Let's finish this up already.
We are taking the following passage relating the story of Adam's fall in Kierkegaard as indicative of a structure of dread:
The prohibition ["do not eat of the tree of knowledge"] alarms Adam [or induces a state of dread] because the prohibition awakens in him the possibility of freedom... [And yet this freedom] is a nothing, the alarming possibility of being able... Thus innocence is brought to its last extremity.
-The Concept of Dread, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre, 103-104.
As we have established, Kierkegaard's structure of dread looks like this:
innocence → dread (occuring in ignorance) → guilt
One is brought into guilt ignorantly, and therefore--in a supreme paradox--innocently. We've also established that dread itself has a structure like this:
dread → what is dreaded
↓
what is "really" dreaded
which, because there is nothing actually being dreaded, essentially looks like this:
dread → nothing, that of which one is ignorant
↓
reality of ignorance
We said that this "reality of ignorance" that is produced by the dread of nothing--the bare fact of one's ignorance as to what is being dreaded, made infinitely more real and more "factual" through dread--points to what Kierkegaard calls possibility and freedom. If the structure of dread is as we said it was (i.e. innocence → dread (occuring in ignorance) → guilt) then it will be this access to freedom that brings one into guilt ignorantly and thus innocently.
How, then, is "possibility" accessed by one's ignorance as to what is dreaded? Well, it is clear that if something comes before someone that is and remains a nothing to them (like, in the example of Adam, the voice of God telling one something that they cannot understand), their constancy in confronting this nothing, in remaining ignorant in the face of it, gets proven. In other words, something is made explicit; something is disclosed and developed, such that it gets loosened from the realm of facts that we take for granted and becomes a fact that we can grasp. It is this disclosing that is possibility.
Let's be a little clearer about what we mean by this. When someone dreads nothing, they slowly begin to revolve around this nothing, obsessing over it in their being. In other words, they do not let go of what they dread: the thing dreaded has a particular hold over them such that it sucks them futher in to the process of dreading. Now, because the thing that is dreaded is really nothing, any attempt in one's being to get a handle on what is dreaded, to get it to be determinate, fails (we might remark that this is what Kierkegaard means when he speaks of the subject "grasping at finiteness to sustain itself"). The reality of one's inability to get a handle on this thing is brought to the fore constantly as, in fact, the only thing that remains in the face of this nothing. That is, completely sucked up into this confrontation with nothingness, with that in front of which one stands ignorant, our ability to remain unable constantly confronts us also. This ability--the last of our abilities in the face of our ignorance--shows itself most clearly. Thus it is disclosed to us, proven as that which is more real even than our what we think are our most powerful abilities--all of which crumble in the face of this thing of which we are ignorant.
This is what we meant last time in saying that what is made clear throughout dread is the constancy of one's ability to be--that is, to be ignorant. As such, we can understand it as what is synonymous with what we have been calling "the reality of our ignorance:" the reality of our ignorance as what is proven through dread is nothing over than our ability to be ignorant. We understand what we mean by "disclosing," or "becoming explicit" if we simply see that in this sentence, what was merely a process one went through before--ignorance--has become something that is not taken for granted, is a possibility--the ability to be ignorant. Expanding what we have diagramed above, then, dread looks like this:
dread → nothing, that of which one is ignorant
↓
what is really dreaded, the reality of ignorance
↓
what is proved in "really dreading," the ability to be ignorant, the ability to be unable to grasp the nothing
If we understand this, then we understand what Kierkegaard means by "possibility," and we understand how ignorance can access it. This "possibility" is essentially this ability to be in such and such a way--in this case, ignorant. Fundamentally what happens is that one sees the unalterable fact of one's situation as a possibility, as something that can be changed because it is only one way of being.
Thus, the accessing of this ignorance as possibility shows us our freedom according to Kierkegaard. This freedom is really the essential fact lying within possibility: that whatever is the situation--i.e. dread--is only a way of being, a way that can in its being be different. Now we understand the passage. When Kierkegaard says, "the prohibition alarms Adam [or induces a state of dread] because the prohibition awakens in him the possibility of freedom," we know that he means that Adam, through dreading the nothing, sees his situation as a possibility, and thereby as one in which he possesses freedom--the freedom to engage it differently, as something that is not necessitated but possible. Thus, our diagram of dread extends downward one more final step:
dread → nothing, that of which one is ignorant
↓
what is really dreaded, the reality of ignorance
↓
what is proved in "really dreading," the ability to be ignorant, the ability to be unable to grasp the nothing
↓
freedom as the essence of this ability
All this is done in the subject's complete ignorance as to what they dread, and indeed as to what is revealed or disclosed by the dread (reality, possibility, freedom). Suddenly they possess freedom. They do not know anything about where it came from--in fact it came from that which they had the least ability to know.
Now--and this is crucial--we have to also note that the passage shows us that this result--freedom--is precisely what becomes dreaded: Adam does not only dread and thereby access freedom, Adam dreads because he is free. That in the face of which one is ignorant (God, in this example) makes one access one's freedom and then dread precisely that. One's freedom is the nothing that one dreads--the nothing is essentially the necessity of the situation in which one exists, i.e. precisely non-necessity. In other words, what one cannot get a grip on is precisely the extent of one's own freedom within the situation. What we have split up again resolves itself into identity. In fact, it was never dirempted into a thing dreaded and a "real" thing dreaded in the first place. We'll show how this makes the subject guilty next time. In the meantime, it is clear that we will have to reorganize our diagram like this:
dread → nothing, that of which one is ignorant
↓
what is really dreaded, the reality of ignorance
↓
what is proved in "really dreading," the ability to be ignorant, the ability to be unable to grasp the nothing
↓
freedom as the essence of this ability
↓
nothing, that of which one is ignorant
This identity--and we will elaborate more on this next time--this identity is only a function of the belongingness of that which is disclosed by dread to dread itself. That is, this identity exists because at each point in the disclosure of the essence of dread by having "what is really dreaded" become more and more determinate, what is dreaded becomes more and more indeterminate and the ignorance with which we confront what is dreaded becomes more and more concrete. That is, throughout the unfolding of the structure we have just outlined, dread itself only heightens. The disclosure that belongs to dread only serves to enhance dread--and therefore ignorance as to what exactly is dreaded and one's innocence. We'll clear this issue up next time.
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