Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger

Kierkegaard’s influence on Heidegger appears in the book as a philosophical convergence around anguish: Kierkegaard identifies it with freedom and lack, while Heidegger understands it as an encounter with nothingness. Rather than treating these accounts as competing explanations, the text argues that each brings out an aspect of the same experience: the human being faces not merely a threatening situation, but its own freedom to act within it.

Two accounts of anguish

Kierkegaard characterizes anguish as arising before what a person lacks and, more fundamentally, as anguish before freedom. Heidegger, whom the book describes as greatly influenced by Kierkegaard, instead regards anguish as the apprehension of nothingness. The contrast is real, but the text insists that the descriptions are not contradictory: the apprehension of nothingness implies an encounter with freedom, because nothingness becomes manifest through a being able to surpass what is given and confront its own possibilities.

This connection fits the book’s broader account of Heidegger’s thought. Human reality has a comprehension of nothingness that appears in attitudes such as hate, prohibition, and regret; anguish is the permanent possibility of finding oneself face to face with nothingness and discovering it as a phenomenon. Nothingness is not an independently existing thing: it nihilates itself and is conditioned by transcendence. The discussion therefore gives anguish a concrete role in human existence rather than treating it as an abstract idea.

Freedom as a lived question

The book explains anguish as the mode in which a person becomes conscious of freedom. In freedom, the human being is its past and its future in the form of nihilation: it is bound to them, yet is not reducible to either. Anguish is consequently not just a feeling about an external danger. It is the experience of one’s own being as unsettled and answerable for what it will make of a situation.

This distinction also clarifies why anguish is reflective. A person asks not only what may happen, but what that person will do, and whether the self can be trusted to respond in a particular way. Freedom is thus not presented as a detached power or a philosophical abstraction; it becomes an issue for the person in the very act of anticipating a choice.

Fear and anguish distinguished

Fear concerns beings in the world and the possibility that a situation will change a person’s life from without. Anguish, by contrast, arises when the person considers the self as an agent and distrusts its own possible reactions. The book illustrates the difference with vertigo: the fear is not simply of falling over a precipice, but of throwing oneself over. The object of anguish is therefore the self’s freedom to act, not merely the danger presented by the world.

The contrast recurs in the example of a soldier under artillery bombardment. The bombardment can provoke fear; anguish comes when the soldier tries to foresee how he will face it and wonders whether he will hold up. A recruit reporting for active duty may fear death, but may more often be afraid of being afraid. The threatening circumstances have not changed; what changes is the focus, from the situation acting on the person to the person confronting how he may act in it.

One situation, two perspectives

The same distinction applies beyond war. Someone who loses much of his wealth in a crash may first fear the poverty that threatens him. A moment later, wringing his hands in a reaction whose course remains undetermined, he asks what he is going to do. The shift from fear to anguish marks a change in perspective: the loss is initially apprehended as an external threat, then as a situation in which the person must confront his own still-open response.

In this account, Kierkegaard’s emphasis on freedom and Heidegger’s emphasis on nothingness illuminate one another. Anguish exposes the gap between a person and any fixed account of what that person is: the self must face what it may do without being able to turn that possibility into a settled fact in advance. The influence between the philosophers is therefore not merely a shared use of a concept. It helps the book explain how freedom becomes something a person experiences—as the unsettling apprehension of possibilities that have not yet been chosen.