What Is Fear?
An Invitation towards A Genuine Life
I’d like to spend a brief amount of time defining fear, and a larger amount of time illuminating fear to be an invitation to take a personal inventory. This inventory can allow new insights to spring up so we may adjust our choices to live a little more genuine.
I’d like to do so using two men who are arguably referred to as the forefathers of modern existentialism: Frederick Nietzsche and Soren Kierkegaard.
Nietzsche defined fear as an emotion that appears when self-preservation is threatened. The emotion exists on an infinitely wide spectrum, from disclosing personal information to others (for example — I am a trans-male) to slamming on your breaks in the middle of an intersection as a truck plows towards you.
Fear, no matter where it emerges on its vast spectrum, is linked to a sense of bodily preservation.
Moving along now from defining fear with bodily preservation to illuminating fear as a tool towards a more genuine you…
Kierkegaard tells a tale of a man who is standing atop a big ass cliff. While on the cliff, fear comes over him. He suddenly has the realization that he might accidentally trip, fall of the cliff, and plummet to his death.
