Angst
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Angst is a Dutch, German, and Scandinavian word for fear or anxiety. It is used in English to describe an intense feeling of emotional strife. It is usually, but not always, associated with teenage angst, or confusion and anxiety within the self.
A different but related meaning is attributed to Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard used the word Angest (Danish, meaning "dread") to describe a profound and deep-seated spiritual condition of insecurity and despair in the free human being. Where the animal is a slave to its instincts but always confident in its own actions, Kierkegaard believed that the freedom given to mankind leaves the human in a constant fear of failing its responsibilities to God. Kierkegaard's concept of angst is considered to be an important stepping stone for 20th-century existentialism.
While Kierkegaard's feeling of angst is fear of actual responsibility to God, in modern use, angst is broadened to include general frustration associated with the conflict between actual responsibilities to self, one's principles, and others (possibly including God). Still, the angst in alternative music may be more accessible to more audiences than existentialism. The term "angst" is now widely used as a theme in many great modern writers. Often, as in the Catcher in the Rye the expression is used as a common adolescent experience of malaise; in this sense it has become one of the most central themes used in the fiction of modern novelists like Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace and others.
