The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

175 Pages·2015·1.18 MB·English

by  Søren Kierkegaard

The Concept of
ANXIETY
A Simple Psychologically Oriented
Deliberation in View of
the Dogmatic Problem of
Hereditary Sin
SØREN KIERKEGAARD
Edited and Translated
with Introduction and Notes by
ALASTAIR HANNAY
Liveright Publishing Corporation
a Division of W. W. Norton & Company
New York • London
Dedication
I would like to dedicate this
translation to my sister
Jane Wiebel
Contents

Cover
Title
Dedication
Translator’s Introduction
Translator’s Note
THE CONCEPT OF ANXIETY
Epigraph
To the late Professor Poul Martin Møller
Preface
Contents
Introduction
I.Anxiety as Hereditary Sin’s Presupposition and as Clarifying Hereditary Sin
Retrogressively in Terms of its Origin
II.Anxiety as Hereditary Sin Progressively
III.Anxiety as the Result of that Sin which is Sin-Consciousness’s
Nonappearance
IV.Sin’s Anxiety or Anxiety as the Outcome of Sin in the Single Individual
V.Anxiety as Saving through Faith
Notes
Concordance
About the Author
About the Translator
Also by Alastair Hannay
Copyright
Translator’s Introduction
A
nxiety is life’s inescapable accompaniment, its constant undertow. Every step
we take offers it an opportunity; to avoid anxiety we would have to lock
ourselves away. But who would then dare say we were not still anxious? The
nineteenth-century Russian writer Nikolai Gogol’s Diary of a Madman
humorously describes the increasing insanity of a minor civil servant who, taken
in care, begins to interpret everything around him as designed to comply with his
wishes. Doors closed to him are for his protection, if they are open it is to
facilitate his royal progress, and harsh treatment in the asylum is part of the
ritual of coronation to the Spanish throne. If we may allow that madness can
purge all anxiety, on this side of insanity there are those of us whose daily
routines can be so ordered as also to arouse the suspicion that our lives are ruled
not so much by the order we impose as by a persistent undercurrent of anxiety
that explains the resort to rules. We are still anxious, anxious about anxiety.
Even open defiance of anxiety, facing it head-on as in extreme sports, may be
seen as a way of acknowledging its motivational power. But then it might also
reveal something deeper, a need to focus on a particular danger to be overcome
in order to clear the mind of possibilities we prefer not to fathom.
To many of us that might seem a good thing, even if the means appear
drastic; although there appears to be nothing obviously pathological in defying
danger, it is in a way therapeutic. A rush of adrenalin can give a welcome sense
of well-being. But there are cases of unsuppressed anxiety that clearly spell
some sort of disorder. They have been given labels: anxiety disorder—plain and
simple—or more ominously, obsessive compulsive disorder and traumatic stress
and social anxiety disorders. These merge with or are components in familiar
phobias, such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia, and acrophobia, panicky desires to
avoid large open spaces, small enclosures, and unusual heights. The treatments
that psychologists and psychiatrists provide give sufferers a more circumscribed
sense of their own existence, a greater sense of security in the here and now, and
an indifference to what may come. Unlike that of those who face anxiety head-
on by defying it, it is the indifference of someone for whom the possibilities that
seem so alarming have been safely put out of mind.
Kierkegaard tells us that this is wrong. It is to turn our backs on possibilities
upon which our human destinies may depend, spiritual possibilities that we are
by nature prone to avoid and therefore naturally shun, but which we nevertheless
have it in us to face. The Concept of Anxiety speaks of a dawning spirit or, in
more concretely psychological terms, of a growing awareness of our peculiar
status among living creatures as conscious of our own singularity, of not being in
immediate continuity with our surroundings but in some way above or apart
from them, able to see ourselves as selves in relation to the world, and to other
selves with whom we share it. Perhaps, among the disorders mentioned here,
those that come closest to anxiety in Kierkegaard’s sense are the phobias, in
particular a sense of catastrophic severance from one’s relation to solid earth. In
another way, Kierkegaard’s anxiety is both like and unlike what is known as
“generalized anxiety disorder,” a form of disability in which there is no specific
mental allergen as in the case of those phobias, but an indiscriminate anxiety in
which anything that comes along causes worry. However, unlike GAD, which
focuses on each particular as it comes, indeed on any particular, the anxiety in
Kierkegaard’s analysis “differs altogether from fear and similar concepts that
refer to something definite.”
In a suggestive rather than clear indication of what this anxiety is, we are
told that it is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” In following
the clue that the mention of freedom provides, we can begin to see what kind of
generalized anxiety Kierkegaard is talking about, and also why he will claim that
it is a misunderstanding to think of it as a “disorder” that can be treated with
“pills and powders.” It will turn out to be a global rather than a generalized
anxiety that, rather than having anything or everything as its focus, is anxiety in
the face of nothing. The metaphors drawn on to describe it can remind us of
those phobias and of acrophobia in particular: “anxiety is the dizziness of
freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now
looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support
itself.”
Anxiety in this generalized form is not something to be cured by therapy; in
fact “cure” is not the right word for its removal at all. Anxiety can be replaced
only by the freedom whose harsh requirements are its cause. Being free requires
us to release the brakes that anxiety represents in order to accept and appropriate
our proper spiritual fulfillment or perhaps even to recognize, if that is what we in
the end believe, that no such prospect is in store. Roughly, in The Concept of
Anxiety, the dizzying height from which anxious spirit shrinks in its acrophobic
panic should be grasped as the vantage-point from which the human being may
achieve its proper fulfillment but in a nonfinite form. To use medication or such
relaxation techniques as meditation and yoga, or just plain exercise, to reduce the
effect of socially disabling and personally destabilizing forms of generalized
anxiety is one thing; it is another to interrupt progress toward spiritual
fulfillment by reducing levels of consciousness. To do so merely adds to the
aggregate of what Kierkegaard here calls sinfulness, and to the “objective”
anxiety that is consonant with it, that already exists in a society, and in the
context of which every individual later than Adam loses innocence.
But why this reference to sin and to Adam? What is “hereditary sin” doing in
the title and isn’t it usually called “original”? How can the barbaric idea that this
biblical figure is to blame for a point of departure for which we later humans
have no responsibility be of any interest to our enlightened age, even to that
element of it still tuned into religion?
The opening chapter of The Concept of Anxiety (henceforth Anxiety) puts
some effort into sweeping aside that simple reading of the Genesis story. The
point in doing so is to tell us that we are all in Adam’s position, except that
unlike Adam we do not begin from scratch in a state of unalloyed innocence. For
we who come later, a sense of sinfulness is already fixed in ways, in habits and
practices, that are charged with the sins of our predecessors, sins of authority as
much as of disobedience, some of them also taken on by what passes for
Christianity itself. But then Christianity, as Kierkegaard sees it, is not a topic for
treatises. Nor do doctrine and ritual get to the content let alone core of true
religion; ceremony and the intoning of words no more make a genuinely
religious community than mere flag-waving makes a nation. Christianity, one of
Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms says elsewhere, is better understood as a form of
communication, a way of associating based not on outward proof of membership
but on an understanding of what it is to be a human being, with its deficits, trials,
and hopes for fulfillment, and also fear of what is required to make good the
human deficit. That complex fear, a fear that is also a longing, is the theme of
this “simple” psychological deliberation.
But then there is sin. That bad conduct is to be understood as a violation of
God’s law sounds rebarbative in an age versed in Nietzsche and Freud, even to
those of the Christian faith. Faithful Nietzscheans dispense with God in any case,
the deity being a long-standing impediment to a new morality that exploits the
possibilities of selfhood rather than, as Nietzsche reads traditional Christian
morality, repressing them. As for Freudians, they will be seeking fulfillment in
their personal happiness by removing more complicated hindrances to that end,
since for them evil has something to do with unnecessary inhibitions in the way
of healthy psychosomatic development. Anxiety’s topic is also the
malfunctioning psyche, but it says that proper psychic functioning depends on a
balance between psyche and soma “sustained by spirit.”
Kierkegaard’s criticism of his society and its ways, inside and outside
religion, does however bear comparison with Nietzsche’s, and vice versa. The
difference is that Nietzsche saw himself as clearing a space that leaves no room
for God’s comeback, while Kierkegaard’s clearance is designed to allow God at
last to have a look in. Both thinkers are products of the German Idealist tradition
but in their different ways mark its ending. To grasp the reason for
Kierkegaard’s focus on hereditary sin, and its connection with anxiety, it helps
therefore to look at the terms of that tradition, since it is these that he uses to
oppose it. This fact can easily mislead one into supposing that Anxiety is a
conscious parody dressed up as a treatise on anxiety simply to ridicule the very
idea of attempting such a thing. From there it would be but a short step to
suppose that nothing in it should be taken seriously. The reader may conclude
that, on the contrary, never was there a more serious “treatise” on anxiety. It
places anxiety where it belongs, in that dawning consciousness, peculiar to
humankind, of a forced capacity to reflect on the manner of its own existence,
among other things but somehow very centrally, on the nature or role of this
very capacity. The complex purpose of this “deliberation” is to persuade us that
the topic in question is too important to spend time finding a place for it in a
system of thought. Kierkegaard’s “essays [attempts],” “deliberations,”
“compilations,” and “expositions” have an openly “unscholarly,” that is to say in
the term of the time “unscientific” style, signaling that rather than presenting
views for further and in principle endless discussion, their purpose is to put
readers back on track, to restore these topics to an “actuality” where the problem
is faced head-on. Kierkegaard’s plan of campaign can be said, in general, to be
directed at retrieving such “topics” from the vicarious lives they have for
centuries led in an intellectual arena as puzzles for clever minds, minds self-
authorized to arrive at and dictate doctrines and patterns of behavior for the
respectful or fearful to follow. Their proper place is as challenges in each
individual’s confrontation with the conditions of actual existence.
Anxiety (Danish Angest) was no new concept in the intellectual circles at the
time Kierkegaard wrote. In his reading of the Romantics he would have come
across the German “Angst” often enough. Philosophers, too, in the Romantic era
helped themselves liberally to notions associated with mental conflict and stress
in their dynamic visions of the way in which the world came about and is en
route—even endlessly—to its fulfillment. At their center was the now seldom
discussed Schelling (1775–1854), whose System des transzendentalen
1
Idealismus and subsequent works introduced the Absolute Idealism that
engaged the attention of much of intellectual Europe in the early nineteenth
century. In doing so it nurtured more familiar names: Hegel and Marx, but also
Kierkegaard.
For Schelling, history was a series of stages emerging from a Fall which,
much like a metaphysical edition of the big bang, accounts for the presence of
sheer diversity out of nothing. Diversity seeks unity in its difference and
unification is the goal of the continuing development. Humankind is a part of the
diversity but also party to the unifying, at least in principle. Participation
requires will or understanding or both. For this humankind finds a model in the
ideal of a personal God, a God that is no human invention but rather, if an
invention at all, one that the ground of all things has come up with itself. Briefly,
the ground of all things forces itself into the shape of personality so that
humankind, through imitation, may contribute to the continuing creation which
then becomes also its own fulfillment. A long footnote in Chapter 2 of Anxiety
tells us that in Schelling’s works “there is often talk of anxiety, wrath, anguish,
suffering etc.,” something that Kierkegaard refers to a little cheekily as “the
deity’s creative birth pangs.” But he warns us not to confuse these agonizings
with those that follow the “positing of sin.”
Hegel (1770–1831), once a student-friend of Schelling’s, his younger
colleague to whom much of his earlier thinking was indebted, retained this
“conflict” terminology in his own rationalistic version of spiritual emergence.
This was one in which the personal God dissolves pantheistically, or some
would say altogether, into the developing world as we find it, this now being
where, if at all, we find the divine will at work. In the Phenomenology we read,
in connection with the development of self-conscious spirit as separate from the
world it surveys:
With the positing of a single particular . . . [consciousness establishes]
the beyond . . . [and in this way] suffers violence at its own hands,
[spoiling] its own limited satisfaction. When consciousness feels this
violence, its anxiety [Angst] may well make it retreat from the truth, and
strive to hold on to what it is in danger of losing. . . . If it wishes to
remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its
thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia. Or, if it entrenches
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itself in sentimentality . . . [etc.]
Anxiety’s reader will find these words, and at least one metaphor, almost exactly
reproduced in the second chapter in an account of “Subjective Anxiety.” But
where the gist of Hegel’s philosophy was, through rational conceptualization of
the human situation and its continuing history, to restore the belief that thought
captures reality as it is, Kierkegaard polemicizes fiercely in the other direction.
As the epigraph to Anxiety puts it, the age of distinctions is over; all distinction
can be reconciled, even that between subject and object. Anxiety fights that view.
Self-conscious spirit apprehends a beyond that it knows thought cannot possibly
reach, but for which it nonetheless has a longing, although in a more personal
and full-blooded way than that provided in thought. But this it can do only at the
cost of all familiar means of self-identity. Anxiety is the ambiguous mood in
which spirit becomes self-conscious in this gap-widening setting. Hegel talks
negatively of the “sighs and prayers” of religion. To him they merely indicate
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that consciousness has so far failed to see the “true identity of inner and outer.”
For Kierkegaard (in this respect as well as others coming closer to Kant, of
whose thought he speaks with respect) that failure is inevitable and should not
only be accepted but exploited to spiritual advantage. One way of reading not
just Anxiety but the preceding and succeeding pseudonymous works is as a
many-sided attempt to replace the still dominant Romantic view of religion with
another that acknowledges the great strain that religious belief puts upon the
understanding.
A further footnote, this one on Anxiety’s final page, refers to a writer, Johann
Georg Hamann (1730–88), a main proponent of the late eighteenth-century
Sturm und Drang (sometimes translated “Storm and Stress”) movement.
Hamann had been Kierkegaard’s own early inspiration in the matter of
subjectivity. The footnote recalls Hamann’s characterization of Angst as an
“impertinent disquiet and holy hypochondria,” something described with
Hamann’s characteristic pungency as the “fire with which we season sacrificial
animals in order to preserve us from the putrefaction of the current seculum
[century].” In a journal entry from two years prior to Anxiety’s publication and
only a few months after returning from a prolonged stay in Berlin, where among
other things he had attended Schelling’s famous lectures and also written a
considerable portion of the second part of Either/Or, Kierkegaard writes that he
regrets both that Hamann had not pursued this thought and that he had not
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understood it in the way that he, Kierkegaard, would prefer. In that same entry
we can get a sense of Kierkegaard’s preferred understanding. It contains his first
recorded pondering on the role of anxiety in relation to sin: