Conclusion

The conclusion revisits the characterization of anxiety by each thinker examined: Kant, Hegel, Schelling, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Darwin, Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, and Levinas. It proposes a three-part overview of anxiety (1) as the fundamental affect supervening upon, and accompanying, pleasure and displeasure; (2) as a sign or symptom of “the possible” or indeed of a conflict between bodily and cultural forces, and (3) as the affect that poses questions—about the conditions of emergence of a moral subject and, ultimately, about what-is. It examines some recent debates about the meaning and rationality of emotions, their evolutionary status, and concludes that this affect cannot be reduced to a cognitive emotion or what the idealist tradition called a “passion.” Rather than intellectualizing it, anxiety must be grasped in its many senses and abided with, like a site of sojourning.