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Contents ■■ . ■' t-utki^uardCommentary: '■(i kness unto Death ( opyright e1987 \i-r.sity Press, Macon, Georgia 31207 AH rights reserved Printed in the United States of America . I
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The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Sl.iiid.mf Un Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Prinl.-d I .ilir-.rv Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984
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library <>/ Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Sickness unto death. (International Kierkegaard commentary; 19) Includes index. 1. Kierkegaard, Seren, 1813-1855. Sygdommen til daden. 2. Sin. 3. Despair. I. Perkins, Robert L., 1930. II. Series. B4376.I58 vol. 19 1984 198'.9 s 87-5614 [BT715] [248] ISBN 0-86554-271-6 (alk. paper)
Acknowledgments Sigla Introduction I. The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard's Work JohnD. Glenn, Jr II. Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation Alastair Hannay
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III. Kierkegaard's Psychology and Unconscious Despair Merold Westphal ■.
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IV. Kierkegaard's Double Dialectic of Despair and Sin James L. Marsh
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V. The Sickness unto Death: Critique of the Modern Age Louis Dupre VI. The Social Dimension of Despair John W. Elrod VII. On "Feminine" and "Masculine" Forms of Despair Sylvial. Walsh VIII. The Grammar of Sin and the Conceptual Unity of The Sickness unto Death RobertC. Roberts
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Sigla
CI, The Concept of Irony. Trans. Lee Capel. New York: Harper & Row, 1966; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. (On Begrebet Ironi, by S. Kierkegaard, 1841.) EO Either/Or. Volume 1. Trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Volume 2. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Second ed. rev. Howard A. Johnson. Princeton: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1971. (Enten-Eller, 1-2, ed. Victor Eremita, 1843.) ED Edifying Discourses, 1-4. Trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Marvin Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1943-1946. (Opbyggelige Taler, by S. Kierkegaard, 1843,1844.) FT Fear and Trembling. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (Frygt og Bseven, by Johannes De Silentio, 1843.) R Repetition. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. (Gjentagelsen, by Constan t s Constantius, 1843.) PF Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. (Philosophiske Smuler, by Johannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1844; "Johannes Climacus eller De omnibus dubitandum est," written 1842-1843, unpubl., Papirer IV B 1.) CA The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (Begrebet Angest, by Vigilius Haufniensis, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1844.)
International Kierkegaard Commentary TCS Three Discourse:- on lin,i^in,?d Occasions [Thoughts on Crucial Situations in Hunuiii I itrl I tans. David F. Swenson, ed. Lillian Marvin SVWMMHI Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1941. (he lulf . rdt.viiktc Leiligheder, by S. Kierkegaard, 1845.) SLW S/,-.';.,'<'• "'•' ' I'*' • Way. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Prince ton I .'nu riMIv I'rcss, 1940. (Stadierpaa Livets Vej, ed. Hilarius tW.hn.ler, I.S45.) CUP i .»(, lulling Unscientific Postscript. Trans. David F. Swenson .mil Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press for American-Scandinavian Foundation, 1941. (Afsluttende uvidemkabelig Efterskrift, by Joahannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierke gaard, 1846.) TA Two Ages: The Age of Revolution and the Present Age. A Literary Review. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1978. (En literair Anmeldelse. To Tidsaldre, by S. Kierkegaard, 1846.) OAR On Authority and Revelation, The Book on Adler. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955. (Bogen om Adler, written 1846-1847, unpubl., Papirer VII2 B 235; VIII2 B 1-27.) PH Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits. (Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand, by S. Kierkegaard, 1847.) Part One, Purity of Heart ["En Leiligheds-Tale"]. Second ed. Trans. Douglas Steere. New York: Harper, 1948. GS Part Three and Part Two: The Gospel of Suffering and The Lilies of the Field ["Lidelsernes Evangelium" and "Lilierne paa Marken og Himlens Fugle"]. Trans. David F. Swenson and Lillian Mar vin Swenson. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1948. WL Works of Love. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, New York: Harper & Row, 1962. (Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, by S. Kierkegaard, 1847.) C The Crisis [and a Crisis] in the Life of an Actress. Trans. Stephen Crites. New York: Harper & Row, 1967. (Krisen og en Krise i en Skuespillerindes Liv, by Inter et Inter. Fsedrelandet, 188-91, 2427 July 1848.)
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CD Christian Discourses, including 77K Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air and Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays. Trans. Walter Lowrie. London and New York: Oxford Uni versity Press, 1940. (Christelige Taler, by S. Kierkegaard, 1848; Lilien paa Marken og Fuglen under Himlen, by S. Kierkegaard, 1849; Tre Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen, by S. Kierkegaard, 1849.) SUD The Sickness unto Death. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (Sygdommen til Doden, by Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1849. TC Training in Christianity, including "The Woman Who Was a Sinner." Trans. Walter Lowrie. London and New York: Ox ford University Press, 1941; rpt.: Princeton: Princeton Uni versity Press, 1944. (Indovelse i Christendom, by Anti-Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, 1850; En opbyggelig Tale, by S. Kierke gaard, 1850.) AN Armed Neutrality and An Open Letter. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington and London: Indiana Uni versity Press, 1968. (den bevxbnede Neutralitet, written 18481849, publ. 1965; Foranledigt ved en Yttring afDr. Rudelbach mig betrseffende, Fxdrelandet, no. 26, 31 January 1851.) PV The Point of View for My Work as an Author, including the ap pendix " T h e Single Individual/ Two 'Notes' Concerning My Work as an Author," and On My Work as an Author. Trans. Walter Lowrie. London and N e w York: Oxford University Press, 1939. (Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed, by S. Kierkegaard, posthumously published 1859. Om min Forfatter-Virksomhed, by S. Kierkegaard, 1851.) FSE For Self-Examination. Trans. Howard v. H o n g and Edna H. Hong. Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1940. (Til Selvprovelse, by S. Kierkegaard, 1851.) JFY Judge for Yourselves! including For Self-Examination, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (trans. David Swenson) and The Unchangeableness of God (trans. Walter Lowrie). Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. (Dommer Selv! by S. Kier kegaard, 1852; to Taler ved Altergangen om Fredagen, by S. Kier kegaard, 1851; Guds Uforanderlighed, by S. Kierkegaard, 1855.)
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International Kierkegaard Commentary KAUC Kierkegaard's Attack upon "Christendom," 1854-1855. Trans. Walter Lowrie. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944. (Bladartikler I-XXI, by S. Kierkegaard, Feedrelandet, 1854-1855; Dette skal siges; saa vsere det da sagt, by S. Kierkegaard, 1855; 0ieblikket, by S. Kierkegaard, 1-9, 1855; 10, 1905; Hvad Christus dommer om officiel Christendom, by S. Kierkegaard, 1855.)
Introduction
JSK The Journals of Seren Kierkegaard. Trans. Alexander Dru. Lon don and New York: Oxford University Press, 1938. (From S0ren Kierkegaards Papirer, I-XP in 18 volumes, 1909-1936. LY The Last Years. Trans. Ronald C. Smith. New York: Harper & Row, 1965. (From Papirer XP-XP, 1936-1948.) JP Seren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press (1) 1967; (2) 1970; (3-4) 1975; (5-7) 1978. (From Papirer I-XP and XII-XIII, 2d ed., and Breve og Akstykker vedrerende Seren Kierkegaard, ed. Niels Thulstrup, 1-2, 1953-1954.) LD Letters and Documents. Trans. Hendrik Rosenmeier. Prince ton: Princeton University Press, 1978. COR The Corsair Affair. Trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.
This volume of essays on Kierkegaard's The Sickness unto Death addresses new questions about the significance of Kierkegaard's work and in so doing illustrates the breadth of his appeal to a younger generation of scholars who have fresh insights and inter ests. Yet to say that is not to say there is a complete break, a dis continuity, between the earlier and the more recent research. There is both continuity and discontinuity between this collection of es says and the older scholarship. The greatest continuity between the older research and the work in this volume is the regard for facts, for accuracy of interpretation. The works of several (Hirsch and Geismar among others), but not nearly all, of the earlier scholars are paradigms of scholarly achievement. The contributors to this volume have, like the best of fheir predecessors, attended to the detail of the text and to the way that Kierkegaard develops his arguments. The most profound difference between the older research and research in this volume is a new set of questions and concerns. This becomes most obvious when one notes the assumption shared by most, if not all, of the contributors to this volume that Kierke gaard's thought has great importance for social philosophy and even constitutes a major critique of modernity. This difference calls into question the stereotype of Kierke gaard as having no social and political thought. His individualism has frequently been interpreted quite narrowly and apolitically. At best he has been interpreted as not having thought about the po litical and social issues of his time. At worst his thought has been interpreted as logically excluding the possibility of his thinking about these political and social issues. These two views, taken to gether, have been the major variations of the common interpreta-
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tion till quite recently. So pervasive was this stereotype that it has even been claimed, for instance, that he had no theology of the church—in spite of the collection we conveniently call The Attack on Christendom. That this collection does not contain a theology of the church in any strict or systematic sense is obvious even to the casual reader. Still, implied in and underlying the polemic against Christendom is a well-considered understanding of the church and society. While most would agree, some perhaps grudgingly, with this assertion, the objection has been raised against some of Kier kegaard's other writings that he had no concern for the wider is sues facing modern society. Yet, in all fairness to those who have held to the better or the worse form of the usual interpretation, it must be emphasized that Kierkegaard never thought that the political and social issues of the time reflected the fundamental ills of humankind. He was, to be sure, neither a Hobbes, a Locke nor a Marx. On the other hand, the forms of life he criticized were those forms of life he knew. The criticism of aestheticism, speculation, Christendom, the ethical optimism of Judge William, and so forth, all testify to the concern he had for the social and political forms of his time. Few of his books could be construed to support the usual in terpretation better than The Sickness unto Death. One can imagine how someone presenting the usual interpretation would go on: The rhetoric of the title, The Sickness unto Death, suggests that Kierke gaard was concerned with the individual. The title, again, sug gests the hortatory or the literary, n o t sober social or political analysis. The subtitle, A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, indicates the unpolitical and unsocial na ture of the book. It is for upbuilding and awakening, that is, the book is religious and probably "preachy." It is, furthermore, "psy chological," again indicating a concern for the individual. Finally the book is authored by a pseudonym, a favorite literary device of the German romantics. The book is scarcely literature, but it is more emphatically neither politics nor sociology. The author is suggest ing so much in the title and subtitle that his intentions are not clear. Yet one thing is clear: Kierkegaard is not presenting substantial re flections on, or interpretations of, modern society.
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Several contributors to this volume have read the same texts and have found Kierkegaard to have a fundamental understanding of society in both a secular and a Christian sense. He rejects the sec ular, and the rejection is a considered one as those who comment on this issue in this volume show. More remarkably, his Christian critique of modernity is not a conservative critique. Kierkegaard's critique of modernity does not look backward to a lost golden age. Neither is his critique a Marxist or a socialist one that looks forward to a golden age yet to come if certain changes are made. What Kier kegaard says against modernity cannot be used by any class inter est to batter another class. Rather, his critique, based as it is upon a developing understanding of the historical and social conditions of his age, is at the same time transcendental, theocentric, apoca lyptic, and prophetic. A n o t h e r issue that emerges between the older a n d newer scholarship is the meticulous detail with which the crucial text (SUD, 13-14) regarding the constitution of the self is analyzed. There are certain texts that simply will not let go of a person, and this is one of them. Only since the mid-sixties has the text received the detailed analysis it deserves, or rather, provokes. The relation of Kierkegaard's views to some other philosophic concepts of the self, the bearing of this concept on the wider issues of the book (edification and awakening), and the way this concept of the self ties his authorship together, are examined in detail in this volume. Further, the issue of the unity of the two parts of the work is clarified if proper attention is given to the definition of the self. Kierkegaard's view of the self has been one of his most fruitful ideas in the areas of psychotherapy and counseling, The Sickness unto Death frequently being read. The wealth of comment on Kier kegaard by practitioners and scholars in these areas is pertinent and perceptive. But as could be expected, philosophers have not been entirely appreciative of these efforts, in spite of the fact that Kier kegaard cast the major analogy of the book as sickness and heal ing. Psychotherapists usually miss the philosophic import of the book, but, on the other hand, they do find a dimension that phi losophers may not properly appreciate. The lack of mutual en lightenment between these two fields speaks more of the arridity of our artificial compartmentalization of the matters of the spirit
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than it does to any inherent difficulty or any conceptual division in The Sickness unto Death itself. With rare exception, theologians have not exploited the mas sive contributions Kierkegaard makes to the doctrine of sin and the issue of the relation of revelation and reason (among many other topics) in The Sickness unto Death. Remarkably, Kierkegaard is more thought about in academic philosophy than in academic theology. Yet in the philosophic community he is usually treated as if his cre dentials left something to be desired, and for this very reason he should be received with more enthusiasm by the theologians: Kierkegaard is confessedly a radical Christian thinker and the ob ject of his authorship is upbuilding and awakening to the Chris tian sense of beings. (Of course, philosophers have other objections to his work: dislike of Kierkegaard's literary devices, objections to specific arguments, and so forth.) Much of the earlier writing on Kierkegaard was concerned with his relation to the philosophy of existence. "Existentialism" is prob ably the most abused philosophic word in the twentieth century. The works of Kierkegaard were first popularized and then neglected dur ing the rise and the gradual demise of that movement, whatever it " was. The relation of Kierkegaard to existential philosophy is dis cussed in this book, but, whereas that was a major concern in many books written in the fifties, this concern is only one of several now. Still, there is a sense in which the relation of Kierkegaard to existen tialism needs to be investigated. Previous scholarship did not, as a rule, penetrate to close reading of the texts in a comparative and an alytical manner. Further, the historical studies were, to a large ex tent, superficial, and frequently broad generalizations were developed on the basis of a minimum of detail. The concern of existentialism and phenomenology with the lived-world has carried over into the issues raised in contemporary philosophy such as sexual identity. New interests such as this one measure Kierkegaard, and Kierkegaard is measured by them. Much remains to be done in all the areas indicated above, but this collection marks an advance in every area addressed. We can do better than our predecessors because of what we learned frorri them. Our successors will do likewise. They will honor us by sur passing us.
I
The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard's Work John D. Glenn, Jr.
"A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self?" (SUD, 13) So begins the main body of The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard1 proceeds to define three dimen sions of human selfhood. The self is, he says: (a) a synthesis of polar opposites—"of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity;" (b) self-relating—"a relation that relates itself to itself;" and (c) ultimately dependent on God—"a de rived, established relation, a relation that. . .in relating itself to itself relates itself to another" (SUD, 13-14). This definition is fundamental for the concrete exploration of selfhood throughout the whole work. The "sickness unto death"— which Kierkegaard identifies as despair, and also later as sin—is a malady affecting all the dimensions of the self. It is a failure to will to be the self one truly is—in other words, a deficient self-rela tion—which involves also an imbalance among the components of the self as synthesis and a deficient God-relation. The health of the 'As it is generally recognized that Kierkegaard "stands behind" the ideas ex pressed in The Sickness unto Death in a sense that is not true of all the pseudony mous writings, I will dispense with references to "Anti-Climacus."
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self—which he eventually identifies as faith—is an affirmation by the self of itself (that is, a positive self-relation), in which the com ponents of the self as synthesis are in right relation, and the self is properly related to its divine foundation. It is a state in which "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests trans parently in the power that established it" (SUD, 14). The definition of the self is, however, not only crucial for un derstanding the other main concepts of The Sickness unto Death; it is also the key to the work's concrete structure. After some general observations about the nature and universality of despair, Kier kegaard proceeds to dissect various forms of despair (a) insofar as they involve misrelation among the components of the self as syn thesis, and (b) insofar as they are characterized by varying degrees of self-consciousness and self-assertion; finally, he analyzes (c) de spair as sin. These three sections of The Sickness unto Death corre spond to the three dimensions of selfhood, so that the definition of the self provides the structure of the rest of the work, while the latter's details make concrete the meaning of the definition. I also hope to show that a similar relation holds between these dimen sions and the three "stages" of existence—the aesthetic, the ethi cal, a n d t h e r e l i g i o u s — d e p i c t e d in K i e r k e g a a r d ' s e a r l y pseudonymous works. This essay will explore these correspon dences in order to clarify Kierkegaard's conception of the self and to show how his definition provides a key for understanding both The Sickness unto Death and his broader work. I will focus in turn on the three dimensions of the definition and on the related forms of despair and "stages" of existence.
clearly in the first major subdivision of his account of the forms of despair, which is entitled "Despair Considered without Regard to its Being Conscious or Not, Consequently Only with Regard to the Constituents of the Synthesis" (SUD, 29). That is, despair is here analyzed (so to speak) psychologically, as a mere state of the self, in abstraction from the self-relation which makes the self responsible for it as an act and qualifies it ethically; it is also in general treated without focus on the God-relation which qualifies it theologically and marks it as sin. This section thus corresponds precisely to the first dimension of the definition of the self, and its details clarify the meaning of the self as synthesis. The specific forms of despair described in this section are char acterized by an overstress on one aspect of the self as synthesis, with a corresponding understress on (or "lack of") its polar op posite. "Infinitude's despair" is a state in which the self becomes lost in vaporous sentimentality, in sheer proliferation of objective knowledge, or in fantastic projects—when by means of the "infinitizing" capacity of imagination the self is "volatilized" (SUD, 31) in its feeling, knowledge, or will. 2 "Finitude's despair," in con trast, is characterized by worldliness, conformism, and a merely prudential attitude toward life:
(A) The Self as Synthesis: The Psychological-Aesthetic Dimension of Selfhood "A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis" (SUD, 13). Human existence is a kind of paradox. A hu man being is neither god nor beast—yet is somehow like both. Is Kierkegaard simply reasserting the traditional dualistic con ception of the human being as a composite of immortal soul and mortal body? He does sometimes refer (such as in SUD, 43) to the "psychical-physical synthesis." But his meaning emerges more
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Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular mat ters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person . . . finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man. (SUD, 33-34) Kierkegaard describes what the right relation between the in finitude and finitude of the self would be in terms that are remi niscent of the "double-movement" of faith in Fear and Trembling, though less paradoxical: To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the pro gress of the becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. (SUD, 30) 2
See SUD, 30-33.
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Where Kierkegaard's initial definition posed freedom and ne cessity as polar opposites, in his discussion of the forms of despair "possibility" replaces "freedom;" freedom seems not so much to be a single pole as to pertain to the synthesis of possibility and ne cessity. He describes "possibility's despair" primarily as a fasci nation with possibility purely as possibility; here the self is awash in a sea of possibilities, but does not proceed to actualize any of them. "What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limita tions" (SUD, 36). "Necessity's despair," on the other hand, in volves a lack of possibility, which means "either that everything has become necessary for a person or that everything has become trivial" (SUD, 40)—that is, either a kind of fatalism or a mentality which reckons life within the narrow compass of probability. These analyses obviously reflect the definition of the self as syn thesis—and help to clarify it. They suggest, first, that the "infini tude" of the self does not primarily mean the possession of an immortal soul, but the capacity to transcend one's own finite situa tion, either in such a way that this finite situation is somehow ne glected or that an expanded, ideal form of the self is envisioned and movement toward its actualization is made possible. Moreover, they indicate that the "finitude" of the self does not mean its bodily char acter per se, but its involvement in actual situations, particularly as this entails a tendency to be absorbed in restrictive social roles—what Heidegger and Sartre identify as the "one." In its specific elabora tion, then, Kierkegaard's definition of the self as synthesis of infini tude and finitude is not so close to traditional soul-body dualism as it is to Heidegger's account of Being-in-the-world as involving both "facticity" and "existentiality" or to Sartre's conception of Being-foritself as involving "facticity" and "transcendence."3 The "necessity" of the self, similarly, does not here seem to mean its subjection to either logical or causal necessity, but refers rather to its unsurpassable limitations. To that extent it might be 3 See Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John MacQuarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 235-36; Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956) 56. Need it be said that both thinkers are greatly indebted to Kierkegaard?
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compared to Heidegger's account of death as "not to be out stripped,"4 though Kierkegaard's later reference to the "thorn in the flesh" (SUD, 77-78) and other features of his discussion indi cate that he primarily intends specific limitations of a self's actual situation. His references to hope, fear, and anxiety as characteris tic attitudes toward possibility suggest that he conceives the self to be defined both by active possibility—what it can do—and passive possibility—what can happen to (or be done for) it. Later "existen tialist" thinkers—including the early Heidegger and Sartre—have tended to overemphasize the former aspect of selfhood; Kierke gaard's conception of the self is in this respect more balanced. Kierkegaard does not here deal with the self as synthesis of "the temporal and the eternal," but other works5 help to clarify his in tent. As with his accounts of the other "syntheses," Kierkegaard is asserting that human selfhood involves certain inherent tensions—in this case, a tension between the self's capacity for unity through time and the tendency of its existence to be dispersed into different moments. In this respect, the self's task is to give its ex istence a unifying meaning, a meaning that is "eternal" in the sense of transcending temporal dispersion, without becoming merely abstract or stultifying. The correspondence between aesthetic existence and the first di mension of selfhood is perhaps clearest in the "Diapsalmata" in Vol ume One of Either IOr. These lyrical and aphoristic paragraphs best epitomize the reflective aesthetic existence of "A," the pseudony mous author of that volume, and provide a prelude to all the major themes that are developed more fully later in the volume, while also suggesting points that are not elsewhere elaborated. Because reflec tive aestheticism contains within itself, as subordinate "moments," the characteristics of lower types of aesthetic existence, these para graphs in a sense represent the whole aesthetic "stage." What the "Diapsalmata" reveal is an individual lacking in any positive se//-relation—he is committed above all to non-commitment, and so his self-relation does not take the form of explicit will, but rather 4
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 308. See below for brief discussions of this theme as it pertains to the two volumes of EitherI Or. 5
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only of (often ironic) self-observation—and in any clarified God-rela tion. His existence is thus dominated by the tensions between the components of the self as synthesis. He is, for example, acutely aware of, and laughs bitterly at, the distance between the infinite and the finite, the ideal and the actual: I saw that the meaning of life was to secure a livelihood, . . . that love's rich dream was marriage with an heiress;. . . that piety con sisted in going to communion once a year. This I saw, and I laughed. (EO 1:33)
My life is absolutely meaningless. When I consider the differ ent periods into which it falls, it seems like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which means in the first place a string, in the second, a daughter-in-law. The only thing lacking is that the word Schnur should mean in the third place a camel, in the fourth, a dust-brush. (EO 1:35)
But he lacks a unifying will to resolve this tension in his own ex istence, and thus vacillates between the infinitude and the finitude of his nature: [My] desires concern sometimes the most trivial things, sometimes the most exalted, but they are equally imbued with the soul's mo mentary passion. At this moment I wish a bowl of buckwheat por ridge. . . . I would give more than my birthright for it! (EO 1:26) Similarly, "A" fails to achieve an appropriate relation between the possibility and necessity of his existence. He expresses a strong preference for possibility over actuality: "Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!" (EO 1:40) He attempts, in fact, to transform his life, through the skillful exercise of memory and imagination, from the status of actuality into that of art—that is, into the dimension of possibility. Yet his lack of commitment, his refusal to will to transform his existence in actuality, leaves him ul timately prey to necessity (envisioned as fate): "And so I am not the master of my life, I am only one thread among many. . . ."(EO 1:30) Thus he is subject, in turn, to "possibility's despair" and "ne cessity's despair." Finally, "A" fails to unify the eternal and the temporal aspects of his self-synthesis. He tries to "live constantly aeterno modo" by keeping free of all temporal commitments ("the true eternity does not lie behind either/or, but before it" [EO 1:38]), and goes so far as to call the gods "most honorable contemporaries"! (EO 1:42) Yet he is aware of the failure of this attempt, and complains at its re sult, which is that his existence lacks temporal cohesion:
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The existence of the reflective aesthete is, then, lived in terms of the first dimension of the definition of the self.6 Failing to exer cise a positive self-relation, to will to shape and unify his own ac tuality, and lacking a clarified God-relation, the self is here buffeted between the infinitude and finitude, the possibility and necessity, the eternity and temporality of its own nature. (B) The Self as Self-Relating: The Ethical Dimension of Selfhood
"In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a neg ative unity. . . . If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self" (SUD, 13). The self is not a simple sum of the factors that compose its synthesis; its direction is not to be determined by mere analysis of the "vec tors" of its component aspects. Everything about the self is subject to an independent variable—namely, the stance which the self takes toward it. To say that the self is self-relating is to attribute to it the capac ity for such reflexive activities as self-love, self-hate, self-judg ment, self-direction—and, above all, of faith or despair, of willing to be or not willing to be itself. It should be emphasized that while self-consciousness is certainly essential to selfhood as self-rela tion, Kierkegaard ultimately stresses here the volitional rather than the cognitive element of the self-relation. Again the issue is, Does the self will or not will to be itself? This is also the chief issue in the second major subdivision of Kierkegaard's analysis of the forms of despair, which is entitled "Despair as Defined by Consciousness" (SUD, 42). Here he first discusses states that are really lower stages of aesthetic existence, where the reason that the self does not will itself to be itself is that This is also true of more "immediate" aesthetic individuals, except that their rxistence lacks A's self-awareness and dialectical complexity.
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it is unaware of being a self in any but the most superficial sense. He notes, however, that "it is almost a dialectical issue whether it is justifiable to call such a state despair" (SUD, 42), and his chief focus is on despair's higher forms. These fall into two main classes. The first is termed "despair in weakness" (SUD, 49). Here the self is not willing to be itself be cause of some factor in its existence—something present, or past, or even a mere possibility—which it finds unacceptable. The sec ond is described as "in despair to will to be oneself: defiance" (SUD, 67). Here the self in a sense wills to be itself, but is yet in despair because it does not will to be the self that it truly is. It may in Pro methean fashion will to be its own lord and creator, but refuse to accept as itself its concrete, finite being, or to acknowledge any au thority over itself which can give seriousness to the task of being it self. (Every word of Kierkegaard's analysis here can be read as a prophetic critique of the atheistic existentialism of thinkers such as Nietzsche and Sartre). Or, finally, it may recognize that it cannot abstract itself from some "thorn in the flesh," some suffering or defect in its finite nature, but yet, refusing to accept any possibility of aid, will to be itself in its very imperfection as a spiteful protest against existence. 7 Kierkegaard's purpose in these analyses is to show the insuf ficiency of an unaided self-relation, that the self alone is unable to put its existence aright, that this can be done only through a right relation to God. This is also a major concern in his depiction of eth ical existence in the early pseudonymous works—most notably in Volume Two of Either/Or. It may seem arbitrary to link the forms of despair just discussed, culminating as they do in demonic de fiance, with the moral earnestness of Judge William, the pseud onymous author of that volume, and Kierkegaard's paradigm of ethical existence. Yet I believe the link holds. For what this "ethicist" stresses above all, what he takes as absolute, is his own self as self-relation, as capacity of self-choice, as will, as freedom:
lidity. Anything else but myself I can never choose as the absolute.
12
What is it I choose? Is it this thing or that? No. . . . I choose the absolute. And what is the absolute? It is I myself in my eternal va7
See SUD, 67-74.
13
But what, then, is this self of mine? . . . It is the most abstract of all things, and yet at the same time it is the most concrete—it is freedom. (EO 2:218)
Judge William's conception of the self as active self-relation, as freedom, in effect incorporates the first dimension of selfhood, the -.elf as synthesis. Recognizing the presence of disparate elements within the self, he holds that these can be harmonized, that a right telationship between the different elements of selfhood can be •if hieved, through a self-choice in which the self as freedom takes responsibility for the development of the self as synthesis. This is the meaning of the title of the second major portion of i'tther/Or, Volume Two: "Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and (he Ethical in the Composition of Personality" (EO 2:159). "The •M'sthetical" refers here to the given aspects of the self, to its mul tiplicity of needs, desires, conditions, relations, and capacities; "the rthical" refers to the freedom with which the self directs its own Incoming. 8 To postulate their "equilibrium" is to assert that ethical **elf-choice does not extirpate or impose a narrow discipline upon the aesthetic aspects of existence, but merely relativizes them, while .it the same time directing them to a harmonious fulfillment. Thus Judge William argues that marriage—which he regards as a prime exemplar of ethical existence—does not destroy, but actually en hances the beauty of "first l o v e " (a beauty which " A " prizes highly). Similarly, marriage ennobles the natural necessity that is expressed in erotic attraction by bringing it into the sphere of eth ical commitment. That ethical existence involves a unification of the diverse as pects of the self as synthesis is also indicated by Judge William in remarks such as this:
"See EO 2:182. The ethicist does not seem to make a clear distinction between f he freedom of the self and the "higher" aspects of the self as synthesis. This may indicate that Kierkegaard had not, when Either/Or was written, formulated ex plicitly, even for himself, the definition of the self, but that he may have arrived ,»» it through the early writings. At any rate, my claim is that it is a key for interfwting these works; I do not intend to advance any thesis about the development of his ideas.
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Man's eternal dignity consists in the fact that he can have a his tory, the divine element in him consists in the fact that he himself, if he will, can impart to this history continuity, for this it acquires only when it is not the sum of all that has happened to me . . . but is my own work, in such a way that even what has befallen me is by me transformed and translated from necessity to freedom. (EO 2:254-255)
only by God. 9 Judge William's confidence that through ethical ex istence one can "succeed in saving his soul and gaining the whole world" (EO 2:182) underestimates both the reality of sin in the self and the difficulty of shaping the world according to ethical pur poses—and thus in effect ignores human dependence on God. CO The Self as Dependent on God: The Religious Dimension of Selfhood
Again, he finds the highest expression of this in marriage: The married man . . . has not killed time but has saved it and pre served it in eternity. . . . He solves the great riddle of living in eter nity and yet hearing the hall clock strike, and hearing it in such a way that the stroke of the hour does not shorten but prolongs his eternity. (EO 2:141) Marriage unites the eternal and the temporal by providing the dif ferent moments of life with continuity and a unitary meaning. However, despite the attractiveness with which Judge William describes—and represents—the ethical life in general, and mar riage in particular, Kierkegaard does not regard ethical existence as the highest "stage," just as he does not regard free self-relation as the ultimate dimension of selfhood. His reservations about the sort of claims made by Judge William on behalf of the ethical are hinted at by a careful reading of Either/Or, and are suggested in the very paragraphs of The Sickness unto Death where the self is de fined. The definition of the self as a "derived, established relation" expresses, he says, "the inability of the self to arrive at or to be in equilibrium . . . by itself." (SUD, 13-14) What is the root of the difficulty? It is that, despite the vague religiousness expressed by Judge William, the individual at the ethical stage of existence attempts to rely ultimately only on his own freedom, assuming for himself the power to make his own life right. He preaches, in effect, a doctrine of justification by works, the "works" in this case being expressions of an essentially Kantian ideal of universality and autonomy. It is this ultimate self-reliance that he has in common with the defiant types of despair described in The Sickness unto Death. He undertakes an unconditional self-af firmation, whereas Kierkegaard thought that affirmation of our true selves is ultimately dependent on a "condition" that can be given
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"The human self is . . . a derived established relation, a rela tion that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another" (SUD, 13-14). The self-relation of every self in volves also a relation to "the power that established it," whether the self is aware of this relation or not. The self-relation and the God-relation are not—as Feuerbach would have it—identical, yet they go hand in hand. To will to be oneself in the fullest sense is also to take up an affirmative stance toward one's foundation; to despair, to refuse to will to be oneself, is also to turn against that foundation. In more explicitly theological terms, to say yes or no to one's own existence as gift and task is to say yes or no to one's Creator. Two important issues immediately arise here. I have suggested that, according to Kierkegaard's definition of the third dimension of selfhood, every self-relation also involves a God-relation, whether or not the self is aware of its foundation in God. Such awareness is one aspect of the "transparency" to which his defi nition of faith refers: "that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God" (SUD, 82). Just what does this "transparency" mean? He does not explicitly define it, though he clearly considers it a matter of degree, and he does analyze pene tratingly the subtle interplay of will and knowledge involved in a self's lack of transparency (its "darkness and ignorance" [SUD, 48]) regarding its own spiritual state. In general, "transparency" seems to mean this: the self's awareness of its ontological and ethical sta tus (in particular its creaturehood and sinfulness), both as part of the human race and as a specific individual, especially in its rela tion to God as Creator, Judge, and Redeemer. 9
See, for example, the various references to "the condition" in PF.
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The second issue concerns Kierkegaard's identification of the " p o w e r " on which t h e self is d e p e n d e n t (or in w h i c h it is "grounded," as in the older translation) with God, as God is con ceived in Christianity. It is this that makes the third aspect of his definition theological, rather than simply ontological or meta physical; for there are views of the self (such as Sartre's) that agree in general with Kierkegaard's up to this point, but conceive differ ently of the self's ultimate foundation. Has Kierkegaard anything to say to those who question this identification? He would not, of course, cite the traditional theistic proofs; he regards these as theoretically inconclusive and as diverting atten tion from the "subjective" task of being oneself. Yet there is in his writings something analogous to Kant's "moral proof"—to the claim that the self's moral task is attainable only if God exists. Kier kegaard holds that only if the self's ultimate foundation is God, rather than some lesser reality or "power," can despair finally be overcome. He says:
Kierkegaard makes it clear that the self's dependence on God is as much axiological as ontological. God is not only the self's Cre ator, but is also its "criterion and goal" (SUD, 79).10 The self is not— .»s a purely ethical standpoint would have it—measured ultimately by a criterion immanent to itself, but by God; and it gains"infinite reality . . . by being conscious of existing before God" (SUD, 79). This means, however, that the more "transparent" a self is in its God-relation—that is, the greater its conception or conscious ness of God—the more sinful is that self's despair. The self's real ity is even more "intensified" in relation to Christ, " b y the inordinate accent that falls upon it because God allowed himself to be born, become man, suffer, and die" (SUD, 113) to offer it for giveness and salvation; but, accordingly, this compounds the sin of a self that rejects this salvation. The God-relation thus accen tuates the freedom and individuality of the self even more than did the purely ethical emphasis on its responsibility for and to itself. These claims are not, of course, mere consequences of the definition of the self, but they flesh it out in such a way that there is a clear cor respondence between the definition of the self as dependent on God and the account of despair as sin. Is the same true of the depiction of the religious "stage" of existence in Kierkegaard's early pseudony mous work? That this depiction must in some manner concern the self s God-relation is, of course, trivially true. But I would like to show that it bears an intimate relation to the whole definition of the self. I will focus on Fear and Trembling, the companion to the two volumes of Either/Or, because these three volumes taken together contain Kierkegaard's richest account of the "stages." Johannes de Silentio, the pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling, deals with religious existence by reflecting on a paradigm of faith—Abraham, in his response to God's command to sacrifice Isaac. Johannes depicts faith through two related, but nevertheless differ ent, contrasts—first with the stance of "infinite resignation," and then with "the ethical." My specific thesis here is that this twofold con-
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The synthesis is not the misrelation; it is merely the possibility, or in the synthesis lies the possibility of the misrelation. If the syn thesis were the misrelation, then despair would not exist at all, then despair would be something that lies in human nature as such. . . . No, no, despairing lies in man himself. If he were not a synthesis, he could not despair at all; nor could he despair if the synthesis in its original state from the hand of God were not in the proper relationship. (SUD, 15-16; my emphasis) That is, only because the human being is God's creature is despair as state (as misrelation among the different components of the self as synthesis) not inherent in the human condition; only thus is de spair as act possible, "inasmuch as God, who constituted man a re lation, releases it from his hand, as it were—that is, inasmuch as the relation relates itself to itself' (SUD, 16); and only thus, through divine aid and forgiveness, can despair be overcome. The title of the last major section of The Sickness unto Death is "De spair is Sin" (SUD, 77). The sickness that was first conceived psycho logically, and then ethically, is now identified theologically. This identification is based in the third dimension of Kierkegaard's defi nition, and its implication that the self's refusal to be itself is also a rejection of its foundation—disobedience to its Creator.
!0
17
Kierkegaard does not discuss here the relation between one's ontological and itxiological dependence on God, nor the sense in which God is the self's "criterion and goal." His later statement that "only in Christ is it true that God is man's goal ,md criterion" (SUD, 114) suggests that what he has in mind in the latter instance is the "imitation of Christ."
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trast shows how the self's God-relation affects, first, the self as syn thesis, and then the self as self-relation—and thus both mirrors and illuminates the whole definition of the self. Johannes first presents infinite resignation and faith as alter native possible responses of someone who, like Abraham (or like Kierkegaard himself in his relation to Regina), is called upon to sacrifice the object of all his worldly hopes. The "knight of infinite resignation" makes the sacrifice but thereafter has no joy or hope in the finite; instead, he seeks repose in a more-or-less stoical tran scendence of all worldly concerns. The "knight of faith," too, pre p a r e s t h e sacrifice, a n d m a k e s t h e s p i r i t u a l m o v e m e n t of resignation—but also and at the same time makes another move ment; "by virtue of the absurd" (FT, 35) he believes that this sac rifice will not be required of him, or that he will receive again what he has sacrificed. The contrast between faith and " t h e ethical" centers on the question of a "teleological suspension of the ethical." Was Abra ham justified in being willing to sacrifice his own child? Not ac cording to "the ethical," Johannes says—and here " t h e ethical" connotes an ethics based on autonomy, rationality, and univer sality. All such standards—and, indeed, any standard that takes the human as its ultimate point of reference—are breached by Abraham's action. If Abraham is justified, it can only be because there is a higher source of obligation than "the ethical," one which at least on occasion warrants its "suspension." Either the latter is true, and Abraham stands in a direct relation to God, a relation not mediated through moral norms—or he is a murderer. Take your choice, Johannes says; there is no neutral standpoint from which the issue can be adjudicated. , To penetrate more deeply into the meaning of these contrasts, one question needs to be posed—namely, h o w does this whole treatment of faith apply to those who are not required, like Abra ham, to give up the "Isaacs" of their lives? Johannes, who repeat edly claims not to understand faith, offers no explicit answer to this question. But a careful reading of Fear and Trembling suggests, I think, these reflections: The existential dilemma to which both infinite resignation and faith are responses seems, fundamentally, to be this—that every
human self is by nature concerned with finite goods. Yet all finite goods are contingent and relative; none can be securely possessed; none can, without some measure of impoverishment or distortion of the spirit, be made its absolute end. Were the self a god, it would (or so our theological tradition implies) in its infinitude transcend contingency and relativity; were it merely a beast, it would be so immersed in finitude as to be unable to conceive of its situation as problematic. But the human being, neither god nor beast, yet in part like each, is both subject to and able to conceive of contin gency and relativity, is both immanent in and somehow transcen dent of the finite. What stance, then, can the self take towards its situation? In "in finite resignation," the attitude of the ancient Stoic (with some Ro mantic feeling added), the self expresses its recognition of the contingency and relativity of the finite by giving it up spiritually, even before losing it or being called upon to give it up in actuality. Thus the "infinitude" of the self, its transcendence of the finite world, is manifested—though this attitude, however "deep," is a type of what The Sickness unto Death labels as "infinitude's despair." In any event, faith, Johannes says, goes further. For illustration he sketches the famous imaginary example of a contemporary "knight of faith" who
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one would swear . . . was the butcher across the way vegetating in the gloaming. . . . And yet, yet. . . this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessed ness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher. . . . He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He is continually making the move ment of infinity, but he does it with such precision and assurance that he continually gets finitude out of it. (FT, 40-41) The knight of faith is, then, no merely immediate individual; he is aware of the contingency and relativity of everything finite, but he does not negate the significance of the finite by giving it u p spiri tually. He accomplishes a prodigy, a "double-movement" of faith, a simultaneous movement of withdrawal and return in his relation to the world.
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All this Johannes tells us, though he continually professes not to comprehend how it is possible—not to understand this "knight of faith" who is nevertheless the product of his own imagination! And perhaps we cannot understand him, if to "understand" means to assimilate to our "natural" attitudes—for he is a challenge to these attitudes, to our tendency to alternate between immediacy and hopelessness. Yet if to understand is to grasp his existence as a challenge then perhaps we can understand him. His "secret," it seems, is this: that recognizing the contingency and relativity of every finite good, he neither takes it as secure and absolute, nor expends all his energy in spiritually distancing himself from it; but he accepts all that he possesses as a gift from the hand of God, to be enjoyed and loved as such, yet to be released, if need be, with trust in God and His power to help us deal with every loss and ad versity. Only thus, by virtue of relating to God in faith, can the self exist as both finite and infinite, both involved in and transcending the world. Johannes' explicit reflections on the relation between faith and the ethical seem to lead, I have indicated, to an either/or which can not be adjudicated. But some of his statements—as Louis Mackey has argued11—hint at a somewhat different conclusion. They sug gest that Kierkegaard is not here concerned only with a few excep tional figures like Abraham, that rather the "suspension of the ethical" which ultimately concerns him is one that takes place in each individual life—namely, sin. For every individual self, as a sin ner, is already "beyond" the ethical, has already "suspended" it. How, then, can the self deal with the reality of its own sin? Where can forgiveness be found? It cannot be found, Kierkegaard (using Johannes as his "messenger"12) suggests, within the con text of an ethics of rationality and autonomy. For in such a context, who can forgive? Can the self forgive itself? Such leniency would be highly suspect—an honest self would rather condemn itself. Can it be forgiven by the ethical law, or by the ideal self which is its eth ical telos? No, for these can only stand over against the self as un"Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet (Philadelphia: University of Penn sylvania Press, Inc., 1971) 224-25. 12 See FT, 3.
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yielding measures of its deficiency. A self can only be forgiven by (hat which is also in some sense personal; only if the self's obli gation ultimately comes from God can a breach of that obligation be forgiven—by God. Thus, as a careful reading of Volume Two of iither/Or already suggests, an existential stance that acknowl edges no authority or power higher than the self and its ethical choice of itself founders on the reality of sin. A defect in the selfrelation, the self's self-estrangement in sin, can be healed only through its relation to God—only by divine grace received in faith. If these are sound interpretations of Fear and Trembling—which is by any account a many-dimensional work—then there is clearly a close relation between the pseudonymous presentation of the re ligious "stage" and the whole definition of the self. Just as the eth ical self-relation supervenes upon and affects the self as synthesis, so the self's God-relation supervenes upon and affects both the self as synthesis and the self's relation to itself. The two contrasts drawn in Fear and Trembling illuminate aspects of this "double affection." The contrast between infinite resignation and faith indicates one way, at least, in which faith makes possible a harmonious relation between different aspects of the self as synthesis. Only in faith, it suggests, can the self exist without despair both as finite—inevi tably involved in and concerned about concrete actuality—and as infinite—capable of some sort of transcendence of that actuality. Similarly, the contrast between faith and "the ethical" suggests that faith both relativizes and restores the self's ethical self-relation. Only if the self stands related to a power and authority beyond itself can the breach that sin inevitably brings into our existence be healed. Kierkegaard's definition of the self is a remarkable instance of his dialectical and literary skill. Yet it is more than that; it provides a key for understanding the structure and content of The Sickness unto Death, as well as the "stages" of existence depicted in his early pseudonymous writings. It forms a crucial part of works that were intended to help his readers on the road to self-understanding and self-fulfillment.
II
Spirit and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation Alastair Hannay
T
he Sickness unto Death opens forthrightly enough by declaring that a human being is "spirit," and amplifies this by saying that spirit is "the self." This latter notion is then elaborated as "a rela tion that relates itself to itself," an intriguing suggestion but hardly forthright and the reader awaits some clarification. But is clarifi cation forthcoming? The notorious passage that follows has seemed to many an attempt on Kierkegaard's part, not to help the reader understand this idea of a self-relating self, but to parody the im penetrability of Hegelian prose. Anti-Climacus continues: [T]he self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to it self. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self. . . . In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of [soul] the relation between [soul] and [body] is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this rela tion is the positive third, and this is the self. (SUD, 13)1
^or purposes of exposition I prefer the more direct translations of 'Sjel' and 'Legeme' as 'soul' and 'body' to the Hongs' 'the psychical' and 'the physical.'
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If this were no more than a dig at Hegelian obscurity, one might conclude that the idea of a self-relating self is not in need of clari fication, but only obscure when clothed in pretentious philosoph ical jargon. Perhaps, whatever difficulties attend an analysis of the notion, the notion itself is nothing more exotic than that of the selfevident ability of human beings to reflect upon what they do and think, and to form their own self-images. But Anti-Climacus's definition of the self as a relation that "re lates itself to itself" is neither empty parody nor a pretentiously decked out truism. It states elegantly, and I believe accurately, a crucial principle of Kierkegaard's thought—only, however, to the appropriately programmed reader. By this I mean a reader familiar with the tradition from which Kierkegaard's terms derive their connotations: the Hegelian tradition. It is now of course some thing of a formality among Kierkegaard scholars to warn against letting Kierkegaard's unrelenting onslaught on Hegel blind one to the extent of the shared assumptions on which that onslaught is based. Yet often it is quite general, methodological assumptions that are referred to (the notions of 'negativity,' 'dialectic,' for ex ample), or mere points of terminology where Kierkegaard uses Hegel's terms to deny what Hegel asserts (the identity of thought and being, and so forth). But there are several points of agreement in basic framework too, and an important one of these is the con cept of self-consciousness. Hegel makes two sets of distinctions. One, within the general cat egory of "subjective spirit," distinguishes 'consciousness,' 'immedi ate self-consciousness,' and 'universal self-consciousness,' (see Samtliche Werke 6, §§307-44).2 These, in outline, are phases in a de velopment from simple awareness of a distinction between inner and outer (see Phenomenology, 143), through a sense of the inner as the center of things but with these things themselves quite independent, to a grasp of the inner and outer as combined in the unity of con sciousness and reality (Samtliche Werke 6, §400; Phenomenology, §394). 2
Quotations from Hegel are from Samtliche Werke, ed. H. Glockner (Stuttgart: Fromann, 1927-1930); Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clar endon Press, 1977); Logic (pt. 1 of The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences [1830]), trans. W. Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975) (abbreviated Enc.); Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952).
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The latter phase—though each phase itself contains a develop ment—provides the terms for defining 'spirit,' or reason as full awareness of itself as being all of reality (Phenomenology, §438). The second distinction is between "natural" consciousness, or soul, and spirit. In the Phenomenology Hegel talks of the "path of natural con sciousness . . . the way of the soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit." This path "presses forward to true knowledge" or "Science," and the goal of the journey is to give the soul a "completed experi ence of itself," in which it finally achieves "awareness of what it really is in itself" (Phenomenology, §77). These passages contain all three of the terms used by Anti-Climacus in the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death to define the self as a self-relating relation. We have 'self,' 'soul,' and 'spirit.' My suggestion is that what Kierkegaard wants us to understand by his idea of a self as a self-relating relation is something that co incides to a considerable extent with what Hegel says about soul, consciousness, and spirit, yet departs from Hegel radically at a point to be determined; and my discussion here is an attempt to determine that point. 7.
Let us begin with Hegel's metaphor of a path that the soul goes along to purify itself for the life of the spirit. For Hegel 'soul' (Seele) denotes a set of possibilities ranging from those limited to (as with Aristotle) organic life as such (see Phenomenology, §265), through those inherent in animal life, to those specific to human life. The "paths" of these possibilities are of different length; that of human life (or consciousness) is one on which the soul progresses through its "appointed stations" to "purify itself for the life of the Spirit." One could read this as saying that the soul can itself acquire the characteristics of spirit, as if spirit was a qualification of the specif ically human soul, something it can become and still remain soul. But Hegel would want us to read it the other way around. Spiritual life is already contained in posse in the initial soul, which in its most general characterization is the "animating principle of the body" (Enc, §34). Spirit is what, in the human case, this animating prin-
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ciple is destined to become. It is the human end-state, the human soul's "completed experience of itself" and "awareness of what it really is in itself." As noted, for Hegel this means not just a grasp of human consciousness as an actually existing subject-pole in re lation to its "negative," the "other" (see Phenomenology, §§347-359), but awareness of a unity between thought and being themselves. A full philosophical account of self-consciousness is one that gives a total grasp of the relation of mind, or consciousness as reason, to its objective environment, and sees this goal of comprehension as a potentiality not just of "natural consciousness" but (having es caped the limitations of a merely natural consciousness) of the nat ural and social world itself. This conveniently, but I think not altogether accidentally, picks out for us the target of Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel's philoso phy. If the term 'science/ as in Hegel, is taken to embrace knowl edge not only of the environment but of a harmony between it and thought—a harmony so total as to give self-consciousness, among other things, the status of "the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life" (Philosophy of Right, §21)—then, says the criticism, sci ence is not at all the end-state of natural consciousness. What endstate would Kierkegaard propose instead? And what would be the corresponding Kierkegaardian life of the spirit? One plausible sug gestion regarding the end-state would be "awareness of the fact that there is no such completed experience of itself." As for Kier kegaard's life of the spirit, the apt answer would be to say that while for both Hegel and Kierkegaard the life of the spirit is the life of clear-sightedness, in Hegel's case the clarity is that of the "stand point of Science" (Phenomenology, §78), taking this to include all ethical life, while in Kierkegaard's it is that of scepticism. This would allow us to see Kierkegaard's "journey" along the path of natural consciousness as merely an abrupted version of Hegel's. For, according to Hegel, natural consciousness proves only to have the idea, or notion, of itself as knowing not—as it itself believes— the reality of that; and for it the path to spirit proves to be one of loss of its status of real knower: "what is in fact the realization of the Notion [of knowledge], counts for it rather as a loss of its own self . . . [t]he road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair . . . [f]or this path is
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the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge" (Phenomenology, §78, original emphasis). Hegel is saying that natural consciousness has to give way to spirit, which is for him the standpoint of science, from which knowledge of appearance has given way to "true" knowledge (cf. Phenomenology, §76). The na ture/spirit distinction used here is a traditional one, going back at least as far as Aristotle's pneuma, a kind of divine stuff (compared by Aristotle in one place to the aither) that preserves the unity of the organism which would otherwise dissolve into its constituent elements if these were allowed to obey their natural laws of mo tion.3 In Hegel's use of the distinction, nature is what appears to consciousness as external, which appearance is replaced in the standpoint of science—of spirit—by true knowledge. If the spiri tual development is inhibited one receives only the "doubt," "de spair," and "loss of self" of the awareness that phenomenal knowledge is not real. This sounds remarkably like Anti-Climacus's account of the individual's path to despair, in light of the fail ure of people even to "try this life" (SUD, 57). In the journals (JP 6:6794) Kierkegaard draws the distinction in exactly Hegel's terms by talking of a "world of spirit" lying "[b]ehind this world of ac tuality, p h e n o m e n a . . . . " Might we not simply say, then, that the life of the spirit for Kierkegaard is the life of one who realizes, on the one hand and like Hegel, that the natural world is only phe nomenal, but on the other that there is no standpoint of science from which true knowledge (including knowledge of right, mo rality, and ethics) can be attained, and squarely faces the conse quent uncertainty about human nature's standing and also the prospect of nihilism? It is clear, however, that this is not what Anti-Climacus would have us call the life of the spirit. Such a life would, in Kierkegaard's as well as Hegel's terms, be purely negative; it would involve no more than the realization of loss—loss of presumptive knowledge and of self. Spirit, again for Kierkegaard as well as for Hegel, has a positive content; it involves the realization that human existence is grounded in an eternal telos. 3
See M. C. Nussbaum, De motu animalium: Interpretive Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) 159-60.
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Every human existence that is not conscious of itself as spirit or conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence that does not rest transparently in God but vaguely rests in and merges in some abstract universality (state, nation, etc.) or, in the dark about his self, regards his capacities merely as powers to produce without becoming deeply aware of their source, regards his self, if it is to have intrinsic meaning, as an indefinable something—every such existence, whatever it achieves, be it most amazing, what ever it explains, be it the whole of existence, however intensively it enjoys life esthetically—every such existence is nevertheless de spair. (SUD, 46)
this God—an infinite benefaction that is never gained except through despair" (SUD, 26-27, emphasis added). Much also gain says the proposal. For instance we have the starkly unambiguous assertion that "the devil is sheer spirit" (SUD, 42). Clearly the devil (in Greek diabolos, or defamer) stands in nothing that Anti-Clima cus would call a God-relationship. So it looks as if Anti-Climacus here employs a more neutral concept of spirit. And since it is the devil's "unqualified consciousness and transparency," and the fact that in him there is therefore "no obscurity . . . that could serve as a mitigating excuse," that earns him the description "sheer spirit," it might look rather as though we were forced back upon our orig inal "negative" notion. Yet that is not so. Although (like Hegel's natural consciousness) the devil despairs, he does not doubt, nor does he suffer any loss of self—at least not as far as we are directly told. Indeed Anti-Climacus says "[t]he more consciousness, the more self [and will]" (SUD, 29, emphasis added), though also "the greater the conception of God, the more self . . . " (SUD, 80 and 113); but it is easy to imagine someone having a strong conception of God without yet having faith. In fact the devil does not despair analogously to Hegel's natural consciousness, for his despair is not that of uncertainty, but of "the most absolute defiance" (SUD, 42), and that presupposes not only a conception of God but something like a standing assumption that God exists and has power to exert. The devil could not be a defamer if there were no one for him to defame. (According to early ecclesiastical writers the devil was cre ated by God as an angel, Lucifer, w h o for his rebellion against God was punished by being thrown into the abyss where he became the prince of darkness.) And this seems generally true of what AntiClimacus classifies as despair. The despairer of The Sickness unto Death, the one who lacks faith, is one who will not affirm what is recognizably the standing assumption that God exists and that one ought to stand before God. True, at the very end of The Sickness unto Death we are told of a form of despair, the axlminating despair, that denies Christ, "declares Christianity to be untrue, a lie," and makes of Christ "an invention of the devil" (SUD, 131). Yet calling Chris tianity an invention of the devil still acknowledges the God that created the devil. Moreover, that Anti-Climacus says this denial of "all that is essentially Christian: sin, the forgiveness of sins, etc."
The passage says that a life not grounded transparently in God is a life of despair; but it appears also to say that the life of spirit has to be one that is grounded transparently in God, and so not a life of despair. Since for Anti-Climacus the opposite of despair is faith, it looks as though the end-state he envisages, faith, and the life of spirit are the same. Of course the humanly existing subject cannot know that it has God as the source of its powers to produce; at most its "becoming aware" of where it has them from is a matter of faith. But then that, on this interpretation, would be the Kierkegaardian alternative to the Hegelian spirit's self-knowledge. To reinforce the interpretation we can turn to Anti-Climacus's remark that pagans "lacked the spirit's definition of a self" because they "lacked the God-relationship and the self" (SUD, 46). They lacked the God-re lationship because pagan belief finds God in nature, and what AntiClimacus means by a God-relationship presupposes Climacus's account of the "break with immanence" (CUP, 506); and they lacked the self because they had no sense of an identity other than in terms of what they shared with (and owed to) other humans (cf. SUD, 46). Should we say then that what we have here is Anti-Climacus's version of the life of the spirit in its properly positive guise? Much of The Sickness unto Death can be read in this light, for example pas sages like that in which Anti-Climacus says that the only one whose life is truly wasted is he who has been "so deceived by life's joys or its sorrows that he never became decisively and eternally con scious as spirit, as self, or, what amounts to the same thing, never be came aware and in the deepest sense never gained the impression that there is a God and that ' h e / he himself, his self, exists before
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is itself a "sin against the Holy Ghost" (ibid.), indeed sin's "high est intensification," shows quite clearly that for him the frame work of the standing assumption, and the assumption itself, remain sacrosanct. In other words if Anti-Climacus were to claim further, from within this framework, that nihilism too was an invention of the devil, he would not be taken seriously by the nihilist; for nihilism denies the framework and so cannot be grasped by one who must consider it to be defiance in Anti-Climacus's sense. Anyone who as serts that nihilism is the invention of the devil must assert it diagnostically from a point of view not shared by the one whose beliefs he diagnoses. I strongly suspect that Kierkegaard intends Anti-Cli macus's diagnoses to be ones that those in the conditions he de scribes are predisposed, however unwillingly, to acknowledge. It appears then that Anti-Climacus's 'spirit' embraces not only faith but despair. There is much to support this interpretation. "[T]he condition of man, regarded as spirit (and if there is to be any question of despair, man must be regarded as defined by spirit), is always critical" (SUD, 25). Unlike a normal illness where the issue of health or sickness is topical for so long as the illness lasts, within the category of spirit the issue is always topical, 'spirit' connotes a perpetual tension between faith and despair. Apart from The Sickness unto Death itself, the reading is supported by most of what Kierkegaard says elsewhere, in the pseudonymous works and the Journals, about spirit. Kierkegaard consistently links the idea of spirit with such partly "negative" attitudes as irony and indiffer ence (to the worldly) as well as resignation—all preliminaries to fundamental choice (CUP, 450; FT, 46; JP 1: 843). In Anxiety, al though spirit (like truth and freedom) is said to be "eternal," spir itual consciousness seems to require no more than the possession of the concept of time or temporality as such sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from a position as it were outside time, or perhaps in the intersection of time and eternity in the "moment" (CA, 83-84, 8889). Finally, scattered throughout the Journals are numerous re marks on spirit as transcendence of nature. Spirit is also linked with individuality as such, and with the individual's task of fulfillment itself (see, for example, Papirer X,4 A 888, 307; JP 2: 2065; 3: 2986; 4: 4350).
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Let us then return to where we began, with the question of how to interpret the idea of a self as a reflexive relation. The passage (with the translation slightly modified) reads as follows: The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates itself to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating itself to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating itself to itself. The hu man being is a synthesis of infinity and finitude, of temporality and eternity, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis. A synthe sis is a relation between two. Looked at in this way a human being is still not a self. . . . In the relation between two the relation itself is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate themselves to the relation, and in the relation to the relation; this is the way in which the relation between soul and body is a relation when soul is the determining category. If, on the other hand, the relation re lates itself to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. (SUD, 13) The passage may be read in three ways: (1) as a description of "health" (faith), (2) as a description of "crisis," or (3) as a mixture of (1) and (2). According to (1), we read the identity of spirit and the self as the identity of spirit and the true self (Anti-Climacus says that the "opposite" of despair, that is faith, is "to will to be the self that he is in truth" [SUD, 20]). The idea of a self as a relation relating itself to itself can then be identified as that of the (to use a neutral term) subject's conforming itself to what we have called the standing as sumption—that there is a God and a need to stand before that God. In order to give point to the distinction between a synthesis in which soul is the determining category and one where the self (and thus spirit) is "positive," one must then say something like this: when the self fails to relate itself to itself and is in despair, then the fact that the true self is not related to is due to the soul's rather than spirit's being the determining category. This could suggest a gloss on Haufniensis's remarks on the "bondage of sin" (CA, 118). In sin a person is willing to be "determined" by temporal goals and is in "an unfree relation to the g o o d " (CA, 119). The claim that, "re garded as spirit," man's condition is "always critical" could then be understood as asserting that, even when the subject does relate
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himself to his true self, the situation still remains critical because the possibility of a reversion to despair is always present (cf. SUD, 114). Indeed Anti-Climacus actually says that when the human being is regarded spiritually it isn't just sickness that is critical, but health too (SUD, 25). According to (2), spirit is not to be equated with the true self, but with the self aware of the options of health and sickness from the standpoint of either, though initially from that of sickness, that is the standpoint from which conforming to the true self is a task. Here the point of distinguishing spirit (and self) from soul, where the relation is a "negative unity," could be the following: human beings live initially "immediate" lives, in the sense that (in a way corresponding to Hegel's "natural consciousness") their goals are located outside them as external sources of satisfaction, and in such a way that they do not yet conceive of the finite world (their "en vironment") as a whole as something in relation to which they are not properly at home. Here they are not yet selves because they have so far no consciousness of something "eternal" in them (SUD, 62), and since despair proper (that is, as a "qualification of the spirit" [SUD, 24]) is always "despair of the eternal or over oneself" (SUD, 60) they have yet to reach the threshold of crisis. Such im mediacy inevitably gives way to a sense of selfhood as transcend ing the world of temporal goals. The self makes an "act of separation whereby [it] becomes aware of itself as essentially dif ferent from the environment and external events and from their influence upon it" (SUD, 54). The scene is now set for the "posi tive" third factor's travails in the realm of spirit. The "critical con dition" in which the subject finds itself is one that embraces both the health and the sickness of spirit. Moreover, even in sickness (that is, despair) it is not true that the bondage of sin is a condition in which the soul takes over from spirit, for "despair . . . is not merely a suffering but an act" (SUD, 62). However hedged around by "mitigating excuses," despair is itself an action of the spiritual subject unwilling to conform to its true self, the mark in varying degree of the open defiance of the devil's "sheer spirit." According to (3), while 'spirit' denotes the realm of task and travail, the idea of the self as a reflexive relation is that of the goal, the true self, of the self conforming to its proper ideal. Here the
distinction between soul and spirit remains as in (2)—the task of spirit begins when the subject emerges from the psychophysical enclosure of immediacy to become a self that is "essentially differ ent" from the environing world. And the critical condition is that in which this self seeks to become and, once it has become, to re main a "positive" third factor in the synthesis. Alternatively, though much less plausibly, the mixed interpretation might invert the mixture and make spirit the true self and the reflexive self the essentially differentiated self in its travails. Of these three readings (or four if we count the inverted mix ture) the second seems overwhelmingly to be preferred. It is more consistent than the first with respect to what Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms say elsewhere of spirit and the self; and it is clearly more internally consistent than the third in that, in conformity with the text, it preserves the identity of spirit and self throughout. As far as external consistency is concerned, we have Johannes de silentio's assertion that the world of spirit is the one in which one must work to "get bread" (FT, 27). Haufniensis, for whom 'spirit' and 'freedom' are interchangeable, says that the "secret of spirit" is that it "has a history" (CA, 66), and he talks of two "syntheses." One is the initial fusion or unity of soul and body in which spirit is not yet "posited," while positing spirit is the same as spirit's pos iting the "second" synthesis, that of time and eternity, as an "expression" of the first (CA, 88, cf. 85). The point seems to be this: prior to positing the second synthesis, the two terms, soul and body, are understood from the point of view of immediacy as form ing a synthesis on their own, or rather (since "synthesis" in a He gelian context implies the union of apparently incongruent terms under the auspices of a third) a unity with these two aspects, as though naturally unified as in the case of psychophysical organ isms lacking a spiritual possibility. This is the case in natural human consciousness before spiritual consciousness emerges; but the emergence of spiritual consciousness is itself the idea that what appears initially to be a unity is really a juxtaposition of opposites. This realization is evidently what Kierkegaard means by the emer gence of spiritual consciousness; for spiritual consciousness, or positing spirit, is recognizing an identity apart from and overordinate to the finite mentality of the first synthesis. Spirit here is the
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emergence of a problem. Since both The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death have as their topic the obstacles to its solution, it seems likely that, in having his author describe the human being as spirit in the first sentence of the main text of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard is drawing the reader's attention to a feature of human consciousness which, once it emerges, presents a specifi able set of problems. The set itself is indeed specified in the triad of opposites, that is, (in their consistent order) infinity and finitude, eternity and temporality, freedom and necessity, mentioned in the opening passage. The latter element in each pair represents a limitation for a subject, now a self, that has emerged from "im mediacy" to "eternal consciousness." Traditionally finitude is the limitation of distinctness, necessity that of rational constraint, and temporality that of exposure to change. In Anti-Climacus these be come something like the limitations of mere particularity, genetic and environmental determination ("facticity" in Sartre's sense), and lack of a stable center in which to reside or "repose." (The most crucial departure from the tradition is the use of 'necessity' in con nection with factual rather than logical constraint.) A human being subject to the limitations but not conscious of them as such, lives the life of immediacy, though such a life is also attempted (ac tively) by those who do feel them as limitations yet due to anxiety will not venture beyond the closure of immediacy. According to our preferred reading the category of spirit applies as soon as the lim itations are felt as such, and therefore applies even to those who try to revert to immediacy. If we are to read the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death consistently in this way, we will also have to understand the "syn thesis" of the limitations with their opposites as the setting of a task rather than as, what might seem more plausible terminologically, its completion. This means that there is at least one prima facie He gelian analogy to discard. In Hegelian philosophy we think of syn thesis as a resolution of opposites. My proposal here is that "synthesis" in both Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death be linked to what was earlier called the "stand ing assumption." The standing assumption is that the eternal is not a negative category but positive in the sense that it "posits" a telos outside nature and the task of holding the elements—for example,
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freedom and necessity—together in a way that expresses this fact. It is useful here to call attention to Kierkegaard's notion of "finite spirit," of which he says it is the "unity of necessity and freedom . . . of consequence [Resultat] and striving . . . " (JP, 2: 2274). Else where we are told that spirit posits the synthesis as a contradiction; spirit "sustains" the contradiction (CA, 88), it doesn't resolve it. Conceptually, however, a synthesis cannot consist merely of a contradictory pair (CA, 85); there must be some framework for conceiving the opposites as congruent. In Anxiety the "moment" is the intersection of time and eternity, and the idea of "finite spirit" combines necessity and freedom as "consequence," or product, and "striving," or effort, in human existence. We might say that the "unity" of the opposites is sustained, as in Spinoza, by a conatus in suo esse perseverandi which here beams in on the absolute telos. What "synthesis" actually means on this reading, then, is the conceiving of the opposites in the light of the presumption that it is right to side with infinity, eternity, freedom. This belief is essential to spirif s being more than a merely negative notion (of doubt, despair, and loss of self), but it is not yet the faith of the true self. The presumption can always be defied, even when it is not denied. There is still a problem. Anti-Climacus describes despair as a "misrelation" (Misforhold) (SUD, 14). This can easily suggest that despair and the relation (Forhold) are mutually exclusive, and then we are back at the idea that it is only the true self that the expres sion "relates itself to itself" applies to, which would force us back either to the first or to the first mixed interpretation. Yet this prob lem, too, can be overcome. What Anti-Climacus actually says is that "the misrelation of despair is not a simple misrelation but a mis relation in a relation that relates itself to itself" (SUD, 14, emphasis added). In other words, what he says is that the reflexive relation already exists as a precondition of the possibility of a misrelation. From what we have said, this precondition can be identified as the self with its spiritual conatus. The self relates itself conatively to what it fundamentally recognizes, accepts, or perhaps has chosen as its ideal self. The misrelation is then an inability to sustain, or direct defiance of, spiritual inertia, prompted by the contrary inertial in fluence of the natural, instinctual "synthesis" which the despair ing individual exploits as a protective device in the anxiety of
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spiritual emergence. Anti-Climacus does not simply say that the relation in which the misrelation occurs relates itself to itself, but also that it is "established" by another (SUD, 14). The misrelation is the self-relating relation's unwillingness to orient itself to God.
his readers what their professions of faith really commit them to. Why? Not, on this interpretation, because Kierkegaard himself ac cepts the content of that faith, though that is surely also true, but because he would insist that whatever a person believes (and in the case of his intended readers it happens to be Christian doctrine), his belief should be formed in full clarity about the options be tween which it adjudicates. This reading, contrary to the first, gives us a radically decontextualized Kierkegaard who might conceiva bly be transported into the present and put on the framework of disbelief in order to test modern man against the over-complacent acceptance of agnosticism and atheism. Surely neither extreme captures the truth of Kierkegaard's au thorship. Nor indeed is it even likely that the motivational com plex behind his activity can be referred to any single point between them, not even if we confine ourselves to just one phase, say that of 'Anti-Climacus.' As a suggestion on how the space of possibil ities might be exploited, I have proposed elsewhere that we pick out two different points corresponding to a "passive," or unreflective, "problem" aspect and an "active," deliberate "solution" aspect.4 The passive aspect corresponds to a need, the kind of need that leaves one wanting a religious framework, and the active ele ment to the adoption of that framework as a solution to the need. Whatever else may be said of the proposal, it at least has the merit of providing a ready explanation of the exclusion of the nihilistic alternative in Anti-Cliamcus's works. Anti-Climacus speaks for the solution, from a point of view for which the nihilistic alternative does not exist; denying Christ is either backsliding within the framework and to be described as the framework specifies, as fall ing in with the devil's invention for example, or it is leaving the framework of the solution and stepping back into that of the need. Problem and solution thus stand in two different "stages." Put succinctly, the reason why the framework is a solution is because it does not contain the conceptual resources for describing the need that gave rise to it. The framework heals the breach by leaving no room for the problem; instead, by "engaging] man [in eternity]
III. This interpretation has the important consequence that with out the standing assumption there is no synthesis. The synthesis is "sustained" by spirit only so far as 'spirit' is understood posi tively, though only in task terms. This raises important questions of the interpretation of Kierkegaard's works as a whole. Why, for instance, do the pseudonymous works not envisage a nihilistic al ternative, in which, according to the above, a "synthesis" would not be an initial part of the framework but itself an option? Does the standing assumption have some transcendental status, for ex ample as a regulative idea? Or are the pseudonymous works de liberately confined to a framework in which the standing assumption has the status of an axiom? And if so, can that be seen as deliberate strategy on Kierkegaard's part, or is it rather an in dication of his failure to take account of a more comprehensive kind of despair? Answering these questions is beyond this essay's scope and its author's capacity; but I can usefully conclude by plotting the space of possibilities in which the answers might be sought. Let us take that space to be bounded by two extremes. On the one hand Kier kegaard's acceptance of the Christian framework can be read as culturally determined and passive. We know he broke with Chris tianity briefly in his early twenties, but this was also a crisis in his relationship with his father, so we are not forced to conclude that the resumption of the framework was other than simply a return to normal. On this view, Kierkegaard's own belief, or disposition to believe, in the truth of Christian doctrine is essential to the way we read him; and Kierkegaard himself is well placed in the context of a society which, for the most part unlike ours, professed Chris tian doctrine. At the other extreme Kierkegaard's own belief is not essential at all—the important thing is that his readers professed Christian faith. Positing the Christian framework as an axiom is simply a piece of strategy on Kierkegaard's part: his aim is to show
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See my "Refuge and Religion," in Faith, Knowledge, Action: Essays to Niels Thulstrup, ed. G. L. Stengren (Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1984) 43-53.
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absolutely" and making life "infinitely more strenuous than . . . when [one is not] involved in Christianity" (JP 1: 844), it redefines our needs. Once God is there the need is to stand transparently be fore him, which is quite different from the need for there to be a God to be able to stand transparently before. Any account of the "problem" stage will be colored by the framework in which it is given. Much of Kierkegaard, particularly Anti-Climacus, reads as though all that goes before is to be grasped from the point of view of what comes last, namely religiousness. In the aesthetic works, however, religiousness is approached prospectively, from a dialectical distance, reminding us of Hegel. Just as natural consciousness breaks down on close scrutiny but in the same moment points beyond itself to a higher unity, so the psychophysical closure (where soul is the determining category) opens in a splitting of finite and infinite, leaving the self no saving option but to grant its constitution by "another" in eternity and to relate itself to that ideal. But—as Anti-Climacus does not make explicit— that there is this saving option is not given unless we adopt the re ligious framework, and before doing that we will have to grant that nihilism might equally be true. That is the problem to which the framework is the solution. Whether coloring the account of what goes before in the dis passionately anthropological way of this proposal takes us nearer to the heart of Kierkegaard or further away is, I think, an open question. But to grant that it does take us nearer is to allow still deeper questions to be raised. Is the need for which the framework is a solution itself "passive" in the sense of our first extreme, and thus local in cultural time and place (as Marx claims), or has Kier kegaard unearthed a universal spiritual need? Secondly, is the fact that Christian doctrine commends itself as the only solution also passive in that sense, or is it really the only way out? The vindi cation of Kierkegaard's thought for our or any time would seem to call for the latter answer in each case.5
5 I would like to express my gratitude to Robert Perkins for helpful advice on the final disposition of this essay, and to Grethe Kjaer and lulia Watkin for some very practical assistance.
Ill
Kierkegaard's Psychology and Unconscious Despair Merold Westphal
I
f Walter Kaufmann had written a book on Kierkegaard, it might have borne the title Kierkegaard: Philosopher, Psychologist, ChrisHan.1 And it might be argued that the three descriptions appear in an order of ascending importance. If it is obvious that Kierkegaard thinks of himself as a Christian thinker first and foremost, it is per haps less evident but no less important that he thinks of himself as a philosopher. It could even be argued that he calls himself a psy chologist to express his role as antiphilosopher. Perhaps Kaufmann's subtitle should read: Christian, Psychologist, Antiphilosopher. Through their subtitles Kierkegaard identifies four of his writ ings as explicitly psychological. Repetition is "An Essay in Experi mental Psychology." The Concept of Anxiety is "A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin." The essay, "Guilty?/Not Guilty?" in Stages on Life's Way is "A Psychological Experiment." And the work before us, The Sickness unto Death, is "A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening." What Kierkegaard means by psychology is not easy to say. Sometimes it seems to connote nothing more than the acute per ception of the human scene, which is, for example, the indispensa
The title of his book on Nietzsche is Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.
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able starting point for the novelist, but he also regularly treats phychology in tandem with dogmatics as a kind of prolegomena to theology (R, 324; CA, 9; SUD, 77). This does not mean that the two treat of different subjects. Whether the theme is repetition, anxiety, or despair, psychology and dogmatics are viewed as two ways of discussing the same human experiences. They differ in that only dogmatics allows the introduction of the distinctively Chris tian categories of, for example, sin and atonement. This makes it tempting to suggest that if Kierkegaard were writing today he would use the term 'phenomenology' where he actually uses 'psychology.' This is perhaps correct, but it raises as many questions as it answers. Apart from there being many vari eties of phenomenology in our own century, there is the fact that Kierkegaard includes the (to us) theological assumption of God as the self's creator on the psychological or phenomenological side of the ledger. The present examination of the (to us) paradoxical no tion of unconscious despair will seek to use crucial parts of The Sickness unto Death to throw light on Kierkegaard's concept of psy chology and vice versa. *******
It is clear, in the first place, that Kierkegaard's psychology is a clinical psychology. Its starting point is sickness, its goal diagnosis and healing. It is theory for the sake of therapy. The dialectical fac tor must never compromise the rhetorical factor, by which Kier kegaard means that the pursuit of scholarly and scientific rigor, which is by no means repudiated, must always be in the service of edification or upbuilding. Only the ideal of indifferent knowledge is repudiated, making the goal of health ultimate and that of knowledge only penultimate (SUD, xiv, 5-6).2 Kierkegaard's anal yses of anxiety and despair are meant for clinical psychologists. In the second place, Kierkegaard's psychology can be said, with an important qualification, to have an Aristotelian concept of health. Just as Aristotle insists that the well being of a human per son is to be found in activity (energeia), so Kierkegaard stresses that 2 On the question of indifferent knowledge Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in profound agreement. See Merold Westphal, "Nietzsche and the Phenomenolog ical Ideal," The Monist 60 (1977): 277-88.
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it is not something that happens to us but something that we do. Whether we speak of falling unto despair, the sickness unto death, or of continuing in it, we must speak of will and responsibility (SUD, xiv, 16-17, 20). If we speak of health instead of sickness, the category of action if again necessary, for in the realm of spirit there is no immediate health, but only that health that coincides with the fulfillment of the task of becoming oneself (SUD, 25, 29). This emphasis on health and illness as modes of activity is in tended to take the interpretation of human well-being beyond what Kierkegaard calls the "sensate-psychical" categories which treat persons as less than spirit. These "external," "temporal," and "secular" categories basically come down to two pairs: pleasant/ unpleasant and good/bad luck (SUD, 43, 51-52). Since Aristotle also wishes to raise the question of the self's health above the levels of feeling and fortune, and does so by stressing activity, Kierke gaard's view of health can be called Aristotelian. Yet Aristotle calls this health happiness, and this is where the similarity must be qualified. Kierkegaard insists that "happiness is not a qualification of spirit, and deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is de spair" (SUD, 25). Part of the reason for this is the ease with which the term 'happiness' slips back to become a category of feeling or mood and connotes not the robust Aristotelian notion of activity but merely a sense of security, tranquility, or contentment (SUD, 24, 26). In the larger context Kierkegaard's complaint is not merely that the term will not retain its Aristotelian meaning; it is rather that the Aristotelian meaning itself is inadequate to the self whose health concerns him, the self as spirit. This leads us to a third description of Kierkegaard's psychol ogy. It rests, again with important qualification, on a Cartesian sense of the inwardness of the self. This comes to expression in a crucial part of the justly famous definition of the self at the begin ning of The Sickness unto Death. "The self is a relation that relates itself to itself" (SUD, 13). The self is a relation in the first place be cause it is a synthesis of such dipolar factors as the infinite and fi nite, the temporal and the eternal, and freedom and necessity. Yet this is not enough to constitute selfhood. Only as this relation re lates itself to itself does the self as spirit emerge. The self is essen-
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tially self related; its being is to be found in the inwardness of its relation to itself. This self-relation is, in the first place, self-consciousness. The self as a synthesis of, for example, the temporal and the eternal, is a self not by virtue of being such a synthesis but by virtue of being aware of being such a synthesis. Since the foundational role of selfconsciousness is generally associated with the Cartesian cogito, we can speak of a Cartesian inwardness in Kierkegaard's psychology. However, there is more to this inwardness than mere self-con sciousness. Kierkegaard is explicit about the fact that the self's re lation to itself is its freedom (SUD, 29). As spirit the self relates itself to itself not only in its awareness of itself, but also in its presiding over itself. It is the inwardness with which the self's self-conscious free dom is understood by Kierkegaard that qualifies the Aristotelian factor in his psychology. It could be argued that since the Aristo telian self deliberates about voluntary actions, it is in possession of self-conscious freedom. But the activity which is the health and happiness of the Aristotelian self is the public activity of the citizen self; whereas the faith which is the health of the Kierkegaardian self is not. We get an especially dramatic account in Fear and Trembling of the knight of faith as publicly indistinguishable from the tax-col lector, the clerk, the shopkeeper, the postman, the capitalist, the grocer, and other such thoroughly "Philistine" personages (FT, 3840). The movements of faith which are the activity in which the knight of faith's health resides are neither the public activities of the citizen self nor the private deliberations which lead to such public behavior. All this the Aristotelian self has. What the knight of faith has that the Aristotelian self does not is another domain altogether in which action takes place, a domain that is neither the public domain of social intercourse nor the private domain which belongs essentially to it. This is why the ethical and religious stages are so sharply distinguished by Kierkegaard. For purposes of illustration we can distinguish between the public and private aspects of a game of cards. If I play the queen of hearts, that is a public act which all can understand and evalu ate. If, on the other hand, I look my cards over, carefully letting no one else see, to determine whether I have enough trumps left to
use one to take this trick, that is a private act. No one else knows what I see or what question I am asking myself. But the private act and the public act (and whole sets of similar acts) belong essen tially to the same game. If, to extend the analogy, while playing cards I am also sending secret signals to a fellow spy in the room by the cards that I play and by the way I look my own cards over, that would be a private act of an entirely different sort. Although occurring in the same physical space, my activity as a spy and my activity as a card player occur in two quite different personal spaces, the former being quite inaccessible to those w h o are only card players. Something similar to this characterizes the inwardness of the self as spirit. The privacy of the activity of its self-concious freedom is not the privacy that belongs essentially to public social life but the privacy that stems from essentially not primarily belonging to public social life. It is clear that the Cartesian cogito begins a movement in the direction of inwardness, taking seriously the non-identity of inner and outer, the gap between the public and private self. But it is not richly developed enough to be the foundation for the distinction just drawn between two radically different kinds of privacy. The first step to correct this is a Hegelian one. Thus, as our fourth description, Kierkegaard's psychology embodies, with an important qualification, a Hegelian view of spirit as relational. Martin Buber puts it more succinctly, when he writes, "Spirit is not in the I but between I and You." 3 This is the view that Hegel de velops in detail in the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he defines spirit as the I that is We and the We that is I.4 This crucial moment in He gelian thought comes as an amplification of the Cartesian-Kantian thesis that the "I think" must be able to accompany all my repre sentations, or, to put it more directly, that (human) consciousness is inseparable from self-consciousness. The Hegelian move is sim3
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Martin Buber, / and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner's, 1970) 89. Sartre's phenomenology of "the look" in Being and Nothingness is another im portant development of the same fundamental insight. 4 For the details of Hegel's argument see Chapter Four of the Phenomenology and Chapter Five of my own History and Truth in Hegel's Phenomenology, each with ref erence to the immediately preceding chapter.
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ply to go one step further to the thesis that self-consciousness is inseparable from other-consciousness, that my awareness of my own self is always mediated through my awareness of another self. The self is thus triply relational. It is first of all the relation of those factors of which it is the synthesis, such as the temporal and the eternal. It is second the relation to itself by which it is self-con scious freedom. And it is third the relation to that other self through whom that self-consciousness is mediated. So Kierkegaard can call the self "a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another" (SUD, 13-14). However, even before Kierkegaard states this Hegelian prin ciple he qualifies it and thereby gives it a quite unhegelian direc tion. To see why he does this let us recapitulate. The Aristotelian factor in Kierkegaard's psychology is the emphasis on health as ac tivity, but activity is so construed as to accommodate the outward ness of the ethical self (and the inwardness essential thereto) but not the inwardness of the religious self. Since in The Sickness unto Death the health of the self is understood to be faith and its illness, despair (which is eventually understood to be sin) the latter mode of inwardness is utterly essential. The Cartesian principle of selfconsciousness is a step in the right direction. It has traditionally and correctly been understood as qualifying the objectivity of views like Aristotle's with a subjectivity that seeks to locate selfhood in in wardness and to provide a coherent account of inward activity. Yet this is, from Kierkegaard's perspective, a false step. For it gener ates inwardness artificially, by taking the domain of privacy which belongs essentially to the public domain as its anteroom, so to speak, the domain of Aristotelian deliberation and of Kantian mo tives; and with the help of methodological doubt it fixes an epistemic gulf between public and private realms that belong essentially together. To call this gulf artificial is simply to note that ontology does not recapitulate epistemology, that in our being as selves we are never cut off from the world of nature and other selves in a manner corresponding to the self-induced epistemic estrange ment brought on by the quest for certainty. 5
The Hegelian concept of spirit reaffirms the rights of being over knowing by reminding us of this ontological truth. The self is, not accidentally and contingently, but essentially and necessarily in the presence of the other. By itself, of course, this does not solve the problem that makes the Hegelian concept of spirit inadequate for Kierkegaard's purposes. The principle of subjectivity becomes a social principle in which spirit as we, the unity of a plurality of selves, attains to self-conscious freedom. In Hegelian language, the subjectivity of spirit is the self-awareness of Sittlichkeit, the ethical life of a people or a nation. Even if, as in the Phenomenology, this community becomes in principle a universal community, unre stricted by national boundaries, there seems no room for the sub jectivity or i n w a r d n e s s of faith. From the perspective of t h e individual, the Hegelian principle is simply a return to the Aris totelian self, whose health is activity, but whose activity is only that of the ethical stage, where the inwardness of faith is not to be found. What Kierkegaard needs is to preserve the essential other-refatedness of the self (so as to avoid the artificial inwardness of Cartesian solipsism) while unfolding for the self a domain for ac tivity in addition to that of the public, universal, ethical life of the human community (so as to gain the possibility of the inwardness of faith). To revert to the previous analogy, he needs to make it possible for the self to act as a spy while playing cards. 6 This is done quite simply by identifying the other to whom the self primarily relates as God. So, before introducing the Hegelian principle in its general form, namely, that the self is "a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another," Kier kegaard introduces t h e formula that gives his o w n distinctive specification to this principle.
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5 Studies of Kierkegaard that emphasize the ontological dimensions of his thought include Michael Wyschogrod, Kierkegaard and Heidegger, Calvin Schrag, Existence and Freedom, and John Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works.
Such a relation that relates itself to itself must either have es tablished itself or have been established by another. If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which estab lished the entire relation. The human self is such a derived, established relation, a rela tion that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. (SUD, 13-14) 6
Kierkegaard himself is quite fond of the spy metaphor for inwardness.
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Kierkegaard leaves no doubt that by this other which has estab lished the self he means God (SUE), 27, 30, 35, 40, 46). Correspond ingly his definition of faith as the health of the self as spirit is as follows: "In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (SUD, 14, 49, 131; cf. 82). The self relates to itself and to God in all conditions. It will be a healthy self if, in relating to itself it wills to be itself and in relating to God it rests transparently in him as its creator. From the ethical point of view (understood by Kierkegaard in Hegelian terms) it is the social order that is the self's ground, the "power that established it." The explicit designation of God as the ground of the self's being gives to Kierkegaard's psychology a po lemical relation to Hegelian theory (and its Aristotelian founda tion). Such a view treats one's fellow humans as the primary other to whom one relates. Since a right relation to this power that has established the self constitutes the self's health, the result is that each seeks "to be like others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man." "Surrounded by hordes of men . . . such a person forgets himself. . . . " Though motivated by a fear "of m e n " and a desire for "earthly advantages," which deserve to be called "cowardly," the rules for playing this game will be presented as the "rules of prudence." In the process people are "lumped together and de ceived instead of being split apart so that each individual may gain the highest," the awareness of existing individually before the God who transcends both individual and social order. 7 The virtue that places one's relation to society before one's relation to God is what the ancient church had in mind when "they said that the virtues of the pagans were glittering vices: they meant that the heart of pa ganism was despair, that paganism was not conscious before God as spirit." (Aristotle might be forgiven this, but Hegel professes to be a Christian thinker.) The result is that people mortgage them selves to the social world as Faust mortgaged himself to the devil. 7
In the companion volume to The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus writes, "Every individual ought to live in fear and trembling, and so too there is no es tablished order which can do without fear and trembling. Fear and trembling sig nifies that one is in process of becoming. . . And fear and trembling signifies that a God exists—a fact which no man and no established order dare for an instant forget" (TC, 89).
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Such a posture, whether in its theoretical version presented by He gel or in its practical version as found in the life-style of bourgeois respectability, is a "secular" posture that leaves no room for faith, condemning the self to despair, the sickness unto death (SUD, 27, 33-35, 46). The immediate implication of this understanding of the self is that one can be in despair without realizing it. Before investigating this central theme of the present essay more fully, two important points must be noted. The first is that this critique of Hegelian the ory and bourgeois practice as a fixation at the ethical stage is by no means unique to The Sickness unto Death. The critique spelled out here, briefly but ever so unambiguously, is not only to be found in the other work by Anti-Climacus, Training in Christianity, but with equal clarity and force in such earlier writings as Fear and Trembling, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and Two Ages.8 To give but one example—the much discussed question of a teleogical suspension of the ethical in Fear and Trembling becomes the question whether the individual has an absolute duty to God. The following understanding of faith, in answer to that question, is best understood when we remember that by the universal Kierkegaard means society, the social order (Sittlichkeit), and by the absolute he means the God who loves and judges his human children both as individuals and as families, tribes, nations, and so forth. The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual—to recall a dis tinction in dogmatics rather rare these days—determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. The paradox may also be ex pressed in this way: that there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single indi vidual absolutely to the absolute.... if this duty [to God] is absolute, then the ethical is reduced to the relative. From this it does not follow that the ethical should be invalidated; rather the ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression, such as, for example, that love to God may bring the knight of faith to give his love to the neighbor—an expression opposite to that which, eth ically speaking, is duty. (FT, 70) 8 I have developed this critique in chs. 3-5 of Kierkegaard's Critique of Reason and Society (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1987).
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One does not cease playing cards just because one is a spy. But playing cards takes a distinctly subordinate role to the task of spying; and one can continue playing cards only in so far as it is compatible with the requirements of spying, a "game" played by quite different rules. To give a more realistic example, those who are pacifists out of religious conviction are precisely those who are persuaded that obedience to God leads them, not to hate their neighbors, but to love them in a way that goes against the socially defined duty to kill in defense of the governmentally defined, na tional interest. Because their willingness to obey society, like that of Socrates in the Apology and the apostles in Acts 4 and 5, is rel ative to a higher commitment, they are bound to seem like traitors to those who view society as an absolute. These latter, in turn, are bound to seem like idolators to the former because they confuse an all too human social order with God. Kierkegaard's point, of course, is not to defend pacifism, but simply to keep open the space in which this kind of conflict between religious and social conscience can occur. The desire to eliminate this very possibility is what bothered him so deeply about both Hegel and his own Danish cor ner of of Christendom. 9 The second item to be noted concerns Kierkegaard's individu alism. It is clearly not a Cartesian individualism, in either of the two possible senses of that phrase. For, on the one hand, there is ut terly nothing solipsistic about it. The self is essentially and abso lutely related to one other person, God, and at the same time essentially but relatively related to the many other persons, soci9
Ironicalry, it is Hegel's understanding of Protestantism that leads him into this disagreement with the intensely Lutheran Kierkegaard. "Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience the principles of the religious and of the ethical conscience come to be one and the same. . . . The moral life of the state and the religious spirituality of the state are thus reciprocal guarantees of strength." Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971) 291. And at the conclusion of his Philosophy of History, Hegel writes that "through the Protestant church the reconciliation of religion and law has taken place. There is no holy, religious conscience separated from or even opposed to secular law." Werke (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970) 12: 539. For the larger context of these passages see Merold Westphal, "Hegel and the Reformation," in the pro ceedings of the 1982 meeting of the Hegel Society of America, History and System, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1984) 73-99.
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ety, whose interaction constitutes the ethical stage, which the re ligious life seeks to eliminate or exclude (rather than merely relativise) only when it misunderstands itself. On the other hand there is nothing of that autonomy, that freedom from all authority which is also associated with the Cartesian project and its Enlight enment offspring, that makes the individual's human reason the ultimate operative standard of the true. The self does not deny so ciety's ultimacy in order to affirm its own. It denies it in order to place both itself and its society under the care and critique of the God who alone is truly absolute. Individuals need to be "split apart" rather than "lumped together" (SUD, 27), not because they are either logically prior, or morally superior, to society, but be cause God is prior, and superior, to both individual and society, a fact that somehow seems easier to remember " a p a r t " than "to gether." The inwardness of faith, which includes elements of both privacy and loneliness, comes from playing two games at once. The knight of faith is both playing cards and spying, while those around him may well be, for all he knows, only playing cards. *********
Kierkegaard's psychology has been seen to be in important re spects Aristotelian, Cartesian, and Hegelian, though each of these aspects is sufficiently qualified to make it equally appropriate to speak of an anti-Aristotelian, anti-Cartesian, and anti-Hegelian psychology. The end result is a concept of the self as an essentially religious task, the task of becoming a self-conscious freedom that affirms both God as its establishing ground and itself as the actual self it is, by virtue of that primal creative act of God and the sub sequent creative acts of its own freedom. Faith and despair are the respective names for fulfilling and failing to fulfill this task. As already noted, it is an immediate implication of this nor mative concept of the self that one can be in despair without real izing it. Given a different u n d e r s t a n d i n g of t h e self a n d a correspondingly different understanding of despair, one could easily be in despair in the Kierkegaardian sense without a con scious sense of living one's life in hopelessness. Even with Kier kegaardian definitions in place one could easily affirm only an abstract God or an abstract self, that is, only a select portion of the
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God who establishes the self or a select portion of the actual self established by divine and human freedom. In this case as well one would be in despair without actually realizing it. In giving exam ples of despair, Kierkegaard regularly suggests that the individual in question is a Christian in Christendom. Yet it is misleading to speak of unconscious despair as an "im mediate implication" of Kierkegaard's view. This can easily sug gest that we have discovered something about his view that he had not noticed, or that he only leaves the implication for us to draw without making the point explicitly. In fact it is a major, overt theme of The Sickness unto Death that the individual is not a reliable index of whether he or she is in despair or not. Already by treating de spair as a sickness rather than as a symptom, such as a pain or an itch, Kierkegaard sets the stage for the claim that his essay is writ ten for those who would be physicians of the spirit—whose expert knowledge is the standard by which health is judged. Just as we take it for granted in the physical realm that a person with a seri ous problem of high blood pressure or cancer may at a given time feel perfectly comfortable and well, so Kierkegaard wants to claim that in the realm of spirit the patient's report that all is well stands open to correction by the physician whose knowledge makes for a more reliable judgment (SUD, 5, 22-23; cf. 29-30, 43-45). The "customary" or "common" view assumes an asymmetry between the realms of physical and spiritual medicine. While it ac cepts the doctor's expertise in the former realm, it assumes that I am the criterion of my own spiritual health. Despair is a psychic state just like the raw feelings that have become so prominent in recent philosophy of mind. For such states the difference between appearance and reality is inoperative. I cannot feel that I have a pain or an itch and then discover that I didn't have one after all. If it felt like it hurt, it hurt (even if I can find no adequate physical cause of the pain). My own reports about these matters are either incorri gible, or, if not, the closest approximation to incorrigibility about empirical fact one could hope for. Kierkegaard finds this view to be "a very poor understanding of despair," so "superficial" as to be "totally false" (SUD, 22-23, 26). In rejecting it he makes a total break with the Cartesian as sumption that that mind, being transparent to itself, is more easily
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known than the body. Or, to put it differently, he rejects the iden tification of mind or spirit with that surface of consciousness that is the domain of raw feelings. If the move to inwardness removes Kierkegaard's psychology from empirical psychology in the ex perimental sense, it is not because he seeks to lay the foundations for an introspective psychology. Like psychoanalysis, his psy chology will be a depth psychology. And, in so far as it is a phe nomenology, it will not be a Husserlian phenomenology, built upon Cartesian foundations, but a Heideggerian, hermeneutic phenomenology, which refuses to take what is self-evident to everyday consciousness as the last word on anything. To readers in an era overflowing with theories of false conscious ness, Marxian, psychoanalytic, hermeneutical, and structuralist, Kierkegaard seems like a true contemporary—at least at this point. To those who have learned from Freud, for example, that there can be unconscious fears and desires, the idea of unconscious despair (and anxiety, about which Kierkegaard wants to say the same thing, SUD, 44; CA, 95-96)10 should not be an insuperable stumbling block. This means that Kierkegaard will be of interest to us, not by virtue of pre senting a theory of false consciousness in general, but by virtue of the specifics of that theory. His view of the self as self-conscious freedom before God—already noted—is the first and most central of these specifics. Further specification comes in his attempts to classify the forms of despair. Kierkegaard's classification of the forms of despair takes up the greatest portion of Part One of The Sickness unto Death.n It falls into two major subdivisions. In the first despair is considered "without regard to its being conscious nor not." In the second despair is considered "as defined by consciousness." It appears that Kier kegaard means that the forms treated in the first can occur at any 10
Jean-Paul Sartre echoes Kierkegaard in speaking of unconscious anxiety in his celebrated essay "Existentialism Is a Humanism," in Existentialism from Dostoyevsky to Sartre, expanded ed., ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: New Ameri can Library, 1975) 351-52. "Although the whole of The Sickness unto Death bears the subtitle identifying the work as a "psychological exposition," Part Two, entitled "Despair Is Sin," employs distinctly Christian categories in such a way as to suggest that it belongs to theology, which Kierkegaard calls dogmatics, leaving Part One as the purely psychological part.
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point on the spectrum of consciousness/unconsciousness. Since that spectrum, as he understands it, is developed in the second subdivision, the full understanding of the first presupposes the analysis of the second, and accordingly we proceed from the later to the earlier portions of the text. Despair as defined by consciousness comes in two major divi sions, the second of which is in turn divided in two, giving us three major points of reference on the consciousness/unconsciousness spectrum. At one extreme there is "The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self." Then there is "The Despair That Is Conscious of Being Despair and Therefore Is Conscious of Having a Self in Which There Is Something Eternal and Then Either in Despair Does Not Will to Be Itself or in Despair Wills to Be Itself" (SUD, vi). We could call the first mode of despair either the despair of ignorance or the despair of spiritlessness with good textual justification, but in the present context it will be best to call it simply unconscious despair. Kierkegaard himself gives specific designations to the two modes of conscious despair. The despair that does not will to be itself he calls the despair of weakness; and the despair that in despair wills to be itself he calls the despair of defiance. By the despair of weakness Kierkegaard intends a special case of something like the Aritstotelian akrasia, moral weakness as the lack of will power. Because of something that happens to me or be cause of something I do, I am tempted to give up on myself. I know better and cannot plead ignorance; but I don't have the strength to resist this temptation, so I fall into the despair of not willing to be myself. I either wish to be someone else, or, in a more sophisti cated form, I disown myself without seeking to be someone else by withdrawing into a private reserve from which I become the ob server of the self I do not wish to be (SUD, 49-67).12 By the despair of defiance Kierkegaard intends the most in tensely conscious mode of despair, whose formula is: in despair to will to be oneself. Neither the suffering that has come to me nor the shameful things I may have done cause me to give up on my-
self. I will be myself no matter what, but in the mode of demonic defiance. This means that I am willing to be self-conscious free dom, but not before God. I will neither be comforted nor corrected by anyone other than myself. Kierkegaard calls this absolute selfassertion Promethean, though Lucifer would be at least as good a model, for the despair of defiance is the desire of the finite self to be God (SUD, 67-74)." Kierkegaard devotes considerable care to defining the bound aries between weakness and defiance and between both these modes of conscious despair and unconscious despair. While the is sues raised by this schema are very significant, the most important point for present purposes is that Kierkegaard deliberately blurs these boundaries in the very process of drawing them. For exam ple, "No despair is entirely free of defiance; indeed, the very phrase 'not to will to be' implies defiance. On the other hand, even de spair's most extreme defiance is never really free of some weak ness. So the distinction is only relative" (SUD, 49; cf. 20). Even more important, the boundary between conscious and unconscious despair is equally relative. The formula of all despair is "to will to be rid of oneself" (SUD, 20). So there is will in all de spair; but will and consciousness are proportionate, which seems to suggest that just as every despair involves some degree of will, it also involves some degree of consciousness (SUD, 29). Kierke gaard hints more directly at this conclusion when he writes, "De spair at its minimum is a state that—yes, one could humanly be tempted almost to say that in a kind of innocence it does not even know that it is despair. There is the least despair when this kind of unconsciousness is greatest" (SUD, 42). Apart from indicating that the unconsciousness of which he speaks is a matter of degree, Kierkegaard triply qualifies the idea that in innocence I might not know I am in despair. That is something he will "almost" say; it is something he might be "tempted" to say. And that temptation comes from seeing things "humanly." 14 But eventually Kierke gaard becomes completely explicit.
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12
What Kierkegaard seems to have in mind here is what R. D. Laing calls the schizoid self in The Divided Self. Dostoyevski's Underground Man would be a dra matic example.
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"See Isaiah 14:12-14 in the King James Version. In Being and Nothingness it is a central thesis of Sartre that each of us is the desire to be God. "In The Sickness unto Death as elsewhere in Kierkegaard's writings, "humanly
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International Kierkegaard Commentary Actual life is too complex merely to point out abstract contrasts such as that between a despair that is completely unaware of being so and a despair that is completely aware of being so. Very often the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state, al though here again the nuances are myriad. To some degree, he is aware of being in despair, feels it in the way a person does who walks around with a physical malady but does not want to ac knowledge forthrightly the real nature of the illness. . . . he may try to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions and in other ways, for example, through work and busyness as di versionary means, yet in such a way that he does not entirely re alize why he is doing it, that is to keep himself in the dark. . . . There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical inter play between knowing and willing. (SUD, 48)15
So it turns out that the three reference points of Kierkegaard's spectrum of despair are abstract idealizations. No real, concrete despair is a pure instance of any of these. Weakness and defiance are always intermingled in varying degrees, and the same is true of consciousness and unconsciousness. What started out as un conscious despair or the despair of ignorance is more accurately called the despair of bad faith. There is, to be sure, a certain obliv ion, but it is achieved only as I manage not to notice that of which I am at the same time aware. 16 So as we turn back to consider the forms of despair without reference to whether they are conscious or not, we need to remember not only that they can exemplify varying combinations of weakness and defiance, but also that we are likely to encounter the ignorance or unconsciousness of bad faith. In fact, Kierkegaard considers this latter mode of despair to speaking" is contrasted with "Christianly understood" to designate the reli giously inadequate perspective of those without faith (SUD, 7-8, 38-40). For the critical role this distinction plays in Kierkegaard's treatment of faith and reason, see ch. 6 of Kierkegaard's Critique. 15
This is why Kierkegaard is so vehement in rejecting the "Socratic definition of sin" as ignorance (SUD, 87-96). 16 Sartre's account of bad faith in Being and Nothingness can be read as a gen eralization of Kierkegaard's account of unconscious despair. In both cases the dipolarity of the self provides the occasion for flight from one pole to the other. In Sartre's case the poles are facticity and transcendence, which correspond very closely to the two pairs Kierkegaard discusses in detail, finite/infinite and possi bility/necessity.
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be not only the most dangerous but also the most common form (SUD, 44-45). It is dangerous for the obvious reason that despair is an illness that will almost surely go untreated as long as it is not felt. The sick soul that succeeds in hiding its illness from itself can not get well and is likely to get worse. But in spite of being dan gerous, unconscious despair, now understood as the despair of bad faith, is anything but rare because of its dual advantage over more conscious forms of despair. It is less painful and it provides less impetus to do something about it, thereby leaving the inertia of everyday life unchallenged. A typical pattern in which Kierkegaard gives examples of var ious forms of despair revolves around the distinction between ex ternal and internal. On the one hand despair is externally motivated by some misfortune that befalls me; on the other hand I am led to despair from within because of something disreputable I have done. Overcome by either sorrow or shame I give up on myself, willing in some manner to be rid of the self I actually am. In these cases the point of reference for despair, the dust particle around which it forms, so to speak, is a contingent, empirical fact. When Kierkegaard turns to discuss despair without reference to the balance between consciousness and unconsciousness within it, the point of reference is changed. Now it is the essential struc tures of the self that provide the occasion or opportunity for de spair. These structures Kierkegaard typically sees dialectically as pairs of opposites as inseparable from each other as vowels and consonants or inhaling and exhaling (SUD, 37, 40). Examples of such categorial structures would include immediacy/reflection, in ner/outer, real/ideal, temporal/eternal, finite/infinite, and possibil ity/necessity or freedom/necessity. The last three of these pairs are part of the definition of the self with which The Sickness unto Death begins. As the synthesis of each pair, the self is already a relation that can then be related to itself (SUD, 13). But it is only the last two of these pairs that are examined in the section now under discus sion. Perhaps Kierkegaard's refusal to be systematically complete is a silent barb directed at the System, but it is at least as likely that he seeks only to give sufficient illustration of the kind of thing he
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has in mind to make it possible for the attentive reader to work out the other cases as exercises.17 The first dipolar category to be discussed is finitude/infinitude. The self is the tension of being both finite and infinite. Its task is to will to be itself (not something else). If it affirms its infinity at the expense of its finitude or vice versa, it is willing to be something other than itself, willing to be rid of itself. It is in despair, an illness we can now imagine as the attempt to speak using either vowels or consonants exclusively or to breathe by inhaling without exhal ing or vice versa. As infinite the self must move away from itself, never becom ing the one-dimensional self that allows the given to define the ho rizon of reality. But as finite the self must always come back to itself, recognizing that our dreams not only should, but also do, exceed our grasp. Despair as the infinitude which lacks finitude is the self's movement away from itself without that return (SUD, 30-31). Far from being bound to the given, unrestrained imagination gives rise first to fantasy and then to the fantastic self, to variations on the theme of Walter Mitty. The fantastic self feels, knows, and wills in the realm of fantasy. Fantastic feeling is the sentimentality that expands itself so as to en compass all and in the process ends up with no one. It is perfectly expressed in the saying, I love humanity—it's my neighbors I can't stand. Fantastic knowing is inhuman in a different way. It is simply the increase in knowledge without any increase in self-knowledge, the objectivity that keeps the knower outside of every frame of ref erence under discussion and thereby immune to the questioning that constitutes inquiry.18 Since the given is not recognized as a self-evi dent norm, knowledge may well have the form of critique, but it will never be self-criticism. Fantastic willing is the making of big plans without the willingness to take personal responsibility for the small
part of the task that can be undertaken immediately. Planning and dreaming never give rise to work (SUD, 31-32). The opposite form of despair is the finitude that lacks infinity. The fantastic volatizing of the self is replaced by a reductionist nar rowing. While the former view may have a religious form, the apo theosis of the finite is essentially secular (SUD, 33). Of the many modes of finitude that make up the facticity of the self, Kierke gaard focuses here exclusively on that of the social order. The de spair that takes this as the given which defines its horizon is expressed in the old motto of Sam Rayburn, To get along, go along. A significant portion of that critique of the self's fixation at the eth ical stage which was summarized earlier in this essay occurs at this point. Surrounded by "hordes" of others, the self forgets itself and out of "fear of men" seeks to reduce its difference from others to mere numerical difference. While the previous form of despair, with its implicit critique of the status quo, may be unwelcome in so ciety at large, this form gives the individual "an increasing capac ity for going along superbly in business and social life, indeed, for making a great success in the world," for it consists in practicing the "prudence" that "makes life cozy" (SUD, 34). Thus whereas actuality does a favor to the former kind of despair by punishing it, it shows this form of illness the dubious friendship of reinforc ing it. Since it is clear that at least one example of the despair of fini tude would be the self that gets to the ethical stage but not beyond it, treating as ultimate the determinateness of a given social order, it makes sense to ask whether the despair of infinity corresponds to the aesthetic stage on life's way. One only needs to ask the ques tion to see how appropriate an affirmative answer is. For the aes thetic stage, especially in those forms most closely associated with romantic irony, can well be interpreted as reflection and imagina tion that have broken completely free from all givens, assuming that ideality is only to be found by leaving reality behind.19 Thus Kier-
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17
There is also the fact of his related discussions elsewhere. The extensive treatment of temporal/eternal in The Concept of Anxiety, to which The Sickness unto Death is a kind of sequel, may account for his mentioning this category as consti tutive but developing only the other two pairs. '"Fantastic knowing is satirized in Concluding Unscientific Postscript as objectiv ity. That satire is renewed in The Sickness unto Death 43 and 90.
19 This obviously makes the analysis of despair a commentary on The Concept of Irony and vol. 1 of EitherI Or. For the similarities and differences between Kier kegaard and Hegel as critics of romantic irony, see Robert L. Perkins, "Hegel and Kierkegaard: Two Critics of Romantic Irony," Review of National Literatures, 1 (1970): 232-54.
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kegaard's treatment of this kind of despair and of faith as its cure is at one level simply another statement of his theory of the stages. In view of the central importance of the categories of finite and infinite in Hegel's thought, the question unavoidably arises whether we are also dealing here with another chapter in Kierke gaard's dialogue with Hegel. The answer is yes, but perhaps not as expected. Kierkegaard, rather than criticizing the dialectical re lationship between finitude and infinity as set forth in Hegelian logic, employs it for his own purposes. It might be thought that for Kierkegaard (as with Descartes, for example), finite and infinite designate two fundamentally different kinds of self, human and divine. Yet we have just seen that he applies the two categories si multaneously to the human self (without any intention of lessen ing the ontological gap between the human and divine). Since this dialectical understanding of the categories as dipolar lies at the ba sis of both a major agreement with Hegel and the repetition of a familiar criticism, it will be helpful to take a brief look at Hegel's development of it. Hegel calls the true or genuine (wahrhafte) infinite—which "must be defined and enunciated as the unity of the finite and infinite"— the "fundamental concept of philosophy" and the basis for the fact that "every genuine philosophy is idealism" (LL, 95).20 This con cept must be sharply distinguished from that of the "bad" or spu rious (schlechte) infinite. The latter is the infinity of "endless iteration" or "endless progression" as in the movement through space or time ad infinitum. It is dualistic in its implications and in volves a "rigid" and "insuperable opposition between finite and infinite" (LL, 94, 94Z, 95). Things are finite simply by being determinate, in accordance with Spinoza's maxim, Omnis determinatio est negatio (LL, 91Z). The negation that determination implies is that of being this and not that and thus it essentially involves being limited in the sense of being related to that which is other. If infinity were to be found
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through the abstract negation of this negation, it would mean the surpassing of all limits through a flight to indeterminacy, the fa mous night in which all cows are black about which Hegel com plained in the Preface to the Phenomenology. In existential terms it is escapism. For "to suppose that by stepping out and away into that infinity we release ourselves from the finite, is in truth but to seek the release which comes by flight. But the man who flees is not yet free: in fleeing he is still conditioned by that from which he flees." Philosophy does not concern itself with "such empty and other-worldly stuff" as this infinity of indeterminacy, for "what philosophy has to do with is always something concrete and ut terly present" (LL, 94Z). The true movement to infinity is not that of flight from the fi nite and the other-relatedness which is basic thereto. The real in finite "consists in being at home with itself in its other, or, if enunciated as a process, in coming to itself in its other" (LL, 94Z). To remain self-related in the midst of, rather than as an alternative to, other-relation is the true irifinity that can be called being-for-self (Fursichsein). It is already clear not only that such concepts as self-subsis tence, self-relation, and self-determination are closer to the He gelian concept of infinity than to any notion of abstract limitlessness, but also that the nature of freedom is at issue here.21 When Hegel comments that "the man who flees is not yet free," it is clear that there is edification to be found, of all places, in Hegel's logic. As this dimension becomes more overt, the harmony between Kierkegaard's critique of the despair of infinitude and Hegel's view of essentially the same phenomenon is dramatic. Man, if he wishes to be actual, must be-there-and-then [muss dasein], and to this end he must set a limit to himself. People who are too fastidious toward the finite never reach actuality, but linger lost in abstraction, and their light dies away. (LL, 92Z) The man who will do something great must learn, as Goethe says, to limit himself. The man who, on the contrary, would do
20
LL is introduced here as a new siglum. It represents Hegel's "Lesser Logic," the version found in the Encyclopedia. The numbers are paragraph rather than page, numbers, since these are standard to all translations. '71 following a paragraph number signifies the Zusatz to that paragraph. With a few changes I have fol lowed the Wallace translation.
21
In connection with the concept of freedom the same dialectic of determinacy, indeterminacy, and self-determination occurs in Paragraphs 5 to 7 of the Philosophy of Right. For an interpretation see Merold Westphal, "Hegel's Theory of the Concept," in Art and Logic in Hegel's Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus and Kenneth L. Schmitz (New lersey: Humanities, 1980) 103-19.
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everything, really would do nothing, and fails. There is a host of interesting things in the world: Spanish poetry, chemistry, poli tics, and music are all very interesting, and if any one takes an in terest in them we need not find fault. But for a person in a given situation to accomplish anything, he must stick to one definite point, and not dissipate his forces in many directions. (LL, 80Z)
theoretical rationalization), it is clear from his other writings that he sees Hegel as the chief theoretician of this despair. Like Judge William, Hegel has a penetrating insight into the extreme and one sided self-understanding of those individuals who define them selves counter-culturally, but little or none into those whose self hood is simply given to them by their culture. When Kierkegaard turns to the category possibility/necessity the question of freedom is even more explicitly in the foreground (SUD, 29). Once again the two factors are equally necessary to the self's health, and the acceptance of one at the expense of the other will be a sickness unto death (SUD, 35, 37, 40). As living the tension of being finite/infinite involves the self moving away from itself yet always coming back to itself, so here the movement of possibility is the self's movement from its place. But the metaphor changes in describing the other half of the truth. ("The mirror of possibility . . . does not tell the truth. . . . [but] only a half-truth" (SUD, 37).) Necessity can be described as the constraint upon the self, but we grasp it more deeply when we see that "necessity is literally the place where it is. To become is a movement away from that place, but to become oneself is a movement in that place" (SUD, 35-36). The task of living this tension is to move away from one's place while moving in it, to transform rather than to escape one's situ ation.22 If possibility "outruns" necessity and the self seeks to move away from its place without remaining in it, then "the self runs away from itself in possibility," a form of escapism similar to the despair of infinitude—and with the same results. Such running away "neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives any where." It is so swallowed up by possibility that it loses all actual ity in the sense of actualizing possibilities. Lacking action, the essence of selfhood, the self becomes a "phantasmagoria" of pos sibilities, a human (or better, inhuman) "mirage" (SUD, 35-36). Although for Kierkegaard the self's place is synonymous with constraint, he does not view the inactivity of this despair as the self's being overpowered by necessity. "When a self becomes lost
On the basis of the same understanding of the self as both finite and infinite, agreement turns to sharp criticism when Kierkegaard turns to the despair of finitude which lacks infinity. We have al ready seen that in this section he restates his fundamental critique of Hegelian theory and bourgeois life-style for remaining fixed at the ethical stage. We need only see how this can be expressed in terms of finite and infinite. Like Hegel and against the extremes of romantic irony, Kierkegaard finds the infinity of the self not in pure self-relation, but in being "at home with itself in its other" (LL, 94Z). In fact, his formula for faith as the self's health is an echo of this Hegelian formula. The self-relating self is "at home with itself," just to the degree that it wills to be itself, and it has this relation "in its other" just to the degree that it rests transparently in the power that established it. What has happened here is that Kierkegaard has specified God as the other in relation to which the self experiences its true infinity. This does not occur in the self's relation to other human selves, individual or collective, for these, unlike God, are not infinite in themselves, and finitude's relation to finitude does not generate infinity. A good deal would need to be spelled out to indicate just in what sense God is infinite in himself. If Kierke gaard were a systematic theologian he would need to undertake this task himself, but for his purpose the negative point is the cru cial one, the reminder that society is not the other in relation to which we experience our true freedom. All those who, in theory or in practice, make society infinite in itself, either by making it the sole other to which the self relates, or by making it the basis and norm for the self's God relation (taking over the role of mediator between God and men as suggested in the passage cited earlier from Fear and Trembling), have lapsed into the despair that consists of accepting the self s finitude but not its true infinity. Though there is no direct reference to Hegel here (since Kierkegaard is more im mediately concerned with the practice of this despair than with its
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^The concept of "place" in this context clearly has the same generality as the concept of "situation" in the writings of laspers, Marcel, and Sartre.
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in possibility in this way, it is not merely because of a lack of en ergy. . . . What is missing is essentially the power to obey, to sub mit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations" (SUD, 36). In short, Kierkegaard picks this particular point to remind us of his general claim that despair is never purely a matter of weakness but always has at least an element of defiance in it. The opposite despair, where necessity eliminates possibility, is, like the despair in which finitude eliminates infinity, viewed as an essentially secular project. Kierkegaard views God as the ground of the self's true possibility just as he is of the self's true infinitude. There are two ways of denying this possibility. Fatalism or deter minism is the total denial of possibility. Just because of its unam biguous posture, it is less subtle than the "philistine-bourgeois" version of this despair. It does not deny possibility altogether, but it is "completely wrapped up in probability, within which possi bility finds its small corner; therefore it lacks the possibility of be coming aware of God." This last aspect stems from the fact that probability is based on a "trivial compedium of experiences as to how things go, what is possible, what usually happens," that is, when God is left out of the picture (SUD, 41). Here as in Fear and Trembling, where Abraham by faith is able to hope for the return of Isaac contrary to all human understanding of what is possible, Kierkegaard draws the sharpest possible contrast between "humanly speaking, there is no possibility" and "with God everything is possible" (SUD, 38). Prayer becomes the touchstone for this kind of faith, the prayer that believes that with God everything is possible and therefore refuses to be bound by what is, humanly speaking, possible. Neither the determinist-fatalist nor the philistinebourgeois modes in which necessity triumphs over possibility know the meaning of prayer in this sense. In Kierkegaard's view they are smothered by necessity, unable to breathe. In an equally dramatic figure, Kierkegaard says that without prayer "man is essentially as inarticulate as the animals" (SUD, 40-41). Once again we are dealing with categories important to Hegel's logic, and in treating them dialectically as co-present within the self, Kierkegaard invites us again to ask about the relation of his anal ysis to Hegel's. His discussion of the despair of possibility (lacking
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necessity) looks at first glance to be a direct criticism of Hegel's treatment of the modal categories. In the middle of his analysis of the loss of action and actuality that this despair involves he writes, "The philosophers are mistaken when they explain necessity as a unity of possibility and actuality—no, actuality is the unity of pos sibility and necessity" (SUD, 36). This seems directed at Hegel, who writes, "Necessity has been defined, and rightly so, as the union of possibility and actuality" (LL, 147).23 But Hegel goes on to add that this account "gives a superficial and therefore unintelligible description of the very difficult notion of necessity." There is something useful about the formula, but it is by no means a sum mary of what Hegel wants to say. Although in his lengthy attempt to specify just what he does want us to understand by these modal categories he does not propose Kierkegaard's counter-formula, that actuality is the union of possibility and necessity, his paragraph 143 with its Zustatz reads like an extended commentary on that for mula. In any case it constitutes a critique of free-floating possibility very much in the same spirit as Kierkegaard's. We can summarize by saying that whenever the imagination seeks to soar away from all givens, all limits, all constraints into a realm of absolute free dom, whether under the rubric of infinity or possibility or what ever, Hegel and Kierkegaard will be united in calling it back to earth and insisting that it submit to the discipline of determinacy. As with the corresponding discussion of the despair of fini tude, the account of the despair of necessity (lacking possibility) can be read as an anti-Hegelian polemic. However, this time the spotlight of criticism is not at all sharply focused on Hegel. The kind of prayer that corresponds to Abraham's faith is the mark of a healthy preservation of possibility in the "place" of necessity. It can be safely said that this kind of prayer is nowhere to be found in He gel's writings, not even in his Philosophy of Religion, and certainly not in his discussion of the modal categories in his logic. Yet there 23
Hegel's own comment, which has the mark of condemnation by faint praise, is most likely directed at Leibniz, who interprets the ontological proof of God's existence in terms of this formula. As a necessary being, God cannot exist contin gently. Only self-contradiction could hinder the existence of such a being. So, if God's existence is possible, it is actual. Since that is what it means to be a neces sary being, necessity is the actuality that is given by its own possibility.
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is nothing distinctively Hegelian about this absence; and this theme is as absent from Kierkegaard's other overt Hegel critiques as the charge that Hegel allows society to usurp God's place is present. The primary target here is that "philistine-bourgeois" mentality whose spiritlessness seems to have prevailed throughout Chris tendom. At this point Kierkegaard is less concerned that Hegel doesn't teach his readers to pray than that no one else, including the reverend clergy, seems to have done it either. We are on the verge of the attack upon Christendom. Although in this section attention has been focused on forms of despair with reference to the dialectical structure of the self but without reference to whether it is conscious or not, we have tried to keep in mind Kierkegaard's dual claim that a) unconscious de spair is the most common form of despair and that b) no despair is fully ignorant or unconscious of itself but can seem to be so only through self-deception, distracting its own attention from that of which it is all the time aware. It would seem to be Kierkegaard's assumption, then, that the four forms of despair just discussed most frequently occur as forms of bad faith, in which the person in despair seems, even to himself or herself, not to realize what is happening (though this appearance is misleading). If we make this assumption with Kierkegaard, at least for pur poses of discussion, we can ask two further questions about un conscious despair. The first concerns the deepest motivations of this despair. If we ask why finitude would seek to free itself from in finity or possibility from necessity or, in each case, vice versa, a first answer that suggests itself from Kierkegaard's analysis is laziness. The task of living the tension of the dialectical simultaneity of di polar categories is an extraordinarily demanding and strenuous task. In fact, this way of describing it is misleading, for this task is difficult in a totally different way from that of ordinary tasks. In stead of an extraordinarily strenuous task we should speak of a uniquely strenuous task. The inertia of everyday life resists the call to such engagement. Spiritually speaking, the self falls into de spair because it is lazy. There is a second and deeper motivation—pride.24 In each case the despair under discussion is the refusal to submit. Where infinOvert references to pride and despair are found at The Sickness unto Death 65
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ity and possibility run amuck, it is the refusal to submit to the con straints of creaturehood; and where finitude and necessity gain the upper hand, it is the refusal to submit to the creator, to the com mands and the consolation of the one who is higher than every thing human, individual or corporate. This leads to a second discovery about motivation and to a new question about unconscious despair, this time one that Kierkegaard himself does not seem to ask. If I am led to despair out of laziness and pride, that fact by itself will give me all the impetus I need to obscure it from my view, because I do not like to think of myself as acting in that way and will gladly avail myself of whatever opportunities for bad faith may be at hand. If, then, the very motivation for despair itself provides the motivation for being in bad faith about it, what possibilities for that bad faith are inherent in the situation? No doubt the capacity for bad faith is sufficient that, when the need is strong enough, no special assistance is necessary. Even if it is not strictly needed, the situation before us does offer such special assistance in diverting attention from that of which I am nevertheless aware. It comes in the form of "the other guy." The dialectical structure of the categories involved here means that the forms of despair come in pairs of opposites. Each mode of despair is, with respect to its dipolar partner, the equal but oppo site one-sidedness. Yet each can easily see the one-sidedness of the other more easily than its own, and in fact, it can easily persuade itself that, simply by virtue of being different from and opposed to that obvious error, it must have struck upon the way of truth. Thus, to use a contemporary example, it is easy to see instances where communism has been a violation of basic human rights and dig nity, but not so easy to see that in the name of anti-communism human rights and dignity can just as easily be trampled under foot. A genuinely neutral observer might well see equal but opposite ways of being inhuman to those not strong enough to defend themselves; but to those involved on either side, the obvious sins of the other side serve to make their own, somehow, into virtue. and 112, but the linkage is structurally much stronger than these two passages by themselves would suggest.
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Something like that is surely at work in the forms of despair we have been considering. They occur in a social context where their opposites can be easily observed. The aesthete, the romantic, the bohemian, in short, the impersonation of counter-cultural imagi nation has no difficulty in seeing and skillfully satirizing the blandness and hypocrisy of main line society. At the same time the Judge Williamses of the world, along with all their fellow defenders of decency and order, have no trouble detecting the arrogance and irresponsibility of their opposites; and while they may not be as witty in denouncing them, they make up for it with the fervor of their moral indignation. The problem is simply that the conspicuousness of the shortcomings of "the enemy" becomes an all too ef fective instrument that enables me to blind myself to my own despair. Here we find one of the deepest roots of Kierkegaard's individ ualism. It is not that he has no use for society or the church. It is rather that he knows that health requires self-knowledge, that bad faith is a major obstacle to that self-knowledge, and that bad faith is sustained by those situations in which I can always compare my self to those whose sins are more obvious (to me) than my own. There is a therapeutic as well as an ontological foundation to Kier kegaard's concern to get the individual alone before God. This is by no means where health ends up, but this is the only place it can begin.
IV
Kierkegaard's Double Dialectic of Despair and Sin James L. Marsh
I
n fact, I state the title of this essay only to take it back immedi ately, for I think finally that there is one dialectic in The Sickness unto Death, with two different aspects, a philosophical and a reli gious. Reflecting on a "double dialectic," however, has advan tages. One is that I can do justice to Kierkegaard's movement from a basically philosophical and ontological conception of the de spairing self to a religious and Christian conception. Second, I can stress the play between the philosophical and re ligious conceptions. Not only is there a dialectic within each sphere, but there is also a dialectic between the two spheres, out of which the one dialectic emerges. There is, then, a movement from mul tiplicity to unity, difference to identity, but the identity is an iden tity in difference in which the philosophical and religious remain as distinct but related aspects of one whole. Third, my paper will traverse a path moving from the relative externality of the dialectics to one another to relative internality, where we see that one is really part of another. Such a path moves through the stages of parallelism between the two dialectics, in version, complementarity, Aufhebung, and paradox. In such move ment, "sin" becomes more inclusive, incorporating "despair" as an aspect of itself. Despair correlates with philosophy and sin to faith. As the content of despair gives way to sin in the essay, so the form of philosophy gives way to faith, and mediation to paradox.
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(A) Parallelism between the Dialectics
If falling into despair is an affair of freedom, then so is contin uation of despair. In contrast to a disease, which has set in once and for all, despair is a disease that I am contracting continually at every instant of my life. Consequently I do not have despair be cause I once had it, but because I am now not choosing it. "For de spair is not attributable to the misrelation but to the relation that relates itself to itself" (SUD, 17). For the above reasons, Kierkegaard says despair is the true sickness unto death, an agony over myself in which I will to be rid of myself and yet cannot be rid of myself, will to die and yet cannot die. Despair is impotent and self-consuming. Even though despair may seem to be over something, it is really over oneself; "It is Mar garet you mourn for." 1 A minute's reflection indicates that it is not over something but over myself that I despair. The person who wishes to be Caesar and doesn't succeed is not in despair over not being Caesar but over himself for not being Caesar (SUD, 19). Because despair is a desire to lose or consume myself that is at odds with itself, the two chief formulas for despair dovetail into one another dialectically. I despair over willing to be myself but such a despair, because it rips itself away from the power that constituted it, is a willing to be a self that is totally independent of such power. Consequently I will not be myself in order to be something else. Conversely a girl disappointed in love who wished to be herself only as the object of her young man's love now wishes to jettison the self who lacks this young man. Despair is this contradictory movement from not willing to be myself to willing,to be myself (SUD, 19-21). If the self is a synthesis of opposites such as infinitude and fi nitude relating itself to itself, the self is freedom. "However, this synthesis is relation, and a relation that even though it is derived, relates itself to itself, which is freedom. The self is freedom" (SUD, 29). Because freedom implies consciousness, despair m u s t be viewed principally under the aspect of consciousness. Different levels of consciousness determine levels of despair. Conscious ness of self is the decisive criterion of self. "The more conscious-
Here, in the course of showing parallelism, I need to indicate also in a summary fashion the main steps and progression of such a dialectic. Kierkegaard begins his discussion of despair by defin ing spirit. Spirit is the self, and the self is a relation of opposites, such as infinite and finite, eternal and temporal, freedom and ne cessity. This relation of opposites relates itself to itself. Rather than being a negative unity such as that between soul and body, which occurs automatically without conscious choice, spirit's relation to itself is conscious and free (SUD, 13-14). Such a relation can either constitute itself or be constituted by an other. If the former were to prevail there would be only one form of despair—not willing to be myself. If the relation is constituted by an other, as Kierkegaard thinks, then there is also despair at willing to be myself in such a way that I deny my relationship to God. Essential to being a self, then, if the self is essentially related to God, is faith in God. For this reason, Kierkegaard asserts that all despair is, implic itly or explicitly, despair at willing to be myself, an attempt to deny the relationship to God. In so doing, however, I literally and figura tively lose myself in despair. Conversely, to ground myself through faith in the Power that constituted me is to escape despair and to find myself. Already the philosophical dialectic points toward the later re ligious dialectic of sin (SUD, 13-21). Despair can be both an advantage and a disadvantage. Despair is advantageous in that it signals the difference between myself as spirit and a beast, disadvantageous in that it is perdition and loss of self. "Despair is the misrelationship in a relation of a synthesis which relates itself to itself" (SUD, 15). Despair is an affair of free dom; to fall into despair is not like becoming lame, blind, or halt. These afflictions come from without, but, because I inflict it on my self, despair comes from within. The relation between opposites such as infinitude and finitude or necessity and possibility is not despair. If that were true, I would be essentially, not freely, in de spair. In the synthesis lies the possibility, but not the actuality, of despair. For despair to be actual I have to choose it, in greater or lesser consciousness that I am choosing it, and the overcoming or annihilating of despair is itself a choice, not something that hap pens automatically (SUD, 15-16).
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'Gerard Manley Hopkins, "Spring and Fall to a Young Child," A Pocket Book of Modern Verse, ed. Oscar Williams (New York: Washington Square Press, 1954) 136.
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ness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self" (SUD, 29). Even though consciousness is the primary point of view from which Kierkegaard will look at despair, he first reflects on despair in light of the factors that go into the synthesis of the self, finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility. Here he insists that we must view despair dialectically. "No kind of despair can be de fined directly (undialectically) but only by reflecting on its oppo site factor." The despair of infinitude, for example, where I become carried away into the fantastical and the limitless, comes from the lack of finitude. Kierkegaard asserts here, pointing towards the re ligious dialectic, that such a unity of finite and infinite can only be achieved in religious faith. "The self is healthy and free from de spair only when, precisely by having despaired, it rests transpar ently in God" (SUD, 30). Kierkegaard next considers despair from the point of view of con sciousness. Considered from this point of view, despair has two forms: unconscious despair and conscious despair, of which there are two main kinds, despair of weakness and despair of defiance—de spair at not willing to be a self and despair at willing to be a self. In the philosophical as in the religious dialectic, there is a movement from less conscious to more conscious, passive to active (SUD, 49). Kierkegaard divides the despair of weakness into two kinds, despair over the earthly and despair over the eternal. The first is pure immediacy or else immediacy into which there enters a small dose of reflection. In the first kind the self hangs its welfare upon some external honor, thing, or person. When disaster occurs— getting fired, not getting tenure or getting jilted—then despair oc curs. On this level the self is so unconscious of itself that it does not distinguish between the external value in question and itself. To such a person, loss of job, tenure, or lover is loss of self. As Kierkegaard will subsequently show, however, what I am really despairing over is myself, not the external value. Such despair reaches its apotheosis when the self willingly expresses to itself the wish to be another self: if I only had his talent, wealth, and beauty, then I could move mountains (SUD, 50-54). When perfection enters in small doses, there is some distinc tion made between the self and externals, and despair does not
come about by reason of a sudden, external blow. She is now, however, willing to make a sharp, clear distinction between the self and externals: "I do not equal my job, my fortune, my fame, my lavish home." Self-awareness on this level is fitful. Rather than taking the path of interiority towards a life of the spirit, the person retreats into externals and a life of quiet, spiritual desperation. Such a life is quite compatible with a life of public success and achieve ment, but it is a life so distracted from itself, so at odds with itself, that it never confronts its own secret despair. Because her selfawareness is so fitful and fluctuating, she can at times convince herself that she is content. Ethical, political, and spiritual ideals held in her youth, now that she has become realistic and adult, are dis missed as fantasies appropriate to youth. Misinterpreting and mis using the Scriptures, she says to herself, "When I was a child, I sought the things of a child . . . " (SUD, 56-60). The next major stage in the despair of weakness occurs when I see that I am really in despair over myself; at this point I discover the eternal in myself. Because I am difinitively and clearly aware that I have a self in danger of being lost, there is progress in mov ing to this condition. Because I experience despair passively, how ever, as something happening to me about which I can do nothing, my despair is still one of weakness. Because the despair is deeper and more continuous, I am closer to salvation. Also, however, I am at odds with myself. I love introversion and solitude, but seek ex troversion and society. I comically switch gears between public, extroverted life and private, introverted life; but it is a switching of gears that never goes anywhere or makes progress. There is just enough solitude to satisfy the needs of inwardness and just enough extroversion to avoid confronting the truth of my condition. Because such despair is intrinsically unstable, two possibilities are present. If I choose inwardness over extroversion, then I can break through to a deeper form of inwardness and religious com mitment. If I choose extroversion, I can plunge into a public life of politics, like Richard III, or a life of sensual debauchery, like Don Juan. At this point I move from weakness to defiance, and the sec ond main kind of despair emerges—despair at willing to be myself (SUD, 60-67).
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If the despair of weakness can be described as womanly, the despair of defiance might be described as manly. If despair of weakness had minimal awareness of the eternal in one's self, de spair of defiance has maximal awareness of the eternal and for that reason is closer to the truth. The despair that is the thoroughfare to faith comes also through the aid of the eternal; through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself. Here, however, it is not willing to begin with losing itself but wills to be itself. In contrast to a despair of weakness afflicted pas sively from without, despair of defiance actively asserts itself as a deed (SUD, 67). If despair of weakness emphasizes the poles of finitude and ne cessity as dimensions of the earthly, despair of defiance empha sizes the poles of infinitude and possibility. Rather than respecting myself as this definite self that I am, I engage in a project of trying to remake myself anew. I engage in ceaseless experimentation with my self. One month I try casual sex, the next celibacy; one year I experiment with radical politics, the next with LSD. Because I con ceive of myself as infinite, creative, and active and do not respect myself as a gift from God, the selves or series of selves that I create are fantastic chimeras, unrelated to anything real, lasting, or sub stantial. Because—like Nietzsche's overman or Sartre's devotee of nothingness—I can instantly drop one project and begin another, my life becomes a lived atheism even when there is literal, proffessed theism. My life becomes absurd, "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." 2 Clearly, such fantastic attempts do not work, because the real self always rises up and brings them to shipwreck. As Kierkegaard puts it, there is a "thorn in the flesh" that through the neglected, finite self pushes out and makes its presence felt. Rather than throwing him self into the arms of God in a leap of faith, however, and allowing God to remove his affliction, he retains the affliction. Like Prome theus, he uses affliction and glories in it, using it as proof against God and as a perverse indication of his own excellence and uniqueness. Better it is to be this isolated, unique suffering individual than, like a great many men and women, to move to the faith that would restore him existentially to the human race (SUD, 67-74). 2
Shakespeare Macbeth, Act V, Scene v.
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Kierkegaard's double dialectic is a logic or phenomenologic of the various stages and gradations of despair and sin. As such, his dialectic is open to being read either as a story of the self's journey from a despair without consciousness of God to a sinfulness aware of itself before God, or as simply uncovering the levels and kinds of sin, each of which has a human, psychological dimension to it and a religious dimension. The essay can be read either diachronically or synchronically. In any event, the next step in Kierke gaard's discussion is to inquire into the way despair, in the presence of God, becomes sin. "Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be one's self or in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD, 77). If Kierkegaard's dialectic is constucted on the basis of con sciousness of self, then first unconscious despair, and subse quently consciousness of having an eternal self about which I despair in weakness or defiance, and finally awareness of myself before God are stages in such self-awareness. If up to this point we have been merely describing the human dimensions of the self, then at this point we reflect on the theological dimension of the self. "The greater the conception of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God" (SUD, 80). The self ac quires for its most adequate, measure not its own internal consti tution of necessity and possibility, finitude and infinitude, but the infinite self of God. The movement from despair to sin, in reality and in Kierkegaard's thought, is a movement from the ethical in fidelity of the self to itself to infidelity to God. If we have seen in the dialectic of despair a movement from less active to more active kinds of despair, then there is also in the di alectic of sin a movement from passive, minimally conscious kinds to the very active. Kierkegaard begins with the minimally con scious sin already discussed and moves to explicitly conscious forms of sin—not willing to be oneself or willing to be oneself de fiantly before God. Conscious sin divides into three kinds: de spairing over one's sin, despairing of the forgiveness of sins, and sin against the Holy Ghost. For Kierkegaard, despair of weakness and defiance are present in each of these three kinds of sin. The sin of despairing over one's sin Kierkegaard describes as a willingness to continue in one's sin consistently. If sin is a breach
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with the good, then despair over one's sin is a breach with repen tance. In breaking with repentance, the sinner maintains herself by sinking deeper into despair. The next sin Kierkegaard considers is that of the despair of for giveness for my sins. Such despair is distinct in three ways. First, despair over forgiveness of my own sins occurs in the presence of God; Christ is the one before whom I despair of forgiveness. Sec ond, as I shall develop more fully later, weakness and defiance are the opposites of what they were before in the dialectic of despair (SUD, 113). Third, because Christ is the one before w h o m I de spair, my sin takes the form of offense at the idea that a man, albeit a God-man, could forgive sins. In our dialectic of sin we have been moving from passivity to activity, less consciousness to more consciousness. In uncon scious despair of sin, I fight God by evasion. In despair over my sins I am more active and conscious, but nonetheless here I am for tifying myself in a position I am already in by taking one step back w a r d s . In despair of my sin, w h e r e I am offended by God's compassion, I cease to be merely defensive and become offensive. In the sin against the Holy Ghost, I move into offensive warfare. "In a way all the preceding forms of despair conceded that the ad versary is the stronger. But now sin is attacking. . . . Sin against the Holy Ghost is the positive form of being offended" (SUD, 125). In general, then, there is a movement from passive to active in each of the two dialectics; this movement has a structure of triplicky, from unconscious despair of sin through weakness to defi ance. In Kierkegaard's discussion of sin, despair over my sin and despair of my sin correspond to weakness, dismissing Christianity to defiance. In despair, we move from ignorance of self to self re jection to self assertion. Defiance is the dialectical Aufhebung of spiritlessness and weakness, recovering the unity of the former and the self-consciousness of the latter. Similarly, in the final phase of sin against the Holy Ghost, the self incorporates the consistency and withdrawal from God of the first phase, but takes u p the sec ond phase, rejecting Christianity in a more intensified form. Kier kegaard moves through the stages of despair or sin in itself in the
form of ignorance, for itself in the form of weakness, and in and for itself in the form of defiance. 3 Kierkegaard concludes his essay by reiterating the formula for faith, as an alternative to sin and despair. This formula points back to the initial discussion of the sin-faith opposition at the beginning of the philosophical dialectic. "In relating itself to itself and in will ing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the Power that estab lished it" (SUD, 14, 131).
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(B) Inversion The first, most external relationship between the two dialectics is that of parallelism or similarity. A second, more internal rela tionship is that, in one instance at least, categories from the first dialectic are inverted in the second dialectic. In the despair of my sin, weakness and defiance are the opposite of what they were be fore. If ordinary weakness is in despair not to will to be myself, here this willing becomes defiance because I am not willing to be who I really am, a sinner. If ordinary defiance is in despair at willing to be myself, here this willing is weakness because I will to be myself, a sinner, in such a way that there is no forgiveness. By such inversion the terms of the philosophical dialectic become even more dialectical. The rea son for this inversion is that sin takes place in the presence of God and such presence inverts our normal categories. What is weak humanly becomes defiant religiously. What is defiant humanly be comes weak religiously. Because God is God, I can be forward towards Him only if I am at great distance. If I come closer, I cannot be forward; and if I am forward, I have to be far away. Such religious forwardness is in contrast to that on a human level, where I am forward towards a person by coming closer and then punished perhaps by being dis tant from the person (SUD, 113-114). (C) Complementarity If the philosophical dialectic grounds the religious dialectic by defining the problem, despair, and the key terms such as infini3
I am indebted here to Stephen Dunning's Kierkegaard's Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985) 214-33; for his suggestive analysis of dialectic in The Sickness unto Death.
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tude-finitude and consciousness-unconsciousness, then the reli gious dialectic completes the philosophical dialectic. The awareness of God before Whom despair becomes sin ushers in the highest, most conscious forms of despair. I see, first, that all despair, most profoundly understood, is a form of sin, either the willed spirit lessness of unconscious sin or the more conscious forms of sin. Conversely, I can also affirm that all sin is despair, as this is de fined in the philosophical dialectic. "Thus sin is intensified weak ness or intensified defiance; sin is the intensification of despair. . . . it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call 'aggravated despair' " (SUD, 77). Another example of the way in which the religious dialectic completes the philosophical dialectic is the relationship between the Christian concept of will and the question of unconscious de spair. Through such a concept, we see that the most common form of sin is a willed spiritlessness, a flight from the truth. To talk about unconscious despair may seem to be not only contradictory but ar bitrary. If I am not conscious of being in despair, how can I legiti mately be said to be in despair? If most people do not seem to be in despair and consider themselves content and happy, then who is Kierkegaard to say that they are? Yet a close reading of Kierke gaard's argument can reveal the plausibility, at least, of his claim. Already in Kierkegaard's discussion, especially in the more wordly, crude forms, of despair of finitude and necessity, he has shown that despair can slip in quietly like a thief in the night. Here Kierke gaard suggests that, just as a person who is sick is often not the best judge of his sickness and requires a diagnosis by a doctor, so the best judge of despair is not the tranquilized millions embody ing in different ways the "happy consciousness," 4 but rather a knowledgeable physician of souls. The vulgar view also overlooks that despair is more dialectical than physical sickness. If a physician pronounces a person sick, it is very likely that at one time she was well. If despair manifests it self in a person, it is very likely that she has always been in despair because despair is an affair of spirit and spirit is eternal. Also the symptoms of despair are more dialectical than those of illness. If I
have a fever, that indicates illness. If I feel tranquil, peaceful, and secure, those feelings could either indicate that I have overcome despair or that, "distracted from distraction by distraction,"51 am engaged in a flight from self that is despair (SUD, 22-28). Kierkegaard's argument, then, is that there is a flight from self, a kind of bad faith or inauthenticity,6 in which the self hides from itself its own spiritual condition. Because the self is essentially spirit—a re flective, free unity of finitude and irifinitude, necessity and possibil ity—being unaware even of the possibility of despair implies supreme spiritlessness, loss of self, and, therefore, despair. Massive uncon sciousness of despair, which might seem to be telling evidence against Kierkegaard's claim, is some of the best evidence for his claims. Men and women subject to unconscious despair, because they do not dare to be spiritual, exist merely as soul-body unities. Although such a unity is intended by God merely as a basement for the house of spirit, most people are content to live in the basement. Here Kierkegaard argues that such spiritual lowliness can coexist with intellectual or aesthetic sublimity. A philosopher can live supremely unaware in a barn next to the castle of his own magnificent system, and paganism exhibits lives rich in aesthetic and political achievement (SUD, 22-28, 42-47; CUP, 268-69). Kierkegaard, then, suggests in his very dialectically subtle treatment that, even though one unconscious of despair may seem to be closer to salvation than one who is conscious, actually the person conscious of despair is closer, because he is closest to the truth of his condition. Despair, even unconscious despair is a neg ativity, and ". . . to reach truth one must go through every nega tivity" (SUD, 44). In moving to a religious conception of sin, Kierkegaard sheds further light on the phenomenon of unconscious despair. If most
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Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964) 76-77.
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T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1943) 17. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel Varnes (New York: The Citadel Press, 1964) 35-45; and Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 211-24, for definitions of bad faith and inauthenticity respectively. Again, we can remain as sured that if these formulations of a mature existential phenomenology are in some sense an improvement upon Kierkegaard, nonetheless they rest upon him for the original inspiration and insight. 6
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people are in unconscious despair and if sin is more intensified and conscious, then perhaps sin is a rarity. If the lives of most men and women are almost too spiritless and trivial to be called sinful, then we can ask, however, How did they become that way? Are per sons naturally born spiritless or do they become spiritless? If the latter is true, does spiritlessness afflict them from without or is spiritlessness a result of bad will, a subtle, half-conscious but de liberate turning away from the light? These questions, put in a Kierkegaardian context, answer themselves. Here also we see the interaction between the philo sophical and the religious dialectic. If the philosophical dialectic defines the problem of unconscious despair, the religious dialectic enables us to answer the question concerning the possibility of such unconscious despair. In understanding despair as sin, as a deter minant of will, we see that bad will is a flight from consciousness as well as conscious sin against the light. Spiritlessness is the most common form of sin.
Scene iii, "For from this instant, / There's nothing serious in mor tality; / All is but toys; renown and grace is dead." Despair over one's sin can also take a more passive form as when I say, "I can never forgive myself this act." Such an utterance, which often passes for depth and seriousness, in reality conceals a very super ficial, unserious approach to life. Though I claim to be serious, I am really not because I will to persist in my sin. In despair of my sins, there is also, as we have already discussed, the sins of weakness and the sin of defiance in inverted form (SUD, 109-112). Sin against the Holy Ghost has three forms, moving from pas sive to active offense against God's love which is expressed by His willingness to empty Himself and become one of us, yet in so doing risk becoming the occasion for offense. The first is analogous to Pi late's "What is Truth," because I pass no judgment about the truth of Christianity. To many men and women such indifference to the truth of Christ may not seem to be offense; but indifference to the basic decision about existence is offense (SUD, 125-29). The second form of the sin against the Holy Ghost is negative but passive. The sinner cannot ignore Christianity, but she cannot believe either. Consequently, she lives her life obsessed by the question, "What think ye of Christ?," but is unable to make a de cision one way or the other. The last most active form of offense is in the decision that Christianity is a lie and that Christ either is not truly a human being or is not truly God. This form of offense makes Christianity an in vention of the devil (SUD, 130-3). Second, we are enabled to see the identity in difference of the philosophical and religious dialectics. Such identity becomes man ifest in the formula for sin, in which sin is described as a form of despair. "Sin is this: Before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD, 77). This formula, by including despair in the broader, richer context of sin, also indicates the Aufhebung of the philosophical in the religious dialectic. Third, transcendence of the merely ethical into the religious also implies the transcendence of a merely ethical, Socratic definition of sin as ignorance. First of all if sin is mere unwilled ignorance, then sin does not exist, for sin is definitely conscious. Second, the ele-
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(D) Aufhebung Fourth, not only is there parallelism, inversion, and comple mentarity in the two dialectics, but there is an Aufhebung of the philosophical dialectic in the religious dialectic. The religious di alectic takes over the key terms, basic concepts, and orientation of the philosophical dialectic; but by relating these to the reality of God, Christ, sin and the offense, the religious dialectic becomes the whole of which the philosophical dialectic is a part. Evidence for this point, first, is that the movement from passivity to activity in the religious dialectic is not reducible to the movement from weak ness to defiance in the philosophical dialectic; these forms of de spair are present at each stage of conscious sin: despair over my sin, despair of my sin, and sin against the Holy Ghost. The reli gious dialectic, then, in including the philosophical dialectic as a moment of itself, is richer and more complex than the philosoph ical dialectic. As an example of the way weakness and defiance function on each level of the religious dialectic, we can consider first the sin of despairing over one's sin. Such willingness to persist in one's sin can take an active, defiant form as when Macbeth says in Act II,
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ment missing in the Socratic definition of sin is will. Even though Socrates would concede that there is a difference between an empty understanding that does not lead to action and one that does, Kier kegaard argues that Socrates has no way of accounting for the transition from having understood to action. Christianity argues that he does not understand because he does not will to under stand. In order to know the truth in an ethico-religious sense, I have to commit myself to the truth. Too often, however, I dally, refuse to go where the truth leads; and darkness of the will spreads to the intellect. Like Augustine, I say equivalently, "Make me chaste and continent, but not yet"7 (SUD, 94). Fourth, Kierkegaard discusses the notion of offense. Before Christ, human beings are infinitely potentiated, not only by the in finite depths of God but the infinite depths to which He sinks in becoming a human being. To reduce or remove the offense, Chris tendom has turned the paradoxical doctrine of Christ, the Godman, into the philosophical doctrine of the God-man, identical with the multitude of human beings. Fifth, in such loss of individuality there is also a loss of the sense of sin, for the two, individuality and sin, are correlative. "The cat egory of sin is the category of individuality" (SUD, 119). Because sin is a category of the individual, philosophy in its orientation to the universal concept cannot comprehend sin speculatively. When such attempts occur, philosophy removes the offense but it also loses the realities of sin and the individual. Because we cannot predicate the sin of God, in affirming sin we reestablish the differ ence between God and human beings. There is a connection, re jected by philosophy but affirmed by faith, among individuality, sin, and offense.
As the discussions of spirit relating itself to itself and the discussion of human beings as a synthesis of finite and infinite, freedom and ne cessity especially indicate that it is no accident in the most Hegelian of Kierkegaard's works that the language is very Hegelian (SUD, 146). Yet where Kierkegaard approximates Hegel most closely, he also transcends him most definitively, for the dialectical movement from the philosophical to the religious is a movement from a dialectic of mediation to one of paradox (CUP, 182-90). I am at the point of becoming genuinely religious when I realize that my greatest strength, relied upon in defiance, is my greatest weakness. No matter what that strength is—political courage, ethical righteousness, or intellectual depth—I have to see that relying on that to deal with despair and shut out God is a form of despair that will not get me anywhere. On the religious level, there is a paradoxical losing of myself in order to find myself that seems absurd to the soul immersed in a defiant stance. Such a subjective paradox corresponds existentially to the objective paradox of Christ, the self-emptying of God. Kierkegaard's approach is cogent here because he is not just saying these things dogmatically from the outside, in the form of di rect communication (CUP, 67-74). Rather he is saying them from the inside of the despairing consciousness as it traverses the stages from the lowest form of despair to the highest form of sin. We are not to take his or anyone else's word for the vicissitudes and self-contradic tion of the despairing consciousness. Kierkegaard's challenge is to "try and see for yourself" as he presents it indirectly to us through the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus. He is the objective figure in whom we can discover, or rediscover in our own subjective depths and expe rience, that the opposite of despair and sin is faith in God (SUD, 8182). As we have already indicated, corresponding to the subjective paradox of losing myself in order to find myself is the objective paradox of Christ, which to the non-believing consciousness takes the form of an offense. That God could care enough about the hu man being to become incarnate, suffer, and die for her, and that the human being is infinite enough and individual enough for God to care for it, is shocking and unbelievable to the ordinary con sciousness. To believe such a thing requires an imaginative power
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(E) Mediation to Paradox Finally, not only is there a dialectic within each of the two dialec tics but, as the previous discussion about parallelism, inversion, complementarity, and Aufhebung indicates, there is also a dialectic between the religious and philosophical as methods or ways of being. 7 See Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, tr. Rex Warner (New York: New American Library, 1963) 174.
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that transcends fatalism or philistinism and that is not within easy reach of the majority (SUD, 100-104). Integral selfhood, as we have already noted, demands consent to necessity, to the particular self that I am, with particular likes and dislikes, aptitudes and limitations, hopes and fears, commit ments and biases. Such necessity, however, w h e n it is present without possibility, turns into the opposite kind of despair. The fa talist, whose god is necessity, and the philistine, who is trivial and spiritless, both repress possibility. The fatalist refuses to believe that for God all things are possible. He refuses to go to the limit of un derstanding that nothing is possible, or taking the leap of faith that allows all things to be possible. "This is the good health of faith that resolves contradictions" (SUD, 40). If fatalism is a spiritual despair, philistinism, because it has tranquilized itself in the trivial, is too spiritless to know that it is in despair. Through an attempt to control possibility, examples of which might be the contemporary fascination with science, rock ets, and computers, philistinism celebrates its triumph in a spirit exactly opposite to that of the popular song of a few years ago, sung by Peggy Lee, "Is That All There Is?" Our contemporary philistines, masters of the banal, servants of technique, and slaves of the dollar, joyfully answer, "Yes, that's all there is." For self knowl edge they substitute computer literacy, for the ability to be secure in the insecurity of conscious freedom, national security. In the contemporary worship of fact, of realism, of moderation, all pas sion, ideals, and dreams are thrown out of the window into the vague realm of the merely Utopian, irrational, and unverifiable. In the positivism and scientism serving the needs of industrial soci ety, one senses the despair of necessity. To confirm such a suspi cion, we can note that the most relevant contemporary examples of the objective thinker so despised by Kierkegaard are not spec ulative philosophers but the positivistic scientist and technocrat, not followers of Hegel and Schelling but Kissinger and Brezinski. To such persons the subjective paradox is mere gibberish and the objective paradox an offense. It is as though Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death, in con trast to The Concluding Unscientific Postscript, desires to take on He gel at his strongest a n d most tempting, in order to decisively
transcend him. For this reason, there is in the essay not only an obvious dialectic of content, which moves from despair to sin, but also a less obvious dialectic of form, which moves from philosophy to faith. This latter dialectic is a dialectic between and among ways of thinking about the human condition in general and the more specific realities of despair and sin. For this reason, in his move ment from mediation to paradox, Kierkegaard enables us to over come the temptation of absolutizing the philosophical dialectic. As a result, even though Anti-Climacus and his readers begin very close to Hegel, they end very distant from Hegel. Moreover, the qualification that sin is a position implies in a quite different sense the possibility of offense, the paradox. That is, the paradox is the implicit consequence of the doctrine of the atone ment. First of all, Christianity proceeds to establish sin so firmly as a position that the human understanding can never comprehend it; and then it is this same Christian teaching that again undertakes to eliminate this position in such a way that the human under standing can never comprehend it. Speculation, which talks itself out of the paradoxes, snips off a little bit from both sides and thereby gets along more easily—it does not make sin quite so pos itive—but nevertheless cannot get it through its head that sin is to be completely forgotten. But Christianity, which was the first to discover the paradoxes, is as paradoxical on this point as possible. (SUD, 100)
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V
The Sickness unto Death: Critique of the Modern Age Louis Dupre
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ierkegaard considered The Sickness unto Death one of his two best works (the other being Fear and Trembling) and Guardini regarded it as the most appropriate introduction to his thought. Which qualities justify the particular significance attached to a work that lacks the brilliance and literary grace of the earlier writings? One major attribute of the later treatise is, I believe, s speculative depth attained through several layers of meaning. The Sickness unto Death may be read as a philosophic-theological anthropology based on a penetrating analysis of despair. But it also develops an origi nal theology of sin, far more mature than the one contained in the earlier Concept of Anxiety. Especially noteworthy here is that sin is treated as an existential attitude, not as a single act or as an inher ited state. Finally, it contains a critique of modern culture. Much of what Kierkegaard refers to as despair corresponds to the pas sionless, noncommittal attitude of the mass society that has re placed individual responsibility with historical awareness. The three meanings are connected. Precisely because of the de cline of individual responsibility, the sense of sin has vanished from our cultural horizon, and the reduction of both has distorted the modern vision of man. The concept that unites the three meanings is that of the individual. I shall restrict my comments to Kierke gaard's critique of the demise of authentic individuality in modern culture, which, for him, is the cause of its anthropological and
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theological inadequacy. This critique appears mostly in the second part of The Sickness unto Death. (A) The Diagnosis From the beginning the Western mind has been allured by the temptation to define existence within the limits of theoretical awareness. "The Greek mind posits an intellectual categorical im perative" (SUD, 90). Socrates qualified this attitude without abol ishing it. In the intellectualist tradition he attributed evil to ignorance. But at the same time his irony exposed the comic defi ciency of theory unrelated to existence. Not only is pure specula tion sterile, it fails intellectually as well. "When someone does not do what is right, then neither has he understood what is right" (SUD, 92). Ignoring Socrates' warning, modern thought tends to reduce being to thinking. Descartes's principle, Cogito, ergo sum, ex presses a freely chosen rationalization of the real, rather than a necessary rule of thought. At the cost of ethical seriousness, mod ern philosophy articulates the mentality of an age that subsumes the concrete responsibility of the individual under the abstract cat egory of the universal. This would eventually generate the homo sociologicus, whose entire existence coincides with the function he fulfills in the universale of society. Modern anthropology reduces the subject to its objective creations and subordinates the individ ual to the group. In a perverse dialectic, the culture of self-consciousness has created the exact opposite of the pure subjectivity from which it started. Exalted to being the sole source of meaning and value, the subject soon loses its own identity in the function of exhaustively constituting objectivity. The subordination of the individual to the group follows from the same unconditional autonomy of the subject. In this work, as in others, Kierkegaard relates one to the other without attempting to justify their connection. Only in the group does the subject at tain the universal meaning that it alone still recognizes. The ac cepted significance of the person has increasingly come to consist in the parts he plays in the various social units (political, economic, professional, religious) to which he belongs. More and more our
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situation is moving toward the condition described in Robert Musil's The Man without Qualities. The person is forced to live his ex istence on various, separate levels. On each one he expresses himself differently according to the particular demands of his function; in none does he engage himself unconditionally. Exis tence withdraws behind a variety of social masks. Kierkegaard has exercised his mordant wit on this comic separation between a shrinking personal existence and an ever-expanding social front. To be sure, the actor of the multiple parts remains unaware of the comic effect of his life. In this respect his attitude differs from that of the deliberate aestheticism of the young man in Either/Or, or of Constantin Constantius in Repetition. Indeed, the most serious danger lies precisely in the person's inadequate awareness of his situation. As in Ronald Laing's description of the schizophrenic mind, the real self—hidden behind these social masks—slowly shrivels into nothingness. When social functions take the place of authentic personhood, the mass with its characteristic lack of re sponsibility and its refusal of commitment becomes "the truth." The problem of mass culture had constantly preoccupied Kier kegaard during the period immediately preceding his writing of The Sickness unto Death and strongly emerges also in the entire second part of that work. In The Present Age (1846) he had described the contemporary mentality in terms reminiscent of his earlier anal yses of the aesthetic attitude. Apropos of Thomasine Gyllembourg's novel Two Ages (To Tidsaldre), he compared the age of revolution (surprisingly relegated to the recent past) to the present "age of reflection." The former was determined by mass move ments: vulgar, nonreflective, but passionate. The present age has become purely reflective, steeped in moral apathy and noninvolved speculation. In both epochs the individual has yielded to the mass, but in the latter he has lost even that last quality of in dividual involvement—passion. The individual does not belong to God, to himself, to the beloved, to his art, to his scholarship; no, just as a serf belongs to an estate, so the individual realizes that in every aspect he belongs to an ab straction in which reflection subordinates him. . . . The idolized positive principle of sociality in our age is the consuming demor alizing principle that in the thralldom of reflection transforms even virtues into vitia splendida [glittering vices]. (TA, 85-86)
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Our contemporaries attempt to find in universal objectivity a substi tute for the individual's eternal responsibility in time. Even if some succeed in breaking loose from the bonds of reflection, they still re main imprisoned in a reflective environment. Only religious inward ness allows them to escape from this second imprisonment. Hence, for Kierkegaard, the problem of contemporary culture is essentially a religious one. Only in the confrontation with God can man become an individual. Yet the conditions for such a con frontation are lacking today. Man has too much lost the sense of distance that a confrontation with God requires: God has become yet another human idea. Kierkegaard stresses the need for a preliminary awareness of the chasm that separates God from man. In the Lutheran tradition he has presented this as as separation caused by sin. Thus the repentant consciousness becomes a necessary condition for a correct concep tion of God. But the problem is that, to be possible, such a conscious ness already presupposes a correct conception of God. Only before God can man attain a genuine consciousness of sin. Through a reflection on the experience of despair Kierkegaard intends to prepare the modern mind to understand again the language of revelation con cerning God and sinfulness. To analyze this experience from its first, only half-conscious refusal to allow the spirit to emerge, to the final, fully God-conscious sin against the Holy Spirit, was the project of the first part of The Sickness unto Death. Yet the impact of the mass mentality itself upon the religious consciousness needed to be reevaluated. In Two Ages Kierkegaard had severely underestimated its potential. As late as 1846 he had considered a revolution unthinkable. It is hard to believe that any informed p e r s o n could have reached such a conclusion only two years before a major revolu tion would topple entire political systems and undermine the so cial structures of France and much of G e r m a n y a n d Austria. Denmark itself would pass through an enormous political turmoil over the Schleswig-Holstein question and over the introduction of a constitutional m o n a r c h y . These expressions of a n e w social awareness were far more powerful than Kierkegaard had deemed possible. (Social consciousness may still remain below the spiritual
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level, yet it is far more than the gossip of public opinion.) Here was a new force at work far more powerful than anything that pre ceded it. Kierkegaard came to understand that it would threaten the individual more than he had suspected. A new sense of ur gency left its impact upon all his writings during the months fol lowing the 1848 revolution. In The Point of View of My Work as an Author (published after Kierkegaard's death by his brother, Peter Christian, in 1859) con tempt has made place for concern, and perhaps fear. The diagno sis of the leveling tendencies he h a d d e n o u n c e d in his earlier writings takes on a precision that it had lacked before. The preface to the Addendum entitled "The Individual," written in 1848 (the main text contains fragments dating back to 1846-1847), begins with the declaration: "In these times all is politics" (PV, 107). To this view Kierkegaard now opposes the religious one as being radically dif ferent: one is all "practical," the other totally unpractical. Yet re ligion alone is able to realize the n e w political dream of h u m a n equality. Only a religiously understood Menneskelighed (humanity) entails Menneske-lighed (equality of men). Politics wrongly assume that truth consists in the agreement of the majority. There is a view of life which conceives that where the crowd is, there also is the truth, and that in truth itself there is need of hav ing the crowd on its side. There is another view of life which con ceives that wherever there is a crowd there is untruth, so that (to consider for a moment the extreme case), even if every individual, each for himself in private, were to be in possession of the truth, yet in case they were all together in a crowd . . . untruth would at once be in evidence. (PV, 110) Only the individual can establish an essential relation to God and thereby introduce the element of eternity needed to provide the equality that m o d e r n society vainly p u r s u e s t h r o u g h political means. "What the age needs in the deepest sense can be said fully and completely with one single word: it needs eternity" (PV, 108). Instead our society has become purely temporal. "Where there is a multitude, a crowd, or where decisive significance is attached to the fact that there is a multitude, there it is sure that no one is work ing, living, striving for the highest aim, but only for one or another earthly aim" (PV, 112). Truth can reach the mass only after it has been broken down into individuals.
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A crowd is untruth. And I could weep, or at least I could learn to long for eternity, at thinking of the misery of our age, in compar ison even with the greatest misery of bygone ages, owing to the fact that the daily press with its anonymity makes the situation madder still with the help of the public, this abstraction which claims to be the judge in matters of "truth." (PV, 118)
on a revived religious consciousness. Only before God can man re gain the solitude that enables him to exist as an individual. In the second part of The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard states the dilemma of modern life:
Kierkegaard's main objective following 1846 was to reestablish the category of the individual, as a precondition for returning a reli gious basis to our culture. (B) The Sinful Individual The idea of the individual, used since 1843, did not originate with Kierkegaard. Hamann's impact is clear and well established. That of Max Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845) is less certain, but some influence of a work that stirred up so much controversy would seem to be almost inevitable. The simultaneous appearance of the idea in disparate places reflects that first inventory of the gains and losses of modernity made around the turn of the nine teenth century. Inspired by the awareness that an existence de tached from the given, cosmic order must henceforth provide its own meaning, the idea of the individual hardly seemed qualified to play a decisive role in reawakening the religious consciousness of our age. Even Kierkegaard's Christian reinterpretation of it still bears traces of the Promethean idea, both proud and tragic, that henceforth man must bear the sole responsibility for his fate in an indifferent world. Still, the use of the category of the individual for defining man's dependence on God was no hasty adaptation of a modern concept to a traditional world-view. Underneath Kierke gaard's often biased evaluation of contemporary culture we detect a keen perception of the profound changes Europe had undergone in few years. In the short period since the beginning of the nine teenth century the romantic consciousness, with its initial empha sis on the individual, had given way to an objective-scientific one dominated by objective universality and a new social conscious ness in which the group would hold priority over the individual. Thus a wholly new threat emerged: the individual came to be iden tified with his social persona. Kierkegaard clearly perceived the is sue and declared the salvation of the individual to be dependent
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If order is to be maintained in existence . . . then the first thing to keep in mind is that every human being is an individual human being and is to become conscious of being an individual human being. If men are first permitted to run together in what Aristotle calls the animal category—the crowd—then this abstraction, in stead of being less than nothing. . . comes to be regarded as being something—then it does not take long before this abstraction be comes God. (SUD, 117-18) This idolatry had, in fact, already taken place. For Strauss and the early Left-Hegelians, the God-man had been reduced to a mythical expression of the unlimited aspirations of the h u m a n race. For Kierkegaard, such a social reduction heralds—beyond the demise of the Christian faith—the utter degradation of the existence itself. In thus divinizing the race, that is, the multitude, man has turned to adore what is less than himself. To such a debasing equation of God and the mass Kierkegaard opposes the individual's solitary confrontation: "Christianity teaches t h a t . . . this individual hu man being exists before God" (SUD, 85). To recover his dignity man has to reestablish his relation to God. However, unless he ap proaches God in the repentant awareness of his infinite distance, the speculative equation soon regains its foothold. In thus making the category of the individual dependent upon this permanent adoption of the attitude of a sinner before God, Kierkegaard moves it from philosophical speculation to a religious obedience. Are we not arguing in a circle? How could a generation that has lost the very precondition for true religion, namely, being an in dividual, be able to use religion itself as a means to regain the in dividuality that is its precondition? Kierkegaard's strategy in dealing with this problem is complex and perhaps not entirely suc cessful. Recognizing that one is a sinner-before-God is, indeed, the only way to become an authentic individual, but since this recog nition itself is not available, Kierkegaard presents his argument by describing a state with which modern man is at least partly ac quainted—despair. Next, in the second part of The Sickness unto
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Death, "Despair is Sin," he identifies this state of consciousness with the theological category of sin. This transition, crucial for Kierkegaard's strategy, creates serious problems. The reader, abruptly introduced into a new territory, will not likely find his way back to the beginning. Does despair, understood in the very wide sense of the preceding description, always coincide with sin as the title suggests? Even if it does, does it follow that all sin, after the first, is an act of despair as the argument seems to imply? Kierke gaard calls sin "despair qualitatively intensified" (SUD,100). But Christian theology hardly recognizes itelf in such a close link be tween sin and despair. It reserves the term despair to one partic ularly acute state of sin. Of course, Kierkegaard would point out that despair is implicitly present in all forms of sinfulness, and at the slightest occasion it will be fully activated. Such a theory may not necessarily be incompatible with Christian orthodoxy, but, then, what does it mean that sin is "despair. . . intensified"? Kier kegaard himself was not unaware of some of the difficulties. How ever, before discussing his response, we must first turn to the problems inherent in the modern understanding of sin itself.
In part this is a pagan view, which is satisfied with a merely human criterion and simply does not know what sin is, that all sin is before God. No, the opposite of sin is faith . . . " (SUD, 82). Beyond restating the Augustinian-Lutheran doctrine, Kierkegaard here attempts to re store the essential, religious dimension to the idea of sin. Another issue concerns the relation of despair with the aware ness of the transcendent dependence essential to full selfhood. From the first part of The Sickness unto Death it would appear that despair is, in fact, accompanied by an implicit or explicit—but al ways negative—God-consciousness. This would seem to bring it close to the attitude of the repentant sinner-before-God with re spect to the kind of self-awareness needed for constituting a true individual. Early in part two Kierkegaard summarizes his conclu sions about despair:
Hegelian philosophy and theology had emptied sin of its ethico-religious content by declaring it a necessary moment in the de v e l o p m e n t of c o n s c i o u s n e s s . This speculative m o v e merely rationalizes the actual attitude of society itself. If a deed con demned in principle becomes sufficiently accepted by "public opinion" it ceases to provoke feelings of guilt and rapidly loses even the name of sin. Experience teaches us, that when there is a mutiny on a ship or in an army there are so many who are guilty that punishment has to be abandoned, and when it is the public, the esteemed cultured public, or a people, then there is not only no crime, then, accord ing to the newspapers . . . it is God's will. . . . It is nonsense, an antiquated notion, that the many can do wrong. What many do is God's wifl. (SUD, 123) For the idea of sin to be at all meaningful, the sense of personal re sponsibility must first be restored; and this requires that sin be re united with its religious origins. Originally sin consists in a failure in one's duty toward God, not in a failure in moral perfection. "Very often it is overlooked that the opposite of sin is by no means virtue.
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Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, in finitely when God is the criterion. In fact the greater the concep tion of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God. Not until a self as this specific single individual is conscious of existing before God, not until then is it the infinite self, and this self sins before God. (SUD, 80) Kierkegaard asserts two theses here: (1) Despair intensifies with self-consciousness; and (2) self-consciousness increases with Godconsciousness. Does this only mean that a greater God-conscious ness creates the possibility of a more intensive despair? Or does it also imply the contrary thesis that, as despair intensifies, a stronger self-consciousness—and hence also a clearer (though negative) consciousness of God—develops? To be sure, the latter does not follow logically from the quoted statement; but several indications suggest that it may have been present in Kierkegaard's mind. Godconsciousness itself is conditioned by the individual's awareness of his own sinfulness. But being a sinner-before-God would seem to imply a previous acquaintance with despair ( = sin). Only in the light of the second thesis does Kierkegaard's emphasis on the in tensive self-consciousness of the demonic mind become fully in telligible. For that and other reasons I am inclined to interpret the strong self-consciousness, and consequently the clear God-con sciousness, as resulting either from the individual's repentance be-
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fore God, or from an intensified (and intrinsically sinful) despair. Both despair and repentance appear to be possible agents in the intensification of self-consciousness as well as in the process of be coming an "individual." Of course, modern society renders both equally difficult. "How in the world can an essential sin-consciousness be found in a life that is so immersed in triviality and silly 'aping' of 'the others' that it can hardly be called a sin . . . ?" (SUD, 101). The problem is not merely that the concept of sin has become theologically empty, but that the very experience of despair has become impossible. Most men and women are, by Kierkegaard's norm, simply "too spiritless" to qualify for despair. That, however, does not make them immune to despair; for despair is not simply a mode of consciousness in trinsically clear to the person who despairs. It is a negative state of being of which only the more intensive forms become directly con scious. The "lower" forms of despair consist precisely in a state of unawareness about one's spiritual identity in which the person feels nothing negative about himself. Such a condition removes the per son further from spirit (and consciousness of himself as individ ual) than the higher ones which, admittedly, are further from salvation. Hence we must not interpret the first part of The Sickness unto Death as a mere description of what is familiar to everyone, in contrast to the theological theory of the second part that has be come unintelligible to the modern mind. No, despair itself remains to a great extent latent, and Kierkegaard considered it his first task to bring the reality of despair to the surface of consciousness. He himself felt by no means assured of success in this basic enterprise. The theme of unconscious despair once again introduces the complex relation between sin and despair. To what extent do they coincide? I would be inclined to connect the unconscious despair with the largely unexplained concept of original sin. If every per son is a sinner-before-God, every person must have been touched with despair. The two concepts appear to be at least co-extensive. The largely Pelagian interpretation that appears in The Concept of Anxiety—each person commits his own "original sin," but the moral climate in which Adam's descendants enter is infested by an ever-increasing anxiety-toward-sin—is not repeated or implied in The Sickness unto Death. Kierkegaard merely indicates that the
dogma of hereditary sin is "the prius in which sin presupposes it self" (SUD, 89). An intriguing footnote explains that original sin "splits men up into single individuals and holds each individual fast as a sinner, a splitting up that in another sense is both har monized with and teleologically oriented to the perfection of ex istence" (SUD, 120). I interpret this to mean that the objective condition of original sin predisposes man to become an individual, both through the consciousness of despair and through that of re pentance. In spite of the essential differences between the despair and repentance, with respect to the development of the person both are preferable to ignoring one's sinful condition which is, in fact, unconscious despair. The relation between original sin and sin has become even more obscure than in The Concept of Anxiety. Whatever theories Kierke gaard may have entertained about original sin at the time he wrote The Sickness unto Death, however, they resist a simple equation with despair. Despair remains a category of freedom, of choice—even at its lowest level where man refuses to become spirit. A condition that merely overcomes man—that he suffers passively like sick ness and death—cannot be called despair (SUD, 16). Hereditary sinfulness does not result from choice. In view of these complexi ties, it is not surprising that Kierkegaard decided to remove from his text the allusions to the dogma of hereditary sin that originally appeared in chapter 2. "What is appropriately stated about sin . . . is not said with respect to the doctrine of hereditary sin" (Supple ment to SUD, 156). Yet even after omitting the problems of original sin, those problems inherent in the equation of despair with sin remain. Ear lier I mentioned the reference to sin as "despair qualitatively in tensified." Kierkegaard himself reports other discrepancies. The sin of offense (despairing of the forgiveness of sins) displays char acteristics that deviate from the phenomenological description of despair in the first part. Ordinarily weakness is: in despair not to will to be oneself. Here [in the sin of offense] this is defiance, for here it is indeed the de fiance of not willing to be oneself, what one is—a sinner—and for that reason wanting to dispense with the forgiveness of sins. Or dinarily defiance is: in despair to will to be oneself. Here this is
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weakness, in despair to will to be oneself—a sinner—in such a way that there is no forgiveness. (SUD, 113)
in "essential continuity"—a precondition for the very possibility of becoming spirit. In ordinary, spiritless existence continuity is no more than the repetitiousness of identical moments of succession, the in terval between discontinuous "events" and experiences.
The same argument would seem to apply to all sins which have God as explicit object. Sin is revealed—it does not come "from within." But as a cat egory of faith sin would seem to exclude a full equation with de spair which consists in a free choice. Perhaps we should consider despair a particular aspect of all sin, but one that becomes fully manifest only when revealed as sinfulness. I mean the aspect of continuity that, although inherent in the sinful drive itself, is mostly ignored by the sinner. The sinner rec ognizes only actual sins, not a continuous state. To him sin is "spe cifically the discontinuous" (SUD, 105). In this common, purely negative idea, the sinful act constitutes an intermittent negation in a positive state of being. Christianity regards such a purely nega tive idea as inadequate. Sin fundamentally changes the self's ontological relation to God, whether the sinner is conscious of this change or not. Indeed, since it affects consciousness itself (cf., Philosophical Fragments), the consciousness of sin alone is no reli able index of one's sinfulness. Socrates' definition of sin as igno rance (the prototype of all later "negative" theories of sin) makes sin not only discontinuous: it eliminates it altogether. "If sin is ig norance, then sin really does not exist, for sin is indeed conscious n e s s " (SUD, 89). Kierkegaard himself h e r e refers to sin as conscious, not, however, in order to equate sin with a state of con sciousness, but merely to indicate that directly or indirectly (for ex ample, through revelation) sin must be accessible to consciousness. If consciousness belonged to the definition of sin, sin would not exist in those who live outside the revelation. "Neither paganism nor the natural man knows what sin is" (SUD, 89). Nevertheless, revelation itself teaches that their condition is sinful. Ignorance does not render them incapable of sinning, but merely creates an obstacle to redemp tion. Christian revelation must begin by teaching the believer that he or she is indeed a sinner. Hence the Christian conception of sin de fines both itself and the (ignorant) pagan sinfulness. Essential to the Christian conception is that it treats sin as a con tinuous state rather than a discontinuous act. In doing so it intro duces into human existence a dimension of eternity—which consists
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Most men probably live with all too little consciousness of them selves to have any idea of what consistency is; that is, they do not exist qua spirit. Their lives—either in a certain endearing childish naivete or in shallow triviality—are made up of some action of sorts, some incidents, of this and that: now they do something good, and then something stupid, and then they begin all over again. . . . They are always talking among themselves about the particular, particular good deeds, particular sins. (SUD, 107) Life "in spirit" takes the opposite attitude; it possesses a consis tency lacking in ordinariness. In stressing the continuous charac ter of sin Christianity brings out the spiritual character of existence. Indeed, the revelation of the "state" of sinfulness may be the first, and for many the only, way in which the person discovers his spir itual nature. The awareness of spirit consists in an awareness of an eternal dimension in human temporality. Acts thereby come to be viewed as part of a totality rather than as isolated decisions. According to Kierkegaard, next to the believer, the demonic person is the only one to have developed this spiritual consis tency. Even as the believer fears to change the entire spiritual na ture of existence by yielding even once to temptation, so the demonic person fears to be tempted to take one step beyond his chosen path. In this attitude he merely follows the internal dyna mism of sin itself which, as a spiritual state, tends toward conti nuity. This drive to persist in being expresses itself in despair which, in one form or another, always accompanies the sinful deed. On the least reflective level, that implicit despair may simply con sist in a desire to repeat the original deed. More reflectively it turns to a refusal to believe in the possibility of change—"an effort to survive by sinking even deeper" (SUD, 110). In explicitly Christian terms this may take the form of despair of the forgiveness of one's sins, or an outright rejection of the doctrine of salvation; but all re ligious forms of despair clearly manifest that "sin has become or wants to be internally consistent" (SUD, 109). The sinful act introduces a state of diminished selfhood. Kier kegaard describes this condition with Macbeth's words after the
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murder: "From this instant there's nothing serious in mortality: all is but toys." The self feels itself irresistibly sliding down on a de clining surface. "He has also lost himself; he cannot even keep on going by himself" (SUD, 110). The only concern of the person who thus loses hold of himself is to preserve at least the new reality ini tiated by his deed. Thus he tends to freeze its actuality in the per manence of an attitude. What survives is the state, not the original self, and despair gives "stability and interest to sin as a power" (SUD, 110).
gaard, existence is rather the dynamic center of responsible selfassertion. It relates itself to itself, but also to its own constituting transcendent principle. This second relation distinguishes it from a purely temporal act of free self-realization (as in atheistic existen tialism). The person who realizes himself in time is also responsi ble for his relation to eternity. Only through a full awareness of this eternal element does the self become spirit, the decisive condition for achieving authentic selfhood. We find, of course, precedents to Kierkegaard's analysis of self hood as an act of self-realization. Aristotle, whose influence here is certain though hard to circumscribe, views man as a being that brings itself from potency to act in accordance with a self-directed teleology. Endowed with rational potencies the human agent de termines his existency by deliberate choice. Kierkegaard's defini tion of the person on the basis of freedom, then, does not introduce an irrational innovation but reaffirms Aristotle's idea. 2 This depen dence in no manner diminishes his originality because Aristotle's self has little in common with the strictly individual concept of the person. As his Ethics shows, he is concerned with an essentially social being, a universal species; in the characteristics of its individ ual specimens he takes little interest. Moreover, that being is es sentially oriented toward theoretical activity. Kierkegaard's emphasis upon the individual self is new in a manner in which only a thinker of the modern epoch could have conceived novelty. The ory for him does not belong to the highest level of self-realization. Indeed, a person who fails to surpass the theoretical attitude re mains within that "aesthetic" stage of existence that prevents him from achieving authentic selfhood. Above all, the primary task of the developing self consists not in social integration, but rather in becoming an individual. Both of these characteristics are inconceiv able without the antecedents of the modern mind. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's entire theory of the self must be seen not as con tinuing the trend actually followed by modern thought, but as an at t e m p t to reverse it. H e a b a n d o n e d , of course, t h e H u m e a n empiricist approach to serfhood that would determine all of nine-
(C) A Critical Conclusion Having explored Kierkegaard's notion of the individual and its relation to the consciousness of sin, we are now in a better position to evaluate the critique of modern culture it implies. What is sick is not only the individual: he or she participates in the despair of an entire culture. The "sickness unto death" here consists in hav ing lost the sense of ultimate responsibility which, according to Kierkegaard, defines existence itself—ultimate in the sense that to exist for Kierkegaard means being in time yet acknowledging re sponsibility for eternity. It is essentially a dynamic mode of being in which the individual freely actualizes his or her own selfhood. There is no need once again to analyze the well-known descrip tion of selfhood with which The Sickness unto Death begins. Here I shall only point out the specific form of self-awareness it implies. Kierkegaard is not referring to the self-consciousness whereby I experience myself as this particular embodied individual. Such an empirical awareness, for him, is merely an epiphenomenon of genuine selfhood. If selfhood were no more than the perspectival center and principle of continuity of all perception—as Hume and the empiricist school of psychology describe it—it would itself be an object of observation. Yet neither is Kierkegaard's self that transcendental ego of Kant, Fichte, and Husserl—the universal structur ing principle of experience which itself never becomes a direct object of experience. Such a principle, as Jaspers has pointed out, is a condition for existence, but does not constitute it. 1 For Kierke'Karl Jaspers, Philosophy 1 (1932) trans. E. B. Ashton (University of Chicago Press, 1969) 54-57.
2
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Cf., George J. Stack, "Kierkegaard's Concept of Existential Possibility, The New Scholasticism 46 (1972): 159.
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teenth century psychology. But, closer to home, he also head-on opposed the idealist current that had begun with Descartes' seZ/as exclusive principle of intelligibility and was completed with He gel's theory of Spirit. (In that sense Kierkegaard's approach is new and revolutionary to an extent that we, who all have been influ enced by it, seldom realize.) Yet when Kierkegaard equated exis tence with the realm of the strictly individual he limited his new born concept within the lines drawn by the same modern thought that he criticized so severely. First we should observe that his "individual" has little in com mon with the kind of narcissistic psychology and ego-mystique to which our time has become more and more accustomed. The selfcentered attitude belongs to the "aesthetic" order, described in Either/Or, that precedes the sphere of existency proper or is an es cape from it. On the other hand, Kierkegaard's idea of the "indi vidual's" self-realization shows unexpected affinities with a line of thought that runs from Stirner to Nietzsche. At first sight no two contemporaries could have been further apart than the philoso pher of ultimate responsibility and the intellectual anarchist who rejected any kind of responsibility as pseudo-religion. Yet a closer look reveals that much of what Kierkegaard dismisses as "the crowd" includes the social relations, for the omission of which we now blame Stirner. Perhaps, as Buber suggests, 3 Kierkegaard's "narrow pass" leads us into the open country of egoism and even tually despair—the very territory of Stirner's se//(SUD, 72). Of course, Kierkegaard moves on to a realm of transcendence high above selfish desires and secular finitude, but not above social iso lation. In contrast to Stirner's "single one," Kierkegaard's individual remains infinitely open—but only in a vertical sense. The social as such contributes nothing to its existential relationship: it re mains a distracting "crowd." It is not difficult to see here, as Kierkegaard himself occasion ally did in the private reflection of his diary, the result of personal problems—the incurable melancholy, the inability to communi cate with others except through his writings, themselves mostly 3 "The Question to the Single One," Between Man and Man (1936) trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1968) 60-81.
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pseudonymous. Yet more significant to us is the connection be tween this individualism and the very culture that Kierkegaard at tacks. The concept of the individual owes much of its prominence in the modern age to two factors, one negative and one positive. The disintegration of philosophical and social universals in the late Middle Ages made possible the emergence of the individual as a moral and aesthetic ultimate in the Italian Renaissance. Never be fore had the single person held the center stage of attention. The breakdown of the traditional social structure in late antiquity may have led to an experience of individual isolation. All indications are that it actually did. Already Hegel attributed the dissolution of the organic city states into unstructured masses to the collapse of the existing political units and the formation of the huge empires of the Hellenistic and the Roman periods. Precisely when social struc tures disintegrate persons become singularized. The breakdown into single units resulted in such positive effects as the develop ment of personal rights and the appearance of private law indis pensable for the full emancipation of the individual. But as long as the concept of person remained primarily a juridical unit, the time of the individual had not arrived. It did not begin until the disin tegration of the res publica Christiana and the medieval structures of thought created a new vacuum that the outburst of individual creativity in the Renaissance filled with a wholly new concept of man. Kierkegaard himself was not unaware of the difference be tween the modern age and the "touching naivete" of the medieval mind in which the individual remains submersed in the universal. In the same diary entry where he mentions the difference he also points at the connection in the modern age between the domi nance of the masses and the exclusive claims of the individual. What led to the emergence of the individual eventually caused his depersonalization. "Alas in our time things are often turned around: it is quite definite that it is this human being who speaks, and yet there is no human being who speaks" (JP, 2:2005). Kier kegaard rarely connects the notion of individual with the ill effects of modernity, but here he clearly views the individual, himself a product of the mass society, threatened to be reabsorbed by it.
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The mass epitomizes the dehumanization of modern life. While Pascal had still been frightened by the isolation of man lost in an infinite space, Kierkegaard fears the endless masses of h u m a n beings, "these countless millions and millions of m e n " that sur round him like an animal species "with their teeming duplicated specimens in the millions" (JP, 2:2010). This fear of the mass drives him to distrust all social organisms. Derived from the individual's needs they constantly stand ready to squeeze him out. Thus the all-encompassing social entity of modern life, the State, is no more than "egoism in its wider dimensions constituted in such a clever and ingenious way that the egoism of individuals cancel and cor r rect each other" (JP, 4:4238). While Hegel considered the State the concrete universal and, hence, the higher truth of the individual, for Kierkegaard the single individual is higher than the universal. The Hegelian position in his interpretation subordinates the indi vidual to the race, thus lowering men to the status of "an animal race endowed with reason" (JP, 2:1614). For him, the foundation of the individual's superiority (and the only solid one!) consists in his exclusive kinship with God. "God is spirit and it would be bes tial for him to be in kinship with a race. He can be in kinship only with the single individual" (JP, 2:2024). The person's spiritual de termination lies in his individuality, while his social character, based upon a plurality of individuals in one race, belongs to his animal quality (JP, 2:2082). Here we touch on the heart of the problem. Kierkegaard at tempted to rescue the transcendent dimension of human existence that he rightly considered to be jeopardized in modern life. To suc ceed in this task he felt it was necessary first to force the person to confront his strictly individual responsibility before God. This may well have been a correct practical maneuver for eliminating the ready temptation of escaping into the mass. Yet elevated into a theoretical principle it leads to a distorted vision both of the person and of his relation to the transcendent. If it is severed from its so cial context that relation turns into an abstraction without any con tent of its own. Detached from the total realities of life the ultimate relation of existence loses its concreteness. But did Kierkegaard not, more than anyone in his time, insist on the concrete ethical obli gations implied in the person's relation to God? Undoubtedly, but
if this obligation is itself not built upon a preexisting reality in its own right, it lacks the dense social texture that alone conveys a real content. In the Works of Love Kierkegaard emphatically declares the duty to others essential in a person's relation to God; but he fails to provide the social obligation with any concrete determination of its own. As he presents it, the duty to one's fellow man remains part of the vertical relation to God—it lacks a genuinely horizontal dimension. All his life Kierkegaard insisted on the ethical commit ment required by that relation and cautioned against the mystic's impatience in attempting to achieve a more "direct" approach to God. Having depleted the ethical injunction of any internal struc ture, he may have left the religious attitude no alternative but to attempt a direct relation to God. While stressing ethical responsi bility Kierkegaard appears to have dangerously loosened the bonds through which alone the individual becomes ethically "concrete." Kierkegaard's insistence on the single individual has affected the relation to God in yet another respect. As a means to attain that singularity he chose what is, indeed, the most isolating religious experience—the consciousness of being a sinner. But this ap proach not only "isolates": if taken exclusively it renders the reli gious attitude predominantly negative, and exposes it to the risk of rapidly degenerating into a morbid disposition toward life. Iron ically, precisely because of his emphasis on the single individual, Kierkegaard was incapable of dealing adequately with what in Christian dogma constitutes the basis of man's sinful condition— original sin. While Christian doctrine declares the human race as a whole guilty, Kierkegaard's treatment of it in The Concept of Anxiety never moved beyond a Pelagian interpretation, according to which each person becomes guilty only through his or her own freely committed sin. The difficulties inherent in the idea of corporate guilt reemerged when he started writing The Sickness unto Death to a point where Kierkegaard eventually was forced to omit it from his argument. A few months later he suggests that racial solidarity itself implies a fallen state.
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In eternal life the race will cease. This will be of great significance with respect to the entire doctrine of original sin. . . . In a Chris tian sense man sighs under being "race." By the synthesis he is constrained in and with the race, must assume all the concretions
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given thereby as his task, participate as an accomplice in the guilt of the race, and by his own guilt increase the guilt of the race. . . . (JP 2:2433)
This text nearly identifies the species quality of human existence with a diminished, or even a sinful, state of being. The issue is not, of course, whether the consciousness of sin and the concomitant experience of isolation form an integral part of the Christian experience. They clearly do. Nor should we dispute the need for an awareness of man's lonely state in his quest for transcen dence. But to declare the prerequisite solitude as the very essence of the religious attitude is to build the relation to the transcendent on one of the principal obstacles for establishing it in our time, namely, the exclusive emphasis upon the individual as source of meaning and value. Despite his unique religious sensitivity Kierkegaard was not able to overcome the "egocentric" predicament of the modern age. Kierkegaard may have acted correctly in attacking the state church; but toward the end of his life it became ever clearer that the affiliation with the Danish State was not the main problem. It was the existence of "Christendom" and, indeed, of the Church as such. Not only did he exclude all acculturation, but, ultimately, he was unable to justify any kind of social or ritual practice in other than an educational func tion. "God sees only the individual" (JP 4:4281). Increasingly, Chris tianity for him became a religion of total isolation. "Back to the monastery out of which Luther broke—that is the truth—that is what must be done" (JP 4:4454). That "monastery," needless to say, was not a common ground for spiritual encounter. With the traditional monastic life Kierkegaard's ideal shares only celibacy and removal from the world. No more than the category of the individual does that of subjectivity escape the restrictions of modern thought. Kierkegaard cor rectly identified the objectivism that culminated in the nineteenth century as the principal obstacle to a genuine understanding of transcendence. Once reality becomes reduced to objectivity, as had gradually happened after Descartes, the very idea of God becomes contradictory.4 Kierkegaard countered the objectivist trend by "Restrictions of space do not allow me to develop this important point. But I have done so on several occasions, e.g. in Transcendent Selfhood and The Other Dimension (both Seabury Press).
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swinging the pendulum in the opposite direction. Yet the exclu sive emphasis upon the subject derives from the same source as objectivism itself. Indeed, critics of the modern age frequently re fer to the so-called "objectivist" slant of modern thought as "subjectivist" (e.g., Max Horkheimer in Eclipse of Reason). The reduction of reality to objectivity follows directly from a turn to the subject, whereby it becomes the sole source of meaning and value. In the process of fulfilling its exclusive function of constituting reality, the subject loses all specific content of its own. It becomes an empty "transcendental subject."5 This was precisely the tragic failure of the romantic reaction: the subject to which it so desperately wished to return remained only the empty shell. Kierkegaard was no ro mantic, and in his very first writing had exposed the flaw of ro mantic subjectivism. Through an ethico-dialectical (rather than a sentimental) relation to the transcendent, he fully intended to overcome the inherent weakness of that subjectivism. Neverthe less his thinking remained caught in the subject-object opposition responsible for both extremes of modern thought. As is so often true of Kierkegaard, however, his basic insight was right, however questionable its philosophical expression. The theological categories within which Kierkegaard attempted to con tain the experience of despair may not have suited the purpose. The universal claims made for the experience were definitely inflated. But beyond the general, theoretical categories, Kierkegaard cor rectly intuited despair as the ultimate consequence of the modern attitude. The reason why his analyses of despair and of dread so uniquely fascinated the twentieth-century mind was, of course, not their theological merit—which in both cases remains dubious—but their sure grasp of the modern predicament. Nietzsche would later refer to it as the nihilism of European culture—a nihilism that had become manifest only at the end of the modern age. What Kier kegaard described as a disease, the possibility of which is inherent This was one of Hegel's main objections against Kant's theory of practical rea son—"how this empty unity as practical reason is nonetheless supposed to be come constitutive again, to give birth out of itself and give itself content." Faith and Knowledge (1802) trans. Walter Carl and H. S. Harris (University of New York Press) 81.
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in the human condition as such, has in fact become the actual, though mostly latent, sickness of our own age. At the beginning of this essay I wrote that The Sickness unto Death contains a critique of an entire epoch as much as of a particular in dividual attitude. In my conclusion I wish to strengthen that claim. Kierkegaard never wrote a treatise on despair as one of the possi ble attitudes an individual could adopt that would have theologi cal implications. Constant allusions to the condition of his own contemporaries reveal that he was writing about the sickness of his own epoch. The phenomenological analysis of the first part and the theological discussion of the second are anything but abstract speculations. They provide the theoretical foundations, by their very nature universal, for an understanding of his own age. Hence The Sickness unto Death must be read as one of the most incisive contributions to a critique of modernity. In this respect it confirms, completes, and anticipates analyses written by Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. As in their work, Kierkegaard's critique remains within the ideological restrictions of the period it criticizes. It offers no prophetic message, no magic formula for curing the ills of the time. Indeed, as a critique it is remarkably unselfconscious. But as in all great works of art and of thought, therein may lie its greatest strength. It forces the reader to go through the whole critical pro cess himself. What Jaspers wrote about Nietzsche applies emi nently to the Kierkegaard of The Sickness unto Death: He does not show us the way, he does not teach us a faith, he gives us nothing to stand on. Instead, he grants us no peace, torments us ceaselessly, hunts us out of every retreat, and forbids all con cealment. It is precisely by plunging us into nothingness that he wants to create for us the vastness of space. It is precisely by show ing us a fathomless world that he wants to enable us to grasp the ground we sprang from.6 In his own indirect way, then, Kierkegaard awakens each reader personally to the consciousness of his age and urges him critically to examine its unquestioned assumptions. In taking this critical distance from current ideologies the reader is forced to become an individual. Thus performatively he will restore truth to a category that, taken by itself, is no more than a consequence of modernity. 6 Karl Jaspers: Nietzsche and Christianity, trans. E. B. Ashton (Milwaukee: Henry Regnery, 1961) 104.
VI
The Social Dimension of Despair John W. Elrod
I
n The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard is concerned with the de generation of the life of the Spirit in nineteenth-century Den mark. He wrote this book against the background of Denmark's modernization1 and the impact of this event on the life of faith. He presents the demise of faith in Denmark as having been strongly exacerbated by a fascination with the "glittering vices" (SUD, 46) of Denmark's emerging middle class way of life. Nineteenth-cen tury Danes gleefully and uncritically absorbed themselves in the opening stages of the modernization of Denmark allowing this po litical, economic, and cultural event to give shape to their natural inclinations, ethical obligations, and religious faith. Kierkegaard viewed this event of modernization as one in which the state and culture replaced God in the formation of the self. This ontological symbiosis nurtured the particular forms of despair described in The Sickness unto Death.2 The despair that accompanied modern life in 'For recent discussions of the modernization of Denmark, see John W. Elrod, Kierkegaard and Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981) and Bruce Kirmmse, "Kierkegaard's Politics: the Social Thought of Soren Kierkegaard in its Historical Context" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1979). 2 For a good analysis of despair against the background of Danish moderni zation, see Bruce Kirmmse, "Psychology and Society: The Social Falsification of the Self in The Sickness unto Death" in Joseph Smith, ed., Psychiatry and the Humanities 5 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981): 167-92.
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Kierkegaard's phenomenology of despair varied in its forms ac cording to the degree of each individual's consciousness of it.3 The overcoming of despair required that each individual extricate him self from his spiritual dependence upon the state and culture, and recognize the necessity of centering himself inwardly in God. Spir itual development in this direction, however, increases the indi vidual's despair. For example, the individual who is thoroughly absorbed in his middle class way of life will occasionally experi ence mild despair in those moments when he doubts that it is spir itually satisfying. Should he eventually understand that, as a spiritual being, he must alone face the question of his life's mean ing and that it cannot be answered in and by his present way of life, his despair will intensify. This intensification of despair is, Kierkegaard believed, a necessary step that each individual must take if he is ever to have the possibility of resolving it in faith. The Sickness unto Death traces this journey of individuation and its accompanying intensification of despair to the existential point of its resolution in the individual's choosing to exist in faith before God. The guiding motif of The Sickness unto Death is the individual pilgrim's progress through the kingdom of despair to faith. Within The Sickness unto Death, the discussion of the social dimension of this trial is limited to the observation that it is one that all persons experience. Its nature and solution are described in terms of the in dividual and his progress (or lack of it) toward the individual act of faith. Individuals are in despair just as they biologically die— alone. Moreover, just as despair and death are individual states of being so are the states of not being in despair and living eternally. If despair is then a social disease, it is such in the sense that it is a spiritual condition every individual, not existing in faith, endures alone. This is the way Kierkegaard's critics have understood his observation regarding the universality of despair. If X is a univer sal state of all Ys, it is one that all Ys are in. Kierkegaard makes this point quite directly in The Sickness unto Death. Yet, in understand ing despair's social dimension, we cannot be limited to this obser vation. Kierkegaard means more. The social dimension of despair 3 For an excellent discussion of the forms of despair in The Sickness unto Death, see Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard's Psychology, trans. Bruce Kirmmse (Pitts burgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978) 240-322.
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means not only that all individuals not existing in faith have it but also that they have it by virtue of the nature of their relations to each other. The social dimension of despair is rooted in the nature of the relations between individuals who do not exist in faith. Thus, while persons experience despair individually, the nature of this affliction must be understood in terms of the nature of persons' re lations to each other when they are not qualified by faith. The crux of my argument consists in uniting two claims made by Kierke gaard. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard claims that the over coming of despair is dependent upon the individual's becoming conscious of himself as Spirit (SUD, 46); and in Works of Love the claim is made that the individual becomes Spirit in loving his neighbor as he loves himself (WL, 69). By bringing together these two separate assertions, I hope to disclose in Kierkegaard's thought what I call the social dimension of despair. The concept of Spirit in Kierkegaard's writings is related to his concept of the self. He represents the self as a dynamic and ideo logically constituted (by God) being that by its very nature strives to complete itself through its own subjective activity. This selfseeking process is described in terms of the self as a relation of both a synthesis of necessity and possibility and Spirit4 (SUD, 35-42). The self's necessity is that determinate dimension of the self that is psycho-socially constituted, and its possibilities are those patterns of meaning, value, and purpose that are possible for it given its ne cessity. As Spirit, the self possesses the power both to become selfconscious, that is, to become aware of itself as a synthesis, and to choose from among its possibilities one possibility that it will seek to actualize through and within the realm of time. Such a choice is the meaning of freedom, and is the act by which the individual be comes a concretely actualized self. This act is the core of the ethi cal-religious life, as Kierkegaard understood it, and is not achieved without anxiety and suffering. Most individuals within Christendom have not spiritually de veloped to the point of understanding, much less striving to realdecent discussions of this formulation of the self have been done in Nordentoft's Kierkegaard's Psychology, 189-200, Elrod's Kierkegaard and Christendom, 132-42, and in Mark C. Taylor's Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1980) 167-80.
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ize, themselves in these terms. Failing to exist within the realm of Spirit, Kierkegaard believed that his contemporaries lived in the far less exalted realm of immediacy. Within immediacy, individuals are neither self-conscious nor capable of ethical-religious actions; nevertheless, the immediate individual does intuit his state of incompletion and the corresponding need to fill this void. The sub jective nature of human being does not escape even the awareness of the individual who has not risen to the level of consciousness through which this condition is made an object of reflection and self-knowledge. Without a complete understanding of what mo tivates him, the immediate individual sets out a project of becom ing, through which he seeks to overcome the incompleteness that troubles and motivates him. This self-seeking scenario is described by Kierkegaard in Works of Love in terms of the dynamics of selflove. It is one that I have described in great detail in Kierkegaard and Christendom,5 and that I shall only summarize here in preparation for my discussion of the social dimension of despair. In disclosing the nature of love, Kierkegaard takes a key point from Aristotle. In Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that crafts men and poets would love their handiwork and poems more than those objects would love their creators if they were to come alive. 6 This is true also of benefactors who love those whom they have as sisted more than the benefitted love them. Aristotle explains that "the cause of this is that existence is to all men a thing to be chosen and loved, and that we exist by virtue of activity (that is, by living and acting), and that the handiwork is in a sense, the producer in activity; he loves his handiwork, therefore, because he loves exis tence. And this is rooted in the nature of things; for what he is in potentiality, his handiwork manifests in activity."7 An object of love is loved because it represents the lover as actualized. It is therefore improper to draw a sharp ontological distinction between the actor and the acted upon, the producer and the product, the lover and the beloved.
Kierkegaard observes in his journals that there is much to be learned from this chapter in Aristotle's work (JP, 5: 2441). Indeed, he accepts in Works of Love this version of the principle of becoming as the one operating in all immediate h u m a n relationships. He identifies it as self-love and acknowledges as correct the Christian presupposition of its unavoidability (WL, 34-35). All individuals love themselves and, by virtue of this self-love, live within human relationships toward the end of becoming concretely actualized selves. Kierkegaard sees within immediacy beneath the surface of eros, friendship, familial relations, even a relation to God—an egoistic striving of individuals to actualize themselves in and through others. "In (erotic) love and friendship one's neighbour is not loved but one's otherself, or the first I once again, but more in tensely" (WL, 69). This passage captures one of the central, guid ing motifs in Works of Love's analysis of all immediate private relations. The journals abound with comparable passages. For ex ample: "But falling in love is self-love. . . . In erotic love I keep my own idea of what is lovable and find that the object completely suits my head and heart; this is why I love the beloved so ardently—that is, I ardently love my self" (JP, 2:1141). Like Aristotle, Kierkegaard argues that in all forms of immediate love the ontological distinc tion is collapsed between the lover and the beloved. The lover completes himself in the other. Love for the other is really only egoistical self-love. This egoistic self-seeking, characterizing private, personal re lations, is as dominant in the public realm of immediacy. In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard describes the striving to become an actualized self within the context of class tensions (CD, 47-48, 60). This insight is also developed in Works of Love. In this work, Kier kegaard describes as "small-minded" those persons who preju dicially band together to exclude those not sharing their customs and values. "Small-mindedness has fastened itself tightly to a very particular shape and form which it calls its own; only this does it seek, and only this can it love. If small-mindedness finds this, then it loves. Thereby small-mindedness sticks together with smallmindedness; they grow together like an ingrown nail, and spiri tually speaking it is just as bad. This association of small-mind edness is then praised as the highest love, as true friendship, as
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5
See Kierkegaard and Christendom, 91-108,127-43.
6
Aristotle, Ethica Nichomachea, 9: 7, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Basic Works of Ar-
istotle, ed. with an intro. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941). 7 Ibid., Aristotle's italics.
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true, steadfast, sincere harmony." This small-mindedness feels " a damp and unpleasant anxiety upon observing another person's individuality and nothing is more important than to get rid of it" (WL, 254, cf. 83). This tension is forcefully illustrated in Flannery O'Connor's won derful short story 'Tiverything That Rises Must Converge."8 This story takes place on a bus in a small Southern town. The main portion of the story occurs as a white mother and her college-aged son, Julian, are riding to the local YWCA. At a stop the bus is boarded by a black woman and her four-year-old son, who immediately attracts Julian's mother's attention. Throughout the ride, the white mother treats the child with gratuitous and condescending gestures of the sort that one makes to an inferior. As the four persons leave the bus, Julian's mother gives the young black boy a "shiny new penny." His moth er's rage, which had been slowly building throughout the ride, erupts with a slap across the white woman's face. She then grabs her son's hand and storms down the street, leaving Julian's mother dazed and sprawled on the sidewalk. Julian accepts this violent reproach as a lesson justly deserved.
never seen before." 10 The black woman's denial of the social ar rangements of white supremacy constituted nothing less than the denial of white identity. O'Connor's story strongly conveys Kier kegaard's notion of the spiritual ground of cultural and class con flict in its portrayal of Julian's mother as one who "naturally" and "innocently" builds her identity in and through the subjugation of the blacks. Whether in the intimate relations of friendship, family, and eros or in the public relations of classes, the immediate individual im plicates others in instrumental relations given the necessity of the other in each individual's striving for the end of self-actualization. Self-love is the form taken by the drive for self-actualization, and the other appears in the immediate consciousness of self-love as a means to the end of self-actualization. 11 In Works of Love Kierke gaard develops a moral alternative to the dilemma of exploitive selflove. Denying that an ethics can begin without presuppositions, Kierkegaard accepts the view that individuals cannot avoid loving themselves. This means simply that individuals by nature desire fulfillment and that in attempting to satisfy this desire necessarily implicate others as means to that end. With this supposition in place, he develops his ethics around the further premise that the individual is morally obliged from the Christian point of view to love his neighbor as he loves himself. For the lover to love the be loved as neighbor is both to acknowledge him as a subject seeking self-actualization and a necessary condition for the lover's own selfactualization. Both the lover and the beloved are subjects seeking self-actualization; neither can realize this end—become Spirit— without willing the other as an end and, thereby, in principle will ing the world as a kingdom of ends. Loving the other as neighbor is, then, a necessary condition for the realization of the end of selflove, namely, self-actualization. We cannot here follow this argu ment, 12 but must return to our discussion of the character of the relation of individuals existing within immediacy with a view to ward understanding the place of despair in that relation.
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He saw no reason to let the lesson she had had go without backing it up with an explanation of its meaning. She might as well be made to understand what had happened to her. "Don't think that was just an uppity Negro woman," he said. "That was the whole col ored race which will no longer take your condescending pennies. What all this means," he said, "is that the old world is gone." 9 His remonstrance at the end of the story, "you aren't who you think you are," is a direct attack on her earlier assurances that she knows who she is. It is clear that her identity is directly linked with her white heritage, which requires the continuing servitude of the blacks. That the blacks will no longer allow Julian's mother this identity is symbolized by the black woman's attack at the bus stop. The story ends with O'Connor's description of the white mother's face as "fiercely distorted." Julian "was looking into a face he had
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8
In Flannery O'Connor, Everything That Rises Must Converge (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1965). 9 Ibid., 21.
10
Ibid., 22. "Sartre's play No Exit nicely illustrates this point. See Jean-Paul Sartre, No Exit, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1946). 12 I have fully developed it in Chapter Four of Kierkegaard and Christendom,
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Early in Works of Love, Kierkegaard makes the point quite di rectly that despair characterizes all forms of immediate or sponta neous love. "Spontaneous love can become unhappy, can reach the point of despair. . . . that spontaneous love can reach the point of despair—proves that it is in despair, that even when it is happy it loves with despair" (WL, 54). The presence of despair in sponta neous love is explained by the fact that "despair lies in relating oneself with infinite passion to a single individual" (WL, 54). The desire for selfhood that seeks its satisfaction in the immediate love for another is a despairing love. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard coun sels that "you have no right to harden yourself against this emo tion, for you ought to love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, for you ought to love, just as little do you have the right to misuse emotion in you, for you ought to love. You ought to preserve the love and you ought to preserve yourself and in and by preserving yourself to preserve the love" (WL, 57, Kierke gaard's italics). Kierkegaard could not more clearly state this point. The lover preserves himself in and through ethically transforming his immediate love for the beloved. The contrary is equally true. The lover cannot preserve himself when his immediate love for the other is not ethically transformed by the power of obligation. Moreover, when immediate love is ethically transformed, despair is no longer present in the relation. When immediate love is not changed in this manner, despair is present in the relation. The so cial dimension, indeed, the social nature of despair could not be more clearly stated. The individual, who despairingly loves another, does not un derstand that the satisfaction of his desire for self-actualization de pends upon acknowledging and respecting that same desire in the other. Indeed, at the most primitive levels of immediacy, the in dividual little more than intuits both his own desire for selfhood and its locus of fulfillment in love for another person. Prior to the ethical act of choosing to love the other as an end in himself (as neighbor), the immediate individual's despairing love relates to the other as an object, as a means to the end of fulfilling his desire for selfhood. The despairing lover legislates a world of objects, of means, in which he is the sole subject, and he exists alone as the sole subject within a world of objects—so legislated by his own de-
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sire. Should the despairing lover become transparently self-con scious, he would observe himself as a creating subject existing alone in his world by virtue of his desire to become realized through the other. All forms of immediate or spontaneous love for others have this meaning. Such recognition would bring to consciousness the despair that is already unconsciously experienced and known in these relations. This transition from unconscious to conscious despair is the map of despair provided by The Sickness unto Death. Guiding the reader along a complicated journey of despair from its most innocent and unconscious points to its most reflective ones in defiance and sin, Kierkegaard introduces his reader to the many subtle twists and turns in this spiritual odyssey. As I have written, it is not my pur pose here to discuss these modes of despair, though it is important to disclose the social dimension of its primary forms. In addition to the despair that is suffered unconsciously, there are four other primary modes: despair in weakness, despair of weakness, despair of defiance, and despair as sin. By returning to O'Connor's short story we can readily observe the social dimension of the despair that is suffered unconsciously and the despair in and of weakness. Unconscious despair—in Kierkegaard's words, "despair that is ignorant of itself as despair"—is caught in O'Connor's description of the relation between white and black people in the South. She describes the relation betwen these two peoples as "natural" and "innocent." That Julian's mother exists "naturally" in this relation means that she does not consciously create the meaning and value of this relation but tacitly consents to it. The "innocence" of the re lation consists in that she is not consciously aware of its identity as constituting function in her life. The white-supremacy mentality is a "small-minded" association in which white people are both bound together and valuably identified by their common exclu sion of the "inferior" black race. Despair is present in the white self's unconsciously willing a world of black objects as a means to its self-realization. Of course, the whites love their fellow blacks, but as one loves an inferior; and love for the other as inferior is a despairing love. Racist love in O'Connor's story is an "infinite pas sion" directed in appropriate ways toward both white and black people.
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Should Julian's mother recover sufficiently from her experi ence to be capable of reflecting on it, she might understand it as misfortune. She will regret the experience, wish that it had not oc curred, and attempt to ameliorate the damage by either forgetting its occurence or taking recriminating action against the "uppity" black mother who has forgotten her place. All this would be an ef fort to recover her innocence. Here is the despair in weakness. She identifies her problem as a threat to her place in the social scheme of things, failing to understand that her problem is in fact a misrelation to herself by virtue of her misrelation to black people. She despairs at having temporarily lost her social standing and will take whatever actions are possible both to recover it and to reassure herself that it has not been seriously threatened. Should Julian's mother allow this experience to prompt a mo ment of deeper self-consciousness, she might come to recognize the spiritual meaning of her racist society and regret that she depends upon black people in this manner. She might come to recognize that a proper relation with all persons requires something entirely other than the rules, customs, traditions, and beliefs of the social ar rangements of white supremacy. She might even understand that her self-realization requires that her relations to others be grounded in some transcendent principle that transforms, rather than re flects, her natural and innocent relations to others. Yet she pos sesses neither the understanding nor the power to will a transformation of her social self and its despair. Kierkegaard calls this spiritual dilemma the despair of weakness. The despair of defiance has an equally social dimension as is exemplified in Iris Murdock's novel, The Time Of The Angels.13 The story is about a contemporary Anglican priest, Carel Fisher, who, because of his eccentric nature and theological death-of-God rad icalism, has been transferred to an out-of-the-way parish on the outskirts of London. The parish, with only one or two parish ioners, is in fact a "nonexistent" one in that it lacks a sanctuary, having only a rectory and a decaying tower designed by Christo pher Wren. To further emphasize the isolation of the rectory and its inhabitants, Murdock describes it as so thoroughly and contin13
Iris Murdock, The Time of the Angels (New York: Viking Press, 1966).
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ually fog-encased that it is barely visible to even nearby inhabit ants of the region. Living with Carel in the rectory is his twenty-four-year-old daughter Muriel whose mother died in her childhood; another child, the nineteen-year-old Elizabeth whom Carel fathered by his now deceased sister-in-law; and Pattie, a mulatto housekeeper and former mistress of Carel. The porter, Eugene, and his son, Leo, complete the list of residents in this unhappy house. The story is developed around Carel's relations to these three women. All three suffer an identical malaise; they feel inescapably ensnared in Carel's dominating will. Pattie was seduced by Carel while his wife, Clara, was yet alive and, even though now sexually abandoned by Carel, seems hopelessly devoted to him. Muriel is a strong willed, intelligent, and highly principled woman who, though she constantly threatens to leave the house to find a job, remains a captive of Carel's will and his house. And Elizabeth, ig norant of Carel's paternity and thinking him her uncle, is a frail, sensitive, and guileless woman, who is sexually bound to her fa ther. Lacking serious relations with any other persons except Carel, he takes possession of and creates these three women according to his needs, desires, and sense of himself as an autonomous self-cre ator in and through his relations with these three women. This carefully crafted, solipsistic world falls into ruin when Muriel and Pattie learn of Carel's incestuous relation to Elizabeth. Both find the courage to leave the house, and Carel commits suicide. Kierkegaard observes that the despair of defiance is more often than not poetic in nature rather than actualized in life. The im probability of this story confirms this judgment, while also dis playing a paradigm case of the despair of defiance. Kierkegaard describes despairing defiance as both coming from the self and being conscious of itself as an act. This despairer severs all con nections with both the concreteness of existence and any power superior to his own. Through imaginary constructions, he seeks to be both creator and master of himself (SUD, 67-8). He understands the error of his megalomania, that he is in fact a self dependent upon both the concreteness of existence and a power superior to himself, and that he is in despair. Yet he, nevertheless wills de fiantly the continuation of his error, flouting and intensifying his
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despairing agony (SUD, 71). He wills to exist within this "inclos ing reserve," which will likely lead to suicide if not escaped (SUD, 66). Carel clearly exemplifies the despair of defiance. The atheist priest, living in isolation from the outside world with three women who lack serious human relationships with anyone but him, seeks to exist as an autonomous self-creator in and through his victims. When they finally succeed in escaping him he is left with himself as a pure and abstract subjective will. Such despair is beyond tol erance, and Carel takes his own life. The most crucial point here for us is that the despair of subjective autonomy is one that is ex pressed and nurtured in Carel's relations with other persons. His despair flourishes in a self-conscious and defiant act in which he seeks to constitute himself through creating others in his own im age. In these examples, the despair in and of weakness, as well as the despair of defiance, textures human relations characterized by egoistic love. It is not the case, however, that we have examined human relationships that only contingently or accidentally are de spairing. Kierkegaard's view of the nature of the self requires that we take a much stronger position regarding the presence of de spair in human relations. As I have stated at the opening of this paper, Kierkegaard holds to the following premises about the na ture of the self: (a) individuals naturally egoistically love them selves; (b) egoistic love necessarily involves the individual with others; (c) in egoistic love, the individual loves only himself through others and not also the other as neighbor; (d) in such relations the individual has not become Spirit; (e) loving one's neighbor as one loves oneself is to become Spirit; (f) where the individual has not become Spirit, he is in despair. The cases discussed above then are examples of the social dimension of despair, which is itself grounded in the social nature of the self. What I have tried to make clear in this paper and to demonstrate in these examples is the ubiquity of despair in human relationships that have not become Spirit by virtue of each willing the other as neighbor. In the second part of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard com pletes his dialectical phenomenology of despair with the claim that despair is sin. Here the level of self-consciousness has ascended to a knowledge of both the self as separated from God and the need
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for grace if the separation is to be repaired. Such knowledge both intensifies despair to its highest pitch and lays open the way to its overcoming. But grace is for Kierkegaard never received without a prior and corresponding human effort, namely, the ethical act of willing the other as end. Such an act, when honestly made, be comes the vessel that will be filled with grace.14 The dialectic of work and grace bestows Spirit; it is a transforming power that brings to egoistic love the end that it naturally seeks. But this issue takes us beyond the scope of our task here. I have limited my goal to ar guing for the social dimension of despair that necessarily affects all egoistic love of self and the other.
"In Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy has written a satirical novel that spoofs contemporary society's tactics to alleviate despair. In this novel, the protagonist, Tom More, seeks unsuccessfully through psychiatric therapy, pop psychology, sex therapy, and his amazing technological breakthrough—The Quantitative Qualitative Ontological Lapsometer—to rid his patients of despair. See Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1971).
VII
On "Feminine" and "Masculine" Forms of Despair Sylvia I. Walsh
O
f the two forms of conscious despair, despair in weakness (not willing to be oneself) and despair in defiance (willing to be the self one wishes to be rather than the self one essentially is), the first is characterized by Kierkegaard as "feminine" despair, the second as "masculine" despair (SUD, 49). This distinction be tween the forms of despair in terms of sexual categories figures im portantly in Kierkegaard's analysis of selfhood and despair in woman and man, but it has received little or no attention in studies of his thought. 1 For a generation grown skeptical of sexual stereodecent studies of selfhood and despair in Kierkegaard's thought that do not treat the distinction between masculine and feminine despair include Mark Tay lor, Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975) as well as his Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel & Kierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980); J. Preston Cole, The Problematic Self in Kierkegaard and Freud (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971); essays in Joseph H. Smith, ed., Kierkegaard's Truth: The Disclosure of the Self (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981); Kresten Nordentoft, Kierkegaard's Psychology, trans. Bruce H. Kirmmse (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1978); Jann Holl, Kierkegaards Konzeption des Selbst: Eine Untersuchung uber die Voraussetzungen und Formen seines Denkens (Meisenheim am Glan: Anton Hain, 1972); Vincent A. McCarthy, The Phenomenology of Moods in Kierkegaard (The Hague/Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 1978); John Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Libuse Lukas Miller, In Search of the Self: The Individual in the Thought of Kierkegaard (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1962),
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types, such a distinction is quite questionable and calls for critical examination. Beginning with a brief account of what Kierkegaard has to say about feminine and masculine despair, the following ex amination will focus on two areas of concern: 1) the congruence of his views with the general structure of selfhood and analysis of de spair presented in his work; and 2) the compatibility of his per spective with recent findings on sexual differences and personality development. From a determination of these correlations we can more readily assess the significance and appropriateness of the sexual categories employed in Kierkegaard's analysis of despair. As if anticipating objections to his classification of despair as fem inine and masculine, Kierkegaard appends a lengthy note to the text that introduces this distinction, defending and commenting upon it in some detail. He claims that his classification is conceptually correct as well as true in actual life, although in exceptional cases masculine despair may occur in women, and conversely, feminine despair may appear in men (SUD, 49). The distinction is thus an ideal one that holds true largely, but not entirely, in actuality. It corresponds on the whole with the ways despair is generally experienced in human life. Women are more apt to manifest despair in weakness, while men are more prone to despair in defiance. Kierkegaard goes on in this note to give a brief account of de spair in weakness or feminine despair in women. Woman's na ture, he says, is characterized by devotedness (Hengivenhed) or giving of herself in submission and abandonment to others (Hengivelse). Lacking a selfish concept of self and not possessing intel-
lectuality in any decisive sense, woman is blessed by nature with an instinctive insight into that to which she ought to give herself. While she can be coy and particularly hard to please, her womanly nature first comes into existence through a metamorphosis or transfiguration of her boundless coyness into feminine devoted ness (SUD, 49-50). Substantively, then, woman gains herself by losing herself; that is, she becomes a woman by giving herself in devotedness to others. Only when she gives herself thus is she herself, and only then is she happy. Not intending to demean woman by this characterization, Kierkegaard lauds her sensitive instinctiveness, against which, he says, "the most eminently developed male reflection is as noth ing," and he hails her devotedness as a "divine gift and treasure" (SUD, 49). Nevertheless, later on in the main text he states that femininity constitutes a "lower synthesis" than does masculinity, which alone falls within the qualification of spirit (SUD, 67). The reason for this, presumably, is that woman lacks the reflectiveness and internal orientation of man. As indicated in the note, she be comes herself instinctively, by giving herself to someone or some thing outside herself. The crucial point in Kierkegaard's characterization of woman is that the devotedness (Hengivenhed) that is her nature also consti tutes for her a mode of despair. If I read the Danish text correctly on this point, devotedness in itself is not despair, nor is the lack or loss of devotion, as is suggested by the new Princeton translation, which reads: " . . . woman, with genuine femininity, abandons herself, throws herself into that to which she devotes herself. Take this devotion away, then her self is also gone, and her despair is: not to will to be oneself" (SUD, 50). The word "devotion," how ever, does not appear in the Danish version of the second sentence quoted above; only the demonstrative pronoun "dette" or "this" is used, and grammatically it refers to the "det" or "that" to which woman devotes herself in the previous sentence, not to devotion.2
notes the distinction between "manly" and "womanly" despair but does not ex plore it in her analysis. Several studies of Kierkegaard's view of woman and man touch on or are relevant to the discussion of this distinction: Howard P. Kainz, Jr., "The Relationship of Dread to Spirit in Man and Woman, According to Kier kegaard," The Modem Schoolman 47 (1969): 1-13; Christine Garside, "Can a Woman be Good in the Same Way as a Man?" Dialogue 10 (1971): 534-44; Gregor Malantschuk, "Kierkegaards Syn paa Mand og Kvinde," in Den kontroversielle Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Vintens Forlag, 1976) 30-61; Birgit Bertung, "Har Seren Kierke gaard foregrebet Karen Blixens og Suzanne Breggers kvindesyn?" Kierkegaardiana 13 (1984): 72-83; Peter Thielst, Seren og Regine: Kierkegaard, Kserlighed og Konspolitik (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1980) 129-31. Sylviane Agacinski, Aparte: Conceptions et morts de Soren Kierkegaard (Paris: Aubier-Flammarion, 1977), also contains some pertinent reflections on Kierkegaard's view of woman and sexual differences (see especially 152-62).
2
123
The Danish text reads: " . . . Qvinden aegte qvindeligt styrter sig i, styrter sit Selv i Det, til hvilket hun hengiver sig. Tages nu Dette bort, saa er ogsaa hendes Selv borte, og hendes Fortvivlelse: ikke at ville vaere sig selv" (Samlede Vaerker, 3rd ed. A. B. Drachman, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 20 vols. [Copenhagen: Gyl-
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The meaning of the text, therefore, is that in abandoning or throw ing herself altogether into that to which she devotes herself, woman tends to have a sense of self only in and through the object of her devotion. When that object is taken away, her self is also lost. Her despair, consequently, lies in not willing to be herself, that is, in not having any separate or independent self-identity. Kierkegaard further points out that man, like woman, gives himself (and "he is a poor kind of man who does not do so," Kier kegaard remarks), but his self, unlike hers, is not defined by de votion; rather, it is constituted by a "sober awareness" of his giving that remains behind when he gives (SUD, 50). Thus, he does not gain his substantive or sexual identity by giving himself, as she does, but already possesses and retains a sense of self apart from it. His despair, therefore, is quite different from hers, as it is characterized by an unwarranted self-assertion rather than by selfabandonment. In relation to God, however, sexual distinctions disappear, and it holds that for both woman and man selfhood is constituted by devotion to God, although Kierkegaard observes that "in most cases the woman actually relates to God only through the man" (SUD, 50). I. When these views are considered in relation to the general structure of selfhood and analysis of despair presented in The Sickness unto Death, a number of questions, problems, and issues arise. In the classic description of the self with which the work com mences, a human being is viewed as becoming a self by relating dendal, 1962-64] 15:106-07). Emanuel Hirsch's German translation, Die Krankheit zum Tode. Soren Kierkegaard/Gesammelte Werke, 24-25 (Dusseldorf: Eugen Diederichs Verlag, 1957), in terprets the text as I do: " . . . das Weib echt weiblich sich, ihr Selbst hineinsturzt in das, daran sie sich hingibt. Wird nun letzteres fortgenommen, so ist auch ihr Selbst fort, und ist es ihre Verzweiflung, dass sie nicht sie selbst sein will." The older German translation by Hermann Gottsched (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1911) interprets it similarly. Walter Lowrie's English translation, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), unfortu nately omits the crucial second sentence of the text quoted above, as well as an earlier phrase identifying devotion as a mode of despair, so that on the basis of his translation it is impossible for the reader to determine wherein woman's de spair lies.
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itself to itself as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, the tem poral and the eternal, necessity (limitations) and freedom (possi bility). Since the human self is established by a power other than itself, it becomes itself by relating itself not only to itself but also to that power which establishes it, that is, God. No distinction is made between man and woman in this description. Since the general term for human beings (Mennesker) is used, the basic structure of selfhood is presumably the same for both sexes. From Kierke gaard's note on feminine and masculine despair, however, it would appear that substantive differences nevertheless exist between woman and man within this general structure. Woman's being, we may recall, is centered in relatedness, in self-giving, while man's is characterized by a self-awareness sustained apart from relations to others. Although he gives to others, his self-identity is not con stituted by giving. It should be noted that giving or relating to others is not a con stitutive factor in Kierkegaard's general description of a self either, as that includes relating to oneself and to God but says nothing about relations to others as forming an essential ingredient in the structure of the self. Kierkegaard's characterization of man's being thus corresponds more closely to the general description of a self than does that of woman, since it stresses self-consciousness or re lating to oneself rather than relating to others. The absence of a relation to others in Kierkegaard's general de scription of the self is rather puzzling inasmuch as only a year prior to the appearance of The Sickness unto Death he published Works of Love (1847), which focuses on relating to others through selfrenouncing love and envisions a triadic structure (the lover, the beloved, and love or God as a third party) of existence in love (WL, 124). One must conclude either that there is a serious inconsis tency in the authorship, or that Kierkegaard does not follow through with a systematic and integrated development of his thought, or that the insights of the earlier work are somehow im plied in the later one. If the last alternative is accepted, it is possi ble to interpret the general description of a self in The Sickness unto Death as incorporating a social dimension in and through the re lation to God or as a component in the self relation, under the ru bric of giving the eternal concrete expression in love, faithfulness,
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and so forth. 3 Still, one wishes that Kierkegaard had addressed the matter of relatedness to others more directly in defining the struc ture of the self. If self-renouncing love is included in the structure of the self, the resulting character of selfhood would correspond more to the feminine devotedness associated with woman than to the self-con scious masculinity of man. 4 That, however, would contradict Kier kegaard's contention that only the latter falls under the qualification of spirit; males, or at least those persons who are predominantly masculine in character, presumably have more spirit or self be cause they possess more self-consciousness ("the more conscious ness, the more self" [SUD, 29]) than do most females. Further problems appear in connection with Kierkegaard's claim that devotedness constitutes the proper mode of relating to God. Woman, as represented in the gospels by the woman who was a sinner (Luke 7:36-50), is presented by Kierkegaard in an edi fying discourse as the model of religiousness because of her ab solute submission to G o d . 5 Yet, as Sylviane Agacinski h a s perceptively pointed out, woman is not considered truly religious, or at least not as religious as man, because she abandons herself by nature, whereas man does not; ironically, therefore, it seems "as if the man were capable of being more and better a woman than the
woman: that is to say, religious." 6 Since the self has its ground in the eternal, which consists essentially in love, and one's chief task in life is to actualize that quality, it would seem too that devotion to the eternal would properly be given expression in and through one's relations to others. That, in fact, is how he sees it commonly working in woman's existence, but not in man's, which sustains a separate, direct relation to God. When Kierkegaard's distinction between feminine and mas culine despair is considered in the context of his analysis of the two types of conscious despair, some incongruences can also be noted in relation to the despair in weakness. As delineated in the text, this form of despair occurs in two basic forms: despair over the earthly (the totality of worldly things) or over something earthly (the particular), and despair of the eternal or over oneself. The first of these is the most common form of despair, Kierkegaard says, and is immediate in nature, containing no (or only a measure of) re flection. In it there is no infinite consciousness of the self nor any awareness of despair as being despair. One seemingly suffers as a result of external circumstances, so that one's despair is not at all self-activated from within. With an increase in reflection, this form of despair becomes more internally motivated, and a greater dis tinction is made between oneself and the environment. As con sciousness of the self increases, despair in weakness becomes despair over one's weakness, in which one shuts oneself off from the self (Indesluttethed) but becomes preoccupied with it, confess ing in solitude one's weakness in willing to be that self. Kierkegaard characterizes despair in weakness as feminine, but in his illustrations of it mostly male examples are used. 7 Indeed, if it is the most common form of despair, one would assume that it is more typical of males than is despair in defiance. Yet the latter is primarily associated with male experience, while despair in weakness is supposed to be representative of women. Kierke gaard's description of the first form of despair in weakness corre-
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3
John Elrod in "Kierkegaard on Self and Society," Kierkegaardiana 11 (1980): 17896, also notes that Kierkegaard's pseudonymous works "pay no attention to the ontological and the epistemological roles played by the other in the development of a concept of the self." He sees Works of Love and all the later literature as being concerned with that deficiency, so that Kierkegaard discovers in them "a social conception of human beings based on the phenomenon of love" (181). Elrod makes a similar point in his book, Kierkegaard and Christendom (Princeton: Princeton Uni versity Press, 1981), treating The Sickness unto Death as part of the earlier pseud onymous literature even though it actually appears after Works of Love (131-32). "An important qualification should be noted here, however. Instead of de voting oneself exclusively to one other, as is the tendency in erotic love relations, in Christian self-renouncing love one is devoted to all, bestowing love equally on the basis of our common humanity. One must give up the type of devotion and boundless abandon that characterizes erotic love; such devotion, Kierkegaard maintains in Works of Love, is nothing more than a "devoted self-love" (cf. WL, 67-68, 78, 80). 5 See "The Woman That Was a Sinner," published in English with Training in Christianity, trans. Walter Lowrie (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1941) 26171.
6
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Agacinski, 153-55. For a similar interpretation of Kierkegaard, see Garside. See SUD, 53,56,59, 63-65. However, excellent examples of females who man ifest despair in weakness as described in SUD can be found in Either/Or, vol. 1, in the characters of Marie Beaumarchais, Donna Elvira, and especially Margaret in Goethe's Faust (EO 1:175-213). 7
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sponds closely to his characterization of woman as instinctive, that is, immediate and unreflective, in contrast to man's self-conscious ness and intellectuality. At the more conscious and intensive stage of despair in weakness, however, the introversion that arises in it concerns the masculine mode (one's relation to oneself) more than the feminine mode (one's relation to others). Thus his character ization of despair in weakness as feminine is not altogether con sistent. As Kierkegaard moves to an analysis of defiant despair, it is seen to presuppose a still higher level of self-consciousness and aware ness of despair; but here the feminine mode is projected as the ap propriate way to selfhood: "through the aid of the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself" (SUD, 67). Ear lier this paradox was seen as characterizing woman's existence, but not man's. Now it is related to masculine or defiant despair in that the self "is unwilling to begin with losing itself but wills to be it self" (SUD, 67). Defiant despair thus results from an individual's unwillingness to adopt a feminine mode of selfhood. In what sense the self is expected to lose itself is not stated in the text. Essentially, however, despair in defiance comes to expression when one seeks to become the self one wants to be in stead of the self one is intended to be by God. Its distinctiveness lies in the fact that one will not recognize one's contingent or de rived status as a self; rather, the self wishes to create itself, to be its own master. Fundamentally, then, this form of despair has to do with one's relation, or more precisely, misrelation to God and to oneself in the expression of an inappropriate form of self-asser tion. The pathway to selfhood thus includes both masculine and feminine modes of relating, and the possibility of going astray on this path arises in corresponding forms of despair. Feminine de spair reflects a lack of self-consciousness (the masculine mode), while masculine despair indicates a need for the feminine mode (submission to that which is the ultimate source of life). While woman's self is lost or misplaced in a finite object of devotion out side herself, man's self is internally misplaced in himself. If being a self were only a matter of relating to oneself, and thus only a question of willing to be oneself, there would be only the possi bility of despair in weakness. But since the self is constituted not
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only by its relation to itself but also to the divine power that estab lishes it, one can only become a true self through orienting oneself in (devoting or submitting oneself to) that power. Thus the femi nine mode is inextricably involved in the process of becoming a self. How much that includes relatedness to other human beings in selfgiving remains unclarified in The Sickness unto Death. Inasmuch as masculine self-consciousness provides individuality or a sense of separateness and consciousness of the eternal, it also plays an im portant and indispensable role. These modes and their corre sponding forms of despair in woman and man are not altogether integrated in Kierkegaard's thought, but they indicate a comple mentary wholeness toward which he aims. 77.
Although the inclusion of both masculine and feminine cate gories in Kierkegaard's analysis of despair is preferable to defining selfhood in terms of one sex only, the appropriateness of the sex ual distinction itself remains a matter of debate. While definite physiological differences obtain between men and women, it is now widely recognized that psychological characteristics distinguish ing them are often culturally rooted rather than biologically deter mined. 8 Indeed, many apparent differences turn out upon inspection to be mythical, the product of cultural stereotyping, rather than real. Thus far, psychological measurements devised for determining sex differences have shown only four such differ ences clearly to exist: males exhibit more aggression, better quan titative skill, and greater spatial visualization, while females excel in verbal ability.9 There is no evidence supporting a gender differ ence in general intelligence, particularly the frequently held no tion that women are less intelligent than men. 8
Janet T. Spence and Robert L. Helmreich, Masculinity and Femininity: Their Psychological Dimensions, Correlates, and Antecedents (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978) 4-10,121-22; Janet Shibley Hyde and B. G. Rosenberg, Half the Human Experience (Lexington MA: D. C. Heath & Co., 1976) 7 (emphasizing an interac tion of biological and environmental factors); Janet Saltzman Chafetz, Masculine/ Feminine or Human?: An Overview of the Sociology of Sex Roles (Itasca IL: F. E. Pea cock, Publishers, Inc., 1974) 4, 27. 'Eleanor Emmons Maccoby and Carol Nagy Jacklin, The Psychology of Sex Differences (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 349-55.
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Kierkegaard's views on woman and man reflect traditional ste reotypes of the sexes; and, to the extent that these continue to shape cultural perceptions and patterns of social development, his char acterizations are compatible with popular viewpoints in contem porary society. Yet that does not necessarily make them valid or acceptable; indeed, his views on woman's intellectuality and spir ituality, or lack of these, are highly questionable. Insofar as woman's being is typically characterized by devotedness, as Kierkegaard claims, it may well not be an innate feature of her nature, but what she has been culturally conditioned to (generally at the expense of forming her own separate identity). Similarly, the egocentricity that Kierkegaard sees in males could be due to excessive encouragement of the individuation process in them, at the expense of developing a sense of relatedness to oth ers.10 Thus many social critics view the identification of woman and man in terms of conventional sex roles and characteristics as in hibiting their full blossoming as human beings, for these sex roles permit only a one-dimensional development of personality. In stead, they point to "psychological androgyny" or cultivation of both "feminine" and "masculine" characteristics in women and men as contributing to higher self-esteem and positive social ad justment.11 In substance, Kierkegaard's analysis of feminine and mascu line despair is in line with that of proponents of androgyny inas much as he diagnoses woman's despair as a lack of masculine selfidentity and man's despair as defiance against feminine devotedness and submission in relation to God. Ironically, however, his
use of stereotyped characterizations of the sexes contributes to the perpetuation of cultural identifications of women and men in terms of those stereotypes and thus reinforces the very despair which his analysis is designed to counteract. Insofar as Kierkegaard's anal ysis is congruent with the views of contemporary advocates of an drogyny, it offers a philosophical perspective that may be helpful in elucidating a common structure of selfhood in terms of the basic components of individuality (masculinity) and relatedness (femi ninity).12 In at least two important respects, however, some con temporary social theorists differ from Kierkegaard. In contrast to his interpretation of despair as being essentially internally moti vated or self-activated, they emphasize the need for, and impact of, change in the external structures of society so as to provide bet ter opportunity for fuller personality development. 13 Second, whereas Kierkegaard analyzes masculine despair only in terms of man's relation to the divine, they point to man's need to develop more receptivity, intimacy, commitment, and giving in related ness to other human beings, especially in relation to woman.14
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10
This possibility is suggested also by David Bakan in The Duality of Human Existence: Isolation and Communion in Western Man (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966) 107-109. "J. H. Block, "Conceptions of Sex Roles: Some Cross-cultural and Longitu dinal Perspectives," American Psychologist 28: (1973) 512-26; June Singer, Androgyny: Toward a New Theory of Sexuality (Garden City NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1977); Barbara Lusk Forisha, Sex Roles and Personal Awareness (Morristown NJ: General Learning Press, 1978) 30-36; 87-105; Spence and Helmreich, 109-110 (with references to others favoring an androgynous or dualistic approach); S. L. Bern, "The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny," Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 42: (1974) 155-62; Judith M. Bardwick, In Transition: How Feminism, Sexual Liberation, and the Search for Self-Fulfillment Have Altered Our Lives (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1979), 153-69, 177-78 (although retaining an appre ciation of gender identity and differences).
12
Although working primarily out of a Whiteheadian perspective, V. C. Saiving, "Androgynous Life: A Feminist Appropriation of Process Thought," in Feminism and Process Thought, ed. Sheila Greeve Davaney (New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1981) 11-31, seeks to develop a general model in which both indi viduality and relatedness are included. In an earlier, ground-breaking article, "The Human Situation: A Feminine View," published in The Journal of Religion (April, 1960) and repr. in Carol P. Christ and Judith Plaskow, eds. Womanspirit Rising (NY: Harper & Row, 1979) 25-42, Saiving analyzes masculine and feminine experience in a manner very similar to Kierkegaard, although without specific reference to his analysis of despair. Kierkegaard's analysis is explicitly discussed and appro priated in a feminist context in Wanda Warren Berry, "Images of Sin and Salva tion in Feminist Theology," Anglican Theological Review 60 (1978): 25-54. See also my discussion of individuality and relatedness in "Women in Love," Soundings 65 (1982): 352-68. "Hyde and Rosenberg, 275-78; Bardwick, 170-82. Critical of the dualistic ori gin of the term "androgyny" but endorsing the notion of wholeness associated with it, Rosemary Ruether, in New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), emphasizes the need for social, eco nomic, and political change (24-31, 204-211). See also Maccoby and Jacklin, 374; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise (New York: Harper & Row, 1976). "Bardwick, 97-99,125-29; Eugene C. Bianchi and Rosemary R. Ruether, From Machismo to Mutuality (New York: Paulist Press, 1976) 84-85, 96, 120; Nancy Chodorow, The Reproduction of Mothering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978) 218.
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It should be noted, too, that there is considerable disagreement among women concerning the notion of androgyny and its appro priateness for women's development. While some emphasize the need for women to be self-assertive and independent like men, others acknowledge and seek to preserve a distinctive character in woman. Labeling androgyny as a patriarchal construct that results in a pseudo-integrity in women, the radical feminist philosopher Mary Daly thinks woman can create a sense of selfhood that is not male-defined and that will manifest genuine differences from man, not those of traditionally defined femininity but of a kind yet to be determined, by spinning "threads of connectedness" with her sis ters. 15 Closer in line with Kierkegaard's association of femininity with devotion, psychologist Carol Gilligan identifies "a different voice" of women evident from the centrality of attachment and care for others in their lives and from the importance of relationships for the formation of their identity. 16 Claiming that "we know our selves as separate only insofar as we live in connection with oth ers," she finds in women's development a fusion of separation and attachment, identity and intimacy. 17 If that is true, Gilligan pro vides an important corrective to Kierkegaard in pointing to an in terdependence of self-identity and relatedness in women. Although Kierkegaard stresses devotion to others in woman's being, he views it as a potential mode of despair for her in that she tends to lose herself in the object of her devotion. Certainly that
can and often does happen, but the possibility of despair does not negate the importance of relatedness in forming self-identity. It is the integral intertwining of these two components of selfhood that Kierkegaard does not sufficiently recognize and incorporate in his analysis. He rightly sees a need for both separateness and relat edness, but for him they appear to be separate categories, so that he fails to perceive the actual interconnection between them. Al though Gilligan finds such an interconnection typifying women's development, this possibility can be extended to males, for with them also identity and relatedness are undoubtedly connected, even if perhaps in a somewhat different way. Thus, without ne gating sexual differences, one can ultimately look beyond them to a common model of selfhood not defined by gender. Since Kier kegaard carries out much of his analysis of selfhood and despair without regard to the sexes and in other works emphasizes our common humanity, the thrust of his analysis is in this direction. How, then, shall we finally assess Kierkegaard's use of sexual categories in the analysis of h u m a n despair? While a distinction between the forms of despair can be made without them, they en able Kierkegaard to bring more concreteness and specificity into his analysis, as well as to account for what he perceives as differences between the sexes in the experience of despair. Insofar as it is historically true that the lives of males and fe males have been characterized by patterns traditionally associated with masculinity and femininity, he provides an astute analysis of the connection between the forms of despair and these modes of sexual identity. In particular, his linking of despair with submis sive self-abandonment on the part of women and defiant self-assertiveness by men illumines some of the dangers and limitations of traditional feminine and masculine modes. His pointing in the direction of androgyny within a common structure of selfhood for the sexes provides a conceptual basis for a fuller development of individuality and relatedness in both sexes. We can further appre ciate the depth to which Kierkegaard's analysis goes in showing a fundamental connection of despair in woman and man with a misrelation to the divine. The idea of a relation to God coupling a high level of self-consciousness with devotion or self-giving establishes
15 Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1978) xiii, 382, 387. To Daly androgyny conveys an image of "something like John Travolta and Farrah Fawcett-Majors scotch-taped together" (xi). Naomi Goldenberg, in Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions (Boston: Beacon Press, 1979), finds some value in the figure of androgyny if it is used to inspire the imagining of a plurality of sexual styles, but she envisions a distinctly feminine form of religion and identity for women in the return to God dess worship (78-81). 16 Carol Gilligan, In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women's Development (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Saiving, "The Human Situation: A Feminine View." 17 Gilligan, 63, 156, 159, 164. See also Christine Downing, The Goddess: Mythological Images of the Feminine (New York: Crossroad, 1981), which envisions for woman an "Aphroditic consciousness" that is a "loving consciousness" and a "being conscious in relationship" (202-207).
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an ultimate matrix within which to affirm both individuality and relatedness in woman and man. Despite these positive features, there are several aspects of Kierkegaard's analysis that remain unsatisfactory. First, it perpet uates stereotyped views of woman and man that are in some cases erroneous or unsubstantiated, in others perhaps historically ac curate but largely the product of cultural conditioning unfavorable to the full development of both sexes. Second, it does not take suf ficient account of the influence of external factors in occasioning and potentially overcoming despair. On a more theoretical level, his analysis fails to incorporate clearly or adequately relations to others besides God in the general description of a self and in par ticular as an essential dimension of male self-identity. Further more, it does not recognize the integral interdependence of individuality and relatedness to others in the formation of the self, particularly in female development. Finally, we may wonder whether feminine devotedness provides an appropriate model for the relation to God inasmuch as it traditionally involves a form of submissiveness that is often made the basis for male dominance over women. Indeed, Kierkegaard himself points to a less hierar chical model for the divine-human relation, and thus also for hu man relations, in Philosophical Fragments, where in the parable of a King and a Maiden (PF, 26-35), the two are made equal in love.
VIII
The Grammar of Sin and the Conceptual Unity of The Sickness unto Death Robert C. Roberts
(A) The Question n many of his writings Kierkegaard distinguishes two kinds of religiousness. The one he often associates with Socrates, the other with Christ. The one is the religion of immanence, the other of transcendence or the breach with immanence. One religious ness falls within the sphere of psychology or ethics, the other within the sphere of dogmatics or revelation. The one is a humanistic, philosophical (or psychological) religion of insight, the other opaque to philosophical inquiry, based not on insight but author ity, and polemical against "reason." In the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus des ignates these simply as "religiousness A" and "religiousness B." To a superficial glance the relation between these two kinds of religious ness is something of a paradox about Kierkegaard's writings. For his task, as he describes it, is to re-introduce Christianity into Christen dom; and yet it is fair to say that the overwhelming majority of his pages explicate an essentially pagan religiousness—roughly "reli giousness A." Kierkegaard is the profoundest and most intellectually thorough exponent of liberal "Christianity" (cf. Harnack, Schleiermacher, Tillich, Bultmann, Schillebeeckx) that the world has yet seen;
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and yet he differs from the liberals in being uninclined to confuse re ligiousness A with Christianity. The paradox of Kierkegaard's devoting so many pages to reli giousness A, while trying to re-introduce Christianity to Christen dom, is superficial. The explanation is near at hand, and lies in strategic considerations: "For Christendom is very far behind. One must begin with paganism" (CD, 6). But the very fact that it is stra tegic to explicate Socratic religiousness at such length suggests that there are conceptual and psychological connections as well as dis connections between religiousness A and religiousness B. These are not simply alternatives b e t w e e n which one m u s t choose. Rather, being Socratically religious is a necessary condition for being a Christian, and being a Christian is a fulfillment of reli giousness A—and this at the same time religiousness B is a "breach" with religiousness A. This paradox, it seems to me, war rants exploring the relations between these forms of religiousness, and my present paper is an exercise in such exploration. The Sickness unto Death is divided into two parts that correspond to these two kinds of religiousness, and so is a natural point of de parture for asking some questions about them. To understand the relationship between Part One and Part Two is, in large measure, to understand the relation between these two crucial aspects of Kierkegaard's thought. To understand this relation will be to un derstand, with respect to the concepts of God, the self, and spiri tual "health," just where the continuities and discontinuities lie between these two contexts. According to Anti-Climacus it is the concept of sin that defines these boundaries, so that concept will be our main focal point. (B) An Oddity in Kierkegaard's Statements about the Knowledge of God Let me begin by noting a certain paradoxicalness in Kierke gaard's statements about our knowledge of God. On the one side, he quite clearly teaches that there is knowledge of God apart from Christianity and indeed apart from any positive religion. In a Cal vin-like comment, he says, " b u t just as no one has ever proved [God's existence], so has there never been an atheist, even though there certainly have been many w h o have been unwilling to let
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what they knew (that the God exists) get control of their minds" (JP 3:3606). He typically depicts Socrates as having a God-relation ship: "let us never forget that Socrates' ignorance was a kind of fear and worship of God, that his ignorance was the Greek version of the Jewish saying: The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wis dom" (SUD, 99). But he also avers that the god of "the very wisest of pagans who ever lived" is "darkness" (see GS, 81), and in the journal he expresses himself thus paradoxically: "Socrates be lieved that he was divinely commissioned to show that all are ig norant—quite right, at that time divinity had not let itself be heard from" QP 4:4286). This paradoxical mode of expression is sustained systemati cally in The Sickness unto Death. In Part One, entitled "The Sickness unto Death is Despair," Anti-Climacus speaks about despair in its relation to the infinite and the eternal, and about the power which constituted the self; and he quite freely uses the word "God" in these connections (See SUD, 16, 27, 30, 32, 35, 38-42, 68-69, 71). Furthermore, in some of the gradations of despair described in Part One, the despairer is aware that he has been created by God and is responsible for expressing that fact in his attitude towards himself. But at the beginning of Part Two, the theological or Christian part of the book entitled "Despair is Sin," Anti-Climacus declares: "Sin is: Before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself. Thus . . . sin is the intensi fication of despair. The emphasis is on before God, or with a con ception of God" (SUD, 77). Then, a little further on, speaking of the descriptions of despair in Part One, he says, "The point is that the previously considered gradation in the consciousness of the self is within the category of the human self, or the self whose criterion is man. But this self takes on a new quality and qualification by being a self directly before God. This self is no longer the merely human self but is what I, hoping not to be misinterpreted, would call the theological self, the self directly before God" (SUD, 79). He also says that "the pagan 1 and the natural man have the merely ^erkegaard uses the word 'pagan' in two ways: in a spiritual sense, and a historical sense. In the spiritual sense, a pagan is a person with little self-knowl edge, whose self-understanding is more or less entirely in "earthly" categories,
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human self as their criterion. . . . paganism is 'to be without God in the world' " (SUD, 81), and that "only in Christ is it true that God is man's goal and criterion . . . " (SUD, 114). So there is this paradox in Anti-Climacus' assertions: he speaks in Part Two as though here for the first time, by presupposing the Christian revelation, is the self conceived as standing before God; a n d yet t h r o u g h o u t Part O n e , w h e r e he was merely speaking "psychologically," the self was defined by its relation to God.
oneself but wanting to be so "on one's own t e r m s , " that is, de fiantly. This latter would not be a form of despair if there were not someone else on whose terms the individual must be willing to be himself in order not to be in despair. The fact that this latter state of mind is despair suggests that the self is created, and further cre ated for a relationship (of submission, acquiescence, gratitude, obe dience) to its Creator.
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(C) Being Human "A human being," says Anti-Climacus, "is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity . . . " (SUD, 13). He goes on to distinguish two ap plications of the word 'synthesis.' In one sense, the self is a syn thesis of these elements whether or not it is glad to be that; if it is not glad to be such a synthesis, then it is in despair. In a second sense, the self "synthesizes" these elements of itself only if, of its own will, it orders these elements of itself in an appropriate order, relates them to each other in a correct relation. In this case, it be comes genuinely a human self, or "spirit." In this section and the next of this paper, I shall briefly discuss some aspects of Anti-Cli macus' psychological analysis of the self, and thus of despair—just enough, hopefully, to ready us to discuss his analysis of sin. For if we understand the relation between despair and sin in The Sickness unto Death then we will understand basically the relation between religiousness A and religiousness B, and the conceptual unity of Parts One and Two of The Sickness unto Death. To begin: What is the "infinite" or "eternal" aspect of the self? Anti-Climacus points out a psychological suggestion of the ex istence of God. There are two forms of despair (SUD, 14), 1) that of being unwilling to be oneself, and 2) that of being willing to be with little awareness that there is an "eternal" dimension to his self. In this sense there are many pagans in Christendom, even among people who talk in spiritual categories. On the other hand, 'paganism' is a socio-historical term, designating times and societies not touched by the Christian message. In this sense, Socrates is a pagan, though in a spiritual sense he is not. (Of course one must not infer that because he is not a pagan, spiritually, he is therefore a Christian! It is the conti nuities and discontinuities between the spiritual pagan and the spiritual Chris tian that concern us in the present essay.)
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If a human self had itself established itself then there could only be one form: . . . to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. This second formula tion is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self to arrive at or be in equilibrium and rest by itself. . . . (SUD, 14) A little later he identifies a person becoming "decisively and eternally conscious as spirit, as self," with his having "gained the impression that there is a God . . . " (SUD, 26, 27). The "suggestion" does not, of course, show that God exists, but only that the human individual cannot, in clear consciousness of himself, love his own life, unless he gladly acknowledges his dependence on God. That we have here only a "suggestion" does not imply that the self-transparent individual only believes (that is, with a certain degree of uncertainty) in God's ex istence; rather, he knows that God exists. This knowledge, along with the human capacities and concerns that generate it, Anti-Climacus identifies as the "eternal" or "infinite'' or "possible" aspect of the self. Only if the individual "synthesizes" this with his "temporal" or "fi nite" or "necessary" aspect is he at one with himself, glad to be him self, integrated, "in equilibrium and rest" with himself. It does not, in Anti-Climacus' view, take revelation or Christianity for a person to know that this is the teleology of the human self and the demand that is placed upon every human being. All it takes is some experi ences that arise in the natural course of life, plus a certain psycholog ical astuteness. What then is the "finite" or "temporal" or "necessary" aspect of the self, and what is it for an individual to "synthesize" this with the other aspect? The concepts of "the finite" and "the necessary" appear to be very close. "Just as finitude is the limiting aspect in relation to in finitude, so also necessity is the constraint in relation to possibil-
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ity" (SUD, 35). Both terms denote such aspects of human existence as the fact of being born at a given time and place and reared in a certain cultural environment, the fact of having or lacking certain physical or mental endowments, of being wealthy or poor, of high social estate or low, of being set in relation to this and that partic ular other human being(s), of having been historically destined to this or that special duty, and so forth. Every person, regardless of the particularities of his life, is required to live that life before God— that is, to accept it as from the hand of God, to trust God alone as his ultimate hope and security, to perform his duties as duties to God. All human beings have this requirement in common; but the particularities differentiate individual from individual, so that what in particular a person is to receive as from the hand of God, what insecurities and defeats a person is to transcend in his God-rela tionship, and what definite tasks he is to perform as duties to God, may vary considerably. These are matters that each individual must work out in fear and trembling in interaction with God; and when these have been worked out satisfactorily—when the individual gratefully receives his particular life from God, lives in peace and hope amidst the insecurity of the present order, and with filial joy performs his mundane duties—then he has synthesized the tem poral and the eternal. Then he is no longer in despair; then h e has become an actual self. A very straightforward illustration of the synthesis of the temporal and the eternal is found in the case of Nicholas Herman of Lorraine (Brother Lawrence): It was observed that in the greatest hurry of business in the kitchen he still preserved his recollection and heavenly-mindedness . . . "The time of business," said he, "does not with me differ from the time of prayer; and in the noise and clatter of my kitchen, while several persons are at the same time calling for different things, I possess God in as great tranquillity as if I were upon my knees at the blessed sacrament."2 Becoming a self, or synthesizing the temporal and the eternal in oneself, is a matter of coming to a certain understanding in which one sees the particularities of one's life in terms of one's relation2
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The Practice of the Presence of God (Old Tappan NJ: Fleming H. Revell Com pany, 1956) 28-29.
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ship with God. But this 'seeing' or understanding is a peculiarly emotional (or as Kierkegaard sometimes says, "existential") one, as is indicated by the fact that the synthesis that realizes the hu man self is conceived as the contrary of despair and anxiety. To be a self is to be emotionally tempered in certain definite ways: it is to be disposed to a special God-grounded peace and hope and joy, a God-directed gratitude and love. (D) Despair and Consciousness Despair, like other emotion-concepts, 3 is a consciousness-con cept. By this I do not mean to deny that emotions sometimes occur unconsciously (as psychotherapists of virtually all schools will in sist). I mean that paradigms of despair are cases in which the suf ferer feels desperate, just as paradigms of anger are cases in which the subject feels angry. If a person did not at least appropriately and potentially feel despair when he is in it, the concept would not be long in the category of emotions. Examples of mental concepts that do not belong in this category are vanity and humility. These are sometimes mistaken for emotions, 4 but the difference is this: There is nothing incongruous or unparadigmatic about a person being vain or humble all his life without ever feeling vain or humble. In fact a person who is vain without noticing it is a more perfect par adigm of vanity than one who in addition to being vain also feels vain. One strategy for disabusing a person of his vanity is to get him to feel it. By contrast, the person who is angry or afraid with3
While acknowledging that 'despair' and 'anxiety' are usually emotion-words, and that for Kierkegaard issues about emotions and passions very much intersect issues of selfhood, the reader may feel uncomfortable with calling despair an emotion in the context of The Sickness unto Death. Anti-Climacus tells us that de spair is an unwillingness or refusal to be oneself—that is, something like an act of will; but emotions, it will be said, are not something that can be enacted. This uneasiness seems to me to rest on a misunderstanding of what emotions are. For a sketch of how it is possible that emotions are both capable of enactment and are also states to which we are passive, see my article "Solomon on the Control of Emotions," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 44/3 (March 1984). For some comments on anxiety as an emotion, see my article "The Socratic Knowledge of God" in The Concept of Anxiety, ed. Robert L. Perkins, vol. 8 of International Kierkegaard Commentary (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1985) 135. 4
As for example in Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind (New York: Harper & Row, 1949) ch. 4.
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out feeling so is, by this token, at some distance from the para digm; and, other things being equal, the more intensely a person feels angry or afraid, the more angry or afraid he is. Similarly with despair: "The ever increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase" (SUD, 42). The fact that despair is a consciousness-concept does not imply that every despairing individual will feel desperate. "Negative" emotions—anger, hatred, envy, fear, anxiety, guilt, and so forth— are often unconscious. (On the other hand, there is something strange about the idea that a person could be joyful, grateful, or hopeful, without being aware of it, though there are certainly dif fering degrees of the intensity of consciousness in all these emo tions.) These two observations about despair—a) that despair is essentially conscious and b) that not every instance of despair is conscious—underlie and are confirmed by the phenomenological description of the grades of despair which anti-Climacus performs on pages 42-74. Keeping firmly in mind that both of these obser vations are true will also help us, I think, to solve some puzzles that occur in connection with Anti-Climacus's comments about sin in Part Two. But perhaps it will be worthwhile to summarize, only ever so briefly, his description of the stages of despair on the path of consciousness. While the number of these stages is negotiable, I shall propose a list of seven, with some alternatives within some of the stages. A despairer can be one who (1) lives in pure immediacy, determined in his self-conscious ness purely by features of his "finitude," and has as yet met no obstacle to being satisfied with this self-understanding. (2) lives in p u r e immediacy as in 1), b u t then meets u p with "something earthly" (for example, the loss of a parent or a failed love-relationship) over which he despairs or in reflection recognizes the possibility of such a mishap and despairs over it in advance. In either of the above kinds of case the individual may either (a) wish he were someone else, or (b) wish (hope) that his life which he finds unacceptable will go away.
(3) on the occasion of some earthly m i s h a p (either actual or imagined), through reflection despairs over the earthly as a whole. (4) despairing over the earthly as a whole, cannot accept the fact that he cannot find his happiness in the earthly, and so fails to embrace the eternal as the solution. (5) finding that he cannot (will not) embrace the eternal as the solution to his unhappiness, despairs over himself because of his weakness in not being able to do this. (6) realizing that his unwillingness to be the weak self he is, is really willing to be himself independently of the Power who made him (pride), and continues to despair in refusing to submit his weakness to that Power, or rejects any imperfection in his concrete self, wanting to be himself in abstraction from the "imperfect" features which belong to him, and in so doing defies the Power who created him in this concretion. (7) in rage against the "imperfection" that he finds in himself, wills to be himself in this "imperfection" out of spite for the Power who created him thus (demoniacal despair). In all these stages except the first, the despairer is to some extent conscious of being in despair—he feels desperate. But as the list progresses, he becomes increasingly clear about what is involved in his despair, and in consequence, feels the grief, the trappedness, the hoplessness, or the anger of defiance more and more in tensely. As the despair deepens in consciousness, the individual becomes increasingly aware of what it is to be human—though by remaining in despair he refuses to let himself become human. (E) Psychology, Grammar, and Christian Psychology My recapitulation of Anti-Climacus's rich account of despair in Part One has been ridiculously schematic; but my purpose is not to expound his concept of despair, except as a precondition for ex plicating the relationship between his discussion of despair in Part One and his discussion of sin in Part Two. In the present section of this paper I propose to make some general comments about kinds of discourse that occur in Kierkegaard's and his p s e u d o n y m s ' writings.
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Much of Part Two is a markedly different kind of discourse from Part One. This should not surprise us, since Part One is clearly "psychological" and, as Vigilus Haufniensis remarks, "sin . . . is no subject of psychological concern, and only by submitting to the service of a misplaced brilliance could it be dealt with psychologi cally" (CA, 14). Sin, in the Christian understanding of it, is not something that can be known by close examination of the human psyche—that is, by the methods of psychology. The reason for this impossibility is that sin is a state of the psyche that can only be known with the help of an authoritative word from God, and psy chology as such does not call upon any such helps. These facts might still leave open the possibility of an activity that could be called "Christian psychology,"—that is, a discipline that describes states of the psyche, but in doing so makes use of a concept (namely sin) that in principle could never be arrived at by observation and human conceptual ingenuity. In fact it seems to me that pages 109-31 (most of section B of Part Two) are occupied in precisely such a descriptive activity. This portion of Part Two can be seen as a partial psychological taxonomy of sin, making use of the concept of despair developed in Part One. We have here a characterization of three "intensities" of sin that parallels, in some ways, the characterization of the "intensities" of despair in Part One, pages 42-74. The rest of Part Two, however, is for the most part not psycho logical, even in this extended sense of the word. It is instead what we might call, following Wittgenstein, "grammatical." That is, it is a series of observations about the behavior, not of people, but of a concept—the concept of sin. 5 The concept has some grammatical peculiarities that must be kept straight if one's discourse is not to degenerate into something pre-Christian, and it is the purpose of 5
There is of course much more to be said about sin than Anti-Climacus says in the "grammatical" parts of Part Two. As Wittgenstein says, "The work of the phi losopher consists in assembling reminders for a particular purpose." (Philosophical Investigations, pt. 1, no. 127). Anti-Climacus is here doing "the work of the philosopher" in Wittgenstein's sense—not building a theory or general theology of sin, but remarking on features of the concept that tend to get lost from view for one reason or another. His larger, guiding purpose is of course to re-introduce Christianity to Christendom; and his assumption is that the absence of Christian ity from Christendom is due partly to deep-running confusions about sin.
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grammatical remarks to highlight these peculiarities, thus heading off confusions and heresies. (These grammatical remarks are of course still psychological in the derivative sense that they are about the grammar of a concept that is basic to Christian psychology. Sin certainly belongs in the domain of psychology as contrasted with, for example, that of mathematics or of architecture.) The main grammatical points made in Part Two are these: (1) Sin cannot be known apart from a revelation. (2) Sin implies "before God." (3) Preaching of sin involves the possibility of offense. (4) Sin is not ignorance, but rebellion. (5) Sin is not a negation, but a position. I shall expound each of these points, with a view to exhibiting the continuities and discontinuities between religiousness A and reli giousness B, and between Part One and Part Two of The Sickness unto Death. But before I get down to exegesis, it will be helpful to make brief reference to a very clear instance of theological gram mar in a writing of another of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms. In Philosophical Fragments, chapter 1, Johannes Climacus shows the connection between the concepts of sin, rebirth, atonement, and God. These concepts form a logically integrated package 6 such that anyone who tries to separate one of them from the rest will necessarily transform the concept into a different, non-Christian one. Socratic religion contains an analogous, but in important ways contrary, 7 package of concepts: to sin corresponds ignorance, to rebirth recollection, to atonement the maieutic activity of the So cratic teacher, to God the Socratic teacher himself. The main, se rious point of this otherwise highly ironical chapter is to exhibit the d e p t h - g r a m m a r of these conceptual packages perspicuously enough to head off theological confusions that result from being 6
I owe this term, and deepened clarity about the idea it expresses, to my friend Steve Evans. For a much more detailed interpretation of Philosophical Fragments as largely a work of theological grammar, see my book Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard's Philosophical Fragments (Macon GA: Mercer University Press, 1986). The grammatical contrariety of the two packages largely explains what Jo hannes Climacus means when he says in the Postscript that religiousness B in volves a "breach" with the immanence of religiousness A.
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misled by the analogy between the packages and from a failure to see their incompatibility. If one thinks of sin as a state of inade quately developed moral consciousness (ignorance), which there fore can in principle be dispelled by strenuous moral efforts, then one has necessarily taken leave of the concept of sin; for to say that a person is a sinner implies precisely that she cannot get herself out of the state by improving herself, but needs instead to be re-cre ated or reborn. For this to occur, an intervention from outside the person has to take place; thus the help she needs is not like that of a Socrates, who elicits from his disciple self-knowledge, but like that of Jesus, who atones for his disciple's sins and thus makes her new. But since this intervention is genuinely from outside the disciple, and not merely the addressing and eliciting of some potentiality she already possesses, it follows that in the strict sense of the word "sin" a person cannot even know that she is in sin until that per son has been informed about the atoning work of her "teacher." That person can, of course, be aware of moral shortcoming and guilt, and even of guilt before God (by virtue of the Socratic con ception of God); but she cannot know that her guilt is sin—that is, a state of death from which she needs to be reborn. Thus the concept of sin is correlative with the concept of revelation, where revela tion is the announcement of a re-creating intervention of God in the life of his people.
ance that the individual can know that his error is sin. 8 But in the passage I just cited, Anti-Climacus goes on to give a rather differ ent account of this grammatical fact, and indeed one which seems to conflict with that of Johannes Climacus:
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(F) Sin Is Unknowable Apart from Revelation It is specifically . . . the teaching about sin, that most decisively dif ferentiates Christianity qualitatively from paganism, and this is also why Christianity very consistently assumes that neither paganism nor the natural man knows what sin is; in fact, it assumes that there has to be a revelation from God to show what sin is (SUD, 89). My little account of the grammar of 'sin' in Johannes Climacus's writing gives one rationale for saying that sin cannot be known apart from revelation: it conceives this sort of human error as a state from which the individual must be delivered so it is only upon the announcement of the deliverer's existence and action of deliver-
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The qualitative distinction between paganism and Christianity is not, as a superficial consideration assumes, the doctrine of the Atonement. No, the beginning must start far deeper,. . . with the doctrine of sin. . . . What constituent, then, does Socrates lack for the defining of sin? It is the will, defiance. The intellectuality of the Greeks was too happy, too naive, too esthetic . . . to grasp that anyone could knowingly not do the good. (SUD, 89-90) If Johannes Climacus is right, it is not at all a "superficial consid eration" to think that the doctrine of the atonement is what qual itatively distinguishes paganism and Christianity; indeed the concept of sin is grammatically locked together with the doctrine of the atonement. But when Anti-Climacus avers that it is "the will, defiance," which the Socratic definition of sin lacks, it seems clear that it is he, and not Johannes Climacus, who is being superficial, indeed inconsistent. True, Socrates seems to hold the odd belief that no one willingly does wrong, and Socrates the man does not evince much guilt-consciousness. Further, it is no doubt true that the psychological "tone" of Christianity, vis-a-vis moral failure, is darker and deeper than that of paganism; and it is no doubt true that the Christian senses his individual responsibility for guilt more clearly and intensely than the pagan does. But one has only to read Alcibiades' report of what happened to his self-image when in the presence of Socrates (Symposium, 216a-c) to see that Greeks were capable of feeling guilty; and Anti-Climacus has himself just fin ished telling us in Part One that a person, assumed not to conceive his despair as sin, may understand himself as in defiance of the Power that constituted him. No doubt sin-consciousness is an "in tensification" of guilt consciousness. Yet an intensification is only 8
It might still be objected that it is logically possible for someone to know that he is in sin (that is, in a state of error which can be remedied only by deliverance) before he hears the message that proclaims the deliverance. But is better to say it is logically possible that a person guess at this, than that he know it. One can imag ine a very self-aware pagan beginning to wonder whether his moral error is in principle remediable by effort; but it doesn't seem to be possible for him to know that it is not.
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a quantitative difference, not the qualitative one that Anti-Clima cus is attempting to explain. How shall we explain Anti-Climacus's mistake here? One fac tor is no doubt his preoccupation with highlighting the superficial guilt-consciousness of the pagans in Christendom, part of the cause for which was an abstract Lutheran insistence on the doctrine of atonement. Another factor perhaps, is that he was writing a psy chological treatise, and therefore inclined to explain this gram matical p o i n t (that p a g a n i s m d o e s n o t k n o w w h a t sin is) psychologically, when in fact he should explain it theologically. A little later (SUD, 100) he does draw something like a conceptual connection between sin and atonement; but it is not as clear as the one that Johannes Climacus draws.
that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms believe to be possible apart from any revelation. But if "psychology," apart from dogmatics, can discern that despair is defiance, why does Anti-Climacus con tend that Christianity has a unique purchase on sin because it is only in Christianity that the self is conceived as standing before God? If the pagan can be conscious of guilt before God, why does it not follow that sin-consciousness is not unique to Christianity? I think that the kernel of the answer must be found in that piece of theological grammar in chapter 1 of Philosophical Fragments. Ac cording to that analysis, you will remember, the concept of sin is correlative with the concept of revelation, where revelation is the announcement of a recreating or re-birthing or resurrecting inter vention of God in the life of his people. That is, it is correlative with the concept of atonement; sin cannot be known apart from know ing the One who takes it away, as the One who takes it away. Whatever the continuities may be—and there are several—the dis continuity between the concept of God as revealed in this way and every concept of God that might be generated out of self-knowl edge is so striking that Anti-Climacus can say, at the beginning of Part Two of The Sickness unto Death, that it is only now, when we explicitly begin to conceive despair as sin, that we conceive that despairer as standing before God. By 'God' he means 'the God who is revealed in Jesus Christ' or 'the God who was incarnate in Jesus Christ.' Let me offer the following as a parable, consistent with AntiClimacus, of the difference between, and similarity of, the knowl edge of God and ourselves which is available through "natural" means, and that which is available through Christianity. Imagine someone who has grown u p without a father. He was reared by a maiden aunt who, for reasons known only to her, re fused him any information about his father. From time to time he has felt distress about his situation, longing to know something about the man on w h o m his existence depended. Of course he knows that somebody was his father, and sometimes takes com fort and a kind of guidance from this thin thought. In his fantasies he imagines his father, sometimes this way sometimes that, and his imaginings even become for him a kind of moral guide: "What would my father want me to do in this situation?" Of course, since
(G) Sin is "Before God" It is indisputable that in the Christian conception, sin is basically offense against God. It no doubt has other "offensive" conse quences for the sinner himself, for others affected by the sinner, and even for non-personal parts of the creation. But what is of greatest moment is that it offends against God. As Anti-Climacus says, "Scripture always defines sin as disobedience" (SUD, 81). So if a person conceives himself, in his misdeeds or unhealthy atti tudes, as offending only against himself or others, then he does not yet conceive himself, in the Christian manner, as a sinner. Of course this is not to say that he is not a sinner, but only that he is not conscious of being one. Anyone who uses the word 'sin' in the name of Christianity, but in such a way as not to conceive God as the pri marily offended party, offends against the grammar of the con cept. Despair is a moral evil; but if it is not conceived as a violation of God, then it is not conceived as sin. This much is unproblematic. What is problematic is Anti-Climacus's suggestion that this cri terion of sin-consciousness distinguishes it from pagan guilt-con sciousness and the forms of despair which he describes in Part One of the The Sickness unto Death. I have discussed, both earlier in this paper and at greater length in another, 9 the consciousness of God "The Socratic Knowledge of God." See n. 3 above.
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his more specific conception of his father is a creation of his own imagination, his conception of the moral imperative from his fa ther is more a function of his moral character than of his father's. And yet this is not to say that nothing in the moral way is to be gained by conceiving his moral obligations as his father's will. Al though the thinness of his knowledge of his father makes it almost worthless as a guide to discriminating right from wrong actions, he may be able to conceive right actions (whatever in particular they may be) as faithfulness to his father. Thus the conception of his fa ther adds a moral dimension (namely the issue of something like obedience, loyalty, reverence, faithfulness) to his self understand ing, even though it does not provide him with any moral "con tent." However, one day this man finds a death-bed letter written for him by his father. In the letter his father familiarly converses with him about many things, and in the course of it his personality comes through clearly. Besides this he has some requests to make of his son—some matters to attend to—as well as some general sugges tions about how he should live. Now the difference between before and after the letter is not that the son receives a wholly new concept, the concept of a father, nor a new belief that he was begotten of a father; but he does gain what we might call "a new conception of his father." Indeed, he gains a conception of his father, becomes acquainted with his father. We might say that, whereas before he had the concept of a father but did not know his father, he now knows his father (and has con sequently had his concept of a father personally enriched). His emotions toward his father, which certainly were not lacking be fore, are intensified and focused. No doubt the parable is defective. For example, there is noth ing in it corresponding to the shock that the pagan lover of God experiences when he hears that God so loved him that he became flesh of his flesh for his sake and died a humiliating and painful death, rejected by men, to redeem him from his state of rebellious alienation, and that nothing short of this act of God—certainly no Socratic efforts of good will on the human being's part—will work the reconciliation. But still it seems to me that, in its own quiet way, this parable helps to soften the paradox I identified in the second
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section of this paper. It makes it plausible how a person might be said on the one hand to know God without the help of revelation, and on the other hand to know God (and himself) only with the help of revelation. (H) The Preaching of Sin and the Possibility of Offense
I have suggested, with my parable, that someone who knows God with the help of the Christian gospel will have more intense and focused emotional attitudes towards God; and I have sug gested that my parable is deficient in not capturing the emotional "shock" that a pagan lover of God such as Socrates will feel as he makes the transition from his pagan knowledge of God to a Chris tian one. Anti-Climacus tells his own parable, of a day laborer who is shocked by the emperor's invitation to come and take his daugh ter in marriage (SUD, 84f). He goes on to say, And now, what of Christianity! Christianity teaches that this in dividual human being . . . is invited to live on the most intimate terms with God! Furthermore, for this person's sake . . . God comes to the world, allows himself to be born, to suffer, to die. (SUD, 85) The paradigm of sinfulness is, having received this loving but shocking invitation from God, to be unwilling to accept oneself with joy as one whom He has made and so redeemed. Anti-Climacus holds that when sin is preached grammatically correctly, and not in the muddle-headed, paganizing way typical of Christendom, it will always be possible for the response to be one of hatred, anger, defensiveness, resentment (what Anti-Cli macus calls, following the New Testament, 'offense'). Yet this re action is only possible, of course, for if the hearer receives the message in faith, then his response will be adoration, joy, and gratitude. The possibility of offense, then, is a psychological cri terion of grammatical correctness. When, for example, the preach ing of sin trades on an inoffensive construal of sin such as might be found in certain forms of psychotherapy (for example 'sin' = 'low self-esteem' or 'sin' = 'poor social adjustment'), the very con tinuity of the preaching with the pagan's self-understanding, and the consequent impotence of the preaching to offend the pagan consciousness, is an indication that the concept of sin has been dis-
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torted. In Christianity, the concept of sin belongs to a package of dogmatic concepts that break with normal—natural humanistic— heathen ways of thinking about being human. As the quote in the preceding paragraph indicates, this conceptual break is created by the story of God's coming into the world, suffering, and dying for the sake of the sinner. To conceive a person specifically as a sinner is to conceive him as refusing to accept himself when this is part of the identity of the God before whom he refuses to accept himself. This conception of God raises the stakes of the human life in a way that is intolerable to a person who both understands it a little, and at the same time refuses to submit to this God. As Anti-Climacus says, " . . . the real reason that men are offended by Christianity is that it is too high" (SUD, 83). It makes the individual more valu able than he wants to be. So if the preaching of sin does not reflect this uncomfortably high evaluation of the human self, we can be sure there is something wrong with it—either conceptually or rhe torically. Of course, the notion of a conception of the human self that is "too high" is a relative one—a "quantitative" conception, to em ploy Kierkegaard's usual vocabulary. The mere fact that a self-con ception is too high for someone is not, by itself, any guarantee that the conception is Christian. After all, Socrates' self-conception was too high for, and consequently offensive to, most of his contem poraries. What makes for Christianity's "breach with [all of] im manence" is that the highness of its conception of the human self is grounded in that philosophically unforeseeable story of God's love, and consequently in a way of looking at the self that could not arise in the heart of man. However, the very plan of The Sickness unto Death—that it should be thought clarifying to precede a grammatical and Christianpsychological analysis of sin with a purely "psychological" ac count of the self and the ways it can fail as a self—bespeaks AntiClimacus's conviction that there are substantial continuities be tween what can be known of the self apart from the Christian story and what that story brings to light about it. And those continuities are of this sort: that a substantial pagan self-knowledge is a pre supposition of the Christian self-understanding, and even of enough understanding of Christianity to be rightly offended by it.
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Most people in Christendom are so dull on the question of what it is to be a human being that they are not in a position either to come to faith or even to be offended upon hearing the Christian mes sage. It is the task of great stretches of Kierkegaard's literature (and Part One of The Sickness unto Death is one of these stretches) to awaken in people the high pagan understanding of what it is to be a self, so that when they hear the Christian message they have the consciousness to understand it—that is, either to glory in it or be offended by it. (X) Sin Is Not Ignorance, but Defiance/Rebellion While acknowledging that there is a great deal of darkening of the understanding involved in sin, and expounding the psychol ogy of this darkening with considerable finesse (SUD, 113ff), AntiClimacus asserts that it is essential to the Christian concept of moral error to locate it most fundamentally in the will. "If sin is being ig norant of what is right and therefore doing wrong . . . then there is no sin at all" (SUD, 89). "Socrates actually gives no explanation at all of the distinction: not being able to understand and not willing to understand. . . . " By contrast, Christianity "teaches that a per son does what is wrong (essentially defiance) even though he un derstands what is r i g h t . . . " (SUD, 95). So strongly does AntiClimacus emphasize that the sinner (may) know(s) that he is doing the evil, that he at one point defines sin thus: "sin is—after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—before God in de spair not to will to be oneself or in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD, 96). Thus he seems to be claiming not only that it is a gram matical feature of sin that it cannot be known apart from a revela tion and a strong personal sense of its wickedness, but also that it cannot be committed apart from these. As he remarks a little later, from this emphasis on the sinner's awareness of the standard against which he offends "this strange outcome emerges . . . that sin is not to be found at all in paganism but only in Judaism and Christendom, and there again very sel dom" (SUD, 101). This conclusion, of course, blatantly contradicts the Christian doctrine of the universality of sin. Anti-Climacus de votes an appendix (SUD, 100-104) to answering the objection, but does not answer it in any conceptual-analytical sense; instead he
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takes the question as another occasion for inveighing against the spiritlessness in Christendom. His answer is that, though in one sense of course all people who are not perfected in faith are in sin, still, in another sense it is true that sin is a great rarity: because of the trivialization of Christianity in Christendom, " . . . the lives of most men, Christianly understood, are far too spiritless to be called sin in the strictly Christian sense" (SUD, 104). The conceptual issue that Anti-Climacus raises here is the dif ficult one of the relation between sin and consciousness. The plan of The Sickness unto Death is to explicate the Christian concept of sin in terms of a negative emotion, a self-hatred that Anti-Climacus calls despair. I have already made the obvious psychological point that negative emotions are susceptible of varying degrees of con sciousness, all the way from near-perfect transparency to an ob scurity so deep that the subject can become aware of the emotion— if at all—only through an arduous therapeutic process. We saw this to be true despite the fact that emotions, unlike some other mental states, are paradigmatically conscious. We also saw that at the very bottom of the scale of consciousness in despair, as expounded in Part One, 42-74, there was a kind of despair that, though it fit the definition of despair as an absence of the successful synthesis of the temporal and the eternal in the self, was not (even in the ob scurest sense) self-conscious. Both of these points relating despair and consciousness have an analog in the present connection. Thus: (1) Sin is paradigmatically a consciousness-concept, but not all instances of sinful actions/attitudes are conscious in the same degree. (2) There is a kind of sin, or better, a presupposition of sin, that does not involve any consciousness of its wrongness. (1) Aristotle implies, not about sin but about moral evil in gen eral, that to be held morally responsible for some act, a person must both know what he is doing and know that it is wrong (Nicomachean Ethics, 1105a-b). He also admits that people can become de sensitized to evil in such a way that their ignorance of the good excuses them from culpability for the present act, even though they are still guilty for having got themselves into this present, morally dull state of character. Sin shares this general feature of moral bad ness, and so is paradigmatically a consciousness-concept. It would
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make no sense to accuse a person of sin in deviating from the norm if he did not and never had known what the norm was. If there are degrees of awareness of the norm, then we can treat Anti-Clima cus's definition of sin as a sort of paradigm or ideal statement of sin: "after being taught by a revelation from God what sin is—be fore God . . . " to despair (SUD, 96). Thus the most perfect ex amples of sin, with respect to its consciousness-dimension, are to be found in Christianity. Yet this does not mean that something approaching this ideal in various degrees is not found in pagan ism. Obviously there is possible in paganism some understanding of moral standards, some notion of personal integrity and, as we have seen, some consciousness of God. This is what the Apostle Paul re fers to when, speaking of pagans, he says that they are "without ex cuse" (Romans 1:19-21). They are obviously not sinners by the definition just quoted from Anti-Climacus, but still they can be called sinners because they possess a more or less remote analog to the un derstanding of being human which Christians have through revela tion. If we treat Anti-Climacus's quoted definition of sin as a paradigm or ideal rather than as a strict definition, then of course there will be many degrees of severity of sin also among those who have received the revelation: for example, people who have been reared from child hood in the trivialization of Christian concepts characteristic of Chris tendom and liberal Christianity will not be, subjectively viewed, sinners in the same way as persons who, with lucid understanding of their God-relationship in Christ, continue in sin. Of course it must also be said, with Anti-Climacus, that those whose self-conscious ness is governed by a trivialized conception of Christianity are, in an other sense deeper in sin than the more self-conscious sinners. That is, they are farther from repentance because of a double barrier: the relative-ignorance barrier of paganism (for such people are, as AntiClimacus points out, after all pagans), and the compounding of the latter barrier constituted by the fact that they are under the illusion of being Christians. (2) "So then, Christianly understood, sin lies in the will, not in the intellect; and this corruption of the will goes well beyond the
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consciousness of the individual." 10 Christianity offers, not as an inference from premises but as a foundational dogma proposed for belief, that there is, structured into the human psyche and prior to any knowledge by individuals of good and evil, a tendency to wards defiance of the good. There is in human beings a mysterious admixture of individual freedom and racial determination with re spect to good and evil: the individual is free enough to be respon sible for his actions, and yet that his will will be defiant is not within the range of his options but is instead determined by his member ship in the human race. As Vigilius Haufniensis remarks in The Concept of Anxiety, the individual is both himself and the race. The rebellion against the good which constitutes sin comes from both places simultaneously. Thus, contrary to the widespread and seemingly very natural "humanistic" and "Greek" way of think ing about ethics and the human potential for good, there is in mainstream Christianity a deep and dogmatic pessimism that to the "natural man" tends to be offensive and seems irrational and in sulting to human beings. This "original sin" is of course not sin in the sense of moral evil—evil for which the individual can be held responsible and condemned—until it goes beyond originality and becomes actual, free defiance of the good. Just as despair at its lowest level of con sciousness—the feminine youthfulness which is pure pie de vivre— is not quite despair as an emotion since not even the obscurest awareness of something eternal in the self has as yet been aroused, so original "sin" by itself—in a young child for example—is not sin as moral evil since it is only the proclivity to develop the rebellious ness of will that is actual, condemnable sin. (/) Sin Is Not a Negation, but a Position The little section that is entitled with this grammatical remark is one of the more puzzling ones in the book. The obscurity of the passage is due partly to the abstractness of the terms—'positive' and 'negative'—in which the remark is couched; and partly it is due to what appears to be the conflation of some rather different con cepts, and the drawing of some strange conceptual connections. "Walter Lowrie's translation in Fear and Trembling and The Sickness unto Death (Garden City NY: Doubleday and Company, 1954) 226.
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In saying that sin is a position, Anti-Climacus means to affirm that it originates in us; it is something we do, rather than something that happens to us or some deficiency in which we just happen passively to find ourselves, such as "weakness, sensuousness, finitude, ignorance, etc." (SUD, 96). It is "conscious action" as op posed to "being acted upon" (SUD, 99). This is clear enough, and an important remark to make in light of some theologies that take the ethical punch out of sin, and make the human self a mere pawn in the hands of a sovereign God or a deterministic system. But here is the strangeness of Anti-Climacus's ruminations. First, he seems to identify sin's being conscious action with its being "before God": "that it is before God is the definitely positive element in it" (SUD, 100). Are not the idea that sin is conscious action and the idea that it is before God quite different ideas? And second, he emphasizes that it follows from the fact that sin is a position that it cannot be comprehended. If "a so-called speculative dogmatics . . . could comprehend this qualification that sin is a position . . . then sin is a negation" (SUD, 97). But how does it follow from the fact that sin is conscious action that it cannot be comprehended? Is it a general truth that things we undergo can be understood, but things we do cannot? First, it is surely a little rough, from a logical point of view, to identify sin's being conscious action with its being before God. Let us say I commit a misdemeanor, and then sit down and think about it. Normally, I shall think of this action as something I did, and not as a mere event in the world—a product of my arms and legs mov ing in a certain way, which in turn are products of events in my central nervous system, which in turn are products of my heredity and environment, my finitude, sensuality, weakness, ignorance, and so forth. But thinking about the action as something I did does not commit me to thinking of myself as having committed the mis demeanor before God! When Anti-Climacus says 'before God' he is referring to the peculiarly Christian God-consciousness that we have already discussed as one of the grammatical features of sinconsciousness. We have also noticed that some of the grammatical features of sin distinguish Christianity from paganism, while others are in common with other ethical forms of life. The "positivity" of sin is a feature of the latter kind, while the "before God" is of the
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former kind. But in his rough way Anti-Climacus is pointing to some connection between these features. What is that connection? The point seems to be one of Christian psychology rather than of theological grammar. And it is that when a person appropriates the Christian concept of God and conceives her actions as before this God who loves her personally and sent His son into the world to suffer for her, her sense of ethical "agency" is intensified. This is a constant theme in Kierkegaard's writings and is often expressed by drawing the connection between standing "before God" and becoming "an individual." An examination of the truth of this psychological claim must be reserved for another occasion. The second oddity is Anti-Climacus's belief that sin's being a "position" implies that it cannot be comprehended. How is this supposed to follow? He says, The secret of all comprehending is that this comprehending is it self higher than any position it posits; the concept establishes a po sition, but the comprehension of this is its very negation. (SUD, 97) Admittedly Anti-Climacus is not anemic if anemia be defined as a deficiency of irony in the blood, and when we read a passage like this it is always healthy to harbor a small suspicion that he is hav ing a bit of fun with us by speaking Hegelian. But let us examine Anti-Climacus's principle by instantiating it. Consider the follow ing case. I wish to comprehend why a brilliant student of mine turned down a full scholarship from the Harvard philosophy de partment and enrolled, at his own expense, in an unprestigious denominational seminary. Through questioning him, I become convinced that he senses a call from God to the ministry of the gos pel, and wishes to be obedient to that call. So in my act of compre hension, the concept (that of obedience to a call) establishes a position (namely that my student's act is an instance of obedience to a call).11 According to Anti Climacus's principle, the fact that my student is being obedient to a call is "negated" because I have com prehended it, and this follows from the fact that "this comprehen sion is higher than any position it posits"—that is, my act of "Notice the shift in the meaning of 'position.' It now no longer means "con scious action," but rather something like "proposition," or "true proposition," or "state of affairs."
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comprehension (namely my judgment that he is obeying a call) is "higher" (spiritually? morally? ontologically? logically?) than my student's act of obedience to the call of God which, being "lower," is relatively negative! I do not think we need to go farther into the matter to see that Anti-Climacus's principle is an epistemological wipe-out. Whether he is seriously proposing it I shall not try to de cide. If it is true that sin cannot be comprehended, it is not because sin is a position and positions can never be comprehended. Can sin be comprehended? What is Anti-Climacus really com mitted to in denying that it can be? We have seen that the concept of sin is part of a dogmatic package of concepts that arises out of the proclamation of a historical act of God as a necessary condition for the escape from moral evil. This act of God is "free"—some thing which God did not have to do, which did not happen out of any kind of necessity, and which therefore cannot be deduced from any set of facts and principles. No human being, no matter how wise, could have predicted this act of God just by sitting down with some principles of natural theology and a good hard look at the human self; and so similarly there remains something retrospectively opaque about it too. One cannot, by thinking the atonement through, see the necessity in it, since there isn't any; but since the picture of the self as sinful is strictly correlative with the picture of the self as the object of an atonement with God, the fact of sin also cannot be arrived at by unaided human thinking. If to be compre hensible something has to be explicable by reference to generally observable facts and generally discernible principles, then the atonement is not comprehensible; and if isin is strictly correlative with the atonement, then it shares a derivative incomprehensibil ity. As Vigilius Haufniensis emphasizes, sin is not a fit subject matter for psychology or philosophy; the claim of its existence is proffered not for scientific verification, but for belief. The belief in sin can be arrived at only by "leaping" over the methods of sci entific verification. Of course the philosopher-psychologist can do what Anti-Climacus does—that is, lead up to the concept of sin by examining a phenomenon such as despair which can be under stood psychologically, and which has certain continuities with sin, and then make a series of remarks about the concept of sin that point out, among other things, that the concept of sin goes beyond
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the concept of despair and beyond the boundaries of "reason" un aided by "revelation." By doing so the Christian philosopher-psy chologist does foster understanding of the concept of sin, and thus in a sense makes it more comprehensible than it otherwise was. That is, he clarifies the generically human self-understanding that is presupposed for an individual's understanding himself emo tionally ("existentially") as a sinner, and heads off misuses or misconstruals of the concept. One of the misconstruals that he heads off is that of taking the concept of sin in abstraction from the free and mysterious intervention of God in human affairs that occurred in the life, but especially in the death, of Jesus of Nazareth.
IX
Self-Knowledge and the Mirror of the Word H. E. Baber John Donnelly Paganism required: Know yourself. Christianity declares: No, that is provisional—know yourself—and look at yourself in the mirror of the Word in order to know yourself properly. No true self-knowl edge without God-knowledge or [without standing] before God. (IP, 3902)
A
necessary prolegomenon to any serious study of Kierke gaard's authorship is first to understand clearly what it is he is saying. His maieutic, prolix, enigmatic, desultory, highly per sonal writing style does not lend itself well to standard philosoph ical scrutiny—at least as adjudged by mainstream, contemporary Anglo-American standards. Since there is much of philosophical importance in The Sickness unto Death—the book the Hongs have aptly called "the consummation of his 'anthropological contem plation' "—the hermeneutical task becomes all the more crucial. Kierkegaard termed himself a "dialectical lyricist," and it is im portant to recall that despair and the sickness unto death are very di alectical notions. (Indeed, the true sickness unto death is despair.) Kierkegaard's use of indirect communication, metaphor, and highly imaginative but sometimes ambiguous figures of speech, should make philosophers chary about any cavalier, iron-clad, logical pigeon-holing of his views. We are, of course, not recom-
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mending Kierkegaard's philosophical style, so much as recogniz ing it for what it is. Existential " c o r r e c t i v e " dialectic notwithstanding, there may be a definitive, central core of mean ing in The Sickness unto Death; but as a more cautious approach to the work a reader can best hope to clarify one central angle. Ar gument forms in Kierkegaard's writings are not transparent, awaiting only the test of possible counter-examples or inferencerules. Ratiocination is very opaque but it nonetheless can be found in his writings. Accordingly, in any philosophical analysis of Kier kegaard's views there is ever present the danger of what in Two Edifying Discourses of 1844 he called the reader's grasping with the right hand what is held in the author's left hand. We trust our sub sequent remarks are not righteously sinistral. The Sickness unto Death as authored by Anti-Climacus (hereafter known as Kierkegaard) is intended as a "Christian psychological exposition for upbuilding and awakening." This aim may prove true, but before the reader can be edified or awakened, a good deal of heuristic analysis must be undertaken.. In his "Preface," Kierkegaard informs us that he does not much care if some readers view The Sickness unto Death as too "upbuild ing to be rigorously scholarly," that is, a paradigm of good philo sophical writing. Kierkegaard thinks it is better to be edifying than to merely provide another banal staple of the mainstream. What does concern Kierkegaard is that some readers will doubtless find it "too rigorous to be upbuilding," and Kierkegaard especially feels all Christian writing should be edifying. The perlocutionary force of The Sickness unto Death may be edifying, but as matters now stand, it is difficult to see how Kierkegaard's intended result can be fully accomplished given the often unclear and obscure locutionary tone of the work. Truth (objectivity) without edification may be blind, but so is edification without truth empty. In Part One of our paper, we shall examine one of the most baf fling passages in philosophical psychology, namely, Kierke gaard's remark that: A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. (SUD, 13)
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In 77K Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard undertakes the dual task of constructing a taxonomy of despair and providing an account of what it is to be a self. We suggest that these two projects are inti mately related. In particular, we argue that Kierkegaard's rather obscure dictum that the self is a "relation that relates itself to itself" is motivated by his interest in distinguishing between reflective and unreflective despair. He characterizes the former as despairing consciousness that is conscious of itself, the latter as despairing consciousness that lacks such self-consciousness. This character ization of despair, we suggest, leads him to regard the conscious ness relation as a relation that relates itself to itself and—thence given his further assumptions that all consciousness is self-con sciousness and that consciousness is criterial for personal iden tity—to his account of the self as a relation that relates itself to itself. We argue that this move can be blocked: Kierkegaard need not have adopted this account of the self. Nevertheless, as our discus sion indicates, we suggest that this analysis of personhood is not a piece of gratuitous metaphysical obscurantism but rather flows from his astute insights as a religious thinker and, as it were, a phenomenologist of despair. In Part Two, we shall examine how Kierkegaard's disdain for rationality applied to matters of faith, his animosity toward the en terprise of philosophical theology, paradoxically destroys his anal ysis of self-knowledge and his diagnosis of the various guises of despair. In short, the fideistic cure for despair found in the "Mirror of the Word" effectively disposes his philosophical diagnosis of the sickness unto death. I. The self, on Kierkegaard's account, is a "relation that relates it self to itself" and despair is a "disrelationship," or, more precisely, a family of disrelationships within the self. At first glance, Kierkegaard's analysis of the self as a "relation that relates itself to itself" appears to be an egregious category mis take, and one which is singularly unmotivated. Intuitively, the self is not a relation at all but rather a particular that has properties and enters into relations.
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We suggest that Kierkegaard's characterization of the self as a relation, while fundamentally mistaken, is not philosophically unmotivated. Rather his account of the self follows from what he takes to be a peculiar formal feature of the relation of personal identity in virtue of which it is what he calls a "positive" relation. Kierke gaard holds that the relation of personal identity is "positive" be cause of the nature of self-consciousness and its role as a criterion for personal identity. Now discussion about relations relating themselves to their own selves seems at best obscure, but on reflection it appears that there is at least one relation that literally relates itself to its own self, namely, identity. The relation of identity holds for items of every category—for particulars and, if there are such entities, for prop ositions, properties and relations—for whatever is, is self-identi cal. If there are relations, they are self-identical a n d , more particularly, the relation of identity is identical with itself. The re lation of identity is thus hyper-reflexive or, in Kierkegaard's termi nology, "positive." It is a relation that holds for itself as well as what might be called its first-order relata. 1 Now while identity simpliciter is a positive relation, sortal rel ative identity relations as a rule are not. By a "sortal relative iden tity relation" we mean a relation designated by an expression of the form "X is the same F as Y," in the usual notation *-=-* where F is a sortal, that is a count noun that conveys identity criteria. It is controversial whether relative identity statements can be analyzed in terms of absolute identity, so that ^ iff Fa & Fb & a = b. Never theless both those who accept the absolutist account of sortal rel ative identity statements, and those who reject it, hold that a -p- b entails Fa & Fb. This is intuitively correct and uncontroversial: if Hesphorous is the same planet as Phosphorous it follows that Hesphorous is a planet and that Phosphorous is a planet. If Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens are not planets at all, a fortiori they are not the same planet. Typically sortal relative identity relations are not positive. Con sider the relation of planet-identity that holds for Hesphorous and
Phosphorous. That relation is not itself a planet, hence it cannot bear the same planet-relation to itself. Indeed the only sortal rela tive identity relations that seem clearly to be positive are the rather banal relations of being the same relation and being the same sor tal relative identity relation. Kierkegaard, however, seems to hold that the relation of per sonal identity is a positive relation, which is to say, the relation of personal identity holds for itself. Now if the relation of personal identity is the same person as itself, it follows that the relation is itself a person since in general ^-f* entails Fa & Fb. Hence given Kierkegaard's commitment to the doctrine that personal identity is a positive relation he must hold that the person—the self—is itself a relation. One might have thought that such a counterintuitive conclu sion should lead Kierkegaard to reject the thesis that the relation of personal identity is hyper-reflexive, from which it follows. But Kierkegaard apparently thinks that he has some i n d e p e n d e n t grounds for accepting the thesis. It is not clear frm the text of The Sickness unto Death what these grounds must be. We suggest that the motivation for the thesis might be found in Kierkegaard's no tion of self-consciousness, and its nature and role as a criterion of personal identity. Such an interpretation is not inconsistent with Kierkegaard's stated views and represents, we believe, a very charitable reconstruction of the text. The theses that lend plausi bility to the view that the relation of personal identity is a positive relation are two, namely, (1) that consciousness is criterial for per sonal identity and, (2) that self-consciousness may be self-reflec tive insofar as to be conscious of oneself is (in at least some cases) to be conscious, in some manner, of being conscious of oneself. We suspect that Kierkegaard assumes that accepting (2) is tantamount to saying that (3) the relation of being conscious of is a positive rela tion; and from (1) and (3) he infers that the relation of personal identity inherits hyper-reflexivity from the consciousness relation. We suggest however that the move from (2) to (3), pace Kierke gaard, is illegitimate. In Kierkegaard's account, consciousness is intimately con nected to the will and to the concept of personhood. Freedom con-
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^his should, perhaps, make us worry about admitting relations to our ontol ogy, since this alleged feature of the relation of identity generates a regress.
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sists in the dialectical interplay between the relations of possibility and necessity that leads to the constitution of self.
which she would have been rid of or would have lost in the most blissful manner had it become "his" beloved, this self becomes a torment to her if it has to be a self without "him." (SUD, 20)
Generally speaking, consciousness—that is, self-conscious ness—is decisive with regard to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self. A person who has no will at all is not a self; but the more will he has, the more self-consciousness he has also. (SUD, 29) As the passage above indicates, for Kierkegaard—strictly speaking—all consciousness is self-consciousness. O n this ac count all loose and unphilosophical talk about a person's con sciousness of external objects or inner states can be paraphrased away in favor of talk about his consciousness of himself as being in certain states. Thus, in the strict and philosophical sense a per son does not see the foot approaching his shin or feel the pain that results, but rather is conscious of his self first as one who is about to be kicked and subsequently as one who is in pain. 2 Despair is a mode of consciousness. Thus, given this account of consciousness, all true despair is, strictly speaking, despair over oneself and talk about despair over other persons, objects, and states of affairs can be paraphrased away accordingly. An individual in despair despairs over something. So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment; in the same moment the true de spair or despair in its true form shows itself. In despairing over something he really despaired over himself and now wants to be rid of himself. . . . Consequently to despair over something is still not despair proper. It is the beginning, or, as the physician says of an illness, it has not yet declared itself. (SUD, 19) What Kierkegaard proposes here is that, in general, sentences of the form "a is in despair over b": where a + b, are to be para phrased away in favor of sentences of the form "a is in despair over himself as one who is. . . . " A young girl despairs of love, that is, she despairs over the loss of her beloved, over his death or his unfaithfulness to her. This is not declared despair; no, she despairs over herself. This self of hers, 2 Compare this to a similar move by Roderick Chisholm in his discussion of "indirect attribution" in The First Person (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1981).
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Moreover, Kierkegaard's analogy of the distinction between non-reflexive false despair and genuine despair on the one hand, and undeclared as distinct from declared sickness on the other, is less than illuminating. A disease that has not yet declared itself is a disease nevertheless, but on Kierkegaard's account, undeclared "despair," being directed to an object other than the self, is not a form of consciousness at all and hence not, properly speaking, de spair. Indeed, Kierkegaard seems to contradict himself within the space of pages 19-20 in The Sickness unto Death since he asserts first that undeclared despair is not properly despair at all but then sug gests that undeclared despair is really, ultimately despair over oneself. If our reading is correct, however, the accusation of inconsis tency here would be a cavilling objection. We suggest that Kier k e g a a r d ' s claim h e r e is b o t h c o h e r e n t a n d philosophically interesting: the apparent contradiction is a consequence of his fail ure to distinguish between despair and talk about despair. Argu ably Kierkegaard's point is that statements about a person's despair over items other than himself can be paraphrased away in favor of statements about the despair of the self over itself. Where the para phrase fails to convey the sense of the original, we suggest that the state described is not properly despair, since despair is a form of consciousness and the consciousness relation is, on Kierkegaard's account, reflexive. For Kierkegaard consciousness is criterial for personal identity in the sense that a is the same person as b if, and only if, a is con scious of b. If the consciousness-relation is criterial for personal identity in this sense, then the relation of personal identity inherits the formal features of the consciousness relation. It inherits, for ex ample, the reflexivity of the latter relation—which is to be ex pected since sortal relative identity relations on the absolutist account and on the account of some relative identity theorists 3 are 3
See, e.g., Nicholas Griffin's Relative Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
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equivalence-relations and indiscernibility-relations (albeit, the rel ative identity theorist will suggest, this holds for restricted classes of predicates). 4 If the consciousness-relation is positive then the relation of per sonal identity should, it would seem, inherit its hyper-reflexivity as well. This will be the case in fact if relations that of necessity hold on all and only the same items are the same relation. If the con sciousness-relation is criterial for personal identity in the sense suggested by Kierkegaard, it will of necessity hold on all and only the same items as the relation of personal identity; hence the con sciousness relation will be the same relation as the relation of per sonal identity. If the consciousness relation is positive then the relation of personal identity will be also, thus the relation of per sonal identity will be a relation that relates itself to its own self. And since whatever stands in the same-F relation to itself or anything else is, a fortiori, an F, it will follow that the relation of personal identity will itself be a person, or self, and one that relates itself to its own self. Thus, if we grant that the relation of consciousness is criterial for personal identity in the way suggested and, in addition, that it is a positive relation, it follows that personal identity is a positive relation and, hence, that the self is a relation. The doctrine that
consciousness is criterial for personal identity, while controver sial, is not peculiar to Kierkegaard (on one interpretation, Locke was its first and chief promoter). It is the additional assumption that self-consciousness is a positive relation that seems to press Kier kegaard alone among writers on personal identity to regard the self as relational; and it remains a matter for conjecture why Kierke gaard made this assumption. We suspect that Kierkegaard's motive for regarding conscious ness as a positive relation was the recognition that self-conscious ness m a y be reflective, that is, o n e m a y be conscious of his consciousness of self. Indeed, despair seems to be precisely a fail ure of reflective self-consciousness.
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Despair is the misrelation in the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself. But the synthesis is not the misrelation; it is merely the possibility, or in the synthesis lies the possibility of the mis relation. If the synthesis were the misrelation, then despair would not exist at all, then despair would be something that lies in hu man nature as such. That is, it would not be despair; it would be something that happens to a man, something he suffers, like a dis ease to which he succumbs, or like death, which is everyone's fate. No, no, despairing lies in man himself. If he were not a synthesis, he could not despair at all; nor could he despair if the synthesis in its original state from the hand of God were not in the proper re lationship. (SUD, 15-16)
4
John Perry and others concerned with "branching cases" of personal identity argue that the "unity relations" that hold necessarily on all and only those pairs of person-constituents that are copersonal, relations which are, to that extent cri terial for personal identity, do not share the formal features of the personal iden tity relation (which for Perry, an absolutist with respect to identity, has all the formal features of identity simpliciter). In particular to "save transitivity of iden tity" from the threat posed by putative cases of fission, Perry argues that the tem poral unity relation for person, which is criterial for personal identity "through time," is not transitive. But the connection between unity relation criteria and the sortal relative iden tity relations for which they are criterial is not that which Kierkegaard suggests holds between identity criteria and the sortal relative identity relations of which they are constitutive. On the understanding of criteria implicit in Kierkegaard's account, when some relation, C, is criterial for F-identity, where F-identity is a sortal relative identity relation, the relation of F-identity holds on just those ent ities that stand in the C-relation. Unity relation criteria for F-identity do not, how ever, hold on the relata of the F-identity relation; rather they obtain between pairs of spatial or temporal F-parts. Thus the temporal unity relation for person does not relate a person to himself but rather holds on distinct, co-personal F-stages.
One point that Kierkegaard seems to be suggesting in this less than translucent passage is that self-consciousness is a necessary but not sufficient condition for despair. To wholly lack self-con sciousness is to lack a self, since consciousness is criterial for per sonal identity; and a being that lacks a self is not a candidate for despair. Now this seems to contradict some of Kierkegaard's remarks in his discussion of despair viewed under the aspect of conscious ness—in particular his characterization of one form of despair as "unconscious" and a "despairing unconsciousness of having a self." We doubt, however, that Kierkegaard would want to hold that the victim of this form of despair literally lacks all conscious ness of himself in the sense that inanimate objects wholly lack selfconsciousness. Rather such a person, while conscious of himself, is not conscious of himself as the sort of entity he in reality is,
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namely a being "in which there is something eternal" (SUD, 47). We might say that, though conscious of himself, he is unconscious of "having a self" insofar as he is not conscious of himself as a self. The passage cited above suggests further that despair is not a form of self-consciousness per se but rather a disorder of reflective self-consciousness—"the relation of a synthesis that relates itself to itself." This appears to be inconsistent with Kierkegaard's ear lier account of despair as a form of what might be called first-order self-consciousness, since on the view suggested here it is rather a disorder of reflective self-consciousness, the self's consciousness of its consciousness. But the two accounts can perhaps be recon ciled; we might say that the first-order self-consciousness itself counts as a state of despair in virtue of the disordered character of higher-order self-consciousness. In any case this notion of reflec tive self-consciousness is crucial to Kierkegaard's analysis of de spair, so that in his account of despair he is led to reflect on the character of reflective self-consciousness. We suggest that it is his understanding of reflective self-consciousness that leads him to re gard consciousness as a positive relation. While the notion of infinite self-reflection is dizzying, it does seem that we can distinguish between simple self-consciousness, understood as self-attribution and reflective self-consciousness, that is, consciousness of oneself as a self-ascriber. Intuitively, sim ple self-consciousness and reflective self-consciousness are differ ent states of the same entity or different ways in which the self is conscious of itself. Kierkegaard, however, habitually writes as if reflective selfconsciousness was not a state of the subject of simple self-con sciousness at all, but rather a state of the subject's state. In this vein, for example, he discusses "the despair which is unconscious that it is despair," "the despair which is conscious of being despair," and so on. The suggestion seems to be that despair, a form of selfconsciousness, is itself a candidate for the consciousness relation, that is, something that can, or cannot be, conscious of itself. Cer tainly metaphorical talk about states or other abstracta is common: for example, "All joy wants eternity," "Love is patient and long suffering," to cite but two cases. Kierkegaard however appears to take literally talk about despair's consciousness of itself or lack
thereof, and he uses this distinction to differentiate two species of despair. Indeed, Kierkegaard seems to be motivated to regard con sciousness as a candidate for the consciousness relation precisely in order to distinguish between different sorts of despairing con sciousness. Now if consciousness is a relation that relates itself to its own self, and if it is in addition criterial for personal identity, it follows that the relation of personal identity is positive and, hence, that the self is a relation that relates itself to its own self. Now such a conclusion could be blocked in several ways. First, it might be argued that, in general, we may not regard relations as positive due to the regress generated by doing so. It then has to be shown that the regress is vicious, for it is not clear that it is. Sec ond, it might be suggested that states or events cannot occur to states or events but only to particulars, so that talk about con sciousness' being conscious is ruled out. 5 Finally, it may be argued that Kierkegaard's analysis of reflective self-consciousness, while not ruled out on general metaphysical grounds, simply lacks ad equate motivation—and it is this last objection that we shall press briefly before returning to our discussion of despair. What appears to motivate Kierkegaard's analysis of reflective self-consciousness is his commitment to the account of the con sciousness relation as reflexive. On this account, strictly speaking, a person can only be conscious of himself and never of anything other than himself—whether external objects or states of affairs or even his own mental states (insofar as a person is not identical with his mental states). Discussion of one's consciousness of other pub lic or private entities is, therefore, to be paraphrased away in favor of sentences of the form "x is conscious of himself as. . . . " How then shall Kierkegaard understand reflective self-con sciousness? Given his commitment to the reflexivity of the con sciousness relation he is barred from understanding it as a relation between a person and a state of self-consciousness where that state is not identical with the person. That is, he cannot say that one is reflectively aware of being conscious of his self-consciousness—nor more particularly that a person is, strictly speaking, conscious of
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See, e.g., A. N. Prior's "Changes in Events and Changes in Things," Papers on Time and Tense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968) 1-14.
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his despair since despair is itself a state of consciousness that may be had by the self but that is not identical with the self. On the other hand, Kierkegaard cannot identify despair with the consciousness of despair, since he wants to claim that one can fail to be conscious of his despair. Kierkegaard attempts to extricate himself from his predicament by ascribing consciousness to the state of despair itself. He can thus distinguish conscious despair from unconscious despair in the fol lowing way: the self in a state of conscious despair is despairingly conscious of himself and, in addition, his despairing self-con sciousness is conscious of itself; the self in unconscious despair is despairingly conscious of itself, but his despairing self-conscious ness is, at best, darkly conscious of itself. By this move Kierke gaard avoids both the counter-intuitive conclusion that the self in despair is despair and also the collapse of the consciousness of de spair into despairing self-consciousness. Arguably, however, Kierkegaard can avoid such results, while retaining his commitment to the reflexivity of the consciousness relation, without making this move. Recall that Kierkegaard claims that "despair over" something other than the self, if it be genuine despair, is really despair over oneself as a self having certain prop erties. The same might be said about ascriptions of conscious and unconscious despair. On this proposal to say, for example, a per son is in a "state of despair which is conscious of being despair" is not to say that the person in question is despairingly conscious of himself and that he is in addition conscious of his despair, but rather that he is consciously despairingly conscious of himself or, less barbarically, that he is conscious of himself as reflectively despairing. More generally, to be conscious of one's consciousness is not to be conscious of oneself and, in addition, to be conscious of one's state of consciousness, but rather to be self-conscious in a special way, that is, to be reflectively self-conscious. This move does not, as Kierkegaard seems to have feared, ob literate the distinction between conscious and unconscious de spair or, more generally, the distinction b e t w e e n simple a n d reflective self-consciousness. On the proposed account, simple and reflective self-consciousness, unconscious and conscious despair, are simply different sorts of conscious states. Perhaps the real worry
is that this account seems to render reflective consciousness un analysable in terms of simple self-consciousness a n d thus ob scures the relation between the two states. We might, however, respond to this objection with a discussion of "parts" or compo nents of states/events. 6 We might even perhaps regard simple selfconsciousness as a component of reflective self-consciousness, and despair simpliciter as a component of conscious despair. Admittedly talk about parts or components of states/events is problematic; but such talk is philosophically interesting on inde pendent grounds, and the problems it poses may not be insur mountable. In any case, the difficulty presented by such talk does not appear to be significantly greater than that generated by Kier kegaard's account of consciousness as a positive relation. 7 Thus, even if we grant that consciousness is criterial for per sonal identity, and wish to maintain the distinction between sim ple a n d reflective s e l f - c o n s c i o u s n e s s w h i c h is crucial for Kierkegaard's analysis of despair, we are not compelled to regard consciousness as a positive relation. Nor are we pressed to con clude that "the self is a relation that relates itself to its own self."
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II. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard distinguishes three basic forms of despair. (1) D e s p a i r occurs w h e n a person is not con scious of having a self. Kierkegaard reminds us, that despite the vanity, conceit, and self-indulgence inherent in the h u m a n con dition, many people often have a very low conception of them selves, that is, " n o conception of being spirit." As he nicely demonstrates in his house analogy, many persons shun the pre mier etage for the cellar. 8 (2) Despair 2 occurs when one is not will ing to be oneself. This "immediate" or comico-tragic, dramaturgical 6
See Judith J. Thomson Acts and Other Events (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 1977). 7 One such difficulty is the regress problem alluded to earlier. Even if the in finite regresses generated by positive relations are not vicious, the suggestion that consciousness is such a relation has the bizarre result that whatever is conscious is not merely self-conscious and reflectively self-conscious but infinitely self-reflec tive. 'For a swipe at Hegel, see SUD, 43-44.
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person has no hypostatized or permanent self and indulges in either aesthetic, romantic fantasy, or the "busyness" or "doublemindedness" so characteristic of the life of bourgeois civility. Kier kegaard nicely illustrates such a situation in his parable of the drunken but tres nouveau-riche peasant who failed to recognize his own legs when they were run over. (3) Despair 3 occurs when one is willing to be oneself. This state of "introversion" is primarily characteristic of the defiant individual, who brazenly tries to con struct an ideal self ex nihilo. Such a person ends u p as a ruler with out a country, who rules really over nothing. Instead, the task of self-development is not to create oneself, but to choose oneself— none of which can be accomplished, Kierkegaard avers, without the recognition of one's ontological dependence upon God. The quest for self-knowledge, then, requires the voluntary synthesis of possibility and necessity, facticity and infinitude, that harmonizes the temporal and the eternal before God. The proposed cure for these three types of despair lies in relat ing oneself to oneself and willing to be oneself before God. . . . "The self is healthy and free from despair only when, precisely by hav ing despaired, it rests transparently in God" (SUD, 30). We take it that Kierkegaard is here claiming that ultimately any eschatological equilibrium in the self comes from God. The deity is the power that stabilizes the self. However, at times, Kierkegaard seems to waiver on this point, contending instead that the sickness unto death can never be overcome—even for the person so related to eternal blessedness—so that despair is nonterminal. This fudging of the issue is based on Kierkegaard's claim that the process of self hood is never complete: "every moment that a self exists, it is in a process of becoming, for the self . . . does not actually exist" (SUD, 30). A similar point is made by Constantin Constantius in Repetition: "I can circumnavigate myself, but I cannot rise above myself. I cannot find the Archimedean point" (R, 186). Kierkegaard offers the caveat that despair is like no ordinary disease, and not just because it affects our souls (spirit) and not our bodies. To be sure, despair is a moral or spiritual malaise, and not a physiological ailment per se. Kierkegaard avers that with a typical disease, there is a time at which one contracts it, but once it sets in there is no longer a contracting of it. Pace Kierkegaard, this is not
quite accurate, as some physical ailments go into temporary re mission, or like Herpes II remain dormant for a while so that a per son is not always contracting them. That is, one can contract such diseases at tu have them go into remission at t2, only to contract them again at t3. However, with despair, there is not just a specific, temporal origin; rather we are always contracting it. Also, unlike ordinary illnesses that often lead to death, despair doesn't have this natural terminus—it remains "the hopelessness of not even being able to die" (SUD, 18). Despair involves "impotent self-consump tion." And of course the despairing person finds intolerable this state of not being able to get rid of himself. In one of his medical similes, Kierkegaard compares despair to consumption, that is, pulmonary tuberculosis. However, his medical illustration seems wayward, as despair was earlier defined as non-consuming. It is also false, pace Kierkegaard, that a person suffering from con sumption "feels well, considers himself to be in excellent health," and so forth. 9 (SUD, 45) Consumption was the medical term used to describe the secondary phase of tuberculosis, where lung damage is most severe. The primary phase of tuberculosis is often symptomless—at least to the patient. Yet true consumption is rarely nondistressful. Unlike many sensations—for example, pain—one can still be in despair even if one thinks one is free of it. Being in despair functions more like being happy than being in pain. If A thinks he is in pain, then A is in pain; and if A thinks he is not in pain, then A is not in pain. But if B thinks he is happy, it doesn't follow directly from his avowal that he is happy; and if B thinks he is unhappy, it doesn't follow that he is u n h a p p y . Happiness like despair—and unlike pain—once activated, is a semi-enduring ontological state of the person. Physicians know that there are alleged illnesses that prove psychosomatic, and conditions of putative health, that turn out to be deceptive. Similarly, a person who is in despair need not be lieve he is in despair: 'Kierkegaard insists that he is not engaging in gloomy, depressing polemics in SUD. Rather, he believes his analysis of despair can prove uplifting, calling upon us to be spirit. The reader of SUD can best let pass Kierkegaard's unfortunate, non-upbuilding, sexist remarks on feminine versus masculine forms of despair. Cf., SUD, 49-50.
International Kierkegaard Commentary
The Sickness unto Death
Even that which, humanly speaking, is utterly beautiful and lov able—a womanly youthfulness that is perfect peace and harmony and joy—is nevertheless despair. (SUD, 25)
son out of despair, make him so afraid of himself that he would stop being in despair, we will not determine here. . . . (SUD, 47)
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More interestingly, a person in despair who believes that he is in despair, may be, in a sense, "mistaken" in his belief. Consider the person who believes himself to be in despair over some mundane matter: In itself, to lose the things of this world is not to despair; yet this is what he talks about, and this is what he calls despairing. In a certain sense, what he says is true, but not in the way he under stands it; he is conversely situated, and what he says must be in terpreted conversely; he stands and points to what he calls despair but is not despair, and in the meantime, sure enough, despair is right there behind him without his realizing it. (SUD, 51-52) Such a person, we might say, truly believes that he is in despair but, arguably, lacks justification for his belief since he bases it on the wrong evidence, and in so doing manifests a radical misappre hension about what counts as evidence of despair and, hence, a mistaken notion of what despair is. For Kierkegaard, however, the most pressing epistemic prob lem concerning despair is not posed by the fact that one may be in despair but not believe it, nor yet by the fact that one may truly be lieve that he is in despair without justification. Rather it arises from the fact that a person may know that he is in despair; that is to say, the despairing self may be conscious of itself as such. This poses problems for Kierkegaard because in his account only the true Christian, one w h o has transcended despair, fully understands what despair is. 10 Indeed, to become sufficiently clear about what despair is—namely the culpable failure of the self to know and will itself to be a synthesis of the finite and the infinite wholly depen dent on God—is to achieve that transparency that obliterates de spair. To what extent perfect clarity about oneself as being in despair can be combined with being in despair, that is, whether this clarity of knowledge and of self-knowledge might not simply wrench a per10
Cf., SUD, 8.
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Pace Kierkegaard, we may perhaps say this much: for a person to know that something has property P, he need not have a com plete and accurate understanding of what P-ness comes to. We, for example, know that snakes are reptiles, that is, that they have the property of being reptilian, but we do not know perhaps whether reptiles have three or four-chambered hearts, though we recall that a textbook characterization of this biological classification makes reference to the structure of the heart. Similarly a despairing per son may know that he is in despair even though he does not have a complete and accurate understanding of what despair is. Indeed, if Kierkegaard is correct, this not only may be the case, it must be the case since, on his account, the only people who fully understand the true nature of despair are those who are in despair no longer. Paradoxically, Kierkegaard suggests it is good to be in despair (just as it is good for a virtuous person to suffer inwardly at the ap parent triumph of vice in a nefarious world); but it is terrible not to wish to be healed of it. Despair affords us the opportunity for spir itual growth—to paraphrase Mill, better a dissatisfied despairer 3 than a satisfied despaired. The pilgrimage of responsible selfhood to eternal blessedness can only be treked on such turf. The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. (SUD, 29-30) To overcome the sickness unto death, and thereby surmount despair, requires a leap of faith, in fear and trembling, to God; but to engage in such a venture is, according to Kierkegaard, to cast aside the objective attitude—to the point of losing one's mind. "To believe is indeed to lose the understanding in order to gain God" (SUD, 38). When all possibilities seem forlorn, and necessity too overbearing, then faith in God is needed to offset despair. One must believe that with God all things are possible. Kierkegaard's God is obviously more Cartesian than Thomistic. Kierkegaard's religiously-inspired anti-rationalism is a promi nent theme in his writings.
International Kierkegaard Commentary
The Sickness unto Death
As for Christianity! Well, he who defends it has never believed it. If he believes, then the enthusiasm of faith is not a defense—no, it is attack and victory; a believer is a victor. (SUD, 87)
of life (aesthetic, ethical, religion A, religion B) provide their own criteria of intelligibility, so that the propositional element in a per son's interestedness is diminished as the personal commitment now sets its own standards. Truth becomes a direct consequence of subjective commitment and no longer a reason for that commit ment. However, pace Klemke, the ever maieutic Kierkegaard sometimes speaks against such a form of epistemological relativ ism, when he says "that it is not the truth that is in need of men, but the men who are in need of the truth" (PH, 144). Indeed in The Sickness unto Death, he dialectically talks of the "good health of faith that resolves contradictions" (SUD, 40)—the use of the term "good" here operating as a synonym for "sound," seeming to imply a rea soned, cogent faith. Also, while it is true that Kierkegaard claims one becomes a "Judas No. 2" by defending Christianity against atheological chal lenges, he also continues to speak of the Christian God as "[not] a God of confusion" (SUD, 117). Indeed, Kierkegaard uses the expression "Christian knowing" (SUD, 5). In addition, Kierkegaard claims "the greater the conception of God, the more self" (SUD, 113). Yet the adequacy of one's conception of God is clearly tied to the adequacy of one's knowledge of God; and what better way to
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His fideism is largely motivated by his vehement reaction to He gel, H. L. Martensen, David Strauss, and others. But there are re ligiously appropriate ways of dealing with Hegelianism, secular humanism, demythologizing trends, and so forth, that do not sac rifice reason at the altar of blind faith. Paradoxically, Kierkegaard's excessive reaction to it all reminds one of the present age's "televangelists," those ideologically entrenched proselytizers of Christendom, that Kierkegaard would doubtless w a n t to part company with. Kierkegaard is suggesting that we should not tes tify on behalf of Religion B, but rather transform our lives into a testimony to it. Kierkegaard may well be correct in pointing out that external signs of Christian existence do not prove one is a Christian; that instead the criteria are internal in the form of inward resigna tion, suffering, the subjective transformation of standing in rela tion to the absolute telos, the private consciousness of self in relation to eternal blessedness, and so forth. "There is only one proof for the Truth of Christianity—the inward proof, argumentum spiritus sancti" (JP, 3608). But such inward transformation need not fly in the face of reason. Despite Kierkegaard's downplaying of objective considera tions in his discussions of religious faith, he does want to distin guish between the appropriate interestedness of the Christian versus the "aberrant inwardness" of the fanatic or "the subjective m a d n e s s " of the aesthete. Elmer Klemke has suggested Kierke gaard is a harbinger of so-called Wittgensteinian fideism. 11 Forms "Studies in the Philosophy of Kierkegaard (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976). Klemke also reads Kierkegaard as a forerunner of logical positivism, wherein tra ditional religious propositions are neither confirmable nor discomfirmable by ex perience, and hence without cognitive meaning. Religious sentences purportedly about transcendent states of affairs are to be read, under Klemke's interpretation of Kierkegaard, as statements pertaining to the utterers of them—placing them squarely in the natural order. Under Klemke's interpretation, subjectivity comes back with full force upon Kierkegaard's desired orthodoxy. But, it is simply in genuous of Klemke to place Kierkegaard, a truly God-intoxicated philosopher, into the camp of positivistic theology. Klemke reads Kierkegaard (especially his pseudonym Johannes Climacus) as separating ontology from theology. Under
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Klemke's interpretation, Kierkegaard is asking not "Is it true that Jesus is God?" but rather "What results from our presupposing that Jesus is God?" (51-52). Klemke writes: "For those who actualize the possibility, the divinity of Christ is their absolute presupposition. Is he God independently of their supposing him to be so? Who knows? . . . All one can say is that one's supposing him to be God makes him God for one's self" (53). Again, Klemke claims that for Kierkegaard the sentence "Jesus is God" (or similar statements about the Incarnation) is an autobiographical claim about the utterer whose life has been transformed by as similating the personality of Christ. But Klemke's analysis of the sentence "Jesus is God," interpreted in terms of an individual's choosing to actualise the ideality of Religion B, is bizarre. (See JP, 3075, for Kierkegaard's important caveat against a Klemke-like interpretation of religious language.) Surely, pace Klemke, the sen tence could be cognitively true although no one chooses to actualise in personal existential appropriation religion B. Surprisingly, Klemke does not hesitate to call Kierkegaard "an extremely rational and logical thinker" (10); but to think it inappropriate to ask if it is really true whether Jesus is God would commit Kierke gaard to the irrationalism he is so often accused of espousing, and what Klemke is at pains to avoid attributing to him. The vicarious form of new birth, as presented by Klemke, smacks of inauthenticity if not self-deception, and leaves one not just exegetically puzzled, but also repeating the Kierkegaardian refrain "quite simply I want honesty."
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learn about the Christian God than by rational inquiry, aided by biblical and revelatory disclosures. Faith and reason are not, then, strange bedfellows. On the whole, Kierkegaard opposes such tra ditional avenues of rational inquiry into the truth-claims of Chris tianity, affirming instead the fideistic shibboleth "Thou shalt believe." Furthermore, if self-knowledge is predicated on divine knowledge, and the latter is impossible to attain (because it in volves an absurdity), then so too is the former. The end result is that Kierkegaard's radical fideism destroys his otherwise often brilliant psychological forays in The Sickness unto Death into the na ture of the self.12 Unfortunately, Kierkegaard seems to conflate throughout The Sickness unto Death psychology with apologetics. We agree with Walter Kaufmann that "Kierkegaard is often extremely perceptive when he deals with inauthenticity, but quite disappointing when he describes authenticity."13 The end result of this is that his psy chological diagnosis of the types of despair is ruptured by his apol ogetic cure for despair. Since the diagnosis and the prognosis are so intertwined, the fideism of his cure destroys the taxonomy of the diagnosis. Long before George Orwell's penetrating outline of doublethink in 1984, Kierkegaard recognized the linguistic chica nery of "concepts turn(ed) around or flop(ped) over" (JP, 4238). Today we find this same resultant diffusion of responsibility in news about policies emanating from the "oval office," and guide lines originating from pieces of architecture (for example, a direc tive from the Pentagon). For Kierkegaard, this is all a manifestation of "the leveling process" resulting in the evasive, deceptive abdi cation of responsible selfhood. For example, sin in the present age has become associated with the guilt of being overweight, not reg ularly working out at the local health spa, transgressing the latest medical guru's dietbook's rules, and so forth. All of this subverts the etymological roots of the term guilt (skyld) which means debt. The present age misrepresents the Imprimatur (mistaking the pangs of calories for those of conscience); for our fundamental debt is to God and not to human or institutional creditors. Today, con12
Cf. his Tertullian-like outburst in SUD, 129. ^Discovering the Mind (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), vol. 2, 28.
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version refers to the phenomenon, not of a call to spirit, but to the real-estate transaction wherein rental units go the route of con dominiums! All of this inauthenticity is symptomatic of the de spair of finitude—the placing of the self "in the dative case"—which to continue the illusion is such that "the world generally has no understanding of what is truly appalling (SUD, 34). Yet despite his penetrating depiction of inauthenticity, Kierkegaard's own para digm of authenticity remains the knight of faith who, at least un der the standard philosophical interpretation, is a veritable religious monster.14 Kierkegaard contends: Despair is intensified in relation to the consciousness of the self, but the self is intensified in relation to the criterion for the self, in finitely when God is the criterion. In fact, the greater the concep tion of God, the more self there is; the more self, the greater the conception of God. (SUD, 80) Yet, we again are led to the conclusion, from the above passage and similar remarks elsewhere in The Sickness unto Death—given Kierkegaard's ingenuous ground rules—that his radical fideism undercuts his psychological study of the nature of selfhood. Kier kegaard holds in The. Sickness unto Death that: (1) The more conception of God the more self, and the more self the more conception of God. (2) But any epistemic-metaphysical attempt to conceive of God is impossible given Kierkegaard's asseveration that rational belief in God is absurd. (3) Given (1) and (2), any epistemic-metaphysical attempt to conceive of the self is also impossible. (4) Therefore the quest for self-knowledge is a failure along with the impossibility of a natural theology. We might put this in the form of a modus tollens argument: (1 A) If one is to attain self-knowledge and overcome despair then one must be able to also attain knowledge about God. "For a hopefully rational and philosophical justification of knighthood of faith, that clearly goes against the received opinion on Fear and Trembling, see John Don nelly's essay "Kierkegaard's Problem I and Problem II: An Analytic Perspective" in Robert L. Perkins, ed., Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling: Critical Appraisals (Uni versity AL: University of Alabama Press, 1981) 115-40, 236-40.
International Kierkegaard Commentary
The Sickness unto Death
(2A) But one cannot attain knowledge about God. (3A) Therefore, one cannot attain self-knowledge and overcome despair. The purported antidote to despair is found in faith. Kierkegaard holds that faith is not a virtue, but rather the opposite of sin. The bondage of sin is apparently broken by an individual's willing to be a self grounded transparently in God and receiving an infusion of divine grace. Yet by claiming that "no man of himself and by himself can declare what sin is, precisely because he is in sin" (SUE), 95), Kierkegaard somewhat unwittingly seems to undercut any deliverance from sin. That is, if you understand sin (which for Kierkegaard is impossible), you have somehow managed to tran scend it; and if you do not understand sin, then you are hopelessly mired in it. In general, Kierkegaard continues to uphold his antirationalism by claiming that sin remains a paradox that must be be lieved, such that "all attempts to comprehend can just be shown to be self-contradictory" (SUD, 98). Kierkegaard introduces two senses of understanding in his dis cussion of Socratic ethical theory vis-a-vis the problem of sin. Soc rates is correct, Kierkegaard avers, in claiming in a cognitive use of the term understand that a person cannot knowingly do wrong or evil. (Of course, if knowledge is equated with virtue, then in some sense a person cannot do what is right or good either, without the proper understanding of the action in question.) And since an in dividual's relationship to God involves, for Kierkegaard, the ulti mate paradox—believing the absurd—then in the cognitive sense of the term we never do fully understand what we subsequently do (given the epistemology behind Kierkegaard's religious moral ity). In addition Kierkegaard emphasizes that oftentimes we are not willing to understand, that is, we lack conative as well as cognitive understanding) even if we could in a purely cognitive sense un derstand. Of course, I may will to understand P and still not un derstand P; but if P is de facto cognitively incomprehensible, then no amount of willing to understand will succeed. Coupled with his radical fideism, Kierkegaard's religious morality seems to destroy moral responsibility for the individual actions of one's self, in light of his ethics of belief.
Socrates explains that he who does not do what is right has not understood it, either; but Christianity goes a little further back and says that it is because he is unwilling to understand it, and this again because he does not will what is right. . . . But can any hu man being comprehend this Christian teaching? By no means, for it is indeed Christianity and therefore involves offense. It must be believed. (SUD, 95)
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Curiously enough, given the Kierkegaardian analysis of sin, the occurrence of sin becomes a fairly uncommon event. That is, since most people in our secular culture are indifferent to religious con siderations, their lives are spiritless. Indeed, even if they are reli gious (for example, Buddhists, Hindi, religionists A, Jews, and so forth) their lives, according to Kierkegaard, are still spiritless! Hav ing little or no conative understanding of Christian divine revela tion, they don't feel the full ravages of despair, so how then can they properly sin? On the other hand, Kierkegaard holds that everything that is not of faith is sin. Kierkegaard seems to be literally contending that even if a person regularly performs morally good actions—as ad judged by both deontological and teleological standards—but ex hypothesi lacks the appropriate relationship to God (found in reli giousness B), then such a person is still a sinner. Kierkegaard re minds one here of that twentieth-century proponent of a Roman Catholic rendition of a similar theme, namely, Leonard Feeney S.J. That is, Kierkegaard is claiming throughout The Sickness unto Death that the religious self is a person's true self, which is arrived at by a free act of faith through the circuitous dialectic of despair. The upshot of his analysis is that no person who is not religious— more specifically Christian—can form or be a true self. Any rela tionship to oneself that is not grounded in the God of the Christian faith (as interpreted by Kierkegaard qua physician of the soul) in volves a false relationship to oneself. The secular, virtuous person is really splendidly vicious. Even those highly reflective individ uals that get a glimpse of the Eternal (perhaps by thinking seri ously about matters of religious belief) but shun it, are in great despair: "the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself" (SUD, 67). These seemingly fully-pos sessed selves lack the "courage to lose (themselves) in order to win (themselves)" (SUD, 67, 45-46). David Hume, for example, might
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never have "stumbled upon himself," but he seemed to be an au thentic self, that is, a distinct personality; yet for Kierkegaard he could not be so described. That is, contra Kierkegaard, Hume seemed to be an active agent, self-possessed, and an individual who refused to be controlled from outside pressures. We might even suggest the following reductio maneuver against Kierkegaard's analysis of sin. Kierkegaard claims that "sin is: be fore God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to will to be oneself, or in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD, 77). However, as we have tried to show, Kierkegaard's epistemology or meta physics rules out such a "conception of God." Accordingly, there seems to be, for Kierkegaard, no sin simpliciter! Moreover, if "it is the conception of God that makes sin dialectically, ethically, and religiously what lawyers call 'aggravated' despair" (SUD, 77), then paradoxically, despair also is phenomenologically void! Amaz ingly, the desultory Kierkegaard, however inadvertently, seems to lead us in The Sickness unto Death into "an impenetrable dialectical labyrinth"15 (SUD, 77).
15
W e
are grateful for the comments of Ronald L. Hall on an earlier draft of this paper, presented at the American Philosophical Association meeting in Decem ber, 1984. Also see Hall's article "Kierkegaard in New York," Soren Kierkegaard Newsletter 12 (1985): 2-4.
X
Kierkegaard on Vertigo John M. Hoberman
(A) Vertigo before Kierkegaard
H \ nxiety," says Vigilius Haufniensis, "may be compared with X A d i z z i n e s s [Svimmelhed]. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the rea son for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" (CA, 61). This essay will argue that Kierkegaard's metaphorical use of vertigo is important for two reasons. First, the passage quoted above is only one of perhaps fifteen in which the theme of vertigo appears in the pseudonymous and non-pseud onymous works; it is employed by his several pseudonyms and, by Kierkegaard himself, as a phenomenological rendering of sev eral kinds of psychological (and, ultimately, religious) disorientation. What is more, it has analogues within the conceptual repertory of the authorship and is thereby conjoined by Kierkegaard with ideas that are of central importance to his thinking, such as free dom, guilt, anxiety, possibility, ambiguity, faith, and the limits of reason. Kierkgaard's repeated invocations of vertigo and the abyss are also important in that they constitute an important transitional phase within a tradition to which the four great existentialist thinkers (Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre) have con tributed distinct interpretations. These "existentialist" treatments of vertigo represent, in turn, variations on a yet larger theme. "Even
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prior to any reference to morality," says Gaston Bachelard, "the metaphors of falling are, it seems, assured of an undeniable psy chological realism."1 From the myth of Lucifer to Heidegger's no tion of "falling" as "a definite existential characteristic of Dasein itself,"2 this archetype has been called upon to express the perilous state of the soul or, for Heidegger, the difficulty of achieving "au thenticity." As Bachelard points out, the idea of falling has "an adjunctive richness." Rarely occurring in a "pure" form, it rather absorbs meanings exterior to itself that may be as different as the judgment pronounced upon the fallen angel in the Old Testament or the ecstatic Heroismus of Nietzsche's Zarathustra (see below). Kierkegaard's crucial place in this tradition is a direct result of his original concept of anxiety, for which vertigo is a metaphorical equivalent.3 This is not the place to offer an extended history of anxiety as a concept, but one historical observation in particular is indispensable. Kierkegaard's celebrated innovation is to have dis tinguished in an unprecedented way between fear and anxiety—a distinction which, according to Heidegger, is typically obscured by "the everyday understanding." 4 The Bible, for example, makes no such distinction of comparable clarity.5 Nor does Aristotle, who 'Gaston Bachelard, L'Air et les songes (Paris: Librairie Jose Corti, 1943) 109. 2 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 220. 3 The German playwright Georg Buchner uses the theme of dizziness in his fa mous Woyzeck (1836) to express an inexplicable but fundamental anguish. "Peo ple make me dizzy [Mir wird ganz schwindlig vor den Menschen]," says the captain. Woyzeck himself, a kind of existential everyman, also experiences vertigo: "The world is spinning before my eyes [£s dreht sich mir vor den Augen]." See Woyzeck. Leonce und Lena (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1968) 19, 22. 4 Heidegger, Being and Time, 394. 5 "It will be noted," one reference work states, "that the idea of anxiety in the Bible seems to be rather sharply distinguished from that of fear." But the same commentator emphasizes the multiplicity of meanings that apply to both terms. "Anxiety is one element of the full range that extends from intent thought and interest through concern, care, worry, dread, to grief and inward pain," while the "concept of fear in the Bible is related to a wide range of emotions, extending from simple apprehensiveness to utter terror or dread, caused by the suspicion of an impending peril, known or unknown" (The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible [New York: Abingdon Press, 1962] 1:154; 2:256). See also the definitions of "dread" and "fear of God" in Karl Rahner and Herbert Vorgrimler, Theological Dictionary (New York: Herder and Herder, 1965) 139,172. Even to speak of "an element of
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defines fear as "a pain or disturbance due to a mental picture of some destructive or painful evil in the future" (Rhetorica 2.5:1382a).6 St. Thomas Aquinas (Summa Theologies, la2ae.4i,4) treats anxiety (agonia) as one type of fear (timor), describing their respective ob jects as defutoro malo and futura infortunia.7 "It would be interesting and gratifying," one commentator states, "to find in the text a clear and unmistakable reference to the anxiety which looms so large in current psychopathology. The expectation of such a treatment is bound to be disappointed. There are certain not inconsequential observations on the nature and scope of anxiety but they are sparse and scattered. Something of the undefined and free-floating char acter of neurotic anxiety may be detected in the reply's repeated allusions to the overwhelming and unbearable disorganization which unchecked fear introduces into the emotional life."8 As we shall see, anxiety assumes its "modern" form when the conse quences of "overwhelming and unbearable disorganization" pre dominate over the idea that its object lies in the future. The "modern" interpretation of fear, emphasizing mental tur bulence rather than the exterior and future threat, is still rooted in Aristotle. "Has not 'fear,'" asks Heidegger, "been rightly defined as 'the expectation of some oncoming evil' ['malum futurum']? Is not the primary meaning of fear the future, and least of all, one's hav ing been?"9 (Heidegger's real emphasis in Being and Time is on the power of fear to bewilder.) In Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1739), the mental disorientation that characterizes fear is traced to our experience of probability, which is itself one mode of the fudread antecedent to morality and common to all men" is not necessarily to take Kierkegaard's position, which de-emphasizes the "terror of Yahweh" or the "[h]oly 'fear' of the absolute, incomprehensible, holy God" and accentuates the confron tation with the self. 6 The Works of Aristotle, trans. W. D. Ross (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1924). Heidegger's translation (Being and Time, 392; Sein und Zeit, 342) renders Aristotle's definition as "a kind of depression or bewilderment" (eine Gedrucktheit bzw. Verwirrung). Heidegger's apparent emphasis on disorientation may reflect Kierke gaard's influence. 7 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, vol. 21 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964) 34-35. 8 Ibid., 34-35n. 'Heidegger, Being and Time, 391.
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ture. 10 Kant's Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (1798) em phasizes, in a manner which recalls Aquinas, a typology of fear: "Anguish [Bangigkeit], anxiety [Angst], horror [Grauen], and dread [Entsetzen] are degrees of fear [Furcht], that is, of the aversion to danger. "Terminological vagueness (from a post-Kierkegaardian point of view) is evident in the category "anxious fear" (angstliche Furcht). But Kant does anticipate the "modern" interpretation of anxiety in the following passage: "Fear [Furcht] of an object which threatens an undetermined evil is anxiety [Bangigkeit]. One may experience anxiety without having a particular object in mind, in which case it is uneasiness [Beklommenheit] arising from merely subjective causes (an unhealthy condition)." 11 The futurity of the evil is left implicit, while its indefinite nature is made explicit. In addition, this mental state is now referred to as pathological, al though not, as we shall see, in Kierkegaard's sense of this term as it applies to anxiety. Hegel, too, offers a typology of the gradations of fear and, in addition, a critique of fear's excessive subjectivity: "fear [Furcht], anxiety [Angst], alarm [Besorgnis], terror [Schreck], are no doubt of one and the same sort of feeling [Empfindundsweise] variously mod ified, but in part are mere quantitative heightenings, in part are forms which in themselves have nothing to do with their content itself, but are indifferent to it." Fear's defect is that it is a feeling (Empfindung), whereas "feeling is the indefinite dull region of the mind: what is felt remains wrapped in the form of the most ab stract individual subjectivity. . . . " 12 It should be noted that both Kant and Hegel, unlike Kierkegaard, treat fear (and their versions of Angst) as essentially superficial due to their "merely subjective" status. It is true that, in the "modern" manner, both authors as-
cribe to fear a nonspecific character ("an uneasiness arising from merely subjective causes," "the indefinite dull region of the mind"). But in the last analysis Kant and Hegel treat fear as unimportant, while Kierkegaard and Heidegger call anxiety nothing less than "freedom's disclosure to itself in possibility" (CA, 111) and "a basic kind of Being-in-the-world." 13 Prior to Kierkegaard, anxiety is not even a distinct, let alone a crucial, category of experience. If the classical (Aristotelian) definition of fear specifies both its future object and its disorienting effects, then vertigo is a meta phorical rendering of the psychic turbulence attending disorientation. The metaphorical use of vertigo for this purpose does not, however, guarantee the "modernity" of the turbulence it repre sents. This is evident in Hume's demonstration that "custom . . . gives a bias to the imagination":
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10 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1969) 490-91. "Immanuel Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1978) 161,110,160. It will be noted that the translator is inconsistent, rendering Bangigkeit as "anxiety" (160) and then as "anguish" (161). For the German text see the Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1912) 189,130,188. 12 G. W. F. Hegel, "On Art," in On Art, Religion, Philosophy (New York and Evanston: Harper Torchbooks, 1970) 59-60; for the German text see Hegel's Asthetik (Berlin East: Aufbau Verlag, 1955) 76.
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To illustrate this by a familiar instance, let us consider the case of a man, who being hung out from a high tower in a cage of iron cannot forbear trembling, when he surveys the precipice below him, tho' he knows himself to be perfectly secure from falling, by his experience of the solidity of the iron, which supports him; and tho' the ideas of fall and descent, and harm and death, be deriv'd solely from custom and experience. The same custom goes beyond the instances, from which it is deriv'd, and to which it perfectly corresponds; and influences his ideas of such objects as are in some respect resembling, but fall not precisely under the same rule. The circumstances of depth and descent strike so strongly upon him, that their influence cannot be destroy'd by the contrary circum stances of support and solidity, which ought to give him a perfect security. His imagination runs away with its object, and excites a passion proportion'd to it.14 By deriving "the ideas of fall and descent. . . solely from cus tom and experience," H u m e makes vertigo an empirical experi ence rather than an existential one. What is more, vertigo is reduced to being a kind of intellectual error, in that the "imagination runs away with its object." Here vertigo is essentially illusion, in that imagination has subverted reason. In a second passage on the ex perience of the precipice, Hume relates this type of fear to the im13
Heidegger, Being and Time, 233. "John Locke, A Treatise of Human Nature, 198-99.
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possibility of the evil that provokes it, "as when we tremble on the brink of a precipice, tho' we know ourselves to be in perfect se curity, and have it in our choice whether we will advance a step further."15 Here the structure of the vertiginous is depicted as a di alectical oscillation between states of certainty and uncertainty. Kant's treatment of dizziness in the Anthropology follows Hume in deriving it from "the mere thought of danger, although one knows that none is present": "Giddiness [Schwindel] and even seasickness, according to their origin, seem to belong to the class of such hypothetical dangers. Without hesitation one can proceed to walk across a board that is lying on the ground, but if it bridges an abyss or even, for one with weak nerves, a ditch, then the mere concern about danger will often be perceived as real danger." Yet Kant goes farther than Hume by associating vertigo, like anxious "uneasiness," with mental pathology: "Deception caused by the strength of the human imagination [Einbildungskraft des Menschen] often goes so far that one believes he sees and feels, as outside himself, something that exists only in his head. Therefore, the per son who looks into an abyss is overcome by dizziness [Schwindel] even though he has a broad surface around him to prevent his fall ing, or perhaps even leans against a strong railing. Strange is the fear of certain mentally sick people [Gemiitskranken] that they will have an inner impulse willfully to cast themselves down from a high place."16 In this sense Kant's interpretation of vertigo is di rectly antithetical to that found in The Concept of Anxiety; for while Kant considers the lure of vertigo a pathological (but essentially epiphenomenal) symptom, Kierkegaard treats it as a fundamental concept of philosophical anthropology. (B) Vertigo in Kierkegaard's Works Kierkegaard's detailed analyses of vertigo appear in the jour nals: in the Book on Adler (OAR; all translations are the author's), 15
Hume, ibid., 491. Anthropology, 170, 170, 68: Anthropologie, 200, 200, 81. Elsewhere in this vol ume Kant defines dizziness (Schwindel) as "a quickly revolving change of many dissimilar sensations beyond comprehension" (einen schnell im Kreise wiederkehrenden und die Fassungskraft ubersteigenden Wechsel vieler ungleichartigen Empfindungeri) (Anthropology, 55: Anthropologie, 64). 16
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and in preparatory notes (dated 1848) for The Sickness unto Death (144-48). In the former (dated 1846-47), Kierkegaard's point of de parture is the deflation of Adler's "genius" (OAR, 127), which he compares to dizziness (Svimmelhed) and associates with intoxica tion; it is, in short, a false genius because it is a disoriented one. An example of Adler's "dizziness" is his (false) conception of Abraham (OAR, 132). This epithetic use of vertigo is extended to include "aesthetic-dizzying viewpoints" (sesthetisk-svimlende Anskuelser) reminiscent of paganism (OAR, 127) and the "dizzying heights" (svimlende Hoider) of Hegelian metaphysics (OAR, 129). The Kierkegaardian notion of the aesthetic as a deficient mode of existence also underlies the first of two polar typologies of vertigo that appear in this section. Whereas "simple dizziness" (simpel Svimmelhed) is the surrender to "aesthetic-dizzying viewpoints," "dizziness of the second order [i anden Potens]" is "both to want to be a Christian of high standing [i eminent Forstand] and to want to help along Christian understanding by way of aesthetics" (OAR, 127). "The vertiginous," says Kierkegaard, "is the expansive [det Vide], the infinite, the unlimited, the indeterminate; and dizziness itself is the unbridled character [Toilesloshed] of the senses" (OAR, 128). This limitless vastness, within which the possibility of ori entation disappears, recalls the "yawning abyss" of The Concept of Anxiety, and not least in its "ambiguity." The indeterminacy that underlies dizziness, while "contrary to human nature," consti tutes nonetheless a temptation—a chaos into which the individual feels impelled to throw himself in an act of self-immolation. This is the "contradiction" which inhabits "the dialectic of dizziness" (OAR, 128). The only salvation from vertigo "is to be sought in the ethical, which by its qualitative dialectic chastens and delimits, de fining [f&stner] the individual and his tasks" (OAR, 128). The second polar typology dialectically differentiates dizziness in terms of ocular effects, which are to be understood metaphori cally. The "dizziness of single vision" is an "excess of imagina tion" that results from the individual's having "gone astray" in the infinite. The "dizziness of double vision" is the result of "an ab stract dialectic which, since it abstractly sees everything double, sees nothing at all" (OAR, 129). The "ocular" typology distin-
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guishes between a dizziness in which one "sees too much" and a dizziness in which one "sees too little." Both polar typologies present "first order" vertigoes which are species of intoxication, and "second order" vertigoes which are forms of self-delusion. The second journal entry, an exercise prefatory to The Sickness unto Death, explores the relationship between dizziness, defined as "an ambiguous joint boundary between the soulish and bodily realms [det Sjelelige og det Legemlige]" (SUD, 144), and despair, a comparison that can "illustrate and illuminate" (SUD, 146). "Diz ziness, in the category of the psychical, corresponds to what de spair is in the category of spirit (SUD, 144)—a formula that recurs verbatim in Anti-Climacus' text. But The Sickness unto Death does not explore the analogy any further than this. As the journal entry makes clear, vertigo is the lower order phenomenon because it is more akin to organic than to spiritual illness, the latter being "dialectically different from what is usually called a sickness" (SUD, 24). This crucial difference is expressed in the idea that a person "can be afflicted with dizziness [like an organic illness], but never with despair" (SUD, 145). As a consequence, the swooning indi vidual (den Svimlende), like the physically distressed but unlike the person in despair, cannot be said to be responsible for his condi tion (SUD, 145). Expressed in Kierkegaard's (Hegelian) jargon, the synthesis of the soulish and bodily realms, in which the possibility of vertigo resides, is a relationship, but not "a relationship which relates itself to itself, which is a determination of spirit" (SUD, 144). The association of vertigo with the body is important because the body, as Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, is interpreted by an cient tradition as external to the faculty of will. Orphic myth saw in the body "the unique root of all that was involuntary"; for the Old Testament prophets, it is "the seat of everything that happens in me without my doing"; in the Phaedo, Plato portrays the soul as "dragged by the body in the direction of those things that never preserve their identity."17 But this is not to say that Kierkegaard considered vertigo a bodily phenomenon. As we have seen, he is careful to specify that vertigo is "an ambiguous common border" between the body and the soul. The individual suffering from ver17
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969) 331,332,339.
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tigo experiences the "nervous illusion" (nerveust Bedrag) that an ex ternal pressure is weighing on him, but its actual origin is internal (SUD, 145). Vertigo, as a psychosomatic analogue to despair, re produces one aspect of its phenomenology—the illusion of an ex ternal pressure. But the difference that separates them is "infinite" (SUD, 146). Vertigo in the pseudonymous works is always associated with the idea of human limitation or finitude. It is significant in this re gard that the only pseudonym who takes vertigo lightly is Johan nes the Seducer,18 who states with misplaced confidence: "One never becomes giddy in a spiritual sense [i aandelig Forstand aldrig svimmel] when one thinks only of a single thing" (EO 1: 391). His dialectical adversary Judge William, whose own theological limi tations are by no means minor, demonstrates both wisdom and a characteristic (here: anti-romantic) lack of imagination when he states that "my head is too strong to take pleasure in seeing every thing grow dizzy before my eyes [svimlerfor mit 0je]" (EO 2:165). Vertigo in Kierkegaard always has a "spiritual sense." It is a phenomenological symptom of "the merely human self" as opposed to "the theological self, the self directly before God" (SUD, 79). In the pseudonymous works and in the Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard uses vertigo to signify spiritual disorientation in five of its aspects: (1) as an encounter with absolute difference, (2) as a state of self-delusion, (3) as a mark of the heathen, (4) as the sign of a negative or pseudo-continuity, or (5) as a symptomatic equiv alent of anxiety. (1) Dizziness is associated with four kinds of difference that, not admitting of any meaningful mediation, are absolute in character. In the Works of Love (1847), we read that "comparison between the infinite and the finite makes a man dizzy [svimmel]. Watch out, therefore, for the comparison which the world wants to force on you, for the world has no more knowledge of enthusiasm than a capitalist has of love, and you will always find that indolence and stupidity are primarily intent upon making comparisons and upon imprisoning everything in comparison's muddied 'realism' ['Vir18 Johannes is also impious enough to play with the contrast between spiritual (aandelig) and bodily (legemlig) dizziness.
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kelighed']" (WL, 180). Johannes Climacus speaks of an analogous difference in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846): "Between God and man, however, there exists an absolute difference, and hence this direct equality is a presumptuous and dizzy thought [svimlende Tanke]" (CUP, 439). Vigilius Haufniensis, comparing re demption and accident, "the highest" and "the most insignifi cant," remarks: "the phenomena have this in common—that they are demonic—although the difference otherwise is enormous enough to make one dizzy [svimlende]" (CA, 127). Finally, there is the abyss that separates the ardent, but impotent, position of Jo hannes de Silentio from that of Abraham, who is able to make the movement of faith. "Whenever I essay to make this movement, I turn giddy [sortner det for mit 0ie], the very instant I am admiring it absolutely a prodigious dread [en uhyre Angst] grips my soul— for what is it to tempt God?" (FT, 48).19 "So this movement I am unable to make. As soon as I would begin to make it everything turns around dizzily [vender Alt sig om], and I flee back to the pain of resignation. I can swim in existence, but for this mystical soar ing [denne mystiske Sseven] I am too heavy" (FT, 50). Vertigo, in summary, constitutes a phenomenological confinium. It should be emphasized, however, that not all individuals are confined to the same sphere: different pseudonyms represent different levels of theological acuity. (2) Vertigo can also signify a state of self-delusion, the ultimate significance of which is religious. Johannes Climacus suggests that "the specific immorality" of his age "might easily be a fantastic ethical weakness, a voluptuous, soft exaltation of despair, in which individuals, as in a dream, fumble after a conception of God with out feeling any terror thereat, but on the contrary pluming them selves upon the superiority which in dizziness of thought [TankeSvimmel], with the indefiniteness of the impersonal, possesses as it were a presentiment of God in the indefinite, fantastically en counters Him whose existence remains pretty much like that of the mermaids" (CUP, 484-85). (It will be noted that in this passage Kierkegaard has changed the concept of vertigo by dissociating it "Earlier in this paragraph Johannes states: "But the next thing astonishes me, it makes my head swim" (min Hjerne vender sig i mit Hoved) (FT, 58).
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from the feeling of "terror." Here dizziness means, not crisis, but indolence.) An analogous passage occurs in Two Ages (1846): "It will no longer be as it once was, that individuals could look to the near est eminence for orientation when things got somewhat hazy [at svimle lidt for deres 0ine]. That time is now past. They either must be lost in the dizziness of abstract infinity [fortabes i den abstrakte Uendeligheds Svimmel] or be saved infinitely in the essentiality of the religious life" (TA, 108). Here, too, dizziness is a symptom of spir itual passivity. (3) The only overtly judgmental use of vertigo appears in the Christian Discourses (1848) in the chapter titled "The Anxiety of Highness" (Hoihedens Bekymring). Kierkegaard's polemical strat egy is to present three types of existence, only one of which is sus ceptible to vertigo: The bird is on high without the anxiety of highness; the Christian of high station [den fornemme Christen], who in earthly highness is exalted above others, is on high without the anxiety of highness; the heathen of high station [den fornemme Hedning] belongs with his anxiety to the abyss, he is not really on high but in the abyss. (CD, 61) It is t h e h e a t h e n w h o has the abyss beneath him, and from this the anxiety arises, or he sinks into the anxiety. And what is this anxiety [Bekymringen]? A longing to become more and more . . . nothing, for it all indeed is nothing; a longing to rise higher and higher in highness, that is, to sink deeper and deeper into the anxiety of the abyss—for what is the anxiety of earthly highness but anxiety of the abyss? And what is this anxi ety? The anxiety is lest any one by guile, by might, by lies, or by the truth, might take this vain imagination [Indbildning] from him. (CD, 60)20 20 This type of anxiety, which seeks to hold onto a cherished illusion, recalls Anti-Climacus's observation that a man who imagines he is happy "is usually very far from wishing to be wrenched out of his error. On the contrary, he becomes indignant, he regards anyone who does so as his worst enemy, he regards it as an assault bordering on murder in the sense that, as is said, murders his happi ness. Why? Because he is completely dominated by the sensate and the sensatephysical. . . because he is too sensate to have the courage to venture out and to endure being spirit" (SUD, 43). In a similar vein, Johannes Climacus refers to "those who were so incensed with Socrates for taking away from them one or an other stupid notion [6jiEi5ctv tivct Xfjoov aC>Td>v &<paiQa>(xai] that they actually wanted to bite him (Thextetus, 151)" (PF, 25).
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This is the only passage employing vertigo as a metaphor in which Kierkegaard places a positive value on a form of highness, which like every significant theme in Kierkegaard's authority is subject to dialectical differentiation. In the case of "highness" this differen tiation is threefold: "The highness of the bird is a shadow, that of the Christian reality, that of the heathen nothingness. The bird has air within it, hence it holds itself aloft; the heathen of high station has emptiness within him, hence his highness is imaginary; the Christian of high station has faith within him, hence he soars [svasver] above the abyss of earthly highness" (CD, 61).21. The ex plicit reference to dizziness occurs in a passage that emphasizes the haunting of the heathen's existence by nothingness: "But his self is non-existent, his inmost being has become pithless and cor roded in the service of nothingness; the thrall of vanity, having no command of himself, in the power of giddy worldliness [i den svimlende Verdsligheds Void], godforsaken, he ceases to be a man, in his most inward being he is as dead, but his highness walks ghostlike among us—it lives" (CD, 60). Here as elsewhere (see below), Kier kegaard interprets vertigo as one element of a complex of related themes: emptiness, the abyss, nothingness, each of which has its (positive) dialectical complement: fullness, 22 highness, reality. Without this embeddedness, which means that it finds its mean ing—in effect—in other categories, vertigo would be as epiphenomenal in Kierkegaard as it is in Kant. (4) In two passages, the aesthete "A" and Vigilius Haufniensis associate dizziness with the "continuity" of boredom. "Panthe ism," says "A" in "The Rotation Method," "is, in general, char acterized by fullness; in the case of boredom we find the precise opposite, since it is characterized by emptiness; but it is just this which makes boredom a pantheistic conception. Boredom de pends on the nothingness which pervades reality; it causes a diz21 The translation (by Lowrie) of svxver as "soars" is unfortunate in that it leads the reader to assume that Kierkegaard ascribes to the Christian the sort of dy namic vertical impulse Nietzsche gives to Zarathustra. A better translation would be "floats" or "hovers." 22 I am inferring this category here: it actually occurs in another context (EO 1:287) in which the theme of vertigo figures.
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ziness [Svimmelhed] like that produced by looking down into a yawning [uendelig] chasm, and this dizziness is infinite [uendelig]" (EO 1: 287). By making vertigo synonymous with boredom, " A " preserves its familiar subjective character; the comparable passage by Vigilius Haufniensis, however, does not, in that it ascribes diz ziness to an inanimate object on behalf of a phenomenological por trayal of introversion or "inclosing reserve" (Indesluttethed): "The continuity that inclosing reserve has can best be compared wth the dizziness [Svimmelhed] a spinning top m u s t have, which con stantly revolves upon its own pivot. In case the inclosing reserve does not drive the individuality to complete insanity, which is the sad perpetuum mobile of monotonous sameness, the individuality will still retain a certain continuity with the rest of human life. In relation to this continuity, the pseudo-continuity [Skin-Continuitet] of the inclosing reserve will show itself precisely as the sudden [det Pludselige]" (CA, 130). The logic of Haufniensis' metaphor is par adoxical: the stasis of monotony is expressed in terms of high-speed rotational motion, the point of the oxymoron being to suggest the sheer tension of introversion. But the linking of vertigo with bore dom must also be seen in the context of a dialectical differentiation of vertigo itself. On the one hand, it is a symptom of the monotonic, of "the sad perpetuum mobile of monotonous sameness [Einerlei]." At the same time, it is a symptom of the multifarious, of "the foam ing multifariousness of life" (Livets skummende Mangfoldighed) (CA, 23), of the disorientation that resides in limitless possibilities; anx iety, experienced as vertigo, is "freedom's disclosure to itself as possibility" (CA, 111). (5) It is difficult to overestimate the thematic richness of the para graph in which Vigilius Haufniensis announces that "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" (CA, 61). As noted above, the existential sig nificance of vertigo derives from its "embeddedness" in a whole set of important categories to which Kierkegaard has related it, cate gories through which vertigo manifests its existence—freedom, guilt, possibility, ambiguity, finiteness, the leap, the synthesis. Freedom inflicts vertigo upon itself in that it "looks down into its own possibility," and "[h]e whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss [svselgende Dyb] becomes dizzy" (CA, 61).
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Guilt has a structural similarity to the abyss, in that it is the ob ject of an ambiguous desire: just as the eye looks down into the yawning abyss with both fear and desire, so too "life offers suffi cient phenomena in which the individual in anxiety gazes almost desirously at guilt and yet fears it. Guilt has for the eye of the spirit the fascinating power of the serpent's glance" (CA, 103). Possibility, like guilt and the abyss, is in one sense equivalent to nothing, which, like guilt or the abyss, is "the object of anxiety" (CA, 61) that provokes vertigo. The "anxious possibility of being able is "a nothing" (CA, 44). It should be noted, however, that Haufniensis dialectically differentiates possibility into its null and finite forms, respectively. On the one hand, possibility is "a nothing that entices every thoughtless m a n " (CA, 50); but it is also a kind of in finitude that can be differentiated, in turn, into "the selfish infinity of possibility" (CA, 61) which resides in anxiety and the "free in finitude" of faith (CA, 62). As a form of nothing, or as a kind of infinitude, possibility represents the disorientation associated with vertigo. Ambiguity is conjoined with vertigo in that the eye which looks down into the abyss (CA, 61) both fears and desires it, just as anx iety "gazes almost desirously at guilt and yet fears it" (CA, 103). Ambiguity, like sheer possibility, represents a state of disorienta tion. Finiteness is the illusory security at which freedom grasps when it "looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness [Svimlen] (CA, 61). Finiteness, in this context, is a false prophylaxis against ver tigo. The leap, or "qualitative leap," is related to vertigo in that, as a condition for the emergence of anxiety, as "the fall" itself (CA, 48), it is also a prerequisite for vertigo. Anxiety is "the final psy chological state from which sin breaks forth in the qualitative leap" (CA, 93). Conspicuously absent in The Concept of Anxiety is the leap of faith that might deliver the believer out of the disorientation of vertigo, a leap the very thought of which makes Johannes de Silentio dizzy (FT, 48, 50). The synthesis is related to vertigo in that anxiety, as "the diz ziness of freedom," "emerges when the spirit wants to posit the
synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility" (CA, 61). The synthesis is actually a double synthesis, since it comes into being "only when the spirit posits the first synthesis [of psyche and body] along with the second synthesis of the temporal and the eternal" (CA, 90-91). "As soon as the spirit is posited, the moment is present" (CA, 88). The moment, in turn, is "that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other" (CA, 89). Here ambi guity means disorientation, and the point at which time and eter nity touch each other represents that boundary limit at which human understanding fails and confusion, which may take the form of vertigo, ensues. As we have seen, the conceptual structure within which Kier kegaard has vertigo play an integral role is by no means confined to The Concept of Anxiety. The finiteness of human understanding, and the idea that there are limits that are approached only at the price of psychological or spiritual disorientation, are familiar themes to readers of the authorship. Nor should we overlook the poetic virtuosity that makes possible this conceptual symphony as a whole. The yawning abyss (svselgende Dyb) that occasions the vertigo of the eye in The Concept of Anxiety (1844) had already ap peared in Fear and Trembling (1843) as the difference between faith and its "furthest possibility," "a yawning abyss [svselgende Dyb] within which despair carries on its game" (FT, 20). A variation on the theme of the abyss in the same book begins the "Panegyric upon Abraham": "If there were no eternal consciousness in a man, if at the foundation of all there lay only a wildly seething power which writhing with obscure passions produced everything that is great and everything that is insignificant, if a bottomless void [bundles Tomhed] never satiated lay hidden beneath all—what then would life be but despair?" (FT, 15). Here Johannes de Silentio takes the intimate maelstrom of anxiety "in which freedom faints" (CA, 61) and projects it onto a metaphyscial scale. Where Virgilius Haufniensis associates the "abyss" with the self's anxious relation to it self, Johannes de Silentio associates the "void" with the self's anxious relation to an absent God. A second innovation on the t h e m e of vertigo occurs in the Philosophical Fragments (1844), where Climacus explores the con sequences of attempting to think the unthinkable:
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What then is the Unknown? It is the limit to which the Reason repeatedly comes, and in so far, substituting a static form of con ception for the dynamic, it is the different, the absolutely differ ent. But because it is absolutely different, there is no mark by which it could be distinguished. . . . Unless the Unknown (the God) re mains a mere limiting conception [Grsendse], the single idea of dif ference will be thrown into a state of confusion [forvirres], and becomes many ideas of many differences. The Unknown is then in a condition of dispersion (biaanoga), and the Reason may choose at pleasure from what is at hand and the imagination may suggest (the monstrous, the ludicrous, etc.). (PF, 44-45) The consequences of Reason's ignoring this limit are the chaos and disorientation of spiritual presumption: confusion, dispersion, and the riot of the imagination. 23 The Reason "goes astray \farer vild]" (PF, 46),24 just as the learner who encounters the Paradox, "who had before possessed self-knowledge, now becomes bewildered with respect to himself [bliver raadvild over sig selv]" (PF, 51). The dif ference between this vision and that of Vigilius Haufniensis is that, while the latter interprets anxiety as the "dizziness" of genuine freedom, Climacus portrays the "confusion" that issues from a spurious one. (C) Vertigo after Kierkegaard Nietzsche's improvisations upon the theme of vertigo in Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-85) combine the motifs of height, depth, the precipice, whirling, and giddiness on behalf of what Bachelard has called "the wholly vertical hierarchy of Nietzschean poetics," "this invincible preference for all that ascends." 25 Unlike Kierkegaard, Nietzsche propounds an ascensional ethos of heroic dimensions based on an invidious comparison of height and depth and the idea 23 It may be worth noting that the Reason's disorientation as described by Cli macus—a confusion which results from an illusory and self-destructive notion of independence from God—is similar to Hegel's portrayal of the excessive subjec tivity of romantic art, which is vulnerable to "freaks of imagination" {Abenteuern der Phantasie) (On Art, Religion, Philosophy, 116; Asthetik, 117). 24 In the Papirer (7, 2 B235, 162) Kierkegaard states that dizziness results from a man's having "gone astray" (faret vild) in the infinite; when the imagination (Phantasien) "runs wild" (kbe vild), the result is pagan doctrine (163). 25 Bachelard, L'Air et les songes, 173,178.
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that vertigo is a disease. By contrast, Kierkegaard offers neither a romanticism of elevation or ascension nor an interpretation of ver tigo as pathology per se. Vertigo in Kierkegaard's writing is better compared with the spiritual condition that is analyzed in The Sickness unto Death: "Pre cisely," says Anti-Climacus, "because the sickness of despair is to tally dialectical, it is the worst misfortune never to have that sickness" (SUD, 26). This is, of course, an ironic understatement, since not to have been in despair is not to have been a human being. Despair, while not "something that lies in human nature as such" [i Menneskenaturen som saadan]" (SUD, 16), nevertheless "lies in man himself [i Mennesket selv]" (SUD, 16), a crucial distinction that cor responds to the difference between non-dialectical (organic) sick ness and despair, which is a thoroughly dialectical "sickness of the spirit" (SUD, 24). Despair has a different dialectic (er. . . anderledes dialectisk) than organic sickness, because it is inherent in the struc ture of being human, and because "not to be in despair can in fact signify precisely to be in despair, and may signify having been res cued from being in despair" (SUD, 24). Both despair and vertigo are pathological only in the sense that they, like anxiety, 26 are the spiritual "sickness" of Kierkegaard's Christian anthropology. Ver tigo, says Anti-Climacus, is a condition "with which despair, al though it is qualitatively different, has much in common, since vertigo [svimmelhed] corresponds in the category of the psychical, to what despair is in the category of the spirit, and it lends itself to numerous analogies to despair" (SUD, 149). A detailed meditation on the relationship between vertigo and despair appears in the journals (SUD, 144-48). It is this "dialectical" aspect of vertigo that Nietzsche rejects. Nietzsche, like Kierkegaard, interprets vertigo as an existentially significant experience; man, says Zarathustra, is "a rope over an abyss." 27 But the apparent similarity to the concept of vertigo of fered by Vigilius Haufniensis or Anti-Climacus is misleading. For Nietzsche, vertigo does not signify the "dialectical ambiguity" (CA, 26
Anti-Climacus actually equates anxiety and despair (SUD, 25). Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978) 14: Also sprach Zarathustra (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1968) 10. 27
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112) of anxiety, but is rather an undialectical condition to be over come.28 Nietzsche, says Bachelard, contemplates the abyss in or der to feel more keenly his own freedom.29 Nietzsche situates man over the abyss, while Kierkegaard situates the abyss within man. Anxiety, says Vigilius Haufniensis, is "entangled freedom [en hildet Frihed]" (CA, 49), but Zarathustra's freedom is disentangled from the abyss. Anxiety is dialectical because Kierkegaard forces freedom and vertigo into a kind of identity, while Nietzsche sep arates them on behalf of freedom's heroic purity of will. A second, and stunning, coincidence of theme concerns the mental disorientation that results from the attempt to think the na ture of God. "God," says Zarathustra, "is a thought that makes crooked all that is straight, and makes turn [drehend] whatever stands. How? Should time be gone, and all that is impermanent a mere lie? To think this is a dizzy whirl [Wirbel und Schwindel] for human bones, and a vomit for the stomach; verily, I call it the turn ing sickness [die drehende Krankheit] to conjecture thus." 30 For Kier kegaard, God is an impossible thought; for Nietzsche, a perverse and sickening one. This sickness, or "vomit" (Erbrechen), is undi alectical precisely because it, unlike anxiety, is avoidable and not an ineluctable part of being human. Both thinkers consider it futile and absurd to attempt this thought, but their reasons for doing so are utterly different. Nietzsche's contempt for vertigo derives from a heroic ideal of valor that is wholly antithetical to Kierkegaard's Christian posi tion. "Courage [Muth]," says Zarathustra, "also slays dizziness [Schwindel] at the edge of abysses: and where does man not stand at the edge of abysses? Is not seeing always—seeing abysses?"31 When compared with Vigilius Haufniensis' doctrine of the abyss, this passage presents a fine paradox; for Nietzsche appears, like Kierkegaard, to integrate the abyss into the structure of being human. He does so by defining the human condition as a prox^For Kierkegaard, anxiety too is a condition to be overcome, but only at the extreme point at which faith is achieved. 29 Bachelard, L'Air et les songes, 169. ^Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 86; Also sprach Zarathustra, 106. 31 Ibid., 157,195.
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imity to the abyss, and by embedding the abyss within the faculty of seeing. Kierkegaard, too, relates vertigo "metaphorically" to the eye (Papirer 7:2 B 235,162). But Nietzsche's apparent identification of the eye and the abyss is not equivalent to its interiorization in the Kierkegaardian sense. The difference is that Nietzsche, like Hume and Kant, regards vertigo as a kind of illusion. For Nietzsche the abyss always remains the object of a will that may or may not possess the courage to "slay" vertigo; it is only the weak who per mit vertigo to insinuate itself into the faculty of will itself. Nietzscheanism, says Bachelard, is a " m a n i c h a e i s m of the imagination,"32 and inherent in it is the undialectical and even he roic confrontation between value and anti-value. By making it an object of the heroic will, Nietzsche achieves in effect a trans val uation of vertigo. Sartre's interpretation of vertigo in Being and Nothingness is taken directly from The Concept of Anxiety: First we must acknowledge that Kierkegaard is right; anguish is distinguished from fear in that fear is fear of beings in the world whereas anguish is anguish before myself. Vertigo is anguish to the extent that I am afraid of not falling over the precipice, but of throwing myself over. A situation provokes fear if there is a pos sibility of my life being changed from without; my being provokes anguish to the extent that I distrust myself and my own reactions in that situation.33 The difference between Kierkegaard and Sartre is one of empha sis. Kierkegaard stresses the phenomenology of disorientation be cause his primary (religious) concern is to establish the difference between finite man and an unthinkable God. But Sartre's primary interest is to show the fact of human freedom and the flight from freedom, the nostalgia of the for-itself for the condition of the initself (a nonhuman stasis). The temptation, as Kierkegaard points 32
Bachelard, L'Air et les songes, 185. Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Pocket Books, 1966) 65. Sartre is adept at applying the theme of vertigo meta phorically. He calls masochism "a species of vertigo, vertigo not before a precip ice of rock and earth but before the abyss of the Other's subjectivity" (492): the for-itself "experiences the vertigo of its own body. Or, if you prefer, this vertigo is precisely its way of existing its body" (505). 33
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out in the second journal entry on vertigo, is to construe a pressure that comes from within as one that comes from without. To avoid anguish and vertigo, says Sartre, it is necessary "that I apprehend in myself a strict psychological determinism." 34 Kierkegaard is far less interested both in the illusion that such a determinism repre sents and in the attendant wish to reify oneself. It is not Kierke gaard but Sartre, with his affinity for images of petrification, whose gaze is transfixed by the Biblical "heart of stone." Heidegger's treatment of vertigo in Being and Time is both oblique and objectifying. Unlike H u m e , Kant, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Sartre, Heidegger never places human subjectivity before the abyss a n d its peculiar temptations. The word that Nietzsche uses for vertigo (Wirbel) appears in Being and Time as "turbulence" in the famous section on the "falling" condition of Dasein, which, most specifically for our purposes, is "conceived ontologically as a kind of motion." 35 It should be noted that this section contains no fewer than three metaphorical terms that recall the theme of vertigo: "falling" (Verfallen), " d o w n w a r d p l u n g e " (Absturz), and "turbulence" (Wirbel). But, as noted above, Heideg ger refrains from exploiting the possibilities for phenomenological drama that vertigo offers to the author who is willing to place his subject at the edge of the precipice. "Falling" becomes "an exis tential characteristic of Dasein itself"; the "downward plunge" be comes D a s e i n ' s p l u n g i n g " o u t of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness"; and "turbulence" becomes that characteristic of the movement of fall ing, of the inauthenticity of the " t h e y " (das Man), that "makes manifest that the thrownness which can obtrude itself upon Da sein in its state-of-mind, has the character of t h r o w i n g and of movement." 36 In a word, the subjective drama of vertigo is sacri ficed to the willed sobriety of Heidegger's descriptive phenome nology. A second oblique approach to vertigo describes the situation of a subject in an "elevated" condition whose pathology, in one sense,
consists in his failure to become "dizzy." In Three Forms of Failed Dasein (Drei Formen missgliickten Daseins, 1956), the Swiss existential ("daseins-analytic") psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger describes three forms of schizophrenia (Verstiegenheit, Verschrobenheit, Manieriertheit) which he calls "universally human, immanent threats to m a n ' s being-in-the-word (Dasein)." These and other forms of "failed" Dasein, he maintains, are to be understood in terms of Heidegger's notion of "fallenness." 37 In its literal sense, Verstiegenheit describes a state that results from having "climbed too high" in the sense of having "lost one's way." 38 Binswanger conceives it as "a form of anthropological dis proportion, as a 'failure' of the relationship between height and breadth in the anthropological sense." More specifically, Verstiegenheit represents a peculiarly self-limiting mode of choice; it is "rooted in the excessive heights of decision that outweigh the breadth of 'experience,'" the result being a "strict attachment or bondage to a particular level or rung of human experience [Problematik]," "the 'absolutizing' of a single decision."39 In the first journal entry on vertigo, Kierkegaard notes that this condition can result from a person's having "lost his way \faret vild] in the infinite" (162). Verstiegenheit, however, represents—if only from the subject's point of view—the very opposite of such disorientation. In effect, Kierkegaard and Binswanger associate disorientation in t h e infinite, a n d the fanatical orientation of Verstiegenheit, respectively, with the theme of choice. For Kierke gaard, anxiety is the "dizziness of freedom," and as such it con-
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Ibid., 67-68. Heidegger, Being and Time, 224. 36 Ibid., 220, 223, 223. 35
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37
Ludwig Binswanger, Drei Formen missgliickten Daseins (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1956) X, XII. ^In a note to his own translation of this chapter, Jacob Needleman offers the following commentary: "The verb, sich versteigen, means to climb too high so as not to be able to return, to lose oneself among precipitous mountain peaks, to fly high, to go too far, etc.. . .To feel the full sense of the word, imagine a mountain climber trapped on a narrow ledge such that he can neither descend nor ascend, and from which he must be rescued by others" (Ludwig Binswanger, Being-inthe-World [New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970] 342n). For a brief analysis of Verstiegenheit, see Gerald N. Izenberg, The Existentialist Critique of Freud (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976) 281-83. 39
Being-in-the-World, 343, 347, 347, 347: Drei Formen missgliickten Daseins, 2, 6,
7,7.
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tains "the selfish infinity of possibility, which does not tempt like a choice" (CA, 61). In fact, vertigo signifies the absence of choice. Verstiegenheit, on the other hand, results from a choice the eccen tric exclusivity of which has stranded the individual at an (objec tively) arbitrary point within " t h e structure of the hierarchy ('Rangordnung') of Dasein's ontological possibilities."40 At the same time, the absolute character of this choice, by ruling out a confron tation with other possibilities, precludes the "vertigo" which ought to result from having "climbed too far." It is in this sense that the absence of vertigo signifies an existential, or ontological, pathol ogy. For from a Kierkegaardian standpoint, an immunity to ver tigo is synonymous with the inhuman. From a somewhat less somber standpoint, Verstiegenheit appears to be a pathological par ody of Nietzsche's cult of the ascent.
soul itself, which is between the two, is movement toward both— a movement by which it attempts to make itself immutable by means of geometry and dialectics, and a movement that consists in making itself perishable through the vertigo of desire. That "something evil" which is the body is, then, less a thing than the direction of a vertigo, the counterpole of the likeness of the soul to the idea. The soul makes itself like the order of perish able things, instead of "seeking refuge" in the ideas.41
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(D) Conclusion For Hume and Kant, vertigo was essentially epiphenomenal, occasioned by errors of thought or mental illness. Kierkegaard transformed the concept of vertigo by making its possibility syn onymous with what it is to be human. He did this by integrating vertigo into an original and influential concept of anxiety (CA, 61). Within the tradition he established, vertigo is a sign of the most fundamental crisis of the self, a radical (and, for Kierkegaard, re ligious) disorientation that is qualitatively different from the merely relative loss of reference that occurs when calculation fails. In another sense Kierkegaard's conception of vertigo is of an cient vintage. In his analysis of the symbolic significance of the body in the Phaedo, Paul Ricoeur points to Plato's conjoining of vertigo and the body in the following passage: "Then the soul is dragged by the body in the direction of those things that never preserve their identity; it wanders about, it is troubled, its head spins as if it were drunk, because it is in contact with things of that kind" (79c). Thus two existential movements are sketched, two movements governed by two "likenesses," by two "kinships," one with the perishable and one with the immutable. Just now we contrasted the Idea and the Body, in a naive way, as two "worlds"; but the
This intermediate position of the soul, suspended between the "two worlds" of Idea and Body to which it is simultaneously at tracted, reappears in Kierkegaard's second journal entry, which situates the possibility of vertigo (Svimmelhed) in the synthesis (Sammenssetningen) of body and soul and defines it as "an ambig uous common border" between them (260). Like Ricoeur's Plato, Kierkegaard liberates the meaning of the body from its literal, cor poreal aspect. Neither thinker will permit the body to be "simply an alibi for guilt, as it is when someone invokes character or he redity to excuse himself." The point is rather that the body "is on the border between the inner and the outer, it is essentially a pro ducer of effects," so that Plato "transmutes the body itself into a symbol of the passivity of the soul." 42 Both thinkers associate the body with the idea of a border, and consequently with the themes of ambiguity and the vertigo that (like anxiety) is an expression of the ambiguous. But Ricoeur's analysis of vertigo has a second phase that dis places its locus from the body to the unjust soul. In the Cratylus, he notes, Plato describes the deluded "givers of names" who "have themselves fallen into a sort of whirlpool where they are agitated and confused, and they have dragged us in after them" (439c). The real issue here is vertigo's relation to the falsification of language: The dizziness that seemed to mount from the body toward the soul, in a first philosophical approximation that was still close to the lan guage of myth, is really an evil of injustice, an evil of false dis course, which paralyzes the soul and delivers it up to the sorcery of its suffering. The body, then, is no longer the origin of evil, but only the "place" of the soul's captivity, while desire is "tempta41
'Drei Formen missglilckten Daseins, 8.
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The Symbolism of Evil, 339. «Ibid., 336, 336, 337.
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tion," and injustice is the origin of the evil by which the soul makes itself like its body. Injustice begets the dizziness that disrupts the original community of the soul with truth, and produces the de ceptive likeness of the soul to its body.43 When Vigilius Haufniensis speaks of "the ingenious sophistry [Sophistik] of anxiety" (CA, 113) or "the sophism [Sophisme] that crazed repentance is capable of producing at every moment" (CA, 116), he echoes Socrates' attack on the Sophists in the Gorgias (464 b ff.) and The Sophist.*4 Ricoeur/s reading of Plato has "false discourse" giving rise to "dizziness." But is there an equivalent argument in The Concept of Anxiety? Insofar as vertigo is both a sign and an analogue of anxiety, and "crazed repentance" the result of anxiety's having "throw[n] itself into the arms of repentance" (CA, 115) and therefore an analogue of anxiety itself, I believe there is such an argument. What must be emphasized here is Plato's idea that evil, in Ri coeur's words, "is the consecration of multiplicity in ourselves" rather than a coherent unity. 45 Kierkegaard, who speaks of "the multiplicity of sin" (WL, 264), embraced this idea with a good deal of passion. Vigilius Haufniensis, to take another example, speaks with poorly concealed sarcasm of "the foaming multifariousness of life [Livets skummende Mangfoldighed]" (CA, 23). The point is that, while multiplicity is a source of disorientation, anxiety and vertigo are its symptoms. As "false discourse," sophistry promotes a mul tiplicity of effects that envelop the individual in a glittering and fragmented world of illusion. Kierkegaard's interest in "false dis course" is also evident in Two Ages (1846), which is filled with crit icisms of degenerate speech forms such as "gossip and rumor" (Bysnak og Rygte), "talkativeness" (Snaksomhed), and "pure drivel" (Sladder) (TA, 63, 64, 106). Finally, in Vigilius Haufniensis' text anxiety, crazed repentance, and the demonic are analogues. Given this analogical procedure, the real meaning of vertigo within Kier kegaard's discourse must be found within the structure of a liter ary idiom that is itself a "producer of effects"—in short, a poetics.
43
Ibid., 341. "Kierkegaard has appended a long footnote on the Sophists (CA, 82-83). 45
Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, 343.
XI
Despair and Everyday ness: Kierkegaard's Corrective Contribution to Heidegger's Notion of Fallen Everydayness Dan Magurshak In the nineteenth century, Soren Kierkegaard explicitly seized upon the problem of existence as an existentiell problem, and thought it through in a penetrating fashion. But the existential problematic was so alien to him that, as regards his ontology, he remained completely dominated by Hegel and by ancient philos ophy as Hegel saw it. Thus, there is more to be learned philosoph ically from his 'edifying' writings than from his theoretical ones— with the exception of his treatise on the concept of anxiety.1
M
ore than a half century after the publication of Being and Time, the extent of Heidegger's debt to the writings of Kierke gaard still remains obscure. Heidegger says little in his published work regarding the matter, and preliminary indications are that the unpublished material in Marbach will shed no light on the subject.
'Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Rob inson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962) 494 ( = n. vi to H 235). In subsequent citations of Being and Time, the letter "H" designates the marginal pagination found in the Macquarrie-Robinson translation. This pagination refers to the 7th German ed. (1953) of the work and enables the reader to return readily to the original text.
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The note quoted above allegedly dissolves any obscurity about this debt. It certainly acknowledges the insightfulness of Kierke gaard's reflections, and it admits that one can learn a great deal from the so-called "edifying works." If this is the case, the debt is duly acknowledged, and any further investigation of the matter is the busywork of an uninspired history of ideas. Such a response is indeed possible, but it would overlook at least three issues raised by the aforementioned note. First, the remarks are inconsistent. It is unclear how an authorship so "completely dominated by Hegel" and his version of ancient philosophy could succeed in thinking existence through "in a penetrating fashion." Even if it investigated existence only "existentielly," such author ship would have to be partially free from such domination. Sec ond, the praise bestowed upon Kierkegaard is almost damning in its faintheartedness. Focusing upon shortcomings rather than ac complishments, the note does not acknowledge sufficiently the extent to which many of Kierkegaard's most important "existentiell" insights pervade Heidegger's "existential" analysis. A care ful reading of Being and Time along with, for example, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, allows one to formulate the following hypothesis: Heidegger, deeply influenced by the work of this "religious writer," made this work his own to such an ex tent that he failed to realize how much his own existential reflec tions relied upon Kierkegaard's writings. To be sure, Heidegger, in keeping with his own path of thinking, appropriates and trans forms the insights for his own purposes; nonetheless, a sense of intellectual integrity demands that the extent of the debt be care fully spelled out and properly acknowledged. Finally, the note suggests that the author of Being and Time has learned more from Kierkegaard's "edifying" work than from his "theoretical" efforts. Such a claim is rather puzzling until we re alize that a work such as The Sickness unto Death, a work for "up building (edification) and awakening" is something of a sourcebook for many of the insights of Being and Time. This paper attempts to show to what extent Being and Time relies upon the insights con tained in The Sickness unto Death. This is evident, first, in the gen eral structures uncovered by Heidegger's existential analysis and then more particularly in his notion of fallenness or ensnarement
(die Verfallenheit). The paper then suggests that, when compared with Anti-Climacus's reflections on despair, Heidegger's analysis of ensnarement inadequately describes the complexity of the phe nomena.
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(A) Existence: Its Structure and Dynamics If one compares the general description of h u m a n existence found in The Sickness unto Death with that found in Being and Time, one realizes how frequently aspects of the former description pro vide the basis, albeit somewhat transformed, for the latter expli cation. To be sure, The Sickness unto Death does not discuss human existence as the disclosure of being. Nor does it emphasize man's being in the world, that is, his dwelling among things and with other people. Still, the structure and dynamics of existence that come to light in its discussions of becoming oneself, despair, and sin are prototypical for the existential portions of Being and Time. The relationship between the two works is already evident in the pithy description of "Christian heroism" contained in the pref ace to The Sickness unto Death: "It is Christian heroism—a rarity, to be sure—to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual hu man being, alone before God, alone in this prodigious strenuousness and this prodigious responsibility" (SUD, 5). Here one already encounters certain notions—venture, self-becoming, wholeness, individuality, solitariness, and responsibility—that challenge tra ditional concepts of human nature and that hint at an outline of ex istence later fleshed out in Being and Time. Existence is described as a task, as something to accomplish that is not without risk. It is a "venture" in the process of self-becoming, for "The self is a con scious synthesis . . . whose task is to become itself . . . " (SUD 2930). Later, Being and Time notes that a person is ontically distin guished from other beings in that his being is at issue in its very being; that is, each person has his being as his own to actualize, as a task of self-becoming. 2 Existing is always a matter of choosing oneself, winning or losing oneself, or only seeming to win one self.3 Also, one must venture "wholly" in a twofold sense: one must 2
Ibid., H12. Ibid.,H42.
3
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commit oneself totally to the task and in doing so strive for a cer tain existentiell wholeness, a certain self-integration. Existence thus requires a total effort at "getting it together." This, too, is echoed in Being and Time's concern with "existentiell" being-a-whole. To become oneself, to be authentic, is to exist in a completely lucid selfpossession that is achieved on one's own. 4 The Sickness unto Death also stresses that the task can be achieved only "alone before God"; it "can be done only through the relationship to God" in which the command, "Thou shalt believe," singles out a person from his generation, the public, and the march of world history and de mands a decision for which he alone is responsible. He must be come the specific individual that he is, this historical, psychophysical, social, responsible individual standing before God. While Being and Time says nothing about matters of faith, it, too, main tains that the task of self-becoming demands a certain recovery of freedom that comes from disengaging oneself from the everyday public mode of being. 5 Since, however, Being and Time contains no discussion of God, it credits a lucid sense of one's own mortality with the capacity for singling out the individual from the crowd. 6 The remarkable insemination of Being and Time by The Sickness unto Death regarding the structure and dynamics of existence be comes more striking as the reading proceeds. According to the lat ter work, a person has to synthesize certain aspects of existence in becoming a self. He must harmoniously integrate the infinity of imaginative abstraction with the finitude of being with others, the possibility of freedom with the necessity of one's historical, psy cho-physical, social existence, and the eternal aspect of self with temporality. Later, Being and Time asserts that a person is thrown projection, that is, a synthesis of "necessity" and "possibility" whose appropriate self-integration must constantly deal with the threats of the One, that is, of the everyday mode of existing as one of the crowd. According to The Sickness unto Death, a man is also potentially "spirit," and this crucial factor enables self-becoming. "Spirit is the self" and "The self is a relation that relates to itself
. . . " and which "has the task of becoming itself in freedom" (SUD, 13, 35). In short, "The self is freedom" (SUD, 29) in that it appro priates, integrates, and balances all aspects of existence in an on going self-development. Herein lies its "prodigious responsibility." Again, it is precisely such a capacity, no longer referred to as "spirit," that is central to the existential analysis of Being and Time. In a genuine experience of anxiety, a person is disclosed to himself as "being-towards [his] ownmost potentiality-for-being, that is, [his] being-free-for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself,. . . [his] being-free-for (propensio in) the authenticity of its being . . . . 7 As the analysis continues, such freedom is described as the potentiality for resoluteness, "this reticent self-projection upon one's ownmost being-guilty in which one is ready for anxi ety," but the explication provided still focuses upon the integra tion of oneself as thrown (necessary), projective (possible), and guilty, that is, finite in the sense of being mortal, being constantly vulnerable to not being oneself, and being "derived," that is, not being self-created. This matter of existential derivation is significant for both texts. As The Sickness unto Death puts it, "The h u m a n self is . . . a de rived, established relation . . . t h a t . . . in relating itself to itself re lates itself to another" (SUD, 13-14). This other is of course "the power that established" the self, that is, God (SUD, 14). One can completely actualize this potential for self-realization only when "in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests trans parently in the power that established it" (SUD, 14,131). In his very being, a human being is related to the power. Being and Time also recognizes "derivation" but in a de-theologized sense. A man finds himself thrown into existence. He finds " t h a t " he is, "but the whence" and the "whither" remain in darkness. 8 The sheer facticity of its existence "stares [him] in the face with the inexorability of an enigma," and all that he "knows" is that he is not the basis of his own thrown abandonment to existence. 9 In place of the estab lishing relationship to the power, then, Being and Time focuses upon
"Ibid., UK 46, 61 (H 236ff., 302ff.). 5 Ibid., UK 55-58, 60 (H 270ff., 295ff.). 6 Ibid., UK 53, 63 (H 260ff., 310ff.).
7
Ibid., H 188. Ibid„ H 134. 9 Ibid., H 136. 8
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man's relation to being in all of its puzzling, ambiguous complex ity. Like The Sickness unto Death, it explicates and explores the re lation to something other than oneself as the essential, intrinsic aspect of the humanness of human being. The manner in which Being and Time explicates the existential dynamics of initial ignorance, awakening, and recovery also seems indebted to The Sickness unto Death. According to the latter work, a person begins life, and all too often continues to live, in self-ig norance, disequilibrium, and the despair of spiritlessness that de ceptively puts itself forth as the fullest possible life. Ignorance, the lowest form of despair, "is the most common form in the world" (SUD, 45). To live in ignorance is "to be unaware of being defined as spirit" (SUD, 25). Similarly, Being and Time recognizes that from the start and most of the time thereafter a person lives his day-to day life as one person among others dominated by the prevailing public interpretation of existence. He does not realize his own unique existential possibilities because he is ignorant, often will fully so, of his potential. Throughout its analysis of the myriad forms of despair, The Sickness unto Death also describes an impor tant willful aspect in not-being-oneself. Still, the seeds of recovery are already present. Although a person is initially spiritless and perhaps superficially happy, "deep, deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is de spair" (SUD, 25). By means of anxiety, a person awakens to him self as possibly self-integrating and is given the opportunity lucidly to accept responsibility for his own existence. In Being and Time, it is also anxiety that accompanies every day-to-day, complacent lack of self-realization and that, when it is genuinely experienced, dis closes one's potentiality for freely being oneself. Once such an anxious awakening occurs, one can, according to The Sickness unto Death, either begin the task of genuine self-reali zation or slide back into a higher, that is, less ignorant form of de spair. A person may stall at various stages along the way, but ultimately his journey ends either in faith on the one hand or in demonic despair on the other. In each case, the outcome is due to his own responsible choice. Again, Being and Time says basically the same thing. Awakening through the mood of anxiety that char acterizes the call of existential conscience, a person may choose to
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live resolutely or to return to the pseudo-security of everyday life; but he is now responsible for whatever he does with his life. (B) About Day-to-Day Living The most interesting aspect of the comparison of these texts lies in their respective analyses of everyday, nonauthentic, or despair ing existence. Here one sees not only another debt that Being and Time owes to The Sickness unto Death, but also how much more the former could have learned from the latter regarding the complex ities and the nuances of ordinary daily life. Being and Time's description of everyday being in the world shows remarkable similarities both to The Sickness unto Death's general de scription of despair and to its specific characterization of "finitude's despairing lack of infinitude" (SUD, 33-35). Both texts assert that for most of the time, most people are not themselves—they do not re alize their ownmost potential in the course of their lives. In addition to being born into an initial condition of self-ignorance that prevents self-integration, they become ensnared in the prevailing, common interpretation of life that tends to reinforce continually a lack of gen uine self-awareness. This tendency not to be oneself, according to both accounts, is a universal phenomenon constitutive of existence. Furthermore, both texts see this tendency rooted in the fact that a person always exists with other people. This being-with-others—part of what The Sickness unto Death calls finitude—is an essential aspect of existence. Every person is born into and educated by a particular society that provides him with the predominant, common interpretation of life. Every indi vidual thereby absorbs an outlook communicated by other partic ular individuals but created by no one in particular. This outlook is the anonymous "collective wisdom" of a particular society that has ready answers for any of life's questions. Thus a person al ways knows what "they" say about what "one" should do and how one should go about it. He learns what "one" should do in order to fit in successfully, but in doing so, the person is also learning how to be "average," that is how to "level" himself out in order to be "just one more man" (SUD, 33-34).10 10
Ibid., H127.
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Viewed in light of what a person could be, a life dominated by the common view of existence is a life in which a person has "lost" or "forgotten" himself (SUD, 33) or has yet to find himself." Such a life is fragmented, non-integrated, or dispersed in a two-fold sense. First, the lack of a lucid, abiding awareness of every aspect of concrete existence leads to a lack of completeness in one's selfconstancy. Second, it causes the person to scatter himself in en gagements and projects that are not appropriate for him. He dis perses and expends energies in pursuit of what " o n e " should pursue. A person living in this way is not only alienated from his ownmost potential and cut off from a possible, genuine self-dis covery; that individual also evades the burdensome task of genu inely existing by means of the relatively undemanding existence as one of the crowd. Such living indulges a person's tendency to "take it easy" because it is simply "easier and safer" to be like the others (SUD, 33).12 According to both texts, ordinary everyday life trades in illu sion. It is "cozy" and "comfortable" to exist finitely as one of the crowd, as "a great success in the world" who is "just what a per son is supposed to b e " (SUD, 34,35). "Everyday familiarity" with the world is a "tranquilized self-security," a "self-evident beingat-home" that enables such a life to pass itself off as genuine, full, concrete living. 13 Because this living conceals its real nature, it is doubly dangerous. As The Sickness unto Death points out, this sort of living is like a sickness that spreads unabated because a pa tient's apparent good health—in this case, a rich, concrete, worldly life—provides no grounds for suspecting that illness is present. As was mentioned earlier, Being and Time follows The Sickness unto Death by contending that this cozy, comfortable, everyday being-at-home in the publicly interpreted world is not completely unaware of or undisturbed by its lack of genuine self-realization. Nonetheless, both accounts stress that most people evade and even repress any sort of sobering, self-disclosive moment of awareness. Instead of resolutely engaging in genuine self-realization on the
basis of such revealing moments, they transform the original lack of self-awareness due to immaturity or lack of attention into a will ful flight from oneself. Vaguely aware but fearful of the demands of existence, they choose not to be themselves, to continue to live in a non-integrated, misrelated, non-authentic life. There are, however, differences in these respective analyses of the phenomena of everydayness. First, Being and Time emphasizes that everyday life is always a day-to-day being in the world of con cerns with other people and among things. At issue, then, is not only genuine and complete self-awareness, but also a genuine dis covery of the being of other beings and the disclosure of being in general. When a person exists as merely one of the crowd, he fails to disclose genuinely the being of any being. Lost in the idle talk that embodies the dominant, public mode of existence, he never deals with things as they show themselves from themselves; rather, he takes them as the public view permits them to be seen. 14 How ever, if he subsequently chooses a life of genuine self-disclosure, the realization of his ownmost possibilities also enables the genu ine discovery of all other beings as well as the sense of being in general. Precisely what this means in daily life remains unclarified in Being and Time, but the intrinsic connection between genuine selfdisclosure and the disclosure of other beings emphasizes that a person, whether fully actualized or not, is always related to other people and things. The Sickness unto Death, on the other hand, describes finiteness as an engagement with others in the world of concerns, but it does so in a way that implies that all being-with-others is in some sense despair. Yet it is clear that even if a person achieves a resolute faith, such self-integrating existence would still embody finitude in the sense of being-with-others. A complete account of existence would therefore demand some explication of genuinely integrated fini tude. It would also demand some account of a life of faith as man ifested in all aspects of existence, particularly in a person's daily concern for himself and for other beings. To be sure, if one reads The Sickness unto Death as but a portion of the larger text of the en tire pseudonymous authorship, one finds an important attempt to
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"Ibid., H 43. 12 Ibid., H 127. "Ibid., H 188-89.
"Ibid., IK 35, 38 (H167ff., 175ff )
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deal with a matter similar to this in "an edifying divertissement" of the Postscript (CUP, 417-446). Still, given the emphasis placed upon the inexpressible inwardness of the life of faith in this latter work, the problem remains. Second, one finds an over-simplification of the phenomena of life in Being and Time that is missing in The Sickness unto Death. Through out its analyses, Being and Time refers to three basic modes of exis tence, that is, authenticity, inauthenticity, and an indifference to this distinction. However, when the distinction between genuine inau thenticity and indifference is the issue, the text is at best inconsistent and at worst guilty of conflating the two phenomena.15 Attempting to describe everydayness accurately, Being and Time calls daily life "indifferent" or "average." It later characterizes this indifference as an indifference to the distinction between inauthentic and authentic existence. Such living is neither authentic nor inauthentic. 16 The discussion then turns to the "self" of such everydayness, the everyday modes of its disclosure, and other re lated matters in a way that leads one to expect that day-to-day, av erage, indifferent existence is a phenomenon independent of either authentic or inauthentic existence. While these latter ways of life are characterized by a more or less explicit acceptance or rejection of one's ownmost potential for being, the former mode is charac terized by a lack of awareness of one's existence as an issue. In av erage existence, a person is "fascinated" by, ensnared by, or absorbed in public, worldly concerns. He is primarily concerned with things and other people such that he is "forgetful," or even ignorant, of his potential for more profound self-becoming. He is not yet himself, but neither is he fleeing this possibility.17 A person 15
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My concern for Being and Time's phenomenologically inadequate account of what is here called non-authenticity began in my dissertation ("Freedom and Death: A Critical Analysis of Heidegger's Notion of Sein-zum Tode in Sein und Zeit" [Northwestern University, 1976] and continued in an unpublished paper ("About Everyday Life: An Existential Critique of Heidegger's Analysis of Inauthentic and Authentic Existence") written in 1981. In his recent book, however (The Eclipse of the Self [Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981]), Michael Zimmerman develops the same concern. 16 Heidegger, Being and Time, H 53, 232. 17 Ibid., H43.
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must first awaken to his potential in anxious self-awareness before he can become genuinely either authentic or inauthentic. Being and Time, however, does not provide an analysis of this indifference. While it separates indifferent day-to-day existence and genuine inauthenticity, it nonetheless confuses these phenomena with one another. For example, the analysis of the One (das Man) as the mode of everyday existence says that in everydayness a per son has neither found nor lost himself; yet, the next statement identifies this indifference as "inauthenticity."18 The same incon sistency emerges in the analyses of idle talk (die Gerede) and curi osity (das Neugier) as everyday modes of discourse and sight. Again, the reader expects an explication of the difference between "av erage," "everyday" discourse and sight and modes of these phe nomena genuinely inauthentic since the text provides hints in that direction.19 Nonetheless, it finally asserts that both idle talk and curiosity characterize everyday disclosedness even as they consti tute inauthentic existence. This identification becomes even more explicit in the analysis of "falling" as the basic structure of every day disclosure. As Being and Time puts it, "This 'movement' of Dasein in its own being we call its 'downward plunge' (Absturz). Dasein plunges out of itself into itself, into the groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness." 20 Remaining in the throw of the thrownness as long at it exists, Dasein "is sucked into the turbu lence of they's inauthenticity."21 There is, then, no consistent cri terion to distinguish indifferent from inauthentic everydayness. Being and Time's analysis of anxiety further exacerbates the problem. It indicates that Dasein's "absorption in the 'they' and in the 'world' of its concern makes manifest something like a fleeing of Dasein in the face of itself—of itself as an authentic potentialityfor-being-itself."22 Everyday absorption in the world is now de scribed as more than an indifference to the matter of genuine selfbecoming; in the falling of everyday disclosure, " . . . we flee into 18
Ibid., H 128. "Ibid., H 168, 172. 2 °Ibid., H 178. 21 Ibid., H 179. ^Ibid., H 184.
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the 'at-home' of publicness, we flee in the face of the 'not-athome' ' ,23 Everyday life is now a "deliberate," motivated flight from oneself, and this is precisely the essence of inauthentic existence. By the time the analysis of everyday, disclosive being-in-the-world is complete, the p h e n o m e n o n has become the self-evasive con cealment of Dasein's potential to exist as authentic mortal freedom. After this, there are still allusions to everyday indifference, but the analysis now recognizes existence only as either inauthentic or au thentic. Because it provides no clear explication of indifference, the analysis in Being and Time does not discuss other ways in which a person may not be himself, that is, in which a p e r s o n may be "nonauthentic" rather than inauthentic. If, however, one now ex amines the extended analysis of despair in The Sickness unto Death, the complex and varied modes of non-authentic everyday life come to light.
ing back to itself in the finitizing process" (SUD, 30). However, in infinitude's despair, which is to lack finitude, an individual be comes "fantastic"; he can lose himself in an infinite or 'imaginary' feeling, knowing, or willing, and live in a pursuit of "abstract" possibilities that fails to come to terms with the limits of existence. He can, for example, become so intoxicated by the God-relation ship that he fails to realize this relation in carrying out his daily, concrete existence. Here, as in any willing, it should be the case that "the more infinite it becomes in purpose and determination, the more personally present and contemporary it becomes in the small part of the task that can be carried out at once . . . the infi nitely small part of the work that can be accomplished this very day, this very hour, this very moment" (SUD, 32). Without this, a per son exists in a non-integrating misrelation to his infinitude. Being and Time never discusses this sort of non-authenticity, but its notions can lend a little more clarity to the phenomenon. A per son's imagination is one aspect of projective being, that is, it con stitutes being-ahead-of-oneself—the futural orientation of human being—because it discloses possibility. When an individual exists fantastically, he forgets his t h r o w n n e s s , that is, his existence bounded and defined as a social, situated being in a world. To be sure, he cannot really escape these boundaries while alive, but he can, with or without artificial stimulants, "space out" and live an abstract, isolated life—an idiosyncratic, totally disconnected exis tence whose extreme form is some form of madness. Such a life does not lose oneself to the public. It is, rather, an individualization gone awry, a commitment to a Quixotic, impossible dream that fails to appropriate the finitude constitutive of existence. Such life may appear quite normal to others since a person may still appear to live as others do, but the inward detachment from finitude si lently and imperceptibly continues to prevent the person from be coming a self. Finitude's despair, on the other hand, lacks infinitude, that is, the imaginative, infinitizing disengagement necessary for becom ing a self. This finitude, according to The Sickness unto Death is pre cisely the levelling-being-with-others that Being and Time describes as the existence of the One. An individual is "completely finitized" by "becoming a number instead of a self, just one more man,
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According to The Sickness unto Death, everyone is in some form of despair at some time in life, and most people spend almost all their lives in some less developed form of this "self-dis-integration." This text considers the self-misrelation of despair from two aspects: First, in terms of the formal constituents of existence; and second, in terms of a person's degree of self-awareness about his spiritual condition. The text claims first that a person exists in a misrelation to him self as long as he has not integrated his infinitude with his fini tude, and these in turn with the possible and necessary aspects of his existence. Given these factors, a person can suffer a despair fo cused upon infinitude, finitude, necessity, or possibility, each of which is a form of non-authenticity, of not-being-oneself. First consider the despair of infinitude and finitude. H u m a n being is both finite and infinite, a being among others and like others, but at the same time the being who imagines, w h o infinitizes himself by means of his imagination. Imagination enables self-reflection because it conceives of possibilities and thereby disengages a per son from the actual, finite situation. In order to become a "con crete" person, an individual must experience "an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite com^Ibid., H 189.
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just one more repetition of this everyday "Einerlei" (one and the same) (SUD, 33). This sort of despair "seems to permit itself to be tricked out of itself by 'the others.'" In this mode of existence, an individual "forgets himself" in worldly e n g a g e m e n t s and be comes "just what a person is supposed to b e " in the eyes of the world. Such despair is not recognized for what it is because life ap pears "cozy and comfortable." Yet the individual has mortgaged himself to the world, and in all of the self-seeking that governs his worldly success, he still lacks a genuine self. Despair in this form comes closest to what Being and Time later describes as inauthenticity, as falling, everyday absorption in the world; and the simi larities b e t w e e n this account a n d the description of finitude's despair are obvious. Such despair is, however, according to The Sickness unto Death, only one of several ways in which an individ ual may be non-authentic. 24 The text then considers the despair of possibility and necessity respectively. As a limited existence with an imagination that en genders the "self's possibility," an individual is both possibility and necessity. This is what makes possible the task of becoming one self: "Insofar as it is itself, it is the necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility" (SUD, 35). Like infin itude's despair, possibility's despair is a matter of losing oneself in possibility, but unlike the former, the latter is not a loss of oneself to a particular, fantastical, unbounded possibility. It is, rather, a floundering in the sea of myriad possibilities without choosing a specific possibility to realize. As time slips away, nothing becomes actual, "eventually everything seems possible," and this abyss of possibility "swallows u p the self:" "The instant something ap pears to be possible, a new possibility appears, and finally these phantasmagoria follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible. . . . " What such an indi vidual lacks is "necessity;" that is, "What is missing is essentially
the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations" (SUD, 36). As The Sickness unto Death imaginatively expresses it, "Possibility is like a child's invi tation to a party: the child is willing at once, but the question now is whether the parents will give permission—and as it is with par ents, so it is with necessity" (SUD, 37). Later, Being and Time will also implicitly acknowledge this connection between possibility and one's thrown (necessary), specific being in the world when it in sists that the anticipation of death brings Dasein back to his ownmost, t h r o w n , concrete possibilities for existence. Such selfawareness is said to scatter all "accidental and provisional" pos sibilities in favor of those that are "favored" by one's unique, con cretely limited potential. 25 Nonetheless, it overlooks the fact that an individual may be non-authentic not only by falling prey to the public world, but also by losing himself in possibilities through an inability to come to terms with his own limitations. This means that even when a person is radically individualized by confronting his own mortality, he may remain non-authentic by being unable to decide where to commit himself. Necessity's despair, on the other hand, has to do with the lack of a sense of possibility. When an individual perceives himself as having no future, life becomes either totally fated or trivial. Such existence is still another form of nonauthenticity—one particularly suited for evading the responsibility of self-determination. This, too, remains undiscussed in Being and Time. To this point, The Sickness unto Death describes what it calls the abstract forms of despair. Now it considers them under the aspect of consciousness or self-awareness, for all actual cases of despair have to do with self-conscious human beings. This matter of selfawareness also contributes to the dynamics of despair since "The ever-increasing intensity of despair depends upon the degree of consciousness or is proportionate to its increase: the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair" (SUD, 42). The issue now is to what extent an individual is aware of himself as a synthesis whose responsibility it is to create a self grounded in the establishing power and in what manner he responds to this
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24 It must be noted here that if one wanted to appreciate fully the debt that Hei degger's analysis of inauthentic everydayness owes to Kierkegaard's authorship, one would have to include a careful study of Two Ages as well. See John M. Hoberman's article, "Kierkegaard's Two Ages and Heidegger's Critique of Moder nity," in Two Ages, ed. Robert L. Perkins, vol. 14 of International Kierkegaard Commentary (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1984) 223-58.
!
Heidegger, Being and Time, H 384.
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demand. The possibilities here range from "spiritlessness," that is, sheer ignorance about the possibility of becoming a self, to lucid, self-possessed defiance of the constituting power. Yet even as the text carefully distinguishes the various modes of nonauthentic and inauthentic existence, it realized that such a classification cannot be airtight: "Actual life is too complex merely to point out abstract contrasts such as that between a despair that is completely un aware of being so and a despair that is completely aware of being so. Very often the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state, though here again the nuances are myriad," for "there is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay be tween knowing and willing . . . " (SUD, 48). In other words, a person may be aware of his self-misrelation and yet not acknowl edge forthrightly to himself what is at stake. He may "keep him self in the dark" by diversions, by losing himself in daily concerns, and not even realize that he is evading himself. On the other hand, he may be quite aware of what he is doing, do it shrewdly, and still be unaware of how grave his spiritual condition is. In any case, most people live most of their lives in one of any number of forms of despair constituting a continuum of progres sively more complex modes of nonauthenticity. This fact chal lenges the adequacy of any existential analysis recognizing only an either-or scheme of authentic and inauthentic existence. On the lowest end of the continuum of a person's knowledge of despair and, more importantly, of the degree of self-awareness that he has of his own condition as despair, there is "the despair that is ignorant of being despair or the despairing ignorance of having a self and an eternal self" (SUD, 42). It is just such an ex istence that Being and Time hints at in its unexplicated notion of in difference. At this level an individual is ignorant of his selfmisrelation, his lack of self-integration, and yet he is in despair. 26
He does not k n o w it, but if ever his superficial day-to-day con tentment, "the enchantment of illusion is over . . . then despair . . . immediately appears as that which lay underneath" (SUD, 44). This despairing ignorance is the "most common in the world" (SUD, 45), and it arises when a person, lacking any sense of being spirit, lives entirely in terms of what is pleasant and unpleasant. Considering himself to be happy, he even resents any suggestion that some thing is seriously amiss. His indignation, however, arises not be cause he "knows" that he is deceiving himself—he is not self-aware enough for that—but because the suggestion seems to him so to tally unfounded. The causes of ignorance of self are manifold. There is the developmentally immature ignorance of a child, but also the ignorance of a " p a g a n " society—a "spiritually immature" com munity that does not provide an occasion for the self-awakening necessary for becoming spirit. Then there is the ignorance of in attention d u e to one's preoccupation with external " b u s y n e s s . " There may be other causes as well, but at least in these cases, not being oneself is unlikely to be based upon repression, self-evasion, or some lack of existential courage. As a matter of fact, one has not yet awakened to the task of self-becoming. One cannot, therefore, speak of the despair of innocent ignorance as despair proper since what The Sickness unto Death later defines as the essential ingredi ent—the willing not to be oneself—is clearly lacking because the appropriate self-awareness is lacking. To be sure, the text clearly asserts that " d e e p , deep within the most secret hiding place of happiness there dwells also anxiety, which is despair;" that is, "Despite its illusory security and tranquility, all immediacy is anx-
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26
Once it is asserted that the one in despair need not know of his condition in order to be in despair, despair is no longer identifiable with affective attunement or mood. Instead, despair becomes a "phenomenon" in two senses. Insofar as a person experiences his despair, it is still a phenomenon of affective self-disclo sure, a mood or an attunement. However, when one is genuinely ignorant of the fact, then it is a phenomenon only for the observer who "sees" the disequilibrium that the subject does not. "Despair," as The Sickness Unto Death describes it, is fun-
damentally a way of being in the world that may or may not be disclosed to one self as despair. It thus becomes a theoretical construct as well as an actual phenomenon. Another question arises concerning the relationship between anx iety and despair. Traditionally, anxiety in the pseudonymous texts is taken as a lower form of self-awareness than despair; but here, it is precisely anxiety that first discloses to the spiritless individual that he is in despair. As he becomes more self-aware, it is not clear whether anxiety is left behind or whether even the most highly developed form of despair is always also anxious in face of the possibility that threatens one's present mode of existence, there is that nothing of the pos sibility disclosed by anxiety. The "nothing," the nonactuality of possibility, can either be that of the possibility of freedom itself or that of a very specific possi bility, for example, of grounding oneself by a leap that forsakes worldly security in face of unforeseen consequences. Thus even in despair one can be anxious.
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iety . . . " (SUD, 25). Yet even here it seems as if the anxiety is not so much an experience as it is the possibility of anxiety's occur rence should the appropriate circumstances come about. If this is the case, one can hardly explicate this mode of life as inauthentic. It is, at best, ignorant, innocent nonauthenticity. Admittedly, a genuine case of such innocent ignorance, with the exception of children, may be rare. In conscious despair, on the other hand, there is a conscious unwillingness to be oneself either from weakness or from defi ance. For this to be the case, a person must have a requisite degree of self-awareness and relatively sufficient understanding of de spair. Depending on the degree of presence of these two factors, a person's daily life may be anything from a repressed self-evasion to a lucid, concerted effort not to be oneself. It is in some forms of conscious despair that The Sickness unto Death locates what Being and Time later calls fallen everydayness, but again, only as one possible way to be nonauthentic. According to The Sickness unto Death, the lowest form of con scious unwillingness to be oneself occurs in a life of pure imme diacy. Here despair is a conscious despair over something earthly, a despair that is still not aware of its ownmost potential, the self's eternal aspect. It is the despair of one who lives "in immediate con nection with 'the other,' of one whose self is totally defined by ex ternals and experienced merely as the subjective role of immediate cravings and desires" (SUD, 51). The aim in life is the pleasant. In the language of Being and Time, this despair belongs to one who is totally absorbed in the world as "they" have interpreted it. Such a person has yet to be disturbed by anxious self-awareness, so when he does "despair" it is not properly despair at all. Some external event strikes a blow at his immediate goals; that is, he is thwarted in some worldly desire, and loses hope. In time, he either gains his end after all and thereby recovers or else he adjusts to his loss by learning "to copy others," to behave as " o n e " should in such cir cumstances (SUD, 52). In this sense, it is a version of finitude's de spair of infinitude discussed above. In any case, he never awakens to the issue of genuine self-be coming, and for this reason, this despair is hardly above the spiritlessness of unconscious despair. Since it does, however, possess
a vague albeit mistaken sense of despair, The Sickness unto Death recognizes this level as an advance over unconscious despair. When immediacy has a quantity of reflection, the matter be comes more interesting. It is here that a person first engages in what Being and Time calls falling, self-evasive everydayness. In spite of calling unconscious despair the commonest form of despair, The Sickness unto Death labels despair at this level as the "most common form" and describes it as follows:
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A certain degree of reflection is indeed present here, consequently a certain degree of pondering over one's self. With this certain de gree of reflection begins the act of separation whereby the self be comes aware of itself as essentially different from the environment and external events and from their influence upon it. But this is only to a certain degree. (SUD, 54) Unlike the later analyses of Being and Time that posit either a com plete, radical individualization or a total absorption in the crowd, this passage suggests a phenomenologically more adequate de scription of self-becoming as a process of gradual awakening. At this level of reflective immediacy, a person has only inklings of his unique potential; he "has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from every externality, a self which is the ad vancing impetus in the whole process by which a self infinitely be comes responsible for its actual self with all its difficulties and advantages" (SUD, 55). This person has yet to experience fully the radical individualization of the call of existential conscience, yet he is moving in that direction. What happens in the despair of reflective immediacy? Accord ing to the text, a person is willing to become a self responsibly, but in that endeavor he encounters an obstacle "in the structure of the self, in the self's necessity," that "makes him recoil" (SUD, 54). Since the occasion for the crisis is reflective rather than external, it marks a higher level of self-awareness. An example from Being and Time is helpful here. Imagine that the person in question encoun ters the obstacle of his own mortality, his unique, non-relational, inevitable, and final possibility. In spite of the vague, fleeting char acter of this self-disclosure, the person realizes, at least for a mo ment, that a sober, lucid, coming-to-terms with this aspect of the self will demand a break with immediacy and a radical reassess-
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ment of his entire life—something that he is unwilling to undergo. Such vague, partial self-awareness is sufficient to make the misrelation of despair volitional. It now becomes a willful flight from oneself, however repressed this flight might be. Here there emerges the core of the phenomenon that Being and Time later describes as falling, self-evasive, inauthentic being in the world. Nonauthentic existence now becomes inauthenticity proper by means of a level of self-awareness that makes self-evasion deliberate. The person has at least two possible strategies in this flight from himself. Unwilling to be himself completely, but yet unwilling to forsake himself altogether, he "forgets" about the problem; that is, he does not, to continue the example, bother about mortality and its implications except on those occasions when he returns to him self to see if the problem has somehow resolved itself. Of course it is still there. He then seeks another remedy. He concentrates all of his efforts in becoming a worldly success. He "forgets" the deeper sense of self and totally abandons himself to the distracting world of daily business in order to live a "rich, concrete life." As The Sickness unto Death puts it, "He appropriates what he in his language calls his self, that is, whatever capacities, talents, etc., he may have; all these he appropriates but in an outward-bound direction, to ward life, as they say, toward the real, the active life" (SUD, 56). At the same time, he forgets the bit of reflection he once possessed and eventually considers it to be just one of those many symptoms of adolescent youth. It is precisely this latter approach that Being and Time characterizes as fallenness, the flight from one's own "notat-homeness" into the "at-home" comfort of everyday being in the world. Whether it is called falling or the despair of reflective im mediacy, the phenomenon is one of willful self-evasion based upon a vague, partial self-disclosure about what is at issue in genuine selfbecoming. For Being and Time, this is the essence of not-being-oneself, but for The Sickness unto Death, the matter is far from ex hausted. Already in the discussion of despair over the earthly as opposed to something earthly, forms of existence appear that call into question any monolithic notion of nonauthenticity and any strict dichotomy between that and authenticity. The Sickness unto Death puts it this way: "When the self in imag ination despairs with infinite passion over something of this world,
its infinite passion changes this particular thing, this something, into the world in toto" (SUD, 60). A person can thus despair over the world as a whole, that is, over the entire sphere of what Being and Time calls everyday, average, concerned engagement in the world. When the entire network of engagements is at stake, there is a genuine advance in self-consciousness. A person can now be come aware of an alternative to everyday life, an alternative which makes his ordinary way of life appear to be a matter of weakness. In such a moment, all of one's daily concerns fade into insignifi cance before an emerging sense of the eternal in oneself. At this point, one is struck by the similarity between this brief description of despairing over the earthly and what Being and Time explicates as the call of Dasein's existential conscience. 27 In The Sickness unto Death, no call characterizes this self-awakening, but the results are the same. A person's everyday world of concerns fades away as his potentiality for authentically becoming "guilty" comes to the fore; that is, he is summoned to appropriate himself as burdened with thrownness, mortality, limitations, and the constant threat of falling anew into self-evasive everydayness. In face of such a sum mons, a person either flees again or becomes authentic. For The Sickness unto Death, this new level of self-awareness, an individualizing awareness of something eternal in oneself, also enables a new, more sophisticated mode of nonauthenticity. As he loses the world in toto, a person realizes that "it is weakness to make the earthly so important." Yet instead of resolutely becoming him self, he "despairs over his weakness" (SUD, 62). Had Being and Time discussed this existential possibility, it might have described it as follows: In the summons to his unique potential for lucidly appro priating his thrown, mortal, and limited freedom, Dasein becomes aware that he has evaded himself and may do so again. He then takes a wrong turn; instead of becoming authentic, he despairs over his weakness. Instead of resolutely accepting the constant threat of falling as an inescapable aspect of existence, he simply broods over it. He is obsessed with having fled his mortal freedom in the past and that he may do so again. In such a case, a person is indeed individualized from the crowd, but this individualization allows for yet another mode of not-being-oneself.
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Heidegger, Being and Time, HI 55-58 (H 270ff.).
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Such an unwillingness to be oneself is not, however, the inauthentic, self-evasive falling described in Being and Time. This de spair is too deep to be forgotten, for "the self is too much self" (SUD, 62). In a way, such a person hates himself in that he cannot accept some aspects of his existence, but he still loves himself too much to turn completely away from his unique potential. He in stead lives a life of "inclosing reserve," that is, he turns inward to brood over his weakness in solitude, saying nothing about it to anyone. This self-enclosed life is still concerned with one's unique self, but only in a limited, sterile manner; thus the person con cerned never gets beyond an obsessive fixation on his weakness. Paradoxically, the motive for such concern is a pride that "places such tremendous emphasis on his weakness" (SUD, 65). The in dividual is so proud of himself "that he cannot bear this conscious ness of weakness." He is like the patient engaged in therapeutic counseling who, having succeeded in overcoming the repression of his problem, interprets the sorrow over his inability to accept his manifested weakness as a symbol of existential "profundity." Proud of such depth, he prefers the egocentric, isolating brooding to the genuine freedom of accepting self-integration. Intensely aware of himself, he is paralyzed in impotent self-consumption. According to The Sickness unto Death, such despair is quite rare, but when it does occur, it can develop in several ways. A person so enthralled may simply "mark time on the spot;" if this occurs, he may eventually either seek a confidant in order to relieve the tension of such non-accepting brooding or commit suicide. Then again, a breakthrough may occur and he may achieve authentic ex istence. Barring these possibilities, a person in such inclosing re serve could also either advance to a higher, defiant form of despair or break out into the world in a futile effort to forget himself and his weakness. "A person in this kind of despair will hurl himself into life, perhaps into the diversion of great e n t e r p r i s e ; . . . or will seek oblivion in sensuality, perhaps in dissolute living; in despair he wants to go back to immediacy, but always with the conscious ness of the self he does not want to b e " (SUD, 65-66). Although this latter strategy resembles the falling of everydayness, it is es sentially different in that it does not forget or repress its unique po tential. Its self-evasion is more lucid than self-deceptive—a
deliberate, albeit not completely conscious attempt to flee from one's unique potential without being able to completely repress it. In light of these analyses, one can plausibly suggest that The Sickness unto Death provides a more comprehensive investigation of the possibilities of day-to-day life than does Being and Time. Ac cording to the latter, one responds to the call back to one's unique potential for becoming a self by either fleeing again from oneself or by existing authentically. It does not envision the possibility that a person may become entangled in the individualizing self-disclo sure itself. In contrast, The Sickness unto Death makes it clear that once a certain level of self-disclosure has been attained, a simple reversion back to the same kind of self-evasion is not possible; one becomes less ignorant, less innocent, and more responsible for one's life. Most significantly, it shows more clearly than Being and Time what the latter describes as the "threatening" character of one's unique potential in relation to day-to-day life. Aware of him self as thrown, mortal, finite, and prone to self-evasion, a person may lack the will to appropriate any or all of these aspects of his life. Any one of them may "threaten" the sense of self and level of meaningful, integrated existence that he has already achieved. A person may then be obsessed by this very weakness and adopt any of the strategies already described. Unlike Being and Time, The Sickness unto Death makes it clear how even radical individualization carries within it the possibilities of grave existentiell danger. The discussion of "defiance," a higher level of despair which is "in despair to will to be oneself," provides still another reason to suspect that Being and Times's notion of inauthentic everydayness inadequately characterizes the possible ways of not-being-oneself (SUD, 67). When a person lives in this fashion, he realizes pre cisely why he does not will to be himself. Such defiance manifests what was earlier called infinitude's despair. Since he is aware of all the "necessities and limitations" of his concrete self, such a person is not repressive; rather, he takes it upon himself to transform everything, "to fashion out of it a self such as he wants" (SUD, 68). According to the analysis, he "does not want to see his given self as his task" (SUD, 68). Instead, he severs himself from any sense of an establishing power and exists as if he were absolutely malle able, as if every aspect of himself lay totally within the province of
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self-creation. Such an existence is possible only through the "de spairing misuse of the eternal" (SUD, 67). This means that the in dividual in question experiences his "infinite self" as the "most abstract possibility of the self," and from this vantage point rec ognizes no limitation that is not somehow in his control. He lives out what might be called an existential Cartesianism in which he acknowledges no limit to his project of self-realization. Unlike the earlier modes of despair, this despair is a self-conscious act of misrelating. Aware of himself as burdened, finite, mortal, free, and situated as a specific individual, the person is nonetheless " u n willing to lose" himself in order to gain himself. This means that he recognizes no limiting conditions given by his situatedness to his self-becoming. He is unwilling to acknowledge and to give himself over to the definite, limited possibilities already deter mined by his genetic endowment, his upbringing, his historical and cultural situation. He acknowledges—to use a Nietzschian term— no "organizing idea" emerging from his particular existence that directs his self-development. Or, as Being and Time would have it, he experiences no call of conscience that discloses to him the pos sibility that is truly his own. Instead, he lives as if he were the pure "for-itself" of Sartre's Being and Nothingness—an absolute freedom embodied in facticity but capable of defining in a totally arbitrary way the meaning of every aspect of its factical existence. However, such defiance suffers from groundlessness; that is, as self-realization it lacks "earnestness" (SUD, 67-68). Recognizing no power above him, a person merely experiments with a hypo thetical self. The self-mastering power that integrates may also loosen at any time, and since the direction in which it develops is arbitrarily chosen, there is no basis for recognizing one possibility rather than another as truly one's own. Because of this volatility in the core of the self, a person lacks "eternal steadfastness." He pos sesses no consistency of resolution or personality, and he makes no constantly renewed commitments that constitute a persisting, recognizable self-identity. Everything can be overturned at any moment. If one attempts to describe such a life in the language of Being and Time, it might read as follows: A person living in defiant de spair has certainly been individualized from the crowd. He is lu-
cidly aware of his ownmost potentiality for becoming burdened, that is, for realizing himself in limited, situated freedom. He exists neither in falling everydayness nor in inauthenticity. Nonetheless, he refuses to acknowledge the power of his limitations. His finite aspects carry only the weight that he grants them, and no call of conscience summons him before a unique possibility. For exam ple, such a person may feel perfectly free in dismissing his con stantly possible death as an external bother when viewed from the perspective of his abstract sense of self. His life is a deliberate re fusal to appropriate certain aspects of his concrete existence on the basis of his capacity for infinite abstraction, a capacity he interprets as one of total self-creation. In spite of its individualized sense of freedom, such existence is nonauthentic and moves in the direc tion of the "fantastic" because it fails to "realize" the finitude of its own specific concreteness. It is true that not everyone finds certain limitations like mortality equally significant, but everyone must still come to terms with a matrix of existence that is largely not of one's own making. In the process of a person's development, certain historical, cultural, and social meanings become a part of him, and genuine self-integration demands their appropriation. A person thus has to "lose" his "abstract," "infinite" self, that is, to appro priate lucidly these given aspects of existence in order to become an integrated concrete self. Such defiant despair has yet another form. According to The Sickness unto Death, "demonic despair" is the most intense form of despair and the advanced stage of what is described as inclosing reserve. In this case, a person aware of his capacity for self-becom ing stumbles u p o n a given aspect of his existence that he is un willing to accept. Failing to reject it completely, he "feels [himjself nailed to this servitude" with no hope of deliverance from it (SUD, 70). Offended by it and by existence as a whole, "he wills to be himself with it, take it along, almost flouting his agony" in spite of and in defiance of existence (SUD, 71). The degree of self-awareness involved here makes such despair demonic. Unable to escape the unacceptable aspect of his concrete self, a person "makes precisely this torment the object of all his pas sion, and finally it becomes a demonic rage." But the more intense this spiritual despair is, the less external manifestation it possesses.
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In secrecy, such a person builds "an inclosure behind actuality, a world exclusively for [him] self, a world where the self in despair is restlessly and tormentedly engaged in willing to be itself" (SUE), 73). He hates existence and in rebellion against it, he wills himself in all his misery as evidence against the goodness of existence. According to The Sickness unto Death, such an individual is like an error in writing that refuses to be erased; it would rather bear witness to the fact that the author is a second-rate writer (SUD, 74). Again, if one attempts to describe such existence in terms of Being and Time's existential analytic, one has to presuppose radical individualization as a condition for its possibility. The person who lives in demonic despair is vividly aware of himself as a potential ity for becoming himself and has already failed in a deliberate at tempt to evade some aspect of his thrownness. He now appropriates it, but hardly in the "fortified joy" of authentic exis tence.28 Instead, he rages against existence in his own intense, undetectable fashion. This calls to mind, by way of example, a Camusian figure fixed upon the absurdity of mortal, human exis tence. Here, there is no question of a lack of self-awareness or of a falling, inauthentic self-evasion. The person in question stares un flinchingly into the abyss of human mortality and "rages" against the inevitable, always possible "dying of the light." For him, death is a tasteless joke played upon people by a universe totally con trary to their hopes for justice, reason, and compassion. Too lucid to evade or to conceal this fact, he appropriates it by making his life a constant, rebellious testimony against this absurd existence. This serious, lucid, self-possessed individual embraces his mortal, fi nite freedom but he never accepts death as anything but absurd. Intense and internal, he may even live a normal life without any one knowing of this inclosed, secret, constant rebellion—his re fusal to accept his own thrownness. According to The Sickness unto Death, it is in such nonauthentic living that the misrelation called despair attains its highest, purely human form. From here, despair can become sin, but only if it is explicitly experienced as despair before God. 28
Ibid.,H310.
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(C) Despair is Sin
The Sickness unto Death discusses this topic from the perspective of Christian faith. Up to this point, the text deals with the various factors and dimensions of despair "within the category of the hu man self, or the self whose criterion is man." As such, they belong to the conversations of philosophical anthropology. Now the "theological self, the self directly before God" is at issue, and de spair becomes sin—that is, "before God in despair not to will to be oneself, or before God in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD, 81). In contrast to sin there is faith, the only mode of existence in which a person escapes nonauthenticity, that is, the despairing misrela tion to oneself. One truly becomes oneself in faith when "in relat ing itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it" (SUD, 14, 131). To be sure, Being and Time has nothing whatever to say about the nonauthenticity described here as sin. It is a matter that must await the clarification of the sense of being in general. Be this as it may, these reflections upon sin and faith still yield important insights into ex istence in general, particularly into aspects of nonauthenticity and individualization overlooked by Being and Time. The first such insight has to do with "the continuance of sin." The three levels of sin—despairing over one's sin, despairing of the forgiveness of one's sin, and dismissing Christianity—involve so phisticated spiritual self-consciousness that enables existential continuity in the sinner's life. As the text points out, "Every exis tence that is within the qualification spirit, even if only on its own responsibility and at its own risk, has an essential interior consis tency . . . such a person has great fear of any inconsistency, be cause he has an immense apprehension . . . that he could be torn out of the totality in which he has his life." This is why a believer fears any inconsistency in his life; that is, "The slightest inconsis tency is an enormous loss, for, after all, he loses consistency— everything perhaps becomes a chaos . . . in which there is no agreement within itself, no momentum, no impetus" (SUD, 107). But since it is a matter of responsible choice, sin, too, has a consis tency, an impetus that the sinner is unwilling to forego. Sunk in a certain misrelation to himself, the sinner has a certain "integrity"; and because he "has internal consistency and is consistent in the
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consistency of evil," he has "abandoned the good" as a threat to this wholeness. At this level, not-being-oneself constitutes a lucid, dedicated commitment against authentic life. This sinful integrity is best seen in the sin of "despairing over one's sin." Such an existential stance "has become or wants to be internally consistent" by having "nothing to do with the good" (SUD, 109). In other words, "It is an effort to give stability and in terest to sin as a power by deciding once and for all that one will refuse to hear anything about repentance and grace" (SUD, 110). A person with such integrity has deliberately closed off any pos sibility of self-transformation towards genuine wholeness. Given this notion of continuity in sin, The Sickness unto Death does not, like Being and Time, attribute self-constancy only to complete or au thentic self-realization. While the latter work sees self-constancy as characteristic of the abiding, lucid resoluteness that anticipates death, the former explicates it as characteristic of both faithful and sinful spiritual life. Even at an advanced stage of self-awareness, a person is not assured of achieving genuine existential integrity. A spiritual, interior consistency in a despairing self-misrelation is possible as one of the higher forms of nonauthentic existence. Whether or not one uses the term "sin" is ultimately irrelevant; the phenomenon of a continuous, lucid self-refusal emerges as a le gitimate existential possibility. The other significant insight that Part B of The Sickness unto Death contributes has to do with the nature of individualization. Accord ing to the analyses of Being and Time, each person at one time or another has to be summoned back from his worldly, public exis tence to his unique potential for becoming himself. This happens in the call of conscience, but the essence of that individualizing summons is every person's own inevitable death. Facing this pos sibility lucidly, that is, anticipating death, a person begins truly to live his own life, and only by confronting death in this manner can a person be individualized. However, the Christian perspective of The Sickness unto Death sees it otherwise. For it, "The category of sin is the category of the individual" (SUD, 119). It asserts that Christianity individualizes when it teaches that "The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I" (SUD, 120). This teaching individualizes in that, "for God in Christ there
live only single individuals" (sinners). It makes every man "a sin gle individual, a single sinner," by revealing his sinfulness, even as it reveals that Christ is the forgiveness of sin in whom one must believe. It thereby unconditionally splits u p the crowd, for each must decide the matter for him/herself (SUD, 120-121). Unlike the call of conscience discussed in Being and Time, the summons here is an external revelation, but its disclosure is formally similar to that of conscience: you alone are solely responsible for determining your life and you, this specific individual, are required to venture a de cision. From the perspective of the revelation of sin and its for giveness (Christ), something like death is merely a transition. To be sure, the individualizing power that the revealed com mand, "You shall believe," has for any person depends on how a person is disposed toward faith. One could, however, say the same about one's own inevitable, constantly possible death. As with the "challenge" of Christianity, some people are genuinely and sin gularly unmoved by such self-awareness even though they seem quite authentic and integrated. That a person could be brought to lucid self-possession by either phenomenon seems to indicate that although self-awakening is an essential aspect of existence, the catalyst for the pre-requisite individualization may vary from per son to person and from age to age. Apart from these insights, the conversation between Being and Time and The Sickness unto Death appears to break off in Part B. De spair as a misrelation to oneself—now defined before God as sin— differentiates itself as despair over one's sin, despair of the for giveness of sin, and the sin of renouncing Christianity as untruth, as a lie. The context is faith, and the relation to the power that it allegedly effects leads one into mystery and perhaps even silence. Such concerns bespeak the conviction that the full realization of human being demands an intrinsic self-transcendence, but to what extent the mystery, silence, and transcendence discussed here are commensurable with those discussed in the entire Heideggerian corpus remains to be seen. For now, it has at least been shown to what extent Being and Time seems to have been influenced by The Sickness unto Death, and in what respects the latter's contribution to existential phenomenology is more adequate than that of the former.
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A Rejection of Kierkegaard's Monism of Despair Haim Gordon
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oven into Kierkegaard's discussion in The Sickness unto Death are three assumptions that I shall challenge in this essay. First, Kierkegaard holds that despair is the existential state of all human beings: Despair is a universal sickness. Second, the pana cea to this despair is Christian faith; and third, the only way to reach this true faith is by eradicating despair. Taken together these as sumptions are what I shall denote as Kierkegaard's monism of de spair—monism because, according to these assumptions, the only starting point for a life of true faith is despair, and the only way of reaching Christian faith is by scaling the dialectical ladder grounded on despair; and also because every human being is immersed in despair, sick unto death with it. I am aware that Kierkegaard points out that there are three forms that despair can take: "In despair not to be conscious of hav ing a self; in despair not to will to be oneself; in despair to will to be oneself" (SUD 13). Thus, in the strictest sense, I am stretching the word monism beyond its legitimate boundaries; and yet, since the basic existential situation of man as Kierkegaard describes him is despair, I believe that using the term should not be too mislead ing. Here I will reject Kierkegaard's description of man's basic extistential situation. I will also reject Kierkegaard's assertion that only by starting from despair can one reach Christian faith. In pressing my attack I shall rely on Nicolas Berdyaev and Fyodor Dostoyev-
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ski. Like Kierkegaard, these Christian existentialists wished to lead their readers to live a life of true Christian faith. Yet their thoughts reveal specific areas where Kierkegaard's monism runs aground.
are two and only two basic ontological states in which man exists: despair and Christian faith. In other words, any ontological state of man that has not attained the unity of the self acquired through true Christian faith, or through a work of Christian faith—such as loving one's neighbor—is by definition despair. Kierkegaard de fines despair so broadly that as an ontological description of the human situation it will not hold. His definition describes a limited ontology, that when pushed to an extreme, fails. Consider Socrates—Kierkegaard writes: "In any case, no hu man being ever lived and no one lives outside of Christendom who has not d e s p a i r e d . . . . " Yet there is no indication that Socrates de spaired, that he suffered from a basic disunity of the self, a sick ness unto death. Even in his most difficult moments—when faced with death in Apology, Crito, and Phaedo, or when dialogue with him is closed down in Gorgias—he expressed a determination and a quiet joy that his way of life was correct, that he was doing what needed to be done. He defies Kierkegaard's description of man's ontological state. He is neither Christian nor sick unto death. If Kierkegaard or his supporters believe—in spite of no evidence— that Socrates is still in despair, the burden of proof rests upon them. They have to explain or describe how Socrates' responses and ac tions fit the forms that despair can take. The burden of proof rests upon them because when one formulates an ontological assertion and holds that it is universal, one must be able to show how and where it is applicable in each instance. A n o t h e r example is Nietzsche's discussion of dancing as a manner of existing. When a person who is dancing has achieved full harmony with the music, he is also in harmony with his body, with his entire existence. Furthermore, at such moments the entire dichotomy of despair versus Christian faith is not a component of that dancer's existence. The dancer has united his self in relation to the music. It would be totally incomprehensible to say that "In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself the self of the dan cer rests transparently in the power that established it." The dan cer is simply dancing, uniting his body in harmonious movement with the music. Nietzsche points out that by living creatively one dances one's existence. Berdyaev would probably agree—as I shall soon show. Here it is sufficient to point out that Kierkegaard's on-
(A) Despair as a Universal Sickness Kierkegaard's views on the universality of despair are spelled out clearly: Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy, so anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not se cretly harbor an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he does not even dare to try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself, so that, just as the physician speaks of going around with an illness in the body, he walks around with a sickness, carries around a sickness of the spirit that signals its presence at rare intervals in and through an anxiety he cannot ex plain. In any case, no human being ever lived and no one lives out side of Christendom who has not despaired, and no one in Christendom if he is not a true Christian, and insofar as he is not wholly that, he still is to some extent in despair. (SUD, 22) I shall briefly sketch four points that challenge the universality of despair. First, Kierkegaard presents his views in such a manner that there is no way of logically refuting them. If I were to say to Kier kegaard, "Now, at time 'f at place 's' I am not in despair," he would probably reply, "You are in despair, you simply do not know or dare to acknowledge that you are in despair." From a logical point of view, the discussion ends here, because neither Kierkegaard nor I can do more than repeat our assertions, and he has suggested no way by which a person may refute or confirm his generalization concerning the universality of despair. Furthermore, if a person refuses to conform to that generalization, he concludes that some thing about the person is amiss. Kierkegaard could respond by indicating that he is describing the ontological situation of man. Thus, any self that has not reached the stage of faith is in disunity and in despair. Only in fully ac cepting Christian faith is the self unified and beyond despair. Yet here Kierkegaard is no less vulnerable. He is asserting that there
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tology is basically an ontology of consciousness, and not of exis tence. The dancer or creator is a person who has unified his self in the deed, much as Socrates unified his self in the act of inquiry; he has not unified his consciousness in order to relate to God. Such unity defies Kierkegaard's universality of despair. Second, if everyone on the face of the earth is in despair, except perhaps two or three Christians, one is tempted to respond: "You know, I would prefer to remain with the majority of the human race, and I suspect that Jesus, as a faithful son of Israel, would re main in our midst." But irony aside, Kierkegaard is presumptuous in deciding categorically that all the Buddhists, Confucianists, Shintoists, Moslems, and Jews, to mention a few hundred million believers, are in despair, and that two or three Christians perhaps have true faith. Such statements, which are not based on an ontological description of the mode of existence of believers in other faiths, border on the fanatical. Third, in presenting his views Kierkegaard relies on the anal ogy of health: "Just as a physician might say that there very likely is not one single living human being who is completely healthy. . . . " Yet what in the world is perfect health? Can it really be de fined? I doubt it. And yet millions of healthy persons wake up every morning to go about their lives. Here Kierkegaard is reminiscent of some Freudians who defined us all as neurotic except the few lucky persons who had undergone Freudian analysis and suc ceeded. When one leads arguments or analogies to the extreme, as Kierkegaard does here, one's terms are unable to depict reality. Thus if all human beings are living in despair as a sickness of the spirit, then being sick unto death is being normal; but being nor mal is being unhealthy—try and make sense out of that. I am aware of the fact that Kierkegaard described and defined what he believes to be "perfect" spiritual health; but this is my point. The act of defining is a way of locking his readers into a very limited view of what being spiritually healthy is all about. Here is where the resemblance with certain Freudians is pertinent. Once one defines health from one specific perspective, be it Christian faith or Freudian psychology, one has negated so much of reality that it casts doubt on the definition.
Fourth, the above points all lead up to the idea that the univer sality of despair is not a necessary basis for understanding the re lationship b e t w e e n m a n and God. Consider, for instance, the following excerpt from Nicolas Berdyaev:
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It is imperative to bear in mind that human creativity is not a claim or a right on the part of man, but God's claim on and call to man. God awaits man's creative act, which is the response to the creative act of God. What is true of man's freedom is true also of his creativity: for freedom too is God's summons to man and man's duty towards God. God does not reveal to man that which it is for man to reveal to God. In Holy Scripture we find no revelation con cerning man's creativity—not on account of its implied denial of human creativity, but because creativity is a matter for man to re veal. God is silent on this matter and expects man to speak. I have frequently been asked to justify my idea of the religious signifi cance of human creativity by quotations from Scripture. I may or I may not be able to provide such justification—but in any case such a demand is evidence of a fundamental misunderstanding of the problem under discussion. It is, in fact, the concealed, rather than the revealed will of God that man should dare and create, and such daring and creativity are a token of man's fulfillment of the will of God.1 At this moment it is not yet my concern to discuss Berdyaev's views; but he does help us see that there are profound expressions of the human spirit such as joy, creativity, ectasy, personal love, and friendship that often transcend the dialectic of despair that Kierkegaard proposes. These expressions may lead to faith in God; they also may not. I would therefore hesitate to follow Kierke gaard and to call them glittering vices. (B) The Panacea to Despair is Christian Faith Until now I have evaded discussing Kierkegaard's definition of despair. The dictionary definition (Webster's) is quite well known— "to be without hope, to lose or to give u p hope." Evidently Kier kegaard's definition is not the dictionary definition; it is the defi nition derived from the psychological or existential state of man. Kierkegaard describes the different manifestations of despair that 'Nicolas Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, trans. Katharine Lampert (New York: Collier Books, 1962) 204.
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originate from his existential concept of the self. "The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, w h o s e task is to become itself, which can only be done through the relationship of God" (SUE) 30). Without evaluating this definition of the "self," it is clear that it is the definition of a re cluse. Neither other persons nor society are mentioned as contrib uting to establishing the self. From this understanding of the self Kierkegaard derives his definition of despair, which is also based on the relationship of the self to itself. Needless to say if we accept such a definition of the self and of despair it entails that Kierke gaard's way of overcoming despair is a possibility; but though these definitions enlighten us as to the existential states of characters such as Macbeth or Faust, they do not cover the whole range of the pos sibilities of the self or of despair. Imagine Martin Luther King, Jr., early in his career, saying: "I am in despair as to the fate of the next generation of black children. Will they receive anything resembling equal opportunity in edu cation? Will they be able to develop as selves?" King is describing his existential state, which has almost nothing to do with Kierke gaard's description of despair. Moreover, only by s o m e w h a t changing the plight of black children will King experience less de spair. King's despair does not arise from a distorted relationship to himself, or from a lack of faith in God, but from his personally relating to the plight of black children. To emerge from this despair he must not only turn to God, but go out into the streets and into the courtrooms and fight against white bigots. In the process he will probably have a deep aversion towards, and perhaps even learn to hate, specific persons: white policemen who set dogs on him, or those whites who bombed a church in Birmingham and killed four black girls. In short, in order to emerge from despair he must attempt to live his freedom creatively and to act lovingly— but this may entail battling against and perhaps hating those cruel persons who wish to oppress and to kill his fellow workers for quality. This example accords with what I believe Dostoyevski and Berdyaev would view as despair: the consciousness of a person that he is in a situation in which he is unwilling or unable to live his freedom creatively in society and to act lovingly to other persons.
This definition of despair (which broadens Kierkegaard's defi nition) allows me to point out three ways of life in the world that are remedies for despair; the ways are characterized by active love, creativity, and joy. Dostoyevski, and to some extent Berdyaev, be lieved that without these remedies Christian faith is abstract and beyond the grasp of many persons. I believe that such is true of any faith, and that perhaps these remedies can heal without being linked to faith. Fyodor Dostoyevski discussed active love rarely, yet in his writings he described persons for whom active love was a way of life. One such person was Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov who, when questioned how to emerge from despair and to acquire faith, responded:
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By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and constantly. In so far as you advance in love you will grow surer of the reality of God and of the immorality of your soul. If you attain perfect self-forgetfulness in the love of your neighbor, then you will believe without doubt. Doubt will no longer be able to enter your soul. This has been tried. This is certain.2 At first glance this citation seems to accord with the views ex pressed by Kierkegaard in Works of Love. Yet as one continues read ing one learns that Zosima means loving the particular in a specific p e r s o n — h e m e a n s loving w h a t appeals to Eros—and not the neighbor in general. He strongly rejects abstract love of your neighbor or of humanity: "It's just the same story a doctor once told me," observed the elder. He was a man getting on in years, and undoubtedly clever. He spoke as freely as you, though in sarcasm, in bitter sarcasm. "I love humanity," he said, "but I wonder at myself. The more I love humanity in general, the less I love man in particular. In my dreams," he said, "I often make plans for service of humanity, and perhaps I might actually face crucifixion if it were suddenly nec essary. Yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone for two days together. I know from experience. As soon as anyone is near me his personality disturbs me and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I begin to hate the best of men: one because 2 Fyodor Dostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. Constance Garnett (New York: Signet, 1957) 60.
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he's too long over dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become hostile to people the moment they come close to me. But it has always happened that the more I hate men individually the more I love humanity." 3
To summarize this point I would suggest a comparison. In "Two Discourses At The C o m m u n i o n on F r i d a y s " Kierkegaard dis cusses citations from the New Testament that include the word love: "But to whom little is forgiven, the same loveth little" (Luke 7:47) and "Love shall hide the multitude of sins" (1 Peter 4:8). It is interesting to ask oneself who is the audience to w h o m Kierke gaard is preaching and how does he appeal to them? The answer is simple: he is preaching to an assembly of despairing sinners who must learn to love and to appreciate the power of God's love; and he appeals to their thinking, to their knowledge of dialectics, to their consciousness. How would Dostoyevski relate to those same citations—through the mouth of one of his characters. Two points immediately come to mind: First, Dostoyevski would have viewed his audience as consisting of the salt of the earth. Some might be in despair, while others might be in love, while others might be joyful new parents. Second, he would have appealed to their daily acts, to their deeds, to their entire being. Some of Nicolas Berdyaev's views on creativity are cited above. Preceding those views is a paragraph that directly challenges the approach developed in The Sickness Unto Death. Berdyaev writes:
It seems that Dostoyevski and Kierkegaard are very close and in one important respect they are; both of them emphasize the im portance of love for the particular as the key to fulfilling Jesus' re quest that a person love his neighbor as himself. Yet there is a significant difference, which stems from their perspective of where a person should begin. Dostoyevski indicates that one should be gin from the concrete love for this or that person. Kierkegaard's entire approach suggests that one should begin from the con sciousness that one must love one's neighbor. His very detailed discussions of love are attempts to convince. Dostoyevski reveals how, in order to express love in the concreteness of life, one must often express aversion and perhaps hatred. Kierkegaard remains primarily on the level of what needs to be done. Although he un derstands the importance of giving freedom to one's passions, for him, this freedom and these passions seem to originate in an act of understanding. Dostoyevski shows how the passions flow from a person's being while interacting in the concrete. This seemingly slight difference is extremely significant. In coping with despair by acts of consciousness that should lead to doing, one is erecting a barrier of consciousness between the per son and the act—a barrier that stifles spontaneity. That is probably one of the reasons Dostoyevski often explicitly refuses, as in Part 3 of The Idiot, to discuss the consciousness of his characters; he merely describes their doings. Such a discussion would be a lim iting of their freedom and a distorting of their spontaneous re sponses. To reiterate: For Dostoyevski active love as a response to despair is most powerful when it is a spontaneous response, with out the consciousness that one's relationship to God is perhaps improving—such a knowledge is an interference. Or, to return to Nietzsche's analogy of dancing, Kierkegaard indicates that one must think about the tune and its significance while dancing; Dos toyevski says, just give yourself to the music. 3
Ibid., 61.
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I have been deeply disturbed by the problem of the relation be tween creativity, sin and redemption. I have experienced mo ments of acute awareness of the sinfulness of man; and such moments probably marked my closest approximation to Ortho doxy. But I also came to realize that to remain fixed in that posi tion, to surrender oneself entirely to the sense of sin, spells frustration and a disablement of life. The consciousness of sin may be a stage on the way towards spiritual renewal and illumination; but it may also prove an omen of unrelieved darkness. There can be no creativity and no illumination if life is reduced to the con sciousness of man's misery, wretchedness, and possible salva tion. If regeneration is to come, the sense of sin must be transformed into another and loftier experience. How are we to overcome the vis inertiae, the lameness and impotence of the sense of sin, and to reach out to a more ardent and creative attitude? The counsels of current religious spirituality invite us to deepen the awareness of our sinful and unworthy condition, thereby making us susceptible to divine grace and illumination. But the source of grace is in God: grace proceeds from on high, whilst the realization of our sinful condition proceeds from below. My question then is this: can we ascribe to grace, which redeems the frustrations and
International Kierkegaard Commentary
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the insignificance of human existence, a quality which is not only divine but also human, which is from 'below' as well as from 'above.' Is man justified solely by obedience to a higher divine power, or is he also justified by his human endeavor and creative ecstasy?4
Look once again at the differences between Kierkegaard's def inition and the definition that I suggested as concurring with the views of Dostoyevski and Berdyaev. Kierkegaard's definition does not indicate the possibility of man's involvement in worldly affairs as a means of coping with his despair. Of course, Kierkegaard is discussing life in this world, but he seems to be among those who believe that grace can only come through a relation with the 'above,' as Berdyaev calls it. Hence, he discusses man's involvement in the world from an other-worldly or reclusive perspective. Berdyaev, by focusing on the creativity of man, gives a much broader basis to the ontology of man's being, and in the process he shows that there are other remedies to despair than faith in God. Armed with an ontology in which to dare and to create is a ful fillment of the will of God, Berdyaev rejects despair as a way to Christian faith and Christian faith as the panacea to despair. The creative act, as an act of spirit, should be man's response to the cre ative act of God and his way of illuminating his life on earth. In the creative act a person gives his deepest thoughts, passions, and anxieties to the world in new form; he shares with his fellow man the good and the beautiful. Thus, the creative act is an act of faith. Such is true not only of acts that result in works of faith, such as Michaelangelo's Pieta or Tintoretto's Paradise, but also of John Lennon's music and of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason. While struggling to give form to his inner world a person is not in de spair. Even if a poet is writing a poem about being sick unto death, the struggle to poetically formulate his situation distances him from his despair. The breadth of Berdyaev's ontology of the self stems from his suggestion that the creative act can bring about a change in the cre ator's relation to himself. Here Kierkegaard's dialectics are reveal ing. Consider the following:
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Berdyaev is right in holding that a person's awareness of his sinful existence, of his state of despair, can have a snowball effect and lead the person deeper into despair. This view accords with the dialectics developed by Kierkegaard in The Sickness unto Death. However, unlike Kierkegaard, Berdyaev believes that human en deavor has worth in the face of eternity; man is justified not only by faith in and obedience to divine power, but also by human en deavor and creative ecstasy. Direct involvement in human affairs is rarely encouraged in Kierkegaard's writings, and when such in volvement emerges it is often viewed disparagingly. For instance, in Either/Or the activities of the seducer are contrasted with the passive (armchair!) love of Judge Wilhelm. No third possibility is presented. As John Elrod pointed out, Judge Wilhelm is a proponent of free choice, and yet he is an existential p a r o d y of his o w n ethical views. 5 —Why? Because he presents his love without passion, and makes ethical choices without their implying creative worldly in volvement. Making ethical choices in this world means getting dirty; it often means inflicting pain—think of the frustrations of the white bigots when faced with the tactics of Martin Luther King— it means reeking with sweat. Judge Wilhelm presents his ethical life as emiting no odor of perspiration; his world is clean and ster ile, without creative ecstasy, without daring to fulfill the seem ingly impossible, without frustrations and failure. It is a life without the tragedy of life, in short an existential parody. Kierkegaard pre sented this parody forcefully; yet, if we exclude Socrates, he did not present us with examples of persons who justified human ex istence through their human endeavor and creative ecstasy. He did not present a creative life as a worthy human challenge. It seems that one reason for this lacuna is his presentation of despair. "Berdyaev, Dream and Reality, 203-204. 5 Private correspondence. See also ch. 5 of his Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975).
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The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. Consequently, the progress of the becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing pro-
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cess. But if the self does not become itself, it is in despair, whether it knows it or n o t . . . . As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing. (SUD, 29-30)
form that can be shared with one's fellow man. He is well aware of the tragic element in all creativity:
What Kierkegaard seems to have missed is that in the creative act man is drawing on his infinitude and limiting it by the concrete. The self is in the process of synthesizing the infinitude of its imag ination with the finitude of the medium in which it is working, a finitude which is also influenced by the finitude of the self. Through working creatively in a medium, the self is relating itself to itself and becoming itself. The creative act can thus be a means of build ing a relationship to God. It is definitely the building of a relation ship to transcendence. The truth of my criticism of Kierkegaard becomes all the more forceful if one rereads the beginning of this paragraph while keeping in mind Michelangelo sculpting Pieta or Tintoretto painting Paradise. Can we say that Michelangelo or Tin toretto were not concretely themselves while working on these creations of genius? Granted that in their daily life they often may have been inauthentic and dishonest with themselves. Frequently they may have sunk into despair. But when Michelangelo sculpted he was himself to the marrow of his bones and when Tintoretto painted he was a synthesis of imagination and the concrete; he was concretely and totally himself. In short, I disagree with Kierkegaard's principle that the only way a person can perform the task of becoming himself is through a re lationship to God. Accepting his understanding of despair would lead us to conclude that all the Buddhists in the world together with athe ists such as Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, and Jean-Paul Sartre never became themselves. Such a conclusion that is absurd and presump tuous can only indicate that Kierkegaard's dialectics need broaden ing. The truth is that in becoming oneself a person develops a relation to transcendence—in the case of Michelangelo it may have been a re lation to beauty, in the case of Marx, Russell and Sartre a relationship to truth—and it is possible that this relationship is also, or will de velop into, a relationship to God. Berdyaev does not see the creative act as confined solely to great artists: it is an expression of man's freedom, of every person's free dom. Like active love it means not dying to the world but living in it fully with one's passions and deepest urges, and giving them
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Man's creative act is doomed to fail within the conditions of this world. It is a tremendous effort which is destined never to suc ceed. Its initial impulse is to bring forth a new life, to transfigure the world and usher in a new heaven and a new earth; but in the conditions of the fallen world the effort turns out to be unavailing: it comes up against the inertia, the laws and the compulsions of the external world, pervaded as it is by inexorable necessities. The attempt gives place to production of aesthetic and cultural objects of greater or lesser perfection. These objects, however, are sym bols of reality rather than reality itself: a book, a symphony, a pic ture, a poem, or a social institution; but all these are evidence of the painful disparity between the creative impulse and its partial and fragmentary embodiment in the objective world.6 According to Berdyaev and Dostoyevski, living life's tragedy as a free man is better than dying to this world, sinking into despair, and hoping to emerge from this despair by faith in God's grace. They both believe that living creatively and acting lovingly are en deavors worthy in themselves—whether they lead to faith in God or not. In The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard does not mention one wordly endeavor that is worthy in itself. In Works of Love love to the beloved and friendship are described as worthy endeavors; but they are preferential love, and not nearly as important as love to one's neighbor, which is the d u t y of every Christian. The tenets of Christian faith, and not human experience or history, define the significance of our worldly endeavors. I have already indicated that Kierkegaard's definition of de spair stems from his definition of the self. We can now add that his suggestion that Christian faith is the sole panacea to despair also stems from this definition: "The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can only be done through the relationship to God" (SUD, 30). If we accept this definition and its view of human existence, a person's life resembles a pendulum clock whose time is measured by the swinging of the person from despair to faith and back. Perhaps such an image reflects Kierkegaard's own life as a 6
Ibid., 209.
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recluse but, as has been shown, such a conception of human ex istence makes our worldly endeavors superfluous. Berdyaev re fused to define the self, or what he called the riddle of personality; as far as I know Dostoyevski never presented such a definition either. Yet they both would have rejected, quite strongly, Kierke gaard's definition of the self and his interpretation of the message of Jesus that stems from this definition. I support their rejection and believe that it partially stems from their understanding that worldly joy is significant for human existence and for Christian faith. Worldly joy does not fit into Kierkegaard's ontology of human existence primarily because his is not an action-oriented philoso phy. Much as he strove to sever himself from the privatdocents whom he relentlessly ridiculed, his writing is a result of contem plation and intense internal suffering, and not of active experience with other persons in the world. The aesthete and the seducer in Either/Or are persons whose activity is to manipulate other per sons—which is a form of passivity; hence immersing oneself in the aesthetic realm leads to melancholy—never to joy or faith in God. The love of Judge Wihelm for his wife is a mode of interacting but, in addition to being a parody of freedom, this love rests essentially on a compromise with one's passions—not in letting one's pas sions lead to the joy and giving of love. One need only compare this love to the description James Joyce gives of love on the last page of Ulysses to discern the difference between a compromising love and the worldly joy of love. In other writings Kierkegaard can bring us to the brink of acting, but further he dares not tread. He sug gests in very broad terms what should be done, but he does not acknowledge the dialectics of growing through doing in the world, or the joy of worldly interaction with this specific person, or with a portion of nature, or with works of the spirit—no wonder that he developed a monism of despair. Hence, there is little sense in crying out to Kierkegaard: Joy ex ists; it is meaningful. I have experienced it when I dance, when I sing under the shower, when I climb a difficult mountain, when I read a great story, when I reach ecstasy in making love or in a mo ment of creativity, when I interact with my children or my friends, when I succeed in bringing about a small change for the better in my encompassing society. For Kierkegaard all these are my ways
of deceiving myself so as not to cope with my despair and with the j u d g m e n t s of eternity. But, for the record, I m u s t repeat: Joy emerges in the lives of those who are willing to give of themselves fully by acting lovingly and creatively in this world. (C) Eradicating Despair Let us assume that Kierkegaard has discovered an eternal truth: The only way to reach true Christian faith is by eradicating de spair. Yet how do I go about eradicating despair? What should I do? Few answers emerge in The Sickness unto Death. Consider the following from his discussion of the despair of finitude. Despairing narrowness is to lack primitivity or to have robbed oneself of one's primitivity, to have emasculated oneself in a spir itual sense. Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, destined to become himself, and as such every self certainly is an gular, but that only means that it is to be ground into shape, not that it is to be ground down smooth, not that it is utterly to aban don being itself out of fear of men, or even simply out of fear of men not to dare to be itself in its more essential contingency (which definitely is not to be ground down smooth), in which a person is still himself for himself. But whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, another kind of despair seems to permit itself to be tricked out of its self by "the others." Surrounded by hordes of men, absorbed in all sorts of secular mat ters, more and more shrewd about the ways of the world—such a person forgets himself, forgets his name divinely understood, does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too hazardous to be himself and far easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number, a mass man. (SUD, 33-34) These are undoubtedly profound observations; but how does a person stop being a number in the crowd? Kierkegaard would probably answer: by venturing to be himself. Granted—but what does that mean in day-to-day terms? And how will such a ventur ing lead to Christian faith? Kierkegaard has fallen prey to the en ticing lure of dialectical thought, which encourages the thinker to believe that if he can show the dialectics of human development, he has shown how to bring about such a development. Such a mis take (which ignores human freedom) is also evident in Marx's novel prophesies, for instance in The Communist Manifesto. Thus Kier kegaard's dialectics in The Sickness unto Death undoubtedly reveal
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links between human despair and faith, but they totally lack sug gestions for how to eradicate the despair, which he believes is bur dening all h u m a n beings. He may have felt this lack; in later writings he attempted to sketch ways a person should act. But those sketches are generally on the level of internal self-examination or abstract principles and do not indicate specific ways of living in the world. Dostoyevski indicated a few ways of reaching Christian faith other than by eradication of despair. I shall confine myself to one such way exemplified by Dimitri Karamazov's conversion. This example challenges the monism of despair and shows—to borrow a term from Karl Popper—the poverty of Kierkegaard's dialectics when faced with the breadth and complexity of h u m a n existence, because the moment of Dimitri's conversion occurred in a dream. After a night of despair, of wanting to kill himself, and of great joy in the discovery of Grushenka's love for him, he was subjected to grueling investigation and charged with his father's murder. At the end of the investigation Grushenka reaffirms her love for and her faith in him. Exhausted, Dimitri sinks down on a large chest and falls asleep.
Dmitri was struck by his saying in his peasant way, "the babe." He liked the peasant's calling it a "babe." There seemed more pity in it. "But why is it crying?" Dmitri persisted stupidly. "Why are its little arms bare? Why don't they wrap it up?" "The babe's cold. Its little clothes are frozen and don't warm it." "But why is it? Why?" Dmitri still persisted. "Why, they're poor people, burned out. They've no bread. They're begging because they've been burned out." "No, No." Dmitri still did not understand. "Tell me why is it those poor mothers stand there? Why are people poor? Why is the babe poor? Why is the steppe barren? Why don't they hug each other and kiss? Why don't they sing songs of joy? Why are they so dark from black misery? Why don't they feed the babe?" And he felt that, though his questions were unreasonable and senseless, yet he wanted to ask just that, and he had to ask it in just that way. And he felt that a passion of pity, such as he had never known before, was rising in his heart, that he wanted to cry, that he wanted to do something for them all, so that the babe should cry no more, so that the dark faced, dried-up mother should not weep, that no one should shed tears again from that moment. He wanted to do all this at once, at once, regardless of obstacles, with the recklessness of the Karamazovs. "And I'm coming with you. I won't leave you now for the rest of my life. I'm coming with you." He heard close beside him Grushenka's tender voice. And his heart glowed, and he strug gled forward toward the light, and he longed to live, to go on and on, toward the new, beckoning light, and to hurry, hurry now, at once!7
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He dreamed he was driving somewhere in the steppes, where he had been stationed long ago. A peasant was driving him in a cart with a a pair of horses, through snow and sleet. He was cold, it was early in November, and the snow was falling in big wet flakes, melting as soon as it touched the earth. And the peasant drove him smartly, he had a long blond beard. He was not an old man, somewhere around fifty, and he was wearing a gray smock. Not far off was a village. Dmitri could see the black huts. Half the huts were burned down, there were only charred beams left. And as they drove in there were peasant women along the road, a lot of women, a whole row, all thin and wan, with their faces a sort of brownish color, especially one at the edge, a tall bony woman, who looked forty, but might have been only twenty. In her arms was a crying baby. And her breasts seemed so dried up that there was not a drop of milk in them. And the child cried and cried, and held out its little bare arms, with its little fists blue from the cold. "Why are they crying? Why are they crying?" Dmitri asked as they dashed by. "It's the babe," answered the driver. "The babe is crying."
The elements in Dmitri's dream that contribute to his conver sion are a recognition of the depth and the prevalence of human suffering, a wish to alleviate this suffering, and the knowledge that the love of Grushenka can help him realize this wish—she is com ing with him. Although Dostoyevski shows that the fusion of these elements can lead to faith in Christ, he does not suggest how such a fusion occurs. The elements can be present without the fusion occurring. There are missing components in his description of the birth of faith in Dmitri's being, but he acknowledges them as miss ing; they spring from the mystery of human freedom, what Berdyaev would call the riddle of personality. Ttostoyevski, The Brothers Karamazov, 463-64.
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International Kierkegaard Commentary
The Sickness unto Death
Kierkegaard might attempt to argue that since Dmitri Karamazov was in despair at the beginning of the fateful night which I have described and underwent a conversion the following morn ing after the despair was eradicated, the dialectics of despair stands strong. But any reader of The Brothers Karamazov will discover many components in the development of Dmitri that night that in no way fit in with Kierkegaard's dialectics, like Grushenka's love, like Dmitri's demanding that everyone believe that he was a scoundrel and not a thief. And we should not overlook the dream, which is definitely not a dream of despair, but rather a dream of discover ing the human predicament and a willingness to partake in it. Fi nally, dialectics does not take into account the element of mystery that I mentioned. Why does Dmitri fall in love with Grushenka and not with Katrina? How does he overcome the urge to murder his father? These and other qustions must remain unanswered, as Dostoyevski leaves them; but it is often these mysteries that con tribute to a moment of conversion and encourage a new faith to arise in the heart of a person. Eradicating despair is not the only way to Christian faith. Three points still need to be made. First, the relationship be tween faith and despair that Kierkegaard advocated is undoubt edly based on the Gospels. One can find there support for the belief that true faith in Jesus has a healing power for the body and for the soul; it will ensure a correct life today and a place in eternity. How ever, Dostoyevski's views can also be based on the Gospels: faith may be reached through a fusion of recognition of the depth and prevalence of human suffering, a wish to alleviate this suffering, and the knowledge that the love of a specific person can help one realize this wish. In short, despair is only one starting point among many of the paths that lead to Jesus. Second, Dmitri Karamazov is a strong advocate against Kier kegaard's monism of despair. He is a person who ventures to be himself, not because he is attempting to overcome despair, but be cause he falls in love, head over heels in love. One of the greatest artistic achievements of Dostoyevski in The Brothers Karamozov is his illustration of Dmitri as a free man during the interrogation, while the prosecutors who arrested him and question him are enslaved by the superficial strictures of their social life and are unable to re-
spond to his openness and trust. Dmitri, strengthened by the love of Grushenka, faces their jeers and sneers without malice or de spair. Third, Dmitri Karamazov is of the salt of the earth. I say this because I cannot escape the impression that much of the dialectics developed in The Sickness unto Death, and especially the link be tween eradicating despair and faith, is not for the Dmitris and Grushenkas, but for an intellectual elite. However, developing this theme requires a separate essay.
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(D) Summary Kierkegaard's monism of despair fails, as many monistic phi losophies have failed, because h u m a n reality, especially in the realm of faith, is much too varied and complex to be confined to the straight jacket of dialectics. It is interesting that Kierkegaard, who was a champion of human freedom, missed this point. The greatness of the human spirit stems from freedom, but confining this freedom to certain paths of development that accord with one's beliefs often clouds our perceptions of reality. Kierkegaard's quest for authenticity and personal freedom is enlightening; his thoughts are often potent and profound, but his attempt to develop a monism of despair is unfortunate.
Contributors
International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness unto Death LOUIS DUPRE, Volume Consultant H. E. BABER is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. JOHN DONNELLY is Professor of Philosophy at the University of San Diego. LOUIS DUPRE is T. Lawrason Riggs Professor of the Philosophy of Re ligion at Yale University. JOHN W. ELROD is Dean of the College at Washington and Lee Univer sity. JOHN D. GLENN, JR. is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Newcomb College of Tulane University. HAIM GORDON is Professor of Philosophy of Education at the Ben Gurion University of the Negev. ALASTAIR HANNAY is Editor of Inquiry at the Institute for Philosophy of the University of Oslo. JOHN M. HOBERMAN is Associate Professor of Germanic Languages at the University of Texas, Austin. DAN MAGURSHAK is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Carthage College. JAMES L. MARSH is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. ROBERT L. PERKINS is Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Stetson University. ROBERT C. ROBERTS is Professor of Philosophical and Psychological Studies at Wheaton College. SYLVIA I. WALSH is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Religion at Clark College. MEROLD WESTPHAL is Professor of Philosophy at Hope College.
Advisory Board
Editor Robert L. Perkins Stetson University Advisory Board John W. Elrod, Washington & Lee University Paul Holmer, Yale University Rex P. Stevens, Mercer University Sylvia I. Walsh, Clark College Volume Consultant Louis Dupre, Yale University International Advisory Board Neils Thulstrup, Denmark Nelly Viallaneix, France Wolfdiedtrich von Kloeden, Federal Republic of Germany J. Heywood Thomas, Great Britain Cornelio Fabro, Italy Masaru Otani, Japan Sixtus W. Scholtens, Netherlands
Index
Abraham, 18-21, 63 Buchner, George, 186 Acts and Other Events, 173 Bultmann, R., 135 Actuality, 10, 62 Carl, Walter, 105 Aesthetic existence, 6-11,13, 72 Chafetz, Janet Saltzman, 129 Agacinski, Sylviane, 122,126 Christendom, 2, 48, 63, 104, 105 Androgyny, 130,132 Christian Discourses, 111, 193,195 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of Church, 2 View, 188 Cole, J. Preston, 121 Anxiety, 195, 213 Communist Manifesto, The, 253 Apology, 48, 241 Comprehension of sin, 158-60 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 187 Concept of Anxiety, The, 30,33,34,35,85, Aristotle, 27, 40, 42, 45, 46, 49, 52, 99, 94,103,194,197, 203, 206, 210 110,154,186-87 Concept of Mind, The, 141 A Treatise of Human Nature, 188,189 Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 30, 47, Attack on Christendom, 2 56, 77, 194 Authenticity, 218-21 Confessions of St. Augustine, The, 80 Bachelard, Gaston, 185, 200, 202 Consciousness, 29, 33-34, 54, 70, 92, 96, Bad faith, 54, 66, 77 141,154-56,165-70 Bad infinite, 58 Contradiction, 35 Bardwick, Judith M., 130 Cratylus, 207 Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Crito, 241 Crowd, 102 Pseudonymous Works, 247-48 Being and Nothingness, 8, 54, 203-204 Daly, Mary, 132 Being and Time, 8, 204-205, 209-38 Defiance, 12, 14, 53, 70, 74, 80, 116-18, Bern, S. L., 130 122,128,153, 231-34 Berdyaev, Nicolas, 239, 243, 247-48, Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 90 249-51 Descartes, Rene, 41-42, 44, 48-49, 86, Berry, Wanda Warren, 131 100,104 Bertung, Brigit, 122 Despair, 5-8,10-12,14-17,21, 68-75, 71, Bianci, Eugene C , 131 91, 141-42 Binswanger, Ludwig, 205 Devil, 29, 53 Block, J. H., 130 Devotedness, 122,123, 129, 132, 133 Book on Adler, 190-92 Dialectic, 67-84, 75 Boredom, 196 Dinnerstein, Dorothy, 131 Brezinski, L., 82 Dizziness, 170,185-208 Brother Lawrence, 140 Dostoyevski, F., 52, 239, 244, 254-57 Brothers Karamazov, The, 245 Double-movement, 7, 19-21
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I n t e r n a t i o n a l Kierkegaard C o m m e n t a r y
Downing, Christine, 132 Drei Formen missglilckten Daseins, 205 Dualism, 6, 8 Dunning, Stephen, 75 Earnestness, 232 Eclipse of Reason, 105 Edifying works, 210 Either/Or, 9,12,14,17, 21 Elrod, John, 121, 126, 247 Emotions, 141-42 Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, 25-26 Enlightenment, 49 Equality, 89 Ethical existence, 6-7,13,17, 20-21, 45, 46, 47, 60, 86,108 Everydayness, 215-31 Existentialism, 4 Extroversion, 71 Facticity, 213 Faith, 6-7, 11,15,19, 28, 30, 62,182 Faith and Knowledge, 105 Faith, Reason, and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard's Philosophical Frag ments, 145 Fatalism, 82 Faust, 46 Fear and Trembling, 7,17,19, 21, 33, 42, 47, 60, 62, 85,194,199 Feeney, Leonard, 183 "Feminine" despair, 121-34 Femininity, 123 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 15 Fichte, J. G., 98 Fideism, 178 Finitude, 7, 56, 60, 70, 138-40, 138-39, 193, 217, 220-22 Forgiveness, 16-17, 20-21 Forisha, Barbara Lusk, 130 Freedom, 5-6, 8, 13,17, 69 Freud, S., 106 Garside, Christine, 122 Gilligan, Carol, 132 God-relation, 5-7, 10-12, 15-18, 20-21, 28 Goldenberg, Naomi, 132 Gorgias, 208 Grammatical, 144-46
Guardini, R., 85 Guilt, 103 Gyllembourg, T., 87 Hall, Ronald L., 184 Hannay, Alastair, 121 Harnack, A., 135 Harris, H. S., 105 Health, 5, 31, 40-41, 50, 215, 241 Hegel, G. W. F., 24-27, 29, 34, 38, 4345, 48, 58, 62-64, 80, 82, 92, 101, 178, 188-89 Heidegger, Martin, 8,185, 187, 204 Helmreich, Robert L., 129 Heroism, 211 Hirsch, Emanuel, 124 Hobbes, Thomas, 2 Hoberman, John M., 222 Holl, Jann, 121 Horkheimer, Max, 105 Hume, David, 183,187,189-90, 204 Husserl, E., 98 Hyde, Janet Shibley, 129 Idle talk, 217, 219 Ignorance, 79, 224 Imagination, 56,190, 219 Immediacy, 70, 226, 227 Individual, 80, 85, 88, 90, 90-98, 100, 104,108 Infinite resignation, 17-21 Infinitude, 7,10,19, 56, 69, 73,138-39 Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible, The, 186 Inwardness, 71 Isaac, 17-18 Jacklin, Carol Nagy, 129 Jaspers, Karl, 61, 98,106 Journals and Papers, 27, 30,101,102,104, 178 Justification, 12, 14 Kainz, Howard P., 122 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 16, 98,188, 204 Kaufmann, Walter, 39,180 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 244 Kirmmse, Bruce, 107 Kissinger, Henry, 82 Klemke, Elmer, 178-79 Knowledge of God, 136-38,148-51 Laing, R. D., 52
T h e Sickness u n t o D e a t h Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 63 Lee, Peggy, 82 Leibniz, G. W., 63 Lesser Logic, 58, 63 Locke, John, 2 Locutionary tone, 162 Love in the Ruins, 119 Lowrie, Walter, 124 McCarthy, Vincent A., 121 Maccoby, Eleanor Emmons, 129 Mackey, Louis, 20 Malantschuk, Gregor, 122 Marcel, Gabriel, 61 Marriage, 14 Martensen, H. L., 178 Marx, Karl, 2, 38, 51, 249-50 "Masculine" despair, 121-34 Masculinity, 123 Michelangelo, 250 Mill, John Stuart, 177 Miller, Libuse Lukas, 121 Modernity, 3,107 Murdock, Iris, 116 Necessity, 8, 10-11, 60-61, 139-40, 212, 222 Needleman, Jacob, 205 Nichomachean Ethics, 99,110,154 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 12, 73, 100, 105, 106,185, 200, 204, 241 Nietzsche and Christianity, 106 No Exit, 113 Nordentoft, Kresten, 109,121 O'Connor, Flannery, 112,115 Offense, 74, 79-80, 95, 151-53 Ontology, 45 Original sin, 155-56 Orwell, George, 180 Pagan, 137-38,146,153,155, 224 Paradox, 6, 67, 80, 136-38, 222 Pascal, B., 102 Pelagius, 94 Percy, Walker, 119 Perlocutionary force, 162 Perry, John, 168 Personality development, 122 Phaedo, 192, 206, 241 Phenomenology, 40 Phenomenology of Spirit, 24-27,43,45,59
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Philistine, 42, 62, 82 Philosophical Fragments, 15, 96,134,145, 149,199-200 Philosophy of Right, 26-27, 59 Plato, 206, 207 Pleasure, 10 Politics, 89 Point of View for My Work as an Author, The, 89 Possibility, 7,10, 60-61, 73, 212 Practice of the Presence of God, The, 140 Present Age, The, 87 Pride, 64 Psychology, 39,144-45,159-60 Rayburn, Sam, 57 Relatedness, 125,126,131 Religious existence, 17-19, 21 Religiousness A, 135 Religiousness B, 135 Repetition, 174 Revelation, 146-48 Ricoeur, Paul, 206 Romanticism, 2 Ruether, Rosemary R., 131 Russell, Bertrand, 249-50 Ryle, Gilbert, 141 Saiving, V. V., 131 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 8, 12, 16, 34, 51, 5355, 61, 73,113,185, 203, 249-50 Schelling, F. W. J., 82 Schillebeeckx, E., 135 Schleiermacher, F., 135 Science, 25 Self, 3-4,10,14-18,21,23,32,68-84,125 Self-consciousness, 44, 86, 133,170-73 Sexual differences, 122,124,129,133 "Shutupness," 127, 197, 224 Sickness, 5, 32, 40-41, 44, 50 Sin, 4, 5-7,15-17,20-21, 31, 235-38; as a position, 156-60 Small-minded, 111 Social philosophy, 1 Socrates, 48, 86,146,195, 241, 247 •Sophist, The, 208 Soul, 25 Spence, Janet T., 129 Spinoza, B., 35, 58 Spirit, 25, 31-33, 68, 97,109,123 Stack, George J., 99
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I n t e r n a t i o n a l Kierkegaard C o m m e n t a r y
Stengren, George L., 37 Stirner, Max, 90,100 Strauss, David, 91, 178 Studies in the Philosophy of Kierkegaard, 178 Symbolism of Evil, The, 192 Symposium, 146 Synthesis, 5, 6, 9, 10, 13, 31-32, 34, 35, 138-41 Taylor, Mark C , 109,121 Teleological suspension, 18, 20 Temporal and eternal, 5-6, 9-11,14 Thextetus, 195 Third, 32-33, 35, 45 Thompson, Judith ]., 173 Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 200-203 Tillich, Paul, 135
Time of the Angels, The, 116 Training in Christianity, 47 Transcendence, 79 Transparency, 6,15, 17 Two Ages, 47, 88, 208 Unconscious, 53 Unconscious despair, 64-66, 76, 115-16, 240-53 Universal, 86 Universality, 14 Weakness, 12, 52, 53, 70-72, 74, 118, 122,127 Westphal, Merold, 48 Wittgenstein, L., 144 Works of Love, 103, 109, 111, 125, 193, 208, 245, 251 Zimmerman, Michael, 218
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