The Idea of Existentialism - Essay Example

The Idea of ExistentialismIntroductionExistentialism is an argument that dwells on the human individual as a conscious subject matter. It encompasses the sense of the human survival being worthless and having nothing. It also explains the anxiety and misery which pass through each human life. Existentialism focuses mainly on the lives of human and emotional certainty of suffering and option for an individual. In order for one to exist, a choice has to be made. The choices made by people in most cases give their own definition.

In regard to the point of view of the existentialists, human beings have two options: to describe themselves or be described by others. The meaning of certain terms in life such as wrong, right, true or false is determined by the individual. They believe that indeed “beauty depends with the beholder” (Rene 78). The existentialists concerns about philosophy ponders that it is neither an effort to investigate and get to the knowledge of the world nor an exceptional occupation that deals with only a few.

Philosophy is seen as being fully incorporated in life. Sartre, one of the earliest existentialists often points out that, to be sure, professional philosophers are essential to build up an intricate set of techniques and ideas. Nevertheless, life can be philosophically lived with the absence of nominal knowledge that philosophy entails. There are two historical forerunners for this belief has been brought on board by the think tanks of the existentialism. The first one is about the traditional Greeks and in particular the image of Socrates including the Stoics as well as Epicureans (Spiegelberg 44).

They argue that the Socrates was not only an armature, but in his search of the better living, he proposed not to have anything that deals with the formation of a system and his teachings took place often in open places. This implies that the existentialists were only just extraordinary. In the previous centuries, speedy development of industrialization and progression in technology was evident, which were often seen as a separation of the human from a properly natural way of living. The second thought of philosophy as a way of life was the German Idealism.

Philosophy, here is thought as an action that is the fundamental part of the history element of the human beings, and not the outer surface of life as well as of the world that acts as a spectator. The idea of philosophy as a way of living is seen in the thoughts of existentialists in various ways. First of all, they took a review of the current life in expressions of the occupation of both manual and rational labor. Philosophy is included in this specialization (Spiegelberg 45). This thinking has a limitation in that the existentialist think tanks researched with different fashions and types of writing in an organized way to escape the consequences of this specialization.

Second, a notion that philosophy takes a study of life from the inside. Existentialists like Kierkegaard for instance argue that the primary truths of his living are not illustrations (Rene 78). This is to imply that the ideas, signs or proposals the meaning of which one can be able to distinguish from the origin. He rather advocates that, the truths of existence are straight away lived, felt and acted. Other existentialists argue that it is vital to understand that the philosopher studying the existence of a human being is himself an existing human.

The last thought about philosophy being a way to live is the nature of life is a permanent existentialist worry and, more illustriously the importance of death.Conclusion This paper has touched on the idea of existentialism in relation to the philosophy of the way of life. There are different thoughts about the existence of the human being in which many arguments about the truths arise. In conclusion, as observed it is hard to come up with the truth about the existence of human life.

Works Cited:Rene, Descartes. Meditation On First Philosophy. New York: McGraw Hill, 2006. PrintSpiegelberg, Herbert.  The Phenomenological Movement.  The Hague:  Martinus Nijhoff, 2002. Print.