Table of Contents
Blaise Pascal
Søren Kierkegaard
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Friedrich Nietzsche
Carl Jaspers
Martin Heidegger
Gabriel Marcel
Jean-Paul Sartre
Simone de Beauvoir
Albert Camus
Book Introduction
Editor's Note and Translator's Note
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“Everyone lives with their own destiny to die.
So everyone has their own life
We must live as beings with the impulse and desire to realize.
Only through these impulses and desires
“Life can be full of meaning.”

Everyone dies someday.
I just face death in a different form every now and then.
Although it is each person's own, it is an undeniable fact that it causes us anxiety and fear in itself, whether it comes unexpectedly and suddenly or arrives right at the time we plan it.
The fear of death is not just the vagueness of the unknown, but also the fear of the emptiness of the very existence that I have felt as myself disappearing.
But death doesn't always evoke only negative emotions.
Sometimes it seems as if death is making me aware of the present, of myself.
The more I try to feel death, that is, the more I recall the distant feeling of not being able to feel myself anymore, the more I can realize my existence right now.
Of course, the sense of death may vary from time to time, but death has been perceived differently in each era.
For Plato, death was the moment when the soul escapes the prison of the body and returns to the world of ideas, and life was the process of preparing for that.
In the medieval Christian world, death was the inevitable fate that humans had to face due to original sin, but at the same time, it was not the end but the beginning of eternal life.
By establishing the afterlife in this way, the concept of eternity was used to overcome the fear of death, but at this time, death did not simply refer to the end of life.
However, this perspective has led us to look at the world we actually live in negatively.

Asking about death and answering with existence
Existential reflections on death

Existentialist thinkers who developed in earnest in the 20th century accepted death in a different way.
Death was seen as a fact in itself that evokes anxiety and fear, and death was not viewed as something dependent on external providence or eternity, but rather as an opportunity to question the meaning of life itself.
Rather than confining death within the framework of meaning given from the outside, it was instead used as a ‘possible basis for existence.’
Of course, there may be slight differences in the stance on death among individual thinkers, but existentialists, including Heidegger, believed that by contemplating death, we can grasp our own original uniqueness and the possibility of existence.
In this way, existentialism showed an attitude closer to human existence by thinking about death from the inside of life, breaking away from the existing transcendental and religious framework.
This perspective emerged prominently in the 20th century as existentialism became a central trend in philosophy, but it was not limited to the 20th century.
Even today, when concerns about human existence and identity are more pressing than ever before, and especially when digital technologies, including artificial intelligence, are attempting to algorithmize even human thought and behavior, existentialism remains relevant.
In a society where humans are evaluated solely on the basis of efficiency and productivity, existentialism leads us to question the unique life of humans, distinct from that of tools.
The realization that humans are not simply a collection of information or functional beings, but rather beings moving toward their own death, forces us to re-examine our attitude and direction in life.
Ultimately, contemplating death leads to the question of restoring the original nature of life, a question that remains relevant to us today.

From Pascal to Camus,
Sentences from existentialists who pondered death
The meaning of death and life seen through them

According to Professor Sang-yeon Han, who edited and translated the book, existentialism in a narrow sense is limited to 20th-century philosophy and literature, but if we examine the thoughts of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre before and after, the history of existentialist thought began a long time ago.
To compose this book, Professor Han Sang-yeon selected the thinkers who presented the most specific and profound reflections on death in the history of existentialism, and among these thinkers, he selected the writings that contained the most specific and profound thoughts on death.
Next, I selected sentences that clearly revealed each thinker's unique perspective, especially sentences that would help me understand the philosophical connections between thinkers.
This is a consideration on the part of the editor to ensure that even readers who are not familiar with existentialist thought can easily understand the text of the thinker.
And this is why this book is also an excellent introductory text that allows readers to understand each existentialist thought by starting from the insights of each thinker.
The reflections of ten existentialist thinkers presented in this book will prompt us to consider how we should view and face death, and our answers will in turn prompt us to question how we should live.