Søren Kierkegaard · Philosophy
Kierkegaard’s psychology of freedom. <em>Anxiety</em> is ‘the dizziness of freedom’ - the vertigo we feel before our own possibility. <em>Despair</em> is the ‘sickness unto death’, the self’s failure to be itself, which most people suffer without even knowing it. The self is a relation that must rest transparently in the power that established it.
In The Concept of Anxiety (1844), written under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard offers one of the first and deepest analyses of a mood that would become central to all later existentialism: anxiety (Angst, dread). Anxiety is not the same as fear. Fear has a definite object - I fear the dog, the cliff, the exam; I can point to what threatens me. Anxiety has no definite object; it is a dread of nothing in particular, a vague, pervasive unease that we cannot pin to any specific threat. And precisely because it has no object out in the world, Kierkegaard locates its source within: anxiety is our response to freedom itself, to the open field of possibility that confronts us as beings who must choose. It is ‘the dizziness of freedom’ - the vertigo that seizes us when we look down into the abyss of our own possibility and realise that what we will become is, terrifyingly, up to us.
Kierkegaard’s image is precise: anxiety is like the dizziness that overcomes someone standing at the edge of a great height and looking down into the chasm. The vertigo arises not only from the depth below but from the awareness that one could throw oneself in - that the possibility is one’s own. So with freedom: anxiety is the ambiguous mood in which we sense, all at once, the openness of what we might do and become, the dreadful weight of having to choose, and the absence of any external thing that decides for us. It is both attractive and repellent - a ‘sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy’, as he puts it - because freedom both draws us (it is our possibility, our dignity) and frightens us (it is our burden, our exposure). Anxiety is thus not a defect or a disorder but the inescapable mood of a free being who is not yet, but must become, a self - the felt presence of our own undetermined possibility.
In The Sickness unto Death (1849), written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, Kierkegaard turns from anxiety to its graver relative: despair. The ‘sickness unto death’ is despair, and despair, he argues, is far more widespread and far more serious than we suppose - indeed it is, in some form, nearly universal, and most people are in despair without even knowing it. But what is despair? Not, fundamentally, an emotion of hopelessness or grief (though it can feel that way); it is a structural misrelation in the self, a failure of the self to be the self it is meant to be. Kierkegaard offers his famously dense definition: the self is a relation that relates itself to itself - a synthesis of opposing factors (the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal, necessity and possibility) that must hold these in balance and, in relating to itself, must also relate rightly to the power that established it.
This is the opening of the lesson. The rest — the dialogue, the primary source, and the recall — is in the app.
You learned that for Kierkegaard anxiety is the dizziness of freedom before our own possibility, and despair is the ‘sickness unto death’ - a misrelation in the self that fails to be itself - which is cured only when the self rests transparently in the power that established it. Explain anxiety, despair, and the self.
Leads to Jean-Paul Sartre.
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