The most obvious, the most easily apprehended ultimate concern is death. We exist now, but one day we shall cease to be. Death will come, and there is no escape from it. It is a terrible truth, and we respond to it with mortal terror. "Everything,", in Spinoza's words, "endeavours to persist in its own being"; and a core existential conflict is the tension between the awareness of the inevitability of death and the wish to continue to be.引自 Introduction
Freedom.
Another ultimate concern, a far less accessible one, is freedom. Ordinarily we think of freedom as an unequivocally positive concept. Throughout recorded history has not the human being yearned and striven for freedom? Yet freedom viewed from the perspective of ultimate ground is riveted to dread. In its existential sense "freedom" refers to the absence of external structure. Contrary to everyday experience, the human being does not enter (and leave) a well-structured universe that has an inherent design. Rather, the individual is entirely responsible -- that is, is the author of -- his or her own world, life design, choices, and actions. "Freedom" in this sense, has a terrifying implication: it means that beneath us there is no ground -- nothing, a void, an abyss. A key existential dynamic, then, is the clash between our confrontation with groundlessness and our wish for ground and structure.引自 Introduction
Existential Isolation.
A third ultimate concern is isolation -- not interpersonal isolation with its attendant loneliness, or intrapersonal isolation (isolation from parts of oneself), but a fundamental isolation--an isolation both from creatures and from the world--which cuts beneath other isolation. No matter how close each of us becomes to another, there remains a final, ungridgeable gap; each of us enters existence alone and must depart from it alone. The existential conflict is thus the tension between our awareness of our absolute isolation and our wish for contact, for protection, our wish to be part of a larger whole引自 Introduction
Meaninglessness.
A fourth ultimate concern or given of existence is meaninglessness. If we must die, if we constitue our own world, if each is ultimately alone in an indifferent universe, then what meaning does life have? Why do we live? How shall we live? If there is no preordained desgin for us, then each of us must construct our own meaning in life. Yet can a meaning of one's own creation be sturdy enough to bear one's life? This existential dynamic conflict stems from the dilemma of meaning-seeking creature who is thrown into a universe that has no meaning.引自 Introduction
