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1 year ago in Philosophy By Venu M
What in your view, constitutes the substantive core or ground of human existence?
As I work on my dissertation in phenomenology, I find the Cartesian cogito to be a necessary starting point but an ultimately isolated one. It feels abstracted from the lived reality of being human. I'm asking because I want to understand what other substantive, perhaps more holistic, grounds for existence have been proposed or experienced that account for our embodied, relational, and worldly nature.
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By Raghav V Answered 1 year ago
In my work bridging philosophy and cognitive science, I've seen the cogito act as a conceptual trap, reducing existence to a spectator intellect. I would recommend looking towards the phenomenological tradition, particularly the concept of "being-in-the-world" as articulated by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty. Here, the substantive ground isn't solitary thought, but our pre-reflective, practical engagement with the world through an embodied and situated consciousness. Our existence is fundamentally an active, meaningful involvement with things and others, long before it becomes a theoretical object of thought. This shift from "thinking thing" to "engaged being" offers a far richer ontology.
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