Issue #22: Why Your Anxiety is Evidence of Your Humanity
Tillich on Anxiety, Geertz on Cockfighting, Clarice Lispector and Snakes that Harbour Conservative Moral Views
For the first time, the Humanities Library is landing in the inbox of over 6000 people this week, so I wanted to start with a profound thank you to every one of you who has supported this newsletter. I hope your Sunday is happy, sunny and you find a few moments to scurry off and read something.
Here's what you'll get if you read on this week…
In the issue:
Paul Tillich on Existential Anxiety #philosophy #theology
Clifford Geertz on Interpretive Anthropology and Cockfighting #anthropology
“Hurricane” Clarice Lispector’s utterly authentic voice #literature
The First Abstract Artist was Not, Contrary to Historical Narratives, a Man #art
A Bestselling Medieval Travelogue that is Completely Wild #history
Paul Tillich on Existential Anxiety #philosophy #theology
Source: The Courage to Be by Paul Tillich, 1952. Chapter 2
At a Glance: Human life bears the weight of knowing it will end, and anxiety is the shadow cast by that truth. For Tillich, it comes in three main forms: death, moral failure, and, the defining anxiety of our times, meaninglessness.
"The basic anxiety, the anxiety of a finite being about the threat of nonbeing, cannot be eliminated. It belongs to existence itself."
Let's open this week with an acknowledgement that you probably don't need an explanation of what anxiety is.
Ours is an age of political instability, climate uncertainty, and rapid progress change in the fields of technology and digital life. If we're switched on to any degree at all, we know what anxiety feels like.
But I'm writing about it anyway, because, more than anything else I've read this week, the ontology of anxiety Paul Tillich puts forward in 1952's The Courage to Be is what has caught my eye.
Tillich was a German-American theologian and philosopher who's significance as a twentieth century thinker came from his building of an interesting bridge between Christian theology and existentialist philosophy.
It was a bridge that allowed him to reshape modern theology to speak more meaningfully to secular and doubting minds like my own.
The Courage to Be is his major work and, in it, he challenges a notion that I've held closely since I was about thirteen years old. Namely, that anxiety is a personality flaw that requires fixing if you want to live a full and meaningful life.
Tillich, in an act of mercy to bookish teenagers the world over, instead argues that anxiety should be thought of as a fundamental condition of being human, something that "belongs to existence itself."
That's because anxiety is really all about that uniquely human curse, that familiar burden of existence that is aware of its own finitude. Tillich puts it like this:
"The first assertion about the nature of anxiety is this: anxiety is the state in which a being is aware of its possible nonbeing. [...] It is not the realization of universal transitoriness, not even the experience of the death of others, but the impression of these events on the always latent awareness of our own having to die that produces anxiety."
That distinguishes anxiety from the more commonly experienced emotion of fear, which is something we're more emotionally and intellectually equipped to deal with.
"Fear, as opposed to anxiety, has a definite object, which can be faced, analyzed, attacked, endured. One can act upon it, and in acting upon it participate in it-even if in the form of struggle.
By this definition, a lot of the things we're consciously anxious about — social interaction, public embarrassment, the safety of loved ones — are better thought of as fears, because they take as their source a definite object.
"Fear is being afraid of something, a pain, the rejection by a person or a group, the loss of something or somebody, the moment of dying."
Anxiety, on the other hand, is a lot more difficult to confront. Because anxiety has no object or, more to the point, its object is the absolute annihilation of of all objects, we cannot approach it with courage of the same sort that helps us to deal with our fears.
"He who is in anxiety is, insofar as it is mere anxiety, delivered to it without help. Helplessness in the state of anxiety can be observed in animals and humans alike. It expresses itself in loss of direction, inadequate reactions, lack of "intentionality" (the being related to meaningful contents of knowledge or will). The reason for this sometimes striking behavior is the lack of an object on which the subject (in the state of anxiety) can concentrate. The only object is the threat itself, but not the source of the threat, because the source of the threat is "nothingness."
In this way, it is our nature to attempt to turn our anxieties into fears. The human psyche is not built to stand face-to-face with raw nothingness. So, we turn anxiety into fear—of enemies, of bad omens, of sin, of gods—because fear can be fought, prayed to, or escaped.
There is light at the end of the tunnel of all this existential despair, but we can't hope to confront anxiety until we've properly understood it. This is where Tillich's map of human anxiety comes in.
He proposes that we distinguish three types of anxiety according to the three "directions" in which nonbeing threatens being:
"Nonbeing threatens man's ontic self-affirmation, relatively in terms of fate, absolutely in terms of death. It threatens man's spiritual self-affirmation, relatively in terms of emptiness, absolutely in terms of meaninglessness. It threatens man's moral self-affirmation, relatively in terms of guilt, absolutely in terms of condemnation."
Anxiety is therefore experienced in three forms:
1 - Anxiety of fate and death
This is the fear rooted in our awareness that we are finite, vulnerable beings who will inevitably die, and it affects us even in the absence of any immediate threat.
"Nonbeing is omnipresent and produces anxiety even where an immediate threat of death is absent. It stands behind the experience that we are driven, together with everything else, from the past toward the future without a moment of time which does not vanish immediately. It stands behind the insecurity and homelessness of our social and individual existence. It stands behind the attacks on our power of being in body and soul by weakness, disease, and accidents. In all these forms fate actualizes itself, and through them the anxiety of nonbeing takes hold of us."
2 - Anxiety of emptiness and loss of meaning
This anxiety arises when we lose or question our ultimate purpose, feeling that life lacks depth, coherence, or a centre that makes everything else matter.
"The anxiety of meaninglessness is anxiety about the loss of an ultimate concern, of a meaning which gives meaning to all meanings. This anxiety is aroused by the loss of a spiritual center, of an answer, however symbolic and indirect, to the question of the meaning of existence."
3 - Anxiety of guilt and condemnation
This is the inner conflict of feeling responsible for our lives and choices, haunted by guilt and the fear of being unworthy.
"Man's being, ontic as well as spiritual, is not only given to him but also demanded of him. He is responsible for it; literally, he is required to answer, if he is asked, what he has made of himself. He who asks him is his judge, namely he himself, who, at the same time, stands against him. This situation produces the anxiety which, in relative terms, is the anxiety of guilt; in absolute terms, the anxiety of self-rejection or condemnation."
These three types of anxiety are not exclusive, of course, but interwoven in such a way that one of them "gives the predominant color" whilst the others continue to persist in the background.
After dealing with his three kinds of anxiety as they manifest in the life of the individual, Tillich goes on to explore their social manifestations in periods of Western history.
I found this idea really interesting. It goes like this.
At the end of ancient civilization, it was the ontic anxiety of fate and death that permeated every layer of social activity.
By the middle ages, this had been replaced by the spiritual anxiety of moral conundrums and the hellish consequences of immoral behaviour.
By the time we arrive in the modern era, the anxiety of emptiness and meaninglessness is dominant, owing, for Tillich, to the "breakdown of absolutism, the development of liberalism and democracy, the rise of a technical civilization with its victory over all enemies and its own beginning disintegration."
Ideas about how to confront this existential anxiety are offered later in the book. It's perhaps beyond the scope of this article if we're aiming to keep things relatively snack-sized, but it essentially amounts to summoning the courage to affirm one's being despite this anxiety-inducing awareness of nonbeing.
What I've taken from Tillich's work is mainly his reframing of anxiety which, it turns out, is not a character flaw at all, but a signal pointing us toward deeper questions of meaning, identity, and faith.
Key takeaways
Anxiety is the deep existential awareness of our own nonbeing, differing from fear because it has no clear object.
Because pure anxiety is unbearable, we instinctively turn it into fear, something more concrete that we can confront, control, or escape.
Anxiety comes in three forms: death, meaninglessness, and guilt, and each has held predominance in different periods in human history. The anxiety of our own age is that of meaninglessness.
Something to think about: Do we really seek distractions to avoid anxiety, or can distraction itself be a form of meaning?
Clifford Geertz on The Symbolism of Balinese Cockfighting #anthropology
Source: Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight by Clifford Geertz, 1973
At a Glance: Everyday rituals, even seemingly trivial ones, are rich with insight into how humans create meaning, identity, and community.
"For it is only apparently cocks that are fighting there. Actually, it is men."
British philosopher Jeremy Bentham once coined the term “deep play" to describe a game so dangerously high-stakes that no rational person would take part.
Yet "deep play" is exactly what Clifford Geertz, in his landmark 1973 essay Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, claimed to have found in the villages of Bali, where men flocked to cockfights in which reputations could be lost in seconds.
Explaining why such irrationally risky behavior persists is the question Geertz sets out to answer in the essay, now a foundational text in symbolic and interpretive anthropology.
Cockfights were generally illegal in Indonesia when Geertz conducted his fieldwork in the 1950s, largely, as he writes, "as a result of the pretensions to puritanism radical nationalism tends to bring with it."
At the time, Balinese elites were concerned that cockfighting would make the country seem "primitive" or "unprogressive" to foreign observers, embarrassing for a nation hoping to modernise.
Ironically, this illegality turned out to be crucial to Geertz's research.
Initially ignored by the villagers, Geertz and his wife were effectively invisible, tolerated but not engaged with. That was until a large cockfight, held to raise money for a school, was broken up by the police.
In the panic, the Geertzes, deploying the "established anthropological principle" of When in Rome, ran with the crowd, diving into nearby gardens.
This moment of shared vulnerability was a turning point.
"The next morning the village was a completely different world for us. Not only were we no longer invisible, we were suddenly the center of all attention, the object of a great outpouring of warmth, interest, and, most especially, amusement."
Suddenly, Geertz had access to the inner workings of village life, giving him an opportunity to observe the cockfight as a social text.
His central claim is that the cockfight is far more than gambling or blood sport. It’s a highly charged symbolic drama in which Balinese men enact status, rivalry, and masculine identity.
The cock serves as a symbolic extension of the masculine ego (and yes, the double meaning of "cock" exists in Balinese too).
Geertz notes fellow anthropologists view that "cocks are viewed as detachable, self-operating penises, ambulant genitals with a life of their own." And though he remains agnostic on that claim himself, he still insists their role as hypermasculine symbols is clear:
"the fact that they are masculine symbols par excellence is about as indubitable, and to the Balinese about as evident, as the fact that water runs downhill."
Through the cockfight, carefully arranged to reflect rivalries between status groups, kinship circles, or villages, men symbolically express tensions and values that might otherwise remain unspoken in everyday life.
It's all, essentially, one big dramatisation of status anxiety.
The article is thick with detailed narrative of the fights themselves, the complex systems of gambling that surround them, and how both are intimately bound up with the social systems of the village.
It's an approach that exemplifies what Geertz famously called thick description: a method of ethnographic analysis that seeks, through detailed narrative of observed events, to understand actions within their full cultural context.
But the significance here isn't in the description, but rather the interpretation.
Drawing from philosophy and literary theory, Geertz takes culture (of which the Balinese cockfight is a mere example) to be an assemblage of texts that the anthropologist must bring her analytical faculties to.
This approach, which came to be known as symbolic or interpretive anthropology, marked a decisive shift toward a more nuanced, semiotic analysis of meaning in culture, the anthropologist moving from mapper of behaviour to creator of meaning.
No longer would the anthropologist simply ask what the function of a practice is, but rather what meaning that practice holds for the people who perform it.
Key takeaways
Though seemingly irrational due to its high stakes, the cockfight is an example of a "deep play" that dramatises honor, masculinity, and status in Balinese society.
The essay is an early example of Geertz's "thick description," an interpretive approach that seeks, through detailed narrative of observed events, to understand actions within their full cultural context.
Geertz's interpretation of the symbolism of the Balinese cockfight puts forth a new way of engaging in anthropological study, one that allows cultural practices to be "read" like a "text."
Extract of the Week: Clarice Lispector, Near to the Wild Heart, 1942 #literature
Colm Tóibín once wrote of Clarice Lispector that she had "an ability to write as though no one had ever written before."
If there were an opposite to ai approximations of human creativity, to the increasing proliferation of the grey average of what humans have put into prose, then she is it.
I'd like to see ai have a go at approximating this from the opening pages of 1942's Near to the Wild Heart (translation by Alison Entrekin)
“Her father's typewriter went clack-clack ... clack-clack-clack ... The clock awoke in dustless tin-dlen. The silence dragged out zzzzzz. What did the wardrobe say? clothes-clothes-clothes. No, no. Amidst the clock, the type-writer and the silence there was an ear listening, large, pink and dead. The three sounds were connected by the daylight and the squeaking of the tree's little leaves rubbing against one another radiant.
Leaning her forehead against the cold and shiny window-pane she gazed at the neighbor's yard, at the big world of the hens-that-didn't-know-they-were-going-to-die. And she could smell as if it were right beneath her nose the warm, hard-packed earth, so fragrant and dry, where she just knew, she just knew a worm or two was having a stretch before being eaten by the hen that the people were going to eat.”
Image of the Week: Primordial Chaos, No. 16, 1906–07, Hilma af Klint
Although Wassily Kandinsky was long credited with creating the first abstract painting in 1911, a lesser-known Swedish artist, clairvoyant and mystic called Hilma af Klint had already begun exploring abstraction as early as 1906, describing it as a "commission" from the spirits.
That same year, she embarked on The Paintings for the Temple, a vast project of hundreds of works intended for display in a spiral-shaped temple. It was a vision she called "the one great task I carried out in my lifetime."
In the paintings, of which the above is a personal favourite, af Klint aimed to convey knowledge of the universe that lies beneath the visible world, to portray, in her words, "images of the life that exists beyond everything."
The Collection: Extracts from The Travels of Sir John Mandeville #history #literature
The Travels of Sir John Mandeville, first published in the 14th century, was a medieval bestseller translated into multiple languages and read for centuries by figures like Columbus and Raleigh.
Claiming to recount 30 years of global exploration, the book is, in reality, pure literature, filled with fantastical creatures, bizarre customs, and the wild exaggerations of a man historians now believe was not a knight, not called Mandeville, and probably never travelled anywhere.
Despite its fabrications, the book remains a fascinating historical curiosity and an insight into the medieval wonder at a world as yet unexplored. Below is a collection of some of its more enduring tall tales.
Mouthless hissing little folk (Dondun)
“In another isle there be little folk, as dwarfs. And they be two so much as the pigmies. And they have no mouth; but instead of their mouth they have a little round hole, and when they shall eat or drink, they take through a pipe or a pen or such a thing, and suck it in, for they have no tongue; and therefore they speak not, but they make a manner of hissing as an adder doth, and they make signs one to another as monks do, by the which every of them understandeth other.”
Snakes with conservative moral views (Sicily)
“And in Sicily there is a manner of serpent, by the which men assay and prove, whether their children be bastards or no, or of lawful marriage: for if they be born in right marriage, the serpents go about them, and do them no harm, and if they be born in avoutry [adultery], the serpents bite them and envenom them.”
One-legged men with an interesting defence against the sun (Ethiopia)
“In that country be folk that have but one foot, and they go so blyve [quickly] that it is marvel. And the foot is so large, that it shadoweth all the body against the sun.”
Chickens covered in wool (Mancy, India)
In that country be white hens without feathers, but they bear white wool as sheep do here.
A boar/bear/lion hybrid (Arabia)
“There be also many other beasts, full wicked and cruel, that be not mickle [much] more than a bear, and they have the head like a boar, and they have six feet, and on every foot two large claws, trenchant; and the body is like a bear, and the tail as a lion.”
Flat faced people (Dondun)
“And in another isle be folk that have the face all flat, all plain, without nose and without mouth. But they have two small holes, all round, instead of their eyes, and their mouth is plat [flat] also without lips.”
Gigantic snails (Calonak)
“There be also in that country a kind of snails that be so great, that many persons may lodge them in their shells, as men would do in a little house.”
Thanks for reading! See you next time.
Enjoyed this? I'd really appreciate you taking the time to ‘like’ or to share it with a friend who also loves wild medieval travelogues or existential dread.
As a Brazilian, it is amazing to see Clarice’s words translated for the world. Hope you all give a chance to her and her books.
This was such an insightful read!