Need to know
Anxiety isn’t normally considered a good thing. It’s an unpleasant feeling associated with inner turmoil, sleepless nights and chewed fingernails. Take it far enough, and a psychiatrist will diagnose you with an anxiety disorder. And yet some philosophers have looked on anxiety as, well, not exactly a good thing but at least as potentially valuable. Clinical anxiety is simply disabling, but existential anxiety, adopted in the right spirit, is potentially liberating.
In the first half of the 20th century, the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger both gave a central place to anxiety in their bold analyses of human existence. Both were influenced – more than they acknowledged – by the 19th-century Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard.
Kierkegaard (1813-55) was a misfit in the buttoned-down world of Lutheran Copenhagen. He came from a well-to-do family, studied theology, and became engaged to an intelligent and engaging young woman. Everything was on course for a life of bourgeois respectability. Then something inside of him snapped. He broke off his engagement, withdrew from society, and devoted himself to writing at a ferocious pace while living off inherited wealth. In the 1840s, he produced more than 30 volumes. His writing was bitterly polemical, attacking the hypocrisies of Danish society and the Danish Church. Many of his books were written under extravagant pseudonyms, permitting Kierkegaard to quarrel even with himself. But no one in tight-knit Copenhagen was under any illusion about the author’s identity.
His prodigious output included the first analysis of existential anxiety. In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), the pseudonymous ‘Vigilius Haufniensis’ (‘the watchman of Copenhagen’) argues that anxiety is the consequence of an honest confrontation with freedom. Nothing but our own free choice determines what we will make of ourselves, and the consequences of that choice echo through eternity. For the most part, we don’t feel the burden of this responsibility because we simply go along with the crowd. Anxiety (ångest in Danish) lifts us out of that happy torpor and confronts us with our individual responsibility. This anxiety is burdensome and terrifying but also liberating.
For Sartre (1905-80), our freedom distinguishes us from things. The operations of nature are causally efficacious. When I throw a rock into the air, its trajectory is subject to the force of gravity in exactly the same way on every single throw. Human motives lack this causal efficacy, as anyone who’s made a New Year’s resolution can attest. In that gap between motive and action – a gap that doesn’t exist between cause and effect – lies the experience of freedom. And we experience that freedom, Sartre says, as anxiety or anguish (angoisse).
Sartre gives two examples of the experience of existential anxiety. The first is vertigo. Sartre distinguishes vertigo from plain fear. If I’m walking along a precarious mountain ledge, a bit of loose rock could send me tumbling to my death. I fear for myself as a thing that is every bit as much subject to the force of gravity as the loose rock I might slip on. Vertigo, by contrast, is a response not to my subjection to external forces but to my freedom. With a shudder, I recognise that I could at any moment throw myself over the ledge. I don’t want to, I’m firm in my resolve not to, but all my present desire and resolve is causally inefficacious. My present self doesn’t get to determine the choices of my future self. At every moment, I’m free to chuck all my resolve and throw myself over the ledge. Anxiety is the chilling recognition of that freedom.
Vertigo is anxiety oriented toward the future: it’s a recognition of the radical freedom of my future self with regard to my present self. Sartre also imagines a past-oriented anxiety in the form of a gambling addict. The gambler recognises the harm his addiction does to him and to those around him and has firmly resolved never to gamble again. But then he sees a gaming table and feels that resolve melt away. Even as he sits down at the table, he continues to endorse the resolve not to gamble – he genuinely wants to not gamble – but his past resolve has no power to compel his present actions.
In the resolve not to gamble and the resolve not to throw myself over the precipice, I wish, if only temporarily and only in some respects, to be a thing – to be something whose movements are as locked in place as a rock under the influence of gravity. But to wish my freedom away is to act in bad faith. Anxiety for Sartre arises as I recognise that, at every moment, my whole self is in play.
This idea of radical freedom had particular pertinence to Sartre, who was writing in the midst of the Second World War and supported the French Resistance. He and his fellow Frenchmen faced stark and dangerous choices concerning collaboration or resistance, and Sartre saw in these choices expressions that defined their identity.
Whereas Sartre condemned Nazism and French collaborators, Heidegger (1889-1976) notoriously welcomed the Nazi takeover of his native Germany. Philosophers since have had to grapple with the question of what to do with the writings of a man who was in many ways personally loathsome but also deeply insightful. Much of Sartre’s Being and Nothingness (1943) feels cribbed from Heidegger’s monumental Being and Time (1927), which offers its own analysis of anxiety (Angst).
For Sartre, anxiety reveals something about us. For Heidegger, it reveals something about the world – or rather the way that we’re related to it. We live in a world full of chairs and tables and pebbles and trees and clouds and songs. For the most part, we suppose those things are all just there and that we happen to be there too, one more item in the inventory list of the world. What we don’t realise for the most part, according to Heidegger, is that the world isn’t a collection of self-standing items but an interconnected whole bound together by care.
Consider chairs. I happen to be sitting on one at the moment. That’s handy because it means I can sit out on my balcony on a sunny day while I type this essay. I like breathing the fresh air and I like talking about philosophy with (and to) other people. The chair fits into a whole picture of a meaningful life, one where the chair is connected to the sun and air and other people and philosophy. The chair presents itself to me as a chair because it has a significant place in this and many other activities that fit into a world that I care about. Remove care, remove the sense of purpose and meaning that animates my activities, and the chair’s distinctive chairness starts to slip away.
This is what happens in anxiety, Heidegger says. Anxiety for Heidegger is like an existential version of that game where you repeat a word enough times that it starts to sound like meaningless babble. In anxiety, it’s not just the words we use that lose their familiar meaning but the things in the world around us. Stripped of its ordinary significance, the chair stands out like an alien object, some bizarre assemblage of stuff.
But like Sartre, Heidegger thinks that anxiety reveals something important: I don’t simply find myself in a world that makes sense; the significance of the world is connected to the significance I find in my everyday activities. And that means that I am partway responsible for the sense the world makes to me.
Kierkegaard, Sartre and Heidegger all think we have a strong motive to flee anxiety when it strikes us. Our freedom entails a heavy burden of individual responsibility, which is daunting. Much easier, then, to act as if the big questions of how to live and how to make sense of things were already settled. All three authors have a life of bourgeois respectability in their sights, a life where contemporary tastes and fashions dictate how ‘one’ ought to live. The contemporary world is more liberal in offering diverse lifestyles but those levelling pressures are still there, whether in the feeling that you ought to get a university degree as a springboard to a fulfilling career, or in the feeling of pressure to align yourself with the political or aesthetic preferences of your peers. Anxiety is discomfiting because it presents us with the stark reminder that it doesn’t have to be this way while providing no guidance about what way it might be instead.
Anxiety is discomfiting – but we can learn to transmute it into something transformative. In what follows, I offer a few pointers on how to evoke existential anxiety and put it to good use.
