Kierkegaard On Anxiety

In the postmodern age, “Man” as a concept has moved beyond the definition of flesh-and-blood and become a philosophical entity. The human condition has become a suspect notion with the displacement of Comtean faith in human benevolence. The rise of the concentration camps in the twentieth century has led to the “delegitimization” of universal discourses of human emancipation or progression towards moral well-being. Even science has been displaced from its position as the grand arbiter of truth. Notions like language, truth, social and moral codes, meaning, humanity--- all have been removed from the centre to the suburbs of existence where multiple language games are in conflict with each other constantly denying any kind of punctual comprehension

(It is the same in Kant: when we are able to identify a pathological cause of an act of ours, this cannot but be a relief from the anxiety of freedom; or, as Kierkegaard would have put it, the true horror is to discover that we are immortal, that we have a higher Duty and responsibility – how much easier would it be to be a mere natural mechanism . . .) Consequently, cognitivist self-objectivization causes anxiety because – although, in terms of its enunciated content, it “objectivizes” us – it has the opposite effect in terms of the implied position of enunciation: it confronts us with the abyss of our freedom, and, simultaneously, with the radical contingency of the emergence of consciousness. (Brockleman

I saw through. I saw something I wasn't supposed to see." (Dick 10) He breaks the pattern of his daily life and now finds himself endowed with such knowledge which was hitherto unavailable to any “element”, that is to say, person in the world. He now knows that “the natural process must be supplemented -- adjusted here and there. Corrections must be made. We are fully licensed to make such corrections. Our adjustment teams perform vital work.” (Dick 11) He, therefore, mediates between two worlds and when he is threatened by the Old Man, he accepts his condition to deceive himself into believing that “it was only a passing psychological fit-- retreat from reality.” (Dick 12) He fails to take a “resolute” decision which Heidegger calls “as the most original truth because the authentic truth of Dasein.'' (Keller 232) It is important to note here that it is not the Being but man who alone errs. Michael Haar states that “Man errs, on the one hand, because he gives way to the forgetting of his forgetting and becomes imprisoned in it and, on the other hand, because he is ‘tempted,’ ‘seduced’ by the entities.” For Heidegger, the notion of Gelassenheit provides the greatest amount of freedom which can be recognized in man. Ed Fletcher couldn’t stop the two worlds from exclusively claiming him and which distorted his essence making him complacent with the world he inhabits.