Amy Levine (Harvard University), “Heidegger on Anxiety and Normative Practice”

Forthcoming, Ergo

By Amy Levine

What is the relationship between an individual human being and the normative practices of her community? We are born and brought up into a world that we did not choose; the ways of being a person that are available to us, are made available by the norm-governed practices of our culture, in the time and place in which we find ourselves. What it means to be a doctor, teacher, parent, or a podcaster is largely given by practices that are independent of us, and the social norms that govern them. How can I live a life which is genuinely “my own” in such a world?

            In “Heidegger on Anxiety and Normative Practice,” I argue that Heidegger has a distinctive answer to this question. It is the topic of his discussion of anxiety, an experience of disruption in Dasein’s everyday relation to its world. Anxiety is about nothing, in the sense that it is about nothing in particular: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is not an entity within-the-world” (SZ 186/231). It is an experience of the collapse of the typical ways in which the world shows up as meaningful, so that in anxiety, “the world has the character of completely lacking significance” (SZ 186/231). Often, the phenomenology of anxiety is read as alienation from the world. Dasein’s projects show up as meaningless or worthless, where they had mattered greatly just a moment before. 

            This alienation from the world of public, shared normative practices reveals the conditions under which they are usually significant for us, and so anxiety is an occasion to take responsibility for that significance. A recent, influential “transcendental” interpretation finds in Heidegger’s discussion an alternative to more familiar Kantian accounts of human agency. Roughly, an experience of anxiety reveals that our activities are groundless: they show up as justified within the context of higher-order projects that themselves lack justification. This is an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its responsiveness to norms: I recognize that the standards that constitute my identity have normative force for me because I care about excelling by them. Living authentically, having achieved this, we are able to act “in light of” norms and not merely “in accordance” with them.

            I argue that the “transcendental” reading tells only part of the story. In anxiety, Dasein recognizes that it is not identical to any of the possibilities for being that it might take up, so it is natural to think that the question who to be arises. This gives rise to a problem. If anxiety is an experience in which all possibilities show up as meaningless, then the choice of one way of living over another would have to be without basis. Transcendental readers see this as a reason to think that we don’t face the choice of a way of living in anxiety: that Dasein can only make choices from the position of already understanding itself as someone in particular. But this treats something that we intuitively think of as within the purview of our own responsibility, the non-arbitrary choice of a way of living from available cultural possibilities, as if it is always presupposed by Dasein’s investigation into how to live.

            A fully satisfying account of how anxiety “individualizes” Dasein, and how it confronts “its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world” will explain how it is possible for Dasein to take responsibility for the non-arbitrary choice between ways of living. To do this, I interpret anxiety differently than as an experience of the meaninglessness of the world. In anxiety, Dasein gets the “yips” about living. An athlete might get the yips when they become suddenly self-conscious of movements in which they had previously been able to “forget” themself. Similarly, in anxiety, Dasein recognizes that there is something that it is doing, by doing everything else that it does: projecting itself onto possibilities, or Being-in-the-World. When this happens, Dasein finds that it is no longer able to do it. Anxiety involves a breakdown in the skill that Dasein engages by doing all of the things that it does, thereby revealing that such a skill is in exercise.

            While anxiety is disorientating, it isn’t an experience of the meaninglessness of the world. By revealing to Dasein that it is engaged in the activity of projecting itself onto possibilities whatever it does, anxiety confronts Dasein with a problem for which nothing in the world is “relevant.” By contrast with fear, which has as its object some threatening object in the world, anxiety is about nothing; it “tells us that entities within the world are not ‘relevant’ at all” (SZ 186/231). It is familiar that we have experiences for which some of the things around us are relevant, and others are not: an affect like fear causes one object—a bear or a deadline—to loom while others recede. In anxiety, nothing in the world is relevant to the experience. Dasein finds itself in a situation for which nothing in the world can offer any help.

            Every possibility available to Dasein shows up to it as enigmatic. The differences between the possibilities available to me in my world—the differences between, for example, what it means to be a doctor, public defender, and a high school teacher—do not put me in a position to decide which to spend my life doing, at the exclusion of everything else I might have done. Our public, shared understandings of what it means to be any of these things does not suffice to account for what it would mean for me to take up these ways of living as my own. By revealing that Dasein is engaged in the activity of projecting itself onto possibilities, it “takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted” (SZ 187/232). I find, in anxiety, that I don’t know how to make use of the possibilities available to me in my world to live my life.

For the same reason, anxiety also provides an occasion for Dasein to take responsibility for its interpretation of its world, in exercising its skill of projecting itself onto possibilities. In taking responsibility for this, Dasein also takes responsibility for the rational basis for the choice of who to be.  Part of what it takes to understand what it would mean for me to pursue any of the available possibilities for living and acting, is to understand what it would mean for something to be worth pursuing for me, and so what counts as success at living my own life. Dasein’s understanding of its world is what puts it in a position to differentiate between the possibilities available to it, which show up as “indifferent” in anxiety, so that it can decide between them.

This interpretation of Heidegger on anxiety is also suggestive of a new way of interpreting Being-towards-death, and “the call of conscience”; for that, you’ll have to check out the paper! For now, I want to mention one point of potential interest for contemporary practical philosophy. The problem of accounting for the choice between moral-permissible, worthwhile projects arises for contemporary accounts of agency and practical reasoning; it can seem as though the choice must be arbitrary, and that the important thing is to commit to some set of commitments, on pain of normative skepticism or alienation. Anxiety could be another perspective from which we reflect on life as a whole.  If so, then our responsibility for the choice of a way of living might depend on interpretative practical thinking presupposed by more familiar forms of deliberation. If public conceptions of what it means to occupy social roles underdetermine any individual’s conception of what it means to take up that role, then there is an ineliminable role for us to play in interpreting the possibilities available to us in order to take any of them up. Indeed, anxiety reveals that it is self-deceived, in every case, to think that I can simply conform, taking on a received understanding of what it would mean to occupy a social role. Doing so always involves creativity and interpretative choice.