50 pages 1 hour read

The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Oriented Deliberation in View of the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin

Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1844

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Part 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Part 3: “Anxiety as the Consequence of that Sin which Is Absence of the Consciousness of Sin”

Part 3, Introduction Summary

Taking a term used by Hegel and other philosophers, “transition,” Kierkegaard argues transition “is a state and it is actual” (82). At the same time, it is a “leap.” Meanwhile, a person’s existence is itself a “synthesis of the temporal and the eternal” (85). Time itself is an “infinite succession” and a constant transition or “a process” (85), meaning the present is just something that is assumed. In actuality, the present is the “eternal” (86) that exists outside the “infinite succession” (85) that is time. Kierkegaard argues that the concept of the moment, meaning a brief instant of time, belongs to eternity, not to time. 


Specifically, he defines the moment as “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other” (89). There are moments that do not touch eternity, but such moments have no real being. Kierkegaard argues this is another major difference between ancient Greek and modern Christian conceptions of the moment. The Greeks had no concept of eternity and, thus, no concept of the future. Christianity instead has a concept of “the fullness of time,” which is “the moment as the eternal, and yet this eternal is also the future and the past” (90).

blurred text
blurred text
blurred text