Anxiety

Unease with no particular object, arising from freedom itself - a philosophical concept rather than a clinical one.

Theme: Life, death and meaning
Tradition: Continental
Term: Angst
Term fixed: 1844

In plain terms

Fear has an object. You are afraid of the dog, the interview, the drop.

Anxiety in the philosophical sense has none. It is not about anything in particular, which is what makes it different in kind rather than in degree - and the tradition's claim is that what discloses itself in it is possibility as such.

Kierkegaard's image is dizziness. Standing at the edge, what produces the vertigo is not the height but the awareness that you could step. Freedom looks back at you, and the recognition that nothing determines what you do next is not comfortable.

That is a philosophical claim about the structure of choosing, and it is worth keeping separate from the clinical condition, which is a different subject with different causes and effective treatments.

As a philosopher would put it

Kierkegaard distinguishes anxiety from fear: fear has a determinate object, anxiety's object is nothing - specifically, the nothing of possibility. His formulation is that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, arising when spirit confronts its own capacity, and it is the presupposition of the leap rather than a consequence of it.

Heidegger's Angst has the same structure and a different purpose. In anxiety, beings as a whole slip away and the world loses its familiar significance; what is disclosed is not any entity but the nothing, and thereby Dasein's own being-in-the-world as such. It individualises, breaking the absorption in the anonymous they and making authentic existence possible.

Sartre's version connects it directly to responsibility: anguish is the recognition that nothing - no value, no nature, no prior self - determines the next choice, and that one is therefore wholly answerable for it. Bad faith is the flight from this recognition.

Where you meet it

In 2000 Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper set up a tasting table in a Californian supermarket. On some days it offered six varieties of jam; on others, twenty-four.

The larger display attracted more people to stop. It produced far fewer purchases: about three per cent of those who stopped bought a jar, against roughly thirty per cent at the smaller display. The finding entered popular writing as the paradox of choice, and later meta-analyses have found the effect is real in some conditions and absent in others, so the strong general claim does not hold.

The narrow result is still instructive. Increasing available possibilities did not straightforwardly increase satisfaction, and something about an open field of options made deciding harder rather than easier.

That is a very modest version of the philosophical point, and it is useful precisely because it is modest: possibility is not experienced as pure opportunity, and the discomfort at an open horizon is ordinary rather than pathological.

What is actually disputed

Whether anxiety reveals anything.

The existential tradition treats it as disclosive - it shows something true about freedom, groundlessness and the self's situation that ordinary absorbed activity conceals. On that account it is uncomfortable and epistemically valuable, and fleeing it is a failure.

The deflationary reply is that this reads a philosophical thesis into a mood. Moods have causes, they vary with sleep and circumstance, and treating one as a source of metaphysical insight is a category error - especially given that the same state is, in other contexts, a treatable condition.

Defenders answer that the philosophical concept was never a description of a clinical presentation, and that the argument stands on its analysis of choosing rather than on the phenomenology. Whether that separation can be maintained, given that the tradition constantly appeals to how anxiety feels, is a fair question.

Commonly confused with

clinical anxiety A medical category with diagnostic criteria and effective treatments. The philosophical concept is about the structure of freedom and is not a description of an illness.

Defined against

Authenticity Anxiety is what makes authentic existence possible on Heidegger's account, and fleeing it is the ordinary condition - which makes the pair a movement rather than an opposition

Philosophers

Søren Aabye Kierkegaard Anxiety as the dizziness of freedom
Martin Heidegger Anxiety as disclosing the nothing and individualising Dasein
Jean-Paul Sartre Anguish as the recognition of total responsibility
Blaise Pascal The unease of a being that cannot sit alone in a room
Friedrich Nietzsche The affirmation demanded of a life with no external ground

Works

Concluding Unscientific Postscript The existential framing
Being and Time Anxiety and the disclosure of the nothing
Being and Nothingness Anguish and bad faith
Pensées Diversion as the flight from an unbearable stillness
The Myth of Sisyphus The related confrontation, handled differently

Schools

Existentialism Where anxiety is central
Phenomenology Where the mood is described structurally
Lebensphilosophie Where life precedes and unsettles reflection
Augustinianism Where restlessness is the human condition
Early Theravada Buddhism Where a related unease is diagnosed differently

Related concepts

Absurdity 1942 · Free will c. 397 · Authenticity 1927 · Despair 1849 · Finitude 1927

Kierkegaard's Angest in The Concept of Anxiety of 1844 is the source; Heidegger's Angst in 1927 develops it, and both are distinct from anxiety as a clinical category, which is a twentieth-century medical concept.