Aurel Codoban – an Existential Stylist: From Desire to Love as Communication Instrument

Abstract

Philosophical counseling proves to be today among the most complex intervention forms in the postmodern individual’s daily life. Aurel Codoban, existential stylist, proposes a way to interpret and act in the existential field. He starts from the premise that philosophy must propose a way of life. He takes on a philosophical practice that builds an ontology of detail in which the fundamental element in the human condition definition is no longer rationality but desire. As existential stylist, the philosopher elicits in his analyses the benefits of philosophical counseling on the love-desire relationship in the context of transformations in individuals’ lives along five dimensions as an existential datum of the human being: physical, social, personal, spiritual and religious. In this context, love as a cognition instrument denotes the way postmoderns use the resources of desire for personal development, alterity cultivation, and subject instituting as relational reality. Bringing together erotic desire and the desire for transcendence, love proves to be a transfiguring force in the postmodern world, even if some of the forms we used to associate to love are blurred or metamorphosed.

Keywords: Pre-theoretical, ontologizing, factual life, facticity, self-world, original science, categorial explication, hermeneutics of facticity