'THE ANXIETY OF GUILT AND CONDEMNATION': OUR LIBERTY IS LIMITED; NO FISH CAN SWIM OUT OF WATER.

 

The anxiety of guilt and condemnation responds to the question, “What have you made of yourself?”  The individual is both the questioner and the questioned.  Tillich says this situation (1952, 51-52), “produces the anxiety which, in relative terms is an anxiety of guilt; in absolute terms, the anxiety of self-rejection or condemnation.”

In some sense you are like one standing or approaching the peripheries of the end of a journey and taking stock.  To this question, one either responds, “Nothing” or “Something.”  And the “Something/Nothing” dichotomy is often determined relative to the norms of the environmental context in which it is made.  In the corporate world all I ever heard was production, tons, bottom-line, objectives and many other measurements of success.  You have achieved something if you measure up to the icons established and determined by your environment.  Everybody heard those voices, and they determined your remuneration in a bottomless pit that never filled.  It was not what most people wanted to do but it was the only voices we heard and measured by.  Nobody said you would never join the ‘Billionaires Club’ if you kept listening to those voices.  Nobody said anything about intuition; that voice that guides you to do what you want to do and are passionate about.

That question is determined in the context of our finitude.  We do not have forever to actualize.  Being human also implies accepting the reality of our finiteness.  We are free to actualize to our highest possible and yet that freedom can only be pursued within the limitations of our liberty.  If we act in accordance with what we believe to be the demands of destiny we are affirmed but nonbeing continues to undermine every action every step of the way, even the best of our performance.

As in ontic and spiritual self-affirmation, death ultimately stands in the background of whether we succeed in making something or nothing of ourselves (moral self-affirmation).

In the Genesis narrative, Adam and Eve were given authority over all creation but their liberty was limited.  They were not to eat of “the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  Anxiety is introduced when we choose to explore beyond the liberties we are given in the divine scheme of things.

There is a problem!

Tillich’s (1952, 54-57) categories of anxiety reach their zenith in despair.  Despair is the dynamic confluence of the ontic, spiritual, and moral ways in which nonbeing seeks to disaffirm being.  There is no hope beyond despair.  However, there is enough being left in us to recognize our state of hopelessness.  Research on human anxiety can only reveal that there are more questions than answers.  The dark corridors of the human soul grow darker with every dawn of new understanding on the subject.  As Frankl (1984, 126-127) said; 'an existential homeostasis is not possible.' 

Despair suggest the surrender of being to nonbeing.  The awareness of that suggestion adds another element to despair which Tillich calls “despair within despair.”  It is one’s awareness of surrender and the inevitable and ultimate prospects of absolute surrender (Tillich 1952, 21-22).

Despair hits the ceiling, and it cannot see its way into the future.  What do you do if you cannot see your way into the future?  A lot of people have been there; like the financier who jumps off the highest skyscraper because his/her investments were wiped out overnight.  Joseph Goebbels and his wife poisoned their six children and committed suicide because they could not imagine life without the Fuhrer (Patin 2009).

A psychiatric observation to this effect was made by Frankl when writing about the situation in the Nazi death camps (1984, 95):

'The prisoner who had lost faith in the future—his future—his faith was doomed.  With his loss of belief in the future, he lost his spiritual hold; he let himself decline and became subject to mental and physical decay.'

Tillich’s analysis of anxiety leaves us with a feeling of doom and gloom.  That is typical of all existentialism and that mood has been decried from philosophical, psychological, and theological directions.  Yet Tillich is presenting two sides of the same coin.  The one side (nonbeing) is perennially feeding on the other (being).  In the thought of Tillich being has a priority over nonbeing yet nonbeing relentlessly seeks to undermine being.  Nonbeing has no life of its own because it feeds on the life of being.  If being did not exist, then nonbeing would be a hollow misnomer.  Being is something and nonbeing is nothing.

How is this priority of being over nonbeing a leverage in dealing with human anxiety?  Tillich argues that whole point convincingly in his comparison of existential and pathological anxiety.  The fact that there is a dark side to human existence means that there is a bright side.  Self-affirmation is not a denial of nonbeing, in it being takes the parasitical nature of the nothingness of nonbeing into itself.  Nonbeing would be nothing if being was not something.  The courage of being to withstand the forces of nonbeing must take that reality into consideration.  Unlike some panaceas to pathological anxiety which seem to suggest the possibility of an emotional or existential equilibrium or elimination (Tillich 1952, 64-70).

For the pathological neurotic, self-affirmation is available but only in a limited sense.  The neurotic is affirmed but is surrendered to the things they fear.  A reappearance of their fears—if they have been removed—may drive them into despair. The neurotic is partially affirmed because he/she finds affirmation in the denial of being’s relation to nonbeing (Tillich 1952, 70-78).

For Tillich, these pathological attempts in the medical and social sciences do not go far enough.  The solutions are often shallow because they ignore the ontic structure of anxiety.  They treat the symptoms and leave the sickness intact. In this way the problem is not solved because it usually will resurface in another form and another place and will finally result in emotional exhaustion and finally despair.