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generator: pandoc

title: 'second-letter-on-anxiety'

viewport: 'width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0, user-scalable=yes'

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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*,

• Self-consciousness*. He says the stoic consciousness retreats into

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

• from* it, or to be free *to* transcend beyond it, but to be free *with*

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.