Presence and anxiety

For years, I have observed within myself the movements of anxiety, this tenacious companion that seemed to structure my relationship with the world. This intimate exploration led me to develop a philosophical understanding of this phenomenon, not as a pathology to be eradicated, but as revealing a fundamental tension between presence and absence to oneself. Here I propose to articulate this lived experience with a conceptual reflection on what I call “adaptive presence,” this capacity to transform anxiety into an engine of existential renewal.

Anxiety as Ontological Revealer

Anxiety is not simply a psychological dysfunction but a mode of being-in-the-world that reveals our existential structure. Martin Heidegger, in Being and Time, distinguishes anguish (Angst) from ordinary fear: “That in the face of which one has anxiety is Being-in-the-world as such. [...] Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses authenticity and inauthenticity as possibilities of its Being.” This fundamental anguish confronts us with our finitude and our radical freedom.

In my experience, I discovered that anxiety functions as an interior projection onto external objects. Concrete threats, administrative difficulties, relational conflicts, economic pressures, become supports for a more fundamental anxiety, what Kierkegaard calls “the dizziness of freedom”. In The Concept of Anxiety, he writes: “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom, gazing down into its own possibility, grasps at finiteness to hold itself.”

This revealing dimension of anxiety forced me to recognize unconscious patterns, notably an original guilt (guilt of existing, of being a burden to others) that structured my relationship with the world. Anxiety then appeared to me not simply as a symptom to eliminate, but as a messenger indicating where inner work must be done. It is, as Jacques Lacan suggests, what “does not deceive”, that is, the real, which erupts into our symbolic construction of the world.

Presence as Intentional Being

Faced with this revealing anxiety, I developed the concept of presence as “intentional being.” This presence is not simple passive contemplation but an active modality of being-in-the-world. As I have defined it, this presence constitutes “a profound openness, which allows one to receive and integrate simultaneously a multiplicity of parameters, while maintaining an immediate capacity for action.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty illuminates this dimension in Phenomenology of Perception: “My body is both seeing and visible. That which looks at all things can also look at itself and recognize in what it then sees the ’other side’ of its power of looking. It sees itself seeing, it touches itself touching, it is visible and sensitive for itself.” This bodily reflexivity grounds our capacity to be present to ourselves while being engaged in the world.

Presence transforms our relationship to anxiety. Rather than being overwhelmed by anxiety or fighting against it, I become capable of observing it. This position of observation creates a space, a distance that allows one to recognize anxiety without identifying with it. This is what contemplative traditions call “mindfulness,” but which I prefer to conceive as a form of “active vigilance,” to use Pierre Hadot’s term in his Spiritual Exercises and Ancient Philosophy.

The Paradox of Adaptation

Anxiety also often arises in the face of adaptation demands that the world imposes on us. As I have developed in my reflections on presence and adaptation, we are caught between two movements: presence which is a state of the instant and adaptation which is a process in duration. Gilbert Simondon, in On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, observes: “The individual is not only individual, but individual-milieu couple; adaptation is a relation not of one term to another term, but relation of the relation of the two terms.”

This tension between presence and adaptation generates anxiety because it confronts us with our fundamental vulnerability. We can neither freeze ourselves in an immobile presence nor dissolve ourselves in perpetual adaptation. Anxiety signals precisely this unresolved tension. But it can also become the engine of creative transformation, which I call “adaptive presence.”

The Transformation of Anxiety Through Action

A central discovery of my journey was that action constitutes the most effective antidote to anxiety. Not the frantic action that flees anguish, but conscious action that assumes and transforms it. Henri Bergson, in Creative Evolution, affirms: “Our action is conveniently exercised on fixed points; it is therefore fixity that our intelligence seeks; it asks where the moving object is, where the moving object will be, where the moving object passes. [...] But mobility is reality itself.”

This Bergsonian mobility joins what I have observed: when anxiety arises, the transition to action, even simple, even modest, even seemingly useless, transforms blocked energy into creative movement. Anxiety then becomes not paralysis but a signal of necessary action. It indicates that we must bring our attention and effort to an object, whatever it may be.

Hannah Arendt develops in The Human Condition an essential distinction between labor, work and action: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world, and this insertion is like a second birth in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the naked fact of our original physical appearance.” True action, that which inscribes us in the common world, dissipates anxiety by reconnecting us to our power to act.

Absence to Self as the Root of Anxious Suffering

Anxiety proliferates in absence to self. This absence manifests through constant projection onto the future, rumination of the past, identification with emotions rather than their observation. As Hartmut Rosa observes in The Uncontrollability of the World: “The attempt to confer upon things a guaranteed availability deprives them of their resonant quality.” Anxiety arises precisely from this will to total control that cuts us off from resonance with the present.

Absence to self creates a vicious circle: fleeing the present out of fear, we deprive ourselves of the resources that would allow us to transform this fear. It is only by fully inhabiting the instant, with its uncertainties, its vulnerabilities, that we recover our capacity for action and transformation.

Adaptive Presence as Life Ethics

The concept of adaptive presence that I propose is neither pure contemplative presence nor passive adaptation to circumstances. It is a dialectical synthesis that allows one to live anxiety as an occasion for growth. Félix Guattari, in The Three Ecologies (1989), develops a fairly similar approach, with his concept of ecosophy: “It is now a matter of forging new modalities of singularizing, processual, polyphonic subjectivation, which can adequately respond to contemporary problematics.”

This ethics implies several dimensions:

• First, the recognition of anxiety as signal and not as enemy. Spinoza, in the Ethics, teaches us: “An affect which is a passion ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” Understanding anxiety is already beginning to transform it.
• Next, the cultivation of an embodied presence that flees neither into mental abstraction nor into hyperactivity. This presence anchors itself in the lived body, which somatic practices like fasting can facilitate by bringing attention back to fundamental sensations.
• Finally, the acceptance of vulnerability as a condition of authentic existence. Judith Butler observes in Precarious Life (2005): “Vulnerability takes on another meaning at the moment it is recognized, and recognition wields the power to reconstitute vulnerability.”

Amor Fati as Transcendence of Anxiety

The Nietzschean concept of amor fati offers a radical perspective on the transformation of anxiety. It is no longer just about accepting what happens but loving it as an integral part of our becoming. Nietzsche writes in Ecce Homo (1888, published in 1908): “My formula for greatness in a human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but love it.”

This unconditional affirmation of existence transforms anxiety from curse to blessing. Trials become occasions for overcoming, crises reveal unsuspected potentialities. The experience of loss, even the most radical, can paradoxically liberate from fear by confronting us with the irreversible. One must dare to traverse them in this spirit.

Toward a Politics of Presence

The transformation of anxiety is not just an individual matter. It engages a political dimension, what I have called “politics of anticonformism.” Social anxiety often arises from fear of judgment, declassing, exclusion. René Girard analyzes in The Scapegoat (1982) how human groups manage their collective anxiety through the designation of sacrificial victims.

Cultivating presence to oneself then becomes an act of resistance. It is refusing the mimetic contagion of collective anxiety, maintaining one’s singularity in the face of conformist pressures. The mind, as I have developed elsewhere, “is by essence anticonformist.” Authentic presence implies the courage to assume this singularity, even at the risk of social incomprehension and its consequences.

Inhabiting Anxiety to Transcend It

Anxiety, traversed with patience and attention, paradoxically becomes a path toward presence. It reveals our absences, our flights, our unconscious identifications. In this sense, it is not the enemy but the symptom of a maladjustment between our deep being and our mode of existence.

Adaptive presence, this quality of embodied, mobile, creative attention, allows one to transform anxiety from prison to passage. It does not promise the absence of fear but the capacity to traverse it while remaining centered. For living one’s life fully means accepting one’s vulnerability while cultivating one’s inner power, recognizing one’s fears while acting despite them, inhabiting the present while welcoming the unexpected that constantly transforms it.

The challenge is not to eliminate anxiety but to learn to play with it, to metabolize it into creative force. It is in this existential alchemy that our deepest capacity reveals itself: that of creating meaning from chaos, of transforming constraint into freedom, of making each crisis a rebirth. Presence is not a refuge outside the world but radical engagement in its perpetual transformation.