The Meaning Of Anxiety
NO.04
3October
10.2022.11
Although I have no intention of talking about the present world,
3 However, no one who has a little observation of the contemporary situation will deny that
This era is inconsistent; and the reason for its anxiety is that
thought may be broader,
or even becomes clear at the abstract level, but it is becoming increasingly uncertain.
——Kerkegaard, "Concept of Fear"
//
- one -
- one -
Although Pascal (1623-1662) became a representative of well-known intellectuals in the 17th century with his outstanding mathematical science genius, his uniqueness is that he does not believe that humans with unpredictable, rich connotations and contradictions can be understood from the rationalism of mathematics. He believes that the rational certainty of human beings is absolutely different from the rational certainty of geometry and physics. So Pascal sounds like a person from a different era. According to Pascal, the laws of human life functioning are the laws of chance and "probable rate". Therefore, he was deeply impressed by the contingency of human existence.
When I think about my short life, the life that was swallowed by the eternal devoured before and after, the insignificance of my current situation, or see clearly that I am just a creature shrouded in the vast space and time of nothingness and indifference. I was scared and surprised to see that I was not here, but now, not in the past; but there is no reason why I appeared here in the present, not in the past.
After witnessing the blindness and pity of human beings and understanding that the entire universe is ignorant, human beings suddenly lost their light, and the fate left to him seemed to be in a corner of the universe. They did not know why the Creator was so mean, nor did they know their mission in life, or were confused about their future after death. This total ignorance makes me worry about humanity, because he is like a man who is taken to a terrible desert island in his sleep. When he wakes up, he doesn't know where he is or how to escape from the island. However, in such a sad situation, people did not feel despair, and I was shocked by this!
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◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆ ◆
So what Pascal is most concerned about is not only the anxiety he has experienced personally, but more importantly the anxiety he observed under the surface of human life in his contemporaries. This can be proved from the phenomenon that "people always spend their lives in a hurry." He noticed that people constantly try to distract themselves, escape boredom, and avoid loneliness until the “trouble” becomes the problem itself. He felt that the most important thing for people to distract themselves was to try not to "think about themselves", because once they stopped to contemplate themselves, they would feel pity and anxiety.
Because Pascal focuses on the direction of coupling and uncertainty in human experience, although he understands that people of his contemporary era use reason as the guide to certainty, he believes that reason is completely unreliable in the guidance of reality. He is not a derogatory reason itself. On the contrary, he was convinced that reason was a unique characteristic of human beings, the dignity of human beings in a quiet nature, and the source of morality ("Be careful thinking and discernment... is the law of morality"). But in real life, reason is unreliable because "it is limited to various sensory awareness", and the messages conveyed by the sensory are extremely unreliable.In addition, he argued that the reason why everyone’s confidence in reason is wrong is because the power of emotions is not taken into account. Pascal has both positive and negative views on emotions. On the one hand, he saw that emotions have value that rationalism cannot understand, which is presented in the beautiful words quoted below: "The reason of the mind is unknown to reason." But on the other hand, emotions often distort and overturn rationality, so reason becomes just an excuse for rationalization. Excessive trust in reason often leads to abuse of reason, either to support stereotypes or king's rights, or to rationalize unjust measures. In fact, reason always "let the truth stand on one's side and the error stand on the other's side."
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The real motivation of human beings is self-interest and vanity, but they defend it with "rationality". Pascal was deeply impressed by the endless phenomenon. He intended to say something outside the question that if "rationality is really reasonable", then we can give reason greater trust. Among all these standards of rationality and universal confidence, Pascal publicly advocates his so-called "true love and respect for wisdom", but he feels that this true love and respect for wisdom is a rare phenomenon in human beings. Therefore, the human situation he saw was much more pessimistic than his contemporaries. “We are placed in a huge medium,” he put forward his observation, “and forever hangs between knowledge and ignorance.”
We have mentioned earlier that the intellectual elites in the 17th century trust reason, and their purpose is to expel anxiety. As a result, it cannot accept Pascal, whose rationality can solve human problems, and at the same time becomes a person who cannot avoid anxiety problems, which can also be used as some support for the above hypothesis.
However, Pascal's position is an exception compared to the popular beliefs at that time and the mainstream development of contemporary philosophy . Overall, the belief that reason can control nature and subdue human emotions is generally enough to convince the intellectual elites of the 17th century, so the problem of anxiety rarely appears in their thoughts. I think that the cultural stance laid by Spinoza and other early modern thinkers did not cause them the inner trauma of the intellectual elites of the 19th century and the masses in the 20th century. The core belief in autonomy gave the culture of the time the completeness of the psychological structure, and it was not until the severe cracks occurred in the 19th century that culture began to be threatened.
(not finished...)
text / (US) Luo Luo.Mei
"The Meaning of Anxiety"
Zhu Kanru / Translation
Edit / Apu
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