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Anguish and Anxiety in Sartre
By: Mitchell

For all existentialist philosophers and thinkers anxiety or anguish (as I will refer to it from now) is of great significance for two separate reasons. Firstly, it is important because it arises out of the existential ontology of being and, as such, as the natural progression of their conception of what it is for us to be. Secondly, it is significant, particularly for Sartre, because of its ethical ramifications and the concept of anguish is one that underpins his whole (albeit hard to solidly formulate) conception of ethics.

The roots of anguish

Anguish, says Sartre, stems from the nature of man. It is by virtue of being the very kinds of things we are that we encounter anguish so it makes sense to look at what Sartre thinks man, essentially, is.

“Man first of all exists, encounters himself, surges up in the world – and defines himself afterwards… He will not be anything until later, and then he will be what he makes of himself.” Sartre 1973 p. 28

Sartre says that man simply is. There is no designer of man, no plan for how we should be and, as a consequence of this, we therefore have no role to fill or thing to be. We simply are. In one of Sartre’s most famous slogans “Man’s existence precedes his essence.” This natural state of total freedom leaves man in a world where he can do literally anything, be literally anything and as such has no way to turn. Like a child in an enormous sweetshop, he doesn’t know where to start or what to do. As Dermot Moran puts it,

“We must face up to the dizzying groundlessness and formlessness of our existence, an experience which provokes anxiety.” Moran 2000 p362

The nature of anguish

Sartre gives many long and complex explanations as to the nature of anguish in Being and Nothingness in terms of how it arises and the implications it has on our lives. What is significant is that it should not be equated with fear. To be afraid is to be afraid of something, whereas anguish is more a fear caused by ‘nothing’ as in nothingness, not as in ungrounded with no object. Sartre makes this distinction by talking of vertigo,

“Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid not of falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over.” Sartre 2002 p. 29

But that is not to say that anguish contains no element of fear. Anguish is fear of possibilities; fear of ones future self before we become it. It is a fear of turning from what we are now into something else, yet being unable to know how to change or which change to make. Sartre says it is

“my consciousness of being my own future, in the mode of not being.” Ibid p. 32

Anguish, then, is fear of one’s freedom and, as such, is not a fear of anything in the world, but a self-reflective fear. It is a fear that looks inwards towards oneself and trembles at the thought of what one could be, and the weight of having no path, no map, no instructions by which to chose and change. The Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset is quoted as saying in Alfred Stern’s book on Sartre,

“…man is the almost inconceivable reality which exists without having a being irremediably being prefixed, who consequently, is not yet what he is bit much choose for himself his own being.” J. Ortega Y Gasset “La Mision del Bibliotecario” from Stern 1968 p. 69

The significance of anguish

Anguish, for the existentialists, is not just an unpleasant condition we may find ourselves in, squirming at the thought that we are not necessary in the universe (like the grand punishment in Douglas Adams’ Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where the victim is shown their tiny place in the universe) but is ethically and psychologically powerful and deeply important.
David Cooper says that it is natural for the existentialists to put emphasis on the role of anguish because,

“…they are insistent that the world is revealed not only though ‘cognitive’ operations, but through action and mood.” Cooper 2000 p. 129

This is precisely the kind of significance Sartre places upon anguish. He treats it as a revelatory state that, when felt, can show a great deal about the nature of man. For Heidegger, whom Sartre was deeply intellectually indebted to, anguish is Grundbefundlichkeit – the means by which one discovers the ground nature of oneself. But this immensely unpleasant and fundamentally disturbing state is one that is often retreated from, and it is here that Sartre most succinctly expounds his ethical theories.
If, when we come to make some choice or perform some action, we reflect on our true freedom we are overcome by a sense of anguish. How am I to choose one thing over another? How am I to choose one course of action over another? We have no God to turn to, no ‘human nature’ to appeal to, no moral law handed down to us from on high – in this state of anguish one’s natural urge may be to flee from the brink of such decisions rather than looking over the precipice and seeing the full enormity of our freedom. This, Sartre says, is bad faith.

Responsibility and the Significance of Anguish

In his conception of bad faith, Sartre is hitting upon the notion of responsibility. He says that whilst we are confronted with these dilemmas of choosing, once we have chosen we have no one but ourselves to reprimand or praise. It is our decision and ours alone and whatever we choose we must bear the burden of responsibility. In this he echoes Plato’s republic where Plato says,

“… the life which he chooses shall be his destiny… The responsibility is with the chooser – God is blameless.” Plato; The Republic, X. 617E

This enormous responsibility is what we face when we accept our freedom and act accordingly and this responsibility is what pushes people into bad faith.
In bad faith, our actions are a lie to ourselves. We dispute our freedom and rather than accept fully as we should, we pretend that our choices are not infinite but are in fact defined by social class, financial considerations, family bonds, the law and many other artificially constructed ‘guides’. The man who says he could not leave his wife because of his children is in bad faith – he could leave his wife as easily as he could wear a blue shirt instead of a white one. But he chooses not to, and to avoid the responsibility, he lies to himself. He says he had no choice and that he had to stay. This sidestepping of responsibility is what Sartre means by bad faith and is a retreat from true freedom when overcome by anguish. David Cooper describes this retreat in the following way,

“It is in the very nature of Angst, hardly a pleasing feeling, that people should generally endeavour to avoid it by ‘fleeing’ into bad faith and the comforting embrace of the ‘they’.” Cooper 2005 p 128

This retreat into bad faith is something which Sartre attacks heavily both in Existentialism and Humanism and, in a more sustained and elucidated way, in Being and Nothingness. The most famous example Sartre gives of bad faith is of the café waiter whom he describes in Being and Nothingness,

“His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer… All his behaviour seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gesture and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café.” Sartre 2002 p. 59

But what, we might ask, is the harm in ‘playing at being a waiter’? For Sartre it is that bad faith is a denial of man’s freedom and his true nature as an undefined being. To play act in this way is to deny one’s true freedom to chose and be as one wants. The waiter does not have to serve with a smile, or clear tables or even take orders from the customers. He could be surly, ignoring them, bringing customers the wrong things intentionally. This totality of possibilities is what is being denied when the move into bad faith is made. In a perhaps more extreme and yet better understandable example, we have the characters portrayed in Existentialism and Humanism. Sartre begins by attacking the ‘I-could-have’s” when he says,

“There is no love apart from the deeds of love, no potentiality of love other than that which is manifested in loving; there is no genius other than that which is expressed in works of art.” Sartre 1973 p. 41

For Sartre there is no use saying ‘I could have been a great musician but I never had the time/the money/the opportunities.’ If you are not a great musician it is simply because of what you did or did not do and, most significantly, you must accept that. But this goes even deeper when Sartre gives some of his more powerful examples. Firstly, the example whereby a military leader undertakes a certain course of action that leads to the death of several of his men. He cannot then say; “I was under orders” or “what choice did I have.” He could always have rejected the order, made some other choice of strategy and not acted in the way that he did. The bad faith or saying he had no choice is in order to free him of responsibility. The son, that Sartre tells us of who must choose between fighting for the French Resistance or looking after his ailing mother cannot say he had no choice but to stay with her, nor can he says his country needed him to fight – what he chooses is his responsibility and his alone.
One might object that it would, therefore, be valid to choose to deceive oneself: to choose to live the inauthentic life of bad faith. But, for Sartre, this is logically absurd,

“The self deception is evidently a falsehood, because it is a dissimulation of man’s complete liberty of commitment.” Sartre 1973 p. 51

For Sartre, it is part of the very nature of what we are that we are not only free but that this freedom entails vast responsibility. This load upon us causes us to feel anguish/anxiety that we can face, facing too our responsibility and freedom, or we can flee into bad faith and inauthenticity. Not only is anguish revelatory with regards to the very nature of man, in that it arises through the confrontation of us being inherently free beings, but it also shows us a path towards an existential conception of morality thus being doubly significant for the existentialist.

Bibliography

Cooper, D. Existentialism – Blackwell (2000)

Moran, D. Introduction to Phenomenology – Routledge (2000)

Plato The Republic [Trans. Waterfield, R.] – Penguin (2003)

Sartre, J-P. Being and Nothingness – Routledge (2002)
Existentialism and Humanism – Methuen (1973)

Stern, A. Sartre: his philosophy and existential psychoanalysis –
Vision (1968)

Article Source: http://journal.ilovephilosophy.com

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