Existential Anxiety

B. Existential Anxiety: An Existential Predicament

A predicament refers to a trying and puzzling situation, a situation that is difficult to extricate ourselves from. An existential predicament is such kind of situation but that which already belongs to the basic structure of our human existence itself. It is, thus, a basic state of our being. And we have just discussed one existential predicament—that of existential void/emptiness.

As mentioned, there is in the human a void, an emptiness within that cannot be filled by any reality belonging to the horizontalplane of existence—the plane of the finite, the limited and the temporal/passing. How can he ever find the complete fulfillment which his very being is thirsting for if what exist in this realm are only the finite, the limited, the imperfect and the temporal?

In this section, our concern is another existential predicament—existential anxiety. We, in the daily course of our life, are unmindful of this existential anxiety, that such anxiety is a basic state of our being human, and a basic strucutre3of our existence. Yet, life has ways of bringing it to our conscious (or direct) awareness. One of which is through kairos, commonly called crucial event.

Life as mentioned is a dynamic movement of human transcendence, a movement of going beyond any limits in the search for the greater, the better, the more. In the course of this movement, we discover that the situations we encounter in life divide themselves into basically two different kinds. On the one hand there are situations such as going to school, purchasing a ball pen, meeting friends, working on an assignment, and so forth, which are routine. Such situations which we do more or less habitually are regarded as normal or regular parts of the business of daily living; and do not require deep thinking on our part.On the other hand, there is another type of human situation running through...