Quotes

Introduction to Kierkegaard (part 1): the existential problem

"Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eyes as in the abyss . . . Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom." (The Concept of Anxiety)

Far from signifying a pathological state which one must strive to alleviate, Kierkegaard posited existential anxiety as an essential requirement on the path to selfhood:

"I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through - to learn to be anxious...Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate." (The Concept of Anxiety)

Anxiety is a response to the awareness of one's freedom, of one's power to gaze into the yawning abyss of possibilities, and through an act of choice actualize one of those potentialities. It is a response to the recognition that one is free to choose from possibilities, and therefore ultimately responsible for oneself and one's future. This awesome sense of freedom and responsibility is apprehended as simultaneously attractive and repulsive, an ambivalence Kierkegaard called "dread":

"In dread there is the egoistic infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a definite choice, but alarms and fascinates with its sweet anxiety"(The Concept of Anxiety)

Lacking the strength and courage to endure the continual anxiety required to walk the path of selfhood, most strive to alleviate their anxiety by choosing, on some level of awareness, not to be a self. Such a choice vaults one into a state of despair, a "sickness of spirit", characterized by the attempt to rid oneself of oneself, and thus do away with the responsibility of being a self:

"To despair over oneself, in despair to will to be rid of oneself-this is the formula for all despair." (The Sickness Unto Death)

Despair takes many forms, and is not necessarily accompanied by feelings of hopelessness and depression. In fact, Kierkegaard thought one could seem in "the best of health...precisely when the sickness is most dangerous."(The Sickness Unto Death). Such an individual would be wholly unconscious of their despair, and thus in a most dangerous position. For a sickness can inflict the most harm when one is unaware that one is even sick:

"The despairing man who is unconscious of being in despair is, in comparison with him who is conscious of it, merely a negative step further from the truth and from salvation. [U]nawareness is so far from removing despair, that, on the contrary, it may be the most dangerous form of despair. By unconsciousness the despairing man is in a way secured (but to his own destruction) against becoming aware-that is, he is securely in the power of despair."(The Sickness Unto Death)

While there are numerous ways in which an individual, through various forms of self deception, hides from his awareness the fact that he lacks a self, Kierkegaard believed "despair over the earthly" to be "the commonest sort of despair". Despair over the earthly arises when an individual attempts to compensate for their lack of self by latching their identity onto something external in the world: for example, a job, a relationship, one's family, wealth, or social status.

If the individual loses this external good, they will likely think that the accompanying misery and emptiness they feel is a result of such a this loss, not realizing that an inner hollowness was there all along: they lacked a self and tried to compensate by projecting their identity onto something external and finite, an attempt which is bound to fail every time: