Fundamental Existential Anxiety — Part 1: Living in the Age of Anxiety I

This seminar places anxiety within a philosophical and cultural crisis rather than treating it solely as an individual psychological symptom. It begins with Nietzsche, who anticipated the collapse of traditional metaphysical foundations and the “death of God” while hoping that human beings could become creators of their own values. Through Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse and the famous story of Nietzsche embracing a beaten horse, the talk presents that project as unfinished. If everything once treated as higher, sacred, or intrinsically valuable becomes available for possession and consumption, the human subject may become emptied along with those values.

Twentieth-century literature and art are used as witnesses to this collapse. T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and The Hollow Men, Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman appear as different images of a world without a secure centre or promised future. For the seminar, they register an age in which faith in rational progress, prosperity, and control had been shaken by world wars, fascism, economic depression, and mass violence. Rationality could no longer be assumed to guarantee moral development.

Existentialism then becomes a response to this condition. In the seminar’s reading, Camus and Sartre attempt to keep the human being standing in a world where meaning is not given in advance. Freedom is therefore not a simple gift; it carries the burden of choice and responsibility, and that burden generates anxiety. Other figures—Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Levinas, and Viktor Frankl—retain some relation to transcendence or to meaning beyond the isolated self. Frankl is especially important to the claim that meaning need not be merely invented; it may be discovered through one’s relation to the world, to responsibility, and to other people.

Postmodern thought formulates the problem differently. Once grand narratives lose authority, smaller truths compete within fields of power. Such criticism can expose monopolies over truth, yet the seminar asks what happens when no shared horizon remains by which desire, value, and responsibility can be distinguished. Modern anxiety appears in this gap: proliferating choices combined with diminishing common standards and a continuous demand to construct an identity.

The closing section distinguishes several levels of anxiety: fears concerning safety and survival; social anxiety concerning rejection and judgment; existential anxiety about freedom, death, and meaninglessness; and the anxiety of self-actualization—the fear of never becoming the person one had the capacity to become. The conclusion is not that anxiety should be abolished. Some anxiety is a cost of freedom and consciousness. The more important task is to distinguish anxiety produced by endless conformity to the gaze of others from the anxiety that accompanies authentic, responsible choice. The seminar’s way out of the “age of anxiety” is therefore not a simple restoration of old certainties but a more mature relationship to meaning, truth, individuality, and responsibility.