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

Kierkegaard describes the view that science and logic can and must be used to understand the real, what Kierkegaard terms the “actuality.” He rejects this view, arguing that logic cannot completely describe actuality because there is always “contingency,” meaning events that cannot be rationally predicted. 

At the same time, Kierkegaard asserts that faith cannot be immediately gained by anyone, because faith requires a “historical presupposition.” Faith requires a deeper, slower understanding while logic addresses that which can be understood immediately. Since faith and dogmatics (religious truths) are not an “immediate” process, if one speaks of faith as “immediate,” then it refers to “the necessity of not stopping with faith” (10).

In the past, philosophers believed that their philosophies captured the full reality or actuality. Starting with the philosopher Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century, philosophers became more skeptical about their own ability to truly understand actuality. Under the influence of the philosopher Friedrich Hegel, modern philosophers have suggested this uncertainty could be solved through the “mediation” or “reconciliation” (11) of two separate ideas or types of knowledge: The practice of dialectics. However, Kierkegaard argues that there is a challenge in reconciling ethics or logic and dogmatics in this way. The difficulty is that, in modern philosophy, reconciliation takes place by comparing a point with its negative. However, in both logic and ethics, Kierkegaard believes that the negative cannot fulfill that purpose in any comparison or reconciliation. Instead, the negative has to be presented as a “contraposition” or the “necessary other,” instead of simply the “evil” (13).

This is important for understanding Kierkegaard’s key argument in The Concept of Anxiety, which is to examine “the psychological treatment of the concept of ‘anxiety’” with “the dogma of hereditary sin” (14). Trying to understand anxiety by reconciling sin with ethics would be difficult because sin is “not a state” and is instead “continually annulled” since it is something that is constantly overcome or chosen. It should not be seen as “a disease, an abnormality, a poison, or a disharmony” (15). As a result, sin cannot be fully understood scientifically or logically. 

Kierkegaard adds that sin cannot be explained completely through ethics either. Ethics deals with what Kierkegaard calls “ideality” (16), referring to principles that exist entirely in the mind, and with how to bring those ideas into reality. It is thus very difficult to understand sin through ethics because the business of ethics is with ideal human behavior. The idea of sin, especially hereditary sin, also stands opposed to traditional, pre-modern ethical philosophy, which held that virtue can be realized in everyday life.

While traditional ethics tries to bring ideality to actuality, Kierkegaard wants to start with actuality and move to ideality. Kierkegaard’s approach to ethics would have to start by presupposing the accuracy of dogmatics, especially the concept of hereditary sin. Even then, though, such a framework to ethics would only “deal with” sin’s “manifestation, but not with its coming into existence” (21). Instead, Kierkegaard considers psychology because it is a field of knowledge that best addresses the fact that sin comes out of “freedom” (21). Psychology is useful at least as a starting point, primarily because psychology is about observing while ethics is about “always accusing, judging, and acting” (22). Since psychology observes, it is useful for understanding sin, which is something that exists in actuality and is constantly in flux. 

Kierkegaard still finds psychology to be flawed, since in his time he finds its practitioners’ observations to be “as abstemious and ascetic as a flagellant.” However, psychology can admit the “possibility of sin” (23), which Kierkegaard argues ethics cannot do. Kierkegaard proposes to start examining sin through psychology in the beginning and then continue to understand sin through dogmatics.