The Sickness Unto Death

Anti-Climacus, 1848*

Preface

Christian heroism is to become wholly oneself. Christian knowledge ought to always be engaged, concerned knowledge. In this, it is higher than detached philosophical knowledge. The Christian should always be oriented toward the world - something here like Heideggerian Sorge. Despair is the sickness unto death; dying to the world is the cure.

Introduction

Humanly speaking, death is the end. Christianly speaking, death and human suffering matters less than the real suffering: the sickness unto death. Thus, the Christian has a tremendous amount of courage compared to the pagan because, just as an adult considers childish fears nothing, so too does the Christian consider earthly suffering to pale next to the suffering of despair.

A - Despair is the sickness unto death

“The self is a relation which relates itself to itself.” The human is the synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, the free and the necessary. The synthesis is the relation between these binaries. However, the human is not a self. The self is an activity, not the relation, but the relation’s relating itself to itself. The self is always given, it’s always founded on the other (God). The only way to have a self is to establish a relation with the thing which made the synthesis/relation possible - God. Despair is the misrelation “in a relation that relates itself to itself and has been established by another” (14).

A - the possibility and actuality of despair

Despair is both an excellence and a defect. It separates us from animals, by relating us, however convolutedly, to the eternal, but it is also a suffering worse than death. Not to be in despair is not something passive, in the way being healthy means the absence of illness; rather, not to be in despair requires actively destroying despair at every moment.

Despair does not lie in the synthesis of infinite/finite, eternal/temporal, freedom/necessity. If the misrelation were in those binaries, then despair would be intrinsic to the human and nothing could be done. The misrelation is in our relation to that relation. Despair is not like an illness we catch; rather, we bring it upon ourselves at every moment. To despair is to be perpetually dying and never dead. Despair wants to consume self, but cannot, which deepens despair.

To despair over something is not yet to truly despair. It is a preface to declared despair, where I despair over myself. Pretty much everything is despair. The lover who seeks self loss in the union of love despairs as much as the disappointed lover. Despair can either be the will to lose oneself or the will to become oneself. either way, it was a mark of eternity, a testimony to the possibility of a self, which makes it an excellence.

B - universality of sickness

Despair is the norm. This is not depressing, but rather elevating. Not being in despair is a form of despair, in the way imaginary health is sickness. Symptoms of despair are dialectical and related to the eternal. So to be unaware of despair is to be unaware of our relation to the eternal and status as spirit. The sickness itself is dialectical; it’s a godsend to get it because it gives a self, which is to say, a sense of self existing before God. Yet it is mortally dangerous to suffer despair if one does not want to be cured of it, because, ultimately, eternity will ask if you lived in despair, and if the answer is yes, then it will bind you to your despair forever.

*I have a suspicion Kierkegaard’s dialects are not Hegel’s, but I’ll confess to not really understanding the difference.

C - forms of sickness

The relating of the self to itself is freedom, which is to say the self is freedom. The task is to become a self, which can only be done through relation to God. The self is always in a state of becoming when it is not in despair (which is to say it is almost never becoming).

a - Infinitude’s despair is to lack finitude

This seems aimed at romanticism. To lose yourself in the fantastic, to feel an intoxicated merging with an abstraction, like humanity, is a form of despair.

b - finitude’s despair is to lack infinitude

This is aimed at secularists, who strip the self of its singularity, defining it, instead, as part of the crowd. The secularists lack imagination, suffering from narrowness of spirit. In essence, Kierkegaard develops here a notion of “the crowd” that Heidegger will later lift and turn into das Man. To be das Man is to be in despair.

Despair defined by possibility/necessity

Need both possibility and necessity to make a self, and to be without either is to be in despair. In order to become itself, a self needs to reflect itself in the medium of the imagination, thereby making infinite possibility manifest. So the self is necessary insofar as it is a self, but possible insofar as it is becoming a self. It’s a form of despair to get lost in infinite possibility, to refuse to submit to limitations. The self becomes unmoored then and never commits to anything.

Despair of lacking possibility

Likewise, it’s a form of despair to lack possibility. There are two forms of this. First, for the person who knows that humanly speaking, collapse is inevitable. If this person does not commit to the fact that for God everything is possible and that God may save, then he is in despair. Likewise, though, the bourgeois who tried to master possibility by dealing only in probabilities is in despair. The possibility of the new is exiled, and the bourgeois, though feeling himself to be a master, lives enclosed in his own, narrow world.

Despair as Defined by Consciousness

The most common form of despair is to be ignorant of it. Pagans are ignorant of despair, because they do not understand existing as a singularity before God. Usually these people are happy in their ignorance and greatly resent being jerked out of despair. This person is furthest from truth.

consciousness of despair as self which does not will to be itself.

Again, there are gradations of this. On one extreme, there is the “immediate man,” who never concerns himself with questions of God and self. Sometimes an external circumstance impinges on his life - or, perhaps I should say her, as this sort of despair is gendered feminine - which makes it seem unbearable to be oneself. This person thinks the self is defined by externalities and thus desires to have another self. This despair is essentially a form of weakness, and though the sufferer may correctly diagnose himself as despairing, he lacks an adequate conception of despair. Anti-Climacus dismisses this as comical.

A slightly more advanced version of despair strikes a person who has some grasp of interiority. this person experiences despair as caused by some internal limitation or necessity, and thus is closer to the truth. He or she is not so naive to believe anything would be solved by being another, but, rather, experiences himself as nailed to himself. He is like the tenant who has suffered damage from a fire and leaves his home, without ever coming to think of another address as home. Usually, this person turns to the world, absorbing himself in society, and thus turning away from the most promising moment in his life. He is mostly immediacy with a dash of reflection.

While there is a tendency to ascribe despair to youth, the truth is everyone is always in despair, as it is common to abandon inwardness for trivialities. The youth despairs most often over the future, and the adult over the past. One cannot repent without despair. These people usually despair over the earthly (the total of the earthly) or a particularity, which is magnified to represent the earthly.

Despair of eternal/oneself

Though often unaware of this, when people despair over the earthly, they despair over themselves. To despair over oneself is a significant advance to despairing over something earthly. It’s the difference between despairing from weakness to despairing over one’s weakness. Yet it’s a form of self-absorption. This person refuses to turn away from his or her despair, instead becoming fixated on the way in which he overestimated the value of the earthly. He feels as if he has lost the eternal, which at least means he has a sense of the eternal. Nonetheless, he passes as normal, because he believes that only the shallow, those living in immediacy, lack discretion. Sometimes he longs for solitude. He is often a superlatively gentle husband because he acknowledges his own weakness. And yet, this fixation on weakness is really a form of pride. Falling is most painful for those most invested in their own virtue. The greatest danger for this person is suicide; his ideal mate is a Taurus.

Despair in Willing to be oneself

This almost parallels Sartre. This person has consciousness of an infinite self, but the infinitude is severed from God. He wants to create his own self, without reference to God. This self is incredibly abstract; the self is a project of sorts created by reference to imaginary constructs.

However, this person usually runs into some sort of finite limitation on the self he wants to construct. However much he may initially wants to overcome this, he eventually becomes fixated on this flaw, making it central to his or her identity, to the degree that he would rather remain nailed to this flawed self than accept relation to God.

Part II: Despair is Sin

Sin is to despairingly will to be oneself or to despairingly will not to be oneself before God. The presence of God magnifies the transgression, in the way assaulting a public official constitutes aggravated assault. There is a certain sort of poetic despair, which poeticizes God, longs for God, without being able to feel certain that God has really called.

Chapter I: gradations of consciousness

The quality of a self is determined by the thing it establishes itself in reference to. The master in front of his slaves has almost no self; the man in front of God has the highest self. The greater the conception of God, the greater sin. Since the pagan lacked a conception of the single individual before God, in a certain sense he didn’t sin. Sin is basically disobedience. the opposite of sin is faith, not virtue.

Appendix

Speculative philosophy cannot think sin or the single individual before God (which amounts to the same thing). It whitewashes the individual to be merely a member of a race. But why do people refuse to engage in Christianity? Because it offends. Offense is unhappy admiration, envy turned against the self. The greater the offense, the greater the admiration and the closer to belief an individual is. In this case, people are offended in the way a peasant would be if the emperor sent for him and asked him to be his son-in-law. The honor is too great. He disbelieves. So too with Christ.

Chapter II: socratic sin as ignorance

According to the socratic definition sin is ignorance, specifically the effort to obscure knowledge. That, however, raises the question of whether a person is aware of what he is doing when he obscures his knowledge. If no, then his knowledge was already obscure and the question begins again. If yes, then sin is really the act of will, not of knowledge. Yet paganism has no room for disobedience, defiance. It assumes one cannot do wrong knowingly.

Christianity understands that sin lies in the will, in disobedience. Good must be done the instant it is known, for the lower nature will try and stretch out the period before action, allowing knowledge to become obscure and action endlessly deferred. Christianity teaches sin through revelation. It can’t be understood through reason, only believed.

Chapter V

The strength of orthodoxy is its knowledge that sin can’t be defined as a lack without weakening it. Sin must be a position. This cannot be proved; at best, one can show that attempts to comprehend/rationalize this are contradictory, and this must be left to faith.

Appendix A: is sin a rarity?

If this heightened form of despair is rare, doesn’t that mean that sin is rare? Doesn’t that mean most of the world never sins? In one sense, yes. But in another, the sinner is not innocent, because it is his fault that he lacks spirit. All people are born with a primitive sense of the self, after all. Anti-Climacus blames Christendom for this, arguing that pastors are now the equivalent to lovers who try to produce logical formulas to justify love. To defend is always to disparage.

The Continuance of Sin

It’s a mistake to think of sin as primarily an act. Everything which does not come from faith is a sin; every unrepented sin is a new sin and every moment in which one does not repent is a new sin. Specific sins are symptomatic of the state of sin; they’re epiphenomenal.

The sin of despairing over one’s sin

This is fairly self explanatory. It’s higher than the previous states, but still not ideal. The sinner here becomes self-enclosed, fixated on his sin. His break is twofold; first, he breaks with the good in despairing/sinning, second he breaks with repentance by despairing over his despair. And yet, this is often lauded in the world as the sign of a deep soul.

The sin of despairing over forgiveness

There is a qualitative abyss separating man and God. And while in some sense this person is infinitely close to God, in that he relates his self to God, understands that he stands and despairs in front of God, he is infinitely far in his sense of offense at the idea of his sins being forgiven. ‘

sin of dismissing christianity as false

This can take three forms. First, neutrality. Christianity requires commitment and to remain an agnostic is to sin. Second, refusal to accept the paradox (this bleeds into the previous section). Finally, simple unwillingness to accept Christianity as true.

*the introduction says that anti-Climacus actually means "prior to Climacus" - anti as in ante.

Philosophical Fragments

Johannes Climacus, 1844

Preface

The piece begins with a piece of self-effacement. Climacus disavows the importance and originality of this effort, claiming it should not be understood as an effort to save the city. He claims to lack the security of an opinion, and says he strives only to learn how to learn to dance lightly with death.

I Thought Project

Can truth be learned?

The piece begins by outlining the socratic paradigm of knowledge. The problem with learning, as Socrates sees it, is that one cannot seek what one knows, and what cannot know what one seeks. Thus, all seeking must be recollection. Socrates, the teacher, can only be a midwife to knowledge; he cannot create new knowledge. Time and teacher become occasions for recollecting the forgotten knowledge. There is something radically egalitarian about this paradigm. As self-knowledge is knowledge of God, every person can be the center, and every encounter an occasion to discover knowledge.

1. - the Christian paradigm

Whereas the teacher and the moment were merely occasions under Socrates, here the moment must have decisive significance, by virtue of the fact that the seeker is not in possession of the truth. The individual is in untruth, outside of the truth. The teacher must give both truth and the condition understanding it, because to be in the condition to understand the truth means to in a certain sense to already be in possession of the truth.

God created the human with the condition for understanding the truth, but the human lost it because of his or her own actions. The teacher is God, who, acting as an occasion, reminds the learner that he is in untruth through his own fault. Acting as more than an occasion, though, the teacher also gives truth and the condition for understanding it.

To be in untruth through one’s own fault is to be in a state of sin. Despite being in the state of untruth through one’s own fault, the individual lacks the capacity to leave that state of untruth. He once had the freedom to truth between truth or untruth, but now, having chosen untruth, he is like a child who buys a toy and wants to swap it for a book. The book seller tells him that, while at one point he could have bought the book, now the choice is gone, because a used toy is useless.

To sum up: the teacher is the savior, deliverer, reconciler, and judge. The moment is the fullness of time.

1. the follower

In conversion, the individual becomes a new person, and repents the knowledge that he was in sin through his own fault.

II: God as Teacher and Savior (A Poetical Venture)

While, for Socrates, the student-teacher relationship was fundamentally reciprocal, because the encounter was an occasion for him to become a teacher and the other to learn - it was both sympathetic and autopathetic - the student-teacher relation in Christianity is fundamentally asymmetrical.

God is moved by love of the learner and wants to win him. Love makes difference equal through unity of understanding. How, then, can God achieve this equality, without it becoming an unhappy love, where God and the individual can’t understand each other?

Here Climacus uses the analogy to a king who wants to wed a peasant. He could appear before the peasant in his glory, making the girl ascend in status. This, however, would be a form of self-loss for her, and would ultimately glorify God, without glorifying the girl, which is the goal.

Therefore, for the moment to have significance, and the equality to be achieved, unity must be achieved by the God/King descending. This, however, necessarily remakes the girl/learner; it’s as if wine is poured into an old wine skin. The vessel shatters.

III: The Absolute Paradox (A Metaphysical Caprice)

“The paradox is the passion of thought, and the thinker without the paradox is like the lover without passion: a mediocre fellow” (36). Thought always pushes toward its own impossibility; the ultimate paradox is the desire to think the unthinkable. The paradox collides against God, the unknown.

Here, Climacus launches into a critique of proofs for the existence of God (which is probably useful to remember for exams). Basically, if God does not exist, it is impossible to demonstrate this. If God does exist, my demonstration is superfluous because it presupposes the existence of God. To demonstrate that the unknown is God would be to provide a definition, not to demonstrate his existence. Demonstration always becomes something else. It’s also backwards to think I could ever demonstrate the existence of anything through logic. I demonstrate that the accused is a criminal, not that a criminal exists. Likewise, if I try to prove Napoleon’s existence through his works, either I include his name in his works, making it a tautology, or I can never link his work back to him. At most, I can link his works back to a great general, etc. I must let go of the demonstration in order for existence to emerge.

Contra Hegel’s notion of relational difference, Kierkegaard’s God is absolutely difference. Humans and God are absolutely difference, and this difference is sin. The paradox has two levels, two aspects which cannot be thought. First, that there exists the absolute difference of sin, and that the positive desire exists on God’s part to annul this and create absolute equality. Both thoughts are equally unthinkable.

Appendix: Offense at the Paradox

A person has a happy relation to the paradox when understanding and the paradox meet in mutual recognition of their difference. Grace determines this.

However, an unhappy meeting of understanding and the paradox is a type of offense, and, by extension, a type of suffering. The particular way in which this offense manifests is irrelevant; it is always offense and always suffering. Offense is misunderstanding of the moment. Every response the understanding gives to the paradox - bewilderments, dismissal, etc - responds to an originates from the paradox. Understanding is predicated on the paradox.

IV: the situation of the contemporary follower

The paradox has two difficulties: that man is God and that the revelation/moment of eternity takes place in time. Both man and God are radically incommensurable, as are time and eternity.

So, in one sense, it seems as if the contemporary witness does not have much of an advantage. He has access to the historical event, but the historical is radically different from the eternal of the revelation. The paradox unites the eternalizing of the historical and the historicizing of the eternal.

Faith in the paradox cannot be an act of will, because the will can only be efficacious once one has the condition to understand truth. One is contemporary by virtue of faith, not by virtue of the historical situation.

Interlude: is the past more necessary than the future?

Coming into existence proves something to be contingent. The actual is no more necessary than the possible; just because something happened doesn’t make it any more necessary than the thing which might have happened. All coming into existence comes by way of freedom. Everything that comes into existence is historical. Even nature is historical, in that it has a past. It is the perfection of the historical to have no history.

the Past

What occurred is unchangeable, but not necessary. To regard the past as necessary is to forget that it came into existence. The future is equally contingent. It’s a mistake to think, like Hegel, that the past can become necessary through apprehension, first because the fact that it came into being makes it unnecessary, but more importantly because the historical cannot be made accessible to sense perception. One cannot perceive something coming into being. Thus, I believe in the historical through an act of will. The conclusion belief draws about the past is not a conclusion, but a resolution. Belief is always battling against doubt. While belief affirms that something came into existence, doubt denies it, refuses to draw conclusions, and dwells with the immediate sensation.

so belief is always an act of faith, for both the contemporary and second-hand follower, because the event is never immediately accessible. The incarnation particularly could not have been immediate to the contemporary, because it was not accessible to the senses, and is a contradiction, because if God is necessary, he cannot come into being. Basically, all of our knowledge is tenuous, an act of belief, and this is only heightened vis a vis the incarnation. The historical contemporary gains nothing.

V: the follower at second hand

At most, the historical contemporaries have the benefit of understanding the offensiveness, the magnitude, the absurdity of the incarnation. the stakes of the decision seem clearer, as opposed to the later follower, who receives a domesticated version of the event, by means of a culture which accepts it. The later generation, however, can clearly see the significance and repercussions of the event, if not its radicality.

The advantage all depends on perspective. If the incarnation is a historical fact, the first generation has the advantage. If it is an eternal fact, then everyone is equally close/distant from it. If it is an absolute fact, then it is absurd, because the historical and the absolute/eternal are radically different.

At best, the testimony of the first generation can dissuade the present generation from thinking that the incarnation was in any way a historical fact or fundamentally historically accessible.

Fear and Trembling

Johannes de Silentio - 1843

Preface

Positions his work contra the contemporary philosopher, who refuses to stop at faith, but, rather, seeks to go beyond it. Questions what it would even mean to go beyond faith, and compares this hubris to the modesty of Abraham and older thinkers, who thought a whole life barely long enough to attain faith. This book is decidedly not a philosophical work, and the writer is emphatically opposed to any system. “I throw myself down in deepest submission before every systematic ransacker.”

Exordium

The narrator speaks here of a man who, as he grew older, became less and less capable of understanding Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac, and became possessed with the desire to witness the event. Four possible depictions of the event follow.

I: After traveling in silence for three days, Abraham reveals the point of the journey to Isaac. Isaac begs for his life, uncomprehending, and, at the last minute, Abraham pretends to be an idolator, so that Isaac would hate his father rather than lose faith in God.

II: They go to the mountain, Isaac is saved, but while Isaac flourishes, Abraham never forgets what God asked of him and remains altered for the rest of his life.

III: Abraham rides out alone and begs God’s forgiveness for his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, while simultaneously being totally incapable of understanding why it should be a sin to sacrifice the best to God at his commandment.

IV: The pair rides out; just as he raises the knife, before seeing the animal to sacrifice instead, Abraham’s left hand trembles. Isaac loses faith.

Eulogy on Abraham

The poet rescues the hero from oblivion; it is he who creates the link between generations, and rescues humanity from the despair of total isolation. The greatness of the poet is commensurate with the greatness of his object. And all greatness is great in proportion to the object of love, expectancy, and struggle. Abraham is the greatest of all figures, by virtue o loving God, expecting the impossible, and struggling with God. While it is great to give up a desire, it is greater still to hold to it after giving it up. It is a wonder of faith that it preserved in Abraham and Sarah the youth and capacity to desire a child even in old age.

Preliminary Expectoration

This section tries to put the story of Abraham into perspective, by imagining our reaction if a contemporary, upon hearing it, were moved to sacrifice his own son. Our tendency to whitewash the story, to claim that Abraham was willing to sacrifice “the best,” obscures the horror and contradiction of the story. Faith called the act a sacrifice, while ethics would term it murder. So the question must be faced whether or not faith is higher than ethics, because, if not, Abraham was simply a murderer.

Johannes de Silentio claims to have no faith himself, but asserts that nonetheless it is higher than anything, particularly philosophy, and mocks the idea that Abraham is quite simple to comprehend, while Hegel is difficult.

So what is faith? To “lose one’s understanding by virtue of the finite and win it back again by the virtue of the finite.” Faith requires a double move; it requires that Abraham both believe that God required the sacrifice, while simultaneously believing that God could not demand such a thing from him. “The movement of faith must continually be made by virtue of the absurd, but yet in such a way, please note, that one does not lose the finite but gains it whole and intact” (37).

Knights of infinite resignation exist, who give everything up for the infinite. Infinite resignation is the last moment before faith, but though their steps are “light and bold,” but they are not true knights of faith. The knight of faith - provided he even exists - is completely unrecognizable, but is a perfect mixture of the infinite and finite. He is continually giving up everything and grasping everything again by virtue of the absurd. Everything he does is by virtue of the absurd (40). He looks like a tax collector, he is totally at home in the world, while living totally before God.

Problemata I: the teleological suspension of the ethical

In the world, we consider the ethical to be the universal, and the ethical task of the individual is is to annul the individual into the universal. Faith, however, claims that the individual is higher than the universal by means of the universal.

The text explains the uniqueness of Abraham by way of contrast to the tragic hero. The tragic hero is great because of moral virtue, while Abraham is great because of personal virtue. The tragic hero sacrifices everything for the ethical; Abraham was tempted by the ethical. While the tragic hero is justified by the result, Abraham never can be, because the result, the outward consequences, are irrelevant to faith. Moreover, unlike the tragic hero, Abraham cannot speak, because to speak means to engage in or express the ethical, and faith demands the teleological suspension of the ethical.

Problemata II: Is there an absolute duty to God?

Kierkegaard begins here with what I take to be a polemic again Kant’s Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. He rejects the idea that religiosity can be reduced to the ethical. to claim that ever duty is a duty to God is to say that we have no specific duty to God. It’s to say that there is nothing incommensurable with human life; radical alterity never intrudes.

Whereas Hegel claims the outer is higher than the inner, the expressed higher than the latent, faith privileges the inner over the outer. The paradox of faith is that interiority is incommensurable with the external.

The man of faith, then, determines his relation to the universal (i.e. ethical) by reference to the absolute; the absolute does not determine his relation to the ethical. This is why the knight of faith cannot make himself understood. So absolute duty can lead to unethical action, but it cannot make Abraham stop loving. This is the difficulty of interpreting the sacrifice. By ethical terms, Abraham was going to commit murder, which is an act of hate. But in terms of faith, Abraham’s sacrifice was really a profound act of love. No one can see this interior state, though, which is what makes faith so terrifying. Abraham lacked the security of the tragic hero, who could give up his self for the universal.

Problemata III: Was it ethically defensible for Abraham to conceal his knowledge?

If Problemata II tried to explain Abraham’s action by way of contrast to the ethical figure, the tragic hero, Problemata III explains it in contrast to the aesthetic figure. Aesthetics has no room for renunciation. two lovers might perhaps renounce each other, but they would get each other back through coincidence. Ethics has no room for coincidence. Aesthetics demands hiddenness - in this case, that the lovers hide their passion - and rewards it. Ethics demands full disclosure and punishes hiddenness. Ethics demands the Agamemnon tell Iphigenia the truth. The aesthetic hero can speak, but will not; the ethical hero must speak; the man of faith cannot speak.

That Abraham did not tell his family of his deed proves it was not ethical. Even Abraham’s last response, that God will provide the lamb, is a form of speech which does not disclose anything. He speaks ironically. To say he knows nothing would be to lie, to say the truth would be impossible, thus, the only option is to speak without saying anything.

Epilogue

Each generation begins primitively. No generation, for example, learns to love from the previous one. Faith is like love, it is love. It is the highest passion, which we may never reach, much less go beyond.