Book: The Concept of Anxiety

Overview
Søren Kierkegaard’s 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety, published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, probes the inner experience of anxiety as the key to understanding freedom, sin, and the transition to a religious life. It stands at the crossroads of psychology and Christian dogmatics, asking how an individual becomes guilty and how the doctrine of hereditary sin can be grasped without dissolving human responsibility. The book rejects speculative, especially Hegelian, explanations in favor of a qualitative account centered on the single individual before God.

Anxiety and Freedom
Anxiety is not fear of something definite but a relation to “the nothing,” an indeterminate lure and recoil that Kierkegaard calls a “sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” It is the dizziness of freedom: when the self confronts the boundless field of possibilities, freedom awakens both attraction and dread. Anxiety belongs to innocence; it arises where ignorance is present yet possibility is felt. Because it is bound to possibility itself, anxiety cannot be removed by more knowledge or by rational systematization. It reveals the self as a synthesis of body and soul becoming spirit, awakened to the task of choosing.

Sin, Inheritance, and the Leap
Against gradualist or developmental accounts, guilt does not emerge by degrees. The transition from innocence to sin is a qualitative leap, paradoxically prompted by anxiety. Freedom, tempted by possibility, posits itself in an act that breaks with innocence. This leap is not deducible from prior conditions; it is the self’s own act in the instant, where time and eternity touch.

Hereditary sin is not a transferable guilt but the condition into which every individual is born, a universal frailty that makes the leap into sin possible and, in a sense, inevitable. Anxiety is the psychological presupposition of hereditary sin: it explains how the inherited condition becomes actual in each person’s act. Each individual repeats Adam, not by copying a historical deed, but by enacting the same structure of possibility and transgression.

Adam, Childhood, and Innocence
Adam functions as the prototype of the individual. The prohibition awakens possibility, and with it anxiety; the leap into sin occurs in the moment when freedom chooses itself wrongly. Childhood mirrors this structure. The child is innocent yet anxious before what is forbidden and unknown, experiencing the same trembling openness that can become either education toward responsibility or occasion for falling.

The Demonic and Unfreedom
After the fall, anxiety does not vanish. It can harden into the demonic, an inward shutting-in of the self, characterized by muteness, secrecy, and the negation of openness to possibility. The demonic is unfreedom’s attempt to will itself as closed, resisting the transparency before God that would heal it. Here anxiety turns from a teacher to a tormentor, unless transformed.

Anxiety as Educator and the Path to Faith
Properly understood, anxiety educates. It brings the self to honesty about freedom, guilt, and the need for reconciliation. “Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate,” because right anxiety strips away illusions of gradual progress and compels the self toward a decisive relation to God. In faith, anxiety is transfigured from a dizzying threat into a disciplined vigilance that keeps freedom awake without despair.

Method and Polemic
The pseudonymous author opposes speculative mediation that explains away sin as necessity. He insists on the irreducible moment of decision, the leap that no system can predict. The book’s psychological analyses serve theological ends: to preserve human responsibility, illuminate original sin without fatalism, and direct the individual from aesthetic evasions and ethical self-sufficiency toward the religious sphere, where forgiveness answers the anxiety of guilt.