Human Experience: A Ground for the Affirmation of God Cover Image

Human Experience: A Ground for the Affirmation of God
Human Experience: A Ground for the Affirmation of God

Author(s): Zofia J. Zdybicka
Contributor(s): Artur Wójtowicz (Translator)
Subject(s): Philosophy, Special Branches of Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion
Published by: International Étienne Gilson Society
Keywords: experience; existence; cognition; world; God; affirmation; reality; person; transcendence; man; religious being; homo religiosus

Summary/Abstract: The authoress claims that the experience of the man’s own existence is genetically earlier than all other types of cognition. It can be called the man’s primordial, basic, radical, fundamental experience: the experience of human existence immersed in the world. It constitutes a foundation and place wherein the problem of God arises in the most natural and spontaneous way, and where the very roots of the problem are to be sought. She emphasizes that it is extremely important that the affirmation of the man’s existence is achieved along with cognitional contact with extra-subjective reality whose affirmation allows for man to more deeply penetrate the affirmation of his own existence, to know his existence as connected with other personal and non-personal beings—and ultimately connected with the existence of a higher and stronger reality, the reality of God. These are not man’s impressions or desires, but facts stated by man. The authoress concludes that it is human experience which reveals man as a correlate of a higher, stronger and transcendent reality. Man thus turns out to be a religious being—homo religiosus.

  • Issue Year: 5/2016
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 283-296
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: English