Concepts of state and transition as used by Kierkegaard

Question

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.

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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.

Answer 1

My copy of the Concept of Anxiety is 7000 miles away, but I can answer more generall on this point. The basic idea is not original to Kierkegaard nor is his use of it singular to that particular text. Kierkegaard was especially fond of Diogenes the Cynic's response to one of Zeno's paradoxes.See here for more on the original case.

For Kierkegaard, the application of this is a critique of the completeness of the system. Thus, the role in Concept of Anxiety and if memory serves Sickness unto Death is that sin lies outside of the moments that we can comprehend (a classic point that goes back at least to Augustine). The specific difference is that Kierkegaard applies this to a Hegelian notion of understanding that encompasses everything. His point is that human comprehension is like motion insofar as it happens only as certain states arrive and by necessity has gaps. (But I wonder if I'm adding anything you don't already know?)