Anxiety by Nietzsche

When reading the book “Anxiety” by Samir Chopra, I encountered this chapter of Nietzsche’s interpreting of anxiety from the perspective of social normals and moralities. It is such an introspective piece that encourages self-reflection.

Nietzsche considered our anxiety to arise from our attempts to be someone other than what we are, selfless bundles of perpetual becoming -— a theoretical view that curiously and ironically aligns his theses with central Buddhist claims. It was this failure of self-acceptance, this inability to take on the world with an optimistic pessimism, that was the ground of our anxiety, that turned us into timorous, cowering cowards, beaten down by that which we could neither change nor accept through the construction of a uniquely personal perspective on life that made this world’s demands tractable. Nietzsche bade us love our fates, calling out to anyone who would listen that we must accept our identities, our stations in life, our anxieties, as parts of ourselves; by accepting the lessons of the classical Greek tragedies, which, he suggested, expressed a stirring defiance in the face of this world’s unsparing requirements, we could acknowledge this world’s horrors unflinchingly and find within them the means to confront existence’s insuperable challenges. In doing so we could find a means of overcoming ourselves, the greatest task of all.

尼采认为我们的焦虑源自于我们试图成为与自己不同的人，成为那些无私且不断变化的存在——这一理论观点好奇且讽刺地与佛教的核心主张相吻合。正是这种自我接纳的失败，这种无法以乐观的悲观主义面对世界的能力，成为了我们焦虑的根源，它使我们变成了胆怯、畏缩的懦夫，被那些我们既无法改变也无法通过构建独特的个人生命观来接受的事物击垮。尼采告诫我们要热爱自己的命运，呼吁所有愿意倾听的人，我们必须接受自己的身份、我们生活中的位置、我们的焦虑，视其为我们自我的一部分。通过接受古希腊悲剧中的教训，他建议这些悲剧表达了在面对这个世界无情要求时激动人心的抗争精神，我们可以毫不退缩地承认这个世界的恐怖，并在其中找到应对存在中无法克服的挑战的途径。通过这样做，我们能够找到战胜自我的方法，而这正是最伟大的任务。

Most centrally, Nietzsche suggested that our anxiety arises because we are in the thrall of a pernicious make-believe, a self-serving construction and arrangement of the world and its affairs posited and established by someone else taking care of their psychic, moral, and emotional needs as the winner of “will to power” among all; like the Buddha, Nietzsche considered us to be in the grip of a formidable illusion, one that made us unhappier than we needed to be. To see what Nietzsche was getting at, note that the world we step into has a history of struggle and contestation, sometimes political, sometimes cultural, sometimes psychological, for power -— into one that suits them, that satisfies their aspirations, that maintains their station in life. It is their constraints, their values, their norms that we are worried, anxious, and guilty about not satisfying. As a damning consequence, our historically constructed social systems of values, morals, and normative constraints create and sustain an acute anxiety (via a terribly afflicting, guilt-inducing “bad conscience”) about not living up to the ideals we imagine regulate our lives. A skeptical critical tradition—going back to Plato’s Republic and whose modern members include Karl Marx and Michel Foucault—has long suggested that such values and ideals are those whose adoption will ensure the continued maintenance of power of the most privileged and entrenched classes. Morality itself -— a specified and regulated code of conduct complete with notions of “guilt” and “wrongdoing,” “good” and “evil”—is exposed as an ideology that suits the interest of the powerful. The conscience it instills in us, the unsparing moral self-critique and examination it urges on us? An invitation to guilt and anxiety.

最核心的是，尼采认为我们的焦虑产生的原因在于我们受制于一种有害的幻想，这是一个自我服务的世界构建和安排，由他人为了满足他们的心理、道德和情感需求而建立，他们是“权力意志”的赢家；像佛陀一样，尼采认为我们被一种巨大的幻觉所掌控，这种幻觉让我们比实际需要的更不快乐。为了理解尼采的意图，需注意我们所进入的世界有一段充满权力斗争的历史——有时是政治上的，有时是文化上的，有时是心理上的——这一世界被塑造成符合他们利益的形式，满足了他们的愿望，并保持了他们的地位。这是他们的约束、他们的价值观、他们的规范，而我们担忧、焦虑和内疚于不能满足这些要求。作为一种严重的后果，我们历史上构建的价值观、道德观和规范性约束创造并维持了一种急性焦虑（通过一种可怕的、诱发内疚的“坏良心”）——这是因为我们未能达到那些我们认为支配我们生活的理想。怀疑主义的批判传统——可以追溯到柏拉图的《理想国》，其现代代表包括卡尔·马克思和米歇尔·福柯——长期以来建议，这些价值观和理想的接受将确保最特权和最根深蒂固的阶层持续保持其权力。道德本身——一种包含“罪恶感”和“错误行为”，“善”和“恶”概念的规定和规范化的行为准则——被揭露为适应强者利益的意识形态。它在我们内心注入的良知，那种无情的道德自我批评和反思？是对内疚和焦虑的邀请函。

For Nietzsche, power is a diverse concept; but being able to divert and subsume the interests of others to our own is an acute and visible manifestation of it. (So is the ability to subsume ourselves to ourselves!) If the “weak” can make the “strong” do their bidding—for whatever reason—then it is the “weak” who are actually “powerful.” This is a lesson every cowed employee, every timid, nervous person and citizen subject to abstract and multiply realized power learns painfully. (This is a lesson parents often realized from their stubborn children too.) The man wagging his finger at your minor physical or financial missteps can wield legal or financial or state power, he can bring you to your knees, begging for mercy. So can the controllers of culture, the arbiters of moral taste, for they can make you and your children think in the ways they want you to—and can breed a sense of acute guilt and moral failure and anxiety when we do not.

对于尼采来说，权力是一个多元的概念；但能够转移和吸收他人的利益为己所用是权力的一种尖锐而明显的表现。（能够让自己服从自己也是如此！）如果“弱者”能够让“强者”按其意愿行事——无论出于何种原因——那么实际上“强者”就是“弱者”。这是每个被吓倒的员工，每个胆小、紧张的公民和受到多重抽象权力支配的人痛苦地学到的一课。（这是父母们常常从他们顽固的孩子身上领悟到的一课。）指责你在财务上或身体上小失误的人，可以利用法律、财务或国家的权力将你击倒，让你跪地乞求怜悯。文化的掌控者、道德品味的仲裁者同样如此，因为他们可以让你和你的孩子按他们希望的方式思考——当我们不这样做时，便会产生强烈的内疚感、道德失败感和焦虑感。

We will, then, not only suffer like the Buddha suggested, for we are mere human beings confronted with our mortality and limitation, but we will also moralize our suffering—a devastatingly self-flagellatory act—by considering this world’s socially constructed misfortunes either to be the curse of malignant fates and vengeful deities impervious to our prayers, or to result from our failures of choices and blessings. Our anxiety is our profoundly mistaken sense of living a marginal, failed life, one lived on someone else’s terms, all without us knowing that we are doing so; it has arisen from our failure to assert our own will on this world, to make it bend to our needs. This is not a task that Nietzsche imagines all of us as being capable of underdoing; many are the bleating, meek members of the “herd,” and few are those independent, defiant, self-reliant “noble souls” who can break free of the herd’s demands and imperatives.

那么，我们不仅会像佛陀所说的那样受苦，因为我们只是面对死亡和局限性的普通人类，而且我们还会将痛苦道德化——一种毁灭性的自我鞭笞行为——通过认为这个世界的社会性构造的灾难要么是恶毒命运和无情神祇对我们祈祷的无视，要么是我们在选择和祝福上的失败所导致的。我们的焦虑是我们对自己过着一种边缘化、失败生活的根本性错误理解，这种生活是按别人的条件过的，而我们却毫不知情；它源于我们未能在这个世界上主张自己的意志，未能使其屈从于我们的需求。这并不是一项尼采设想我们每个人都有能力承受的重负；许多人是“羊群”中咩咩叫、温顺的成员，只有少数独立、反抗、自立的“高贵灵魂”能够摆脱羊群的需求和命令。

If conventional morality is exposed by Nietzsche as a pernicious, anxiety-creating ideology, then so are our social and economic arrangements, the desirable roles that they create, and that we fail to fit into. Here lurk many moral, spiritual, and personal failures of self-realization, all while we remain haunted by the cosmic failures of ours only so within a particular religious, cultural, or moral perspective, the handiwork of other humans, “all-too-human” just like us. Nietzsche thus suggests that our spiritual illness, our anxiety, is a function of us failing to find someone else’s “life solution” a viable one for us. But without conventional certainty, with traditional normative values undermined and corroded, we would find ourselves saddled with an awesome responsibility: we must erect new scales for good and bad, new units of measurement, new “tables of values,” and we are alone, with no cosmic guidance at hand. The uncertainty we confront is all-consuming and immense, tremendously productive of anxiety, for where are we to find normative guidance now? Yet, bear this dread we must if we are to step into the new, fearful, yet promising world of intellectual disillusionment.

如果尼采揭露了传统道德是一种有害的、制造焦虑的意识形态，那么我们的社会和经济结构也是如此，它们创造了理想的角色，而我们未能适应这些角色。在这里潜伏着许多道德、精神和个人自我实现的失败，同时我们仍被某种特定宗教、文化或道德视角中的宇宙性失败所困扰，而这些都是与我们一样“过于人类”的其他人所造成的。尼采因此提出，我们的精神疾病、焦虑，是我们未能找到他人“人生解决方案”的结果。但是在没有传统确定性的情况下，在传统规范价值被削弱和腐蚀的情况下，我们会发现自己肩负着巨大的责任：我们必须建立新的善恶标准，新的衡量单位，新的“价值表”，而我们是孤立无援的，没有宇宙的指导。我们面对的这种不确定性是全面的、巨大的，极具生产焦虑的能力，因为我们现在要在哪里找到规范的指导？然而，如果我们要迈入这个新的、令人畏惧但又充满希望的知识幻灭世界，我们必须承受这种恐惧。

For Nietzsche, Anxiety was either our reaction to the burden of the world’s normative pressures, for creating a sense of guilt and moral failure, or a reaction to their absence, for without them we were lost and disoriented; in either case, anxiety was our resultant state. This absurdity suggested the liberated state of the one who did not need those values, and was not oppressed by their presence or absence, for he made his own, delivering himself to his own demands, and living his own life. Such a state could be free of the anxiety that possessed the common man, but it was, for that reason, an arstocratic state accessible only to a select few, the ‘noble souls,’ those who could be Übermenschen, or ‘overmen,’ who could rise above the herd, and make an evolutionary advance toward a higher form of life, being to the common man what man was to an ape.

焦虑要么是我们对世界规范压力的反应，因这些规范带来了内疚感和道德失败感；要么是我们对这些规范缺失的反应，因为没有它们我们就会迷失和困惑；无论哪种情况，焦虑都是我们的结果状态。这种荒谬的状态暗示了一个解放的状态，那就是一个人不需要这些价值观，也不会因其存在或缺失而感到压迫，因为他自创了自己的价值观，顺从自己的要求，过着自己的生活。这样的状态只对少数几个选中的人可及，即所谓的‘高尚灵魂’，那些可以成为超人（Übermenschen）或‘超人’的人，他们能够超越大众，并在进化上迈向更高的生命形式，就像人类之于猿类的区别一样。

But Nietzsche’s imagined ideals for the good life are aspirational, and we could do worse than try to live our lives like the ‘noble souls’ Nietzsche wrote his works for, for if we did, we would live our lives free of the neurotic fear of disapproval by family, society, and culture, free of the anxiety of losing their love and acceptance, of not gaining their hollow accolades; we would not be racked by guilt just because we were not appropriately deferential to established authority; we would be fully accepting of ourselves, weaknesses and strengths and character blemishes included, as we would take these to constitute our distinctive signature, ours alone, and thereby be delivered from malignant envy and feelings of inferiority; we would disdain devious manipulation of, or sycophancy or servility to, people or ideals; we would realize that while the world lacked meaning, we could construct it and our life in our own unique, distinctive way; we would affirm life to the extent that we would be willing to live this life again and again till infinity as a form of the ‘eternal recurrence’; we would accept our life wholeheartedly, proud and unashamed of all our mistakes, sins, and errors, just as we are of our achievements and medals, for we would realize they all stand and fall together; we would not feel shame or envy or jealousy or guilt or resentment or a desire for retribution and vengeance because these are the hallmarks of the ‘lower soul.’

然而，尼采设想的美好生活理想是令人向往的，我们不妨试着像他笔下的‘高尚灵魂’那样生活，过上摆脱对家庭、社会和文化不认同的神经质恐惧的生活，不再为失去他们的爱与接受而焦虑，也不再为无法获得那些空洞的荣誉而困扰；我们不会因为没有适当尊敬现有权威而备受内疚的折磨；我们会完全接受自己，包括我们的弱点、优点以及性格上的瑕疵，因为我们会将这些视为构成我们独特印记的一部分，属于我们自己。这样我们就可以摆脱恶性的嫉妒和自卑感；我们会鄙视对他人或理想的巧妙操纵、阿谀奉承或奴颜婢膝；我们会意识到，虽然世界缺乏意义，但我们可以以独特的方式构建它和我们自己的人生；我们会肯定生命，以至于愿意不断重复这一生，直至无限，作为‘永恒轮回’的一种形式；我们会全心全意地接受自己的人生，既为自己的成就和勋章感到自豪而毫不羞耻，也会坦然面对所有的错误、罪过和失误，因为我们会认识到，它们彼此相连、共同存在；我们不会感到羞愧、嫉妒、怨恨、内疚，或对报复与复仇的渴望，因为这些都是‘低等灵魂’的标志。