The Concept of Anxiety

Author – Søren Kierkegaard

Of all of the books in the recorded history of this site. I understood this book the least. I checked it out because a podcast I was listening to used a quote from it and has some commentary about it that I thought was interesting.

I’d say that unless you have a background in philosophy and immediately grasp the contextual meaning of words like ethical, or aesthetic, or dogmatic, or other philosophical jargon, you are going to have a really bad time. Furthermore, if you don’t have a broad base of understanding of other major philosophies that this book speaks to, or understand the cultural context this book was written in, you will have an even worse time. Furthermore, if you haven’t read through the dictionary recently, you will not know the meaning of many of the words he uses and either have to spend time looking it up, or just skip it and hope it makes sense later. It doesn’t. I had a bad time.

Here is a sample of confusing text to give an idea of what reading the book is like:

The concept of guilt as a totality-category belong essentially in the religious sphere. As soon as the esthetic wants to have something to do with it, this concept becomes dialectical like fortune and misfortune, whereby everything is confused. Esthetically, the dialectic of guilt is this: the individual is without guilt, then guilt and guiltlessness come along as alternating categories of life; at times the individual is guilty of this or that and at times is not guilty. If this or that had not been, the individual would not have become guilty; in other circumstances, one who is not considered as being without guilt would have become guilty.

The quote that was referenced in the podcast that intrigued me is:

Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom

The main thing I got from reading my research on this book is that Kierkegaard didn’t see anxiety as a negative. I should note he doesn’t appear to be talking about severe anxiety as it relates to mental health conditions, he references it more as the standard human emotion we all deal with regularly and uses the term “angst” often to describe it.

He says that at some point as we grow up, our consciousness awakens and we become aware of the vast freedom of choice we have. We think of the endless possibilities that are in front of us. Each possibility has different ramifications, and opens up different possibilities, which lead to further possibilities, which lead to further opportunities, which lead to further opportunities, which… you get the point. This is what Kierkegaard means by the dizziness of freedom.

He compares this dizziness with someone standing on a cliffs edge. He says that in the face of all of life’s possibilities, we too stand on the edge of a cliff, fully aware of “the alarming possibility of being able”.

He talks about how we like all of this freedom in some ways as it makes us feel like we are in control, but we dislike it because of the dizziness that it causes. So we often retract ourselves away from freedom, which Kierkegaard calls grasping at the finite, or in other words, we frame our world as finite and unchanging in an effort to quell our anxiety. However this suppression of anxiety comes at the cost of our personal growth. (I wrote some notes about the finite vs infinite mindset that also came from Kierkegaard on my post about deconstruction).

Kierkegaard tries to make the point that to move forward in life, we need to experience the dizziness of freedom. And since he says anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, Kierkegaard is encouraging us to embrace and learn to co-exist with anxiety. This allows us to move forward despite all the unknowns, to take risks, and to stretch ourselves and learn what we are capable of.

If we run from our angst (anxiety), we block out the possibilities that lie before us since we aren’t willing to explore them. Kierkegaard calls this despair. A life of despair is devoid of possibilities, it is bland and invites the status quo and perhaps worst of all, rids us of the hope for a better future.

So to summarize the book, we need to embrace anxiety and learn to use it to help move us forward. The other option is despair or as an alternate word, depression.