Existentialism
Anxiety of Freedom
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dissiness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself.
Søren Kierkeggard – Concept of Anxiety
In Towards a Critical Existentialism (forthcoming), I take up two common ways of thinking about freedom, popularized by Isaiah Berlin. The first is what Berlin refers to as the “’negative’ freedom,” by which he means “simply the area within which a man can act unobstructed by others. If I am prevented by others from doing what I could otherwise do, I am to that degree unfree…” (Berlin 1969, 156). This seems by far to be the sense of freedom most people have in mind when they worry about their freedoms. Is the government preventing me from purchasing a gun, preventing me from going to a restaurant, football game, or to school unless I am vaccinated against Covid-19 or wearing a mask? Just a brief survey of the signs people bring to freedom rallies offers an indication of what they are concerned about—they don’t someone someone, and in particular a government, preventing them from doing what they “could otherwise do.” One attendee to the rally brought a sign saying, “My Grandma did not survive the Holocaust for me to be masked or vaxxed against my will!”; another’s read, “I call the shot not you”; and finally, a common sign at one rally in Bloomington, Indiana, read “Ethical health care equals right to refuse.” The shared sentiment, it seems clear, is that the mask and vaccine mandates are forcing a choice upon them that they ought to be free to make for themselves. Berlin refers to this sense of freedom as negative for it is a freedom from government, or it concerns itself with the space where government does not have a say in what one does or chooses to do.
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