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title: 'second-letter-on-anxiety'
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+++ date = "2018-10-23T10:36:07Z" title = "Second Letter on Anxiety" +++
To Al, Cara, Courtney, and Tim.
Well, you have probably all found out by now. Charmaine and I have
broken up. We broke up last night. It was triggered by the fact that I
quit another job. This is the second mechanic's job that I have quit and
I quit for exactly the same reason as I quit the first one -- I was
overwhelmed by a massive infliction of anxiety. I suppose I should have
taken my own advice in the first letter I wrote to you all. You can only
take so much incompatibility between you and your environment, however.
The kind of therapy I was advising in my first letter was a very stoic
one. I was advocating accommodating yourself to your external
environment, and trying to change your own will so that it better suits
the demands of the external world. Hegel talks about the stoic
consciousness in the second chapter of the *Phenomenology of Spirit*,
itself and attempts to free itself from the external determination of
the outside world. A famous American philosopher Donald Davidson came up
with a very simple analogue in metaphysics -- he called his philosophy
of mind ''Coherentism''.
Davidson claimed that ''nothing serves as a justification of a belief
except another belief''. This is exactly like the stoic phenomenological
consciousness in Hegel because Davidson conceives the normativity of
truth to be totallly divorced from the external world. The''world'' does
not constrain and interact with our perception of the world, on this
account, because our minds are free to determine whatever judgement
about our sense-data that we feel.
As Communists, we know that this philosophy is without any merit. We are
not like the Conservatives, who say the traditions of the past are to be
followed and accommodated, we know that if there is an injustice in the
world around us, it is not **us** who needs to change, it is that the
world is not yet correct, and that the **world** must change.
So where does this leave us, metaphysically?
If the world is not the force which impresses itself on our senses and
demands that WE must change our will in order to be congruent with it,
then surely the dialectical antithesis is also equally incorrect. We are
not like magicians who can bend and manipulate the fabric of the world
to our every whim. If we could just arise from our armchairs and shoot
the roasted turkeys of our Communist philosophies into the mouths of the
masses, then we would have arrived at a purely free society already.
So what is the answer? How are we supposed to deal with the nauseating
reality of Capital and the State?
The answer is through the negation of the negation of stoicism: what
Hegel designates as true freedom. Hegel's monicker for the purest form
of freedom is ''absolute negation''. By this he means *the ability to
determine itself through another entity*. The problem of unjust external
determination and constraint from the outside world is not to be free
it.
This does not mean ''coping'' with unjust circumstances and bearing with
them, it means to take the circumstances in which you find yourself and
use them as the starting point for transforming the world and yourself
into something, hopefully, eventually, perfectly just. There is an old
cliche that is better to have loved and lost than never loved at all.
This annoying phrase perfectly demonstrates the difference between
freedom *from* and freedom *with*.
The most perfect form of relation of yourself to the objective world is
through the process of mutual aid -- through the co-determination you
achieve through cooperating and assisting your fellow comrades, you set
yourself free from anxiety.
The breakdown of this process of mutual aid, and transformation of human
interdependence into an antagonistic form of competition is the root of
all anxiety.
So the world is not an ineffable lump of matter like he positivists say.
The world is there to be grappled with and challenged and built upon.
The only way to exorcise your anxiety is to find a way of cooperating
with your fellow humans in accordance with mutual aid.
The onset of stoicism is when this process has completely ground to a
halt.
Anyway. I hope this letter finds you well :-)
Blair.