26. ANGST AND THE PARADOX OF COURAGE
The deepest question of all ontology is: Why is there something
(i.e., being) rather than nothing (i.e., non-being)? This question is the
ultimate basis of all existential wonder. For the question, Why is the
world here? leads directly to the question, Why am I here? and from there
to a host of questions about the meaning of life. Questions of the latter
sort have been the most frequent types of questions addressed in my
students' insight papers. This is particularly true once we recognize that
most questions about death are also, at least indirectly, questions about
the meaning of life. For the awareness of non-being first raises the
question of being; and in the same way the awareness of death first raises
the question of the meaning of life. In the next lecture we will examine
the paradox which arises out of our search for life's meaning in the face
of the inevitability of death. But today we will focus on another,
closely related paradox, which arises within us any time we choose life in
the face of death.
According to most existentialists, any time we come face to face with
the possibility of our own non-being (e.g., as when we reflect upon our
eventual death), we have a natural "existential response" involving a very
special kind of fear. Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), a German
existentialist philosopher who, with Wittgenstein, is generally regarded
as one of the two most influential twentieth-century philosophers,
distinguished between this special existential fear and ordinary kinds of
fear in the following way. Ordinary fear is a person's empirical response
to a threatening object within the world: it usually requires us either to
fight the object in hopes of overpowering its threat, or to flee from the
object in hopes of escaping from its threat. In both cases we can say the
person who is afraid of something in the world responds by trying to push
something out of the world--either the feared object or one's own self
(see Figure 26.1a). By contrast, existential fear is a response in the
depths of a person's being to the general human situation, especially when
that situation reveals within us the presence of non-being or
"nothingness" in some way. The natural human response is to flee from the
threat, since it seems impossible to fight against "nothing"! But in this
case we flee not by seeking to escape the world, but by immersing
ourselves more fully into the empirical objects of our ordinary experience
(see Figure 26.1b). This may be done in many ways, such as by pursuing
hobbies, watching television, becoming an avid sports fan, or even
becoming a scholar and immersing oneself in books. Heidegger's point is
that the usual (unhealthy) way of escaping from the threat of non-being is
merely to pretend it is not there, by immersing oneself in being.
Using Heidegger's distinction as an introduction, let us now look back
to the ideas of an earlier philosopher, who also had much to say about the
nature and function of existential fear. The philosopher who is generally
recognized as the father of theistic existentialism (as opposed to the
atheistic existentialism fathered by Nietzsche) is Smren Kierkegaard
(1813-1855). Kierkegaard (pronounced "Keerkagore", meaning
"churchyard"--i.e., graveyard) was a lonely Danish philosopher who wrote
twenty-one books (as well as 8000 pages of unpublished papers) in twelve
short years, and whose ideas were never well received during his own
lifetime. His main philosophical ideas were developed in a series of
books written under several different pseudonyms (in some of which he
argued against his own ideas!). But in the last few years of his life he
wrote a number of books using his own name, in which he attacked the
corruptions he perceived in the Christianity of his day. Of his many
interesting ideas, the only one we will have time to investigate here is
his use of the Danish word "angst" to refer to what I have called
"existential fear".
(a) Ordinary Empirical Fear (b) Existential Fear ("Angst")
[Figure 26.1: Inappropriate Responses to Two Kinds of Fear]
Although angst is sometimes translated as "dread" or "anxiety",
neither of these words captures the full depth of the existential fear of
non-being which Kierkegaard intended this word to denote. Dread is too
often associated with extreme displeasure or apprehension at the thought
of facing some empirical threat, as when I say I dread going to the
dentist. Likewise, anxiety is too often associated with ordinary
"stress", as when students say they feel anxious about their ability to
pass the upcoming examination. In order to guard against the temptation
to connect angst too closely with ordinary empirical types of fear, many
scholars have adopted the habit of simply using the original Danish
word--a practice I shall follow today. When I do refer on several
occasions to dread or anxiety, we should, of course, identify these with
angst, not empirical fear.
Kierkegaard's first book, Either-Or (1843), distinguished between two
basic ways of life, the aesthetic and the ethical. The former is based on
feelings and focuses on enjoying the pleasures of life; the latter is
based on duty and focuses on doing what is good. As such, this
distinction corresponds to the distinction we discussed in Lecture 18,
between utilitarianism and deontology. At first, those who read the book
debated over which of these two opposing points of view the author
actually wished to support. But Kierkegaard's true intention was to
demonstrate that either choice on its own is as absurd or incomplete as
the other. For he later published another book, Stages on Life's Way
(1845), wherein he argued that the aesthetic and ethical stages both point
beyond themselves to a third stage, the religious, which synthesizes and
surpasses the two earlier stages (see Figure 26.2). He defined the
religious way of life in terms of an attitude of "inwardness", which
transcends the "outwardness" required for theoretical reasoning and
scientific knowledge.
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844) Kierkegaard developed his idea of
angst by analyzing the Christian idea of sin. Angst, he claimed, is a
psychological state arising naturally out of the essential, ontological
nature of man: our freedom gives us infinite potential for the future;
yet our presence in time makes us finite and ignorant. In other words,
angst arises out of the tension between the sensuousness of our body
(rooted as it is in time) and the freedom of our soul (rooted as it is in
eternity). Our ignorance insures
[Figure 26.2: Kierkegaard's Three Stages and Two Leaps]
that the choices we make for our own future will eventually plunge us into
sin, so that angst comes to be experienced as "entangled freedom"
(p.320)--that is, as the infinite tangled up in the finite. Sin, then, as
the normal state of the human spirit (see Figure 26.3), is the first of
two "qualitative leaps" we must make in order to progress through the
stages of life. After leaping from innocence to sin (as in the story of
Adam and Eve), the second leap is from sin to faith (as in the story of
Abraham). The first leap corresponds to the change from the aesthetic to
the ethical (or vice versa), while the second corresponds to the change
from the aesthetic/ethical choice to the religious (see Figure 26.2).
Paganism is rooted in the aesthetic stage, where the leap of sin is
experienced as fate and the leap of faith as providence; Judaism, by
contrast, is rooted in the ethical stage, where the leap of sin is
experienced as guilt and the leap of faith as atonement. Christianity
surpasses both of these by actually being rooted in the properly religious
stage of absolute faith in God.
[Figure 26.3: The Ontological Origins of Angst and Sin]
Kierkegaard's analysis of angst and sin suggests that the lack of
angst is the worst possible psychological state, since without angst we
could never progress to the stage of spirit. In the original state of
innocence angst arises as a response to the "nothing" (i.e., the person's
ignorance) of the future: "anxiety is freedom's actuality as the
possibility of possibility" (p.313). To ignore this freedom is actually
idolatry when it causes the person in the aesthetic stage of life to grasp
innocence, peace, happiness, beauty, etc., as if they were good in and of
themselves. For to do so is to separate oneself from the spiritual depths
of one's own human nature: "The most effective means of escaping
spiritual trial is to become spiritless" (p.385). Yet once this freedom is
utilized, an awareness of sin arises, which causes a new kind of angst, in
the form of "anxiety about evil" (pp.381-386). This comes in three forms:
(1) the desire to return to a state of innocence; (2) the threat of
falling deeper into sin; and (3) the wish that mere repentance were enough
to atone for sin. Unfortunately, the attempt of many religious people to
overcome such anxiety by means of outward goodness only gives rise to more
angst, in the form of "anxiety about the good" (pp.386-420).
The truly religious person turns away from both aesthetic and ethical
aims in order to become inward. "Inwardness" refers to immediate
self-understanding in action (p.408), which requires a person to be open
to the eternal in one's own self. To turn towards oneself in this way is
therefore identical to turning towards God. As a result, it always begins
by heightening a person's awareness of guilt (pp.376-377):
In turning toward himself, [the religious "genius"] eo ipso turns toward
God, and ... when the finite spirit would see God, it must begin as
guilty. As he turns toward himself, he discovers guilt. The greater the
genius, the more profoundly he discovers guilt....
In turning inward he discovers freedom....
To the degree he discovers freedom, to that same degree the anxiety of
sin is upon him in the state of possibility....
Such a person will then recognize that anxiety really points beyond itself
to faith (p.385):
The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith,
courage to believe that the state [of sin] itself is a new sin, courage to
renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do; faith does not
thereby annihilate anxiety, but ... extricates itself from anxiety's
moment of death.
In other words, the proper response to anxiety is to stop being anxious
about anxiety, accepting it in the belief that it exists for a higher
purpose. Whereas pagan anxiety expresses itself most profoundly as fate,
and Jewish anxiety as guilt, the anxiety of the true Christian (whom
Kierkegaard regarded as practicing the most advanced form of religion) is
therefore expressed in the form of suffering.
Kierkegaard argued that the key to solving the problem of angst is to
learn to face it courageously, with the paradoxical feelings of
"sympathetic antipathy" and "antipathetic sympathy" (p.313). Anyone who
"has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate"
(p.421). For "anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it
consumes all finite ends" (p.422). Despite its apparently negative
character, the suffering caused by angst is therefore essential to our
spiritual growth: "the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is
the man" (p.421). Kierkegaard had numerous other philosophical insights,
not only concerning the human experience of angst, but also about numerous
other topics, such as the paradoxical relationship between history (the
finite) and subjectivity (the infinite), and the true nature of Christian
faith as requiring a subjective willingness to die. However, we will be
unable to pursue these or other interesting topics here.
Instead, I want to point out that, given Kierkegaard's analysis of
angst, the relationship between dread and death is analogous to the
relationship between love and life: just as love is the moving power of
life, so also dread is the moving power of death. Whereas the former is
the power of being, driving us towards the unity of opposites, the latter
is the power of non- being, driving us towards the diversity of opposites.
In other words, dread is the driving power behind the "estrangement" which
Tillich regarded as the necessary prerequisite for love (see Figure 25.1).
The struggle between these two powers is, in fact, what keeps us alive,
while at the same time giving us a glimpse of our eternality in the midst
of our finitude. In other words, dread, in spite of being a primarily
negative experience, reminds us of our capacity for self-transcendence.
Together, the powers of love and dread remind us that, on the one hand, we
are not at home in this world, and yet on the other hand, we are not
entirely strangers either. Recognizing this paradox can help us to
respond to real experiences of angst in a way which is appropriate to the
eternal dimension of our lives.
The failure to balance the powers of eternality (love) and temporality
(death) in our lives usually results is some type of psychological
disturbance, and can eventually lead even to insanity. Insanity does not
come from paying too much attention to the paradoxes of human experiences;
rather, it results from the attempt to run away from them to the security
of either the infinite or the finite on its own. As long as the two
powers are engaged in a struggle within us, our mental health will be
preserved. But the loss of either eternality or temporality can drive a
person insane: for the former would limit us to an application of
analytic logic, thereby causing us to see the world as an unbearable
diversity of fragmented and disconnected bits, while the latter would
limit us to an application of synthetic logic, thereby causing us to see
the world as an unbearable unity, without discrete and intelligible parts.
The former describes the form of insanity that stems from an overemphasis
on reason over imagination, as when paranoid schizophrenics interpret
their experience within a narrow set of limits (e.g., "everyone is against
me"); the latter describes the form of insanity that stems from an
overemphasis on imagination over reason, as when the elderly lose
themselves in the limitlessness of senility.
Tillich argued that we are all guilty of losing our eternality to some
extent. The best explanation for the angst we feel when we think honestly
about our own death, he claimed, is that we all know deep down inside that
we deserve to die, because of the unauthentic way we have lived. Too
often, people's response to this guilt is merely to flee from it into the
safety of philosophical arguments for immortality or a religious hope for
eternal life. Yet the latter only increases the philosopher's
over-dependence on logical reasoning, while the former only increases the
believer's over-dependence on religious imagination. In other words,
these common "solutions", though not in themselves wrong, can sometimes
backfire by intensifying the loss of eternality that comes from denying
one side of the paradox.
The only proper response to the loss of eternality revealed in our
experience of existential dread is, according to Tillich, to face the
threat of non-being with an existential courage to be. In his book, The
Courage To Be (1952), he described this response in the following way
(p.152-153):
Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of
non-being. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of
non-being upon itself by affirming itself ... Courage always includes a
risk, it is always threatened by non-being ... Courage needs the power of
being, a power transcending the non-being which is experienced in the
anxiety of fate and death, ... in the anxiety of emptiness and
meaninglessness, ... [and] in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. The
courage which takes this threefold anxiety into itself must be rooted in a
power of being that is greater than the power of oneself and the power of
one's world.... There are no exceptions to this rule; and this means that
every courage to be has openly or covertly a religious root. For religion
is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself.
Like Kierkegaard, Tillich therefore saw the threat of non-being as an
existential problem whose only adequate solution is essentially religious.
This word "religious" should not be misunderstood as referring to
religious practices, such as going to church, singing hymns, etc. For
such things can be misused to keep us away from truly religious courage.
Instead, the point here is that to be religious means to be open to an
experience of a Being who, by transcending the distinction between being
and non-being, can alone supply us with the courage to be.
This basic experience of receiving the gift of the courage to be is
closely related, according to Tillich, both to mystical experiences of
participation in God, and to more ordinary experiences of a personal
encounter between man and God. Such experiences are rooted in a
recognition that the presence of non- being within us estranges us from
our true nature, and that this problem can be solved only if we are
willing to be "grasped by the power of being itself" (p.153). For only
when we "participate in something which transcends the self" (p.161) will
we be prepared to experience the most profound manifestation of the
courage to be, in the form of the "courage to accept acceptance" (pp.159-
166). This courageous self-affirmation is not merely "the Existentialist
courage to be as oneself. It is the paradoxical act in which one is
accepted by that which infinitely transcends one's individual self." Nor
does this ultimate acceptance require us to deny our guilt, for "it is not
the good or the wise or the pious who are entitled to the courage to
accept acceptance but those who are lacking in all these qualities and are
aware of being unacceptable" (pp.160-161).
At the beginning of the process of accepting acceptance, the courage
to be is experienced merely as the bare "courage of despair [i.e., of
angst]" (p.170):
the acceptance of despair is in itself faith on the boundary line of the
courage to be. In this situation the meaning of life is reduced to
despair about the meaning of life. But as long as this despair is an act
of life it is positive in its negativity.
Eventually, by living our life in the paradoxical power of the courage to
be, we will finally be ready to welcome death itself not as a tragic
confirmation of angst, but as the final step in this life-long process.
Along these lines, Tillich claimed that Plato's arguments for the
immortality of the soul were "attempts to interpret the courage of
Socrates", who had clearly recognized that "the courage to die is the test
of the courage to be" (p.164). We will look more fully at the experience
of death itself in the following lecture. For now, however, it will
suffice merely to summarize Tillich's theory of courage in terms of the
map given in Figure 26.4.
The religious basis of the courageous acceptance of life in the face
of death, of being in spite of the dreadful prospects of non-being, is
made explicit in the biblical notion of the "fear of the Lord". The Old
Testament references to fearing God are too often watered down to the
point where they are taken to mean nothing more than being careful to obey
the Law lest we be punished. But they refer far more profoundly to the
fact that the God of the Old Testament, as the Being who holds all beings
in His hand, is the ultimate source of life and death; as such, the one
who is courageous enough to approach such a Being must do so with the
utmost reverence and awe. As Mitchell put it: "Fear of the Lord is being
in awe, aware of the shocking, silent, presence of God"
[Figure 26.4: Existential Courage in the Face of Non-Being]
(In Pursuit of Wonder, p.75)--a comment reminiscent of Otto's notion of
awe in the presence of the numinous (see Lecture 23, pp.168-169).
Throughout the Bible this fundamental, other-worldly fear is depicted as
an existential response to the human situation which, if we accept it,
will give us otherwise unattainable strength in coping with the fearful
situations that arise in the ordinary world. This could indeed be
regarded as the basic message of the Psalms and Proverbs: "The fear of
the Lord is the beginning of wisdom" (e.g., Psalm 111:10; Proverbs 1:7)
means we will learn best how to respond to the threats within the world
only when we have courageously responded to the threat outside the world.
In other words, angst and wisdom are best regarded, paradoxically, as two
sides of the same coin.
If we do not merely ignore the basic ontological question raised at
the beginning of this lecture, then we seem to have a choice between two
possible answers: either the existence of the world is meaningless and
the courage to be has no basis, or else there is a God who is,
paradoxically, beyond the very distinction between something and nothing,
and who thereby lends meaning to both being and non-being, thus forming
the ultimate basis of faith, and so also of our courage to be. But as
Kierkegaard, Tillich, and many other religious existentialists have
pointed out, this God cannot lend meaning merely by being a doctrine
imposed on us by the social pressures of a religious community; rather, we
must experience God as a reality that gives us power to cope with the
paradoxes of life, providing us with faith in the face of doubt, peace in
the face of turmoil, acceptance in the face of guilt, and courage in the
face of dread.
QUESTIONS FOR FURTHER THOUGHT
1. Could Figure 26.1 be revised to depict appropriate responses to the two
kinds of fear?
2. Is it possible to choose both the aesthetic and the ethical ways of
life?
3. Is it necessary for human beings to sin?
4. Does angst actually help us to cope with ordinary, empirical fears?
RECOMMENDED READINGS
1. Smren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A simple psychologically
orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin, tr. Reidar
Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980), especially section 5, "The Concept of Anxiety", pp.313-316. (Page
numbers refer to the original Danish pagination, as cited in the margins
of this translation.)
2. Paul Tillich, The Courage To Be (London: Collins, 1952), especially
Chapter VI, "Courage and Transcendence", pp.152-183.
3. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: The Free Press, 1973).
4. Douglas N. Walton, Courage: A philosophical investigation (Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 1986).