# Existentialism



## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

What is "is"?


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## crhoades (Aug 10, 2006)

> _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> What is "is"?



Am I the only one that cannot read that without hearing a Bill Clinton inflection?


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

> _Originally posted by crhoades_
> 
> 
> > _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> ...



Well, he was well educated.


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## crhoades (Aug 10, 2006)

> _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> What is "is"?



I have no idea what the ramifications are to this answer but a knee-jerk answer is - God.

Only God is. He is the Great I AM. He is the only eternal, infinite, unchangable, perfect being. Everything else is created and therefore cannot just 'be'. 

Your thoughts? What are the problems/implications of this answer? Never thought through this before, so cut me some slack if it leads down a path that I don't want to go.


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

> _Originally posted by crhoades_
> 
> 
> > _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> ...



Hegel has the same answer. God is "Absolute" for Hegel. All Truth is Absolute, therefore all that is True is God. So, you'd need some major qualifications for that answer in order to avoid the Pantheism of Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_ (which, taken in the right context and applied properly, is a wonderful study on consciousness and knowledge, in my opinion).


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

I would say "is" is subjective, individual, sense-perception; but, I'm not wholly committed to that just yet. There is a lot to think about when answering something like this...


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

> It is a natural assumption that in philosophy, before we start to deal with its proper subject-matter, viz. the actual cognition of what truly is, one must first of all come to an understanding about cognition, which is regarded either as the instrument to get hold of the Absolute, or as the medium through which one discovers it.
> 
> ... securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them. For, if cognition is the instrument for getting hold of absolute being, it is obvious that the use of an instrument on a thing certainly does not let it be what it is for itself, but rather sets out to reshape and alter it.
> 
> ...



[Edited on 8-10-2006 by WrittenFromUtopia]


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## crhoades (Aug 10, 2006)

Van Til breathed the air of the idealists and was even accused of being one himself many times. I will make all the qualifications that he made about Hegel and the idealists.


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)




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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 10, 2006)

> The wealth of sense-knowledge belongs to perception, not to immediate certainty, for which it was only the source of instances; for only perception contains negation, that is, difference or manifoldness, within its own essence.


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## Vytautas (Aug 10, 2006)

"is" means "=". "=" means equals so it also means that something is the same as something else. For example, red is a color. This example means there is a simulatirty between color and red. The similarity is that red is a sub-category of color. In this case the things are not completely equal so the "œis" deserves a squiggly equals sign. So "œis" also means approximant to as well as equal to.


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## MW (Aug 10, 2006)

> _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> Hegel has the same answer. God is "Absolute" for Hegel. All Truth is Absolute, therefore all that is True is God. So, you'd need some major qualifications for that answer in order to avoid the Pantheism of Hegel's _Phenomenology of Spirit_ (which, taken in the right context and applied properly, is a wonderful study on consciousness and knowledge, in my opinion).



It is more correct to say that all Truth is "of" God, when writing from the human perspective. Yes, Truth is God, as long as we recognise that man's comprehension of truth is not exhaustive. Hence Truth continues to transcend human experience, thus defeating Pantheism.

There can be no predication, IS, without God, I AM. More particularly, there can be no human predication, IS, without the Logos. All things were made by Him and for Him.

[Edited on 8-11-2006 by armourbearer]


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## Cheshire Cat (Aug 11, 2006)

> _Originally posted by WrittenFromUtopia_
> I would say "is" is subjective, individual, sense-perception; but, I'm not wholly committed to that just yet. There is a lot to think about when answering something like this...



When I say "Truth *is* absolute", does the connective word "is" make that statement subjective, individual, or based on my sense-perception? Can I test that proposition by my sense experience? These questions are rhetorical btw...

Maybe I can put this a better way. *Is* 'truth' subjective, individual, and based on our sense perception? 


[Edited on 8-11-2006 by caleb_woodrow]

[Edited on 8-11-2006 by caleb_woodrow]


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## Theogenes (Aug 14, 2006)

"IS" is the copula between a subject and a predicate using the present tense of "BE".


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## JohnV (Aug 14, 2006)

Existentialism was an idealism that sprang out of man's self-centred approach to reality. That is, he believed himself to be the reference point of all knowledge, and therefore where he was and what he knew was the crucial element to knowledge, to certainty in knowledge. 

As I recall, that was what it was back in its heyday. It is passe now. But at the time people were turning to things that would bring them new revelations, and drugs were a big part of that in its later manifesting stages. "The happening" was the code word for some kind of spiritual or mental interaction with some kind of religious experience; "religious" here not meaning our usual sense of the term, for it could be interaction with anything that even seemed spiritual or "other". It ran out of steam, as I recall, because it was manifesting itself in ever increasing debauchery in its adherents, and ran out of moral ground, like so many "isms" before it.


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## WrittenFromUtopia (Aug 14, 2006)

You have to account for the literary aspect of the Existential movement as well. It was more than philosophy, per se.


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## JohnV (Aug 14, 2006)

Existentialism was expressed through the arts as well, to be sure. It is part of the whole cultural expression, first though philosophy, then through the arts, and then through actual practices. There is the propagation aspect, and then the culmination aspect, with everything in between, along with before and after, making up the whole of it. It was expressed through literature, painting and sculpture, as well as through music. There is the European expression of it, and then later the North American expression. 

It was a way to label the time that history went through, explaining why things went as they did. It was really nothing more than a feeble attempt of man to go on his own, apart from God. It all happened simultaneous with the assumed victory of science over the Bible, the extreme optimism that man could do anything he set his mind to. At its height it was declared that God was dead; as it waned the same influential voices began to declare that man was resurrecting God. It turned out that the extreme optimism was nothing more than a verbal con game, using words to advantage to give a notion of substance, but really lacking it altogether. That was why God needed to be resurrected. 

One of the biggest ideas that gave rise to it was the question of, "What is?" It was also its downfall, for they found they had explained exactly nothing in the end, but only gave out an illusion of answers to the question. They still found they needed God in the end, but supposed they could raise their own god to fill the void. But they were still hanging with their intellectual feet well off the solid ground. And they still did not know what was right side up or up side down. They were still the reference point in themselves to determine such things, and found they were not big enough to answer the important questions. "What is?" still loomed large.


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