50 pages • 1-hour read
The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin
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Key Figures
Søren Kierkegaard
Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher and theologian who left a mark on Christian thought, existentialist philosophy, psychology, and ethics. He was born in 1813 to a middle-class family in Copenhagen and went on to study theology at the University of Copenhagen, receiving a Master’s degree by 1841. Aside from a brief engagement with a woman, Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard never entered any other romantic relationship.
Throughout his life, he remained a devout Protestant Christian and experienced what might today be diagnosed as clinical depression. Although he attended a seminary and became formally qualified to be a Protestant minister in Denmark, Kierkegaard felt that God personally called him to become a writer instead, and lived off an inheritance from his father and profits from his publications. During his lifetime, he became known for his bitter opposition to the government-run Church of Denmark and a feud with a satirical Danish magazine, The Corsair.
A prolific writer, Kierkegaard often published his works under pseudonyms. His first book was also one of his most influential, Either/Or, published in 1843. Arguing that everyone is faced with a choice between an aesthetic life, one spent pursuing one’s own personal interests, or a civic life, centered around involvement with one’s community, Kierkegaard argued that both lifestyles had risks and the only way to successfully reconcile the two choices was through faith.
Besides The Concept of Anxiety, other major works were Fear and Trembling (1843), an analysis of the story in Genesis about God commanding the patriarch Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac; The Sickness unto Death (1849), which argued that failing to comprehend and accept one’s self led to spiritual death; and The Practice of Christianity (1850), which presented Kierkegaard’s views on an authentically religious life and argued against attempts to “prove” Christianity through rationalist arguments.
Kierkegaard’s influence expanded outside Christian theology, influencing even atheist philosophers and literary writers like Jean-Paul Sartre with his ideas on individual authenticity and the challenge of facing existential crises. He died suddenly in 1855 at the age of 42, possibly from an undiagnosed tuberculosis of the spine.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel was arguably one of the most, if not the most, influential philosopher in 19th century Europe. He was born in 1770 in the southern German city of Stuttgart. As a young man he idealized Enlightenment philosophers, the French Revolution, and Napoleon. Wanting to be a scholar, Hegel received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Jena in 1801 and taught philosophy as a professor at Jena, Heidelberg, and finally Berlin. Despite a reputation as a poor lecturer, in his lifetime Hegel was successful both as a writer and as a professor, with people traveling from across Europe to attend his philosophy lectures.
Hegel’s major publications include The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), Philosophy of Right (1821), and Science of Logic (1831). He is perhaps best known for developing the Hegelian dialectic, the logical concept that one can arrive at truths by comparing two related but contradictory ideas—known as a thesis and an antithesis—such as living in a free society and having to work to survive in that society. Further, Hegel believed that history was a series of stages where such contradictory ideas and forces clash until they are resolved, leading to greater personal freedom and civic rights for all people. For Hegel, individual freedom was the ultimate goal of human life and history.
When it came to Christianity, Hegel remained a devout Protestant, arguing that Christianity aligned with Enlightenment ideals of reason. It was this idea, that Christianity could be proved rationally, that drove many of Kierkegaard’s criticisms of Hegel in The Concept of Anxiety and elsewhere. Nevertheless, Hegel’s own emphasis on the importance of knowing oneself is reflected throughout Kierkegaard’s thought.
Immanuel Kant
Born in 1724 in Königsberg, a city in what was then the northern German kingdom of Prussia, Kant became another pivotal figure in Western philosophy—so pivotal, in fact, that his work is often considered the dividing line between Enlightenment and modern Western philosophy. This is because much of Kant’s work sought to solve the great debate between empiricism (the view that all knowledge comes from direct experience), and rationalism (which argues that knowledge mainly arises out of natural deduction).
Kant wrote extensively in trying to find another way of synthesizing empiricism and rationalism. As part of this attempt, he argued that metaphysical concepts, such as the existence of God or an afterlife, could not be proven through abstract or logical reasoning. Instead, such concepts were best vindicated through what Kant called “practical reason,” which is understanding how and why humans make ethical and moral decisions.
As a writer and professor of philosophy at the University of Königsberg, Kant achieved international fame in his own lifetime. His most well-known works include Critique of Pure Reason (first published in 1781 and revised and republished in 1787), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Critique of the Power of Judgment (1790), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797). Kant’s influence on Kierkegaard was through the idea that Christianity could not be truly understood and defended through reason.
However, in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard did reject Kant’s argument that ideas like God’s existence could be proven in a way through an analysis of ethics and morality. Instead, while Kierkegaard believed certain aspects of Christianity could be approached through sciences like psychology, he asserted that Christianity’s deeper mysteries, like the nature of humanity’s separation from God as described in the Book of Genesis, belonged to the realm of theology and faith.
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