Among other thoughts I remember these: "You are going on,"" I said to myself, "to become an old man, without being anything, and without really undertaking to do anything. On the .
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other hand, wherever you look about you, in literature and in life, you see the celebrated names and figures, the precious and much herald men who are coming into prominence and are much talked about, the many benefactors of the age who know how to benefit mankind by making life easier and easier- then suddenly this thought flashed through my mind: "You must do something, but inasmuch as with your limited capacities it will be impossible to make anything easier then it has become, you must, with the same humanitarian enthusiasm as the others, undertake to make something harder (Kaufmann 84)."" .
So Kierkegaard was launched upon his career, he searched for new difficulties. He did not need to search far for he questioned his own existence, and his life was consumed in the continuous deed of existential thinking. .
Inspired by Kierkegaard were both Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. Karl Jaspers set out to explain the meaning of Being, a level of consciousness. He wrote about three distinct but interdependent forms of being, being-there, being-oneself, and being-in-itself. Being-there embraces all reality and includes animate and inanimate matter, thoughts and bodies, in other words whatever can stand as an object (Grimsley 152). Being-oneself is a being that can never be understood in the way that objects are known, because it can not be contained within the limits of objective criteria. Being-oneself or the concept of existence has a basic feature that one has to be possible' to exist, but existence in itself is incomplete but only part of the concept of being-in-itself. This extreme limit of philosophizing transcends all being (Grimsley 153).
Martin Heidegger also set out to explain the essence of Being.
