Anxiety
Metadata
- Author: Samir Chopra
Highlights
The persistent, nagging realization that our technical and material mastery of nature, our economic power, and our scientific prowess leave our fundamental existential predicaments of mortality and limitation as before is good cause for growing terror; there is “no exit.”
to be anxious is to be human and that to be human is to be anxious.
even if we are living the life we want to live, we will find we are not anxiety-free and that reflecting on our anxiety may help us uncover clues to the life we want to continue living.
the explicit task for a philosophical therapy based on Buddhism is to offer “treatment of deep-seated dissatisfaction.”
While dukkha is sometimes understood as mere “suffering,” an examination of its nature and its putative causes reveals it to be—besides other affects and feelings—an acute anxiety, an existential discomfort, resulting from an intellectual and emotional failure to face up to the bare facts of existence (which include the nature of human personal identity).
For the Buddha, anxiety was a problem, the emotion engendered in a situation when a being like us is deluded about what it is, and about the nature of the world it inhabits; anxiety is an unfortunate affliction to be avoided and cured by altering the terms of this relationship with existence.
To understand the Buddhist notion of anxiety, consider the Four Noble Truths, which the Buddha offered to his disciples as antidotes to this world’s perplexities: There is suffering in this world; this suffering has an identifiable cause; this suffering can be eased; here is how you do so.
We cannot, during any given pleasurable state, avoid feeling that the state will end soon, to be replaced by its deprivation, or that we will grow sated, and begin longing, hopelessly and helplessly, for the lost desirable state. (Indeed, such pleasurable states, like beautiful days in the spring or fall, make us especially anxious as we dread their all-too-soon ending, their vulnerability to “wasting” by us, their possibly-never-to-be-repeated status.) We
experience alienation because we feel estranged in this world, in both the political and the economic realms, which are controlled and administered by forces not under our control or reckoning, and in the private realm, where we are alone and isolated in our unique, incommunicable, ineffable subjectivity, one that can never be made satisfactorily commensurate with anyone else’s.
The day my daughter was born, I rejoiced, even as I acknowledged facts almost too painful for me to make note of here: that I cannot prevent her from suffering loss and despair of her own; that none of the force of my parental love and longing can change the nature of the world she has been born into; and finally, and shatteringly, that she too will pass someday.
For the Buddhist, existential anxiety is a species of dukkha; it is not neurosis; it is not a sign of freedom, authenticity, or the limitless possibility of action and choice. Instead, it is the state of being of an ignorant creature confused about its own nature, fumbling in the dark, hurting itself and others by its delusions and ignorance, by its fearful reactions to the ever-present possibility of decay, dissolution, and death in its life. The anxiety, the dukkha, it suffers from is pointless and needless and can and should be alleviated or eliminated.
Anxiety, then, arises within us; it is not caused by the world outside. The world is what it is; our relationship to it, our knowledge of it, causes our anxiety.
we are not born to instantiate a predetermined metaphysical essence, a perfect, abstract, Platonic Form of which I am only an imperfect realization; rather, I exist, come into being first, and then make myself.
Freedom’s possession, because it is characterized by anxiety, is not an unmitigated joy;
To be free is not the same as being happy.
and moral failure and anxiety when we do not. We will, then, not only suffer like the Buddha suggested, for we are mere human beings confronted with our mortality and limitation, but we will also moralize our suffering—a devastatingly self-flagellatory act—by considering this world’s socially constructed misfortunes either to be the curse of malignant fates and vengeful deities impervious to our prayers, or to result from our failures of choices and blessings.
As a damning consequence, our historically constructed social systems of values, morals, and normative constraints create and sustain an acute anxiety (via a terribly afflicting, guilt-inducing “bad conscience”) about not living up to the ideals we imagine regulate our lives. A skeptical critical tradition—going back to Plato’s Republic and whose modern members include Karl Marx and Michel Foucault—has long suggested that such values and ideals are those whose adoption will ensure the continued maintenance of power of the most privileged and entrenched classes.12 Morality itself—a specified and regulated code of conduct complete with notions of “guilt” and “wrongdoing,” “good” and “evil”—is exposed as an ideology that suits the interest of the powerful. The conscience it instills in us, the unsparing moral self-critique and examination it urges on us? An invitation to guilt and anxiety.
We want to live but are afraid of experiencing life; we want life but are afraid of living. This is the tension that Kierkegaard finds in anxiety; it is present in the movement from possibility to actuality, from the present to the future, from ambiguous desire to concrete, committing, action. (These formulations also bring Kierkegaard’s notions closer to Buddhism, for dukkha is the feeling that the present moment is tainted by anticipation of future loss, and social and moral transgression. Indeed, Kierkegaard insists that even in “good fortune’s most hidden recesses of happiness, there dwells also the dread that is despair,”41 another point of commonality with dukkha.)
But we are not just creatures who are free to act; we are creatures who are aware we are free to act; we could have been creatures who are free to choose but are not conscious of their freedom.
For Kierkegaard, the difference between neurotic and healthy individuals is marked by their responses to anxiety: the healthy individual moves ahead despite the inner conflict and anxiety, actualizing her freedom, whereas the unhealthy retreat to a safer enclosure, sacrificing their freedom as they do so.
our courage to face a particular kind of fear comes about only when we face an even greater fear, the procrastinating writer finally gets to work when the wrath of the editor, or the loss of the reader or her own artistic sensibility, strikes her as a greater fear than the anxieties of the blank page and her fumbling attempts to fill it.
The existentialist philosopher and Protestant (Lutheran) theologian Paul Tillich wrote his classic work The Courage to Be to claim that we need a distinctive courage to exist, to persist in living, to just “be.” Tillich’s book is not titled The Courage to Wage War or The Courage to Climb Mountains; we are heroes, courageous ones, if we can affirm life and its singular challenge: anxiety. In displaying the “democratic” courage of Socrates, who in freely affirming his own death, affirmed life,70 we rely on an acute, hard-earned wisdom about the nature of our being: it is suffused with an awareness of its own nonexistence.
What if I do not live my life richly enough and do not take sufficient advantage of it?
Tillich’s analysis reminds us, too, that an important determinant of dealing with anxiety is to realize the braveries we have already demonstrated our capacity for; we must package those understandings of ourselves into our self-conception; we must erect ourselves as heroes in our minds for getting up in the morning and turning our face toward the rising sun, to welcome another day of uncertainty and doubt, and yes, anxiety.
So, anxiety is a profound awareness of myself as I am unmediated and naked, with no anchors to support my sense of self.
this revelation that this world is not the only one possible is a frightening prospect for those who consider its stability and invariance essential to their sanity.
there is no signal the world will send our way to confirm our actions are the right ones, merely the hopeful assent of confused and uncertain humans like
Anxiety is a signal to us that we harbor repressed emotions, desires, and sexuality; the task of psychoanalysis—and the analyst and analysand—was to allow an investigation of such repression to aid a working through of the anxiety and an easing of the repression.
The psychoanalytic focus on anxiety goes from social to individual: the world does not repress and police me; I, my own mind, do. Anxiety thus produced repression, and not the other way around; Freud termed “neurotic anxiety” as such because it causes neurosis, not because it is caused by neurosis. In this model of anxiety arising from inner conflict, to have a desire but also to believe that that desire is immoral or dangerous is to suffer guilt and anxiety; we approach the forbidden fruit, and yet we shrink from it; we are made anxious. This should remind us of Kierkegaard!
A singular modern achievement has been to replace the Great Chain of Being with the Great Hierarchy of Social and Economic Class and Status; we know what would await us were we to transgress in our socially and culturally defined and demanded responsibilities of relentless work, never-ending material accumulation, and undying ambition for class mobility. Class decline is our new death, the primeval sink of modern anxiety.
modern technological changes disrupt older forms of social and political organization without dispelling older power forms or inequality and instead hurtle us toward climate change, mysterious pandemics, and political dysfunction.
The choice, the freedom existentialists speak of, the ones that libertarians valorize when they suggest that a fired worker is free to find another employer, or negotiate another contract, or move to another state to find a new job: this all appears a cruel joke to the hamstrung worker who finds herself exhausted, marginalized, and anxious. Marcuse suggests instead that our freedom is always a qualified one, determined by the social structures and historical moments that enclose us and reveal our choices to us. A choice that is not visible is not a choice at all,
libertarianism—supposedly a political philosophy of freedom and emancipation from governmental control, by insisting on our right, and indeed, our need, to make choices in all domains of human interest, even ones where we might want to bank on a social consensus of public goods and values—creates anxiety. The endless shopping for medical insurance from a “menu of options” of deductibles, copays, networks of providers, and the like is merely the latest laughable self-inflicted injury in this domain; rather than being able to count on the guaranteed security of health care when we are ill, without regards for our employment status or class or age, we are forced into endless shopping at times of ill health, again and again thrust into zones of decisional anxiety. Is this the space where we expect freedom will flourish?
two implacable, impervious forces rule our lives: finance and technology, the underwriters of this modern world, neither of which is comprehensible nor controlled by us. Our movement through this world is through a strange land; its workings are hidden from us, and we cannot ask any more, for all is proprietary, hidden away from our prying eyes through a combination of legal mechanisms and social agreement.
we are alienated from life itself—our work schedules leave us little time to build or sustain relationships with friends and family, who too are commodified, reduced to their economic particulars—and thus we are alienated from our fellow human beings and ourselves. The characteristic irony of modern urban life is the feeling of isolation in a teeming city; no one has time for sex, or the quality food and entertainments, which are left for tourists on vacation to enjoy; to merely meet a friend entails a long series of booking appointments for a “good time” to “get a coffee.”
To live with anxiety in such a world is a task considerably more challenging than simply facing up to it: it requires a fundamental reconfiguration of the ways in which we have chosen to organize our societies, a task taken on with considerable enthusiasm by the politically active, who find that praxis can deliver them from fear—while they act.
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“We would not be anxious if we all made living incomes and had affordable housing and health care.” But even those who live in comfortable homes, have good health insurance that makes $250-per-session psychiatrists affordable, and send their children to Ivy League colleges suffer terribly from anxiety. As the Buddha knew well, even if all material gains were to be secured, we would not be free of existential anxiety—even
Combating and confronting anxiety requires acceptance, activism, and contemplation, an acute blend of which might be the salutary recipe for living with it.
we need to learn to recognize cultural and ideological triggers of our anxieties, to realize the damage done to our being by internalizing familial, social, and cultural advertisements of, or guilt-inducing admonishments to live, the “happy life.”
Anxiety is our response to the mythical requirement, the forbidding injunction in fact, that we must live according to normative standards drawn up for us, that this life and all its pleasures could be ours, if only we would do the “most essential,” “the best,” and not miss out on the “essential” or the “must-see.”
This is the same as religuous commandment
and if we do not do things the way guidebooks—religious or moral texts, or corporate brochures—tell us, then we will have missed out on the right life,
ANother example of this is self-help books and productivity “hacking”