The Dialectics of Affect

Initially influenced by Schelling’s lectures on positive philosophy (1841–1842), Kierkegaard ultimately withdrew from his lectures, devoting his attention exclusively to the redaction of Either/Or. The Concept of Anxiety was written in the shadow of that work under a uniquely anonymous pseudonym. Of course, anxiety in his deformalization of late idealism was not a concept; it belonged and did not belong to the understanding. Indeed, it precedes human actions under the sign of inherited “sinfulness” and as sheer possibility. If Kierkegaard aligned freedom with a leap, then anxiety was the affect precursive to it. Anxiety was the prethetic knowing that we are able to do. . . X. Tracing the “spiritual” history of the human race which carries the sins of the fathers even as it freely enacts sin, Kierkegaard urged that the more spiritual the culture, the more anxious it was. No longer the adjuvant of reason as in Hegel, anxiety belonged to the irreducible condition of a living subject. Over the five years that separated the Concept of Anxiety from Sickness onto Death, Kierkegaard’s mood of “Angest” will intensify as it is approached from his new perspective of Coram Deo (“before God”). Within the new perspective, the status and the meaning of the self is altered, showing a clearer relation to infinity. For the task of Kierkegaard’s philosophy—learning to become the nothing that one is—had attained a new stage in his existential dialectic. His arguments influenced Heidegger’s recourse to anxiety as a passage toward the question of being.

The New Philosophy

Kant’s transcendental revolution temporarily cut through debates between Humian skeptics and rationalists of a Leibniz-Wolffian stripe. It established reason as an immanent tribunal, judging its possibilities and errors. Through an analysis of the structure of intuition and the deduction of the categories intrinsic to judgement, largely scientific, the edifice of the first Critique raised epistemology out of metaphysics and psychologism. Together, the Antimonies and Paralogisms of pure reason indicated the contradictions and misuse of concepts into which rational speculation had hitherto fallen. The paralogisms of the erstwhile rational psychology had argued in favor of the simplicity, substantiality, and the personality of the soul, thereby following a logic of substance and accidents where passions and affects were the latter, attaching to that soul. By showing the errors of the paralogisms, Kant effectively “dispatched” virtually all affects to his “science of man and the world,” the anthropology of human practice. However, the solution to Kant’s Paralogisms of the soul opened a new circle, such that our inner sense and its logical condition, transcendental apperception preceded, but could only be thought thanks to, the categories of understanding. At stake was the intrinsic unity of consciousness within the transcendental project. Although the Critique of Practical Reason retained a crucial intellectual affect, Achtung (attention and respect), Kant’s epistemology required clear distinctions between understanding, reason, and affects. In a sense, ontology and epistemology bifurcate into the domains of a transcendental approach to experience as representation and what lays outside it (including pre-reflective sensibility and affects).

Conclusion

The conclusion revisits the characterization of anxiety by each thinker examined: Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. It proposes a three-part overview of anxiety (1) as the fundamental affect supervening upon, and accompanying, pleasure and displeasure; (2) as a sign or symptom of “the possible” or indeed of a conflict between bodily and cultural forces, and (3) as the affect that poses questions—about the conditions of emergence of a moral subject and, ultimately, about what-is. It examines some recent debates about the meaning and rationality of emotions, their evolutionary status, and concludes that this affect cannot be reduced to a cognitive emotion or what the idealist tradition called a “passion.” Rather than intellectualizing it, anxiety must be grasped in its many senses and abided with, like a site of sojourning.

Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil

Overcoming his early admiration of Fichte’s Doctrine of Science and his philosophy of the “absolute I,” Schelling crowned his own philosophy of nature with an account of the emergence of the absolute out of itself. The only way in which God or the absolute might thus emerge and evolve was if it encompassed within itself what was both itself and not itself. Two years after Hegel’s Phenomenology, Schelling published his Freedom essay, arguably setting Hegel’s 1807 dialectic on its head. Starting with God (or what-is) as a self-organizing being, Schelling introduced vitality and self-origin into an absolute that was no longer a historic terminus ad quem. By reviving Spinoza’s holism, Schelling proposed a new logic of identity: A=A and their indiscernible difference, or B. The possibility of the living absolute giving rise to itself thus resulted from two principles existing in “indifference to each other” yet inseparable, and there was no third term by which to distinguish them. Eschewing Hegelian dialectic in favor of contrariety in a genre, Schelling characterized the coexistence as Sehnsucht, an objectless “affect” out of which emerged an incipient order. All living beings contained this bi-une principle. However, in humans the two could become unbalanced, thereby accounting for the possibility of evil, of “a merely particular will” striving for ascendency. While this characterized evil in humans, the tension between the two principles, which had begun as Sehnsucht, would soon be called angst in the Ages of the World, underscoring the importance of the affect.

From Kant to Hegel via Philippe Pinel

This excursus reviews Kant’s treatment of Affectus and Leidenschafte (affects and passions) in the Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (lectures given over a span of many years). Having argued that empirical psychology was scientifically unfeasible and established his rational psychology as beyond the fictions of dogmatic metaphysicians, Kant could only treat affects from the perspective of practice in the world, like a behaviorism before its time. Nevertheless, his classification of passions ran as if parallel with psychopathologies—ordered according to representations, imagination, judgement, and reason. Building on his 1763 essay “Negative Magnitudes,” the anthropology was profoundly critical of affects, pointing to those “tensions constantly ready to explode,” and requiring vigilance. In sharp contrast, Hegel reintegrated passions into his mature Philosophy of Mind (1813) arguing that inclinations and passions overcame their subjective enclosure thanks to the idea of freedom. He supported his arguments using the French revolutionary psychiatry of Philippe Pinel. Pinel’s original taxonomy had the advantage of being monist; thus different from the binary of neurosis and psychosis, Pinel argued in favor of forms of “mania.” Crucial for Hegel was that even manias with delirium, grouping passions around an idée fixe, an indestructible kernel of rationality endured. This allowed Hegel to claim that freedom and nature were rooted in reason, and although reason might find itself tangled in contradictions it never entirely disappeared. This audacious claim resignified the function of reason as Geistlichkeit (spirituality) apt to integrate psychology into the dialectical movement of mind subjective.

Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins

Levinas radicalized Heidegger’s hermeneutic moods into intensely embodied states and affects, pointing toward their intersubjective connections. His early work challenged Heidegger’s intellectualist approach to affective tonalities, arguing that our experience of “Being” occurs in bodily modes, from nausea to shame to escapist pleasures. Following his famous treatise on welcoming the “Other” in 1961, he turned to theorize the experience of alterity as first affective; and thereafter in 1974 as anxiety and emotional memory (“the other-in-the-same”). Taking a step outside Husserl’s phenomenology, he located the birth of responsibility for the other in the intersubjective interweave of our lived bodies and affects, and later on as mourning and mnemonic obsession. Since Scheler’s The Nature of Sympathy (1923), Levinas’s was the greatest effort, since Kant’s practical reason colored by Achtung, to underscore within phenomenology the connection between specific affects and ethical responsibility.

Heidegger II

Following claims that Being and Time was essentially philosophical anthropology, and questions about the embodiment and mortality of Dasein, and Heidegger recurred to the distinction between humans who, as being-there, create a “world” for themselves and confront their death resolutely, versus animals who are caught up in their natural environments and do not die so much as “perish” biologically. In 1929 he studied the work of gestalt biologists like Jakob von Uexküll to support his arguments for the world-poverty of animals, unable hermeneutically to forge a real “world.” By 1936, nevertheless, his logic faltered when he argued that the age of technology and giganticism had reduced most humans to mere “technicized animals.” Even if this was a rhetorical flourish, it remained that only an anxious few remained among us who could dwell poetically and be free for their death, an idea with significant implications for the metaphysical politics Heidegger developed in response to Nazi politics. By 1949, the technicized animal—poor in world—appeared to perish with no greater resoluteness and dignity than its animal relatives.

Heidegger I

Heidegger deformalized Husserl’s phenomenology by proposing the unity of understanding, states of mind, and our abiding sense of being cast into the world and of anxious “falling.” Influenced by Kierkegaard’s angest, he defined humans as an open site in-the-world (Dasein) ever haunted by two anxieties; that of our everyday cares (Sorge) and the profound angst that opens us to the question of what we really are, and of why there is being instead of simply nothing. He thus adapted Leibniz’s metaphysical question about being in hermeneutic terms and argued that this was the path out of an exhausted, European metaphysics and toward a new thinking.

Husserl

Following the Kantian “Copernican revolution,” Husserl’s phenomenology is the most powerful idealistic reformalization in twentieth century philosophy. He “corrected” Kant’s transcendental deduction and second-order investigation of mind by arguing that thoughts, associative memory, and affects were available to phenomenological description. In his mature, 1920s investigation into passive synthesis and the complexity of “subjective” time, Husserl approached affects in light of dynamic forces running up and down the temporalizing flux of consciousness. As “retentions,” they joined representations, sometimes clustering around the Schwelle des Bewusstseins (threshold of consciousness), and returning through association. With the transcendental “ego” defined as a universal flow, experiences within the latter, which Husserl defined as retentions and protensions, remained active and betokened in memory, phantasy, and affects.

Freud and the Three Anxieties

Anxiety in Freud takes three basic forms over the course of his intellectual evolution. Initially it belies the interactions of neural energies and sexuality. From its mechanistic origins it gradually comes to denote the explicitly psychological situation of the subject caught in a conflict between its bodily drives and social norms. Finally, Freud traces the origin of angst in a surprisingly Schellingian way, with the trauma of birth. Against his brilliant colleague Otto Rank, he argues that anxiety is “there” before a mature ego has taken shape and is able to recollect its onset. Therefore anxiety in Freud precedes what we consider our subjecthood, our self or ego. As a symptom and defense response, anxiety echoes Nietzsche’s great intelligence of the Nietzschean body, and thereafter goes through a hermeneutic transformation as a sign of the human being caught between nature and culture.