When I feel very anxious, I sometimes talk to myself. It generally only makes me more anxious. What do I think I am doing? Who do I think is speaking? Who is listening? I haven’t a clue.
At least Kierkegaard, the great anxiety master, had an answer, or in any case he had a theory about how it all began, this business of speaking to oneself in the grip of anxiety. He worried—and worried is a gross understatement—about sinfulness in himself and in all humankind. It all could be traced back, or so the story went, to something that happened in the Garden of Eden. The Lutheran Formula of Concord, which Kier-kegaard took to heart, made it all too clear: ut omnes propter inobedientiam Adae et Hevae in odio apud deum simus—because of the disobedience of Adam and Eve, God hates all of us. That our sinfulness is inherited and not merely learned is all too clear; just look around you and look into yourself, and you will see, if you are honest, how wretched we all are, how naturally we are drawn to falsehood.
How, he wondered, as he grew increasingly anxious, did it ever get started? For the inherited story, the story Kierkegaard knew held the answer, said that the first humans were created innocent. How then could they ever have disobeyed? How could there possibly have been a qualitative leap from innocence to sin? Here’s where anxiety comes in. The prohibition itself—being told that he could not eat from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, lest he die—must have made Adam anxious, and anxiety is the perfect pivot upon which innocence could turn into sin. “He who becomes guilty through anxiety is indeed innocent,” Kierkegaard wrote, “for it was not he himself but anxiety, a foreign power, that laid hold of him, a power that he did not love but about which he was anxious. And yet he is guilty, for he sank in anxiety, which he nevertheless loved even as he feared it. There is nothing in the world more ambiguous.”
But if the prohibition—the equivalent of a parent sternly warning a child not to go too near the stove—came from God, wouldn’t that make God the origin not only of the first human’s anxiety but also of the whole subsequent history of sin? Here is where talking to oneself comes in, as the brilliant, absurd solution to the problem. For God did not talk to Adam, Kierkegaard writes; “Adam talked to himself.”
Stephen Greenblatt’s books include Tyrant: Shakespeare on Politics.
