about "The Concept of Anxiety" and "The Sickness Unto Death" by Søren Kierkegaard

 
Søren Kierkegaard's The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death were published in the 1840s. The discussion of freedom and anxiety in these works laid the foundation for existentialism. Kierkegaard was the first modern philosopher and the first person to find himself in a modern age. However, his faith and spirituality make him timeless.

Philosophy departments consider The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness Unto Death to be a pair.

The Concept of Anxiety explores sin, guilt, and anxiety, which is undirected fear, a general sense of dread. Kierkegaard rebuffs the idea that anxiety is caused by original sin. Rather, innocence generates the conditions for anxiety. Consider Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; recall that God forbade Adam from eating from the tree of knowledge. God's directive makes Adam aware that he has a choice. This freedom to choose causes anxiety. Furthermore, Adam could not have known he was sinning because, being the first to sin, how would he know what sin was? Sin was real only after Adam ate from the tree of knowledge. Rejoice in your freedom.

The Sickness Unto Death explores spiritual death, which is despair. Here, Kierkegaard deals with self, or the self-concept of selfhood: the "relation's relating itself to itself in the relation." In The Sickness Unto Death, Kierkegaard delves into the binary concepts of the finite and the infinite and the possible and the necessary. Tension between these polarities results from not being right with God. And, thus, despair. Kierkegaard elaborates further that there are three kinds of despair. All this is not as interesting as The Concept of Anxiety, so I will not elaborate. However, my favorite passage in The Sickness Unto Death comes when Kierkegaard is describing the person who lives life in a religious mode, but who, in the process of becoming spiritual, has lost his self:

Such things do not create much of a stir in the world, for a self is the last thing the world cares about and the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having. The greatest hazard of all, losing the self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss--an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc.--is sure to be noticed.

anything but about idealism

Countries speak to ideals, but are never kind to idealists.

The greater suffering is the better suffering

Maybe twice a year for most of his adult life, Samuel Clemens met a mysterious but familiar girlfriend in his dreams, according to some notes of his published in Harper's. Of the first time he lost her in a dream, he wrote, "I turned around, and the log house was gone. I ran here and there and yonder down the lanes between the rows of tombs, calling Alice; and presently the night closed down, and I could not find my way. Then I woke, in deep distress over my loss, and was in my bed in Philadelphia". The published notes close with a final comment on her death in a later dream:

That was a terrible thing to me at the time. It was preternaturally vivid; and the pain and the grief and the misery of it to me transcended many sufferings that I have known in waking life. For everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go about awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world. When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves, and aggrandized and enriched by the command over the mysterious mental magician who is here not our slave, but only our guest.

I like this. The dream life is real because the sense of loss and misery felt there, and felt upon waking, is complete; none of our expressions, including feelings and imagination, are compromised by reason and its accounting for competing obligations and practical concerns; such so-called harsh realities make life "unreal" because they make us "artificial"; and they make us artificial because they make us check our impulses, make us plan and act in strategic interests that are foreign to our nature, so to speak, and that feed into life's complex network of power relationships, the ultimate game of pretend. In dreams, imagination and feeling reign, and they are felt and exercised honestly and fully. The very vividness of their creation is the character of the real.

Notes:

• How amazing to me that he felt such a sense of loss over a dreamed of girl. Grief dreams about real persons, understandable.
• People wake and interpret dreams, introducing the artificial into the real, dressing themselves in reason.