Justifying Our Existence: An Essay in Applied PhenomenologyIn his magnum opus Being in Time (1927), Martin Heidegger (1889 1976) argued that individuals have assumed that their existence is "a given," when in actual fact they simply have the ability to be. Justifying Our Existence examines the ways in which human beings attempt to calm their existential concerns by magnifying and proving their existence through phenomena such as self righteousness, careerism, nationalism, and religion. Using remarkably