What Part of Spintronic Hyper-Reality is Hype, and What Part is Reality? Stuart Parkin Should Know.
What's Next? Time Travel?
Søren Kierkegaard famously wrote, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” in his 1844 work, The Concept of Anxiety. He meant that realizing one's own absolute freedom and infinite possibilities to choose—like looking down into a deep abyss—creates a overwhelming, dizzying sense of anxiety.
Key Aspects of the Quote:
Context:
- The Metaphor: Kierkegaard compares the feeling of anxiety to looking down into a precipice (or abyss).
- The Cause: It arises from the realization that you have the freedom to choose, and that you are responsible for your actions.
- The Result: It is a "sweet anxiety" or "dizzying effect" that occurs when the spirit contemplates its own potential.
- The Meaning: It signifies that anxiety is not just fear of something external, but a necessary, internal part of being human that comes with the potential to grow.
This concept is a cornerstone of existentialist thought, emphasizing that we are always at a crossroads with endless possibilities. As noted in The Marginalian, this anxiety is linked to creativity, as it compels us to make choices and define our own existence.An excerpt on Kierkegaard's notion of anxiety...
Firstly, although it is certainly related to fear in various ways, anxiety must be clearly distinguished from fear. In The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard argues that fear is a person’s concern about what threatens him from outside – from a myriad threats to life, limb, livelihood and happiness over which he has limited control. Anxiety, on the other hand, is a person’s concern about what, so to speak, threatens him from inside, from within his own consciousness. An anxious person is concerned about what he might choose to do given his freedom to choose. He is troubled by his own freedom and spontaneity; by the awareness that there is nothing whatsoever preventing him from choosing to perform a foolish, destructive or disreputable act at any moment, other than his choice not to perform it. “Hence,” says Kierkegaard, “anxiety is the dizziness of freedom” (p.61). To be anxious is to be bewildered by one’s own freedom; to be worried and disturbed by the realisation that one always has many options in any situation and must continually choose one option or another. Not choosing is not an option because choosing not to choose, or choosing to do nothing, is still a choice.
This dizziness of freedom is most clearly manifested in the sensation of vertigo. Kierkegaard takes the example of a man standing on the edge of a tall building or cliff. The man fears he might fall over the edge, that the safety rail or the ground might give way, that someone might push him off, and so on. Greater than his fear of falling, however, is his anxiety that he is free to jump if he decides to – that his not jumping is an ongoing choice which he might abandon at any moment in favour of jumping. He experiences this anxiety, the threat of his own freedom, as vertigo, an overwhelming giddiness. The drop obsesses him, the void seems to beckon him down; but really it is his own freedom that beckons to him – the very fact that he can always choose to go down the quick way. Vertigo is dread of this alarming and persistent possibility, and all our alarming possibilities produce in us a psychological state akin to vertigo. That is to say, what a person overlooking a sheer drop dreads is not the possible inadequacy of the physical guard rail, but that he ultimately lacks a psychological guard rail to prevent him from choosing to climb over and plunge to his death. If it appears on the face of it that his dread is of the void itself, this is because his vivid awareness of the void immediately forces him to confront his own possibilities, his own dreadful existential freedom. The void is the occasion of his dread, but not its source.
I did but prompt the age to quit their clogs
By the known rules of ancient liberty,
When straight a barbarous noise environs me
Of owls and cuckoos, asses, apes and dogs:
As when those hinds that were transform'd to frogs
Rail'd at Latona's twin-born progeny
Which after held the sun and moon in fee.
But this is got by casting pearl to hogs,
That bawl for freedom in their senseless mood,
And still revolt when truth would set them free.
Licence they mean when they cry liberty;
For who loves that, must first be wise and good.
But from that mark how far they rove we see,
For all this waste of wealth and loss of blood.