Anxiety

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Anxiety#1

“How shall a man be proud, when his conception is a crime, his birth a penalty, his life a labour, and death a necessity”

Arthur Schopenhauer, On Human Nature, 1897

“I can’t imagine life going on without me after I die”, a peculiar resonance resounds with these words. They feel wrong, that said, anyone hearing them may make sense of them. ‘Life’ will go on after we die, or so we assume. It is what we believe. If it didn’t our whole notion of reality would be put into question. Entertaining the idea of a reality that has no independence of me is an offence, an offence to our senses and an offence to our reasons for being. There are problems in a world in which your reading this did not exist independently of my writing it, problems; as far as our reason is concerned that is.

A friend said these words during conversation some years ago, since then I’ve tried to make sense out of what she meant. I want to feel what she meant as much as understand it. Not least because I have my own sense of life; at one time or another we think about our death. What is it we think of when we think about death? Is it our non-existence? I am closer to the beginning of my life now than the end; others are closer to the end. There is a marked difference I have been told. Is there an important difference?

One of my favourite quotes from David Hume, maybe the crux of his philosophy is in these lines:

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“For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception. When my perceptions are removed for any time…..I am insensible of myself, and may truly be said not to exist…….nor do I conceive what I is farther requisite to make me a perfect non-entity”

David Hume, A Treatise on Human Nature, 1739

The point is; I can identify something in me called life and this ‘something’ is amorphous. Yet to me sensing it, there is something definite. It is as amorphous and vague as I am to myself. It is to me, identical to my own identity. I know what I mean by ‘me’ and I know what I mean when I talk about ‘my life’. I don’t mean by life what a scientist would describe as life, it is not a definition. I couldn’t give you a measurement of, it doesn’t smell of anything, but it feels like something.

These things; feelings, emotions, the sensations of me and my sense of life are part of what I am when I am conscious, they are the distinguishing features of the inner and the outer world in which I am. These feelings harbour the border between who I am and the world. They are my sheaths of being. Without my consciousness I don’t know what knowledge would be. Certainly I couldn’t imagine a life going on to go on without me. Maybe that is what my friend was getting at.

“And here are trees and I know their gnarled surface, water, and I feel its taste. The scents of grass and stars at night, certain evenings when the heart relaxes – how shall I negate this world whose power and strength I feel? Yet all the knowledge on earth will give me nothing to assure me that this world is mine”

Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus 1942.

These distinctions play a greater part in our lives than we might appreciate. The relationship between the inner and outer is often blurred. When you suffer depression, feeling and cognition affect your relationship with the outside world. The world is a place that bears not hope, hope for your existence to have any meaning and significance beyond your own punishment. The world can be persecutory, cruel. On the other hand when you feel on top of the world, excited by the existence you can call your own, the world seems to skip to your very tune and each ray of light is a pleasure to the eye.

Yet we know the ‘world’ remains unchanged, disaffected by our success or failure. For some, this is the essence of the world’s cruelty; for others just a fact of life, either way the world continues to go on without us, and we carry on trying to identify with it.

I wonder how much we can really distinguish our sense of life from the world, To what extent are we and our world entwined? To what extent is all of what we understand dominated by our worldview; a view of the world centred in our universe, a unity of intellectual and cognitive resonance with experience and action? How does this world aesthetic affect the essence of what we understand?

These questions are not new in any way. To draw some understanding however, is not easy. Beyond simply understanding, I would like a moral for our understanding because morals can guide us in our journey through the thoughts that we employ when we think about ourselves and everything that is our life.

But it is important to be clear. Scientific, analytic and logical investigation does not serve us here. They may be superior images; they may be the right course for our intellect if we want to understand the world as a picture, intellectually definite and make it compassable. However, the world we inhabit is not a picture. It an experience and it is that experience that we refer to when we talk about our lives.
Anxiety, adulthood – the very ‘raison de etre’ for our continued existence – are questions that have meant something for as long as we have told each other stories and had awareness of our very existence. They have formed the backdrop of our musings for as long as we have communicated and may have served our experiences as sentient and cognitive creatures for longer than that.

Anxiety, or better put, an anxiety, is a determining factor; determining the very experience of being for all of us in one way or another. Symptoms of anxiety are as common in the psychologists chair as they are in the history books; it has not been uncommon to resort to violence from the anxiety caused by fear, humiliation, or loss – to the threat of what it is we believe to be our essence.

“There is no madness but that which is in every man, since it is man who constitutes madness in the attachment he bears for himself and by the illusions he entertains.”

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1964

If I were to raise an objection with myself at this point, I would question my own rejection of science and of the analytic method in this discourse. The science of human nature; psychology, sociology, anthropology have all canvassed the human experience. They have made strides in an attempt to quantify the qualitative character of our existence. In so doing they have given shape to something that is not only common to each of us, but something to which we are all asked to subscribe. What is more, these sciences, these modes of investigation have as their defence data. Data, which when analysed yield patterns that we can conform to, agree upon and accept as writ.

However, this is not about that. In the quantification an abstraction occurs that limits the very meaning of what is quantified. It is a Platonic ideal, a realm of descriptive abstraction that does not resemble the world we inhabit. Despite its uses, despite its success in mapping the territory of the mind it is rightly defensive about its limitations and the Cartesian gap between the mind and the body remain the realm of void and obscurity.

“Madness deals not so much with truth and the world, as with man and whatever truth about himself he is able to perceive.”

Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization, 1964

So we start again, we start with the same evidence that science itself must begin with; the human experience. The quale of being that constitutes the origin of knowledge. We begin in other words with the certainty we have and as we dig and explore there is one certainty that appears to us consistent, ourselves. Is this a Cartesian repetition?

However, this knowledge of ourselves seems to constitute the essence of a problem. It is the beginning and the end of an anxiety that we must perpetuate. This recursion, from perception to being begs the very questions of existence that have dominated the threads of our culture to the point where we have accepted the paradoxes. We will either sanction our being through description and writ or obviate the possibility of definite answers in a leap of faith. Either way the meaning our lives bear, what purposes our self knowledge possess do not evaporate through these tricks of the intellect. We are either left with a space to fill with a void of nothingness or we make that leap of faith.

There is a third option, to live our lives without a sense of meaning beyond the moments we inhabit and to exist, like animals, with the pressings that the modern world will weigh upon us. This would be the most amicable solution for a government in fear of rebellion. However, we are human and not a political abstraction.

As adaptable a solution as this may be we are littered with the consequences of this option in our literature. Ivan Ilyich chose this third option and it was only on his death bed, in the throws of dying that he awoke to a possession of his being and his consciousness. It was only then that the torment implicit in his being was freed, freed in the moment of his change from being to non-being and death.

And so my friend’s question remains; what is the relation of her death to the life she knows and if the life that she knows dies with her then what remains once she is dead? What meaning can she assay into her realm of not-being, from the consciousness she has now of her life and her experience of the world as she knows it?

The question is a personal one, provoking reactions as diverse in human kind as there are reactions to be had; and all because the questions draw on the elements of our being closest to us, our identity. Yet if we are to agree with Hume, we are left at all times, in all moments and at all places with a dilemma; that we cannot traverse the moment of perception to the inference of a being, or a person with any certainty. And if we cannot have certainty of ourselves, what certainty can we have of the myriad identities that multiply with the time that we have.

We are left with the paradox that opened this essay, that the only certainty that is guaranteed beyond reason is an offence to our very notion of being. Through that, the offence grows to all that we know and identify with, crossing the harbours of reason and leaving open the question; without that certainty what madness are we left with, what anxiety shall be provoked.

The will to believe, the leap of faith from reason to the depths of belief are as ancient as our awareness is. The are some who have gone so far as to reason that the Cro-Magnon man had religious places of worship, symbols of deity. Bertrand Russell divides human thought into two classes; mystics and romantics and analytic and scientific modes of thought. His analysis is as superficial as his philosophy. It is the negation of what it means to be human. To experience beauty, pain, lust and love; to connect through the subjectivity of our feeling to the world we inhabit. It is this irrationality that is the mark of the everyday, waking and feeling surrender to the climate of the day.

As we make that connection we are filling a void coherent with the human experience. Filling that void with the certainty of belief we leap from anxiety to security. In faith of something we have hope and hope pushes us beyond the cold and calculated meaning of nothingness. Our mind, to borrow a phrase from Martin Amis, becomes dependant, dependant on the identity and the meaning that we have acquired in our leap of faith and the interrogation of that faith; the attack on our meaning becomes an attack on us, on our identity and the meanings in life that we subscribe to through our being.

The truth is that the life that we imagine when we are alive will not continue when we die. It is only a life that is imagined, by us, while we are alive. Time will continue, people will be born and others will grapple with the existential questions of their being. Some will find solace in religion, others, in the momentary passing of here and now, others will subscribe to the wonders of science and others will decide that with an honesty that few can admit, that there is no meaning for them and remove themselves from existence altogether.

For those of us who remain however, there are lessons to be learnt. There is a meaning that we can acquiesce with equal sympathy. That for a time anxiety will continue. That anxiety will shift the meanings and identities of our lives as we find a context of being with which we can find comfort before the end of our time. Beyond that, with certainty, there is nothing but space, a void and nature. If we can rest content in them then we have achieved what most people are too angst ridden to discover. That in the simple meaning of being there is life and in that life we are all common in our destiny.

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