Existential anxiety is an inner state-of-being which feels like fear
but which is different from fear in every detail:
(1) Angst is a non-psychological, free-floating 'terror',
(2) which has no cause or channel of approach.
(3) It is a permanent, ever-renewed inner condition,
(4) which pervades our whole being.
(5) And we cannot cure it by psychological techniques.

     Existential anxiety usually makes itself felt
by the ways it distorts and exaggerates ordinary fears and worries.

     Angst resides in our deepest level of being—our human spirits—
where we also discover our freedom, creativity, and self-transcendence.

     We human beings have developed elaborate ways of
denying and covering up our existential anxiety,
trying to evade it or explain it away.
But if we so desire, we can consciously embrace our angst
and make it into a dynamic, positive principle for living.

     And finally, if we are willing to give up our self-reliance
and our ego-centered striving to fulfill ourselves,
and if we are able to commit ourselves totally, existentially,
we can be released from our existential anxiety
and enter upon the wonder-ful life of fulfillment, joy, and existential peace.

     This exploration of angst began with these words from Kierkegaard:

          Learning to know anxiety is an adventure
          which every man has to affront if he would not go to perdition
          either by not having known anxiety or by sinking under it.
          He therefore who has learned rightly to be in anxiety
          has learned the most important thing.

          [Søren Kierkegaard The Concept of Dread, 1844
          (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1944) p. 139]

Being sensitive to our existential anxiety is the most important thing
because we cannot become full human beings without this awareness.
But even when we notice our Existential Malaise,
we confront another pitfall—that we may succumb to angst.
Both not knowing anxiety and sinking under it are ways of losing ourselves.
But if we truly acknowledge our existential anxiety,
we discover in its depths the possibility of Authentic Existence
and maybe—below the bottom of despair—
the possibility of Existential Freedom.

     Chapter 6    EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY: ANGST    by JAMES PARK    149

   If you would like to read this whole chapter
(also published as a separate book),
you have two options:

    A new edition of this chapter published as a separate book
has just appeared, 2001:
Existential Anxiety: Angst.

    The fourth edition (2001) of the larger book
in which this chapter appears:
Our Existential Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety, & Death.