Kierkegaard, the philosopher of anxiety who did not marry so he could dedicate himself to thinking

We live in the age of anxiety. Or, at least, that is what we are told on many occasions and not without reason: economic and vital uncertainties, in addition to catastrophes like the pandemic, make us feel less control and security in our lives. We don’t know if our rent will be raised, the job market is uncertain, leaders like Putin and Trump weaken Western democracy, war threatens to return to Europe and we could also talk about pensions if it weren’t for the fact that climate change threatens to make them unnecessary. .

This feeling of helplessness is not new, although it may seem like it has never been experienced to this magnitude. 180 years ago, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard published The concept of anguish, the first book dedicated entirely to anxiety. Kierkegaard anticipates our ideas about this emotion, although his conception is also different from the contemporary one, and not only because psychologists and psychiatrists know more about the subject. For the thinker, anxiety is a fear that does not have a specific object, is inseparable from our life and our freedom, and has a religious root. Furthermore, his goal was neither to cure nor treat this feeling, but to understand it and even embrace it.

Begonya Sáez Tajafuerce, professor of Philosophy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, ​​remembers in a video call that Kierkegaard placed the origin of anguish in the original sin of Adam and Eve. This means that anxiety is born when the individual is aware of his freedom, his responsibility and his possibilities, an idea that influenced 20th century existentialism, and especially the work of Martin Heidegger and Jean-Claude. Paul Sartre.

A work that starts from life

For Kierkegaard, life has risks because we don’t know how things are going to turn out and we are never sure if we have made the right decision. But since anxiety is linked to our freedom and responsibility, it is an essential aspect of being human and is nothing we can or even should avoid.

The philosopher did not speak in the abstract, but his writings arise from experience. One of the keys to his anguish was the breakdown of his engagement to Regine Olsen. The philosopher doubted whether he would be able to lead a conventional life, married and with a job, or whether he should dedicate himself to being a writer and an artist: “He realized that it was impossible for him to unify these two ideas,” he explains in video call Joakim Garff, author of Kierkegaard, the philosopher of anguish and seduction (Tusquets), a recent biography of almost a thousand pages. In this decision there was “a clash between aesthetic fascination, on the one hand, and love and marriage, on the other.”

There is also, as we pointed out, a religious reading: the “vertigo of freedom” of which he speaks in The concept of anguish It is related to another of his books, Fear and Trembling, in which he starts from the story of Abraham: God asks the patriarch to sacrifice his only son, Isaac. Abraham prepares to kill him on Mount Moriah, but an angel stops him and tells him that God was only testing him. Kierkegaard reflects on faith from this story and comes to the conclusion that it involves a leap into the void: Abraham believed in God, but he had no way of knowing if it was a hallucination or a dream.

As Juan Arnau writes in his Portable Philosophy Manual, “anxiety can be paralyzing (vertigo before the abyss), but also a springboard for jumping.” We constantly take leaps of faith like Abraham’s, even if they are not religious: how do we know if we make the right decision when we change jobs, when we buy an apartment or when we start a romantic relationship?

Begonya Sáez Tajafuerce warns of the danger of forcing biographical interpretations and remembers that Kierkegaard’s texts are not just stories of his life: the author wants to understand and explain himself and, in doing so, gives us tools so that we can try. But Sáez also points out that Kierkegaard’s life “is connected to his work in many ways.” In his texts, the philosopher tries to answer everyday questions and establishes with the reader what Garff calls “an existential dialogue”: when we read Kierkegaard, “we dialogue with a person who has gone through many experiences that we can also recognize.” .

Kierkegaard maintains these dialogues with himself in his works, many of them signed with pseudonyms that sometimes, as in Either one or the other, they question each other and respond. This distances his texts from literal biographical interpretation and at the same time helps us continue reading him today. Professor Sáez explains that Kierkegaard writes from specific perspectives and points of view, with the aim of offering multifaceted texts that defy single interpretations. His philosophy is anchored to a changing, contradictory and paradoxical existence.

Living with anguish

All this does not mean that reading The concept of anguish can replace the psychologist, and even more so considering that it is not an easy book (Garff describes it as “almost illegible”). But it does help us understand why we all, to a greater or lesser extent, feel anxiety and why this feeling also contributes to making us human, just like other emotions that we prefer to avoid, such as pain and sadness. Anxiety is part of us, it is something we have to experience to a greater or lesser extent to be fully human and to learn from our vulnerabilities and, if necessary, our mistakes.

The British philosopher Erin Plunkett, book editor Kierkegaard and Possibility (Kierkegaard and possibility, not translated into Spanish), highlights in a video call the importance of keeping in mind this cultural and philosophical reading of anxiety without, of course, leaving aside the treatment that people who go through it need. “Instability is a painful feeling and, for example, experiences like the Covid pandemic are deeply destabilizing,” he explains. And reading Kierkegaard helps us realize that we always live, at least to some extent, “a precarious and contingent life,” no matter how much we try to distract ourselves from this sensation with work, the penultimate HBO series or whatever it offers us. the mobile at all times. Anxiety can be useful because it “awakens us to the possibility that things will not be the same tomorrow as they are today.” It makes us more attentive to our life, to what it offers us and what we can do with it.

Sign up here to the weekly Ideas newsletter.

_