*I took a 300 level philosophy course as a sophomore and never again. The reading never stopped. By the time the final exam came around it was close to a thousand pages, across fifteen different philosophers. It was one of the most bizarre things I have ever studied. This final essay was written off one page of a Kierkegaard book, since each of us was assigned a random page and told to write about it. I am publishing it anyway, because otherwise it just sits in a folder somewhere and gets lost.*
There is a passage in The Concept of Anxiety where Kierkegaard writes, “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss” (Kierkegaard 61). I read that and I thought that for so many years I had assumed anxiety was a malfunction in myself, something to drown out and something to fix. But reading this writing that anxiety is dizziness, I may feel as if I am free, and that the abyss is not outside of me. The abyss is looking down at all the people I could become and all the people I will never get to be.
In this essay I will argue that Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety reveals something paradoxical, and I think true: anxiety is not the opposite of living well but one of its preconditions. The very thing that frightens us is not a malfunction. It is the felt recognition of our own freedom. I will argue that anxiety is both what makes us fully human and what opens the door to our own downfall, and rather than treating that as a flaw in the argument, I want to show that this is exactly the point. Anxiety is not a problem to be solved but an unavoidable cost of being a person. A life without it would not be a better life. It would just be a smaller one.
To make this argument, I want to reconstruct Kierkegaard’s distinction between fear and anxiety, and his claims that anxiety is freedom’s recognition of itself rather than a response to certain threats. I also want to explain the concept of dizziness of freedom and the pull of attraction and repulsion he calls “sympathetic antipathy”(42). And I will evaluate why this matters, both for individual level and in cultures as well, with the claim that the more profound anxiety, the more profound the culture is. Finally, I will address the strongest objection to my thesis that if anxiety opens the door to sin we need to minimize it, and I want to show that anxiety cannot be reduced without also reducing the freedom which we want to keep.
Most people treat anxiety as a bigger and more generalized version of fear. Fear is when you know what you are scared of, and anxiety is when you are scared of everything at once or of nothing in particular. Kierkegaard says that framing is wrong. The difference between fear and anxiety is that fear has an object. I am afraid of the car that might hit me. I am afraid of failing the exam. I am afraid of losing someone I love. Fear is something specific and definite, which is why it makes sense to manage it. I can prepare for the thing I fear. Fear is rational in the way it is oriented.
Anxiety is not oriented and points to nothing. Kierkegaard writes that anxiety “is altogether different from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite, whereas anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility” (42). It does not arise from any particular thing but from the openness of what I could do, who I could become, and which direction my life could still go. I am not anxious because something bad is coming. I am anxious because I am free, and freedom, when you truly feel it rather than just understand it abstractly, is overwhelming. It is the fact that I have to choose. It is the fact that I am the one choosing.
Animals do not feel anxiety. Kierkegaard is very explicit about this, and not because animals live easier lives than we do, but because they follow instinct. “Anxiety is not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit” (42). A dog does not wake up wondering whether it made the right choices or whether its life could have gone differently. The animal’s path is largely determined for it. There is no abyss of open possibility staring back at it. I am not an animal, in philosophical terms at least. I am a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the determined and the free. My anxiety is a direct consequence of this synthesis. The more developed I am as a person, the deeper my anxiety, not because life is worse, but because I am more awake to just how open everything is. I am stretched between them, and the stretching is exactly where anxiety lives.
What does it mean exactly to call myself a synthesis? Kierkegaard’s Vigilius Haufniensis has written that “man is a synthesis of the psychological and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit” (Kierkegaard 43). But the synthesis runs wider than just body and mind. On one side, I am finite. I am stuck with the body I have, the family I was born into, this particular point in history, the years of my life that have already passed, the language I think in, the limits of what I will and can know. Most of what defines me I did not pick or choose, and cannot change. On the other hand, I am infinite. I have an imagination that can picture lives I will never live, choices I have not yet made but am about to, futures that exist as possibilities and now only as openness. The Stanford Encyclopedia describes Kierkegaard’s self as an “on-going synthesis of contrasting fundamental characteristics: the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal; the necessary and the possible” (Lippitt and Evans). It is not a synthesis I ever finish making or ever complete entirely, as anxiety shows up in the gap between those two sides. A pure animal, all finite, would never feel it. A pure spirit, all infinite, would not need to, and I feel it because I am caught between these things.
The image Kierkegaard uses for innocence is strange, as in innocence, “the spirit in man is dreaming” (Kierkegaard 41). The spirit is present but not yet awake. It is starting to project its own actuality, but that actuality is “nothing” because the person has not yet acted, has not yet chosen anything (41). And this nothing, Kierkegaard says, “begets anxiety” (41). What I find interesting is that this overturns a normal assumption we have, that anxiety shows up after something goes wrong, such as a loss, a failure, or a hard decision we have to face. We fail an exam, we lose a person we love, and then we believe the anxiety appears. But Kierkegaard is saying anxiety was there first, even when sleeping inside the most peaceful moment of innocence. It is not caused by anything external; rather, it is the spirit’s first awareness that it has the power to act, before even knowing what action is. This is what Kierkegaard means when he calls anxiety “the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety” (41). Innocence was never simply peaceful or clear as it looked; anxiety was always its hidden condition.
He also says that anxiety is “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy” (42). I both hate it and also I am drawn to it, at exactly the same time. He makes this point through children. When you watch children, he says, you discover that anxiety shows up as “a seeking for the adventurous, the monstrous, and the enigmatic” (42). Children are repelled by the dark and desperate to go toward it. They want a scary story. They watch the frightening thing through their fingers and then beg for it again. Kierkegaard is not describing something irrational. He is describing the structure of anxiety itself. It “captivates him by its pleasing anxiousness” (42). The abyss is not just threatening. It is fascinating. And the fascination is not a mistake we should correct. It is a sign that anxiety is tied to everything genuinely alive and meaningful about human experience.
The most difficult passage in these pages is also the most important. Kierkegaard compares anxiety to the dizziness of a person who looks down into a yawning abyss. He writes that the dizziness is “just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down” (61). This means the void he is staring into is partly his own. It is his own freedom, his own open possibility, looking back at him. He calls this “the dizziness of freedom” (61), and that is the central image of the whole writing I assume. It is not the height that makes him fall. It is the fact that he could jump.
Then he describes what happens inside that dizziness. The person does not make a clean rational choice to fall. Kierkegaard says “freedom succumbs in this dizziness” (61). And when freedom rises again on the other side, it sees that it is guilty. But he insists that the person becomes “as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become” (61). They are innocent because anxiety, “a foreign power, that laid hold of him,” took hold of them (43). It was not fully them who fell. But they are also guilty, because they sank into the very thing they feared and loved at the same time, and they cannot blame anyone else. The fall came out of their own freedom, which is their own self.
This brings me to what I want to say about Kierkegaard that I think anxiety is good in a deeper sense than just being unavoidable. It is connected to everything genuinely alive and meaningful about human experience. The reason I am drawn to big questions, to difficult art, to uncomfortable ideas, to honest conversations about things that do not have simple answers perhaps, is that I am naturally oriented toward depth, and depth is exactly what anxiety tends to track. The things I find most meaningful in life are the things that come with the most anxiety attached.
Kierkegaard does not limit this to the individual. He extends it to entire cultures. He writes directly that “The more profound the anxiety, the more profound the culture” (42). A culture that has learned to sit with anxiety is a culture capable of producing great philosophy, great art, and genuine ethical thought. A culture that suppresses anxiety, by telling everyone how to think and who to be and what to value, ends up trading depth for stability. It might keep people calm, but it makes them shallower.
Kierkegaard’s claim becomes more concrete when I think about some of my favorite writers I have read. The cultures that produced the absolute best came from people living through hard and uncertain times. In 19th-century Russia, when the society was struggling with problems like censorship, poverty, loss of faith, religious doubt, and the collapse of the old social order. What emerged from it were great writers like Fyodor Dostoevsky, Leo Tolstoy, and Anton Chekhov, writers whose works are considered very powerful and among the very best even a century later, born out of absolute catastrophe. Comparing that with a lot of modern culture today, where the explicit goal in most cases has become to stay calm, sleep better, avoid stress, and feel emotionally balanced and grounded, the work of today rarely carries the same weight as that created by people willing to face extremely uncomfortable thoughts under a rigid, structured society.
That said, I do not want to overstate this and take this argument too far. Kierkegaard can sound in this passage like he is romanticizing suffering, saying that suffering automatically makes people wiser or better, simply because they are anxious. That is not the point, and it would not be true if he did. There is a big difference between a society that honestly faces anxiety and one that is crushed by it. The first can create deep thinking and meaningful art, while the second leads only to hopelessness. That difference is very crucial, because otherwise the argument would become unfair to people who are truly suffering.
We tend to think that a less anxious society is a healthier one. Reading this made me wonder if a society with low anxiety is not necessarily doing better. It might just have less room to grow.
This is also where Kierkegaard’s image of dizziness becomes personal for me. Standing at the edge of my own life, looking forward, is what causes the dizziness. The void I stare into is my own freedom. The emptiness that overwhelms me is the infinite space of paths I have not taken yet. The question I keep coming back to is: what happens if I refuse to look? What if I step back from the edge and never let myself consider the abyss at all? The answer, for Kierkegaard, is that I would stay innocent in the bad sense. I would never wake up as spirit. Dizziness is not the price of living a bad life. It is the price of becoming a self at all.
There is a moment that comes back to me when I read Kierkegaard’s description of the dizziness of freedom. I had to decide whether to stay in Nepal, where I had grown up and where my family was, or to leave for the United States. Staying meant a life I could already picture - those streets, those people, a future I could more or less see coming. Leaving meant a country I had only imagined and a version of myself I could not picture at all. What I felt standing at that decision was not fear in any ordinary sense; there was nothing specific to be afraid of. Both lives were safe enough. What I felt was closer to what Kierkegaard describes. The void I was looking into was not in either path. It was in me. I had to choose, and nothing outside me was going to do it for me. Whichever way I went, I would become the person who made that choice. This is what Kierkegaard means when he says the dizziness is just as much in the eye as in the abyss (Kierkegaard 61).
Before getting to the objections, it is important to understand what Søren Kierkegaard means by sin and anxiety. Kierkegaard, writing as Vigilius Haufniensis, holds that anxiety “is the state that precedes sin,” but the transition from anxiety to sin always happens through what he calls a “leap” (Lippitt and Evans). As he writes, “between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain” (Kierkegaard 61). That sounds like evasion, but the point is specific: if the move from anxiety could be fully explained, it would no longer be free. It would be the conclusion of a causal chain, like being carried along by the chain of events. Which means the person who fell did not really fall in any moral sense; they were pushed.
This is also why guilt is complicated and “ambiguous” for him. A person is innocent in the sense that anxiety can overpower them, but also guilty because the decision still came from their own freedom, and they fell to their own freedom. Both sides exist at the same time, and ignoring either side misses the point Kierkegaard is describing.
The strongest argument against my thesis goes like this. If anxiety is what opens the door to sin, then embracing it, or encouraging people to sit with it rather than manage it, seems morally irresponsible. Wouldn’t it be safer and more ethical to minimize anxiety wherever possible? If the dizziness of freedom is what causes the fall, then shouldn’t we try to just stay grounded? The objection has more force. Kierkegaard himself describes the moment of falling in unflattering terms, as freedom fainting in weakness (61). If that is what anxiety leads to, why not avoid it?
The problem with this objection is that it assumes I could reduce anxiety without also reducing my freedom. Kierkegaard would say the two are inseparable. Anxiety is not a side effect of freedom that I could surgically remove while leaving the freedom intact. Anxiety is freedom’s felt recognition. If I somehow stopped feeling anxious about my future, what I would actually have done is stopped being genuinely free. I would have closed off the infinite openness of my own possibility. I would have decided in advance that I already know who I am and what I am going to choose, which is to choose nothing. I would have stepped back from the cliff. And this would mean my moral growth would stop in the first place. The person who never fell never had to take real responsibility either. My mind would be shut, my body unharmed but never tested and never in its highest potential.
There is also a second response. The objection treats anxiety as if it were the same kind of thing as suffering, where less is always better. But Kierkegaard’s whole point is that anxiety is not suffering. It is the structure of being a self in time. He writes that the anxiety in innocence “is no guilt, and in the second place it is no troublesome burden, no suffering that cannot be brought into harmony with the blessedness of innocence” (42). Anxiety, in his view, is not a wound to be healed. It is more like a light that turns on when you become aware that you are free. You can shut your eyes against the light, but you cannot make yourself unfree by doing so. You only make yourself less honest about it.
There is also another objection. Kierkegaard talks about anxiety as a philosophical experience, the felt recognition of one’s own freedom. But that is not what most people think of when they hear the word “anxiety.” Most people mean panic attacks, constant fear, sleeplessness, or even just the dread that stops you from leaving your apartment, eating, or sleeping. If that is supposed to help someone “become a self,” then telling people to sit with it sounds cruel. Someone in the middle of a panic attack is not having a profound encounter with their own freedom. They are suffering, and what they need is treatment. A theory that ignores this could be seen as detached from reality. He distinguishes between anxiety as the structure of being a free self and anxiety that has become, in his words, a “feminine weakness in which freedom faints” (Kierkegaard 61). My argument is not that all anxiety is good or that suffering is a marker of depth. The argument is much narrower as to: anxiety as such, the felt openness of being free, is the condition of becoming a self. The answer is to learn to engage it, not to eliminate it. Treating it purely as a clinical problem to remove is a category error, trying to cure something that is structural to being human.
If Kierkegaard is right, then the question I started with is anxiety good for me? It turns out to be a question I honestly cannot meaningfully ask. Anxiety is not the kind of thing that can be evaluated separately from being a self. It is what being a self feels like from the inside, and asking whether I would be better off without it is like asking whether I would be better off without my own freedom. Maybe easier, for sure, but then I would not be me. It would be someone with just a body walking around making the choices that were already made for it. It would be someone who never woke up as spirit, never felt the openness of my own life, never had to take responsibility for who I was becoming. The version of me that never felt anxiety would not be a happier version of me, but rather no version of me at all - only a body walking around making the choices that were already made for it. What I take from Kierkegaard is the refusal to believe that, this would be a better life. Dizziness is the price of being awake, and I would rather choose to be so.
I am a person in a world with options, walking around an abyss that is partly mine, made by my decisions and my world. Kierkegaard would tell me that the motive is to not escape it preferably to witness it. To recognize it. To say, yes, I am dizzy, and the dizziness is the price I pay for being a self. The lesson is not that anxiety is pleasant or that I should chase it. The lesson is that anxiety is the shape my freedom takes when I let myself feel it, and refusing to feel it would mean refusing the freedom too. That is why I think Kierkegaard is what I relate to and feel is valid. He gives a name to something we usually treat as a problem and shows that it was never a problem in the first place. It was the cost of being awake, your best self.
Works Cited
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically-Oriented Deliberation on the Dogmatic Problem of Hereditary Sin. Edited and translated by Reidar Thomte, Princeton University Press, 1980.
Lippitt, John, and C. Stephen Evans. “Søren Kierkegaard.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta, Stanford University, 22 May 2023, plato.stanford.edu/entries/kierkegaard/.