This past Sunday we listened to a TED Talk speaker talk about fear ("What fear can teach us" by Karen Thompson Walker). She proposed that fear was a narrative we tell ourselves that might have bad outcomes, which creates anxiety in us which we interpret as fear. By re-casting the narrative we can convert our fears into opportunities, she posits. She provides several stories as fear narratives to demonstrate how this works.
If Socrates were to tackle this topic, how would he do it? I am not aware that he did, in any of the dialogues, but someone with more time to search this out might find it. A quick Google comes up with very little from Socrates, except the fear of death question he was asked after his sentence was handed down by the elders of Athens. Fear has been studied by others, and a review of their concepts might be in order for our discussion.
Socrates responds: For to fear death, gentlemen, is nothing other than to think oneself wise when one is not, to think one knows what one does not know. For no one knows whether death might not be the greatest of all goods for a human being, but people fear it as if they knew well that it is the greatest of evils.
Socrates replied that it was because of the immortality of the soul that death was no evil. The purpose of philosophy was to free the soul by guiding it to the eternal truths, and so when death came, it was a liberation. The body, he asserted, was a messy pit of passions and rude cravings.
I feel that fear might be broken into categories. Precognitive fears (fear of heights, fear of spiders), and cognitive fears (fear of failure, fear of death) are 2 that jump out at me. If we can think about something that creates anxiety within us, and we can identify the key element causing this anxiety, can we name the key element as the thing we fear?
The lines between psychology and philosophy might become blurred with fear as the discussion topic, so come prepared to share your insights with an open mind. My goal is not to reduce or rid anyone of their fears, but to hold them up to the light for an examination of the processes that create them. Watch the TED Talk again. Search TED Talks that might be on a similar or related topic, and if you fine one, please leave the link in the comments below.