ABSTRACT
The introductory section starts by asking what a responsibility to and for absent others means when thinking, reading, and writing. The purpose is to explain the method of existential ethics and describing its aestheticizing inclinations. The introductory section is centered on the slogan, “always historicize,” which for many is a call for an extraordinary aesthetic freedom in literary activities. I explain how this question will be understood in this book, and how this difficult relation between ethics and aesthetics has been discussed in the philosophy of history, literary criticism, and existential philosophy. This introductory section calls for recognizing the ethical importance of responding to absent generational others as real people in our exhortations to think, read, and write about them.
