Soren Is My Man

I have dabbled in philosophy.

Read a little Jung, Freud, Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus. And when I say "dabbled" and "a little" I mean that specifically. They fascinate me because they attempt to explain humanity, but it ain't no easy read. Still, I enjoy it.

But my man is Soren Kierkegaard. I come back to him frequently.

I was contemplating anxiety recently and came across a quote from Kierkegaard that reads, in part: "Just as a physician might say that there is very likely not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little.................who does not secretly harbor an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself......................an anxiety he cannot explain."

I believe this to be true.

Fear is usually triggered by a known threat, anxiety is a feeling of being threatened by an unknown source. It has been said that anxiety attacks us from all sides at once. Hence it can be paralyzing, or at the very least, confuse us about how to deal with it.

Of course there is severe anxiety, which can be crippling - and the milder form of anxiety which "permeates the background of our daily existence" (from the Academy of Ideas.com). Kierkegaard considered this form of anxiety to be "an indispensible ingredient in a life lived to full potential" (the Academy of Ideas.com).

Kierkegaard called anxiety "the dizziness of freedom." Freedom being the choices or possibilities life presents, which are automatically accompanied by anxiety because of unpredictable outcomes. Learning to co-exist with anxiety, to deal with it, is a positive thing and enables us to pursue risks. Dealing with anxiety results in growth.

He recognizes that many people are uncomfortable with freedom and prefer to avoid anxiety, so they choose the status quo, which is safer. Kierkegaard calls this "grasping at finiteness"; the opposite of growth.

Per James Hollis (director of the Jung Educational Center): "Thus we are forced into a difficult choice: anxiety or depression. If we move forward, as our soul insists, we may be flooded with anxiety. If we do not move forward, we will suffer the depression, the pressing down of the soul's purpose. In such a difficult choice one must choose anxiety, for anxiety is at least the path of personal growth; depression is a stagnation and defeat of life."

Sooooooooooooooooo, what I find fascinating in all this is the twin concepts that almost everybody experiences anxiety on a pretty regular basis (although the majority will never admit to that), and that anxiety can be considered a positive thing (as long as it doesn't result in locking yourself in the bathroom for weeks at a time while your wife stands screaming outside the door "I had to buy diapers, for Christ sake).

Anxiety comes upon me unbid, and it pisses me off. But anxiety is an emotion and emotions are a direct result of what you are thinking. So the thing to do is to stop immediately and examine your brain.

The caveat is that anxiety is often not linked to one specific thought. I find that when I look into my mind at that moment it's like dust in a windstorm and it ain't easy to wrestle all that to the ground and sort it out.

But at least I am thinking about it.

The main point is that Soren Kierkegaard is my man.