![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
The Courage to Be ch 2
Feb. 16th, 2025 08:15 amThis chapter has an interesting structure, since it starts with the philosophical definition of non-being--and remains quite philosophy heavy for most of the chapter--until the last few pages, which is all about the political and economic transformations that bring certain kinds of social anxieties to the forefront of society. One thing that struck me in reading this chapter is how much influence Tillich has had on certain sociologists of religion, especially Peter Berger, when it comes to things like the social construction of meaning, and the social order as a shield against meaninglessness, as well as what happens with the breakdown of the social order. He also introduces terms like "ultimate meaning" that I've seen other sociologists use.
I was a little impatient with his survey of the various philosophical definitions/arguments about the existence of non-being at first, but he does have an interesting point, which is to better define fear and anxiety, and explain the difference between them. In this chapter, he's working with a different definition of courage: the power of the mind to overcome fear. He believes that courage can overcome fear, because fear has an object that can be faced, attacked, or endured--e.g. fear of losing your job can be met by patience, or finding another job, etc. Anxiety, though, has no object, because its object is nonbeing. "Anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing, experiencing its own finitude." In other words, it's ultimately connected to death/human mortality.
Thus his long definition of non-being. Nonbeing has no inherent existence, is not an object, and so courage has trouble fighting it. Anxiety is more than fear of the unknown; it's connected to something which by its nature cannot be known (nonbeing). This is existential anxiety; apparently he's going to talk about neurotic anxiety in a future chapter. Since anxiety's object is non-being, the negation of every object, it can lead to a profound sense of helplessness. One interesting social response he mentions (but doesn't follow up with much here--perhaps in later chapters?) is that anxiety strives to become fear because fear can be met by courage, leading him to suggest the human mind becomes a permanent factory of fears, to escape anxiety. [I assume this is going to be connected to the rise of fascism in his later chapters: we produce an object of our fears--outsiders, immigrants, Jews, etc.--as a way of displacing our existential anxieties].
He then goes to talk about three varieties of anxiety he sees as existential. I disagree a bit--I think his third example is super-cultural, not existential--but he does do a good job later in the chapter tying the overarching anxiety of different periods to changing political and economic circumstances. The 3 types of anxiety are ontic anxiety--tied to being itself, with the existential dread of death and the whims of fate; spiritual anxiety, tied to the fear of meaninglessness and the emptiness of existence; and moral anxiety, tied to the fear of guilt and condemnation. It's this last one, that seems super-Christian to me, that doesn't seem as generalizable to the whole human condition.
The first two seem kind of self-explanatory, so I didn't take a lot of notes, except on the threat to "ultimate concern" in spiritual anxiety--"a meaning which gives meaning to all other meanings"--and that one possible response to this anxiety was fanaticism, which he defines as sacrifice of one's sense of self to save meaning. He also noted in this section that symbols can lose meaning over time due to changes in the culture at large, which clearly influenced Vervaeke.
In his discussion of moral anxiety, he suggested that humans need moral affirmation; man is "required to answer what he's made of himself" which is connected to guilt, and his failure to actualize his potential can lead to despair; a couple potential psychological responses are antinomianism or legalism. Again, this seemed quite Christian to me. At the end of the book, he does connect the crisis in moral anxiety to the late Middle Ages, where everyone dealt with their fear of a wrathful, punitive God by rituals like pilgrimage or, for Protestants, belief in predestination. I will say that is an interesting insight about predestination I hadn't thought of before.
He then talks about despair--literally "no hope"--where nonbeing is victorious. He sees human life as a consistent attempt to avoid despair.
I was a little impatient with his survey of the various philosophical definitions/arguments about the existence of non-being at first, but he does have an interesting point, which is to better define fear and anxiety, and explain the difference between them. In this chapter, he's working with a different definition of courage: the power of the mind to overcome fear. He believes that courage can overcome fear, because fear has an object that can be faced, attacked, or endured--e.g. fear of losing your job can be met by patience, or finding another job, etc. Anxiety, though, has no object, because its object is nonbeing. "Anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing, experiencing its own finitude." In other words, it's ultimately connected to death/human mortality.
Thus his long definition of non-being. Nonbeing has no inherent existence, is not an object, and so courage has trouble fighting it. Anxiety is more than fear of the unknown; it's connected to something which by its nature cannot be known (nonbeing). This is existential anxiety; apparently he's going to talk about neurotic anxiety in a future chapter. Since anxiety's object is non-being, the negation of every object, it can lead to a profound sense of helplessness. One interesting social response he mentions (but doesn't follow up with much here--perhaps in later chapters?) is that anxiety strives to become fear because fear can be met by courage, leading him to suggest the human mind becomes a permanent factory of fears, to escape anxiety. [I assume this is going to be connected to the rise of fascism in his later chapters: we produce an object of our fears--outsiders, immigrants, Jews, etc.--as a way of displacing our existential anxieties].
He then goes to talk about three varieties of anxiety he sees as existential. I disagree a bit--I think his third example is super-cultural, not existential--but he does do a good job later in the chapter tying the overarching anxiety of different periods to changing political and economic circumstances. The 3 types of anxiety are ontic anxiety--tied to being itself, with the existential dread of death and the whims of fate; spiritual anxiety, tied to the fear of meaninglessness and the emptiness of existence; and moral anxiety, tied to the fear of guilt and condemnation. It's this last one, that seems super-Christian to me, that doesn't seem as generalizable to the whole human condition.
The first two seem kind of self-explanatory, so I didn't take a lot of notes, except on the threat to "ultimate concern" in spiritual anxiety--"a meaning which gives meaning to all other meanings"--and that one possible response to this anxiety was fanaticism, which he defines as sacrifice of one's sense of self to save meaning. He also noted in this section that symbols can lose meaning over time due to changes in the culture at large, which clearly influenced Vervaeke.
In his discussion of moral anxiety, he suggested that humans need moral affirmation; man is "required to answer what he's made of himself" which is connected to guilt, and his failure to actualize his potential can lead to despair; a couple potential psychological responses are antinomianism or legalism. Again, this seemed quite Christian to me. At the end of the book, he does connect the crisis in moral anxiety to the late Middle Ages, where everyone dealt with their fear of a wrathful, punitive God by rituals like pilgrimage or, for Protestants, belief in predestination. I will say that is an interesting insight about predestination I hadn't thought of before.
He then talks about despair--literally "no hope"--where nonbeing is victorious. He sees human life as a consistent attempt to avoid despair.
