the concept of dread
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- No scanning noise detected (automatic measure over the whole text, not checked by hand)
- Extent:
- ~76,400 words · 363 passages
Cite this work
- APASøren Kierkegaard. (n.d.). the concept of dread. Digital reproduction: SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/kierkegaard/the-concept-of-dread
- MLASøren Kierkegaard. the concept of dread. Digital reproduction, SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/kierkegaard/the-concept-of-dread.
- ChicagoSøren Kierkegaard. the concept of dread. Digital reproduction, SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/kierkegaard/the-concept-of-dread.
Reference to the edition that SigPhi reproduces: SigPhi is its digital reproduction, not its publisher. The edition's year is not in the metadata (hence "n.d."), and the translator appears only when recorded.
What it is about
Anxiety examined as a concept: what exactly this fear without an object is, and what it has to do with original sin.
Context and history
Published in 1844 under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. The definition people quote is that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom: you do not fear some particular thing, you fear that you could do anything at all. The book passes for psychology and at moments is, but it is written against Hegel and against the idea that sin can be explained inside a system — hence its insistence that sin always arrives by a leap, never by a deduction.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Thus when sometimes in the course of investigations which are hardly more than propaedeutic 4 one finds the word "reconciliation" used to designate speculative knowledge, or the identity of the knowing subject and the thing known, the subjective-objective, etc., then one easily sees that the author is brilliant and that by the aid of his esprit he has explained all riddles, especially for those who do not even scientifically take the precaution, which yet one takes in everyday life, to listen carefully to the words of the riddle before guessing it. Otherwise one acquires the incomparable merit of having by one's explanation propounded a new riddle, namely, how it could occur to any man that this might be the explanation. That thought possesses reality was the assumption of all ancient philosophy as well as of the philosophy of the Middle Ages. With Kant this assumption became doubtful. Suppose now that the Hegelian school had really thought through Kant's scepticism (however, this ought always to remain a big question, in spite of all Hegel and his school 5 have done, by the help of the catchwords "Method and Manifestation," to hide what Schelling 8 recognized more openly by the cue "intellectual intuition and construction," the fact, namely, that this was a new point of departure) and then reconstructed the earlier view in a higher form, in such wise that thought does not possess reality by virtue INTRODUCTION 11 of a presupposition — is then this consciously produced reality of thought a reconciliation ? In fact philosophy is merely brought back to the point where in old days one began, in the old days when precisely the word "reconciliation" had immense significance. We have an old and respectable philosophical terminology: thesis, antithesis, synthesis. They invent a newer one in which mediation occupies the third place. Is this to be considered such an extraordinary step in advance?…