The Concept of Anxiety - Anxiety

Anxiety

The anxious person stands at the crossroads and wonders which way to go. Kierkegaard captured the sentiment well in his book Either/Or, which is filled with examples of people at the crossroads. Part I is all about an individual who is anxious about everything while Part II is about an individual who is more relaxed because he's developed a life view. Kierkegaard used his Two Upbuilding Discourses published just after Either/Or to provide a positive alternative to the individual at the crossroads. The first person, from Either/Or Part I, is anxious about the future and the second, from his discourse, has developed a life view.

What portends? What will the future bring? I do not know, I have no presentiment. When a spider hurls itself down from some fixed point, consistently with its nature, it always sees before it only an empty space wherein it can find no foothold however much it sprawls. And so it is with me: always before me an empty space; what drives me forward is a consistency which lies behind me. This life is topsy-turvy and terrible, not to be endured. Part 1 p. 24 Swenson

"How, then, shall we face the future? When the sailor is out on the ocean, when everything is changing all around him, when the waves are born and die, he does not stare down into the waves, because they are changing. He looks up at the stars. Why? Because they are faithful; they have the same location now that they had for our ancestors and will have for generations to come. By what means does he conquer the changeable? By the eternal. By the eternal, one can conquer the future, because the eternal is the ground of the future, and therefore through it the future can be fathomed. What, then, is the eternal power in a human being? It is faith. What is the expectancy of faith? Victory-or, as Scripture so earnestly and so movingly teaches us, that all things must serve for good those who love God. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Soren Kierkegaard 1843-1844 Copyright 1990 by Howard V. Hong Princeton University Press p. 19

The Brothers Grimm were writing about the use of folktales as educational stories to keep individuals from falling into evil hands. Kierkegaard refers to The Story of the Youth Who Went Forth to Learn What Fear Was in The Concept of Anxiety (p. 155). Can the "power of the example", or theatre pedagogy, or the theatre of the absurd, help an individual learn how to find the good? Imagination can be of assistance but it can also keep an individual from making crucial decisions. What's keeping him from making the decision? Nothing except the imagination of the individual involved in making the decision, imaginations of guilt and sin and fear and rejection. In Fear and Trembling Abraham had to choose to follow God or call him a monster. In Repetition the Young Man had to choose to get married or to follow his love of writing. Both were "imaginative constructions" created by Kierkegaard that dealt with hope and love. Kierkegaard felt that imaginative constructions should be upbuilding. Kierkegaard wrote about "the nothing of despair", God as the unknown is nothing, and death is a nothing. The single individual has a reality which fiction can never represent. People should learn the difference between imaginary constructions and reality. Many things are hard to understand but Kierkegaard says, "Where understanding despairs, faith is already present in order to make the despair properly decisive."

God grant, that all playwrights compose nothing but tearjerking plays, full of all possible anxiety and horror that would not allow your flabbiness to rest on the cushioned theater seats and let you be perfumed with supranatural power but would horrify you until in the world of actuality you learn to believe in that which you want to believe in only in poetry. Either/Or Part II p. 122