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

Drawing on the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, “The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was,” Kierkegaard interprets the story as showing that every individual has to face anxiety. When they do so, they have to not avoid it completely or succumb to it. Human beings experience anxiety because they are a synthesis of “beast” and “angel.” Anxiety comes from the choice and possibilities that come from freedom. Anxiety is destructive unless it is combated with “faith” (155), which can turn anxiety into something educational. This is because faith gives the individual an awareness of the finite and the eternal. At the same time, completely lacking anxiety is not a good thing, but rather a sign of being “spiritless” (157).

At the same time, Kierkegaard suggests that if someone “defrauds possibility […] he never arrives at faith” (157). Although “the anxiety of possibility” (158) does present dangers such as death by suicide, faith is the solution. A belief in fate does not help, since while anxiety may lead a person to a belief in fate, once someone starts to have confidence in their faith, anxiety begins to undermine that confidence.

Anxiety also “discovers guilt” (161). This guilt is something that only knowledge of eternity can resolve. Nor can finitude and a lack of knowledge of eternity help with anxiety “except in a very mediocre and depraved sense” (161). Kierkegaard uses the example of a hypochondriac who will find an actual event more reassuring than the anxiety that comes from the possible things they imagine. Even then, though, such reassurance is less than the one achieved by the person whose anxiety and guilt is alleviated by being “educated by possibility” (162) and by the Atonement.