What the hell am I doing? Do I really need to explore Kierkegaard's thoughts about original sin, the individual, progression, the flow of time, dogma, dread eroticism, sensuality, modesty, self-knowledge, demons, faith, repentance, anxiety? I once read, and I think this was attributed to Brian Eno, that the Velvet Underground's first album only sold a few thousand copies, but everyone who bought one formed a band. I would have written the joke myself, but the fact that the joke only exists in abstract, in possibility, MUST make the joke more funny.
Once the joke gains form, becomes actual, the joke loses the possibility of humor. The joke dies. God dies. Look, I'm a fairly smart guy. But sometimes these BIG philosophy books throw me for a loop. They make me feel like I need to study and not just read the book. This is a book where I would probably get more out of it through some sort of level classroom dialectic.
I need somebody with more experience with Hegel, Jewish thought, Socrates, and Christian ethics and existentialism than I possess to brief. To hold my hand through this book. To smack my hand as I wander off into unexplored tributaries. Alas, being an adult reading this alone on my bed, I have none of those things. I have my friends on GR. I have a dictionary.
I have a fairly large library. I have time crap, if I write time here now, will I have to explore past, future, eternity, etc? Anyway, it was worth it. It wasn't too much to bear. I read it.
I'm glad I did. View all 16 comments. I didn't realize how interesting this book could be at this reading. You fall asleep while reading it if you are not awake. It feels like Kierkegaard is continually repeating himself. However, after the fact and in reflection, I found some benefit.
Here is what I got from it. In the Garden of Eden, Adam is most satisfied. He breathes the joy of living until God commands him: "Do not eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge! To I didn't realize how interesting this book could be at this reading. To prove that he is free, he must violate this prohibition, this law - despite the consequences.
The anguish comes from knowing what we must do to prove our freedom, even when it must destroy us. Hence the idea that "anguish is the vertigo of freedom". The release is not a right but a privilege for those who know how to prove themselves worthy of it. Finally, it is a book that I do not regret having read! View 2 comments. This is one of Kierkegaard's most difficult texts - and also one of his first. But it's a necessary read and one I've been putting off for much too long simply because it sets up many of the concepts that constitute his chief works.
In Anxiety, Kierkegaard explores the relationship between sin as a dogmatic and psychological concept. He holds that sin entered the world in historical time, when Adam made his choice in Eden. But, there's a catch. Because sin didn't exist before Adam, he couldn't This is one of Kierkegaard's most difficult texts - and also one of his first. Because sin didn't exist before Adam, he couldn't have known what he was doing.
God gave him a choice, but it wasn't really a choice, confined as it was between only two possibilities. So there wasn't much freedom - as the word is used in modernity - in what Adam did. His choice positioned humanity in an eternal relationship with God - and rooted anxiety in this relationship. Anxiety is the "dizziness" or, as Sartre would say, the "nausea" that we feel when we realize that life is a continuous stream of possible choices. But sin grounds this anxiety in one's relationship with God.
The only way out of anxiety is the famous "leap of faith," which Kierkegaard discusses in later texts. That is, faith in the paradox - not the irrational - but the paradox of Christ, as the vessel this probably the wrong word that God the eternal uses to enter time. It's essential to note that Christ is a paradox and NOT a contradiction.
And, for Kierkegaard, belief in a paradox or in the absurd isn't an abandonment of reason, when it's the only choice that can be used to make life, existence, and the individual meaningful. The Christ cannot be explained rationally - and God is most interested in the individual. God created individuals - not systems or, in Nietzsche's word, "herds. And any science that attempts to prove or disprove the existence of God is on the wrong track.
This stuff isn't the domain of the scientific. Our experience of anxiety really signifies our lack of faith.
This lack is the relationship between anxiety and sin. We, according to Kierkegaard, have to have faith in the absurd in order not to experience anxiety. But it's almost impossible to sustain this belief, when the culture, capitalism, and even organized religion aethesthetize everything and make the extraordinary Christianity into the mundane and the traditional.
But anxiety seems our lot. Because humanity exists in a state of becoming, it always has a tendency to slip back into questioning Christ from a rational or aesthetic perspective. This makes no sense because God is completely Other than us. And yet we do it I'll be honest - I need to think more about hereditary sin. Kierkegaard seems to be arguing that lust didn't exist before Adam made the leap to sin. And now we are all conceived in lust, which is a sin against God. This means that we come into the world as a result of sin.
But, again, this sin is grounded in God's will, which orients us toward him, through spirit and Christ. So sin is never final - and it's not predestined that certain people are "sinners" who will never know God. God is unknowable or, as Beckett, would say, unnamable. Sin grounds us in a relationship with God. And the anxiety that we feel about sin - about "doing the right thing" - makes possible the choice of finding a relationship with God through faith in the paradox and absurdity of Christ.
View all 3 comments. These things always create conflicting feelings in me. I liked the book, it is a major philosophical work. Kierkegaard's influence on contemporary thinking is unquestionable, thanks to little details such as being the first existentialist, having an incredibly creative mind that made him a relevant figure in literature, psychology, theology However, it is not something I can relate to, or agree with I am not quite comfortable saying this, but well, it is the truth.
He states that it can make you sin, but it also may lead you to salvation. He is not talking about just one form of anxiety, he explores a lot of them. This book may give you a new perspective on life, if you can relate to its content. If not, it's still a truly interesting reading. View all 8 comments. Kierkegaard is a gifted writer. He writes what he wants because he knows he's saying something worthwhile and lets his reading public be darned if they can't figure it out.
He reminds me of Melville. He'd rather sell almost no books and say something of value than sell many books but say nothing of value. This book gets at why I read books.
Nothing to me is more important than understanding who we are as human beings and Kierkegaard gives an understanding for that within this book.
He presumes th Kierkegaard is a gifted writer. He presumes the reader comprehends Hegel's "Science of Logic" and he writes in the style of Hegel's "Phenomenology", a style that involves thinking about the abstract by considering it within an abstract and then going towards a concrete.
A way of thinking about thought that I love. The book has multiple takeaways but to get there various concepts get thrown at the reader through the paradoxes that Kierkegaard always has lurking about in his books. The particular is not the universal and the universal needs the particular, or Adam is not the race but each man is a member of the race. He takes this theme and plays with it and gets at the paradoxes that gives us our understanding.
Every man is different but yet we think of them as part of a race or as humanity. Each individual is only like the others but is not the others.
Adam, the first man, or what we call a man, is part of the race. He'll say that 'the sensuous is not the sin but its the sinfulness that gives us the sin". The truths we believe are falsifications since the particular is not the universal nor the general the singular. There is a whole lot of Nietzschean thought floating around in this book. He does talk about anxiety and he'll say that "anxiety is about nothing". That's a real theme he has within this book.
It's the nature of being or existence or how do we deal with nothing and what does it mean. He mentioned that one of the last acts of Christ was when a demon came up to him and said "what do you have to do with me" showing how the "anxiety for the good is demonic" since the demon believes Christ goodness should have nothing to do with him.
If this book was all I knew about Kierkegaard, I would think he was not religious because the way he frames his arguments and how he used the bible only to make his points. He's got a chapter on 'now' and what does it mean. I found it way more illuminating than the modern book "Now: The Physics of Time" which I read just the week before. Kierkegaard really gets the concept in non-physics speak and understands what our instants mean.
He doesn't put that chapter in for no reason. He knows the convolution between our understanding about our existence and the nature of being immortal and the understanding of immortality and the more we know our now the further we will be from the ultimate good the infinite.
He understands the pieces and knows how to put them together. The fun part for me was later in the book: "Irony is jealous of earnestness". He's getting at our understanding of our authenticity, but he uses the word 'earnestness' or 'inwardness'. In Heidegger's division II of "Being and Time" the "Time" part he clearly is indebted to Kierkegaard and this book for how Heidegger develops his dasein a thing that takes a stand on its own understanding or as Kierkegaard is doing in this book getting at our own understanding of human being.
There are differences between the writers but the overlap includes that our understanding needs the anxiety about the nothingness for our authenticity to be actualized within our finite time because being is time and time is finite.
There's a part of me that said he is mocking Hegel, religion, and the psychology of his times and doesn't really mean what he is writing, but even if that were true, he is telling a story about the human experience such that you know at times he just wants to 'howl! No doubt, this is a complex book beautifully written. View 1 comment. Apr 24, B. Kierkegaard had just turned thirty-one. The modest edition of copies, half the number of the other pseudonymous works, was finally sold out eleven years later, whereupon a second edition of copies was ordered and published in August , just three months before Kierkegaard died at the age of forty-two.
There will never not be a time in my l " The Concept of Anxiety original title Begrebet Angest was first published in June There will never not be a time in my life when I will not need Kierkegaard. I've already read The Sickness unto Death , which was a sequel of-sorts to this book. That book deals with despair--this book deals with anxiety.
The questions that this book is trying to answer is: What is anxiety? Where did it come from? How do we deal with it? If you are familiar with Kierkegaard then you know he gives no easy explanations to these and his answers may not be satisfactory to those of the atheistic faith. Even those who are religiously inclined may not like what this doctor's diagnosis is. I am not gonna try to explain it because while I can understand it, I can't do it the justice that Kierkegaard does and also I have a headache right-now which precludes me from in-depth analysis with Kierkegaard's prose.
I could give a layman's explanation of this book like a lot of the other Goodreads review, but I feel that I would for the most part just be summarizing one chapter and Kierkegaard deserves more than that. But to show I am not totally difficult, I will post the paragraph that this work is mostly known here on Goodreads for: " Anxiety can be compared with dizziness.
He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason? It is just as much his own eye as the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. It is in this way that anxiety is the dizziness of freedom that emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grabs hold of finiteness to support itself.
In this dizziness freedom subsides. While I definitely classify this book as philosophy, I will note that there is a sort of scientific-like examination that--while nothing like modern psychology--is not philosophical.
Since I can't claim any familiarity with 19th or 20th century psychology, I can't pass any judgement on it. In the end, I definitely enjoyed this book and the message it gives to me. Even though he is mainly concerned with anxiety, he tackles so many other things in this book to get here.
Kierkegaard's favorite philosopher was Socrates and it shows. Well, Kierkegaard is my favorite philosopher and I hope that I can somehow try to keep showing that through my own life. The attacks of anxiety, even though terrifying, will then not be such that he flees from them.
Anxiety becomes for him a ministering spirit that leads him, against its will, where he will. Then, when it announces itself, when it disingenuously makes it look as though it has invented an altogether new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not draw back, and still less does he try to ward it off with noise and confusion, but bids it welcome, greets it solemnly, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he takes it in with him and says, as a patient would say to the surgeon, when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready.
Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything, and frightens the finite and petty out of him, and it then leads him where he will. I struggled with this as I think it required greater familiarity with that with which he was arguing Nonetheless I still find him immensely stimulating, often very funny too.
A recondite yet insightful read that both makes one gnash one's teeth and flinch with sudden violence when the home truths emerge from their ambuscades. Before I get to the nitty-gritty behind the work, I'll say a few words about the writing and presentation itself, since I feel that here the form is of great moment. Now, Vigilius Haufniensis hereafter "Kierkegaard" - for clarity's questionable sake makes a point of writing as obfuscatingly and as turgidly as he possibly can.
The question is: A recondite yet insightful read that both makes one gnash one's teeth and flinch with sudden violence when the home truths emerge from their ambuscades. The question is: what on Earth for? Is he taking the Hegelian piss? Is this simply aimed at the learned 19th-century audience, only to be understood by them if by anyone?
Or is Kierkegaard trying to drive home a valuable point through stylistic means? Any or all of the above might be the case here. The way of writing is unquestionably Hegelian, with its propensity for categories, middle terms and negations - and hazy arguments shrouded either in diaphanous semantic niceties or the impenetrable winding sheet of ludicrous terms.
Kierkegaard was indubitably influenced by Hegel, there's no way around it, yet he pokes fun at the great systematist and his acolytes - the speculators - time and again, which calls the reader's attention to the whole set-up: is Kierkegaard simply being a hypocritical humbug or is he simply winking at us with is accustomed diablerie? Here's my theory: Kierkegaard is writing wittingly heavy stuff, yet not to the extent that I found myself struggling with the read.
The text makes use of Kierkegaard's core terms like infinity, eternity, moment, demonic etc. Part of the reason for the heaviness is that he wanted to point out the shortcomings of Hegelian philosophy in relation to Christianity, and Kierkegaard wanted to beat the speculators in their own game. Another part for this congested gobbledygook is that he wanted to show how futile such careful definitions and argumentative gymnastics are in comparison with things that cannot be so defined in Kierkegaard's opinion.
Indeed, he clearly states that things like eagerness on which a great deal of Kierkegaard's philosophy rests cannot be put into words - they're existential categories. Lastly, Kierkegaard does sometimes let go of the academic jargon when he wants to deliver certain key points, which in my opinion bears out that he wasn't using the complex terminology just because it was the best medium for his study.
Summa summarum, through the delivery of The Concept of Anxiety , Kierkegaard once showed what an irritating little Or I could be horribly wrong about it all, and I'm simply too daft to follow through his arguments. However, I'm not making this up simply in order to make myself feel better for not understanding everything herein - luckily, I've read Kierkegaard before to already know what kind of a trickster he can be.
When it comes to the fruit of the deliberations professed herein, I must say I'm a bit puzzled. Because I don't necessarily share the same premisses as Kierkegaard does, it was rather difficult for me to see whence the necessity for delineating the psychological, the dogmatic and the ethical so carefully and so The same applies for his idea about the spirit as opposed to the mind - I simply don't get it. And this is a great shame, because if I don't agree to the teachings of Christianity and to religiousness on the whole, Kierkegaard is simply talking about familiar psychical concepts here disguised as religious categories.
But as was typical for his time, there was really no need to explain the core concepts, because they were so obvious to many - and perhaps Kierkegaard even thought that there's no point in defining something like spirit as per what I said above. But I tried. The first part of the study concerning the relation of Adam and sin to that of later generations was more or less pointless for someone like me, since it only had to do with some theological minutiae.
Kierkegaard effectively avers that there is no proper metric for sin, since it enters into world through qualitative leaps - in other words, it enter every sinner separately, and before that takes place, sensuousness or any of those seemingly "base" things are not sinful very non-Catholic of K! However, this treatment does pave way for the topic of anxiety, which was a lot more relevant and interesting to my pagan self.
Kierkegaard speaks of anxiety as a degree of existential discomfort felt at the sheer plurality of possibilities before any act takes place. In this way, anxiety has "nothing" as its object - and Kierkegaard did a pretty rotten job at explaining this, since he definitely did suggest that you can be anxious about things.
Even when you're anxious about the "freedom of possibilities", that "freedom of possibilities" is your object, in my opinion. Otherwise no cogitation or no sense can have any object whatsoever. If I understood him correctly, the anxiety that is anxious about nothing is still not guilty, whereas anxiety that has an object which is still nothing?
Thus anxiety is rather confusing, yet Kierkegaard sees in it the absolute qualification for an individual becoming truly individual, since in anxiety they are drawn to their very own selves; they choose themselves and feel that those endless possibilities are for them only, and thus - by extension - for the whole human race. Through individualism one acquires the true understanding of human nature, and this is done especially through anxiety: one gets the idea that all these things one is anxious about can befall oneself, and the more one realises that all kinds of things can befall oneself, the more profound individual he becomes in Kierkegaard's books.
However, one can also be anxious about good things, which turn the individual demonic. Demonicity is something that is latent in all human beings, and at best it is merely absent - just like sinfulness. When we break off a yarn when we realise we can't blurt out a rude word in the presence of others, when we keep silent when we should probably grass on our friends, when we simply walk by when someone is in need, we're being demonic: in the first case, we're anxious about speaking what we truly think, in the second case about adhering to the truth and in the final case about charity.
These examples might be a bit incompetent, provided on how one sees when a demonic person acts , but the aforementioned cases should still be somewhat correct in principle.
Now, a true individual, in the throes of his existential Angst, will also keep in mind the possibility that he might become demonic at any point. Now, all this has clearly been a tremendous influence on Heidegger. He too saw the existential significance of anxiety and conscience, yet unlike him, Kierkegaard continues to play leapfrog and insists that the only safeguard against suicidal anxiety is faith. In other words, instead of developing the topic further and he definitely had the potential for it, being such a perspicacious chap , he backed off and jumped over the issue by resorting to faith.
Through the eagerness of faith and through the eagerness of anxiety, Man finds himself in moments of repetition and thus connects himself with eternity - the only thing one should in sooth be anxious about. And now I'm extrapolating a bit through this meaningful repetition of constant confirmation of faith, one repeats meaningfully the ideal existence.
That's about it for the main thesis. As usually happens when I read Kierkegaard, I start out pretty fascinated, my interest wanes soon whenever he starts digressing, and suddenly he offers me a fabulously incisive anecdote, which makes me regain my wandering attention. This time round, he made rather wonderful points in the midst of his main deliberations. First of all, he suggested that certain topics ought to be approached from a certain point of mood - not everything should be approached "rationally" or "scientifically", but rather this is what I thought him to mean if one talks about love, one should seek to express the concomitant emotions instead of simply providing an inventory of marital bliss.
And as always, Kierkegaard plants nice little reminders about not "rushing headlong into life" - something that anyone can tell you, but not something that everyone can convince you of. Once again, a Kierkegaardian read has proven to be both amusing and bemusing, and has shown itself belonging in the category of profundament all puns intended. I still do not know how to wrap my head around his words, since posits very different things from what I do and he belongs to a whole different ideological climate than I do, but every single time the bell of wisdom rings far away, however faintly, and calls me back to exert myself in trying to understand what the Danish shapeshifter has uncovered once again.
Though my patience wears thin with him at times, he nonetheless remains one of the most fascinating individual writers I've ever encountered. Woody Allen once joked, "I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in 20 minutes. It's about Original Sin.
Read full review at Nemo's Library View all 5 comments. I have a historic crush on Kierkegaard, a great mind. The man, the myth, the legend. I rate just about every Kierkegaard book as a 5 because, even if I disagree with the man, he has such a creative mind: I have never finished reading an SK book without being challenged by an entirely new perspective and style of thought.
The Concept of Anxiety is no different. Kierkegaard tackles sin and original sin, better termed hereditary sin, in a way that I'm not sure I've ever encountered before.
Numerous times he simply sidesteps the question of why there i The man, the myth, the legend. Numerous times he simply sidesteps the question of why there is sin, and perhaps how there is sin, and purposely never addresses the question of defining sin as this or that action. Some may be dissatisfied with this approach, but if you read the first quarter or so of the book and you'll find that he has the best of reasons for not answering the questions that most of us usually ask.
Instead, the book focuses on the attitudes and state of sin, and attitudes and state before sin, and attitudes and state within sin, and attitudes and state within before sin, and so on. Basically the question is, what wells up inside of an individual to cause sin, and what emotions and states of spirituality does sin cause? Since we must live in this world as individuals, sin is essentially assumed, and all the focus is on the individual who sins and who does not sin.
If you have trouble with the word, 'sin,' as more and more people do nowadays, you're in luck. Again, SK assumes sin in this world and in all of us, but sin is not actually the focus.
You might think it is based on my review, but take another look at the title of the work and you'll see that sin is only a secondary aspect of anxiety. Don't go into this book expecting to learn more about anxiety disorders or something like that. SK does take a psychological look at anxiety, but a he wrote this in the middle of the 19th century, and b though SK was far ahead of his time in many respects, I doubt psychology as we understand would ever be one of his concerns.
Anxiety as SK defines it is a much larger concept than we define it. Trust me on that one: I go to a psychiatrist weekly because of anxiety issues. I don't know if it's the material or the translation or some combination of both, but The Concept of Anxiety is not nearly as accessible as Works of Love or Fear and Trembling. The other two are easy by comparison.
Those having a background in I don't know if it's the material or the translation or some combination of both, but The Concept of Anxiety is not nearly as accessible as Works of Love or Fear and Trembling. Those having a background in Hegel and others will likely be better off, and once I do, I'll have to reread this one.
I didn't love it but I didn't hate it I liked that it made me feel less bad about my anxieties but it was hard for me to take it seriously. The house itself—and therefore his home—becomes a symbol of his exclusion:. Through this brown gloom, darkened now by a surly sky, Chris was taking the skiff, standing in the stern and using his oar like a gondolier.
Judith Butler explains this process of alienation entailed by the loss of the other:. If I lose you, under these conditions, then I not only mourn the loss, but I become inscrutable to myself. As they meet for the first time since his return, she loses all her attributes:. There was a rustle in the shadows, and he dropped my hands. The face that looked out of the dimness to him was very white, and her upper lip was lifted over her teeth in a distressed grimace.
It was immediately as plain as though he had shouted it that this sad mask meant nothing to him. Her depiction of a frail marriage based on social conformity reveals her desire to go against the norm, to go against expectations—an agenda that seems to reach its paroxysm through a rhetoric of omission. The aesthetics of omission at work in The Return of the Soldier aim indeed at debunking the normative power of such narratives.
The banalisation of scientific and medical analysis is a way for West to shift her focus from normative and alienating discourses to the experience of the traumatised and his family. Not only does the medical profession fail, but the male medical profession fails. How does he look? She crept behind me to the window, peered over my shoulder and saw.
I heard her suck in her breath with satisfaction. Elizabeth Reeves Covington perfectly accounts for this unsettling ending:. West establishes her literariness by erasing from the narrative the very aspect of the text that is most significant from the perspective of scientific and realist fictional discourse.
The final omission superbly fragments the novel and resonates with the traumatic omissions at play in the rest of the narrative, whose analysis would deserve to be the subject of another entire paper. The same technique is used at the end of the novel and resonates with the first pages of the story, as if the symbolic dash was the only way Kitty and Margaret could ever connect. Omission becomes the guiding thread of the whole novel and even permeates class barriers.
But if a baby could leave all this! The fracture is not only historical, medical nor social, but really is genealogical, regardless of gender or class. West offers an alternative end to Howards End, as the future of the nation no longer revolves around a marriage and a child but rather around the opposite: a dead child and a fractured marriage.
Her rhetoric of omission places West at the heart of an exceptional modernist project which sought, after the war, to go beyond canonical literature and to defy expectations. Imperial policies and the uneven gendering and class structures subtending the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are social, political, and economic traumas that remain obscured when the state and the nation are literally and figuratively under attack.
If exception can first appear as a source of exclusion and seems endowed with negativity, exception truly allows for a reassessment of established structures and for a shift of perspective on social, historical, scientific and narrative modes of expression.
Exception stands against both conformity and comfort: its aim is to disrupt, to disturb, to disorient. London: Verso, , — Nothing, except the function it receives, in a specific context, as long as its imperative is compared to an actual situation deemed unacceptable by the norm and to a foreseeable situation required by the norm and vice versa. Contents - Next document. Forster, V. Alice Borrego. Keywords: exception , norms , conformity , normality , exclusion , oppression , omission , counter-narrative , state-of-the-nation.
Outline The Invasion of the Abnormal. The Dynamics of Exclusion. Full text PDF Send by e-mail. Its absence is embedded in bodies and spi Nothing, except the function it receives, in a specific Top of page. Browse Index Authors Keywords. Follow us RSS feed. Newsletters OpenEdition Newsletter.
Member access Login Password Log in Cancel. In collaboration with. In All OpenEdition. Home Catalogue of journals OpenEdition Search. All OpenEdition. OpenEdition Freemium. OpenEdition Search Newsletter. Sin embargo la otra parte no es por ello para nada menor y continuamente se hace sentir por la ansiedad.
Porque el ismple pensar me presenta varioas maneras de actuar. Pero otros hacen un nuevo salto hacia el estadio religioso. Lo bueno para el esteta es todo aquello que es bello, que satisface o que es agradable. En este estadio se manifiesta el sentimiento de responsabilidad ante compromisos adoptados.
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