The Age of Anxiety


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.

W. B. Yeats

Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
everything not part of it to ash.

Wallace Stevens
Since we all live in the 20th century we must certainly know where we are. Surely we understand our own world better than Athens of the 5th century BC or Renaissance Europe. But the world we live in is so close to us, we are so much a part of it, that we do not know how to distinguish what is important in the history of philosophy or religion from what is only trivial, a major trend from a passing fashion. Because it is hard to see the woods for the trees, a few clues may be helpful to guide us through the labyrinth. Let's call them Ariadnian threads. There are at least four of them that I can detect.

I. Loss of Confidence

Students of contemporary culture have characterized this century in various ways-for instance, as the age of anxiety, the aspirin age, the nuclear age, the age of one-dimensional man, the post-industrial age; but nobody, unless a candidate for office at some political convention, has called this a happy age.
All these events have undermined the old beliefs in progress, in rationality, in people's capacity to control their destiny and improve their lot.

At the core of this collapse of confidence we find a growing feeling of the radical ambiguity of the human mode of being in the world.

In Dante's day the dark wood was only a small maze in a coherent, well-ordered world. He never doubts the reality of the sun beams falling on the top of the hill. But, in contrast, Yeat's disoriented falcon evokes a feeling that "Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world". In a world that has no center-and no falconer-the disorientation is cosmic, not local.

II. Concern with Science

Some people-including some philosophers-have been tempted to blame science for these feelings of disposition and disorientation. Think, for instance, of the me that I experience when I look inside myself or that I experience by the naked eye-a rich, thick, fruity land of plum pudding of odors, tastes, colors, likes and dislikes, prejudices and passions.

And now contrast this with the complex structure of amino acids and polypeptide chains that our science department tells me I am. Which is the real me? Or, if both are somehow real, how are they related?

Or think of the conviction that our own acts and those of other people are praiseworthy or blameworthy, and that the rural quality they have depends on our having been free to do them or to abstain from doing them.

And then contrast this with the scientific view that human behavior is, in principle, as predictable as a solar or lunar eclipse. If we are not free to choose one act in preference to another, but, instead, our behavior is wholly the outcome of antecedent events in time, including our heredity and environment, then the consequences are that the notions of obligation and responsibility are as inapplicable to us as they are to automobiles, rockets, or computers. No wonder the falcon is disoriented!

But does science in fact lead to these consequences? Some people-including some philosophers-argue that it does not. Quite the contrary. According to these people, science reorientes the falcon by locating it once and for all in the real world instead of the various false worlds of myth, superstition, and fancy.

Thus science, far from causing metaphysical anxiety by destroying the old orientation, provides a way of satisfying-and, for the first time in the history of culture, satisfying fully and securely-the ontological urge, the urge for objectivity. The falcon, then, is far from feeling disoriented. It may indeed dislike the world in which science has shown it to be living, but, if so, it must simply learn to put up with things as they are.

III. The Disassociated Sensibility

A third Ariadnan thread is the theme of the divided self, or, in T. S. Eliot's phrase, the "disassociated sensibility." Mankind has always agreed that it is distinguished from the rest of nature by its consciousness of what it does and what it experiences. But what was once regarded as a supremely valuable distinction-think Socrates' "the unexamined life is not worth having"-has increasingly come to be regarded as a major misfortune.

More and more people long to return to a simple unconscious mode of existence in which they are indistinguishable from the rest of nature instead of proudly separated from it. And since they realize that this mode of existence is impossible for them, they experience anguish and despair.

In fiction, from Satie and Dostoyevsky to D. H. Lawrence, you find a search for immediacy, in contrast to acceptance of an experience mediated by consciousness. But you find it not only in fiction. Much of the appeal of Zen, of sensitivity training, of encounter groups, of the drug culture, and of hippie dropout can surely be traced to a similar distaste for the psychic distance that consciousness interposes between human beings and the world.

IV. The Linguistic Turn

A fourth thread is language. Those who are down on consciousness as creating a fatal gap between the knower and the world are likely to perceive language as a distorting lens through which the knower peers in vain. But do we peer wholly in vain?

Some hold that by a special method or on special occasions we can experience pure reality, uncontaminated by language. Wallace Stevens has described this kind of experience-
Let's see the very thing and nothing else.
Let's see it with the hottest fire of sight.
Burn everything not part of it to ash.
Trace the gold sun about the whitened sky
Without evasion by a single metaphor.
And say this, this is the center that I seek.

"Credences of Summer"
But if there are those who hope to penetrate past language to the very thing itself, there are others who, like T. S. Eliot, hold that the use of language is a never-ending
...raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion.

"East Coker"
These radically different visions of the relation between language and reality have not merely been expressed in verse. They also have underlain and deeply influenced philosophical theory in this century.

Freudian psychology probably had a good deal to do with this development. Dreams, jokes, slips of the tongue are held to be a veil that covers the reality of inner states, but a veil that can be penetrated by those who realize that dreams, slips, and jokes are in fact a special kind of language whose symbolism must be learned.
To those who challenged Bertrand Russell by asking what meaning life can have to an agnostic, he said, "I feel inclined to answer by another question: what is the meaning of "the meaning of life?"

Here, then, are four themes that have strongly marked 20th century culture-a concern with science, a worry over consciousness, a preoccupation with language, and an urge to recapture objectivity and so revive our belief in a universe that has purpose, direction, and proportion-one in which the falcon's flight is truly oriented.

V. The Revival of Realism in Philosophy

There is an analytic tradition in philosophy that can be traced far back into the past - Hume, Locke, Hobbes. A chief characteristic of the analytic tradition is its commitment to atomicity, that is, to the belief that the universe consists of a very large number of independent, encapsulated entities. They can be conceived of as material particles, as sense data, as impressions, as "facts." But common to all philosophers of this tradition is the conviction that the ultimate entities of which the universe is composed are only externally related-that they are "loose and separate" (Hume).

From this basic assumption follows the importance of analysis-the primary task of philosophy is the analysis of complex entities into the simple entities of which they are composed. Because the simple entities are simple they are directly understandable whenever they are encountered. The direction of explanation is from the large to the small.

The analytic tradition thus put a very high valuation on "clarity", the pursuit of which has been a main preoccupation of 20th century thought. And this led to a great concern about language and the view that most of our language is seriously inadequate.

Everyday language suggests that the universe consists of untidy conglomerates like dogs and cats and apples and oranges, instead of such neat, encapsulated, atomistic entities as sweetness, redness, and sphericity. So ordinary language must be refined and purified.

For G. E. Moore, the British philosopher of realism, language is anything but "a raid on the inarticulate." Rather, it is just a label that we attach to a proposition in order to identify it for people with whom we want to communicate. It follows that we can have independent knowledge of a proposition before finding the right label for it. Indeed, it would seem that we must have such prior independent knowledge of the proposition; otherwise how do we know which label is the right one?

It also follows that a given verbal expression may be the label for two or more quite different propositions-for instance, "that is red" may express a proposition about somebody's political affiliation and also a proposition about the focus of some color in the spectrum.

In short Moore's analysis turns out to be an examination of the ways in which certain English terms are actually used and a recommendation to confirm our own usage to one of these ways, rather than to any other. For instance, on this analysis of Moore's analysis he was not displaying, as he believed himself to be doing, the property denoted by "is" and the property denoted by "exists" and showing us that they are exactly the same property. Instead, he was urging us to agree to use "is" and "exists" interchangeably.

In short, Moore's view of language was that it is denotative and this in turn rests on his realism. As J. M. Keynes, who knew well, wrote: "Moore had a nightmare once in which he could not distinguish propositions from tables. But even when he was awake, he could not distinguish love and beauty and truth from the furniture. They took the same definition of outline, the same stable, solid, objective qualities and commonsense reality."

In order to establish his realism, Moore had to attack the idealism generated by Karl and Hegel against whom most 20th century philosophers reacted. More's proof of realism can be briefly summarized: On the one hand, consciousness is real and not a case of mistaken identity, as James had held; on the other hand, it is not an organizing activity, as the idealists had held. It is, just the nature of consciousness to be of, so that we are "conscious of" blue: when we are conscious of blue, it is blue we are conscious of-blue itself, and not another thing.

Further, what is true about blue, is of course, equally true of all other things-they are all equally independent of us and our thoughts about them. The universe contains in fact an immense variety of different kinds of entities. These items divide into two main classes-items that are "mental" (or psychical) and items that are not. But all of these have the characteristic of being in their nature, independent of minds. The objective and public world revealed to our view is just the world that common sense believes in. Finally, that all this is true Moore held to be completely obvious to anyone who takes the trouble to look carefully at his or her experience.

When we go from these epistomological questions to the question of ethics we find Moore's approach not in the least surprising.

The so-called moral laws that Kant characterized as categorical imperatives are at best only rules of thumb, and that "duty", which be exalted as "sublime", is only equivalent to "useful".

The only difference between "good" and "yellow" is that "yellow" is the name of the natural property and "good" of a nonnatural property. All the principal ethical theories that philosophers have ever put forward, according to Moore, have been worthless since they have involved "the naturalistic fallacy." The naturalistic fallacy consists in trying to define "good."

If one holds, as hedonists do, that pleasure is the good, one commits the naturalistic fallacy. Similarly, one commits this fallacy if one holds, as idealists do, that self-realization is the good. It is quite possible that all of these are good, that is, that each of them has the unique and unanalyzable property of being good, just as primroses and crocuses have the unique and unanalyzable property of being yellow. But clearly none of these is good, and good is identical with none of them. Good is just itself and not another thing.

Moore was not only a realist; his realism was the realism of common sense. The objective and independent universe in which he so deeply believes is not, as it is for some 20th century philosophers, the world as revealed in the sciences; it is the ordinary, everyday world of oranges and apples, tables and chairs-the world that everybody except a few philosophers believes exists.