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From "The Return of the Religious, or Reading Ethics Using Religious Categories: Kierkegaard, Levinas, and Recent French Thought" By Bettina Bergo.
"For all individuals, how one responds to anxiety and what its principal objects are, determines the sort of personality one develops. Kierkegaard speaks of a personality caught up in the state of the "demonic."[20] This is a state in which freedom, entangled with itself in anxiety, slowly turns into non-freedom and obsession. The visible symptoms of the demonic are enumerated like a hodge-podge of psychoanalysis and more literary troubles: "a hypersensibility and a hyperirritability, neurasthenia, hysteria, hypochondria, etc." (CA 136-37). These symptoms accompany and are heightened by the principal phenomenon of the demonic: the refusal to speak and to open oneself to the other, which is Kierkegaard's concept of "inclosing reserve" (CA 123ff.). The state arises in one of two possible sorts of anxiety: anxiety before the good and anxiety before evil. It is not difficult to imagine what, or why anxiety is found before evil: the apprehension of harm or of sin is its content. But as a human being shuts itself off, in cynicism, skepticism, or some emotional state like envy, it shows an increasing anxiety about the good, about love and the other transcendence that expresses itself in "confession," like Levinas's apology. Inclosing reserve thus desiccates freedom as possibility; it is anti-sociality, a negative ethic of sociality par excellence. States Kierkegaard, "The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdition. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying: 'Leave me alone in my wretchedness'" (CA 137)."
Too Sensitive
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