“Because it is possible to create — creating
one’s self, willing to be one’s self… — one has anxiety. One would have no
anxiety if there were no possibility whatever.”
“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin
famously wrote. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the
nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a
shadow? In his 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety , Danish philosopher Søren
Kierkegaard (1813–1855) explains anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom, of
paralyzing possibility, of the boundlessness of one’s own existence — a kind of
existential paradox of choice. He writes:
“ Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming
spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference
between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; dreaming, it
is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as
a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp
for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. More it cannot do as
long as it merely shows itself. [Anxiety] is altogether different from fear and
similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s
actuality as the possibility of possibility.”
Anxiety
may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning
abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his
own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is
the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the
synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of
finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this,
psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed,
and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two
moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can
explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it
is possible to become.
He captures the invariable acuteness of
anxiety’s varied expressions:
“Anxiety can just as well express itself by
muteness as by a scream.”
Kierkegaard argues that, to paraphrase Henry
Miller, on how we orient ourselves to anxiety depends the failure or
fruitfulness of life:
“ In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that
he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. But he
who sank in possibility — his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused. . . .
Whoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting
into bad company and going astray in various ways as are those educated by the
finite, but in danger of a fall, namely, suicide. If at the beginning of
education he misunderstands the anxiety, so that it does not lead him to faith
but away from faith, then he is lost. On the other hand, whoever is educated
[by possibility] remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be
deceived by its countless falsification and accurately remembers the past. Then
the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that
he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its
will leads him where he wishes to go.”
Core to this premise is the conception of
anxiety as a dual force that can be both destructive and generative, depending
on how we approach it. Like Nin herself observed in her reflection of why
emotional excess is necessary for writing, Kierkegaard argues that anxiety is
essential for creativity. Perhaps the most enduring and thoughtful
interpretation of his treatment of the relationship between creativity and
anxiety comes from legendary existential psychologist Rollo May’s The Meaning
of Anxiety (public library), originally published in 1950.
“We can understand Kierkegaard’s ideas on the
relation between guilt and anxiety only by emphasizing that he is always
speaking of anxiety in its relation to creativity. Because it is possible to
create — creating one’s self, willing to be one’s self, as well as creating in
all the innumerable daily activities (and these are two phases of the same
process) — one has anxiety. One would have no anxiety if there were no
possibility whatever. Now creating, actualizing one’s possibilities, always
involves negative as well as positive aspects. It always involves destroying
the status quo, destroying old patterns within oneself, progressively destroying
what one has clung to from childhood on, and creating new and original forms
and ways of living. If one does not do this, one is refusing to grow, refusing
to avail himself of his possibilities; one is shirking his responsibility to
himself. Hence refusal to actualize one’s possibilities brings guilt toward
one’s self. But creating also means destroying the status quo of one’s
environment, breaking the old forms; it means producing something new and
original in human relations as well as in cultural forms (e.g., the creativity
of the artist). Thus every experience of creativity has its potentiality of
aggression or denial toward other persons in one’s environment or established
patterns within one’s self. To put the matter figuratively, in every experience
of creativity something in the past is killed that something new in the present
may be born. Hence, for Kierkegaard, guilt feeling is always a concomitant of
anxiety: both are aspects of experiencing and actualizing possibility. The more
creative the person, he held, the more anxiety and guilt are potentially
present.”
Both The Concept of Anxiety and The Meaning of
Anxiety endure as excellent reads in their entirety, timeless and increasingly
timely in our age of anxious wonder.
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