Status Updates From The Concept of Anxiety: A S...

However, this anxiety in the world is the only proof of our heterogeneity. If we lacked nothing, we should do no better than the pagans and the transcendental philosophers, who know nothing of God and like fools fall in love with lovely nature, and no homesickness would come over us.

On the other hand, whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music and when the apprentices of finitude lose their minds and courage. One is often deceived this way in life. The hypochondriac is anxious about every insignificant thing, but when the significant appears he begins to breathe more easily. And why?

When one or another extraordinary event occurs in life, when a world-historical hero gathers heroes about him and performs deeds of valor, when a crisis occurs and everything gains significance, then men want to have a part in it, because all of this is educative. Possibly so. But there is a simpler way in which one may become more thoroughly educated.

In actuality, no one ever sank so deep that he could not sink deeper, and there may be one or many who sank deeper. But he who sank in possibility—his eye became dizzy, his eye became confused, so he could not grasp the measuring stick that Tom, Dick, and Harry hold out as a saving straw to one sinking; his ear was closed so he could not hear what the market price of men was in his own day,

Therefore this possibility that is said to be so light is commonly regarded as the possibility of happiness, fortune, etc. But this is not possibility. It is rather a mendacious invention that human depravity has dressed up so as to have a reason for complaining of life and Governance and a pretext for becoming self-important.

And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise,

If a human being were a beast or an angel, he could not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety; and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man—yet not in the sense usually understood, in which anxiety is about something external, about something outside a person, but in the sense that he himself produces the anxiety.

In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious in order that he may not perish...

A person says Ich Ich [I - I] so long that he becomes the most ridiculous of all things: the pure I, the eternal self-consciousness. He talks about immortality until at last he himself becomes not immortal but immortality. Despite all this, he suddenly discovers that he has not succeeded in having immortality included in the system, and now he is intent on assigning it a place in a supplement to the system.

Some bend eternity into time for the imagination. Conceived in this way, eternity produces an enchanting effect. One does not know whether it is dream or actuality. As the beams of the moon glimmer in an illuminated forest or a hall, so the eternal peeps wistfully, dreamily, and roguishly into the moment. Thought of the eternal becomes a fanciful pottering around, and the mood is always the same: Am I dreaming,

Nowadays, the various governments live in fear of restless disturbers; there are altogether too many individualities who live in fear of one restless disturber that nevertheless is the true rest—eternity. So they preach the moment, and just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so eternity is best annihilated by mere moments.

If the clarity of cognition is lacking, knowledge of the feeling, there exists only the urge of the spirit of nature, the turgidity of immediacy. On the other hand, if feeling is lacking, there remains only the abstract concept that has not reached the last inwardness of the spiritual existence, that has not become one with the self of the spirit.

...it always indicates a greater discretion to abstain from definitions, because a person can hardly be inclined to apprehend essentially in the form of definition what must be understood differently, what he himself has understood differently, what he has loved in an entirely different way, and which in the form of definition easily becomes something else, something foreign to him.

The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the individual himself—not the pure self-consciousness, but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no author, not even the one with the greatest power of description, has ever been able to describe a single such self-consciousness, although every single human being is such a one.

Inwardness is an understanding, but in concreto the important thing is how this understanding is to be understood. To understand a speech is one thing, and to understand what it refers to, namely, the personal, is something else; for a man to understand what he himself says is one thing, and to understand himself in what is said is something else.

The thought of God’s existence, when it is posited as such for the individual’s freedom, has an omnipresence that for the prudent individuality has something embarrassing about it, even though he does not wish to do anything evil. To live in a beautiful and intimate companionship with this conception truly requires inwardness, and it is a much greater feat than that of being a model husband.

Thus the “pious” person knows that the religious is absolutely commensurable, that it is not something that belongs only to certain occasions and moments in life, but that a man can always have it with him. However, just when he is about to make it commensurable, he is not free.

An adherent of the most rigid orthodoxy may be demonic. He knows it all. He genuflects before the holy. Truth is for him the aggregate of ceremonies. He talks of meeting before the throne of God and knows how many times one should bow. He knows everything, like the man who can prove a mathematical proposition when the letters are ABC, but not when the letters are DEF.

The thought of immortality possesses a power and weightiness in its consequences, a responsibility in the acceptance of it, which perhaps will recreate the whole of life in a way that is feared. And so one saves and soothes one’s soul by straining one’s mind to produce a new proof. Yet, what is such a proof but a “good work” in a purely Catholic sense!

...that truth is for the particular individual only as he himself produces it in action. If the truth is for the individual in any other way, or if he prevents the truth from being for him in that way, we have a phenomenon of the demonic. Truth has always had many loud proclaimers, but the question is whether a person will in the deepest sense acknowledge the truth, will allow it to permeate his whole being,

...because the demonic is able to express itself as indolence that postpones thinking, as curiosity that never becomes more than curiosity, as dishonest self-deception, a weakness that constantly relies on others, as superior negligence, as stupid busyness,...
For this reason, truth is the work of freedom, and in such a way that freedom constantly brings forth truth.

Morgan asked me if I was reading a self help book and no, I’m not.

That a love affair, which when it is true has the nature of continuity, is exactly the opposite, namely, an infinite emptiness (not because Klister is an evil man, faithless, etc., since on the contrary he is sincerely in love, but because in his love affair he is a supernumerary volunteer, just as he is in the customhouse) has great comic effect when the accent is placed on the boring.