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title: 'hegel-sense-certainty-and-anxiety'
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+++ date = "2018-10-13T10:50:11Z" title = "Hegel, Sense-Certainty, and
Anxiety" +++
To Al, Courtney, Tim, and Cara.
I hope you are all doing well. I am here in Sydney, sitting on the floor
of my office, typing on this old 1970s Adler Gabriele 2000 I restored
myself. The escapement was an absolute nightmare to get back into proper
working order, but I got there :-)
Anyway I wanted to write you all a letter about a very strong emotion
that I feel a great deal of the time. That emotion is anxiety. I feel it
when I am criticised, I feel it when I have forgotten to do something
important at work, and I feel it most strongly of all when I have made a
mistake, no matter how trivial. I wanted to know more about this
incredibly unpleasant emotion. It commands so much of my energy and
cognitive capacity that I really think I have to rid myself of it.
Surely you feel the same. Anxiety hangs around our work and our social
interactions so closely that it seems we just **are** our anxiety. It is
as if we have no control over our emotions, they just possess us and
take control of us, and push us into a dark spiral of self loathing and
nervous energy. I know this is how I feel so much of the time.
So what is anxiety, and how can we get rid of it?
I spoke to someone very wise that I trust, and this is what he had to
say:
I think anxiety is like inner doubt for Descartes, it is the core
epistemic nub from which we move outwards in comporting ourselves to
the world, and from which basis we only merely deduce and infer the
reality of other objects of experience, which anxiety always
underlies.
Anxiety, along with other neuroses, is in fact one of the key things
engendered by real live thinking. Often I have had the curious
experience, especially upon returning to a text to re-read it, that
certain elements of my interpretation are different, that the
hermeneutic surface of perfection is a shifting sand liable to be
swayed by passion and fortune. The fact of anxiety is like the one
constant, despite its contributiong to the shifting of that sand. It
is like the speed of light, perfectly fixed, where light itself is of
course variable in the shapes and manner in which it befalls a scene.
I liked some of what my friend was saying, but I felt like there was
something moral to be evaluated about anxiety. My friend was merely
describing what anxiety was, but not really evaluating **why** anxiety
troubles humans so much, why anxiety is rampant and seemingly an
ever-present thing to **suffer** through.
At this point I remembered that dialectics has something to say about
anxiety. My comrade, Simon, put the phenomenology of anxiety very well
as we were both discussing how aimless and immediate anxiety comes on to
us at work.
He said:
I first feel anxious, and then I go and look for some explanation.
And I think this is exactly how anxiety functions at the level of
experience. It is a completely immediate possession of the ego. It is an
inseparable quality of what Hegel calls "this-ness". The phenomenon of
anxiety is perfectly characterised by Hegel in Chapter One, Section One
of the *Phenomenology of Spirit*. Hegel is course talking about the
beginnings of experience in this section, but because anxiety shows up
in our thoughts exactly the same way empirically, I think we are
permitted to borrow from Hegel in this way.
Hegel says of sense-certainty, which we can transpose as "anxiety":
I, *this* particular I, am certain of *this* particular thing, not
because I *qua* (read: as) consciousness, in knowing it have developed
myself or thought about it in various ways; and also not because *the
thing* of which I am certain, in virtue of a host of distinct
qualities, would be in its own self a rich complex of connections, or
related in various ways to other things. ... (The) thing *is*, and it
*is*, merely because it *is*.
Hegel always manages to give a moral characterisation of some object at
the same time as he is describing it. In this exposition of the
immediacy of anxiety we can see already how anxiety develops into its
dialectical negation--what Hegel calls ''Perception'', or what I will
call''relief''. Anxiety is the immediate possession of some, at the
time, indefatigable''knowledge''. But the closer we look at this
controlling or seemingly irrefutable feeling, we can see it has no
context. It has no rich connections to anything else in experience --
and for this reason it is''false'' in comparison to relief: relief is a
better representation of the true state of affairs that you are situated
in in the real world. So Hegel gives us the clue to relieving our
anxiety: you can take control of your own agency and emotions by
developing your thoughts beyond ''I am feeling this emotion, or having
this knowledge/experience, and I am sure of it''. Developing richer and
more complex connections between your thoughts and the outside world
purely and completely dispels anxiety always.
You can cast away anxiety by asking more questions, surrounding yourself
with people who will care for you, and provide you with more feedback
about your behaviour and those of others. Generally speaking, the more
data you have about your place in the world, the better you will be
prepared to dal more with your anxiety.
And when I say ''data'', I don't mea little atomic pieces of empirical
evidence, I mean a broad web of complex, rich dialetical connections.
The wider the variety of dialectical connections you are able to develop
about yourself, and the environment, and other people, the more
comfortable you should feel.
I hope this letter finds you well, comrades.
I miss you all desperately, an I hope that one day we will all be
together again soon.
:-)
Yours for the revolution,
Blair.