a) Infallibility and Inspection of “Mental Contents”

There is a long and strong philosophical tradition, reaching from St. Augustine to the present, according to which knowledge of the contents of the mind is infallible. It will be our next task to highlight this tradition and to refute its thesis.

Descartes’s method of doubt, you may recall, has three steps. Firstly, Descartes argues that the perception of ordinary objects is not infallible. A tower seen in the distance, for example, may appear to be round when it is really square. We may mistake the person across the street for our neighbor. And so on. Secondly, Descartes maintains that not even “near-perceptions” are infallible. Descartes believes that he is sitting by the fireplace, in his room, thinking about the fallibility of knowledge, but he may really be asleep in his bed, merely dreaming that he is awake and philosophizing. Thirdly and finally, an evil demon may be manipulating his mind so that he believes, as he of course does, that two plus three is five and that a square has four sides, even though these propositions may actually be false. Not even our knowledge of mathematical propositions, therefore, is infallible. Descartes then proceeds to show that at least one proposition is exempted from this systematic doubt. This is the proposition that he exists.

Two things are of special interest for our purposes. Firstly, the knowledge shown to be doubtful is not knowledge of mental things, of the contents of the mind, but of the external world. Our perceptions of the things around us, of towers in the distance, of persons across the street, are shown to be fallible. And so are our perceptions of our own bodies, their locations in space and in time. Even knowledge of mathematical propositions is shown to be doubtful. But nothing is said about knowledge of our minds. Perhaps Descartes could assume that the skeptic who was to be refuted shares with him the assumption that knowledge of the contents of our minds is not open to skeptical doubt.

The second point concerns Descartes’s criterion for infallibility. The first two steps of the method of doubt seem to yield a clear and obvious answer: A kind of knowledge is deemed to be fallible if and only if we have made mistakes in regard to this kind in the past. Since we have made mistakes about things seen in the distance, the shape of the tower, for example, perception of distant objects is fallible. Since we have mistakenly believed that we are in one place when we merely dreamed that we were at that place, our perceptions of this sort are fallible as well. But this criterion would equally show that mathematical knowledge is fallible; for it is clear that we have made mistakes about mathematical matters as well. Who has not added up wrongly when trying to balance her check book? Even brilliant mathematicians accept false theorems as true. Why, then, does Descartes believe that he must introduce the evil demon when he takes the third step of the method of doubt? Why does he think that it is necessary to switch to a different criterion of infallibility, a criterion that may be summed up in this way: A kind of knowledge is infallible if and only if we could not make mistakes in regard to this kind of knowledge, even if a powerful demon were to try to deceive us? It would be pleasant to pursue this question, but we must not stray from our path. Let us adopt as our criterion for infallibility the one Descartes applies in the first two steps of the method of doubt. This is our question: Do we make mistakes about the contents of our minds?

Notice that I have not mentioned certainty. Certainty, I hold, is a matter of firmness of belief. It is a quality of belief. People can be certain about the most dubious propositions. I shall not reveal my prejudices by giving examples of those beliefs which I hold with certainty. But it can be said that I am as certain that I am now sitting at my desk as I am about some mathematical propositions. Certainty, it seems to me, can attach to our beliefs about the world around us, even to beliefs about the realm beyond the world around us, just as easily as to the statements of mathematics and logic. It can attach itself even to the propositions of metaphysics! On the other hand, there are propositions of set theory, for example, about which some of us are not certain at all. And many of the philosophical propositions which I tentatively advance in this work seem to me to be somewhat uncertain.

Can we make mistakes about what occurs in our own minds? Do we make mistakes, to take the obvious case first, about the sense-impressions which we experience? Some philosophers have argued that we cannot. Look at the following famous passage from H. H. Price:

When I see a tomato there is much that I can doubt. I can doubt whether it is a tomato that I am seeing, and not a cleverly painted piece of wax. I can doubt whether there is any material thing there at all. Perhaps what I took for a tomato was really a reflection; perhaps I am even the victim of some hallucination. One thing however I cannot doubt: that there exists a red patch of a round and somewhat bulgy shape, standing out from a background of other colour patches, and having a certain visual depth, and that this whole field of colour is directly present to my consciousness.

(H. H. Price, Perception, p. 3)

We grant immediately that the perception of the tomato is not infallible. But in regard to the red round patch, we wish to pause for a moment. I shall take for granted that this patch is what I have called a “visual sense-impression” or a “visual sensation.” And I shall also assume that Price knows that this sense-impression is red rather than blue, round rather than square, and so on, because he has inspected it. If so, then Price is claiming that the inspection of visual sense-impressions is indubitable, that is, infallible. But this seems to me to be mistaken. It seems to me that we can make mistakes about the properties of our sense-impressions. For example, we may believe that a given sense-impression is round, but find out, after closer inspection, that it is really sort of pear-shaped. We may assert at first that it is uniformly red, but then notice that parts of it are darker than others, and so on. And what holds for visual sense-impressions holds equally well for auditory and olfactory ones: we can and do make mistakes about their properties and relations. Furthermore, we can and do make mistakes about feelings and emotions. The properties of a pain may at first not be obvious to us; an emotion may be mistaken for quite a different one. And such examples can be multiplied. Why, then, have so many philosophers insisted, in the face of common sense and introspective psychology, that our knowledge of mental contents is infallible?

Some may have reasoned that unless there are infallible truths, the skeptic cannot be refuted. And since they cannot bear the thought of skepticism’s victory, they bury their heads, like philosophical ostrichs, in the sand of ignorance. But surely this is a poor reason. If all knowledge is fallible, so be it! No amount of wishful thinking will change the fact. I do believe that all knowledge is fallible. But in distinction from those philosophers, I do not believe that this fact means the triumph of skepticism or, at least, the triumph of the kind of skepticism one needs to fear.

I think that there is also another, more profound, reason for believing that knowledge of sense-impressions is infallible. Take a look at this passage from Chisholm:

If for any such characteristic F, I can justify a claim to knowledge by saying of something that it appears F (by saying of the wine that it now looks red, or tastes sour to me), where the verb is intended in the descriptive, phenomenological sense just indicated, then the appearing in question is self-presenting and my statement expresses what is directly evident. The claim that I thus justify, by saying of something that it appears F, may be the claim that the thing is F, but as we have seen, it may also be some other claim. To the question “What justification do I have for thinking I know, or for counting it as evident, that something now looks red to me, or tastes sour?” I could reply only by reiterating that something does now look red or tastes sour.

(R. M. Chisholm, Theory of Knowledge, pp. 32-33)

It is clear from the context that the appearing terminology is doing duty for the sensation terminology. Chisholm states that we could say “I am experiencing a red appearance” or “I have a sour taste” instead of “the wine appears now red to me” and “the wine now tastes sour to me,” respectively. Chisholm is therefore talking about visual and other kinds of sense-impression. But notice the ‘now’ that appears in Chisholm’s sentences; for example, in the expression ‘the wine now looks red’. This suggests that he is not really talking about a lasting sense-impression but about one of his acts of reflection on the sense-impression. Right now, he seems to be saying, my reflection upon the sense-impression shows that it is red. In other words, Chisholm tells us what one particular act of reflecting on the lasting sense-impression yields. He is telling us that, according to this particular act, the sense-impression is red. But this kind of report must be distinguished from reporting on the color of the sense-impression as established by (thorough) inspection. The latter may involve a number of acts of reflection.

Next, Chisholm proposes to dispose of sense-impressions in favor of kinds of sensing, a move that has become popular under the heading of “the adverbial theory of sensing.” Instead of talking about red sensations, he proposes to talk about sensing redly. Note that this is not supposed to mean that the sensing, the mental act, is red, but rather that it is a peculiar kind, not further specified, of sensing. Now, I think that an adverbial view of sensing makes no more sense than an adverbial theory of perceiving would, according to which one may be said to “see airplanely.” But this is not the point I wish to make. Rather, I propose to accept his view for a moment in order to call attention to the fact that his introspective report is about a mental act and not about the object of this act, that is, about a visual sense-impression. When he states that he is now sensing redly, he is telling us that he is now experiencing a mental act of sensing of a certain sort. Looking at the subject matter from this perspective, we are faced with the possibility that some of those who claim infallibility for introspective reports about sense-data may in actuality claim infallibility for reports about acts of reflection.

This impression is reinforced when we turn to another class of statements which Chisholm takes to be “directly evident”:

Thinking and believing provide us with paradigm cases of the directly evident. Consider a reasonable man who is thinking about Albuquerque, or who believes that Albuquerque is in New Mexico, and suppose him to reflect on the philosophical question. What is my justification for counting it as evident, or for thinking that I know, that I am thinking about Albuquerque, or that I believe that Albuquerque is in New Mexico?

(Chisholm, 1966, p. 28)

The first sentence is misleading. It is not thinking and believing in general which are directly evident, but rather thinking or believing that one is thinking or believing. What is supposedly infallible is not the thought that Albuquerque is in New Mexico, but the thought (judgment, assertion) that one is now thinking that Albuquerque is in New Mexico. Obviously, I can make a mistake about where Albuquerque is located, but presumably I cannot make a mistake about what I am now thinking. This interpretation of Chisholm’s view raises the question of whether or not knowledge about acts of reflection and acts of believing (judging, asserting, etc.) are infallible.

b) Infallibility and Reflection on Mental Acts

Reflection, I claimed earlier, is a unique mental act which allows us to inspect mental contents and to monitor mental acts. It is the source of most of our knowledge about mental things. It provides us with most of the knowledge which we have of our own minds. In every case of reflection, the act of reflection is part of the conscious state, and its object is the object of one’s attention. If one reflects on a desire, for example, the situation looks like figure 11.

Figure 11

To have a mental act is to be able to reflect upon it. But this is not to say—and I cannot stress this point too strongly—that the act of experiencing itself is an act of knowing. I have devoted much time to arguing that experience is not reflection. And let me also stress once again that this turning of one’s attention to mental acts in reflection is not a case of memory proper. Reflection has an immediacy, it seems to me, which acts of remembering do not have. It is like a shadow that accompanies all of our experienced mental acts.

Is reflection on mental acts infallible? Can we be mistaken about now thinking that Albuquerque is in New Mexico, now seeing an elephant standing on two legs, now having a desire for the boy next door? It may seem to be impossible to make mistakes in these matters. What would it be like to be mistaken about thinking that Albuquerque is in New Mexico? Well, there are two possibilities: one could be mistaken about what it is that one thinks, or else one could be mistaken about the mental act that occurs. For example, one may really be thinking that Albuquerque is in Mexico; or one may not really be thinking that Albuquerque is in New Mexico, that is, asserting it, but may merely suppose it to be in New Mexico. You could be mistaken about the object of the act or about the nature of the act itself.

There is no doubt that reflection is the basis, and the only basis, for all of our tests of our perceptions, beliefs, emotions, etc. You see a tower in the distance and perceive it to be round. When you reach it, you see that it is really square. You realize that you made a mistake earlier. You discover this mistake because you trust your memory: you remember now that a while ago it looked round to you. But this means that you now trust your reflections concerning (a) your remembering of what you perceived to be the case earlier, and (b) your present seeing that the tower is square. Only because you take these reflections for granted do you discover that you made a perceptual mistake. In general, there is no way of checking, no test, no discovery of mistakes, that does not rest ultimately on accepting the testimony of reflection. But though it is true that in the end we cannot but trust reflection, this does not imply that reflection is infallible. Nor does it follow, of course, that we can never discover that we have been mistaken. Reflection, though it is the last court of appeal, is nevertheless fallible. A person may not be sure whether just now he saw something or merely thinks that he saw it; a person may convince herself that she is not afraid of something when she really is; a person may come to believe that he despises his mother when he really desires her; and a person may insist that she believes something when she really believes something else. Reflection on mental acts, it seems to me, is no more infallible than inspection of mental contents.

This claim must appear so obviously mistaken, if not utterly wrongheaded, that we should look more carefully at a paradigm case of allegedly infallible knowledge. Ayer contrasts the assertion “that is a bunch of grapes,” made while he is sitting in a vineyard, with the assertion “I am now seeing what looks to me like a bunch of grapes,” and then asks: “How in that case could I possibly be wrong?” (A. J. Ayer, The Problem of Knowledge, pp. 59-60). Even if there are no grapes there, even if he is hallucinating, Ayer points out, his statement would be true. That is undoubtedly so. But it does not follow, as he seems to think, that Ayer could not be mistaken in “describing the character of the experience” which he has, that is, in describing the character of the act which he experiences. It may be the case that Ayer’s act of seeing does not really intend a bunch of grapes, whether or not there really is anything in front of him at all. Even as a mere report about the act of seeing and its object, his assertion can be false. There is a scene in Orwell’s 1984 that forcefully proves my point. The interrogator O’Brien holds up his hand in front of his prisoner Winston, with four fingers extended and the thumb hidden. He asks Winston how many fingers he is holding up, and Winston answers: “Four.” O’Brien turns a dial and Winston feels incredible pain. The next time, Winston answers the question with “Five.” But O’Brien is not satisfied: “No, Winston, that is no use. You are lying. You still think there are four. How many fingers, please?” Winston screams: “Four! Five! Four! Anything you like. Only stop it, stop the pain.” After more torture and more interrogation, the scene ends like this:

“Just now I held up the fingers of my hand to you. You saw five fingers. Do you remember that?”

“Yes.”

O’Brien held up the fingers of his left hand, with the thumb concealed.

“There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?”

“Yes.”

And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed.

He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. The gist of this horribly repugnant scene is that a person can be forced, because of the threat of unbearable pain, to misreflect upon his perceptions. The lesson is that a person, in extreme circumstances, may learn to be mistaken about his perceptual acts. Let me emphasize that such mistakes are very rare. But even though they are rare, they prove that reflection is not infallible.

I chose Ayer’s example of perception because it seems to me to make the strongest case for the infallibility of reflection. As soon as we turn to a different kind of example, my contention is strengthened. I have in mind emotions, desires, fears, etc. Reflections on acts of this sort are quite often mistaken. Freud’s theory of the unconscious is merely a theoretical elaboration of this well-known fact. We can kill several birds with one stone if we take a brief look at Freud’s view.

c) Infallibility and the Freudian Unconscious

Freud had an uncanny knack for expressing his views in a most inappropriate terminology. His use of the word ‘unconscious’ is a prime example of this tendency. Some of the misunderstandings of his theory could have been avoided had he chosen a more felicitous terminology. On the other hand, it may also be true that part of his fame rests precisely on this provocative use of language. Freud, we must keep in mind, is one of the greatest writers of German prose, and his style is, on the whole, admirably clear and concise. Why, then, does he time and again forge a technical vocabulary which is bound to distort his views and provoke antagonism to them? May his own unconscious have been at work for reasons that are quite clear to some of his admirers?

We shall discard Freud’s idiosyncratic terminology and attempt to fit his theory into our emerging picture of the structure of the mind. The first thing to stress is that our notion of a conscious state has no connection with Freud’s notion of the unconscious. One may be tempted to call anything “unconscious” which is mental but does not belong to the conscious state. The act of experiencing the conscious state would then be unconscious. Following the temptation further, we would then say that a mind consists at any given moment of a conscious and an unconscious part, namely, of a conscious state and the act of experiencing the conscious state. But I prefer not to talk this way; in part, at least, because I wish to avoid as best as I can any confusion with Freud’s theory.

What does the Freudian notion of the unconscious come down to? In one sentence: An unconscious desire, for example, is a desire which, though it is experienced, is not recognized for what it is. The person who experiences the desire has learned to misidentify it. This learning process is called “repression.”

Let us consider an example. Assume that a girl called Anna enters her father’s bedroom one hot summer morning in order to ask him a question. Her father is just about to get out of bed and, since it is summer, he is completely nude. Suddenly, Anna feels a strong sexual desire for her father. She recognizes her desire, is terribly ashamed of it, and feels guilty for having it. But she also suddenly remembers that the night before, at the dinner table, her family had bemoaned the fact that a girlfriend of hers had suffered a sudden heart attack; and she wonders whether the terrible state she is finding herself in may not be due to a similar affliction. Perhaps she is mistaken: her agitation is caused, not by a desire for her father, but rather by a similar heart attack. With this thought, she runs from her father’s room, goes to her bedroom, and starts taking her pulse. All of this happens in a flash.

The thought that something may be wrong with her heart reduces Anna’s feeling of shame and guilt: she cannot help having a weak heart; it is not her fault. Of course, the thought that something is wrong with her heart is not a pleasant one, but it is like nothing compared to the recognition that she wants to sleep with her father. The reduction in shame and guilt is a most powerful reward for coming to believe that her heart may be weak. Anna thus learns to believe that there is something wrong with her heart. Whenever she feels from now on a desire for her father, or even feels a desire for another man (perhaps, someone who reminds her of her father), she immediately concludes that her heart is acting up again and starts taking her pulse. The counting of her heartbeat distracts her from having erotic feelings; it requires great attention. She complains to her mother about these frequent attacks and is sent to the family doctor. By now, these “attacks” have spread to other situations. She has an attack when she is alone with her boy-friend; when she is in a crowded elevator, pressed against an attractive male; when she sorts her father’s underwear for the washing. The family doctor, of course, finds nothing wrong with Anna’s heart and sends her to a specialist. The specialist finds nothing wrong either and sends her to a colleague. Finally, one decides that Anna is neurotic, and she is put in the care of a psychoanalyst.

Anna’s sad story illustrates the process of repression. The desire for her father is said to become unconscious because it is repressed. At first, when she entered her father’s bedroom, her desire was conscious. She realized it for what it is when it first occurred. She (a) experienced the desire, (b) reflected upon it, and (c) recognized it for what it was. This recognition made her feel most awful. But then another possibility occurred to her, and the thought that there may be something wrong with her heart, in the blinking of an eye, removed her terrible guilt and shame. Thus the thought gets powerfully reinforced. Anna learns to think that her agitations are due to a weak heart rather than a desire for her father. She learns not to recognize her desire for what it is. The desire has now been repressed and has become unconscious. There is nothing mysterious about this process of repression and the resulting unconscious. It is a straightforward learning process. Anna’s desire for her father, we must stress, is still there; it is still experienced; it is still a part of her conscious state, it has not disappeared. A repressed unconscious desire is just as much part of the conscious state as an unrepressed conscious desire. But Anna has learned to misidentify what she experiences. An unconscious desire, therefore, is simply a desire which is experienced but misidentified.

Unconscious desires, fears, wishes, etc., are prime examples of mistaken reflection. But it must be emphasized that there is an important difference between an “ordinary” mistake of reflection and a “neurotic” mistake. Anna’s mistaken reflection serves a purpose. It is possible for you to think that you dislike someone intensely at first sight when, in reality, you are attracted to that person. But this may be an honest mistake; you simply have not sorted out your feelings too carefully. As soon as you reflect on what you really feel toward her, you realize that you find her attractive. The neurotic’s mistake, by contrast, is systematic and functional. It always serves a purpose, and the purpose is to reduce guilt, shame, horror, and so on. What is fascinating about Freud’s insight is not the bare fact that we can make mistakes about our desires, fears, hopes, etc., but that we can learn to perpetuate such mistakes because they serve a purpose.

To return to Anna, her troubles are just beginning after she has learned to believe that there is something wrong with her heart. The doctors now assure her that she is as healthy as an ox. She “knows,” of course, that they must be mistaken, but why would they lie to her? Are they hiding something from her, something even more fearsome than a weak heart? Or are they right after all; is she really imagining things? Anna will have to invent further stories, make up new hypotheses. She may have to repress other fears. The point is that a neurotic’s work is never done: the truth continuously threatens to destroy the web of misconceptions which the neurotic has so carefully spun. That is the reason why neurotics are miserable, why they cannot relax, and why they cannot concentrate on anything else. It is the task of the psychoanalyst to relieve the neurotic of this burden. The principle of Anna’s cure is clear: the process of repression has to be reversed. She has to unlearn her misidentification of her desire for her father. Only the truth will make her free of neurosis. Most likely, she will only be able to face the truth if she can be made to feel less ashamed and guilty about her desire. However this is accomplished, her hypochondria will disappear as soon as she realizes that what agitates her is the desire for her father.

A neurotic, it may be said, hides the truth about her desires, fears, hopes, etc. from herself. Every neurotic lives a lie. But we must be careful not to take this talk of lying too literally. Otherwise, it is easy to arrive at Sartre’s view that a Freudian view of repression is absurd (see Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, pp. 90-96). Sartre believes that Freud’s theory splits consciousness into two parts, so that it becomes impossible to account for the fact that it is one and the same thing that does the lying and is lied to. He constructs the following dilemma. Either it is one and the same consciousness that lies and is lied to, or else it is not. According to Sartre, Freud chose the second alternative: Consciousness is split into two parts, the ego and the id. But this will not do, Sartre argues, for “the very essence of the reflexive idea of hiding something from oneself implies the unity of one and the same psychic mechanism and consequently a double activity in the heart of unity . . .” (Sartre, 1966, p. 94).

But the first alternative, as Sartre sees it, is not acceptable either. Assume that person X deceives person Y into believing P. In this case, X does not believe that P is the case. Y, on the other hand, does believe that P is the case. Now, if Y is the same person as X, if Y is the same consciousness as X, then X does not believe in P, insofar as X is the deceiver, and X also and at the same time believes in P, insofar as X is the deceived. But this is a contradiction. It is impossible for one and the same person, at the same time, to believe P and also not to believe P. According to Sartre, it is indeed one and the same consciousness which in “bad faith” deceives and is deceived. Does this mean, then, that Sartre believes in a contradiction? I do not know the answer. However, I also believe that Sartre would not be greatly disturbed by our question. Bad faith, he might well have replied, is by its very nature contradictory.

Our story of Anna’s neurosis clearly shows in what precise sense she is both a liar and also lied to. She clearly realizes at first that she desires her father. Only because of this realization does she feel shame and guilt. Later, she thinks that she has a heart ailment, because this thought comforts her. She does not believe at one and the same time both that she desires her father and also that she does not desire her father. Rather, even though she believed at one time that she desires her father, she no longer does. Now she believes that something is wrong with her heart. She no longer believes that she desires her father; and if it were suggested to her that she does, she would respond with righteous indignation. Thus there is no contradiction.

There is a small lesson. One may come to think that there is a contradiction if one starts with the mistaken assumption that one cannot possibly have a desire without knowing that one has it. Since we have agreed that Anna still desires her father, even after she has convinced herself that there is something wrong with her heart, we would have to conclude, based on this assumption, that she still knows that she has the desire. And since she knows it, she believes it. Thus she would later on both believe and also not believe that she desires her father. It is precisely this point which I have argued earlier: To have a desire and to know that one has it, are two quite different things. I have even claimed that merely to have a desire is not to know that one has it. Experience is not knowledge. In order to find out what one experiences, one must reflect on what one experiences. And reflection, we have just seen, may not yield the correct answer. Anna gives the wrong answer, because the truth is unbearable.

d) A Word about Anxiety

I distinguished between emotions and moods. There can be no doubt that emotions and moods are essential parts of the furniture of the human mind. What would a mind be without fear and anger, without love and lust, without joy and sadness? But the importance of emotions and moods extends further. Without emotions, I believe, there would be no knowledge of the difference between right and wrong. Our knowledge of what is morally good and evil rests, ultimately, not on perception and reason, but on our emotional responses. This is a long story, and I have to be content here to point out that “knowledge of the external world” encompasses more than common sense and science. Morality lies at its center.

Moods, too, play an important role in our understanding of the world. Bollnow describes it well:

Perception itself, therefore, is already thoroughly a matter of mood [gestimmt], and even the apparently excepted theoretical attitude has not freed itself from the mood, but, quite to the contrary, presupposes a certain mood, namely, that of “quiet lingering”. The same holds immediately for all of the achievements of understanding life and the world. In every mood, the world is already interpreted in a very specific way, and all understanding is already guided by this basic interpretation of life and world through the mood.

(O. F. Bollnow, Das Wesen der Stimmungen, p. 57)

Bollnow goes on to show in detail how different moods, from ecstasy to deepest sadness, color our experience of people, of time, and of the world.

We undoubtedly owe the emphasis on the importance of moods to the existentialists. Heidegger in particular derives his analysis of human existence from a consideration of moods as the ground of this existence. But here we notice a curious phenomenon. Although existentialists stress the importance of all moods, it is one mood in particular that has caught their fancy: “The unique importance of anxiety is the common uniting presupposition of all existentialism, whose far-reaching consequences appear in ultimate clarity in Heidegger. All other moods are from the very beginning related to anxiety” (Bollnow, p. 67). Bollnow does not share this prejudice of the existentialists in favor of anxiety. His investigation deals with the influence of sadness and despair on our experience of reality, with the nature of Nietzsche’s dionysical ecstasy, and even with Proust’s conception of time in happiness. Yet, Bollnow shares the existentialists’ view that anxiety is a fundamental mood. I shall argue that this view is mistaken. Anxiety is not only not the most important of all moods, but not a mood at all. Existentialists, therefore, are doubly mistaken. Their first mistake is, as Bollnow convincingly argues, that they think of anxiety as being of the essence of human existence. But they are also, secondly, mistaken, as I shall argue, on even deeper grounds; for anxiety is not a mood at all.

Bollnow almost stumbles on the truth when he at one point realizes that anxiety has no place in the spectrum from happiness to sadness which is characteristic of moods:

On the one hand, they [anxiety and despair] are close to the dejected [gedrueckten] moods, are themselves forms, nay, enhanced forms of depression. On the other hand, however, they are so different from them that a common treatment would distort the essential nature of these two groups. Happiness and sadness are two poles between which human life fluctuates in a regular or irregular manner, and even though seriousness has its proper opposite in fun, these new moods [anxiety and despair] lie outside of such a polarity. They have no genuine opposite . . . One could therefore consider to remove them from the circle of customary moods, and to contrast them with the latter as being “in bad humour” [Verstimmungen].

(Bollnow, pp. 48-49)

Indeed, anxiety does not fit the pattern characteristic of moods. In order to see where the existentialists—and even such an astute observer as Bollnow—go wrong, we shall take a brief look at Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety and then return to Anna’s neurosis.

In his The Concept of Dread, Kierkegaard develops (at least) four theses about the nature of anxiety (dread):

(1) Anxiety is a defining characteristic of human beings. Human beings, and only human beings, can experience anxiety. Animals, for example, can be afraid, but they cannot be anxious. Kierkegaard states: “One does not therefore find dread in the beast precisely for the reason that by nature the beast is not qualified by spirit” (S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Dread, p. 38; see also p. 47 and p. 139).

(2) Anxiety is not the same as fear: “One almost never sees the concept dread dealt with in psychology, and I must therefore call attention to the fact that it is different from fear and similar concepts which refer to something definite, whereas dread is freedom’s reality as possibility for possibility” (Kierkegaard, p. 38).

(3) The object of anxiety is nothingness. This nothingness is sometimes said to be fate and sometimes said to be guilt. Here is a representative quotation: “If then we ask further what is the object of dread, the answer as usual must be that it is nothing” (Kierkegaard, p. 86; see also p. 55 and p. 69). Just as I have taken the liberty to use the translator’s ‘dread’ in the quoted text, so I shall take the liberty to speak of ‘nothingness’ where the text contains ‘nothing’.

(4) Anxiety reveals the possibility of freedom: “Thus dread is the dizziness of freedom which occurs when the spirit would posit the synthesis, and freedom then gazes down into its own possibility, grasping at finiteness to sustain itself’ (Kierkegaard, p. 55; see also p. 99).

Anxiety is undoubtedly a mental phenomenon, but it does not seem to have an object. That contradicts Brentano’s thesis of intentionality, according to which every mental phenomenon has an object. Now, we could just admit, as we have already done, that Brentano’s thesis is false, that there are exceptions to it; and we could then say that anxiety is one of these exceptions. Or else we could search for an object for anxiety. If we adopt the second possibility, we could reason—I am tempted to say “in Hegelian fashion”—as follows. (1) Anxiety has no object. (2) That is, nothing is the object of anxiety. (3) Therefore, the object of anxiety is nothing. (4) Thus anxiety has an object after all, namely, nothing. And to emphasize that nothing is an object, we could speak of nothingness: The object of anxiety is nothingness. In this fashion, Brentano’s thesis of intentionality is saved and Kierkegaard’s third thesis is vindicated.

I have indulged in this fanciful reconstruction of the way that may lead to nothingness, because I want to contrast it with quite a different way of securing an object for anxiety. According to this approach, anxiety does have an object, our first impression is mistaken, but this object (as well as the corresponding act) has been repressed. According to this Freudian interpretation, anxiety is nothing but fear, but fear whose act and object have been repressed. There exist not two distinct mental phenomena, fear and anxiety, but only one, namely, fear. There are not two kinds of mental acts, fear and anxiety, but only one kind, namely, fear. But a person may either know that his emotion is fear and what it is he is afraid of, or else he may merely experience the emotional state without recognizing its direction-giving mental act of fear and its object. In the latter case, it must seem to him that he is agitated, disturbed, nervous, etc., but that all of this turmoil has neither a direction nor an object. Of course, we know from our analysis of repression that the fear is still experienced by the anxious person; it is still part of the conscious state. There is the emotional state, and there is the direction-giving act of fearing a specific object (situation). But the person has learned not to recognize the act of fearing or its object. The repression may be more or less strong or extensive. Perhaps the person realizes that she is afraid, that what she experiences is “somewhat like fear,” but she has no idea what she is afraid of. Or perhaps the person does not even know that it is the emotional part of fear that he experiences. In either case, what the person suffers from is constant and overwhelming fear without its act and object. Anyone who has ever been truly afraid knows what a horrible feeling it is. Now imagine the plight of the neurotic: he is overwhelmed by fear without knowing what he is afraid of, or even that he is afraid.

We saw earlier how Anna’s desire becomes unconscious by the process of repression. The same learning process occurs when fear is turned into anxiety. Anna, we must now add to our story, not only realizes at first that she desires her father, but she is also terribly afraid that she may act upon her desire, that she may do something to fulfill her desire. Not only is she afraid that she may act in a certain way, she also recognizes this fear for what it is. As a consequence, she is not only ashamed of her desire, but also ashamed of what she might do. And just as she learns to misidentify her desire, because this misidentification is rewarded by a reduction of shame and guilt, so does she learn not to recognize her fear, for this non-recognition is rewarded in the same way. In order to reduce her shame and guilt, it is necessary that she not only not recognize her desire for what it is, but also not recognize her fear for what it is. Furthermore, there is the added complication that she could not keep on believing in her heart ailment and at the same time be fully aware of her fear of approaching her father in a provocative way. The recognition of her fear would lead to a recognition of her desire.

From our Freudian point of view, there is some truth to Kierkegaard’s thesis that nothing is the object of anxiety. Anxiety has no object in the sense that the anxious person can no longer identify the object of his fear. In reality, though, it has an object; for it is nothing but fear whose object has been repressed. Our point of view also sheds some light on the rest of Kierkegaard’s theses. It is clear that anxiety must be distinguished from fear just as his second thesis claims. But here, too, we must be cautious. Anxiety, I have emphasized, does not form a separate kind of mental act, distinct from fear. But it is a different kind of mental phenomenon from fear; for it is experienced as different because of the successful process of repression. Even the first thesis, that only human beings can experience anxiety, makes sense from our point of view. A dog, for example, may perhaps be said to be afraid of cars, but it cannot be said to be anxious. It cannot be anxious because it cannot repress its fears. And it cannot repress its fears because it cannot feel ashamed and guilty. In order for Anna to repress her fear, she must be able to feel that it would be wrong, shameful, disgraceful, nasty, etc. to act in a certain fashion. She must have a moral sense. If we can agree that animals do not have a moral sense, that they cannot distinguish between right and wrong, then we can also agree that they cannot repress anything and, hence, that they cannot experience anxiety. That anxiety is characteristic of the human condition is ultimately due to the fact that human beings, and only human beings, can distinguish between what is morally right and what is morally wrong.

Last but not least, there is Kierkegaard’s claim that anxiety reveals to us the possibility of freedom. Through anxiety, we become aware of our freedom. The anxious person, as Sartre says, has “a vertigo of possibility” (J. P. Sartre, The Transcendence of the Ego, p. 100). If a person feels anxious, we would say, she has been confronted with her freedom to act. She has been confronted with the fact that she is capable of doing things which she never thought possible. Anna, for example, is confronted with the fact that she may make sexual advances to her father. This realization, the realization that she could act in such an unspeakable way, reveals to her how distant the horizon of her possibilities is. She may be saying to herself: “My God, if I could do a thing like that, then I am capable of doing anything!” Anna experiences a vertigo of possibility.

I have argued that anxiety is repressed fear. If my argument is sound, then it follows that Bollnow and the existentialists are mistaken when they hold that anxiety is a mood. But it also becomes understandable how they could make this mistake. For anxiety is experienced without a direction, without an object, just as a mood is.

In regard to the larger circle of our inquiry, we have seen that there is no such thing as the infallibility of “inner sense.” Mistakes are possible, not only about the external world, but also about the contents and acts of our minds. Nor should this fact give us reason for despair. Fallibility, though part of the human condition, is not a part to be bemoaned. It is the price we have to pay for the thrill of discovering the truth. And the truth about ourselves, the truth about our desires, emotions, fears, and joys, is the truth that makes us free from neurosis.