Purification by fear or the existence of freedom

The concept of fear (or anxiety) is of great importance in existential philosophy. Existentialists give fear a positive connotation: we need it in order to pull a person out of a thoughtless life. Fear is like fire, it burns everything unimportant and temporary; only in it is true existence revealed. The first to write about this was Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), a Danish philosopher and psycholo...