What is fear? Why do people fear?

Modern psychologists have found that the biggest difference between humans and animals is that people are afraid of things that don't exist-they themselves are surprised by this phenomenon because they don't know where this fear comes from. It is very meaningful to explore this problem, which can touch the secret passage of the soul more effectively than we can explore a work. According to the British theologian James Reid, "many fears come from our ignorance of the world in which we live, and from the world's control over us." "In order to achieve a full life, the first thing we need to do is to gain the power to control fear." In modern society, fear afflicts us more and more powerfully, to the point where everyone can't avoid it. This reminds me of the 19th century English poet and essayist Melci, who said that he would ask such a question: "Is the universe friendly to human beings?" This unsolved problem puzzles many people who think they are smart and makes people feel the impermanence of the world. It is precisely because of man's finiteness and insignificance that compared with the unfathomable difference between the universe and the world, people are afraid of many incomprehensible things. For example, until today, many people naively think that the numbers "four" and "thirteen" will bring them ominous, which shows how fragile and helpless people are in the face of the impermanence of the world.

There are many concrete things that threaten the survival of mankind and make people have to be afraid. For example, suffering, or mental trauma, is ubiquitous in our lives. Not to mention those bloody and dark passages in human history, even now, people are on the verge of danger because of ideological poverty, emotional decadence, love is moving towards desire, noble spirit is retreating from secular life, violence is increasing, and nuclear threats are everywhere. This troubled world is beyond the reach of human beings. The "Superman" predicted by Nietzsche was not born, but modern people bear the burden that only Superman can bear, which is why they are afraid and desperate. Let's recall the Atlas in classical mythology! He can carry the world on his shoulders and take a walk on the Atlas mountain on the coast of North Africa. He does so without any effort, because he is Atlas! However, if he puts the world on our shoulders, we will be crushed immediately, because we are just ordinary people and can't bear this burden. The same is true of mental problems. Since the Renaissance, people have been established as the center of the universe and the ultimate existence, and people have begun to be responsible for their own survival, which is like carrying the world on Atlas' shoulders on people's shoulders, and will eventually be crushed. People have to pay for what they have done, just as the Jews killed Jesus of Nazareth and paid for the concentration camp, so everyone can say that they are paying the price. The setbacks that exist again and again put the seriousness of survival in front of everyone. In Freud's time, human beings suffered only sexual frustration, but now it has become a frustration of survival, which is even more serious. Perhaps this is how the tragedy begins: as a limited existence, people are simply unable to bear everything for themselves. I now recall the time when the ancient saints knelt before God and prayed. They could pour out all their troubles, pains and misfortunes to the Supreme One, and their sad tears could flow to him, and the unbearable burden of survival could be entrusted to him. How happy they were!

However, in the 2th century, human beings chose the road of self-commitment, so they abandoned the sacred faith. Who can comfort us except people who feel sorry for themselves? When I read Van Gogh's letters to his lover, I felt that this lonely painter needed love and comfort so much. Bigasso, a master of cubist painting, used cubist painting all his life to abstract people into lines and squares. However, he painted his wife and lovers with humanity, which shows that Picasso hopes to find comfort in the portraits of these lovers. Freud said in a letter to his lover, "Little Princess, please love me irrationally when you come to me!" This shows that Freud also longed for comfort in love, but it was terrible for him to say such a thing. Freud believed that sex is the ultimate goal of everything, and he did not believe in the existence of love in theory. Because he is a human being, there is an original essence of longing for true love, which will curse Freud's sex-centered thought. When he said, "Please love me irrationally", the shock he suffered inside could probably be described as trembling with fear.

The examples of Van Gogh, Picasso and Freud point out the same fact: man and himself are separated, that is, existence and essence are separated. As Kafka said, what I said was different from what I thought, and what I thought was different from what I wanted to think. These separated facts plunged Van Gogh, Picasso, Kafka, Freud and others into fear and despair. They can't make themselves what they want to be. What's more, the cultural situation that everyone lives in seems to be a huge cocoon, in which self is imprisoned. This cocoon causes people not only to be unable to communicate with others smoothly, but also to be alienated from self-communication. The impossibility of communication (not communication in a general sense, but communication between personalities) brings a result: everyone's me has become a lonely me. Loneliness, real loneliness. I think of antonioni's film Zoom in. The whole film is full of the sound of the camera closing the door, and there is almost no dialogue. Even if the models perform irrationally, there is no hint of communication. Finally, on the tennis court, a masked man plays tennis alone without an opponent. At this time, the camera keeps zooming out and the people in the picture keep shrinking until an empty court is left. This film, like another film by antonioni, The Red Desert, fully expresses the lonely, indifferent and empty scene of modern people without communication and comfort. At the same time, movie master, Ferini and ingmar bergman almost all expressed this theme to reveal the universal spiritual dilemma of mankind.

People appear in the artist's field of vision in this way, which must contain the artist's deep fear of the world and people themselves. Bao Si Will said: "There is nothing more distressing than fear; Fear makes us miserable and makes us despicable in our own eyes. " Montaigne said, "Fear is even more abominable and unbearable than death itself." Here, fear means loss of dignity. When Kafka wrote in the novel Cave that the little animal pricked up its ears and listened nervously to the movement outside the cave, he had reached the abyss of loneliness and fear. Ingmar bergman finished the famous film Silence in 1962, and said that he had discovered an important fact: God is no longer there, and now there is only silence in this world. In the face of this fact, Bergman was very scared. Afterwards, he told reporters that he finished the play Silence while listening to Bach's music. I think Bergman is using Bach's music to resist his inner fear. Let's recall Coppola's famous film "Apocalypse Now" again. "I" walked on a river that seemed to be endless, and I was more and more afraid of the facts I was going to face. When "I" saw the officer (Marlon Brando) hiding in the forest and refusing to fight, fear drove "I" to cut the officer with a knife in order to relieve my inner pressure. At this time, only the officer was painfully in a pool of blood. Fear! " Here, Coppola shows us how much war has hurt human nature.

Fear is deeper than fear. Fear is facing a specific object, and fear, like anxiety, may be boundless without a specific object. Physical attacks (such as a tiger coming at you) will make you afraid, but mental injuries will produce fear and eventually lead to despair. Fear is the present, and fear can occur for the future and the unknown. So, how does fear happen? Or, why are people afraid? A pig will be killed at night, and it can still eat happily at noon, but people can't do this because people will worry about the future. If there is no security in the future, no happiness brought by comfort, and no communication between personalities, people cannot find a suitable position for their own existence. Once he stepped out of the standard of existence, anything could threaten him. Without a greater protector and unreliable self, where does the comfort come from? People raise themselves to the center of the universe, but they can't control their own destiny. In the face of such a serious living situation, fear is inevitable.

Before exploring the causes of fear, I should first talk about what is the basic form of fear. Fear has many faces, but it can be summarized into three forms: first, fear of things that have no personality; Second, I am afraid of "non-existence"; Third, fear of death. Maybe we can think of some other forms of fear, but the above three actually cover most types of fear. The intensity of fear is also different, some are weak, some are strong enough to lead to despair, and some are in between. Many modern people have experienced this terrible darkness, which leads to a philosophy of despair, and fear is characterized by trembling, which shows that people have suffered more than they can bear, so that their psychological actions have lost their sense of security and dependence. In the face of existing threats, people need a greater protector.

Why are people afraid of "things without personality"? The reason is that since everyone's ego has become a cocoon, he can no longer understand the existence outside himself. He ignores the sacred existence and no longer imagines the perfection of human existence. In fact, man's own existence is open, and he is eager to unite with higher beings to make up for his own shortcomings. Therefore, the East has the idea of "harmony between man and nature" and the West has the enlightenment of "harmony between god and man". In ancient China, people emphasized that "man" must be unified, coordinated, consistent and harmonious with "heaven", which is called "towering to heaven, praising and cultivating". However, there is no sacred reality corresponding to "heaven" in China's thought, and "heaven" seems very empty, and finally "harmony between man and nature" is understood as "natural humanization", and the result is "man". In western thought, "Heaven" is God, Christ and the Holy Spirit who gives life. "Harmony between God and man" means that the divinity of the Trinity meets the humanity it redeemed in time, but it does not produce the third sex, and it is the duality of God and man, represented by Jesus Christ, whose ultimate unity is "Heaven"-"New Heaven, New Earth and New Jerusalem". Nowadays, in this era of blasphemous materialism, both East and West no longer advocate "heaven", but enthusiastically pursue territorial things, and human existence is completely closed to sacred existence. This kind of existence is closed, which makes people start to know themselves from the standpoint of people, just like wearing an eye patch. As a result, the more modern people know their own human nature, the more they find it difficult to identify and have no connotation, so they begin to fear human "impersonal" things, and their fears are justified. This is why the more modern artists want to know people, the less people have a place in their works. In fact, the original meaning of the ancient Greek famous saying "know yourself" is "remember: you will die!" However, modern people have misunderstood this sentence.

An example may illustrate the problem. Children are usually afraid of being left alone in a dark and "impersonal" room. No matter how people comfort him, in western countries with Christian tradition, parents will say to their children, "Don't be afraid, because God is here." This is a simple and wonderful truth, because there is a personality, infinite, present in the past and eternal in the future, and people with the same personality don't have to be afraid of "impersonal" things. Many psychologists use this method to show the appearance of "God exists" in a pragmatic way, but it can help the sick to some extent. Carl jung often tells his patients that in all life, if God exists, they can cope with psychological fears. Eight days before Jung's death, he talked about what he thought was God in his last interview with reporters. "Anything that cuts into my will from outside me or emerges from my collective subconscious." His suggestion is to call it "God" and surrender to "He". Why can Jung cure many people in this way? Because the existence of God dispels the fear of "impersonal things" in people's hearts, it is too real.

The second basic fear is about "non-existence". Why are many people afraid of "non-existence" today? Since it doesn't exist, what can be used to arouse people's fears? Because modern people generally don't know the origin and end of everything, and they don't know where they come from, the unpredictable theory and existence itself make them feel at a loss. Moreover, most modern people believe that everything, the world and people are produced by chance and chance, which denies necessity and dominance and will naturally lead to confusion in understanding. Since everything is accidental, everything has infinite possibilities: what exists may become nonexistent in one moment, and what does not exist may become existent in another moment. Where can there be a sense of security? Existence is meaningless because it lacks a fixed foundation, and people will naturally feel fear of "non-existence"

The third basic fear is the fear of death. This fear is the most obvious and destructive. "Remember: you will die!" For everyone, it is a cruel fact. Death is so unquestionable. Augustine said: "Everything is uncertain, only death is certain." The power of death will nullify the meaning of all living people: everyone alive is dying, preparing to die, and finally entering the embrace of death without exception. Since I am doomed to die, and death is not in my control, it may come to me at any time, so what is the meaning of my life? The fear of death is actually a question about the meaning of life, which is almost the most fundamental problem that puzzles all philosophers. There must be too few people who look forward to death as a kind of happiness like Socrates, because it needs the courage to devote themselves to the truth. Plato's thought originated from Socrates' uncompromising death. For Socrates, the dialogue with the truth-saying "Tao" (logos)-can make him ignore some terrible essence of death. Even when the person in charge of poison warned Socrates to talk as little as possible, otherwise the poison would attack slowly and he had to take two or three servings, Socrates replied, and prepared wine, "I might as well take two or three servings." Socrates overcame his fear of death, but people in this era have lost their pursuit of "Tao". What else can he use to resist this fear? Fear means a threat, the threat of time to us, and the self-threat caused by self-defects, which is related to sin, because "the wages of sin are death."