søren kierkegaard the concept of anxiety

On the other hand, whoever is educated remains with anxiety he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsification and accurately remembers the past. If at the beginning of education he misunderstands the anxiety, so that it does not lead him to faith but away from faith, then he is lost. But he who sank in possibility - his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused… Whoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting into bad company and going astray in various ways as are those educated by the finite, but in danger of a fall, namely, suicide. In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. Kierkegaard argues that, to paraphrase Henry Miller, on how we orient ourselves to anxiety depends the failure or fruitfulness of life: He captures the invariable acuteness of anxiety’s varied expressions:Īnxiety can just as well express itself by muteness as by a scream.

He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.Īnxiety may be compared with dizziness. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety.

Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited sleeping, it is suspended dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. He writes:Īnxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a shadow? In his 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety ( public library), Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explains anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom, of paralyzing possibility, of the boundlessness of one’s own existence - a kind of existential paradox of choice.

“Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin famously wrote.

Søren kierkegaard the concept of anxiety