This has to be one of the worst books every written. Soren Kierkegaard apparently wrote The Concept of Dread in his younger years as a writer. Reading this short and indigestible tract is equivalent to breaking off the ends of asparagus stalks, not the tips which you can gently cook and easily eat in a wide variety of ways, but the bottom parts that are hard as wood, fibrous, and nearly impossible to chew. Lacking in any clear purpose, direction, or relevance, this is one work of literature that can be spat out into the garbage so you can move on to something more nurturing and digestible.
It is not easy to tell why Kierkegaard wrote this. He never explicitly states his reasoning behind the matter. He apparently wanted to write something about psychology, or at least he keeps mentioning psychology and saying that it has severe limitations, something he claims to demonstrate. But the definition or purpose of psychology is never examined. He says its is inferior to religious dogma but he doesn’t get around to saying why dogma is more useful. In fact philosophy, in the truest sense of the word, is meant to do away with dogma, a system of beliefs that does not require proof or systematic thinking. After reading The Concept of Dread, you can possibly deduce that Kierkegaard preferred dogma to evidence based reasoning because he had no talent for logic or methodical thought. He never argues a point. What he says is true because he says it is true and you are stupid if you don’t agree with him. End of argument.
You could invoke Wittgenstein’s claim that philosophy is meant to be descriptive of reality rather than argumentative, an assertion that has merit when used in its proper context. But if that is what Kierkegaard was up to here, he fails miserably to convince through description. The descriptiveness starts with Adam, alone in the Garden of Eden. Kierkeagaard objects to the story of Adam and Eve being interpreted as an allegory or a myth; we have to take it as historical fact. Why? We can’t know because he never gives a reason for this. But let’s be nice readers and take him at his word for the sake of following his discussion. Adam, the first man, was paradoxically outside the human race while being the human race at the same time. Why is this important? Who knows? Did Adam have language? He didn’t need it because he had no one to speak to until Eve came along. Only God spoke to them but God is omnipotent so would he even need to use language to communicate with them? Couldn’t he just implant information in their heads without the medium of speech? Kierkegaard raises this question but never attempts to answer it. And that pesky serpent didn’t actually speak because snakes, by nature, don’t talk.
So when Adam is confronted with the possibility of committing Original Sin he hesitates because he feels...GASP!...a moment of dread. Yes those butterflies in his stomach were a paralyzing anxiety that made him see a future full of infinite possibilities that could result from his desire, decision, and consequent action. But Adam has faith and takes a leap, crossing over the abyss of anxiety and commits Original Sin. And we, the descendants of this mythological first man, have been doing the same thing ever since. This is a profound insight by Lierkegaard’s standards. But this is the same dread felt by every teenage boy the first time he tries to kiss a girl. It is the dread you feel before going to a job interview. It is the dread you feel the first time you score a bag of weed or use a fake ID to buy beer at a convenience story. No doubt, it is the dread that Evel Knievel felt every time he revved up his motorcycle engine before jumping his bike over a line of parked cars. Yes, people get nervous before they do something risky. It is a mundane insight by most people’s standards. 150 years after Kierkegaard wrote The Concept of Dread we have self-help books with titles like Feel the Fear and Do It Anyways. Thanks Soren, you really did the world a favor by writing this book. It’s not easy to comprehend what the field of psychology was like in the mid-19th century but certainly they were farther along than this. He doesn’t advance his thought much beyond this simple assertion and his claim that psychology is inferior to dogma is undercut by the obvious fact that he didn’t seem to know much about psychology to begin with.
How does he claim to know what Adam was feeling at that time? Did he travel back in time and ask Adam about the matter? He couldn’t have been relying on someone else’s testimony because no one was there but Eve and the snake. By Kierkegaard’s admission, the snake couldn’t speak and it hasn’t been established that Adam could either. Is any of this important anyways? Nope. Kierkegaard doesn’t grasp the idea that philosophizing and quibbling are two different things.
There is also a wonderful mess of insights we get from the rest of the book too. Original Sin entered the world through Adam but it is possible that Original Sin was first a part of God; after all, if it entered the world, it must have entered from someplace, it had to exist first in order to enter. Every human is a sinner but each one has to start the chain of sin themselves; humans are born as an eternal chain of recurrence and sin starts anew with each one. “Everything is a copy of a copy of a copy”, says Edward Norton’s nameless charcter in Fight Club. Great idea, Kierk, old buddy...where did you get it from? Socrates, right?
We also get a long digression into the description of time and eternity, though it’s not explained what purpose this serves in developing the thesis, though it’s not quite clear what the thesis is. Time is the measurement of eternity’s flow through the present into the past. A moment is a segment of eternity but it is a segment that lasts forever. Eternity only extends into the future because once the present becomes the past it no loner exists. But doesn’t that mean that eternity has a boundary and a limit, making it, therefore by definition, not eternal? “Shut your mouth”, shouts Kierkegaard from his grave, “logic is nonsense when being confronted by the truths of belief and dogma.”
Towards the end he claims that people who have faith are able to overcome dread but people who oppose faith because they fear it become locked up inside themselves because without faith, they are unable to make the leap of faith that overcomes dread. What logic! Did Kierkegaard personally know of anyone who fit this description? How can he claim this to be a universal truth when he spent so little of his life around the other human beings that he despised so much? The guy didn’t have many friends and apparently he didn’t want any either. He probably never even traveled outside of Denmark. These concepts of faith, dread, and fear of faith are vaguely expressed and some concrete examples of what they mean would have gone a long way in clarifying matters and proving they have any validity. Kierkegaard lacked an epsitemology and his wrtigins suffer terribly because of that omission. Of course, he believed faith mattered more than facts so why bother with proof?
Don’t forget that spirit is what binds the soul to the body and Hegelian philosophy, science, paganism, and anything that isn’t Christian is twaddle, an oddly annoying word that gets used often whenever Kierkegaard makes an ad hominem attack on anyone he disagrees with. To be fair, this overuse of “twaddle” is probably the fault of the translator. But even so, at an intellectual level intellectual level it’s like calling someone a poopy-face or saying, “Yo mama’s so hairy you got rug burn when you was born.”
The book actually gets easier to follow towards the end. The theme of “dread” that is supposed to be the thread tying the whole book together but it is not strong enough to do this. The comprehensible parts of the book are random and don’t complement one another. The Concept of Dread is formless, sloppy, lacking in structure, without clear purpose, and never presents any ideas that are relevant to anything in the real world. If you are not a Christian, then it is based entirely on a false premise. You may want to be a good sport, keep an open mind, and try to see this from the point of view of someone you disagree with but that does not add up to much when the author does such a poor job of stating what his purpose even is. Even if you are a Christian there is a definite possibility that you won’t understand or accept what Kierkegaard is yammering on about because he does such an insufficient job of writing clear and meaningful ideas.
Some people say reading Kierkegaard will help you understand the Nazi Martin Heidegger but if you can understand Heidegger at all, reading Kierkegaard doesn’t offer much assistance. Heidegger, the fascist sympathizer who studied under the Jewish Husserl and had and had an affair with the Jewish Hannah Arendt, was possibly nothing more than a master of obfuscation anyways. Bertrand Russel accused him of using complex language to hide the fact that he had nothing to say (I only partially agree with this) and even the Nazis snubbed him, calling his philosophy gibberish, when he petitioned them to be the prime philosopher of National Socialism while applying for the position of rector of an elite Nazi university. (If you are a Kierkegaard defender, don’t whine at me about this digression since Kierkegaard also goes on long, irrelevant sidetracks in several of his books.) Reading Kierkegaard in light of Heidegger is like reading one of those footnotes that doesn’t do anything to enhance the main text.
Over the last 30 years, I have read a lot of philosophy. I have read other books by Kierkegaard too. Abstract thinking is not foreign to me. Other reviewers say they like this book but can’t explain it. Some reviers explain it but their explanations make no more sense than the original text does. I’m calling bullshit on The Concept of Dread. It reads like something Kierkegaard wrote in haste without putting much thought into what he wanted to say. He probably never bothered to proofread it, revise it, or edit it. If he were alive today, he might even be surprised it is still in print. Skip over this pile of detritus and go straight for Fear and Trembling. I don’t agree with that book but at least it is comprehensible and can be understood, analyzed, and debated in a meaningful way.
Kierkegaard, Soren. The Concept of Dread. Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey: 1973.
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