If we read the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death in this way, we must also understand the 'synthesis' 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 Hegelian analogy to discard.
My proposal here is that 'synthesis' in both Anxiety and Sickness be linked to what was earlier called the standing assumption that God exists and we must stand before Him if we are to be truly ourselves. Thus the standing assumption is that the eternal is a positive category in the sense that it 'posits' a telos outside nature and the task of holding the elements – for example, 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'.13 Elsewhere we are told that spirit posits the synthesis as a contradiction; spirit 'sustains' the contradiction,14 that is to say, it does not resolve it. Conceptually, however, a synthesis cannot consist merely of a contradictory pair;15 there must be some framework for conceiving the opposites as congruent within a unity. In Anxiety the 'instant' 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, though never losing sight of the limitations. This belief is essential to spirit'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 an 'imbalance' or 'misrelation' (Misforhold) (p. 44 [14] ). This can easily suggest that despair and the relation (Forhold) are mutually exclusive, which leaves us with the idea that it is only the true self to which the expression 'relates to itself' applies. Yet this problem, too, can be overcome. What Anti-Climacus actually says is that 'the imbalance of despair is not a simple imbalance but an imbalance in a relation that relates to itself' (ibid., emphasis added). In other words, the reflexive relation already exists as a precondition of the possibility of an imbalance. 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 has perhaps chosen as its ideal self. The imbalance is then an inability to sustain, or direct defiance of, a spiritual inertia, prompted by the contrary inertial influence of the natural, instinctual 'synthesis' which the despairing individual exploits as a protective device in the anxiety of spiritual emergence. Anti-Climacus does not simply say that the relation in which the imbalance occurs relates to itself, but also that it is 'established' by something else (ibid.). The imbalance is the self-relating relation's unwillingness to orient itself to something other, and non-finite, that posited it.
3 This interpretation has the important consequence that, without the standing assumption, there is no synthesis. The synthesis is 'sustained' by spirit only so far as 'spirit' is understood positively, though only in task terms. This raises important questions for the interpretation of Kierkegaard's works as a whole. Why, for instance, do the pseudonymous works not envisage a nihilistic alternative in which, according to the above, a synthesis would not be an initial part but itself an option? Does the assumption have some transcendental status, for example as a regulative idea? Or are the pseudonymous works deliberately confined to a framework in which the standing assumption has the status of an axiom? And if so, can that be seen as strategy on Kierkegaard's part, or is it rather an indication of his failure to take account of a more comprehensive kind of despair?
Answering these questions is far beyond this essay's scope, 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 Kierkegaard's acceptance of the Christian framework can be read as determined and passive. We know he broke with Christianity 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 in, or disposition to believe, 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 Christian doctrine. At the other extreme whatever Kierkegaard himself believed 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 readers what their professions of faith really commit them to – not, on this interpretation, because Kierkegaard himself accepts the content of that faith, even if that is nevertheless 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), the belief should be formed in full clarity about the options between which it adjudicates. This reading, contrary to the first, gives us a radically de-contextualized Kierkegaard, who might conceivably be transported into the present, where he might 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 authorship. Nor indeed is it even likely that the motivational complex behind his activity can be referred to any single point between, not even if we confine ourselves to just one phase, say that of Anti-Climacus. As a suggestion on how the space of possibilities might be exploited, I propose elsewhere that we pick out two different points corresponding to a 'passive', or unreflective, 'problem' aspect and an 'active', deliberate 'solution aspect'.16 The passive aspect corresponds to a need, the kind of need that leaves one wanting a religious framework, and the active element 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-Climacus'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 falling 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 belong to two different stages. Put succinctly, the reason why the framework is a solution is that it no longer contains the conceptual resources for describing what gave rise to it as a 'need'. The framework heals the breach by 1eaving no room for the problem; instead, by 'engag[ing) man [in eternity] absolutely' and making life 'infinitely more strenuous than … when one is not involved in Christianity',17 it redefines our needs. Once God is there the need is to stand transparently before 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 coloured 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 (as Kierkegaard calls them), 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 instant points beyond itself to a higher unity, so the psychical closure (where soul is the determining category) opens in a splitting of finite and infinite, leaving the self no saving opt
ion but to grant its establishment by 'something else' in eternity and to relate itself to that ideal or 'measure'. But – as Anti-Climacus does not make explicit – that there is this saving option is not given unless we adopt the religious, or indeed the Christian, 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 colouring the account of what goes before in the dispassionate 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 further 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 by now many others besides Marx and Freud would claim), or has Kierkegaard unearthed a universal spiritual need? Secondly, is the fact that Christian doctrine commends itself as the only solution also passive in that sense, that is to say, it only seems inevitably so, or is it really the only way out? The vindication of Kierkegaard's thought in this area for our or any time would seem to call for the latter answer in each case.
* * *
6
BASIC DESPAIR
The Sickness unto Death distinguishes between two types of 'authentic' despair: 'not wanting to be oneself' and 'wanting to be oneself'.1 The heading to the first section (A) in Part One identifies another and prior type: 'being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair)'. But the author only begins to discuss this unconscious form of despair later, in a section on coming to consciousness of one's despair. There, although he admits one might wonder whether this third type should be called despair at all, he goes on to say that this form of despair, the inauthentic one, is the 'most common' of all.2 That it is so is, however, already anticipated in the second section (B):
It is as far as possible from the truth that the common view is right which assumes that anyone who doesn't think or feel he is in despair is not in despair, and that only the person who says he is in despair is so. On the contrary, he who says without pretence that he despairs is, after all, a little nearer, a dialectical step nearer being cured than all those who are not regarded and who do not regard themselves as being in despair. But as most authorities on the psyche will concede, the normal situation is this: that most people live without being properly conscious of being characterized as spirit – and to this one can trace all the so-called security, contentment with life, etc., which is exactly despair.3
The difficulties have to do with the fact that despair is analysed as a relationship involving the self, but, according to the analysis, what makes the third, or, in point of genealogy, first, form of despair inauthentic is that in this form of despair there is no consciousness of self. But before the matter of its credentials can be settled there is a prior question of how to understand the two authentic forms and their interrelationship. It is to this question that this essay is devoted.
From the start Kierkegaard says quite unequivocally that 'all despair can in the end be resolved into or reduced … to the second form',4 that is, 'wanting to be oneself'. Before asking why this form should be regarded as the general one, let us be clear what the formula for this second form of authentic despair actually says. It sounds at first sight paradoxical. Surely being contented with the self one is or has become is the very opposite of despair? But as Kierkegaard himself stresses at the
very beginning, the kind of despair he says is basic could not be a form of despair at all without the idea that the self is established by God. The word 'spirit', just encountered in the above quotation, suggests a teleology in which a form of selfhood is, for all human beings, in the offing. The very first sentence in The Sickness unto Death asserts that '[t]he human being is spirit'. And to the question 'But what is spirit?' it answers 'Spirit is the self'. What the formula for despair 'wanting to be oneself' means, then, is 'wanting to be one's own self' rather than the self that is grounded in God, or, as Anti-Climacus says more circumspectly, a self 'established by something else', by a 'power'. The state in which despair is rooted out is one in which, 'in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it'.5 Thus there are two ways of wanting to be oneself. One is a despairing way, in which one sees oneself as no more than what one can make of oneself. The other, the 'formula' for riddance of despair, is where, whatever one makes of oneself, that self is seen as owing to a power to which its own origin and destiny are due. The former turns out to be sin, the latter faith.
The disjunction here, the either/or that makes the contrast between despair and its opposite conveniently lexical, might itself indicate that the form of despair called 'wanting (in despair) to be oneself' is the basic one. If all despair can be perspicuously distinguished from faith as wanting to be one's own (that is, self-posited) self, the question then is how to bring the first form of authentic despair under this general formula. It is, we recall, 'not wanting (in despair) to be oneself'. How can this be seen to be a special case of the former?
It is possible to interpret the formula 'not wanting to be oneself' in different ways. One is to take it that the self one does not want to be is the self as spirit, or as developed spirit. The idea here is that spiritual teleology goes against the grain. That would make the occurrences of 'self' in both formulae tidily synonymous. But, perhaps in the light of difficulties with this talk of a teleology and its going against the grain, one might take 'self' in the special case to be simply the self one finds oneself being, to be who one is in the here and now. Even if that should solve whatever the difficulties might be, it would upset the tidy synonymy. However, if the difficulties proved sufficient, we might conclude that the formulae did not order themselves in the conveniently lexical fashion, and if Kierkegaard's claim about which is basic is based on it, we might also conclude that his account should be modified accordingly.
I once assumed unquestioningly that Kierkegaard as Anti-Climacus had good reason to claim that the second form of despair represents despair in general and is therefore the basic form. The reason was not so much the tidily definitional either/or so much as my finding it natural to read the text in that way. The first authentic form of despair was a shunning of the trials of spirituality. Naturally, then, I took the further question of whether there is something to call 'inauthentic' despair to be a matter of whether there is an unconscious, perhaps preconscious, form of despair satisfying the second authentic form – something that raises the difficulties Kierkegaard himself recognizes before dismissing them.
Michael Theunissen, however, in a paper to which this essay and earlier versions are responses,6 claims that if we reconstruct Kierkegaard's analysis of despair we find that Kierkegaard is indeed mistaken; according to the implications of his own analysis, Kierkegaard should have said that the basic form of despair is the first, the kind he calls not wanting to be oneself. Accordingly, Theunissen proposes in his reconstruction as the Grundsatz of Kierkegaard's analysis: 'Immediately, we want not to be what we are [in our selves, our pre-given Dasein, and our human being].'
However, the issue is to some extent complicated by the fact that Theunissen offers significantly different readings of the two authentic forms of despair (in terms that he also applies to the inauthentic, or, as he says, 'non-real', form). Glossing the first form, as we have just seen, as not wanting to be ourselves in our pre-given existence, Theunissen, if that is to be the basic form, must then read the second form as a special case of the same. That is to say, and against the text as I read it, he must treat it as an unwillingness to be oneself in one's pre-given existence. The text itself has 'fortvivlet at ville være sig selv'. To achieve the required result the expression 'fortvivlet' must be given the force of negation, so that we can read it as saying that the despair consists in the willing to be oneself being somehow impeded – a despairing of the very willing (to be oneself), as against the reading to be defe
nded here: that this is a form of willing to be oneself that, because it ignores the spiritual teleology, amounts in itself to despair. Consistency does of course require that the qualifying expression 'fortvivlet' be used similarly in both formulae, and we assume this is the author's intention. In the case of the first authentic form of despair, which is 'not wanting to be ourselves in our pre-given existence', it could be a matter of, say, 'despairing of being any other self than the one we are'.
Theunissen offers a lexical argument of his own. He points out that the despair of not wanting to be oneself cannot be analysed into that of wanting to be another. You can very well want not to be yourself without at the same time wanting to be another, but whenever you want to be another you are still wanting not to be yourself. So not wanting to be yourself (or a self at all) is the basic form of despair. I shall not comment on this argument until the conclusion. First we must confront the readings it is based on. They are clearly not implausible and they may even stand the test of extensive exposure to the rest of the text. But even were they to fail this test to some extent, they may be thought to offer a better basis than the text's for an analysis of the phenomenon of despair in our own time. They at least relieve the analyst of the burden of allegiance to the religious premise that prefixes much of the pseudonymous literature, particularly the work of Anti-Climacus. Whether they do stand up to the test of their context is another matter that I shall not judge. I confine myself to attempting to vindicate my own reading of the formulae and the text in which they are embedded.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 13
