Bogoslovska smotra, Vol. 91 No. 3, 2021.
Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.53745/bs.91.3.2
The Boundary Situations of Human Existence as Topoi of Faith and Hope
Pavle Mijović
orcid.org/0000-0001-6399-7694
; Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Sarajevo, Sarajevo, Bosna and Herzegovina
Abstract
The boundary situations of human existence transcend an explicitly individual perspective and often point towards wider social dynamics that are hostile to the undisturbed development of personal and collective reality. In the first part of the article, such boundary situations will be analysed within the theoretical frame offered by Karl Jaspers. Antinomies that characterise boundary situations will be scrutinised within the relation between the scientific and existential world. Husserl’s understanding of the crisis of science, especially in the perspective of »loss of meaning« will be investigated from the point of view of the intersection of scientific optimism and societal crisis. On the basis of that intersection, the author develops a hypothesis that boundary situations gain additional momentum in the context of crisis, within which the scientific optimism loses its stabilising function and causes a wider social crisis. The second part of the article sketches an alternative discursive practice: The syntagm of Pope Francis, »Peripheries of Human Existence«, will be used as a kind of methodological framework within which boundary situations can be observed and analysed. Plurality and diversity of boundary situations, on the one hand, and dynamism of the living world and social circumstances, on the other, demands a multidisciplinary methodology that transcends autoreferential approaches often encountered in individual sciences. Thus, the author offers a critical analysis of the phenomenon of autoreferentiality and sketches the contours of an inclusive method that would be capable of strengthening trust in the social framework (Niklas Luhmann), thereby creating a conducive context of realising tangible hope.
Keywords
boundary situations; peripheries of existence; autoreferentiality; trust; realisation of tangible hope.
Hrčak ID:
273595
URI
Publication date:
2.2.2022.
Visits: 1.031 *