Anxiety takes on a special meaning in existentialism. Existential anxiety, it is said, differs from ordinary, psychological anxiety. Existentialists privilege certain ways of existing, such as anxiety, boredom, or nausea, and these ways of existing disclose the way the world is to us. If we are to make sense of anxiety in light of the Sartrean dictum “we are what we do,” then both anxiety and boredom are states of existence where “we don’t know what to do, so we don’t know what we are.” This idea that we are what we do finds its origins in Heidegger’s philosophy, which overhauls the traditional fetishization of cognition and instead accounts for human existence in terms of practical intelligence that involves an agent in an environment. In boredom, we are underwhelmed by the affordances of our environment; in anxiety, we find ourselves excited into a state of inaction. In either case, we are confronted with Being or non-Being because of the way that anxiety and boredom lead to a breakdown in the relation between our practical concerns and what our world has to offer us.
When we abandon philosopher Renee Descartes’ age-old idea of a “ghost in a machine” in favor of an embodied, embedded, and practical agent in a world, we reunite “man and world.” The challenge is to answer the question, how do we make sense of existential anxiety without recourse to subjectivity? Usually, we think of moods as a subjective coloring over our perception of the world that is outside us; we view the world through rose-tinted glasses. On the other hand, existential philosophy (Heidegger’s philosophy, in particular) rejects this notion that there is a mind “inside” us pitted against an outside world. This is not to succumb to behaviorism either. The existential psychology of Rollo May, as one example, defines itself in the context of a growing distrust for both Freudian psychoanalysis and behaviorism.
We might say that the existentialists witnessed the breakdown of traditional ways of knowing, partly in light of 19th century industrialism, which was a time of loneliness and conformity. Today, we see this pattern continued somewhat. That is, today’s situation is similar in that the basic ways of comporting ourselves towards our world involve our pre-reflective acceptance of our heritage and our tradition, but like the time Rollo May was writing, in our time we find American culture split between those who accept the old categories of social normativity and those who seek to revise the old ways of knowing for reasons of social justice. Put less abstractly, we did what our ancestors did. To stave off existential anxiety, we simply did things as things have always been done.
In Europe, for example, before it was industrialized, just as in Africa before it was Europeanized, individuals experienced the meaning of their lives in terms of the local religious orthodoxies and the accustomed national or tribal ways of life. Wherever its impact was felt, however, the new technological culture disrupted the old patterns irrevocably. Often it came close to destroying them altogether, and it left only a void in their place. The traditional customs and beliefs had provided built-in psychic security for the individual. They had protected him against losing his equilibrium — short of organic psychosis — as long as he could believe in the practices of the group and participate in them wholeheartedly. But when the old groups were physically broken up and their members were scattered in the factories of the cities, or when, for any of many reasons, the faith in their teachings was gone, the individual was left unprotected. He could no longer have recourse to the spiritual past of his people. He was isolated and cut adrift in life; and it is this situation of the lone individual no longer sustained by the cultural resources of his ancestors that is a main root of the psychological problems that have arisen in modern times. (Progroff 1956 p. 5)
We get married at eighteen, have children, pick a profession, and we carry out our rural existence. However, as tradition breaks down, we no longer have the “psychic security” of our ancestor’s customs and their spiritual beliefs. Sometimes certain ways of existing, for better or worse, are transformed. Part of this takes place through a change in social values in the form of cultural revolution, while it also partly takes place through advancements in technology, which makes society more pluralistic. In the face of a technologically transformed world whose traditional values are more widely held in disrepute, how we do we know how to live? Where do we turn for guidance or wisdom in how to live our lives? How we do find the courage to be?
