Phenomenology and Existentialism in the Twentieth Century

Our world’s cultural circles are permeated by the philosophical influences of phenomenology and existentialism and the illuminations of movements following on them. These two quests to elucidate rationality – ever renewed in the progress of thought – took their distinct inspirations from Kierkegaard’s existentialism plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl’s phenomenology focusing on the constitutive aspect of rationality. From a century’s distance, however, we can see that those who continued Husserl’s investigations and the existentialists could meet and mingle readily because they had this in common, the vindication of full reality.

The two projects melded in the inquisitive minds (Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, et al.) and numerous philosophical issues were expanded in various perspectives (the lived body, subjectivity, personhood, etc.) In a fruitful cross-pollination of insights, ideas, approaches, fused in one powerful wave and undermined the dominant reductionism, empiricism, naturalism then being disseminated throughout science and all domains of thought.

Existentialist rejection of ratiocination and speculation together with Husserl’s shift to seeking the genesis of meaning in experience closed a gap between philosophy and literature (Wahl, Marcel, Berdyaev, Wojtyla, Tischner, etc.), the foundational nature of language (Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc.) and opened the "hidden" behind the "veils" (see herein Sezgin and Dominguez-Rey).

This wondrous renewing wind had not only transformed the culture of our day, but has also paved the way to the renewal of our humanity in a New Enlightenment, to which we will pass in our following third and final volume in which we appreciate the impact and promise of Phenomenology and Existentialism in the twentieth century.