Anxiety Is The Dizziness Of Freedom

From Chapter 1 of The Concept of Anxiety (1844), published under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. Søren Kierkegaard describes anxiety (Angst) as the distinctive mood of human freedom: unlike fear, which has a specific object, anxiety is directed at the "nothing" of possibility — the vertiginous awareness that one must choose without guarantee. He uses the image of looking down from a great height: the dizziness is caused not by danger below but by the freedom to jump. This phenomenological analysis of anxiety as the shadow of freedom anticipated Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialist account in Being and Nothingness by nearly a century.