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The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin (Kierkegaard's Writings, VIII) (v. 8)

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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.

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!

I am anxious but I do not know why , perhaps it is because I am writing a review of a book I do not understand. I understand that 'anxiety' is vague and has no necessary object, that it is 'free- floating'. ' Fear ' on the other hand has a specific object.
Anthony Storn on his Website defines Kierkegaards 'Anxiety concept' as follows:
"Kierkegaard asserts that anxiety preceded Adam's sin. Anxiety is not itself sin, but is the natural reaction of the soul when faced with the yawning abyss of freedom. When God commanded Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the terms "good" and "evil", so says Kierkegaard, would have had no significance for him. His ignorance was indeed bliss. But the awful predicament of freedom, before and apart from sin, yielded anxiety. There is also an anxiety that is a manifestation of sinfulness, and Kierkegaard addresses that later. But first his concern is that all individual persons are born with the same freedom and anxiety as a result of that freedom that Adam possessed, and thus we sin not because we are sinners, but we become sinners because of our qualitative leap out of freedom into sin, and hence sinfulness. It is then that the expression of anxiety is sin."
As I understand it Kierkegaard seems to be pointing out the value of 'anxiety' as preliminary to the 'leap of faith' which will bring us to God. 'Anxiety' is the necessary prelude to the free decision which enables us to overcome it.
I do not mean to dispute this. I only wonder whether the 'leap' made once remains the 'leap ' forever. For in my own experience 'Anxiety' always returns , no matter what decision we make.

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.

This is one of Kierkegaard's most difficult, and most profound works. The subtitle of the work is "A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin". The concept of sin, of course, has a dogmatic presupposition. Sin is a religious category and so even to use the word sin presupposes a Christian dogmatic standpoint but Kierkegaard's book is not primarily about dogmatics or about the dogmatic concept of sin or original sin but a psychological investigation of anxiety as a presupposition of sin.

One of the primary questions Kierkegaard is attempting to answer in this work is: what kind of beings must we be for anxiety to be possible? Kierkegaard defines the human as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, as well as a synthesis of body and psyche held together by spirit (by which one should understand self-consciousness). Anxiety is about possibility so the fact that we are capable of anxiety presupposes that our consciousness reaches beyond the actual into the possible. This is what spirit is as a synthesis of the finite (the actual) and the infinite (the possible). This is also the presupposition of freedom.

Kierkegaard analyzes anxiety as being the psychological presupposition of sin, and, of one's first sin in particular. Because sin presupposes itself it is difficult to explain a first sin. How is it that one is led to sin from a previous state of innocence? Why do we not simply remain in a state of innocence? One answer would be an inherent selfishness but as Kierkegaard rightly points out the real self (by which Kierkegaard means the individual, what Heidegger refers to when he says that Dasein is always "mine") is posited in the qualitative leap. This is similar to Fichte's notion that the self does not exist before positing itself. The truly individual self only exists through self-consciousness and making decisions. Someone who does not make decisions is not truly a self in Kierkegaard's view. Selfishness cannot explain sin, therefore, because selfishness does not exist before it is posited by the qualitative leap. This is the sense in which sin seems to presuppose itself. It seems that in order to sin, sin itself must already be presupposed.

Kierkegaard solves this problem by positing anxiety as a presupposition of sin. Sin still comes into the world through a qualitative leap. Anxiety cannot explain sin in a causal way. But even in innocence the individual can have a vague anxiety about possibilities and this can provide the condition for making the leap into sin. Part of Kierkegaard's goal is to posit freedom as the ground of sin. Kierkegaard is opposed to any view that would view sin as an objective fact about us that is somehow inescapable. If, for example, sin is simply an inherent selfishness then there is no freedom and the whole concept of sin, which implies responsibility and guilt, is annulled. Sin is always posited by freedom for Kierkegaard which is what he means by saying it comes about through the qualitative leap.

The qualitative leap is related to Kierkegaard's understanding of the moment. Kierkegaard has a very interesting, but also obscure, footnote about Plato's attempt to deal with the moment dialectically in the Parmenides. The moment lies between motion and rest and is the point that motion turns into rest and rest into motion, i.e. it is the point of the qualitative leap (82-83). Kierkegaard himself considered the moment to be an image of eternity and I think we can understand what he means if we attempt to think about the moment conceptually (or dialectically) along with Kierkegaard. The moment is in time, and therefore it is temporal in that sense, but it is not temporally extended, and is, therefore analogous to eternity (it is an atom of eternity). We can get at what Kierkegaard means by the qualitative leap through this analysis of the moment. If we think of time in the ordinary linear way time becomes an unbroken straight line in which each point on the line is determined by the point immediately preceding. Spirit, as the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, introduces a break in time. The past is cut off from the future by a kind of chasm. In order to move from the past to the future it requires a leap which takes place in the moment (the transition which it is impossible for metaphysics, including Hegelian metaphysics, to grasp). The chasm between the past and the future is the abyss of freedom and anxiety is precisely the dizziness of staring into this abyss. Kierkegaard is able to conclude, therefore, from the fact of anxiety that the human being must be a synthesis of the temporal and eternal in this sense. While the innocent have no notion of sin yet they do perceive (after the injunction not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil) this abyss and this causes anxiety and is the presupposition for the leap into sin.

One of the aspects of the book that is least worked out, and seems to receive little attention in the secondary literature, but that I think is quite interesting is the notion of the quantitative accumulation of sin. Kierkegaard believes that every human being brings sin into the world just as Adam did. We all begin in the same position of Adam before the fall. The only difference is the quantitative accumulation of sin in the world. Part of what this means is that the institutions of society and the culture in a very broad sense of the term are shaped by sin. These are objective facts about the world that we can do little about. They are historical artifacts. This can make it difficult for subsequent generations to avoid sin since they must try to find some place within these institutional structures that have been shaped by sin. Cultural values also have been shaped by sin. Few people would agree with the idea that our cultural values are based on a genuine, objective understanding of the human good (the values placed on money and fame for example). The fact that institutions have been distorted by sin is, I think, the reason someone like Gandhi did not pursue his political goals through ordinary channels.

Ultimately Kierkegaard will reach the conclusion that the answer to anxiety is faith. What is genuinely interesting about Kierkegaard's analysis is that he attempts to ground it in an ontology of the human being. If his ontology is correct then the conclusion follows: faith (as Kierkegaard defines it in The Sickness Unto Death "resting transparently in the power that created us" (a paraphrase)) is the solution to our human problems. Other solutions (ethical striving, repentance, speculative philosophy, etc.) fall short.

I have spent a great deal of time in this review talking about sin. The truth is, however, that most of Kierkegaard's book is taken up with his psychological analyses of various forms of anxiety. Kierkegaard examines anxiety as it relates to what Kierkegaard took to be the stages of culture: primitive anxiety, pagan (Greek and Roman) anxiety, Judaic anxiety, and Christian anxiety. This kind of progression is, of course, no longer the accepted view of history but if anyone is curious what the principle of Kierkegaard's progression is, it is the same as Hegel's, each stage is supposed to represent an increase in self-consciousness. Kierkegaard also, in the section on Christian anxiety, divides up anxiety based on whether it is anxiety about evil or anxiety about the good (which he calls the demonic). All of his psychological analyses in these sections are very astute. Kierkegaard was one of the most profound psychological observers in the history of Western philosophy which is why you do not necessarily have to be Christian, or buy into all of his dogmatics, to get a great deal of value from reading Kierkegaard.

Kierkegaard was approaching psychological questions from a phenomenological standpoint long before that method was systematized by Edmund Husserl in the twentieth-century. Kierkegaard presents especially profound analyses of the many ways in which freedom freely prostrates itself and binds itself in unfreedom. Freedom is always the ground of unfreedom for Kierkegaard but freedom can create its own prisons. Freedom can, paradoxically, freely transform itself into unfreedom. Kierkegaard also rightly connects freedom to truth, "the content of freedom is truth, and truth makes man free" (138). This is a very profound thought. We often tend to think of truth as something that binds us, that forces our hands. If something is true we feel we are somehow bound to accept it even against our will which seems like the opposite of freedom. We associate freedom with the arbitrary and with being able to have our own will, to affirm what we want to be the truth. But in reality it is the truth which sets us free.

This is, probably, Kierkegaard's most difficult book. It is, at least, the one that commentators spend the most time complaining about. There is a good book Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair (Marquette Studies in Philosophy, #12) by Gregory Beabout that I thought did a really good job of making sense of The Concept of Anxiety as well as The Sickness Unto Death. There are two other books on Kierkegaard I have to recommend despite the fact that they are not specifically about The Concept of Anxiety. One is Kierkegaard's Philosophy of Becoming: Movements And Positions (Suny Series in Theology and Continental Thought) by Clare Carlisle, and the other is Becoming a Self (Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy) by Merold Westphal. The first book deals primarily with Either/Or, Repetition, and Fear and Trembling and does a really good job of elucidating the concept of repetition (which is central in understanding Kierkegaard), and the second is a commentary on the Concluding Unscientific Postscript which, along with The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death is one of the three most important Kierkegaard works (in my humble opinion).

The Concept of Anxiety:
A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation
on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin

Kierkegaard's Writings, VIII
Edited and Translated with Introduction and Notes
by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1980)
(ISBN: 0691072442)
(Library of Congress call number: BT720.K52 1980)
(first published in Denmark, 1844)
This is a careful, scholarly edition of the book previously
translated (by Walter Lowrie) as The Concept of Dread.

Kierkegaard presents what is probably
the first philosophical analysis of existential anxiety.
Angst became one of the buzz words of the 20th century,
but here we have a careful discussion
of what existential anxiety feels like from the inside.
Anxiety also appears in a number of other books by Kierkegaard.

Søren Kierkegaard here deals with the relationship between
angst and existential guilt, traditionally called "original sin",
--a sense of 'guilt' that is not related to moral misbehavior.
The thought is profound, but Kierkegaard has not worked out
the phenomenon of existential anxiety
as carefully as Martin Heidegger would do it in the 20th century.

Since Kierkegaard draws heavily upon Christian theology
(the sub-title should have "doctrinal" rather than "dogmatic"),
this book might be somewhat difficult for the general public
--but not for people familiar with Christian philosophy.
The Concept of Anxiety is one of Kierkegaard's central books.
Other existential writers have created better formulations of angst,
but it all began here--and it will continue into the future.

If existential anxiety (angst) helps you to understand yourself,
you might be interested in other books along the same line:
Search the Internet for the following expression:
"Books on Existential Spirituality".

James Leonard Park, existential philosopher
and seeker on the path of existential spirituality.

The opinions of several reader reviewers that this is basically straight forward and clear book strikes me as spectacularly unbelievable and show a lack of comprehension of this book. This is considered by most who are familiar with Kierkegaard ("K") to be his most difficult book. Most of K. is difficult for most readers, but this book is difficult even for readers who claim to have read all or most of his works.

First off, psychology in this work does not coincide with today's concept of psychology. Also, anxiety does not equate with today's common definition. The work is full of dense formulations and repititions and not a few contradictions (or at least great muddles). I have read all of K's works and think him the second most profound writer in all of history (Dante, being first). But this book is not easy. I believe K. himself was unsure of what he actually believed about sin, anxiety, eternal/temporal, infinite/finite etc.

Fortunately this book can be skipped. The essential insights of the book are contained in Postcript, Fragments and Sickness unto death. That is not to say that this book should be skipped, but I would advise readers not to expect clarity on significant points. Unlike Pound's Cantos, where Pound did expect everyone to understand a great deal of the poetry, K. would have wanted readers to gain certain, clear knowledge from The Concept of Anxiety. I believe he has failed and will only confuse not only the amateur K. reader, but also those who purport to understand ( or try to understand)in K's works in their entirety. The reader reviews of this book support my thesis since virtually everyone misreads this book.

It's been a while since I've had to write in Philosophy-Speak...I think I've forgotten how. But let me speak plainly. This is one of the few philosophical treatises that I've actually read cover-to-cover. Kierkegaard is, by far, my favorite philosopher, and I tend to agree with most of what he has to say. As a religious person, I agree with what he has to say. The main proposition of this book is: Sin IS Anxiety, and the opposite of Anxiety (Sin) is Faith. As an existentialist, we are all radically free (I know, Sartre's phrase) so when we despair (The Sickness Unto Death) we actually CHOOSE to feel that way. Once we accept this, we can achieve serenity through Faith in God.