On Philosophical Construction of the Term Anxiety

According to the modern psychiatry, normal, physiological anxiety is part of everyday life and is associated with situations characterised by uncertainty and vagueness. Anxiety plays mainly a protective role and becomes pathological when it is triggered by inner, irrational signals. However, the modern psychiatry tends to view the transition from physiological to pathological anxiety as quantitative. As the mechanism of psychosocial stressors is identical to that of biological stressors, the stress reaction cascade develops in the same manner in both of these cases [1]. Anxiety symptoms typically occur in neurotic disorders. Outside neurotic disorders, they appear in a wide spectrum of psychiatric pathologies, almost always with depressive symptoms. It also accompanies phobias, hypochondriac syndrome, obsessions, neurasthenic syndrome, exhaustion and often psychotic disorders with hallucinations and delusions.

Anxiety symptoms are characterised by the presence of unsubstantiated anxiety in a common situation, which is experienced by the individual as unreasonable, bothersome and sorrowful. The inner restlessness typical for milder forms of anxiety symptoms transform into more significant external restlessness in more severe forms. From the perspective of phenomenology, anxiety symptoms can be classified under chronic anxiety, anxiety attack and panic reaction. An anxiety attack or panic reaction intensifies the ambiguous uncertainty of the threat, which the affected individual cannot escape, as the subjective experience is accompanied by significant vegetative and somatic effect. For example, in the case of generalised anxiety disorder, an anxiety attack may suddenly develop into the monstrosity of dread. This means that the state of pathological anxiety may be characterised by inner instability, which further deepens the anxious aspect of the condition. However, the risk of suicide is small.

Pathological anxiety tends to replace physiological anxiety also in the remaining everyday situations, specifically in the case of nervousness. As suggested previously, there are many shades of pathological anxiety in terms of subjective perception and therefore also objectifying description, and this is further evident in the distinction made in diagnostics between anxiety disorders, organic disorders (infection, intoxication, tumours, hyperthyroidism, arteriosclerosis), schizophrenia, depressive episodes, personality disorders [2].

The study bases its examination on analysing the perception of anxiety in Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis. Why focus specifically on Sigmund Freud?
a) Because his contribution to understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety in terms of psychiatry and medical perception in general is virtually incalculable.
b) Because on one hand he describes the topic of anxiety as the central problem of psychiatry and medical thinking in general, on the other hand his description of anxiety as the central issue interconnects psychiatry and medicine with philosophical reflection. This is why his concept of anxiety has not been surpassed to this day and it makes sense to return to the historical genesis of his opinions, although they may be influenced by the time of origination and have been surpassed entirely in certain aspects.

The study subsequently proceeds to analyse the opinions of philosophy on anxiety. However, this paper needs to limit the width of the perspective in order to maintain clarity, as anxiety is omnipresent explicitly and indirectly, and this is true in particular in philosophy as a discipline examining the key questions of the world and the man in the world. It is therefore necessary to simplify the methodology, and the study will thus focus on the topic of anxiety in religious philosophy and existentialist philosophy, working with the topic of anxiety in the work of S. Kierkegaard, M. Heidegger and J. P. Sartre. Furthermore, the author will introduce his thought experiment in the sense of philosophy of anxiety as a cohesive philosophical system.

The key objective of this study is to deepen the cooperation between psychiatry and medical thinking and systematic philosophy in order to open new horizons for examining the problem. The study strives to construct anxiety with philosophical means (naturally without claiming to provide definite answers) and the aim of the study is gradually fulfilled in the form of answers to the following questions:
a) What is the difference between anxiety and anxiousness?
b) Is anxiety a subjective emotion or an exogenous principle?
c) Many states of subjective perception, such as obsession, boredom, fear, etc. probably have their anxious aspect. The means of systematic philosophy can be used in an attempt to define the relationship between anxiety and these phenomena, i.e. to define their anxious background.

Anxiety cannot be derived mentally in any manner; this is Freud’s major early standpoint that remained unquestioned in the ideas appearing in his subsequent work. From the perspective of aetiology, for example while fright may be the source of traumatic neurosis or even hysterical neurosis, it can never become the source of permanent predisposition for anxiety. Freud notes that as the aetiological source of many cases of anxious neurosis cannot be recognised, explanation through heredity may be valid in this case. Therefore, anxious neuroses of unknown non-sexual aetiology exist. From the perspective of pathophysiology, anxious neuroses of known aetiology (Freud does not state whether these account for a bigger or a smaller part of all anxious neuroses) are derived from aspects of sex life.

Freud lists anxious neuroses of sexual aetiology as follows: anxiety of virgins or adolescents; anxiety of newly-wed women; anxiety of women whose husbands suffer from ejaculation praecox or significantly decreased potency; anxiety of women whose husbands practise coitus interruptus or reservatus; anxiety of widows and intentionally sexually abstaining women; anxiety in menopause during the last major surge of sex drive; anxiety of intentionally abstaining men (with a defence system using compulsive ideation and hysteria); anxiety of men with frustrated arousal; anxiety of men who practise coitus interruptus; anxiety of older men (at the time of declining potency and increasing libido); neurasthenics, whose disease was caused by masturbation, falling into anxious neurosis once they cease to pursue sexual satisfaction in this manner; anxiety due to exhaustion.

It is characterised by:
a) General irritability, including in particular hypersensitivity to sound and noise.
b) Anxious anticipation, including hypochondria, which does not appear at the peak of anxious anticipation and is conditional on the existence of paraesthesia and unpleasant bodily sensations. Anxious anticipation is the core of anxious neurosis, as it comes hand in hand with free anxiety, which may feed various ideations.
c) The presence of anxious attack, which can be described from the perspective of subjective feelings as imminent end of life, stroke, madness associated with distressed perception of body function disorder. Freud classifies acute anxiety according to physical symptomatology associated with the relevant feeling; for example, acute anxiety with heart function disorders, acute anxiety with breathing disorders, etc.
d) Exceptional emphasis is placed on polymorphism and fluctuation of anxious neurosis symptoms. In addition to anxiety attack, Freud describes germinal anxiety attacks and equivalent anxiety attacks [3].

This study examines the term anxious anticipation as a key moment in Freud’s concept. This means that anxiety does not stem from the past, but is future-oriented instead. While we may regret our past and our engagement in it, anxiety is not the emotional experience stemming from this. Projection of anxiety into bodily experience is the second noteworthy aspect. When the moment of anxious anticipation, i.e. focus on future, is connected with projection of anxiety into bodily experience, i.e. inner and outer disquiet, an action obviously becomes a term connecting future with bodily experience. The ability to anxiety to potentially open various modes of actions is another major characteristic of anxiety to be examined in this study. In this context, Freud seems to be anticipating in particular religious interpretation of anxiety, according to which anxiety is at the base of a radically new future. All of this is underscored by the third moment of Freud’s perception, which presents anxiety as a phenomenon of the world that cannot be reduced to anything else, as one of the axes the world is built on.

Despite Freud being a scientific agnostic, his perception of anxious neurosis points to the potential existence of transcendental dimension of the world, which cannot be rejected a priori. However, it is necessary to point out even in this brief summary that anxious neurosis cannot escape the main theorem of Freud’s work as a whole, according to which the origination and symptomatology of neuroses stems from sexuality as such. At the same time, the study cannot avoid the term childhood anxiety to weaken the proposition described above and keep the interpretation within the proportions of Freud’s actual statements. Childhood anxiety is included in the essence of the idea of childhood sexuality as a germinal matter from which adult sexuality develops at a later stage. Freud states: “Children behave from an early age as if their dependency on their carers had the character of sexual love”. In the event of lacking care from one’s close people childhood anxiety develops as something pre-empting the option of disorder appearing in future: “A child behaves the same way as an adult, transforming its libido into anxiety, when the libido cannot be satisfied.

Conversely, an adult turned neurotic due to unsatisfied libido starts to behave the same way as a child in their anxiety, starting to experience fear of being along, i.e. without the presence of a person whose love seems to be certain to them, and attempting to alleviate their anxiety using the most childish means”. If neurosis is the opposite of perversion, and if fixation of individual infantile sexual instincts is a condition for perverse character of sexuality and consequently of potential future displacement and origination of a neurotic symptom, it is necessary to mention pathophysiology of fixation as seen by Freud: “A great proportion of subsequently observed deviations from normal sex life is determined from the start by experiences in childhood in neurotic, as well as perverse individuals, despite childhood being described as a period in life free of sexuality. Constitutional attraction, premature maturity, characteristics of increased fixation, and accidental awakening of sexual instinct by an external stimulus contribute to their origination [4]”.

Freud’s taxonomy of neuroses from the 1890s distinguishes between neurasthenia, anxious neurosis, hysterical psychoneurosis and compulsive psychoneurosis. Anxious neurosis is the first hint at Freud’s theory of anxiety. However, the first comprehensive theory of anxiety can be found in the Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. However, Freud’s first comprehensive theory of anxiety works with new classification of neuroses, which differs from the original classification from the 1890s. Freud newly expressly includes neurasthenia, anxious neurosis and hypochondria under neuroses. It is obvious at first sight that hypochondria has been separated from Freud’s original perception of anxious neurosis. However, the following changes can be considered truly significant:
a) While Freud admitted the existence of sexual and nonsexual aetiology of anxious neurosis in the model from the 1890s, the acute neurosis symptoms are said to arise from libido in the second decade of the 20th century, which means that its origin is exclusively sexual.
b) Besides being influenced by mental circumstances, major contribution of the nature as such to acute neuroses is described: “Acute neuroses display undoubtable likeness with pathological states triggered by chronic effects of poisonous substances and their acute withdrawal, with intoxication, and with states produced by abstinence in individual aspects, as well as in their typical characteristic – the influence on all organ systems and all functions”.
c) There is a major difference between the acute neurosis symptoms compared to psychoneuroses: while representing substitute satisfaction of libido, it lacks the general sense of a symptom, which is inherent to psychoneurosis symptoms. On the other hand, psychoneurosis symptoms is not mere substitute satisfaction. It is an exceptionally fitting and the only possible solution of relationships between an individual and their social environment in the dynamics of past and present. It represents the suffering and the profit of illness. The temporary beneficial effect is redeemed by generally blocked personality development.
d) While the acute neurosis and the psychoneurosis symptoms differ, Freud describes interesting relationship between the two: “There is an interesting relationship between acute neurosis symptoms and psychoneurosis symptoms, which represents major contribution to understanding psychoneurotic symptoms; acute neurosis symptoms are the core and a stepping stone to psychoneurotic symptoms. This relationship can be more distinctly observed between neurasthenia and transfer neurosis referred to as conversion hysteria, between anxious neurosis and anxious hysteria, and between hypochondria and certain forms referred to as paraphrenias (dementia praecox and paranoia); we will discuss these later [5]”.
e) Freud distinguishes between imminent anxiety and developed anxiety. While imminent anxiety mobilises individual’s resources for managing unfamiliar and threatening situations, development of anxiety is always pathological and neurotic.

Freud’s contemplation always includes a specific, precisely formulated outcome, as well as the germinal fluid for further development of his consideration of exceptionally difficult issues. However, Freud avoids apodicticity in all his statements, as he is an honest thinker and is preventatively self-critical. While his first comprehensive system of anxiety is an attempt to define a comprehensive system in an unclear terrain, it contains certain contradictions, which need to be pointed out, as they lead to better understanding of anxiety:
a) If anxiety symptoms are a precursor to psychoneurotic symptoms, the link between anxiety and future is weakened, as the origination of psychoneurotic symptoms is a temporary solution to an otherwise rationally unsolvable problem hic et Nunc. Psychoneurotic symptoms seem to block the link between anxiety and future. If anxiety is a phenomenon that maintains its link to future under all circumstances, is anxiety as a precursor to psychoneurotic symptoms indeed anxiety?
b) According to Freud, the difference between imminent anxiety and developed anxiety is vast. It is a difference between health and illness, between the ability to accept future and necessity of being caught in conflicts of the present, but surviving. However, how should transition between two distinct qualities be possible?
c) Freud strengthens the overall meaning of the anxiety phenomenon clearly recognised in the 1890s, when he proposed independence, non-deduction and therefore primality of anxiety. He seems to be adding another layer of significance, when he states that the issue of anxiety is the central point where the most important questions intersect. However, his deliberate emphasis on the independence and non-deduction of anxiety appears to be merely verbal, because anxiety is associated with exclusively sexual aetiology and thus becomes a derived phenomenon.

Initially, it is necessary to reiterate that Freud’s work needs to be perceived as tireless contemplation on intersections of the most difficult philosophical and medical problems. However, the background is solid, as it is supported by meticulous work of a psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and neurologist. This should be the attitude applied to the analysis of Freud’s second comprehensive theory of anxiety. The transition from the first comprehensive theory of anxiety to the second comprehensive theory of anxiety is gradual. However, we will focus on the notional peak of construction of the second comprehensive theory of anxiety, which can be found in the chapter Anxiety and Instinctive Life in the New Series of Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. Initially, the following is reiterated:
a) Anxiety is associated with frustrated arousal within libidinous energy management.
b) Freud clearly states and agrees with psychiatry of the time that anxiety is an affective state.
c) He assumes that readiness to anxiety or developed anxiety as such reproduce the primary toxic anxiety as an affective state with deep bodily links, which may be the moment of birth.
d) Freud defines readiness to anxiety as a state of increased sensual tension and motoric alertness.
e) This situation may lead to two possible outcomes: anxiety may be limited to a signal allowing for the solution of the actual situation, or anxiety may develop and repeat the old traumatic experience.
f) Definition of typology of neurotic anxiety can be observed in three different situations “Then we focused on neurotic anxiety and decided to observe it in three different situations. Firstly, as a freely floating general anxiety, ready to attach to any new opportunity that may arise; this is the so-called anticipatory anxiety, as seen for example in typical anxious neurosis. Secondly, as anxiety bound firmly to certain content of ideation, in the so-called phobias, where the relationship between anxiety and external danger can still be recognised, but this anxiety must be considered excessive. Finally, it is perceived as anxiety in hysteria and other forms of severe neuroses, which either accompanies symptoms, or is presented separately as an attack or a long-term state, but always without obvious justification by external danger [6]”.

However, Freud changes its concept immediately, as:
a) Developed neurotic anxiety is not the consequence of disbalance in libidinous energy management. Instead, it is external anxiety causing this libidinous disbalance.
b) Neurotic anxiety is no longer mentioned and only anxiety stemming from the outer world remains. This is described according to the idea of birth anxiety as the primordial trauma mentioned by Otto Rank.
c) This is explained by complete, to some extent definite idea of the structure of mind defined by Freud, which contains the Id, Superego and Ego.

Anxiety coming from the outside (and this is unavoidably traumatic anxiety) occupies the Ego, and this traumatic anxiety from the outside is used within the Ego in relation to imperative instinctive requirements of the Id, as well as in the interaction with the Superego. The Id seems to be an unconscious reservoir of instincts and the underlying driving force of an individual. The Ego is part of the unconscious sphere of the Id, which is altered by the direct influence of the outer world intermediated by perception and consciousness. In addition, the Ego sphere is subject to differentiation and a separate Superego is profiled here, in certain sense playing the role of the critical moral authority in relation to the Ego as the ideal Ego, although it is unconscious and depends on the Id entirely in terms of energy. Therefore, the Superego is the source of unconscious feeling of guilt, which can also be described as anxiety of the conscience [7]. As Freud states: “The Superego is not a mere residuum of initial objective choices arising from the Id sphere. It is also a reactive energy output turning against them [8]”.

Therefore, summary of certain aspects of the first and the second comprehensive theory of anxiety produces a basis on which the first contribution to the construct of the term anxiety using philosophical means can be defined:

Table 1:

Therefore, the study also needs to examine the issues of reproduction as discussed in the work of Sigmund Freud:
a) In general, it can be stated that Freud’s work is oriented towards dialectics of the conflict between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality, and the requirement for reproduction plays a minor role here. The conflict between the principle of pleasure and the principle of reality is omnipresent of Freud’s work from the 1890s, when denial of libidinous wishes or displacement is mentioned as the mechanism of origination of the symptoms of hysterical psychoneurosis. The first quote comes from the work “Civilised” Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness: “Our culture is generally built on supressing the instincts. Each individual has surrendered a certain part of their assets, the completeness of their power, the aggressive and vindictive tendencies in their personality; the shared cultural assets comprising material and ideal assets was formed with these contributions [9]”. The second quote comes from the work entitled Civilisation and Its Discontents: “This means that the meaning of life simply rests in the program of the principle of pleasure. The purposefulness of this principle, which governs the work of the mental apparatus from the start, is beyond any doubt. And yet, its program is in conflict with the entire world, the macrocosm and the microcosm. It is unviable, everything is opposed to it… There is no doubt that people facing the pressure of these possible sufferings tend to reduce their requirement for happiness. This happens the same way as the principle of pleasure is transformed under the influence of the outer world into the more modest principle of reality [10]”.
b) The Ego and The Id is a late work by Freud, in which Freud the physician meets Freud the philosopher. According to Freud, Eros is more conspicuous and more accessible than the death instinct, which works silently. Its aim is to unify and at the same time to spread the substance of life. It contains self-preservation instincts. However, similarly to the instinct of death, the nature of Eros is conservative. It strives to reproduce the conditions before the origination of life. Therefore, although one may anticipate express mention of reproduction of the mankind in the topic of Eros, this theme is not discussed expressly. Suggestions of this topic may be detected concealed in Freud’s rather ambiguous formulations.
c) Nonetheless, reproduction plays a highly important role in one major context. In his Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, Freud discovers and describes essential bases of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis seems to have been completed in its crucial parameters in Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. Let’s focus directly on the issue of reproduction, as in this work Freud mentions reproduction in a single important section, giving it unexpected but from the perspective of psychoanalysis logical character. Sexual development of an individual is completed in puberty, and Freud states: “The new sexual aim for men rests in ejaculation of sex products; it is not distant from the former aim of achieving pleasure. Rather, the greatest part of pleasure is associated with this final act of sexual endeavour. Sexual instinct now serves the reproductive function: it is – so to say – altruistic.” Reproduction as a topic only appears after completion of individual developmental stages of sexual organisation, i.e. in the stage of subordination of individual infantile stages of sexual development to genital organisation. The entire process is controlled by the egotistic dualism pleasure-denial of pleasure, and only than reproduction appears as the first and probably also the last altruism that can be found in sexuality.

As explained previously, Freud’s theoretical outline of the structure of mind in the 1920s had a significant impact on his understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety. In the structural model of mind, Freud the psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and neurologist meets Freud the philosopher and expert on culture. Freud the philosopher is evident in particular in his description of the anticipated instinct of death and in the discussion of the consequences arising from the existence of the instinct of death. Freud stated that the Id is the source of two main instincts – Eros and the instinct of death. While Freud presents individual medical evidence of the existence of the instinct of death in outburst of the instinct of death is sadism or accumulation of the instinct of death in the Superego in the case of melancholy, his dualistic theory of instincts as a whole is a philosophical or even poetic vision. To return to the topic discussed in this study, anxiety relates to the instinct of death as follows: “It seems correct to me to understand anxiety directed at death as something different from objective (real) anxiety and from neurotic anxiety triggered by libido…The mechanism of anxiety relating to death could only rest in the fact that the Ego significantly releases its narcissist libidinous content, i.e. that the Ego gives itself up that same way it gives up any other object in an anxiety attack. I believe that anxiety relating to death is played out between the Ego and the Superego”.

The standard history of philosophy claims that this Danish thinker of the 1830 and 1840s belongs to religious philosophy, or philosophy of faith, yet anticipates certain moments in the thinking of existential philosophy. This study aims to present a targeted and selective view of anxiety and its immediate ideological context. This is the only option, as Kierkegaard declares himself to be the antipode of systematic philosophy in the sense of German conventional philosophy, and variations of ideas from various angles enveloped in an imaginative or even brilliant literary style are his main contribution. Kierkegaard is a proof of the fact that philosophy is text and nothing else than text. This selective view is inherently topical and even deliberately particular, as it assumes inherent inability to distil a clear philosophical profile from philosopher’s work without major simplification, in particular in situations when philosophy and literature are merged in single creation. Therefore, the study approaches the topic of anxiety according to Kierkegaard by striving to explain his view of anxiety in particular on the opening sections of his work Fear and Trembling, while taking account of the formulation order of this work. It should be reiterated that the aim of this study is to examine anxiety and, in this sense, examination of Kierkegaard is only auxiliary:

Table 2:

Returning to the topic of anxiety, Kierkegaard states: “Anxiety is left out from Abraham’s story [11]”. This means that it is there. Anxiety is associated with the paradox of faith, in which the God is found – and lost again. Anxiety looks at a lone man, who say himself to be socialised by the God only to be submerged in loneliness again. Therefore, faith has the character of a leap into absurdity and anxiety is the experience of this situation. Anxiety is the psychophysical experience of the absurd. Faith is a paradox, when an individual defeats the general, even the general of ethics. Abraham finds himself in a place beyond all ethics. Yet, surely it can be assumed that this initial motion of faith played out in the duality of profit and loss of that one has gained, and these core motions of faith repeat over and over, until they finally reach complete community of God. In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard describes faith as a leap into absurdity in anxiety as follows: “Therefore, either the paradox that an individual has an absolute relation with the absolute exists, or Abraham is lost”.

Firstly, Heidegger’s perception of anxiety should be described as interpreted by the Czech psychotherapist, theorist and practician in particular of group Dasein analysis, Oldřich Celek: “Heidegger does not study it by speculating on anxiety or by gathering various thought or story associations concerning anxiety. However, he does not obtain its existence or meaning empirically either, i.e. as an extract from its psycho-physical, psychosocial or introspective expressions of experience. The man as an existing being feels anxiety from being in the world when everything has lost its sense, when nothing remains there in. Anxiety produces loneliness and isolates an individual from objects and people …An individual in anxiety finds themselves in depressing strangeness. Anxiety is a threat that targets an individual directly from their exclusive way of being, from their knowledge of their own end, mortality. Anxiety thus derives from the horizon of a man’s fear of their own options for being [12]”. Let’s allow Martin Heidegger to talk directly through his own views from his major work Being and Time [13].

Table 3:

Let’s introduce the view on anxiety of the French philosopher and writer through several quotes from his major philosophical work Being and Nothingness [14]:

Table 4:

The author within this study revisits his own work focusing on the above topic [15-18] and their statements. The entire study is essentially reiterated, as the essays were written based on the study of S. Freud, S. Kierkegaard, M. Heidegger and J.P. Sartre. A certain degree of abuse of anxiety in history is typical. Whenever a thinker wanted to grasp something strangely undefinable – and at the same time postpone the issue elegantly ad acta – all they needed to do is to refer to it as anxiety. Anxiety has two sides: on the one hand, it triggers “anxiety” as the power of all powers, as an entity of unmatched greatness. On the other hand, anxiety is seen as emptied endlessness, and we accept anxiety as helplessness, which can be subjected to any interpretation effort, any interpreting dogma. How should one understand the strange balance between being everything and being nothing?

From the philosophical perspective, anxiety thus carries the Godly logic. However, it is the Godly logic of a certain kind. Anxiety is only everything sui generis. It is everything on the edge of nothing, and this makes it unique. It is unique as the God, yet at the same time godless. Anxiety is so unclear that nothing vaguer than anxiety can be imagined – anxiety therefore exists. This may be the scholastic evidence of the existence of anxiety, which should be naturally taken with reservation as a poetic assembly. Anxiety is, anxiety is everything; and yet, it is so distant from the God. If the God is flawlessly definite, anxiety is flawlessly indefinite. The following table describes that basic scheme of philosophy of anxiety, as announced in the introduction to this study.

This scheme is based on the following general idea: The source of anxiety or from what anxiety is derived is just as unsolvable question as the question of who created the Creator. According to the basic theoretical scheme of philosophy of anxiety, the world as a whole comprises two directions of creation. The godly direction, from which creation of everything that is comes – and the direction of anxiety, which defines the experience of everything that is. Therefore, anxiety simply is, similarly to the God. It does not arise from anything; it is not derived from anything. Yet, it belongs to this world just as significantly as the God. However, when we ask the question of what prevails in the already created world – the God or anxiety, it is necessary to say that anxiety prevails, as the God only views his creation from a distance. If the man’s situation should be described using extreme terms, one can only say that the man has anxiety within his reach and the God very far behind his back.

To focus on the basic methodological steps in philosophy of anxiety, this philosophy rests on the fact that anxiety as an exogenous principle and as a direction in the world’s creation from the philosophical point of view cannot be more than a set of anxiety truths, which are too cruel for the man to identify with them. The man has to look away from these truths, to supress them – and he does so in the response to anxiety; for example, in obsession, boredom, categoric imperative, unease, fear. This means that these key experiences are derivatives of anxiety dominated by anxious pole, which they may strives to ignore.

Naturally, including categoric imperative among obsession, boredom, unease and fear may raise major doubts. After all, Immanuel Kant describes it as a formal ethical rational principle. However, the history of categorical imperative as a certain kind of anxious, strenuously moral endogenous reactive humanness starts way before the excellent philosopher Kant. Categoric imperative has its anxious emotive content and formal rationality is only an external coating as an expression of the attempt to look away from the truth of anxiety. Including obsession, boredom or fear among clear derivatives of anxiety is not likely to raise doubts.

Unease is an experience to which the author found inspiration in the work of a major philosopher focusing on anxiety, J. P. Sartre. However, this attempt to construct the term anxiety using philosophical means is a mere thought experiment, which does not claim to be definite or free of errors. The author of this study would not probably include unease in the system, yet it fulfils its function in its logical completeness. To summarise from the point of methodology: the view into the unease of anxiety produces the truth of anxiety, which is described and analyses in the message of anxiety. The last step is to define the response to anxiety arising from the message of anxiety.

Table 5:

The author would like to express his thanks to the following persons for their assistance in his publication activities relating to the topic of anxiety: Rudolf Steindl (philosopher, Senior Member of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences). Milan Mráz (Director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences). Felix Seebauer (Chief Editor of Prager Wochenblatt).

No conflict of interest.

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