Existential anxiety and “the courage to be”
"The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself." - Paul Tillich
In 1952, Paul Tillich, the most influential theologian of his generation, published The Courage to Be. Tillich wrote the book in the post-war era, a time of great uncertainty and anxiety. I was curious, when reading it recently, to see if this 60 year old book holds relevance for our day. It does.
Tillich proposes, as an antidote to pervasive anxiety, the concept of courage. He acknowledges that we live in a universe which threatens our sense of being and that holds within it the possibility of complete and utter meaninglessness. We are vulnerable to sickness and death, we live with anxiety, we feel guilty for not living up to our potential, and we tend toward despair in tough times. All of these themes are still relevant today.
Tillich’s famous assertion is that “courage is self-affirmation in spite of anxiety of the threat of non-being”. But what does that actually mean? In this sense “non-being” does not merely mean physical death. It means the loss of existence; of all that is. The anxiety that this realization produces, Tillich says, is part and parcel of being a human being. And so, despite the realities of “non-being”, we are tasked with courageously affirming ourselves. In order to do that, he says, we have to confront the anxiety which is inherently part of human life, in an active way. We must live creatively by funneling that anxiety into a purposeful life. Too often, he says, people shrink away from life because of this anxiety. They are unable to access the appropriate courage; disconnected from their own “self-affirmation”. “The negation of life because of its negativity”, he says, “is an expression of cowardice”.
For Tillich, anxiety is not just a psychological or physical phenomena, it is at the core of human experience (it is existential). He thinks that without addressing the problem at that level, attempts at “managing” it are ultimately in vain. There are different kinds of anxiety, Tillich says, along with the existential anxiety previously discussed, there is normal “non-existential anxiety”. How to know which is which? The kind of basic anxiety which Tillich speaks about is non-contingent. It cannot be reduced to the events or circumstances of one’s life, nor can it be reduced to a structural imbalance in the mind or a chemical imbalance in the brain. It just is.
In order to fully understand and comprehend the concept of anxiety, Tillich believes in a radical re-thinking of it. It needs to be placed into a framework of understanding which is not reducible to psychological or biological explanations, but which accepts as a fundamental axiom that being itself breeds a particular kind of anxiety which, in response, breeds a particular kind of courage: the courage to be.
Sources
Tillich, P. (2008). The courage to be. Yale University Press.
