Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (1844): fear has an object; anxiety has none. It is like dizziness at the edge of an abyss — we fear not the fall but our own possibility of jumping. “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom.”
Martin Heidegger (What Is Metaphysics?): in anxiety beings as a whole slip away and the nothing is revealed. Jean-Paul Sartre: anguish is the consciousness of our freedom; Bad Faith is flight from it.
Sententiae
phrases in the originalAngst
Origin. Kierkegaard’s Danish “Angest” (The Concept of Anxiety, 1844), then Heidegger’s Angst in Being and Time. — Martin Heidegger
For existential dread.
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related by shared connectionsNirvāṇa
The Buddhist goal — the “blowing out” of the fires of greed, hatred and delusion, the end of suffering and of rebirth. The Buddha described it as unborn and unconditioned, and refused to say whether the awakened exist after death.
The Underground Man
Dostoevsky’s nameless, spiteful, hyper-conscious narrator who rebels against reason, progress and his own interests to prove he is free.
Alas, Poor Yorick
In the graveyard, Hamlet is handed the skull of the jester who carried him on his back as a child — and sees where all flesh, wit and glory end.
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s longest play — a prince ordered by his father’s ghost to avenge a murder thinks, doubts, delays, feigns madness, and dies in the act.
Mokṣa
Liberation — release from the cycle of rebirth and from all suffering, the highest goal of human life in the Hindu and Jain traditions (and, as nirvāṇa, in Buddhism). Every Indian school defines it differently, and the arguments over what it is, and how it is won, are the backbone of Indian philosophy.
Antigone
Sophocles’ tragedy of the young woman who buries her brother against the king’s decree — the founding drama of conscience against the state, which Hegel read as the collision of two rights.