Anxiety and Wonder

In this astute analysis of anxiety and wonder, Maria Balaska argues that understanding ourselves requires more than natural causal explanations and resists psychopathological approaches to overpowering experiences. With Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Lacan, she insightfully elucidates the deeply human desires to feel at home in the world and find meaning in it—and the possibility of their fulfilment. * Kate Kirkpatrick, Regent’s Park College, University of Oxford, UK *

Maria Balaska presents the best treatment to date of wonder and anxiety in Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Focused on the objectlessness of both experiences – what Kierkegaard calls the ambiguous power of spiritand Heidegger terms “the nothing” – the book draws as well on Freud, Lacan, Plato, and Wittgenstein to argue that living authentically means embracing the liberating power of one’s mortal open-endedness.Capacious, insightful, and written in lucid prose, Prof. Balaska’s text will enrich both lay and professional readers.’

Maria Balaska facilitates a conversation between Heidegger, Kierkegaard, Lacan and Wittgenstein that presents philosophy as embodying an anxious wonder at our capacity to make sense of things. She thereby deepens ourunderstanding of all four thinkers, and illuminates not only the distinctive nature of philosophy, but its ineliminable role in the perennial human task of making sense of ourselves and our place in the universe.

Maria Balaska is a Research Fellow at Åbo Akademi University, Finland, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the University of Hertfordshire, UK. She is author of Wittgenstein and Lacan at the Limit: Meaning, and Astonishment (2019) and editor of Cora Diamond on Ethics (2020).