Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 24
Kierkegaard's pseudonym exploits the depth-psychological potential in Aquinas's account even more by introducing a distinction between finite despair, a kind of piecemeal, everyday despair, and despair proper, which is total. This helps us to gloss a sentence which we have not yet quoted from the passage in which Johannes Climacus refers apparently out of the blue to despair as 'Arrigskab'. He says that 'despair is always the infinite, the eternal, the total', though in its case in 'the instant of impatience'.24 We will return to this last remark in conclusion. The point here is that despair proper is total because, as distinct from mere doubt, which has to do only with the intellect, it infects a person's whole life. Certainly, to lose finite things in which one invests 'one's life' makes one 'despair' in an everyday sense, even to the point of 'losing the earthly' as such, at least it seems so, and not just some part of it about which one had great expectations. But this is not the real despair we should attribute to a person in the event of such a felt loss. The real despair is 'going on behind him unawares'. It is 'to lose the eternal'25 by placing such a heavy investment in the earthly.
An everyday, finite despair may, however, turn your focus in upon yourself, specifically upon your inability to avoid such earthly failures. You can then be said to despair over yourself, which is nearer the mark but still pointing in the wrong direction. The truth of the matter, on the one hand, only evident to one who can see the absurdity, lies in the disproportion between the massive investment a person makes in earthly success, and a consequent touchiness about failure to achieve finite goals, and the paltriness of the dividend on the other (if one only reflects on it). So despair proper is the attempt to escape the realization that human being cannot find its fulfilment in finite enterprises. It is a failure to relinquish the hold of the world, to fight concupiscence, and a flight from the idea that one is not just a finite thing among others in the world but qua existing somehow continually beyond it.
Now although the 'object' of hope and of despair in Aquinas and in Kierkegaard is not quite the same, the two are closely related and similar in relevant respects. In Aquinas, as Gilson puts it, '[h]ope is intimately bound up with man's constant effort to live, act and realize himself, and beats in the heart of all'.26 What one hopes is not so much to avoid, say, illness or misfortune as to achieve some form of fulfilment, though of course in order to avoid thereby being unfulfilled. For example, 'from grace and merits' one achieves 'beatitude'.27 Grace and merit are goals before which the world and human nature place obstacles. One hopes that one may receive grace and merit when one believes one can surmount these obstacles; when you fail to sustain this hope you despair. The 'object' of your despair might be the goal of beatitude itself; but it could also be the obstacles to attaining that goal, the fact that you need to receive grace and to show merit. In that case you cease to believe, wrongly, that your despair is due to the contingencies of the world, to misfortune; you see that the fault lies with yourself or (since you may not feel the fault is exactly yours) at least with something 'about' you. But you still fail to see where the real fault lies; you fail to see that it lies in the fact that your goals are merely finite. Of course, you might retain the goal of beatitude by grace and merit and, instead of turning against it, you turn against your own impotence by denying that you are powerless and taking it that beatitude is yours for the asking. You would then be distorting the goal, not in the sour grapes way but in one of the three broadly distinct ways outlined above. You assume beatitude has been reached because you have escaped either from reality into fantasy, or from imagination (the ability to envisage possibilities for yourself that are not yet realized) into (let us say) Heideggerian das Man. If these face-saving expedients fail, you might then turn, rancorously and openly, against the goal of beatitude itself. That would be the despair Anti-Climacus calls 'defiance', but also the main form of despair, and also 'sin'. Sin, for Anti-Climacus, is standing before God and not accepting that one is a sinner. The defiant way of doing that is to declare Christianity to be 'untruth and a lie'. Along with the 'denial of everything Christian' go 'sin, the forgiveness of sins', and so also, of course, beatitude.28
On truth and untruth, Aquinas says they are in the intellect while good and evil are 'in the appetite'. To want that which is correctly apprehended is good.
(Note another point of similarity: that what is good is the wanting, not just the good itself.) Similarly, 'any inclination matching the mind's false judgment is evil in itself, and thus a sin'.29 From a Christian viewpoint the goal – beatitude or eternal blessedness – is always possible. The judgement that it is so is therefore true. That much is in the intellect. What Aquinas and Anti-Climacus have in common of course is not that truth is in the intellect but that, whatever the appropriate epistemic attitude to it may be, there is this truth, namely that an eternal happiness is available. For both thinkers, despair or hope in this regards involve the abandonment or retention or , respectively, of an expectation of a future state the achievement of which cannot be assumed simply as a matter of course but whose possibility is presupposed. Despair involves a false appraisal and hope a true appraisal. Aquinas distinguishes despair in the religious context from that in which despair would correspond to a true appraisal. Someone who despairs 'along the road' (in statu viæ) over something he is innately incapable of achieving responds appropriately to the truth, as does the doctor who despairs of curing a terminally ill patient.30 To defy the facts in these cases would mean going on trying – 'desperately' in this other and still legitimate sense – to do what was manifestly impossible. 'Despair' here has another sense: it is the despairing refusal to give up hope when it is clear that there is none. But despair in the sense that Aquinas and Anti-Climacus have in common is the opposite case: it is giving up hope when hope and not despair conforms with the true appraisal that an eternal happiness is within reach.
But there is this huge difference that while Aquinas believes this truth can be known, for Kierkegaard it is 'known' only in faith. For Kierkegaard, indeed, the circumstances of its truth, what makes it true or how it can be true at all, is beyond all human grasp; and not merely does it defy understanding, in terms of what we take understanding to be, it goes against all possible understanding – from the point of view of reason it is absurd. So for Kierkegaard there are difficulties even in the way of putting the framework of grace and merit in place. One may hope that it is there in spite of these fundamental epistemological difficulties; one may also hope to keep believing that it is there in spite of them, but unless you can open yourself to this 'offence' to human reason you will despair even of the very possibility of starting to acquire merit and receive grace. Clearly the Anti-Climacus pseudonym is someone who has withstood this test. Which is why his and Aquinas's accounts so far go in parallel.
But to someone who does not share Aquinas's or Anti-Climacus's theological premise, the framework of grace and merit as goals through which one can either hope to attain or despair of attaining beatitude will not be in place. Where for both Aquinas and Anti-Climacus its not being in place would be a sin, or, to be more precise, the conscious denial that it was in place would be a sin (Anti-Climacus says it is 'highest intensification of sin'31), for such people the very idea of sin would be false. Naturally, it is open to anyone to deny that the framework is in place. They may give as the reason the insuperable 'arduousness' of believing the theological premise. Whatever Aquinas or Anti-Climacus would say about
your disbelief or denial (that it was despair), you may affirm that Aquinas's judgement and Anti-Climacus's faith are inappropriate to the facts. For you there is no eternal blessedness in store. Or rather, in order not to mix the views, for that could also be a statement from within the framework, from your point of view you cannot believe that such a thing is in store. In that case your judgement with regard to those who believe that it is indeed in place is that they are in the position of Aquinas's wayfarer and doctor and, at least from any interest in acting appropriately to the facts, should
cease to hope.
However, an important point, even for those who do believe that the framework is in place, that is, for those who do not, as Aquinas and Anti-Climacus would have to say, despair on this epistemological point, and who do believe in and hope for an eternal happiness, their belief may still be a false one, though in another sense. If, for example, what for the religious writer is objectively true is not believed in the right spirit, is misconstrued, or is made too easy both to believe and to earn, that too would be a kind of false belief. For Kierkegaard, at least in his Johannes Climacus vein, you do not believe truly unless you believe that what you believe is an intellectual absurdity. Indeed anything short of a clear and unqualified acceptance of the prospect of an eternal happiness, in full view of the difficulties, might be said to count as a case of false believing – even more so in the case of someone who simply has no conception of the framework, someone who is not yet 'spirit'. Even if you think you do have that conception, your life 'from a Christian point of view' can still be 'too spiritless to be called sin in a strict Christian sense'. Anti-Climacus observes that this is true of 'the lives of most people' who live what they call Christian lives.32
For Anti-Climacus, then, true belief is possible only 'before God', that is, in God's presence. One might put it epigrammatically by saying that in the question of Christianity a precondition of believing truly is truly believing, and for that there must be a vivid conception of God.33 For Aquinas, on the other hand, truth is a matter of judgement; it is what is correctly apprehended in the traditional philosophical sense of a relation established by argument between a statement and what it says – that includes statements about what it is good to do.34 Among Christian truths is the truth that an eternal happiness is within reach. As we noted, like any inclination matching the mind's false judgement, despair for Aquinas is 'evil in itself, and thus a sin'.35 It is a failure of will.
Now Aquinas places the will on the side of reason. He says: 'The faculties of the soul are commonly divided into the rational, the concupiscible, and the irascible. But the will is distinguished from the irascible and the concupiscible. It is therefore contained within the rational.'36 But Anti-Climacus's view is quite different. For him if any faculty contained the will, it would have to be imagination. Anti-Climacus points out, though, that imagination is no ordinary faculty; if you want to call it that, it is really the faculty for all faculties. Imagination is the faculty with which we envisage possibilities. The range of possibilities someone envisages defines his feelings, understanding and will.37 There is a progression: 'The more
consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self.' So a self is not something pre-determined but 'what it [the self at any time] has as its standard of measurement',38 and that depends on imagination. Will, in Kierkegaard, appears in general to be a broad notion covering what today we would call motivation. Rather than calling it, as does Aquinas, a faculty of the intellective soul, on Kierkegaard's account we should in terms of Aquinas's classification probably call it a faculty of the irascible soul. It is not the executive arm of a tripartite psychological economy but more like a state of the economy itself. Both despair and hope are expressions of will. In a signed work Kierkegaard says that 'every despairer has two wills', and he calls despair 'double-mindedness' (Tvesindethed).39 In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus describes the will as 'dialectical' and as having 'beneath it the whole of a person's lower nature'. When knowledge of the good becomes 'suitably obscure', the apparent distance between what is 'known' to be good and what is desired decreases. 'In the end' knowing and willing enter into a collusion in which knowing 'goes over to the will's side and lets it be known that what the will wants is quite right'.40
But can't we simply transcribe this into Thomas's terminology by reserving will for an agency that effectively executes actions matching true judgement of what is good, leaving to our lower natures the production of actions due to judgements based only on what is desirable? Pressure exerted on our wills by these natures will then be understood as threats to the will to resist which the will must then steel itself against them or be reinforced from without; rather than as manifestations of a second will expressing the demands of our lower natures.
4 That, however, would seriously obscure the phenomenological advance made by Kierkegaard over Aquinas. Allowing the will to stand for a variable state of a 'dialectical' economy in which knowing and desiring are at odds with each other, and seeing its variety in terms of strategies which confer truth on propositions easier or more convenient to accept than those that correspond to true judgement, avoids both the rationalistic bias and the abstraction of Aquinas's account. It places despair, as the sum of these strategies, realistically within its living psychological context, as what, as Anti-Climacus often expresses it, pretty well all of us in our whole being are.
Kierkegaard's account provides the will with a history, a history of the will's ambivalence: the will to fulfilment, on the one hand, and the will to reduce the developing 'dissonance', on the other, between what is possible and what is desirable. In the beginning there may be no will at all in Kierkegaard's sense (that is, a will whose magnitude is proportional to some standard of selfhood which implies 'arduousness'). For that there must be some distance and some difficulty, and 'someone who has no will at all is no self'. The distance and difficulty can be understood in the terms of Hegel's Phenomenology as the development from a state of undifferentiated union through differentiation to a higher reunion in differentiation. The attractions and repulsions of the irascible soul enter the picture once the differentiation has begun. From then on the two faces of the will are magnified in
proportion to what standard the 'self' measures itself by, and the will to 'will one thing' becomes ever more arduous.
We must not confuse the situation in which distance has not yet occurred (phenomenologically) with that in which its absence is the result of a subconscious stratagem whereby distance is erased by conveniently manufactured 'knowledge'. Such stratagems are not necessarily 'in the mind', that is to say, conscious; they can be latent, for instance, in petit-bourgeois habits of life and thought which offer no scope to imagination. Accepting such habits may be a stratagem all the same, and a very effective one at that, the protective measure that Anti-Climacus calls 'spiritlessness'. As noted earlier, these habits safeguard those who live according to them from the dialectic of despair and its opposite, from the positive movement possible for the 'double-minded'. Such people believe they already will the good, which for Kierkegaard (here unprotected by any pseudonym) is the only thing that can be willed 'as one thing'.41 But of course imaginative people too can produce this illusion by leading their lives in fantasy. What is common to them is that they are turned away from some higher standard of selfhood. As Anti-Climacus says, 'they contrive gradually to obscure the ethical and ethico-religious knowledge which should lead them into decisions and consequences not endearing to their lower natures'.42 For lower nature read 'concupiscence'. We noted earlier that the theological connotation of this term embraced a longing for worldly things. In Kierkegaard this longing has a deeper side: it is a clinging desperately to the worldly in order to escape unendearing thoughts about what it means to be a self.
Choosing something less arduous (and 'lower') serves to obscure knowledge of something more arduous (and 'higher'). Despair at its highest levels is sin. 'Sin', says Anti-Climacus, 'does not consist in man's not having understood what is right, but in his not wanting to understand it … .'43 Note again that it is not the desperation of the clinging that is Kierkegaardian despair. Whether or not also desperate, despair itself is always a kind of evasion or flight. Normally, it is true, we think of evasion and flight as typically rational notions: if one steps aside or seeks cover, one does so for reasons that are obvious. Kierkegaard's account of despair assumes one may take avoiding action without realizing it. That is a difficult idea but surely not an implausible one. As Anti-Climacus says, each human being is 'primitively o
rganized as a self'.44 Selfhood in his sense is a strain because it is seen in terms of a selfhood 'established' by God and not by your affiliations or by yourself;45 so much of a strain, indeed, that no one outside or inside Christendom escapes despair, except perhaps the odd 'wholly' true Christian.46 What is 'arduous', in Thomas's sense, is the fact that to be this self requires a radical deconstruction of what we normally call selfhood. The selves we like to think of ourselves as being or becoming must first be 'broken down'.47 Giving way to the deeply implanted resistance to this is despair.
5 So far we might say that Kierkegaard's concept of despair is basically Thomas's. Differences have appeared but some of them, as in the case of faith
versus knowledge, are irrelevant to the basic notion of despair as flight or evasion. Others, as in the case of will, are real but still do not directly affect the basic notion.