I am amazed that some people can be so lacking in anxiety as to imagine that they have grasped the truth of their art on the first try.
—Henri Matisse
In his 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety, Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.” (In some translations, the word “dread” is used instead of “dizziness.”) Freedom is the capacity to make your own choices. The more freedom one has (to make choices, some of which may be fraught with danger or uncertainty), the more anxious one feels. Unlike fear, which has a specific object—a known undesirable outcome—anxiety is a general unease about unforeseen outcomes.
The greater the mystery one faces, the more unknown, unpredictable, and consequential the outcome of a choice may be, the greater the anxiety one may feel when called to choose, and the greater the temptation to opt for easy, safe, and predictable options rather than riskier and less certain ones. Kierkegaard compared the feeling of facing a difficult choice to standing at the edge of an abyss, looking in, resulting in dizziness. So long as you don’t look into the abyss or even know it is there, you will not feel anxious. Anxiety and its effect of dizziness arise when you worry about the possibility of missteps, wrong choices, what may be at stake if you decide to take one course instead of another.
Ironically, we face great and consequential choices at any time without realizing it, choosing implicitly to stay the course rather than consider alternatives—not looking into the abyss. Most of us are free to make profound changes in our lives on any day—quit a job, end a relationship, leave a community, rethink our political views, change where we live, and many others. Still, very few regularly consider all the choices they are free to make, preferring implicitly to avoid the “dizziness of freedom.”
In his 1950 book, The Meaning of Anxiety, psychologist Rollo May (inspired to a considerable degree by Kierkegaard’s philosophy) distinguished between two kinds of anxiety: normal anxiety, and neurotic anxiety. Normal anxiety, according to May, is a feature of the human psyche and should not be considered as a problem to be solved. Unlike other life forms, we humans are aware of the nature and finality of our existence and have the capacity to imagine future possibilities. These traits make us—at least to a degree, when we consider them consciously—naturally anxious. In fact, it is this anxiety—the knowledge of our mortality, and the possibilities open to us—that drives our creativity and sense of urgency to seek meaning and value in our lives by such activities as artmaking, studying, inventing, experimenting, and seeking to understand the world. Without normal anxiety prompting us to strive for better lives and deeper knowledge, it would be too easy to find a comfortable niche and become unmotivated to seek further. Put another way, anxiety goes hand-in-hand with freedom—the capacity to make choices, which may lead to uncertain outcomes. In May’s words, “Anxiety is essential to the human condition.”
Distinct from normal anxiety, neurotic anxiety manifests as exaggerated, irrational concern about the future. Neurotic anxiety is not only more painful to endure than normal anxiety; it also prompts people to seek safety, to cling to various defense mechanisms, to escape into a “shut-in condition” (May’s term), thus sacrificing freedom by avoiding uncertain choices. People suffering from neurotic anxiety would rather pretend the abyss isn’t there: convince themselves that certain choices are not even open to them, even when they clearly are.
What may not be obvious is this: the two kinds of anxiety are linked with creativity, or lack thereof. To create is to change the future: to bring something new into existence. We consider our present reality, imagine ways to improve upon it, and bring our imagined future reality into existence. However, departing from our present reality and striving for an uncertain outcome may at times be fraught with anxiety that requires a degree of courage to overcome: to pursue a creative goal. As May put it, “This capacity to experience a gap between expectations and reality and, with it, the capacity to bring one’s expectations into reality, is the characteristic of all creative endeavor . . . man’s creative abilities and his susceptibility to anxiety are two sides of the same capacity, uniquely possessed by the human being, to become aware of gaps between expectations and reality.”
Consider that creativity is formally defined as the production of novel (i.e., original, not done before) and appropriate (i.e., having demonstrable value) things. Creative works thus arises when people find the courage to overcome their anxiety about pursuing endeavors whose success is uncertain, for the possibility (never guarantee) of some form of success and reward. Creative work always involves the possibility of failure and is thus a source of anxiety. The more we fear failure, the more courage we need to overcome our anxiety to embark on a creative endeavor.
Creativity is one area where there is a marked difference between normal anxiety and neurotic anxiety. Normal anxiety involves a rational estimate of the probability and cost of failure, allowing us to muster the courage to pursue creative ideas when their reward is worth the risk. Neurotic anxiety, on the other hand, is rooted in irrational and exaggerated estimate of the cost of failure, thus discouraging us from daring to pursue uncertain outcomes, and to stick instead to safe, predictable, uncreative choices. Put another way: normal anxiety and the courage to overcome it are preconditions to creativity, whereas neurotic anxiety, along with its effect of irrational fear of failure and misplaced estimates of the penalties for “coloring outside the lines,” becomes a hurdle to creativity.
Among the defense mechanisms people adopt to cope with anxiety, is finding safety in numbers: in communities. Communities are unified around shared values. When these are values members genuinely and rationally believe in, community membership can be a great source of comfort, encouragement, and courage. Alas, the temptation of community benefits—including alleviation of anxiety—may outweigh individuals’ desire to question their values, or even to comply with values they outright disagree with and that may cause them suffering.
Any time a person chooses to forego questioning or asserting their own values when they may conflict with the community’s, this person forfeits a degree of freedom. At least some degree, all communities limit their members’ creative freedom—the freedom to pursue or even entertain ideas, beliefs, and actions that may cause rifts within the community or even threaten the community’s values.
Put another way, communities encourage conformity (even if allowing some degree of tolerance around the mean) and discourage those who stray too far from the mean, in either direction: criminal or moral transgressions on the negative end, and disruptive genius on the positive end. Friedrich Nietzsche noted this feature of communities. He believed that people generally fall into two categories: those who are courageous individuals who dare to form and adhere to their own values, and those who are members of “the herd” who take their values unquestioningly from the collective and its “leaders.” In The Will to Power (a book of his writings published posthumously by his sister), Nietzsche minced no words on the subject. He wrote:
The herd seeks to preserve one type and defends itself on both sides, against those who have degenerated from it (criminals, etc.) and those who tower above it. The tendency of the herd is directed toward standstill and preservation, there is nothing creative in it.
Let us now consider in this light an “inconvenient truth” in photography, which is this: most photographers today belong to various communities and often practice their work in groups. Also, it’s hard to argue with the observation that an overwhelming proportion of photographs we see today are pre-planned repetitions: same subjects and scenes, photographed in more-or-less the same ways, often by following directions or by executing detailed plans—in other words: uncreative.
Pursuing uncreative, safe, predictable, and community-preapproved photographs may be considered a defense mechanism against anxiety—against pushing the creative envelope, which may entail the risks of failure, misunderstanding, lack of positive feedback, or antagonizing community members by defying community values or expectations (e.g., strict realism, limitations on “allowed” post-exposure manipulations, frowned-upon use of certain tools or techniques, compositions that fail to comply with “rules,” deviating from popular aesthetic sensibilities, “inappropriate” subject matter, etc.)
Given that the actual risks involved in failing to make photographs on a given outing, or making photographs that might meet with criticism or disapproval by the “photographic community” are hardly existential, one would have to conclude that at least a part of the reason for so much sameness in photography is neurotic anxiety on the part of photographers—the kind of exaggerated, irrational anxiety that robs creative individuals of the courage to overcome their anxious feelings and pursue truly creative work. In turn, the cost of such conformity and lack of creative courage, as the thinkers cited in this article and many others concluded, is this: sacrificed freedom—pretending that the creative abyss (broad and deep, with myriad possible routes, some riskier than others, some yet unknown) is in fact just a shallow gully one may traverse only by a handful of established, safe bridges.
It may seem that the only freedom we sacrifice in this sense is creative freedom, but this is not the case. As Kierkegaard observed, anxiety is correlated with the degree of courage it takes to choose from among several alternatives when some of these alternatives may involve both high risk and high reward. Consider for example a photographer facing a choice of how to use vacation time. Of all the things this person is free to do and of all the places this person is free to go to, why is it that so many choose from just a shortlist of known photogenic locations, where they aim to visit only a handful of famous sites or pursue only a handful of known subjects? Why is it that members of photographic communities are so anxious about returning from their travels with no “good” photographs guaranteed to garner favorable and predictable accolades and avoid seeking novel, creative choices and experiences outside these narrow limits? In her book, On Photography, Susan Sontag ventured an answer:
Like every mass art form, photography is not practiced by most people as an art. It is mainly a social rite, a defense against anxiety . . . It seems positively unnatural to travel for pleasure without taking a camera along. Photographs will offer indisputable evidence that the trip was made, that the program was carried out, that fun was had . . . Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs.
Now consider all the other things that travel may be other than just “a strategy for accumulating photographs”: all the things to be experienced, learned, even discovered beyond evidence that this photographer, too, has placed their camera in the same spots so many others have and performed the correct sequence of operating the buttons and dials on their camera?
In her book, The Creativity Choice, Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle explained why over-reliance on community ties hinders creativity. In the book, she correlated the roles social connections may play at various phases of the creative process. Specifically, she warns against the influence of strong social relationships in narrowing the range of creative ideas one may even consider to begin with. Strong relations may help early in the process by encouraging one to be creative and offering support and assurance to help relieve anxiety. They may also be helpful and supportive in carrying out a creative idea or in recovering from failure. But, she recommends avoiding strong connections and turning instead to “weak ties” (i.e., not close relationships) in the initial phases of conceiving creative work.
Part of the reason to favor weak ties in the early phases of creative work is that one is less worried about disappointing or even losing these weak ties by not accepting their advice or by seeking additional information elsewhere. Another reason, in Dr. Ivcevic Pringle’s words (and adding my own emphasis), is this:
The benefit of weak ties is that they connect people to different social circles. These contacts can have backgrounds and experiences that are quite distinct from ours, thus providing a source of information and ideas that otherwise would not occur to us. Having access to weak ties can expose us to a greater variety of information or perspectives and broaden the reach of our thinking . . . If your goal is creativity, remind yourself that trying to fit in is not actually helpful. Concerns about performance . . . can tempt you to “color within the lines” in the context of work or to try to anticipate what decision makers and evaluators are looking for and then to perform according to those standards.
In his Untimely Meditations, Nietzsche praised his then-friend, the composer Richard Wagner, for having accomplished the “maturity to do with joyful freedom what was necessary at every moment of creation.” Describing Wagner’s music, Nietzsche wrote, “the fiery soul of this art thirsts to roam about for once unchecked in the freedom of the wilderness.” Praising Wagner for asserting his individual creative freedom and sticking to his own values even when the greater musical community did not always approve, Nietzsche then wrote (with added emphasis by me), “An artist who possesses this power over himself subjugates all other artists even without wanting to do so. To him alone . . . do those he subjects, his friends and adherents, represent no danger or limitation: whereas lesser characters who seek support from their friends generally lose their freedom through them.”
In recent years, after presenting my thoughts about individuality, creativity, and art before various clubs and communities, I have sometimes found myself in the awkward position of having a community member point out that my views are incompatible with the community’s policies (especially in such areas as critique and competition). I generally respond to such comments by referring the person to the community’s leaders for further discussion. But of course, that is not the only course of action one may take in such matters. The first question a person must ask when facing a discrepancy between their own values and desires, and community-imposed restrictions on creative expression, is this: is membership in this community helping or hindering me?
Kierkegaard characterized moments of choice as involving “the rigorous pondering of the alternatives, and of the multitude of thoughts that attach to each separate link.” It seems to me that people who are unhappy with values imposed by their communities in fact rarely consider all choices open to them, including the choice to not participate in contests and communities whose values they disagree with, or feel creatively limited by.
“The artist,” wrote Robert Henri, “is the man who leaves the crowd and goes pioneering. With him there is an idea which is his life.” In his book, The Gift of Not Belonging, Dr. Rami Kaminski elaborated on this same sentiment. He wrote:
Once you accept and understand who you are, you become free from the tremendous social pressures that group membership imposes. When you have no affinity for any particular group, your sense of self-worth is not conditioned on the group’s approval. You are not obligated to endorse the collective position, opinion, or point of view. You get to enjoy closeness and connection in individual relationships, while being exempt from the social contract that requires you to prioritize “the good of the group” and fulfill social needs over personal ones. You learn how to separate what you inherently know to be true from what you were indoctrinated to accept as true. And, best of all, you know no other way to think other than to think for yourself . . . Submitting your life to the group for review inevitably leads to the relinquishing of control over your own happiness.
Whatever your social inclinations are in any other context, consider whether they are serving you well or holding you back when it comes to artistic expression. Studies show that the most creative people, and also people who find the deepest meaning and greatest value in creative work, are those who are intrinsically motivated (i.e., driven by their own inner need to express themselves creatively), rather than extrinsically motivated (i.e., driven by rewards bestowed on them by others, including lessening their anxiety).
No doubt, you may find great rewards, comfort, safety, camaraderie, and inspiration in a community setting. But take a moment to consider whether some activities—primarily your artistic pursuits and creative choices—should be protected exceptions from the influence of “strong ties.” Consider, in other words, Edward Weston’s admonition (to Ansel Adams):
But after all, Ansel, I never try to limit myself by theories. I do not question right or wrong approach when I am interested or amazed,—impelled to work. I do not fear logic, I dare to be irrational, or really never consider whether I am or not. This keeps me fluid, open to fresh impulse, free from formulae: and precisely because I have not formulae—the public who know my work is often surprised, the critics, who all, or most of them, have their pet formulae are disturbed, and my friends distressed.
I would say to any artist,—don’t be repressed in your work—dare to experiment—consider any urge—if in a new direction all the better—as a gift from the Gods not to be lightly denied by convention or a priori concepts.
. . . photographers, even those, or especially those, taking new or different paths should never become crystallized in the theories through which they advance.
The dumbbell can serve as a metaphor for how people avoid uncertainty and gravitate toward certainty. I’ve forgotten where I first read that, but it seems a propos your thesis on creativity.
The current state of politics in America seems to illustrate this dumbbell tendency. I believe my own brother, an otherwise highly intelligent man who I love, has fallen prey to this tendency, choosing comfortable social relations with his neighbors over clear recognition of the true facts of our present situation.
Of course, he could claim the same about me…
Sorry to hear about your predicament, Tom. I deliberately avoid promoting any political ideologies here. There are many other places for it. In times of great tensions, I think it’s important to also have places to set aside the issues of the day for a while and contemplate other meaningful topics.
I’m not sure, but I’m guessing the dumbbell metaphor you refer to is about training yourself to tolerate uncertainty in the same way you trail physical muscles: don’t start with a heavy weight, but work your way up to it. Try a lower weight/uncertainty for a while until it becomes comfortable, then raise the limit a bit at a time. If this is not what you had in mind, please elaborate. I’m curious.
I think I have a somewhat different take, or at least a different emphasis. It seems to me that the standard existentialist analysis of anxiety and freedom risks mistaking a cause for an effect. The existentialist explains our anxiety as rooted in an awareness of our freedom. Standing at the edge of the abyss makes us dizzy, they tell us, not because (or at least, not just because) we fear falling in, but because we understand that we are free to act in many different ways, some of which may result in consequences we wish to avoid. But as I see it, our sense of our freedom itself arises, in part, out of our imaginative capacities: our ability to conceive of many alternative ways that things might have gone in the past (but didn’t), or might still go in the future (but won’t). This capacity, together with the fact that some things matter to us, leads to anxiety (in the case of future states) or to regret (in the case of past actions). In other words, our sense of freedom is the product of our imaginative capacities together with our ignorance, just as anxiety is. We would not feel anxious (as opposed to fearful) or perhaps even free, if either we could imagine only one course of action, or cared not which outcome came about. Were we omniscient, it is questionable whether we could still imagine alternative ways that things might have gone or yet might go. In such a blessed state I suspect anxiety and regret would disappear. Unfortunately, we cannot be sure how the future will go, whichever course of action we take. This lack of omniscience ensures that we are condemned be able to imagine many different ways that things might go – hence, our anxiety.
But is our imaginative capacity, which is plausibly a pre-requisite of creativity, indicative of a genuine metaphysical freedom? I’m skeptical about that. Our past is, in part, the result of our choices. We may regret something we have done only to the extent that, looking back, we feel that we could have made a different choice and wish that we had. But all our choices are the result of the person we were at the time together with the circumstances in which we found ourselves, and since in general we do not control the circumstances, the only way that we could have made a different choice would have been to be a different person; to be someone we were not. Of course, it doesn’t stop there. We imagine that, even if the person we were could not have made a different choice, we could have been a different (better or wiser) person. But the metaphysical basis of that eludes me, and it seems to me to be largely the result of our own ignorance about how we came to be the person we were – or indeed, are. I don’t deny that we have the capacity to make our own choices. What I’m less sure about is whether we could, in any metaphysically significant sense, have chosen a different course of action. The sense of openness we have regarding the future, and which gives rise to anxiety, seems to me to a result of a condition of ignorance rather than metaphysical freedom. Despite this, I remain largely sympathetic to existentialist approaches, but only so long as our sense of freedom is grounded in epistemic possibilities rather than metaphysical possibilities.
As I would put it, to create is not to change the future, but simply to bring it about. Without metaphysical freedom novel things of demonstrable value can still be brought into existence. So anxiety, in my view, is not the precondition of creativity, but more like its usual accompaniment, because it has the same sources: our imaginative capacity, our ignorance, and the fact that some things matter to us.
But now imagine someone who created purely for themselves, who cared not what the consequences were, or whether their work received approval or not from this or that community. Could such a person “fail”? What would there be for that person to be anxious about, so far as their creative work was concerned? I’m not sure I know anyone like that, though I know of some who profess to be, and others who strive to be. To be honest, though, I’m not even sure I would want to know someone like that. Who, in their right mind, wants an Übermensch in their household?! I ask this because I think we are, in our nature, social beings. Yes, we are perhaps also in our nature, creative beings. And yes, these two aspects of our nature are often in tension with each other. Which, then, should we choose? Neither. The fullest realization of our nature lies in the delicate balancing of all aspects of our nature, recognising that the unconstrained pursuit of any one aspect of our nature will always be to the detriment of others aspects of our nature.
Thank you for your erudite response, Martin! What a treat!
I agree with everything you say (with a couple of minor exceptions that may be too esoteric to mention here). Conceding that your formal philosophy training exceeds mine, I’ll just offer a couple of comments for clarity.
Your opening paragraph summarizes very well my points in this essay (at least those I hoped to make). Although you don’t use the term explicitly, I sense that what you are missing as a metaphysical foundation has to do with the question of determinism. I have been gathering notes for a while now for a future post I’ll title Philosophical Confessions in which, among other things, I’ll mention that I am a (hard) determinist, which of course is a position very much at odds with the existentialist premise of libertarian free will.
Ironically, the foundations for metaphysical determinism were laid by some of the precursors to existentialism (certainly Schopenhauer, but also to a considerable degree Nietzsche… although he ends up contradicting himself on this topic in some of his writings). Heidegger and Husserl were not determinists, but they also did not believe in libertarian free will. In this sense, I think the existentialists took an unfortunate, politically (rather than rationally) motivated step backward in formulating their metaphysics.
Perhaps it’s worth mentioning here that, while I believe the existentialists were “on to” some very powerful ideas, the philosophy as a whole doesn’t hold well for me. Sartre’s outright denial of any form of determinism is one reason. His and de Beauvoir’s attempts to shoehorn humanism into their (ultimately nihilistic) worldview is another.
For what it’s worth, Nietzsche himself admitted he has never met an Übermensch. And Zarathustra’s “household” consisted of an eagle and a serpent 🙂
Guy