Text Ticker: The Metaphysics of Anxiety
I just did a blog post about anxiety and ownership over at KtB that was a great deal of fun. It’s a reply to a really interesting letter to the editor; click the link below to get it all.
There is a metaphysical question at work here. In Aristotelian philosophy, everything must have a cause—indeed, several different kinds of causes operating at different levels. Therefore, on the one hand, I could say that I am letting myself be anxious. But I could also speak of the material causes, the neural engines at work in anxiety. Or, somewhat more removed, the formal reasons why I might be anxious, the contexts in my life that set the stage for anxiety to arise. And so on. It seems to me, therefore, that Michael’s suggestion that “I” should be the ultimate arbiter of anxiety is a choice among a multitude of possibilities—useful in certain cases, perhaps less so in others.
