Angst Misbehavin'

How have philosophers, and others, come to dwell on such phenomena (if they may be called that) as angst, dread, nothingness, anxiety and other such foreboding--what, exactly?  Feelings? Things? States?  It seems to me a good question, as by my understanding these woeful conditions of mind are said to exist separate from any particular object.  That's what distinguishes them from fear, for example.  We fear something or someone in particular.  The angst, dread, etc. written of by philosophers, usually existentialists, have no particular object as they refer to life, living in general, or the world in general, all their constituents conspiring, as it were, to make us miserable in some profound sense.

Angst seems to have been created by that most melancholy of all Danes, Soren Kierkegaard.  Kierkegaard makes Hamlet seem positively jolly.  The author of such works as Fear and Loathing and Sickness unto Death wouldn't be the life of any party, except perhaps a burial party, at which he could, I suppose, cheer others present by making comments regarding the good fortune of the deceased to be quit of this vale of tears.

Kierkegaard was a (very sad) man of the 19th century, and it seems the concept of life and the world as full of woe and the relentless urge to expound on that subject in painful though not useful detail developed during the 19th and 20th centuries, at first at least through the efforts of Europeans.  I wonder why, and here provide a modest effort at an explanation, or the beginnings of one.

I think of ancient Western philosophy, and I know of no instance where the followers of Plato or Aristotle, the Stoics or Epicureans, or philosophers of any ancient school of which I know felt or described anything even nominally similar to angst, dread, anxiety or any other items in the cornucopia of woe posited by existentialists or nihilists, let alone anti-natalists who go them one better by not only decrying the world but contending it's so full of suffering that it is immoral to have children.  Even the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, who thought there was a realm beyond the imperfect world, to my knowledge didn't dread it as a whole.

Something must have happened to change this perception of the world so completely.  Ancient Western philosophy, like so much else, was stopped cold by the onset of Christianity, which later tried to assimilate it, though not all of it.  Christianity famously condemned the world and all that's in it, including we humans, as sinful and wicked.  Like certain ancient philosophers, they thought there was a higher realm.  But they thought that realm was available only to Christians, and very good Christians to boot.  The ancient pagan philosophers didn't think that the higher realm was available exclusively to any follower of any particular religion.

Christianity began to lose its grip on thinkers and intellectuals from about the 18th century on.  Many, like Voltaire, accepted a kind of Deism.  But subsequently, those no longer able to accept Christianity or a Christian god found it impossible, for some reason, to accept the world.  "Without God, anything is permissible" are the words used by Dostoyevsky in The Brothers Karamazov.  Despite the fact that the ancients accepted the world as good, or at least not dreadful, without the need for believing in a personal deity like the one endorsed by Christianity, the intellectuals of the 19th and 20th century could not do so.  And so, for them, anything was possible.  There was no longer a guide for conduct, no standards to be applied, nothing good or bad, no purpose to life; we're deposited in the world for no reason, only to suffer.

If this hypothesis has any basis, it's striking the extent to which the absence of God, of standards, of morals derived from a creator, rendered the intellectuals of formerly Christian Europe hopeless and in despair.  The reaction to the Death of God was dramatic, even melodramatic.  The search for alternatives began, but these thinkers had been so convinced of the need for absolute knowledge and standards of conduct that the probable, the likely, the well established didn't suffice to assuage their concerns.  

And so nothing quite worked.  Nothing replaced Christianity.  Existentialism, nihilism, were unsatisfactory and fostered melancholy at best, angst, dread and anxiety at worst.  Some became mystics or quasi-mystics, seeing some form of redemption through nationalism and racist ideologies and belief in leaders amounting to demigods.

The result is many of us see the world as not only separate from us, but deadly to us.  We're outsiders without hope or function.  We have no place to go.  For everything, we're out of tune.  

Separate from the world, but not beyond it in any permanent sense.  Subject to it but incapable of remedying our lot or making things better for us or others, there being no God to tell us that's what we should do.  It seems a remarkably self-pitying, futile way to live.  If it is the result of a disenchantment with a particular religious view which became rationally unsupportable, however, there are ways to overcome that disenchantment, as the ancients knew but we have forgotten.

The Dread of the Real

We're all fairly familiar with this dread, aren't we?  If not from feeling the dread, then from being immersed in it through the pronouncements of various intellectuals, certain of the religious, and of course by undergoing what is called a liberal arts education, which mandates the reading of the works of various dread-full titans of the history of the West.

I'm reading a book by Robert Unger with the rather exclamatory title The Self Awakened:  Pragmatism Unbound.  I have a fondness for pragmatism the philosophy (I'm still awaiting the movie), as anyone deigning to read this blog knows.  So, it seems, does Unger; but he also evidently believes it does not go far enough.  Regrettably as far as I'm concerned, he does not reveal where it or humanity or philosophy in general should be going in the first parts of the book, but he makes very firm statements that it and we and philosophy are not going where they and we should.  And, in pointing out why that is the case, he constantly refers to what he (or perhaps those of us who aren't going where we should--I'm not sure yet) feels is our plight as miserable, decaying, dying animals trapped in a universe beyond our comprehension.

Dread has a peculiar meaning in philosophy, or at least in some kinds of philosophy, being roughly the same as angst.  It seems a kind of glorified fear, a fear which some claim is even useful in an unusual manner.  I use it here in a broader and more common sense, which certainly may involve fear but would also include loathing and disgust, even contempt and disdain, directed of course sometimes with alacrity at us, our fellows and the universe in general.

Am I alone in thinking that the tendency to indulge in describing, explicating, bemoaning and expounding on this "plight" is tiresome and futile?  It's been going on for centuries, obviously to nobody's gain--indeed, the very idea of gain may be unimaginable if not intolerable to those who feel we exist in a foul, incomprehensible world without meaning or purpose.  I especially am interested by those who are called or call themselves "anitnatalists" who are apparently persons who take advantage of the fact that they live and think and experience to contend that it is inappropriate for us to give birth, thereby causing the creation of others who will live and think and experience as they do.  Inappropriate because, of course, the world is foul, incomprehensible and without meaning or purpose.

When we think of this tendency towards dread of the world we naturally think of the "usual suspects", dismal purveyors of misery and angst such as Kierkegaard (speaking of fear), Schopenhauer, Sartre and their many equally if not more miserable and angst-filled followers.  But the belief that the world is inferior or a source of evil and our brief lives a chore if not worse has been around a long time.  Jolly old Plato, of course, thought little of the world and even less of humanity.  Even Marcus Aurelius wrote of the world and we humans as being of little worth, now and then; whether this indicates his real feelings or thoughts written in his darker moments or as a kind of exercise is unknown.  The Stoic view that God is immanent in nature would seem to preclude the kind of disdain for it we find in Plato, or the odd despair over it which seems a feature of modern times.

But of course we humans really came to disdain the world in toto and even with gusto upon the advent, as it were, of Christianity.  For this we probably have to thank St. Paul, primarily.  Now there was a man who dreaded, and indeed hated, the world and all that's in it!  It's curious, though, that this dread of the real in the West, at least, is not limited to Christians, but may be even more evident in intellectuals who have renounced Christianity.  I'm not sure if this is a result of the fact that philosophy, like politics, makes strange bedfellows or the fact that misery loves company.

Assuming the world is pointless and hideous, and we if not hideous are at least pointless, though, why take the trouble to point out that this is the case, and pronounce upon it in hideous detail?  Perhaps we have here a even more striking example of the fact that misery loves company.  Does this represent an instance where the miserable among us are engaged in a relentless quest to make certain that others are miserable as well?  Or is it simply that many of us are whiners and many of us for some reason enjoy hearing others whine?

Why not, at the least, make efforts to lessen the misery; our own and those of others?  That would seem to be the intelligent response to misery, whether it is real or imagined.

Absurdism

I wish I was referring to the humorous evocation of the absurd, but no; "Absurdism" is, apparently, a variant of existentialism, and so humor has no place in its discussion.   But perhaps it does.

I came across a book called The Absurdity of Philosophy and downloaded it without much thought, just assuming, I must confess, that it would be an amusing read.  Thus far, it is not.

I was puzzled by the preliminary chapter in which the author describes himself as going through a daily routine pausing, with considerable frequency, to light cigarettes.  It's been some time since I've read anything written in last few decades which refers to lighting cigarettes at all, let alone doing so every time one is not involved in doing anything else requiring the use of hands.  I smoked for many years, and am familiar with lighting a cigarette in this reflexive manner, in my case whenever the phone rang in my office, for example.  Curiously, I find myself vaguely annoyed by the author's tendency to advise me that he lit a cigarette after a shower, while watching TV, etc.

Then, for reasons not foreshadowed, reference was made to Camus.  And then to Kierkegaard.  And then to French history.  The serial consumption of cigarettes seemed to be explained.  Ah, he must be French, I thought.  Cigarettes, Camus and Kierkegaard.  What else could he be?

But it seems he's not French.  He does, however, seem to accept (pun intended, I suppose) Absurdism.

It appears Absurdism reflects one of the three options the exceedingly melancholy Dane Kierkegaard believed rather presumptuously are available to us in reacting to (you guessed it) the meaninglessness of our lives.  The others are, unsurprisingly, suicide and belief in God or some kind of Other who or which manages to accord meaning to our miserable existence.  Absurdists, at least of the Camusian (?) variety, forego suicide (doubtless with difficulty and regret) and disdain belief in God.  They instead accept the meaninglessness, and live with it.  Perhaps this is similar to Sartre's version of "self-reliance", which evidently consists of withdrawing into oneself in response to the nausea said to result from everything and everyone but oneself. 

Now I will acknowledge that confronted with these three cheerful options, I would be inclined towards acceptance myself.  It is an option which would at least engender a kind of self-respect.  I would in that case, assuming I bought into the meaningless of life and was appropriately nauseated, be like Camus' Sisyphus and acquire a certain dignity.

However, I find the cause of the alleged three options to be difficult to accept.  That is to say, I find it difficult to conclude that life and the universe are meaningless.

What Kierkegaard and others like him actually seem to conclude is, in my opinion, that life and the universe have no meaning to them, in the sense of a purpose which makes everything bearable that they find disagreeable (and they apparently find many, many things disagreeable).  They have no meaning they find satisfactory, in other words.

But why should they?  Why expect they would, in the first place?   It seems extremely silly to believe the universe exists or you exist for a specific reason.  It seems even sillier to expect that this reason would be somehow intimately related to what we do or don't do, should or should not do, and that we would or should approve of the reason.

Acceptance of the fact that the universe and life need have no such reason would be more reasonable, if acceptance is what is appropriate.  Does this amount to the same thing, though, without the arrogant assumption that the universe was made for us, and the disappointment we feel when we understand it was not?

If so, the extirpation of the laughable conceit is beneficial in itself.  It's nice to live without being a self-involved fool.  How does one live, though, if we find the universe unsatisfactory?

We don't find it unsatisfactory, though.  We find our lives unsatisfactory for various reasons.  But we can solve certain problems, at least, and make it more satisfactory than not.  This isn't worthless, as our satisfaction is significant to us and why shouldn't it be?

We form our own goals and work towards them.  We make our lives meaningful. 

As someone who admires the Stoic way, I would say we live according to nature.  That doesn't entail belief in a God in any traditional sense, but it entails a respect and even reverence for the universe and all that's in it.  The universe inspires awe and reflection; we recognize this and act accordingly.