Søren Kierkegaard: The self as synthesis, despair, and the leap of faith

Existentialism starts with Kierkegaard. In this session we’ll be talking about his theological Existentialism. A fiercely original thinker (and kind of a weird person, though I won’t go into that), I hope to show you why it’s no coincidence that Kierkegaard’s insights into the nature of selfhood influenced a remarkably wide range of writers, thinkers, and even the odd discipline, including Dostoevsky, Sartre, the discipline of psychology, and so on.

What I want to do is offer two readings of Kierkegaard—one secular, one theological. Both will center on subjectivity and despair, but one will not include Christian theology and the other will. Apart from introducing you to Kierkegaard, I take this approach to show you that Kierkegaard’s Existentialism can be attractive both to religious and non-religious people alike.

One thing that applies to both readings, and is a useful way of contextualizing Kierkegaard, is that his concept of the self can be seen as a response to two opposing ways of thinking about truth, reality, and the self in the West. In this opposition, Platonic philosophy represent one side and the Judaeo-Christian tradition represents the other. However helpful, these are broad generalizations, needless to add.

The Platonic tradition

For Plato and Platonists, ultimate reality is universal, objective, and abstract. The pursuit of truth must therefore be disinterested in particularities and subjectivity, because taking an interest necessarily involves taking an interest in something particular from a subjective perspective. And that just leads you in the opposite direction of truth.

The concept of self that emerges here is one detached from the world and the worldly part of oneself, instead wholly focused on cultivating abstract reason. That’s the whole point behind each and every one of Plato’s dialogues—the true self has to learn to sideline inessential things, mainly things of the body, and arrive at the truth.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition

For the Judaeo-Christian tradition, however, truth though universal is to be found in history, in the world. God created the earth, and it was good, as we have it in the Bible. For the Jews, God intervened in the course of the history of the Jews and singled out this particular people as his people. For the Christians, God revealed himself in history and instituted a fundamentally new type of truth and meaning of life in doing so.

The world of particularities—peoples, certain events—in the Judaeo-Christian tradition contains the truth and therefore requires a passionate interest in the world. The concept of self that emerges in this tradition is an engaged one. Rituals are important, conducting yourself in the world in a certain way, i.e. according to moral principles, is important.

In both traditions, the self is not a unity but rather a combination of three essences: reason (or mind), body, and soul. For the Greeks, the true self has to learn to sideline inessential things and arrive at the truth, which means favoring reason. For the Christians, an individual has to achieve the salvation of the soul in this world—bring the soul, reason, and body into a harmonious combination, but ultimately favoring the soul.

The modern continuation

These two traditions underlie the major divisions in Western philosophy until Pascal and Kierkegaard. Plato echoes in the rationalist tradition with thinkers like Descartes and Spinoza. The Judaeo-Christian view is found, with heavy modifications, in the empiricist and materialist traditions with people like Hobbes, Marx, and Locke.

It was Pascal who first argued that the self isn’t a combination but a synthesis—an agonizing, painful synthesis where you can’t get rid of, can’t privilege, any constituent, whether soul, mind, or body. The task in life becomes learning how to live as such a synthesis.

It was Kierkegaard, however, who first offered a systematic philosophy based on showing that the self is a synthesis, not a combination, and that an authentic self has to come to terms with that.

In the readings you’ll have probably noticed that Hegel and Hegelian concepts play a major role in Kierkegaard’s thought. Throughout, Kierkegaard is adamant to reject Hegelian idealism.

In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard starts by critiquing Hegel’s moral philosophy, according to which individual ethical life is universal. The foundation, goal, and standard (telos in Greek) of ethical life lies outside of subjectivity, outside of lived time and space.

Ethics according to Hegel becomes the task to express this universality. And that means, in Kierkegaard’s words, “to annul [man’s] singularity in order to become the universal.” Examples of such universalities that individuals are to somehow merge with are the Church, social morality, and State. All these universalities care about is fulfilling a goal outside of subjectivity and judging subjectivity according to a standard external to subjectivity. At least according to Kierkegaard’s reading of Hegel.

In one example, Kierkegaard mentions “assistant professors” employed by the state in Denmark and Germany. He scolds them because “they have a permanent position and a secure future in a well-organized state.” They annul their singularity to express the universality of the state, for example by judging the deeds of human beings, past and present, by the extent to which they contributed to the existence and results of the state, seen as the highest expression of mankind’s essence.

These assistant professors instrumentalize both themselves and other human beings in partaking in the universal. They are selves, to be sure, but they are “inauthentic” selves—selves alienated from themselves in being related in and by the universal, not being related to themselves by themselves.

In a sense, this presages critical theory and bears some affinity to a Marxist critique of abstract reason. I think it is elements like these that lead someone like Sartre to try to combine Kierkegaard with Marx, not without merit in my opinion.

Against this modern Hegelian speculative philosophy, Kierkegaard invokes elements from the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In the case of morality, Kierkegaard turns to Abraham and the episode in which he is asked by God to sacrifice his son Isaac. Abraham plays a tremendously important role for Kierkegaard.

First, it challenges the idea that the ground and goal of moral choice is universal, abstract, objective, and external to individual subjectivity. Why? Because Abraham acts strictly within his subjectivity—faith in this case, but one could also call it radical freedom, a radical singular choice, which of course would become the key concept in Existentialism. Universality could not have acted for Abraham, nor could it provide him with a template for his decision.

Second, it challenges the belief that individual moral choice is consistent with and intelligible to the universal, to social morality. If Abraham were to be judged according to social morality or law, he would have to be seen as a senseless murderer. But Hegel doesn’t call Abraham a murderer. Hegel doesn’t say that Abraham committed a breach or sin against universality. Yet Hegel doesn’t see that the truth of Abraham undermines his philosophy.

That, for Kierkegaard, means that Abraham reveals something about human life that’s accepted but not accounted for by Hegel and the Greek tradition, and even by most Christians, because most Christians tend to slip back into some lopsided logic, whether it be Platonist or Hegelian.

We can easily think of examples that aren’t religious: think of a person who would do anything for someone he or she loves, even if by doing that this person is breaking a moral code or a law, and even if it seems incomprehensible to anyone from the outside.

In other words, we know that people place those they love above the realm of the universal and can’t explain why they do so in public or universal terms. What they do seems to everyone else absurd or paradoxical. One could say they take it for a form of madness, irrationality, or similar. But Kierkegaard says that’s not the case.

Third, what Abraham finally shows is that “Faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal—yet, please note, in such a way that the movement repeats itself, so that after having been in the universal he as the single individual isolates himself as higher than the universal.”

What does that mean? Remember the dialectic: Dialectical logic doesn’t admit of absolute contradictions or oppositions. It sees all parts of Being as interlinked through what Kierkegaard calls “quantitative” relations, which differ not in kind but only in degree. Abraham becomes a problem for the dialectic, for he reveals a difference in kind, a “qualitative” difference or disjunction between individual subjectivity (his choice to sacrifice Isaac) and universality (the prohibition against murder, the norm that we should never harm our children). The disjunction is absolute.

This is the “teleological suspension of the ethical”: Abraham suspends the universal ethical in the name of his individual relationship to God. The individual stands in absolute relation to the Absolute, and this relationship cannot be mediated by the universal.

Kierkegaard’s famous definition from The Sickness Unto Death: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.”

This is notoriously difficult. Let me try to unpack it.

It means that the self is not a thing or substance. It’s a relation. More specifically, it’s a relation between different aspects of human existence, among which Kierkegaard mentions infinity and finitude, possibility and necessity, temporality and eternity.

But the self is not just this relation or these relations between these aspects. It’s the relation’s relating itself to itself. The self is conscious of itself as this relation between its aspects, conscious of itself as the relator, and then conscious of itself as… you get the point, the relating doesn’t stop, until the self reflects on itself and takes a stance toward itself in all this, which means that the true self is a painful, agonizing synthesis of opposing elements. The self can’t get rid of any element. It can’t privilege one over the other. It has to learn to live as this synthesis.

The dialectic of infinitude and finitude

Insofar as the self is a synthesis, it’s a synthesis of the infinite and the finite. The self is infinite because imagination can make anything possible—you can imagine yourself as anything, and of course you can imagine infinite being. But the self is also finite—you have this particular body, this particular history, these particular circumstances, and so on.

The task is to be both. If you lose yourself in infinitude, you become fantastical—lost in purely abstract possibilities with no grounding in reality. If you lose yourself in finitude, you become narrow—trapped in the trivial details of everyday life with no sense of possibility. To be both, to live dialectically, doesn’t make life any easier, in any sense, it simply means living to the fullest in your own existence.

The dialectic of possibility and necessity

The self is also a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Insofar as it is itself, actually existing as a particular person, it is the necessary—its existence is imbued with necessary elements: a beating heart, a way of thinking, a social class, and so on. But insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility—you can choose how to relate to these givens.

If the self runs away from necessity to possibility, it cannot return to itself. Everything becomes possible, nothing actual. The abyss of possibility swallows up the self. This is fantastic imagination, wishful thinking that never commits to anything.

But if the self lacks possibility, either everything becomes necessary (to Kierkegaard this amounts to fatalism, determinism) or everything becomes trivial (the philistine-bourgeois mentality of routine experience and probability). Here the self loses the sense that things could be otherwise, that it has freedom.

An example to help you grasp this dialectic:

My biological necessity means that I need water to survive. But in a situation in which there is me and another person, and there’s only enough water for one or very limited water, I have possibility, I’m not determined to follow my necessity. I can make a choice, and the choice isn’t just me or them. In Kierkegaardian terms: my self relates these possibilities and necessities. So, I can say that this other person is sick and needs the water more than I do, so maybe I decide I’ll gladly give up most of it or all of it for this other person, even if it means I die of thirst. I can also decide that my life matters the most, that I don’t give a shit about this other person, and that’ll do what I have to to seize all the water for myself. And so on. Isn’t this the Kierkegaardian logic of the sacrifice revealed as ever-present possibilities (Abraham’s sacrifice kind being one possibility, or the symbol of one possibility) in everyday life?

But in relating necessity and possibility, and by making a choice, I don’t transcended necessity, nor possibility. What I do is this: I have agonistically learned to live with the synthesis in making a free choice, committing fully in a singular moment.

Despair happens when shit goes wrong, when I don’t learn to live like an agonized synthesis.

Or, in a little more philosophically sexy language: despair is the sickness unto death. It’s not what we might today call sadness or depression. It’s a fundamental misrelation in the self. Because the self is a relation that relates itself to itself, despair occurs when this relation goes wrong.

Kierkegaard distinguishes multiple forms of despair,

Despair of infinitude: To lack finitude

This is fantastic infinitization. The self becomes abstract sentimentality. It loses itself more and more in imagination and possibility. A person with this despair can thrive in the world, live well, be honored, have family, and so on. But the person’s real, that is full, self is not there. This is sometimes called inauthenticity. Unfortunately, by and large the world, according to Kierkegaard, cares little for cultivation of the real self, simply because we see many people governing the world according to fantastic infinitization or some other form of despair.

In the most vulgar segments of Western counter-culture (teenagers reading about Kierkegaard, and so on), despair is seen as this cool thing, a performance in a specific social setting, that goes with a certain kind of clothing and manners, to achieve a higher social status, or something along those lines. But it really isn’t. If the Kierkegaardian self is likened to a machine, despair basically signals that its parts aren’t working together properly, so you kind of need to “fix” them.

Despair of finitude: To lack infinitude

Kierkegaard writes: “The secular mentality is nothing more or less than the attribution of infinite worth to the indifferent.” Every human being is primitively intended to be a self, it’s destined to become itself. However, that doesn’t mean that every single moment, every single concept of self, is as full as any other. Here Kierkegaard of course reveals himself to be an anti-democrat and anti-egalitarian.

Equality is fundamentally bad, he says, because it means that selves become lost in “hordes of men,” become “a copy, a number, a mass man.” They mortgage themselves to the world. They grind down their uniqueness to fit in, to be like everyone else. In this despair, a person seems to permit themselves to be tricked out of their self by “the others.”

Now, one might argue that conditions in which each individual can pursue their own synthesis, make a full choice, isn’t incompatible with an egalitarian society. One might argue that for each individual, and not just a few, to have that possibility it’s necessary to have an egalitarian society. One might also argue that Kierkegaard argued against egalitarianism because he came from a socio-economic class which benefited from inequality. But I won’t do that here.

Despair not to be oneself outside of pure immediacy: Despair in weakness

This is despair over the earthly or something earthly. The “man of [pure] immediacy” is only psychically qualified as a self, and entirely bound up in immediacy, unable to see anything else. This person’s dialectic, that which the person has set to determine his thinking and feeling and acting, is: the pleasant and the unpleasant, good luck, bad luck, fate.

This person can be a churchgoer, someone who listens to the pastor, performs all religious rites, is considered an upstanding citizen, and so on. But that person’s still in despair, they’re not willing to be themselves, because they remain weak before and succumb to physical drives, desires, and circumstances. Such a person’s life is essentially about stimulation and instant gratification, about dwelling in pure immediacy, whether that be through drugs, gambling, sex, violence, consumption, or prayer. This is the lowliest form of despair for Kierkegaard.

This despair is like a coin. It can flip to the other side. This happens when such a person believes they realize why they’re in despair: because of something fundamentally external to themselves: an unjust world, bad luck, bad temper, bad genes, whatever. But, according to Kierkegaard, “it always comes from the self, indirectly-directly from the self, as the counter-pressure (reaction).” So, there’s another layer of misrecognition of true selfhood (this one conscious), and in this case it can lead to “inclosing reserve,” withdrawing from the world because the pain or risk of pain is too great. Instead of pursuing its synthesis in immediacy, the person closes themselves off from immediacy, becomes a recluse, apathetic to life, and so on. Suicide, Kierkegaard says, is a great danger here.

Despair to will to be oneself: Defiance

This is when the person achieves more consciousness of itself as a self to the point where that consciousness takes the form of an act, and that act takes the form of defiance. Defiance is despair with the (ultimately useless) aid of the eternal, says Kierkegaard, because it tarries with both possibility and actuality. “In a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away.”

The person’s defiant wants to be master of themselves, to create themselves, to make their self into the self they want to be. They’re conscious of an “infinite self” but this is only the most abstract possible self. They want to determine what they will have or not have in their concrete self. They accept necessity as a biological being, yes, but then they want infinite self—to start over from the beginning, to “become who they are meant to be.” So, paradoxically, they don’t want to be their own self. They want to create a different self, a better self, a self better than others, perpetually, and somehow, in all of this, they believe they know best, they believe they need no assistance. This is why the aid of the eternal is useless to them, because they’re running away from accepting themselves, from agonizing synthesis, from choosing within the synthesis.

Kierkegaard says that people fallen to this form of despair are actually afraid of eternity, because it will separate them from their “demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men.” Their “demonic madness” fears that eternity could get the strange idea of depriving them of their misery. The results are as devastating as they’re comical: “This absolute ruler is a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing.”

Kierkegaard argues there are three fundamental ways of existing, three spheres of life. Each, except the highest, will remain unfulfilled, and leads to despair.

The aesthetic sphere

The aesthete stands apart from his or her objects, is not genuinely relating to them. They are fleeting, and he or she can therefore feel licensed to pursue all directions, all objects, as plaything to be picked up or thrown away at whim. What this means is that he or she seeks satisfaction in variety, novelty, originality, and so on. He or she avoids an Abraham-type commitment because commitment would limit his or her freedom. He or she lives for the moment, the experience, the sensation, the creation of something new (from within this sphere).

But this life is ultimately empty. The aesthete is destined to become bored. Boredom is structurally built into the aesthetic lifestyle, because the nature of existence is this: nothing satisfies for long. He or she’s therefore constantly seeking the next experience, the next pleasure. He or she has no stable identity, no commitment, no depth. The aesthete, being all vanity, is bound to chase the wind.

The ethical sphere

The ethicist is bound to objects. Think of marriage: love transitions to marriage, commitment, duty, obligations. The ethical isn’t merely a choice between good and evil, but what one determines for the whole of existence. Either/or is taken seriously.

This is the realm of the universal, of morality, ethics, social norms. The ethical person commits to universal principles and lives by them. Marriage, career, civic duty—these are taken seriously, permanently, totally.

But remember Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel. The ethical, the universal, is not ultimate. It cannot account for Abraham, or choice in general. It cannot account for the passionate individual who stands in absolute relation to the Absolute.

The religious sphere

The religious sphere is faith over duty. “Almost as if it has a unique language or form each time an individual stands before God.” Kierkegaard asks: “Can a historical point of departure be given for eternal consciousness? Can an eternal happiness be built on historical knowledge?” The “infinitely interested individual” is “passionately” interested in the truth.

There are two forms of religiousness:

Religiousness A: Here I meet God, but annihilate myself. This is the recognition of the infinite qualitative difference between God and human.

Religiousness B: Here I meet God, and I live with the paradox of the finite meeting the infinite. This is the “leap of faith.” This is specifically Christian faith, Kierkegaard says, since it entails a belief in the Incarnation, that the eternal entered time, that God became man. This is absurd, paradoxical, offensive to reason, scandalous to reason. But it’s the highest form of existence, says Kierkegaard.

Let me give you another concrete example to illustrate these ideas: the characters Thomas and Tereza from Milan Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Thomas is fully committed to Tereza. He wouldn’t do anything to hurt her. He has, in Kierkegaardian terms, an infinite passion for something finite. Yet at the same time, he is very much determined by physical drives, sex, so has sex with other women. He doesn’t see this as a contradiction, doesn’t therefore see it as an agonized synthesis, and he is, consequently, in despair.

Tereza is fully committed to Thomas, she has the same passion. But she’s is not open to satisfying her sexual needs with others. Tereza sees Thomas’ behavior as a contradiction according to universal morals and she’s, consequently, in despair.

So, who’s living as an “authentic” self? Well, according to Kierkegaard, neither, because neither live in the religious sphere. Both are committed and passionate, but they haven’t made the leap of faith. They haven’t stood before the infinite, as individuals. So, they’re bound to get stuck in loops of despair.

Of course, a non-theological reading would provide a different answer. That answer might still be that neither is living as an authentic self, but because they don’t fully own accept that they’re choosing to exist in the aesthetic and ethical spheres. There’s actually one reading, by the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus, that says that Thomas is living authentically, while Tereza is not, because Thomas is giving himself over to doing only what he wants, while Tereza gives herself over to doing what an external moral system dictates she should do or not do. I think, and now I’m admittedly guessing, that reading says quite a lot about the sensibilities of many professional Western philosophers and perhaps the fantasies of well-off middle-class males transposed onto philosophical interpretations.

Let me try to bring all this together. Kierkegaard’s philosophy responds to dominant Western traditions of thought about the self. Against the Platonist tradition that privileges universal, abstract reason, and against the Judaeo-Christian tradition that was being absorbed into Hegelian dialectics, Kierkegaard insists on the primacy of individual subjectivity.

The self isn’t a thing or substance. It’s a relation that relates itself to itself. It’s a synthesis—painful, agonizing—of infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, temporal and eternal. You can’t get rid of any aspect. You can’t privilege one over the other. The task is to learn to be this strange synthesis.

Most people are in despair. Most fail to be themselves, that is, they fail to live as synthesis. Either they lose themselves in fantastic infinitude (abstract possibilities disconnected from reality) or they lose themselves in narrow finitude (the trivial details of everyday life or physical pleasures). Either they’re overwhelmed by possibility (everything could be different, nothing is actual) or they’re crushed by necessity (everything is determined, nothing could be otherwise).

Even those deemed “successful” aren’t authentic selves. The either passively accept whatever the world makes of them, or they try to be absolute ruler of themselves but end up “a king without a country, actually ruling over nothing.”

For Kierkegaard, ultimately, it’s the religious sphere where we live the synthesis to the fullest, by enacting a suspension of the ethical—like Abraham, we may have to go beyond the universal, beyond social morality, to obey the command of the infinite.

But there’s also a secular reading of Kierkegaard. Even without being religious, one can appreciate his insights. The self as synthesis, the various forms of despair, the critique of living inauthentically according to social expectations or abstract universals—all this makes sense without theology.

Kierkegaard remains, in my view, deeply insightful. He captures something essential about human existence: that we are fundamentally divided, contradictory beings. That most of us live inauthentically, either conforming to social expectations or escaping into fantasy. That genuine selfhood requires passionate commitment and radical choices which entail breaking laws and boundaries, living with paradox and uncertainty.