Episode 04 - Existential Anxiety in Everyday Life
Transcript
Ellie: 0:07
Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,
David: 0:09
And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.
Ellie: 0:12
The podcast where two friends,
David: 0:14
are also professors,
Ellie: 0:16
put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday,
David: 0:18
because big ideas are within everyone's reach.
Ellie: 0:21
Woo!
David: 0:22
Hello, everyone.
Ellie: 0:23
Hi, welcome back to our podcast. So you know that feeling, when you sit down on your couch, after a long day of work, just want to relax with a cozy TV show and you turn on Netflix duh-dummmm!
David: 0:41
The sound of pure, existential dread.
Ellie: 0:46
Because then you have to decide what to watch.
David: 0:50
This is a discussion that I have with my partner virtually every day. What we ended up doing is just browsing option after option without actually selecting anything. Neither of us can pull the plug and say, "Enough is enough, this is what we're watching." And it means that at the end, we decide not to watch anything at all.
Ellie: 1:12
I'm the opposite. I just will settle on something, even if I know it's bad. Like last week I watched almost the entire season of this Netflix show called Emily in Paris. This show is horrible. It offends my sensibilities on every level. The fashion is like from 2010, the depiction of French culture is just like horribly caricatured, although there are a few fun little tidbits here and there.
David: 1:39
Okay, truth time. Did you identify with Emily? Yes or no?
Ellie: 1:43
A little bit, but I really want to be a Camille
David: 1:46
Because when I think of you, I think of you as a woman who is into fashion, into art, and who spends time in Paris. So I also watched Emily in Paris and for a minute, I thought of you, Ellie.
Ellie: 2:01
Oh my God, you think I'm Emily in Paris.
David: 2:03
I didn't- I didn't go that far, but I agree with you that there is a really weird, caricaturized version of French life and French culture. The only thing that redeems that caricature is that it's literally happened to me. Every single thing that they described.
Ellie: 2:20
Yes.
David: 2:22
You know, it's like a caricature that is true to life. And so I- I'm angry at the show, but I'm also angry at those few French people that have made the show hold true for me.
Ellie: 2:32
Definitely. Yeah like the scene where she first goes into the boulangerie to buy a baguette, and the woman is just staring at her like "What the heck are you doing?" was yeah, just so classic. Okay. Back to the matter at hand. I was just sitting on the couch, watching episode after episode of this show even though it was bad, because I didn't want to have to deal with all of the other options on the table.
David: 2:57
The unbearable weight of freedom on your couch, on your shoulders, while you're holding the remote.
Ellie: 3:05
This might seem like a really banal phenomenon that you experience now and again, or maybe daily, if you're David, but this is actually what existentialists refer to as anxiety.
David: 3:17
Today we're going to be talking about the existential notion of anxiety.
Ellie: 3:23
First, we'll describe what anxiety is and what it feels like.
David: 3:28
And next we'll talk about how anxiety emerges when our freedom to choose is put to the test, like when I watch Netflix.
Ellie: 3:35
Finally, we'll go over some ways to overcome anxiety that existentialism proposes. And you'll see that even though existential anxiety comes up in things like trying to figure out what to watch on TV, it actually says so much more about our human condition than can possibly be encapsulated in one simple example. We want to provide a content warning for this episode. we discussed briefly suicidal thoughts.
David: 4:00
Let's talk about what anxiety is.
Ellie: 4:03
So anxiety is a word that comes up constantly in everyday life. But, defining it is actually somewhat challenging. Existentialists, such as Sren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Simone de Beauvoir describe anxiety in a particular way, and this definition of anxiety in existentialism sometimes overlaps with the medical notion of anxiety, which we may be more familiar with, but in other ways, doesn't. I want to make a quick note about the terminology we're using in this episode, David. So we will use the term anxiety for the most part. But it's worth noting here that anxiety is synonymous with the words angst, anguish, and dread in existentialism. They're all just different translations of the same word in Danish, German and French, which the existential authors were writing in. David, what is anxiety, considered from the perspective of existentialism?
David: 5:03
Well here, I think we can recruit the help of the Danish philosopher, Sren Kierkegaard, that you just mentioned. He defines anxiety primarily as a mood, and he differentiates moods from psychological states. And so the difference between the two has to do with the fact that a mood is something that washes over you and your entire world. It has no specific target, no specific object, whereas the psychological state is much more narrow in its domain of application. And so for Kierkegaard, existential anxiety is the feeling that takes you over or that engulfs you, and that makes you think about the world and relate to the world in a very specific way.
Ellie: 5:48
And this specific one way of relating to the world that we have in anxiety is for the existentialists, a more profound way of relating to the world than our usual everyday life would suggest. Heidegger, for instance, describes anxiety as a fundamental mood. And it's a mood of attunement. When we experience anxiety, we are attuned to our human condition and our relation to the world. So what is the human condition that anxiety attests to? Anxiety, according to existentialists, is consciousness of freedom. When I feel anxious, I am feeling the weight of my own freedom, the fact that nothing outside of me is determining me. It may be influencing me, but at the end of the day, I have to make decisions for myself.
David: 6:42
So think about playing poker. When, uh, you know, you have the dealer who hands out all the cards, and then all the players look at their hand and then the game begins. Existentialists would look at the card that you're dealt as what they call facticity. Those are the facts of your situation. Now how you played the game is still open to you because you get to make a lot of choices, even if you were dealt a particularly bad hand. So, for example, you can fold. Or you can stay in the game hoping that others will fold before you, or if you want to, you can simply bluff all the way through and potentially win the whole game. But the point here being that the material, social, historical conditions that you are born into, the facts of your life, the facticity of existence, doesn't determine the options and the possibilities that are within your horizon.
Ellie: 7:38
And that idea that we go above and beyond the facticity or our situation is the idea that we are transcendent. That transcendence, which existentialists talk about a lot, is freedom. You're free in relation to how you deal with your situation. One example that existentialists love to focus on is vertigo.
David: 8:04
This is an example that Sartre uses in his 1943 book Being and Nothingness where he says vertigo is an experience, not of the possibility of falling, but of the possibility, as Sartre says, of leaping into the abyss, the fact that you could jump at any moment-
Ellie: 8:21
Yes. I remember being a kid and going to visit New York for the first time. I was standing on top of the Empire State Building and I was completely overcome with this terror. I had this sheer terror looking down, hundreds of floors, seeing the street beneath me and thinking not that I might fall from the building, but that I had the power to jump. The fear of heights is, well, a fear of my own possibility of jumping. What is my own possibility of jumping? My freedom. Existentialists will say, "Actually, the phenomenon that I'm describing is better termed anxiety than fear." Let's say a little something about the distinction between anxiety and fear, according to existentialism. Fear has a determinant object. Fear is about something. Anxiety has to do with our own freedom in relation to possibility.
David: 9:19
Well, one difference here is that particular psychological states-- so for example, my fear of heights-- can trigger a moment of existential anxiety, but it's not the only one that can do that. So vertigo can rear its head under a number of conditions. So maybe you feel vertigo when you're at the Empire State Building but maybe I feel vertigo again in this existential key when I'm going on a road trip by myself, driving for a long stretch of the road, let's say three, four hours, and then for a moment, you have that thought of "What if I just veered to the side, what if I just pulled one side of the steering wheel and I could end it all." This sounds dark, like it's a reflection of a disturbed psyche, but for many of the existentialists, it's a fundamental fact of our condition. It's not that you were suicidal in a clinical sense, it's not that you're depressed from a medical perspective. It's rather that there are moments that bring into focus the fact that even the most absurd, radically other, radically unthinkable possibilities are in fact within your reach.
Ellie: 10:31
And I think a lot of times when we experience those types of thoughts, we think there's something wrong with us. And we think that we are freaks, or that there is something deeply disturbed that's going on with us. But actually, these are very common thoughts for humans to have. And for the existentialists, obviously they're not pleasant thoughts to have, but they're ones that do say something about who we are, because they reveal that we are undetermined possibility.
David: 11:06
And this is where Kierkegaard's writings, in his book The Concept of Anxiety, are particularly helpful, because Kierkegaard will say precisely this. He will say these are not pleasant or fun thoughts, but they are quintessentially human thoughts. So can we even imagine a human being who does not experience anxiety about the fact that they can choose who they want to be, that they can make decisions about the direction in which their life will move.
Ellie: 11:34
Yeah, I like that idea that our existence is a problem for us, right. If anxiety, as we've seen, is consciousness of freedom, then it means that I have to take responsibility for my freedom. Anxiety isn't the feeling that you have so many things to do. It's rather the feeling that you could not do all of the things that you have to do. It's the feeling that it has to be you who does them or doesn't do them and nobody else. No one can write your essay for you. No one can do the presentation for you. No one can choose the Netflix TV show for you.
David: 12:20
And even if we could identify specific places where you could outsource choice, let's say I will pay somebody to plagiarize my essay. Ultimately, that's a choice, and that's a choice that you cannot flee from. And so what anxiety discloses is the necessity of choice, of action, and the fact that we can never take off this weight that we experience, which is the fact that we are the makers of our lives. And I like how Sartre puts this, because he says not to choose is in itself a choice. And it just highlights this inevitability that we try to flee away from, that we try to conceal, but that will always haunt us, will always follow us. One thing that I'm still wanting to hear a little bit more about is most of us have heard the term anxiety. We live in a culture, really, that talks about anxiety all the time. We're garrulous about anxiety. We talk about it all the time, and yet, it seems as if what we talk about when we talk about anxiety is not quite what the existentialists had in mind when they were talking about the phenomenon. How do you think existentialists and then medical professionals, either converge or diverge in their understanding of anxiety? Cause I suspect we might not see eye to eye necessarily on this point.
Ellie: 13:49
Yeah. So the existential concept of anxiety predates the psychological concept of anxiety. And I mean part of this is just the simple fact that Kierkegaard is writing about anxiety in the 1840s and psychology as a discipline doesn't split off from philosophy until a few decades later, and only then does it become a science. In the book The Existentialist Survival Guide, the philosopher Gordon Marino talks about the way that anxiety was especially a major concept for existentialists around the time of the First and Second World Wars, because anxiety tends to emerge collectively in situations where traditional frameworks that offer us certainty and reassurance fall away. So anxiety emerges, for instance, in periods where faith, whether it's faith in God, faith in science, faith in government, are pulled out from under us. And this was very much the case in the period around the time of the First and Second World War. But then the medical profession, and especially big pharma, come in, co-opt the concept of anxiety, and turn it into a psychiatric disorder. And so Marino traces the annexation of anxiety by the medical profession and is really concerned that it becomes considered a disorder rather than a fundamental part of the human condition.
David: 15:16
One of the things that I think Marino does really well is really highlights the difference between the way in which medical professionals understand anxiety versus the way in which a philosopher, especially one with existentialist credentials, might think about anxiety. So if you approach anxiety medically, then anxiety, by definition, will be something that you either have to cure and try to eliminate, or it will be something that you tried to manage. The problem with medical approaches to anxiety is that by definition, they never get at the root of the problem, right? They just sedate our symptoms. If you're an existentialist who sees anxiety as an expression of our humanity, then getting rid of anxiety is not in fact a good thing. Because that's the moment in which you lose that which is uniquely human. For medical professionals, anxiety is a problem to be solved, you know, potentially with a pill potentially with-
Ellie: 16:18
cognitive behavioral therapy.
David: 16:19
Cognitive behavioral therapy, um, something that fixes the chemical imbalance in the brain-
Ellie: 16:25
is a myth, but we'll leave that for another time.
David: 16:28
Correct, but that's the dominant conception in medicine, even if there are people who are now pushing for a more social and environmental understanding of anxiety. It's still rooted in this notion of something to be cured, um, and he says from a philosophical perspective, and an existentialist perspective, anxiety is not something to be cured. It's actually a teacher, from which we learn a number of lessons about how to live a meaningful life. And those are, in my view, polar opposite approaches to anxiety.
Ellie: 17:03
Yeah the idea with existentialism is that there is a meaning behind anxiety. And if we treat the symptoms, we are losing sight of that meaning. This doesn't mean though that existentialists are like, "Oh, let's just feel anxiety all the time! Three cheers for anxiety, screw happiness and joy and contentment!" No, they do think that there are ways to deal effectively with anxiety and move out of it as a conscious and overwhelming mood. But that is different from treating the symptoms. And we'll get to that, I know, a little bit later in the podcast, when we talk about existential, uh, ways of dealing with anxiety. I'm looking here at the American Psychiatric Association's website. It's a webpage called "What Are Anxiety Disorders?" The way that the American Psychiatric Association defines anxiety, which I think has a sort of stranglehold over the public imaginary around anxiety, is as follows: "Anxiety refers to anticipation of a future concern and is more associated with muscle tension and avoidance behavior." And they contrast this with fear, which is described as an emotional response to an immediate threat and is more associated with a fight or flight reaction. It's really interesting to me here that the American Psychiatric Association, like existentialism, distinguishes anxiety from fear. Also like existentialism, takes fear to be an immediate emotional response and implies that there is a sort of determinant object of fear that provokes, in the case of this definition, a fight or flight reaction.
David: 18:43
Beyond that, I mean in the definition that you gave us, right, anxiety is equated with muscle tension and I think that this is where you really see the difference, where there is the identification of a physiological or anatomical target for a possible intervention, because then, once you define anxiety in this way, you start imagining the sorts of things that would be a cure for anxiety under the worldview of the medical expert. And that's going to look very differently than the reactions to anxiety or the ways of dealing with anxiety that you would get if you're talking to Kierkegaard or Simone de Beauvoir or, uh, Jean-Paul Sartre.
Ellie: 19:24
I actually think this note about the muscle tension that we have in the psychiatric definition of anxiety is potentially compatible with the existential idea of anxiety, because existentialists in general are very resistant to the idea that the mind and the body are separate. For existentialists the body is en-minded, right. And the mind is embodied. And so if we take this notion of muscle tension as symptomatic of anxiety in the existential sense, I think we might be getting somewhere.
David: 20:01
Yes. And I think here we're getting to a possible, uh, difference between our understanding of anxiety, because there is an aspect of my thinking about psychiatry that makes me believe that existential questions are foreclosed to psychiatry almost in principle because, insofar as you're still thinking under a doctor patient model and are still looking for cures, to me, we've already left the domain of the existential.
Ellie: 20:40
I mean, I am in agreement with you that the psychiatric conception of anxiety tends to reduce anxiety to a problem to be solved. I am very much with you there. I think I'm just wondering whether the definition of anxiety that we get in psychiatry is actually that different from the existential definition of anxiety. There's still going to be a huge impasse between how they cope with anxiety, but there could be at least some shared basis. One thing that I think is really different is that that psychiatry attempts to distinguish sort of normal, everyday anxiety from anxiety disorders. And so the American Psychiatric Association says that an anxiety disorder requires that anxiety be out of proportion to the situation and that it hinders a person's ability to function normally. An existentialist will say, yeah, of course anxiety hinders your ability to function normally, but what's so great about normal functioning? There's something that's lost in our everyday experience, where we're sort of going with the flow, accepting things as they come, and failing to see our freedom. This condition of going with the flow is what Albert Camus describes as mechanical life. I wake up, I make breakfast, I go to work, I come home, I eat dinner, maybe I watch
a movie or read a book, scroll my phone: 22:04
that is our mechanical way of living. Most of the time we aren't cognizant of our own freedom.
David: 22:13
Yeah, and I- I like also the way in which Beauvoir contrast the world of the child who doesn't worry about a thing in the world, with the worldview of the adults, which is that mechanical life. And she calls said the world of the serious. And she says when you become an adult and you have responsibilities and you're basically on autopilot, you never pause to really think about that world that anxiety opens up for you, which is that recognition of the fact that at any point in time, you could make any decision that you want, even a decision that wouldn't make sense for somebody in your position. And again, to go back to this question about the relationship between existentialism and psychiatry, this is what you probably will never hear a psychiatrist say, which is, "Yes, in fact, you should be anxious. Why? Because guess what? You have one life and time is running out and the clock is ticking." And so your choices do have the significance to them. And thus, from the feeling of anxiety, you can use that feeling to propel yourself into a meaningful life. And that's what I don't think is possible within a medical model.
Ellie: 23:33
Although at the same time, we do recognize that there is a time and place, very, very important, of the psychiatric model of anxiety in helping people cope with challenges in their everyday lives.
David: 23:45
Yeah, I'm very happy that you bring this in Ellie because that's an essential which is that the existentialist model of anxiety should not in any way be interpreted to diminish the experience of people struggling with something like clinical anxiety.
Ellie: 23:58
Yeah. So we've talked about the fact that anxiety is consciousness of freedom, but it's also important to the existential concept of anxiety that the world starts to look alien to us, when we experience anxiety. This is what Heidegger describes as the uncanny or unhomeliness. What is also not possible within a medical model is the idea that anxiety gives me unique insight into my own relation with the world. So let's talk a little bit about that, David. How is it that in anxiety, according to existentialists, I start to feel like the world is alien to me?
David: 24:42
Well, one way to think about this is just to look at concrete illustrations. So if you think about the very rich history of existentialist literature, it's filled with representations of this moment of the uncanny, that moment where suddenly the world around you doesn't make sense. Think about, um, the writings of Kafka, uh, like Kafka's Metamorphosis, where you have a character that wakes up one day and is a cockroach, the term he uses is a vermin. So we don't even know what shape it is. And, uh, the- the story is about this character trying to make sense of their new condition and finding them themselves alienated from their body, from their social relations, nobody wants to talk to them. And so it's this feeling of being so utterly different that you're no longer at home in your home.
Ellie: 25:37
So the bottom line here is that according to an existentialist perspective, anxiety is the consciousness of freedom, and this consciousness of freedom makes us feel dizzy with possibilities. Anxiety is the feeling that we are not determined by our outside circumstances, but that we are always in relation to them in ways that we have to actively take up. This is different from the psychiatric notion of anxiety, which considers anxiety as having to do with a future concern, having a determinant object, and which tries to find ways to cure anxiety.
David: 26:14
We also saw that anxiety produces a feeling of disorientation in the world, where out of the blue-- and I think the notion of out of the blue is important because it seems to sneak up behind you and grab hold of you-- it suddenly makes you feel as if you are an alien in this world. And we've discussed the way in which, for example, existentialists literature can be a very good medium.
Ellie: 26:44
Enjoying this episode? Please rate and review Overthink on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. So there's this TV show, The Good Place, and in fact, one of the main characters is a philosophy professor and has this stereotypical tendency of philosophy professors to be indecisive.
David: 27:05
I don't have that tendency, except in relation to Netflix, I live an authentic life every single day before 9:00 PM.
The Good Place audio: 27:15
"Okay. We have so many big choices to make. Let's- let's start small. Do you want to use a dry-erase board or the regular pen and paper? Just pick. Chidi, just pick! Yeah it would be easier to sort out the issue of dry-erase versus paper if I could write down the pros and cons for each, but, of course, I would have to use one of them to write down the pros and cons for them which is problematic."
David: 27:43
In this- in this segment of The Good Place, we are shown Chidi's problem, which is that he's a fundamentally indecisive person and not just indecisive in the sense that he likes to take his time and consider the variables, but rather that he cannot own the choices that he has to make, and as a result, doesn't make a choice.
Ellie: 28:04
So in this clip, we see that in order to make a pro and con list of a particular choice Chidi has to make, he first has to decide whether to write the pro and con list with a pencil on paper, or to write it with a dry-erase marker on a whiteboard. And that decision, that decision that proceeds the pros and cons list for his other decision is itself so overwhelming that Chidi can't even decide between the dry-erase marker and the pencil.
David: 28:33
And what I like about that specific example is that it highlights the fundamental, infinite regress that Chidi suffers from, because in order to make a choice, he wants to write down all the possible pros and cons. But in order to get there, he has to write all the pros and cons of choosing either a pen or a marker. And so, it creates this paradox where he never actually reaches the moment of making a choice, because even the most basic element that is needed for human action for him is a problem and he just cannot decide. So I liked that it- it brings into focus the fact that you can always push back the problem of choice and choose how you're going to choose and then choose how you're going to choose how you're going to choose. And again, the point is that it's an infinite regress.
Ellie: 29:25
Yeah, absolutely. There's no way to get out of making a choice.
David: 29:30
And one way we can think about Chidi, and this is a major pet peeve of mine, is that he is what today we would call somebody who suffers from FOMO, because he wants to control every dimension of his decision so that there will be no remainder.
Ellie: 29:49
Yeah.
David: 29:50
He doesn't want there to be any negative consequence, any negative side effect that was not factored into his decision. So he always wants to make the rational, mathematical choice. And that's already a departure from the way in which existentialists think about the nature of choice.
Ellie: 30:10
Yeah, I think this is such an important point and one that gets overlooked in our society in general these days, given the data-driven nature of so much of our economy and our human life. So I remember a couple of years ago, there's this guy that I met at a party in New York who was starting a company to help people make decisions. And he had created this algorithm that would weigh the pros and cons for you, and then come up with the best possible decision. And knowing that I was a philosopher, he wanted me to pitch this in my classes to students and maybe even use it in my classes. And I was like, "Dude, I am a scholar of existentialism. I think your algorithmic conception of human decision making is fundamentally flawed, in part for ethical reasons, and political reasons, it's like absolutely terrifying and could so easily be co-opted for awful purposes-"
David: 31:10
That's already an awful purpose. That's already co-opted.
Ellie: 31:14
Yeah, because also, like, it's impossible to actually evade the dizziness of freedom in any human choice, because you would already be choosing to use that algorithm in order to make a decision.
David: 31:29
This is a critique of what is sometimes called rational choice theory, which is the framework that really dominates the social sciences, especially behavioral economics, which is the idea that we make decisions by maximizing self interest. And that we do that simply by calculating the pros and cons of things like Chidi, and one of the things that rational choice theory really cannot make sense of is the way in which people actually make choices. We don't just make choices as if we were computers or as if we were robots. We make human decisions. And that means that sometimes, the right decision for us is the irrational decision. Decision-making is not an algorithmic or computational event for us in the same way it might be for a computer.
Ellie: 32:20
You mentioned FOMO here, and I guess I'm not sure quite how you're seeing that in relation to this mathematical conception of decision-making that we've been talking about. How do you see FOMO happening in Chidi's decision?
David: 32:33
Yeah. So when people think about fear of missing out, FOMO, we're talking about people who want to maximize utility, right? And that is a fundamentally calculative approach to decision-making where the idea is that if you're a good enough accountant, and if you have all of the variables at your disposal, you're able to come up with a rational decision that, again, could be computed and could be plugged into some form of algorithm so that you never make the wrong choice. And so when you talk to people who suffer from FOMO, it applies to really every aspect of their lives. I have a couple of friends who suffer from it and you go out to dinner with them. And they really cannot choose what to eat because they worry, what if I order, uh, the lasagna, maybe I'm missing out on this other thing that could be better, even if I want the lasagna, maybe this other thing would, in the grand scheme of things, give me more utility. So it's not that they choose based on what they want to eat, even what is cheaper, it's just that they want to control all of the variables. And so an existentialist would look at this as the clearest expression of what Sartre calls bad faith, which is precisely what Chidi suffers from, this attempt to get away from choice.
Ellie: 33:56
You mentioned the concept of bad faith, and this is a phrase that gets tossed around a lot among anyone who has a cursory knowledge of existentialism. Let's talk about this and how it relates to anxiety. So bad faith is basically a term for lying to oneself and it's lying to oneself by denying the human condition usually thought of as a condition of freedom.
David: 34:19
And one of the ways in which existentialists think about bad faith is in terms of fleeing into a comfort zone. When you are in a situation in which you have to make a choice- so, for example, it's imagined that my mother says to me, David, why do you continue to be a professor? Why don't you just change careers altogether? And it sort of triggers an existential moment. Then I can just respond by saying, "Oh, because that's just who I am now. I am a professor or because I need to pay the bills. That's just who I am." The implicit assumption that I cannot change who I am, that I can not redirect my life, that's the lie, because at any point in time, Sartre and Beauvoir would say, I could jump ships, I could quit my job, and I could begin a new life. Maybe I become, I don't know, Emily in Paris, that, or I suddenly decide that I want to be a person who works in private business, or I want to be an entrepreneur. Again, the choice is always there, but the ways in which we rationalize not making a choice is the bad faith.
Ellie: 35:38
Yeah. Sartre describes their being two forms of anxiety in relation to time. He says that I can have anxiety with regard to my own past in precisely the way that you're describing it, David. I like to take comfort in the fact that I am who I have become already. We fall back into mechanical life by taking refuge in the illusion of certainty. But anxiety is that realization that nothing holds me to being who I was yesterday and that in order to continue being who I was yesterday, I have to actively take up that identity, right? There's also another form, which is anxiety with regard to my future self. I feel anxiety when I realize that I am my future self, even though I am not my future self yet. My future self doesn't have any fixed essence. I don't know who I will be tomorrow, but I know that I will be there tomorrow, and that my future self is going to have to deal with the consequences of whatever choices I make now.
David: 36:46
And one way to think about this is in terms of that very famous existentialist motto, which is existence precedes essence, which is the notion that we exist first, and then we create our essence through decisions, through actions, through behaviors. Bad faith is the inversion of those terms. Bad faith is the assumption that essence proceeds existence. And that even before I make a decision, I already know who I am. Because that's my essence and essences are unchangeable. And so one way to think about existentialism and the concept of bad faith is that it rides on the back of the anti-foundationalist, anti-essentialist commitments of existentialist philosophy.
Ellie: 37:37
Perhaps the most famous example of this anxiety of decision-making is one that Jean-Paul Sarte talks about in his 1945 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism." He describes the situation of a young man who is torn between going off and fighting in the French resistance and staying home with his mother. His mother depends on him for support and care. What's so tricky here as Sartre describes it is that there is no moral system that can make the decision for the boy. There is a fundamental tension between the commitment to country and the commitment to his mother and the boy needs to choose which of those commitments he wants to make. Does he want to uphold the commitment to his country or the commitment to his family in this case, his mother? And if he wants to uphold one of those commitments over another, he has to justify that in some way, but no matter what, it is up to him to justify the decision. Even if he goes to a priest for advice, he's making the choice to go to a priest for advice rather than going to somebody else for advice, that itself is a choice.
David: 38:50
And the point here is that there is no right answer.
Ellie: 38:53
I don't know. I haven't tried out that algorithm that was recommended to me at that party.
David: 38:58
Mine always spits out "Stay with mother."
Ellie: 39:01
Which is why you currently live halfway across the world from your mother.
David: 39:04
Well true, but one of the things that makes the analysis so powerful in "Existentialism Is a Humanism" is that Sartre says, "How should this young man choose? Well already the choice of which framework to use for choice has to be taken into account. But even if you already decide to choose using a specific school of thought, a specific ethical tradition, which one is the right choice? We don't know. You can turn to Christianity, you can turn to any other school of thought that is ethical in nature. And at the end of the day, you're still going to be in square one. You're still going to be that young man torn between your duty to your family and your duty to your nation."
Ellie: 39:52
This feeling of tornness is one that we can actively take up, but more often than not, we flee from, and that condition of fleeing is bad faith.
David: 40:03
Up until now, we've been talking about anxiety in terms of the way it expresses itself and the way in which we flee from it in moments of bad faith. But it's also important to recognize that anxiety, even for existentialists, remains a problem, not in the sense that it's a problem to be cured, what is the appropriate response to anxiety, once we're operating reading under an existential, rather than medical, model?
Ellie: 40:33
Well, there are a few possible answers to this. One of the ones that first comes to mind is Heidegger's concept of resoluteness. Resoluteness as Heidegger describes it is authentic being a self. I see that there is no external source of meanings, but rather that I am creating meaning myself.
David: 40:56
Resoluteness is an attitude.
Ellie: 40:59
And it's an attitude that projects us towards specific actions. So this attitude of resoluteness manifest in resolutions or particular actions that we take with respect to our situation, what existentialists will sometimes call projects. So Heidegger says that resoluteness exists in projecting itself in specific situations, in making decisions, for instance, and in acting on those decisions.
David: 41:26
Can you give me some examples?
Ellie: 41:28
Yeah, of course. So the man who is deciding between going to the French resistance and staying home with his mother makes a decision, let's say he decided to stay home with his mother, and then he stays home. That is a resolution. So he has an attitude of resoluteness that manifests in the decision making. But to go back to something that you said before, David, in making that decision, he is recognizing that he is the source of that decision. So resoluteness is our authentic attitude of being a self and realizing that being a self is expressed in particular actions in the world.
David: 42:02
And it seems that one of the ways to think about resoluteness is as that which gives the resolution, whatever it is, it's value. One thing that I really like about existentialism that I always tried to emphasize to my students is that we can think about noble actions, right? So we can think about staying with your mother for her wellbeing, or we can think about going to war for the resistance army. And in some ways we think of the resolution to do that as valuable because the content of the decision we see as valuable, but for existentialists, even if you decide to do something that violates social norms in some ways, and that maybe we don't think of as particularly good, if you do it in a resolute manner, it actually adds value to your existence. And so there are some dark characters in the history of existentialism, that highlight this point.
Ellie: 43:07
Yeah. Although, at the same time, you can be resolute in making very standard actions as well, right? And so Kierkegaard uses the example, for instance, of just like an average Joe type guy who goes to work and comes home to a wife at the end of the day and eats dinner with her. And this person is actually authentic, but you just wouldn't know it from the outside. And so existentialism isn't licensing any particular decisions but rather just this attitude that you take up in your particular projects.
David: 43:39
A second way in which we can cope with anxiety is mindfulness.
Ellie: 43:45
Mindfulness is such an interesting word here, David, because it obviously has connotations of the Buddhist tradition, but it's been taken up in a lot of neoliberal and cliche ways in American society. But I think you're right that mindfulness is a very existential way of coping with anxiety. Mindfulness, like resoluteness, is an attitude. But whereas resoluteness focuses more on our own feeling of freedom, mindfulness is more about noticing details in our environments and appreciating them for what they are rather than trying to change them immediately. And so a mindful approach is going to take up this incredible insight that anxiety gives me into the contingency of everyday objects, into the fact that there is a glass of water standing in front of me and isn't that incredible? So we have this experience in anxiety of the unusual and unfamiliar nature of everyday objects and mindfulness encourages us to uphold that, to embrace it, and to actually appreciate it.
David: 44:56
Yes and there is a way in which mindfulness really becomes a celebration of existence. And, uh, this becomes then a specific way of relating to the source of our anxiety, which is our fundamental freedom.
Ellie: 45:13
So, David, as you know, I've been practicing Buddhist meditation for 10 years and I practice in the Teravata tradition, a very old tradition of Buddhism. The approach that this tradition of Buddhism takes to mindfulness is basically noticing. But this activity of noticing, which sometimes comes up in noticing your breath, noticing emotions, noticing thoughts, noticing patterns of desire, ultimately provides a way out of suffering. Even though mindfulness is associated with the Buddhist tradition and the way that it's been taken up, especially in the U.S., there are also non-religious ways of experiencing mindfulness. And one example that I think is really interesting here is one that comes up in Jenny Odell's book How to Do Nothing. Odell talks about going to see a performance of the composer John Cage's famous piece, 4'33". It consists of a pianist, who comes out to the piano, but plays nothing for four minutes and 33 seconds. And the noises of the space, the ambient noises, whether it's an audience member coughing, or people will come out on the stage and blend a smoothie, or use a typewriter, those are actually the sounds of the piece rather than the silent piano. Odell talks about how after experiencing this performance, she went out into the streets of San Francisco and experienced everything differently. She was hearing for the first time, the noises of the buses and the crowds as a kind of music. And she actually says, "For months after this, I was a different person." Something about the familiarity of being in a symphony hall and hearing piano music was taken away by the fact that the pianist did not actually play anything on the piano, and instead it was the ambient noises that made up the piece. And when she experienced this deep familiarization, it resulted in an embracing of the beauty around her, of the ambient noises that she took for granted for such a long time before this. This is a really great example of mindfulness and she associates it with that concept in her text.
David: 47:37
And I've seen a number of other scholars who write about the political value and the existential value of nothingness in this key using yeah- yeah. There are people who talk for example, about birdwatching as a practice, what it means to go into nature and just pay attention to the soundscape that is this and we can think about the- the French philosopher Michel de Certeau in this context about walking going for a walk and engaging in a practice nature. If somebody were to ask you, "what's the point of that?" There is no point, and that's the point.
Ellie: 48:14
Yeah.
David: 48:15
One way to think about this is just that there is no point to existence other than existence itself. You don't exist to produce, you don't exist to make people happy, you just exist to exist. Just taking those moments to quite literally take in existence has that philosophical, existential, um, I would even say almost revolutionary, potential built into it, of reconfiguring the way in which you see yourself and the way in which you engage with the world. And I think we can compare this to potentially a third way of dealing with anxiety, which is not so much to aim to reduce suffering as much as to accept the absurdity of suffering or the absurdity of the world in general. I think this speaks to that stereotype of the existentialist philosopher as a tortured character who commits himself or herself to a life of pain and suffering, which is a misreading in my interpretation, but there is a strand within existentialism that really taps into this notion that the world is absurd and the task of philosophy is to get us to live with and cherish that absurdity. And that's something that becomes particularly clear in the writings of Kierkegaard. In his case, he was a Christian and he wrote a lot about Christianity, but for him, the value of Christianity is not grace or salvation. There's something fundamentally absurd about Christianity, and Christianity moreover helps us live with the absurd.
Ellie: 50:00
And how does it do that? Because you mentioned that this is a third way of coping with anxiety. What exactly is this way of coping?
David: 50:06
Well so if we just focus for a moment on Kierkegaard, um, Kierkegaard will say something like, if you really look at, let's say the Bible, it's utterly filled with absurdity in the sense of paradox, there are things that you just cannot reconcile. The Trinity doesn't make any sense. The notion that God became man doesn't make any sense. There's a lot of stories that just don't make any sense and the value is that if you're a Christian and you embrace that absurdity, it actually brings you to recognize the limits of human rationality. That's the point about faith for Kierkegaard. Faith is not rational.
Ellie: 50:49
So the third way of coping with anxiety is faith.
David: 50:53
So for a Kierkegaard, the answer is yes, it would be faith, but for those of us who don't identify as religious persons-- and I'm an atheist, and I'm very vocal about it-- the point about faith, that Kierkegaard makes is simply that it highlights the limits of reason and it brings into focus the fact that human beings need more than rationality, we need this leap of faith. And so it, in his case, it really is a faith rooted in Christianity. But again, if you have a more expansive understanding of what it means to take a leap of faith, that's not just rooted in religious orthodoxy, then you get a sense of- of the value of Kierkegaard's writings in this respect. And again, there is this sense in which there is an authenticity here that is rooted in our kind of resignation to the absurdity of existence, that there is no reason for X, Y, or Z, if that makes any sense.
Ellie: 51:59
Yeah so it sounds like we have three ways of coping with anxiety as we're understanding it, the first is embracing your freedom and resoluteness; the second is embracing the details of everyday life and mindfulness; and the third is embracing, suffering and ugliness through faith.
David: 52:16
Not necessarily faith, but it can faith. I mean, the, uh, the characters in Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, it's not a religious character, uh, and so there, you have a secular version of the embracing of not necessarily ugliness, I would say absurdity.
Ellie: 52:33
I think I'll stick with mindfulness and resoluteness.
David: 52:35
I will with joyless grayness and embracing the ugliness of existence. I really feel more at home cause it's a darker take on existence.
Ellie: 52:48
And I'm more Emily in Paris.
David: 52:50
Yes. And I'm more like, um, Dostoyevsky in St. Petersburg. So this brings us to the end of our episode, has so far covered the notion of anxiety and the ways in which anxiety manifests itself, primarily in those moments where we're forced by the way of the world to make a choice.
Ellie: 53:12
We've offered three potential ways to cope with anxiety from an existential perspective, resoluteness, mindfulness, and faith, or what David has called embracing ugliness
David: 53:25
It's important to love yourself.
Ellie: 53:30
In all of your ugliness. We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
David: 53:42
You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at DearOverthink@gmail.com.
Ellie: 53:50
You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.
David: 54:04
Thanks so much for joining us today!