EXISTENTIALISM, MAN AND SOCIETY: A PHILOSOPHICAL APPRAISAL

Résumé

The problem of existence of the individual self and the other is consequently predicated on the related issues of conflict, freedom, choice, responsibility, authenticity, alienation, anxiety, nothingness, absurd, commitment, and value. Existentialism did not develop much in the way of a normative ethics; it therefore, requires a certain systematic approach to the philosophical theory of freedom, value and to moral psychology of human existence, deriving from the idea of existence as self-making in situation. A philosophical analysis of an existential account of meaning and value must recognize the possibilities of a certain absurdity to the existence of man; although reason and value have a foothold in the drama of the world of existence but they however, lack any ultimate foundation in human existence. This paper is saddled with the onerous task of unraveling man as a free moral agent tasked with multiplicity of factors such as commitment, responsibly, authenticity, anxiety, freedom, choice and value and his phenomenological and existential imports to his immediate political society. This paper concludes that the idea of freedom is the origin of value and that freedom is defined not in terms of acting rationally (Kant) but rather existentially, as choice and transcendence are the ideas most closely associated with the foothold or hallmark of existentialism. This paper concludes that the existentialist's everyday practical engagement is the source of meaning and value. This paper adopts the method of analysis in conceptualizing and contextualizing the existential account of man's freedom, choice, and responsibility – his deliberate human actions and everyday practical engagement to his social, historical and political world. The existentialdialogical engagement is ultimately the basis for an authentically meaningful life that is, one that answers to the existential condition of being human and does not flee that condition by appeal to an abstract system of reason or Divine will. Transcendence represents my radical freedom to define myself, while facticity refers to that other aspect of my being which represents the situated character of this self-making.