Existential experience: a mystery and a problem

Abstract

The growth of academic interest in the specific problems of existence takes its roots in the generaltendency to humanize knowledge. In modern literature, the idea of existential experience increasingly acquires the status of a multidisciplinary category that is associated with the shaping of a holistic vision of human nature and the historical development of man. The discussion reported in this paper deals with the problem of understanding of this particular kind of experience, which can be perceived as a sort of mystery where a human being is granted the possibility of an immediate contact with the world, or as a continuous and problematic process of self-understanding of existential subject, its constituting itself in the world with regard to cultural meanings and values, or as the making of one's proper ontology of existence – the temporal horizon of one's being – one’s personal history, which allows to integrate one's situations, events, meanings and values as fragments of a single destiny in the context of the past, present and future. The phenomenon of existential experience is interpreted on the basis of existentially oriented philosophy, psychology, and fiction.