The Sickness Unto Death Part 1 Section A

Overview and Argument

At the start of this work Kierkegaard lays the groundwork for the ideas that he wants to discussAlbeit in a very verbose and somewhat confusing manner at the start. A few questions right off the bat that he answers is:

1. What is despair?
2. What is the self? The spirit?
3. What are the different types of despair?

The self, to Kierkegaard or the pseudonym he published under, Anti-ClimacusA "higher" self, at least when comapred to both one of his previous pseudonyms Climacus as well as Kierkegaard himself, is a relation that relates to itself. A human being, he follows, is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, the temporal and the eternal, and finally the freedom and the necessity. Part of what makes Kierkegaard hard to digest is how he just shoves very abstract ideas in your face from the jump. Its imperative then that we have a solid understanding of these before moving on.

Humanity is infinite and finite because an individual exists for a discrete, finite amount of time. Yet our capacity for things like imagination and abstraction is infinite. Similarly, we live in time (temporally), but we contemplate eternity. Ultimately, as humans we are shaped by necessity, be that our biology, history, circumstance etc. but we always maintain the freedom to choose and to become. This last one, namely the relation between necessity and freedom, is distinguished from the other two dilemmas. Where the first two ideas govern what the self is, the relation between necessity and freedom describes what the self does with itself. It governs becoming.

To go even deeper, Kierkegaard tries to get across the point that this relation that essentially describes humanity is does not and can not ground itself. Instead, it is grounded by something outside of it: God. A self that tries to ground itself collapses into despair. To Kierkegaard, despair is a misrelating of the relation between these three juxtapositions. Despair, however, is both a merit and a defect. A merit in the sense that "the possibility of this sickness is man's advantage over the beast; to be aware of this sickness is the Christian's advantage over natural man; to be cured of this sickness is the Christian's blessedness". This "infinite merit", as he calls it, also serves as the "greatest misfortune and misery". He claims, "As infinite as is possibility's merit, just so great is the descent".

As mentioned previously, there are different types of despair. The first, and perhaps most uncomfortable, is that not feeling despair is its own form of despair. Not being aware of the sickness does not imply a cure. In his diagnosis, most people walking around content have simply never become conscious of themselves at all. The next form of despair is when one does not want in despair to be themself. Suppose one becomes aware of certain limitations or problems with themself. Maybe it is a past failure, or personality problems. They wish to escape from the self they actually are, but the problem is that the self cannot discard itself because it does not ground itself. So the despairing person is trapped in figurative agony as they continuously try to flee from the cage that is the self. Finally, the last form of despair is to desire to be oneself. This seems, at first glance, totally reasonable. But for the same reason that the previous example is a recursive loop of despair, the man who wills himself to be himself falls into despair. Rather than fleeing from himself, he clings to himself absolutely and attempts to become his own foundation. Yet the self is not self-grounding. It derives its existence from something beyond itself, and thus the attempt to establish oneself purely on one's own terms becomes another impossible project.

It is important to note, however, that these are not equal forms of despair but actually an improving sense of consciousness. The forms of despair from start to finish each signal a step up from the previous one to Kierkegaard.

To wrap up, Kierkegaard arrives at the claim that underlies the entire work: despair is the sickness unto death. Unlike a terminal physical illness, despair cannot be ended by death. Physical sickness culminates in death, but despair is a sickness of the spirit, and thus its suffering extends beyond the limits of earthly life. Its torment lies precisely in the fact that the despairing self longs for an escape that never arrives. Death, which ordinarily appears as the end of suffering, offers no cure for despair. Now, having diagnosed despair and its various forms, Kierkegaard's ultimate task is to explain how the self can escape this condition by properly relating itself to the power that created it.

Connections

I had a couple of interesting connections here. Nothing super profound but just some things I was reminded of as reading. First, the idea of a human being the synthesis of these three different spectrums is in direct opposition to what someone like René Descartes would say. To Descartes, his cogito I think, therefore I am grounds humanity in the mental spectrum. So when Kierkegaard would argue that we live on what could be said to be three axes, Descartes would reduce that to one. Additionally, the idea of finding an "optimal" relation or allocation between things, in this case the three pillars of the synthesis and within each pillar the two ideals, showed up when I was reading Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. In this book, he discusses the "Golden Mean" where virtue lives between two extremes of excess and defficiency. These aren't entirely applicable to eachother because Aristotle was more focused on ethics and virtue in his writing, but a structural comparison nonetheless.