Talk:Existential dread

Wikified as part of the Wikification wikiproject! JubalHarshaw 14:06, 26 October 2006 (UTC)

-

Good lord, what the hell is this article saying?

Needs Improvement
This topic is in dire need of improvement, both in language and content. The bizarre sentence construction fails to explain just what this topic is about. Vadigor 17:16, 17 July 2007 (UTC)

--

Yeah, WTF?

There's a better explanation in the 'angst' article anyway:

A different but related meaning is attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855). In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard used the word Angest (Danish, meaning "dread") to describe a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair in the free human being. Where the animal is a slave to its instincts but always confident in its own actions, Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to mankind leaves the human in a constant fear of failing its responsibilities to God. Kierkegaard's concept of angst is considered to be an important stepping stone for 20th-century existentialism. While Kierkegaard's feeling of angst is fear of actual responsibility to God, in modern use, angst is broadened to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one's principles, and others (possibly including God). Still, the angst in alternative music may be more accessible to more audiences than existentialism. The term "angst" is now widely used as a theme in many great modern writers. Often, as in the Catcher in the Rye the expression is used as a common adolescent experience of malaise; in this sense it has become one of the most central themes used in the fiction of modern novelists like Don DeLillo[1], David Foster Wallace and others.