«Non ti noccia
la tua paura; ché, poder ch’elli abbia,
non ci torrà lo scender questa roccia»

(Divina Commedia, canto VII)

1. A brief history of fear

We don’t like to talk about fear—or rather, about fears. It always takes a certain effort, even when we confide in a family member, a friend, a partner, a therapist, or a confessor. A great repressed thought of in Western culture, we reluctantly speak of fear because, since ancient times, we have tended to think it stems from our own shortcomings, from an insufficient exercise of virtue, from a weakness we have been unable to transform into courage and pride. Indeed, Aristotle states:

Virtues arise neither by nature nor against nature, but they are engendered in us who by nature are disposed to receive them and through habit we bring them to perfection. […] Furthermore, every virtue arises and deteriorates as a consequence and because of the actions themselves […]: by performing actions in trade with men, some of us become just, others unjust; and by performing others in danger, and by accustoming ourselves to fear or courage, some of us become courageous, others cowardly. (Et. Nic., II, 1103b)

From a very early period in Greek culture, there has been a strong moral judgment regarding fear: famous are the Epicurean exhortations in Lucretius’s De rerum natura not to fear death or the wrath of the gods, or those of Seneca in his Letters to Lucilius to “stand firm” in the storms of life. The Synoptic Gospels move in the same direction, in which Christ’s exhortation to his disciples, “Do not be afraid!”, recurs at least eight times. And one could continue along this line at least as far as Descartes, who in The Passions of the Soul fully reproduces the Aristotelian distinction:

Fear or Fright, contrary to Boldness, is not only a coldness, but also a disturbance and a stupor of the soul that takes away the power to resist the evils it thinks are imminent […] it is not even a particular passion, but only an excess of Cowardice, Stupor and Fear, always vicious […] And since the principal cause of Fear is surprise, there is nothing better, to avoid it, than to use premeditation and prepare for all the events, the Fear of which can cause it (1986, p. 102).

As one might expect, the most obvious consequence of such exhortations has certainly not been a decrease in fear in Western man, but rather his tendency to hide it as something to be ashamed of. As Jean Délumeau (2018) observes, commenting on Montaigne’s considerations on the fortification of the city of Augsburg in 1580, “not only individuals considered in isolation, but also communities and civilizations themselves are engaged in a permanent dialogue with fear” (p. 9). Yet, throughout modernity there has been no historiographical research on this topic: we have to wait for Lefebvre’s essay of 1932 (1953) and that of Febvre (1956), in which it clearly emerges that it is a question

[…] to restore its legitimate share to a complex of feelings which, taking into account the different latitudes and different eras, could not help but play a role of capital importance in the history of human societies close to and familiar to us (p. 581).

Thus, because of that ancient equivalence established between fear and cowardice, history ended up extolling resoundingly heroic attitudes—literature between the 14th and 16th centuries is replete with them: just think of figures like Amadis of Gaul, Orlando Furioso, John the Fearless, Charles the Bold, and even Don Quixote—charming fear with such a sense of shame that it leads us to hide it as deeply as possible. As Délumeau further observes, it is quite evident how this rhetoric of heroism serves the reproduction of the power relations that characterize feudal and post-feudal society: only the fearless hero or noble can exercise his power over the common people, shamefully subjugated as weak and cowardly. Courage is thus speciously linked to the social status of the aristocrat or, later, the bourgeois, while cowardice becomes the hallmark of the humble. Moreover, Virgil already clearly stated that “fear is proof of low birth” (Aeneid, IV, 13).

Of course, with the French Revolution this bond was called into question: however, not in the sense of a reevaluation or profound consideration of fear as a specifically human dimension, but of the possibility for the humble to aspire to courage. If in the 19th century the heroic actions of the humble were progressively exalted in a decidedly rhetorical form – think of Hugo’s description of the defeat at Waterloo – it is in the 20th century that fear began to be taken as an object of reflection on man, digging ever deeper, as happens for example in great contemporary literature, from Zola to Proust, from Dostoevsky to Camus. As Girard masterfully shows in The Romantic Lie and the Novelistic Truth (1961), the romantic hero reveals the full falsity of his own Promethean desire, yielding the sceptre of heroism to the “man from underground.”

On this basis, how can we, at least briefly, conceive of our relationship with fear today? Certainly, during the twentieth century, the contributions of psychology and neuroscience have highlighted the phenomenon of fear as a mechanism and strategy that humans have evolutionarily developed in their interaction with the environment (Oliverio Ferraris 1980). We therefore know almost everything about how fear arises in us and what evolutionary function it has played throughout human history, in that it has allowed us to better defend ourselves from risks and dangers arising from the environment and from our fellow creatures (weather events, epidemics, wars, etc.). This clarification, however, has not been accompanied by a profound reflection on the meaning, or rather the possible meanings, of fear in human life. And it is precisely on the basis of this lack of awareness that fear, which in various ways unites us all, can be oriented toward far-from-obvious goals, becoming a collective Grundstimmung. In this regard, in a trenchant essay entitled “A Philosophy of Fear,” Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen (2008) highlights how fear today represents a true “cultural lens” through which we observe the world. A highly ambivalent lens, however: while on the one hand, the risk minimization we constantly seek as a form of rationality is by no means free from irrational aspects, on the other hand, we sometimes specifically seek out fear (in extreme sports, horror films, etc.) almost to exorcise it. The theme of risk management is central: we will see how fear, through that powerful governmental device that is the crisis, has often been politically oriented in order to strengthen the link between security, control, and performance culture (Gentili 2018; Praino 2021).

2. Phenomenology of fear

While scientific approaches (psychophysical and neuroscientific) to the phenomenon of fear provide us with precise information about what happens in our body and brain when we feel fear, the description of the experience of fear is much less univocal: what does it mean to “feel fear”? What is the essence of fear? In the course of twentieth-century thought, one of the theoretical approaches that has most reflected on the structure of experience is undoubtedly phenomenology: we will therefore try to turn to it in search of some clues about the experience of fear. Although Husserl does not delve into a thematic description of this phenomenon, we find some useful clues already in the Fifth Logical Investigation of 1900-2001 (2005), in which the experiences of joy and displeasure are described in §15. In fact, if both experiences are complex intentional acts that include in their unity not only the representation of a joyful or sad event and the actual character of the joy or displeasure referred to them, such acts are connected to sensations of joy or displeasure as stimuli that on the one hand excite the affectivity of the psychophysical subject, while on the other they objectively determine the events as joyful or unpleasant, determining, so to speak, a rosy or grey atmosphere. From this perspective, fear would be nothing more than an imaginative anticipation of an unpleasant or painful event (already experienced in the past, or reported by others), toward which consciousness is directed through an operation of imaginative variation: for example, if I know I fear dogs and I see a large one in the distance, I can imagine it approaching me, and since I visually perceive that there are no barriers (a fence, a gate, etc.), I can imagine its possible approach as threatening. The same dynamic applies to any state of affairs that I perceive as threatening, that is, devoid of elements that prevent or block the occurrence of the sad or unpleasant event: I imagine getting sick, losing my job, a loved one, the esteem of others, and fear assails me. Fear thus offers an extraordinarily complex field of phenomenological investigation, intertwining objectifying and non-objectifying intentional acts, modulations of affectivity, imaginative (eidetic) variations, and retentional/protensional structures of consciousness. At least at a first rough description, fear can be defined as an intentional act of an imaginative nature, associated with a psychophysical condition, directed toward an event, object, or state of affairs that is potentially unpleasant, painful, or sad for the subject. This imaginative variation is influenced by similar past experiences, now embedded in the subject’s consciousness and memory, which (consciously or unconsciously) pre-orient their intentionality toward a certain real or imagined state of affairs. This is also influenced by the attributions of meaning coming from other subjects, who describe certain events as potentially dangerous or unpleasant. Thus, it is possible for me to be afraid of an event I have never experienced, but which is intersubjectively deemed unpleasant or dangerous.

However, in the vast phenomenological panorama inaugurated by Husserl and continued by countless philosophers,[1] the description of the phenomenon of fear has not been developed in the sense of an analysis of the various gradations of intentionality involved, but in the direction of identifying a class of entities responsible for fear as opposed to another, much more fundamental phenomenon, namely anguish. This is the paradigmatic case of the existential analytic that Heidegger conducted in 1927 in Being and Time (1976). As is well known, man inhabits the world in the form of Dasein (Dasein), that is, of that particular entity for which, in its own existence, its very existence “is at stake”, “is at stake”. Of the two fundamental modalities in which the -there of Dasein, that is, its already always “being at stake”, is realized, understanding and the emotional situation, it is certainly the latter that indicates the affective component of existence, capable of originally revealing Dasein to itself. More precisely, the emotional state exposes Dasein to its thrownness into the world, that is, to the groundlessness of its having come into the world from an abyssal origin, from an obscure “where” to which it is abandoned in its being-in-the-world and in which it projects itself in its radical finitude. Now, according to Heidegger, the two fundamental emotional states of Dasein are fear and anguish: the former is always determined by the “before what” of an entity that presents itself to it in the world (the threatening thing), while the “before what” of the latter is Dasein itself, confronted with its own thrownness once the world has lost all possible meaning and has been reduced to pure nothingness. Clearly of Kierkegaardian origin, this distinction has also enjoyed long-standing popularity in the context of phenomenologically inspired psychology: since it is not without presuppositions, it is necessary to pause here for a moment to bring its essential junctures into focus.

In §29 of Being and Time, Heidegger reflects on the emotional situation as Dasein’s openness to the world: since this openness presents itself as a “letting-come-to-meet,” it is also always “environmentally far-sighted” (1976, p. 175), that is, projected—imaginatively, as specified above—toward the entities that manifest themselves from time to time. Therefore, if the emotional situation consists in projecting oneself toward the world, Dasein is ontologically characterized by the possibility of being struck by it: the emotional situation that reveals the world’s threatening character is, precisely, fear. Heidegger writes: “Only an entity that is in the emotional situation of fear or fearlessness can discover the intramundane entity as threatening. The affectivity proper to the emotional situation is an existential element constitutive of Dasein’s openness to the world” (Heidegger 1976, p. 176). Regardless of the fact that here too, in line with the modern tradition outlined above, Heidegger places fear and fearlessness together, almost as if treating them – in an Aristotelian way – as two sides of the same coin, it should be noted that fear is nothing more than a «determinate mode» of the emotional situation, of which anguish is the mode of «fundamental importance» (p. 178).

The “before-what” of fear, “that which frightens,” is always an entity encountered in the world, be it a usable entity, a mere presence, or a Being-with. Research cannot take the form of the ontic finding of the entity that can “frighten” us most often and most, but must tend toward the phenomenal determination of that which frightens us as such. What is the character of that which frightens us, and how does it present itself in fear? The “before-what” of fear has the character of menace (p. 179).

Non si può non notare che il §29 di Essere e tempo, pur riconoscendo che «si danno diverse possibilità di essere impauriti», non si diffonde in descrizioni precise delle varie modalità della paura, fatta eccezione per un cenno alle nozioni di spavento, orrore e terrore: invero in modo piuttosto frettoloso, Heidegger punta dritto al concetto di angoscia (§40), tralasciando uno degli elementi costitutivi dell’esperienza della paura, la tendenza cioè – tipica dell’uomo – a trasformare il vissuto di coscienza in coscienza del vissuto, quindi il vissuto della paura in paura del vissuto della paura, in una moltiplicazione ricorsiva all’infinito: come vedremo meglio sotto, la paura genera paura di aver paura, paura di aver paura di aver paura e così via in un regresso vertiginoso che può investire l’intera esperienza del mondo, fino al timore e tremore in cui affonda la soggettività, o quel che ne resta.

Heidegger says nothing about this process: the “thingness” of fear as such eludes him, preoccupied as he is with maintaining a firm distinction between fear and anguish. Indeed, he returns several times to the gap between the two:

[…] Dasein diverges from itself. The “before-what” of this retreat [of Dasein] must, in general, have the character of threat. However, it is an entity that has the very character of the retreating entity, of Dasein itself. The “before-what” of this retreat cannot be understood as a “fearful event,” since this character always inheres in an inner-worldly entity. The threat that is “frightening” and that is discovered in fear always comes from an inner-worldly entity. […] anxiety originally makes fear possible (p. 233).

Ultimately, for Heidegger, fear is always directed at an entity in the world, while anguish is always faced with the thrownness of existence: the “before-what” of anguish is nothing determinate, but represents the irruption into everyday existence of Dasein’s most specific question, the one in which it discovers that the meaning of its existence is at stake. The network of significance of entities sinks into an empty horizon, things no longer have any importance, Dasein is naked before itself and touches the deepest root of its own ontological structure: divergent from itself, it discovers itself in the dispersion to which it has been consigned since an origin that was never present. Analogously to what occurs in Kierkegaard’s thought, but without the reference to divine transcendence, anguish opens and inaugurates the possibility of choosing an authentic, “proper” existence for Dasein, which plans for itself by taking on its own ultimate horizon: death.

3. Beyond Heidegger: The Recursiveness of Fear

As is well known, the influence of the existential analytic of Being and Time on contemporary culture has been enormous: even outside of philosophical discourse and regardless of the coloration attributed to it, the distinction between authentic and inauthentic existence has become common currency. However, it merely reproduces, at a more radical ontological level, the distinction, typical of modernity, between fear and courage: along the unraveling of a common thread that ties together the Stoic sage, the Cartesian subject, the Hegelian figure of the master, and Nietzsche’s overman, the Being that lives in authentic existence does not fear death because it is free from ties to the world; it has “negated” them precisely because it has experienced the nullifying power of anguish. Conversely, Dasein living in inauthentic existence is held captive by fear of the entities that threaten it from time to time: it is easy to recognize the “coward” of whom Aristotle and Descartes speak, as well as the “slave” who, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, does not risk (denies) his own life and becomes a mere instrument of the master, or the Apollonian man incapable of gazing into the abyss of being. In short, Heidegger’s description of fear remains unconsciously imprisoned in an Aristotelian-Cartesian vision of the subject, the same one that Heidegger criticizes as the greatest limitation of Husserlian phenomenology. Indeed, if, against Husserl, Being and Time claims the facticity of Dasein, its being originally immersed in the sphere of the empirical, the distinction between fear and anguish decisively reproduces the clear distinction between the empirical and the transcendental, that is, between the ontic and the ontological, not taking sufficiently into account that – as Husserl well explains in §58 of The Crisis of European Sciences – the transcendental always “flows back” into the empirical in a continuum in which it is always artificial to draw lines of separation.

Therefore, before postulating a qualitative distinction between fear and anguish, it is necessary to verify whether and how they are intertwined in experience: if we suspend the validity of such a rigid distinction and stick phenomenologically to the experience of fear, trying to grasp its full complexity, we cannot fail to notice that, as Virno (2010) suggests, both emotional tones and logical and linguistic acts are characterized by infinite regress, that is, by a dizzying recursive structure. This represents a constant possibility in human existence and occurs every time the solution to a problem (of any kind) proposes the same problem again at a higher level of abstraction. Moreover, Chomsky (1970) already observed that recursion allows us to distinguish human language from the communicative codes of other animals. Now, in interacting with the environment, humans generate logical, pragmatic, or emotional cycles that, recursively repeating themselves, give rise to infinite regress. More precisely, these cycles are characterized by hyper-reflexivity, transcendence, and duality: the first indicates the biological need to represent one’s own representations or perform operations on one’s own operations; the second consists in the need to project oneself beyond the here and now to detach oneself from one’s own life and achieve some form of subjectivity; and the third marks the biological need for an extra-natural, artificial life.

Because perceptual impressions do not dictate unambiguous behaviors, the human animal, in order to survive, must continually monitor and reform its behavior through a hypertrophic development of reflective performances. Representation, since it cannot base its validity on a previous stimulus, ensures it by becoming itself the object of a second, more powerful representation, capable of weighing it and evaluating its perspicacity. Metarepresentation, each time anew, remediates the discontinuity between environmental stimulus and cognitive response. It retrospectively fills the void that this discontinuity has wedged into experience. One might say: metarepresentation takes the place of the stimulus, taking on the orienting function that the latter performs in other living species. All this also applies, obviously, to meta-operations, that is, to those practical conducts (work-related, institutional, etc.) that have their exclusive point of application in other, previous and more immediate, practical conducts (Virno 2010, p. 51).

On these premises, Virno can affirm that even the emotional tones of our species are susceptible to recursive reiteration: “an affect applies itself each time anew to the situation that its very onset has provoked” (p. 55). Since syntactic recursion never ceases to modify them, passions too are open to an infinite regress. However, what matters is this openness, not the actual course of the regress. It is the mere possibility of an inconclusive “and so on” that determines the nature of passions, as well as the ways in which they manifest themselves. Instantaneous sadness and the joy of a brief moment, while not actually duplicating into sadness for sadness and joy for joy, are what they are because they could duplicate themselves over and over again, or rather because they never fail to contain within themselves an interminable march backwards.

Anguish is a reflection of the hyper-reflexivity inherent in human animal fear. Or rather: it arises if, and only if, this hyper-reflexivity unfolds without any limits whatsoever, at a compulsive pace. […] The feeling of fear applies itself recursively to what it itself has produced. The spiral of terrified metarepresentations unfolds in ever-widening spirals: the fear of being afraid is followed by the fear that grips us because we have felt the fear of being afraid; but already an even higher degree of fear supervenes, rising above those that have followed until then […]; and so on, ad infinitum. Now, when a fear of the fear of being afraid, etc., prevails, the reference to a specific danger loosens and then disappears entirely. Fear permeated by syntactic recursion loses its connection with the empirical fact that initially aroused it. It is a piercing and pervasive fear, but of nothing in particular. Where it is articulated in an ascending hierarchy of logical levels, fear no longer has an object and, precisely for this reason, becomes anguish (Virno 2010, pp. 61-62).

4. The fear device

At the mercy of fear that has now become anguish is he who fears not a contingent event, but the contingency of events as such: once immersed in this spiral, the world as such appears threatening and he feels constantly suspended between life and the constant possibility of death. The experience of fear thus refers to a recursive structure typical of the interaction (cognitive and affective) between homo sapiens and the environment, such that it can amplify infinitely until it becomes a sort of “lens” through which we experience the world, the Grundstimmung of our entire existence. It is also in this sense that Benasayag, echoing Spinoza, speaks of “sad passions” (2003) as a typical pathology of our time. A time in which the precariousness of life and the possibility of death at every step manifests itself in multiple forms: terrorist attacks, pandemics, permanent economic crisis. It is when fear spreads easily in a sort of contagion that it becomes the object of governance.[2] If the fear of being suspended in a state of perpetual crisis in which our lives are constantly in danger and in which the future is so unpredictable that it makes all our life plans (work, relationships, etc.) uncertain spreads, any palliative of this fear will seem like a reasonable price to pay to suspend, even if only momentarily, the unpredictability of the environment.[3] And suspending the unpredictability of the environment means making it, at least apparently, safe, regulated, controlled, monitored.

The notion of crisis provides a perfect example of how traditional meanings can be transformed: in the neoliberal era, economic and political goals converge to the point of intertwining and transforming the crisis from a conceivable and economically resolvable eventuality into a practice, a technique of governance. What we have been experiencing since 2008 is not an economic crisis, but rather the failure of the political economy inherited from the seventeenth century, the slow disintegration of the traditional art of governance, the emergence of a new practice of governance that sees subjects become the population and that places networks of communication and surveillance in place of statistical regulatory frameworks (Praino 2021, p. 50).

It follows that, if on the one hand the contemporary neoliberal model of rationality exalts individual self-affirmation – man as “self-entrepreneur” – thus re-proposing and deforming the ancient cliché, already Greek and modern, of the courageous man, on the other hand it manages and indefinitely prolongs the state of crisis in which fear is renewed at every step: thus, to fulfill himself individually, the individual pays the price of renouncing the exercise of freedom as sharing a public space (Leghissa 2012) in exchange for the guarantee of a presumed security as a palliative of fear.

If the security device is thus one with the recursive structure of fear, feeding on it and then taking it on board, that is, making it an object of management, it expertly interrupts the infinite regression through forms of collective reassurance, yet without ever allowing it to be completely extinguished, instead continuing to draw from it the root of its own perpetuation. Consequently, we oscillate between the paroxysmal multiplication of fear for a future that appears increasingly threatening, for a future that threatens to realize our worst fears, and the temporary reassurances we obtain by surrendering broad spaces for the exercise of freedom: not freedom as a project of self-affirmation, which remains the primary objective suggested—if not shouted—by the device itself, but freedom as the sharing of a shared and co-designed public space.

Perhaps, rather than naively trying to “overcome” the fear of an uncertain environment by hiding or repressing it, perhaps by flaunting false certainties, we could try to find other ways to interrupt the recurrence and endless amplification of fear itself: no longer by surrendering spaces of freedom in exchange for ever-increasing doses of control, but by intersubjectively constructing more reassuring horizons. Only the work of self-understanding, on the one hand, and conscious attention to the affections that populate our environment, even in their transitory nature, can crack the lens of fear and restore spaces of resistance in which the contingency and thrownness of existence are not presented solely in the form of precariousness, but as a free opening to the new.

Bibliography

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Notes

[1] See, for an introduction, Cimino & Costa 2019.

[2] «Contemporary governance – understood as a self-perpetuating process – is an expanded and open technique of social regulation, it is a way of managing nation states conceived as perpetually in crisis, it is an administrative system that dialogues and at the same time tries to learn from the components of civil society that it governs and who, in previous eras, were considered recipients and implementers of plans devised from above» (Praino 2021, p. 40).

[3] «This condition becomes the rule within the spontaneous order of the market; it is in fact as a device of an order – and not as a “technical” and temporary factor of imbalance in the balance of economic cycles – that the crisis involves and activates those subjective states of mind such as trust, credit, belief, guilt, expectation, fear, which such a condition of suspension between life and death induces. And it invests in them» (Gentili 2018, p. 97).