TABLE OF CONTENTS
Abstract
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Background of Study
1.2 Statement of Problems
1.3 Research Objectives
1.4 Research Question
1.5 Research Hypothesis
1.6 Scope of Study
1.7 Significance of study
1.8 Limitation of study
1.9 Definition of terms
CHAPTER TWO
2.0 Literature Review
CHAPTER THREE
3.0 Research methodology
3.1 Research Design
3.2 Population of study
3.3 Sampling Design and Procedure
3.4 Data Collection Instrument
3.5 Administration of Data Collection Instrument
3.6 Methods of data analysis
CHAPTER FOUR
4.0 Data Presentation and Analysis
4.1 Data Presentation
4.2 Test of Hypothesis
CHAPTER FIVE
5.0 Summary, Conclusion and Recommendation
5.1 Summary
5.2 Conclusion
5.3 Recommendation
References
Questionnaire
CHAPTER ONE
1.1 Self: An Existential Approach.
Existentialism is better seen as a style of philosophizing rather than a philosophy. Thus, the existentialists have some patterns of thought following their existential traits. Hence, they deny that reality can be neatly packaged in concept or presented as interlocking system. “An inquisitive style of thought that sets to adopt with ardent mastery the world in relation to man’s life in it.”1 Jean Paul Sartre, Soren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger made remarkable imprints among the existentialist thinkers. The basic style of their philosophizing begins from man rather than nature. A philosophy of the subject rather than the object per se. William Barrett’s definition of existentialism sets the existentialists’ agenda in motion:
A philosophy that confronts human situation in its
totality, to ask what the basic conditions of human
existence are and how man can establish his own
meaning out of these situations.2
From the foregoing therefore, existential approach to self is not very difficult to define.
Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the father of modern philosophy was the first to make a dialectical shift in the history of thought, breaking apart philosophy from the chains of scholastic ‘theocentricism’ to the modern ‘anthropocentricism’. In his famous cogito, he sets out to posit the “I” as the referential point of existence. Hence, the “I” becomes the starting point and the end point “terminus a quo and terminus ad quem” of his ontological status quo. The ‘I’ becomes the thinking subject.
But, a remarkable attempt to move the straight points of philosophy from the “abstract thinking subject to more concrete base, in the total, multi-dimensional human experience of involving in a world of affairs was carefully explored by John Macmurray.”3 Toeing the same line of argument, the existentialists owe their thought in agreement with John Macmurray’s view of the self as an ‘agent’ as against the traditional understanding of self as the ‘subject’.
In his own words, “the ‘I’ act (the self as agent) replaces the ‘I’ think (the self as subject) as the place where existential philosophy finds its beginning.”4 Thinking according to him is an abstraction from the totality of self as agent. Having given a skeletal view of the general notion of the existential self as the existentialism owe to Macmurray, it is very pertinent at this juncture to X-ray what three front liners existentialists have as their views in relation to self.