Abstract:

The issue of existence is the most fundamental problematic of the existential intellectual approach. This approach is opposed to the essentialist understanding, which tries to understand reality in essence by subjecting existence to the distinction between essence and appearance and to understand appearance as a secondary element connected to the essence in question. Unlike essentialist metaphysical understandings, the issue of Being is handled in a context in which human existence is at the center in this way of thinking. Human existence has been considered not as the manifestation of a fixed, potential essence in time, but as a process of existence in which possibilities hidden in time become known with every selective decision. Therefore, becoming is not the abstract, ideal essence becoming known, but the actual existence of the possibilities contained in the life that is being experienced itself by an elective decision in a historical context. In the context of the description of human existence, Kierkegaard took his anxious existence into the center of his thought of existence, while Heidegger took his being-in-the-world. Sartre, who we see as the synthesis of Kierkegaard and Heidegger thought, has considered the human being as an existence that appears as being-for-itself in the environment of being-in-itself. Jaspers, which we see as the synthesis of Heidegger and Kant thought, has considered human existence as an existence in which the encompassing entity manifests itself as being-we on the ground of the transcendent world. The aim of our study is both to reveal the differences between essentialist concepts and the idea of existence in the ontological context of the concept of existence, and to decipher the different descriptions of existence within the idea of existence.

Keywords: