From experience to gift. Reflections on life as disclosed to consciousness. Part 2
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15633/lie.1913Keywords:
life, death, encounter, reduction, donationAbstract
In the first part of this meditation I argued concerning the self-disclosure of life to consciousness that there is something prior to all concrete conscious reflection on life and thus prior to whatever notion of life. We are already affected by life before thematically and reflexively experiencing it.In this second part I would like to investigate how this original vital experience (Erlebnis) in which life is disclosed in a silent way is transformed by consciousness to reflected conscious experiences. This transformation that allows for a new access to life at the same time necessarily goes along with a certain reduction. It is this reduction that has to be traced back in order to discover the full meaning of life, i.e. the donum (the self-giving character of life) behind the data or simple givenness of life.
I realize this step analyzing three typical forms of experiences in which life thematically reveals itself, such as new life, death and encounter. In each of these experiences of life the data of life contains a reference to the underlying donation: the self-disclosure of life in form of a gift of life. This allows me to argue that that in any ‘vital-experience’ what offers itself to the personal encounter is the full Life as such. Further I show how the gift of life is to be discovered in all three dimensions of its manifestation: life-world, inner life of the soul and event.
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