The dizziness of freedom
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" circulates as a complete thought. It fits on a mug, and most quotation sites stop there. In the book it is the opening of a longer sentence, and the part that usually gets cut describes what freedom does once it starts to feel dizzy.
Kierkegaard published The Concept of Anxiety in Copenhagen in 1844, under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. The standard English edition is Reidar Thomte's translation for Princeton, which renders the Danish Angest as "anxiety". Earlier English readers knew the same book as The Concept of Dread.
Where the sentence stands
The line is in chapter II, in the section titled "Subjective Anxiety". The first chapter dealt with Adam and innocence. This section turns to the ordinary person who comes later, and to the anxiety that lives in that person.
Just before it, Kierkegaard asks where dizziness comes from. His answer is that it lies as much in the eye as in what the eye is looking at. Had the person not looked, there would be no dizziness. Then comes the whole sentence:
"anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself."
— Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and tr. Reidar Thomte with Albert B. Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1980), chapter II, section 2, "Subjective Anxiety", p. 61
It holds three movements. The mug keeps only the middle one.
The spirit that wants to posit
The first clause needs some of Kierkegaard's vocabulary. In chapter I he describes a human being as a synthesis of the psychical and the physical. The two do not hold together on their own. They need a third element, which he calls spirit.
"To posit" the synthesis means, roughly, to take that joining on oneself. It stops being something that simply happens to a body and a mind. It becomes a self that someone has to hold together and answer for.
So the dizziness does not come out of nowhere. It comes at the moment a person starts to become someone in particular.
Looking into possibility
The second clause is the familiar one. Freedom looks down into its own possibility. It sees that it could do this, or that, or something it has not thought of yet, and that nothing outside it will settle the matter.
This is why the comparison is with dizziness. Fear points at a thing. Dizziness has no object of that kind; it comes from the looking itself. Rollo May later built a whole book on the difference between fear and anxiety, discussed on the page on the meaning of anxiety.
Laying hold of finiteness
The third clause is the one that gets cut. Freedom, dizzy from its own possibility, reaches for something finite to hold itself up.
Kierkegaard does not list what finiteness contains. In his vocabulary the finite is whatever is limited, particular and already given. Read that way, the list is long, and most of it is ordinary: a routine, a job title, a rule, a plan, a relationship, a firm opinion about what kind of person one is. None of it is harmful in itself. People need a floor under them.
What the sentence notices is the use. The finite thing is grabbed in the middle of the dizziness, "to support itself", as the sentence says. It is held so that looking can stop. Someone who feels dizzy grips the nearest solid object without asking whether it is the right one.
So the grabbing belongs to anxiety too. Freedom looks, the look is too much, and freedom closes its hand on something.
Where psychology stops
Kierkegaard does not treat the grip as a cure. In the lines that follow, freedom gives way in this dizziness, and he says psychology cannot follow any further. What happens next in the book belongs to guilt and theology, and this page leaves it there.
So his psychology ends where a person reaches for support. It describes the reaching and says nothing about where it leads.
After Kierkegaard
Existential psychotherapy drew heavily on this book. If anxiety belongs to freedom, then what a person holds on to in anxious moments says something about the freedom that frightened them. The rule kept too strictly or the certainty defended too hard may be doing the same work as the finite thing in the sentence.
Irvin Yalom later described the many ways people hand the authorship of their lives to something else; that account is on the page about responsibility avoidance. In Kierkegaard's sentence the handing-over begins earlier, inside the dizziness itself.
He leaves the reader with a question he never asks outright. What am I holding on to so that I don't have to look into my own possibility?
Epimelea is an app built around the existential school. The conversation carries over from one meeting to the next. The archive is encrypted on the device and belongs to the person who wrote it.
About the app: an AI therapist for long-term therapy
This page is about a school of psychotherapy. It is not medical advice and not emergency help. If you are in danger right now, contact your local emergency number, or find a helpline in your country at findahelpline.com.