Posted on January 9, 2024 by PLT Staff

In this lecture originally given to PLT Director Charles Marsh’s class, Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Freedom, King’s College Professor of Philosophy Clare Carlisle presents accounts from Søren Kierkegaard’s life and works to illustrate the Danish philosopher’s understanding of anxiety. She first breaks down two prevailing principles of Kierkegaard’s thought, subjectivity and ambivalence, referring throughout to Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, Journals, and The Concept of Anxiety. She later carefully compares Augustine’s and Kierkegaard’s understandings of Original Sin, discussing how anxiety itself interplays with Kierkegaard’s model. Finally, Carlisle discusses Kierkegaard’s experience with social anxiety and how his intimate experiences with it manifest in his writing.

Excerpt: “In a way, writing and his relationship to his authorship became probably the most significant relationship of his life… [Kierkegaard] was a very anxious person, had a quite intense experience of anxiety, and it’s really through writing that he… is working through that.”

• Video Information
• Date Recorded:September 21, 2022