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generator: pandoc

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.