PHILOSOPHY 201 (STOLZE)
Notes on Thomas Wartenberg, Existentialism
Chapter Four: Anxiety
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The importance of anxiety
Worry vs. anxiety
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken”
The Leap of Faith
Encountering Ourselves
The Importance of Anxiety
“For the Existentialists…is not just one emotion among others: it is the
one that best reveals to us our nature as human beings. This means that
anxiety has metaphysical significance: it allows humans to correctly
understand the nature of the being that they are, but only if they have a full
and complete experience of the emotion. For many people, anxiety is an
emotion from which they flee, seeking in various ways to anesthetize
themselves to its unpleasantness. But the Existentialists believe that
paying attention to one’s anxiety is crucial because of the significance of
what it signals” (p. 71).
Worry vs. Anxiety
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Worry is characterized by intentionality (it has an object) but
anxiety appears to be “free floating” (it is objectless).
Ex: a student who is going to take an exam
Sartre’s criticism of Freud’s account of anxiety
Robert Frost, “The Road Not Taken” (1920)
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
The Leap of Faith
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Kierkegaard on belief in God
Ex: Abraham’s sacrifice of his son Isaac
Encountering Ourselves
“Through the use of the phenomenological method, we
ourselves are the object of our anxiety, because we have
the freedom to make decisions about how to live our lives,
indeed, we are, as Sartre puts it, condemned to be free.
Since we have no rational grounds for making the
fundamental decisions we must as free beings, anxiety is
simply our way of registering in the depths of our being our
difficult and upsetting situation” (p. 88).