The Ground

Before the absurd there was dread — a Dane writing under false names and a Russian who had stood before a firing squad.

A course on the thought of Kierkegaard & Dostoevsky.

What you will learn

  • Distinguish anxiety from fear by their objects.
  • Explain why anxiety is tied to possibility rather than danger.
  • See why this is a discovery about freedom, not a pathology.
  • State what a teleological suspension of the ethical would be.
  • Explain 'by virtue of the absurd' precisely.
  • See why the pseudonym matters to the argument.
  • State the three forms of despair.
  • Explain why despair can be unconscious.

Course outline

  1. The Dizziness of Freedom — Anxiety is not fear. Fear has an object; anxiety has none, and that is precisely what makes it the mood in which you discover you are free.
  2. Abraham on the Mountain — A man is told by God to kill his son, and prepares to do it, and we call him the father of faith. Johannes de Silentio cannot make that add up, and refuses to pretend he can.
  3. The Sickness Unto Death — Despair is not a mood. It is a misrelation in the structure of a self — which is why the most common form of it is the kind you do not know you are in.
  4. The Man in the Basement — A retired clerk in Petersburg explains why he will not be improved, and produces the objection that every rational scheme for human happiness has failed to answer since.
  5. The Grand Inquisitor — Christ returns to Seville during the Inquisition and is arrested. The Cardinal explains, kindly, why freedom was a mistake — and Dostoevsky gives him every good line.
  6. What They Handed Forward — Two Christians produced the questions that a mostly atheist movement would live on. What survives the removal of their God — and what quietly does not.

Works read in this course

  • The Concept of Anxiety — Kierkegaard (as Vigilius Haufniensis), 1844 — anxiety as the dizziness of possibility
  • Fear and Trembling — Kierkegaard (as Johannes de Silentio), 1843 — Abraham, the leap, and whether a duty can override the ethical
  • The Sickness Unto Death — Kierkegaard (as Anti-Climacus), 1849 — despair as a misrelation in the self
  • Notes from Underground — Dostoevsky, 1864 — the clerk in the basement who will not be a piano key
  • The Brothers Karamazov — Dostoevsky, 1880 — Ivan's poem of the Grand Inquisitor, and the strongest case against his own faith

Terms introduced

angest, the leap, by virtue of the absurd, the single individual, teleological suspension of the ethical, despair, the underground

Part of the Simposeum course library.