Existential Anxiety

Abstract

Human existential anxiety is one of the most important topics dealt with by existentialist philosophy, which is concerned with the self in its individual experience. I wondered about its nature, its motives, and its value. Kierkegaard is considered as the first to present a full research into this phenomenon in his famous book "The Concept of Anxiety", in which he explains what this feeling has to do with the first sin. It is the anxiety of the individual self in the experience of realizing the Christian faith. As for Heidegger, he makes this feeling what reveals to the self its self and the possibility of achieving authenticity and freedom from the false existence that is the everyday world. Whereas Sartre goes beyond Heidegger's notion of anxiety about death toward anxiety about the ego because he considers man the being condemned to freedom, this work concludes with the agreement of these three philosophers, despite their different orientations, that anxiety is the advantage of man  alone. They consider it ontological and linked to nothingness. Its value is that it reveals to the self the  possibility, choice and human freedom.