Summary

In this chapter Tillich elaborates upon the opposites of courage, the twin ideas of nonbeing and anxiety that constitutes an incessant and impending threat. While the Stoics and Neo-Stoics provide an adequate definition of self-affirmation, they do not satisfactorily deal with its antitheses. For this, Tillich turns to the various ‘philosophies of life’ expounded by philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Henri Bergson, and Alfred North Whitehead as well as twentieth century existentialists like Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre. Each school and each figure deals with nonbeing by arguing for the essential self-affirmation of its opposite, i.e., being and life itself. Nonbeing, for Tillich, is pure negation, the contradiction and nullification of any idea, concept, or entity. The possibility of this negation leads, inevitably, to the apprehension of existential anxiety, of the possibility of nothingness and nonbeing. Paradoxically, being as...