Oltre il Processo. Verso un Esistenzialismo Critico

Abstract

The article proposes a critical existentialism grounded in a radical ontological revision of the concept of existence, understood as relative existence in act. This perspective goes beyond both Whitehead’s process philosophy and the various twentieth-century monisms, from James to Russell. Ultimately, this critical existentialism overturns the phenomenological tradition, still captive to the idea of experience as the appearance of the world to a subject. The mistake shared by these approaches lies in maintaining, in different forms, a distance between being and appearing, between world and consciousness, between object and subject. Critical existentialism—elsewhere referred to as the Mind-Object Identity (MOI)—holds that existence requires no experiential or phenomenal pole: to appear is to exist. For this to hold, whatever exists does so always relatively to something else, and reality is a network of relative objects in act, each coinciding with the exercise of its own power. Within this framework, the phenomenological reduction gives way to an existential reduction, which does not suspend the world but rather the subject itself, dissolving intentionality and every remaining dualism. Freedom is no longer a distance from being, but existence in relation to itself. The mind is not in the body, but is the world—which, finally, is not what appears to someone—but what gives itself fully, in act, as existence.