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

For Søren Kierkegaard, anxiety is an inevitable consequence of humans being part-animal and part-spirit, or “a synthesis of the psychical and the physical” (43) while also having free will and numerous choices. Even before Adam committed the first sin, he had a “knowledge of freedom” and anxiety. Kierkegaard especially attributes Adam’s anxiety to God’s prohibition against eating the fruit from the Tree of Knowledge, since “prohibition awakens in him freedom’s possibility” (44). This is true for every human being who is alive now or has ever lived, since “[a]nxiety is freedom’s possibility” (155). For this reason, Kierkegaard argues for anxiety as a condition of freedom. 

For Kierkegaard, this aspect of the human condition does not necessarily mean that freedom or even anxiety are innately bad. Instead, people are “educated” by anxiety and possibility, in a way where they are better equipped to cope with life’s unexpected problems and with “actuality” (156), such as the inevitability of death. Having freedom and the experience of anxiety allow individuals to understand and actualize themselves and comprehend the world around them, since “the content of freedom is truth, and truth makes man free” and “truth is for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action” (138).