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Anxiety
Anxiety
A Philosophical History
B E T T I NA B E R G O
1
3
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

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© Oxford University Press 2021
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and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bergo, Bettina, author.
Title: Anxiety : a philosophical history /Bettina Bergo.
Description: New York, NY, United States of America : Oxford University
Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020019189 (print) | LCCN 2020019190 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780197539712 (hb) | ISBN 9780197539736 (epub) |
ISBN 9780197539743 (online) | ISBN 9780197539729 (updf)
Subjects: LCSH: Anxiety. | Emotions (Philosophy)
Classification: LCC B105.E46 B465 2020 (print) | LCC B105.E46 (ebook) |
DDC 128/.37—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019189
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020019190
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
For Claude and Diane, mes modèles
Contents
Acknowledgments  xiii
List of Abbreviations  xv
Introduction—Anxiety: A Philosophical History  1
I.1. An “Age of Anxiety” and the “Age” of Anxiety  1
I.2. The Debated Role of an Affect in Spirit and
Reason: From Kant to Kierkegaard  5
I.3. Will and Representation: Anxiety Erupts in
Post-Kantian Philosophy  8
I.4. Darwin’s Original Semiosis: An Argument for the
Universality of Emotion  12
I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-Resurrection: From
Noumenal Will to Wills as Force  16
I.6. Freud’s Three Anxieties: Neurological, Ideal,
and Originary  19
I.7. Husserl’s Phenomenological Foundations of
the Ego, Time, and the Affects  22
I.8. Heidegger: Care and Angst and the Problem of
Dasein’s Embodiment  25
I.9. Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins  30
I.10. Finis Initii: Toward an Incipient Synthesis  33
1. The New Philosophy: Kant’s Transcendental Revolution
and the Fate of Emotions in German Philosophy  36
1.1. Introductory Remarks  36
1.2. Before Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”: Dilemmas
in the Heritage of the Cogito  40
1.2.1. Cartesian Dualism and the Two Sides of the Ego  40
1.2.2. Locke’s Reintegration of Sensation and His
“Simple Ideas”: New Dilemmas  43
1.2.3. Kant’s Transcendental Critique of the Soul  46
1.3. A “Soul” Divided: Unknowable in the Paralogisms
of Pure Reason, Essential Postulate for Practical
Reason  49
1.3.1. Practical Reason, Freedom, and the Soul: A
Practical Dilemma  51
viii Contents
1.4. Schwärmerei and the Genesis of the First Critique  53

1.4.1. From the “Dreams” to the Paralogism of
Personality: Unity and Representations  53
1.4.2. The First Paralogism of Substance (The Problem
of Unity)  55
1.4.3. “The Soul Endures over Time; Therefore It Is a
Person”: The Third Paralogism of Personality  59
1.5. Kant’s Cradle: The Self in Time and Steel  63
1.6. The Problem of Memory: “When I Am Conscious of
Myself, I Am Then Conscious of Myself ”  68
1.7. The “Reality” of Sensibility: Intensive Magnitudes  70
1.8. Conclusion: Anxiety as Theme, Anxiety
as Symptom  72
Excursus 1. From Kant to Hegel via Philippe Pinel  77
E1.1. Introductory Remarks  77
E1.2. Kant, Madness, and the Passions  77
E1.3. Hegel, Reader of Pinel and French
Revolutionary Psychiatry  85
E1.4. From Kant to Hegel via Pinel  94
2. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and
Groundless Life  97
2.1. Introductory Remarks: Infusing “Life”
into Idealism  97
2.2. Anxiety as the Original Tension in the Birth of
Nature: Schelling’s Path  102
2.3. Life Erupts in the Philosophical Inquiries into
the Nature of Human Freedom (1809)  105
2.4. Vitalizing Being: How an Individual Is Both
Particular and Universal  109
2.5. Leading Germans “Back to the Heart”: The
Living Will and Its Affective Signs  112
2.6. Schelling’s Hupokeimenon and God’s
First E(x)motion  116
2.7. The Mood That Re-flects (das Ebenbild Gottes)  119
2.8. The Positive Philosophy of Freedom and
Evil: Kabbalah, Not Manichaeism  121
2.9. Anxiety and Love: The Struggle and Return  123
2.10. Return to the Groundless (Ungrund): Love
as Adelon  126
2.11. Conclusion: Positive Philosophy of That
Which-Will-Be  128
2.12. Aftermath  132
Contents ix
3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard  133

3.2. Kierkegaard’s Path to The Concept of Anxiety  136
3.3. The “Mythology” of Sin and Sinfulness  141
3.4. The Evolution of Freedom and Possibility  145
3.5. The Dialectic of Anxiety: Intimations of
Freedom and Guilt, Signs of Spirit  149
3.6. Anxiety over Evil, Anxiety over the Good: “Every
Life Is Religiously Designed”  153
3.7. Toward Redemption: Myth against Systems,
Particularity against Universalism  156
3.8. The Sickness unto Death (1849): Anxiety’s
Ultimate Dialectic  160
3.9. Wanting to Be Someone Else, Wanting to Be
Oneself: The Dialectic of Affective Intensification  162
3.10. Myths and the Knowledge of Anxiety  166
3.11. Coram Deo (in the Presence of God): From
Anxiety to Despair in Protestantism  169
3.12. Conclusion: On Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Affects  173
Excursus 2. The Universality of Emotions? Darwin’s The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)  175
E2.2. Darwin’s Context  177
E2.3. Monogenism versus Polygenism, Adaptation
versus Struggle  180
E2.4. The Expression of the Emotions: Darwin’s
Four Difficulties  184
E2.4.1. Lamarckian Adaptation as Contrasted
with the Survival of the Fittest  185
E2.4.2. Expression as Communication versus
Expression as the Spontaneous Externalization
of Mental States (Including Anxiety)  189
E2.4.3. Science Understood as Hypothesis and
Observation versus Science as Ideology  192
E2.4.4. True Instincts and Habit-Created Instincts  195
E2.5. Conclusion  198
4. Schopenhauer, “Life,” and the Affects of the Noumenal  201
4.1. Introduction  201
4.1.1. Life, the Heart of Schopenhauer’s Thought  201
4.1.2. Taxonomy and “Plastic Forces”  203
4.1.3. Science and Philosophy on “Life”: Systems and Foundations  204
4.2. German Natural Science and the Pantheism
Controversy  208
x Contents
4.3. Monism and Dual-Substance Philosophies: The

Debate over Spinoza  212
4.4. Schelling, the Philosophy of Nature, and the
Metaphysics of Self-Organizing Systems  217
4.5. Schopenhauer’s Metaphysical (Un)ground of Life  222
4.6. Parricides and Paternities, Acknowledged and Unacknowledged  228
4.7. Schopenhauer, Life, and the Affects of the Noumenal  235
4.8. Conclusion  240
5. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic
of Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation  243
5.2. The Body Philosophizes  245
5.3. Ressentiment as Anxiety  250
5.4. Nietzsche’s Dialectic of Anxiety: After the
Death of God, the Birth of Evil  253
5.5. Transvaluations: How Many, Ultimately?  255
5.6. The Logic of the Hōs mē (ὡς μὴ), or
“As If Not”: Free from Anxiety?  257
5.7. The “Weight” of the Cross: Hegel and
Nietzsche on the Death of God  261
5.8. The Work of Mourning and the Restructuring
of Time as Moment  266
5.9. Conclusion: Toward the “Highest Feeling”
as a Response to Mourning  272
6. Freud and the Three Anxieties  275
6.1.1. The Origin and Persistence of Neurology  275
6.1.2. In the Steps of Charcot: Encounters between
Neurology and Psychology  277
6.2. Anxiety Neurosis and the Mind-Body Problem  281
6.3. The Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)
and the Neurological Ground of Anxiety  286
6.4. From Neurology to a Psychoanalytic Conception
of the Unconscious  290
6.5. Anxiety in the Metapsychology  298
6.5.1. The Innovations in the Ego and Its Drives  298
6.5.2. The Circle of Anxiety  300
6.5.3. The “Economic Problem of Masochism”
and the Fusion-Defusion of the Drives  306
6.6. Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety (1926): Toward
a New Foundation in the Trauma of Birth  308
6.6.1. Confronting Otto Rank’s Fallacies  311
6.6.2. Anxiety between Danger-Object and Symptoms  314
Contents xi
6.7. Conclusion: Birth Trauma and the Ego as

“Quasi-Transcendental” Postulates  317
Excursus 3. Husserl: The Problem of Affective Forces, Einfühlung,
and a Phenomenological Unconscious  319
E3.2. From Static to Genetic Phenomenology  321
E3.3. Activity and Passivity in the Embodied
Ego and “Its” Psyche  328
E3.4. The “Energy” of Psychic Affects and the
“Reservoir” of Past Time  330
E3.5. The Problem of the Feeling of Affective Forces
and Drives: Sensation and Sensibility  333
E3.6. The “Affection” of Angst  335
7. Heidegger I: Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental
Ontology and the Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard  339
7.2. Heidegger’s Critique of Affects, Time-Consciousness,
and Passive Synthesis in Husserl  342
7.3. Care as the (Non)essence of Dasein  346
7.4. Heidegger’s Debt to Kierkegaard  349
7.5. Three-Part Time, Three-Part Being in Heidegger  354
7.6. Angst: Anxiety or Anguish?  357
8. Heidegger II: Angst, the Temporalization of Dasein,
and the Temporality of “Life”  361
8.1. Introductory Remarks: Freedom and Willing in
Nietzsche and Heidegger  361
8.2. Can Dasein Be in Its World and Yet Be Alive?  367
8.3. The Organ and the Tool: Capacity and Behavior versus
Utility and General Function  369
8.4. Eigentlichkeit versus Eigentümlichkeit: The Case of
Animal “Ipseity”  375
8.5. Benommenheit in Uncanniness and In-an-Environment  377
8.6. Beings “and Nothing Besides”: The Origin of
Negation in Anxiety  379
8.7. Heidegger Strengthens His Position on Animal
Being (1936)  384
8.8. “The Sojourn of the Gods”  390
9. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective Origins  397
xii Contents
9.2. A New Multitude of Attunements to Being in

On Escape (De l’évasion, 1935)  399
9.3. Redemption through the Other Person (1947)  404
9.4. Levinas’s New Conception of the Subject: The
Hypostasis (1947)  407
9.5. Anxiety as “Pre-synthetic” and Precognitive: Levinas
versus Husserl  409
9.6. Anxiety and the Phenomenological Unconscious  416
9.7. Anxiety, Time, and “Life”: Levinas Reads Bergson
against Heidegger  422
9.8. “Pre-originary Susceptiveness”; or, The Saying
(Dire) (1974)  426
9.9. Conclusion: On Anxiety, Trauma, and Melancholia  429
Conclusion  438
C.1. Kant’s Transcendental Revolution and the Fate of
Emotions in German Philosophy  441
C.2. From Kant to Hegel Reading Philippe Pinel  443
C.3. Anxiety, Freedom, and Evil: Schelling and
Groundless Life  446
C.4. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair
in Kierkegaard  448
C.5. The Universality of Emotions: Darwin’s The
Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872)  451
C.6. Nietzsche and the Intensification of the Dialectic of
Anxiety: Mourning and Transvaluation  453
C.7. Freud and the Three Anxieties  455
C.8. Husserl and the Problem of Affective Forces,
Einfühlung, and a Phenomenological Unconscious  459
C.9. Angst in Heidegger’s Fundamental Ontology: The
Debts to Husserl and Kierkegaard  465
C.10. Emmanuel Levinas and the Anxiety of Intersubjective
Origins  469
Epilogue: Social Implications of the “Age of Anxiety”  472
Bibliography  479
Name Index  497
Subject Index  505
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt thanks to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,

which provided me a year of research (2002) to begin work on this book. Three
subsequent summer fellowships ensured its completion, and special thanks are
due to Drew Gilpin Faust, then Dean of the Institute; also to Meredith Quinn,
Associate Dean for Strategy and Academic Programs, and Sharon Bromberg-
Lim, Associate Director of the Fellowship Program. Thanks also to Sarah
Hammerschlag and to Ryan Coyne of the University of Chicago, Martin Marty
Center, at the Divinity School, for a semester’s research seminar (2016). The
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada generously funded
my research, seminars, travel, and assistants first in 2005 and again in 2012 for
three-year periods. Without this invaluable aid of time and resources, the book
would not exist.
The people who have helped me, with suggestions, corrections, and questions,
are numerous. At the Université de Montréal, I thank my colleagues Christian
Leduc for reading chapter 1, Augustin Dumont, for his help on German
Romanticism. In order of our time working together, I thank my invaluable
and talented assistants, Gabriel Malenfant, Philippe Farah, Laurent Vachon
Roy, Thierry Gendron Dugré, Christiane Bailey, Étienne Pelletier, Marc-James
Tacheji, Justine Massicotte, Marc Zilbert, Stéphanie Bourbeau, Sepehr Razavi,
and the accomplished David Marie Bertet. At Harvard, the invaluable aid of
Trevor Levin must be mentioned; as also the research contributions of Emily
Brother, Emmaline Cook, the work of Frances Choi, Ella Duncan, Yashaar
Hafizka, and the remarkable Aafreen Azmi. Greg Bates, independent editor,
vastly improved the book’s prospectus and gave suggestions on style throughout.
Friends and more distant colleagues read parts of the book or discussed it
with me. These include Robert Gibbs (University of Toronto), Martin Shuster
(Towson University), Nicholas Smith and Marcia Sá Cavalcante Schuback
(Södertörn Hogskola, Stockholm), Philippe van Haute (Radboud University),
Cary Federman (Montclair State University), Anthony Calcagno (University
of Western Canada, King’s College University), Stella Gaon (Saint Mary’s
University).
Two seminars with François Duchesneau (Université de Montréal) vastly
expanded my understanding of post-Cartesian physiology in light of German
philosophy.
xiv Acknowledgments
Claude Piché (Université de Montréal) read the first chapter and advised me
patiently on Kant’s philosophy. Leonard Lawlor read the book, posed impor-
tant questions, and provided advice. Lewis Gordon read the manuscript and
made unforgettable critical comments, and inspired me to finish. Finally, Oona
Eisenstadt (Pomona College), Chia Tien Lee, Diane Bergeron (Université de
Montréal), Sandra Tilmon (University of Chicago), and Dr. Dominique Scarfone
have improved my life intellectually and spiritually.
Finally, special thanks to Richa Jobin and her editorial team at Oxford
(India) for assiduous work. Thanks as well to Hannah Doyle, OUP, who walked
me through the publishing process. And, heart-felt thanks to Lucy Randall,
Acquisitions Editor at Oxford, for supporting this project.
Abbreviations
AA Levinas, “Autre et autrui”

AC Nietzsche, The Anti-Christ
ACD Darwin, The Autobiography of Charles Darwin
ACS Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis
AEAE Levinas, Autrement qu’être ou au-delà de l’essence
AK Kant, Immanuel Kants Gesammelte Schriften
ANM Kant, “Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into
Philosophy”
AOK Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge
AP Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics”
APPV Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View
AUC Kierkegaard, Kierkegaard’s Attack upon “Christendom”
BGE Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
BT Heidegger, Being and Time
CC Levinas, Carnets de captivité et autres inédits
CCN Goetz et al., Charcot: Constructing Neurology
CI Tilliette, La christologie idéaliste
CJ Kant, Critique of Judgment
COA Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety
CP Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy
CPR Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
CPrR Kant, Critique of Practical Reason
CUP Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript
CV Dagognet, Le catalogue de la vie
DM Darwin, The Descent of Man
DP Tort, Darwin et la philosophie
DSS Kant, “Dreams of a Spirit-Seer”
EE Levinas, Existence and Existents
EEMA Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals
EHU Locke, An Essay on Human Understanding
ER Courtine, Extase de la raison
EV Franck, “L’être et le vivant”
FBM Sulloway, Freud: Biologist of the Mind
FCM Heidegger, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics
FCR Canguilhem, La formation du concept de réflexe aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles
FR Beiser, The Fate of Reason
FRPR Schopenhauer, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason
xvi List of Abbreviations
FT Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

GA Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe
GBT Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought
GDP Henry, Généalogie de la psychanalyse
GDT Levinas, God, Death, and Time
GM Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals
GOP Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis
GR Zoller, “German Realism”
GS Nietzsche, The Gay Science
GW Freud, Gesammelte Werke
HA Merleau-Ponty, “L’homme et l’adversité”
HCT Heidegger, The History of the Concept of Time
HFC Foucault, Histoire de la folie à l’âge classique
IE Nuzzo, Ideal Embodiment
INP Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy
IP Merleau-Ponty, Institution and Passivity
IPN Schelling, Ideas for a Philosophy of Nature
IRL Richir, introduction to Recherches sur la liberté humaine
ISA Freud, Inhibitions, Symptoms and Anxiety
KAIM Waxman, Kant’s Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind
KCA Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic
KCPR Adorno, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
KEC Hampson, Kierkegaard: Exposition and Critique
KPA Piché, “Kant and the Problem of Affection: Vahinger’s Trilemma”
KSA Nietzsche, Kritische Studienausgabe
KTO Findlay, Kant and the Transcendental Object
KZS Schopenhauer, “. . . die Kunst zu sehn”
LI Husserl, Logical Investigations
LMA Rivelaygue, Leçons de métaphysique allemande
LPA Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis
MDI Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des Deutschen Idealismus (Schelling)
MFL Heidegger, The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic
MM Gould, The Mismeasure of Man
N Heidegger, Nietzsche
NIS Husserl, Notes sur l’intersubjectivité
NM Haar, Nietzsche and Metaphysics
NOD Franck, Nietzsche et l’ombre de Dieu
NP Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy
NSG Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God
NVC Klossowski, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle
OBBE Levinas, Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence
OE Levinas, On Escape
OOS Darwin, On the Origin of Species
OP Kant, Opus Postumum
List of Abbreviations xvii
OT Foucault, The Order of Things

OWN Schopenhauer, On the Will in Nature
PCIT Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time
PINH Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom
PJ Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals
PME Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (Encyclopedia)
PR Schelling, Philosophy of Revelation
PS Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit
PZ Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique
QCT Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology”
R Kierkegaard, Repetition
RC Tort, La raison classificatoire
SCK Philonenko, Schopenhauer: Critique de Kant
SD Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death
SE Freud, Standard Edition
SEE Quignard, Le sexe et l’effroi
SET Gould, The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
SF Swain and Gauchet, Le sujet de la folie
SMEP Strasser, The Soul in Metaphysical and Empirical Psychology
SOH Breuer and Freud, Studies on Hysteria
SP Romano, “Signification et phénomène”
SR Scheler, Ressentiment
SS Zöller, “Schopenhauer on the Self ”
SSC Brunschvicg, Spinoza et ses contemporains
ST Quignard, Sex and Terror
STE Heidegger, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
SW Schelling, Sämtliche Werke
SWS Mann, Shall We Sin?
TA Levinas, Le temps et l’autre
TAb Krell, The Tragic Absolute
TFM Broch, Theorie de la folie des masses
TI Levinas, Totality and Infinity
TMP Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale
TN Ricoeur, Time and Narrative
TO Levinas, Time and the Other
TR Agamben, The Time That Remains
TS Vaysse, Totalité et subjectivité
TSZ Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra
TV Reemtsma, Trust and Violence
VCV Zac, “Vie, conatus, vertu”
WIM Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?”
WM Blumenberg, Work on Myth
WP Nietzsche, Will to Power
WWR Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation
Introduction
Anxiety: A Philosophical History
I.1. An “Age of Anxiety” and the “Age” of Anxiety
Four figures sit alone in a New York bar, listening to radio reports of the war.
Minimally sketched, they are more like archetypes, though we only slowly learn
of what. Each speaks as if into the darkness of the pub. As the news on the radio
grows darker, the four are brought closer together and their laments weave
into each other’s, while they sink into inebriation. Rosetta, a successful sales
representative, muses:
Lies and lethargies police the world

In its periods of peace. What pain taught
Is soon forgotten; we celebrate
What ought to happen as if it were done,
Are blinded by our boasts. Then back they come,
The fears we fear. We fall asleep
Only to meet the idiot children of
Our revels and wrongs; farouche they appear,
Reluctant look-behinds, loitering through
The mooing gate, menacing or smiling,
Nocturnal trivia, torts and dramas,
Wrecks, arrivals, rose-bushes, armies,
Leopards and laughs, alarming growths of
Moulds and monsters on memories stuffed
With dead men’s doodles, dossiers written
In lost lingos, too long an account
To take out in trade, no time either,
Since we wake up. We are warm, our active
Universe is young; yet we shiver.1
1 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue, ed. Alan Jacobs (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2011), 17.
Anxiety. Bettina Bergo, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197539712.001.0001
2 Introduction
In homage to Yeats, William H. Auden composed his eclogue, The Age of

Anxiety,2 during the Second World War. Seven decades later, this age shows no
signs of abating, and its implications are as social as they are psychological. Yet
beyond the search for anxiolytics of all varieties, we rarely ask whether anxiety
has some value—indeed, whether there is something to be learned from anxiety
that might even make it endurable.
As if heeding Auden’s warning about “pain taught” and “soon forgotten” and
“the idiot children of /Our revels and wrongs,” Jan Philipp Reemtsma, of the
Hamburg Institute for Social Research, published his Trust and Violence: Essay
on a Modern Relationship in 2008.3 Reemtsma argued there that anxiety together
with irony might open a perspective from which we could confront our contem-
porary sociopolitical situation, with irony providing us critical distance on our-
selves. But what about Auden’s “idiot children” of the “fears we fear”? What is the
point, in other words, of anxiety in Reemtsma’s ethical dyad? What does it have
to teach us outside of its usual domains of psychology and pharmacology (or
poetry)?
Reemtsma argued that anxiety encapsulates our awareness. But of what?
Anxiety has no object, no purpose: “our active /Universe is young; yet we shiver.”
It is a sensation—of trembling—and it turns into an emotion when it gains, or
seizes on, an object. I call anxiety an “affect” because both sensation and emo-
tion “affect us”; put simply, affects turn our attention toward them, like Auden’s
“reluctant look-behinds.” Accordingly, for Reemtsma, anxiety directs us to the
contingency of our condition and sustains our apprehensions about repeating
the errors of the past. His suggestion, to combine the moods of irony and anx-
iety, comes as a thin prescription for living today, like one last minima moralitas.
Yet if we understand the perspective that irony affords us, do we grasp anxiety in
the depth of its historical and philosophical unfolding? For example, do we ap-
preciate anxiety’s duality—sometimes stimulating and enlivening, at other times
depleting and depressing? Indeed, when we confront what is possible, or likely,
for tomorrow’s society, our anxiety either leads us to cast about for action and
solutions or it submerges us in objectless paralysis. How, then, to resist falling
into these traps? First, I would say we have to abide with anxiety; then, too, at-
tempt to think it, to think about it. That is the purpose of this book.
Auden’s tragic diagnosis of both the war and its denouement echoes in
Trust and Violence’s maxim of vigilant anxiety, ever conscious of the danger of
replaying recent history. It is this awareness that sustains our contemporary
2 W. H. Auden, The Age of Anxiety: A Baroque Eclogue (New York: Harper and Row, 1948; first
British edition, 1947).

3 Jan Philipp Reemtsma, Trust and Violence: Essay on a Modern Relationship, trans. Dominic
Bonfiglio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Hereafter TV.

Introduction 3
aversion to violence. But this attitude is fragile; it can, and will, unravel. Thus
Reemtsma adds:
The coping strategies of the past, those unconscious attempts to preserve mo-
dernity by brightening its image, have failed, and the coping strategies of the
present are all too transparent as a result. We know the risks and can’t act as
if we don’t, for trust and irony do not mix. Irony is a means of creating dis-
tance from self and as such an excellent strategy for overcoming angst. But
while there is much to commend overcoming angst for the individual, there
is . . . little to commend it for modern society as a whole. The preservation of
modernity can take place only in angst, in the fraught awareness that the violent
excesses of the past can recur and that our future is uncertain. Yet a society with
nothing but angst would perish in a sea of despondency, over-analysis, and ni-
hilism. (TV 308)
To stave off sheer despondency, the last voice in Auden’s poem, named Malin,
entreats that Christological “Always-Opposite4 which is the whole subject /Of
our not-knowing, yet from no necessity /Condescended to exist and to suffer
death” (108). Reemtsma speaks, in a more secular vein, of the protection of “self-
assurance” (308). Self-assurance begins with detachment, and so needs irony.
Together, irony and angst might even transform our ways of knowing. And
Reemtsma adds, tentatively, “With luck, [knowledge] resurfaces as sensitivity”
(309). I hope, in this study, to turn to knowledge—taking the mood of angst as
my object, and to show, if possible, how pondering the meaning and roles of anx-
iety in philosophy and psychology can infuse this objectless trembling with un-
derstanding, so that angst may inflect knowledge into Reemtsma’s “sensitivity.”
What then do we know of anxiety and its long history? A search for the origins
of anxiety, even if we do not consult the burgeoning, popular psychological liter-
ature in which it appears as a medicatable disorder, takes us across eras, figures,
and disciplines. We find anxiety discussed as early as Plato’s Symposium, where
Aristophanes recounts the myth of the Androgyn, condemned to an ongoing
state of agitation, or erōs, in quest of its lost complement. The Roman Stoics, on
the other hand, opposed angustia to augustia, that greatness of heart cherished
in statesmen and philosophers. Seneca held angustia close to melancholy, ven-
turing, “No animal is more fretful (morosius) than man.”5 Seneca the Younger
wrote to Lucilius, of the internal rot of first-century Roman society, “All . . . men
4 “Always-Opposite” denoting the eternally opposite of humans, divinity, and here the God who
incarnates in his “son.”

5 See Pascal Quignard, Le sexe et l’effroi (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), 242. In English, Sex and Terror,
trans. Chris Turner (New York: Seagull Books, 2011), 127. Hereafter SEE and ST, respectively.
4 Introduction
are led astray by delights that are deceptive and short-lived . . . like drunken-
ness . . . which pays for a single hour of hilarious madness by a sickness (tædio)
of many days, or like applause and the popularity of enthusiastic approval which
are gained, and atoned for, at the cost of great mental anxiety’ ” (SEE 243; ST
127; trans. slightly modified). As we know, the aftermath—perhaps paralleled
by Auden’s Malin and his entreaty of the Always-Opposite—was the expansion
of early Christianity and the engulfment of Stoicism, which had promised no
Messiah.
I do not propose to go back to the Romans and the stifling tædium vitæ that
crept into the first centuries of the Common Era. Rather, I trace the evolution of
anxiety in select nineteenth-and twentieth-century thought. I hope my study
will appeal not only to philosophers and historians but also to cultural theorists.
It is, nevertheless, a study in the history of philosophy and proceeds by consid-
ering significant philosophers—sometimes responding to each other—and their
discussions of anxiety as a mode of sensibility and as an emotion. This dualism,
sensibility-emotion, is very important and sets anxiety as if between “body and
mind,” corporeity and mentality.
Like Reemtsma, I think we have yet to escape the “age of anxiety”—the explo-
sion of the pharmacopeia offering itself as remedy suggests as much.6 It might
be somewhat reassuring, then, to know that discussion of anxiety and angst has
carried on emphatically for the past two centuries at least. My study grounds our
understanding of anxiety’s history and shows its significance in disciplines of the
mind, notably in the following European philosophers and psychologists: Kant,
Hegel, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Freud, Husserl,
Heidegger, and Levinas. In the following pages of this introduction, I offer a sim-
plified narrative, following the historical strands of my argument that anxiety
is multidimensional and that an understanding of this may help us abide it ex-
istentially. Before we begin, a brief caveat lector: readers well versed in the his-
tory of philosophy should approach what follows as a road map, approximative
at best; the arguments are presented with more sophistication in the chapters
themselves.
6 The studies of anxiety, notably in youth, are numerous and lie beyond the scope of this book.
However, a remarkable inquiry into the social and political implications of an anxious citizenry was
done by Franz Neumann, one of the first of the Frankfurt school to analyze the political and eco-
nomic foundations of fascism. His essay, the last to appear before his untimely death in 1954, was
“Anxiety in Politics,” a thirty-page analysis of the impact and spread of anxiety in Western democ-
racies. See Franz Neumann, “Anxiety and Politics,” in The Rule of Law: Political Theory and the Legal
System in Modern Society (Dover, NH: Berg, 1986).
Introduction 5
I.2. The Debated Role of an Affect in Spirit and

Reason: From Kant to Kierkegaard
I begin by showing how Kant’s critical revolution unfolded thanks to a departure

from empiricist and rationalist traditions. His transcendental project addressed
shortcomings in both. In their place, Kant developed what he called a “rational”
psychology, excluding from his transcendental construction all passions and
emotions except Achtung, attention and respect.7 Following this decisive Kantian
innovation, I examine Hegel’s and Schelling’s responses to transcendental
idealism—notably to Kant and Fichte. My argument is as follows: while Kant
provided empirical psychology with a powerful impetus by insisting that tran-
scendental psychology should examine only the laws of the flow of time, or inner
sense, thereby eliminating affects and passions from the critical project, Hegel
carried psychology back into metaphysics in the form of French Revolutionary
psychiatry. Kant had shown in the first Critique that the soul was theoretically
indemonstrable; it was but an Idea, albeit crucial to practical reason. Yet Hegel’s
speculative reason, rather like a force in dynamic evolution, does not encounter
the Kantian limits imposed by the bounds of finite experience. Thus the soul can
reappear in his Philosophy of Mind—first as sentience, our ability to feel (PME
§403). Hegel’s careful reading of Philippe Pinel’s Traité médico-philosophique sur
l’aliénation mentale ou la manie (1801) provided him with empirical support for
his argument that reason survived and could grow even in the case of its apparent
absence or failure. In his Berlin lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Hegel wrote:
The main point in derangement is the contradiction which a feeling with a fixed
corporeal embodiment sets up against the whole mass of adjustments forming
the concrete consciousness. The mind [der Geist], which is in a condition of
mere being, and where such being is not rendered fluid in its consciousness,
is diseased. The contents which are set free in this reversion to mere nature are
the self-seeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and the rest of the
passions. . . . It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper hand in insanity
[Verrucktheit], but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more intel-
ligent part, which is there also. . . . The right psychical treatment therefore keeps
in view the truth that insanity is not an abstract loss of reason [Vernunft] . . . but
only derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason.8
7 Apart from respect, admiration, and a certain shame, all of which point, in their ways, toward the
moral vocation of “pure practical” reason.

8 G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind (Part Three of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences
[1830]), trans. William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), §408, 124; emphasis added.
Hereafter PME.
6 Introduction
But how could Hegel be sure that what Pinel referred to as intermittent ma-
nias preserved reason, albeit tangled up in itself? Hegel was convinced by Pinel’s
“moral treatment,” which consisted in spending time with the interned, now
freed of their shackles (according to Revolutionary myth). Pinel urged that the
healer of souls “approach gently all the demands of their self-esteem” and make
no “opposition . . . to anything . . . proposed that [was judged] doubtful or im-
probable, but always a tacit referral to a later examination.”9 Pinel followed this
method, wrote accounts of his practice, and partly inspired Hegel to revisit the
passions, not only reintegrating them into the project of an evolving reason but
rendering them indispensable to it.10 Anxiety was both emotion and passion. For
Pinel and Hegel after him, it was a clear sign of the contradiction between reason
and derangement. By resorting to the psychiatry emerging from the French
Revolution, Hegel restored to idealism the consideration of affects, which Kant
had sequestered to behavioral anthropology.
Rethinking Fichte’s identity philosophy in 1809 through his Romantic turn
toward a universal organicism, Schelling situated anxiety, this time as Sehnsucht,
or anxious longing, at the very origin of the universe, or God, out of itself.11
Schelling’s two originary principles, dependent on each other yet with no dialec-
tical interaction, gave rise to matter and form. As evolved matter and spirit, they
constituted the balance manifest in animals, even as their potential imbalance
in humans constituted our principal peril, the possibility of evil. With Schelling,
idealism began to think a living universe—animating Hegel’s formal Absolute.
The themes of theodicy, the separation of divine principles, and their ultimate
reconciliation in love ran through all Schelling’s subsequent investigations, one
way or another.
When the Prussian minister of culture brought the elderly Schelling to Berlin
in 1841 to quell the surge of student enthusiasm for Hegel, Schelling taught his
philosophy of revelation. In 1842, a twenty-eight-year-old Søren Kierkegaard
attended Schelling’s lectures for four months, from early November until
February 3. At first, Kierkegaard was delighted when Schelling uttered the
word “actuality.” Finally, idealism—at least, Schelling’s Kabbalistically inflected
variety—had come to terms with actual existence! In a letter, Kierkegaard
rejoiced, “I am so happy to have heard Schelling’s second lecture. . . . I have long
groaned . . . in travail. Then he spoke the word ‘actuality,’ about the relation of
9 Philippe Pinel, Traité médico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale, 2nd ed. (1809; Paris: Les
Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005), 80. Hereafter TMP.

10 PME. For Pinel’s work, see his Traité medico-philosophique sur l’aliénation mentale (from the
considerably modified second edition, published in 1809).

11 F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Inquiries into the Nature of Human Freedom, trans. James
Gutmann (1936; La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1986). In German, see Schellings Werke, vol. 3
(Leipzig: Fritz Eckardt, 1907), 429–574.
Introduction 7
philosophy to actuality, and the unborn babe of thought within me leapt for
joy. . . . I remember almost every word he said from that moment on.”12 But
Kierkegaard was ultimately disappointed by Schelling and devoted his time
in Berlin to the cloistered redaction of his Either/Or. Following his return to
Denmark, he published The Concept of Anxiety—attaching an ironic title to his
serious existential study of the affect. This was now 1844, one year after his Fear
and Trembling, and the same year that the Philosophical Fragments.13
From the first four chapters (Kant, Hegel and Pinel, Schelling, Kierkegaard)
we learn that anxiety (taken in itself or in tandem with desire, as in Schelling and
Kierkegaard) proves to be a sign—of livingness or living possibility. In Schelling,
it is what could only be called an “affect,” silently at work affecting the Absolute
and propelling the emergence of the One, of intelligibility, and ultimately of all
animal life.14 In Kierkegaard, angest is the “psychological” mood that reflects the
“ability to do” indicative of our freedom. Most important is that, for the Danish
philosopher, anxiety precedes freedom when understood as an uncaused act. But
anxiety is no cause; it is our condition, the mark of the past and of the sins of
the fathers. For Kierkegaard, anxiety itself evolved—individually and culturally.
In something like a sketch of the spiritual evolution of the species, Kierkegaard
argued that the more our self-awareness (our “spirit”) intensifies the conscious-
ness that we are embodied life and psychic reflection, the more we feel anxiety
about what is possible. As the root of an engagement with being, as energy, anx-
iety thus offers us something like vitality and determination. Yet as tremulous
enthusiasm lacking a clear object, this same affect exhausts us. One way or an-
other, anxiety precedes and accompanies our free leap, into sin or into openness.
In this way, Kierkegaard psychologized Schelling’s still abstract conception of the
two principles at the root of good and evil. As we will see when Schopenhauer
proposes his correction of the Kantian system, angst is our lived experience of
the action of the life-will within us and all living beings. That is the end of one
thread of our story, at least as it began at the end of the eighteenth century.
12 Joakin Garff, Søren Kierkegaard: A Biography, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 2005), 209–210.

13 Kierkegaard attended Schelling’s Berlin lectures starting in November and running through
February 3, 1842, after which time the notes break off, as Kierkegaard grew weary of Schelling’s ide-
alism. In the second lecture, however, Kierkegaard heard Schelling utilize a concept that he would
later use to his own, distinct ends: “actuality.” See Garff, Søren Kierkegaard, 209–210. And see Søren
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic
Issue of Hereditary Sin, trans. Reidar Thomte (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980).
14 I use the term “affect” to regroup sensations, understood as the elements of the world of things
that I perceive, including my body, all of which could be considered “objective” contents of con-
sciousness, and emotions, understood as elements or determinations of myself that are immediately
experienced by me, and which include pleasure and displeasure.
8 Introduction
I.3. Will and Representation: Anxiety Erupts

in Post-Kantian Philosophy
At this point the narrative trunk ramifies into several branches. We might expect
so; Kant’s division of reason into pure theoretical and pure practical, as he argued
in the preface to the B edition of the first Critique, held that the idea—though
not the knowledge—of freedom was compatible with theoretical knowledge.
In other words, in practice we discover our freedom in choosing, as if freely, to
follow the pure moral law. The young Schopenhauer, who studied the idealists
assiduously from 1810 to 1812, charged that Kant’s approach to reason had pro-
duced extravagant interpretations: from Fichte’s absolute I to Schelling’s identity
in difference to the origins of God from his own dark ground or Basis, as found
in the later Schelling and Boehme. Schopenhauer wrote in his 1813 dissertation
that the very possibility that practical reason might justify beliefs like freedom,
the existence of God, and the soul had “led crazy philosophers headed by Jacobi
to that reason which directly comprehends the ‘supersensible’ and to that absurd
statement that reason . . . recognizes directly and intuitively the ultimate grounds
of all things and all existence.”15
As I discuss in the fourth chapter, this represented not one but several
misunderstandings of Kant. But I quote the young Schopenhauer because late
idealism, notably in Schelling, unfolded into a new sort of Spinoza-inspired pan-
theism that some have called Romantic and others organic. Justifying Jacobi’s
fears that such doctrines led to atheism, Schopenhauer, in his major work The
World as Will and Representation, frankly dispensed with God in his “correction”
of these late idealist deviations. As we will see, insofar as he spoke of a noumenal
will as generative hypothesis, he opened philosophy to the importance of its ma-
terial manifestations and thus to the body.
Why the body in the wake of Kant’s transcendental philosophy, which
recurred to it so sparingly (e.g., “incongruent counterparts”)?16 Schopenhauer
reminded his readers that Kant’s critical project had clearly demonstrated that
finite beings only “know” representations, Vorstellungen. These “constructions”
make experience possible thanks to the spontaneous schematization of intuition
and our innate “categories” of the understanding.
15 David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2010), 219.
16 In his pre-critical period, Kant discussed what he called “incongruent counterparts” including
the right and left hand, in appearance largely identical but never superposable. See “Concerning the
Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space” (1768). Discussion extends into his
essay “What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking” (1786). Finally, in his approach to space,
precritically defined as absolute (1768), then as the form of outer intuition (1781), Kant emphasized
the role played by the orientation of objects relative to the body.
Introduction 9
But philosophies of representation entail basic contradictions, one of which

is this: even if the condition underlying the synthesis of experience—that is, the
thing-in-itself—had some ontological status (though we could never “know” it),
that so-called thing-in-itself remains a representation. An undetermined, per-
haps ungraspable representation, but a representation all the same. The world
thus is all Vorstellung, but for Schopenhauer this world is indeed as it gives itself.
Any search, then, for a ground of being proves a contradiction in terms because
the “ground” itself could only be, in its turn, a representation.
I tarry with Schopenhauer because, beyond his “correction” of Kant and
polemics with Fichte and Schelling, Schopenhauer’s thought influenced more
than just his famous inheritors Nietzsche and Wagner: it provided a powerful
impetus to post-metaphysical thinking. One of Schopenhauer’s biographers,
Rüdiger Safranski, expresses this incitement as three “affronts,” three wounds
to our self-love that we easily recognize today: the first is “cosmological . . . our
world is one of countless spheres in infinite space, with a ‘mouldy film of living
and knowing beings’ existing on it. Second, the biological affront: man is an
animal whose intelligence must compensate for a lack of instincts and for in-
adequate adaptation to the living world. Third, the psychological affront: our
conscious ego is not master in its own house.”17 This was a “death of God” philos-
ophy that required no “madman” to announce that event to his city.
The world for Schopenhauer is one of representation, then. But we should
take care to distinguish between representations of objects and representations
of subjects. As Berkeley had held, every object presupposes a subject (cog-
nizing it). Of course, since Descartes’s cogito (qua) cogitatum, the subject itself
remained the enigma. The first Critique’s paralogisms on the soul had shown that
we know ourselves experientially as representations, which Schopenhauer ac-
cepted. Indeed, in Kant’s paralogism of personality, we appear to ourselves as dis-
crete snapshots, like the balls of Newton’s cradle, each one striking the next and
transmitting all its force and velocity to the subsequent ball. Why the snapshots
and cradle balls? Because time was the form of inner intuition, not some reality
outside of representations into which they might all “fit.” There was thus no
“objective” unity to the subject. And the ideality of space and time in Kant led
Schopenhauer to a disquieting conclusion. As the mere forms of outer and inner
intuition, space and time—not to mention the categories—strike all phenomena
with a real and a moral (meaning “practical”) “nonexistence, a moral . . . nul-
lity.”18 The Kantian phenomenon, Kant’s Erscheinung, thus came down to mere
17 Rüdiger Safranski, Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, trans. Ewald Osers
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 345.

18 Alexis Philonenko, Schopenhauer: Critique de Kant (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1988), 296.
Hereafter SCK.
10 Introduction
Schein, or appearance, for Schopenhauer. With his commitment to probity,

Schopenhauer forged what Alexis Philonenko, the French historian of idealism,
called “the founding moment of the transcendental category of tragedy: . . . there
is no meaning . . . to living, and death is what it is, a nothing” (SCK 296).
Some commentators see in Schopenhauer—not Fichte and not Schelling—the
culmination of the first wave of spät-Kantianismus, before the rebirth of Kant’s
thought with Cohen and Natorp. Yet Schopenhauer ventured at this point a
“positive” step that extracted him from the representations dilemma. A subject
not only has knowledge of itself as an object, he argued, but also has an imme-
diate awareness of itself—as feeling. It “experiences” itself directly without or
even prior to the synthesis of feeling into “experience.” In that respect, the sub-
ject affects itself out of time, understood as the form of inner intuition applied
to representations. It is quite legitimate to inquire what “it” is we are feeling as
we “self-affect.” And Schopenhauer’s response was that we feel our living bodies
immediately, much as any living being does: as sensation, as striving, trembling,
and with this, pleasure and pain (§20). Immediate self-affection, then, is a fact
of being alive. Indeed, following the distinction of knowledge into objective, as
representations, and subjective, as self-affection and “willing,” we can say that
when we think of being alive in terms of motives and causes, we have already
objectified it thanks to the activities we undertake. However, in our imme-
diate existence, we experience being alive as activity-in-passivity (not unlike
Schelling’s God giving birth to itself). The objectified motives and acts express
what the idealist tradition called our “wills,” and the subjective “self-affection”
corresponds to the sheer presence in us of livingness itself, like a groundless
thrust. As Michel Henry, whose debt to Schopenhauer was considerable, put it:
[Schopenhauer’s] concept of life thus divides: to the first determination[,]‌ac-

cording to which life resides in the will-to-live (le vouloir vivre) and proposes
itself as . . . desire without end[,] is now added the essential determination . . . in
conformity with which life now denotes the mode of this will’s givenness to it-
self, a mode of givenness in which the will feels itself immediately, and which
makes it . . . not a simple [or psychological] will, but a living will.19
Schopenhauer’s will—closer to Spinoza’s conatus essendi than to the Kantian will

that discovers its freedom by performing its duty according to the moral law—
is the nameless immanence of life in us. Through it, bodies take shape as the
objectifications of life in its many modes. And Schopenhauer added: “We can
turn the expression of this truth in different ways, and say: My body and my will
19 Michel Henry, The Genealogy of Psychoanalysis, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 1993), 167; emphasis added.

Introduction 11
are one; or, What as representation of perception I call my body, I call my will
in so far as I am conscious of it in an entirely different way comparable with no
other; or, My body is the objectivity of my will; or, Apart from the fact that my
body is my representation, it is still my will, and so on” (WWR 1:102–103).
In light of this, it would be “theoretical egoism” (WWR 1:171) to suppose that
only our individual bodies have immediate self-affection, and not similarly so
those of any living being. In contemporary parlance, what a body becomes—a
kind of symphony of eyes, mouth, limbs, sex, hands, teeth—is the progressive
objectification and coordination of functions. There is not first an eye, and then
a function that conveniently moves into it. There is a living world with beings of
various forms, evolving and differentiating, giving rise to the need to see or per-
ceive that environment.
With this astute move, Schopenhauer argued that the world was
representation—and will. Indeed, he resolved the conundrums he (and others)
pinpointed about representation with the activity of will in its self-unfolding
and self-differentiation. Strikingly, Schopenhauer moved past Kantianism by
reducing his functions of the mind to a single category, causality or “sufficient
reason,” and lodging it in perception, that is, in intuition—a completely sepa-
rate faculty for Kant. Moreover, we feel Schopenhauer’s groundless principle, the
will, even before it becomes a reflective “experience.” The will appears as a rest-
less striving and a troubling emotion: close, respectively, to anxiety and angst.
Anxiety as sensation expresses life’s striving in us. However, as the passion of
angst, it is a scourge that must be quelled by the intellect, as we will see in his
reading of the Arjuna myth.
Though his influence waned along with German metaphysics, Schopenhauer
is a hinge between Kant and Nietzsche. His will as driving force (WWR
1: §26) provided material for Nietzsche and twentieth-century vitalism and
Lebensphilosophie; his emphasis on perception, his situating causality within it,
arguably presaged phenomenology: think only of his exclamation, “We demand
the reduction of every logical proof to one of perception.”20 Most important for
my purposes here, however, is that the manifestation in us of his noumenal will
set anxiety at the heart of the first wave of post-Kantian philosophy.
20 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E. F. J. Payne, 2 vols.
(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1: §15. Hereafter WWR.

12 Introduction
I.4. Darwin’s Original Semiosis: An Argument for

the Universality of Emotion
For Schopenhauer, the action of the will epiphenomenalized at the level of sensi-
bility, which implied the universality of affect within humans, if not all animal life.
Nevertheless, the polygenists of the nineteenth century debated such questions
of universality of affects; specifically, whether all humans felt and expressed the
same emotions. On their account, cultures varied widely (and hierarchically),
and if emotions and intellect had a dialectical relationship with culture, then the
universality of emotion could hardly be sustained.21 Such a claim would have se-
rious consequences for philosophies unfolding at a transcendental level.
In 1844, when the second edition of World as Will and Representation came
out in its definitive two-volume set, Charles Darwin was immersed in the prep-
aration of a study on the emotions in man and domestic animals. The Expression
of the Emotions in Man and Animals was ultimately published in 1872, one year
after The Descent of Man and one year before Darwin published his corrections
to the sixth edition of Origin of Species.22 This timing, as we will see, justifies my
excursus on Darwin. Recall that the readers of Origin were many, and influential.
For example, Marx and Engels read Origin, not bothering with The Descent of
Man.23 Consequently, they missed The Descent’s paradoxical thesis that compli-
cated the mechanism of selection operating under the struggle for survival. In
that 1871 work, Darwin argued that natural selection operates at all levels in na-
ture, assuring a Malthusian “survival of the fittest” up to the point at which cultures
take on a specificity of their own.24 Patrick Tort, the French translator of Darwin
and author of numerous studies on him, has discussed the implications of this
twist on selection. One is that cultural evolution—unlike “natural” evolution—
proceeds thanks to the “progressive installment of an anti-selective functioning
in human [social] institutions” (RC 343). More specifically, “Against the dying
out and extinction of the weak, the ill, and the indigent are opposed individual
or social behaviors of protection, of assistance, help, and rehabilitation, which
are indifferent to the idea of a decline in the quality of the hereditary legacy, a
decline inevitably connected to the reproduction of weaker beings” (RC 343).
Indeed, Tort named this opposition Darwin’s “reversive effect,” taking evolu-
tion in a direction that favored social and even moral complication and opening
21 Recall the doctrines of the time concerning colonized people: neoteny held that the African
child, possessed of superior motor skills than the European infants, presumably developed up to
around age twelve, only to stop at puberty (neoteny).
22 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals, ed. Paul Eckman
(1872; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Hereafter EEMA.

23 Patrick Tort, Darwin et la philosophie: Religion, morale, matérialisme (Paris: Éditions Kimé,
2004), 47–48. Hereafter DP.

24 Patrick Tort, La raison classificatoire (Paris: Aubier, 1989), 343. Hereafter RC.
Introduction 13
benefits that were no longer biological so much as social and cultural (RC 344).
This broke decisively with Herbert Spencer and Edward Tylor, for whom social
life proceeds out of biological existence, but in a continuist way and without any
such “reversals.”
Among other things, publishing The Expression of the Emotions when Darwin
did, immediately following The Descent of Man, served a polemical purpose. In
addition to arguing against polygenists and in favor of the fundamental unity
of humanity, Emotions countered the arguments of social Darwinists against
the cultivation of sympathy (RC 343). Darwin turned his attention to five
emotions: pleasure, fear, suffering or grief, rage, and disgust. For my purposes,
fear and anxiety stand largely together. Darwin argued that the expression of
emotions constituted universal communication that likely preceded the devel-
opment of spoken language. Indeed, he pursued his semiotic thesis all the way
to domesticated dogs and cats, as well as to Old World monkeys. However, ex-
pression did not simply function as an iconic sign. Darwin quoted the work of
the anatomist Louis Pierre Gratiolet, On Physiognomy and the Movements of
Expression (1865): “It follows . . . that the senses, the imagination, and thought it-
self, however elevated, however abstract we suppose it to be, cannot be exercised
without awaking a correlative sentiment, and that this sentiment is directly,
sympathetically, symbolically, or metaphorically translated in all the spheres of
the external organs . . . as though each one of them had been directly affected”
(EEMA 13).25
Gratiolet’s claim was important because expression made possible the em-
pirical study of emotion and sensibility, thanks notably to the extraordinary
photographs of Duchesne de Boulogne and his hapless subject with thick facial
skin. If Gratiolet was right that mental activities, from imagination to logical
reflection, excited the nervous system and spontaneously elicited “correlative
sentiments,” then demonstrating the legibility of expression—whatever the cul-
ture of the expressing individual—would imply that we might recognize clearly
the “underlying” affects and emotions themselves. Expressions served not only
served as iconic signs, then, but also provided an entry point into human mental
activity itself. The universality of sensibility and emotion promised the investi-
gator a glimpse into the origins of embodied communication and, indeed, evi-
dence in favor of a common ground of the human mind—perhaps even the mind
of the domesticated animal.
25 Darwin cited the French original, which I here translate: “Il résulte . . . que les sens, l’imagination
et la pensée elle-même, si élevée, si abstraite qu’on la suppose, ne peuvent s’exercer sans éveiller un
sentiment corrélatif, et que ce sentiment se traduit directement, sympathiquement, symboliquement
ou métaphoriquement, dans toutes les sphères des organes extérieurs . . . comme si chacun d’eux avait
été directement affecté.”
14 Introduction
But that is not all. In The Descent of Man, even as he overturned the continuist
thesis of the social Darwinists, Darwin reminded his readers that “our great phi-
losopher, Herbert Spencer, has recently explained his views on the moral sense.”
Darwin cited Spencer’s words: “I believe that the experiences of utility, organ-
ized and consolidated through all past generations of the human race, have been
producing corresponding modifications, which, by continued transmission and
accumulation, have become in us certain faculties of moral intuition—certain
emotions responding to right and wrong conduct, which have no apparent basis in
the individual experiences of utility.”26
If we keep in mind his “reversive effect,” we see that Darwin is concerned with
expression mainly in light of “certain emotions responding to right and wrong
conduct.” In short, Darwin here focuses on the relationship between human
moralities, particularly human sympathy and altruism, and the specific affects
developed as utility functions, but not under the exclusive conditions of selection
of the fittest.27 If he could show that the expression of emotions translated the
broad or universal experience of the same five emotions and of states of mind,
then Darwin would provide a strong argument that, across cultures, such affects
and behaviors as altruism and protection of the weaker had carried natural se-
lection into social selection, as if turning the principle on itself for the sake of
the collective. He went so far as to assert in The Descent of Man that “there is not
the least inherent improbability . . . in virtuous tendencies being more or less
strongly inherited . . . [Moreover, e]xcept for the transmission of moral tenden-
cies, we cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect be-
tween the various races of mankind” (DM 493).
The qualifier “except for” is causalist, for monogenists: Darwin here ascribes
to transmission the principal differences between the “various races.” He had
encountered the enigma of transmission over his decades-long correspondence
with British Empire landholders and clergy in Asia, Malaysia, North America,
and parts of Africa. Hence his curious vacillation: if “virtuous tendencies” were
“more or less strongly inherited,” then what was the means of their transmis-
sion if not cultural practices? To answer this question he required Lamarck
and French adaptationism. Darwin, as we know, would not become “Darwin”
until Ronald Aylmer Fisher worked out his 1920s “population genetics” that
synthesized Mendel’s polygenic particulate theory of inheritance with selec-
tion over time. Habitual activity thus appeared to be transmissible over many
26 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection Related to Sex (New York: Penguin, 2004),
492; emphasis added. Hereafter DM.

27 A contemporary discussion of the problem of group selection toward moral sensibility and co-
operative acts is found in social psychologist Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind: Why Good People
Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), in the chapter titled “Why Are We
So Groupish?,” 189–220, esp. 192–195.
Introduction 15
generations.28 Indeed, because Darwin doubted that evolution made leaps, and
because habituation and transmission seemed to hold the key to the univer-
sality of expression and body language, there was a good deal of Lamarck in the
Darwin of 1871 and 1872. Although Lamarck’s transformisme had not yet be-
come an object of ridicule, Darwin nevertheless rallied to defend the relevance
of his views. He argued, for example, that “a man often wishes to make certain
gestures conspicuous or demonstrative, and will raise his extended arms with
widely opened fingers above his head, to show astonishment, or lift his shoulders
to his ears, to show that he cannot or will not do something. The tendency to
such movements will be strengthened or increased by their being thus voluntarily
and repeatedly performed; and the effects may be inherited” (EEMA 351; emphasis
added).
In both The Expression of Emotions and The Descent of Man, the conclusion
was unavoidable: “The far greater number of the movements of expression, and
all the more important ones, are, as we have seen, innate or inherited” (EEMA
349). Moreover, under conditions of social well-being, “Natural selection acts
only tentatively” (DM 507). We can see clearly that “sympathy” becomes part of
a social selection: “originally” selected, quite naturally, it was “then passed down”
(DM 504). Most importantly for my purposes, Darwin’s extensive arguments and
illustrations led him to conclude with the following remark: “I have endeavoured
to show in considerable detail that all the chief expressions exhibited by man are
the same throughout the world. This fact is interesting, as it affords a new argu-
ment in favour of the several races being descended from a single parent-stock,
which must have been almost completely human in structure, and to a large ex-
tent in mind, before the period at which the races diverged from each other”
(EEMA 355).
We know that Darwin’s study, which beyond arguing for secular monogen-
esis urged the extensive and universal transparency of human minds, met with
the fierce opposition of cultural anthropologists like Margaret Mead. And recent
28 J.-B.-P.-A. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, or exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire
naturelle des animaux (Brussels: Culture et Civilisation, 1970; reproduction of the 1809 work,
published by Dentu in Paris), vol. 1, chap. 7, p. 235. One of his many examples of adaptability con-
cerned animals whose eyes were vestigial in environments deprived of light (p. 242). Habit, in indi-
viduals, was the greatest impetus to change, as it gradually became a second nature (pp. 246ff). The
importance of need, as a guide to the development and change of habits, was itself a function of
affect: notably, of the state called the sentiment intérieur—a feeling of being alive, or self-affection
subject to variations in emotion—which directed the movement of the fluide nerveux influencing
the musculature. Lamarck’s theory was rooted in that of neural irritation discharging itself through
movement. However, in addition to the sentiment intérieur, also equated with sensibilité, he added “la
sensibilité morale,” which resulted from “emotions produced by thought within the internal senti-
ment” (Philosophie zoologique, vol. 2, chap. 4, “Du sentiment intérieur,” pp. 281–291 and passim). The
conception resembled the Cartesian discussion of the body in the Treatise on the Passions. The role
of affectivity and the body cannot be underestimated in the formation of need, and consequently, of
habit. No selective mechanism was necessary given the chiasm of environment and embodied affect.
16 Introduction
decades have seen the revival of this debate.29 My excursus on Darwin is nec-
essary to address the hypothesis of the widespread legibility of affects. Anxiety
has a unique position in this theory: it is immediately recognizable despite the
paucity of specific facial manifestations accompanying it. Whatever the ultimate
merits of this universalist argument, it here stands as an empirical pendant to
many philosophies, for example, serving as a background to Nietzsche’s reading
of Herbert Spencer and the German Darwinist Wilhelm Roux—author of The
Struggle of the Parts in the Organism in 1881.
I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-Resurrection: From Noumenal

Will to Wills as Force
The impact of Schopenhauer’s descriptions of the will on Nietzsche is well

known.30 Nietzsche broke Schopenhauer’s metaphysical will into competing
forces in bodies. In this, he followed Roux’s radical Darwinism that explained
the emergence of bodily organs through the immanent, evolutionary struggle
between cells and tissues.31 But struggle for Nietzsche opened onto a unique
“hermeneutics” of forces: the weaker force thus “interpreted” the stronger force
in its way and fell in with it, just as the stronger force “understood” the weaker
forces it incorporated.32 This is not so surprising when we consider the activity of
29 See Ruth Leys, The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017).
30 Whatever Nietzsche thought, when he composed “Schopenhauer as Educator,” about the
philosopher’s “noumenal will,” he praised Schopenhauer’s living example as offering an education in

philosophy superior to the works of university-thinkers of his time. Schopenhauer lived his “ethic” of
calming the urgings of the will through the intellect. That, indeed, best describes how one becomes
“what one is,” as Nietzsche would urge later on. See “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely
Meditations, ed. Daniel Breazeale, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997), 125–193, and xix.
31 Wilhelm Roux, Der Kampf der Theile im Organismus: Ein Beitrag zur vervollständigung der
mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre [The Struggle of the Parts in the Organism: A Contribution to

the Completion of the Mechanistic Theory of Purposiveness] (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1881). Roux
was a respected evolutionary physiologist in Nietzsche’s time. See Wolfgang Müller-Lauter, “Der
Organismus als innerer Kampf,” Nietzsche-Studien 7 (1978): 189ff. For Nietzsche’s discussion of
Roux’s ideas, see The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), §118,
pp. 175–176. Hereafter GS. In German, Nietzsche Kritische Studienausgabe, vol. 3, ed. Giorgio Colli
and Mazzino Montinari (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1980), 476. Also see in the Kritische Studienausgabe, vol.
9, Nietzsche’s notes from 1881 (KSA 9 [1881] 11 [284], p. 550. Hereafter KSA with volume, year, and
notebook numbers, followed by the fragment and page numbers.
32 From the perspective of his hermeneutics of force and force-levels, Nietzsche argued that in
bodies, force-differentials were qualitative affairs such that the “greater power corresponds to another
consciousness, to another feeling, desire, to another perspectival vantage; growth itself is an aspira-
tion to be more; the aspiration for an increase in quantum grows from a quale; in a purely quantita-
tive world everything would be dead, stiff, motionless.—The reduction of all qualities to quantities
is nonsense: what appears is that the one accompanies the other, an analogy” (KSA 12 [1885–1886]
2 [157], pp. 142–143). That is why he readily answered the question: “What do active and passive
mean?” answering, “Is it not to be master and mastered?” See the selection of some of Nietzsche’s
Introduction 17
antibodies “attacking” cancer cells. Its implications for what we call “reason” and
the “good” are far-reaching, however: the living body, as a constellation of hierar-
chies of forces, first grasps what is good for its own survival and growth. In 1885,
Nietzsche wrote in his notes, “Man is a plurality of forces situated in a hierarchy,
in such a way that some command, but those commanding must also create, for
the ones that obey, everything needed for their preservation, in such a way that
they are themselves conditioned by the existence of those they command. All
these living beings must be of a similar kind, or else they could not serve and
obey one another in this way” (KSA 11 [1885] 34 [123], p. 461) .
Sometimes, rather than speaking of “forces,” whose effects alone we perceive,
Nietzsche would write of Wille zur Macht, referring to the sum of wills toward
stronger life. Nietzsche thus conceives of the body in a new logic, that of be-
coming, for which the original morality was organic and concerned the good of
the body as a dynamic composite organism. Before any notion of “faculties” like
the will, and in opposition to transcendental principles like Schopenhauer’s nou-
menal will, he proposed a materialism of forces. This looked nothing like the
materialism of his time, which worked with linear, mechanistic causality. Indeed,
Nietzsche argued, mechanism reasons badly; it takes effects for causes, when the
actual causes are self-regulating or “cybernetic”—to use a contemporary term.
The body is the superior “reasoner.” And Nietzsche used the “human analogy”
to propose an interpretive intelligence whose processes unfold at all levels, in-
cluding that of cells and tissues. As commentator Didier Franck puts it, “The
relation between forces, constitutive of force itself, is not only quantitative; for,
in the absence of all [definitive] equilibrium, the quantitative relation between
forces—which is that of the greater to the lesser or the lesser to the greater—
becomes a qualitative relation between superior and inferior forces.”33
Although this sounds like anthropomorphism, this is not the case, as
Nietzsche’s method depended on “de-humanizing” our conception of nature
(and thereby, our philosophy). By “dehumanizing,” Nietzsche did not mean dena-
turing or devaluing humans. He meant taking our self-image out of every ap-
proach we adopt toward things, animate or inanimate, including our own bodies.
As he recalled in an 1885 note entitled “The Inverted Order of Time”: “The ‘outer
world’ has an effect on us: the effect is telegraphed to the brain, there it is pre-
pared, given form, and led back to its cause: the latter is then projected and it is
only then that the fact reaches consciousness. That is to say, the phenomenal
fragments in The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1968) §564,
p. 304.
33 Didier Franck, Nietzsche and the Shadow of God, trans. Bettina Bergo (Evanston: Northwestern

18 Introduction
world appears to us as a cause only after ‘this cause’ has had an effect, and after
the effect has been elaborated. That is, we continually reverse the order of events.—
While ‘I’ see, it already sees something else.”34
The guiding thread in his comprehensive project of precipitating the revalu-
ation of nihilistic or Christian values was the body. The latter had to be under-
stood not as a being or object, but processually, as the ongoing interaction of
forces or “wills” or “souls”—although Nietzsche found each of these terms over-
laden with connotations, whether spiritual or mechanistic. These interactions
proceeded according to a dynamic hermeneutics governed by intensities or
“quanta of force,” in Nietzsche’s own words, where “force” denotes strength and
health above all. In 1887, he observed: “In summa: that which becomes conscious
is subject to causal relations [forces] that are entirely withheld from us—the
sequence of thoughts, feelings, ideas in consciousness expresses nothing to in-
dicate that this sequence is a causal one: but apparently it is so, to the highest
degree.” He continued, nevertheless, “On this appearance we have founded our
entire representation of spirit, reason, logic, etc. (none of these exist: they are ficti-
tious syntheses and unities) . . . and these have been projected into things, behind
things!” (KSA 13 [1887–1888] 11 [145], pp. 67–68).
Stated succinctly, Nietzsche’s project amounted to overcoming the nihilism
inherited from Paul’s interpretation of the life of Christ, and the Pauline creation
of a church-body, consisting of members all equal in dignity and worth: “For the
body is not one member, but many. If the foot shall say, ‘Because I am not the
hand, I am not of the body’; is it therefore not of the body?” (1 Corinthians 12:14–
17). In Paul’s “revaluation” of Jewish Law, and his conception of a pneumatic
body, justice among the equal believers is vindicated by the resurrection: “If there
be no resurrection of the dead, then Christ is also not resurrected; but if Christ
is not resurrected, then our preaching is vain, and so is our faith,” wrote Paul
to the church in Corinth (1 Corinthians 15:13–14). As a son and grandson of
Lutheran pastors, Nietzsche long sought a new justice rooted in his conception
of a naturalized body of forces and his idea of the eternal recurrence of material
configurations in infinite time—like a “sur-resurrection.”
The decline in his time of belief in the trinitarian God only made the project
more urgent. Nietzsche was not the first to observe the demise of the Christian
God. Hegel had already done so in 1807, albeit under a very different interpre-
tation.35 But Nietzsche urged (with no pretense to aggrandizement) that we now
found ourselves with “absolutely no further master over our heads; the old world
34 Nietzsche, KSA 11 (1885) 34 (54), p. 437; also see KSA 11 (1884) 26 (44), p. 159.
35 For Hegel’s 1807 narrative of the death of God, see Phenomenology of Spirit, “Absolute Knowing,”
§808. Also see Xavier Tilliette’s discussion of the various Hegelian readings of this event in Tilliette,
La christologie idéaliste (Paris: Desclée, 1986).
Introduction 19
of values was theological—it has been overturned—more briefly: there is no su-

perior instance over us: insofar as God could be such an instance, we are now
ourselves God . . . we must attribute to ourselves those attributes that we once
attributed to God” (KSA 13 [1888] 143).
Such a task was, in itself, enough to elicit anxiety. But I do not believe that
was Nietzsche’s goal. The well-known image that appears in his Genealogy of
Morals of European man, with coated tongue and ruined nerves, points to the
object of his revaluation. For Nietzsche, European angst was the result of life
forces turned back, into us and against our bodily health. Anxiety was one of
the modes of this res-sentiment. The task, then, was to learn to feel differently;
changes in thought would follow in due course. Now it was Max Scheler, one of
Nietzsche’s best readers, who put his finger on anxiety in his 1912 On Resentment
and Moral Value Judgment. Scheler’s strategy expanded Nietzsche’s meditation
on the manifestation of ressentiment beyond the behaviors of quasi-historical
groups (like the priestly castes in the Genealogy of Morals).36 Attempting to pro-
vide a phenomenology of Nietzsche’s revaluation, Scheler examined the specific
affects through which ressentiment came into our consciousness. Thus, fear,
anxiety, and intimidation would be the “psychical dynamite” that engendered
processes that Nietzsche had himself insufficiently described, although, wrote
Scheler, “He certainly had [them] in mind.”37 It is thanks to Scheler, and indeed
to his sustained reading of Nietzsche, that we see how anxiety proves again to
be an emotion and a sensation that entwines body and mind. Not Kierkegaard’s
sign of our freedom to do X, much less the epiphenomenon of Schopenhauer’s
universal “will,” anxiety in Nietzsche’s sense allowed him to rethink the living
body in history and philosophy as the source from which a new sensibility might
unfold after the “death of God.” His principle that the body philosophizes, der
Leib philosophiert, sets on its head the hegemony of reason and consciousness
and deconstructs any hypostatized subjectivity; we are invited to become what
we are—creatively alive.
I.6. Freud’s Three Anxieties: Neurological, Ideal,

and Originary
I transition to the twentieth century with Freud, whose thought runs from the
last two decades of the nineteenth century up to 1936. Initially a student of
36 Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals /Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage
Books, 1967). Hereafter GM, followed by treatise number. KSA 5.

37 Max Scheler, Ressentiment, trans. Lewis Coser and William Holdheim (Milwaukee: Marquette

20 Introduction
philosophy with the psychologist philosopher Franz Brentano, Freud studied

physiology and neurology at the University of Vienna. Among other things,
he scrupulously dissected the large nerve cells of the marine lamprey, whose
large axons facilitated the study of neuronal synapses. Between 1893 and 1895,
he had developed a comprehensive neurological account of affects, thought,
dreaming, and the system called consciousness. This was his project for a scien-
tific psychology—a work he ultimately destroyed in disgust.38 At the same time,
working with a Josef Breuer, his senior colleague, Freud was receiving patients
with neurological complaints whom he diagnosed, in keeping with the age, as
“hysterics.” Having studied with Jean-Martin Charcot in Paris (1885–1886),
Freud followed his teacher in distinguishing that polysymptomatic condition
from epilepsy because, unlike the latter, it lacked telltale physical lesions in the
nervous system. Again following Charcot, Freud first suspected that the ac-
tual etiology was tied to sexuality. As the number of his cases grew, however, he
came to believe that the true etiology was one of conflicts; for example, between
a drive (Trieb) and a social norm internalized or expressed by a loved one. The
initial hysterical attack would have to have been triggered by a trauma, phys-
ical or emotional. But hysteria could not be reduced to disorders with similar
symptomatologies like asthenia or to what he called anxiety neurosis. The differ-
ence lay in the relationship between personal history, mind, and body.
Upon his return from Paris in 1886, Freud set out initially to distinguish the
anxiety symptom of hysteria from that of anxiety neurosis, a purely neurolog-
ical disorder due to inadequate or nontraditional sexual release. By 1895, he
had established the bifurcation between purely physiological and psychological
disorders. As his work on transference neuroses (hysteria, obsessive compulsion)
expanded, he increasingly sought psychological explanations for anxiety, under-
stood as the primary symptom of a conflictual idea separated from its original
affect and as if thrust deep into unconsciousness (Verdrängung). In this period,
which arguably lasted until at least 1897, when he declared he must give up his
“neurotica,”39 the physiology of anxiety remained important, as Freud had devel-
oped a probative neurological theory of energy flow and synapse-accumulations
(“summation”), which accounted for the drives and their blockages. Their occa-
sional eruption into consciousness took the form of agitation and anxiety. In the
case of transference neuroses, Freud was looking for a way to read bodily factors
together with psychological forces and events.
38 Sigmund Freud, “Project for a Scientific Psychology,” in The Standard Edition of the Complete
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey and Anna Freud, 24 vols.
(London: Hogarth Press, 1950–1975), 1:283–399. Hereafter SE.
39 Sigmund Freud, The Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887–1904, trans.
Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 264.
Introduction 21
Anxiety’s repression etiology remained. Yet Freud also became increasingly

aware that certain affects—including anxiety and guilt—were not always con-
scious. He observed this as patients “acted out” behaviors that repeatedly elicited
punishment or criticism from others. Following their extensive narratives, anal-
ysis brought to light the surprising insight that an affect, whose apparently main
property was to be conscious, might also have unconscious cognates.
During and after the First World War, a new type of patient began
frequenting psychiatric and psychoanalytic clinics. These came to be called
the Kriegsneurotiker, victims of war neurosis, what we today would call a post-
traumatic stress disorder. It is clear from his writing that Freud was loath to iden-
tify these with his erstwhile hysterical patients. However, he was perplexed by
their recurring nightmares, given his long-standing theory of dreams as wish
fulfillment. How could a dream that apparently repeated experiences of great
suffering also symbolically realize a desire? Answering this question also meant
addressing the reflex to repetition that, in these patients, took on a demonic
quality. Could it be, he wondered, that the nervous system (by now called “the
id” to underscore its impersonal, embodied character) was governed by some-
thing other than the “pleasure principle”? Freud speculated in 1920 that, under
traumatic conditions, the life drive, called “Eros,” evinced a deeper duality; it was
intertwined ab initio with a homeostatic drive designed to bring down tensions
within the body, and even speculatively to lead the organism back to its lowest
possible energy level. Sometimes called the “death drive” because of its accom-
panying expressions of aggression, the “nirvana principle” was Freud’s attempt to
explain why organisms pursue their course from growth to maturity, only subse-
quently to follow a progressive decomplexification toward inanimacy or death.40
What did this imply for anxiety? Simply, the profound angst experienced by
the war-traumatized accompanied them into their dreams, which were governed
by anything but a pleasure principle. Instead, these dreams had a different func-
tion: to prepare the organism for new situations of conflict. On this explanation,
anxiety was the accompaniment of trauma, and no longer a symptom of repres-
sion. Moreover, rejecting Carl Jung’s conception of Eros as our only drive, Freud
admitted that some force, responsible for bringing down excitations (physical
and psychical), came to oppose Eros following traumatization. In so arguing, he
seemed to stop and exclaim: “We have unwittingly steered our course into the
harbor of Schopenhauer’s philosophy.”41 Undaunted by the curious persistence
of the philosopher of noumenal willing, Freud turned his sights toward the (non-
noumenal) origin of the two drives.
40 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” SE 18:55–56. In German, Gesammelte Werke, 18 vols.
(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1940–1968), 13:53. Hereafter GW.

41 Freud, “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” in SE 18:50; GW 13:60.
22 Introduction
He never solved this enigma, especially in relation to the pleasure principle un-
derstood in energetic terms. But one of his most gifted students, Otto Rank, argued
by 1924 that the actual genesis of anxiety lay in the trauma of birth, which left per-
manent “traces” in the perceptual and mnemic systems. Freud wavered; it appeared
fair to say that birth was traumatic for the nervous system. Yet he had long argued
that the “ego” had insufficiently developed at birth for the subject to recall her per-
ceptual experiences as a neonate. In that sense, anxiety—as sensation and affect—
preceded the complete formation of the ego, something ensured by its experiences
with others and in the world over time. Freud argued this in 1926, expanding his
already twofold conception of anxiety from sign of repression to unconscious affect
and symptom, and ultimately to our original “state” as mammals. Thus Nietzsche’s
“grand intelligence of the body” ultimately found entry into Freud in the form of
angst as a physiological preparation for trauma and danger, underway even before
the ego “recognized” what was befalling it.
Having thus begun his career with a materialist conception of forces close to
that of the influential Helmholtz, Freud increasingly approached the body as the
intersection of social (moral) and physiological forces. By thinking the two to-
gether, thanks initially to his transference neurotics, Freud challenged reductivist
versions of Cartesian body-mind parallelism. In his unique approach, anxiety,
whether normal or pathological, was crucial: it spanned consciousness and uncon-
sciousness; it could originate either neurologically or socially (trauma); it disturbed,
diminished, and yet protected both organism and psyche under traumatogenic
conditions.
I.7. Husserl’s Phenomenological Foundations of

the Ego, Time, and the Affects
Following my discussion of Freud, I open an excursus on the twentieth-century

project of a formalist approach to (or “eidetics” of) affects in the work of Edmund
Husserl. I focus particularly on the way Husserl’s phenomenology gradually
transformed itself from essentially static to genetic constitutions. He began with
investigations into the nature and variety of intentionality and the intuitions
underlying meaning. However, arguably motivated by his exploration of time-
consciousness (1905–1909), he then turned toward concerns with the origin of
pure consciousness, the durability of memory, and affective forces and their na-
ture. As he deepened his research into the consciousness of temporal objects like
melodies, he began to speak of such experiences as dynamic phases, continually
moving away from our present or now-moment, all within an overarching flow
of “subjective” time, which amounted to the ground-structure of subjectivity
Introduction 23
itself.42 Whatever the sensory source of this regular flow—which obeyed a priori
laws concerning its contents, their succession, and scrutability—the relationship
between present experience and memory proved increasingly complex.
By the time he wrote the notes today entitled the Bernau Manuscripts (1917),
Husserl’s dense time-consciousness (always consisting of a now-moment, its
immediate “retention,” the anticipations it carries implicitly with it, and more
distant memories no longer retained) also grappled with the question of associ-
ation in light of identity and concept formation. Whether returning from what
we would consider the “distant” past or stimulated by a more recent experience,
object associations frequently escaped the sway of our will. Some returned un-
bidden, yet powerful enough to distract us from a conversation. This raised three
questions, each differentially important to our discussion of affects. First, for-
mally, how far did what Husserl called retentions “flow back” in us? At the level
of contents, if we were most likely to retain contrastive experiences, which gen-
erated affective “saliences,” then what became of them as they slipped further
and further back in the flow of time-consciousness? In other words, what if any-
thing kept them alive, so to speak? Finally, concerning the whole, was it a kind of
synthesis that explained the dynamic presence, at all “times,” of consciousness?
And if not, what ensured the unity of what Husserl had identified as “absolute
subjectivity”? These three questions—and others beside them—flowed out of his
research into “passive synthesis,” his term for the fusion, contrast, or alignment
of two or more intuitions.
Now, while Henri Bergson had warned against spatializing time, the problem
of association opened the terrible question of intuitions flowing into a kind of
mnemic reservoir43 or persisting somehow around the “threshold of conscious-
ness” (ACS 215; Hua 11:166). Certainly, memories survived, sometimes long
after an experience had ended, and supposedly something like an affective force
accounted for their survival and their return, when prompted by an expression
or new perception. Yet genetic research had carried Husserl as if through the
layers of egoic life, all the way to what he timorously called “the unconscious”
(ACS 202; Hua 11:154). Although he would not widely acknowledge the eventu-
ality that some representations would be repressed, as they were in Freud (ACP
42 Edmund Husserl, On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time, trans. John
Barnett Brough (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1991), §36: “We can say . . . this flow is
something we speak of in conformity with what is constituted, but it is not ‘something in objective
time.’ It is absolute subjectivity and has the absolute properties of something to be designated meta-
phorically as ‘flow.’ ” In the original, Husserliana: Edmund Husserls Gesammelte Werke, 15 vols., ed.
Rudolph Boehm (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969). Hereafter PCIT and Hua.
43 Edmund Husserl, Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis: Lectures on Transcendental
Logic, trans. Anthony J. Steinbock (Dordrecht: Springer, 2001), 227; Hua 11:177. Hereafter ACP.
24 Introduction
202, Hua 11, §§ 28–31, and §§ 32–36),44 Husserl was forced to borrow psycho-
logical language from Friedrich Herbart, Kant’s successor in Königsberg, who
had first speculated about a Schwelle des Bewusstseins (threshold of conscious-
ness).45 Around this, representations clustered, vying to return as affects and
ideas and attract the attention of the ego. Nevertheless, Husserl chose to forgo
Herbart’s mathematical reduction of ideas, intuitions, and affects to quantifiable
representations. He did venture, however, a formal approach to what he would
call affective Kräfte, forces that ran up and down our chains of retentions and
which phenomenalized with recalled objects as intensities, whether emotional
or sensory (pleasure, pain). As he wrote, “An influx of affective force [affektive
Kraftzufuhr], which naturally has its primordial source [Urquelle] in the impres-
sional sphere, can enable a retention . . . to restore what is concealed in it con-
cerning an obscure sense-content [vernebeltem Sinnesgehalt]” (ACS 222; Hua
11:172). The survival of intuitions, or discrete experiences, thus appeared to de-
pend on the force generated by their contrast with other experiences, preceding
or contemporaneous. But affective force was also more than mere contrast; it was
anything that excited the ego, including irritation, conflictual values, troubling
motivations, and so on (ACS 518–519; Hua 11:416).
Although Husserl had reached, in the course of his “genetic” investigations,
the proverbial gateway of psychoanalysis, he was in no way obliged to follow the
Freudian distinction between normal and pathological. Moreover, in developing
a formal approach to absolute subjectivity as a universal, self-constituting dy-
namic, and to affects as that X which attracts the attention of the ego and ensures
the survival of certain intuitions, Husserl had laid a new formal groundwork for
psychological approaches to affects such as anxiety, pleasure, and unpleasure.
This formal structure established a propaedeutic for the psychological investi-
gation of more intellectual affects interwoven with memory or fantasy. It was not
yet clear how this formalism should best be expanded, although Max Scheler was
one of the first explicitly to criticize phenomenological formalism—notably the
latter’s intellectualist approach to values.46
Scheler, however, would not be the last. Although Heidegger, Husserl’s most
illustrious student, dedicated Being and Time to his teacher “in veneration and
44 For a discussion of Husserl’s “constitutional” meaning of repression (Verdrängung) see
V. Biceaga, The Concept of Passivity in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), §2.3,
pp. 24–25.
45 Friedrich Herbart, Lehrbuch zur Psychologie (Königsberg: August Wilhelm Unzer, 1834), §§16–
21, pp. 12–16. English translation “A Textbook in Psychology,” in Significant Contributions to the
History of Psychology: 1750–1920, ed. D. N. Robinson (Washington, DC: University Publications of
America, 1977), 1–200. Also see Husserl’s deliberation about awakening of lost associations implying
something acting on the I, Hua 11: appendix VIII, no. 10, pp. 378–379.
46 Max Scheler, “The Theory of the Three Facts,” in Selected Philosophical Essays, trans. David
Lachterman (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

Introduction 25
friendship,” the 1927 work dismantled transcendental subjectivity, Husserl’s

erkentnistheoretische now-moments, and his abstract affects animated by inde-
terminate forces. Replacing the multilayered ego of phenomenology in its world,
as an open site or Da-sein, Heidegger focused not on the constitution of objects
and beings so much as on the way that Being-there proceeded, care-fully, in its
world—working, building, and creating. In the wake of the host of metaphys-
ical subjects largely inaugurated by Modern philosophy, Heidegger defined
the human reality as interpretative, and as animated by care (Sorge, translated
from cura).
I.8. Heidegger: Care and Angst and the Problem

of Dasein’s Embodiment
Arguably, angst provides Heidegger an existential reduction that deformalizes

Husserl’s methodological bracketing. Yet, in 1927 at least, angst proves to
have another influence: Heidegger’s affect could be aligned with the impact of
Nietzsche’s “thought of thoughts,” eternal recurrence. Beyond its revelatory sig-
nificance was a pedagogical one: Nietzsche gradually conceived the “thought
of thoughts” to teach us how to feel otherwise, as this affective transformation
had to precede any reflective revaluation of values. If eternal recurrence’s deci-
sive and multifaceted impact on Heidegger was subtle in Being and Time, it be-
came explicit by the period 1936–1940, when he gave lecture courses on topics
in Nietzsche’s thought. Heidegger had equated another Nietzschean theme,
“willing,” with his “resoluteness” (Entschlossenheit) in Being and Time; by 1939,
he read willing in light of passions, a choice well justified by Nietzsche’s defini-
tion of willing as affect and will to power as pathos.47 This sheds retrospective
light on why attunements necessarily accompanied understanding in Being and
Time, where the two together characterized “how we find ourselves in the world”
(sich befindet).48 Such attunements respond to Nietzsche’s perspectivalism and
his poetics; they appear clearly in The Gay Science’s “Mistral” song, a tribute to the
47 Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. I The Will to Power as Art, trans. David Farrell Krell (San
Francisco: Harper and Row, 1979–1987), 48. Hereafter N with volume number.
48 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1962) (hereafter BT), §29, pp. 174–175: “An entity of the character
of Dasein is its ‘there’ in such a way that, whether explicitly or not, it finds itself [sich befindet] in its
thrown-ness [into the world]. In a state-of-mind, Dasein is always brought before itself . . . in the sense
of finding itself in the mood it has. . . . The way in which the mood discloses . . . is one in which we turn
towards or turn away. . . . Phenomenally, we would wholly fail to recognize both what mood discloses
and how it discloses, if that which is disclosed were to be compared with what Dasein . . . knows and
believes ‘at the same time’ when it has such a mood.” For the German, see Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe,
ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann et al., 102 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann,
1997–), 2:179–180. Hereafter GA.
26 Introduction
troubadours of Provence, who invented a new way of feeling and, with it, the first
gaya scienza.49 Indeed, Nietzsche was clearly the first to propose active measures
by which to free oneself of the weight of the (metaphysical and theological) tra-
dition. Recall Zarathustra’s admonishment of the shepherd into whose throat an
ugly snake had slipped and bitten fast. Nietzsche’s “Bite, bite!” is as if enacted by
Heidegger’ destruction (Ab-bau) of the tradition. Indeed, the care shown by the
being that finds itself in-the-world (Dasein), and which is profoundly anxious,
may well have been a preoccupation of Nietzsche, who characterized it histori-
cally as the legacy of the animal that taught itself to keep its promises (GM 2, esp.
§§1–7). The Heideggerian innovation, then, was to consider Dasein as experien-
cing its life while dispensing with Nietzsche’s residual biologism.50
Paradoxically, in emphasizing the “clearing” that we are as Dasein (BT §28; GA
2:177–178), Heidegger came close to rehumanizing Nietzsche’s approach, given the
Aristotelian source of Dasein’s concern with getting itself into view as a whole in
order to determine the meaning of its existence. By extension, Heidegger defined
death as our ownmost possibility, something Nietzsche would have had no reason
to do, since willing the future, which amounted simultaneously to saying yes to the
past, enacted amor fati within the framework of eternal recurrence. The confronta-
tion with our finitude as a task thus diverged significantly from Nietzsche’s emphasis
on creative vitality. Indeed, for Heidegger, Nietzsche was over-concerned with life
as biological forces, even though their interactions were “hermeneutic.” Dying for
Nietzsche, similarly biological and hermeneutic, could in no way redeem the past,
as he had argued. This had to be done through the kind of willing close to Dasein’s
“resolute openness” (N 1:48), which Heidegger defined as the quality of him “who
stations himself as far out amongst beings as possible in order to keep them firmly
within his field of action.” 51
A significant dimension of Nietzsche’s thought that Heidegger largely aban-
doned was the monism that characterized his perspectivalism of forces and the
ascendant affectivity of creative bodies. By undercutting this dimension existen-
tially, Heidegger simultaneously opened a hiatus between the Dasein that (self-)
49 See GS, “To the Mistral,” 372–375; KSA 3. Also see “The Gay Science (Gaya Scienza),” in On
the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1967),
293–294; KSA 5.
50 See Heidegger, N, vol. 3: The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. Joan
Stambaugh, David Farrell Krell, and Frank Capuzzi (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), §16,
“Nietzsche’s ‘Biological’ Interpretation of Knowledge,” 101–110. Hereafter N followed by the volume
number. In German, GA 6.1:532–542 (my translations here).
51 Trans. modified. Heidegger’s original reads “Der Wille als das Über-sich-Herrsein ist . . . Ent-
schlossenheit, in der sich der Wollende am Weitesten hinausstelt in das Seiende, um es im Umkreis
seines Verhaltens festzuhalten” (GA 6.1:45).
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Title: The descent of the sun: A cycle of birth
Author: Unknown
Translator: F. W. Bain
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Language: English
Original publication: United Kingdom: Methuen & Co. Ltd, 1903
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

DESCENT OF THE SUN: A CYCLE OF BIRTH ***
THE DESCENT OF THE SUN.
[Sanskrit script]
(The illusion of a waking dream.)
Like a Digit of the Moon

In the Shadow of the Earth
Spirit undergoeth Swoon
In the Vestibule of Birth;
Dreameth transitory trouble,
Weareth Hues of Heaven, hurled
Hither, thither, as a Bubble
On the Ocean of the World.
[vide n. p. xv.]
THE
DESCENT OF THE SUN
[Sanskrit script]
A CYCLE OF BIRTH
TRANSLATED FROM THE ORIGINAL MANUSCRIPT.
BY
F. W. BAIN
[Sanskrit script]
'and in a dream I saw a lotus fallen from heaven'
THIRD EDITION.
James Parker and Co.,

31 BEDFORD-STREET, STRAND, LONDON;
AND 27 BROAD-STREET, OXFORD.
1906.
First Edition, 1903.
Second Edition, 1903.
Third Edition, 1906.
DEDICATED
TO
MARGARET.
INTRODUCTION.
Here is a fairy tale which I found in an old Hindoo manuscript.
As the title shows, it is a solar myth. Literally translated, its name is: The
glory of the Going Down of the Sun. But this is only the exoteric, physical
envelope of the inner, mystical meaning, which is: The Divine Lustre[1] of
the Descent (Incarnation) of Him Who took Three Steps: i.e. Wishnu, or the
Sun, the later Krishna, or Hindoo Apollo. And this epithet of the Sun is
explained by the well-known passage in the Rig-Weda (I. 22. 17[2]), 'Three
steps did Wishnu stride: thrice did he set down his foot.' A mythological
expression for the rise, the zenith, and the set of the Sun. But the old
magnificent simplicity of the Rig-Weda was perverted by subsequent
Pauranik glosses; and Wishnu, according to the new legend, was said to
have cheated his adversary, Bali, by striding, in his Dwarf Incarnation, over
the three worlds. In our title, a different turn is given to the old idea, which
we may express by saying that the steps commence, not with the rise, but
the set of the Sun: his Going Down, his mysterious period of Darkness, his
Rising again. This is the inverted Race, or Cycle of the Sun, which so much
exercised the mind of primitive man, and seemed to be a symbol of the
mystery of Birth and Death.
And ours is a strange story; which seemed to the translator not unworthy
of being clothed in an English dress, containing as it did so much in little
bulk that, as the French say, donne à penser. Absolutely Hindoo in its form
and spirit, it is for an Englishman full of associations, and instinct with that
philosophical mythology, scraps and fragments of which are familiar to him
in the story of the Fall and the poetry of Milton, in many an old fairy tale, in
some touches of Pythagoras and Plato, and some old religious legends. Lux
in tenebris: a dazzling light, in the most profound darkness: the night of the
sun: a heavenly body, doomed to put on mortality and suffer for a period in
this lower world of darkness, birth and death: in some such ways as these
we may express its central idea. But for the reader not acquainted with
Sanskrit it may be worth while to point out that there runs throughout it a
veiled allegory which he would not be apt to detect, to the teaching of the
Sánkhya Philosophy of Kapila, (who is older than Thales;) according to
which it is the duty of PURUSHA, the archetype of the spirit of man, the
Primæval Male, to hunt for and pursue PRAKRITI, the feminine
personification of material Nature, the Eternal Feminine, till he finds her:
when instantly she disappears 'like an actress[3].' In this respect, the story
somewhat recalls the Gita-Gowind of Jayadewa, which according to one
school of interpreters, deals with the Soul, personified as the lovely Rádhá,
in its search after the Divine. For among the Hindoos, the earthly and the
heavenly love are always confounded.
And let not anyone suppose, that the lesson embodied in these pages is
obsolete or dead in the India of to-day. I wrote the last lines of this
translation late one evening, and I walked out in the dusk to the bridge
across the river, about half a mile away. There was not a breath of air. It was
a night as still as that which long ago Medea chose on which to work her
spells: nothing moved save the twinkling stars; all below was plunged in
sleep, every tree a picture, every leaf seemed carved in stone: only, every
now and then, a flying fox burst screeching from a branch. And as I stood
upon the bridge, I could hear a faint din of tom-toms coming from the
distant city of the Peshwas. I looked westwards, up the river. The sun had
set, leaving behind it a ruddy glare which faded higher up the sky into the
darkness: and exactly on the confines of the colours, in that bath of
nilalohita, that purple-red, which is a favourite epithet of the god Shiwa,
hung, like a thing in a dream, the lovely streak of the new moon, one day
old. All was reflected in the still mirror of the broad sheet of water formed
by the river Bund, or dam.
I turned round. On the eastern side, below the bridge, the river runs in
disconnected pools. All was buried in dark and gloom. But about two
hundred yards away, on the right bank, there was a red spot and leaping
flames. They were burning on the bank a corpse, whose former owner had
died of plague. For here in Poona it is now, as it was of old in the days of
Homer, [Greek: aieì dè puraì nekúon kaíonto thameiaí ....]
Suddenly a voice said behind me: They burn well on a cold night. I
looked round. Beside me stood a Hindoo, whose real name I do not think it
lawful to mention. His white clothes were stained and splashed all over with
red, for the Holi festival had left its mark on him.
Why, Wishwanáth, I said, what are you doing here? Or have you come,
like me, merely dekhne ke wáste, to see the sun set, and 'eat air'?
Wishwanáth cast a careless glance at the sky. Yes, he said, it looks well
from here: but then I have seen it so often. It was a new moon yesterday.
And very soon it will be old. Look, Wishwanáth, here is a strange thing.
See, there on that side is the moon, following the sun to rest in a bath of
fire, and they will both appear to-morrow all the better for it. But now, look
down there. There is another thing passing away in the fire. But how will it
be with that?
And I pointed to the burning pyre on the other side.
The Hindoo looked steadily at it for a moment, and then at me. It will be
just the same, he said.
What! you think that that will come back again, like sun and moon?
He did not answer for a moment. Then he said slowly, in a low voice, as
if speaking rather to himself than me: How should it not return? na jáyate
mriyate wa kadáchit[4].
I looked at him, but said nothing. He continued to gaze steadily at the

burning pyre, in silence, and I did the same. The flames were dying down:
their work was done.
Metempsychosis, transmigration, everlasting incarnation and re-
incarnation of the immortal soul in body after body, birth after birth: all
Hindoo literature is but the kaleidoscopic reiteration of this one identical
idea, whose beauty is such that no logic will ever destroy it or oust it in
favour of another. For the Sanskrit language is a kind of shrine, consecrated
to the embodiment and immortalisation of this philosophical myth. The
Hindoos are possessed by it; it is their hereditary heirloom, Kramágatam,
the legacy from an immemorial past: it is all that they have left. And
nations, like the characters in our story, cling desperately, in periods of
degradation and eclipse, to all that reminds them of a former state of ideal
prosperity, which lingers in their literature and echoes in their souls, like
dim recollections of a forgotten paradise, or faint reminiscences of a former
birth. Distance lends enchantment, and time effaces detail, and endows
stern realities with dreamy beauty; and thus a rugged stony past fades
gradually into a picture, blue, soft, and unutterably beautiful, like some low
barren island, seen far away in the haze, over a hot and glittering sea.
POONA,
March 21, 1903.
[1] Shrí also means a Sacred Lotus, and it is the name of the twelfth Digit of the
Moon: thus indicating the position of this story in the series to which it belongs:
for an account of which, and the manuscript, I may refer the reader to the preface
to her predecessor Shashiní, entitled A Digit of the Moon.
[2] Cp. also I. 154, 155, and elsewhere. It should be observed that learned doctors
differ as to the interpretation of the three strides: but this is not the place to
examine their views.
[3] From this point of view, the period of Night would be the reign of Tamas, one
of the three great categories of that philosophy: the Quality of Darkness, as
opposed to Light, Ignorance, as opposed to Knowledge, Evil, as opposed to Good,
the World Below, as opposed to the World Above.
[4] From the Bhagwad-Gitá: IT is never born and never dies.

CONTENTS.
SUNSET.—An Evil Eye
NIGHT.—A Sleep and a Dream
DAWN
[Note.—As the story belongs, by its title, both to Sun and Moon, it
should be observed, that the Night and the two Twilights, Dusk and Dawn,
apply to both in opposite ways. The Moon rises when the Sun sets, reigns
over the Night when he is buried in Darkness, and either sets or vanishes
when he is risen in his light. For the Moon is the type of Night, or this lower
world (ihaloka), but the Sun, of Day, that is, of the other.]
NIGHT.
I. A Lotus of the Day

II. By Beat of Drum
III. An Eclipse of the Sun
IV. Inspiration
V. Nightwalker
VI. A Lotus of the Night
VII. The Silver Swans
VIII. The Land of the Lotus
IX. Recognition
X. Separation
XI. The Lord of the Beasts
XII. The Other Body
XIII. A Light in Darkness
XIV. Illusion
XV. The Dead of Night
XVI. Before Dawn
Sunset
AN EVIL EYE.
The Descent of the Sun.
INVOCATION.
O glorious and infinite Spirit of Peace, Lord of Ascetics, who whirling

round in thy wild dance dost lend as it were its colour to the sky, in whose
mirror are seen reflected the blueness of thy throat and the silver digit of the
moon in the matted tufts of thy tawny hair: thee we adore. And we worship
the ever victorious trunk of the Elephant of Elephants, whose fierce glare
consumes the innumerable hosts of opposing obstacles, as a forest fire
shrivels the blades of dry grass[1].
Long ago, on the slopes of Himálaya, there lived a young King of the
Spirits of the Air, named Kamalamitra[2]; for he was a portion of the Sun.
And he worshipped the husband of Umá[3]. And he turned his back on the
pleasures of the senses, and went afar off, and dwelt alone, among the icy
peaks and snowy plateaux that lie around Kailás. And there he remained,
living at first upon leaves, and then upon smoke, and finally upon air,
performing penances of appalling severity, till after a hundred years[4] that
Lord of Creatures was moved to compassion. And he appeared to him, in
the twilight of evening, in the guise of an ascetic, but in stature like a tall
tree, with the new moon in his hair, and said: I am pleased with thy
devotion, so now I grant thee a boon: ask. Then the young King bowed
before him, and said: Blessed One, let me continue in this contemplation of
thee: that is enough. Then said Maheshwara: This is well said: nevertheless,
ask of me some boon. Then said Kamalamitra: Since it is so, and I must
absolutely choose, then give me a wife, whose eyes, like these hills and this
sky, shall be full of the dusky lustre[5] of thy throat and thy moon, as if,
insatiate of gazing at thee, they had become, not transitory mirrors, but
pictures permanently stained with thy glory. For so shall she be a medium
of devotion between me and thee.
Then the moon-crested God was pleased. But he looked into the future,
by his magic power of divination, and saw what was coming. And he said
slowly: Eyes such as these will be dangerous, not only to others, but also to
their owner. Nevertheless, I have given thee a boon: thou shalt have thy
desire.
Then he disappeared, and Kamalamitra returned home rejoicing. And by

the favour of the deity all the emaciation and fatigue of his penances left
him, and he became strong as Bhima and beautiful as Arjuna[6]. And he
arrived at his palace on the evening of the next day, and went into the
garden to repose, as the sun was going down. And as he went, he looked
before him, and suddenly he saw a woman, floating on a pool of white
lotuses, in a boat of sandal, with silver oars. And her glances fell on those
snowy flowers, and turned their tint to blue, for her eyes were lowered: and
she was resting her chin on one hand as she lay, and with the other dropping
one by one into the water the petals of a lotus red as blood. And the round
curve of her hip stood up like a sand bank, and was mirrored again in the
silent water below. And her lips moved, for she was counting the petals as
they fell.
And Kamalamitra stood still, holding his breath, and gazing at her,
fearing to move, for he thought it was a dream. Then all at once she looked
up and saw him, and smiled, bathing him with the colour of her eyes. And it
seemed to Kamalamitra that he stood in a pool of colour formed by the
essence of all the blue lotuses in the world. And then suddenly he
remembered the boon of the God who is clothed with heaven[7], and he
exclaimed: Surely thou art my own wife, sent me by the God who keeps his
promises, and none other. For yesterday I gazed at his glory, and now I am
gazing at thy two eyes, and it is the same. And if it be so, by what name
shall I call thee? Then she said: My name is Anushayiní[8], and for what
purpose did the Creator form these eyes, but to reflect the image of their
lord?
Then Kamalamitra, having thus obtained her from the deity, took
possession of his lovely little wife, and thereafter remained with her in the
region about Kailás, utterly bewildered and intoxicated by constantly
gazing at those mirrors of deity, her two great eyes. And he plunged into
their sea, and was drowned in it, and the whole world seemed to him to be
made of lotus blue[9]. And like a vessel filled to the brim and running over,
he was so overflowing with delight in her beauty, and the pride of having so
unique a specimen of womankind all to himself, that he could not contain
his emotion, but sought relief in going about everywhere talking about her,
and trying to get everybody to acknowledge, what he thought himself, that
all other women in the world were absolutely nothing in comparison with
his own wife. Alas! a woman is one thing, and emancipation quite another.
So it happened, that on a day, when he was disputing about her with one
of his friends, and abusing him, for not readily admitting all his own
eulogies of his wife, that friend of his suddenly burst out laughing, and
exclaimed: For all things there is a cure, even for snake-bite there is a cure,
but there is no cure, for one who has been bitten with a woman's beauty.
Know, O thou infatuated lover, that the golden glamour of our Other Half,
Man's ectype, Woman, is not like a simple musical theme, but one infinitely
various, containing ten thousand notes, and stirring like a churning stick all
the emotions in the ocean of the soul of man. And however beautiful may
be thy wife's eyes, still eyes are only eyes, and a woman is not all eye, but
something more. For one woman witches us, like a waterfall, with the
music of her bubbling laughter, and another entrances us, like a forest-pool,
with the peace of her shadowy silence. And one entangles us, like
Yama[10], in the nectar-nooses of her hair, while another pierces us, like
Manobhawa[11] with the archery of her poisoned eyes. And one enflames
us, like the Sun, in the fever-fire of sick desire, while another soothes us,
like the Moon, by the camphor of her dewy kisses. And like oxen, we are
goaded, by the biting sting of one woman's evil, and like elephants, we are
tamed, by the subtle spell of another's purity; and like birds, we are
decoyed, by the lure of the bower of one girl's arms, and like bees, we hover
and sip, around the honey of another's lips, and like snakes, we wind and
coil[12] round the slender stem of one girl's waist, and like weary travellers,
we long to sleep on the living pillow of another's bosom. Then Kamalamitra
broke in impatiently: Away with the fascinations, of all the women in the
three worlds, past, present, or to come! Could they unite to form the very
body of the god of love, yet the eyes of Anushayiní, alone, would, like the
eye of the enemy of Kaudarpa[13], reduce them to ashes. Aye! those eyes,
with their blue irresistible invitation, would succeed in corrupting sages,
where Menaká, Tilottamá[14] and the rest had failed.
Then his friend laughed in derision, and said: Boasting is useless, and in
words, all men can do everything, and every woman is another
Rambhá[15]. Babble no more of her beauty, but come, let your paragon of a
wife put her power to the proof. For hard by here, in the wood on the
hillside, is an aged Sage, named Pápanáshana[16], whose austerities terrify
even the gods. He would be an admirable touchstone for the eyes of this
wonderful wife of yours, whose beauty exists, like a bubble, only on the
stream of your words.
And then, stung by the taunt, Kamalamitra exclaimed in wrath: Fool! if

she does not turn him from his asceticism as easily as amber draws after it
stubble and grass, I will cut off my own head and cast it into the Ganges.
Then his friend laughed again, and said: Do nothing rash, thou art not
Daksha[17]: once gone, thy head can never be restored. But Kamalamitra
hurried away to find Anushayiní. And he found her in the garden by the
lotus pool, and told her of his brag, and said: Come instantly, and make the
experiment, and vindicate the power of those wonderful eyes of thine, and
my own faith in them, without delay. For I burn to convict that foolish
sceptic of his folly, by ocular demonstration.
Then Anushayiní said slowly: Dear husband, thou wert angry, and
therefore indiscreet, and I fear, lest by doing evil we may bring on ourselves
punishment. For expiation follows guilt, as surely as Orion treads on the
heels of Rohini[18]. There is sin and danger in this rash experiment. And
now it will be better for us not to venture upon the verge of a precipice,
over which we may both fall, into irreparable disaster.
But as she spoke, her eyes rested on Kamalamitra, and bewildered him,
and destroyed the persuasion of her words. For he heard nothing that she
said, but was full of the blindness of passion, and more than ever convinced
of the omnipotence of her beauty. And so, seeing that she could not turn
him from his will, Anushayiní gave in, and yielded to him as to her deity.
Nay, in the interior of her heart she rejoiced, to find that she could not
dissuade him, for she was filled with curiosity herself, to see whether in
truth her beauty would prevail over the ascetic, though she trembled for the
consequences. Alas! where beauty, and curiosity, and youth, and self-will,
and intoxication combine, like a mad elephant, where is the cotton thread of
self-control?
Then those two lovers kissed each other passionately, like travellers who
have been separated for a year. And yet they knew not that they were doing
so for the last time. And then they went together to the forest, to find that
old ascetic. And hand-in-hand they rambled about, like a pair of Love's
arrows in human form[19], till they penetrated to the very heart of that
wood. And there on a sudden they came upon that old sage, and saw him
standing, plunged in meditation, motionless as a tree. And round him the
ants had built up their hills, and his beard and hair trailed from his head,
like creepers, and ran down along the ground, and were covered with
leaves: and over his withered limbs played a pair of lizards, like living
emeralds. And he looked straight before him, with great eyes that mirrored
everything, but saw nothing, clear and unfathomable and still, like mountain
tarns in which all the fish are asleep.
And Kamalamitra and Anushayiní looked at him awhile in silence, and

then at each other, and trembled, for they knew that they were staking their
souls. But as he wavered, the thought of his friend's derision came back into
Kamalamitra's mind, and filled him with anger. And he said to Anushayiní:
Advance, and let this old muni[20] see you, and I will mark the result.
So Anushayiní went forward, obeying his command, and stepped over

the leaves with feet lighter than themselves, till she stood in front of the
sage. And when she saw that he did not move, she raised herself on tiptoe to
look into his eyes, saying to herself: Possibly he is dead. And she looked
into those eyes, and saw there nothing save two images of herself, like two
incarnations of timidity, that seemed to say to her as it were: Beware! And
as she stood there, trembling in the swing of uncertainty, Kamalamitra
watched her with ecstasy, and laughed to himself; and said: Certainly that
old muni is no longer alive, for otherwise she would have reached his soul
through the door of his eyes, were it down in the lower world.
So as they stood there, waiting, gradually that old sage came to himself:
for he felt that his meditations were being disturbed by something or other.
And he looked, and saw Anushayiní standing before him like the new moon
at the close of day, a pure form of exquisite beauty[21], a crystal without a
flaw, tinged with the colour of heaven. And instantly, by the power of his
own mystical meditation, he divined the whole truth, and the exact state of
the case. And he cast at that wayward beauty a glance, sorrowful as that of a
deer, yet terrible as a thunderbolt: and immediately courage fled from her
soul, and strength from her knees, and she sank to the ground with drooping
head, like a lotus broken by the wind.
But Kamalamitra rushed forward, and caught her in his arms. Then as
they stood together, the old ascetic spoke and cursed them, saying slowly:
Irreverent lovers, now shall that beauty which occasioned this insolence
meet with its appropriate reward. Descend now, ye guilty ones, into mortal
wombs, and suffer in the lower world the pangs of separation, till ye have
purged away your guilt in the fire of human sorrow.
Then hearing the doom of separation, wild with grief they fell at his feet,
and implored him, saying: Fix at least a term to the curse, and a period to
our pain. And he said again: When one of you shall slay the other, the curse
shall end.
Then those two unhappy lovers looked at each other in mute despair.
And they drew in that instant from each other's eyes a deep draught of the
nectar of mutual contemplation, as if to sustain them in their pilgrimage
over the terrible sea of separation, saying as it were to each other, but in
vain[22]: Remember me! Then all of a sudden they disappeared and went,
like flashes of lightning, somewhere else.

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Anxiety: A Philosophical History 1st

Edition Bettina Bergo

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Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data

1.4. Schwärmerei and the Genesis of the First Critique  53

3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard  133

4.3. Monism and Dual-​Substance Philosophies: The

6.7. Conclusion: Birth Trauma and the Ego as

9.2. A New Multitude of Attunements to Being in

Heartfelt thanks to Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study,

AA Levinas, “Autre et autrui”

FT Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling

OT Foucault, The Order of Things

I.1. An “Age of Anxiety” and the “Age” of Anxiety

Lies and lethargies police the world

University Press, 2011), 17.

In homage to Yeats, William H. Auden composed his eclogue, The Age of

British edition, 1947).

Bonfiglio (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012). Hereafter TV.

incarnates in his “son.”

I.2. The Debated Role of an Affect in Spirit and

I begin by showing how Kant’s critical revolution unfolded thanks to a departure

moral vocation of “pure practical” reason.

Empêcheurs de penser en rond, 2005), 80. Hereafter TMP.

considerably modified second edition, published in 1809).

University Press, 2005), 209–​210.

I.3. Will and Representation: Anxiety Erupts

15 David E. Cartwright, Schopenhauer: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

But philosophies of representation entail basic contradictions, one of which

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 345.

Schein, or appearance, for Schopenhauer. With his commitment to probity,

[Schopenhauer’s] concept of life thus divides: to the first determination[,]‌ac-

Schopenhauer’s will—​closer to Spinoza’s conatus essendi than to the Kantian will

University Press, 1993), 167; emphasis added.

(New York: Dover Publications, 1966), 1: §15. Hereafter WWR.

I.4. Darwin’s Original Semiosis: An Argument for

(1872; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Hereafter EEMA.

2004), 47–​48. Hereafter DP.

492; emphasis added. Hereafter DM.

28 J.-​B.-​P.-​A. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, or exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire

I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-​Resurrection: From Noumenal

The impact of Schopenhauer’s descriptions of the will on Nietzsche is well

philosopher’s “noumenal will,” he praised Schopenhauer’s living example as offering an education in

mechanischen Zweckmässigkeitslehre [The Struggle of the Parts in the Organism: A Contribution to

University Press, 2012), 138.

of values was theological—​it has been overturned—​more briefly: there is no su-

I.6. Freud’s Three Anxieties: Neurological, Ideal,

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1.4. Schwärmerei and the Genesis of the First Critique  53

3. The Dialectics of Affect: Anxiety and Despair in Kierkegaard  133

4.3. Monism and Dual-Substance Philosophies: The

University Press, 2005), 209–210.

Schopenhauer’s will—closer to Spinoza’s conatus essendi than to the Kantian will

2004), 47–48. Hereafter DP.

28 J.-B.-P.-A. Lamarck, Philosophie zoologique, or exposition des considérations relatives à l’histoire

I.5. Nietzsche and the Sur-Resurrection: From Noumenal

of values was theological—it has been overturned—more briefly: there is no su-

(Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1940–1968), 13:53. Hereafter GW.

Following my discussion of Freud, I open an excursus on the twentieth-century