Sartre claims that fear is borne of our uncertainty about being able/unable to carry out our choices and defines anguish as the unreliability on our future-self. His views on the topic are in opposition to Heidegger’s claim i.e., anguish is a lack of significance/concern (‘sorge’). Subsequently, Sartre’s outlook on anguish declares humans as free beings whether or not they act according to or against their values. He believes freedom to be a lack of all constraints. However, we are never not in the influence of things that are out of our control which annihilates the fact that we are free and questions Sartre’s view. In this essay, I will examine both philosophers’ views on fear and anguish, comment on Sartre’s explanation of freedom and raise my opposition to it relying on the basis of phenomenology.
Sartre’s view on anguish and how it differs from fear is a reply to Heidegger’s thoughts on the same subject. Heidegger, displeased by Freud’s credo of anguish, states that anguish is a lack of significance. To reach such a conclusion Heidegger first examines fear. He declares fear to be about a ‘definite threat’, meaning what one’s afraid of can actually be pointed out to as an ultimate object. If we were to state that we’re afraid, then without any trouble, we’d also be able to declare a decisive “entity-within-the-world” which makes us afraid. On the other hand, Heidegger points out that anxiety relies on indefiniteness. According to Heidegger there are two senses of indefiniteness. One is when the object of our fear is “fractically undecided”(the state of anguish from Freud’s point of view). This state of indefinites does nothing but promote indeterminate fear. When the object of our fear is irresolute it doesn’t necessarily draw us into a state of anguish for we still know that ‘something is wrong’ and hence we are still aware of/involved with what’s ‘wrong’. However, in order to be anxious, Heidegger says there should be a loss of relevance. To explain relevance, Heidegger first examines how we have projects in life that we achieve to aspire and at the end everything we do/experience serves these projects. He says we experience things in the world as “ready-to-hand” or as equipment that aid us to reach our projects. Such “ready-to-hand” things are directly involved in our lives and thus concern us. When engaged in our projects, with things we care about, we feel settled and at home. But when thing lose their significance we are no longer involved with them and they lose all their familiarity, making us feel unsettled (e.g., the case of a man in church who is on longer connected to his religious beliefs). Heidegger calls this: ‘estrangement form the world’, the loss of a ‘project’ which is the core of anguish:
“Here the totality of involvements of the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand discovered within-the-world, is, as such of no consequence; it collapses into itself; the world has the character of completely lacking significance.” (Martin Heidegger, Care as the being of Dasein).
Sartre disagrees with separating anguish from fear based on ‘definiteness’ and presents an alternative view. His separation is based on ‘reflectiveness’. He observes the actions of the afraid and concludes how when one is scared, one can quickly reflect on the fearful issue and come up with choices that will serve as escapes. For example, if you were to be in the presence of a lion, you’d be afraid unquestionably, but you would also consider the possibility of running –escaping by substituting your possibilities in the place of transcendent probabilities. This is an example of the ‘reflective switch’ which changes your relationship to the issue by reflecting it back on you. However, you may not be able to run away from the lion due to various natural reasons and that is what would scare you. The fact that you may be unable to carry out the choice declares you passive in your possibilities:
“Through these various anticipations, I am given to myself as a thing; I am passive in relation to these possibilities; they come to me from without, insofar as I am also an object in the world, subjected to the force of gravity, they are not my possibilities.” (Jean-Paul Sartre, BN, 66).
Thus, when you’re afraid, your fate is up to superior forces completely out of your control. On the contrary, in a state of anguish, Sartre claims that your fate is within your own hands and that you’re the declarative agent in your own life. When asserting your possibilities to escape from what scares you, Sartre underlines how it is up to you to actually exercise those possibilities or not. But you cannot guarantee that your future-self will put up with the possibilities/resolutions you once declared. There is an uncertainty of fate that comes along with being the primary agent over your life because your present beliefs are not bound to declare your future actions, you, as a human being, are susceptible to change which highlights how you cannot dominate over your future self. “The decisive conduct will emanate from a self which I am not yet. Thus the self which I am depends on the self which I am not yet.” Unlike natural causes, you are free to change the courses of your action/values and this freedom kindles a feeling of worry which, in Sartre’s opinion, is anguish. Whilst fear can be summarized as hesitancy about being unable to carry out the choice, anguish is hesitancy about being willing to carry out the choice.
The anguish in Sartre’s view reveals that we are free because our future self is marked autonomous. It is able to act for or against reasons independent from any constraints (that our current-self may have put up) which is why we’re worried of the future in the first place. This claim of Sartre underlines the indeterministic/liberal quality of human beings by stating the ‘randomness’ of their actions. However, I disagree with the fact that we are free. Rather, our world is deterministic for our actions depend on various outside forces (e.g., religion, societal norms, our upbringing, empirical expectations and more). Considering everything we evaluate when making decisions, even though our actions/beliefs/choices may not be predetermined, they are effected by numerous restricting factors. Hence, we are not free as Sartre acknowledges us to be.
Comments