Angst

One of the students in my Heidegger seminar sent around this discussion of Angst via Kierkegaard in Saturday's New York Times. The key is the connection between Angst and freedom.

Here is how Gordon Marino frames it:

Many philosophers treat emotions as though they were merely an impediment to reason, but for Kierkegaard there is a cognitive component to angst. It is in our anxiety that we come to understand feelingly that we are free, that the possibilities are endless, we can do what we want — jump off the cliff or, in my case, perhaps one day go into the class I teach and, like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, say absolutely nothing.

...

Writing in different key, Kierkegaard registered this journal entry: “Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the possibility of being alone in the world,  forgotten by God, overlooked among the millions and millions in this enormous household. A person keeps this anxiety at a distance by looking at the many round about who are related to him as kin and friends, but the anxiety is still there.”

To locate freedom from Angst is very different from Arendt's finding of freedom in our natality, our capacity to begin. That we are beginners. And yet, in a world increasingly organized by social science, statistical norms, and bell curves, freedom does require a turn away from our standardized approach to the world. That is where Angst can be useful, insofar as angst singularizes us and separates us from convention.

-RB