Human beings are doomed to exist and disappear regardless of their own will, and suffer from existential anxiety in conflict with other entities in the world and uncertainty about absolute existence. Western and Eastern philosophies have each tried to solve this problem by identifying an absolute being or emphasizing harmony among humans, while primitive approaches acknowledge the inscrutability of the absolute and rely on charisma. These various approaches have all attempted to address human existential anxiety.
Humans are doomed to exist as a single entity against their will and then to be annihilated without knowing where they are headed. This existential anxiety is due to the fact that every individual in the world is in a horizontal contradiction with every other individual, and a vertical contradiction with an unknown absolute being that governs their existence and annihilation. Here, “horizontal contradiction” refers to the conflict that arises from the differences between individuals, and “vertical contradiction” refers to the conflict that arises from the fact that the absolute always remains unknown to individuals. How have humans dealt with this existential anxiety?
In ancient Greece, before the formation of the polis, the absolute was an unknown to each individual. Believing that human existence was dictated by the gods, the ancient Greeks believed that the best way to live was to interpret and follow the will of the gods. After the formation of the polis, however, Western philosophy began to attempt to identify this absolute. It sought to resolve both vertical and horizontal contradictions by revealing the nature of absolute existence through the power of reason. Western philosophy believed that by identifying a universal principle that corresponds to the nature of absolute existence, it is possible to find a universal sameness that encompasses the differences of individuals, and thus secure the identity of individuals by defining them as legitimate components of a system without contradictions. However, individuals may differ in their understanding of what constitutes a universal principle. Therefore, in Western philosophy, ‘argumentation’, a method of arguing over the nature of absolute existence through a process of logical justification, became important.
Even in the Shang dynasty of China, the absolute being that governs human life was a mystery. Ancient Chinese believed that the will of heaven determined human destiny, and they sought to live in harmony with it. However, after the Spring and Autumn period, scholars who inherited Confucius’ ideas shifted their attention from the vertical relationship with the absolute to the horizontal relationship between humans and other humans, the in-man relationship. They dismissed the idea of a relationship with an absolute being as unnecessary, and focused on finding ways to harmonize the horizontal entities that were in conflict with each other. They sought to resolve conflicts between entities by establishing specific moral values, such as honor or courtesy, that could be shared by the group. They prioritized the order of the group over the individual, making the values of the group their identity. Thus, “complementarity”-the practice of conforming to moral values and refraining from revealing oneself in order to maintain harmony and order in a group-became important to them.
These two approaches to existential anxiety are fundamentally similar in that they both see humans as capable of resolving contradictions, albeit in different ways. However, in the former, it is difficult to escape the limitation that even if an individual answers endlessly about what an absolute being is in order to resolve anxiety, it is only the individual’s own interpretation of the absolute being. The latter has the limitation that it is only a partial solution in that it ignores the relationship with the absolute being to resolve anxiety and focuses on resolving contradictions between individuals within the group. Both of these methods are anthropocentric, devised at a time when urban civilization was in full swing and began to seek a perfect governing order within the walls of the city.
But there’s another way. The most primitive of these begins by acknowledging the inevitability of the vertical and horizontal contradictions that loom over the individual, and leaves the absolute unknowable. It recognizes not only the limitations of an object’s ability to define the nature of an absolute being, but also the futility of attempting to do so. For this reason, contradictions between entities are also not seen as something that can be resolved. Since each entity is doomed to subordination to the Absolute, entities entrust themselves to objects endowed with charisma by the Absolute and live in total dependence on them. In this context, “charisma” refers to the ability to be granted unilaterally by an absolute being. Individuals temporarily parasitize on objects that are endowed with charisma and represent absolute beings, gathering and dispersing in response to changes in the environment in which they live. In this way, they neither identify nor turn away from the Absolute in order to resolve their existential anxiety. For them, existential anxiety is not resolved. They merely become parasitic on the charismatic objects that they are endowed with, and this becomes their identity.
Compared to the previous two approaches, this approach is characterized by the fact that it sees contradictions as unresolvable and the identity of the entity as temporary and therefore subject to change. If the method that emphasizes contestation and complementarity is the logic of human-centered cities that developed in the last two or three thousand years as civilization developed, this method is the logic of the wilderness that humans have imprinted on their bodies as a way of being with all living things for hundreds of thousands of years of time and life. According to this logic, our superior sentience is actually no different from other animals’ specialized survival abilities in terms of our inability to resolve existential anxiety.
After all, humans have lived and continue to struggle to find solutions to their existential anxiety in a variety of ways. This search and endeavor provides us with important clues to understanding the nature of human existence, and continues to pose new questions and challenges. In this context, existential anxiety is not just a negative emotion, but also a driving force for human beings to constantly reflect and develop. In this way, existential anxiety drives us on a constant journey to deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world.
