By Zaiti Athirah
As it happened, I learned that anxiety is as innate as the internal ceaseless gyre reeling over and over in our stomachs like a running engine in which its kinetics are what locomote us living.
It’s a rather heavy-laden question in philosophy, though to think that what isn’t in philosophy, is that we have been contemplating the significance of terror, desire, and inhibition – nouns I could think of so far that are akin to anxiety.
What Aristotle believes is the cognitive constituent that sets us apart from other organisms – that we inhabit a fleeting and fragile space between the regretful past and the uncertain future. Our actions in the present are shaped by memories and expectations, often tinged with anxiety. Lest even our implicit understanding of rationality revolves around the worry of whether we'll effectively align means with ends. What Kierkegaard exhorts is the fuel of philosophy, the raiser of questions and desires for answers and respite from inexorable life errors.
The feeling of the first time having the strange air inflating our jelly lungs as we had just been pushed out of the womb convulsed us into piercing squawks of tears – which physically translates our first anxiety – of many. Infants with very much inchoate brains may not be able to acknowledge it yet, pathologies aside, this is the primeval anxiety. How much different would it be from the last tears of life, in our loosening grasp of the world, in the defiant rage against the dying of light?
Now that we’ve understood our human fate with anxiety, consider this absurdity:
“...Man eats, drinks, marries, watches, plays, lives under a roof, rides, walks, or remains still with the sole aim of driving out their contraries and, in general, all other anxieties. Yet each of these actions is, in turn, an inescapable hotbed of new anxieties; unexpected obstacles to its realization raise difficulties according to the occasion…” – Ibn Hazm, who was deliberate with his ellipses.
The sublime truth and this weighty secret is that the mental pain of anxiety is, no matter what, inevitable. This fact had my friend and I snickering in class at the thought of Sisyphus, perpetually rolling up his boulder and getting imagined as happy doing so. And Camus was simply asserting a wisdom of perspective, rather than anguishing at the preordained loop, we must value the significance of meaning in our anxious beings.
This matters, because this is the cerebellum’s weightage behind our moral scrupulosity, human discoveries, and spiritual apprehension. It’s man’s survival instinct that progresses us through the ever-growing nuances of dilemmas of every discipline.
This matters, because how would we pursue the relief of the distinctive unease? Where anxiety underwrites inquiry, we claim that the success of the inquiry removes anxiety and is pleasurably anticipated.
Philosophy is the path that we hope gets us there. Anxiety is our dogged, unpleasant, and indispensable companion.
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