Professor Fayez Sayegh, one of the professors of philosophy at the American University of Beirut, is among our thinkers who incline toward "existential phi-losophy in their thinking." He has founded a circle for the study of "Kierkegaard," the father of existential philosophy, comprising some gradu-ates of the university's department of philosophy and some thinkers inter-ested in Kierkegaard. On this occasion we thought to ask him for a definition of existential philosophy, and he wrote us the following article.

The Scope of the Term

The phrase "existential philosophy" is used in two senses: a first sense, com-prehensive and broad, and a second sense, narrow and specialized.

(a) "Existential philoso-phy" in its most com-prehensive sense is every philosophy that directs its attention and its concern toward being (existence). In this sense it is the antithesis of every intel-lectual effort that begins, not from the analysis of existence as it is and the making of existence and its structures the arbiter over mental conceptions, but rather from the con-ceiving of existence and its structures, and the positing of it, upon the basis of mental construc-tions. That is to say, in this sense it applies the mind to existence, and does not impose existence as the mind wills. It is "existential" in the sense that it acknowledges the "priority" of existence over the philosophizing mind, and the necessity of the latter's submission

to the requirements of the nature and structure of the former.

(b) But "existential phi-losophy" in its special sense — and this is the technical sense by which it has come to be known — is the philosophy that begins from human being, from the human-ity of man, and all of whose effort is confined within the understand-ing and analysis of this being. The word "being," in this sense, contracts in scope until it is confined to human being. But the existential philosopher trusts that this contraction in scope is justified in the end by the fact that it contracts to the point where the "density of value" is concentrated: for human being, which is a part of being in general, is the cream of that more gen-eral being, its center of gravity, the locus where the highest values are gathered, the seat where the spiritual values are massed. Therefore the existential philosopher sees nothing better than this contraction in scope, so long as it is justified and compensated by an increase in value.

I must say a word here about the expression "being." The more cor-rect thing would be for existential philosophy to be styled "the philosophy of life," after life, were it not that "life" is a term which has acquired, thanks to science, a special biological cast, and has broadened until it embraces non-human creatures, such as ani-mals and plants. If there were a word denoting human life alone, it

would be better for the philosophy to be named after it than after being, as is now the case. For the phrase "existential philosophy" now, in its specialized sense, is confounded with the comprehensive sense mentioned above.

The Presuppositions of Existential Philosophy Compared with the Implications of Non-Existential Philosophy

In what has gone before I have defined the outer scope within which existential phi-losophy arises. But this definition tells us noth-ing whatever of its true nature; it merely points us to the seat from which it springs.

True acquaintance with existential phi-losophy must come through acquaintance with its fundamen-tal implications, and these are not truly understood except by comparison with the contrary implications of the non-existential philosophies — of the metaphysical philoso-phies generally, as his-tory has known them. Let us set out these implications, compar-ing them quickly.

(a) We may contrast these two types of philosophy, first, in respect of the origin of each.

The "non-existential" philosophy — let us call it, so as to embrace all the various philoso-phies that fall within it, Academic Philosophy — arises from a "desire for knowledge" which is in truth a kind of "curiosity." Long ago Aristotle said that philosophy has its origin in "wonder," or "perplexity," or "ques-tioning," or "astonish-ment." In this sense it seeks knowledge as an end in itself, and sets out to know in order

to be rid of ignorance. Knowledge, in its view, is a value in itself, and ignorance a "disvalue" in itself.

Existential philosophy, however, arises not from this "desire," but from an existential "anxiety" that seizes the philosopher and robs him of rest. It is an anxiety that touches his being and shakes it to its foundations: for it is an anxiety bound up with the problems that touch human being at its very core.

In this connection we may distinguish the "starting point" of each of the two philosophical types: we may say that aca-demic philosophy treats "philosophical ques-tions," while existential philosophy treats "exis-tential problems."

And on the basis of all this we may distinguish the two philosophers. If we resort to the distinction Pythagoras drew among men — saying that life is like a contest, and that people fall into classes: some are the contestants, some the spectators of the contest, and some those who turn the contest to profit — we may say that the existential philosopher is among the contes-tants in life, while the academic philosopher is among the spectators of the contest.

(b) The second funda-mental distinction is a distinction between the subjects of the two types of philosophy. Academic philosophy has for its subject the knowledge of truth, meaning "the first principle of existence," or "the structure of existence." Here arises metaphysics in its spe-cial sense — ontology.

Existential philosophy, however, has for its first and last sub-ject human being and