Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide

Recognizing how acute this issue has become today and why our age is often called the age of anxiety, Samir Chopra convincingly shows that anxiety is embedded in human nature, and its total absence would be more of a deviation than a norm. Many thinkers—from Buddha and Kierkegaard to Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger—saw anxiety as an inevitable response to the very fact of existence: to live is to be anxious. Drawing on social theories and everyday realities, the author explains how material circumstances intensify anxiety, but emphasizes that neither money, nor influence, nor technological progress can ultimately rid us of it. Combining a candid, personal account of his own experience with scientific knowledge, the researcher demonstrates how a philosophical perspective on anxiety can help us manage our relationship with it, learn to coexist with it, and even turn it into an ally.