Program transcript:
Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. Anxiety is something we've all experienced, and some of us have at times been crippled by it. To get a better perspective on the condition, my guest today has literally taken a more philosophical approach to the problem. Samir Chopra is a philosophical counselor and a philosophy professor at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York. And he's the author of a new book, it's titled "Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide." Professor Chopra, welcome to the program.
Samir Chopra: Thanks very much for having me on, Grant.
GR: We really appreciate you making the time. So, let me start with the basic question I had when I first was aware of your book, which is, why do we need a philosophical guide to anxiety? Isn't feeling it and dealing with it enough to occupy us?
SC: That's a great question, Grant. I think the easiest way to answer that is, I think we need philosophical guides for the kinds of things or the kinds of problems or issues that we see as perennial or universal or enduring. I think philosophy is most suited to help us inquire into the kinds of things that cut across space, time, cultures. And one of the things I think I can quite confidently say, even if the exact word anxiety hasn't been used in the past, the way that people report their feelings about, you know, about their reactions to existence, the problems of existence. In that sense, anxiety does seem to emerge as a kind of universal, timeless condition. So, I think we need philosophical guides for those sorts of things that are, you know, that are deeply, uniquely, centrally human, which unite us. And I think that's why we need a philosophical guide for something like anxiety. It's a perennial condition. Every age, every era, every society likes to think it is particularly deeply, uniquely afflicted with anxiety. And we might be, in this era, even more afflicted than normal, but I do think it is something that is endured with us. And, you know, one of the small pieces of bad news I have for readers is that it's unlikely to go away and it's likely to stay with us, so we might as well start reflecting on it, thinking about it a bit more carefully, and figuring out how, rather than trying to expel it, we can start to live with it in some ways.
GR: That all makes sense, and I want to come back to a couple of the things that you introduce there in your answer. But, let me ask this now. One of the things that I thought was very interesting about your book is that it goes back and forth, the arrows go in both directions when it comes to anxiety and philosophy. And you just talked about the importance of the philosophic, more philosophical understanding of the condition, but you also talk about how anxiety informs a lot of philosophy. And I was interested in hearing you talk a little bit about that. Would you say that anxiety is an essential part of philosophy?
SC: Yeah. Well, let me start by pointing out that in many languages the word for astonishment and the word for terror, can often be quite related. You know, when we think of something being awful or awesome, these two words, they involve two emotions that are present in there. There is a sense of wonder, but wonder can also be inflected with a sense of fear about what exactly am I looking at? And I put it to you, that if philosophy arises in response to existence, that our wonder and our awe and our amazement at what surrounds us, our curiosity, you know, we say that philosophy starts to wonder if philosophy starts some curiosity, right, what's that bright light up in the sky? But I think for someone who's never seen that bright light up in the sky, it can also be a source of terror. So, amazement has, I think, fear in it. So, I'm also interested to inquire into this thing, because it has struck me in those two different registers. So, I describe anxiety as the kind of, you know, the loam or the soil from which philosophy springs forth. It's wonder, is there, curiosity is there, but it's also a sense of wanting to know what is this thing that confronts us? And let me ask. Because after all, you know, Hobbes says this in the, "Leviathan", that it is anxiety that makes me drive to inquire into the causes of that which perplexes us, right? So here is the darkness that confronts me. The darkness is mysterious, beautiful, forbidding and yet at the same time, it is inviting. Push into me, see what lies hither, reach out into it. So we reach out into it with curiosity, but with trepidation, because we're not quite sure what we might find, right? And I think that's the little fine line that I'm talking about it. You know, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, he says, beauty is but the beginning of terror, right? And the, you know, the opening line of the, you know, the Duino Elegies, right? So, I think there is something going on in there that this wonder is not quite innocent. This wonder has something of, what is it that confronts me? I think that's the feeling I'm trying to, that's the phenomenology I'm trying to get at, that, you know, like the romantics talk about it. There's this beautiful waterfall, it's beautiful, but it's also mysterious, it's also terrifying. I think that's where I think anxiety and philosophy are quite intimately related. And I think that's why anxiety underwrites inquiry as well.
GR: I've got to make this quick observation that, this is the political philosopher in me speaking now, but I was fascinated with that line from Hobbes that you brought up, because you could also think of his ultimate rationale for the creation of this all powerful state as being driven by the anxiety of what might happen without it.
SC: Very much so. The state of war that he talks about, you know, is very much like, I want to reduce the anxiety of uncertain existence so I'm willing to hand over my power to supreme Leviathan, right?
GR: Life is nasty, brutish and short.
SC: Life is nasty, brutish and short and it is extremely uncertain, and it's extremely fearful of what might lie around the corner so let me hand over my freedom to the totalitarian monarch who will dispense, who will dispense power, and as a result, banish anxiety for my life. So there are political significances of us being anxious constantly, yeah, very much so.
GR: Interesting. I'm Grant Reeher, and we’re speaking with Brooklyn College of the City University of New York Professor Samir Chopra, and we are discussing his new book. It's titled, "Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide." I want to come back to the question I started with and frame it in terms of sort of the end user of your book, you know, the reader and in the moments of when they are feeling these things. And it seems to me a lot of the actual experience of anxiety, it's pre-rational and pre-verbal, it just comes. And at that moment you are almost the least able to engage the philosophical part of your brain to say, let me get some context, here's what's going on, let me understand this, you're just like, panicking, or you're feeling it. So, I just wonder if there's something that you could reflect on there about how do we get back when we're caught in the moment of it?
SC: You know, that's a very good question, Grant. I don't think somebody who's in the throes of a panic or anxiety attack is going to run to find my book and say, look, you know, I better read what Professor Chopra has to say about how to navigate these moments.
GR: (laughter)
SC: But I do think that one thing that philosophical reflection on anxiety can help us is that it can make us think about why anxiety is inevitable for us as human beings. And once you reflect on our existential conditions, and we come to see it as inevitable, we've taken a good step towards trying to live with it. So, I put it to you, there are certain conditions, for example, the fact that we live in time, we are aware of a past, present and future. We know that this time is finite, this is not indefinite. And thirdly, we are conscious of this time being finite. For example, we could be creatures that lived in time, which was finite, but we wouldn't be aware of it, right? Now, this kind of creature which lives in finite time, knows that that time is finite, is conscious of it. This creature, the human being, also has two additional features. The human being is also curious about the future. It wants to know what is going to happen in the future. For example, I might be just perfectly satisfied with the present. The present is here, that's good. That's not our condition, we constantly want to know what is happening. Now, we want to know what happens in the future, but we are relatively powerless to drive the future or to change it, or to bend it to our will. This kind of creature that knows it has a future, that its time is limited, it wants to know, but it cannot do anything about it, this creature will always be anxious, right? Now, any problematic situation in which we find ourselves, we really only have three options. Escape, either you leave the situation, you say, I don't like this, I'm out of here. The second one is activism. You do something about it, you change it. If you cannot escape, if you cannot change the conditions, the only third option that's left to you is to live with it, right? So, I compare anxiety, one of the examples I use constantly in my talks is that I'm a traveler in the mountains. I'm walking through, I need shelter at night. I come across this hut. This hut has a little hole in its roof. I cannot leave and go anywhere else, this is the only hut that gives me shelter. I do not have the materials with which to fix the hole in the roof. What can I do? I must spend the night in this hut. I must deal with the hole in the roof. So, I come to see the hole in the roof as perhaps something differently. Perhaps it's the aperture through which I can see the stars in the sky, right, as I lie on my back, freezing, right? So, anxiety is that kind of thing. It's not something, you know, there might be people who might want to escape existence altogether, right? But if we cannot change the conditions of our existence, if we cannot do anything about it, right, if I cannot modify them, in that sense, we are going to live with anxiety and we're going to have to reformulate our understanding of this thing. Some things can be inevitable in our life and still unpleasant, right? There's still problems, but our attitude to them needs to shift if we know they're going to be perennial problems, as opposed to problems that we think are going to go away at some point of their own accord, or we are going to do something magical to them.
GR: Right, right. Yeah, that that's an interesting way to frame it. And I want to come back to something that you had said at the outset, as well. And that is, it is the case that if we look at a lot of survey data, a lot of mental health data and information in recent decades, that it's all suggesting that anxiety has indeed increased substantially in recent years, and particularly so among young people, apparently. Now, one of the main explanations of this that everybody points to is social media and, you know, the concerns that come out of worrying if you're a, you know, adolescent, what people are saying about you and how popular you are and all that.
SC: Yeah.
GR: But I wonder if something broader is going on. Do you have any reflections on that about where we have been as a society in recent years, and why we seem to be more anxious?
SC: Well, Grant, I think that's a really interesting question because, there is truth in the fact that anxiety seems to be much more prevalent now. It is certainly being diagnosed much more often. It is certainly reported much more often. We also have a very large industry that is interested in treating anxiety, through medication and through, you know, through other. So, I think there is a way in which anxiety is much more talked about social phenomena. We started using language for it in the late 19th century. But I think there are some material factors to our age now which do make it a particularly anxious age. For example, technology makes it possible for people to communicate their anxieties with each other. Technology also makes it possible for us to compare ourselves to each other and to feel dissatisfied with our lives, and to not be sure whether our lives are meeting certain kinds of cultural or ideological standards that we might imagine applying to our life. Technology also makes it possible, as you say, you know, when you talked about popularity, I think at some deep, fundamental level, that's the kind of craving or desire which is quite natural for acceptance. And I would say love, and love and acceptance from our fellow human beings. And I think there is a way in which the material conditions of our society, which are extremely gamified, which set standards upon our life, which impose qualitative and quantitative metrics upon our life, which talk about lives being successful, which talk about people wasting their potentials. These kinds of things are tremendous material pressure on us. They constantly make us feel that if you're not living life in a particular way, we are about to lose the love of our parents, of our friends, of our society, that there isn't a home waiting for us. So, I think people now do feel more threatened by loss of love, by a certain kind of alienation from the world. And I think the material conditions of our world, you know, which have made it hard for people to have substantial relationships with friends and family because they are overworked, exhausted, constantly stressed out. These leave us less time to build these kinds of relationships, which can be reassuring. So, I do think there is a sense in today's world, we are anxious, just like every other generation has been before us, but the material conditions have given that universal existential anxiety, I think, a kind of particularly pernicious form these days, which has made it quite hard. This is something that I do feel that in a way, you know, if I could talk to youngsters today, I think one of the things I would try to tell them is that, you know, you really have to find a way to not be so, you know, affected by the cultural and ideological pressures that people tell us on, this is a normal life, this is a good life, this is how you should live it. So, I think this feeling of constantly being a failure, not coming up to standards, not quite matching up. I think this creates a very horrible, gnawing, nauseating kind of anxiety that I'm not good enough, I'm not going to be loved. And of all the things that we can do to human beings, I think threatening them with the fear of loss of love is probably the worst that we could do. And this is something, unfortunately, that our societies, modern societies, seem to specialize in. We seem to make it as if acceptance is contingent, right? And that's horribly anxiety inducing.
GR: You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher and I'm talking with Samir Chopra. He's a philosophy professor at the Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and he's the author of a new book titled, "Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide" and we've been discussing the issues that the book raises. So, I want to talk about kind of the middle meat part of your book, and that's where you break out different kinds of anxiety, and you kind of track them onto different philosophical figures and discussions. What are the principal types of anxiety? Briefly.
SC: I have in my book, I've sort of worked my way through four different philosophical schools of thought, and I think the broadest categories would be anxiety as a kind of universal response to the conditions of existence, which we find in Buddhism. The confrontation with our fine attitude, our mortality, our fear of loss, of becoming old, dying. I would say it's where the fear of being fearful or the fear of future discomfort and agony, probably most, you know, most prominently raises its head. That's one category of anxiety, I would say, as anxiety as existential anxiety in response to the conditions of existence. I also talk about existentialism. You know, 19th century European literary and philosophical phenomena, where anxiety is existential in the sense that it confronts us with the fact that our future is as yet unformed and that we are in some way deeply, profoundly responsible for shaping and constructing that future through our own choices, right? And that is felt by us as a kind of, you know, what we might call a terrible or dreadful freedom, because it is up to me, so to speak. There isn't a script that I can comfortably follow, I need to make my path for myself. And guess what? Every storm that I place in my path is one that I will test by stepping on it, right? So, it's sort of up to me to make of it. So sometimes we say anxiety is the fear of nothing, right? The fear of something ill formed, of something inchoate and that inchoate in the existentialist canon is the future, it's the rest of my life. I also talk about anxiety from the psychoanalytic perspective. And, you know, Freud famously gave us three different theories of anxiety. It was a phenomenon that he struggled with in the course of his lifetime. And, you know, one thing Freud was always ready to do was to revise his theories and he worked on anxiety. And I think one of the most profound, I think, realizations that Freud gives us is, that anxiety is a kind of a fear that I will re-experience a loss that I have suffered once in my life. You know, he sets a lot of store by this kind of genealogical method that something happens in my sort of primeval history, you know, I lose the, you know, the sort of unconditional love of my mother or my parents or something, but thereafter life becomes a kind of a theater in which I think this loss might happen again. So even say, if my friend doesn't invite me to their birthday party, this becomes a kind of a shadow event, right? I'm reminded of this earlier traumatic loss.
GR: Sounds like PTSD.
SC: Yes, very much so. And it's a kind of a feeling which I think is quite profound. And as I was finishing the book and I've been talking about it, have come more and more to think that the loss of love is actually quite a powerful driver. In fact, I would say the most profound realization I've had while writing the book is that even the fear of death, you know, which underwrites the Buddhist notion of existence, or the Buddhist theory of anxiety, or the existentialist theory of anxiety, as in Heidegger, I would say fear of death is actually fear of the loss of love. Because when I die, the most precious thing that I will lose will be the love of those I love and those who love me, right? I mean, the worst thing about being in your deathbed is going to be seeing the faces of those who are mourning for you, right? So, I think that's quite a profound kind of anxiety that I will lose the love of those who care for me. The last kind of anxiety is what I would call material anxiety. The stress that comes from knowing that I live in a society where relationships are commodified, where my existence is uncertain because I don't know whether I'll be able to make next week's rent, whether my children will be able to find, you know, their way forward, whether I will be able to pay the medical bills, whether I will be able to, as it were, keep body and mind together in the material conditions, right? So, I would say, anxiety as a response to existence, anxiety as an awareness of my freedom, anxiety as a fear of loss of love and anxiety as a kind of a response to the material conditions of my life, are the four approaches that I take in this book.
Grant Reeher: If you've just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Samir Chopra, the author of, "Anxiety, A Philosophical Guide." Well, we're getting a little short on time, and I just want to give you a heads up, there are a couple of bigger questions I still want to get into. So, one of the subheadings of your chapter borrows the title of a book that I read when I was a young adult, and it had quite an impact on me. You have a subheading called, “The Courage to Be” and so I obviously thought of Paul Tillich. Very curious to get your take on the courage to be, what are you getting out there in that particular section of your book?
SC: You know, one of the things that Tillich talks about in his book is that our anxiety arises from the fact that we confront a certain kind of nothingness at the end of existence, and this nothingness is so profound that even the concepts that we might have for dealing with existence are inadequate with it, because it is quite literally nothing. So, I think one of the things that I drew from Tillich, which made me, you know, include him in my book, is that he is very good at bringing out the kind of anxiety that nothingness produces, but I think he also makes it the case that there is something quite brave, something quite courageous in us just facing each day as it comes. I think we're quite used to thinking of ourselves as being cowards. And I want to say that there's actually something quite profoundly brave about us enduring this thing, this life, which is, you know, the greatest mystery of all mysteries, right? Just the bare fact of existence is quite, and I think that's one thing that thinking about nothingness does is, it makes us realize just how magical and wondrous existence is and how utterly, you know, beguiling, mysterious, and at the same time terrifying existence is. So just in dealing up with it, right, just in facing up to it, there is a certain kind of courage that we're showing, right? And I think that's what I drew most from Tillich that on reflecting on that nothingness makes us realize on just how beautiful, wondrous and terrifying existence is and there's a certain kind of courage we need for it. And, you know, they should breed compassion in us for all of us that deal with it.
GR: Right, right, we're all dealing with this. I want to come back to an earlier conversation we had and tie it to something very specific about the way anxiety is being treated today. And that is the different kinds of medications that have been produced to, very effectively in many instances, allow people to continue to function with anxiety. But it's, the question is this, and I'm sure you've thought about it, if anxiety is such a fundamental condition of human existence, should we at least have some pause in thinking, hey, you know, we can invent a drug that makes us feel a lot better about it on a day to day basis? How do we navigate that? And a lot of people who are hesitant for these drugs, I think are hesitant for the right reasons. They say, well, it might change, this is who I am, this is what I experience, you know? So, I just, if you had some quick reflections on that, I know that's something you could speak about (at) great length.
SC: Yeah. You know, this is an important and complicated question. We are, no response to that question can be made without acknowledging that, you know, we're embedded in a particular kind of society, in a particular kind of political economy, in a particular kind of medical system that has a particular kind of relationship to the understanding of what we call mental health problems, right? And I think, I'll just say this really quickly, I think mental health problems are medicalized to a certain extent, which means that when we see problems in behavior, which are often, it's not quite clear whether they are physical problems or whether they are normative problems, like normative problems in the sense that, you know, somebody who wants to sit around all day, stare at the trees and maybe, you know, throw little stones into a pond. I think our culture would describe that person as being lazy, as being unmotivated, as being ill-disciplined. These are terms of abuse in some sense, because the person doesn't fit in with our social norms. And one of the things I worry about, not just with respect to anxiety, but also with respect to depression, is that we might be over-medicating this, we might be diagnosing anxiety too quickly. We might be taking some things which are a normal response to the kinds of societies we live in, to the normal conditions of existence, and medicating it a little bit too quickly. I think some kinds of reflections on the anxieties we have are useful. For example, parental anxiety, which is quite deep and profound, is an important signature of my love for my daughter, for instance, right? It helps me to reflect on what my values are. The things that really scare me are the things that are super important to me. So, there's a way in which my worst fears bring into contact, bring me into contact with my most important values. So, I think if we run away from anxiety too quickly, if we rush to medicate it, we might be missing important encounters with ourselves.
GR: And to take it to its logical conclusion, you end up with something like, "Brave New World," where you kind of medicate the ability to challenge the system out of existence.
SC: That's right.
GR: Only a little time left, a minute and a half or so. And I'm going to give you a really nasty question at the end, because it's personal and complicated, you could talk about it for a long time. You're a philosopher, but you also write about your own personal issues in this book, you blend memoir into this. Could you just briefly, and again, very briefly, what were your own struggles with anxiety and how did philosophy either stimulate those anxieties or help you cope with them?
SC: Well, you know, it's been said that you can only really philosophize about things that are actually problems for you. Other stuff is kind of armchair speculation. So, I wrote a book on anxiety because I'm a very anxious person. I describe my, what I took to be my becoming anxious in response to the early deaths of my parents, which I would say in some ways removed, you know, what I would call, you know, metaphysical certainty for my life. You know, the sense that I have these guardians, the sense that these people are going to take care of me. So, I think an infected me with a deep sense of anxiety and fearfulness. But I think when I thought about it a bit more, when I spent five years in therapy talking about this stuff, I think I realized that I'd always been anxious. And the more I thought about it, I realized not only had always been anxious, I was always going to be anxious given the conditions of my life. So, I think I went into therapy thinking that I had become anxious. And I think what I learned over a period of time by studying, by reflection, was that this was just who I was. It was just that, you know, certain conditions in my life had pulled that basement dwelling anxiety out and brought it to the fore. But in that sense, I wasn't that different from any other human beings. The universe hadn't marked me out for some special punishment. I was just another human being that was going to get its fair share of, you know, anxiety, unhappiness and all the other mixed blessings of existence.
GR: Well, I'm glad it worked out for you. For what it's worth, for the last 30 minutes, you've seemed pretty zen to me. (laughter)
SC: (laughter)
GR: But we'll have to leave our conversation there, unfortunately. That was Samir Chopra and again, his new book is titled, "Anxiety, A Philosophical Guide." If you want to get a deeper and a broader perspective of an anxiety that's been haunting you or of things you're feeling more generally, this is a very readable and insightful book, and you know, it may make you feel a little better. So, Professor Chopra, thanks so much for taking the time to talk to me, really appreciated it.
SC: Thanks very much for having me on.
GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.
