Tuesday, July 26, 2011

鏡/visualizing Angst

One of the purposes (perhaps the purpose, given how things flow into one another) of my project is to try and visually represent Angst. Why I opened my big mouth I might never know, but here's one of the photographs I've chosen.




"Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence, anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs to dizziness. Further than this, psychology cannot and will not go. In that very moment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain. He who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become." Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety p. 61
 By the way, anxiety is the same as Existential Angst, pronounced "ahngst," not "aynkst."

2 comments:

Austin said...

I can make out the chair but I honestly can't tell what else I'm looking at other than chaos. I think this one is spot on :D "Chair Mirror?" How did you set up this shot?

Hat said...

Awesome, that's what I was going for. I plunked a chair in between two mirrors, in a patch of light beneath a skylight.