In the Library
The Concept of Anxiety
Søren Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis), 1844
- Form
- Form Philosophy
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Demanding
- Reading time
- Reading time 4.5 hours
- Translated by
- Translated by The Daily Canon (2026)
- Original
- Original da
- Chapters
- Chapters 21
- Length
- Length 59k words
£1.99
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In the same way anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which arises when spirit wants to posit the synthesis
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The reading guide, in the app
How to Read The Concept of Anxiety
Under a subtitle about the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin sits the first book anyone wrote about the feeling of standing at an edge with nothing to fear except that you are free to move.
The book looks, from its title page, like a treatise for theologians, a deliberation on Adam, the Fall and hereditary sin, prefaced by an Introduction about which science a problem belongs to. Readers who start at page one and meet that Introduction tend to conclude they have wandered into a seminary argument and quietly put it back. What the reputation misses is that the theology is the question Kierkegaard sets himself, while the answer he keeps finding is a description of an experience you have almost certainly had, the unease that comes from nowhere in particular and attaches itself to nothing you could name.
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About the book
Stand at the edge of a cliff and look down, and the fear is not only of falling; it is the terrible knowledge that you could jump. Kierkegaard, writing as Vigilius Haufniensis, the watchman of Copenhagen, calls this vertigo anxiety, "the dizziness of freedom," and says the eye is as much to blame as the abyss. He finds it first in Eden, in Adam before the fruit, innocent and already trembling at a forbidding word, because the prohibition shows him what he never knew was possible: that he is able. From there the book follows anxiety through sin, through spiritlessness, through the demonic dread of the good, until it arrives somewhere astonishing. The unease a person spends a lifetime trying to quiet, it argues, is the mark of a self that is free, and whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate. Heidegger and Sartre would build philosophies in its shadow. Read it, and the knot in your stomach at the cliff's edge starts to look like the first proof that you are free.