Li Gongming | Secretary of the Week: "I am worried, so I am" ... Intellectual history and practical significance

Li Gongming

"Worries: A Literary and Cultural History", by Francis O'Gorman, Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2021 edition, 244 pp., 65.00 yuan

I think Francis O'Gorman's "Anxiety: A Literary and Cultural History" (original title Wallying: A Literary and Cultural History, 2015; translated by Zhang Xueying, Guangxi Normal University Press, April 2021) is indeed a "subtle, exploratory, and completely innovative" book, and the Sunday Times comment is not false. The question is how to recognize and reflect on the intellectual-historical significance and relevance of this unique research theme of the book.

The author begins his "Preface" by saying that this is a book about apprehensive and apprehensive people. Worry seems to the author to be an experience, so if the reader never has any worries, it is happy and enviable, and there is no need to read it. "This book is dedicated to those who instinctively and personally know what I am talking about. We live with worry. If you understand, then read on. (p. 4) There may not be many people who really have never had worries; there are probably too many people who have never really thought about what worries are, and the author hopes that "those who instinctively and personally know what I am talking about" may be even less. The fact that an academic thinking and research appeals so strongly to the response and recognition of the reader's individual experience shows that it is not a cold academic production, but also indicates the difficulty of reading. The author argues that the most important thing is not how to define what "worry" is, but how to recognize "its inherent diversity and contemporaneity", so the book is more suitable for readers who are willing to think hard about the essential problems of worry from the perspective of diversity and contemporaneity. This is of course also challenging for readers, especially in the atmosphere of the Internet culture full of "worrying" topics and its healing chicken soup, and the ideological and academic connotations of the book are easily obscured. Even more concise testimonials such as "Self-Examination Manual for The Worrier," "Cultural Guide to the Diseases of the Times," and "Dismantling the Magic Box of Anxiety by The Hand of Literature, Art, Philosophy, Psychology, and Sociology" are difficult to fully convey the challenge and complexity of the book's reading experience.

The first thing that attracted me was the book's reflections on the object of study, method, and academic sense. From the perspective of knowledge production in academic research, the legitimacy of "worry" as a research topic is itself full of doubts, so the book has a clear exploratory nature in constructing the research topic. The first is to explore how to make anxiety a reasonable subject of study, and the second is to explore ways to properly talk about this topic and its significance, and in the "Foreword" section, We can see O'Gorman's self-questioning and reflection on this exploratory nature. In the "Preface", the author says that it is difficult to ask and define what is "worry", so the topics discussed in this book are not clearly defined and clearly scoped, and there is no clear reference and effective methodology in writing. It is not a medical book, self-help book, or autobiography; although the subtitle has "History" and "Literature," it is neither a historical work nor a research work on literary expression. "Rather, this study is a literary and philosophical meditation on the meaning, its origins, and how it always accompanies us." (p. 5) There is no doubt that this exploration of the legitimacy of the subject matter of the study has imbued the writing of Worry itself with apprehension, and the sources of this anxiety are multifaceted, "for 'apprehension' itself is very complex and diverse, and is of such importance that it cannot be considered one-sidedly". (p. 19) This is a serious challenge to the establishment of a research theme; the ambiguity and possibility of coexisting in the scope and boundaries of the research object are both dangerous and tempting. From the perspective of focusing only on people's mental state, the book focuses on more than just pathology, medicine, psychological counseling, and psychotherapy. Since O'Gorman does not consider anxiety to be a mental illness, the book is by no means a self-help book to "cure" anxiety. He emphasizes that the book is not merely a reflection on the history, literary representations, meanings, and "healing" of worry, but an exploration of a "culture of worry": the whole web of sociology, theology, political science, and aesthetics is created and given meaning. (p. 24) Worry is an indelible spiritual undercurrent in human daily life, an internal experience of living individuals, and a detector of mental states closely linked to the changes of the times, which has undoubtedly left a deep mark in many fields of human spiritual production. The problem is that these fragmented imprints, which are distributed in a network of historical space-time, cannot be covered by a certain subject area that currently has a clear object and research theme, so O'Gorman's thematic academic thinking around "worry" has a distinct exploratory and constructive significance of academic themes. Incidentally, the references cited in this work, published in 2015, up to 2014 (see page 94, original note 1), also illustrate the cutting-edge nature of the study.

O'Gorman's research interests include English literature, psychology, musicology, university education, and cultural memory, and these subject areas help him weave a web of research around "worry", but the personal and intrinsic nature of the subject of "worry" makes his research not limited to the field of discipline and academic discourse. Therefore, he constantly thinks and asks questions between the publicity and legitimacy of academic research topics and the intrinsic and private nature of personal experience in the book, as an entry point for personal perspectives and the emphasis and analysis of personal inner spiritual experience is one of the important features of the book, "This book is more like a personal journey to find worry and its meaning (for better or worse)". (p. 24) The author confesses that the author is also writing about himself, the veteran worrier Francis O'Gorman, "a man who feels vulnerable, oversensitive, overly contradictory, anxious, sleepless from time to time." This personal experience also gives the author confidence in the establishment of the book's research theme: "This book strives for the authenticity of the topic discussed, and although this topic is full of obstacles and has no formed methodology, in my chaotic personal mental space, the 'worry' that is the subject of this book is extremely vivid and vivid. (Ibid.) However, from the inner spiritual life of the individual to the construction of the academic research field and related themes, further interpretation and argumentation are needed. O'Gorman says that instead of dwelling on personal experience, he wants to use his own experience of worry to advance the discussion of the inner life of mankind, while acknowledging the difficulties encountered here: "The inner world of man is so diverse that it is difficult to find everyday evidence that we know very little about each other." (p. 23)

In addition, there are also complexities in the inner life of human beings and the place of worry in them, and O'Gorman has a sober and careful discernment about this. First, "it is relatively recent for us to realize that a complex inner life may be a sign of a complex and delicate individual." Thanks in part to modernist literature, we begin to realize that our inner sensitivity, and our intimate reflections on the world, are the hallmarks of our individuals as distinctive and valuable individuals." (p. 12) He gives examples of anglo-American and Irish modernist narratives of the early twentieth century, such as the rich, complex and elaborate inner life of Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway and James Joyce's Leopold Bloom. As an example of the intersection of individual experience with the study of literary history and intellectual history, I am reminded of Peter Guy's "The Education of the Senses" (The Bourgeois Experience, Volume I, translated by Zhao Yong, Shanghai People's Publishing House, 2015), who borrowed the title and concept of Flaubert's "L'Education sentimentale" to write a chronicle of the growth of bourgeois experience, starting from the inner perspective of sex, violence, and self-awareness in the "senses", with a secret private diary and letters Based on original materials such as archives, we explore the macroscopic themes of the times such as "the growth of a class" from the microscopic and individual psychoanalysis. Second, compared to Guy's "senses," the "worry" that O'Gollman was concerned with was far from the inner world that was complex and interesting or full of seductive desires and fascinating hopes, and it was only one feature of the inner life that people hardly dared to talk about, and if it contained desire, it was also relatively banal—just wanting to get rid of the uneasy, disturbing feelings of worry. While modernists could imaginatively write anxiety into literature as a complex subject, the anxieties of O'Goleman's research are often academically difficult to make. "But I'm interested in the challenge of trying to talk about this hidden, resisted, long-avoided topic, and trying to see what other major cultural issues that worry reveals to us about the way we live today." ...... I'm interested in worry because I live in it." (pp. 13-14) The rationale for this challenge lies in the fear that this spiritual phenomenon is inextricably linked to the inner life and way of life of mankind, and that there is no reason for the temple of academic research to shy away from this subject. If Peter Guy realized from the outset that it was necessary to dismantle the existing disciplinary research scaffolding and start a new stove under the guidance of psychoanalytic theory, O'Gorman explored how to rationally construct an important and special research theme, while exploring the construction of a reasonable and effective academic scaffolding and the construction of a new working platform on it. This challenge has a dual academic significance: one is to fill the thematic and methodological gaps in humanities research in an interdisciplinary context, and the other is to add a unique internal connection between the publicity of humanities academic research and individual experience.

In the "Preface", the author introduces the writing framework of the whole book. The first chapter begins with a discussion of the basic definition of worry, the "brief history" of the concept of worry revealed in modernist literature, and the concealment of worry and its relevance to specific groups and to the particular definition of modern individuality. The second chapter delves into issues such as self-belief, the root of worry, and the strategies people have "coped" with since the beginning of the twentieth century. Chapter Three, which explores how worry arises from reason, appears to be a macroscopic history of worry-provoking thought, involving the connection between worry and belief, reason, logic, choice, decision-making, and many aspects of human life, and is arguably the most speculative and critically concentrated part of the book. Due to the importance of the topics in this chapter, the author has introduced some important ideas and perspectives here. The first is an exploration of how anxiety accompanies the simultaneous emergence of anxiety in the cultural myth of the "birth of reason", which establishes the importance and possibility of rational reasoning and human choice, as well as the related expressions of literature and visual art. It then "discusses the contemporary issues that arise from this macroscopic history of apprehension" and how apprehension provides a reflective and critical perspective and perspective on philosophical and political thought. From the perspective of "worry", rethinking John Stuart Mill's liberal thought, the concept of choice in the free market, the concept of "free man", and the social harmony and "liberation" of people, and regarding worry as the basis for critical analysis of mainstream political assumptions, it is a profound exploration of the ideological historical significance of "I am worried, therefore I am", and its practical critical significance. Although the subtitle of the book only mentions literary and cultural history, from the content of this chapter and its importance, the history of ideas and reality are the most important focuses of the book. The structure of the final chapter is loose, ranging from the anxieties that arise in the writing of the book to the question of whether anxiety can be used as a necessary resistance to the pursuit of superficial, self-centered pleasures in contemporary culture, arguing that the existence of the worriers can enhance the well-being of our society, and exploring how the apprehensives can derive temporary comfort from the visual arts and music, showing a more unique perspective on cultural history research. The author concludes by arguing that people living in today's Western societies are doomed to be unable to escape their worries, and that the best course of action is to understand the causes behind it, emphasizing that the book's thrust remains constant: even if we cannot "cure" the worries, we can boldly try to understand them. (11 pages)

From concept to thought, "worry" is full of characteristics that are difficult to grasp precisely and difficult to observe, and O'Gorman's metaphor is wonderful, such as that it escapes like a bat, like sleep, which only occurs when people are not ready to observe; it can be a collective emotion, but more of a private experience. A Marxist can reveal the socio-economic roots of worry from how late capitalism reduced people to fragmented, anxious selves, while a Freudian might reveal that worry is just the tip of the iceberg, and beneath our daily worries lies the deepest spiritual wounds. O'Goreman agrees that these perspectives and research may also be correct, and the question is how to verify them. (13 pages)

A history of ideas arising from "apprehension" and its connection to contemporary life still dates back to the Classical Era of the West as the "birth of ideas", but the author did not stop here, but quickly went through the Renaissance to descartes in the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century. O'Gorman does not fully identify with the linear, simplistic narrative of the development of rational thought, but only acknowledges that the symbolic moments of these transitions from faith to reason do have a strong meaning, even if they are not 'true' or confirmed to be true. ...... The transition from a thoughtless world of faith to a world of independent thinking is indeed one of the great explanatory myths of contemporary human history, even if we cannot accurately portray it or call it correct in any simple sense. The turn from faith to reason is the great Western story of our 'coming to the self', the grand myth of the birth of the individual, the soothing narrative: the importance of the self and the legitimate, complete 'right' to think for oneself." (pp. 130-131) Rene Descartes' epoch-making significance is therefore extraordinary, and the most famous (and in O'Gorman's view) philosophical proposition left by him in modern history is "je pense, donc je suis", but it is not expected that "I think" is accompanied by "I worry". O'Gorman points out, "Because independent thinking is bound to go wrong." Obviously, Descartes denied faith through the process of reasoning of the mind. His famous words grasped—or recaptured—the conditions under which anxiety could exist. Perhaps, he should have said, 'I am worried, therefore I am.' (p. 131) Anxiety arising from the knowledge of thinking is a bit like Su Dongpo's "the beginning of life's literacy troubles", but in O'Gorman's view, the worries are not only about the feelings of life, but also a major issue in the history of human thought and a problem in contemporary life. "Anxiety is born out of people's ability to reflect, evaluate, weigh, and doubt. Sadly, to be a modern apprehensive (in the most universal sense of all history) is nothing more than a sign of our oldness as human beings. Je m'inquiete donc je suis: I'm worried, so I'm here. (p. 134) Thus it appears that the emergence of anxiety certainly did not begin with Descartes's "I thought" or from the rational "I thought" of human history, but was intimately connected with human existence. This "worry" with "being" is ontological, referring not only to the anxiety of having to choose oneself because one cannot blame everything on fate, but also to the powerful guilt that comes with choice—the more choices there are, the more difficult it is to make decisions, and the more difficult it is to implement effective actions. That's why the concept of "risk assessment, which first emerged in 1957 in American society in an era of worry. (p. 148) The possibility of rationality over choice makes "us encouraged to believe that there is a 'right decision,' but this does little to our state of mind, but instead gives rise to feelings of guilt, inadequacy, frustration, and overwork." We tend to cling to the idea of 'making the right decision'. (p. 148) From reason and choice to the cult of "right," this is the most common and powerful force of thought in contemporary life. O'Gorman takes the ideas of the modern British philosopher and utilitarian John Mueller as an example of a discussion to show that the frank discussion and emancipation of thought on reason, freedom, and truth, which are of incomparable importance in the history of human thought, do not necessarily bring about social progress and achieve human well-being. In the Preface, the author has already discussed John Mill's "liberal ambitions" in advance, "he believes that human beings can reach conclusions through free and rational thinking, and thus improve human well-being." But this chapter adopts the view of apprehensives, who argue that it is difficult to draw reliable conclusions through reason, and therefore makes critical comments on Mueller's hypothesis. And I think the apprehensives are aware that reason doesn't necessarily improve human well-being, something that Mill's optimism failed to take into account. (p. 8) Specifically, in his famous On Liberty, Müller proposes a liberal dream in which he holds high faith that rational thinking liberates truth, that one should not restrict the expression of any opinion under the premise of moderate expression, and that the suppression of any opinion will only reduce the likelihood that the whole truth will be understood; discussions between dissidents will gradually recognize the legitimacy of the other's views and move towards consensus together." The dream of liberalism is that society progresses gradually through open discussion, and that everything is tolerable except intolerance; everything is discussable, believing that the correct views brought about by ideas will eventually prevail. (p. 152) But O'Gorman points out that this is not the case. In the view of the apprehensive, presenting different points of view does not always lead to a clearer, let alone agreed, problem; moreover, through a rational analysis of the consequences of decisions, there is a worry about believing in the "right answer", which leads to hesitation in sufficient information, sufficient argument, and profound analysis, thus paralyzing the decision-making. (p. 153) Here O'Gorman is merely pointing out from the realm of the relationship between thought and action the factors of distress that cannot be ignored, arguing that even these factors alone are sufficient to make Mill's liberal ideals difficult to achieve. He does not speak of the tragedy of the constant setback of this ideal in the context of the historical reality of modern times, by forces far more powerful than the theory of apprehension. But his question was already alarming: "How much of what Mill happily calls 'truth' really improve human well-being?" Reason tells us what is 'true', how much can we bear? (p. 155) This is a thought-provoking question if it should not be seen as a justification argument for abandoning truth.

In O'Gorman's discourse, from the truth of the Age of Rational Enlightenment to the right to freedom in modern economic life, worry has always been a bit like a "devil's apologist," questioning all progressive narratives inescapable. The principle of freedom and the right to choose are important cornerstones of the modern market economy and public politics, but all of this is not all good in the eyes of a worried person, such as the confusion of choice, and more seriously, the consequences of individuals having to bear the wrong choice. (p. 165) O'Gorman certainly does not use the theory of distress to deny the free principles and the right to choice of modern civilization, acknowledging that the modern world of choice he describes is not a bad thing in itself, "worth celebrating in every respect", but also to see that "they also have some embarrassing side effects, that is, to heat up anxiety once again". In the Preface, I also deal with this question in general terms: "I have particularly explored the idea of choice in the free market, the concept of 'free' man, and the conviction that the most ideal conditions for social harmony and life are achieved by 'liberating' all men from their desires and 'destiny'. I admit that the approach I have adopted is indeed a bit unrealistic, but I still insist that the experience of worrying about choices, and the apprehensive understanding of human freedom, implies a political philosophy as opposed to advanced capitalism in the West. (p. 8) This embodies the book's critical significance from a frettory perspective, but for those who have not yet entered this context of freedom and choice, knowing this incomprehensible apprehension in advance is actually a somewhat cruel luxury. "In the contemporary world, our rational minds have long been in a state of decay, both gain and loss, and resentment, as a grim, politicized consequence of seemingly innocent and pleasurable choices," Ogorman said. (p. 177)

These are all unbearable burdens for the anxious, but after all this has been discussed, O'Gorman still points out: "None of the worriers wants to lose the freedom to think or make decisions for ourselves in time as we can." Especially when we realize that this is a question of choice, of rational thinking, it is difficult to think that the answer to the pain of worry is to deprive us of the freedom to make decisions. (p. 175) Of course, there is no more simple and important truth than this.

Editor-in-Charge: Huang Xiaofeng