mit toa personally valid way of life{1}. The twentyth-century German philosopher MartinHeidegger {3} felt that anxiety leads to the individual's confrontation with theimpossibility of finding ultimate justification for his or her choices. There are many otherthemes in existentialism, here are just a few. First, there is the basic existentialiststandpoint, that existence precedes essence, has primacy over essence. “Man is aconscious subject, rather than a thing to be predicted or manipulated; he exists as aconscious being, and not in accordance with any definition, essence, generalization, orsystem. Existentialism says I am nothing else but my own conscious existence.”{4,21-22}. A second existentialist theme is that anxiety, or the sense of anguish, ageneralized uneasiness, a fear or dread which is not directed to any specific object.Anguish is the dread of the nothingness of human existence. This theme is as old asKierkegaard {5} within existentialism; it is the claim that anguish is the underlying,all-pervasive, universal condition of human existence. Existentialism agrees with certainstreams of thought in Judaism and Christianity which see human existence as fallen, andhuman life as lived in suffering and sin, guilt and anxiety. This dark picture of human lifeleads existentialists to reject ideas such as happiness, enlightenment optimism, a sense ofwell-being, since these can only reflect a superficial understanding of life, or a naive andfoolish way of denying the despairing, tragic aspect of human existence. A thirdexistentialist theme is that of absurdity. To exist as a human being is inexplicable, andwholly absurd. Each of us is simply here, thrown into this time and place---but why now?Why here {5}? All existentialist have pondered these very questions. Blaise Pascal, aFrench mathematician and philosopher of Descartes time, once said, “When I considerthe short duration of my life, swallowed up in the et...
