The another goal of these remarks is the search
for meaning to one’s life through individual essential
decisions, which takes on singular relevance. The
book also analyzes some of the crisis of our age and
points out the importance of the existential turn in
one’s individual attitudes and outlooks on life. An
individual lives in an inner conflict: on the one hand,
one lives under the impression of all-mightiness, believing that everything is possible, yet on the other
hand, one experiences helplessness, despair, doubt,
and the loss of oneself.
Inspired by Kierkegaard, Havel, Patočka, Ricoeur
and others, the author stresses the importance of
passion as a fundational element for existential
truth. The crutial question is one of the single individual.
If a person is capable of compassion and of
maintaining an honest realationship with one’s
neighbor, than one can muster irony and egoism.
Only the single individual who has forsaken the
crowd and changed one’s attitude toward one’s
neghbour is capable of an existential turn. To understand
the existential turn in its practical dimensions,
the author draws a comparison between
existencialism and feminism, inspiring a radical ethical
stance toward this attitude. Such existential
ethics was influenced by Kierkegaard, specifically his
pseudonymous work The Concept of Anxiety, where
he himself created a need for existentialist ethics –
his second ethics, which would be philosophy first.