Anxiety: A Philosophical History 0197539718, 9780197539712
Anxiety looms large in historical works of philosophy and psychology. It is an affect, philosopher Bettina Bergo argues,
396 45 49MB
English Pages 528 [539] Year 2020
Table of contents :
Cover
Anxiety
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction—Anxiety: A Philosophical History
I.1. An “Age of Anxiety” and the “Age” of Anxiety
I.2. The Debated Role of an Affect in Spirit and Reason: From Kant to Kierkegaard
I.3. Will and Representation: Anxiety Erupts in Post-Kantian Philosophy
I.4. Darwin’s Original Semiosis: An Argument for the Universality of Emotion
I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-Resurrection: From Noumenal Will to Wills as Force
I.6. Freud’s Three Anxieties: Neurological, Ideal, and Originary
I.7. Husserl’s Phenomenological Foundations of the Ego, Time, and the Affects
I.8. Heidegger: Care and Angst and the Problem of Dasein’s Embodiment
I.9. Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
I.10. Finis Initii: Toward an Incipient Synthesis
1. The New Philosophy: Kant’s Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of Emotions in German Philosophy
1.1. Introductory Remarks
1.2. Before Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”: Dilemmas in the Heritage of the Cogito
1.2.1. Cartesian Dualism and the Two Sides of the Ego
1.2.2. Locke’s Reintegration of Sensation and His “Simple Ideas”: New Dilemmas
1.2.3. Kant’s Transcendental Critique of the Soul
1.3. A “Soul” Divided: Unknowable in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, Essential Postulate for Practical Reason
1.3.1. Practical Reason, Freedom, and the Soul: A Practical Dilemma
1.4. Schwärmerei and the Genesis of the First Critique
1.4.1. From the “Dreams” to the Paralogism of Personality: Unity and Representations
1.4.2. The First Paralogism of Substance (The Problem of Unity)
1.4.3. “The Soul Endures over Time; Therefore It Is a Person”: The Third Paralogism of Personality
1.5. Kant’s Cradle: The Self in Time and Steel
1.6. The Problem of Memory: “When I Am Conscious of Myself, I Am Then Conscious of Myself”
1.7. The “Reality” of Sensibility: Intensive Magnitudes
1.8. Conclusion: Anxiety as Theme, Anxiety as Symptom
Excursus 1. From Kant to Hegel via Philippe Pinel
E1.1. Introductory Remarks
E1.2. Kant, Madness, and the Passions
E1.3. Hegel, Reader of Pinel and French Revolutionary Psychiatry
E1.4. From Kant to Hegel via Pinel
2. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and Groundless Life
2.1. Introductory Remarks: Infusing “Life” into Idealism
2.2. Anxiety as the Original Tension in the Birth of Nature: Schelling’s Path
2.3. Life Erupts in the Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809)
2.4. Vitalizing Being: How an Individual Is Both Particular and Universal
2.5. Leading Germans “Back to the Heart”: The Living Will and Its Affective Signs
2.6. Schelling’s Hupokeimenon and God’s First E(x)motion
2.7. The Mood That Re-flects (das Ebenbild Gottes)
2.8. The Positive Philosophy of Freedom and Evil: Kabbalah, Not Manichaeism
2.9. Anxiety and Love: The Struggle and Return
2.10. Return to the Groundless (Ungrund): Love as Adelon
2.11. Conclusion: Positive Philosophy of That Which-Will-Be
2.12. Aftermath
3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard
3.1. Introductory Remarks
3.2. Kierkegaard’s Path to The Concept of Anxiety
3.3. The “Mythology” of Sin and Sinfulness
3.4. The Evolution of Freedom and Possibility
3.5. The Dialectic of Anxiety: Intimations of Freedom and Guilt, Signs of Spirit
3.6. Anxiety over Evil, Anxiety over the Good: “Every Life Is Religiously Designed”
3.7. Toward Redemption: Myth against Systems, Particularity against Universalism
3.8. The Sickness unto Death (1849): Anxiety’s Ultimate Dialectic
3.9. Wanting to Be Someone Else, Wanting to Be Oneself: The Dialectic of Affective Intensification
3.10. Myths and the Knowledge of Anxiety
3.11. Coram Deo (in the Presence of God): From Anxiety to Despair in Protestantism
3.12. Conclusion: On Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Affects
Excursus 2. The Universality of Emotions? Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
E2.1. Introductory Remarks
E2.2. Darwin’s Context
E2.3. Monogenism versus Polygenism, Adaptation versus Struggle
E2.4. The Expression of the Emotions: Darwin’s Four Difficulties
E2.4.1. Lamarckian Adaptation as Contrasted with the Survival of the Fittest
E2.4.2. Expression as Communication versus Expression as the Spontaneous Externalization of Mental States (Including Anxiety)
E2.4.3. Science Understood as Hypothesis and Observation versus Science as Ideology
E2.4.4. True Instincts and Habit-Created Instincts
E2.5. Conclusion
4. Schopenhauer, “Life,” and the Affects of the Noumenal
4.1. Introduction
4.1.1. Life, the Heart of Schopenhauer’s Thought
4.1.2. Taxonomy and “Plastic Forces”
4.1.3. Science and Philosophy on “Life”: Systems and Foundations
4.2. German Natural Science and the Pantheism Controversy
4.3. Monism and Dual-Substance Philosophies: The Debate over Spinoza
4.4. Schelling, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Metaphysics of Self-Organizing Systems
4.5. Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical (Un)ground of Life
4.6. Parricides and Paternities, Acknowledged and Unacknowledged
4.7. Schopenhauer, Life, and the Affects of the Noumenal
4.8. Conclusion
5. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation
5.1. Introductory Remarks
5.2. The Body Philosophizes
5.3. Ressentiment as Anxiety
5.4. Nietzsche’s Dialectic of Anxiety: After the Death of God, the Birth of Evil
5.5. Transvaluations: How Many, Ultimately?
5.6. The Logic of the Hōs mē (ὡς μὴ), or “As If Not”: Free from Anxiety?
5.7. The “Weight” of the Cross: Hegel and Nietzsche on the Death of God
5.8. The Work of Mourning and the Restructuring of Time as Moment
5.9. Conclusion: Toward the “Highest Feeling” as a Response to Mourning
6. Freud and the Three Anxieties
6.1. Introductory Remarks
6.1.1. The Origin and Persistence of Neurology
6.1.2. In the Steps of Charcot: Encounters between Neurology and Psychology
6.2. Anxiety Neurosis and the Mind-Body Problem
6.3. The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and the Neurological Ground of Anxiety
6.4. From Neurology to a Psychoanalytic Conception of the Unconscious
6.5. Anxiety in the Metapsychology
6.5.1. The Innovations in the Ego and Its Drives
6.5.2. The Circle of Anxiety
6.5.3. The “Economic Problem of Masochism” and the Fusion-Defusion of the Drives
6.6. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926): Toward a New Foundation in the Trauma of Birth
6.6.1. Confronting Otto Rank’s Fallacies
6.6.2. Anxiety between Danger-Object and Symptoms
6.7. Conclusion: Birth Trauma and the Ego as “Quasi-Transcendental” Postulates
Excursus 3. Husserl: The Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Unconscious
E3.1. Introductory Remarks
E3.2. From Static to Genetic Phenomenology
E3.3. Activity and Passivity in the Embodied Ego and “Its” Psyche
E3.4. The “Energy” of Psychic Affects and the “Reservoir” of Past Time
E3.5. The Problem of the Feeling of Affective Forces and Drives: Sensation and Sensibility
E3.6. The “Affection” of Angst
7. Heidegger I: Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology and the Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard
7.1. Introductory Remarks
7.2. Heidegger’s Critique of Affects, Time-Consciousness, and Passive Synthesis in Husserl
7.3. Care as the (Non)essence of Dasein
7.4. Heidegger’s Debt to Kierkegaard
7.5. Three-Part Time, Three-Part Being in Heidegger
7.6. Angst: Anxiety or Anguish?
7.7. Conclusion
8. Heidegger II: Angst, the Temporalization of Dasein, and the Temporality of “Life”
8.1. Introductory Remarks: Freedom and Willing in Nietzsche and Heidegger
8.2. Can Dasein Be in Its World and Yet Be Alive?
8.3. The Organ and the Tool: Capacity and Behavior versus Utility and General Function
8.4. Eigentlichkeit versus Eigentümlichkeit: The Case of Animal “Ipseity”
8.5. Benommenheit in Uncanniness and In-an-Environment
8.6. Beings “and Nothing Besides”: The Origin of Negation in Anxiety
8.7. Heidegger Strengthens His Position on Animal Being (1936)
8.8. “The Sojourn of the Gods”
8.9. Conclusion
9. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
9.1. Introductory Remarks
9.2. A New Multitude of Attunements to Being in On Escape (De l’évasion, 1935)
9.3. Redemption through the Other Person (1947)
9.4. Levinas’s New Conception of the Subject: The Hypostasis (1947)
9.5. Anxiety as “Pre-synthetic” and Precognitive: Levinas versus Husserl
9.6. Anxiety and the Phenomenological Unconscious
9.7. Anxiety, Time, and “Life”: Levinas Reads Bergson against Heidegger
9.8. “Pre-originary Susceptiveness”; or, The Saying (Dire) (1974)
9.9. Conclusion: On Anxiety, Trauma, and Melancholia
Conclusion
C.1. Kant’s Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of Emotions in German Philosophy
C.2. From Kant to Hegel Reading Philippe Pinel
C.3. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and Groundless Life
C.4. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard
C.5. The Universality of Emotions: Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
C.6. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation
C.7. Freud and the Three Anxieties
C.8. Husserl and the Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Unconscious
C.9. Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard
C.10. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
Epilogue: Social Implications of the “Age of Anxiety”
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
Cover
Anxiety
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Introduction—Anxiety: A Philosophical History
I.1. An “Age of Anxiety” and the “Age” of Anxiety
I.2. The Debated Role of an Affect in Spirit and Reason: From Kant to Kierkegaard
I.3. Will and Representation: Anxiety Erupts in Post-Kantian Philosophy
I.4. Darwin’s Original Semiosis: An Argument for the Universality of Emotion
I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-Resurrection: From Noumenal Will to Wills as Force
I.6. Freud’s Three Anxieties: Neurological, Ideal, and Originary
I.7. Husserl’s Phenomenological Foundations of the Ego, Time, and the Affects
I.8. Heidegger: Care and Angst and the Problem of Dasein’s Embodiment
I.9. Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
I.10. Finis Initii: Toward an Incipient Synthesis
1. The New Philosophy: Kant’s Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of Emotions in German Philosophy
1.1. Introductory Remarks
1.2. Before Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”: Dilemmas in the Heritage of the Cogito
1.2.1. Cartesian Dualism and the Two Sides of the Ego
1.2.2. Locke’s Reintegration of Sensation and His “Simple Ideas”: New Dilemmas
1.2.3. Kant’s Transcendental Critique of the Soul
1.3. A “Soul” Divided: Unknowable in the Paralogisms of Pure Reason, Essential Postulate for Practical Reason
1.3.1. Practical Reason, Freedom, and the Soul: A Practical Dilemma
1.4. Schwärmerei and the Genesis of the First Critique
1.4.1. From the “Dreams” to the Paralogism of Personality: Unity and Representations
1.4.2. The First Paralogism of Substance (The Problem of Unity)
1.4.3. “The Soul Endures over Time; Therefore It Is a Person”: The Third Paralogism of Personality
1.5. Kant’s Cradle: The Self in Time and Steel
1.6. The Problem of Memory: “When I Am Conscious of Myself, I Am Then Conscious of Myself”
1.7. The “Reality” of Sensibility: Intensive Magnitudes
1.8. Conclusion: Anxiety as Theme, Anxiety as Symptom
Excursus 1. From Kant to Hegel via Philippe Pinel
E1.1. Introductory Remarks
E1.2. Kant, Madness, and the Passions
E1.3. Hegel, Reader of Pinel and French Revolutionary Psychiatry
E1.4. From Kant to Hegel via Pinel
2. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and Groundless Life
2.1. Introductory Remarks: Infusing “Life” into Idealism
2.2. Anxiety as the Original Tension in the Birth of Nature: Schelling’s Path
2.3. Life Erupts in the Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809)
2.4. Vitalizing Being: How an Individual Is Both Particular and Universal
2.5. Leading Germans “Back to the Heart”: The Living Will and Its Affective Signs
2.6. Schelling’s Hupokeimenon and God’s First E(x)motion
2.7. The Mood That Re-flects (das Ebenbild Gottes)
2.8. The Positive Philosophy of Freedom and Evil: Kabbalah, Not Manichaeism
2.9. Anxiety and Love: The Struggle and Return
2.10. Return to the Groundless (Ungrund): Love as Adelon
2.11. Conclusion: Positive Philosophy of That Which-Will-Be
2.12. Aftermath
3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard
3.1. Introductory Remarks
3.2. Kierkegaard’s Path to The Concept of Anxiety
3.3. The “Mythology” of Sin and Sinfulness
3.4. The Evolution of Freedom and Possibility
3.5. The Dialectic of Anxiety: Intimations of Freedom and Guilt, Signs of Spirit
3.6. Anxiety over Evil, Anxiety over the Good: “Every Life Is Religiously Designed”
3.7. Toward Redemption: Myth against Systems, Particularity against Universalism
3.8. The Sickness unto Death (1849): Anxiety’s Ultimate Dialectic
3.9. Wanting to Be Someone Else, Wanting to Be Oneself: The Dialectic of Affective Intensification
3.10. Myths and the Knowledge of Anxiety
3.11. Coram Deo (in the Presence of God): From Anxiety to Despair in Protestantism
3.12. Conclusion: On Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Affects
Excursus 2. The Universality of Emotions? Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
E2.1. Introductory Remarks
E2.2. Darwin’s Context
E2.3. Monogenism versus Polygenism, Adaptation versus Struggle
E2.4. The Expression of the Emotions: Darwin’s Four Difficulties
E2.4.1. Lamarckian Adaptation as Contrasted with the Survival of the Fittest
E2.4.2. Expression as Communication versus Expression as the Spontaneous Externalization of Mental States (Including Anxiety)
E2.4.3. Science Understood as Hypothesis and Observation versus Science as Ideology
E2.4.4. True Instincts and Habit-Created Instincts
E2.5. Conclusion
4. Schopenhauer, “Life,” and the Affects of the Noumenal
4.1. Introduction
4.1.1. Life, the Heart of Schopenhauer’s Thought
4.1.2. Taxonomy and “Plastic Forces”
4.1.3. Science and Philosophy on “Life”: Systems and Foundations
4.2. German Natural Science and the Pantheism Controversy
4.3. Monism and Dual-Substance Philosophies: The Debate over Spinoza
4.4. Schelling, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Metaphysics of Self-Organizing Systems
4.5. Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical (Un)ground of Life
4.6. Parricides and Paternities, Acknowledged and Unacknowledged
4.7. Schopenhauer, Life, and the Affects of the Noumenal
4.8. Conclusion
5. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation
5.1. Introductory Remarks
5.2. The Body Philosophizes
5.3. Ressentiment as Anxiety
5.4. Nietzsche’s Dialectic of Anxiety: After the Death of God, the Birth of Evil
5.5. Transvaluations: How Many, Ultimately?
5.6. The Logic of the Hōs mē (ὡς μὴ), or “As If Not”: Free from Anxiety?
5.7. The “Weight” of the Cross: Hegel and Nietzsche on the Death of God
5.8. The Work of Mourning and the Restructuring of Time as Moment
5.9. Conclusion: Toward the “Highest Feeling” as a Response to Mourning
6. Freud and the Three Anxieties
6.1. Introductory Remarks
6.1.1. The Origin and Persistence of Neurology
6.1.2. In the Steps of Charcot: Encounters between Neurology and Psychology
6.2. Anxiety Neurosis and the Mind-Body Problem
6.3. The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and the Neurological Ground of Anxiety
6.4. From Neurology to a Psychoanalytic Conception of the Unconscious
6.5. Anxiety in the Metapsychology
6.5.1. The Innovations in the Ego and Its Drives
6.5.2. The Circle of Anxiety
6.5.3. The “Economic Problem of Masochism” and the Fusion-Defusion of the Drives
6.6. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926): Toward a New Foundation in the Trauma of Birth
6.6.1. Confronting Otto Rank’s Fallacies
6.6.2. Anxiety between Danger-Object and Symptoms
6.7. Conclusion: Birth Trauma and the Ego as “Quasi-Transcendental” Postulates
Excursus 3. Husserl: The Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Unconscious
E3.1. Introductory Remarks
E3.2. From Static to Genetic Phenomenology
E3.3. Activity and Passivity in the Embodied Ego and “Its” Psyche
E3.4. The “Energy” of Psychic Affects and the “Reservoir” of Past Time
E3.5. The Problem of the Feeling of Affective Forces and Drives: Sensation and Sensibility
E3.6. The “Affection” of Angst
7. Heidegger I: Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology and the Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard
7.1. Introductory Remarks
7.2. Heidegger’s Critique of Affects, Time-Consciousness, and Passive Synthesis in Husserl
7.3. Care as the (Non)essence of Dasein
7.4. Heidegger’s Debt to Kierkegaard
7.5. Three-Part Time, Three-Part Being in Heidegger
7.6. Angst: Anxiety or Anguish?
7.7. Conclusion
8. Heidegger II: Angst, the Temporalization of Dasein, and the Temporality of “Life”
8.1. Introductory Remarks: Freedom and Willing in Nietzsche and Heidegger
8.2. Can Dasein Be in Its World and Yet Be Alive?
8.3. The Organ and the Tool: Capacity and Behavior versus Utility and General Function
8.4. Eigentlichkeit versus Eigentümlichkeit: The Case of Animal “Ipseity”
8.5. Benommenheit in Uncanniness and In-an-Environment
8.6. Beings “and Nothing Besides”: The Origin of Negation in Anxiety
8.7. Heidegger Strengthens His Position on Animal Being (1936)
8.8. “The Sojourn of the Gods”
8.9. Conclusion
9. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
9.1. Introductory Remarks
9.2. A New Multitude of Attunements to Being in On Escape (De l’évasion, 1935)
9.3. Redemption through the Other Person (1947)
9.4. Levinas’s New Conception of the Subject: The Hypostasis (1947)
9.5. Anxiety as “Pre-synthetic” and Precognitive: Levinas versus Husserl
9.6. Anxiety and the Phenomenological Unconscious
9.7. Anxiety, Time, and “Life”: Levinas Reads Bergson against Heidegger
9.8. “Pre-originary Susceptiveness”; or, The Saying (Dire) (1974)
9.9. Conclusion: On Anxiety, Trauma, and Melancholia
Conclusion
C.1. Kant’s Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of Emotions in German Philosophy
C.2. From Kant to Hegel Reading Philippe Pinel
C.3. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and Groundless Life
C.4. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard
C.5. The Universality of Emotions: Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)
C.6. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation
C.7. Freud and the Three Anxieties
C.8. Husserl and the Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Unconscious
C.9. Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard
C.10. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins
Epilogue: Social Implications of the “Age of Anxiety”
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
