Who wrote The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin?
The Concept of Anxiety
Kierkegaard
In 1793, forty-one years before Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Anxiety, Immanuel Kant wrote his book Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone; his book elevated reason in the realm of Christianity.[7] Many continental philosophers wrote their books in relation to Kant's ideas. Kierkegaard was familiar with Book Two of Kant's book The Conflict of the Good with the Evil Principle for Sovereignty over Man[8] and he made a similar study in this book; however, he might call it the conflict of ethics and anxiety for sovereignty over man. Kierkegaard would replace Kant's term "Good" with "Ethics" and his term "Evil" with "Anxiety about the Good". He wrote about the ideal good versus the actual good that a single individual can do in the following way: "Ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality. On the other hand, it is not the nature of its movement to raise actuality up into ideality. Ethics points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions. Thus ethics develops a contradiction, inasmuch as it makes clear both the difficulty and the impossibility."[9] He was wondering how any existing human being can make any movement in an ideal world.