Edward Albee's Existential Vertigo

“Well, first of all, anybody who doesn't carry a certain amount of existential angst with them throughout their lives is either a dumb brute or, by choice, insensitive …. If you think of yourself and the world around you, you have to participate in that. You have to have these anxieties and these fears, especially if you come to the conclusion that you're going to go through it only once.”

                                                                          – Edward Albee

A subject which inevitably comes up when doing (or reading or seeing) A Delicate Balance is 'fear' – or 'anxiety' or 'dread' or, as I prefer because we are really dealing with a philosophical term of art, angst. Anyone attempting a concise definition of this much explicated and exploited notion could do worse than consult Søren Kierkegaard, the idiosyncratic and indispensable philosopher who both figuratively and literally wrote the book on subject (The Concept of Anxiety, 1844). Kierkegaard compares angst to the dizziness, the anxiety, many experience when looking over the ledge of a high building, a sensation that is not the ordinary fear we feel when confronted by a threat (such as the possibility we might fall) but a response to something quite different: the recognition that there is nothing preventing us from leaping into the void. Angst is “the dizziness of freedom” we feel when we stand on the (metaphorical) ledge overlooking our life and consider all the distinct possibilities of what we could be and become if we would dare to choose one and make the leap.

The disabling vertigo, the need to maintain balance, is understandable: every choice we make has consequences (including the loss of other choices) for which we are fully and solely responsible. But not choosing has consequences, too. And our freedom is not infinite, not least because it is (in the jargon of our age) “time sensitive” – in time our freedom, our being, all our possibilities, will end. There is a tradition, of which it is safe to say that Edward Albee is a part, that considers the 'problem' of angst not the sensation itself but our compulsion to evade it, to deny freedom and instead seek refuge in withdrawal, estrangement, distraction, fantasy, self-delusion, self-medication, servitude, resignation, routine, naïveté, compromise, etc. etc. Ultimately, however, we face the question: “What did you decide?”