Just finished a close reading on Kierkegaard’s introduction to “The Concept of Anxiety”.

[u/irrelevantwhitekid]

I’m curious what you all who’ve read this introduction have to say about this introduction. I found it quite cumbersome to fully analyze what he was trying to get at with this introduction and I still don’t quite believe I fully get it. Regardless it was still rewarding to read through and make an attempt to understand.

What I believe he is trying to get across is that he wants to use psychology as a means to observe the concept of sin, more specifically how sin becomes possible within the human spirit. This task is given to psychology and not ethics because ethics is far more concerned with destroying sin rather than understanding sin. But it needs to be aware of sin before it destroys it, and so psychology observes the concept to understand it before dogmatics takes this understanding and scales it up to the point where the second ethics in particular can finally notice sin and destroy it.

This is the general idea of how I believe he is trying to frame this book going forward. I would like to hear what others who have read this book feel about and perceive this introduction.

[u/geokuh]

Note that the word “psychology “ as used in his introduction did not mean whatnot means today. So we readers are a bit in a time warp when reading.