The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard's Writings, VIII)

Kierkegaard herein proposes a theory of personality he eventually complimented with "The Sickness Unto Death," a unique psychological perspective not unlike modern psychoanalytic views, but in my opinion, much more sane and well-founded. As a graduate student in marriage and family therapy, I spoke to my professor of personality theory about these views, which one might call a "trinitarian-dialectical" view of object relations. Object relations is of course based on dialectic, but as with SK's thinking, the basis is not a Hegelian dialectic: there is no synthesis except in spirit. For instance, in couples therapy, object relations presumes that the couple will not magically "merge" into one agreeing person! SK here uses the Christian view of God as the archetypal "other" to found a theory of personality, which also calls for a reinterpretation of what "original sin" actually is. Therefore the concept of motive (spirit) is fleshed out, and in fact made central. SK as well takes into account the historical compounding of neurosis, which is fascinating. Yet the core is of course the individual, and I can say that these ideas are not only profound for the theorist or philosopher, but offer clinical usefulness to mental health professionals! I recommend reading "The Sickness Unto Death" alongside this book; these two are SK's most psychological works, and complimentary. A common criticism is that SK's books are quite dense; generally this criticism is made by those who are not introspective, or fear being so. But if he is dense, this is one of the densest! Hard work bears fruit here, however.

_The Concept of Anxiety_ is one of Kierkegaard's most straightforward, honest, and personal works. Primarily, it deals with the typical human understanding of sin, why we designate certain acts as sinful, and how our perception or experience of these acts is altered by the fact that they are labled as "sinful". This book approaches the question of sin in a very enlightening and insightful manner, questioning certain aspects of sinfulness that we may have taken for granted. Kierkegaard reminds us that our experience of the sensual is greatly altered when the idea of "sinfulness" is attached to it, while paradoxically our understanding the definition of "sin" is contingent upon our sensual experiences. In other words, sin is simultaneously a necessary force in establishing what we consider to be sensual, while also being somewhat dependent on pure sensuality in order to establish itself as sin. Kierkegaard also examines the linguistic factors that contribute to our understanding of sensuousness and sinfulness. Kierkegaard asks us, to what extent to we depend upon language in order to solidify these primal sensual experiences in our memories? This book deals brilliantly with the entire spectrum of interrelationships among pure sensuality, sin, guilt, langauge, and memory. Kierkegaard weaves a tapestry showing us how all of the afforementioned concepts are inextricably intertwined. In sum, the message Kierkegaard is trying to convey is the fact that sin, language, memory, and the sensual are connected in both the retroactive and premonitory sense. Overall this book is absolutely fascinating. It is not puritanical or biased in the orthodox religious sense. It deals very fairly with the human experience of sin and guilt, and suggests that these types of feelings are essential to the basic experiences of memory, sentient consciousness, and temporal, existential being. Highly recommended to anyone who is willing to entertain the idea that sin is a basic building block of intelligent subjective experience.

Kierkegaard's analysis of the concept of anxiety is unbelievably useful! He presents anxiety as dealing with guilt and sin in a Christian context but his idea and thought can be understood in a secular and non-religious format as well.Kierkegaard is responding to Hegel's optimism strikingly in this work. Hegel's attempt at a systematic explanation of the ever-evolving Idea is shattered for Kierkegaard by man's encounter with non-being and nothingness, and this encounter is accompanied by the anxiety of man in the world.This work, along with Philosophical Fragments, and the Sickness Unto Death, are the most important and influential of Kierkegaard's writing. In his work Being and Time, Heidegger uses Kierkegaard's analysis of the threat of non-being to describe what he calls "angst." Sartre does similarly in Being and Nothingness when he speaks of man's freedom as condemned to anguish. There are countless other works that indicate that this contribution by Kierkegaard truly is the seedlings of modern western existential thought.A must have for anyone with a beginning interest in Kierkegaard!

In an important Journal entry (VII 1 A 181) Kierkegaard describes the dialectic of human freedom in relation to divine omnipotence. This dialectic is difficult to grasp in that it differs from that of relative power. Relative power exists in its use, in the extent to which the powerful one can inflict his/her will on others. Relative power has to with the overcoming of opposition. Kierkegaard argues that absolute power need not exert itself in this way. There is no effective opposition to its purposes. It shows might, not in force, but in allowing its purposes to be accomplished freely by those who freely choose to cooperate with or to oppose its'purposes, but, in either case, simply further them. The Concept of Anxiety takes this theological paradox and applies it to psychology. The "ground" of anxiety (if we may here speak of ground where all is groundlessness) is the ambivalence of freedom. One must choose and in the choosing one's heart is revealed. It is so because there is no compulsion to our choice, not our biology nor our upbringing nor even God. This freedom, therefore manifests itself as dizziness, as vertigo, as anxiety, because possibility opens out before us as an abyss. Anxiety is a complete ambivalence, a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy, a simultaneous attraction to and repulsion from our own freedom. The leads our author (Vigilius Haufniensis "The Watcher of Copenhagen") into his brilliant discussion of the Myth of the Fall and human sin. The "Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary sin" is to be mapped on to human psychology. Oddly enough, this is no slavish following of Christian Dogma as it is taught. Haufniensis makes a decisive break with Christian dogmatics since Augustine in asserting that "Hereditary Sin" is not transmitted by sex. We are do not inherit sin. We are not born into sin. By anxiety, sin enters the world. Anxiety, not birth, is the proper antecedent to sin. Kierkegaard interprets the Myth of the Fall as the story of every human being. Adam is the race. We are, each of us, Adam. We have all of us committed an original sin. We had no idea, prior to sinning the first time, what sin meant. We only knew the anxiety. Having sinned, we know now that, by a sin, sin enters the world. Sin is never necessary, it is always a free act. Sin is chosen and once chosen reveals itself as a trap. Then our anxiety reaches a new height. This heightened anxiety may lead us to perdition or to seek God's forgiveness, thus is the heart revealed. The only thing I can compare this work to is Nietzsche's "Genealogy of Morals", and that compares to this as lightning to the lightning bug. It is a very brilliant, if difficult work. There is, however, another important reason for reading this book: its' sister and repetition is "Sickness Unto Death" and reading this one greatly enhances the experience of reading that.

Being human and homo sapiens is an adventure of being nothingness standing at the brink of the abyss not knowing anything about reality and having to make desitions in a vacuum. Not knowing or not being able to tell good from evil but feeling responsible to do the good thing, or feeling bad for having done evil. Our nothingness in an animated conversation with our ignorance or inocence. You are full with fear and take your attention away from reality. You go to your virtual reality presented by your senses and to your imagination.