Kierkegaard's Writings, VIII: Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin by Kierkegaard Søren Thomte Reidar & Reidar Thomte & Albert B. Anderson

Author:Kierkegaard, Søren, Thomte, Reidar & Reidar Thomte & Albert B. Anderson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: 1980-04-12T05:00:00+00:00

I. Freedom Lost Somatically-Psychically [IV 402]

It is not my purpose to present a pretentious and bombastic philosophical deliberation on the relation between psyche and body and to discuss in which sense the psyche itself produces its body (whether this be understood in the Greek way or in the German way) or, to recall an expression of Schelling, in [IV 403] what sense the psyche itself, by an act of “corporization,”37 posits its body. Here I have no need of such things. For my purpose, I shall express myself to the best of my ability: The body is the organ of the psyche and in turn the organ of the spirit. As soon as the serving relation comes to an end, as soon as the body revolts, and as soon as freedom conspires with the body against itself, unfreedom is present as the demonic. If there should be someone who has not as yet sharply apprehended the difference between what I have developed in this section and what was developed in the former section, I shall state it again. As long as freedom does not defect to the party of the rebels, the anxiety of revolution will still be present, not as anxiety about the good, but as anxiety about evil.

It will be easy to see what a multiplicity of innumerable nuances the demonic in this sphere comprises, some of which are so imperceptible that they are apparent only to microscopic observation, and some so dialectical that the category must be used with great flexibility in order to recognize that the nuances belong under it. A hypersensibility and a hyperirritability, neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, etc.—all of these are or could be nuances of it. This makes it so difficult to talk about these things in abstracto, since speech itself becomes algebraic. More than this I cannot do here.

The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdition. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying, as did the demoniac in the New Testament with regard to salvation: τί ἐμοὶ καί σοί [What have I to do with you]? Therefore it shuns every contact [with the good], whether this actually threatens it by wanting to help it to freedom or only touches it casually. But this is also enough, for anxiety is extraordinarily swift. Therefore, from such a demoniac is quite commonly heard a reply that expresses all the horror of this state: Leave me alone in my wretchedness. Or such a man says in referring to a particular time in his past life: At that time I could probably have been saved—the most dreadful reply imaginable. Neither punishment nor thunderous tirades make him anxious, yet every word that is related to the freedom scuttled and sunk in unfreedom will do so. In this phenomenon, anxiety expresses itself also in another way. Among such demoniacs there is a cohesion in which [IV 404] they cling to one another so inseparably and anxiously that no friendship has an inwardness that can be compared with it.

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