"On Anxiety": A conversation with Samir Chopra (Keywords: Existentialism; Psychoanalysis;Critical Theory;Self-Knowledge;Buddhist Philosophy)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 2 ("Crossing the Floods")

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In this conversation with Maryam Aghdami, Samir Chopra reflects on the many faces of anxiety and the possibilities of living with it rather than seeking to master it. Drawing on Buddhist philosophy, psychoanalysis, existentialism, and Marxist thought, Chopra explores how anxiety reveals the fragility of the self and the contingency of the world, while also serving as a gateway to self-understanding. He suggests that recognising anxiety as an inevitable part of existence is not to accept resignation, but to seek ways to transform our social and material conditions so that they do not deepen this unease. He invites us to think of anxiety not as a sign of failure or pathology, but as an indispensable part of being alive, a mood that, if understood, might guide us towards greater awareness, care, and agency.

Maryam Aghdami (MA): How do you define a concept as elusive as anxiety? Is there a distinction to be made between clinical and existential anxiety?

Samir Chopra (SC): We can begin by distinguishing anxiety from fear. Fear is said to have a concrete object, while anxiety does not. Anxiety is a sort of formless, anticipatory fear. There are several kinds of anxiety. The first kind, existential anxiety, arises from our existential conditions. The second is a basement-dwelling, ever-present anxiety, which is the fear of death. And the third kind, found in Freudian psychoanalysis, is the fear of the loss of love.

There is no sharp dividing line between clinical and existential anxiety. Existential anxiety is the constitutive condition of a creature that has certain conditions attached to its existence. In the case of human beings, we are creatures who know that time is running out. We want to know what lies in the future but we cannot, nor can we hope to change the future. And this makes us very anxious. All of us suffer from basic existential anxiety. But since each of us is unique, with particular life histories and material conditions, the anxiety that we suffer from is also distinctive and unique. No one's anxiety is quite like anyone else's simply because no one is like anyone else. What you are diagnosed with in a clinic might be that basic existential anxiety playing itself out in its own distinctive way in your particular life.

MA: What I appreciate about your book is that you approach anxiety from different frameworks, such as existentialist philosophy, critical theory, psychoanalysis and Marxism. But you start with Buddhism, which some might not consider philosophically rigorous. Yet I found, in that section, a very deep philosophical discussion about the self. Can you elaborate on how the Buddhist idea of not having a continuous self relates to anxiety?

For Buddha, there are certain failures of knowledge, particularly our failure to realise certain existential truths, that lead to our suffering.

SC: The central concept in Buddhism is that of dukkha or dukh. It has been translated sometimes as dissatisfaction with existence or suffering, sometimes as anguish or worry. Anxiety is one of the emotions that results in a general dissatisfaction with existence. The Buddha recognised the following as our basic existential conditions: we will grow old, we will age, we will lose the company of those we love and we ourselves will ultimately die, all of which makes us deeply apprehensive and afraid. For Buddha, there are certain failures of knowledge, particularly our failure to realise certain existential truths, that lead to our suffering, such as the fact that the world is eternally changing or that everything in the world is dependent upon everything else.

Furthermore, we also fail to recognise that the self-identical, enduring-through-time self, that we ascribe to ourselves – the I or the Ego – does not exist in the way that we take it to be. We take ourselves to be an entity that endures through time, acquires certain attributes (such as age, height, income, colour) and in the end, runs out of time and dies. On the contrary, Buddha suggested that there is no enduring self underneath these attributes. There are five bundles or skandas – consciousness, volition, sense, perception, and form – and the self as we know it is merely the locus of these five processes dynamically changing and evolving over time. There is no unified entity that endures through it. But if there is no unified entity underneath these processes, then whose fortunes and misfortunes are we worried about? If we think about it, it is the self that stands to lose or gain in this world; it is the target of fortunes and disasters that we imagine for ourselves. In the absence of such a self, our worries and their resulting suffering appear to stem from a deep confusion about who we are. We are anxious because we have not understood ourselves properly. In my book, I give the example of a person who goes to see a movie but refuses to leave the theatre once the credits roll out and instead starts crying and wailing because they want the movie to go on. Everyone can agree that this person needs to be educated on the concept of a movie, so that they stop distressing over the fact that it has ended. The same goes for the self.

Heidegger thinks of anxiety as a kind of mood that reveals to us certain aspects of our existence.

But we can claim to know something without truly understanding it. For instance, we often think we know that life is finite. We say, ‘Yes, yes, I know I will die someday’. But do we really? For this, I provide another analogy. Imagine you have just taken the bandage off of someone who went through an eye surgery and ask them, ‘Can you see?’ and the person says, ‘Yes, I can see’ and then promptly walks into a table. We have a similar relationship with these Buddhist truths. We think they are obvious (‘I get that there is no substantive, continuous self’), but we do not really get it. And this disjuncture, between our beliefs about the world, our understanding of existence and the way things really are, is the root cause of our suffering.

However, what we need to understand is that the path to enlightenment in Buddhism is a very long and difficult one, which means that for most of our lives, we will be living with anxiety. Sometimes people take Buddhism to be promising us deliverance from anxiety, so it must regard anxiety as negative. That is true, but we also have to realise that we are not going to be free of it quite as quickly, so we have to find ways to live with it. The Buddhist eight-fold path can thus be understood as not just a path to enlightenment but also one where we learn to live with and navigate anxiety.

MA: Could you talk about how existentialist philosophers like Heidegger have addressed the question of anxiety, particularly as it relates to our desire for certainty?

SC: What interests me about Heidegger’s writings on anxiety is that he thinks of anxiety as a kind of mood that reveals to us certain aspects of our existence. Heidegger privileges moods over the much-exalted ‘reasons’. These moods are noetic in that they give us knowledge and so, we should pay attention to them. Anxiety as a mood introduces us to the contingent nature of all that we observe. It is the mood that makes us realise that the things we might take to be eternal, as somehow essential to us, are products of historical circumstances and agreements between human beings. When I inquire into who I am, I come to realise that there is a veil of meaning that we have imposed over existence to make it comprehensible. And when this veil is lifted, I am hit with Being in its nakedness.

The process of learning to live with anxiety begins with accepting that it is going to be ever-present. I must no longer have a relationship of success or failure with respect to its removal.

In Sartre’s Nausea, there is a great moment when Roquentin is in the garden and he looks at the roots of a tree and is nauseated because the roots are present to him in their naked being. There is no mediation here, nothing that tells him these are roots of a tree, that this is a biological entity, that their purpose is nourishment; all of a sudden, they are just existent to him. Anxiety is the mood that makes us realise that all that is familiar is held together by a series of contingent historical arrangements, which could collapse at any moment and expose the naked being underneath it all. It also tells me that I have a role to play in constructing and maintaining these meanings.

MA: How can one manage and ultimately live with one’s anxiety? Why is that valuable?

SC: The process of learning to live with anxiety begins with accepting that it is going to be ever-present. I must no longer have a relationship of success or failure with respect to its removal and I also need to fundamentally change how I view it. For instance, I have to stop thinking of anxiety as inherently undesirable. Moreover, I can also learn to navigate certain triggers that exacerbate my anxiety. And this can be quite valuable because facing our anxiety can often lead to greater self-knowledge. When you feel anxious, try not to immediately push it away. As Paul Tillich says, one of the best things we can do with anxiety is to think about it and make it into a fear, i.e. give it a concrete object.

Meditating on our anxiety can help with this. By meditating, I do not just mean sitting in a mindfulness session but actually thinking about what might be making me anxious. This is an unpleasant task, but it is necessary if we are to use anxiety as a source of self-knowledge. Anxiety can also remind us of the values that we wish to live by, because our failure to live by them can make us anxious, which in turn can be an opportunity to investigate the values we have chosen for ourselves. Thus, learning to live with anxiety can help us assess the kinds of lives we have lived so far, whether they meet the conditions we have imposed upon ourselves and to inquire into where those conditions come from. When I talk about living with anxiety, I am inviting you to engage in a species of self-inquiry. If I find that I am anxious in particular circumstances or settings, then there is a particular relationship I have to those circumstances and settings that is worthy of my investigation as a kind of gateway to self-knowledge. 

MA: Some critical theorists and Marxists have argued that encouraging people to accept their anxious conditions is problematic because it promotes social conformism. Wouldn’t preaching acceptance of anxiety discourage them from going against social injustices and oppression?

SC: Marcuse was very critical of Sartre’s views in particular and of existentialism in general precisely for this reason. The worry is that we might be preaching a kind of acquiescence and complacency by asking people to treat a man-made condition as an ontological condition of existence. But the fact that we are doomed to be anxious in an existential sense should lead us to demand that our material conditions not aggravate the basic anxieties that we already have. This calls for an active engagement with the world. A creature that is bound to be anxious as a condition of its existence should be especially interested in ordering a world that does not make it more anxious than it needs to be.

The fact that we are doomed to be anxious in an existential sense should lead us to demand that our material conditions not aggravate the basic anxieties that we already have. 

Thus, the lesson from critical theory is that we should not be complacent about the way we organise the world nor should we readily accept the way it is presently organised, especially if we find that the extant order makes us more anxious than necessary. We should strive to construct the world with our eyes open, where we work to make it better for our community, our family and for ourselves. This might, in turn, give us the space to reflect on our existential condition and break away, even if only temporarily, from the ‘unconscious haze’ of modern society, which expects us to get up every morning, punch the clock and get to work. This kind of absorption in work is its own deliverance from anxiety, but critical theory asks us to push back on it and investigate critically the ways in which we have ordered the world around us.

MA: While you were in therapy to deal with grief and anxiety, you also went to philosophy classes. How did philosophy help you with this?

SC: I began my PhD a few months after my mother passed away, while I was still grieving for her. Her loss was a double-hammer blow because I had lost my father when I was just a teenager. I found my early days in philosophy terribly alienating. I was in an analytic philosophy department in the 1990s and all that we studied was philosophy of language, epistemology, logic and philosophy of mind. It was quite an ahistorical department, which had also marginalised continental philosophy. So, I ended up doing a lot of technical material in college and wrote my dissertation on formal normative epistemology.

The hardest challenge of all is coming to understand who we are and accepting ourselves.

But I found the philosophical discussions I had with my classmates to be a kind of deliverance. All the traditions and thinkers that I have mentioned so far, I discovered on my own because I was curious to find out why they were dismissed by analytic philosophers in the ways they were. I had come to philosophy via reading existentialist literature and I started reading Marxist theory in college, both of which helped me think through the feelings I had about who I was in this world.  I also found the writings of some African-American writers to be very useful. So, I would say that a complex set of sources influenced how I thought about philosophy and how philosophy could help me. And once I started teaching, I offered a wide spectrum of courses from various philosophical traditions. As I discussed and worked through this material in classes with my students, I found some of the deliverance and relief that I was looking for. Not all the philosophy I studied was equally helpful to me, but much of it was.

MA: You mentioned that you left academia to practice what you have called philosophical counselling. Could you briefly describe what it is?

SC: If you look at the etymology of the term psychotherapy (psyche for soul, therapy for healing), it means soul healing. This is the term that philosophers used to describe themselves in many ancient traditions. You can find this notion in ancient Greek and Eastern philosophy. The Buddha, too, was referred to as a great healer. And this was the original promise of philosophy: reflecting on ourselves and our lives would enable us to lead better lives. Philosophy was meant to help us find some consonance between ourselves and existence. In a similar vein, the purpose of philosophical counselling is to seek useful self-awareness through an investigation of the beliefs and values we live by. We want to understand who we are and the counsellor acts as a sympathetic and informed guide in this process, by asking the right questions and prompting self-understanding. This helps us to carefully think through our problems and to exercise agency and choice in our actions.

So, I would say that philosophical counselling is psychotherapy in the sense that psychotherapy is a kind of philosophical counselling. If you look at all the modern psychotherapeutic traditions, they start with philosophical foundations. Psychoanalysis has the theory of the tripartite mind and it understands mental disorders as resulting from inner psychic conflicts. Freud was famously influenced by Schopenhauer and Nietzsche in his theory of the unconscious. Cognitive behavioural therapy is quite explicitly based upon Stoicism: there are chains of reasoning and we learn to throw spanners in the reasoning that leads to problems. These are all philosophical methods and theories that have found their way into psychotherapeutic modalities. All of these psychotherapeutic traditions (including clinical psychology) rely on models of the person. Philosophy offers its own models of the person, whether metaphysical or moral. These models help us understand who we are and why we might be facing certain problems. The reflections that philosophers have offered on the human condition are useful for thinking through how we might learn to live with ourselves. Probably the hardest challenge of all is coming to understand who we are and accepting ourselves. In this way, philosophy has an important role to play in psychotherapy and it is a field that philosophy should never have vacated in the first place. Thus, philosophical counselling is just an attempt to return philosophy to its rightful position as soul healers which is what philosophy was supposed to be.

Samir Chopra is a philosophical counsellor and professor emeritus of philosophy at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. His academic interests include pragmatism, existentialism, Buddhism, critical theory, Nietzsche, the philosophical and legal foundations of artificial intelligence, philosophy of law, and the politics and ethics of technology. He is the author of On Anxiety (2024).

Maryam Aghdami is a doctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, working at the intersection of feminist epistemology, social epistemology, and the epistemology of ignorance. Her work also explores the epistemic injustices experienced by neurodivergent individuals and philosophical approaches to mental health. A committed advocate of philosophy beyond academic settings, she is a member of the editorial board of The Philosopher.

First published online on 14th June 2026

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