The Philosopher of Despair

Søren Kierkegaard Read Through Lev Shestov

There is something I continually return to when I read Kierkegaard: he does not let me rest. I can read other philosophers with a certain calm, as an observer of ideas that do not necessarily concern me personally. Kierkegaard is different. He does not write primarily to be understood by “people in general,” but to reach the single individual. And that single individual is always me—here and now, with my choices and my responsibility for the good.

The Russian religious philosopher Lev Shestov read Kierkegaard as a thinker who broke with the philosophical tradition itself. In Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy, published in Danish in 1947, Kierkegaard appears almost as an anti-philosopher. It is a sharp and one-sided reading, but for that very reason it can also make something visible.

For Plato and Aristotle, philosophy begins in wonder—the wondering gaze directed at the world. For Shestov’s Kierkegaard, it begins somewhere else: in despair. Only when a human being encounters what cannot be accommodated within an explanation is thought compelled to change. Despair becomes not the collapse of thought, but the place where another kind of thinking can begin.

I recognize something of this from my own life, from my years as a social worker and later as a researcher. The deepest insight does not always arise from calm reflection. Sometimes it comes through an encounter with what cannot be explained away: suffering, powerlessness, and the irreparable. Then it is no longer enough to understand from a distance. The question becomes how I myself am to live with what I have seen.

Job Against Hegel

In Repetition, Kierkegaard has his pseudonym Constantin Constantius turn to Job. Job’s greatness does not lie in submitting to a universal explanation of suffering. He laments, protests, and demands that his case be heard. He refuses to turn his loss into a necessary part of a rational world order.

For Shestov, Job therefore becomes the counterfigure to Hegel. In Hegel, thought seeks coherence, mediation, and totality. The particular is to find its place within the universal. But Job cannot be reconciled with an explanation that makes suffering necessary. He does not merely want to understand what has happened. He wants his life back.

Here Shestov discovers an abyss between speculative philosophy and biblical faith. On one side stands thought’s demand for necessity; on the other, the human cry that even the irreparable must somehow be restored. Job refuses to accept that what has happened must therefore have the final word.

This does not mean that Kierkegaard simply rejects reason. It is Shestov who sharpens the opposition and drives it as far as possible. But Kierkegaard’s writings provide him with the foundation: again and again, they show that concrete existence cannot be dissolved into a system. A human being does not suffer in general. A person suffers as the single individual. No explanation can suffer in that person’s place.

Job’s truth is therefore not a doctrine that can simply be transferred to others. It becomes true in the way he stands within his suffering. It is precisely here that Kierkegaard’s thinking becomes practical philosophy: truth concerns not only what I know, but how I exist in what I know.

Abraham Against Socrates

The same opposition becomes even sharper in Fear and Trembling. There Kierkegaard, through Johannes de silentio, places Abraham before the universal ethical. Abraham cannot explain his journey to Mount Moriah in a way that enables others to understand him. Seen from the outside, the act is terrible. Faith gives him no language with which to make it universally intelligible.

Socrates seeks truth through questions, dialogue, and understanding. Abraham walks without being able to justify himself before the community. Thus, it is not only two individuals who stand opposed to one another, but two forms of truth. Socratic truth seeks what can be tested in dialogue. Abraham’s truth is borne in solitude, in his relationship with God.

But this must be said with care. Kierkegaard does not despise Socrates. On the contrary, Socrates accompanied him throughout his authorship. The opposition reveals a limit instead: Socrates can lead a person far in self-knowledge, but he cannot make the paradox of faith understandable. Faith does not begin as a better explanation. It begins where explanation can no longer carry the human being.

The Letter to the Hebrews says that Abraham set out “not knowing where he was going.” It is an image of the movement of faith: setting out without possessing the road in advance. Faith is not certain knowledge of the outcome. It is walking when the map no longer shows where the road leads.

The Paradox of Faith

In The Sickness unto Death, Anti-Climacus writes that the opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith. He points to the words of the Letter to the Romans: “Whatever does not proceed from faith is sin.” This is a decisive definition. Christianity does not primarily offer a moral improvement of the human being, as though sin could be overcome by becoming a little more virtuous. The question concerns the very relationship in which a person stands—to oneself and to God.

Shestov reads this as a revolt against the dominion of reason. For him, faith becomes a struggle against necessity: against the claim that what is impossible for human beings must also be impossible for God. He uses strong language and makes Kierkegaard appear to be an enemy of reason. It is here that his reading becomes both compelling and dangerous. It makes the radical nature of faith visible, but it may also lead us to believe that Kierkegaard is urging us towards thoughtlessness.

He is not. Kierkegaard does not ask us to stop thinking. He shows us that thought has a limit. Reason can describe what is probable, illuminate our motives, and expose self-deception. But it cannot guarantee faith. Nor does faith arise because a person has calculated correctly. It is another way of standing in existence.

Despair becomes decisive precisely at this limit. It arises when a human being can no longer make the self add up—when one neither wills to be oneself nor can escape oneself. For Kierkegaard, despair is therefore not merely a feeling. It is a sickness of the self, a rupture in a person’s relationship to oneself. But the diagnosis is not the final word. It points towards the possibility that the self may rest transparently in the power that established it.

Anxiety and Possibility

In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard approaches another boundary experience. Under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis, he writes:

“Innocence is ignorance. In innocence, the human being is not determined as spirit, but psychically determined in immediate unity with the natural condition. Spirit is dreaming within the human being.”

In this state there is peace and repose, yet at the same time something disturbs the peace. What is it? Kierkegaard asks. Nothing. And what effect does nothing have? It gives birth to anxiety.

Anxiety, therefore, is not merely fear of something specific. It arises in the encounter with possibility—with the fact that the human being can. It is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.” A human being is not only what one already is; one also stands open before what one may become. This openness contains both creation and fall.

Shestov also reads anxiety as a break with the security of knowledge. But in Kierkegaard the picture is more complex. Knowledge is not in itself the sin. The problem arises when human beings believe that knowledge can abolish the uncertainty of existence, or that they can think their way out of responsibility for their own lives.

Anxiety cannot simply be explained away. It must be lived through. It can paralyse a person, but it can also educate—by offering no secure answers, but teaching the individual to remain within possibility without fleeing from oneself.

Despair Is Not the Final Word

Shestov helps me see the rebellious element in Kierkegaard: the protest against philosophical systems that make the suffering of the individual into a necessary link within a larger whole. He sets Job against Hegel and Abraham against Socrates. He reminds us that a person who has lost everything does not necessarily need an explanation. Perhaps that person first needs to be allowed to cry out that what happened should never have happened.

But Kierkegaard cannot be reduced to Shestov’s struggle against reason. Despair is not the goal, and the absurd is not a celebration of arbitrariness. Despair reveals that human beings cannot ground themselves. It opens the question of what—or whom—the self rests in.

When I close the book—or, as now, the screen—I am therefore left with more than the question of what I understand. I also ask what understanding cannot do for me. Can it bear the loss? Can it reconcile me with the irreparable? Can it tell me how to live?

Kierkegaard does not allow these questions to come to rest in a theory. He returns them to the single individual. To me. Not so that I will reject reason, but so that I will not mistake it for life itself.

Perhaps practical philosophy begins precisely there: not when despair has been given the final word, but when it compels me to ask how I am to go on living.

Literature

Kierkegaard, Søren. Repetition (1843).
Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling (1843).
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Concept of Anxiety (1844).
Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness unto Death (1849).
Shestov, Lev. Kierkegaard and the Existential Philosophy. Translated by Elinor Hewitt. Ohio University Press, 1969.