DE L’ « In-Existence » Intentionnelle À Ĺ « Ek-In-Sistence » Existentielle

Abstract

This chapter deals with the concept of existence in phenomenology and in philosophies of existence rooted in phenomenology. The author outlines a brief history of the forerunners of existentialism, from Socrates to Pascal. He focuses on several main figures of contemporary existentialism from S. Kierkegaard to M. Merleau-Ponty, including M. Heidegger, K. Jaspers, P. Wust, J.-P. Sartre, G. Marcel and I. Quiles. He and refers in particular to the works of two historians of existentialism: E. Mounier, and H. Beck. The question addressed to each of them is: how did existentialist doctrines solve the problem of (philosophical) alienation effected by the existence. The solution oscillates between Sartre’s (nihilistic) “ek-sistence and Quiles” (immanent) “in-sistence”. Thus a conciliation, and even synthesis between these extreme positions is necessary and it was really undertaken by H. Beck. He dismiss the dialectical like positiviste approaches to the benefit of the “ana-loqical”approach to the relationship between the World and its ontological foundation. The union of two positions under the label of “ek-in-sistence” would create a “dynamics of the existentialist thought” leading to a new method, that of “ontological hermeneutics”. It aims at the “understand and explaining” the sense underpinning the existence of a “life-net” and comes to it from a “divine substance”. Even if contemporary existentialism was marked by the phenomenology for good and for worse, the contribution of the latter, in particular that of the phenomenology of intersubjectivity and of the theory of the whole and the part would be necessary to implement the project of this ontological hermeneutics. In conclusion this history of existentialism can be made in parallel to the evolution of Husserl’s thought concerning the phenomenological reduction and transcendental idealism. These ideas were unknown before the publication of Husserl’s latest unpublished manuscripts. In the light then the meaning of the reduction is the “mundanization” (Verwetlichung) of the transcendental ego which manifests itself in the world. And the transcendental idealism is described as a synthesis of the natural and the transcendental attitudes to the world.