Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 15
Should we take the motto we are focusing on to apply only to this sensitive kind of case? Given the prominence the text gives to the example, it seems much more likely that the motto and example are chosen precisely because this sensitive kind of case is thought to throw most light on the wider phenomena to be included in this concept of despair. This would conform with Anti-Climacus's assertion that it is the second form of authentic despair – the defiant form – that is paradigmatic for despair (and also for inauthentic despair).
However, does Kierkegaard really mean to say that all the human phenomena he designates as 'despair' are cases of not wanting to be this God-given self? If so, isn't this notion of a true self simply a gratuitous piece of theology, a prejudice prefixed to the phenomenology of despair rather than a concept which emerges from it? Further, as we saw, the notion of a true self arises explicitly only in connection with the second authentic form of despair (wanting to be one's own self). Is it not then conceivable that Kierkegaard intends the notion of a true self to refer to something that emerges only when there is an awareness of the infinite abstraction of selfhood, that is to say, the negative self as discussed above? As far as the first authentic form of despair is concerned, it might be enough to make do with the less ambitious and psychologically more realistic notion of 'not wanting to be oneself, or not wanting to be a self at all'.
Well, let us assume for the moment, with regard to the first authentic form of despair, that we can read the text quite neutrally as to whether the self the despairer does not want to be is any kind of self at all or the true, God-posited self. And the text does in fact seem to fit both readings; there is no obvious point at which the concept of a true self need play a part. After all, as indicated by the section entitled 'Despair Viewed under the Aspect of Consciousness', the notion of a true self as adumbrated does not emerge until the self has a grasp of its own negativity, that is to say, until there is a notion of being an unspecified self in relation to which all finite characteristics are merely contingent. So why not simply hold the diagnostic notion of 'true self', the theological prefix, in abeyance? Why not, in the fashionable phrase, simply 'defer' it? True, we cannot defer it forever, since the text does not allow similar liberties in the case of the second authentic
form of despair. But at least here we might find a piece of pure philosophical anthropology uncontaminated by the presupposition of Christianity.
It is clear that in general anthropological terms there is something to be said for taking the disinclination to be a self tout court to be the most fundamental form of despair. Selfhood is a threat one faces before reaching the point where an alternative is conceivable to the self one is, simply because selfhood has to be in place in some sense before alternatives can be considered.25 There may also be some reason to regard it as the most significant form, though that claim would need special pleading and we would have to be clear whose reason it is. But let us allow that it is indeed plausible to assert that not wanting to be a self at all, in the sense in question, is the basic form of despair in Western society. 'Basic' here can also mean not just 'prevalent' but also fundamental in the metaphysical or perhaps anthropological sense that it confronts the issue of selfhood at the roots.
So perhaps Kierkegaard would agree. Indeed perhaps this is what he means when he describes the first authentic form of despair as 'not wanting to be oneself'. After all, according to the account he goes on to develop, and of which the two pages we have focused on here form only a very short summary, what someone on the way to becoming the true self has to confront is precisely this unspecified self now so familiar to readers of post-existentialist literature, that is, the prospect of a merely formal particularity in relation to which all 'worldly' modes and manners of identity are external and subject to radical choice. And if this is perhaps not what Kierkegaard meant, then, in presenting the first form of despair, might we not say that he should have confined himself to what is also phenomenologically the truer account?
Yet what about the second authentic form of despair? There is no textual excuse here for removing the notion of a true self. It is clear that Kierkegaard intends us to understand this despair as the defiant attempt to be rid of the true self. He also makes it quite clear that he considers this form to be in a certain sense basic: 'so far from its being simply the case that this second form of despair (wanting in despair to be oneself) amounts to a special form on its own, all despair can in the end be resolved into or reduced to [opløses i og tilbageføres til] it'.26 In what sense does Kierkegaard claim the second can be resolved into or reduced to the first, and what can be his reasons?
One reason could be the following. Any attempt to avoid selfhood takes the form of being what I shall call here 'a self of sorts'. By that I mean roughly the way in which a person who lives in the Heideggerian category of das Man understands his or her 'self'. This is nowhere near a true self, and does not even approach the negative self; it is a self formed out of ready-made roles and manners and defined by similarities and differences between these. It may not always be possible to define oneself in this way; 'one' may lack the social opportunity or be psychologically incapable of assimilating the das Man role(s) available which would make one a self of sorts. But typically, and on a scale large enough for social criticism to find a target, refusing the project of personal selfhood would mean seeking cover in some such guise or other. (One becomes and remains a self
of a sort, or of several sorts, as parent, teacher, politician, chairman of the local rifle club, and so on; one does what 'is done' even if, less sociably but no less protectively, it is to join a street gang.) Barring insanity, there is no alternative for someone who does not want to approach true selfhood via the narrow pass of the negative self, though insanity itself is indeed, in a manner of speaking, a way out. In other words, the characteristic manoeuvre of someone who does not want to face selfhood is to be a self of sorts, a sort of a self, a self answering to some general social description. That is of course a contradictory project in terms of what it means actually to be the true self, for the latter must be appropriated from the vantage-point of the negative self. In other words, the typical manifestation of not wanting to be an unspecified 'I' is to be a self of sorts.
There is admittedly a difficulty with this suggestion. If defiance consists in the wilful replacement of the goal of true selfhood with an alternative self, a self of one's own design and making, the vantage-point of the negative self must already be reached. The self one wants to be in this second form of despair is a full-blown self, a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, adopted from the vantagepoint of the negative self. In that case none of the 'selves of sorts' adopted by the weaker person whose despair is that of not wanting to be him- or herself will count; in that kind of despair there is, strictly speaking, no self that one is substituting for the true self.
There is, however, an answer to this. One does not have actually to reach the vantage-point of the negative self in order to respond defiantly to its challenge; a premonition of it could be enough for one's way of life to acquire features answering to the model of defiance. Thus the power-crazed person with his motto 'Caesar or nothing' may have no very clear conception of actually being the negative self, that is to say, 'nothing'; what he understands by it may be more in the form of a premonition that unless he becomes Caesar his life will have absolutely no value. His position may be that of the person who demonstrates his despair merely symptomatically by attributing infinite value to something finite. It is only in his behaviour that he shows that he has some concept of the infinite; his self-conception is not yet one in which finite and infinite are separated in practice. Consequently, and if we accept this version of the power-crazed person's defiance, the goal of becoming Caesar may count both as a case of defiance and as an attempt to become a self of sorts, a Caesar-self, a self which does as Caesars do.
This would indicate, as the text indeed has it, that there is no clear-cut distinction between the two authentic forms o
f despair. We would be free, therefore, to look for expressions of defiance in authentic despair of the first kind too. In support of this possibility it could also be pointed out that it is unlikely in principle that there should be a determinable transition from not wanting to be oneself to wanting to be one's own self. The likelihood is that many cases of not wanting to be oneself are also well described as cases of wanting not to be oneself. There is, in the idea of not wanting something, already a hint of defiance, an active stance against something of which one has a premonition perhaps but also to which one is at the same time disposed to give
one's assent. As the text says, we are all constitutionally disposed to become spirit. The claim that all despair has the form of defiance makes allowance for the correlative reluctance or fear generated by this disposition. Despair here is the traditional notion of desperatio, a negative stance in response to an evaluation of the possibilities of succeeding in something assumed to be worthwhile, opposed to hope. Aquinas captures this when he writes:
regarding a good not yet possessed, in which the notion of the arduous can be verified because of the difficulty of obtaining it, if that good is judged to exceed the capacity of the one seeking it, despair ensues; but if it is judged not to exceed that capacity, hope arises.27
What is both novel and crucial in Kierkegaard's account is that this notion of despair is applied to patterns of social behaviour which are not, and could not be, the result of any conscious evaluation of capacities or possibilities. Further, the less consciously the evaluation occurs, the more complex becomes the psychology of evaluation itself: capacities can be strategically undervalued in order to make despair appear more appropriate; or the goals themselves, what is hoped for, can be undervalued so as to become attainable at less cost. It is worth remembering whom Kierkegaard was writing for, namely people who, he believed, grossly simplified the requirements of the life of spirit, people who spoke its language but did not live its life. These were people who saw themselves as selves of a spiritual sort, when spirit requires that you do not see yourself as a self of any sort at all. What especially concerned him were the protective guises which gave selves of certain sorts names which made them sound as if they were actually facing the tasks of true selfhood when in fact their behaviour was a travesty of the very notion. In reading The Sickness unto Death it is surely relevant to consider the extent to which it is a work directed at a specific society, a society in which people were contented in their (spiritual-sounding) roles. If openly refusing to take up the task of what the members of that society, being nominal Christians, would have to admit was a task of true selfhood is the most obvious form of despair, for Kierkegaard it was the more widespread, unobvious forms that mattered, not just because they were more prevalent, but also because they were psychologically more difficult to break out of. These forms include willingly being the sort of self, the being which is in fact to turn away from that task, but also immersing oneself in manners and practices which are the protective measures society, in its own defence but also at the hands of fearful individuals who have had a say in its making, has accumulated over time.
Kierkegaard's concept of a God-posited self is not that of an ideal self which has to be specified then aimed at and then appropriated, or put on as though it were a new suit of clothes, a self in which one must take up habitation in place of one's actual self with all its limitations. Being God-posited is Kierkegaard's theological specification of the self one already is, the given self and its limitations, the self of one's Dasein. That is why so much of Theunissen's Korrektur
seems right-minded. Wanting to be rid of oneself is a state common both to all those disinclined to engage in the project of selfhood at all, and to those – and perhaps there are not many nowadays – who can be appropriately described as unwilling to conceive of their given selves as God-posited because they have some notion of this idea but are offended by it. Still, you cannot treat the project of selfhood with no God in view and of appropriating the fact that you are God-posited as if they were one and the same. To reduce the latter to the former would be to empty it of all that Kierkegaard has put into it. Defining despair as the attempt to be rid of the true self gives the notion a significance which is lacking if it is defined simply as a reluctance to become a self at all. As was noted in connection with the power-crazed man, what the despairer is reluctant to do is, in Either/Or terms, to accept his given and limited self as eternally valid. In Anti-Climacus's terms it is a reluctance to make the given self the vehicle of an ethico-religious life based on a direct relation to God.28 On this reading, the self one does not want to be is the self acknowledged as true in the sense adumbrated. On the alternative reading, the religious category enters at the end as the condition under which the self one initially does not want to be, the given self simpliciter, need no longer be reluctant to be itself. The latter may sound a more cogent account of despair than the former, and superficially they may seem hardly to differ. I hope I have said enough, however, to show that they do differ and significantly.
Finally, and by way of further support for the reading I advocate, let us recall Kierkegaard's personal obsession with lost immediacy. The state in which selfhood first becomes an issue is where the closed circle of 'immediacy' is broken by reflection and finds it is only an assumption. We might say, in a Hegelian spirit, that it is at this point that the notion first emerges of the divine, as that crucial notion upon which the embrace is seen now to depend. Why not then say that what the budding self shuns is just this prospect of loss of that initial state? If so, then the proper description of someone in the first form of real despair would be: not wanting to be the God-established self in any other way than that of immediacy. This would lend another kind of support to the case for my claim that the notion of a true self should also enter into the analysis of the first authentic form of despair. As for Theunissen's lexical argument, its conclusion was that wanting not to be oneself was basic because uniquely common to both forms of despair. My argument has been that there is a case for saying that wanting to be oneself, though in some guise other than that of one's true self, is what the phenomena embraced by The Sickness unto Death share. Consequently the text is right to make paradigmatic the form of despair it calls defiance.
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7
A QUESTION OF CONTINUITY
Although Either/Or was Kierkegaard's best-seller, his later attitude to the ethical view of life he seems to be defending there would lead you to expect embarrassment at a folie de jeunesse rather than any kind of proprietary satisfaction. He seems, indeed, even in the very writing of the book, to have been on the way to disowning its manifest message; and in the retrospective and self-justificatory Synspunket for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (Point of View), Kierkegaard's posthumous report to history, Either/Or is described as 'pre-religious'. Yet the Point of View was originally intended to accompany a second edition of Either/Or1 as part of a public declaration on Kierkegaard's part that his pseudonymous authorship had been a religious project from the start.
How convincing is that claim, and what justification is there for it? More particularly, what continuity could Kierkegaard expect his readership to discern between the avowedly pre-religious Either/Or and the subsequent pseudonyms? Indeed, given Kierkegaard's disparaging remark the year before his death that what Judge William says about 'the woman' is 'what you would expect from a married man who champions marriage with ethical enthusiasm', another on marriage as part of an 'intricate plot' designed to destroy the man's spirit, and numerous remarks on the 'mediocrity' of 'the human',2 we may even ask how Kierkegaard could possibly square this evident lack of enthusiasm for marriage with the claim that Either/Or was still part of the ongoing corpus.
There was a clearly economic motive in republishing Either/Or: In view of his failing finances Kierkegaard sorely needed the revenue from further sales of his best-seller to support the later religious production. Still, it seems certain that he was willing and able to persuade
himself that Either/Or was a genuine precursor to that production and indeed a religious work itself,3 though not manifestly. Because its readership had overwhelmingly responded to the work as an aesthetic product, he feared that if the second edition appeared on its own the impression that readers would receive of his production overall would be of an aesthetic author,4 with the result that the productivity's religious point would be 'lost'.5 Hence the intended accompaniment by a 'careful explanation' in the Point of View. Because Kierkegaard regarded it as 'crucial' that since the time of writing Either/Or he had 'stepped into the character of a religious author',6 to make it
quite clear that publication of the second edition did not mean that he was stepping out of that character, he planned to include The Sickness unto Death in the package, under his own name.
In the event, for reasons Kierkegaard himself details,7 he changed his mind about publishing the Point of View in his lifetime, while The Sickness unto Death, written in the immediate aftermath of 1848, was published only after some delay and now under a (new) pseudonym.8
Despite Kierkegaard's qualms, however, the second edition of Either/Or came out, on 14 April 1849. It was accompanied by a manifestly religious work: The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air. Unlike the first edition, the second came in a single volume, thus preventing new readers from succumbing too readily to the temptation to read the 'either' without troubling to look into the 'or'.9