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The Concept of Anxiety

_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. --Reviewer: Ross James Browne from Atlanta, Georgia United States

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The seedlings of existential thought
Kierkegaard's analysis of the concept of anxiety is unbelievably useful! He presents anxiety as dealing with guilt and sin in a Christian context but his idea and thought can be understood in a secular and non-religious format as well.

Kierkegaard is responding to Hegel's optimism strikingly in this work. Hegel's attempt at a systematic explanation of the ever-evolving Idea is shattered for Kierkegaard by man's encounter with non-being and nothingness, and this encounter is accompanied by the anxiety of man in the world.

This work, along with Philosophical Fragments, and the Sickness Unto Death, are the most important and influential of Kierkegaard's writing. In his work Being and Time, Heidegger uses Kierkegaard's analysis of the threat of non-being to describe what he calls "angst." Sartre does similarly in Being and Nothingness when he speaks of man's freedom as condemned to anguish. There are countless other works that indicate that this contribution by Kierkegaard truly is the seedlings of modern western existential thought.

A must have for anyone with a beginning interest in Kierkegaard! --Reviewer: Anthony L. Macri, Jr. from Wyckoff, NJ United States