The question of decision is one of the main existencialist preocupation from Kierkegaard to Sartre and French Phenomenology. The Book Decision and Existential Turn is searching for new formations of identity, which should allow for an asymetrical relation at the very heart of ethics. Some remarks about the existential way of thinking can examine and open new philosophical perspectives in concrete ethics.
     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.

Reviewed by: Prof. Dr. Žarko Paić, Prof. Dr. Dalímir Hajko
Publishers: Kierkegaard Circle, Trinity College, University of Toronto;
Central European Research Institute Soeren Kierkegaard Ljubljana;
KUD Apokalipsa
Number of pages: 203
Price: 20 CAD, 16 USD, 15 EUR