“The tragic bind that man is peculiarly in – the basic paradox of his existence – is that unlike other animals he has an awareness of himself as a unique individual on the one hand; and on the other he is the only animal in nature who knows he will die. As Laura Perls so vividly put it, man is suspended between these two poles: one pole gives him a feeling overwhelming importance and the other gives him a feeling of fear and frustration. Lower animals are spared both the burden of importance at having emerged as sharp individualities, as well as the burden of the knowledge of their own finitude. But man must live the acuteness of the contradiction: he is an emergent life that does not seem to have any more meaning than a non-emergent life – in fact, that seems all the more senseless to have emerged at all, since it is equally mortal.”