www.radicaluncertainty.com

Author: Nicholas Williams

THE PHILOSOPHICAL APPROACH TO ANXIETY…

Our usual way of dealing with anxiety is by trying to solve it within our established framework of thinking. In other words, we want the anxiety to be eliminated, but we want the thinking (which is our framework of understanding) to remain. We could also explain this ‘unacknowledged double-requirement’ by saying that we wish to interrogate the anxiety, to find out where it is going and where it is coming from, but we do most definitely do not wish to interrogate our established way of looking at the world.

How can we be so sure of this? What are our grounds for coming up with such a statement? The answer is simple: anxiety consists of a ‘fear of losing control’, it is where we have based our sense of well-being (our ‘peace of mind’) on the possibility of being successfully in control, and it turns out that this particular horse is not going to come in for us. If we weren’t relying on being a ‘successful controller’ then there would be no anxiety around the prospect of losing control, but we have relied on it. There are therefore two ingredients to anxiety:

[1] The fact that I assume (or believe) that it is absolutely important that I stay in control.

[2] The fact that I know (on some deeper level) that this is in fact an unattainable goal.
The fact that I cannot exert control effectively is not the real cause of anxiety, but rather it is my unexamined need to exert control that is the cause.

Now the question we were asking was, “How can we say that our usual approach to anxiety is to try to eliminate the anxiety in our lives, whilst retaining the over-all conceptual framework of which this anxiety is a part?” If we accept the above definition of anxiety (as a fear of losing control) then we can begin to glimpse the answer: we do not want to give up our established way of understanding the world because that framework of thinking is our most fundamental way of ‘staying in control’. Knowing what is going on is the most basic form of staying in control – I may not be able to change what is going on but at least I have a framework for understanding it, at least I know ‘what is going on’.

I don’t like losing external control, which is where I lose my grip over ‘how thing happen’, but I fear losing internal control even more – internal control being my ability to make sense of what is happening. When I lose internal control, then this really is ‘losing my grip on reality’! What we are saying therefore is that my framework of understanding (which is so familiar and taken for granted by me as to be practically invisible) is my ultimate security blanket – this is what gives me my sense of my self, and my sense of the world, neither of which I am at all keen to see threatened.
We could therefore say that there are two types of approaches to anxiety:

[1] The technical (or ‘controlling’) approach. This involves the successful manipulation of the anxious thoughts and feelings, whilst retaining the all-important ‘context of understanding’ within which that ‘controlling’ makes sense. In other words, my over-all goals never ever change.

[2] The ‘philosophical’ approach. This does not involve anything definite or specific, but it does involve the letting go of all definite and specific ways of understanding the world, and what the world is all about. Everything is ‘up for grabs’ here because there is absolutely nothing that I insist on keeping the same.

The first approach is obviously all about maintaining my sense of security and this is the name of the game with regard to controlling in general. Controlling means (as we have seen) that reality not only does what I say, it is what I say, and when I keep hold of my framework of understanding reality ‘is what I say it is’ (or ‘is what I believe it to be’). Once we see this, then it is plain that in the second approach to anxiety, the boot is well and truly ‘on the other foot’ – in other words, reality is what it wants to be, not what I want it to be. To put it simply, I am no longer the boss, I no longer insist on having the last word.
PHENOMENOLOGY

One reason we call the Type-2 approach the ‘philosophical’ approach to anxiety is we are being philosophical. I am not throwing a fit, or having a tantrum, I am ‘being philosophical about it’. There is obviously a great deal of dignity in this approach: If I am being philosophical, the implication is that I am - in a profound way – relating to ‘what is’, no matter how difficult or painful that might be. Another reason is because there is a school of philosophy which sees things very much in the way that we have been doing, and this is the school known as ‘phenomenology’. It also accords very closely with the philosophy of Kierkegaard, as writer and lecturer in philosophy Paul Strathern (1997, p. 55; p. 53-4) here explains:

Existence is a colossal risk. We can never know whether the way we choose to live is the right way. Anyone who realizes this fully, who makes himself consciously aware of it, is bound to feel anguish, according to Kierkegaard. Such subjective truths, supported by no objective evidence, are grounded on nothing. Literally. We thus come to know the nothingness of existence, the utter uncertainty that lies at its heart. Life is fundamentally tentative and elusive.

…Kierkegaard rightly sees that even so-called facts can be determined by our attitude. To a considerable extent, our values determine the “facts.” Faced with the same reality, the Christian and the pleasure-seeker may see different “facts.” (As for example, if both were introduced to a bordello or a religious retreat.) In this way, each individual is to a certain extent the creator of his own world. And he creates his world because of the values he holds.

It is not difficult to see in such thinking the seeds of present-day relativism, with its rejection of the entire notion of objective truth. Kierkegaard also anticipates twentieth-century phenomenology, which sees all forms of consciousness as “intentional” – in other words, consciousness is always purposive. We see the world the way we do because of what we intend to do to it. Like Wittgenstein’s remark: “The world of the happy man is a different one from the world of the unhappy one,” whose apparent banality takes on a more profound tenor when one realizes that he is speaking here of the exercise of will. As Kierkegaard realized, the individual sees the world that he wills to see, and this depends upon the values he has previously chosen, the ones he lives by, the ones that make him what he is. Kierkegaard thus argues that the values that makes the individual what he is, also make the world what it is.

The key idea in phenomenology is the intentionality of consciousness, as Strathern says. This means that reality looks to us the way it does look because we want it to look at way. We will it to be that way, and so our whole perceived universe comes into being because we will it to. This is another way of saying what we have been saying, i.e. we exercise internal control by grimly hanging on our established way of thinking about the world. Of course, no one is saying that we actually acknowledge that this is what we are doing – it goes without saying that if we knew that this is what we were doing then there would be precious little satisfaction in it for us.

The mechanism of evaluation and conceptualization and thinking which provides me with a sense of security about things is an unconscious sort of a process – I evaluate without knowing that I am evaluating, I conceptualize without knowing that I am conceptualizing, I think without knowing that I am thinking. Basically, I impose meaning on the world without acknowledging that this is what I am actually doing.

WILLING MYSELF TO BE CALM…

There is another, simpler, way to look at the two approaches to dealing with anxiety. This all comes down to willing versus not-willing. In the Type-1 approach to dealing with anxiety (the technical or controlling approach) I basically will myself not to be anxious – I will myself to be calm, in other words. In the Type-2 approach to dealing with anxiety I give up willing entirely. This is like saying “Let not my will but thy will be done”, which is of course the essential religious approach. Submission to a greater (and therefore more genuine) reality is the basic message in all religions; for example the world Islam actually means ‘submission’.

So in the Type-2 (i.e. ‘non-technical’) approach to anxiety we do not will ourselves to be calm, but we take the risk that maybe we won’t be calm. We don’t will anything, we let go of our frantic and terrible ‘willing’ and submit to reality, whatever that reality might turn out to be. In our normal frame of mind, ‘submitting’ sounds like losing, in a wrestling match if I submit then I lose, and obviously the thing to do is to win not to lose. So, our logic tells us, submitting is a bad thing.

But if we stop to reflect on matters (which is a very good thing to do!) then we can see that submitting to reality is hardly the same thing as losing. Psychologically (or philosophically) speaking, refusing to acknowledge reality is the ‘failure’, if such a word is to be used. The refusal to acknowledge reality is an act quite without dignity; furthermore, it puts us beyond all chance of redemption because without reality there can be no redemption. All there can be is the ‘false hope’ that is offered us by our internal controlling – the hope that we can somehow will things to be okay. In this case, what we are relying on is the sheer force of our desperation, which does not really seem like a very good thing to rely on!

We can conclude by saying that there are two types of being calm, two types of ‘being relaxed’:

[1] Conditional calmness. Here I am calm or relaxed just so long as certain conditions are met. Another way of explaining this state of mind is to say that it is where I am ‘relaxed-within-the-secure-framework-of-my-conceptual-framework’. I am relaxed with the terms of my ‘personal narrative’, which is the story that I tell myself about myself, and my place in the world.

[2] Unconditional calmness. Here I am calm ‘unconditionally’. My calmness is not dependent upon conditions being a certain way, i.e. my calmness is ‘independent’. When I am in the state of conditioned peacefulness, the peace that I am experiencing is part of the story that I am telling myself and it is therefore the type of peace that makes sense to me within my narrow framework of understanding. But when I am in the state of unconditioned (or ‘un-programmed’) peacefulness, then the peace that I am experiencing is not part of the story that I am telling myself in order to feel safe (or secure). In this case, the peace that I am experiencing is ‘the peace that passeth understanding’.