Abstract

Time has not worn out the urgency and the novelty of these essays on existentialism published first in 1950 and again in 1959. The nothingness on which Paci writes so poignantly here is being as dealt with in the various historico-philosophical positions of transcendence. This suggestion of Paci is Heideggerian in character: being and nothingness are after all identified. But since Paci has in mind the inevitable destruction of human finitude by philosophical conceptions of transcendence, his words of caution apply to Heidegger's intentions as well. Heidegger in fact destroyed metaphysics, i.e., the possibility of enclosing transcendence within any philosophical system. Yet by making this destruction systematic he opened up a new transcendence which encompasses existence as speech oriented in the philosophical mode. For Paci all of these philosophical positions end up identifying being and nothingness precisely because none of their images of transcendence can be properly superimposed upon the freedom and the finitude of man; thus, they become irrelevant, they lead nowhere. Three philosophical directions in Paci's background lead him away from this irrelevancy: the Augustinian emphasis on the existentiell that leads through Kierkegaard to Jaspers; the immanentistic [[sic]] sense of human development that flows parallel in Marx and Croce; the constitutive role of experience and expression in the late Husserl. Concerning the latter, Paci sees some important connections between constitution and myth in the two central chapters of his work, one of which is about existentialism and neo-Kantianism and the other about myth and existence.--A. M.