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

Alienation | Ambiguity | Angst or Anxiety | Awareness as Agony | Bad Faith | Being | Boredom | Christian Existentialism | Death | Demythologized | Ethics and Morality | Existence Precedes Essence | Existential | Existentialism | Faceless | Fight Club | for None and All | Futility | God is Dead! | Hell is Other People! | Individualism | Nausea | Nothingness -- Nonbeing | Phenomenology Theatre of the Absurd |

Alienation: --"The trouble with me is that I'm an outsider. And that's a very hard thing to be in American life." ---Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis

Alienation is the estrangement from other people, society, or work. Psychiatrists consider alienation a blocking or dissociation of a person's feelings. Some philosophers believe that alienation is produced by a shallow and depersonalized society. Fourth-century theologian Saint Augustine wrote that due to its sinful nature, humanity was alienated from God. To Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, alienation resulted from the split between the conscious and unconscious parts of the mind. French social theorist Émile Durkheim suggested that alienation stemmed from a loss of societal and religious tradition. Existentialists saw some measure of alienation as an inevitable part of the human condition

----By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts- but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively. ---Erich Fromm

----Human beings are compelled to live within a lie, but they can be compelled to do so only because they are in fact capable of living in this way. Therefore not only does the system alienate humanity, but at the same time alienated humanity supports this system as its own involuntary masterplan, as a degenerate image of its own degeneration, as a record of people's own failure as individuals. ---Václav Havel

----There is no religion in which everyday life is not considered a prison; there is no philosophy or ideology that does not think that we live in alienation. ---Eugène Ionesco

----Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. ---R. D. Laing