Existential Phenomenology and Applied Philosophy

Abstract

The philosopher loves wisdom for its potential contributions to meaningful living. The wise person is mindful of the means to refinement of concepts and ideas and aware of the possibilities of their use, misuse and abuse. He strives to minimize distortion, disrespect and compromise of the integrity and uniqueness of the objects of conceptualization and ideation and to maximize truthfulness. He is ever aware of the need for, and yet sensitive to the limits of, the application of static concepts and ideas to a flowing experience of a dynamic reality. He has a will to sustain the dialectical tensions between the abstract and the concrete, the necessary and the contingent, the universal and the particular, the collective and the individual, theory and experience, and theory and practice. Ultimately, the wise person has the virtue of discernment, creativity and humility in making claims to truth in science, religion, morality, social and political thought, aesthetics and everyday living.

When Eudamidas saw the aged Xenocrates and his disciples in the Academy, engaged in seeking for the truth, he asked: “Who is this old man?” And when he was told that Xenocrates was a wise man, one of those occupied in the search for virtue, he cried: “But when does he then propose to use it?”

— Kierkegaard¹