What to think about the place of anxiety as an ontologically privileged mood in philosophy? Its origin, clearly articulated in Pascal and then Kierkegaard, has its roots in contingency of human life. This contingency is not only the province of the human as a thing in the world—Pascal: “I am afraid and wonder to see myself here rather than there”—but so too of the world the human creates. The world does not come preformed to perception, but unfolds as an event, spontaneous and indeterminate. For Heidegger, this disclosing of the world as a world coincides with the mood of anxiety. For him, anxiety has double intentionality to it: on the one hand, the value human existence confers upon the world “sinks into indifference.” On the other hand, through this recession, anxiety accents its positive structure: through it, the nothing is revealed. The revelation of the nothing is anxiety’s gift to metaphysics.
All of this is perfectly familiar to any introduction to existentialism, and in existential therapy circles, anxiety has been harnessed as a pathway to the disclosure of value. Thus in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and Medard Boss, anxiety assumes a hermeneutic aspect to it. For them, anxiety is not something to be “cured,” but a mood to be read. More of this later perhaps. For now, I am again thinking through the experiential aspect of anxiety, which has been curiously overlooked. More broadly, I am concerned, above all, with the relationship between the unreality of the world and the loss of self, each of which is an expression of anxiety.
On this point, R.D. Laing remains especially insightful. The strength of Laing is that he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity “more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial, estranged from his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.
In the impasse, the stability of the embodied self is consistently put in question, and the anxiety marking ontological insecurity is orientated toward the preservation of the self. This is the “engulfment,” which Laing regards as the threat to the autonomy of the self. Alongside engulfment, “impingent” is the term Laing applies to “the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in…” This sets in place the germs of an agoraphobic experience of the world: for the ontologically insecure person, movement is stifled from all directions by a need to retain spatio-temporal continuity, and thus preserve an intensely delimited “reality.” Far from a liminal state, Laing is right to recognise the incipient presence of impingement in the everyday: “Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.”
Where is the self in this de-realised world? Failing to reconcile self and world, time and other, he nevertheless persists both spatially and temporally. Life goes on, as Laing says. Central to this experience of the world-as-anxious, for Laing, is the disunity between mind and body. As with Merleau-Ponty, the normal experience of embodiment takes as its point of departure an ownership of “one’s own body.” One’s body is “mine.” Complete identification with my body, not only as a physical thing, but as a centre of experience, means that being orientated in the world coincides with being secure. By way of contrast, Laing speaks of the unembodied self as placing the body as secondary to the “mind.” I am not entirely convinced by this. It seems to me, that far from privileging mind over matter, the anxious experience of the world encounters the body as all too real, all too present. Too present, the anxious body protrudes into the world, its flesh a mass of contingency and anonymity—leading to the problem of self-consciousness. But that’s for next time.
All of this is perfectly familiar to any introduction to existentialism, and in existential therapy circles, anxiety has been harnessed as a pathway to the disclosure of value. Thus in the work of Ludwig Binswanger, Rollo May, R.D. Laing, and Medard Boss, anxiety assumes a hermeneutic aspect to it. For them, anxiety is not something to be “cured,” but a mood to be read. More of this later perhaps. For now, I am again thinking through the experiential aspect of anxiety, which has been curiously overlooked. More broadly, I am concerned, above all, with the relationship between the unreality of the world and the loss of self, each of which is an expression of anxiety.
On this point, R.D. Laing remains especially insightful. The strength of Laing is that he gives flesh to Heidegger’s conceptual structure, inserting the body where Heidegger’s da-sein analytic leaves us disembodied. Laing’s visceral account of “ontological insecurity” signals a subjectivity “more dead than alive” whose loss of identity is marked by a lack of temporal continuity, a feeling of being insubstantial, estranged from his body, and a fundamental insecurity with regard to other people, such that relation to others is a matter of being “preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying” the self. Here, Laing’s Hegelian influence is directed toward the ontologically insecure person, for whom no dialectic reconciliation between self and other is possible.
In the impasse, the stability of the embodied self is consistently put in question, and the anxiety marking ontological insecurity is orientated toward the preservation of the self. This is the “engulfment,” which Laing regards as the threat to the autonomy of the self. Alongside engulfment, “impingent” is the term Laing applies to “the full terror of the experience of the world as liable at any moment to crash in…” This sets in place the germs of an agoraphobic experience of the world: for the ontologically insecure person, movement is stifled from all directions by a need to retain spatio-temporal continuity, and thus preserve an intensely delimited “reality.” Far from a liminal state, Laing is right to recognise the incipient presence of impingement in the everyday: “Even a slight fever, and the whole world can begin to take on a persecutory, impinging aspect.”
Where is the self in this de-realised world? Failing to reconcile self and world, time and other, he nevertheless persists both spatially and temporally. Life goes on, as Laing says. Central to this experience of the world-as-anxious, for Laing, is the disunity between mind and body. As with Merleau-Ponty, the normal experience of embodiment takes as its point of departure an ownership of “one’s own body.” One’s body is “mine.” Complete identification with my body, not only as a physical thing, but as a centre of experience, means that being orientated in the world coincides with being secure. By way of contrast, Laing speaks of the unembodied self as placing the body as secondary to the “mind.” I am not entirely convinced by this. It seems to me, that far from privileging mind over matter, the anxious experience of the world encounters the body as all too real, all too present. Too present, the anxious body protrudes into the world, its flesh a mass of contingency and anonymity—leading to the problem of self-consciousness. But that’s for next time.
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