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. Despair is any failure of this relation: when the self will not be itself, or wills to be a self other than it is, or wills, defiantly, to be itself entirely on its own terms without reference to the power that grounds it.
Kierkegaard maps despair into forms of increasing intensity. There is the despair of weakness - not willing to be oneself, fleeing one’s self, wishing to be someone else, or simply living so immersed in the finite (in busyness, pleasure, the crowd) that one never becomes aware of having a self at all (this last is the most common and the least conscious). And there is the despair of defiance - willing, in proud rebellion, to be oneself by one’s own power alone, refusing to acknowledge any dependence on the power that established the self. The deeper and more conscious the despair, the more it knows itself as despair, the more spiritual it becomes - so that the demonic defiance of the person who knowingly and willfully refuses to be grounded in God is, paradoxically, ‘higher’ (more intensely spiritual) than the unconscious despair of the person who has never noticed they have a self to be. The sickness unto death is called that not because it kills the body, but because it is a sickness of the spirit that cannot end even in death - the despairing self cannot escape itself by dying, for what despairs is precisely the eternal in the self.
Behind both anxiety and despair lies Kierkegaard’s revolutionary conception of the self, which is the deepest contribution of this part of his thought. For Kierkegaard, the self is not a fixed thing we simply are - not a substance, a soul-stuff, a given nature we possess from birth. The self is a relation, an activity, a task: it is something we must become, and may fail to become. We are born as a synthesis of opposing elements - finite and infinite, bound by necessity yet open to possibility, temporal yet touched by the eternal, body and soul - and the self is the ongoing work of relating these elements rightly, holding them in balance, and in doing so relating ourselves to ourselves and to the power that grounds us. To be a self is an achievement and a responsibility, never finished while we live; and despair is the name for every way this achievement can go wrong. This is why despair is so widespread and so hidden: most people never undertake the task at all, living so immersed in the finite - in distraction, conformity, the crowd, busyness - that they never become aware that they have a self to become, and this very unawareness is the most common form of despair.
The consequences of this conception ripple through all of modern thought. To say that the self is a task rather than a given, that we must become who we are through freedom and choice and may fail to do so, that anxiety is the constitutive mood of a free being and despair the ever-present danger of a self that has not grounded itself - this is the founding insight of existentialist psychology and philosophy. It passes directly to Heidegger (anxiety as the mood that reveals our being, the flight into the anonymous ‘they’, authentic existence as a task) and to Sartre (the anguish of freedom, bad faith as the flight from our own responsibility, the self as something we make rather than find). It shaped depth psychology and the modern understanding of the human being as a creature who can be alienated from itself, who can fail to become itself, who suffers not only from outward troubles but from a sickness in its very relation to its own existence. Kierkegaard gave us the vocabulary - anxiety, despair, authenticity, the self as task - in which the modern individual understands its own inner life. And he insists that the negative moods are not merely afflictions to be medicated away but summonses: anxiety and despair, rightly understood, are the spirit calling us to undertake the task of becoming a self, and pointing us, finally, toward the faith in which alone the self comes to rest.
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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