1 Terminology

This essay is about Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. It is not about Kierkegaard’s book The Concept of Anxiety, although this will necessarily play a major part in what follows. But is it about ‘anxiety’ at all?

When Walter Lowrie decided to translate Begrebet Angest, he lamented that ‘the very title of this book reveals a serious lack in our language: we have no word which adequately translates Angst’ (Lowrie, Reference Lowrie1957 [1943]: ix). Curiously, Lowrie here uses the German spelling Angst, as opposed to Kierkegaard’s own Danish Angest and it would, of course, be via Heidegger’s radical interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work that ‘angst’ would eventually be incorporated into English. Noting that the Spanish translation uses angustia and the French angoisse, Lowrie opts to follow Lee M. Hollander’s 1923 selection of Kierkegaard’s writings and to use ‘dread’. Published in 1944, The Concept of Dread became the standard English translation until Reidar Thomte’s 1980 The Concept of Anxiety. By this time, the Heideggerian angst/anxiety had entered Anglophone consciousness and Thomte’s introduction notes the centrality of anxiety in the existentialist vocabulary, citing Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and the psychoanalyst Rollo May alongside Heidegger as leading contemporary exponents (Thomte, Reference Kierkegaard1980: xvi–xvii). He could also have added those who came to the term via Sartre’s angoisse/anguish. Whether or not what the existentialists did with anxiety accords with Kierkegaard’s own usage is another question (see Section 10).

Anxiety has won the day, but Lowrie’s demurral raises the question as to whether anxiety is really Kierkegaard’s ‘anxiety’ or is ‘dread’ indeed the better term? In fact, there are good reasons for choosing ‘anxiety’, apart from its etymological proximity to Kierkegaard’s Angest and its popularization through existential philosophy – and there are perhaps even better reasons for abandoning ‘dread’. At least in contemporary British usage, ‘dread’ has negative connotations that are alien to Kierkegaard’s usage. The online Cambridge Dictionary, for example, states that the noun ‘dread’ means ‘a strong feeling of fear or worry’ while the corresponding verb means ‘to feel extremely worried or frightened about something that is going to happen or that might happen’. Understanding Kierkegaardian anxiety in these terms would launch us down a completely misguided path. It might be claimed that this is indeed the path that many Anglophone commentators on existentialism did in fact take in the post-War era. Arland Ussher’s 1955 book Journey through Dread, for example, sees Kierkegaardian dread in terms of ‘holy awe’ (Ussher, Reference Ussher1955: 10), ‘the unreasoned sense of guilt’ (Ussher, Reference Ussher1955: 11), and the pursuit of ‘the maximum of misery’ (Ussher, Reference Ussher1955: 27). Much that Ussher goes on to say is not entirely off the mark, but his book indicates the kind of tendency prevalent in that era to see existentialism in general and Kierkegaard in particular as marked by a preference for the dark side of existence.

Discussing the planning of his own translations, Lowrie suggested that it would have been appropriate to publish The Concept of Dread together with Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death as a trilogy dealing with (respectively) ‘Fear, Dread, Despair’ (Lowrie, Reference Lowrie1957 [1943]: vi). It is true that there are important connections between these three works. Nevertheless, Lowrie’s suggestion, if acted upon, would all the more have framed Kierkegaard’s contribution as a study in darkness and would have been at the expense of a very different set of intertextual associations of ‘anxiety’ within Kierkegaard’s writings and the very different set of horizons that contemporary readings of The Concept of Anxiety (the book and the concept) have opened up.

The face-off between ‘dread’ and ‘anxiety’ is only one of the philological issues to which we need to be sensitive. As we shall see, Kierkegaard describes anxiety as a very particular element or moment in the overall architectonic of human psychology, but he also describes this same element in other terms, notably Bekymring, translatable as ‘care’ or ‘concern’. A good example of this – which will also help throw some preliminary light on what is at issue in the concept of anxiety – is in the upbuilding discourse ‘Strengthening in the Inner Being’. Contrasting the thoughtless life of those given over to worldly pleasures and distractions with the Christian alternative proposed by the apostle Paul, Kierkegaard suggests that breaking free from worldliness involves a ‘deeper reflection’ on the meaning of life, a reflection that makes a person ‘older than the moment and lets him grasp the eternal’. Not only that, this reflection also establishes such a person in a genuine relation to the world, rather than just being absorbed by it, and ‘this relation cannot be mere knowledge about the world’ but is ‘a concern (Bekmyring) about what meaning the world has for him and he for the world’ (SKS5, 93, 86). Such concern is the basis of the ‘inner being’ that the discourse recommends, and that (Kierkegaard says) enables a person in all humility to be a co-worker with God (SKS5, 92/EUD, 85–6).

This moment of awakening is addressed in various of Kierkegaard’s discourses, as in the discourse ‘To Gain One’s Soul in Patience’ which describes the transition from being ‘lost in the life of the world’ or being ‘possessed by it’ (that is, existing simply as an animal being, acting on the basis of instinctive drives and responses) to a person conscious of having a soul. The first and pivotal moment of this transition is what Kierkegaard calls a sense of ‘resistance’ a ‘disquiet’, the sense that there is more to being human than just following one’s spontaneous impulses (SKS5, 164–65/EUD, 165). This time, the key term is neither anxiety nor concern but ‘patience’, for which the Danish term Taalmod had (as Kierkegaard was well aware) the literal meaning of the courage (Mod) to bear or endure (at taale) and, implicitly, also involves ‘becoming older than the moment’.

Issues of terminology are also raised by Lowrie’s translation of the first part of Kierkegaard’s 1848 Christian Discourses as ‘The Anxieties of the Pagans’, translating Kierkegaard’s Hedningernes Bekymringer, rendered in the more recent translation by Howard and Edna Hong as ‘The Cares of the Pagans’. This is a series of meditations on the section of the Sermon on the Mount in which Christ instructs his listeners not to be ‘anxious’ (RSV) about food, drink, or clothing but to be like ‘the birds of the air’ and ‘the lilies of the field’ and, summing up, declares that his disciples should ‘not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself’ (Mt 6.34).

Translations of this gospel text and the key word merimnāte are already indicative of the challenges of finding the right word and there are significant variations amongst translations. Where the RSV has ‘do not be anxious’, the King James version has ‘take no thought’, and the New International Version ‘do not worry’; the Latin Vulgate uses the verbal form of ‘sollicitudo’, while Luther’s ‘Sorge’ is taken up by Heidegger in Being and Time, translated by Robinson and Macquarrie as ‘care’. Heidegger himself alludes to the Christian provenance of the word when he writes that ‘The way in which “care” is viewed in the foregoing existential analytic of Dasein, is one which has grown upon the author in connection with his attempts to Interpret the Augustinian (i.e. Helleno-Christian) anthropology with regard to the foundational principles reached in the ontology of Aristotle’ (Heidegger, Reference Heidegger1962: 199 n. vii/492). Parenthetically, it can be shown that Heidegger’s own use of ‘Sorge’/’care’ evolves from the German Bekümmerung, which translates Kierkegaard’s Bekymring (see Pattison, Reference Pattison2024: 15, 27).

We shall return both to the lilies and the birds and to what Heidegger does with Kierkegaardian anxiety. For now, the point is merely to flag up that Angest/‘anxiety’ inhabits a richly populated semantic field in which it has multiple affinities and crossovers with a range of terms that, in English, include ‘care’, ‘concern’, ‘solicitude’, and even (if we follow the King James Version), just ‘thinking’. ‘Worry’, we have seen, is one widely used translation; however, this is perhaps the one case in which the word’s exclusively negative connotations rule it out as a twin for Kierkegaardian anxiety.

All this being said, not every mention of anxiety in Kierkegaard’s writings has the meaning that is developed in The Concept of Anxiety. Not least in the many journal entries in which it appears, it is used in a more everyday sense and may even be akin to ‘worry’ or ‘trouble’ – but this can be understood as all the more illustrating what Kierkegaard shares with many other great writers and philosophers: the ability to take a word familiar in everyday parlance and give it a new depth of meaning and application.

2 Methodology

Many of the skills required for academic study are transferable from one discipline to another, but it is also the case that each discipline has its own distinctive procedures. An exercise in social science involving qualitative research will be very different from research aimed at authenticating mediaeval texts. What is being studied will necessarily and properly affect how we approach it – hence the proliferation of academic disciplines which, even in an age favouring interdisciplinary projects, continue to have their own subject-specific ways of working.

One of the aims of Hegel’s system (the system that Kierkegaard so energetically attacked) was to do justice to the plurality of disciplines while maintaining the unity of science as a whole (where ‘science’ is understood in the sense of the German Wissenschaft as relating to all forms of academic study, inclusive of the humanities, themselves referred to in German as, literally, ‘the spiritual sciences’). Curiously perhaps, the opening paragraph of Kierkegaard’s introduction to The Concept of Anxiety states the desirability of such a unity in plurality in terms that many Hegelians could have endorsed. However, this is immediately followed by a sustained attack on Hegel’s failure to deliver on what is promised. Key to this attack is what Kierkegaard sees as Hegel’s inability to explain the transition from logic to the world of actual entities that are involved in a constant process of becoming and his use of a series of terminological obfuscations to conceal this inability. Kierkegaard dismisses Hegel’s assertion that qualitative categories can be developed from purely quantitative categories or that subject and object can be mediated in such a way as to preserve what is essential to both as empty claims. As will become clear in the progress of the text, what Kierkegaard calls anxiety plays a crucial role in illuminating just how such qualitative categories as spirit, freedom, and subjectivity emerge from a state of nature and in this sense The Concept of Anxiety can be seen as making good on what he sees as a fatal gap in the Hegelian system.

These are themes to which Kierkegaard will return at much greater length in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript. More pressing is just how one might approach a concept – anxiety – which has eluded the Hegelian system. Is it even possible to treat it as a concept (Tsakiri, Reference Tsakiri2006: 19)? And if one tries to do so, what sort of concept is it and where does it belong within the overall ecology of academic study?

This question makes it sound as if Kierkegaard is here pursuing a straightforward piece of scholarly research, which goes against the grain of what much Kierkegaard commentary might lead us to expect. So often, Kierkegaard is seen as the eternal prankster, an ironist who continually deconstructs his own authorial intentions (which are in any case concealed behind a barrage of pseudonyms). Nevertheless, there is a case to be made for seeing The Concept of Anxiety as a serious exercise in philosophical psychology. Indeed, seriousness or earnestness (Danish: Alvor) is itself thematized at several points in the course of the argument. It is also worth noting that recent research has established that Kierkegaard had originally delivered the text to his publisher with his own name on the title page – ‘S. Kierkegaard, MA’ – and only subsequently changed this to the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, ‘the watchman of the harbour’ (a play on the name Copenhagen, literally ‘merchant’s harbour’), a fact that argues for the authorial seriousness of the work.

Of course, it must then be acknowledged that he did, after all, make this change and that the book we have was presented to the world under this new pseudonym. But how far should this affect our approach to what it says? I have argued elsewhere that Kierkegaard scholarship’s tendency to pay excessive deference to Kierkegaard’s own claims regarding the distinctiveness of each of the pseudonyms and his strictures against confusing what they say with his own opinions has been overdone (Pattison, Reference Pattison2019). Despite its unique complexity, there is an argument to be made for the overall unity and, indeed, seriousness of Kierkegaard’s work, despite all the internal differentiations between the various pseudonyms, between the pseudonymous and upbuilding works, and between the developments within the upbuilding and Christian writings. The Concept of Anxiety is an important element within such a holistic reading and, as we saw in Section 1, there are clear connections across to the upbuilding writings as well as to other pseudonymous works such as Concluding Unscientific Postscript. The pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis would not be used again, but the ideas contained in ‘his’ book are to be found across Kierkegaard’s authorship.

A subsidiary but significant argument in favour of taking this work fully seriously is the fact of the dedication. This was to Poul Martin Møller, who had been a professor in the philosophy faculty at Copenhagen University from 1831 until his death in 1838 and was both intellectually and personally close to Kierkegaard – the original draft of the dedication referred to him as ‘the inspiration of my youth’ and ‘the mighty trumpet of my awakening’ (SKSK4: 344). Kierkegaard’s intellectual debt is flagged in the dedication’s references to Greek culture, Homer, Socrates, and Aristotle, as well as to Møller’s literary works – like Kierkegaard himself, he mixed literary experimentation with straightforward philosophical arguments. However, this dedication would be absurd if Kierkegaard himself was not recognized by the book’s readers as its actual author. Intriguingly, Møller lectured on Aristotle’s De Anima that he also in part translated – a text that, like The Concept of Anxiety, attempted a philosophical account of human psychology.

As the sub-title clearly states, the answer to the question as to how anxiety is to be studied in a disciplinary perspective is psychology, a term that would appear in the sub-titles of several of Kierkegaard’s other works, including The Sickness unto Death, self-described as ‘a Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening’. However, the careful wording of the two sub-titles also indicates a significant difference between them.

Psychology was at that time a subdivision of philosophy rather than an autonomous discipline and, in Hegel’s system, the domain of what he called ‘subjective spirit’. Kierkegaard’s sub-title also flags the relevance of what it calls ‘the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin’ and suggests that the ‘psychological deliberation’ that is to follow is ‘oriented’ towards this theological problem. Nevertheless, the introduction will make clear that Kierkegaard intends to observe the proper limits of a purely psychological enquiry. In other words, even though The Concept of Anxiety may seem to many contemporary readers to be saturated with issues, questions, and assumptions relating to Christian theology and is at some points hard to follow without some knowledge of these, the claim is that it remains within a strictly ‘scientific’ approach and, as such, is fully accessible to those who do not share a theological presumption in favour of faith. Even if psychology were to discuss sin, it would do so in a very different manner from theology. Like any science, psychology takes an attitude of disinterested observation, but sin is not something that can be observed disinterestedly because, as Kierkegaard suggests, sin can only be dealt with in the ‘serious’ mode of ‘courageous resistance’ (SKS4: 323/CA: 15). Sin is not in fact the subject of any science and, if it is to be spoken about at all, it is to be spoken about in the mode of preaching, ‘in which the single individual speaks as the single individual to the single individual’ (SKS4: 323/CA: 16). In this regard – and even though The Sickness unto Death is not exactly ‘preaching’ – The Concept of Anxiety is not intended to share the later work’s explicit Christian intentions or its commitment to ‘upbuilding’ and ‘awakening’, both familiar terms in the Christian piety of Kierkegaard’s time.

Unlike The Sickness unto Death, then, The Concept of Anxiety is not a Christian book, and its subject matter is not sin but, as the title says, anxiety. Anxiety is not sin and can even be advantageous to faith. Its relation to sin is that it is the psychological state that makes sin possible, but sin, like faith, is a qualitative leap that cannot be explained by the accumulation or analysis of merely quantitative data. By focusing on anxiety, Kierkegaard’s hope is that it will be possible to give a fuller and more adequate account of what Hegelian psychology merely obfuscates.

Importantly, and although Hegelian psychology is in some respects the jumping-off point for Kierkegaard’s study, the problem at the heart of The Concept of Anxiety is a question that has vexed Western philosophy since its beginning, namely, the question as to how a being whose body is subject to the laws of nature common to the animal kingdom as a whole can at the same time be a being with a sense of being elevated above nature and feel itself free to choose how it will be in the world. The question has been differently framed – and differently answered – in different times and contexts. In ancient philosophy, in Platonism and Stoicism, for example, philosophy involved a kind of ascetic discipline aimed at liberating the soul from the disturbing passions of the body. Christian philosophy accepted that bodily life was integral to human identity and that our final state would involve a resurrected body and not just an immaterial soul. Closer to Kierkegaard’s own time, Kant and German idealism had focussed the question on the issue of freedom and whether human beings were in all respects totally subject to the laws of nature – knowledge of which had expanded exponentially in the preceding 300 years – and whether, therefore, it was at all possible for human beings to act freely as moral agents and to be answerable for all that they do in their lives.

Hegelianism gave special emphasis to the term spirit, implying (for Hegel) a life that was not only conscious of itself but also capable of freely directing its intellectual and moral energies. In this regard, the threefold division of the Hegelian Karl Rosenkranz’s Psychology (a work from which Kierkegaard quotes several times in The Concept of Anxiety), which runs from ‘anthropology’, through ‘phenomenology’, to ‘pneumatology’ (doctrine of spirit) is instructive. Anthropology studies the human being as a purely natural or animal being, phenomenology studies the human being as a conscious and self-reflective being, but pneumatology examines the human being as capable of subjecting its natural and self-conscious states to the rule of freedom so as to transform them into an ‘organ and sign of its inwardness’ and, in doing so, becoming a self-determining subject (Rosenkranz, Reference Rosenkranz1843: 240).

Kierkegaard’s psychology too is directed to giving an account of the human being qua spirit, inclusive of how spirit emerges from and is related to human life qua animal being. At the same time, he sees the qualitative transition from nature to spirit as marked by a radical discontinuity that Hegelian psychology fails to consider. It is this point of discontinuity that is identified – psychologically – as the site of anxiety. One consequence of this is that, from the very outset, anxiety is going to be marked by an essential elusiveness and ambiguity. It relates to both nature and spirit and is the point of unity between them; yet it belongs to neither and cannot therefore be dealt with exclusively as a phenomenon of nature or as a manifestation of spirit.

How then does Kierkegaard plan to throw light on this moment of discontinuity that simultaneously unites and divides nature and spirit in human life?

Although I have suggested that we take seriously the seriousness of The Concept of Anxiety as a contribution to the study of human existence, Kierkegaard’s procedure is at several points rather irregular. The Concept of Anxiety reads very differently from its nearest Hegelian parallel, Rosenkranz’s Psychology. It is in this regard typical that Kierkegaard only offers a sustained reflection on his methodology several pages into the second chapter and does so in a way that could almost be described as a diversion from the main flow of the text. He begins this methodological interlude by disclaiming any desire to write a ‘learned work’ or offer ‘literary proof texts’ (although what will follow provides evidence of very extensive learning and makes multiple literary references from the Bible through to contemporary poetry). What he is about, he says, is an exercise in observation (Danish: Iagttagelse). As such, his work builds on a skill acquired over many years of practice and means that he does not need to rely on particular facts but is able to create his own representative examples that serve as experimental models (Danish: Experimenter), non-literally but helpfully translated by Thomte as ‘imaginary constructions’ (SKS4: 360/CA: 55). Insofar as there is a ‘method’ here, it involves the experimenter sitting alone in his room, identifying or even inventing a case study that will exemplify the particular passion at issue, and developing it according to its internal logic.

Such experiments, he concedes, do not have the same authority as facts, but they do have the authority that comes from being able to illuminate the matter at issue. In some respects, this makes the psychologist sound rather like a fiction-writer, and many recent philosophers have been persuaded that there are strong analogies and even overlaps between some kinds of fiction-writing and some kinds of philosophy – and, of course, not a few philosophers (not least amongst those linked to existentialism) have also been novelists and dramatists: Sartre, de Beauvoir, Marcel, and Murdoch, to name a small but influential selection.

If the word ‘experiment’ popularly suggests an essentially empirical procedure requiring the precise notation of empirically observable processes that are testable by controlled repetition, Kierkegaard’s ‘experiments’ sound like something completely different. At the same time, there is some analogy here to the use of models in scientific research: an experiment is not simply the recording of a sequence of observations but also involves interpreting these in the light of a hypothesis or model that only acquires empirical verification after the event. Atoms and molecules do not really look like the configurations of billiard balls that were still seen in classrooms when I was at school. Nevertheless, they served both research and education to establish a point of view from which to proceed to a closer and more accurate knowledge.

Although the difference between Kierkegaard’s method and lab-based scientific research is obvious, several commentators have found a closer parallel in the work of twentieth-century phenomenology – and, of course, both the concept of anxiety itself and other related concepts (such as ‘the moment’) would be taken up and thematized in the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and those influenced by him. As in Kierkegaard’s ‘experiments’, the Dasein analysed in Being and Time is not the outcome of social statistics regarding attitudes to language, anxiety, and death but something of an ‘imaginary construction’, a type whose authority is derived solely from its power to persuasively illuminate the kind of life we find ourselves living in the world.

I shall return to what happens to Kierkegaardian anxiety in the twentieth century, but the issue here is what is going on in Kierkegaard’s own text. Certainly, there are passages that read somewhat like phenomenological analysis, as in the crucial Section 5 of the first chapter, ‘The Concept of Anxiety’, which deals with the emergence of human subjectivity from a state of nature. At the same time – and quite apart from the rich literary and philosophical allusions and illustrations that (despite Kierkegaard’s disclaimer) are scattered throughout the text – it might be more appropriate to use the term that Rosenkranz used for the final section of his Psychology: pneumatology, the study of spirit. The major difference here would be that, as I have indicated, Kierkegaard’s understanding of spirit incorporates recognition of a radical discontinuity in the development of the subject that becomes a genuinely spiritual being. This difference cannot be mediated or sublated, as in Hegelian accounts, but – Kierkegaard’s hope is – we can construct a picture that shows what happens and just what is at issue in this moment of discontinuity. It is to the development of just such a picture that The Concept of Anxiety is dedicated.

Again, this might invite some analogy with a phenomenological approach but now there is a further proviso: that if phenomenology takes its point of departure in the phenomena, that is, in what appears to consciousness, anxiety is characterized by an elusiveness and ambiguity that, normally, does not appear to consciousness as what it is. Of course, Heidegger’s and Sartre’s phenomenologies also require us to interpret what appears to consciousness in such a way as to show what doesn’t immediately appear to naïve observation – as when Heidegger shows how the way in which people talk about death is for the most part a way of avoiding thinking about death at all. Nevertheless, their claim is that what appears to consciousness is the only material that we have to work with if we are gaining access to any deeper or more authentic dimension of being. Whether that claim is justified or whether they each have unacknowledged presuppositions that they bring to their critical interpretation of phenomena is a legitimate question and, in the case of Kierkegaard, perhaps a pressing question. This is because although Kierkegaard claims that The Concept of Anxiety’s ‘orientation’ towards the question of original sin is strictly and exclusively developed within the bounds of psychology, some readers will find it marked and defined by a set of Christian presuppositions – quite apart from what they may know about Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole. To the extent that this is so, then Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety is neither a pure psychology nor a pure phenomenology. At the same time, the question remains as to whether this account is able to offer genuine insight into the question of what it is to be human and whether it is possible to understand the human being as essentially distinctive within the overall spectrum of cosmic life – and that can be answered only after a closer examination of what Kierkegaard actually says.

3 Anxiety and the Self

In this section, I shall develop an account of anxiety as a pivotal moment in the emergence of the self or spirit, as seen within the horizon of philosophical psychology. However, although this account is guided by The Concept of Anxiety it is not a simple exegesis but an attempt to restate Kierkegaard’s argument in terms that are as accessible to those who do not share his Christian presuppositions as to those who do. This is not, however, what Michael Theunissen called a ‘corrective’ to Kierkegaard (Theunissen, Reference Theunissen1993) but seeks merely to give maximum credit to Kierkegaard’s own claim that this is a work that remains strictly within the limits of a psychological enquiry. To be sure, this will mean flattening out much of the idiosyncratic depth and complexity of The Concept of Anxiety but, at the same time, it sets out an interpretative framework that can be used as a jumping-off point for readers to explore particular aspects of the text further.

As has been mentioned several times, Kierkegaard’s account draws heavily on biblical and doctrinal versions of the fall. In Section 7, I shall reflect further on how what is said in The Concept of Anxiety relates to these theological sources. In this section, even though the nature of Kierkegaard’s text makes it impossible to avoid invoking images and narrative elements derived from the Bible, I shall not treat the issue as being about the religious self but about the human self, any self, as such. Anxiety, for Kierkegaard, is not pathological but a clue to human beings’ capacity to live as free, spiritual beings. In the first instance, I shall bracket the issue of gender differentiation and Kierkegaard’s view as to how this qualifies the experience of anxiety. Questions of gender are not marginal, however, and I shall return to them in Section 6. Here, I will consider anxiety solely in its most abstract and general form.

4 Anxiety and Time

Following on from explaining how we do not begin life individually as a tabula rasa but are born into histories that are already heavy with the consequences of the loss of freedom (sin), Kierkegaard makes what seems like a curious diversion in which, over the course of ten pages, he offers an extraordinary and extraordinarily influential meditation on the nature of time. At the end of this section, he adds a short footnote saying that it could equally well have been fitted in at the end of Chapter 1, that is, as continuing his analysis of the nature of Adam’s fall and it is for the sake of this structural connection that I shall be discussing it here, before turning to the matter of anxiety and sexuality. It is this passage that would be taken up and radically reworked by Heidegger in Being and Time, securing for it the status of a major source for a crucial element in that groundbreaking and paradigmatic work.

The meditation on time shows Kierkegaard at his most brilliant, drawing on his knowledge of classical philosophy, Christian scripture, and modern literature, developing an argument that operates on several different levels simultaneously and that is not only deeply interrelated to the themes of The Concept of Anxiety but also to texts from across Kierkegaard’s authorship, notably (but not exclusively) Either/Or, Repetition and the religious discourses. At the same time, it also – and for the same reasons – shows Kierkegaard at his most infuriating, constantly shifting levels, backtracking to previous points, and, for all the vivid intrigue of his examples, leaving their exact point open to interpretation. His exposition is, at best, convoluted and for this reason I shall not trawl through it line by line but attempt to construct the argument that emerges from it in order to bring out how the meditation contributes to his characterization of the anxious self.

Theoretically, the starting point is the same as for the analysis of Adam’s original fall, namely, the human being in the state of nature or ‘dreaming innocence’. In this condition there is no reflection on the temporal character of life. There is not even any coherent sense of past, present, and future. To the extent that there is consciousness of time at all, it is of what Kierkegaard calls an ‘infinite vanishing’ (SKS4: 389/CA: 86) and is as such ‘infinitely contentless’ (SKS4: 389/CA: 86). In the second of his ‘Two Upbuilding Discourses of 1843’, Kierkegaard gives an account of a person living in this state that brings to the fore the implication for the experience of time.

Yet, as The Concept of Anxiety argues, such a life cannot really be said even to have a present, since there is no awareness of any essential difference between past, present, and future. If we were really to live in the now, even the now would not emphatically be the now. In a state of nature, time has no significance (SKS4: 392/CA: 89). The same is true for the abstract metaphysical idea of eternity. Lacking content, it now has neither a past, present, or future, neither in nature nor in eternity.

As we have seen, Kierkegaard represents the self as a synthesis of body and soul that is brought about and governed by spirit, that is, self-directing freedom. At the same time, the self is to be a synthesis of the temporal and eternal. As Kierkegaard points out, this may seem somewhat awkward, since the one synthesis involves three terms and the other only two – adding that in this case it cannot even really be a synthesis which requires a third term (SKS4: 388/CA: 85). However, he will go on to say that this second synthesis (the temporal and the eternal) ‘is not another synthesis but the expression of that first synthesis’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 88). As he also explains, it is the advent of spirit that, again, brings about the synthesis – ‘again’, only this is not a different event but the same event of the becoming of spirit seen in a different aspect. Unpacking this further, Kierkegaard’s implication is that temporality and even the eternal are themselves the product of this advent and could not be without it.

In this aspect, the advent of spirit is what Kierkegaard calls ‘the moment’, using the Danish term Øjeblik (cf. German: Augenblick), literally meaning the glance, flash, or twinkling of the eye (SKS4: 390ff./CA: 86ff.). As Kierkegaard sets out in a long footnote (SKS4: 385–88/CA: 82–4) Plato could only conceive of both time and eternity in purely abstract or metaphysical terms (SKS4: 391/CA: 88), while the Latin term ‘moment’ means ‘pure vanishing’ (SKS4: 391/CA: 88). Although a footnote reference to Aristotle’s category of kinesis or movement from possibility actuality is said to relate to historical freedom (SKS4: 385/CA: 82), this is not followed up and the further argument suggests that it will only be in Christianity that the moment acquires its full weight of meaning (SKS4: 393/CA: 90). We shall return to the significance of Kierkegaard’s terminology but first have to consider how the timeless state of nature might arrive at the point at which time first becomes meaningful.

Essentially, this is the same as the process which unites body and soul under the impact of spirit and, again, the vital clue is in the character of ‘dreaming innocence’. Under the aspect of dreaming, this state was defined as having an essential relation to possibility and since it was unable to give any content to its own possibilities in this condition, these had the character of ‘nothing’ and, as such, engendered anxiety. Possibility, however, ‘corresponds exactly to the future’ (SKS4: 394/CA: 91). As Kierkegaard says, ‘For freedom, possibility is the future and for time the future is the possible. In individual life, anxiety corresponds to both of them. It is for this reason that linguistic usage precisely and correctly connects anxiety and the future’ (SKS4: 394/CA: 91). The possible is what I might be, become, or do: what I will be, not merely what I am or feel myself to be right now.

However, the self that is in this condition does not yet know the future as future. It is still being carried along by the flow of life in a timeless now – and, as Kierkegaard comments, this is another way of describing the psychological condition immediately preceding sin, as described in Chapter 1. This changes only in the moment in which the self becomes aware of its freedom to enact its own possibilities, that is, the possibility of living as spirit. It is in this moment, Kierkegaard argues, that sees the emergence of time-consciousness. Only with the moment does the future become a fully possible future and only through having a fully possible future do the past and present become meaningful.

Kierkegaard teases out his point by contrasting the Greek and Christian understanding of time. For the Greeks (specifically Plato), the moment is not a category of time but ‘an atom of eternity’ (SKS4, 391/CA: 88). In other words, the moment in which a person becomes conscious of eternity is not itself understood as a moment in time but a moment of recollection of that which was before all time, defining it, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘backwards’ (SKS4: 391/CA: 88). Such an account, he suggests, does justice neither to time nor to eternity. If, however, the moment is understood as the mutual touching or intersection of time and eternity, then it is also understood as temporal. Since time and eternity are co-present, time is given eternal significance and eternity becomes meaningful for a life in time (we might think of the billboard slogan for the movie Gladiator: ‘What we do in life, echoes in eternity’). But what, concretely, does this mean?

In Being and Time, Heidegger will criticize Kierkegaard for developing the idea of the moment with reference to an unreconstructed and essentially supernaturalist view of eternity, whereas Heidegger’s own argument is driven solely by the exigency of attempting to understand one’s life as a whole, which, lacking a reference to the eternal, culminates in the claim that this becomes possible only in the anticipation of one’s own death. A full consideration of this objection would require a lengthy digression, but I mention it here to draw attention to the fact that, contra Heidegger’s objection, Kierkegaard too glosses what he is saying about the eternal with reference to the whole of life. Again, this underlines the precedence of the future in characterizing the moment, since ‘in a certain sense, the future is the whole of which the past is a part and the future can, in a certain sense, signify the whole’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 89).

What is at issue here is not, then, a vision of eternity, as in St Paul’s mystical rapture to the third heaven, Augustine’s experience in conversation with his mother at Ostia, or Henry Vaughan’s vision of eternity ‘like a great ring of pure and endless light’. What is at issue is the self’s own life, its possibility of freely taking responsibility for itself as a whole. In this context the eternal is not the object of a direct natural or supernatural cognition. Rather, it is present in what Kierkegaard calls ‘the incognito’ of the future (SKS4: 392/CA: 89) which, as such, also remains essentially ‘ambiguous’ (SKS4: 392/CA: 89). Once more, Kierkegaard takes the opportunity to repeat his claim that this is something the Greeks were unable to see, since they envisaged the eternal in purely abstract terms and, as such, essentially in the past and accessible only through recollection – in contrast, he notes, to his own argument in Repetition that one comes to eternity by going ‘forwards’ (SK4: 393n./CA: 90n.).

The priority of the future and its connection to understanding one’s life as a whole is underlined and implicitly radicalized by a footnote that references 1 Corinthians 15:52, where Paul writes that when the trumpet sounds to bring the living and the dead to judgement, we shall be changed from our mortal to an immortal condition ‘in a moment (atom), in the twinkling of an eye’. For Paul, clearly, this is the moment, the ultimate future, in which our lives as a whole are seen once and for all for what they truly have been, a view of who we are against which there is no appeal.

Kierkegaard does not at this point develop this eschatological context and refers to it only as a ‘poetic paraphrase’ of the moment (SKS4: 391n./CA: 88n.), that is, as a way of bringing out the suddenness of the transition and its implications for the whole of our lives. For, given the ambiguous and incognito character of the moment in which we are to achieve our possibility for living as fully spiritual beings, there can – once more – be no explanation or calculation as to what we must do to bring this about. We are again in the situation of freedom’s vertiginous loss of its own possibility – not this time occasioned by looking down into the abyss but by the ambiguity and impenetrability of the future. We do not know what the future will or even could be and yet we are to choose ourselves through choosing some possibility as to who we are to become in that same unknown future and anxiety is the moment in which this situation takes hold of us (SKS4: 384/CA: 81).

This brings us back to Kierkegaard’s recurrent problem regarding the transition from quantitative to qualitative categories and it is with reference to this that Kierkegaard opens the meditation on time. As often, this involves a serious-satirical blast against what he sees as the confusion of Hegel’s introduction of transition into logic. But whatever the case with Hegel, transition is an urgent and compelling issue in relation to historical freedom, that is, to the task of living freely and responsibly in a history defined by fallen freedom – a history in which it may well be that everyone we know is a gangster but also one in which we must discover and enact the good. In this situation we have to choose who we are going to become – but, Kierkegaard insists, ‘the new is brought about by the leap’ (SKS4: 388/CA: 85). There can be no ultimate explanation for our action since it is defined by a future that we can – necessarily – not know. To act freely is to take entire responsibility for the outcome of our action even though that is unknowable and, in many cases, not what was intended.

This is indeed vertiginous and, once again, induces us to step back from the possibility being opened up before us. As Kierkegaard puts it ‘As (in the preceding chapter), spirit expressed itself as anxiety when it was to be posited in the synthesis or, better, when it was itself to posit the synthesis as spirit’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individual, so again here: the future that is the eternal’s (freedom’s) possibility in the individual is anxiety’ (SKS4: 394/CA: 91).

In this state of anxiety, freedom fails to enact what it has in it to be or to become and what was seen in Adam recurs in each subsequent individual. Even though an individual living later in history will have more scope to reflect on all that has gone wrong and can go wrong in human history, collectively and individually, this difference is merely quantitative. Whether in Adam or in any subsequent individual – that is, whether in the ideal type of human being or human being as it exists in the situation of historically concrete life – the moment has the same significance and the same intrinsic dynamic (SKS4: 394/CA: 90). Time itself, time as such – and not only the consciousness of all that has happened in time – is at the very root of our anxiety about who we are and what we might become and, in a bitter twist, it is this same anxiety that repeatedly prevents us from realizing our own best possibilities.

5 Anxiety and Sex

Sigmund Freud located the causes of anxiety in the restraint or blockage of the libido and, as such, rooted them in human beings’ sexual life (Freud, Reference Freud1922: 328–430). Quite apart from the more particular details of Freud’s account, his overall approach seems to be so different from Kierkegaard’s as to make it far from easy to draw any fruitful comparisons. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard was not unobservant of the interconnections between anxiety and sexuality and, more broadly, of how the experience of anxiety is gendered. His discussion of this is largely concentrated in the second chapter, ‘Anxiety as Explaining Original Sin Progressively’, in a sub-section of a larger discussion of ‘Subjective Anxiety’ entitled ‘The Consequence of the Relationship of Generation’ (SKS4: 367–77/CA: 62–73).

Kierkegaard is well aware of the difficulties of addressing these issues and comments – perhaps very much in the persona of a psychological observer – that ‘the whole question of the meaning of the sexual and its meaning in the particular spheres [of psychological life]’ has not to date been dealt with in a satisfactory way and that public discourse is shaped by an oscillation between the moralizing language of the pulpit and the ribaldry of the theatre (SKS4: 371/CA: 67). It is worth noting that he uses a Danish word ‘Sexualitet’ that does not appear in contemporary Danish dictionaries and that is clearly intended to frame the discussion as scientific.

A further difficulty that he also notes is that ‘One must here especially use the caution exercised by doctors never to take a person’s pulse without being sure that it is not one’s own but the patient’s pulse that is being taken. In the same way, one must be on guard against [mistaking] the movement that one discovers is not the observer’s own unease in making his own observations’ (SKS4: 375/CA: 71). Such a caution is all the more to the point in face of a history of interpretation that sees Kierkegaard’s authorship as an extended self-confession.

We must immediately concede that Kierkegaard’s assumptions about gender are those of his time – even if what he does with them are at several points unusual and innovative. In other words, Kierkegaard thinks about gender in what we would call essentialist terms. Some (though not all) contemporary readers will have difficulty in giving this the time of day. However, if we are to understand Kierkegaard then we must follow his argument rather than the argument we would like him to have made. We may still find ourselves in disagreement, but we will at least have attained some understanding and, importantly, without understanding how he envisaged the interface between anxiety and sexuality we will fall short of understanding his concept of anxiety as a whole.

Starting with the gendering of anxiety, Kierkegaard is clear that men and women have distinctive psychological profiles that are rooted in nature. Very much in continuity with conventional approaches, he declares ‘that woman is more sensuous than man’, which, he says, reveals itself in her ‘physical organisation’ (SKS4: 369/CA: 64). Declaring that he will leave further discussion of that to the physiologists, he focusses on what he calls the ‘ideal aspect’ of woman’s ‘ethical’ identity: ‘procreation’ (using another technical-sounding word, unusual in the Danish of his time: Procreation). In Chapter 1 he had noted the biblical narrative’s description of Eve as a ‘derived’ creature, made from Adam’s rib (Gen 2.21–2), suggesting that even though this does not involve sexuality as such, the fact of being derived involves a certain predisposition to sinfulness (SKS4: 352/CA: 47).

At this point in the argument, Kierkegaard is speaking of sinfulness in a purely abstract sense (and remember that the ‘Adam’ of Chapter 1 is still an ideal type and not the historically situated human being as known in the concreteness of actual life). In other words, even prior to sexualization, the female has a derived nature that disposes her to sinfulness – even though, as he also insists, she too is at this point essentially innocent. He also qualifies the significance of this derivation by suggesting that, in this regard, Eve is in the same situation as every subsequent individual (female or male) and that, crucially, the difference between the first and all subsequent individuals is ‘merely quantitative’ (SKS4: 368/CA: 63), meaning that it cannot explain the qualitative leap into sin and, as he goes on to say, ‘it in no way follows that her guilt is greater than Adam’s’ (SKS4: 368/CA: 64).

The meaning of woman’s derived nature is all the more magnified when sexuality is taken into account, however. Kierkegaard cites the words of the divine condemnation consequent on the primal couple’s eating of the forbidden fruit: that woman’s desire shall be for her husband, adding that while it is equally true that her husband desires her, this desire does not define him in the same way (SKS4: 370/CA: 66) – which is a different way of saying what Either/Or’s Seducer says even more succinctly: that woman’s being is being-for-another, an expression to which Simone de Beauvoir would be duly attentive.

All of this expands what is meant in saying that woman is more sensuous than man. It also suggests the context for what is perhaps Kierkegaard’s most important claim regarding the gendering of anxiety: that ‘woman has more anxiety than man’ (SKS4: 370/CA: 66). How is this?

Men and women are equally a synthesis of body and soul constituted by spirit/freedom. Yet, as we have seen Kierkegaard arguing, women are more prone to anxiety than men. This is because their greater (quantitative) sensuousness – implying also their being-for-another – makes the challenge of freedom all the greater. There is, as it were, more for spirit to bring under its control and Kierkegaard identifies two points at which this is especially clear: the sexual act and childbirth. In the sexual act both partners surrender their individual freedom to the sexual instinct. But this surrender also involves an intensification of anxiety. Why? Because, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘Spirit cannot go along with the culmination of the erotic’ (SKS4: 375/CA: 71). ‘Spirit’, he adds, ‘is indeed present, for it is what constitutes the synthesis, but it cannot express itself in the erotic, it feels alien to it … but this is precisely anxiety’ (SKS4: 375/CA: 71). How, though, is this more of an issue for women than for men?

As in dreaming innocence, spirit is present but not active. In Eden, it is present as a nothing that arouses the sense of possibility, and in the sexual act, it is concealed or, as it were, suspended. Once more, however, we must remember that anxiety is not sin and the anxiety that is felt in the sexual act does not entail the sinfulness of the act. There is an eroticism that is ‘pure and innocent and beautiful’ and in that case anxiety itself is ‘amiable and mild’, an experience that poets have called a ‘sweet anxiousness’ (SKS4: 376/CA: 72). But, he adds, such anxiety is all the more strongly felt in women than in men, implicitly referring back to the assumption that because woman is essentially more sensuous and her being is being-for-another, the absorption in the sexual act all the more imperils her relation to her own freedom. Putting this another way, we might say that because of the nature of the sexual relationship, the actualization of her essential freedom is all the more difficult for women than for men and that it is all the more difficult for women to affirm themselves in the context of the sexual relationship than it is for men.

Kierkegaard’s own assumptions here are, as has been said, essentialist, that is, that this situation is determining for women on the basis of their essential nature. This is, of course, widely disputed – though conservative philosophers have recently been pushing back on this. On the other hand, if we read it as a historically specific commentary on the situation of middle-class European women in the first half of the nineteenth century, that is, as historically specific, it may for some become more credible – though it is arguable that Kierkegaard’s own emphasis on the historically concrete nature of the experience of sin should have led him to recognize this and be more aware of his own culturally inherited essentialism.

That is as may be. The second point at which women’s propensity for anxiety comes to a peak is childbirth. ‘That a woman giving birth is anxious is well enough known’, Kierkegaard writes, ‘Physiology has its explanation: psychology must also be allowed its own. In giving birth, a woman is again [i.e. subsequent to the sexual act] at the outermost limit of one extreme of the synthesis, causing anxiety to tremble because there is nothing for it to do in this moment, it is as if suspended’ (SKS4: 376/CA: 72).

This, Kierkegaard insists, is not because women are more animal than men. On the contrary, such anxiety is ‘an expression for the perfection of human nature’ (SKS4: 376/CA: 72) and it is experienced precisely because women are conscious that their existence as free and spiritual beings is imperilled in childbirth, unlike the ‘ease of giving birth’ seen in animals and, he says, ‘the less developed races’ (SKS4: 376/CA: 72) – a comment that, of course, raises a whole new set of questions about Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the assumptions of his time.

The anxiety inherent in the conception and birth of the human individual is not, however, exclusive to the woman who conceives and gives birth. Kierkegaard by no means clarifies the connections here, but what he next goes on to say seems to imply that this anxiety is in some way transmitted to the child conceived and born in anxiety. As he puts it, ‘The procreated individual is more sensuous than the original and this “more” is the universal “more” of generation characterizing each later individual in relation to Adam’ (SKS4: 376/CA: 72). This, I suggest, is to say that for all human beings born through sexual reproduction, the realization that their lives and their possibility to live as free spiritual beings are derived from an event (sexual reproduction) characterized by anxiety is itself the occasion for anxiety: that their freedom is positioned in relation to a non-freedom that precedes them and yet makes possible their own ability to become free, spiritual beings. For such individuals – each and every one of us – the ‘nothing’ that aroused anxiety in Edenic innocence has become a something (SKS4: 366/CA: 61) and this something is the possibility of its own entanglement in the history of sexual reproduction. Against this background, ‘spirit’s anxiety in assuming responsibility [for this “more” of sensuousness]is greater. The maximum here is the terrifying fact that anxiety in the face of sin can produce sin’ (SKS4: 377/CA: 73).

But has Kierkegaard slipped a gear here? Without making it explicit, has he not implied that the enactment of the purely sensuous sex-drive is intrinsically sinful?

Throughout the discussion, Kierkegaard has been and will be insistent that sensuousness as such is not sinfulness. Towards the end of the chapter, he even refers to it as his ‘old point’ (SKS4: 382/CA: 78). Sensuousness is integral to the body-soul synthesis through which human being is constituted. As a naturally occurring element within human beings’ embodied lives, sexual difference is integral to human being and Kierkegaard waves aside contemporary speculation (such as found in Franz von Baader) that the original humans were androgynous prior to the fall (SKS4: 354/CA: 48). Yet, at the same time, human beings in the state of innocence are ignorant of the significance of this difference, so that Kierkegaard can also say that the leap into sinfulness and sexuality are so deeply interconnected as to be ‘inseparable’ (SKS4: 353/CA: 48). ‘Sinfulness is by no means sensuousness, but without sin there is no sexuality and without sexuality no history’ (SKS4: 354/CA: 49).

Nothing that we have heard so far would seem to justify this statement. That we are all born into a condition in which sexuality is the occasion for anxiety and a defining issue – but not intrinsically an obstacle – with regard to affirming our defining freedom does not entail that sexuality is as such sinful. Does Kierkegaard offer any reasons as to why the defining experience of sensuousness is sinful?

A possible answer to this question is given in the opening pages of the section in which the discussion of sexuality is to be found. This is where we find Kierkegaard’s much-quoted image of anxiety as the dizziness or vertigo of freedom, when, faced with the possibility of our own infinite freedom, freedom itself ‘succumbs’ and ‘grasps at finitude’ (SKS4: 366/CA: 61). Applied to sexuality and to the anxiety that is specific to sexuality, this suggests that spirit is not merely suspended in the sexual act and in childbirth but that, in the context of such a suspension, we ‘grasp at finitude’ in the sense of objectifying or reifying the sexual act or some aspect of the sexual act. In other words, we do not know sexual relations as they might be in a relationship between equally free spiritual beings, each of whom brings the whole of their body-soul unity to their sexual lives under the direction of freedom, but only as distorted by spirit’s failure to be itself and to direct the whole.

As Kierkegaard comments, the ‘more’ of sensuousness that is involved in the derived individual’s experience of sexuality is ‘infinitely fluctuating’ (SKS4: 377/CA: 73). In other words, each family, from the house of Laius (Oedipus) through Hamlet to the Karamazovs will enact this in its own way, but in every case the individual’s path to freedom can only be through the struggle with a sexuality that has become and that is represented to it as sinful. To fill this out, he notes, ‘requires an extensive and careful aesthetic-psychological exposition’ (SKS4: 377/CA: 73) that The Concept of Anxiety itself is not intended to provide – although many other passages from Kierkegaard’s authorship do provide just such worked examples. Indeed, the Kierkegaard family might itself provide an eminent example of what this might mean, not least with regard to Kierkegaard’s own experience and understanding of the interrelationship between sexuality, anxiety, and sin – a complex that has much engaged Kierkegaard commentary and which, again, I shall consider in a later section (see Section 9). For now, I note only that many have seen this family history and Søren Kierkegaard’s own destiny within it as exemplifying what he here describes as a situation in which ‘from his earliest awakening an individual is placed and influenced in such a way that he experiences sensuousness as identical with sinfulness and this highest form of the “more” will manifest in the most painful form of the collision if there is nowhere in the entire world where he can find absolutely no place of refuge’ (SKS4: 378/CA: 75).

This section started with a brief reference to Freud’s theory of anxiety, a theory that has a very different set of presuppositions from those that underpin Kierkegaard’s argument. Yet there is a point at which we can see a certain convergence between them. Freud argues that it is ‘the primary anxiety state during birth, the separation from the mother’ that is reproduced in childhood anxiety and, for some, in neurotic anxiety (Freud, Reference Freud1922: 340). But this too can be glossed as a recurring ‘fear of freedom’ (Erich Fromm), an anxiety that accompanies us from our earliest days or even hours of life and that repeatedly inhibits the attainment of the freedom for which, at the same time, we feel we are made. A full accounting of the similarities and dissimilarities between a Kierkegaardian existential approach and Freud’s medical psychoanalytic approach would be material for extensive debate, but if what I have suggested can be seen as one possible point of convergence, then the task of a Kierkegaardian existential therapy and that of psychoanalytic therapy may share at least some analogous goals. Both aim at freeing the individual from distorted psycho-physical compulsions and, at the same time, enabling freedom itself to become the overall directing power in a person’s life.

There is, of course, a glaring and arguably insuperable difference between Kierkegaard and Freud in that Kierkegaard supposes what Freud emphatically rejects: that the resolution of the crisis of anxiety is to lead a person to faith – or, as Kierkegaard puts it at the very end of The Concept of Anxiety, psychology passes anxiety on to dogmatics. Within the overall structure of Kierkegaard’s authorship, this religious outcome would seem to be found in other works, notably the many upbuilding discourses that he published from 1843 onwards. Yet, as we have seen, The Concept of Anxiety itself repeatedly makes use of terms such as sin and atonement and takes its fundamental orientation from the biblical narrative of the fall. So just how does what is said in The Concept of Anxiety look like if we approach it not as a purely psychological treatise but – as many readers of Kierkegaard suspect – as an essentially Christian account of the human condition. Just what does Kierkegaard’s exposition mean for the Christian doctrine of sin?

Before answering this question, however, we have one more task in relation to Kierkegaard’s psychological studies of anxiety. While the larger part of The Concept of Anxiety is dedicated to bringing out the nature of anxiety as it is experienced in typical human experience, he also treats cases that have an exceptional relation to anxiety, namely, the genius and the demoniac. It is therefore to his discussion of these that we shall turn next.

6 The Genius and the Possessed

The main thrust of The Concept of Anxiety is to show how anxiety is integral to human being as such, Kierkegaard takes time out along the way to consider two cases that require special consideration: the genius and the person who is possessed, ‘the demoniac’.

The case of the genius is introduced by a brief discussion of how the ancient world (‘paganism’) suffered under a sense of fate, as manifested in individuals chosen by destiny for greatness or doomed to a tragic end – or, often, to both. Such fate is experienced both as a necessity to which the individual is subject or as being at the mercy of some merely accidental external event. In both cases the meaning of the individual’s life is beyond their control. The oracle seems to promise a means of interpreting fate but its messages are ambiguous, making the relationship between the oracle and the one seeking guidance both sympathetic and antipathetic – in other words, a relationship defined by and as anxiety (SKS4: 400/CA: 97).

The situation repeats itself within Christianity, wherever the claims of spirit are not acknowledged as such. The genius provides a pre-eminent example because, on Kierkegaard’s account, the genius does not achieve greatness through spiritual self-transformation but by virtue of some exceptional gift of nature, the origin of which is outside of the genius’s own efforts and appears to him (and Kierkegaard’s examples are exclusively male) as a kind of fate. The picture is complicated if we consider what Kierkegaard says elsewhere about, specifically, artistic genius, which is rarely the simple unfolding of natural power but is the product of the artist’s dissonant relation to the world – but this too can also be envisaged as subjection to fate.

The main example used in The Concept of Anxiety is not the artist, however, but Napoleon (identified by references to the battles of Marengo and Austerlitz). Nothing can withstand the genius’s sense of destiny, except (Kierkegaard says) himself, that is, a gradual or sudden loss of faith in his destiny or the belief that his destiny has turned against him. Where ordinary mortals experience anxiety in the moment of danger, external circumstances mean nothing to the genius but ‘his anxiety lies in the moment before or the moment after, the trembling moment in which he is to keep company with that great unknown, which is fate’ (SKS4: 403/CA: 101). It follows from this analysis that the genius is not a religious category, since his relation to fate excludes both the struggle with sin and the desire for salvation.

The genius is dealt with relatively succinctly, but the discussion of the demonic constitutes the longest sustained section of The Concept of Anxiety (thirty-six pages in the English translation). Kierkegaard’s essential definition of the demonic is, however, concise: it is anxiety in the face of the good, as illustrated by the demoniac possessed of multiple evil spirits who, when approached by Jesus, called out ‘What have you to do with me, Jesus, son of the Most High God? I adjure you by God, do not torment me’ (Mk 5.7, see also, e.g. Mk 1.24, Lk 4.34, Lk 8.28) – who, in other words, resists the possibility of being healed and restored to his right mind.

Kierkegaard makes short work of what he regards as the conventional approaches to such a person. Sympathy, he says, is simply a means of egoistically hiding behind belief in one’s own normality (SKS4: 421/CA: 120). Ethical condemnation gets more credit, since even if it shows itself in persecution and punishment, it implies the belief that the sufferer is capable of better (SKS4: 422–23/CA: 120–21). Medicine regards the problem as purely physical and finds the answer in powders, pills, and statistics (SKS4: 423–24/CA: 121–22).

For Kierkegaard, this last example highlights the essential error of the modern approach, namely, that it fails to see that the issue is not physical but spiritual.

More concretely, Kierkegaard defines the demonic as what Thomte translates as ‘inclosing reserve’ (Lowrie has ‘shut-upness’). Presupposed in Kierkegaard’s argument is the idea that freedom is intrinsically communicative and our capacity for talking freely with one another is a normal and eminent way in which freedom manifests itself in human life. The person who lacks freedom and does not want freedom will, conversely, withdraw from conversation, they will not (as Kierkegaard says with reference to a common figure of speech) ‘come out with it’ (SKS4: 425/CA: 124). This need not be taken literally and although Kierkegaard does not spell it out in this passage, he knew better than most that speech too can be a means of self-concealment (he several times quoted Talleyrand’s saying that ‘men speak only to conceal the mind’). As he goes on to say, ‘The collisions between inclosing reserve in relation to revelation can once more be infinitely varied and incalculably nuanced’, no less so than the profuse fecundity of natural flora (SKS4: 429/CA: 127).

Yet if the human being is as such oriented towards freedom or, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘every life is religiously planned’ (SKS4: 407/CA: 105), then the impulse towards communication and revelation can never be entirely suppressed. In the case of one possessed, however, such revelation will be involuntary (SKS4: 424/CA: 123) and may be marked by suddenness (SKS4: 430–33/CA: 129–32) or, equally, by boringness (SKS4: 433–35/CA: 132–34). What these have in common is an essential lack of continuity that makes them incapable of communicating coherently or expressing the sustaining interest of a life that has chosen to be grounded in its own freedom and understands itself as a whole or, as Kierkegaard would say, in the light of the eternal.

In saying that ‘every life is religiously planned’, Kierkegaard is not, of course, pointing to religion as a matter of external observance. Indeed, a superstitious religious observance (Christian or otherwise) may itself be a form of the demonic (SKS4: 444/CA: 144–45). Kierkegaard characterizes this as revealing an excess of passivity in the self that allows its scope for action to be constrained by the passive acceptance of external regulations and practices, whereas unbelief, by way of contrast, represents a kind of self-defining activity that refuses to acknowledge the passivity that is proper to human nature. Anticipating the discussion of masculine and feminine despair in The Sickness unto Death, he refers to these as, respectively, masculine and feminine versions of the demonic (SKS11: 164–65/SUD, 49).

Both the genius and the demoniac are presented as exceptional cases. However, not least with regard to the intermittent aspersions on the present age scattered throughout his discussion, it is possible to see Kierkegaard’s argument here as pointing to what, in the previous chapter, he had referred to as spiritlessness and that he sees as a vice peculiar to a Christian society. But such a society has been given an idea of the good. Consequently, not to wish and not to strive to realize that good is, implicitly, to show anxiety in the face of the good, an anxiety ‘away from spirit’ (SKS4: 398/CA: 95), as he had said. The Concept of Anxiety is, as we have seen, presented as an exercise in philosophical psychology and its intention is not avowedly polemical. Nevertheless, a polemical undercurrent can be sensed throughout Kierkegaard’s exposition, adding a further layer of tension to an already complex and heavyweight text.

7 Anxiety and Sin

Anxiety is not sin, even though it is described by Kierkegaard as the condition that makes sin – but also faith – possible. Likewise, The Concept of Anxiety is not about sin but is an exercise in philosophical psychology. As he says in the very final sentence of the book, ‘As soon as psychology is finished with anxiety it is then to hand it over to dogmatics’ (461/162), where it will be approached with an appropriate existential seriousness. Nevertheless, the book is, as the sub-title puts it, ‘oriented towards the dogmatic problem of original sin’.

Kierkegaard is well aware that this is a fine line and a secular reader might worry that he doesn’t always keep within his self-imposed limits. Sin seems to be mentioned in one way or another on every page and is often treated as if it were a fact or a given in a way that threatens to muddle the neutrality of the author’s observational method. Whether this is or is not the case would require a detailed line-by-line reading of the text which is beyond the reach of this short essay. However that question gets decided, I would argue that much of what Kierkegaard says about sin may be glossed in terms of a persistent and ineradicable moral turpitude that manifests across society, in the family, and in individuals. This, after all, is something like the concession made by Kant when he began his study of religion within the limits of pure reason with a quotation from 1 John 5:19: ‘The world lieth in evil’. Even from a secular point of view, much of this can make sense to all those who don’t share the relentless hyper-optimism of a celebrity chat-show.

That being said, there are clearly many passages where Kierkegaard engages with the specifically Christian doctrine of sin and it is hard to imagine The Concept of Anxiety might be like if these were filleted out.

In considering the relationship between anxiety and sin, these preliminary observations lead on to two questions. Taking these in reverse order, the first is to look more closely at just how Kierkegaard treats the Christian doctrine of sin; the second is to see what the concept of anxiety means for a situation in which ‘the world lieth in evil’.

The sin that Kierkegaard is concerned about in The Concept of Anxiety and, indeed, across his authorship, is not this or that sin, not ‘sins’ (drinking, swearing, adultery, etc.), but sin as a general feature of human existence. This is what, in line with Christian tradition, he refers to as ‘original sin’, the sin inaugurated by Adam’s fall and extending to the whole human race. In Kierkegaard’s Danish the term Arvesynd can be literally translated as ‘inherited sin’ and the mechanism by which Adam’s sin is transmitted to the rest of the human race is, rather straightforwardly, sexual reproduction. Much of the tradition would accept that sex is not of itself sinful but, it is argued, subsequent to the fall sex is invariably enacted with sinful lust and that we are therefore infected by sin from the moment of conception. Sin is, indeed, a sexually transmitted disease.

The Danish Church of Kierkegaard’s time had inherited the defining dogmatic statements of the Reformation. Particularly important amongst these was the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which states:

By Kierkegaard’s time, the most rigorous application of this doctrine had been softened, as in the popular exposition of Christian doctrine by Bishop Balle at the start of the nineteenth century. Against the Augsburg Confession, Balle taught that human beings still had a conscience capable of distinguishing between right and wrong (Balle, Reference Balle1840: 25f.). Kierkegaard himself noted the views of his own dogmatics lecturer, H. E. Clausen, who stated that ‘The later doctrine of the fall as the complete ruination of human nature as the result of Adam’s one sin and the attribution of this sin to his descendants is alien to scripture’ (SKS19/KJN3, Notebook 1:6, 34/29).

Kierkegaard is in this sense knocking at an open door when he effectively dismantles the basic structure of the conventional doctrine of original sin, as that had been understood by the Reformers. This may well be missed by secular readers who are not informed by the relevant doctrinal debates, but there is little doubt that Kierkegaard’s rereading of the Genesis story has as much in common with the demythologizing readings being developed by Hegelianism as it does with the ‘older dogmatics’ that he sometimes claims to have been supporting. Kierkegaard’s Christianity is not lacking in rigour, but its rigour is not that of a literalist interpretation of scripture nor of resistance to development in the formulation of doctrine. As the German Kierkegaard scholar Emmanuel Hirsch already argued in the 1930s, Kierkegaard’s position is clearly heterodox (Hirsch, Reference Hirsch1933: 711).

Already in the opening pages of The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard launches a full-scale assault on the magisterial teaching of the Protestant Reformation regarding original sin and argues that the moral outrage of the Church Fathers moved them to use language with ‘an almost feminine passion and with the fanaticism of a girl in love’ (SKS4: 333/CA: 26), producing hyperbolic accounts of Adam’s original perfection and thereby putting him ‘outside of history’ (SKS4: 334/CA: 28). Against this, Kierkegaard argues that ‘[Adam] is himself and the race; what then explains Adam explains the race and vice versa’ (SKS4: 336/CA: 29). In other words, Adam is a typical representative, a model, of every human being’s existential situation.

Following on from this, Kierkegaard’s reading – some might even say demolition – of the Genesis story is thoroughgoing. He dispenses with the voice of God, replacing it with Adam’s capacity for speech. Eve plays no role in the first run-through of the story and her fall is essentially no different from that of any other ‘derived’ individual in that she is said to have a presentiment (Ahnelse) of sin that a being in the state of pure innocence would not have (SKS4: 352/CA: 47). When it comes to the serpent, Kierkegaard frankly confesses that he can attach ‘no definite thought to it’ (SKS4: 353/CA: 48), arguing (as we have seen) that no one is ever tempted from outside because true temptation is always from within. We tempt ourselves and the locus of that temptation is precisely anxiety. He also dismisses the inheritability of sin, arguing (as we have again seen) that every subsequent individual falls in exactly the same way as Adam. The fact that ‘the world lieth in evil’ is only ever a quantitative judgement and can never explain the qualitative leap by which the individual – in anxiety – passes from innocence to sin.

Kierkegaard’s treatment of the Genesis story, then, is simply to use it as, in effect, illustrative material for an experiment or imaginative construction that lays the basis for everything that follows: a way of envisaging how each of us makes the passage from innocence to guilt and how we are to understand what can never be explained.

A further question remains, however, and that is: just how does anxiety throw light on the situation in which we are collectively and individually locked in a situation of general evil? The question may seem superfluous given that we have already tracked Kierkegaard’s own account of anxiety as explaining original sin progressively and looked at how this might manifest in the life of the individual. But there is a curious feature of Kierkegaard’s account that we have not yet considered. This is that anxiety seems in each case to be a vanishing moment. No sooner do we glimpse the prospect of living as spirit, as freely responsible for the beings that we are, than we become dizzy at the infinite possibility which such freedom and responsibility reveal and we fall, grasping at finitude. W. H. Auden and others since have spoken of an ‘age of anxiety’ (sometimes with reference to Kierkegaard), but can there be an ‘age of anxiety’? Doesn’t anxiety – Kierkegaardian anxiety, at least – vanish the moment it appears? Is anxiety in any sense an event in the world?

We can reframe this question by thinking briefly about the relationship between anxiety and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard will identify sin and despair, albeit with the qualification that despair is only sin when the person despairing also has an idea of God that, in despair, they either reject or cannot believe is able to help them. Kierkegaard also claims (1) that despair is universal and (2) that it is rooted in a failure of the self to be itself and not to realize its destiny to exist as spirit.

With regard to the universality of despair he states that, ‘there has lived no human being and, outside Christianity, there lives no human being who is not in despair – and within Christianity there is no one who is not a true Christian [who is not in despair] and inasmuch as he is not such a one, he is still somewhat in despair’ SKS11: 138/SUD: 22). With regard to the self’s failure to achieve its teleological orientation towards freedom, he opens with a much-quoted definition of spirit as a self that relates itself to itself and is transparent its ground in a power greater than itself. This self-relation involves synthesizing a sequence of dialectical polarities: finitude-infinity, necessity-possibility, the temporal-the eternal. As in The Concept of Anxiety, sin (aka despair) originates in a failure or malfunction of the self, understood in both works as complex and internally self-relating.

What this entails is that there is no one – apart from the true Christian – who has ever lived or is now living who is not in despair, that is, in sin. The possibility that is momentarily glimpsed in anxiety seems never, in fact, fulfilled – not (as we have seen) through an inherited fault but each time by the self’s own self-sabotage. In his study of The Sickness unto Death, Michael Theunissen pointed to how Kierkegaard’s analysis shows despair as ‘always already’ having lost the horizon of possibility that is intrinsic to the self’s being the self that it is (Theunissen, Reference Theunissen1993: 137–38).

This situation might seem as gloomy as that described by the Augsburg Confession, according to which human beings are not only incapable of rescuing themselves from the evil into which they have fallen but are even incapable of knowing what is for their good. In this situation, as Reformed theology especially emphasized, human beings’ ultimate flourishing (salvation) depends on the initiative of divine grace coming from without the sphere of the human. This would also seem to imply – as some Reformation theologians also accepted – that whether we are to be damned or saved is ultimately a matter of divine predestination.

This is not Kierkegaard’s position. Even if the possibility of the radical freedom to become who we are that is opened up in anxiety is indeed ‘always already’ lost in such a way that (empirically, as it were) we never encounter anxious human beings but only despairing ones, this possibility nevertheless remains integral to our constitution and we are capable of apprehending it as such. Only so can anxiety be ‘educative’ and become ‘saving through faith’ as the final chapter of The Concept of Anxiety argues. While an extreme application of the Reformed doctrine could lead a person to believe that they were predestined to damnation or, in a secularized version, that life is a ‘useless passion’ (Sartre, Reference Sartre1958: 615), Kierkegaard’s anthropology suggests that even though ‘the world lieth in evil’ the possibility of a freedom by which we might become better than we are is an inalienable element in our humanity. The horizon is dark, but there is always the possibility that the world could become otherwise than it is.

It would require a more detailed theological investigation to fully work out the scope of the human contribution to salvation and the extent and, perhaps more importantly, the way in which our salvation requires divine assistance. Kierkegaard’s position here has been keenly debated with very different outcomes by many eminent modern theologians whose conclusions often reflect the more general positions of their respective confessions. What the place of anxiety in the overall configuration of Kierkegaard’s thought signifies, however, is that by whatever means deliverance from evil is to come about, we must – and do – have some part in it.

8 Case Studies in Anxiety

In addition to The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole offers a series of case studies in anxiety (Angest or Bekymring) and in this section, we will consider just three out of a large selection. These are from Either/Or, Stages on Life’s Way, and the religious discourses on the lilies and the birds.

9 Anxiety in the Life of Søren Kierkegaard

For the first hundred and more years after his death, many readers saw Kierkegaard’s works as essentially confessional and they were subject to intense biographical speculation. It could be argued that Kierkegaard himself invited this approach by promoting what he called a subjective point of view at the expense of objectivity. Critics have seen this as opening the door to a philosophy of arbitrary wilfulness but, as The Concept of Anxiety makes clear, arbitrariness would be more characteristic of a demonically distorted life than the serious and inward kind of life marked by the integration of body, soul, and spirit that Kierkegaard recommends. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s own life has been mined as a source for explaining what we read in his published and unpublished writings and, conversely, these have been widely understood as deriving their singular power and interest from Kierkegaard’s own subjective investment in them. The real content of Kierkegaard’s writings is, on this point of view, the unique personality of Søren Kierkegaard.

I do not think this is entirely mistaken and it is hard to deny Thomte’s comment that ‘The Concept of Anxiety has deep roots in the personal history of its author’, listing journal entries stretching from 1837 to 1850 (CA, xii-xiii). But (as Kierkegaard himself might have said) what matters is how this is understood. If we are reading Kierkegaard’s writings as the transcript of a protracted psychoanalytic session, then attention is going to be directed to trying to identify the primal scenario that explains it all. As far as the secondary literature is concerned this has often meant scrutinizing both published and unpublished works for clues as to just what happened behind the closed doors of the parental home and just what it was that drove Kierkegaard to take such an intense interest in the shadow side of life – anxiety, melancholy, guilt, and despair (to name only a few prominent themes) – and, in connection with this, why he ultimately found it impossible to marry and broke off his engagement to Regine Olsen without any real explanation.

Kierkegaard’s own comments seem to point in different directions. Writing several years after the engagement he writes of his own ‘vita ante acta’ and describes himself as a ‘penitent’ (SKS19/KJN3: Notesbog/Notebook 15:4), suggesting some sin in his own life, possibly a visit to a brothel and anxiety concerning a sexually transmitted disease. One journal entry concerns a man who visits a prostitute; time passes and he is to marry, ‘then anxiety awakens’ (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:76). However, in this instance what occasions the man’s anxiety is not the possibility of disease but the thought that he might already be a father (like the bookkeeper in the short story ‘A Possibility’).

Other journal entries suggest instead that the impossibility of marriage was somehow connected to Kierkegaard’s relation to his father and to some sin in his father’s life: ‘Should I have explained myself, then I would have had to initiate her into terrible things, my relation to father, his depression, the eternal night that rages deep within, my wanderings, lusts, and debaucheries (which are perhaps not so extreme in God’s eyes since it was anxiety that brought me to run wild and how was I going to look for support when I knew or sensed that the only man I had admired for his strength and power, was unsteady’ (SKS18/KJN2: JJ:115), he wrote.

This has often been connected with a journal entry known as ‘The Great Earthquake’ in which Kierkegaard writes

What, then, was it that Søren had ‘sensed’ in his father’s life? Was it some secret sin committed by the father that the son either guessed at, witnessed, or was in some way involved in?

Attempts to answer this question have produced wildly varied results. One hypothesis concerns a story about the father’s childhood, spent in poverty on the Jutland Heath before he went to live in Copenhagen and became a successful and respected businessman. Sent out to watch sheep in the bitter cold, the shivering and hungry child shook his fist and cursed God. Some have speculated that the father’s secret sin was of a sexual nature: that he had forcibly violated Søren’s mother prior to their marriage (she was his second wife and had formerly been a domestic servant in his household) or that he had had an extra-marital affair – and, again, this might have involved transmission of some disease. Sexual abuse within the home has also been mentioned.

The journal entries already quoted are amongst those that have given an impulse to such speculations and there are passages in the published works that can seem to point in the same direction. One obvious example is the fascination with Abraham’s readiness to kill his beloved son (Fear and Trembling). In ‘“Guilty?” – “Not-Guilty?”’ (Section 8), Kierkegaard inserts a number of detached pieces that poetically and enigmatically evoke dark aspects of the father-son relationship and in some cases imply a sexual element. ‘A Possibility’ has been discussed, but there are more.

The first of these inserts, entitled ‘The Quiet Despair’ tells of a father and son; although their normal conversation was bright and cheerful the father would sometimes stop, look into the son’s face, and say ‘Poor child, you are going into a quiet despair’ (SKS6, 187/SLW: 200). The father believed that he was guilty of bringing about his son’s depression while the son believed that it was he who had elicited the father’s sorrow. The father dies, and only the memory of the voice and the words ‘poor child, you are going into a quiet despair remain. A later insert, ‘Solomon’s Dream’ tells of how Solomon one night heard noises from his father’s sleeping chamber. Concerned about some possible danger he goes to investigate but saw only David, stricken with despair in his repentant soul. Solomon himself does not know that he, Solomon, was conceived in David’s adulterous relationship with Bathsheba, whose husband he also arranged to have killed. Now his own sleep is disturbed. ‘He dreams that David is an ungodly man, rejected by God, that his royal majesty means that God’s wrath is upon him and that he must bear the purple as a punishment, doomed to hear the people’s well wishes while the Lord’s justice holds secret and hidden court over the guilty one … [and] that a secret guilt is the secret that explained everything’ (SKS6, 234–35/SLW: 251).

These and other texts resonate extensively with what we have read in The Concept of Anxiety and, of course, we recall Kierkegaard himself, speaking in the voice of Vigilius Haufniensis, saying that he needed to take added care not to speak of himself when intending to speak of others, like the teacher who marked his own work, thinking it was the student’s. Especially they resonate with the discussion of how anxiety explains original sin progressively, the sense of fate experienced by the genius, and the demoniac who is shut up with his life’s secret and unable to communicate it to others.

For example, when we read in ‘the great earthquake’ of the presentiment that engenders a belief that the whole family is under a curse, this states very precisely the dynamic that gives sin its ‘hereditary’ character or, as Kierkegaard puts it, explains it progressively. This is not because sin in the individual is directly transmitted by sexual reproduction but because the anxious awareness of sin induces the vertigo in which freedom falls. And while sexuality as such is not sin, Kierkegaard – like the wider Christian culture – seems to see the anxiety induced by a sense or presentiment of some sexual transgression as having a singular intensity that will all the more heighten the vertiginous prospect of falling by virtue of the repetition of that sin in one’s own life. Of course, ‘the great earthquake’ itself does not mention anything of a sexual nature, but this has not prevented commentators from speculating – assisted, of course, by texts such as ‘Solomon’s Dream’.

The term ‘Ahnen’, that I have translated here as ‘sense’ or ‘presentiment’ was a term that had acquired some importance in romantic philosophy as a kind of apprehension that was more than merely sensory but that also lacked the clarity and distinctness of rational knowledge. It was a term that Kierkegaard well understand, as when he uses it in a journal entry to explain how

If we add in The Concept of Anxiety’s idea of anxiety as a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy, this accurately describes a mechanism familiar to most of us from our own childhoods and for, some of us, familiar from our attempts to parent or otherwise guide young children. To speak of certain subjects in a tone of voice that implies strong but unspecified disapproval will almost inevitably arouse a sense for what is not being made explicit that both attracts and repels. Again, this is perhaps most obvious in relation to sexual issues: there is no surer way to make the child want to see what is in the book hidden at the back of the cupboard (in my childhood it was only my grandmother’s copy of Tom Jones).

Taken at face value, the great earthquake and related texts seem, then, to identify Kierkegaard’s own anxiety as akin to the sense of fate he ascribed to the genius, but it was also an anxiety focussed on an unspecified guilt and an anxiety that led him to become ‘shut up’ in the incommunicability of that guilt.

Such a line of interpretation makes for a good if dark story and it shaped Kierkegaard’s image in the 100 years following his death. However, it is clear that the passages mostly cited by commentators with regard to Kierkegaard’s or his father’s secret sin all require careful interpretation and cannot be taken in a directly autobiographical sense. ‘The great earthquake’, for example, was long assumed to have been written in the summer of 1838, in a period when Kierkegaard had been reconciled with his father after having moved out of the parental home and shortly before the father’s death. Such a dating clearly talks up the potential autobiographical significance. However, attention has recently been drawn to the fact that an excerpt from a German translation of Macbeth, written out on the same sheet of paper, was only published in 1839 and current scholarship assigns these notes to the period when Kierkegaard was preparing Stage on Life’s Way several years later (SKS27K, 656–60). Of course, this doesn’t rule out an autobiographical reference, not least as Stages is itself a text that has multiple points of contact with Kierkegaard’s life, but it does suggest that it is a text shaped by reflection and literary artifice and, as such, not to be taken as direct evidence for some event in Kierkegaard’s life – let alone his father’s. Likewise, the passage discussing presentiment and anxiety (SKS17/KJN1: BB:42) is accompanied by marginal notes dealing with a range of issues of which Kierkegaard had no direct experience, including the psychology of executions and, seen in context, suggests that he is working at a point of psychology rather than offering direct insight into his own history – and, of course, the comments about children and anxiety have an application not at all limited to his own case. Perhaps most disappointing for the more Gothic versions of Kierkegaard’s dark childhood is the comment in the journal entry discussing the nature of presentiment that the external occasion doesn’t need to be intrinsically momentous in order to set the dynamics of anxiety into motion.

None of this is to deny important connections between Kierkegaard’s personal life and his writing but it is to say that these are not of the nature of direct reportage. To the extent that Kierkegaard himself is present in them, the personal materials have themselves become experiments in the sense attached to the word by Kierkegaard and his pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis: that is, they are imaginary constructions and we understand them best not by trying to connect them back to obscure and disputable occurrences in the young life of Søren Kierkegaard but with regard to how they best illuminate the matter at issue.

10 Anxiety After Kierkegaard

Kierkegaard’s introduction of anxiety into philosophy would become central to the twentieth-century philosophy of existence, also known as existentialism. The key text in this regard is Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927), supplemented by his 1929 inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics?’ This would be taken up by Jean-Paul Sartre and, in the post-war era, became a defining feature of left-bank existentialism. In theology, a particularly influential view was that of Paul Tillich, notably in his best-selling book The Courage to Be. In this section, I shall briefly survey their respective treatments of anxiety, highlighting similarities and differences in relation to Kierkegaard. Finally, we cannot avoid the fact that anxiety, sometimes referred to as social anxiety, is a constant topic of discussion in today’s society, with particular concern for the apparent epidemic of anxiety amongst younger people. In conclusion, I shall therefore consider whether there are resources in Kierkegaard to help address this crisis and, if so, what they might be.