe, including its human inhabitants, is rarely rational, and philosophical systems that seek to make everything seem rational are just futi le attempts to overcome pessimism and despair. This impressive-sounding reciprocation denotes the philosophy that grew out of the work of Edmund Husserl (1859â€1938). In brief, phenomenology interests itself in the essential structures found within the stream of aware experienceâ€the stream of phenomenaâ€as these structures manifest themselves separately of the assumptions and presuppositions of science.\r\nPhenomenology, much more than existentialism, has been a product of philosophers instead than of artists and writers. But like existentialism, phenomenology has had enormous impact impertinent philosophical circles. It has been especially influential in theology, the tender and political sciences, and psychology and psychoanalysis. Phenomenology is a movement of thinkers who induct a variety of interests and points of view; phenomenology itself finds its antecedents in Kant and Hegel (though the movement regarded itself as anything but Hegelian).\r\nKant, in the C ritique of minute Reason, argued that all objective knowledge is based on phenomena, the data received in sensory experience. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, beings are treated as phenomena or objects for a consciousness. The world beyond experience, the â€Å"real” world assumed by natural science, is a world concerning which much is unknown and doubtful. But the world-in-experience, the world of uncontaminated phenomena, can be explored without the same limitations or uncertainties.\r\n'