![]() ![]() Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. He whose eye happens to look down the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.Īnxiety may be compared with dizziness. More it cannot do as long as it merely shows itself. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited sleeping, it is suspended dreaming, it is an intimated nothing. He writes:Īnxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. But what, exactly, is anxiety, that pervasive affliction the nature of which remains as drowning yet as elusive as the substance of a shadow? In his 1844 treatise The Concept of Anxiety ( public library), Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (May 5, 1813–November 11, 1855) explains anxiety as the dizzying effect of freedom, of paralyzing possibility, of the boundlessness of one’s own existence - a kind of existential paradox of choice. “Anxiety is love’s greatest killer,” Anaïs Nin famously wrote. ![]()
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