Existential Angst

[Johnny Kerosene]

Can someone give me a better definition of Existential Angst? I read what it said on Wikipedia, but I'm not sure I totally got it.

[hatzel]

What aren't you understanding, mate? Do you mean the feeling itself, all that about throwing yourself off a building or not, or the significance of that feeling in Kierkegaardian etc. thought? Or perhaps neither? :)

[Apoi_Viitor]

As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), it is the realization that ultimately, you alone are responsible for your actions, and that if you fuck up, there is nothing you can blame.

[Ose]

Angst, or anguish as Sartre calls it, is essentially an experience of one's own inescapable freedom. It manifests itself in experiences such as the cliff example given on Wikipedia. Consciousness is determined not by what it is, but by what it is not (in relation to its intentional objects; consciousness is always consciousness of something). Therefore the essence of the individual is not objectively defined; this is freedom. Choices and actions are what determines our essence (the process of self-making), therefore freedom is fundamental to human being.

The term 'existential angst' is also used more colloquially to mean a sense of the meaninglessness of life and a lack of place in the world. This is the same thing; it comes from the fact that there is no predetermined role for us in the world and no objective basis for our values.

[hatzel]

As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), it is the realization that ultimately, you alone are responsible for your actions, and that if you fuck up, there is nothing you can blame.

One may wish to reword it slightly as 'you alone are responsible for your actions, and therefore have the power to fuck up' :lol:

[hatzel]

I'm actually going to have another go at this, taking a somewhat different approach...here's a bit from an old Jim Carrey stand-up show (I'm not necessarily endorsing it as worthwhile from a comedy perspective :rolleyes:), which is pretty much just a definition of angst...

uIvGLOJPels

Pretty much, angst is that. That impulse to punch your friend or stick your fingers in the fan or cut your tongue with a razor blade, or, more precisely, the accompanying fear of doing so. The example Kierkegaard uses, the fear of throwing oneself off of a building, is much the same, really. We can take a very similar example of me at a train station, when a train comes, and I think 'I could through myself in front of that train...I could do it...' as Kierkegaard's character knows they could throw themselves off the building. At this point, the individual's very existence is their own hands. They can destroy themselves, or they can save themselves. Paddy has addressed this...the fear that we are free to jump off the building or into the path of an oncoming train. We could also consider Carrey's characters...one who can destroy their tongue, they have that ability to mutilate their tongue, their fingers, or their friends face. It's entirely within their own hands, to do or not to do, and they are scared at this...responsibility...

Carrey's characters can be seen as having a certain responsibility to themselves, or to their friend, the audience. The voice that keeps them from doing it is that voice of responsibility, but they still fear...not living up to that responsibility. There is the responsibility to oneself, inasmuch as life has no intrinsic meaning, and so the individual is responsible for making it meaningful. For Kierkegaard and other theistic existentialists, there is also the responsibility to a deity, angst being the fear of sin, of failing the deity. And there is, of course, the fear of failing others. (EDIT: one could go further, and think of Levinas and the like, and the responsibility to the Other, which has had a certain influence on later existentialism.)

However...there is a certain amount of good to come from all this, as I meant to suggest in the above post. The feeling of angst that I feel when a train approaches the station, for example, can be a reminder that I am actually unbelievably powerful, insofar as I can destroy myself, or I can save my own life. I'm not some insignificant speck, I have great power. And, perhaps, it is angst that actually keeps Carrey's character from cutting his tongue, as it challenges him with the potential, which he must then choose to deny, to overcome. Without the angst, Carrey's character hasn't had the opportunity to make the choice to consciously reject the impulse; they would instead be unconscious and almost automated activity, not cutting the tongue, depriving the individual of the freedom to have made the decision not to...

And this is the strange, somewhat postmodern and potentially unsuccessful attempt at blurring of the line between the pop-culture that is a Jim Carrey stand-up show and Kierkegaard's philosophical writings :laugh:

EDIT: I'm not necessarily happy with the above, it lacks a certain clarity, but this is my United States of Whatever...

[Dasein]

Sartre on Angst, or Anguish, from his 1945 lecture, Existentialism Is A Humanism:



Existentialists like to say that man is in anguish. This is what they mean: a man who commits himself, and who realizes that he is not only the individual that he chooses to be, but also a legislator choosing at the same time what humanity as a whole should be, cannot help but be aware of his own full and profound responsibility. True, many people do not appear especially anguished, but we maintain that they are merely hiding their anguish or trying not to face it. Certainly, many believe that their actions involve no one but themselves, and were we to ask them, "But what if everyone acted that way?" they would shrug their shoulders and reply, "But everyone does not act that way." In truth, however, one should always ask oneself, "What would happen if everyone did what I am doing?" The only way to evade that disturbing thought is through some kind of bad faith. Someone who lies to himself and excuses himself by saying "Everyone does not act that way" is struggling with a bad conscience, for the act of lying implies attributing a universal value to lies.

Anguish can be seen even when concealed. This is the anguish Kierkegaard called the anguish of Abraham. You know the story: an angel orders Abraham to sacrifice his son. This would be okay provided it is really an angel who appeared to him and says, "Thou, Abraham, shalt sacrifice thy son." But any sane person may wonder first whether it is truly an angel, and second, whether I am really Abraham. What proof do i have? There was once a mad woman suffering from hallucinations who claimed that people were phoning her and giving her orders. The doctors asked her, "But who exactly speaks to you?" She replies, "he says it is God." How did she actually know for certain that it was God? If an agel appears to me, what proof do I have that it is an angel? Or if I hear voices, what proof is there that they come from heaven and not from hell, or from my own subconscious, or some pathological condition? What proof is there that I am the proper person to impose my conception of man on humanity? I will never find any proof at all, nor any convincing sign of it . If a voice speaks to me, it is always I who must decide whether or not this is the voice of an angel; if I regard a certain course of action as good, it is I who will choose to say that it is good, rather than bad. There is nothing to show that I am Abraham, and yet I am constantly compelled to perform exemplary deeds. Everything happens to every man as if the entire human race were staring at him and measuring itself by what he does. So every man out to be asking himself, "Am I really a man who is entitled to act in such a way that the entire human race should be measuring itself by my actions?" And if he does not ask himself that, he masks his anguish.

The anguish we are concerned with is not the kind that could lead to quietism or inaction. It is anguish pure and simple, of the kind experienced by all who have borne responsibilities. For example, when a military leader takes it upon himself to launch an attack and sends a number of to their deaths, he chooses to do so, and, ultimately, makes that choice alone. Some orders may come from his superiors, but their scope is so broad that he is obliged to interpret them, and it is on his interpretation that the lives of ten, fourteen, or twenty men depend. In making such decision, he is bound to feel some anguish. All leaders have experienced that anguish, but it does not prevent them from acting. To the contrary, it is the very condition of their action, for they first contemplate several options, and, in choosing one of them, realize that its only value lies in the fact that it was chosen. It is this kind of anguish that existentialism describes, and as we shall see it can be made explicit through a sense of direct responsibility toward the other men who will be affected by it. It is not a screen that separates us from action, but a condition of action itself.

[RED DAVE]

Lying here in the semi-darkness, blacked out by the mindless aftermath of Hurricane Irene, using a cellphone to communicate with people I can't see, strikes me as a perfect time to discuss existential angst.

I have thought about this for years, and I have come to the not-particularly-astonishing conclusion that this experience is a result not of metaphysical conditions, but of material conditions: not of the relationship of mankind to the universe but of mankind to capitalism. I think it was Marx who called philosophy "an era comprehended in thought," and existentialism is no exception to this. It is, I believe, a philosophy compounded of the unaided individual's experience of the peculiar capitalist form of alienation. Big surprise.

Please note that virtually all the examples of angst mentioned above involve two aspects: violence and the choice of whether or not to commit such violence toward the self or others. There doesn't seem to come into play the choice to commit an act of love toward the self or others. Apparently, the universe, according to this system, only gives us negative emotions and the choice to commit them or not.

This presents us with the question: where does this negativity come from? Is it the "natural" response of the individual to the blindness of nature to his/her existence? (Obviously, Irene had no consciousness of my existence.) This is a possibility. Or is it something else? Is it possibly a response to the separated and alienated lives we lead under this system, which is based on the fetishism of commodities, wherein we experience ourselves not through our own labor but through the products of our labor which take on a significance and are given care that we ourselves are denied? That's a mouthful of assertion to swallow without argument.

Let me close this by saying that we are confronted with choices that existential angst does not view as fundamental but which are such but which are covered up by the subjective negativity of what we often experience. The choices to love, to create, to build, to reach out are, I believe much more fundamental than the destructive choices fetishized by existentialism. Our emotional lives under capitalism are often unhappy, and our universalizing minds convert this to a universal condition, with fantasies if destruction and self-destruction to match. Our real choice is whether to accept this crap as ultimate reality or go beyond the subjective by such choices, difficult though they may be.

Maybe more later when the lights come on.

RED DAVE

[Hit The North]

I love you RED DAVE. That was a lovely post.

Just sayin...

[Rooster]

I would also recommend reading some of Sartre's novels. Nausea is a great book.

[Hit The North]

I would also recommend reading some of Sartre's novels. Nausea is a great book.

Read it about four times.

I'd also recommend Sartre's Road to Freedom trilogy.

[Zanthorus]

I think it was Marx who called philosophy "an era comprehended in thought,"

For the record, the statement that philosophy is it's own era comprehended in thought comes from Hegel.

[black magick hustla]

existentialism is so passe its the realm of college undergrads who just discovered PhIlOsOpHy we aren't in the 1950s anymore