Haufniensis claims that only anxiety in accordance with faith will be honestly and positively educative to an individual in relation to his spirit. This results in the exposure of finitude by anxiety. The learning and understanding of anxiety leads to a learning and understanding of possibility, which in turn leads to a learning and understanding of ones infinitude, but Haufniensis warns that such a learning and understanding can only be truly educative if the individual has faith. Faith is the central and most crucial aspect of education through anxiety due to its unconditional certainty, allowing an individual to honestly let go and fall into darkness certain that light will again come.
In order to understand why Haufniensis argues that faith is so tremendously important in the process of being educated through anxiety, one must understand anxiety, possibility and infinitude and how they all lead to the destruction of the actual and the finite.
The spirit relates anxiety, possibility and infinitude since spirit is the reason for their respective existences. The spirit is what makes man unique from animals. It is more then just a consciousness, like that of a butterfly or an elephant, but rather an intellectual awareness of consciousness itself. Moreover an understanding and a recognition of ones self: self-consciousness. “Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit” (I, 43). This is what makes man unique, allowing him to be what he fundamentally is. Haufniensis asserts that “Innocence is ignorance” (I, 41), that man as an innocent (some philosophers like to use the term natural man) being is merely ignorant to really understanding himself, and thus his spirit. Spirit is therefore always present in man even when he is ignorant of it because spirit is always a possibility; mans spirit can be idle or dreaming. Spirit is constantly part of...