Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin: Concept of Anxiety v. 8 (Kierkegaard's Writings) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Soren Aabye Kierkegaard was indeed a moving and thought provoking man in his relatively short life, but there is probably no-one who familiarised himself with Kierkegaard's writings who would claim not to have been touched by his deepfelt sense of longing for something higher and truer to our inner self. In "The Concept of Anxiety" he addresses that one issue that makes us human and that makes our existence real and meaningful, namely anxiety. It is important to distinguish between "fear" and "anxiety" in such that "fear" is focused on an actual threat in the environment and "anxiety" is precisely not focused and not in our actual surroundings, but in our self. In anxiety it is what we call "I" that is rendered insecure, and our own freedom is the culprit of this insecurity. As Kierkegaard himself stated, "Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." It is therefore our freedom that makes us experience dread. We naturally fear becoming "nothing". Consider the story of Adam and Eve, who lived in a utopian state (of mind) until the power of man's individual freedom was put to the test, which contravened and transcended the direct will of God. Man was then cast out of paradise and forced to live a life of hard work, insecurity and the threat of becoming "nothing" (ie. nonexistence), and human history was born. It was precisely this act of realising our own freedom that made us the sole bearer of all responsibility that sprouted from this realisation.
It is tantamount to a child growing up when at a certain age some behaviour gets punished and life loses it's absolute innocence. The fear of getting punished runs contrary to the individuals free will and this interplay between 'being-able-to-do' and 'not-allowed-to-do' is the source of anxiety. We are tricked into believing that we are not free while we actually made that choice ourselves to believe that.
This is what Kierkegaard essentially argues in this writing, which has been found by many important existential psychologists as probably the most thorough explanation of anxiety ever written.

This book once again proves that we as a human race could with thanks know a man such as Soren Kierkegaard who devoted his life to cast a light on those questions which haunt us into being...human.

_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.

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.