Kierkegaard

Everything depends on anxiety coming into view. The human being is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical, but a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. In innocence, the human being is not merely animal, for if at any moment in his life he were merely animal, he would never become a human being. So spirit is present but as immediate, as dreaming. So far as it is now present, it is in a sense a hostile power, for it constantly upsets the relation between soul and body, a relation that does have subsistence but then doesn’t have it, because it received it first through spirit. It is, on the other hand, a friendly power that wishes precisely to constitute the relation. What then is the human being’s relation to this ambiguous power; how does spirit relate to itself and to that which conditions it? It relates as anxiety. To do away with itself, that spirit cannot do; seize itself, so long as it has itself outside itself, ti cannot do that either. Nor can the human being sink down into the vegetative, for he is characterized as spirit. Flee from anxiety he cannot, for he loves it; really love it he cannot, for he flees from it. Innocence has now reached its peak. It is ignorance, not an animal brutishness but an ignorance characterized by spirit, and it is as such precisely anxiety, because its ignorance is about nothing. Here there is no knowledge of good and evil, etc., but the whole actuality of knowledge projects itself in anxiety as the enormous nothing of ignorance. ~ Page 53

Analytic philosophy is a style of philosophy that prefers care in argumentation, and that favors strong inductive and/or valid and sound arguments, where possible, for its conclusions. Poetic, purely evocative discourse is welcomed, as long as its truth claims, if there are any, can be put into arguments. Nietzsche and Kierkegaard are stunning great analytic philosophers who write poetically but meet this standard. Pure poetry, artistic expression, is preferred and/or privileged when it comes to expressing how things seem; more direct modes -- scientific and analytic ways of speaking, writing, and arguing -- are preferred when describing the way things are. ` Page 5