PHILOSOPHY 201 (STOLZE)

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PHILOSOPHY 201 (STOLZE)

• Notes on Thomas Wartenberg, Existentialism

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Chapter Four Anxiety

• The importance of anxiety
• Worry vs. anxiety
• Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken
• The Leap of Faith
• Encountering Ourselves

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The Importance of Anxiety

• For the Existentialistsis not just one emotion
  among others it is the one that best reveals to
  us our nature as human beings. This means that
  anxiety has metaphysical significance it allows
  humans to correctly understand the nature of the
  being that they are, but only if they have a full
  and complete experience of the emotion. For many
  people, anxiety is an emotion from which they
  flee, seeking in various ways to anesthetize
  themselves to its unpleasantness. But the
  Existentialists believe that paying attention to
  ones anxiety is crucial because of the
  significance of what it signals (p. 71).

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Worry vs. Anxiety

• Worry is characterized by intentionality (it has
  an object) but anxiety appears to be free
  floating (it is objectless).
• Ex a student who is going to take an exam
• Sartres criticism of Freuds account of anxiety

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Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken (1920)

• Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
• And sorry I could not travel both
• And be one traveler, long I stood
• And looked down one as far as I could
• To where it bent in the undergrowth
• Then took the other, as just as fair,
• And having perhaps the better claim,
• Because it was grassy and wanted wear
• Though as for that the passing there
• Had worn them really about the same,
• And both that morning equally lay
• In leaves no step had trodden black.
• Oh, I kept the first for another day!
• Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
• I doubted if I should ever come back.
• I shall be telling this with a sigh

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The Leap of Faith

• Kierkegaard on belief in God
• Ex Abrahams sacrifice of his son Isaac

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Encountering Ourselves

• Through the use of the phenomenological method,
  we ourselves are the object of our anxiety,
  because we have the freedom to make decisions
  about how to live our lives, indeed, we are, as
  Sartre puts it, condemned to be free. Since we
  have no rational grounds for making the
  fundamental decisions we must as free beings,
  anxiety is simply our way of registering in the
  depths of our being our difficult and upsetting
  situation (p. 88).