Home 9 Passage 9 Existentials

When exploring the meaning aspects of a phenomenon or event, the existentials of lived world (existentiality), lived relation (relationality), lived body (corporeality), lived space (spatiality), lived time (temporality), lived things (materiality) and lived technics (technology) can be used to explore the phenomenon in a heuristic manner. They are existentials in the sense that they belong to everyone’s lifeworld—they are universal themes of all human life. Actually, it was Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception (1962, 2012) that prompted for me the idea of existentials as guides for phenomenological reflection that I started in my early human science workshops. Merleau- Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception is organized in major sections on body, spatiality, things or world, others or relations, and temporality. And these existential themes clearly are systematically explored and belabored in the various chapters. In fact, gradually these fundamental existentials occur repeatedly in the phenomenological literature. We all experience our world and our reality through these existentials. Of course, we can even distinguish additional existentials such as death (dying), language (linguisticality), and mood (modality). The point is that existentials are helpful universal “themes” of human existence to explore meaning aspects of our lifeworld and of the particular phenomena that we may be studying.