Quotation
Last reviewed:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Søren Kierkegaard · Existentialism (forerunner) · Modern · 1844
What does it mean?
Anxiety, in The Concept of Anxiety, is not fear of an object in the room. It is the dizziness of freedom: looking down into what you can do, including what you can do wrongly. The book is published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, so the sentence is a psychological voice inside a theological argument about the fall. A rival reading, clinical and also some later existentialist, takes the dizziness as a useful description of possibility and drops the hereditary sin. That use is real. It is not the book's own frame.
Did Søren Kierkegaard really say this?
The library’s label is Paraphrase or translation. Standard English of a sentence in The Concept of Anxiety, published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. The image is of looking down into one's own possibility.
Where it comes from
The Concept of Anxiety, chapter 2
Approximate date: 1844.
How to use it
A graduate in Edinburgh cannot name a threat and still cannot sleep, because a choice would make them someone. Ask whether you are looking at a possibility rather than at a danger. The question is his. It is not a diagnosis, and it is not a reason to skip a GP.
A mindset reading
Anxiety here is the feeling of a freedom that can fall. Erasing every trace of it is not what the chapter asks. Romanticising it is not what the chapter asks either. Both misuses are common.
Understand the philosophy
The book distinguishes anxiety from fear and ties it to the leap. Even if you refuse the theology, the distinction between fear of something and dizziness before one's own possibility has had a long afterlife, including in the existentialists who rarely keep his pseudonyms.
- freedom
- mind
- self
FAQ
What does it mean?
Anxiety, in The Concept of Anxiety, is not fear of an object in the room. It is the dizziness of freedom: looking down into what you can do, including what you can do wrongly. The book is published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, so the sentence is a psychological voice inside a theological argument about the fall. A rival reading, clinical and also some later existentialist, takes the dizziness as a useful description of possibility and drops the hereditary sin. That use is real. It is not the book's own frame.
Did Søren Kierkegaard really say this?
Paraphrase or translation. Standard English of a sentence in The Concept of Anxiety, published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. The image is of looking down into one's own possibility.
Which work is it in?
The Concept of Anxiety, chapter 2 Approximate date: 1844.