Dispatches · No. 04 · Recommendation ·
Paul Tillich’s Ultimate Concern in the Digital Age
A preprint by Chunxi Hu reads life in the digital age through Paul Tillich’s idea of ultimate concern.
The article argues that digital technology wears down what Tillich saw as the conditions for ultimate concern: freedom, wholeness and a unified sense of self. Algorithms discipline choice, scoring systems fragment the story of a life, and virtual identity loosens the self’s anchor in the body.
It proposes two responses: reclaiming these human capacities within technological systems, and turning diffuse digital anxiety back into existential anxiety — telling what is truly ultimate apart from “digital idols” — so that people can affirm their humanity through what Tillich called the courage to be.
This is a preprint, posted in September 2026, and has not yet been peer reviewed.
A note from the lab
As digital tools and AI become part of clinical care, we are interested in what they mean not only for efficiency and safety but for how people find meaning, particularly when facing illness and mortality. This paper offers an existential vocabulary for that question, drawing on Tillich, whose ideas of anxiety and the courage to be have long informed existential psychotherapy.