The principal claim of this thesis is that anxiety when understood through the lens of philosophical existentialism is a mood of uneasiness that stems from the objectless possibilities, as opposed to real lived possibilities, entailed by the core conditions of our being. These can include anxiety over conditions such as freedom, mortality, identity, and so on. This anxiety has a self-cultivational aspect in that the reflection it motivates provides insight into the self. This self-cultivation of existential anxiety is key to how philosophers can assist those afflicted with the existential form of eco-anxiety, as opposed to the forms of coping offered by social science research that focus on a practical form of eco-anxiety. I show that previous accounts of eco-anxiety point towards a general understanding of existential eco-anxiety that gives a general basic description of what the phenomena is. My contribution is to give a definition of eco-anxiety that, while related to other forms of existential anxiety, accentuates its connection to past historical approaches to existential anxiety and highlights its foundation as a historically instigated phenomenon. While other definitions of eco-anxiety are not without value for understanding the non-pathological anxiety people often feel in the face of ecological crisis, my argument gives a general account that explains what constitutes existential eco-anxiety regardless of its specific manifestations and provides a framework for how philosophers can assist in self-cultivation. The insight gained from these findings is that philosophers can play a role in providing an ecologically friendly interpretation of different values and worldviews on which the anxious may draw to find new ways of living meaningfully in a rapidly changing world.

The key goal of this research project is to reinterpret eco-anxiety, a mood of uneasiness about our current ecological crisis, from an existential perspective that derives inspiration from accounts of anxiety by philosophers such as Kierkegaard and Heidegger. The contribution of this project is to provide a new way of understanding eco-anxiety. My conclusions depart from historical and contemporary understandings of existential anxiety in comparison to the practical anxiety posited by social science literature. A second contribution of this research is to explain why philosophers can and should assist in the work of helping people learn from eco-anxiety, as philosophers can provide the new ideas people need to interpret the current ecological situation and develop themselves toward a more meaningful life, something that is analogous to the historical idea of philosophy as a discipline that cultivates people.

Master of Philosophy (MA)

Thesis