Kierkegaard

 

THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

A Christian Psychological Exposition
for Edification and Awakening by
Anti-Climacus

Edited by
S. Kierkegaard
Translated with an Introduction and Notes by
Alastair Hannay

Introduction

The biggest danger, that of losing oneself, can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is bound to be noticed.

Anti-Climacus^*

A sickness ‘unto death’ would normally be an illness that someone took with them to the grave, or more pointedly the one that took them there. In the New Testament story, Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, thereby showing that Lazarus’s own sickness unto death was miraculously now no longer so – though of course in the end Lazarus presumably died like everyone else. But such fatal, or ‘terminal’, illness is not what Kierkegaard’s title refers to. As the author points out in his Introduction, there is a sense in which, even if Jesus had not raised Lazarus from the dead, the story implies that neither his nor anyone else’s sickness is ‘unto death’. For in that story Jesus is Christ, and Christ is ‘the resurrection and the life’; so for the Christian, that is to say, for the person who believes that the historical Jesus was Christ, the Lord’s anointed, nothing human that ends in death comes thereby to an end. There is everlasting life.

The ‘sickness’ which Kierkegaard’s book refers to as ‘unto death’ is resistance to this belief. It is the inclination to accept that as far as the individual is concerned, death is indeed the end. Now why should Kierkegaard want to call that a sickness? After all, even in his own time there must have been people strong both in mind and body who rejected the Christian teaching of sin and salvation, and who faced what they accepted as total extinction with equanimity. And today, of course, even in societies that once proudly professed Christian principles, the rejection of Christian belief – or at least the failure unequivocally to accept it – is the rule rather than the exception. So in what sense can the denial of Christian dogma constitute an illness?

The aim of my Introduction is to bring out background considerations which may help readers unfamiliar with Kierkegaard’s writings to answer this question for themselves. It may be useful at the outset to divide the question into two by asking first: In what sense does Kierkegaard mean the failure of Christian faith to be a sickness unto death? And second: Has the diagnosis any plausibility? As will be apparent, answering the first question goes quite a long way towards answering the second. Although no really satisfactory answers may be available, raising the questions should in any case help the reader to grasp the plan and potential impact of this remarkable book. Having discussed them I shall add some comments helping to situate the book in the context of the life and work of its equally remarkable author.

In its widest sense a sickness is a disturbance in what would otherwise be a state of general well-being. The disorder might be physical or mental. The sickness which is the topic of Kierkegaard’s work is mental, though it is important to note that Kierkegaard actually describes it as a sickness of the ‘spirit’. To us mental illness is a familiar enough idea, very much more so than to Kierkegaard’s readers almost a hundred and fifty years ago. But what normally leads one to accept the categorization of a mental disturbance as ‘sickness’ is the assumption that its immediate cause is something outside the patient’s control, as in mumps (whether or not you deliberately invite contagion), and that its subsequent history is determined by specific tendencies to chronicity, malignancy or return to health inherent in the particular disease itself. What Kierkegaard refers to as the sickness unto death, however, is a disturbance the persistence, aggravation and removal of which are matters of the patient’s own personal choice. One is responsible for ‘catching’ the illness and according to Kierkegaard its persistence is due to one’s constantly continuing to ‘catch’ it.

That, however, would be too bald an account. Certainly the forms of the ‘sickness’ that the book ends up by stressing most are those in which the option of ‘health’ is consciously rejected; eventually, if allowed to run its course, the sickness comes to a crisis in the form of a choice between well-being (or salvation) and a fully conscious rejection of Christian teaching as ‘untruth and a lie’. But the work as a whole (described as expository by its author) outlines in detail a morbid step-by-step progression towards this crisis from a state in which the sufferer is not even aware of the sickness, and where, of course, the sickness cannot be said to be maintained due to anything like a deliberate failure to choose health. In fact the principal theme of The Sickness unto Death is the raising of the level of a person’s awareness of the urgency of the choice. Once the choice is clear, failure to follow Christian teaching is a matter of deliberate refusal or defiance. The subtitle identifies the work as a psychological exposition with Christianity as its background and as intended for ‘edification and awakening’.

The psychology here is far removed from the behavioural science which goes by that name nowadays. Essentially, it is a form of phenomenological psychology, that is to say, a psychology which seeks confirmation in subjective experience of the truth of its descriptions of our mental states and of the ways these relate to, or unfold from, one another. On the other hand, because the work presupposes the Christian teaching of sin and redemption, it does not appeal to subjective experience alone. What Kierkegaard seems initially to be aiming at is recognition on the part of people who already profess Christian belief in some more or less habitual way, of the varying extents to which their lives constitute failures to measure up to the standards of what they profess, such failures in fact being timid refusals to face the spiritual challenges of their alleged belief.

This fear is an essential element in Kierkegaard’s portrayal or diagnosis of the lives and society of his contemporaries. In The Concept of Dread (also translated as ‘The Concept of Anxiety’)^* published five years earlier, Kierkegaard describes ‘spirit’ in a human being as emerging from a state of innocence in which human fulfilment is regarded simply as development of human nature. ‘Spirit’ for Kierkegaard is what sets a human being apart from and above its simply human nature – apart from and above it in a way that leaves the individual without a given or natural identity, and forced to acknowledge or construct another. In The Sickness unto Death spirit is identified as the ‘self, and we find that the increased levels of awareness which form the main topic of the ‘exposition’ are levels of an increasing self-awareness. Kierkegaard detects in contemporary life-styles, in the kinds of goals people set for themselves, in their ideals of fulfilment, a fundamental fear of conscious selfhood. He calls it ‘despair’. And this, although it is also identified later as ‘sin’, is the most general designation of the ‘sickness unto death’. The most common forms of despair are naturally enough those where the defences against conscious selfhood are most effectively deployed, and where the level of self-awareness is correspondingly low. Here, in greater or less degree, people are unconscious of their despair. However, Kierkegaard’s exposition carries us beyond this defensive and (in his terms) unself-conscious response to emergent spirituality, and presents it as a stage in a malignant development which culminates in the ‘demonic’ denial of ‘everything Christian: sin, the forgiveness of sins, etc.’. Such defiance is the ‘height’ of despair.

This raises several points which give us the opportunity to probe more deeply into the distinctive meaning of Kierkegaard’s text.

Desirability of the Sickness

Let us begin by noting that the analogy with sickness, and with physical illness in particular, would normally suggest that once there is a cure for it, it can be applied at any stage, and the earlier the better. There may be illnesses that for various reasons are best left to run their course, but in general the ideal way to cope with an illness is to nip it in the bud. It is better still, of course, to take precautionary measures which prevent it occurring at all. But for Kierkegaard this analogy does not hold in the case of despair. Despair is not a disorder of the kind that should be rooted out or prevented. Indeed, from the point of view of spiritual development, there is something healthy about it. For one thing, even if it is clearly negative, despair is at least a sign of some first inkling of the requirements of such a development. But more than that, Kierkegaard thinks despair offers the only avenue to ‘truth and deliverance’. This is an extremely important point, for it seems to imply that human development, spiritual development, is bound to progress through a state of sickness. The possibility of despair, we are told, is ‘man’s advantage over the beast’ and ‘the Christian’s advantage over natural man’. Spiritual fulfilment requires that there be this possibility in order that despair be actively countered and ‘rendered impotent’. To be cured is ‘the Christian’s blessedness’. The only way of escaping despair, therefore, seems to be to go through with it. The cure is for the self to ‘found itself transparently in the power which established it’, but since transparency here requires full self-awareness (in a sense to be discussed briefly in a moment), and full awareness of the self is the goal of spiritual development, the cure is simply not available until one reaches the point where continued denial of one’s dependence upon God is an act of open defiance. Only then does the alternative – open acknowledgement of that dependence – become possible.

That does not, of course, preclude a person’s reaching that stage in a spirit of Christian acceptance rather than denial. And as far as that goes, the process of progressive self-awareness is also one which can be undergone by someone who, at least in his or her own eyes, has been a Christian all the way from childhood. But the only thing that conclusively establishes that there is no remnant of despair is this ‘transparent’ acknowledgement of individual dependence upon God, and it is clear that Kierkegaard considers the kind of professions that Christians typically make of their belief to fall well below that standard. These people, too, professed believers, are in despair, for they are denying themselves true selfhood. The important thing here, then, is that the progression is not described in terms of whether a person is willing or unwilling to profess belief in God (and Christ), but in terms of whether they are willing or unwilling to accept, and try to measure up to, a divinely set standard of human fulfilment. The author ironically chides his own society for its excessive humility, for having too low an ideal of fulfilment, while at the same time being conceited enough to think that measuring up to that modest ideal gives grounds for self-satisfaction. Among the forms of heightening despair that he describes, there is one which seems to have no progressive possibilities. This is a spiritual backwater which Kierkegaard calls ‘spiritlessness’, the protective absence of any consciousness of oneself as spirit. All despair, he says, is a ‘negativity’, but ignorance of it is a ‘new negativity’, and while one must ‘pass through every negativity’ to ‘arrive at the truth’, once in this backwater one has to paddle (or be propelled) back to where the current is, so that the progression to truth through all the other negativities can continue.

There is no doubt that Kierkegaard saw his own mission as a writer as that of assisting his readers to the consciousness of their own despair. And it is equally clear that he saw the progression to ‘spirit’ as one that requires the facing rather than the shelving of inherent difficulties. A note in his journals even sounds as though the encounter with difficulty must be enforced on one if one is to come further: ‘He who has not suffered under human bestiality will not become spirit.’^*

Pure Selfhood

It is clear from the above that the concept of selfhood in The Sickness unto Death must be a rather special one. Of course, the very notion of a self is vague, and it is impossible to assign it a definitive sense. So there may be nothing inherently peculiar or objectionable about the special sense employed by Kierkegaard. But if one starts with a very modest concept of selfhood, say one where being a self requires nothing more than the ability to answer to one’s name, then Kierkegaard’s concept is at least an extraordinarily immodest one. It requires that one answers directly to God.

Now that is not quite correct. In the first place, Kierkegaard talks of degrees of selfhood. Answering to God, or standing ‘before’ God, is the highest degree; but one can be less or more of a self, depending on the degree of one’s self-consciousness. Again, this does not mean that there is a self already there, full-blown, of which one is more or less conscious of being; what Kierkegaard means is that the self is a less or a more full-blown self according to the person’s consciousness of being a self. Selfhood is constituted in consciousness; it is itself, if you like, a kind and degree of consciousness: the kind that answers to eternal demands of an ethical nature, and the degree that corresponds to the clarity with which it grasps that it is of that kind. But also, second, Kierkegaard does not say that the highest degree of selfhood corresponds only to the paradigm of a person’s answering to God; one can be as much of a self as it is possible to be and yet not answer to God. The requirement is that at least one have the ‘conception’ of God: ‘The more conception of God, the more self’ and vice versa. But you can have the conception of God and still not answer to him. You can have the conception of God and be ‘before’ God, or you can have the conception of God and have your back turned to God, or be standing at a distance disparaging all that God stands for.

But even possession of the conception of God is an extraordinarily strong requirement of selfhood, and the question it raises is, what justification is there for setting one’s ideals of selfhood that high? Is it perhaps not simply that Kierkegaard imposes his Christian requirement quite arbitrarily, and that the consequent expanding of the range of sickness to cover what would normally be considered conditions of tolerable well-being, is merely ideologically motivated? Is it perhaps not also the case that Kierkegaard is guilty of confusing selfhood, as a certain kind of personal autonomy and consistency, with some other quite distinct notion of human fulfilment? Why, in any case, if selfhood is to be linked to fulfilment, should the fulfilment be specifically Christian?

Let us go back to a journal entry from two years prior to the publication of The Sickness unto Death. There Kierkegaard writes that ‘the whole development of the world tends in the direction of the absolute significance of the category of particularity’.^* Now that might be a prophetic or just a very discerning remark. It says that there are forces at work in history and society which place increasing and – when projected – absolute emphasis on sheer oneness, not the oneness of unity with others, but of singleness, particularity. The massive industrialization of European society in the nineteenth century led, as commentators have endlessly pointed out, to an atomization of the old, rurally based societies, with their organic groupings each with its clearly identified function. The age of ‘rationalization’ (to use Max Weber’s terms) was one of ‘disenchantment’ (Entzauberung), a draining away of the ethical content that attached to membership, by virtue of one’s well-defined group, in a large, coherent community, and the ‘rational’ reorganization of society into a system of extreme division of labour, with consequent loss of corporate identity, multiple social roles, partition between social and personal identities, and so on. In this sense it is indeed true that Kierkegaard’s world was bound for an absolutization of the particular, away from the universal. It is tempting, and not necessarily altogether misconceived, to bear this socio-economic development in mind when reading Kierkegaard’s further remark that particularity is ‘precisely the principle of Christianity’. What this suggests is that the exigencies of this development force upon people that state of particularity where, divested of any coherent social identity, they find themselves in the lonely situation that enables them, as single human beings, to stand directly before God.

To the critical reader, however, that situation has a twofold ambiguity. In the first place, standing before God in this way may simply accentuate the split between social and personal life. May not the self one is in standing before God, and which transcends one’s fragile social ego, perhaps simply be a substitute for the self one can no longer ‘put together’ in social life? Or can standing before God be construed as a privileged situation which no merely socially constructed identities can provide, and which, furthermore, all attempts to establish such identities must merely frustrate? Secondly, as the former alternative indicates, there can be doubt about the status of the situation itself. Might not the idea that one can have an identity over and above whatever status one’s social or familial roles, or the eyes of one’s fellows, confer on one be altogether illusory? The God one stands before may be nothing more than a compensatory fiction, a factitious super-eye created to confer a specious status immune to the disintegrative tendencies at work in a modem society. Or, again, can it be that we do have eternal identities, which modern societies help us by default to find, by extruding us?

The former options have had their prophets too. For Kierkegaard, however, if we can adapt his remarks to these socio-economic circumstances, it is dearly the positive ones that apply. The more one loses any social identity, and the more naked, undifferentiated and ‘spiritual’ one becomes, the better adapted one is to occupy that solitary position ‘directly before God’. And there is absolutely no suggestion that there is no God there to stand before. On the contrary, and this is something we shall briefly touch on below, according to The Sickness unto Death the suggestion would itself be a sin, the sin of rejecting Christianity as lies and falsehood, a sin which is despair at its height. The negative options are excluded by definition.

Whatever one’s conclusions about that, there is no question that Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood fits the bill as far as the absolutization of particularity, or of individuality, is concerned. And one might argue that for any view of life at all in which individuality is put in the centre, Kierkegaard’s self would be paradigmatic. That might even be argued in the case of a view in which individuality took the form of a socially conspicuous individualism, for such individualism is always comparative. You are an individualist because nobody does, or very few do, just the kinds of things you do, or does them in just your kind of way. But it is impossible to make such comparisons in the case of Kierkegaard’s individual: its individuality is pure particularity; no comparisons with other individuals count at that level. When one stands there as Kierkegaard’s individual one stands there bared of any basis for comparative identity and ready to found one’s identity on something quite different. One is then, it could be said, a paradigmatic individual. This also indicates how the fact that Kierkegaard defines selfhood in terms of a conception of God may be understood. So long as it is assumed that identity is conferred in the eyes of another, God is the only resort for an individual for whom no intercomparative identity counts.

Reluctance and Refusal

There are two main, though not mutually irreducible, forms of despair in The Sickness unto Death. One is the despair of a person for whom the situation of the solitary individual is too strenuous an ideal. The other is the despair of a person who actively rejects the ideal. They are respectively called the despairs of not wanting to be oneself and of wanting to be oneself.^* This sounds rather confusing, as though there could be no alternative to despair: whether you don’t want to be yourself or you do, you are in despair. However, the despair of ‘wanting to be oneself’ is really that of wanting to be the self one is in one’s own eyes and not those of God. It is wanting to be one’s own self, instead of a self whose specifications and identity are the outcome of one’s relationship to God. So the picture Kierkegaard presents of despair has these two forms: first, a reluctance to make headway towards the ideal of selfhood, a reluctance which also involves a more or less conscious fudging of the nature of the ideal and so also of the despairer’s actual distance from it; and second, once the true nature of the ideal breaks through (once, as Kierkegaard puts it, there is ‘consciousness of an infinite self’), a progressively clear-minded and deliberate refusal to accept it. In each of these phrases we are to assume that the ideal – the true self – is a self that conforms to the image of humanity revealed by God in the person of Christ.

There are plenty of reasons why there should be this reluctance and this refusal, even if we abide by the general assumption that Christianity provides the paradigm of selfhood. Of course, one’s reluctance may stem simply and directly from disbelief in that assumption; and the question then is whether Kierkegaard or his pseudonym have anything to say to this kind of reluctance other than that from what they depict as the Christian point of view it is despair and sin.

Leaving that aside here, other reasons for reluctance and refusal have already been offered. One is that Kierkegaard’s notion of selfhood requires a severing of the idea of oneself as a creature of one’s role and reputation in human society, and acceptance of some identity for which all of that doesn’t count. Another is the offence to reason presented in the reading of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation on which the ideal of selfhood is based. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript^* the whole idea that the eternal should enter time is described as a contradiction and ‘inaccessible to thought’. On top of that comes the additional absurdity that in performing this inconceivable feat, God should also take on the form of a lowly servant, the least of mankind (in Philosophical Fragments the total unreasonableness of the doctrine is referred to as the ‘absolute paradox’). Thus not only is no support for the ideal self forthcoming from the side of reason, but anything that might come from that direction shrieks out against it. There is, however, a further, perhaps more personally compelling reason for reluctance and refusal. Although Kierkegaard’s concept of the self absolutizes the notion of selfhood, the absolutized self that eventually stands before God (and that must mean before Christ) hardly answers to the description of absolute selfhood that immediately leaps to the mind in an age that, at least in evaluative terms, associates selfhood with the achievement of a certain personal independence and self-centred autonomy. The self that stands before God has as its ideal or model a paradigm of unselfishness, of selflessness. Whether this requirement is a logical consequence of the outlined notion of absolute individuality is unclear. Why should the God one stands before not demand self-assertion, self-glorification? Might perhaps the model offered in an alternative incarnation of the eternal have been one of outright selfishness? Or is that precluded somehow by the fact that it is the eternal that is incarnated? Or even by the fact that the self submits to the model, whatever kinds of actions it presents as paradigmatic, that is even if it acts ‘selfishly’ out of a pure desire to follow the model? These are deep, though important, questions we cannot go into here, beyond remarking that in Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous works we find the idea that acting in the way of the ‘eternal’ is acting for the good without thinking of one’s own benefit, and without even thinking of the importance of one’s own role in bringing the good about.^* At least we can understand why people should be reluctant to become selves of this order, and why, when they realize what sort of self it is, they prefer to manufacture their own identities.

Unable to Die

But a person manufactures his or her own identity in vain. And this is a central feature of Kierkegaard’s account of despair. When you manufacture your own identity, choose, construct and pursue your own ideal of human fulfilment, something essential is missing. Something that would prevent you simply demolishing the ideal and beginning all over again with a new ideal when the fancy takes you. Kierkegaard’s text doesn’t state directly what that is, beyond saying that such a person lacks something ‘eternally firm’. It seems clear that the firmness cannot be part of what is chosen, a kind of gloss on the choice; that is, you will not achieve eternal firmness simply by saying ‘I choose to be ideally thus, and also to be eternally firm in this choice,’ for there is no reason why the latter constituent should be any the less instantly revocable than the former. Nor, it seems, would it be any better a proposal to say that someone who chooses to accept an identity in the eyes of God is, in effect, choosing something that is eternally firm by definition. For the fact that what you choose is eternally firm does not guarantee that the choice of it will be equally so. Perhaps the answer lies in the thought that in the background of any such fundamental choice – and choosing how to specify oneself qua human being is pretty fundamental – there must be an indefeasible assumption of some kind which is, as such, even more fundamental, so fundamental that it could not be said to be chosen. It might, for example, be the assumption that life is meaningful, that there is at least some point of view from which the world makes sense; or it could be that God exists, or that God is Love. What is thus indefeasible would no doubt vary considerably from time to time and place to place, though by its very nature less from person to person. But for any such assumption, no conscious choice that goes against it, however fundamental, will be eternally firm, and any fundamental choice that is not so backed will be – well why not say it? – eternally unfirm. As Kierkegaard says, a person who chooses his own identity is ‘a king without a country’ and his subjects live in conditions where rebellion is ‘legitimate at every moment’. Someone who has chosen to stand before God, on the other hand, knows that if he rebels, God is still there to judge him.

This would help to account for what must first strike the critical reader as a distinctly unsatisfactory aspect of Kierkegaard’s ‘exposition’. In The Sickness unto Death no allowance is made for the possibility that Christianity is indeed lies and falsehood. To reject Christianity as lies and falsehood, according to its author, is sin; in other words, rejecting the doctrine of sin and forgiveness is itself a sin, and indeed the greatest sin of all.

But there could also be a more superficial reason for this. The author of The Sickness unto Death is not given as Søren Kierkegaard himself, but as Anti-Climacus, with ‘S. Kierkegaard’ responsible for publication. Indeed the majority of Kierkegaard’s best-known works, and all those of an ‘expository’ nature, are pseudonymous, for reasons Kierkegaard himself later explained. One reason was his wish to dissociate himself, at least in his reader’s mind, from the views expressed in these works. This does not imply that in no case are the views or attitudes expressed his own, but in this particular case we have Kierkegaard’s own word that there is indeed a discrepancy between his own position and that of his pseudonym. Of his own relation to Anti-Climacus and to Johannes Climacus (the pseudonymous author of Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) Kierkegaard wrote in his journal:

J. Climacus has much in common with Anti-Climacus. But the difference is that while J. Climacus places himself so low that he even admits to not being a Christian, Anti-Climacus gives the impression of taking himself to be a Christian to an extraordinary degree, occasionally even of taking Christianity only to be for demons, though not in an intellectual respect … He has himself to blame for conflating himself with ideality (this is the demonic element in him), but his account of the ideality can be quite true, and I bow to it … I put myself higher than J. Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus.^*

The superficial reason for the absence of a genuinely nihilistic alternative in this work, then, is that its pseudonymous author is a Christian and the work is committed to the framework of Christian belief. For Anti-Climacus the life of spirit is one for which the relationship to God – standing before God – is presumptively valid from the start, simply because that is what the view he expresses dictates. No wonder, then, that everything else is despair and that there is no room in The Sickness unto Death for rejecting the Christian framework without this being judged a ‘sin’; that is, without the rejection being understood in the very terms that are rejected.

This merely classificatory reason appears, however, unsatisfactory. Even though Anti-Climacus is made to say what Kierkegaard could not in all honesty say himself, the exercise of making him say it can hardly be dismissed as merely intellectual. It seems more likely that Anti-Climacus is used to present in ideal form a background assumption which for Kierkegaard himself was indefeasible, but which, once expressed in this way, he would reasonably find himself falling short of Perhaps even inevitably, because perhaps any normal human being – as opposed to a demon, which as we know is a divine being though of an inferior sort^* – would fall short.

That brings to mind Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous pronouncement towards the close of Being and Nothingness that man is a ‘useless passion’.^† But there is a more interesting reverse parallel. The despair Anti-Climacus discusses as the ‘sickness unto death’ is either failure or refusal to place oneself in God’s hands. And what makes the failure or refusal a state or an act of despair is that it involves a surrendering of the hope of reaching the goal of fulfilment. To despair is to give up hope. (Whereas to be desperate, or act desperately, on the other hand, is to act in the last extremity of hope.) Sartre maintains that human behaviour is based on a fundamental and indefeasible desire to be God, but the structure of human consciousness ensures that the desire (as also the notion of God) is contradictory. Being God is, of course, a very different goal from being placed in God’s hands, and the difference suggests something of the distance that separates Kierkegaard from our own, post-Nietzschean culture. But there is a further twist to the difference. For although Anti-Climacus might be willing to describe his version of the goal of fulfilment as a fundamental passion, he would not describe it as a useless one. On the contrary, in impressing upon his readers that it is the only way out of despair, he must be assumed to imply that it is also a possible way out, in spite of the contradictory nature of the required belief that one is standing before God (Christ). What for Anti-Climacus is useless is the attempt to dislodge this fundamental ‘passion’ to rest in God, to hinder this drive towards selfhood before God. Any attempt to do so will fail; that is to say, any attempt to get rid of this drive, to have it die, is in vain. And vain, too, as Kierkegaard characteristically points out, is any attempt to dispose of the self that is unable to eradicate this drive to die, and so too any attempt to dispose of the self that cannot rid itself of that incapable self, and so on. The ‘torment of despair’, says Anti-Climacus, ‘is precisely not being able to die’. The despairer has his sickness unto death. It is despair that is the useless passion; it tries to but cannot ‘consume the eternal’.

Readers of Sartre will notice one more twist. In taking the desire to be God as fundamental, Sartre is offering a diagnosis or explanation of behaviour which, if he were to use Kierkegaard’s terminology, he would have to describe as despair. Sartre calls it mauvaise foi, or bad faith. People try to objectify themselves, to make themselves into substantial entities with built-in functions and values, thus denying the radical freedom that belongs to them by virtue of their being conscious. It is this that is the attempt to be God, who is both conscious (free) and substantial. A deep urge on the part of human beings to be complete in the way God is conceived as being is psychologically understandable. But the passion that drives those in ‘bad faith’ uselessly in quest of a divine nature is precisely a form of despair; it is an attempt to be rid of inherent deficiencies of the human state. For Anti-Climacus, on the other hand, despair is an attempt not to appropriate but to expunge the goal of completeness, which for him is the direction in which both deep passion and true selfhood lie.

Spiritual Need

But does human passion really lie in that direction? Or rather, is there an unexpungeable human yearning to occupy the position that Christianity provides, a place in which one’s lot is to sin and one’s expectations centre upon forgiveness and a consequent state of bliss? You would not think so. Indeed, some make so bold as to suggest that no one in their right mind would willingly conceive their life-situation in this light.

And yet if there is, as Anti-Climacus claims, a religious need which emerges through a heightened awareness of oneself, and if Christianity offered the only possible scenario for satisfying that need, then there would certainly be something to it. Indeed, if one were able to show that Kierkegaard has unearthed a universal spiritual need, The Sickness unto Death would be immediately topical.

ultimate^*