Existence, Meaning, Excellence by Andrius Bielskis

Author:Andrius Bielskis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Routledge

4

Existence, meaning, excellence

Existence

Any ontological account of human life has to start from the fact of its existence. Yet this apparently uncontroversial fact, philosophically acknowledged by very different philosophers, has not been emphasised and conceptualised enough. The inability to philosophically acknowledge existence is not the case with Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. For the Marx (and Engels) (1998) of The German Ideology the starting point of ontological enquiry into human history, which in their case is the key to understanding humanity itself, is the existence of ‘human individuals’:

The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity (…). The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals.

(Marx and Engels 1998: 36–37)

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.