Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 23
Kierkegaard must undoubtedly be immoral. But hasn't our discussion told us that our way of life is not uniform, even about what to do with evidence? We can praise those who plough boldly into nature to wrest from it alone what facts it can disclose, come what may, and are ready at any moment to be proved wrong but will plough on in another direction rather than relax or relapse into dogma. But why not praise equally those who hold fast to a dogma which responds to a naïve interest if they sustain that interest and perhaps even the dogma, come what may? In the one case we praise a mind open to the world, in the other a stand in the face of the world. Of course, if we say 'commitment' in the face of the evidence and are thinking of evidence in the limited context of fact-finding, then the alternative to an open mind seems to be a closed one. But it depends how far your world extends. If it amounts to more than a mere accumulation of facts, then commitment can be a virtue, the virtue of withstanding pressures of exposure to the world, comparable to the fact-finder's virtue of boldly giving himself up to them. There may even be a kind of hierarchy in which commitment comes out higher than rationality. Significantly, the pressures straining commitment are not so much the facts to which critical rationalism boldly exposes itself. Rather, the pressure on commitment is the strong temptation to believe that the rationalist way of life is the only one there is. It could be a temptation one should resist. The rationalist ensures that the world gets to him as uncontaminated as possible by any prior commitment. A hero of commitment might be one who protects himself against the deception that he can get through life as a journalist and not also as an author, believing that 'critically' editing whatever scripts he can get the world to submit to him is an adequate specification of life's fulness. The rationalist's optimism (or naïveté
perhaps?) might be a self-deceiving response to the same deep-seated interests that elicit commitment among those whom the rationalists describe as irrational. Rather than think too highly of the rationalist if he represses this interest, we might conceivably find it in us to praise the leaper of faith for defending his dogma even unto the last ditch of absurdity.
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10
HUMOUR AND THE IRASCIBLE SOUL
The author of Postscript says just once, right out of the blue, that 'all despair is a kind of bad temper' ('al Fortvivlelse er en Art Arrigskab').1 No clarification or support is provided, nor is despair described in that way in The Sickness unto Death, which is the main source for the concept, or anywhere else in the corpus, so far as I know. One may suspect there is no deep point here, just a writer indulging a penchant for vivid expression.
But is it out of the blue? If in the context and at first glance the expression looks unmotivated, we can at least guess which part of the blue it comes out of.
Bad temper can have many names: 'peevishness', 'irritability' and, in the old Humour days, 'choler'. But another term just as venerable would be no stranger to someone as familiar with ancient and medieval philosophy as Kierkegaard, namely 'irascibility' (something choler was supposed to cause). Not only that, readers of Thomas Aquinas will know that for Thomas the 'irascible' is the home of despair.
But can there be a connection? And if so, can it be intended; or is this just a random case of retrieval from a collective classical memory? The context can in fact help us here, but in order not to exclude too peremptorily a wider question about the context itself, I shall postpone this consideration until the end. This wider question has to do with how far the parallel between Aquinas's desperatio and Kierkegaard's Fortvivlelse can be extended and with what results for the comparison.
1 Irascible' is a scholastic term and it derives from Plato's well-known distinction within the irrational soul between appetite pure and simple, epithumia, traditionally translated 'concupiscence'and having the special connotation of a longing for worldly things, and a 'spirited' element, thumos, meaning 'spirit' but in the everyday sense in which showing courage is to be 'spirited'.2
Plato needs thumos to fill a motivational gap between desire, on the one hand, which he sees as blind impulse, and reason, on the other, or the ability to calculate or judge. One may judge that giving in to some blind impulse will have a damaging effect for society or oneself, but it still requires thumos to resist the impulse. Thumos, too, is an appetite of sorts, but one that is informed by a judgement.
Without thumos we would never move away from things that attract us, nor intervene in situations where our judgement tells us that something bad is happening. The word (orge) Socrates uses in the passage where the tripartite soul is introduced in the Republic can mean 'temper' in a wider, non-specific sense, but the examples he gives do favour translation as 'anger' or 'indignation'. If we think of a person's concerned engagement in the world broadly enough to include expectations, fears and hopes (as well as frustrations and regrets), then the irascible soul can be seen to embrace hopes in the mode of their frustration, and therefore despair.
Plato's tripartite soul is a theory of psychological organization intended to throw light on the constitution of the city-state. Aquinas, on the other hand, considers the irascible soul in its relation to the prospect of religious salvation. But the basic psychological mechanism remains the same. Aquinas describes the difference between hope and despair in quite general terms. For the 'irascible power' to come into play there must be some good 'not possessed', otherwise the necessary element of 'the arduous' is not present. An irascible power responds to an assessment of some situation salient enough for it to be sensitive to; the typical example would be of some difficulty that lies in one's path.
[R]egarding 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.3
A good possessed, naturally enough, provokes no irascible power. Not so, according to Aquinas, when what is possessed is an evil, for here there is the difficulty of becoming rid of it. If in one's judgement this difficulty cannot be overcome, then, on Aquinas's view, no irascible power can be incurred; there remains only the 'passion of sadness', which is not an irascible but a 'concupiscible power'.4 But in the case of an evil not yet possessed, the irascible power of fear is evoked if the difficulty of avoiding it is judged beyond one's capacity, whereas if, on the other hand, one believes that one can avoid it, then the irascible response is boldness.5
You might think that the response to admitting to yourself an inability to be rid of an evil possessed would be despair. You might think this not necessarily because despair seems a better candidate than sadness, since it might well occur to you that the response could be one of despair in the form of sadness; just as despair in something like the form of sadness would be evoked by a corresponding inability to acquire some good. So why, in this respect, are failing to be rid of an evil and failing to acquire a good not symmetrical?
The only possible answer seems to be this: (1) irascible powers are by definition those which respond to difficulties standing in the way of interests that are still operational; (2) there are states in which the interests which the difficulties once stood in the way of are no longer operational; (3) despair belongs to the former while sadness belongs to the latter. When an interest is no longer opera
tional, then the difficulties in the way of it are no longer salient. The reason for their no longer being salient here, unlike the case where the appetite is satisfied, is that the possibility of attainment has been pushed aside. A word that fits nicely here is 'resignation', and sadness does seem the more fitting response than despair. In resignation the good in question is taken out of the realm of considerable options; in despair that is not so. In the case of resignation this need not mean a total loss of interest in the good; the interest may survive in some latent form or be elevated consciously to a level where it is protected from life's contingencies. Either way, because, by being shelved, the good in question is effectivel
y removed from the irascible soul's reach, the project of attaining this good will have been taken off the operational agenda. Readers of Fear and Trembling will see limned here in outline the move made by the 'knight of infinite resignation', whose impossible love on earth for his princess is 'transfigured into a love for the eternal being'.6 As Johannes de silentio says: 'In infinite resignation there is peace and repose.'7 In other words the difficulties are shelved. But there can still be sadness, which is a passion (as also its counterpart, joy – according to Aquinas, both are 'in the concupiscible'8). Their responses could be said to be postagonistic.
But why should despair be agonistic? 'Appetite', says Aquinas, 'is the source of movement and an agent is moved only towards what is possible; certainly no one would be attracted by an object which he considered impossible.'9 You could say that one way in which despair differs from resignation is that in despair there is still the attraction, in the sense of a desire for the object. In resignation you resign your desire and (or in order to) forget the attraction. But in despair you still have the desire and you are still attracted: 'we neither hope for nor despair of what we do not desire'.10 In plain desire (a concupiscible power) no difficulty intervenes (or at least not such as to mobilize judgement as to whether it lies in one's powers to overcome it or not). Hope and despair arise only when the object of desire is 'something arduous, attainable only with difficulty'.11 You hope when you think that something you desire is attainable, albeit with difficulty; you despair when you think it is not attainable.
But then how does one characterize the irascible 'passion' of despair? How can it still be a passion when what it desires is considered to be out of reach? What is despair? Aquinas says that, rather than a giving up of the desire, despair is 'avoidance' or 'flight'. This might deserve to go down as an original contribution to depth psychology, but Thomas, as ever unswerving in his devotion to the Philosopher, gives the credit to Aristotle. He quotes him twice. The first quotation says: 'What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit [dióksis] and avoidance [fugé] are in desire';12 and the second says: 'When men come upon something impossible, they turn away.'13 You could say that they are put off. What Aquinas himself says is that, instead of being attracted by the object, they are now repelled by it: 'If the object is considered impossible to attain it becomes repulsive.'14 Paraphrasing the analysis, Gilson writes of a 'retreat of the appetite from itself'.
Hope is interior; it is maintained in the face of some obstacle, annihilating it so to speak by desire; and thus it belongs with the passions of the irascible. If the difficulty becomes extreme to the point of appearing insurmountable, a sort of hate succeeds the desire. Then, not only is the pursuit abandoned but we no longer wish to hear this impossible good so much as mentioned. This retreat of the appetite from itself, and the accompanying rancour against its former object, is called despair.15
Although Kierkegaard nowhere refers to the passages in Aquinas here paraphrased – indeed there are very few references to Thomas at all, and none of his works is listed in the inventory of books put up for auction on Kierkegaard's death – and even if his concept of despair (Fortvivlelse) in fact owed nothing consciously to Aquinas's, there are nevertheless remarkable similarities. One of them is captured in Gilson's expression 'we no longer wish to hear this impossible good so much as mentioned'. It is of course not impossible that Gilson is projecting his own familiarity with Kierkegaard into his paraphrase, but the expression captures exactly the defining characteristic of the despair called 'reserve' (Indesluttethed) in The Sickness unto Death.
In that work despair is presented under the general formula: 'to want to be rid of oneself'.16 Reserve, or keeping one's self to oneself, is a person's retreat from the difficulties of being (in some sense) one's self as these gradually dawn on him. The retreat manifests itself in, for instance, not wanting to hear anything said about this self. The reason given in The Sickness unto Death is that the self has 'something eternal' in it, which in Aquinas's terms would also be something 'arduous'. One will not hear about this self which it is too arduous for one to become, even though one now realizes, however dimly, that one is such a self. Or the retreat might manifest itself in chiding those who do speak of it for the indelicacy of not realizing that such things are too precious to be spoken of in public.17 The pseudonymous author, Anti-Climacus, talks of the reserved despairer keeping his self behind a closed door. That the realization is dim is an advantage, of course, because that makes it easier to keep out of mind the idea of being such a self. The question Anti-Climacus poses rhetorically is whether a self kept under cover can nevertheless play a part in everyday life.
Has he taken flight from reality into the wilderness of the monastery, the madhouse? Is he not a real person, fully dressed like others or going about as they in the usual kind of coat? Yes indeed! Why not? But this matter of the self he takes up with no one, not one soul; either he feels no urge to do so or he has learned to suppress it.18
2 There is an apparent conundrum to solve before further examining this and other possible similarities. How can someone be both attracted and repelled at the same time by the same object? There is no difficulty of course in the ordinary
case where some aspect attracts and another repels. But here we are to assume that it is the object as a whole, or the object under just one aspect, that first attracts but then, once it proves beyond reach, repels. It was proposed above that it is the continued attraction of an object that distinguishes despair from resignation. So if, in Gilson's paraphrase, despair is the appetite's retreat from itself to the accompaniment of rancour against its former object, the question is in what way can the object nevertheless remain attractive to the despairer?
There are three broadly different situations in which it may be conceded that it was so. At one extreme is the person (like Kierkegaard's reserved despairer) who has learned to suppress all thought of what, until he found it was beyond his reach, attracts him. The attraction is still there but its power to attract is overridden, overpowered, pushed into the background by dedication to daily matters and a refusal to think of the object of attraction. At the other extreme is someone who very clearly appreciates what attracts him but in the face of the difficulty turns away from it, in hatred. How is that possible? Though the hatred is directed at the object of attraction, it is not ascribed to it in virtue of some feature of the object itself. It is a property projected or redirected on the object in some complex way that enables the despairer to avoid the thought that it is his own impotence that he should hate rather than the object. This means that it can still be thought of by us, or even the despairer, as desirable. If the complexity is unravelled, we see that the object continues to be attractive rather than repulsive.
In between these two extremes is a third kind of situation, that of the person who 'solves' the conflict by persuading himself that something not beyond his powers is 'as good as' (even identical with) what he is powerless to obtain. Some complex mechanism may be at work here too, but in this case (or cases of this kind) what is suppressed is the thought not of the object, as in the first extreme, or of its attractiveness, as in the second, but of the 'arduous' features that would make it repulsive if they were too arduous.
In all three cases we see what might be called despair's 'strategies', part at least of what Anti-Climacus refers to in one place as 'the cunning and sophistry present in all despair'.19 Perhaps they should be called strategy-like mechanisms rather than strategies, for the latter suggests some consciously adopted expedient. However, it is not hard for us today to accept the idea that such mechanisms are at work below the conscious surface, mechanisms that can at least be described metaphorically in the language of conscious action. Wilting before the enormity of some task in which we are engaged hopefully, we acquire a new interest in which we hopefully engage, namely that of playing down the extent of the effort needed to accomplish the original task. (It is of course quite another thing if one responds by trying to improve one's
given capacities, what one is currently able to do, to the point of being able to achieve the originally impossible goal.) One does not want to appear to oneself a loser. A fantast might come to believe he has reached the goal by ignoring the factual evidence that he has not, while a less imaginative person, the philistine for example, might take it that he has done so by being persuaded that he embodies, even in his very person, all the evidence there could
be. If neither strategy works, so that at least in one's own eyes one cannot help but appear a loser, there is then the further resort of making the effort required seem unworthwhile because the enterprise itself is in any case just not worth the candle: the 'sour grapes' manoeuvre. Readers of The Sickness unto Death will be struck by the similarity between several of these alternatives and the two directions in which equilibrium can be lost in the 'synthesis' which forms the self.20 The idea of metaplans hopefully engaged in which can go awry and which call for still further defensive maneouvres engaged in hopefully, and so on, all of them potentially too arduous and in an in-principle infinite regress, is also memorably captured in Kierkegaard's description of despair as 'impotent self-consumption'.21
With 'strategy' as a component in Kierkegaard's account of despair we have something which explains the possibility of attraction and repulsion in respect of the same 'good', and which in addition provides a seemingly fruitful elaboration of an idea already present in Aquinas – if not indeed also Aristotle. We may now proceed to note further similarities.
3 One such is Anti-Climacus's talk of a 'dialectic'. Hope and despair are to be defined in terms of each other: despair as the loss of hope and hope as the sustained absence of despair.22 This captures Thomas's idea (as Gilson expresses it) that despair is the idea of an appetite's retreat from itself. Despair is not a new appetite replacing an old one, hope, but an accommodation to the fact that the object of hope can no longer be hoped for.23 Kierkegaard uses this idea of a dialectic also to explain that feature which makes a person 'spiritless'. The feature in question is the person's being beyond or beneath hope and despair. The obstacle against which hope triumphs and in the face of which hope gives way to despair is something the petit-bourgeois person protects himself from ever having to face, as in the third and in-between position outlined above. A spiritless person is one who is therefore impervious to Socratic suggestion and needs to be shocked into spiritual development.