The Difference Between Anguish and Fear

Anguish is almost always confused with fear. However, they are two completely different states of mind. As the philosopher S. Kierkegaard first understood, fear, or anxiety, is an instinct triggered by a real and often imminent threat: an instinct closely tied to one’s survival (principium conservationis). Later, Heidegger identified three types of fear in his work Being and Time: shock (an unexpected and sudden fear), horror (a fear caused by a perceived threat), and terror (the combination of both shock and horror, being sudden and continuous). Anguish, on the other hand, is a feeling not determined by any identifiable factor. It does not arise from a specific threat but is rather an undefined anxiety that pushes us to decide on a possibility that life presents to us: possibilities that may or may not happen. A possibility that entails a freedom of choice concerning real facts that influence us.

Therefore, we can attempt to analyze, within the confines of a brief writing, what anguish is, distinguishing it, as stated, from fear. It is, indeed, a feeling that generates anxiety stemming from a sense of restlessness or disorientation, which can cause both individual and collective suffering. Many psychiatrists claim that normal anxiety can, in some cases, become pathological, leading to existential forms of paralysis, such as the famous example of Buridan’s donkey. In his masterpiece The Concept of Anguish, Kierkegaard examined it as a spiritual oppression caused by a sense of precariousness in relation to the world. He wrote:

“Anguish is a determination of the dreaming spirit, and as such belongs to psychology. In wakefulness, the difference between the self and the other is established; in the dream, it is suspended… The reality of the spirit is shown as a figure attempting its possibility, but as soon as it seeks to grasp it, it vanishes… The concept of anguish is entirely different from that of fear and similar concepts that relate to something determined, whereas anguish is the reality of freedom as a possibility for possibility.”

It is clear that Kierkegaard, being a Christian theologian, believed that the emergence of this feeling in human beings began with the divine prohibition against eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This prohibition led Adam (Man) to experience the emotional situation of possibility and the ability to choose. From here came the anguishing unrest that would eventually lead him to choose sin, which, as St. Paul rightly understood, is the ultimate act of pride — humanity's attempt to replace God. Therefore, anguish is neither a necessity nor an abstract freedom devoid of constraints; it is not free will. Instead, it is an opening to a limited, constrained freedom that, nonetheless, reveals humanity’s Promethean possibility. Indeed, Adam and Prometheus are foundational myths in human history.

Kierkegaard’s thinking later influenced the works of major 20th-century theologians, such as K. Barth (whose commentary on St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans is highly significant), R. Bultmann, D. Bonhoeffer, and others. However, it was M. Heidegger who, more than anyone, analyzed the emotional state of anguish, not only from a theological-Christian standpoint but also from an existential perspective concerning the individual (the being-there), particularly in relation to death. Man is a being that can potentially be open to the world and others; however, this openness closes with death, at which point the individual being-there becomes entirely isolated with itself. Death is an insurmountable possibility, Heidegger writes, because it marks the renunciation of all other possibilities. Hence, in the face of this inescapable limit, people may feel either fear or anguish: if dominated by fear, they flee from death, losing themselves in passivity and self-dissociation; whereas if they accept anguish, they live for death — that is, they fully embrace their individual and historical destiny through, as Heidegger calls it, “anticipatory decision.”

These concise philosophical clarifications help, at least partially, to distinguish between anguish and fear, whose meanings are commonly used interchangeably, despite being two of the most significant human emotional states.

Usually, humans manage to bring out the best in themselves when danger is extreme. It seems that the threshold before falling into an endless abyss has been reached, but the escape route remains unseen. In fact, those present stagger, like never before, in the thick fog, heading toward the precipice. They are like an alcoholic, who, before being overwhelmed by fatal delirium tremens, clutches onto the neck of a bottle for one last sip. Yet, we find ourselves on the edge of a volcano that, instead of erupting with lava, ash, and gas, will likely spew nuclear fusion bombs capable of reaching temperatures of about 10 million degrees once detonated. However, it is astonishing to observe that almost no one seems to be concerned about this. The only people visibly fearful are those still wearing masks everywhere, more than two years after the supposedly terrifying Covid pandemic.

However, as we now clearly see, it turned out to be a flu-like epidemic of a different type, causing roughly the same number of deaths as the 2017 outbreak, yet still generating more fear than a possible — and tragically very likely — nuclear holocaust. This is because most people are almost completely indifferent to the danger of nuclear war, as it is not perceived as a real threat. No one is mobilizing, no one is organizing to oppose this grave risk. The only concern seems to be the need to pay overly expensive bills or, in the future, losing a job (which are, of course, significant aspects of daily life). There is no active response, no protest, no cultural battle against the increasing mortal danger; except for the few activists. The bomb is not perceived as a deadly threat. How can this be?

This is where the distinct meanings of fear and anguish become essential in answering, at least in part, this question. Fear, artificially fueled by the media owned by large financial groups that also own major pharmaceutical industries, has been and continues to be spread with sadistic expertise by the mass media, which, in complicity with these groups, showed images for months of caravans of corpses or hospitals and nursing homes filled with severely ill patients. Fear, in fact, is more than a feeling; it is a primordial survival instinct, common to all living beings, including viruses. When it is propagated in a universally pervasive manner, with hidden political and economic agendas, it becomes terror. Thus, the entire "pandemic" situation was a massive act of terrorism.

So, nearly all of humanity has been deeply penetrated by a fear that obliterates rational thought. It became pointless to explain to university professors or intellectually qualified people, like the overwhelming majority of doctors, that the mortality statistics due to the virus were within the norm of the last decades. Terror completely clouds reasoning. Around seven million deaths in two years out of eight billion humans is an indisputable fact: the lethality rate was extremely low. This, in fact, demonstrates how fear has little to do with rationality, except as a means of self-preservation. It was experienced as "every man for himself." Fear does not allow for thought. A far more complex analysis is required for anguish.

If we reread the passage from Kierkegaard above, we find that anguish is described as "the reality of freedom understood as a possibility for possibility." This means that in Adam, humanity “substantiates” freedom of choice, both as a gift and as a curse, which, though realizable only empirically, remains our fundamental freedom. It necessarily involves an internal reflection on what to decide: anguish forces us to think. One cannot choose anything without reflection. For this reason, we are poter-essere (potential beings), that is, beings-there who have, again, freedom of choice as their foundation, even within finitude. Heidegger, in his own terminology, called this a null-foundation, characterized by death as an insurmountable possibility.

However, apart from these speculations, we can conclude that anguish involves an inseparable link to self-consciousness that is aware of thinking, and it is entirely different from fear, which annihilates any possibility of thought. Fear is a rejection of all possibility, leading, as a consequence, to a futile flight from death, which ultimately becomes the death of others. On the other hand, we could say that anguish, being a feeling, is expressed through reflective, existential judgments concerning possibility, similar to the judgments Kant spoke of regarding aesthetics, such as beauty and the sublime.

Today, most people have fallen into the terrifying dimension of fear. G. Anders wrote, in his most important book The Human Is Outdated, that modern humans are "illiterate in anguish," particularly regarding the atomic threat. This definition, seemingly difficult to comment on, implies that contemporary humans no longer experience anguish, or have at least eliminated it as an emotional state. In reality, Anders understood that the vast majority of people no longer choose, and thus no longer reflect. They live entirely within their alienation, due to an inauthentic, repetitive existence without a future.

Today, particularly in the Western world, people are dominated by fear and no longer understand the meaning of reflective anguish. As a result, they cannot recognize real dangers, because no one thinks deeply anymore. The god of money in capitalism has corrupted every noble aspect of humanity: there is no longer truth, justice, beauty, sacredness, ethics, or a sense of community. Ultimately, it has even robbed us of the sense of anguish, and with that, any possibility of freedom. Now, Being, understood as thought or co-belonging with it by the being-there, has abandoned us, and we have become shipwrecked, with no island to land on.

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