2 - Anxiety

Summary

The concept of anxiety

Existence, actuality, subjectivity, passion: we have seen how these terms are used by Kierkegaard to designate an experience of life in which I, as this particular individual that I am, become aware of the uniqueness and fragility of my life, as it moves ineluctably into an unknown future. Does this future contain possibilities for creative self-transformation? Might it even open out onto an eternal happiness? Or, perhaps, eternal damnation? Or just extinction? The questions seem unanswerable, yet how can I know who I myself really am if I cannot answer them? For there would seem to be all the difference in the world between an existing being destined for eternal happiness and one destined for extinction, but caught as I am in the midst of time I have no independent knowledge as to which of these beings I myself am.

If this is indeed my predicament – our human predicament – then it is well described by another key Kierkegaardian term: anxiety. In now turning to Kierkegaard's treatment of anxiety and to a range of related themes and concepts, we shall find ourselves extending and elaborating the idea of the self established in a preliminary way by the analysis of “existence”. In other words, the concept of anxiety is not engaging a different subject-matter from the concept of existence, for in each case this subject-matter is fundamentally nothing but the self that is my self, the self shaped by the passionate, subjective question concerning who I am, how I came here and where I'm bound for.