-:- an Existential Reading List by Katharena -:-

the Realm of Existentialism | What is Existentialism? | Basic Themes of Existentialism | Existential-Speak | Existential Themed Books and Reviews | Magnetar, an Existential Think Tank | Existentialism and the Human Situation | Existentialism and the American Consciousness | Existentialism and Moral Individualism | Subjectivity and Existentialism | Existentialism, Choice and Commitment | Irrational Man : A Study in Existential Philosophy | Existentialism's Dread and Anxiety | Existentialism : Man and Human Relationships | Existentialism and the Significance of Being | World, Limits, Existence -- Existentialism | Problems of Existentialist Theology | Modern Existentialist and Phenomenological Studies | What is Phenomenology?

Martin Heidegger has pointed to the foundation of the intersubjective relationship in dread. When a man decides to escape from the banality of anonymous existence--which hides the nothingness of existence, or the nonreality of its possibilities, behind the mask of daily concerns--his understanding of this nothingness leads him to choose the only unconditioned and insurmountable possibility that belongs to him: death. The possibility of death, unlike the possibilities that relate him to other things and to other men, isolates him. It is a certain possibility, not through its apodictic evidence but because it continuously weighs upon existence. To understand this possibility means to decide for it, to acknowledge "the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all" and to live for death. The emotive tonality that accompanies this understanding is dread, through which man feels himself to be "face to face with the nothing' of the possible impossibility of [his] existence."

But neither the understanding of death nor its emotive accompaniment opens up a specific task for man, a way to transform his own situation in the world. They enable him only to perceive the common destiny to which all men are subject; and they offer to him, therefore, the possibility of remaining faithful to this destiny and of freely accepting the necessity that all men share in common. In this fidelity consists the historicity of existence, which is the repetition of tradition, the return to the possibilities from which existence had earlier been constituted, the wanting for the future what has been in the past. And in this historicity participate not only man but all of the things of the world, in their utilizability and instrumentality, and even the totality of Nature as the locus of history.