The adventure of being a person

pp. 50-154

in: James G. Hart, The person and the common life, Deventer, Kluwer, 1992

Abstract

The words Erfahrung, Erleben, "experience," and "awareness" have suggestive etymologies. With a slight encouragement one might entertain Erfahrung and Erleben as journeys suggesting a weariness and an experience of peril. For transcendental phenomenology, the human being's pursuit of authentic personal life is a medium for the adventure which is the self-realization of "the absolute" or all of monads. This adventure, which transpires through the experience and achievements of monads, has moments of activity and passivity, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, decline and improvement, success and failure. The focus of this chapter is on the elements of personhood. This occasions an abstraction from the social matrix in which persons come to be and in which personal being is cultivated. In the subsequent chapters these abstract considerations will be inserted in the more concrete whole of intersubjectivity.