Anxiety’s Nothingness

On Freedom, Synthesis, and the Self in Kierkegaard

Some nights I wake at around two o’clock, during what is often called the wolf hour. The house is quiet, and the darkness is complete. There is no concrete external danger. No sound warns of anything threatening, and nothing in particular has happened. Yet the unease is there.

It can feel like an indefinable worry, a sense that something is not as it should be, without my being able to say what this “something” is. The thoughts begin searching for an explanation. They move backwards toward what has happened and forwards toward what might happen. Small problems grow in the darkness. What appears manageable during the day can acquire a weight in the middle of the night that it otherwise does not have.

The rumination keeps me awake. Consciousness tries to give the unease an object, as though it wished to transform indefinite anxiety into a more manageable fear. Fear can be examined. It can be delimited and perhaps met with action. But often there is no particular cause. There is only the darkness, wakefulness, and an unease without a clear direction.

Usually it releases its hold after an hour or two. I fall asleep again without anything having truly been resolved. What seemed threatening in the darkness of the night loses its power when sleep returns or morning approaches. The world becomes concrete again. Things receive names, tasks acquire boundaries, and worries can be arranged according to their importance.

This nocturnal experience can serve as an entrance into Søren Kierkegaard’s distinction between fear and anxiety. Fear is directed toward something definite. Anxiety is not. Its object is, in Kierkegaard’s strange and precise word, Nothing.

But what kind of Nothing is this?

Fear Has an Object

My point of departure is Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, published in 1844 under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. That the book presents itself as a psychological work is already clear from its subtitle: “A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin.”

Kierkegaard’s aim is not to provide a medical or clinical description of anxiety. He examines the significance anxiety has for the human relation to freedom, guilt, and responsibility. The work stands as one of the most significant texts in the intellectual history of anxiety and in several respects anticipates later psychological and existential-philosophical investigations.

The distinction between fear and anxiety is decisive. Fear has an object. We fear illness, loss, violence, financial insecurity, or a danger at which we can point. Even when fear is intense, we know in principle what it concerns.

Anxiety lacks such a definite object. Vigilius Haufniensis writes:

“But what effect does Nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety. Dreaming, spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is Nothing, and innocence continually sees this Nothing outside itself.”

Anxiety is therefore not directed toward a particular thing in the world. It arises in the encounter with something that has not yet become actual. It turns toward the future, toward the open and indeterminate, toward what may happen—and toward what the human being may itself come to do.

This does not mean that anxiety is empty or without significance. On the contrary, it is filled with possibility. Its Nothing is not merely an absence, but an openness that has not yet taken form.

During the wolf hour, my thoughts often try to fill this openness. They bring forward possible problems, old mistakes, and future losses. It is as though the mind cannot endure an unease without an object. It wants to turn anxiety into fear by attaching it to something definite.

But perhaps the significance of anxiety lies precisely in the fact that it cannot simply be reduced to something definite. It shows that the human being does not live only among things and events. It also lives in relation to possibility.

The Dizziness of Freedom

Vigilius Haufniensis compares anxiety to dizziness:

“Anxiety may be compared with dizziness.”

The comparison is not accidental. When a person stands at the edge of an abyss and looks down, dizziness does not arise only from the fear of falling. It also arises because the person discovers that they can fall. They are not merely facing an external danger, but their own possibility.

Kierkegaard calls this the dizziness of freedom:

“Thus anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when spirit wants to posit the synthesis, and freedom now looks down into its own possibility and then grasps finitude to support itself. In this dizziness freedom succumbs.”

Anxiety is “the actuality of freedom as the possibility of possibility.” It is one of Kierkegaard’s most condensed formulations. Freedom has not yet become actual as a particular action or decision. It appears as the possibility of being able.

The human being discovers that it is not completely bound to what it already is. It can act differently. It can respond in a new way, break with a habit, refrain from doing what is expected, or step into something unknown. But this openness gives no guarantee that it will choose rightly.

Freedom also includes the possibility of choosing wrongly, of turning away from oneself, or of grasping at something that makes one unfree. Anxiety is therefore ambiguous. It can open the human being toward responsibility and change, but it can also lead to flight, paralysis, and despair.

Anxiety is thus not merely a discomfort that should be removed. Nor is it simply something positive that should be romanticized. It is a sign that the human being stands in relation to its own possibility.

This is what makes dizziness such a precise image. The person who becomes dizzy loses, for a moment, their secure footing. The world is still there, but the relation to it has become uncertain. In the same way, the human being in anxiety may lose the self-evident sense of being identical with the life it has lived until now.

It discovers that life could have been different, and that it itself could become different.

The Human Being as Synthesis

For Kierkegaard, the human being is not a simple and finished entity. It is a synthesis. In The Concept of Anxiety, he writes:

“The human being was therefore a synthesis of soul and body, but is also a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal.”

The psychical and the bodily do not merely stand side by side. They must be held together in a lived human life. The same applies to the relation between time and eternity, necessity and possibility, finitude and infinitude.

The human being is finite. It has a body, a history, an age, and particular conditions of life. It is born in a particular place and into relationships and contexts it has not itself chosen. At the same time, it can transcend the immediately given through imagination, hope, decision, and responsibility. It can relate to its own history and ask what that history is to mean.

It is spirit that posits the synthesis. Spirit here does not mean a separate substance added to body and soul. Spirit is the human capacity to relate to oneself and to the relation one already is.

A human being does not merely have a body. It relates to the body. It does not merely have a past. It interprets it. It does not merely exist in time. It knows that time passes and that life will one day end. It does not merely receive possibilities, but can try to choose among them.

Anxiety belongs within this self-relation. It arises because the human being is not only what it is, but also stands in relation to what it may become.

The wolf hour is in this sense more than a particular hour of the night. When the tasks and distractions of the day become silent, the human being may become more exposed to its own self-relation. What during the day is held together by routines, conversations, and practical tasks becomes less self-evident. In the silence of the night, the human being does not necessarily encounter a specific danger. It may encounter its own openness.

Spirit then relates to itself as anxiety.

Dizziness and Despair

Gregor Malantschuk read Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death as a continuation of The Concept of Anxiety. He referred, among other things, to a draft in which Kierkegaard writes:

“What dizziness is in relation to the composition of the psychical and the bodily, despair is in the relation of spirit.”

The journal note does not simply identify anxiety and despair. It suggests rather a structural parallel. Dizziness arises within the psychical-bodily composition, while despair arises within the self’s relation to itself.

In The Concept of Anxiety, dizziness receives a more precise meaning as an image of freedom’s encounter with its own possibility. Despair arises when the self-relation fails: when the human being does not will to be itself, or when it wills to be itself without acknowledging that it has not created its own ground.

Anxiety and despair are therefore not the same. Anxiety belongs to the sphere of possibility. It stands at the threshold. Despair concerns the way the human being actually relates to itself.

Yet there is a connection between them. When anxiety cannot be endured as possibility, the human being may try to flee from it by making itself less free than it is. It may cling to habit, role, the expectations of others, or a fixed idea of who it must be.

It may also lose itself in possibility. Rumination is one example. Thought moves endlessly through everything that might happen without returning to the concrete reality in which something can actually be done. Possibility then becomes not an opening of freedom, but an endless circle.

Anxiety becomes unfreedom when the human being can no longer move between possibility and actuality.

Between Inheritance and Responsibility

The Concept of Anxiety is largely concerned with hereditary sin. This is the declared focus of the work, but it is also a concept that may seem foreign to a modern reader.

Hereditary sin contains a basic tension. Inheritance is a natural category. It points to what the human being receives without having chosen it. Sin or guilt, by contrast, is an ethical category. It concerns something the human being has done or for which it is in some way responsible.

What one has received through inheritance is not usually associated with guilt. What one is oneself guilty of cannot, on the other hand, simply be explained away as inheritance, nature, or an inborn burden.

Yet the human being lives precisely in the transition between what is given and what is chosen.

We have not chosen our body, our earliest relationships, our historical time, or the basic conditions that shaped us. Nor can we simply choose away everything that has been done to us. Yet we do not thereby cease to be responsible human beings.

We are not guilty of everything that has shaped us. But neither can we always renounce responsibility for what we do with what we have received.

Here anxiety acquires significance as an intermediate determination. It lies between possibility and actuality, between what the human being can do and what it actually does. Anxiety is not itself guilt, but it signals that guilt is possible because freedom is possible.

The ambiguity of anxiety therefore also concerns the question of responsibility. Before the action has been carried out, it is not yet decided what the human being will do. Freedom remains open. But precisely because there is such an openness, the human being cannot completely reduce itself to the product of its inheritance and circumstances.

Kierkegaard’s analysis is demanding because it neither dissolves the human being into nature and necessity nor imagines a limitless and self-created freedom. The human being is both given and free. It is shaped by something it has not chosen, yet it must still relate to the life it has been given.

Anxiety arises within this tension.

What Is Nothing?

To say something concrete about Nothing is difficult. If Nothing is made into an object, it is no longer Nothing. It cannot be placed beside other things in the world.

Martin Heidegger examines Nothing in his lecture What Is Metaphysics? He emphasizes that Nothing is neither an object nor a being. Nor is it an empty background beside what exists. Nothing makes it possible for beings to appear as beings to human existence.

Heidegger’s question is different from Kierkegaard’s, but there is a point of contact between them. In both, Nothing names an experience in which what is given loses some of its self-evidence.

For Kierkegaard, Nothing is freedom’s still-indeterminate possibility. It is not a hidden content behind anxiety, but precisely the absence of a definite content. Freedom has not yet chosen its direction. The human being looks down into possibility without knowing what it will become.

For Heidegger, the experience of Nothing can open beings as a whole. For Kierkegaard, it opens the human being’s relation to itself. In both cases, the self-evident familiarity with the world is disrupted.

This can resemble the nocturnal awakening. The room and the house are the same, but the relation to them has changed. Everyday life has lost its usual hold. The concrete recedes, and possibilities press forward. Darkness itself is not Nothing, but darkness can become the experience in which the indeterminate makes itself felt.

It is as though the human being, for a moment, finds itself between what already is and what has not yet taken form.

The Moment as Turning

This experience leads thought onward to Plato’s dialogue Parmenides. In the third hypothesis of the dialogue, the strange turning point is described in which something passes from motion to rest or from rest to motion.

Plato uses the word exaiphnes—the sudden or momentary. Egil A. Wyller translates the passage as follows:

“It is this strangely placeless thing in which it must be when it changes: the moment. For the moment—or ‘the sudden’—seems to designate something like a point of departure for change in two directions.”

The moment is not itself motion or rest. It lies between them, outside the time in which the one state endures and the other has not yet begun.

It is tempting to read Plato’s exaiphnes in light of what Kierkegaard calls the Moment: the placeless turning point at which something passes into something else without itself being a lasting stage.

For Kierkegaard, the Moment is the meeting of time and eternity. It is not merely a brief span of time, but the point at which the human being may relate to its own life in a new way. The Moment is the turning at which possibility can become actuality.

In this sense, the Moment stands close to anxiety’s Nothing. Both name a transition that has not yet been decided. In anxiety, freedom looks down into its own possibility. In the Moment, possibility may receive a direction.

But no turning is automatic. The Moment does not force the human being to choose. It only opens the possibility that something may begin.

The Self Is a Task

The view of the human being that appears more indirectly in The Concept of Anxiety is formulated more clearly in The Sickness Unto Death. Here the self is described as a relation that relates itself to itself.

The human being is not merely a synthesis. It is a self because it can relate to this synthesis. It can ask who it is, who it has been, and who it ought to become.

The self is therefore not an object lying ready inside the human being, waiting to be found. Nor is it an identity one can secure once and for all. The self is a task.

To choose oneself does not, however, mean to create oneself out of nothing. The human being has not chosen its starting point. It cannot make itself its own foundation. To become oneself means rather to take over the life one has been given without reducing oneself to what one has so far been.

This is a decisive distinction. The idea that the human being can freely construct itself overlooks body, history, relationships, and necessity. The idea that the human being is only the result of these conditions overlooks freedom and responsibility.

Kierkegaard’s self lies between these extremes. It is given, but unfinished. It is bound, but not completely determined. It must become what, in a strange sense, it already is.

Freedom therefore does not consist in being able to become anything whatsoever. It consists in the possibility of relating differently to the life one actually has.

One can respond differently than before. One can acknowledge what one previously fled from. One can break a habit, ask forgiveness, take responsibility, or say no to an expectation that has made one a stranger to oneself.

Such actions do not create the human being out of Nothing. They are attempts to enter into the self-relation that has already been given as a task.

When Morning Comes

Anxiety does not tell us what we should choose. It offers no recipe and no certainty. It only shows that life has not been finally decided.

The human being is shaped by its body, its history, its inheritance, and its relationships, but it never completely coincides with what it has already become. In anxiety, a distance opens between the given and the possible.

Within this distance, freedom may be lost. The human being may flee into rumination, denial, habits, or roles that relieve it of having to encounter itself. But it is also within this distance that a human being may begin to take over its own life.

When I wake during the wolf hour, anxiety rarely feels like freedom. It feels more like unease, loneliness, and fatigue. It would be unreasonable to turn nocturnal sleeplessness into an exalted philosophical experience. Anxiety can be painful, paralyzing, and destructive.

Yet Kierkegaard’s analysis can help us see that the indefiniteness of anxiety does not necessarily mean that it is meaningless. The unease shows that the human being is not enclosed only within what is. It also stands in relation to what may become.

Often I fall asleep again without having found an answer. Morning comes, and the questions of darkness recede. But perhaps the night has nevertheless reminded me of something: that the self is not a possession I own once and for all. It is a relation I must continually enter into.

Perhaps this is what Kierkegaard means by the dizziness of freedom. Not that we stand before an empty and meaningless Nothing, but that no one else can fully enter into the possibility that is ours.

Anxiety is the place where this possibility first appears—not as a promise that we will choose rightly, but as a reminder that life is not yet over.

The self remains a task.