What is existence? This word means "to occur", "to appear", "to arise", "to appear", "to appear", "to go out". This is his exact translation from Latin. Unlike essence (nature, quintessence, fundamental principle), that is, its aspect, it is an aspect of any being. What is existence like? This concept is often combined with the word "being". However, it has a difference with him, which consists in the fact that it is an exclusively aspect of being, in being is usually understood in the meaning of everything that exists in the world.
What philosophers say
For Baumgarten, the concept of essence or nature coincides with reality (like existence). For thinkers in general, the issue of proof of existence occupies a special place. It stands at the center of the existentialist philosophy of Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Jaspers, Marcel and many others. In this case, it denotes the unique and direct experienced experience of human existence.
Thus, according to Heidegger, existence can be attributed to a certain being (Dasein). It must be considered in the special conditions of the analytics of existence, and not of categories, which is applied to other beings.
In the dualism of existence and nature, scholasticism sees a fundamentally bifurcated natural universe, which was created and is determined only in God. The origin or appearance of something is not derived from the essence, but is ultimately determined by the creative will of God.
What's the problem
As a rule, existence is opposed to the concept of essence. The second traditionally comes from the Renaissance (if not earlier). A wide variety of disciplines in science are researching it.
Science in the traditional understanding of existence makes attempts to discover the substance. Mathematics (one of the exact disciplines) has been especially successful in this area. For her, the conditions for the existence of something are not so much important as the very ability to perform various operations with the fundamentals.
At the same time, existence does not mean an abstract and distant view of these matters, but focuses attention on their reality. As a result, a certain distance arises between the fundamental principles of abstract and existential reality - the essence of existence.
At the center of the doctrine of philosophy about people is the problem of human essence. Its discovery is implied in the very definition of absolutely any subject. Talking about the functions of this item and its meaning will not work without this.
In the process of scientific developmentrepresentatives of philosophy tried to find the fundamental differences between people and animals and gave an explanation of the human essence, using a variety of qualities.
Why we are not them
We have a lot of similarities with animals both in the anatomical structure and in behavior, the manifestation of emotions and feelings. Both we and they strive to form couples in order to give offspring, take care of our children, create some kind of connection with fellow tribesmen, build a certain society. He is the best from our standpoint. Perhaps, on the part of animals, the principles of organization of their society are much more reasonable or more viable. Remember how complex the hierarchy is in hyenas or chimpanzees.
But a man differs from an animal in his smile, flat nails, the presence of religion, some skills and a huge store of knowledge. It is important to note that in this case, the human essence is sought to be determined on the basis of those features that are its difference from the closest species, that is, from the side, and not on the basis of the person himself.
This way of defining a person turns out to be not entirely correct from the point of view of methodology, since the essence of any particular object can be determined by studying the immanent mode of the form of existence of this nature, as well as the laws of its existence from the inside.
What society is
Are all the signs that distinguish a person from an animal of serious significance? Science today testifies that at the origins of the historical development of various forms of human existence lies labor orlabor activity that is carried out at all times within the framework of production in society.
This means that the individual is not able to engage in any productive activity without entering into direct or indirect relationships with other people. The totality of such relations forms a human society. Animals also build bonds with their tribesmen, but they do not create any products.
What is a person
With the consistent evolution of human labor activity and production in society, the connections of people in it are also improving. The development of the individual occurs exactly to the extent that he accumulates, improves and implements his own relations in society.
It is worth emphasizing that it implies the totality of human relations in a society of people, that is, ideological (or ideal), material, spiritual, and so on.
This point has an important significance for methodology, since it leads to the conclusion that a person should be understood not in relation to any ideals or vulgar materialism, but dialectically. That is, you should not reduce its meaning only in relation to the economy or to the mind and the like. Man is a being who accumulates all these qualities in himself. This nature is both rational and productive. At the same time, it is moral, cultural, political, and so on.
Historical aspect
Man himself combines to some extent the full range of relationships within society. In this way he realizes his own social essence. An entirely different aspect of the species question is that man is a product of the history of his species.
Such people as they are now, did not appear immediately out of nowhere. They are the end point of the development of society in the historical framework. That is, we are now talking about the integrity of one individual and the whole human race.
With all this, each individual is not only the result of society and relations in it. He himself is the creator of such relationships. It turns out that he is both an object and a subject of social relations at the same time. In man, the realization of unity, as well as the totality of the object and subject.
In addition, there is an interaction between society and a person at the dialectical level. It turns out that the individual is a kind of microsociety, that is, a manifestation of society at a certain level, and at the same time it itself is a person and his relations within society.
Existential problem
You can talk about the essence of man in relation to social activities. Outside of it, as well as outside of various relationships in society and simple communication as a form of realization, an individual simply cannot be considered a person in full measure.
However, the human essence is not fully reduced to the essence, which in reality manifests itself and is found in existence. The nature of each individual is a common characteristic of the human race, existence is something always individual.
What is existence
Existence is the being of man as a nature, manifested in a full variety of properties, forms and types. Such a complete wholeness finds its expression in the fact that a person combines three main structures: mental, biological and social.
If you remove one of these three factors, then the individual will not. Both the development of people's abilities and their full formation in any case will have a connection with such concepts as the volitional aspirations of the human "I", natural talents and the surrounding society.
The very aspect of the mode of existence in its significance is not inferior to the problem of human essence. It received the most complete disclosure in the philosophy of existentialism, which is interpreted as the being of an individual, connected with going beyond the categories of our real-individual world.
The Science of Existentialism
As noted above, existence is always something individual. Although it implies a life together with someone, but in any case, a person will meet death only alone with himself.
For this reason, existentialism sees our society and the individual as two opposite images that are in a permanent state of conflict. If a person is a person, then society is an impersonal existence.
Real life is the personal being of the individual, his freedom and the desire to get out of the box. Existence in society (in the concept of existentialism) is not a genuine life, it isthe desire to establish one's "I" in society, accepting its framework and laws. The social part of the human essence and his real life in existentialism contradict each other.
Jean Paul Sartre said that existence comes before essence. It is only by meeting death face to face that one can discover what was "real" in human life and what was not.
Becoming a man
It is worth noting that the thesis "existence goes before essence" contains a certain pathos of humanism. There is such a sense here that a person himself determines what will come out of him in the end, as well as the whole world in which his personal existence will be.
The thing is that each individual finds his essence only in the process of his socialization. At the same time, he becomes an increasingly large subject of the surrounding society, more and more exposed to its influence. Following this concept, one must accept that the newborn is only a "candidate" for the role of a person. His essence is not given to him from birth. Its formation occurs in the process of being. In addition, only with the accumulation of sociocultural experience does the individual become more and more human.
Also true is the existentialist position that the real meaning and true meaning of a particular person's life are determined only "at the end of the road", when it is finally clear what exactly he did on this earth and what are the real fruits of his labors.
The meaning of one life
This is a very important philosophical question. Often, the true meaning of one person can only be discovered some time after his death. As you can see, it is not so easy to fully agree with the existentialist assertion that existence goes before essence, because it implies complete inner freedom and that a person is nothing.
At the same time, he is already "something" anyway. It continuously develops over the years of existence in the social environment where it enters. She leaves her mark on him and puts her limits on him.
For this reason, the very concept of individual being is impossible without the participation of a system of relations within a certain society, which are its essence.
