Dread in Kierkegaard

Dread (what we can also call anxiety) has a specific structure for Kierkegaard, a structure Heidegger elaborates as thrown-ness in Being and Time.  In a footnote Heidegger indeed acknowledges that he is indebted to Kierkegaard as well as to Christian theology: "The man who has gone farthest in analyzing the phenomenon of anxiety--and again in the theological context of a 'psychological' exposition of the problem of original sin--is Soren Kierkegaard." But more important than the indebtedness is the exactitude, the meticulousness, of his understanding of what Kierkegaard says--of that structure of dread.  Let's see what that structure is and how he reached this understanding.

Kierkegaard outlines the structure of dread in the following passage in The Concept of Dread, taking Adam's fall into sin as the phenomenon's most concrete instance:

...When it is related in Genesis that God said to Adam, "Only of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat," it is a matter of course that Adam did not understand this word [i.e. that he was "innocent"]. For how could he have understood the difference between good and evil, seeing that this distinction was in fact consequent upon the enjoyment of the fruit?

When one assumes that the prohibition awakens the desire, one posits a knowledge instead of ignorance; for Adam would have had to have a knowledge of freedom, since his desire was to ["freely"] use it [i.e. the distinction between good and evil]. The explanation therefore anticipates what was subsequent. The prohibition 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.

Kierkegaard is saying that dread is fundamentally what allows innocence--exemplified in Adam before he ate of the tree of knowledge--to be "brought to its last extremity," or, in other words, to let itself fall into the state of sin, whose essence, Kierkegaard later says, is guilt. Let's represent this structure in this way:

innocence → dread → guilt

Some initial remarks should be made here on this and on the passage.  First, in this passage Kierkegaard points out explicitly that this structure completely ignores the relevance of transgression as we normally understand it to the narrative of Adam's fall into sin. Sin is not the result of disobeying the prohibition. The prohibition doesn't matter: what matters is the relationship between innocence and guilt.  He's also slyly indicating what the result of this analysis will be: understanding guilt will better allow us to rethink prohibition; the concept of prohibition is what will be re-evaluated or revalued by his analysis of how dread engenders guilt. Next, even if we are to turn to the prohibition, Kierkegaard thinks of things differently.  Christian theology has often focused on the prohibition of the eating of the tree when it comes to Adam's fall in Genesis, although it has often interpreted this widely. But what actually is prohibited for Kierkegaard, is something like the desire to know. We'll specify exactly what Kierkegaard thinks is prohibited by God in this statement later (he's even more precise about it), and thus get a chance to look at what he conceives of as desire as well. But for now, the first question to put to ourselves is why he wants to bypass the issue of prohibition in the first place? How will looking at dread, and not transgression, as the origin of guilt eventually make us rethink what the concept of prohibition involves?

Because the key to understanding dread is to understand it as also bound up with knowledge. As Kierkegaard says, "when one assumes that the prohibition awakens the desire, one posits a knowledge instead of ignorance.", and this covers up the essential phenomenon of how guilt arises. Essentially, understanding prohibition as the thing that awakens desire covers up the fundamental ignorant innocence that is constitutive for the act of eating of the tree--the ignorance that is precisely what makes the story (like the story of Job) so extremely disturbing to us. Why would God punish what essentially is an act done without our ability to know that it was wrong? Positing that Adam was focused on the prohibition itself when he ate of the tree requires that he know what the tree will do when he eats of it--in short, if the prohibition awakens the desire, it is precisely because Adam would know beforehand why what is prohibited is prohibited. Obviously this is untenable: how could Adam know beforehand what the tree would give him? No, the whole instance proceeded in complete ignorance. But how, then, could Adam have become guilty of trespassing against God's word? That is where dread comes in.

Dread is what, for Kierkegaard, leads us out of innocence and ignorance and into guilt, instead of knowledge. Knowledge is not what causes the fall of Adam, but dread, and with it, freedom. Thus to the structure we outlined above, there would seem to correspond a structure that looks like this:

ignorance → dread → knowledge

But because we do not know how dread begets knowledge, this statement as yet is empty. Furthermore, if we were to try and tie freedom into this structure by representing it as the following we would be fundamentally wrong:

ignorance → dread → knowledge, freedom

Freedom is not a consequence of dread for Kierkegaard, but rather underlies it as what dread itself activates or actualizes in dread's becoming actual. Thus, we must ask, how does dread lead us out of innocence and ignorance by way of being connected with freedom for Kierkegaard?

It should be noted that all the foregoing has done is to outline the interconnected nature of two structures, the structure of innocence and guilt, and the structure of ignorance and knowledge, which we can represent by combining our previous representations:

innocence → dread → guilt
ignorance → dread → knowledge

It is also clear from the foregoing that two concepts remain to be connected to this nexus: prohibition and, most essentially, freedom. But it is not by specifying what either of these are for Kierkegaard that we get a handle on what he means by them and dread more generally. Rather, it is by proceeding with the structures that we already have outlined that we can specify their nature. In other words, though Kierkegaard has a specific nature of freedom, he does not specify what freedom is concretely and then derive his analysis of dread (not to mention his reading of Scripture) from it--this would be too abstract for him. Rather he sticks close to what he already knows and what Scripture already tells him about the transition between ignorance and innocence and guilt and knowledge. We'll do the same.

Indeed, it should be obvious by bringing the two structures we have outlined that, if we posit some other term--dread--instead of the prohibition itself as the thing that leads us out of ignorance and innocence, that this third term--dread--will be responsible for relating both ignorance and innocence. In other words, from what we have already seen Kierkegaard say, it should be obvious that dread leads us out of innocence ignorantly, and that dread leads us out of ignorance innocently. It is by analyzing these relations that Kierkegaard sticks close to what he already knows and does not give in to a pressure to cover up the disturbing nature of Adam's fall--not to mention the fall of anyone innocently or ignorantly into guilt and knowledge.

Now, if one is led out of innocence, or, as we normally call it, is guilty for some reason, and yet is led out of innocence ignorantly, he still seems innocent: indeed, this is why Kierkegaard says "he who... becomes guilty is innocent" (102)--that is, if they become guilty ignorantly. Why should this be the case? Why do we normally make this provision for guilt? Or, put differently, how can one who is guilty be innocent at the same time if they are ignorant? By our normal reasoning, we say that if an innocent person is lead to guilt ignorantly, it is something other that effectuates the guilt, not the person who was lead into guilt. "They didn't really mean it," we say, "it wasn't really their fault." Guilt must be tied up with this "something other," then. Kierkegaard simply names this "something other," "dread." That is, instead of pursuing the issue of guilt by making an exception of the case in which someone is led to guilt ignorantly, as we usually do, he analyzes it as a positive phenomenon. In other words, he is not excluding this instance from the rest of our codified ways of assigning guilt, making of it a case where the "rules don't apply in the same way:" rather, he will eventually conclude that this instance is the exemplary instance of the way guilt arises.

But let us continue--how could one be led into guilt ignorantly, if guilt essentially lies in knowingly doing something? Where is the knowledge located in this instance? If someone is guilty innocently because of ignorance, and thus has become guilty by "something other" than her or himself, and if this "something other" is dread, then we might say that it is precisely dread that effectuates the guilt knowingly. In other words, if the innocent person is still innocent after being made guilty through dread, it is not the person who is responsible for this guilty status: for how could he have known--being ignorant--whatever it was that rendered him guilty? Dread knows, somehow, or has some relationship to the knowledge of which the person is ignorant, and thus Kierkegaard continues the sentence just quoted ("he who through dread becomes guilty is innocent") by saying "for it was not he himself but dread, an alien power which laid hold of him" in the transition between innocence and guilt (102). Thus by specifying the relationship of dread to knowledge we get a handle on exactly the way someone innocent and ignorant can be led to guilt. If they are seized by dread, they are seized by something that has a relationship to a knowledge that they do not know. We might represent this the following way before we go on to analyze this relationship:

innocence/ignorance → ( dread ← knowledge ) → guilt

Notice that this gets rid of our previous schema where knowledge was somehow a product of the dread of an innocent person along with guilt, which was represented this way:

ignorance → dread → knowledge

Knowledge is intimately connected with dread, and not with ignorance. Thus it does not directly oppose and obviate ignorance itself; knowledge does not suddenly come along and wipe out innocence because it wipes out ignorance. Rather, knowledge has a direct relationship to dread, and only can effect ignorance through this mediation.

We can specify the relationship of knowledge to dread by asking what must necessarily be the essence of a knowledge that preserves ignorance. The answer to this is that it must be a fantasy, something that is not real in content but is real in its ability or possibility to be real. As Kierkegaard says, at the center of dread is that which in an innocent act could have been, that which in an act was that person's particular "I can" (104), in the sense of an ignorant "I can do this which I currently fantasize about" at the moment of one's fantasizing. This is why Kierkegaard specifies dread as a "dreaming" (101) of the spirit: the moment at which a subject dreads is the moment in which that subject indeed "projects its own reality" even though "this reality is nothing" and "this nothing constantly sees innocence outside of it" (101). The reality it projects is precisely its own ability to do whatever it is that it projects.

Now it should be obvious that by "seeing innocence outside of it," Kierkegaard means that in the particular moment of dread, what is, is only that which is for someone who is ignorant, or does not know reality, and is therefore innocent in the way we determined before. Let's penetrate deeper into this phenomenon. What is real in the moment of dread is nothing, and dread itself is thus dread "about nothing" as we usually say. But this nothing is not really nothing, as Kierkegaard says. It is only nothing insofar as what the dread is about in reality is nothing. In reality, whatever is dreaded has the constitution of a dream, a wish. But the fact that the dread occurs and is about something that is not real does not make the act of dreading itself disappear. The act of dreading is precisely everything, it is so much not nothing--it is and remains one of the most keenest and most real psychological feelings possible. We thus might represent dread as the following, making a distinction between the act of dread and what is dreaded.

dread → content, what is dreaded → nothing, dream
↓
form, the act of dreading
↓
real, reality

More appropriately, we might call the act of dread a desire, since a desire is precisely a relationship to something that is, as of yet, nothing. Indeed, if we are going to call this act a wish or a dream as well this seems legitimate. But in recharacterizing this act this way, we can see desire come into play--and it should be quite clear now that it is precisely not the desire of some particular bit of knowledge like the distinction between good and evil. What is dreaded, what is desired is something that is not, and since the act of dread or desire occurs anyway, we are left to conclude that that which it is really about is precisely unrealized possibility itself, in other words, the reality of nothing--the reality of something that, as of yet, is not real and is therefore nothing. Put differently (and perhaps more clearly), what the desire is about is (in Freudian/Lacanian terms) really the drive, the act of desiring alone. Similarly, what is dreaded is really only the possibility of the individual to realize that particular thing one dreads. Thus the above relationship can be redrawn like this:

dread → desire, what is dreaded → nothing, dream
↓
drive, what is really dreaded
↓
real, reality

This continual play on the word "nothing" Kierkegaard uses (and which we are merely reduplicating) he uses perhaps to curb the impact of the radical thesis he is putting forth here. What he is saying is that what dread is drive itself, the desire for the realization of what is unrealized and, as the desire of someone who is ignorant, is the desire of something that is not known. Desire, as dread and therefore as drive, is desire for that of which one is ignorant, that which is nothing currently. As such, it is not fundamentally that thing that is desired, but (because one does not really know that thing, the act one could have done), it is really the possibility of the realization of that thing. This is what is meant by us saying desire is desire of "the reality of nothing:" it is fundamentally the desire for the possibility to realize what is now nothing, the desire of drive. Furthermore, as a dream or wish or desire, one possesses already in dread this possibility--it is there in one's desiring of that which does not exist. This is why it is, as Kierkegaard implies, the greatest inner possibility of a subject.

Let's sum this up to be a little clearer. What is desired in dread is precisely that of which one is completely ignorant--to the subject it appears as nothing, making him say characteristically when asked what he is worried about, "it's nothing." Thus, what is desired is precisely not knowledge, because what is desired is precisely that of which one as of yet cannot actually know. However, desiring (and we should mention that we do not even know of this desire--desire is not like a willing)--desiring that of which one is ignorant is indeed desiring the possibility of knowing that which is not known--this is, as it were, the side effect of desiring precisely that which one cannot know. In desiring non-knowledge, as we might put it, we are precisely desiring the possibility not of knowing the non-knowledge itself, but of knowing our own possibility to know, our own possibility to not be as ignorant as we are now. This side-effect we call drive, or the reality of the act of dread. We might represent this structure of knowledge thusly:

dread/desire → (desire as such) that of which one is ignorant
↓ (drive)
possibility of knowing

It should be obvious that this is just a condensed version of what we have already specified. It is this downward arrow that is active: the desire for that of which one is ignorant opens up a general, indeterminate possibility of knowing anything--i.e. not just that of which one is ignorant. Rightly, Kierkegaard does not speak of this indeterminate result as genuine knowledge yet: dread brings into view only "a nothing in lively communication with the innocence of ignorance". It is "lively communication" only that is really going on here, since what is being known is precisely only the reality of the possibility of knowing (drive). Thus, one can still speak of this knowledge of a possibility of knowing as ignorance, and we will indeed do so. It is ignorance in lively communication with only the possibility of knowing, and as such, it produces no knowledge and continues to preserve ignorance itself. We can represent this thus within the larger structure of dread:

ignorance → { dread ← ( [ desire → that of which one is ignorant ] → possibility of knowing (drive)/ignorance ] ) } → guilt

This specified, we can show exactly what this type of ignorance is and does. It should be noted that grasping the role of desire has allowed us to specify the role of prohibition, but we will put this off to later when the whole phenomenon of dread comes fully into view. Now, this particular type of ignorance, this knowledge only of an open-ended possibility of knowledge this "I can," this result of a desire based in dread, Kierkegaard names "freedom." As Kierkegaard puts it, "dread is the reality of freedom as possibility anterior to possibility" (101). By "possibility anterior to possibility" Kierkegaard means that freedom is the reality of possibility itself as the reality of possibility in the nothing, in the unrealized, in that of which the subject is and remains ignorant. Thus we might rewrite our above structure as the following, having it retain the same meaning:

ignorance → ( dread ← freedom ) → guilt

Now, it is obviously this freedom that brings one from innocence into guilt. How does this occur according to Kierkegaard--especially if it is not really knowledge still? I'll save this answer for another post.