Fate and Death and Tillich, Oh My!

Continuing into Chapter two of The Courage to Be, Tillich begins his discussion of the three types of anxiety with the biggest one: the anxiety of fate and death. I’ve already written some about what Tillich says about the anxiety of death, but to repeat a bit, death is the way our anxiety over the intrinsic problem of nonbeing manifests. The anxiety of death “overshadows” the anxiety of fate – the anxiety of death is “the horizon within which the anxiety of fate is at work.” (Courage p. 42.)

The anxiety of fate is really interesting to me in the way Tillich presents it. Basically he says that it is the anxiety over the contingency of all things – their unpredictability. Our temporal being, our spatial being and our world itself is contingent. The fact is that it is the result of history and it didn’t have to be this way. “Contingent does not mean causally undetermined but it means that the determining causes of our existence have no ultimate necessity.” (Courage p. 44) Nothing that happens to us is ultimately necessary in a sense, and the awareness of this fact produces an anxiety.

Fate and death both, Tillich says, threaten our ontic self-affirmation – the basic self-affirmation of our existence. Fate threatens it in a relative way, and death in an absolute sense. The inevitability of death is what makes the anxiety of fate “inescapable.” (Courage p. 45.)

The matter of fate is related to evolution in the Darwinian sense. We are lucky, in a sense, to be here. There is no inevitability to this. Life got along quite well for many millions of years without producing anything that has consciousness in the way that we do. Evolution by natural selection works through both chance (mutation) and non-chance (natural selection) and our having evolved the way we did is a contingency of history.

In my personal life this fact of historical contingency reminds me to be very grateful for what I have. I didn’t have to be born in the USA in the time I was. I have grown up in relative luxury never having to worry about food or shelter – a luxury that vast majority of human beings throughout history have not had. In a less general sense there were several historical contingencies that led to me meeting April when I did and getting married and having Alexander – the two more important events of my life. They didn’t have to happen. I am very lucky and I never forget that.

On the other hand, what some level of chance can give, it can also take away. We know as finite human beings that we cannot control everything in life. I work at a District Attorney’s office and the crimes we see every day keep that in sharp focus. We see victims that had lives as fortunate and happy as anyone’s torn apart by drunk drivers, drug dealers, violent family members, etc. And beyond such contingencies we all have friends and family suffering with disease and other health problems. You know any of it can happen to anyone.

Obviously we are not only victims of fate, but neither are we “destined” by providence to have perfect lives. I do believe in a providence of a sort – what I like to call “chess master providence.” I used to play chess at a chess club regularly. I was never a great chess player – good enough to beat most people I would play games with at the local coffee shops but not good enough to provide much a challenge to a master. I have played chess masters with decent rankings, though, and it is incredible to see how they operate. It seems like they advance on your position with the inevitability of an avalanche. It often seemed like they set traps 10 moves in advance. I asked a chess master about that once and he assured me that he doesn’t see 10 moves ahead, but he said he knew the positions to get himself in so that “good things are likely to happen.” Especially, he noted, if your opponent makes a slight error.

That is about as good as we can do in life, it seems to me – put yourself in a position where good things are likely to happen. If you do this, often times good things do happen (chess master providence is at work). The key word, however, is “likely” – there just aren’t any guarantees. And that is where the anxiety of fate comes in. You can do everything “right” put yourself in as good a position as is possible for you and things can still go wrong. And eventually fate will catch up with you and we all face that final inevitability: death. That is why death produces an inescapable anxiety at the horizon of fate.

Tillich’s ultimate object here is to find out if there is a way through religion or other means to defeat this anxiety and the next two anxieties he discusses. Or, as he puts it with a question at the end of this section: “Is there a courage to be, a courage to affirm oneself in spite of the threat against man’s ontic self-affirmation?” (Courage p. 45.)