Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  As Kierkegaard himself stresses at the very beginning, without the idea of a self established by God, the kind of despair he says is basic could not be a form of despair at all. There would only be the despair of not wanting to be oneself.

  And were that indeed the only form available, it would be extremely paradoxical to be told that you are still in despair even if you do indeed want to be yourself. The only escape would be indifference as to whether or not you are yourself, and that is obviously not what Kierkegaard intends when he talks of a state in which 'despair is completely eradicated'.7 If we understand in a quite straightforward way what not wanting to be ourselves is, that is, where we have some idea of the self or person we are and we don't want to be that person – the kind of case Theunissen's Grundsatz refers to – and we are told that this is a state of despair, we could quite naturally assume that the way to avoid despair is to be content with being this self, to be that self willingly, go along with being it – unless, that is, we are also told, as we are by Kierkegaard, that willingly being oneself still need not be being one's self in its spiritual form. For in that case we can see how even if we are willingly the self we are, we may still be in despair. We need some idea, then, of a true selfhood to contrast with a selfhood we are willing to take on, in order for willing to be the self we take on still to count as a form of despair. We need some notion of a 'true' form of selfhood.

  Does it have to be that of a God-established self, though? Might it not just as well be, for instance, Heidegger's notion of a self authentically related to death as its 'utmost, though indefinite, yet certain possibility', the possibility before which, in Heidegger's functional equivalent of Kierkegaardian despair, 'Dasein flees in everydayness'?8 We could go further. Even within everydayness, anyone with a notion of an ideal or better self can allow that now willingly being the self one previously didn't like the thought of becoming may still fall short of some better self one still doesn't like the thought of becoming. And if that is all that the despair of wanting to be oneself – of willingly being what one is – amounts to, we could always envisage escaping despair either by becoming a still better self or by adjusting to some everyday specification of selfhood we don't immediately want to be confined to, though in some respects we allow it is this confined self we indeed really are. But none of this captures Kierkegaardian despair. According to Kierkegaard, it is still possible in either case to be in despair, because no self at all we become and like, and no self we didn't like but are now satisfyingly adjusted to being, is our real, proper, best or 'true' self. To be that self, one has to make a Uturn and look and move in quite the opposite direction. That direction is not the Heideggerian one of confronting one's utmost possibility. For according to The Sickness unto Death, thinking that 'death is the end or the end death' is precisely to despair.9 So not only is it not enough just to have upgraded one's self according to some ideal within everydayness, it is not even enough to emerge from one's refuge in everydayness to face one's finitude. Indeed, embracing death as the end proves to be the Kierkegaardian paradigm of the properly despairing self.

  So Anti-Climacus claims that there is this notion of selfhood that is a notion of a God-established self, and asserts that any striving after a goal of selfhood that is not an acceptance of this ideal is despair. In a way, I suspect, he is really claiming that any striving after a goal of selfhood at all is despair – any striving to become a 'better' self than the self one is – because to strive in this self-improving way is to try to be a self in a way that is not that of being a God-established self, and only the latter gives you the condition in which you can be rid of despair. At any rate, I understand the text's main claim to be that the fundamental form that despair takes – that is, the way in which despair manifests itself, the behaviour we should call despair in the most basic sense – is that of aiming at, or willingly accepting, specifications of selfhood that do not have the form of a selfhood established by God. The case where this behaviour is most conscious (to the subject or agent in question) is what Anti-Climacus calls 'defiance'. But Kierkegaard says that there is an element of defiance in all despair.10 It is both tempting and plausible to suppose that Kierkegaard would include here the case of inauthentic despair, where there is as yet no conception of being a self about which one can raise questions of wanting to be it or not. If Kierkegaard is right in this – though perhaps he isn't, in which case I think this is where we should first look to find out whether he is mistaken – all 'trying to be/being willingly a self' is a way of trying to escape or deliberately disregard the form of a God-established selfhood; that is, of not wanting to be one's true, God-established self.

  To elaborate, let us look at the brief summary of the concept of despair which appears in the third section (C) of Part One entitled 'Despair is the Sickness unto Death'. Anticipating the fuller account that follows, the text says here that despair first appears in the form of a despair over something, but that the real and underlying target is the self. There are several difficulties of interpretation with regard to these two pages. One of them has to do with what the text here says is true of all despair, that it is an attempt to be rid of the self. We may feel that we can understand this notion in the case of despairing over something important enough in relation to the person's self-image for the despair to count as despair over the self; wanting rid of the self which proves incapable of something of that importance makes sense at least figuratively, but perhaps even literally if some theoretically appropriate sense of 'self' can be found. But how can we move from that idea to another also given in the text, namely that even succeeding in something of this importance is an attempt to be rid of the self?

  First let us itemize the claims that appear to be made in the text. Two illustrations are provided which, when combined, look as if they give us a synopsis of the main points to be made about despair. One is the example of the power-crazed person (den Herskesyge, lit. the power-sick) whose motto is 'Either Caesar or absolutely nothing.'11 The other is that of a young girl who despairs over the loss of her loved one (whether through death or betrayal). If we suppose they fail in their projects, they remain selves they do not want to be. What is made explicit in the case of the young girl is that if she succeeded in becoming his, she would not have become herself but become his; she would have been rid of her self (though 'in the most blissful manner'). This indeed was her project. But as it happens, she fails and is left with the self she did not want to be. The formerly hopeful self is now a self of 'torment', in the form of a 'loathsome void', if in fact he died, or, if it was a betrayal, of a 'despicable reminder'.12 The text suggests that, having failed, she wants even more to get rid of this self, but to the comment 'You are consuming

  herself' she is made to reply 'Oh, no! The agony is just that I can't'.13 Here, then, we have a case complying with the first half of Theunissen's lexical argument for the fundamental status of the despair that is not wanting to be oneself: You can very well want not to be yourself without at the same time wanting to be another. Of course, such a person might have thought 'How nice to have been a self-sufficient self and consolable self instead', but the case of the girl is presented as one in which she has no such alternatives in mind and just wants to be rid of herself tout court. We recall the argument is that since you can want not to be yourself without wanting to be another but not conversely, wanting not to be yourself is the basic form of despair.

  There is, however, an alternative reading of the girl's case and what she wants rid of, though in vain. According to this reading, the self she vainly tries to escape with no other in view is a self that is independent and free in respect of all its relationships with the world, a self that does not need to try to be rid of itself by surrendering to another, being another's. The sickness unto death is, on this reading of the unriddable self, the futile attempt to shirk one's spiritual destiny. As the text puts it: just as Socrates proved the soul was immortal 'from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as
the body's sickness consumes the body … [so can one] similarly prove the eternal in a man from the fact that despair cannot consume his self'.14

  Let us move on now to the power-crazed person. We can say that his very hunger for power is an expression of his unwillingness to be himself. Part of this is that he wants not to be a self that is unable to become Caesar, but that is a part of the project that may not be clear to him until he fails to become Caesar and then wants to be rid of the self that was too weak to become Caesar. This regressive 'wanting not to be the self that cannot' is called 'the heightened formula for despair, the rising fever in this sickness of the self'. It sounds as if the regress is meant to be infinite – 'what [the despairer] despairs over is … that he cannot consume himself, cannot become nothing'.15 That is, each failed attempt to be rid of a self that fails in its attempt to be rid of a self simply produces yet another attempt to get rid of the most recently failing self. Since the regress is infinite, becoming nothing is not an alternative to becoming Caesar. Now this suggests, just as before, that we might take the self that the power-crazed person vainly tries to become to be this weak self that cannot become Caesar, just as at a more modest level of attainment a would-be Kierkegaard scholar might not want to be a self that cannot master Danish. However, there is an inherent weakness in this. It is practically a tautology to say that the attempt to change one's given self is to try to get rid of the self; it is just another way of saying that one wants to change its specifications. In this sense any kinds of change, including the kinds that we call development, getting educated, realizing oneself, and so on, would be classified as cases of wanting to be rid of one's self, of what one is. But the stakes are surely higher here, almost as though the would-be Kierkegaard scholar would prefer not to be a human being at all if he or she couldn't master Danish. In another sense, and I believe the textual and contextual evidence strongly favours this reading, the

  self the would-be Caesar wants to be rid of is the self he should become and in relation to which the project of becoming Caesar is entirely incompatible. Becoming Caesar would be to go in the direction opposite to that of the self which the would-be Caesar would be rid of. If he became Caesar. And the latter is a self which as yet he is not, not a self that he currently knows himself as being and finds unsatisfactory. The would-be Caesar is, by heading in the Caesar direction, looking for a way of not facing up to the project of selfhood that confronts him, and he does it by seeking quite the wrong kind of satisfaction. This, we can introject here, complies with the second half of Theunissen's lexical argument for the position enjoyed in the analysis by wanting not to be oneself: whenever you want to be another you are still wanting not to be yourself.

  To give our alternative reading some preliminary backing, let us go back five years to the answer Assessor Wilhelm gives to the question he himself poses in Either/Or when, in connection with the notion of choosing oneself, he asks: 'But what, then, is this self of mine?' As what he calls 'a first shot at a definition', he says, 'the most abstract thing of all which yet, at the same time, is the most concrete thing of all – it is freedom'.16 Thus it is not in any ordinary sense a merely factual self. It is not the self one knows oneself as being just by virtue of possessing finite properties; indeed, as the term 'freedom' suggests, it has more to do with possibility than with actuality. Perhaps a clue to why the power-crazed person does not want to be this self may be found in this latter fact. We can develop this idea by linking it to the notion of a 'negative' self developed later in the first part of The Sickness unto Death. There we find terms like the 'infinite form' of the self, and of its 'negative' form, and also of the self's 'infinite abstraction'.17 However, we can see from remarks Wilhelm makes in Either/Or why the self considered simply as the most abstract thing of all is not a self. It is what we would call a transcendental self, a self or 'I' that remains identical whatever changes of finite properties it may undergo. But as Wilhelm says, it is a mistake for a person to think of himself as 'remaining himself though everything were changed'. It is to suppose that there were 'something in him that is absolute in relation to everything else, something whereby he is the one he is, even if the change he obtains through his wish were the greatest possible'.18 Such a self, says Wilhelm, which a person might conceive of himself as remaining under all conceivable change, 'as if his inmost being were an algebraic entity that could stand for whatever it might be', is not a self one could ever choose to be. Moreover, all you can say about this 'most abstract expression for the "self" ' is that it is 'freedom'. Finally, although 'the self I despair over is a finitude as every other finite thing', the self I choose, if I do choose a self, is 'the absolute or my self according to its absolute validity'.19

  Given the central part played in The Sickness unto Death by the notion of 'spirit' and the fact that the theme of the work is the difficulties people experience entering or staying within this category, it seems clear that the component expression 'self' in 'despair over oneself' reaches much further than the finite self simply as it is. The power-crazed person is placing undue significance on finite matters; it matters too much to him that he becomes Caesar, so that if he fails to become

  Caesar, this self of his will be the most intolerable thing of all, much worse than that of the young girl, whose torment is that she did not become another's. So, even if it is a failure of the finite self that makes the power-crazed person unable to 'bear' being that self,20 the very project which defines the failure is itself pathological, a case of despair. So we could say, as our first shot at a definition, that the self the power-crazed person does not want to be is a self which from the point of view of the negative self must in finite terms be counted a 'nothing', a self for which no finite properties are essential but also for which no non-finite properties are available. The power-crazed person is avoiding the necessity of having to choose between, as it says in A Literary Review, 'be[ing] lost [fortabes] in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be[ing] infinitely saved in the essentiality [Væsentlighed] of religiousness'.21 The force of the motto 'Caesar or nothing' will then be that it is preferable to become Caesar than to face the alternatives that emerge when the negativity of selfhood is fully recognized: a loss of selfhood altogether or the surrender of selfhood to God.

  The text's characterization of the power-crazed person's kind of despair introduces briefly the notion of a true self, of a self which one is 'in truth'. Here, says Anti-Climacus, '[t]he self which, in his despair, he wants to be is a self he is not (indeed, to want to be the self he is in truth, is the very opposite of despair) …'.22 It makes perfect sense, therefore, to identify the self which the power-crazed person wants rid of as the true self. The same passage says that 'the second form of despair – wanting in despair to be oneself – can be traced back to the first – in despair not wanting to be oneself'.23 The man who wants to be Caesar is, by virtue of that very fact, not wanting to be his true self, the self chosen 'in truth', as it says here, or as Wilhelm put it, the self 'in its eternal validity'.

  So the would-be Caesar's attitude is that of one who has some grasp of the negativity of selfhood. He is on the threshold of knowing himself as an abstraction for which all finite characterizations are contingent. He is trying to be rid of his negative self by exploiting its freedom to reconstitute himself as a Master in the finite world. This invites the thought that the force of the 'Caesar or nothing' example in this early section of The Sickness unto Death is to indicate that the tyrannous person is someone peculiarly sensitive to the negativity of selfhood, that is, to the fact that before acknowledging that the self one is is established by God, one must first achieve an abstract vantage-point from which alone that finite self can be chosen absolutely. But this negativity is only one side of the true self, and by the same token it is only one of the aspects of selfhood that the power-crazed person wants rid of, and indeed it is not clear that he does want rid of it, since the vantage-point is one whose 'freedom' allows him to choose a tyrant as his role model. What the
tyrant is really trying to hide from himself is the prospect of having to return, from the point of view of that negativity, to his historical self with all its limitations. Nor, from the negative vantage-point he shuns but at the same time exploits, is limitation just a matter of contingent impossibilities. From there any possibilities at all will be seen to suffer from the categorial limitation of being purely contingent and inessential. Thus true selfhood has a twofold nega

  tivity: on the one hand, the abstractness of a self separated from all finite determinants; and, on the other, the thought of the radical contingency of all that makes up the finite self. Instead of taking his historical self to have 'validity' after all, a thought which the freedom of the abstract vantage-point both necessitates and articulates (as what it means to appropriate the true self), the power-crazed person chooses another self, a finite self – he chooses to (try to) become Caesar. But in doing so he is mixing categories, though he, unlike the young girl, is at least on the verge of realizing they are indeed distinct. As Wilhelm has said, 'oneself' is the only thing one can choose absolutely.24 The power-crazed person fills the void with a fixed fivite idea, instead of accepting the challenge of the choices and tasks confronting his given self.