Dread And Authenticity

This paper evolved quite naturally out of two previous articles of mine published in these pages, “Death and Authenticity” (1986a) and “Love and Authenticity” (1987). The first portrayed death as a crucially significant challenge to authenticity: not only because it reveals the ever present finitude of whatever we cherish here on earth, but also because it subtly and unceasingly reminds us of the fact that at any moment it may hurl us into a state of facing hopelessly and endlessly the truly significant tasks which we have avoided. The paper on love and authenticity attempted to convey the powerful, creative mutual interaction of Eros and Agape, the essential role of genuine, unselfish love for the “other” in the formation of the Self, the unavoidable, painful conflicts and sacrifices required in the process of becoming and affirming the Self we are, as well as the challenging paradoxes that render this quest interminably open-ended.

To turn, now, to may at first seem anticlimactic. Yet a genuine stance toward love and death requires an understanding of dread and anxiety which our everyday attitudes tend to veil. Anxiety and dread cause us to shudder, to tremble; we want to avoid what we dread; and usually dread seems more decidedly negative than anxiety, as the latter can, at times, have the redeeming, positive connotation of “anxiously looking forward to something pleasant, new, and exciting.”

The title of Soren Kierkegaard's book on this subject is translated preferably with The Concept of Dread rather than with The Concept of Anxiety. Here and elsewhere, this great Danish thinker states clearly and unambiguously that dread is just as much part of an authentic human existence as death and love. They are basic existential dimensions of the incarnated, human Self, to which guilt (Heuscher, 1980) must be added as a fourth dimension. All four point to the freedom that this Self is called upon to manifest and to witness. In the foregoing papers the focus was heavily on