"It is said that a dancer's hardest task is to leap straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself. Perhaps no dancer can do it - but the knight does it. The mass of humans live disheartened lives of earthly sorrow and joy, these are the sitters out who will not join the dance. The knights of infinity are dancers too and they have elevation. They make the upward movement and fall down again, and this too is no unhappy pastime, nor ungracious to behold. But when they come down they cannot assume the position straightaway, they waver an instant and the wavering shows they are nevertheless strangers in the world...But to be able to land in just that way...that is something only the knight of faith can do."
— Søren Kierkegaard [1]
An understanding of the human condition must not merely be outward-facing, but inward-facing as well. The Enlightenment, for all its great achievements in the former category, has not served us well in the latter. Amongst great material wealth and abundance we find ourselves full of ennui and existential confusion. Is the solution a return to the pastoral past, or a future among the stars? Neither — because the problem is not one of external circumstances but of the inner life, which every individual must understand and shape, at least in part, on their own.
What intellectual framework can serve our inner lives? The Western tradition falls short, since its focus reason and objectivity does not address the specific nature of human existence. Even ethics, which is perhaps the only field of humanities that is not merely descriptive, can only furnish us with a description of our duties, and lacks the vocabulary to capture the spiritual or emotional aspects to such actions. Traditionally, such vocabularies were the domain of religious or communal life. Perhaps a return to a pastoral past would restore the power of such institutions; but if we are committed to the Enlightenment view of the primacy of the individual, this is not an option. We must therefore develop a philosophy of living that emphasizes the individual's right and duty to find meaning for themselves, namely Existentialism.
Sartre defines Existentialism as "the attempt to draw all the consequences from a position of consistent atheism." However, in sharp contrast to Sartre's atheism, Kierkegaard (the “father of Existentialism”) developed Existentialism as a deeply religious project. Both thinkers were committed to understand the human condition, but disagreed deeply about the role of religion in such a project. We therefore arrive at the question:
Does Existentialism require Faith?
I. The Human Condition, Stages of Despair, and the Sickness Unto Death
The human being is a contradiction. Namely, as humans we must struggle against imperfection in reaching for perfection. This imperfect-perfect duality exists in all aspects of our lives: consider the in-built cognitive biases of our minds against the desire to exercise reason, the certainty of our death against our desires to experience everything, or our weakness to temptation against the goal of living ethically. Humans are necessarily flawed; while we can strive for perfection, we can never reach it. As put by Kierkegaard in [2],
Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two factors. So regarded, man is not yet a self.
This contradiction at the heart of human existence leads us to Kierkegaard's concept of Despair, which he develops in The Sickness Unto Death. Despair is precisely the "Sickness Unto Death," as opposed to the Biblical story of Lazarus, who died in the flesh but did not suffer from this deeper sickness. As in many aspects of Kierkegaard's thinking, Despair assumes a triple-form, with each stage reflecting a particular kind of attitude that the individual has towards their spirit, or self. These are arranged in terms of increasing levels of consciousness:
Despair at not being conscious of having a self.
Despair at not being willing to be oneself.
Despair at willing to be oneself.
As the subtitle of the book suggests, each of these stages is to be understood as part of a psychological exposition; therefore while Kierkegaard does explicate the stages of Despair dialectically, I prefer to lean on his use of analogies and stories to illustrate these. Hence to illustrate Despair of the first kind, which is not conscious of having a self, Kierkegaard writes [2]:
[I]t is far from being the case that men in general regard relationship to the truth, the fact of standing in relationship to the truth, as the highest good…So when a man is supposed to be happy, he imagines that he is happy (whereas viewed in the light of the truth he is unhappy), and in this case he is generally very far from wishing to be torn away from that delusion. On the contrary, he becomes furious, he regards the man who does this as his most spiteful enemy, he considers it an insult, something near to murder, in the sense that one speaks of killing joy. What is the reason of this? The reason is that the sensuous nature and the psycho-sensuous completely dominate him; the reason is that he lives in the sensuous categories agreeable/disagreeable, and says goodbye to truth etc.; the reason is that he is too sensuous to have the courage to venture to be spirit or to endure it. However vain and conceited men may be, they have nevertheless for the most part a very lowly conception of themselves, that is to say, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute of all that a man can be…
Here we see also a clearer definition of what is meant by the self, or being conscious of having a self. While the dialectical definition of the self ("The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation's relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself") is rather confusing, we see that the proper understanding of the self is in opposition to living in the psycho-sensuous, and rather involves "being spirit, the absolute of all that a man can be." Moreover we see why Despair is termed as a sickness, for at this stage the Despairing man wishes to live in illusion, just as a cure to a sickness can often be temporarily more painful that the sickness itself.
Next, we arrive at the concept of Despair at not willing to be oneself, despite being conscious of having a self. This is aptly termed "self-enclosure," or "introversion."
That blind door behind which there was nothing is in this case a real door, a door carefully locked to be sure, and behind it sits as it were the self and watches itself, employed in filling up time with not willing to be itself, and yet is self enough to love itself. This is what is called introversion. And from now on we shall be dealing with introversion, which is the direct opposite to immediacy and has a great contempt for it, in the sphere of thought more especially.
But does there then in the realm of reality exist no such self? Has he fled outside of reality to the desert, to the cloister, to the mad-house? Is he not a real man, clothed like others, or like others clad in the customary outer-garments? Yes, certainly there is! Why not? But with respect to this thing of the self he initiates no one, not a soul, he feels no urge to do this, or he has learnt to suppress it.
In other words, one who has Despair of the second kind is quite skilled at self-suppression, quiet reflection, and maintaining all the appearances of one who is concerned only with the temporal world and their projects therein. From the outsider's perspective such a person may be indistinguishable from one who Despairs at not being conscious of the self, although the former kind of person is perhaps more dignified and ethical, while the latter may be more selfish and attentive to instant gratification.
Note that the Despairer at this stage has perhaps felt a slight urge to abandon worldly commitments ("Has he fled outside of reality to the desert, to the cloister, to the mad-house?") but has not acted upon it. Indeed, this disciplined self-denial, even to the point of anticipating such temptations, is characteristic of Despair at not willing to be one self.
[O]ur despairer is introverted enough to be able to keep every intruder (that is, every man) at a distance from the topic of the self, whereas outwardly he is completely "a real man." He is a university man, husband and father, an uncommonly competent civil functionary even…And a Christian? Well, yes, he is that too after a sort however, he preferably avoids talking on the subject, although he willingly observes and with a melancholy joy that his wife for her edification engages in devotions. He very seldom goes to church, because it seems to him that most parsons really don’t know what they are talking about. He makes an exception in the case of one particular priest of whom he concedes that he knows what he is talking about, but he doesn’t want to hear him for another reason, because he has a fear that this might lead him too far.
A fear that he may be led too far! In other words, the self-enclosed Despairer fears being led away from his temporal life and towards the more difficult path towards being a self. I think Despair of the second kind is quite common among the educated and worldly of our time, who will readily admit the deep flaws of our selfish and consumerist society, perhaps even working at a company they laughingly admit is evil, but then continue to act out their roles in this play, shrugging and asking "what is to be done?" In moments of quiet reflection they will grasp the full extent of their Despair, and this self-awareness is what they believe maintains their fundamental goodness and comprises their penance; yet they are too practiced at self-denial to contemplate going further, to truly pursue the self — that is, to become spirit, or the absolute.
Worse, as Kierkegaard alludes to, such Despairers will smile indulgently at their fellows who have managed to cling to some shred of meaning ("he willingly observes and with a melancholy joy that his wife for her edification engages in devotions"), as though at a confused child. While outwardly admiring the ability of others to pursue meaning, they are of course contemptuous of anyone who does not submit to nihilism, regarding this as an act of immaturity, and not realizing that they are in error as well — in Despair.
Finally, we arrive at Despair of the third kind, which is Despair at willing to be oneself. At this stage, there is even greater consciousness of what Despair is, of one's own condition, and of the infinite self. The failure to become the self, then, is not one of "self-enclosure" but rather of excess pride. The necessary step here is to practice faith, and surrender to the infinite self and the absolute — but instead the Despairing self stubbornly refuses, due perhaps to the presence of a perceived "cross" [2].
[A]n experimenting self which in despair wills to be itself, at the moment when it is making a preliminary exploration of its concrete self, stumbles upon one or another hardship of the sort that the Christian would call a cross, a fundamental defect…like Prometheus the infinite, negative self feels that it is nailed to this servitude…this too is a form of despair: not to be willing to hope that an earthly distress, a temporal cross, might be removed. This is what the despair which wills desperately to be itself is not willing to hope. It has convinced itself that this thorn in the flesh gnaws so profoundly that he cannot abstract it -- no matter whether this is actually so or his passion makes it true for him…
So he is offended by it, or rather from it he takes occasion to be offended at the whole of existence, in spite of it he would be himself, not despitefully be himself without it (for that is to abstract from it, and that he cannot do, or that would be a movement in the direction of resignation); no, in spite of or in defiance of the whole of existence he wills to be himself with it, to take it along, almost defying his torment. For to hope in the possibility of help, not to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible -- no, that he will not do. And as for seeking help from any other -- no, that he will not do for all the world; rather than seek help he would prefer to be himself -- with all the tortures of hell, if so it must be.
Kierkegaard alludes to the solution to Despair of the third kind in this passage, which is "to speak of help by virtue of the absurd, that for God all things are possible." This is no easy feat, however, and to properly understand faith in this fashion we must turn to Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard's allegorical exploration of the story of Genesis 22.
II. Isaac, Abraham, and the Teleological Suspension of the Ethical
In the stages of consciousness characterizing the types of Despair, there is an analogy to Kierkegaard's famous trinity of life paths: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. The earliest stage of Despair is characterized by lacking consciousness of a self, and this is closest to the aesthetic life. At this stage, one is occupied entirely with material pleasures and worldly affairs, with no regard for the self. Next, one is conscious of having a self, but then either Despairs at not willing to become oneself or at willing to become oneself, and this is comparable to the ethical life. At this stage, the individual is concerned with attending to their worldly duties, and either deliberately forgoes deeper reflection (as in self-enclosure) or refuses to give up their cross.
Entering the religious life, by means of some "leap of faith," is the subject of Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling. This examines the story of Genesis 22, in which Abraham is commanded by God to sacrifice his son Isaac as a test of faith. For Kierkegaard, Abraham exemplifies the "knight of faith" as described in the opening passage. The knight of faith, unlike the knight of infinity, is attendant not to the ethical duties of his life (as Abraham may be ethically obligated to not harm his son), but rather to the absolute duty to God. At the same time, the knight of faith executes the leap of faith in a particular way, as he enters "straight into a definite position, so that not for a second does he have to catch at the position but stands there in it in the leap itself."
This is a radical concept, because of the knight of faith ethics is not a praiseworthy pursuit but rather a source of temptation away from the duty towards the Absolute. Nevertheless Kierkegaard argue for its correctness existentially, as absolute duty emerges precisely from the relation of the individual to the universal. Quoting [1],
The paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual...determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal. The paradox may also be expressed in this way: that there is an absolute duty to God, for in this relationship of duty the individual relates himself as the single individual absolutely to the absolute. In this connection, to say that it is a duty to love God means something different from the above, for if this duty is absolute, then the ethical is reduced to the relative. From this it does not follow that the ethical is invalidated; rather, the ethical receives a completely different expression, a paradoxical expression....
The paradox cannot be mediated, for it depends specifically on this: that the single individual is only the single individual. As soon as this single individual wants to express his absolute duty in the universal, becomes conscious of it in the universal, he recognizes that he is involved in a spiritual trial, and then, if he really does resist it, he will not fulfill the so-called absolute duty, and if he does not resist it, then he sins, even though his act realiter [in actuality] turns out to be what was his ethical duty....
The story of Abraham contains such a paradox. The ethical expression for his relation to Isaac is that the father must love the son. This ethical relation is reduced to the relative in contradistinction to the absolute relation to God.
The paradoxical opposition of the individual in opposition to the universal (the ethical) is what sustains the Abraham's duty, or what Kierkegaard terms the teleological suspension of the ethical. The individual who suspends the ethical to attend to the Absolute must continue to exist, but does so not tragically (as the knight of the infinite), but immediately and definitely (as the knight of faith).
We arrive then at the core concept of Abraham's story, which is that one should act on the strength of the absurd. The absurd here, not to be confused with Camus's use of the term, refers to the paradoxical nature of Abraham's duty and existence. By virtue of the absurd, the knight of faith can perform the "double movement" — first by moving from the finite to the infinite, and second from the infinite to the finite.
"[T]his man has made and every instant is making the movements of infinity. With infinite resignation he has drained the cup of life's profound sadness, he knows the bliss of the infinite, he senses the pain of renouncing everything, the dearest things he possesses in the world, and yet finiteness tastes to him just as good as to one who never knew anything higher, for his continuance in the finite did not bear a trace of the cowed and fearful spirit produced by the process of training; and yet he has this sense of security in enjoying it, as though the finite life were the surest thing of all.
And yet, and yet the whole earthly form he exhibits is a new creation by virtue of the absurd. He resigned everything infinitely, and then he grasped everything again by virtue of the absurd. He constantly makes the movements of infinity, but he does this with such correctness and assurance that he constantly gets the finite out of it, and there is not a second when one has a notion of anything else…[T]o be able to fall down in such a way that the same second it looks as if one were standing and walking, to transform the leap of life into a walk, absolutely to express the sublime in the pedestrian–that only the knight of faith can do–and this is the one and only prodigy."
To get the finite from the infinite — to leap into the definite position — this is proper understanding of the knight of faith, who achieves all by virtue of the absurd. We can go further here and consider the implications for Christianity, which Slavoj Zizek calls the "atheist religion." By the realized eschatology interpretation of the Bible, Christ's return is manifest already in the community of believers itself.
Where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I among them.
— Matthew 18:20
The eternal life promised by Christianity is, on this interpretation, nothing more than the overcoming of Despair that occurs in our earthly lives.
Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.
— John 17:3
Hence the challenge of faith comes for Christians and atheists alike. Can you make the movements of infinity, and get the finite out of it, by virtue of the absurd?
III. Reason, Faith, and the Individual Above the Universal
What Tarquinius Superbus spoke in the garden by means of the poppies was understood by the son, but not by the messenger.
As Kierkegaard stresses throughout his works, faith is a paradoxical thing. In addition to this paradoxical nature, faith is necessarily an individual experience, as it is a direct expression of the self in relation to the Absolute. Therefore we must rely on the use of allegories and storytelling to illuminate faith, which Kierkegaard does beautifully through multiple references to antiquity.
In the epigraph of Fear and Trembling, which I have quoted above, he alludes to the capture of the city of Gabii during Roman times. Upon capturing the city, Tarquinius Superbus’ son sent a messenger to his father to ask what he should do next. His father, not trusting the messenger's loyalty, took him for a walk in the garden and used his cane to strike off the flowers of the tallest poppies. When this was relayed to Tarquinius’ son, he understood that he was to kill the most distinguished men of the city. Much has been made of the meaning of this epigraph (see [3]), which clearly alerts the reader of Fear and Trembling to the presence of hidden meaning(s) in the text. At the most basic level, the passage is clearly a commentary on the difficulty of grasping faith, which can be understood only by those who are already in the position of the requisite background knowledge. In addition, we can understand the Father to be God himself, whose messenger (the author of Fear and Trembling, who Kierkegaard named as “Johannes de Silentio”) can deliver messages to his children (humanity, the reader) but himself can only imperfectly participate in the project of faith.
To bookend his discussion, Kierkegaard relays the tale of Heraclitus the Obscure in the epilogue to Fear and Trembling.
“One must go further, one must go further." This impulse to go further is an ancient thing in the world…Heraclitus the obscure said, "One cannot pass twice through the same stream. [He] had a disciple who did not stop with that, he went further and added, "One cannot do it even once." Poor Heraclitus, to have such a disciple! By this amendment the thesis of Heraclitus was so improved that it became an Eleatic thesis which denies movement, and yet that disciple desired only to be a disciple of Heraclitus. . .and to go further -- not back to the position Heraclitus had abandoned.
By illustrating the folly of Heraclitus' disciple, Kierkegaard warns of the danger of wanting to always go further. While Heraclitus meant to communicate the ever-changing nature of reality, his discipline, eager to go further, ended up reversing his master’s position, claiming that nothing can change at all (the Eleatic thesis).
The attempt to understand faith more deeply than its bare meaning can similarly be self-defeating. The desire to go further, which is characteristic of academic pursuits, is seen here to be undesirable. Our task is to accept the wisdom of faith as it is conveyed to us, although of course its paradoxical nature may make this impossible.
In critiquing the desire to go further, Kierkegaard was also responding to the Hegelians of his time, whose systematizing thought he famously rejected in favor of an individualized and existential point of view. In regards to faith, this only reinforces his position that the individual is higher than the universal, and therefore attempts to "go further" by universalizing faith (and even, perhaps, any philosophy) is mistaken. This is existentialism par excellence — quoting [1],
"Faith is just this paradox, that the single individual as the particular is higher than the universal, is justified before the latter, not as subordinate but superior, though in such a way, be it noted, that is is the single individual who, having been subordinate to the universal as the particular, now by means of the universal becomes that individual who, as the particular, stands in an absolute relation to the absolute. This position cannot be mediation, for all meditation occurs precisely by virtue of the universal. It is and remains for in all eternity a paradox, inaccessible to thought. And yet faith is this paradox…[O]r else faith has never existed just because it has always existed. And Abraham is lost."
This acceptance of unknowability is present not only in the faith of Kierkegaard but in the Catholic understanding of mathematical infinities due to Georg Cantor, as well as the Hindu philosophy of Nirguma Brahman (non-dualism), as I have written previously. Kierkegaard's innovation is to claim that the unknowability of the Absolute does not diminish the role of the individual, but elevates it as the foundation of an existentialist faith. To paraphrase Kant, we must abolish God to make room for faith. Ergo, my claim that we can read Kierkegaard even as Christian atheists — paradoxical indeed!
IV. The Self as an Unending Project
Let us return to Kierkegaard's definition of the self, from [2].
The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self. Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis…Such a relation which relates itself to its own self (that is to say, a self) must either have constituted itself or have been constituted by another…
The disrelationship of despair is not a simple disrelationship but a disrelationship in a relation which relates itself to its own self and is constituted by another, so that the disrelationship in that self-relation reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it.
This then is the formula which describes the condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself the self is grounded transparently in the Power which posited it.
The dialectical definition of self as relation, while dense, can be summed as stating that the self is a verb, not a noun. In other words, the self is not the bare fact that there is a relation, but consists of the relating of the relation to itself. This perpetual activity of relating (in Despair or in Faith), which we might call the perpetual self, is what characterizes the human condition. If the relation (the self) is in Despair, then there is a disrelationship which "reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the Power which constituted it," namely in relation to God. But therein, we find the solution to Despair as well, which is by correcting this disrelationship, and being grounded in the Power that constituted the self.
In understanding the self as a verb, we are invited to engage in the lifelong project of relating to our selves in the correct way — that is, in living correctly. Strikingly, Kierkegaard emphasizes that from all external appearances the one who does so (the Knight of Faith) may appear to be completely engaged in the ordinary and temporal aspects of life ("he constantly makes the movements of infinity, but he does this with such correctness and assurance that he constantly gets the finite out of it"). How strange, that the most enlightened person is not he who lives as an ascetic in the mountains, but he who lives an entirely ordinary seeming life! This is no paradox, it is merely an illustration of the inward-facing nature of faith. Indeed, as is illustrated in the opening passage of this essay, our task is the leap into the definite position, so that we need not catch ourselves for even a second, but are already in the position during the leap itself.
During the leap itself! To simultaneously leap and maintain the definite position without a moment of wavering is as to dance on the head of a pin. How many knights of faith can do it? Perhaps none, but this is the task, which appears so simple as to be motionless but is most difficult of all.
To conclude, let us decipher a message conveyed on the very first pages of Kierkegaard’s books. In attributing the authorship of his works, Kierkegaard was known employ several pseudonyms, so as to indicate that his works are a dynamic and broad-ranging dialogue between various characters and points of view. The pseudonymous author of The Sickness Unto Death, which is understood as the sequel to Fear and Trembling, is named Anti-Climacus, in reference to the earlier pseudonym of Johannes Climacus. The name "Johannes Climacus" was in turn a reference to the 6th-century monk John Climacus ("John of the Ladder"), who wrote The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Scala Paradisi). This work was read widely in Christendom as an explicit, 30-step sequence of acts towards salvation. Kierkegaard employs the pseudonym Johannes Climacus for some of his earlier works (e.g. De Omnibus Dubitandum Est [All is to be Doubted]) to indicate that he is searching for a systematic approach to faith in modernity.
In turn, the author of Fear and Trembling is named as Johannes de Silentio ("John the Silent"), perhaps to indicate that the author cannot offer a Ladder of Divine Ascent to others, and therefore must remain silent on such matters. Indeed, Kierkegaard emphasizes his position of "silence" at several points of the book, emphasizing that he is not a Knight of Faith [1].
I cannot make the movement of faith, I cannot shut my eyes and plunge confidently into the absurd.... Be it a duty or whatever, I cannot make the final movement, the paradoxical movement of faith, although there is nothing I wish more.
Finally, in the later book The Sickness Unto Death Kierkegaard adopts the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Here "anti" does not mean against, but rather "ante" as in "anticipate." Hence Anti-Climacus is an "extraordinary Christian," and far greater than Johannes Climacus. Unlike Johannes, Anti-Climacus seeks no systematic sequence of activities to achieve salvation, but rather arrives there directly ("in the definite position") by means of the leap of faith.
Therefore, by means of this progression of pseudonyms Kierkegaard reinforces the central message of his works: there is no systematic approach to existence and the human condition. There is only faith, and the courage to embrace it.
References
[1] Kierkegaard, Søren. Fear and Trembling: A Dialectical Lyric. 1843.
[2] Kierkegaard, Søren. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition For Upbuilding And Awakening. 1849.
[3] Green, Ronald M. "Deciphering Fear and Trembling's Secret Message." Religious studies 22.1 (1986): 95-111.
N.B. The cover art is Francisco de Zurbaran's St. Francis In Ecstasy (1639).