The age of making distinctions is past.

It has been
vanquished by the system. In our day, whoever
loves to make distinctions is regarded as an eccen-
tric whose soul clings to something that has long
since vanished. Be that as it may, yet Socrates still
is what he was, the simple wise man, because of
the peculiar distinction that he expressed both in
words and in life, something that the eccentric
Hamann first reiterated with great admiration two
thousand years later: "For Socrates was great in
'that he distinguished between what he under-
stood and what he did not understand.' "
 TO THE LATE

PROFESSOR POUL MARTIN M0LLER

THE HAPPY LOVER OF GREEK CULTURE, THE ADMIRER OF

HOMER, THE CONFIDANT OF SOCRATES, THE INTERPRETER OF
ARISTOTLE-DENMARK'S JOY IN "JOY OVER DENMARK,"
THOUGH "WIDELY TRAVELED" ALWAYS "REMEMBERED IN
THE DANISH SUMMER"-THE OBJECT OF MY
ADMIRATION, MY PROFOUND LOSS,

THIS WORK
IS DEDICATED.
 16 The Concept of Anxiety

Sin does not properly belong in any science, 33 but it is the

subject of the sermon, in which the single individual speaks as
the single individual to the single individual. In our day, sci-
entific self-importance has tricked pastors into becoming
something like professorial clerks who also serve science and
find it beneath their dignity to preach. Is it any wonder then
that preaching has come to be regarded as a very lowly art?
But to preach is really the most difficult of all arts and is essen-
tially the art that Socrates praised, the art of being able to
converse. It goes without saying that the need is not for
someone in the congregation to provide an answer, or that it
would be ofhelp continually to introduce a respondent. What
Socrates criticized in the Sophists, when he made the distinc-
tion that they indeed knew how to make speeches but not
how to converse, 34 was that they could talk at length about
every subject but lacked the element of appropriation. Ap-
propriation is precisely the secret of conversation.
Corresponding to the concept of sin is earnestness. Now
ethics should be a science in which sin might be expected to
find a place. But here there is a great difficulty. Ethics is still
an ideal science, and not only in the sense that every science is
ideal. Ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality. On the
other hand, it is not the nature of its movement to raise ac-
tuality 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. What is said of
the law 35 is also true of ethics: it is a disciplinarian that de-
mands, and by its demands only judges but does not bring
IV
289
forth life. Only Greek ethics made an exception, and that was
because it was not ethics in the proper sense but retained an
esthetic factor. This appears clearly in its definition of virtue 36
and in what Aristotle frequently, also in Ethica Nicomachea,
IV • If this is considered more carefully, there will be occasions enough to
288
notice the brilliance ofheadmg the last sectton of the Logic "Actuality," inas-
much as ethics never reaches it. The actuality with which logic ends means,
therefore, no more m regard to actuality than the "being" with which it
begins.
 134 The Concept of Anxiety

closed [indesluttet] in God or in the good, because this kind of

inclosure signifies the greatest expansion. Thus the more
definitely conscience is developed in a person the more ex-
panded he is, even though in other respects he closes himself
off from the whole world.
If I were now to call attention to the terminologies of the
most recent philosophy, I might say that the demonic is the
negative and is a nothing, like the elf maid who is hollow
when seen from the back. However, I do not prefer to do
this, because the terminology in and by its social intercourse
has become so amiable and pliant that it may signify anything
whatsoever. The negative, if I were to use this word, signifies
the form of nothing, just as the contentless corresponds to in-
closed reserve. But the negative has the defect that it is more
externally oriented; it defines the relation to something else,
which is negated, while inclosed reserve defines the state it-
lci'1 self.
When the negative is understood in this manner, I have no
objection to its use as a designation for the demonic, provided
that the negative can otherwise rid itself of all the bees that the
most recent philosophy has put in its bonnet. The negative
has gradually become a vaudeville character, and this word
always makes me smile, just as a person smiles when in real
life or in the songs ofBellmann31 he meets one of those amus-
ing characters who was first a trumpeter, then a minor cus-
tomhouse officer, then an innkeeper, then again a mail carrier.
Thus irony has been explained as the negative. Hegel was the
first to discover this explanation, but strangely enough, he
did not know much about irony. That it was Socrates 32 who
first introduced irony into the world and gave a name to the
child, that his irony was precisely inclosing reserve, which he
began by closing himself off from men, by closing himself in
with himself in order to be expanded in the divine, who also
began by closing his door 33 and making a jest to those outside
in order to talk in secret-this is something no one is con-
cerned with. On the occasion of one or another accidental
phenomena, this word "irony" is brought up, and so it is
irony. Then come the parrots, who despite their survey of
 Anxiety of Sin 135

world history unfortunately lack all contemplation, and who

know as much about the concepts as that noble youth knew
about raisins, who, when asked in the test for a grocer's li-
cence where raisins come from, answered: We get ours from
the professor 34 on Cross Street.
We now return to the definition of the demonic as anxiety
about the good. 35 If on the one hand unfreedom were able to
close itself off completely and hypostatize itself, but if on the
IV
other hand it did not constantly will to do so* (in this lies the 402
contradiction that unfreedom wills something, when in fact it
has lost its will), the demonic would not be anxious about the
good. Therefore anxiety manifests itself most clearly in the
moment of contact. Whether the demonic in the single indi-
viduality signifies the terrible or whether the demonic is pres-
ent only like a spot on the sun or like the little white dot in the
corn, the totality of the demonic and the partly demonic have
the same qualification, and the tiniest part of the demonic is
anxiety about the good in the same sense as that which is to-
tally embraced by it. The bondage of sin is, of course, also
unfreedom, but as shown above, its direction is different, and
its anxiety is about evil. If this is not held fast, nothing can be
explained.
Unfreedom, the demonic, is therefore a state, and psychol-
ogy regards it as a state. Ethics, on the other hand, sees how
out of this state the new sin constantly breaks forth, for only
the good is the unity of state and movement.
Freedom, however, may be lost in different ways, and so
there may also be a difference in the demonic. This difference
I shall now consider under the following rubrics: Freedom
IV
• This must constandy be mamtained desp1te the illusion of the demonic 401
and that oflanguage usage, which by employing such expressions in describ-
ing this state almost tempts one to forget that unfreedom i~ a phenomenon of
freedom and thus cannot be explained by naturalistic categories. Even when
unfreedom uses the strongest possible expressions to affrrm that it does not
will itself, it is untrue, and it always possesses a will that is stronger than the
IV
wish. This state can be extremely deceptive, for one can bnng a human being 402
to despair by holding back and keepmg the category pure over against his
sophisms. One should not be afraid of this, but neither should youthful
imagmative constructors try themselves in these spheres.