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While reading Søren Kierkegaard's "The Concept of Anxiety", I asked myself how much of the temporal interpretation of dialectic and the interaction between state and transition (leap) are original to Kierkegaard. I know that Kierkegaard understood quite well what Hegel had written, and intentionally used abstract Hegelian concepts in concrete contexts. So I ask myself whether these concepts already appear in the writings of Hegel, and are used by Kierkegaard as outlined there.

As an example of what I have in mind here, take the following quote from The concept of anxiety:

The history of the individual life proceeds in a movement from state to state. Every state is posited by a leap. As sin entered into the world, so it continues to enter into the world if it is not halted. Nevertheless, every such repetition is not a simple consequence but a new leap. Every such leap is preceded by a state as the closest psychological approximation. This state is the object of psychology. To the extent that in every state possibility is present, anxiety is also present. Such is the case after sin is posited, for only in the good is there a unity of state and transition.


I find the description of the interaction between state, transition and time (past, present and future) in Kierkegaard's book intriguing. It also reminds me of the wave particle dualism of quantum mechanics, where the wave nature corresponds more to the state (which normally cannot be measured directly), and the particle nature corresponds more to the transitions (which often have observable side effects). I also ask myself how much other authors after Kierkegaard have used these concepts in similar ways.

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this is an interesting question, but I don't see the similarity between the process being described and the wave/particle dualism which you relate it to. Are you able to elaborate on why you think there is a similarity? – Dr Sister Jan 2 at 9:56
@DrSister The quote I gave is just an example. The link leads to more quotes, which will give a better impression how the book "feels". To simplify, let's take the quote from Matthew: "You will know them by their fruits" instead. The prophets are good or bad/false, but what really counts are their acts and the consequences of their acts. You can't know whether they are good or bad, but you can see their acts and the consequences. Similarly, we can't know (measure) the wave function of a particle, but we can see the consequences of it on the interactions of the particle with other particles. – Thomas Klimpel Jan 2 at 12:08
I see, a good clarification. This reminds me of what i've heard Zizek refer to as 'the impossibility of standing on one's own shoulders', the discontinuity between historically imbedded ways of appraising actions and their actual historical outcomes .. – Dr Sister Jan 3 at 8:12

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