A Reading of King Lear from the Perspective of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and Three Stages of Existence

Abstract

This essay interprets King Lear from the perspective of Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety and three stages of existence. Kierkegaard evaluates Shakespeare’s genius, especially for his representation of life as it is, including its absurdities and incomprehensibilities. The audience or readers are likely to shudder at the absurdities of human life represented in King Lear. Lear’s sudden decision to divide his kingdom based on his daughters’ love for him, his misperception, and the controversial ending have especially been the focus of critics. My purpose is to show that Kierkegaard’s philosophical concepts could help understand the argumental issues and thus may enrich the meaning of the play. Before arguing the issues, I investigate Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety as a fundamental human feeling, including its origin, its derivation, and its augmentation. Although Kierkegaard based the origin of anxiety on Adam’s fall in Genesis, his argument of anxiety is psychological rather than religious. For him, human anxiety is not an automatic byproduct of Adam’s breach of God’s prohibitory decree. Rather, it draws from Adam’s liberty to keep or breach it. His liberty engenders “a possibility” of disobedience, and the possibility simultaneously produces anxiety in him, in turn motivating him to disobey the order. From this point in the fall, all human sins and anxieties are derived and augmented. The anxiety from “possibility” especially accounts for Lear’s sin, that is, his rash decision to divide his kingdom and disown Cordelia. The spiraling interaction of anxiety and sin drives him even to the point of madness. However, Kierkegaard argues that human recognition from suffering does not help free humans from the vicious cycle, unless they have momentum when they commit to God. Kierkegaard’s three types of human existence, namely, the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious, are applied to understand King Lear in relation to Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Lear, as a man dependent on immediacy in the earlier part of the play, can be classified as an aesthete. However, as he suffers, he changes inwardly and becomes ethical. Nonetheless, Lear’s repentance and recognition do not bring him justice or freedom from anxiety and suffering. In other words, Lear does not leap into what Kierkegaard calls the religious stage, where one can commit oneself to God and thereby be free from all human absurdities. Shakespeare perhaps suggests the difficulties and limits of solving absurdities within the human dimension by showing Lear’s ordeal and unfulfilled poetic justice in King Lear.