Anxiety, Death and the Leap

Abstract

Although the whole analysis of anxiety can be interpreted as a proper and distinctive treatment of the time before the Fall, Kierkegaard refrains from developing an explicit analysis of this time. This makes him appear indifferent to any distinction between cosmological and fallen time. However, his analysis of anxiety arguably oscillates between two conceptions of time. Accordingly, his discussion of the time preceding Adam’s qualitative leap to sin cannot be considered temporal in the familiar sense of the term, while the analysis of the time after the Fall is, strictly speaking, temporal.