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.
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.
In order to bring the intrinsic meaning of the existential self to the fore, Soren Kierkegaard driving home his message made an allusion to the idea of the ‘anonymous crowd’. In his own words, “Being in a crowd unmakes one’s nature as an individual self by diluting self.”5  He further stresses:
      Acrowd in its very concept is untruth, by reason of the                 fact that it renders the individual completely impenitent           and irresponsible or at least weakens his sense of duty, vision         and responsibility by reducing it to a fraction.6
From a different angle, Martin Heidegger with a bold stroke shifted the nineteenth century continental philosophy away from the traditional concerns about theories and focused it upon the concern of thinking individual (self). He sets out to explore the deepest nature of self as an existing being.  Fascinated by the question of being (Zeins frage) he desires to explore the fundamental ontology - the phenomenological analysis of the ‘Dasein’. In his fundamental task of de-structuring the essential components of the Dasein he does not intend to joke when he remarks, “Dasein has a pre-ontological understanding of his own being because; being reveals itself gratuitously to him.”7 By making serious enquiry into the meaning of being through rational and fundamental questions, the existential approach to self in Heidegger’s line of thought is not very difficult to disclose, implying though it may be.
Jean Paul Sartre not dismissing his phenomenological background approaches the question of self as the only unique Consciousness. According to him,
          The mode of the existence of the Consciousnesses
          is to be conscious of itself and being conscious of
          his consciousness, its law of existence is correctly
          defined.