Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #200712 in Books
• Published on: 1981-02-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 294 pages

Language Notes
Text: English, Danish (translation)

Customer Reviews

Too Confusing and Obscure Even for Kierkegaard
The opinions of several reader reviewers that this is basically straight forward and clear book strikes me as spectacularly unbelievable and show a lack of comprehension of this book. This is considered by most who are familiar with Kierkegaard ("K") to be his most difficult book. Most of K. is difficult for most readers, but this book is difficult even for readers who claim to have read all or most of his works.

First off, psychology in this work does not coincide with today's concept of psychology. Also, anxiety does not equate with today's common definition. The work is full of dense formulations and repititions and not a few contradictions (or at least great muddles). I have read all of K's works and think him the second most profound writer in all of history (Dante, being first). But this book is not easy. I believe K. himself was unsure of what he actually believed about sin, anxiety, eternal/temporal, infinite/finite etc.

Fortunately this book can be skipped. The essential insights of the book are contained in Postcript, Fragments and Sickness unto death. That is not to say that this book should be skipped, but I would advise readers not to expect clarity on significant points. Unlike Pound's Cantos, where Pound did expect everyone to understand a great deal of the poetry, K. would have wanted readers to gain certain, clear knowledge from The Concept of Anxiety. I believe he has failed and will only confuse not only the amateur K. reader, but also those who purport to understand ( or try to understand)in K's works in their entirety. The reader reviews of this book support my thesis since virtually everyone misreads this book.

I am anxious but I do not know why'
I am anxious but I do not know why , perhaps it is because I am writing a review of a book I do not understand. I understand that 'anxiety' is vague and has no necessary object, that it is 'free- floating'. ' Fear ' on the other hand has a specific object.
Anthony Storn on his Website defines Kierkegaards 'Anxiety concept' as follows:
"Kierkegaard asserts that anxiety preceded Adam's sin. Anxiety is not itself sin, but is the natural reaction of the soul when faced with the yawning abyss of freedom. When God commanded Adam not to eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the terms "good" and "evil", so says Kierkegaard, would have had no significance for him. His ignorance was indeed bliss. But the awful predicament of freedom, before and apart from sin, yielded anxiety. There is also an anxiety that is a manifestation of sinfulness, and Kierkegaard addresses that later. But first his concern is that all individual persons are born with the same freedom and anxiety as a result of that freedom that Adam possessed, and thus we sin not because we are sinners, but we become sinners because of our qualitative leap out of freedom into sin, and hence sinfulness. It is then that the expression of anxiety is sin."
As I understand it Kierkegaard seems to be pointing out the value of 'anxiety' as preliminary to the 'leap of faith' which will bring us to God. 'Anxiety' is the necessary prelude to the free decision which enables us to overcome it.
I do not mean to dispute this. I only wonder whether the 'leap' made once remains the 'leap ' forever. For in my own experience 'Anxiety' always returns , no matter what decision we make.

Essential Kierkegaard
_The Concept of Anxiety_ is one of Kierkegaard's most straightforward, honest, and personal works. Primarily, it deals with the typical human understanding of sin, why we designate certain acts as sinful, and how our perception or experience of these acts is altered by the fact that they are labled as "sinful". This book approaches the question of sin in a very enlightening and insightful manner, questioning certain aspects of sinfulness that we may have taken for granted. Kierkegaard reminds us that our experience of the sensual is greatly altered when the idea of "sinfulness" is attached to it, while paradoxically our understanding the definition of "sin" is contingent upon our sensual experiences. In other words, sin is simultaneously a necessary force in establishing what we consider to be sensual, while also being somewhat dependent on pure sensuality in order to establish itself as sin. Kierkegaard also examines the linguistic factors that contribute to our understanding of sensuousness and sinfulness. Kierkegaard asks us, to what extent to we depend upon language in order to solidify these primal sensual experiences in our memories? This book deals brilliantly with the entire spectrum of interrelationships among pure sensuality, sin, guilt, langauge, and memory. Kierkegaard weaves a tapestry showing us how all of the afforementioned concepts are inextricably intertwined. In sum, the message Kierkegaard is trying to convey is the fact that sin, language, memory, and the sensual are connected in both the retroactive and premonitory sense.

Overall this book is absolutely fascinating. It is not puritanical or biased in the orthodox religious sense. It deals very fairly with the human experience of sin and guilt, and suggests that these types of feelings are essential to the basic experiences of memory, sentient consciousness, and temporal, existential being. Highly recommended to anyone who is willing to entertain the idea that sin is a basic building block of intelligent subjective experience.