Our Existential Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety & Death

by James Park

Outline for Chapter 6:

Existential Anxiety: Angst

Fear and Anxiety

I. SIMPLE FEAR

A. Worries about Practical Matters.
B. Personal Fears.
C. Identity Problems.
D. Relationship Worries.
Five Dimensions of Fear
1. Description: Psychological Responses to Danger.
2. Cause: Caused by Specific Threat.
3. Duration: Temporary, While the Danger is Present.
4. Scope: Limited to the Values the Peril Can Reach.
5. Cure: Fight or Flight.
II. EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY

Schematic Chart: Simple Fear and Existential Anxiety

Five Dimensions of Existential Anxiety

1. Description: Irrational, Free-Floating Terror.
2. Cause: No Intelligible Basis or Source.
3. Duration: Permanent, Does Not Pass Away.
4. Scope: Pervades Our Whole Being.
5. Cure: Nothing We Do Will Overcome Angst.
How Fear and Anxiety Interact in Ordinary Experience

III. ANXIETY AS A PHENOMENON OF THE HUMAN SPIRIT

A. Anxiety and Freedom.
B. Anxiety as a Dizziness of the Human Spirit.
C. Guilt and Anxiety.
IV. MOMENTS OF DISCLOSURE OF EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY
A. Exaggerated Fears.
B. Phantom Fears.
C. Plain, Ordinary, Everyday Anxiety.
D. When Normal Securities Disappear.
E. Fear of the Future.
F. Fear of the 'Nothing'.
G. Ontological Anxiety.
V. ATTEMPTING TO HANDLE EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY
A. Looking for a Cause—Transforming Anxiety into Fear.
B. Explaining Anxiety Psychologically.
C. Turning Away from Spirit—Distracting Ourselves.
D. Weaving Security Blankets and Constructing Anxiety Dams.
E. Claiming that Existential Anxiety is an Illusion.
F. Creating and Enjoying Order and Beauty.
G. Succumbing to Existential Anxiety.
    Ellen West
    Lola Voss
VI. FOCUSING ANXIETY FOR AUTHENTIC EXISTENCE

VII. FREEDOM FROM EXISTENTIAL ANXIETY

A. How We BecomeExistentially Free.

B. Remaining in Existential Freedom.

1. Premature 'Responding'.
2. How Existential Freedom
    Differs from Authentic Existence.
3. Developing Responsive Projects-of-Being.
4. Sliding Back into Our Old Orientation.
5. Existential Freedom is Independent of all Formulations.
SUMMARY

Chapter 6

Existential Anxiety: Angst

    Have you ever felt the nameless dread?
Terror and anguish without a cause?
This chapter gives a name and careful description to the nameless threat,
the free-floating anxiety we have all felt but perhaps not faced.

    First we will distinguish existential anxiety from simple fear in 5 ways.
Then—capitalizing on insights provided by
Martin Heidegger, Søren Kierkegaard, & Ludwig Binswanger—
we will proceed to unpack and examine many dimensions of this experience:
our ordinary ways of trying to manage anxiety;
the option of channeling it creatively as the impetus for Authenticity;
and finally the possibility of living without angst.
 

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 leaned rightly to be in anxiety
has learned the most important thing.
            —Søren Kierkegaard in 1844
    Anxiety is being 'afraid' when there is nothing to fear.
We struggle with something in the dark, but we don't know what it is.
From somewhere and yet nowhere seeps out a vague feeling of threat.
Floating around in our body, unsettling our stomach,
a generalized sense of menace possesses our whole being.
This uneasiness has no identifiable cause.
Our Anxiety is seldom an object of consciousness that we can focus on;
rather, it seems to be a deep, inner state of our being,
which makes itself felt without the aid of conceptual thought
—indeed against our fervent wish to be free of anxiety.
In angst we confront the fundamental precariousness of existence;
our being is disclosed as unspeakable fragile and tenuous.
And when it bursts thru the protective shell in which we try to encapsulate it,
our anxious dread renders us helpless.

    Fear is a response to a definite danger
threatening in a specific way.

          But anxiety is a 'feeling of threat'
      in the absence of any real danger,
      or a 'fearful feeling' that is
      out of proportion to any threat.

    Fear is a psychological reaction
to threatening objects or circumstances.
It arises from a situation that is already interpreted
(altho this interpretation may later change)
and it always has an understandable cause.

          Anxiety is the non-psychological twin
      of fear; it feels like ordinary fear,
      but it does not arise from a situation
      and it has no intelligible cause.

    Fear arises from living in the world:
Because we live in a world of real dangers,
we are sometimes understandably afraid.

          Anxiety arises from within ourselves:
      From the depths of our being we feel
      a sense of threat that has no cause.

 
    Much more about existential anxiety or angst
—62 pages in all—
will be found in Our Existential Predicament.
This chapter is also available as an separately bound book
—fifth edition, 2006: Existential Anxiety: Angst .
Go to the publisher's website for details: www.existentialbooks.com.

    Also two excerpts are available on the Internet.
These are found by clicking the blue items
in the Table of Contents for this chapter, above.

    A three-page treatment of the same subject appears here:
Existential Anxiety: Angst .

If you would like to explore the dynamics of existential anxiety more deeply,
here is a collection of links to much more such thinking:
The portal for Existential Anxiety:Angst .

Go to the complete contents of
Our Existential Predicament:
Loneliness, Depression, Anxiety, & Death.

Go to the EXISTENTIALISM page.

Go to the beginning of this website
James Leonard Park—Free Library