The Individual in Søren Kierkegaard

To learn something from Kierkegaard is not, first and foremost, to learn something about Kierkegaard. It is to be taught — with one's gaze turned toward oneself, toward one's own historical situation, and toward the Christian criteria by which both oneself and one's age must ultimately be judged. If the reader of Kierkegaard learns something about his own relationship to Christianity, this is far more important than the fact that it was Kierkegaard he learned it from. This turn away from the author and toward the reader is not a modest footnote to the authorship; it is its very method.

Kierkegaard spoke to the single individual. The whole authorship can be read as a sustained struggle against the “crowd” — against the anonymous mass that relieves the individual of responsibility for his own existence. Human beings, according to Kierkegaard, have only one way out of the emptiness and despair lurking in the aesthetic life: to choose oneself in despair, and there become conscious of one's eternal significance as an individual. Despair is therefore not a condition one argues one's way out of. It must, Kierkegaard says, remain quiet and inward — an inner movement, not a public spectacle.

Kierkegaard wrote many books under his own name, but also many under pseudonyms, in which case Kierkegaard was often listed as editor rather than author. He even writes in his journals that he is not responsible for what the pseudonyms write; what they write is their own responsibility. This makes it complicated to know where Kierkegaard himself stands. In describing what Kierkegaard means by the concept of the individual, I must therefore proceed through three quite different pseudonyms: Johannes Climacus, Vigilius Haufniensis, and Anti-Climacus. To honor Kierkegaard's insistence that he is not responsible for what the pseudonyms mean, what follows is written in the name of the pseudonyms themselves, even though it was Søren Kierkegaard who set the texts down with his own pen.

The Truth in the Self

The pseudonym Johannes Climacus poses the question of how far a human being can go in the knowledge of truth. Climacus credits Socrates with having posed the question correctly, for it was Socrates who accomplished philosophy's highest task precisely by formulating it with precision. For Socrates, truth is not something given to man from outside; it already exists within him. The task is to go into oneself and find it again, to rediscover it. “For the Socratic view, every human being is himself the center, and the whole world centers only around him, because his self-knowledge is a knowledge of God.”

Against this background, Kierkegaard introduces what he calls the absolute paradox — a double contradiction. The first is the human one: man is a mixture of time and eternity, and can only be saved by virtue of a historical event, whereas the Greeks always subordinated the historical to the logical and rational. The second is the divine one: eternity enters into time in order to save man, whereas the Greek conception of salvation instead meant that man was lifted out of time and into the eternal — without the eternal ever mingling with time and thereby contradicting its own nature.

From this follows the dilemma of reason. If reason is to accept that it has a limit, and that this limit can be thought of as God under the designation “the unknown,” it runs into an impossibility: it cannot express or grasp “the unknown,” because “the unknown,” by definition, is absolutely unlike reason itself — even though this is precisely the presupposition for grasping the concept at all.

All coming-into-being is suffering, Climacus writes, for the necessary can never suffer the suffering of actuality: the possible — not only what is excluded, but also what is assumed — shows itself as nothing in the very moment it becomes actual, because actuality annihilates possibility. Everything that comes into being proves, through the very fact of its coming into being, that it was not necessary, for the only thing that cannot come into being is the necessary — because the necessary already is. History thus becomes a tomb for possibilities: “What has happened has happened, cannot be undone; in that sense it cannot be changed.” Karl Barth, strongly influenced by precisely this line of thought, later proclaimed the otherness of God — reason's inability to grasp and humanize the almighty, true, and merciful God, whose thoughts are not our thoughts and whose ways are not our ways.

What, then, is Christianity? Climacus answers that any theology candidate can account for its dialectical movements, provided he is able to carry them through undaunted. Far more difficult is the question of how one becomes a Christian — a question to which Climacus devotes all his energy, precisely in order to show how demanding it is when taken seriously. Two paths lie open. The objective path proves insufficient: historical proof does not help a person to the truth of Christianity, but it does help the individual realize that the choice must be made in an entirely different way. The subjective path is therefore the only viable one: “Subjectivity is truth.” This is not subjectivism, in which the individual can claim whatever he likes and still call it truth. Climacus wants to remove all arbitrariness from subjectivity. To be a subject is to be an existing human being.

To exist is to journey — through stages. Kierkegaard outlines three: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The transition between them does not happen gradually, but through the leap — Kierkegaard's answer to Hegel's mediation, in which contradictions are raised up and reconciled. To be religious in this final stage is nevertheless not the same as being a Christian. To be a Christian means that the world as we experience it, and revelation — God in time — meet in the individual, and that one lives in faith. The task of faith, according to Climacus, is “at every moment to discover the improbability, the paradox, and then, with the passion of inwardness, to hold fast to it.” Here God is the absolute other.

Anxiety and Despair

In The Concept of Anxiety, written under another pseudonym, Vigilius Haufniensis, Kierkegaard discusses original sin through the concept of anxiety — described as “a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.” Anxiety gradually takes on an increasingly reflective character: the more spirit a person has, the more anxiety, because the person also becomes more aware of how much is actually at stake.

If anxiety was Kierkegaard's first psychological investigation, despair is his second — and it is here that the true center of gravity of the authorship lies. This investigation, set forth in The Sickness unto Death, is written under a third pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, who, unlike Johannes Climacus, speaks from a fully Christian standpoint. To have anxiety is normal, as long as it is not so unrealistic as to become pathological. To despair, by contrast, is a sickness, even though it is normal to despair, and even though the individual often does not even know that he is doing so.

Despair presupposes a particular structure in the human being — the synthesis of the self — without itself being an unavoidable part of it. It is rather a malfunction in the structure: a deformation or crippling of the self that prevents it from becoming what it is meant to be. Despair is a sickness of the spirit, and it manifests itself in three forms: not being conscious of having a self (inauthentic despair), despairing because one does not want to be oneself, and despairing because one wants to be — or insists on being — a particular, self-chosen form of self.

Faith is the opposite. To have faith is for the self to accept the true self God has given it, and to be willing to be this self before God. A humble and realistic acceptance of oneself in the sight of God and under God's guidance is the secret behind spiritual health — the only radical cure for despair. Everything else is, at best, treatment of symptoms. “In despairing over something, he really despaired over himself, and now wants to get rid of himself.” The recipe for despair, in all its forms, is precisely this: to despair over oneself, and in that despair to wish to be rid of oneself. Precisely for this reason, despair, understood as a hopelessness over who one truly is, is what Kierkegaard calls humanity's universal sickness. And it prefers to dwell where one least expects it: “It is despair's favorite, its most exquisite dwelling place: deep within happiness.”

Two Methods for Reading Despair

According to his interpreters, Kierkegaard offers two ways of analyzing despair. The first can be called the “recipe method”: just as a recipe requires exact amounts of each ingredient, the various forms of despair can be analyzed by examining the factors that together make up the synthesis of the self. The second is the “snowball effect”: here one disregards the individual factors and instead focuses on how the quality of despair changes and intensifies with the degree of consciousness. The self's own attempt to combat despair increases consciousness of it — which in turn intensifies the despair, in a self-reinforcing spiral.

The recipe method takes as its starting point that the self is a synthesis of opposing factors, and that the self's task is to become concrete without letting either factor gain the upper hand. The moment one factor dominates, the self is no longer itself, and is by definition in despair. Development, Anti-Climacus writes, must consist in infinitely moving away from oneself in the infinitizing of the self, and just as infinitely returning to oneself in the finitizing of it. Here lies the classic pair of opposites, infinitude and finitude. Too much infinitude, and the self loses itself in the fantastic and the boundless — fantasy becomes the dwelling place of infinitude, the expanding factor that plans the future, and the danger is that fantasy captures the self so that it never finds its way back to itself. Sentimental idealism, technical-scientific, inhuman knowledge, and daydreamers' grandiose projects are all examples of this. Conversely: too much finitude, and the self becomes completely absorbed in the everyday, the conventional, and the worldly — without the courage to be anything more. “Despairing narrowness is to lack primitivity,” writes Anti-Climacus, meaning by primitivity originality: every human being is unique as a self, and despair here consists in never daring this.

A related conceptual pair is possibility and necessity. The self needs both in order to become real. Pure possibility is God's domain — for with God everything is possible — but for the human being, too much possibility leads the self to “struggle itself weary in possibility,” where more and more becomes possible because less and less becomes actual, until the abyss has swallowed the self. Conversely: too much necessity, and life is experienced as slavery, as routine, as imprisonment — a despair caused by a lack of possibility, far more common and more recognizable to large parts of humanity. Possibility is to the self what oxygen is to breathing. “To pray is also to breathe,” writes Anti-Climacus, “and possibility is to the self what oxygen is to breath.”

The snowball effect describes how the degree of consciousness continually intensifies despair: the more consciousness, the more intense the despair. The maximum of despair is, in Anti-Climacus's image, the devil's despair — for the devil is pure spirit. The minimum of despair is a kind of innocence that does not even know that anything like despair exists. To illustrate the various degrees, Anti-Climacus uses the image of a house with a basement, a ground floor, and an upper floor, inhabited according to an imagined hierarchy among the residents — and points out the tragicomic fact that most people, in their own house, prefer to live in the basement.

The characteristic feature of the despair of our age, as Kierkegaard describes it, is the ability to explain everything outwardly through science, to enjoy everything aesthetically through culture, and to master everything in everyday life through social skill — while remaining inwardly dull, unaware that one comes from God and lives before God. Only through a pure subjectivity does one arrive at a true objectivity and a living dependence on God. The opposite of despairing is believing: relating to oneself, and in willing to be oneself, transparently grounding the self in the power that established it.

The Despair of Weakness and the Despair of Defiance

Kierkegaard finally distinguishes between two basic forms. The despair of weakness is not wanting to be the self one already is. The despair of defiance is wanting to be a self of one's own choosing — a self-made self, the form our age's self-help psychology cultivates when it proclaims that one can become whatever one wishes to be. In a more advanced form, the despairing person himself understands that it is weakness to take earthly things so seriously, that it is weakness to despair — but instead of turning toward faith, humbled under his weakness, he immerses himself further in despair and despairs over his own weakness. This is, at its core, self-contempt: he sits trapped in his own self-denial, unable to be rid of it or to forget it — in a closedness that is the exact opposite of immediacy, and that carries a deep contempt for it.

The third form is the despairing person who forcefully attempts to be himself, who defies everything for the sake of it. Such a strong personality never finds rest within his own closedness.

From Sickness to Sin

It is in the second part of the work that Kierkegaard draws the most controversial conclusion: the disproportion within the self is an almost universal sickness in humanity, one that resists its own radical cure — becoming spirit through faith. Humanism stands helpless before this despair, a sickness the self itself refuses to be healed of. Christianity has another word for it: disobedience. The sickness is disobedience, and therefore sin — and even not wanting to be healed is itself a further sin. “Sin is: before God, in despair, not to will to be oneself; or before God, in despair, to will to be oneself.” Despair is sin, and the opposite of sin is not virtue but faith: “that the self, in being itself and in willing to be itself, is transparently grounded in God.”

The Socratic definition of sin — that sin is ignorance, so that a human being never sins except in ignorance of what is right — stands in sharp contrast to the Christian understanding, in which sin lies in the will, not in cognition, and in which the corruption of the will reaches further than the individual's consciousness. A weak will can therefore stand just as much against God as a strong one.

As Anti-Climacus presents it, Christianity is the radical cure for humanity's universal sickness. Confronted with Christ — God who shows the human being how it can live in true health — the sick and sinful individual fundamentally has only two possibilities: to believe, or to be offended, indeed even to become angry.