Both Soren Kierkegaard (1844) and Martin Heidegger (1926), for example, have emphasized the importance of anxiety, insofar as it is related to freedom, and have sought to maintain a strict separation of fear from anxiety. Second, the distinction between fear and anxiety has proven to be important for continental philosophy. Given Hobbes’s own emphasis on the consistent use of language, we ought to ask ourselves what the difference between fear and anxiety might be. Hobbes valued clear definitions because the possibility of the Commonwealth presupposed the consistent, and non-interchangeable, use of language. The first one involves a faithfulness to the text. There are more reasons why we should examine the distinction between fear and anxiety. Anxiety, we will see, is a sign of the gap that separates sensibility from the sphere of cognition this gap is impossible to bridge with a representation. Anxiety irritates this foundation because it is both inside and outside of sensibility it is a feeling that is caused by nothing in particular. It also names the breakdown of his empiricist conception of experience because anxiety disrupts the metaphysical foundation that is articulated by Hobbes in the section titled “Of Man” that grounds the Commonwealth in a determinist empiricist doctrine that locates the origin of all feelings, thoughts, and actions in the realm of sensibility. As we will see, Hobbes seeks to eradicate anxiety through fear of the state which replaces the cause of anxiety, the future, with a tangible object of fear-the Commonwealth.Įven though Hobbes infrequently deploys the term, anxiety is connected to a network of fundamental concepts in Leviathan including law, causality, cognition, the future, sensibility, and the possibility of vision or foresight. Investigating anxiety may not only provide access to a new interpretation of Hobbes, it may also stimulate thought about political possibilities foreclosed by Hobbes’s politics of fear. While the centrality of fear has received substantial commentary, I argue that anxiety, not fear, is the fundamental problem in Leviathan although it has received little analysis. This essay establishes the difference between fear and anxiety and traces the political implications of this distinction. But this claim only captures part of the picture. Fear stabilizes subjectivity and this makes the Commonwealth possible. In order to achieve political tranquility, humans replace fear of each other with fear of the state.
Leviathan (1651) is famous for its account of fear.
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