Kierkegaard On Radical Evil

KIERKEGAARD'S ANALYSIS OF
RADICAL EVIL
Related titles
Kierkegaard: A Guidefor the Perplexed - Claire Carlisle

Kierkegaard ~ Julia Watkin
KIERKEGAARD'S ANALYSIS OF
RADICAL EVIL
DAVID ROBERTS
continuum
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© David Roberts 2006
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN:0-8264-8682-7
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Roberts, David, 1962-

Kierkegaard's analysis of radical evil / David Roberts.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8264-8682-7 (hardback)
1. Kierkegaard, Soren, 1813-1855. 2. God and evil. 3. Ethics. I. title.
B4378.E8R63 2006
170'.92-dc22 2005023351
Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol

Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
To my wife Debbie
CONTENTS
Ab vii
P ix
An Historical Introduction: Kant and Schelling on Radical Evil 1

Kant 2
Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom 10
The Struggle of Self-Becoming: Spiritless Self-Evasion 23

The Self as a Relation 23
The Spiritless Evasion of the Self 27
The Despair that Abides in Infinitude 33
The Despair that Abides in Finitude 42
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 58

The Aesthetic Stage of Existence 60
The Ethical Stage of Existence: Self-Choice 68
Ethical Self-Choice 74
The Positive Self-Choice 74
The Self as a Task 78
The Despair of the Ethical Stage of Existence 81
The Final Movement Toward Defiance: Infinite Resignation 102

The Self s Primary Object of Relation 102
The Initial Expression of an Existential Pathos: Infinite Resignation 106
The Essential Expression of an Existential Pathos: Suffering 114
The Decisive Expression of an Existential Pathos: Guilt 120
The Despair of Religiousness A 121
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 128

Transparent Despair 128
Conclusion: The Category of Offense 142
Bibliography 153
Index 157
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations have been used for S0ren Kierkegaard's works:
CA: The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert

B. Anderson. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1980.
CD: Christian Discourses/The Crisis and a Crisis in the Life of an Actress.
Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1997.
CUP: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton
UP, 1992.
EUD: Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses. Trans. Howard V. and Edna
H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990.
E/O I: Either/Or, Part I. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong.
Princeton: Princeton UP, 1987.
E/O II: Either/Or, Part II. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong.
FS: For Self-Examination. For Self-Examination/Judge for Yourself! Ed.
and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, pp. 1-87. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1990.
FT: Fear and Trembling. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London: Penguin
Books, 1985.
JFY: Judge for Yourself! For Self-Examination/'Judgefor Yourself! Ed.
and trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong, pp. 89—215.
JRNL II: Saren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Volume II. Ed. and
trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong. Bloomington: Indiana
UP, 1970.
JRNL III: S0ren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Volume III. Ed. and
UP, 1975.
JRNL IV: S0r en Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Volume IV. Ed. and
UP, 1975.
PA: The Present Age. Trans. Alexander Dru. New York: Harper
Torchbooks, 1962.
viii Abbreviations
PF: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong.

PH: Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing. Trans. Douglas V. Steere.
New York: Harper, 1948.
SLW: Stages on Life's Way. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong.
SUD: The Sickness Unto Death. Trans. Alastair Hannay. London:
Penguin Books, 1989.
PREFACE
In a non-dualistic formulation of Being, the Good is that which is — the

Real and that out of which everything that exists has its Being. A theistic
conception of the universe views this ultimate Good as God, and everything
that exists flows from the creative act of God. Further, as supremely good,
everything created by God must also be good. The problem, however, is that
everything is not transparently good. The news is full of horrendous images
(the worst of which are neither printed nor shown), along with stories of
intense human cruelty. We are daily confronted with what is abstractly put
as 'the problem of evil'.
The problem does not consist simply in the existence of evil, but in our desire
to save the ground of existence (whether viewed as the Good or God) from
culpability in regard to evil: if the ground is responsible for evil, then all hope
for redemption seems futile. The problem of the ground's culpability can be
understood as arising from the syllogism that states, 'All that exists comes
from God. Evil exists. Therefore, evil comes from God.' The traditional
approach to this problem has been to call the second premise into question,
so that evil is conceived as being nothing — a privation of the Good, a non-
essence. This traditional approach has received various formulations: evil is
ignorance of the Good, it is a lack of.willpower (a divided will), or it is the
inability to keep human or divine ordinances. While these formulations do,
indeed, allow one to skirt around the problem that arises if evil has substantial
existence, they do not help us understand our experience of evil (both histori-
cally and individually) as a powerful force, capable of considerable destruc-
tion and terror. Within the traditional view of evil, the more evil something
is the further something is from the Good - the less existence or actuality it
has, and so the more impotent it should be. Experience, however, teaches us
just the opposite: the more evil something is, the more powerful its acts of
destruction, the more we feel its actuality (energeia), and the more we realize
the power before which we tremble is not nothing. Thus, we must strive to
understand evil in such a way that the explanation is more in line with our
experience, rather than seeking an abstract consistency.
There is perhaps no one in Western thought who has explored the existence
of evil in a more insightful and profound way than S0ren Kierkegaard. Kier-
kegaard understood radical evil, not as ignorance of the Good, but as a self-
conscious and transparent understanding of one's place before the Good.
x Preface
He also did not understand radical evil as a weakness of will (a 'divided will'),
but as a self-determined (free) will, whose strength and integration is derived
from its rebellion against the Good. Radical evil is neither a privation nor a
negation, but a position an individual takes before God. The position consists
of a gathering of the self around the passion of 'offense' — a passion born
of pride and despair. In this, evil becomes a powerful force arising both in
and through human existence, a force each individual must confront within
himself or herself.
Given that evil is something rather than nothing, we move back into the
initial problem raised in the syllogism. As we saw, the traditional approach of
overcoming the conclusion was to call the second premise into question: evil
does not, in reality, exist. In this book it will be the first premise that is called
into question: the existence of evil did not come from God, but arose through
the structure of the self, and responsibility for its existencefalls upon each individual.
While this undercuts the conclusion that evil was created by God, it brings
with it its own set of problems, the main one being an understanding of how
evil acquires existence through humanity - how the ground of existence
points to human responsibility in regards to evil. With this, the problem of
evil is no longer a God-problem, but a human problem. Evil, whatever it
may be, plays itself out within the human heart. Further, we will discover
that the meaning of human existence is crucial for an understanding of evil.
Again, this is where Kierkegaard becomes our guide, for his understanding
of the human self is not one in which the self comes into existence as a ready-
made substance; rather, human existence is in the process of self-becoming.
This self-becoming consists in a rise in self-consciousness and freedom — what
Kierkegaard calls 'spirit'. It is in our analysis of the structure of the self, and
the rise in self-consciousness and freedom, that we will discover the source of
evil and our rebellion against God. We will see that, in becoming more self-
consciously free, one may become more transparently offended by God's
power (and concomitantly, despair in the face of one's own impotence), out
of which arises a self-conscious defiance against God. It is in this most intense
form of despair (what Kierkegaard calls 'defiance') that we will discover the
nature of our radical rebellion against God. What makes this evil radical is
that it is a self-determined choice - a position or stance around which an indi-
vidual's existence is gathered. This is so far from being nothing that it is to be
understood as among the highest actualization of human selfhood.
To say evil is a position is to change our understanding of evil. Evil is not so
much a concern about whether one does or does not do good. This is an under-
standing of evil as a privation and negation of the Good. Instead, evil is related
to how one, as an individual, stands in relation to the Good — how one posi-
tions oneself in relation to God. In becoming a self, one chooses whether one
will gather oneself around being offended by God, or will have faith in God.
Preface xi
This choice is not a matter of keeping or breaking rules and regulations, but is
concerned with whether one relates to God in humility (faith) or in pride
(offense and defiance). As we will see, this change in our understanding of
evil will have a profound effect on how each individual understands the evil
residing within his or her own heart. Evil, as an essential possibility, will be
less about specific actions, than about the indescribable depths in which one's
existence is grounded.
We will begin the analysis with a historical review of Kant's and Schelling's
examination of the ground of radical evil. We will find that there arises out
of these two idealist philosophers an understanding of freedom which is
intimately connected to the problem of evil; indeed, we will see, especially in
Schelling, that the issue of human freedom cannot be separated from the
problem of evil.
In Chapter 1 we will examine Kierkegaard's analysis of the structure of the
self in terms of what he calls 'spiritlessness'. A spiritless individual is merely a
potential self, a self that has not yet invested itself with self-consciousness and
freedom. Existence, for such a self, is spent in the evasion of its task. We will
also find that the potential for evil exists within this type of existence, and
that its seeds are found within the spiritless evasions of itself. It is out of this
spiritlessness that each individual must break free in order to become a self.
Several conclusions will be drawn from this analysis, two of which will be espe-
cially important in guiding the remainder of the examination. The first of
these establishes that the nature of the self is not such that it is something fin-
ished and accomplished; rather, each individual has the task of becoming a self
through a rise in self-consciousness and freedom. The second conclusion points
to the way we must approach the problem. We will not understand human
freedom and evil by examining it objectively from a distance - but only by
'owning' our own evil, and exposing the evasions by which we cover the evil
within our own hearts.
The remaining chapters will consist of an analysis of the self in terms of this
rise in self-consciousness and freedom. We will use as our guide the three Kier-
kegaardian stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
Chapter 2 will be an analysis of the relative increase in consciousness and des-
pair within the aesthetic stage, in which the self remains lost within the multi-
plicity of its desires. Enjoyment and pleasure are the passions of this stage, and
so it remains bound to the immediate moment, and the pleasure that can be
found therein. We will find that there is a movement within this stage that may
bring the self to the brink of a consciousness of its despair.
In Chapter 3 we will discover that this consciousness of despair allows for
the possibility of a leap from the aesthetic stage to the ethical. In choosing to
despair of the aesthetic existence, the individual, for the first time, makes an
absolute choice, and thereby moves from the contingencies of aestheticism
xii Preface
into the choice for self-becoming — a choice that defines ethical existence.
In this chapter, we will examine the ethical stage, and see how the absolute
choice for oneself brings a rise in self-consciousness and freedom. We will also
discover that, as necessary as the ethical stage is for gaining oneself, it ulti-
mately ends in despair, as it uncovers the evasions it uses in order to hide
from the guilt and evil it continually carries within itself.
This will bring us, in Chapter 4, to the religious stage of existence. In this
chapter we will discover a further actualization of the self in its self-conscious-
ness and freedom. We will see that, as the self becomes more and more itself, it
does not leave evil behind, but may gather itself around its offense and defi-
ance of the Good. A fully actualized self (spirit) is conscious of itself before
the Good - it is transparent to the Good - and yet it may be offended by the
Good, and so rebel against it in defiance.
In the final chapter the category of offense will be examined in relation to all
the stages of existence. Offense is at work in even the most spiritless forms of
human existence, though it has no actuality or energy behind it. It evades
and hides from its offense, and so its evil remains a mere potential — that is, it
falls under the traditional view of evil as a negation or privation. As the self
rises in self-consciousness and freedom, it becomes more aware that it is
offended by the Good, and may choose to gather its existence around this pas-
sion of offense. In its most transparent and self-determined form, evil becomes
a radical choice against the Good — it becomes defiance.
An Historical Introduction: Kant and Schelling on Radical Evil
The problem of evil is a human problem, and is of such central significance for
understanding the human situation that, whenever there is a discussion on
what it means to be human, evil cannot be ignored for very long - for we will
inevitably feel its bite. The capital insight of this investigation is that the capa-
city for freedom is inseparable from the problem of evil; therefore, an initial
step toward investigating evil is to problematize human freedom.
In this introduction, we will undertake just such an investigation by looking
at the views of Kant and Schelling. In a book on S0ren Kierkegaard, this may
seem an arbitrary choice. In fact, however, it is highly relevant — called for by
Kierkegaard's own approach to the problem of evil. There is a specific devel-
opment of the themes of freedom and evil from Kant to Kierkegaard, by way
of Schelling. As we will see in examining Kant and Schelling, an ontology of
freedom will be developed in the space opened up by the moral division
of good and evil.
For Kant, freedom consists in a capacity to act through an internal catalyst
which is free from externally influenced or directed incentives. Freedom, in
other words, is to be self-determined rather than other-determined. Such an
account of freedom has a decisive impact on Kant's moral theory, which he out-
lines in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant must develop a moral
theory that divorces itself from all expected results, including any anticipated
gain from acting morally (whether staying out of jail, the respect of others, or
getting into heaven). Such expectations move the incentive for action outside of
oneself, and are no longer free. For Kant, such an action is, in a way, notanaciat
all, so much as a flowing together of heteronomous forces.
As we examine Kant's moral theory, it will become apparent that, while
Kant is able to provide a foundation for moral action, he is unable to account
for immoral actions. Kant himself comes to recognize this, and seeks to rectify
this problem in his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. It is in the Reli-
gion that Kant provides a basis for the notion of'radical evil'.
Schelling extends Kant's analysis of freedom in his Treatise on the Essence of
Human Freedom, where freedom is shown to be based on the possibility of choos-
ing between good and evil. In providing a basis for such a choice, he shows that
the ontological structure of freedom is in this very choice itself. In other words,
freedom is the freedom^cr good and evil. It is through our discussion of this
2 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
treatment that we will make our own transition to what is of central impor-
tance here - the work of Kierkegaard.
Kant
Kant's Moral Theory in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

Kant seeks to define free, moral actions as acts performed without any external
influences or incentives. To do this Kant must distinguish between actions
done for a hoped-for effect, and those done from an internally determined
motive. Duty is just such an internal motive: 'to perform [an] action only
from duty and without any inclination — then for the first time [one's] action
has genuine moral worth'. An action done from an inclination is a means to
another end; an action done from duty is an end in itself, and is an autonomous
act of the will. It is autonomous because the law that determines and defines
duty is not given externally, but is an internally derived law. Indeed, Kant
conceives the moral law to be a part of the will: the conception of the law
serves as the 'determining ground of the will'. The law is the objective deter-
mination of the will, while respect for this law is the subjective determination.
Kant says that this subjective element is the maxim that 'I ought to follow such
a law even if it thwarts my inclinations'. 3
This moral worth of an action comes from the fact that the laws and princi-
ples of reason determine the will, so that, in its purity, the will is unaffected by
inclinations. In other words, reason infallibly determines the will, in that, if
one acts according to reason, one's will is necessarily good. This is also the
essence of human freedom: when one's actions are self-determined (deter-
mined by one's own nature), one is free; to the extent one is determined by
anything external, one is not free. To be self-determined, then, is to act from
the purity of the will's origin (practical reason), and this origin gives moral
worth to an action.
One can see how this could create problems for Kant's moral theory.
As long as one acts freely (that is, from the principles of the law determined
by practical reason), one acts morally; yet when one acts from inclinations
(incentives other than respect for the moral law), then one is acting according
to natural impulses, and so is no longer free. Thus, Kant leaves no room for free
acts that are contrary to the law. By defining the will as practical reason, and
showing freedom to be acting from this basis, all acts apart from this basis are
unfree, and so amoral. The only free acts, then, are moral acts.
Before getting deeper into this problem, we need to consider how this relates
to Kant's famous 'categorical imperative'. This will allow us to understand
how the will is self-legislating, which in turn will show us how unyielding is
the difficulty described above.
An Historical Introduction 3
A hypothetical imperative presents a potential action as something that is

required to be done in order to achieve something else — something one desires.
In this the action is a means to a further object, and one acts on the basis of
the hoped-for effect. Such an action is good only as a means, and not as an
end in itself. The will can be absolutely good, however, only when determined
by a ground that is free from all expected results. Only a categorical imperative
commands a certain conduct apart from any effects it may bring. Thus, Kant
says that the categorical imperative does not concern the material of the
action or its intended result, but the form and its principle. The first formula-
tion of the categorical imperative is: 'Act only according to that maxim by
which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.'
The second formulation is: 'Act as though the maxim of your action were by
your will to become a universal law of nature.' It is the universalizability of
the maxim that makes the imperative categorical. The only concern of this
imperative is that the action be willed at all times without contradiction,
apart from any effects that may or may not result. A hypothetical imperative
allows one to act a certain way one day, and act the opposite the next, because
one acts according to what will bring about the desired effect. The categorical
imperative is what Kant calls a 'practical law',J and is determined by reason.
This means that reason alone determines the will, and everything empirical
falls away, since reason is an a priori determining ground.
Since reason gives the law to the will as the a priori determining ground of the
will, each person is, in an important sense, a law-giver. Further, because
reason is the same in all rational beings, it serves as the universal principle of
the law. This is how self-legislation can be understood: the 'will is thus not
only subject to the law but subject in such a way that it must be regarded also
as self-legislative and only for this reason as being subject to the law (of which
it can regard itself as the author)'. As a human being, one is subject to the law
that one has given to oneself. This self-legislation is not relativistic because
universal reason is the ground of all rational wills.
Self-legislation is nothing else than the expression of freedom. Kant says
that to act according to the principle of one's own will is the principle of the
autonomy of the will, which is contrasted to 'all other principles which I accord-
ingly count under heteronomy'. As autonomous, we give ourselves maxims
which are independent 'from all [natural] incentives'.' If we were not inde-
pendent, then we would be subject to the natural laws of needs - rather than
subject to our own self-legislated law-giving and be incapable of free acts.
Autonomy is the property of the will to be a law to itself. This is why Kant
says that 'a free will and a will under moral laws are identical'.
Although the moral law is self-legislated, it does not come to us as something
that we are 'at one' with, but as a constraint and obligation. This is because all
our actions are mixed with natural inclinations, so that we do not follow the
law in a purity that would move us simply on the basis of the law within our-
selves. Yet how can we speak of freedom, self-legislation and autonomy, while
at the same time speaking of the need for constraint and obligation in regards
to the law? How can we speak of the purity of the origin of the will (Kant is
unwilling to allow for a divided will), and also of a will that is mixed with incli-
nations and external incentives? As we look into this problem, we will see the
great difficulty Kant will have, not only in understanding the nature of evil,
but in accounting for evil at all.
Kant attempts to overcome this problem by claiming that it is dissolved
when it is seen that we assume different standpoints when looking at ourselves
as causes (which are not determined by anything outside of ourselves), than
when we see ourselves in light of our actions — as effects we see ourselves
doing. Here Kant is distinguishing between appearances and things in them-
selves. Kant distinguishes between the phenomenal or empirical self, and the
noumenal, 'real' self. The former is the self we perceive ourselves as; the latter
is the self behind which we can never get. We can never get behind this self,
because it provides the categories through which we come to understand our-
selves to begin with. The noumenal self is not determined by empirical laws,
but is a member of the intelligible world the world ruled by reason. This
world has its own law, just as there is a natural law as the ground of all appear-
ances. It is the law of the intelligible world that is the 'ground of all actions of
rational beings';12 this law consists of the universal principles of morality given
by reason. This is the realm of which we speak when using the terms 'auton-
omy' and 'freedom'.
We also belong to the sensible world, and as belonging to this world, we
come to think of ourselves as obligated - that is, as subject to the moral
law. Thus, when we think of ourselves under the aspect of freedom, we are
transported to the intelligible world as its members, and so speak of the auton-
omy and purity of the will and of ourselves as self-legislative; when we think of
ourselves as obligated, we think of ourselves as belonging to both the intelligible
world and the sensible world.
The fact that in obligation we think of ourselves as belonging to both worlds
is important, because it points out that our will is not divided, but that we
always concur with the self-legislation of our will (that is, we agree 'whole-
heartedly' with the moral law within us). Kant says,
As a mere member of the intelligible world, all my actions would completely

accord with the principle of the autonomy of the pure will, and as part only
of the world of sense would they have to be assumed to conform wholly to the
natural law of desires and inclinations, and thus to heteronomy of nature.
(The former actions would rest on the supreme principle of morality, and
the latter on that of happiness). But since the intelligible world contains the
ground of the world of sense and hence of its laws, the intelligible worldis (and must be
conceived as) directly legislativefor my will, which belongs wholly to the intel-
ligible world.
It is for this reason that the laws of the intelligible world provide the laws
that are taken by me to be categorically binding for my actions. Since I am a
member of the sensible world, the laws of the intelligible world hold for me as
an 'ought' (I 'ought' to conform to the laws of this world). The will of the intel-
ligible world contains the supreme condition of the sensuously affected will.
These 'two' wills are the same will: 'besides my will affected by my sensuous
desires there is added the idea of exactly the same will as pure, as practical itself,
and belonging to the intelligible world. . . .'14 Given this relation namely,
that even as I will in the sensible world, the basis for such willing is the
pure, practical will it follows that even in acting contrary to this will, I will
this will — that is, I always will what is in accordance with practical reason.
As Kant puts it,
there is no man, not even the most malicious villain (provided he is other-
wise accustomed to using his reason), who does not wish that he also might
have these qualities. But because of his inclinations and impulses he cannot
bring this about, yet at the same time he wishes to be free from such inclina-
tions which are burdensome even to himself. 15
Here we come to a pause. This 'malicious villain's' actions are depicted, not
as immoral, but as amoral. No one may willfully choose against the moral law.
Instead, the 'villian's' actions are determined by his inclinations and impulses
(the laws of nature), which have no bearing on his will, since his will is a
member of the intelligible world. Thus, it follows that no one is able to willfully
choose against the moral law. At times Kant does speak of a good will and bad
will. l b Yet this is inconsistent, because there is only one root of will, and this is
purely rational. Thus, what he calls the 'bad will' is not a will at all, but a suc-
cumbing to the laws of nature, which might better be described as a lack of
will. Since we are not responsible for our inclinations and impulses we do
not attribute them to our proper self (that is, our will ) the notion of evil is
left out of the equation.
Kant further closes the door to evil by saying, 'that to which inclinations
and impulses and hence the entire nature of the world of sense incite him
cannot in the least impair the laws of his volition as an intelligence'. 18 The
laws of the intelligible world cannot be corrupted (the will cannot be cor-
rupted), and so another door by which to explain evil is closed. As we will see
in the next section, Kant's analysis in the Religion shows that a corruption of
the will can and does take place. It is in this corruption that radical evil finds
its place within Kant's moral theory.
Kant's Theory of Radical Evil in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
In the Religion, Kant rather abruptly adapts his position. He now allows for a
corruption of the will. Not that the law of reason is corrupted, but the will may
choose incentives other than this law for its rule. How is this possible, given
that in the Foundations Kant defines the will as practical reason? Kant accom-
plishes this by distinguishing between three 'parts' of the will. John R. Silber,
in his analysis of Kant's change in the understanding the will, says,
The will according to Kant is a unitary faculty. But, like reason and the
understanding, it is subject to division into 'parts' for the purpose of analy-
sis. These parts, to which Kant refers by the terms ' Willkiir,' 'Wille,' and
'Geisinnung,' are aspects or specific functions of this essentially unified faculty
of volition.
The distinction between the Willkiir and the Wille is a distinction between
that aspect of the will that chooses according to the rule of its maxim (Willkilr),
and that aspect of the will that is rational (Wille}. In the Foundations, Kant
asserts that the will is identical with practical reason; in the Religion he draws a
distinction between these two capacities - will and reason. The Wille does not
make decisions or adopt maxims, but is a source of a strong incentive in Will-
kiir. According to Silber, Wille can determine the Willkiir, in which case it is
practical reason itself. However, Wille is not free, ' Wille is rather the law of
freedom, the normative aspect of the will, which as a norm is neither free nor
unfree'. The Wille is able to arouse desires or aversions in the Willkiir,
namely, the 'moral feeling', which is respect for the moral law. When the Will-
kiir is determined by the Wille, the will as a whole is as it was described in the
Foundations when Kant proclaims that the will is practical reason. However, by
distinguishing between the will as practical reason, and the will as that which
adopts its maxim, Kant allows for a capacity of the will to freely choose con-
trary to practical reason. In looking at this capacity we will come to see
Kant's view of radical evil.
In the Foundations neither the sensuous nature nor the practical law could
serve as a source of immoral acts. Sensuous nature could not be the ground of
immoral acts because it determined actions according to natural inclina-
tions and impulses; the practical law could not be the ground because it was
incapable of being corrupted. Kant holds to this in the Religion. The important
difference, however, is that, while in the Foundations Kant took reason's incor-
ruptibility to prove the will's incorruptibility (that is, even when the malicious
villain acts contrary to the moral law, he still wills the moral law), in the Reli-
gion he allows the will to be corrupted by choosing against the moral law.
Thus, Kant says that evil 'can only lie in a rule made by the willw [Willkiir] for
the use of its freedom, that is, in a maxim'. Whereas in the Foundations the will
necessarily chose as its ground the laws of reason, in the Religion, the Willkur is
viewed as a capacity of the will to adopt maxims contrary to reason - that is,
contrary to the Wille. The Willkur is the ultimate ground for determining
action, and so maintains itself in freedom, though it does so by adopting good
maxims or evil maxims. As Kant says,
freedom of the willvv is of a wholly unique nature in that an incentive can

determine the will w to an action only so far as the individual has incorporated
it into his maxim (has made it the general rule in accordance with which
he will conduct himself); only thus can an incentive, whatever it may be,
co-exist with the absolute spontaneity of the willw (i.e., freedom)."
In other words, the Willkur adopts a maxim by which it determines the rules
of its action. In the Foundations, the Willkur had one incentive: respect for the
law of reason. Kant now allows for other incentives to be incorporated into
the free will, which can serve as the maxim of the Willkur. If the moral law
is one's incentive, and if one makes it one's maxim, then one is morally good.
On the other hand, if one adopts as a maxim an incentive other than the moral
law, one is morally evil.
The third aspect of the will is disposition (Geisinnung], which is the ground or
basis out of which we adopt our maxims. The disposition is adopted by the
Willkur, and is never indifferent, but either J good or evil. The 'subjective
ground or cause of this adoption [of the disposition] cannot further be
known'," and so Kant regards it as a 'property' of the Willkur — something
that belongs to the Willkur by nature.
Every human being has three predispositions, which are able to become
the source of the incentives of the Willkur. They are called predispositions
because they are not chosen, and are a part of us naturally. These three predis-
positions loosely follow Plato's three parts of the soul. The first of these pre-
dispositions is 'animality'. This is mechanical love, and has within it the social
impulses, as well as the drives for preservation and propagation. The second
predisposition is 'humanity'. This is self-love, and seeks to acquire worth in the
opinion of others. Finally, there is personality. Kant says that this is respect for
the moral law within us, and is the source of moral feeling. None of these pre-
dispositions contradict the moral law, but are predispositions toward good, in
that they can join in the observance of the law - just as, for Plato, reason may
rule over the appetites and spirit. Of course, animality and humanity can be
used contrary to their ends, which gives rise to evil within the self.
According to Kant, evil is not a predisposition, although humans have a
'propensity' toward it that is, a possible inclination to which all humanity
is liable. Kant gives three degrees of propensity to evil. The first is 'frailty' or
'weakness'. This is summed up by the Apostle Paul's discussion in Romans 7,
where he asserts that he does not do what he wants to do. This is also the weak-
ness of will described in Augustine's Confessions, and is important to the tradi-
tional view of evil as weakness. For Kant, in 'weakness' one adopts the good
(the law) into the maxim of one's Willkur, though the maxim is weak in com-
parison to some inclination one faces. One wills the moral law, but allows an
inclination to override one's will.
The second degree is 'impurity of the human heart'. In this case the maxim
is not purely moral. The maxim is good in that it intends to observe the law,
but it has not adopted the law alone as its all-sufficient incentive. In other words,
other incentives are needed for it to act according to the law. As Kant says,
'actions called for by duty are done not purely for duty's sake'. Thus, motives
beyond simply duty are needed in order to observe the law. Silber says that
'Whereas the weak-willed individual is strengthened by the knowledge of his
weakness and purified by the Wille that condemns his vice, the impure indivi-
dual is dying the quiet death (euthanasia) of morality through his confusion of
moral and non-moral incentives'. Here we see another 'rendition' of the
view of evil as weakness; this time, rather than the will being weak or divided,
it is confused — ignorant.
Both weakness and ignorance can be the grounds for all sorts of evil actions,
and so the traditional view of evil is not completely mistaken when it attributes
evil to these grounds. The problem with the traditional view, however, is that
it goes no further. In his Religion, Kant goes beyond these grounds, and takes
the initial step toward a more actualized form of human evil. This is the third
degree of the propensity to evil, which he calls 'wickedness'. Here the Willkur
acts against the incentives that spring from the moral law, in favour of those
that are not moral. It reverses the ethical order of incentives of the Willkur.
It should be noted, however, just because the moral law is neglected, does not
mean a wicked person acts against social norms, morals, or laws. Indeed, it
may be that acting lawfully is the best way to fulfil the will's evil incentive.
Thus, Kant distinguishes between the letter of the law and the spirit. Those
who conform outwardly to the moral law, while inwardly being determined
by incentives contrary to the moral law, simply obey the letter of the law.
In this case the outward obedience to the law is accidental - that is, contin-
gent on the situation. Those who obey the spirit of the law have, as their suffi-
cient incentive, the law in itself.
According to Kant, a man is evil when he 'is conscious of the moral law but
has nevertheless adopted into his maxim the (occasional) deviation there-
from'. By the term 'radical evil', Kant points to an evil that corrupts the
ground of all maxims. Having said this, it should also be noted that, for Kant,
the Wille can never be corrupted. If the Wille were to be corrupted, then we
would have a practical reason which is 'exempt from the moral law, a malignant
reason as it were (a thoroughly evil will)'. Kant denies the possibility of such a
corruption, for this would set up opposition to the law itself as an incentive.
In other words, the incentive would not be merely self-love or sensuous nature,
but opposition to the moral law itself. Every action would be motivated
by a maxim whose rule is to act contrary to the spirit of the moral law. Kant
cannot fathom such a human being (though, as we will see, Schelling can),
because it is a contradiction to speak of a reason that acts against reason
itself. As Silber writes,
To assert . . . that there are devilish beings who defiantly and powerfully
reject the moral law itself, presupposes a conception of freedom which,
according to Kant, is hopelessly transcendent and without foundation in
human experience. In human experience, he insists, our knowledge of free-
dom is revealed exclusively by the moral law and its realization depends
upon the incorporation of that law in volition. Hence, speculation about
devilish beings is either transcendent superstition, or, since the most evil
mode of free expression is wickedness, devils must be responsibly portrayed
in the weakness of wickedness.
Humans are evil only insofar as they reverse the moral order of their incentives.
There is no repudiation of the moral law in this, but
the moral law [is adopted] along with the law of self-love; yet when he
becomes aware that they cannot remain on a par with each other but that
one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes
the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the
moral law.
The moral law is not rejected, but is made a conditional incentive.

Is it not possible, however, for a person to repudiate and reject the moral
law? Is there not ample evidence in our own age of a 'thoroughly malignant
will'? As Silber says, 'man's free power to reject the law in defiance is an iner-
adicable fact of human experience. . .. Kierkegaard consolidated the opposi-
tion to Kant's moral optimism in asserting the power of men to fulfill their
personalities in the despair of defiance'. Silber goes on to say,
Far from languishing in the impotency of personality demanded by Kant's

conception of freedom, Ahab infuses the excess of his personal strength into
the spirits of his men, into the rigging of his ship, and even into the artificial
limb on which he stamps out his defiance of the law. History in turn records
the deeds of Hitler and Napoleon. No weak personality loses an entire army
in Egypt only to lose yet another in Russia; no weak personality leads a civi-
lized nation to moral disaster and a continent to ruin.'
The issue of fulfilling one's personality in opposition to the moral law
becomes the problem Schelling faces in his Treatise. Schelling attempts to
understand freedom, not simply in terms of its relation to the moral law, but
in its structure. He comes to see that freedom is structured around the choice
for good and evil. In this Schelling seeks to comprehend the ontological struc-
tures of humans in such a way that we are able to discover the origin of
our universal propensity to evil — something Kant conceived as impossible to
grasp. In tracing Schelling's movement toward this origin, we will discover
the horizons with which this free choice for evil consists, horizons which are
much more expansive than allowed by Kant.
Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom
As the title of Schelling's book implies, the issue around which the origin of evil
revolves is freedom. In Kant's Foundations, freedom was freedom for moral
action; indeed, all actions contrary to the moral law were deemed unfree
acts. In his Religion, freedom is still freedom for moral action, but he now
allows that freedom can be used for evil; still, the primary focus of the power
of freedom is the Wille, in which the moral law comes to us as an incentive.
Thus, to commit evil is, for Kant, to subordinate the very power of the will to
other incentives, which are adopted as the maxim of the Willkur.
In Schelling, we will see that freedom is freedom for good and evil; freedom
finds its essence in the choice for good and evil itself. Schelling's Treatise shows
that the ontological structures of human beings do not simply allow for this
choice, but demand it. It is this analysis to which we will now turn.
Evil is a problem because of the difficulty of trying to understand a universe
in which all is not good. This seems obvious enough, but when one tries to dis-
cover how a 'rebellion' could arise within Being how something which is a
part of Being could turn against Being, and so itself - it would seem that one is
left with only two choices, neither of which are very enticing. The first choice
is that of dualism: there is not one Being (Substance), but two eternal Beings;
these Beings are in a continual battle with each other, and part of this battle is
fought within the soil of the human heart. The other is that of monism, in
which there is one Being, of which evil is a part. In this latter view, there are
two tendencies of rectifying this seeming contradiction: first, we could say that
what we conceive as evil is not actually evil; everything in Being is good, and
so it is our limited perspective that sees something as evil. Second, we may
echo Baudelaire's belief that if there is a God, he most certainly is the devil —
that is, there is no good. Both these answers give away too much, whether
downplaying evil, or defiling the purity of the Good. In both cases one loses
the sense of the difference and opposition that is good and evil, and so is not
so much left with an answer to the problem, as with a denial that the problem
actually exists.
Schelling's Treatise seeks to allow for the difference between good and evil,
without succumbing to dualism. He does this by creating a theodicy which
draws a distinction between the basis or ground of God's existence, and
God's existence itself.' The basis is not God, though it is a part of God as his
basis. In other words, as the basis of God's existence, the ground is not God in
his existence itself, yet as the basis of this existence, the ground is inseparable
from God - no basis, no God. The basis precedes God's existence as an abyss
or chaos, a mixture in which nothing is separated. This abyss is not God, but is
nonetheless necessary for his existence (ek-sistence) or revelation.
Schelling says this basis is 'the longing which the eternal one feels to give
birth to itself. This longing seeks to give birth to God, i.e., the unfathomable
unity, but to this extent it has not yet the unity in its own self. Thus, the basis
is the longing of God to reveal himself. This longing is not the revelation itself,
but the impetus of this revelation. Just as water is never revealed to a fish at the
bottom of the ocean, because there is no basis by which the water can stand out
for the fish, there is no revelation of God without the opposition or basis. It is in
this sense that the basis (the longing for revelation) is not God, and yet is inse-
parable from God, for without this longing for revelation of existence, God
would not ek-sist - stand out.
As longing, the basis is also to be understood as will. This will, as the basis, is
a kind of blind willing whose movement is toward understanding. The under-
standing is what eventually gives guidance or content to the will. Thus, one
finds here the same distinction between understanding and will as was found
between God and his basis. The will is the basis of understanding, just as long-
ing is the basis of God. In both cases the ground is unconscious of its object,
though we may say that it longs and wills for that which it serves as a basis.
After the eternal act of self-revelation, the world within which we dwell pos-
sesses rule, order, and form.
Schelling calls the ground the 'incomprehensible basis of reality in things,
the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the great-
est exertion but always remains in the depths'. 36 Science's attempt to wrap
everything up under its covering-laws is a doomed enterprise, for unruli-
ness pervades all that exists. Indeed, apart from unruliness there is no rule;
apart from unreasonableness there is no reason, for true reason is born of
unreasonableness.
This notion that order, reason, and rule are not original is very important
for Schelling's understanding of evil. As we saw, the problem of evil is in
coming to understand how it can arise out of Being — out of the Good, out of
the rule and order of all that is. For Schelling, however, order and rule are not
primordial and so evil does not arise out of them. The issue changes, then, for it
is not an issue of how evil arises out of the more original, already established
Good, but how the possibility for good and evil arises out of the seed of unruli-
ness. The question in which Schelling must find his way, then, is how order
arises from disorder.
As we have seen, the primal longing is a longing for God's revelation,
though this longing is unconscious of its object. Since God is pure light, Schel-
ling speaks of the primal longing as 'turning towards reason'. The formation
or informing of Being can be understood in terms of the tensions within the
longing itself. Examining these tensions will allow for a more detailed under-
standing of how order arises from disorder.
Schelling says that the first effect of reason is the separation offerees. There
is a hidden and unconscious unity within the depths of longing, and it is
through reason's separation of these forces that this unity unfolds and devel-
ops. The forces were always in the depths, though the unity was not conscious
of itself as this unity. In other words, it was a chaotic mix, a seething cauldron
offerees, which, like a witch's brew, holds within itself a power to change the
order of things — or in this case, the disorder of things. Creation itself is this
separation of ever more varied and diverse forces. This separation brings to
light, at the same time, the hidden unity within the chaotic. It is this primal
nature that is the eternal basis of God's existence or revelation.
Schelling says that the basis 'must contain within itself, though locked
away, God's essence, as a light of life shining in the dark depths'. 3 In this we
find that the basis holds within itself both light and darkness, though the dark-
ness rules and the light remains hidden. But once aroused by reason,39 longing
strives to preserve the light within itself. Reason 'rouses longing (which is a
yearning to return into itself) to divide the forces (to surrender darkness) and
in this very division brings out the unity enclosed in what was divided, the
hidden light'. Heidegger, in his commentary on this text, describes this
yearning of the longing to return to itself as the ground's craving to be more
and more ground:
The ground thus wants to be more and more ground, and at the same time it
can only will this by willing what is clearer and thus striving against itself 'as
what is dark.
Thus it strives for the opposite of itself and produces a separation
in itself/• 4 1
The ground can seek to satisfy its yearning to be more and more ground only
by willing the light (that which is not ground as such). As the ground wills the
light in order to differentiate it from itself, the longing becomes the basis
(ground) of the light, thus becoming more and more ground. Longing surren-
ders the chaotic darkness to the light, and a separation offerees evolves into
ever more differentiation, though in such a way that a higher unity conies
about. In the end, all creation and arising of Being is this longing to bring
order to what is chaotic, and to bring to light what is hidden in the chaos.
Indeed, according to Schelling, nature itself is this combination of order and
longing: there are two principles in nature, the longing of the dark depths and
the light of reason. Schelling points out, however, that these principles are
really one and the same, though 'regarded from the two possible aspects'.43
One can see how these principles are the same by thinking in terms of the
will. Schelling says the principle of the darkness is the self-will of the creature,
a will that is devoid of understanding and thus blind. This is mere craving and
desiring in itself. On the other hand, there is the universal will of reason. These
principles differ in that one is a self-will toward the particular, while the other
is a universal will toward the light. Still, both are will., and in this sense the
same. The will of the self-will, and the will of the universal will are the same
will, though seen from two possible aspects.
The self-will is opposed to reason as longing is opposed to the light of under-
standing. Self-will seeks to differentiate itself more and more from the univer-
sal will, and yet in this it becomes a tool for the universal will, serving as its
ground. In most things of the world, the particular will remains a tool. For
example, the animal does not ordinarily venture outside its species. When such
a thing happens we often find the result to be grotesque, and are repelled by
the ugliness of a self-will asserting itself against the order of the universal will.
In humans, however, the 'inmost and deepest point of original darkness' is
revealed. The power of this particular will is given over to humans, and yet it
is revealed by the light that is, made conscious, given understanding. Thus,
Schelling says that in humanity 'there are both centers — the deepest pit and
the highest heaven'. Since humans are creatures (natural) who arise from
the depths, they contain the dark principle that is independent from God.
This principle is transfigured by the light, though it remains basically dark.
In terms of will, the particular self-will is transfigured by the light into the uni-
versal will of understanding. In Kantian langauge, the Willkur (particular
will) has as its motive the Wille (the universal will of reason).
It is this unity, arising in nature only in humans, which Schelling designates
as spirit. It is the deepest pit and the highest heaven in one. This transfigura-
tion of the particularized self-will by light allows for spirit to arise in human
beings. It is because the two principles are 'dissoluble' in humans that the pos-
sibility of good and evil arises, since the particular will may try to assert itself
in place of the universal will. In other words, it is the combination of both prin-
ciples in humans that makes them spirit, and it is the dissolubility of these
principles that allows for the possibility of evil. In Kantian terms, it is the pos-
session of the Willkur and the Wille that allow for personality (spirit); it is the
dissolubility of the two wills that allows for radical evil.
This unity is indissoluble in God, for he maintains the basis within himself,
keeping it under his control through Love. His particular will is the universal
will - the Wille cannot be separated from the Willkiir in the divine will -
which means there is no possibility of evil in God. With the dissolubility of
these two principles in humans, the depths may rise up and assert themselves
against the universal, against the light of reason. The principle of the depths
(self-will) is that which allows humans to be independent from God, and is the
principle of selfhood (self-will) in them. There is no possibility of a person
becoming completely swallowed up by the universal will so that he or she no
longer has the particular will. This is because the principle of the depths forces
itself on humans - that is, forces humans to be themselves. To be completely
swallowed up in the universal will is to deny oneself, for one is, in one's very
ontological structure, distinct from God (necessarily so) by having one's own
will. Humans have a will that is free from the order of the universe. Kant called
this the Willkiir, or an aspect of the will that could choose against the universal
will of reason (the Wille).
Thus, spirit is able to hold itself in complete freedom, 'no longer the tool of
the universal will operating in nature, but above and outside all nature'. 47 It is
transcendent in the sense that it is able to break with immediacy.
The separation of these two principles can take place in two possible ways:
through good or through evil. The first possibility is that of good, in which
'man's self-will remains in the depths as the central will, so that the divine rela-
tion of the principles persists'.48 In Kant's terminology, the Willkiir chooses
as its incentive respect for the law - the Wille. Here, 'the spirit of love rules
[in the will] in place of the spirit of dissension which wishes to divorce its own
principle from the general principle'. One relates correctly to the relation of
the self by relating to the power that established (combined) the relation —
that is, love. Thus, the choice is between love and dissension.
The second possibility of freedom is that of evil. As Schelling puts it,
Self-will may seek to be, as a particular will, that which it is only in its iden-
tity with the universal will. It may seek to be at the periphery that which it is
only insofar as it remains at the center. . . . It may seek to be free as creature
(for the will of creature is, to be sure, beyond the depths, but in that case it is
also a mere particular will, not free but restricted). Thus there takes place in
man's will a division of his spiritualized selfhood from the light (as the spirit
stands above light) - that is, a dissolution of the principles which in God
are indissoluble/50
Spirit is faced with the possibility of defying the unity of the self, by moving out
from the centre and asserting itself at the periphery. It seeks self-revelation, or
better, self-glorification. Kierkegaard will call this attempt at self-glorifica-
tion despair, because this desperate attempt of the particular will to usurp
the universal will is a truly hopeless enterprise. Schelling also saw evil as a
doomed enterprise, because he did not believe the particular will has enough
power within itself to establish itself as a universal will. Schelling writes,
Will, which deserts its supernatural status in order to make itself as general
will also particular and creature will, at one and the same time, strives to
reverse the relation of the principles, to exalt the basis above the cause, and
to use that spirit which it received only for the center, outside the center
and against the creature, which leads to disorganization within itself and
outside itself/
The particular will's defiance against the order of love leads to disorganization
within and outside itself. It is in this sense we may say this relation of the self to
itself is despair, for the end which it seeks ultimately leads to its own destruc-
tion. This defiance is ultimately self-destructive because the particular will
does not have the power within itself to organize and unite the nexus of
forces; rather, each force seeks to organize the individual around itself.
At this point Schelling is careful to distinguish his view of evil as disorder,
from a view of evil as a negation of all order. He is not of the belief that evil is
a mere negation or privation of the Good, just as he does not believe that disease
is a mere privation of health. He writes,
Disease of the whole organism can never exist without the hidden forces of
the depths being unloosed; it occurs when the irritable principle which
ought to rule as the innermost tie offerees in the quiet deep, activates itself,
or when Archaos is provoked to desert his quiet residence at the center of
things and steps forth into the surroundings. 52
Disease is not a privation of health, nor is evil a privation of Good, in that these
disorders are the grounds of a new order. A particular will which has asserted
itself, does not lose the forces which make it up, but it sets these forces loose.
Disease is the effect of an attempted self-revelation of the depths, which should
5
remain in the centre, an attempt of the depths to move toward the periphery.
For example, cancer is the process of cells dividing in a 'disorderly' manner.
This is not a mere privation, for it rivals order in intensity, even to the point
that it ultimately destroys the body of which it was a part which is, of course,
the despair of such rebellions. The reason this attempt at a new order ulti-
mately leads to destruction is because the cancer cells do not have the power
to establish their order as a general order upon the body. Schelling says of dis-
ease that it 'is indeed nothing essential and is actually only an illusion of life
and the mere meteoric appearance of it - a swaying between being and non-
being - but nonetheless announces itself in feeling as something very real. Just
so is the case with evil.''
Evil is not a mere privation, because it is attempting to create a form (its
own form) with the forces of the dark ground. In other words, evil is not dis-
order in the sense of going back to pure chaos (the longing of the depths in
which the light remains hidden), because the light has penetrated the darkness and so
has separated out theforces — consciousness has arisen. Instead, evil is discord and
disorder in the sense of having built a false unity out of these forces.
In the physical realm one could think of a malformed animal in which the
parts are all there, but they have been put in the wrong places or grotesquely
deformed. It is a false unity, in that it does not abide by the form of the species,
and seeks to 'assert' its particularization through this false unity — a desperate
attempt at self-revelation, if you will. This often strikes us with horror, and so
the self-assertion announces itself as very real; still, it is a mere illusion of the
species, an oddity, something finite, for it is in a losing battle against its entele-
chy, its universal will.
The positive aspect of evil is grasped by seeing that it is not derived simply
from the dark principle, or the creaturely, but from the dark principle being
brought into an intimacy with the light that forms a nexus offerees. As Schel-
ling says,
evil is not derived from the principle of finitude in itself, but only from
the dark or selfish principle which has been brought into intimacy with the
center. And just as there is an ardor for the good, there is also an enthusiasm
for evil.
It is this 'enthusiasm for evil' that Kant held to be unthinkable. Yet evil, too,
has personality; evil is also born of spirit. We know this to be true, for there is a
temptation to explain good and evil within a dualistic framework, where evil
is personified, and carries a power near or equal to the good. It is monism
that has had difficulty dealing with this issue, for it seems unfathomable that a
power could arise that is contrary to the source of power, a strength that is
strong without strength. According to Schelling, it is the division between the
dark depths of longing and the light of reason that allows for an actualized
form of evil.
The division between the two principles takes place only within humans
(animals are not moral creatures), and so it is in humanity where the possibi-
lity of good and evil finds its source. It is this very possibility that turns out to
be the essence of human freedom for Schelling:
Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the
source of self-impulsion towards good and evil in equal measure; the nexus
of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom.
He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be this act.
What is paradoxical about this situation is that, as the dividing line, as the
self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure, it would seem that he
stands at the place of indecision. But this is not possible, for 'he cannot
remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because
nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous'. Thus, for Schelling there
must be a 'solicitation to evil, even if it were only to the principles within him
to life, that is, to make him conscious of them'/
Here we have a movement beyond where Kant was willing to go. Schelling
will attempt to uncover this 'solicitation of evil'. What brings humanity out of
its seemingly structural indecisiveness? Given the analysis thus far, it is clear
that this solicitation does not come from outside of humanity; indeed, the soli-
citation is built into humanity's very ontological structure. Nothing is given to
explain evil 'except the two principles of God'.
As we have seen, evil is the continual self-willing of selfhood to get itself
under its own control, and thus define the centre in itself. This self-willing
comes from the depths. However, it would be a mistake to say that evil comes
from the depths, or that the will of the depths is evil's primal cause, 'for evil can
only arise in the innermost will of one's own heart, and is never achieved with-
out one's own deed'. j9 Thus, the depths are not the solicitation to evil. Instead,
Schelling writes about the 'terror of life' as that which drives a man out of the
centre. This terror is the horror of being consumed and crushed by the centre,
6
of being swallowed up by the universal will by what seems to the particular
will to be a foreign will. The depths, as self-will, is driven to the periphery,
because it fears the annihilation of itself by the universal will. It is this reaction
which 'awakens in the creature passions or the individual will, but it awakens
this only so that an independent basis for the good may be there and so that it
may be conquered and penetrated by the good'.
This awakening, this terror that drives the self-will out toward the periph-
ery is not evil, but is actually the possibility of good. Indeed, it provides the
independent basis through which it is conquered by the good. It is only in crea-
tures other than humans that the particular will is not terrorized by the uni-
versal will. Or to put it another way, it is the dissolubility of the two principles
that allow for this arousal of the depths in humans, and it is this arousal itself
which activates the freedom as the possibility between good and evil. This soli-
citation of evil will not allow humans to remain indecisive, but arouses and
awakens us to our freedom - namely, to the anxiety-ridden decision for good
or for evil.
We cannot get out from under this contradiction, because the very working
out of this contradiction is what it means to be a self, to be spirit. True, people
may tranquilize themselves in various ways, and in this show themselves to
be unwilling to be both particular and universal will, but this is nothing more
than a rather innocuous method of choosing against the universal will. It is, as
we will see in the next chapter, a spiritless form of despair. This spiritless-
ness seeks to hide freedom from itself by blinding itself to the choice of good
and evil.
True humanity consists in an intensity of personality, where selfhood is
activated by being self-consciously and freely before the universal will as a par-
ticular will. This intensity is not, by necessity, driven to evil (is not a predispo-
sition to evil), but is that which awakens slumbering goodness. The terror of
the universal will remains in the awakening, and so there remains a continual
struggle to annihilate the particular will's attempts at self-glorification. The
self is this very struggle itself, whether it chooses for good or for evil.
Evil arises, then, out of this struggle, for one is receptive to the non-being
(the ground) which seeks revelation, and this reception is supported by one's
inclination toward evil. In this, one gives into the illusion inherent in the
false nexus or combination of forces. Schelling gives a compelling description
of this process, a process built on the ever increasing power of selfishness:
So the beginning of sin consists in man's going over from actual being to
non-being, from truth to falsehood, from light into darkness, in order him-
self to become the creative basis and to rule over all things with the power of
the center which he contains. For even he who has moved out of the center
retains the feeling that he has been all things when in and with God. There-
fore he strives to return to this condition, but he does so for himself and not in
the way he could, that is, in God. Hence there springs a hunger of selfishness
which, in the measure that it deserts totality and unity becomes ever needier
and poorer, but just on that account more ravenous, hungrier, more poiso-
nous. In evil there is that contradiction which devours and always negates
itself, which just while striving to become creature destroys the nexus of
creation and, in its ambition to be everything, falls into non-being.
Humans are potentially spirit, which is to say they do not possess 'activated'
selfhood as a matter of course. The self is activated or actualized in the self-
conscious choice between good and evil. This choice arises as the 'terror of
life' is consciously faced in the individual. The choice comes down to this: do
I allow the terror of the universal to drive me toward self-revelation and self-
glorification, or do I allow the terror to show me my need for the universal
will's revelation and glorification? It is a distinction between defiance and
humility, despair and faith, offense and worship, envy and adoration, dissen-
sion and love.
A problem arises around this view of freedom. If the ability to truly choose is
something only a free person can do, and yet freedom is something which itself
must be chosen, how can one choose freedom before possessing it?63
According to Schelling, the 'usual conception' of freedom is that it is a
capacity of the will, which, when faced with a choice between contradictory
opposites, is completely undetermined with respect to either one. He regards

this as a very deficient view of freedom: 'To be able to decide for A or -A with-
out any motivating reasons would, to tell the truth, only be a privilege to
act entirely unreasonably.'' With the advent of Kantian idealism, freedom
comes to be understood in terms of a higher necessity or determination for
making choices, though not a necessity of compulsion — that is, not an exter-
nal determination. Freedom is freedom only in terms of an 'inner necessity
which springs from the essence of the active agent itself. Thus, in both
Kant and Schelling, freedom is conceived as the capacity to act according to
the laws of one's own inner being.
The question, then, concerns the inner necessity of human Being. According
to Schelling, this inner necessity is freedom itself. This is where the problem of
freedom arises for Schelling: how can freedom be the capacity to act according
to the inner necessity of one's own nature, and at the same time be this inner
necessity? Schelling puts this problem in a single statement: 'man's being
is essentially his own deed'.' The paradox consists in this: man posits him-
self, and yet he is nothing other than this self-positing. To posit himself, he
must first be, for what is not cannot posit. Yet, how can he 'first be' if he must
first posit himself? Schelling says, 'this Being which is assumed as prior to
knowledge is no being, even if it is not knowledge either; it is real self-positing, it
is primal and basic willing which makes itself into something and is the basis and founda-
tion of all essence'. In this sense, the self-positing arises out of the dark basis,
which is the ground of all existence and revelation — as well as the possibility
of good and evil.
When, however, does this self-positing take place? When, and how, does a
human being determine his or her essence? Schelling says it is a determina-
tion that cannot occur in time, and yet determines our life in time. It is an act
that belongs to eternity, though it does not 'precede life in time but occurs
throughout time (untouched by it) as an act eternal by its own nature'. "
Schelling continues,
Though this idea may seem beyond the grasp of common ways of thought,
there is in every man a feeling which is in accord with it, as if each man felt
that he had been what he is from all eternity, and had in no sense only come
. i . ,- 70
to be so in time.
What is this feeling? Schelling points to a guilt that seems to have been
invested to us at our births, and yet for which we are somehow responsible.
Schelling does not look deeper into this feeling, nor does he examine how it
relates to the solicitation of evil. It remains as dark as it did for Kant, who
attributed this self-positing beyond the empirical and phenomenal world of
time and space: for Kant the choice is made from the intelligible world — by
the noumenal self.
What we discover in Schelling is that evil is a choice though it is a choice
chosen at birth. In this sense we may speak of the pre-destiny of evil in man.
Schelling writes, 'When, through the reaction of the depths to revelation, evil
in general had once been aroused in creation, man from eternity took his stand in
egotism and selfishness; and all who are born are born with the dark principle of evil
attached to them. .. .'71 Thus, we have chosen to stand on the side of selfishness
from eternity, and have determined our lives in this choice. This is radical evil,
for 'Only an evil which attaches to us by our own act, but does so from birth,
can therefore be designated as radical evil'. It is radical because it is not a
determination from without, but from within. This choice remains dark for
Schelling, since it took place in the eternal past; however, for Kierkegaard
this is a choice made in time — it is an existential choice. We will now turn to
an examination of this choice between good and evil, as well as to the ontolo-
gical guilt under which we find ourselves. At this point, suffice it to say that at
some level we are in time as already guilty; it is in this guilt that we spend our
lives, and with which we must struggle. This guilt means that freedom finds
itself solicited by evil in terms of a radical egoism and selfishness. It is the task
of freedom to pick up this basis (for the spirit of evil provides a basis for the
spirit of love) and be transformed through a self-positing which allows the
good to be manifested through one's selfhood. In other words, we must
awaken to the possibility of good and evil, and allow the good to arise out of
this propensity to evil.
Notes
1. Immanuel Kant. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Immanuel Kant: Philosophi-

cal Writings. Ed. Ernst Behler, pp. 52^125. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New York:
Continuum, 1986, p. 66.
2. Kant, 1986, p. 68.
3. Kant, 1986, p. 68.
4. Kant, 1986, p. 86.
5. Kant, 1986, p. 87.
6. Kant, 1986, p. 85.
7. Kant, 1986, p. 96.
8. Kant, 1986, p. 97.
9. Kant, 1986, p. 103.
10. Kant, 1986, p. 110.
11. 'A man may not know even himself as he really is by knowing himself through
inner sensation. For since he does not, as it were, produce himself or derive his
concept of himself as a priori but only empirically, it is natural that he obtains
his knowledge of himself through inner sense and consequently only through the
appearance of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected.' (Kant,
1986, p. 114 [my emphasis]).
12. Kant, 1986, p. 115.
13. Kant, 1986, p. 116 (my emphasis).
14. Kant, 1986, p. 116 (my emphasis).
15. Kant, 1986, p. 117.
16. Kant, 1986, p. 117.
17. Kant, 1986, p. 120.
18. Kant, 1986, p. 120.
19. John R. Silber. 'The Ethical Significance of Kant's Religion'. Introduction to Reli-
gion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. Ixxix—cxxxiv. New York: Harper, 1960,
p. xciv.
20. Silber, p. civ.
21. Immanuel Kant. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Trans. Theodore M.
Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper, 1960, p. 17. In the translation
by Greene and Hudson, the Willkur is translated as 'will"" in order to differentiate
it from Wille.
22. Kant, 1960, p. 19.
23. Kant says that the disposition is 'the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of
maxims' (1960, p. 20).
24. Kant, 1960, pp. 20-1.
25. Kant says that these predispositions have 'immediate reference to the faculty of
desire and the exercise of the will w ' (1960, p. 23).
26. Kant, 1960, p. 25.
27. Silber, p. cxxii.
28. Kant, 1960, p. 27.
29. Kant, 1960, p. 30.
30. Silber, p. cxxv.
31. Kant, 1960, p. 31.
32. Silber, p. cxxix.
33. Silber, p. cxxix.
34. Much of Schelling's language and approach may seem foreign to our 21 st century
ears, but some profound insights about Being can be drawn from them, and these
insights will be essential for Kierkegaard's approach to the problem of evil.
35. F. W. J. Schelling. Of Human Freedom. Trans. James Gutmann. Chicago: Open
Court, 1936, p. 33.
36. Schelling, p. 34.
39. How does this arousal happen? In this question we find the reason for Schelling's
allegorical language. He explains it as God's imaginative response. In other
words, it is a creative act, and in this sense remains a part of the dark depths -
that is, it remains hidden in the basis of God's existence.
41. Martin Heidegger. Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985, p. 136.
42. This analysis reminds me of a quote sometimes attributed to Michelangelo:
'Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to dis-
cover it.'
44. The 'self-will of creatures stands opposed to reason as universal will, and the latter
makes use of the former and subordinates it to itself as a mere tool' (Schelling,
p. 38).
51. Schelling, p. 41 (my emphasis).
52. Schelling, pp. 41-2.
63. This problem will unfold more fully as we examine Kierkegaard's view of evil, so
it is not necessary to grasp the problem completely at this point.
1
The Struggle of Self-Becoming: Spiritless Self-Evasion
The task of every human being is to become a 'self. The self is not a ready-
made, substantial entity that we possess simply by virtue of existence; rather,
it is a choice. As we have seen, both Kant and Schelling believe the self must
choose itself in its freedom, though this choice is made outside time (for Kant
all free acts transcend the phenomenal world which comes to us through time,
and for Schelling it was a choice made in the eternal past). Kierkegaard, how-
ever, believes this choice is made within time, and that the nature of the self
should be conceived in terms of a self-becoming. He develops this view in
terms of the unique structure of the human self. Further, it is clear from The
Sickness Unto Death - the work in which this structure is most systematically
presented that self-becoming is connected to the problem of evil.
The Self as a Relation
We begin at the paradox of human freedom discussed at the end of the intro-
duction - namely, that 'man's being is essentially his own deed'. The proble
can be stated in a question: If we are to choose and become ourselves while in
temporal existence, who are we while in the midst of this becoming? In his
upbuilding discourse 'To Gain One's Soul In Patience', Kierkegaard proble-
matizes this issue in terms of gaining what is already possessed:
[I]f a person possesses his soul, he certainly does not need to gain it, and if he
does not possess it, how then can he gain it, since the soul itself is the ultimate
condition that is presupposed in every acquiring, consequently also in gain-
ing the soul. Could there be a possession of that sort, which signifies precisely
the condition for being able to gain the same possession?1
For Kierkegaard, the human self finds itself in just such a condition, in that
self-becoming is its very nature. Thus, the change that takes place in self-
becoming is not like the Aristotelian notion of kinesis, where the change, pro-
cess, or telos of the action is geared toward the creation of another object — for
example, the telos of the act of building a house is found in the house that is
built. Rather, it is along the lines of the Aristotelian notions ofenergeia and ente-
lechy, where the process is the telos, and where change is internal and bound
within the form or structure of the process itself. Becoming a self is what the self
is', our Being is in the process of (self) becoming. Kierkegaard writes,
One who comes naked into the world possesses nothing, but the one who
comes into the world in the nakedness of his soul does nevertheless possess
his soul, that is as something that is to be gained, does not have it outside himself
as something new that is to be possessed.2
This situation is due to the ontological structure of the self as a relation that
relates itself to itself, and to the structure of the self as a self-contradiction.
Kierkegaard gives his structural definition of the self in The Sickness Unto Death:
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the
self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which
is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating
to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis.
A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human
being is not yet a self. In a relation between two things the relation is the
third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation,
and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of
soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation
relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and thais is the self.
The process of self-becoming consists in the continual struggle of bringing the

poles of the self into equilibrium. This is not an external act, nor an all-final
point to be reached in which we finally become something completely other
than we formerly had been. Rather, we become what we always are: a self-
contradiction continuously seeking equilibrium. Part of Kierkegaard's pur-
pose in writing The Sickness Unto Death was to show the ever-changing stance
of the self to itself, especially as it stands in its murelation to itself. In other
words, his definition of the self speaks not only to the possibility of becoming
a self, but more importantly, to the possibility of not being a self - of being in
what he calls 'despair'. Even if it is true that one exists as becoming, one may
choose against this structure, and not accept the task of self-becoming.
The self, then, is a possession that can be gained or lost, but which remains a
type of possession even in this gaining or losing. Again, Aristotle's concepts of
energeia (act) and entelechy may be helpful here. An animal too has its entelechy,
and could be said to possess itself in this form. It has its entelechy in the form and
eidos of the species. Thus, it fulfils its form in simply being. It possesses itself —
its form - in all its acts. In Schelling's terminology, an animal's particular
will becomes a tool for the universal will, which is to say that it plays out its
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 25
particularity within its eidos or species. In humans, however, there exists a
more radical separation between the particular and universal wills. Humans
become conscious of themselves as particular wills; thus, they possess them-
selves as this separation of the 'deepest pit and the highest heaven'. For Kier-
kegaard, they possess this as something to be gained — that is, as something to
be united. They may choose not to be themselves, and so not accept themselves
as this task of self-becoming.
If one does not take up this task, then one loses oneself. What is the self lost
in? It is lost in what Kierkegaard calls the 'negative unity'. The negative unity
is simply the various syntheses that make up the self. It is possible, and actually
quite probable, that most people exist as a mere negative unity. This negative
unity is a rather innocuous phenomenon, for in it one exists, as John Elrod puts
it, in 'immediate unity with one's natural condition'. This is a self that lacks
self-consciousness and freedom. The self is not conscious of the contradictory
poles that make up its structure, and so it does not, as a positive third element,
unify them. It flits between the poles of these syntheses, at one moment living
out of its finitude in denial of its infinitude, and in the next moment in its infi-
nitude in a rejection of its finitude. The unity of these syntheses remain, but
only as a negative unity, in which one lives 'according to the categories of
nature and culture totally devoid of an awareness of one's self as a self. This
is what Kierkegaard calls spiritlessness and the aesthetic stage of existence.
The spiritual self, on the other hand, is aware of the syntheses of the self, and
of the possible misrelations of these syntheses. This is why Kierkegaard calls it
a 'positive third' — that is, something distinct from and above the mere nega-
tive unity which makes up the syntheses. It is a positive unifier of the opposing
poles of the syntheses. It realizes there is a self as it is (real), and also a self as it
could be (ideal); a self which is bound by its past (necessity), and yet is open to
the future (possibility); a self that is scattered in the moments of its life (tem-
poral), though somehow continuous throughout this flux (eternal); a self that
is limited (finite), but whose imagination, feeling, will, and knowledge take it
beyond its limitations (infinite). This triadic structure constitutes Kierke-
gaard's ontological understanding of the self, a self which is not constituted as
substance, but as a struggle in which it must gain itself. As in all struggles, the
possibility of failure is an ever-present danger, and, if we are to believe Kierke-
gaard, failure is much more common than success.
The self initially approaches the world as a negative unity - as already
having lost itself in the categories of nature and culture. Kierkegaard says,
'What people aspire to — to possess the world a person was closest to it in
the first moment of life, because his soul was lost in it and possessed the
world in itself.' The problem we face, however, is that we cannot both possess
the world, and possess ourselves as something to be gained. In possessing the
world, we are possessed by it — that is, we abandon ourselves to it. This is due
to the contingent nature of the world, and the fact that our possession of it can
be lost or diminished. If we give ourselves over to the longing and desire of
possessing the world (allowing its possession to guide our lives), its contingent
nature binds us, and we are forced to bow to its contingencies as we attempt to
gain it.
A good example of this possession can be found in a work like Machiavelli's
The Prince. If ever there was a guide to possessing the world, this is it. There are
pages and pages of practical formulas to help the would-be prince gain the
world and keep it in his possession. And yet, toward the end of the book, we
discover that these formulas and guides do not ensure the possession of the
world, but only prove to be ways in which we have a better chance of holding
onto the world against the whims offortuna. It isfortuna who rules. And so, in
spending the 'periods of calm'8 building the dikes and floodgates in an attempt
to control the torrents offortuna, she shows her strength over us, and it becomes
apparent how thoroughly she possesses our lives. Kierkegaard expands on
this theme:
What is the temptation that in itself is many temptations? Certainly it is not the
glutton's temptation to live in order to eat. . . . [I]t is to live in order to slave.
The temptation is this, to lose oneself, to lose one's soul, to cease to be a
human being and live as a human being instead of being freer than the
bird, and godforsaken to slave more wretchedly than the animal. Yes, to
slave! Instead of working for the daily bread, which every human being is
commanded to do, to slave for it — and yet not to be satisfied by it, because
the care is to become rich. . .. Instead of being willing to be what one is,
poor, but also loved by God . . . to damn oneself and one's life to this slaving
despondent greed day and night, in dark and brooding dejection, in spirit-
less busyness, with heart burdened by worry about making a living. . . .
This is to be a slave tofortuna, a slave to the ever-changing whims of tempor-

ality. While those who are lost in worldliness are more likely to envy the fortu-
nate soul, Kierkegaard is horrified to see a person succeed in this way. It is not
simply watching a person being tossed around by the whims of the world that
is so troubling, but the realization that the self is thereby abandoned in this
futile undertaking.
Having said all this, we return to the fact that in the midst of this lostness the
self does not thereby completely surrender possession of itself. The structure of
the self remains, and no human can become lost in the world as an animal is
lost, for, unlike animals, when a human being is lost,
At the same moment he is different from the world, and he senses this resis-
tance that does not follow the movements of the world's life. If he now wants
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 2 7
to gain the world, he must overcome this disquiet until once again, like the
undulation of the waves, he vanishes in the life of the world - then he has
won the world. However, if he wants to gain his soul, he must let his resis-
tance become more and more pronounced and in doing so gain his soul, for
his soul was this very difference: it was the infinity in the life of the world in
its difference from itself.10
This resistance is the eternal, the infinite, the ideal, and the possible, which do
not allow for complete and utter lostness. So even while lost to itself, the self
continues to possess itself in, and as, this difference - as something to be
gained away from the world. While lost in the world, the self remains, at some
level, heterogeneous to the life of the world.
It is the structure of the self as a self-relating relation that allows the self to
become free from the world in which it is lost. But this is not all that is at work
in becoming oneself, because the structure of the self is a derived relation.
In other words, this structure is established by an Other, which for Kierke-
gaard is God. 11 The possibility of despair is due to the fact that God has
released the self from his hand, and yet the self only becomes itself by freely
turning and relating itself back toward God - whether in humility or pride.
Thus, we are released from the hand of God that we may choose ourselves in
him. The task of existence is to free ourselves from worldliness, in order to find
ourselves in the power that established the structure of the self. Thus, Kierke-
gaard says that one's soul is gained from God, aw ay from the world, and through
oneself. This is a difficult task, which is why most people abandon it, and thus
abandon themselves. Kierkegaard's authorship is an attempt to make us feel
the contradictions within ourselves, in hopes of awakening us to the struggle of
becoming a self. We will begin our analysis of despair and evil by examining
our least awakened state of consciousness: spiritlessness.
The Spiritless Evasion of the Self
Spiritlessness and Choice
For Kierkegaard, an understanding of evil can be arrived at prior to all onti-

cal, public, and relational manifestations of evil, because the ground of evil is
found in the individual's choice against his or her self and the Good. Although
evil, when it manifests itself— and it does not always do so — is committed
against others, the seat of evil is not in these actions; evil is first and foremost
an ontological matter. Another way of saying this is that we commit evil
against the Good before we commit it against others, in that our relationship
with others is always mediated by our relationship with the Good. In this
chapter we will examine the ontological structure of the self with this view of
evil in mind, and come to see how the potential for evil arises, primordially,
from this structure, and not from our relationship with others.
As we have seen, we do not first come upon an actualized self, but the self
in its negative unity. This self is characterized by potentiality and movement.
In the same way, we will see that, although the ground of evil is found in the
structure of the self, the structure itself allows only for the potential of evil; the
actualization of evil must be addressed through an analysis of the process of
self-becoming, which consists of a deepening of self-consciousness and free-
dom. As we explore the structure of the self in terms of the finite and infinite
poles, we will be examining the ways the self despairs of itself, and how it
maintains itself in a mere potential for selfhood. The process by which selfhood
(as well as evil) is actualized will be the theme of the last four chapters.
Since we will be looking only at the potential for selfhood in this chapter,
we will be dealing with the 'spiritless' mode of the self. A spiritless individual
has no interest in actualizing the self, is satisfied with dwelling in existence
as potential, and finds all talk of becoming a self ludicrous (who else am I, the
spiritless person asks, if I am not myself?). The spiritless self is secure in
the power of its negative unity. It reacts to what comes to it externally, and
seeks to define itself through its relation to the world. This is essentially self-
deception and an evasion of the self s true task.
To gain a clearer understanding of this, we must recall that multiplicity is
not the milieu of freedom. The Catholic theologian, Karl Rahner, makes this
point well when he writes, 'Freedom does not consist in always being able to do
the opposite of what has been done up to now, but consists in being able to
effect once and for all into finality'. For Rahner, the essence of freedom is
not the willing of a multiplicity of external things, but the ability to take pos-
session of oneself:
a free act is originally not so much the positing of something else, of some-
thing external, of some effect which is distinct from and opposed to the free
act itself. It is rather the self-fulfillment of one's own nature, a taking posses-
sion of oneself, of the reality of one's own creative power over oneself. Thus,
it is coming to oneself, as self-presence in oneself.
In the introduction we saw that for Kant freedom of will is not found in the
willing of heterogeneity, but in willing one thing — the maxim of reason —
and in this, one gains the unity of character found in personality. Kierkegaard
is very Kantian (and Rahnerian) in this regard: freedom, as the seat of self-
hood, is not the ability to 'undo' oneself from moment to moment (the ability
to posit the opposite of what has been posited up until now), nor to will in a
number of different directions, but is taking possession of oneself, and project-
ing oneself in a single direction.
The Struggle of Self-Becoming
The willing or choice that arises out of this self-possession is qualitatively
different from that which arises out of the merely potential self. The potential
self does not so much choose, as avoid existential decisions - those choices that
project and posit the self. A spiritless self runs from all situations that require
creative choice, and simply reacts to what is happening around it externally.
Kierkegaard does not attribute any actualization to the spiritless self. Even in
the case of evil, he finds it questionable whether we could call a potential self a
self that sins:
Where in all the world could one find a real sin-consciousness . . . in a life so
immersed in triviality and chattering mimicry of 'the others' that it can
hardly - is too spiritless to - be called sin, and merits only, as the Scripture
says, to be 'spewed out'.
While Kierkegaard does not believe an individual makes a self-conscious

choice to be spiritless, he is not willing to say that spiritlessness is something
which has come upon an individual by necessity, and for which the individual
has no responsibility: Ts it something that happens to a person? No, it is the
person's own fault. No person is born spiritless; and however many take it with
them to the grave, as all they have got out of life — that is not life's fault'. The
person is responsible, not because spiritlessness wasfreely chosen as the meaning
around which life is to be gathered, but because it is accepted through default.
While it could be argued that there is an aspect of human choice in this default,
there is a fundamental difference between spiritless 'choices' and the choice of
an actualized individual: while spirit is characterized by earnestness (an
acquired originality of disposition), spiritlessness is characterized by indiffer-
ence. As Kierkegaard states, 'the lives of most people, characterized by the dia-
lectic of indifference, are so far from the good (faith) as almost to be too spiritless
to be called sin, yes, even almost too spiritless to be called despair'. It is just
this distinction between earnestness and indifference that is to be made clear in
this work, especially in reference to the notion of evil. In order to understand
the nature of spiritless indifference, it must be contrasted to the Kierkegaardian
view of the earnestness of freedom.
Freedom and Repetition
Kierkegaard believes human existence gains continuity in a moment of pas-

sion, and through the continual repetition of this moment, whereby a person
invests his or her existence with meaning. This moment gathers one's past and
future: it redeems the past by drawing it up into the passion, and gives expec-
tancy to the future. In this, a continuity is gained in and through the passion.
Frederick Buechner describes this event or moment,
As humans we know time as a passing of unrepeatable events in the course of
which everything passes away including ourselves. As human beings, we
also know occasions when we stand outside the passing of events and
glimpse their meaning. Sometimes an event occurs in our lives (a birth, a
death, a marriage — some event of unusual beauty, pain, joy) through
which we catch a glimpse of what our lives are all about and maybe even
what life itself is all about, and this glimpse of what 'it's all about' involves
not just the present but the past and future too.
Inhabitants of time that we are, we stand on such occasions with one foot
in eternity. 20
Although these moments are unrepeatable in an aesthetic or immediate

sense, the meaning they contain is repeatable, and just this repeatability of
meaning is what Kierkegaard means by the term 'repetition'. Kierkegaard
says, 'For an existing person, the goal of motion is decision and repeti
This passion, because it is a decision, is not something passively undergone, as
Buechner seems to imply, but a choice. A good example of this is found in one
of Kierkegaard's journal entries:
There is something missing in my life, and it has to do with my need to

understand what I must do, not what I must know — except, of course, that a
certain amount of knowledge is presupposed in every action. I need to
understand my purpose in life, to see what God wants me to do, and this
means that I must find a truth which is true for me, that I must find that
Idea for which I can live and die. ...
The Idea was what I lacked in order to live a complete human life and not
merely knowledge. So I could not base the development of my philos-
ophy of life — yes, on something one calls 'objective' — on something not
my own, but upon something which reaches to the deepest roots of my exis-
tence and wherein I am connected into the divine and held fast to it, even
though the whole world falls apart. Yes, this is what I lack and this is what
I am striving for.
Just because one has a moment of passion around which one's life is poten-
tially gathered, does not mean it will continue to be gathered in the future.
To gain continuity, one must repeat the passion in an existential decision. This
'idealizing passion' intensifies the interest in one's existence, and yet, since
one's existence is not finished, it does not define one's life onceandfor all. Because
we are in the process of becoming, there is the ever present possibility of losing
this passion. Thus, while the earnestness of the eternal manifests itself in infi-
nite passion, the passionate decision may, in time, come to nothing. Kierke-
gaard discusses this in terms of Jesus' parable of the foolish maidens:
I prefer to remain where I am, with my infinite interest, with the issue, with
possibility. . . . The five foolish maidens had indeed lost the infinite passion
of expectancy. So the lamp went out. Then a cry arose that the bridegroom
was coming. . . . The door was shut and they were shut out, and when they
knocked at the door, the bridegroom said to them: I do not know you. This
was not just a quip by the bridegroom but a truth, for in a spiritual sense
they had become unrecognizable through having lost the infinite passio
Repetition is the oil in the lamp that keeps the flame of infinite passion burn-
ing, and gives to existence the continuity of the eternal. Repetition brings to
each moment the same originality found in the moment of passion, around
which one's life was gathered. One may gather one's life in a moment of pas-
sion, but to bring continuity over one's entire life, one needs repetition.
Repetition, in its 'maturity' - when it is self-conscious is earnestness.
Kierkegaard says that
earnestness . . . is the acquired originality of disposition, its originality pre-

served in the responsibility of freedom and its originality affirmed in the
enjoyment of blessedness. In its historical development, the originality of dispo-
sition marks precisely the eternal in earnestness, for which reason earnest-
ness can never become habit.
Repetition and earnestness point to the responsibility laid upon every human
being to acquire and preserve the 'originality of disposition'.
When Kierkegaard speaks of the originality of disposition, he is pointing to
the essence of freedom. Kierkegaard took from Kant and Schelling the view
that disposition is something chosen and acquired ('man's being is his own
deed'}, though he rejects that an acquired originality of disposition takes
place outside time: he sees it as an historical development. This development
is not simply a quantitative building up of experiences, but a rise in conscious-
ness and freedom through a series of qualitative leaps. In The Concept of Anxiety
he writes: 'When the originality of earnestness is acquired and preserved, then
there is succession and repetition, but as soon as originality is lacking in repeti-
tion, there is habit. The earnest person is earnest precisely through the origin-
ality with which he returns in repetition'. 3 Self-becoming is a matter of
acquiring and preserving. The acquiring takes place as qualitative leaps in the
moment; the preserving is the continual repetition of these leaps throughout
one's life. 6 To be earnest is to keep the originality of the acquired disposition
ever before one. True, the moment is the important element of acquiring a
continuity of disposition, but this still must take place in temporality, for one
may only repeat what is in time.
Kierkegaard gives an example that will be helpful:
Every Sunday, a clergyman must recite the prescribed common prayer,
and every Sunday he baptizes children. Now, let him be enthusiastic, etc.
The fire burns out, he will stir and move people, etc., but at one time more
and at another time less. Earnestness alone is capable of returning regularly
every Sunday with the same originality to the same thing.
Take away the originality from disposition and one has habit. Perhaps one
gains enthusiasm once in a while, but mostly one is simply going through the
motions. Earnestness, on the other hand, comes before the same leap (the same
existential, passionate decision) with the same originality, by which all things
again become new. Without this originality, one loses passion and becomes dis-
interestedly involved.
Think back to the foolish maidens who had lost their infinite passion. Kier-
kegaard says they became unrecognizable to the bridegroom through their
having lost the earnestness of their infinite passion. They were unrecognizable
because they did not have the same disposition; they did not have the same disposition because
they did not have it in its originality. It is true that one may make all the right exter-
nal movements when one lacks this originality of disposition (one may obey the
letter of the law), but these actions are derived, not from passion (the spirit of
the law), but from habit.
Kierkegaard says that most of us live our lives without any true direction,
without a grasp of the eternal and what is required of us. There are some, how-
ever, who, at some moment in their lives, find the passion in which all things
become new. Their existence is transformed by being gripped by a new mean-
ing, which gives continuity to their lives through the realization of a task they
have as human beings. The problem, however, is that after time they lose the
original passion that accompanied this transformation, and so they now 'fulfil'
this task out of habit. To speak of habit, however, is simply to speak of having
lost the sense of one's task.
This brings us back to the issue of spiritlessness, and its evasion of freedom's
task. In the remainder of this chapter we will be examining the self-deception
of spiritlessness, with a continual eye on how the self is able to maintain itself as
a mere potential of selfhood. This will give us a basis by which to examine how
evil is actualized through the self s relation to itself. Further, through this ana-
lysis we will come to see the characteristics, aims, and dangers of remaining as
a mere potential self.
The Task of Becoming Oneself

Self-becoming takes place within a continual mode of expansion and contrac-
tion. For instance, in terms of finitude and infinitude, Kierkegaard writes that
'The development must accordingly consist in infinitely coming away from
oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in

the finitization'. The human self is always more than it is at any given
moment, but it is this 'more' in such a way that it never loses contact with
what it immediately is. The self should continually move away from what it
is at the moment, and yet it can only do this as itself. In this infinite moving
away and returning, the finite is always changed in some way, so that one is
not returning to the same limitations. Merold Westphal describes this expan-
sion and contraction as follows:
As infinite the self must move away from itself, never becoming a one-
dimensional self that allows the given to define the horizon of reality. But
as finite the self must always come back to itself, recognizing that our
dreams not only should, but also do, exceed our grasp.29
While our dreams exceed our grasp, we are to take what we can from them and
make them concrete. This is why Kierkegaard expresses self-becoming as
becoming concrete: 'To become oneself.. . is to become something concrete.
But to become something concrete is neither to become finite nor to become
infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis.'
Whenever the self loses itself in the expanding poles of its syntheses (the eter-
nal, infinite, possibility, ideality), what it needs is self-understanding, because
in its expansion it has lost sight of the self it is. When the self loses itself in the
contracting poles (the temporal, finite, necessity, reality), it needs freedom,
that which allows it to choose itself in its becoming. To be spirit is to be con-
scious of oneself in one's freedom, and thus relate oneself to both one's limita-
tions and one's possibilities. We will come to see that the responsibility and
meaning of the self is found in the attempt to fulfil this task. Further, the poten-
tial for evil arises out of this task.
The Despair that Abides in Infinitude
Imagination
Above we noted that the idealizing passion is that around which a person gath-
ers his or her life. The imagination is the capacity that allows for the infinitiz-
ing of the self. It is through the imagination that we are taken beyond
ourselves into the possibilities and ideals that exceed our present situation.
In his journal, Kierkegaard writes:
Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality,

in existence, in order to get them far enough out, or within, or down into
actuality. And when imagination has helped them get as far out as they
should be - then actuality genuinely begins.32
The imagination helps the self get out of its given situation, and the way the
world normally comes to it. According to Kierkegaard, there are far too many
people who never take in the expanding breath of infinitude, and so remain
within the categories of the purely sensate. Life comes to them as pleasant or
unpleasant, fortunate or unfortunate, and so forth. What they lack, and need
more of, is imagination.
Imagination presents a danger, however: while it is necessary for moving
beyond oneself, it does not, by itself, move back into the self— it does not
make the imagined possibilities and ideals its own. If the imagination is
not combined with earnestness, then it becomes a capacity that moves the
self away from itself, dissolving the tensions within the self. Kierkegaard says
that if a person
understood himself or tried to understand himself, if he truly was concerned

about understanding himself, if the inner being announced itself within him
in that concern then he will not occupy himself withflights of fancy and fortify
himself with dreams but in his adversity will be concerned about himself.
These flights of fancy are evasions in which fantasy becomes the mode of exis-
tence. The evasion takes place by giving the imagination free reign to lead one
farther and farther away from the finite pole of the self. Since imagination has
only a negative relation to the finite - as that which it seeks to move beyond
and away from — it is up to spirit to bring the meanings and possibilities which
imagination envisions down into one's finite situation. Spirit will not allow
one's limitations to be evaded, and continually keeps its eye on the place to
which it is to return — namely, the self.
We will examine several concrete forms of this despair by looking at the
imagination's influence over the capacities of feeling, knowing, and willing.
Kierkegaard says of the person whose imagination is given free reign, that
'His feeling is purely immediate, his knowledge only strengthened through
contemplation, his will not mature'. 34 We will look at each of these capacities,
beginning with infinite feeling, and ending with infinite knowing. This will
show us that spiritlessness is able to maintain itself in self-deception, and has
a profound need for self-knowledge, in order to overcome its despair.
Infinite Feeling
Feelings and emotions are extremely important for Kierkegaard, because they
are what often give the impetus for movement within a person's life. One need
only see how love can determine the direction of life to understand how this is
the case. The problem is that feelings can become completely grounded in
imagination. In this, feelings lose all relation to finite limitations, and one
becomes emotionally 'moved' by a phantasm. While feelings arising only
within the imagination may seem to have an affective power, this is an illusion,
for even this 'power' is based on the imagination.
For example, some people speak eloquently about their love for humanity,
and about their desire for everyone to be at peace with one another. These
feelings show themselves to be real, however, only when confronted by an
actual person. What makes the feeling concrete is the love one has and shows
toward one's neighbour, or even more telling, one's ability to be at peace with
one's adversary. It is all too easy to love 'humanity', the difficulty comes in
loving the person who just cut in front of you in line. Indeed, it is usually
those who profess such love that are unable to concretize it, for they assert it
only to reassure themselves - and others of their love; the one who truly
loves people spends his or her time and energy in action - in actually doing
what love requires. When feelings are infinitized in this way, 'the self is
simply more and more volatilized and eventually becomes a kind of abstract
sensitivity which inhumanly belongs to no human'. Thus, one imagines
oneself to be other than who one is, and evades oneself in despair over one-
self. Being unwilling to face one's true relationship with others - one's self-
centredness and cruelty - one deceives oneself by imagining a kind of abstract
or displaced love for humanity.
Infinitized feeling can take another form. There is a feeling of fond resolu-
tion that can seem all-consuming, but which has no staying power (passion)
behind it. Such a feeling is captured by the circumstances of the moment, but
as soon as the circumstances change, the conviction and feeling disappears.
The feeling is never made concrete, because it cannot remain stable and con-
sistent throughout the changes of the finite. Although the feeling lacks the
power necessary to make the resolution concrete, it can be held fast in the ima-
gination, and may actually be held onto for quite a while, even though it
remains unreal. Kierkegaard characterizes this as shortsightedness:
[I]n selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being altered. If it

is not altered it is an accident, since the cause of its exemption is only that by
sheer chance his life was not touched by any change. But the stability of such
a conviction is mere fantasy on the part of the one whom fate has pampered.
. . . Rather, its true stability is revealed when everything is changed. It is
rare indeed that a man's life is able to escape all changes, and in the changes
the conviction based on immediatefeeling is a fantasy, the momentary impression simply
inflated into a consideration of the whole life.'
A mundane example of this infinitized feeling is the New Year's Resolution.
The feeling arose through the beginning of a new year, and its accompanying
reflection on the past year. In this self-reflection, one discovers some things one
would like to change about oneself. Unless this moment is truly the 'moment of
eternal passion', and is held onto through repetition, this feeling of the
moment is simply imaginitively extended through time. It shows itself to be a
fantasy when the difficulty of existence confronts it — that is, when actuality
works against the feeling of the resolution. The resolution felt substantial in
the imagination, but proved to be without reality.
This shows the danger of all types of despair that abide in the infinite: such
despair is full of conviction and resolution, it is 'passionate' and 'moving',
though all this happens only in the imagination. One is simply evading and
denying the reality of one's existence, and because the power of the imagina-
tion makes the fantasy seem so real, the individual is allowed to keep the
deception from rising to consciousness. Such people are not free, but are
bound by the changes that take place in the immediate situation. A true reso-
lution is like a promise an individual makes to himself or herself. A person who
is self-consciously free has the power within the self to keep the promise. This is
what distinguishes self-conscious choice from the empty promises and 'choices'
of spiritlessness. Nietzsche recognized this same distinction when he wrote:
'To breed an animal with the right to make promises — is not this the paradox-
ical problem nature has set itself with regard to man? And is it not man's true
problem?'37 The problem facing humanity, according to Nietzsche, is whether
it has sufficient power and hold upon itself to follow through with its promises.
Kierkegaard is pointing to the same problem, though from the aspect of self-
consciousness: does the person have sufficient self-consciousness to grasp onto
what imagination brings before his or her eyes, and make it an actuality?
Will a person be honest enough to count the costs, and determine whether he
or she is willing to pay the price for actualizing the ideal? Spirit is this honest
transparency toward oneself.
There may turn out to be no movement of the infinite into the finite because
one is unwilling to shoulder the responsibilities placed on the self by the finite.
To speak of an 'unwillingness' is to point to an infinitized will that remains a
mere potential capacity. By allowing the will to reside in the infinite pole of the
self, spiritlessness deceives itself into thinking that it is making choices upon it
resolutions. Thus infinite feeling consoles itself through the empty assurances
of an infinitized will.
Infinite Willing
Like infinite feeling, infinite willing is a matter of evasion: one imagines one is
willing, and yet this willingness is a fantasy. With infinite feeling one is caught
up in doing great things, making great changes, and imagines one is willing
to act on these resolutions. The problem is that in order to fulfil resolutions,
one must usually start with the small things, those which are, more often
than not, mundane, and not very extraordinary. A garden is not created by
throwing an arm full of flowers on the ground, but one must till the soil, dig
holes, plant, weed, water, and the like. A will becomes infinitized when it is
unwilling to start with these 'small' tasks, and when it despises the moments
of small beginnings:
[T]he more it [the will] is infinitized in its purpose and decision, the closer
and more contemporaneous it becomes with itself in that small part of the
task which can be carried out now, immediately . . . so that when furthest
away from itself (when it is most infinitized in its purpose and decision), it is
simultaneously as near as can be to itself in the carrying out of the infinitely
small part of the task that can be accomplished this very day, this very
oo
hour, this very moment.
Thus, using the example of the garden, the will is infinitely away from itself as
it imagines a beautiful garden, with all sorts of exotic specimens and colours;
simultaneously, however, the will is concrete in its carrying out of the smallest
tasks that such infinitized will necessitates.
The will can maintain itself in the infinite by the continual reassurance that
the resolution will be carried out when the time is right. Kierkegaard says the
problem with these assurances is that the time is always right - there is always
a step to be taken in the direction of the fulfilment of the resolution. What
keeps the will infinitized is the little word 'if:
people kept on using this assurance: Tf it were required of me, I would be

willing to forsake everything, sacrifice everything . . . .' Meanwhile, the
world has seen an almost complete moral disintegration - but not one of
the assurers found that it was required of him; he merely went on giving
the assurance 'that i f . . .V39
A concrete resolution knows nothing about this ' i f . . . ' , because the require-
ment of such a resolution is to act, not to assure. However, this assurance is
the means by which the self remains unconscious of its self-deception, and
thus evades the task of self-becoming. To test one's resolution one must
merely see the path one's life has taken since the resolution arose: Tf year
after year my life continually expresses that I am just like everybody else,
then I shall at least shut up about assurances 'that if...
We see again that the issue revolves around a self-deception — namely, an
unwillingness to become concrete with regards to one's will. The unwilling-
ness is due to the difficulty involved in concretizing the possibilities and ideals
of imagination. In the end, one is not honest about one's desires or abilities to
fulfil the resolution. Kierkegaard says that self-knowledge does not consist in
the ready assurances of despair, but in eyeing these assurances suspiciously:
Earnestness is precisely this kind of honest distrust of oneself, to treat oneself

as a suspicious character, as a financier treats an unreliable client, saying,
'Well, these big promises are not much help; I would rather have a small
part of the total right away'. 41
It is not easy to admit that one does not have the power of self to face the
difficulties and tensions of becoming oneself, or that one is more interested in
being comfortable than in actualizing one's ideals. If the courage to face this
knowledge about oneself is not present, then the imagination can be used to
hide this reality.
If these evasions start to fall apart, and consciousness of despair begins to
arise, the self has still another way to deceive itself in its infinite willing: one
may see the action of the will as something that follows — as a matter of
course — upon the consideration of how to proceed in one's resolution. Such a
view believes that the problem is in the planning, in the 'making certain', and
in understanding. As Kierkegaard says, 'We make out that if we only under-
stand the right it follows automatically that we do it. What a grievous misun-
derstanding or what a sly fabrication!' 42 Here again, we find a self-deception
based on a continual assurance that what is grasped infinitely in the moment
will become concrete if or when the time is right — when one has all the facts
and contingencies worked out. This leads to the issue of infinite knowing.
Infinite Knowing
Infinite knowing is an accumulation of knowledge that one fails to relate to
one's existence. There is an objective and disinterested kind of knowing that
moves away from the self. Nicolas Berdyaev, in his book The Destiny of Man,
explains the importance for philosophy to keep an existential connection to
the issue it seeks to understand:
The only way radically to distinguish between philosophy and science is to

admit that philosophy is unobjectified knowledge, knowledge of the spirit as
it is in itself and not as objectified in nature, i.e., knowledge of meaning and
participation in meaning. Science and scientific foresight give man power
and security, but they can also devastate his consciousness and sever him
from reality. Indeed it might be said that science is based upon the aliena-
tion of man from reality and of reality from man. The knower is outside
reality, and the reality he knows is external to him. Everything becomes an
object, i.e., foreign to man and opposed to him. The world of philosophical
ideas ceases to be my world, revealing itself in me, and becomes an objective
world standing over against me as something alien to me.4
This type of knowledge can become a place where the self can hide itself from
its task. For Kierkegaard, the significance of all knowledge is measured in
whether, and how, it is appropriated by the individual. All knowledge
becomes essential by becoming self-knowledge.
As we will see, self-knowledge is the only knowledge the value of which is
without qualification. Knowledge not related to oneself may be interesting,
but it can also be dangerous to the task and purpose of one's existence:
To come to oneself in self-knowledge. . . . In any other knowledge you

are away from yourself, you forget yourself, are absent from yourself. . . .
To forget oneself. . . to go away from oneself by losing oneself in knowing, in
comprehending, in thinking, in artistic production, etc. — precisely this is
called being sober. From the Christian point of view this is intoxication.
For the person in the aesthetic stage of life — whether the aesthetic individual
is an artist, a professor, a political analyst, or any other of a number of occu-
pations that traffic in knowledge - whose overarching goal is to enjoy
life, knowledge is significant to the extent that it brings pleasure and joy.
No doubt, to understand has its pleasures. The issue of life, however, is not
about what one knows and can espouse, but about how one is:
[W]e all know how to talk about the good; no cultured person would put up
with being thought ignorant of it, with being thought personally unable to
describe it profoundly and eloquently, because to understand . . . is a plea-
sure. But personally to strive to be the honest, upright, and unselfish one —
no, that would indeed be an effort. "
One can spend a lifetime studying various views of what is good and worth
pursuing, but if one does not act on it, then, in one's hands, the knowledge
becomes empty and a means of evasion.
This is the case because, in the end, it is not knowledge that changes one's
life, but action. Most agree that action is what changes one's circumstances,
but Kierkegaard says more than this: one becomes oneself only in action. One
relates to oneself and to the Good through action, for it is in action that one's
desires, passions and goals are tested and evaluated. I can learn all about how
I should relate to the Good, but if I do not act on this knowledge, then my life is
not changed in any substantial way, and the knowledge is superfluous.
More often than not, this knowledge becomes a means of evading one's
unwillingness to relate one's life to the Good, and knowledge about the Good
is viewed as a sufficient relationship to it. This is the case because one's knowl-
edge can be far ahead of what one is capable of at the present moment:
'In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And
every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in this knowing
far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses'.
Most of us already know far too much for our own good; what we need is to
come back to ourselves and act on what we know. Knowledge can become a
means of venturing off into boundless territories that have nothing to do with
our own existence. Kierkegaard says 'the more understanding increases, the
more it becomes a kind of inhuman knowledge in the production of which
man's life is squandered'.49 Knowledge is not in itself bad, but the state of knowl-
edge is.50 Knowledge is to be understood as the prerequisite to action; if one
does not start with the small tasks the Good requires in the moment, then one
is being led away from the Good by knowledge of it.
Kierkegaard views this abstract state of knowledge as a spiritless form of
rebellion against the Good. Spiritlessness is not the conscious and earnest
movement against the Good we will come to see as radical evil, but is a weak
evasion and lack of earnestness toward one's existence, and one's relationship
with the Good. Spiritlessness' conscious belief is that it is on the side of the
Good, and assures itself that when enough knowledge has been gained, it will
certainly act accordingly. As usual, these assurances are evasions. It evades
and denies its actual relationship to the Good, because it is possessed by an
unconscious anxiety of what will be found if it relates its knowledge to its life:
One fears that one's knowing, turned inward toward oneself, will expose the
state of intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this
state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will
make it impossible for one to slip back again into that adored state, into
intoxication.
Anyone who has applied the ideal to one's life knows how dangerous it can be,
how when it is allowed to inspect one's heart and character, one's identity and
self-estimation can be decimated. So the ideal is kept at arms length, and never
allowed to penetrate one's life.
Kierkegaard says the failure to apply the ideal to one's life is a lack of con-
science. He shows this by pointing to the story of David and Bathsheba in 2
Samuel. Although Bathsheba was married to another man, David had her
brought to the palace, slept with her, and she became pregnant. To cover this
up, David had Uriah — Bathsheba's husband — put at the front line of the
battle, whereupon the army withdrew, leaving Uriah to be killed. David
then took Bathsheba as his wife. During this time David felt no remorse
for his action, though it went against the ideal he himself claimed to follow.
So God sent the prophet Nathan to tell David a story. Nathan told David
about a grave injustice. There was a poor man who owned nothing but a
lamb. The man loved this lamb, and treated it as one would treat a child.
There was also a rich man who had many sheep. When a traveller came to
visit the rich man, the latter had the poor man's lamb killed in order to serve
it to the traveller. Kierkegaard says,
I imagine that David listened attentively and thereupon declared his judg-
ment, did not, of course, intrude his personality (subjectivity) but imperson-
ally (objectively) evaluated this charming little work. . . .
Then the prophet says to him, 'Thou art the man.'
See, the tale the prophet told was a story, but this 'Thou art the man' - this
was another story - this was the transition to the subjective.
When the story became personal when the issue was no longer about a king
objectively rendering judgment over a matter within his kingdom — David
gained radical self-knowledge, his conscience awakened, and he repented.
Kierkegaard uses the story in order to question whether one really comes to
know the ideal through objective knowledge of it. If the ideal is not applied
to existence, one does not know it, for the ideal is what it is only in relation to human
existence. Until it is expressed in life - until it is given flesh and blood, one's
own flesh and blood — one does not truly understand what the ideal is calling
for what it means. Kierkegaard says that to believe that a disinterested
knowledge in the Good is in some way to relate correctly to the Good is self-
deception; to claim to be dealing with ideals, with what is good and meaning-
ful for human existence, and then to be completely unrelated to them in one's
own life is hypocrisy.
Kierkegaard believes that valuing an objective and speculative form of
knowledge of the Good will eventually lead to a loss of all ethical and reli-
gious - that is, earnest forms of existence:
Prior to the outbreak of cholera there usually appears a kind of fly not other-
wise seen; in like manner might not these fabulous pure thinkers be a sign
that a calamity is in store for humankind — for example, the loss of the ethi-
cal and the religious? Therefore, be cautious with an abstract thinker
who not only wants to remain in abstraction's pure being but wants this to
be the highest for a human being, and wants such thinking, which results
in the ignoring of the ethical and a misunderstanding of the religious, to be
the highest human thinking.J
By the choice of the method of thought, the objective thinker is using thought
as a diversion from something. What is being diverted is the individual's
misrelation to his or her own self. The abstract thinker blocks the path of exis-
tential self-knowledge, with its inherent struggles and tensions, in order to
evade the path of self-becoming.
As against this comfortable and safe infinitizing of feeling, willing and
knowing, Kierkegaard would rather we commit outright sins and evil acts,
for then we could at least have the self-understanding that we are wretched,
instead of this deceitful rebellion against the Good in the complacency of
objective knowledge about the Good. It has always been the judgement of
Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, that it is better to face God as a tax
collector, harlot and a swindler, than as a self-righteous Pharisee. In this,
Christianity turns 'ethics' on its head, and we find that the rebellion against
the Good is often perpetrated by those who are most religious, whereas the
irreligious - if they feel the pain of their weakness - are closer to God than
the Pharisee ever was: 'it is terrible living life to become mold on the immanen-
tal development of the infinite. Then instead let us sin, sin outright, seduce
girls, murder men, rob on the highways — that at least can be repented, and
God can at least catch hold of such a criminal'.
Somewhat ironically, it turns out that the spiritless, cultured rebellion
against the Good holds within itself a great danger. It seems sophisticated,
and while it is adept at keeping within the norms of society, it uses infinite feel-
ing, willing, and knowledge to evade its true relation to the Good. Its deprav-
ity only becomes apparent when the norms of a society, which such a person
willingly and even conscientiously follows, calls for the butchering of other
human beings — something we saw happen over and over again in the twenti-
eth century, and which continues on into the twenty first. This is due to the fact
that spiritlessness always sides with the expedient, the comfortable, the secure,
and the tranquil. If the established order is relatively humanitarian or 'civi-
lized', then the people within that order will live accordingly; however, if it
becomes fearful, defensive and barbaric, then the people will follow those
norms. A spiritless rebellion against the Good loses sight of that which can lift
it out of this danger. This will become more clear as we now turn to the despair
that abides in finitude.
The Despair that Abides in Finitude
In this form of despair, the evasion becomes a cultural affair. As we will see,
worldliness develops a system whereby the individual may evade the responsi-
bility of becoming a self, by the levelling of all selves down to the lowest
common denominator. To relate only to the finite pole of the self is to become
trapped within the established order and its modes of existence, because it is
the infinite that allows the self to transcend the established order of things.
Kierkegaard develops many categories (strewn throughout his authorship) to
describe this form of despair, such as, worldliness, the secular mentality, sensi-
bility, probability, sagacity, moderation, and the levelling of the crowd. Each
of these processes work together in order to clamp down on the individual,
making sure he or she does not try to rise above the established order within
the culture. The clamp does not have to be very tight though, because this is
not a trap the individual wishes to escape: one can find great comfort in the
despair that abides in the finite, for the 'strength' of this despair is that it
allows one to feel quite at home in the world, and provides numerous means
of maintaining one's denial and self-deception.
As we look at this form of despair, we will see that Kierkegaard has a parti-
cularly strong distaste for its inner workings, because he saw it as the power
behind the spiritlessness that was overwhelming his age. His, and ours, is an
age of spiritlessness that has turned its back to spirit.5 Kierkegaard sees this
as the greatest tragedy to happen to humanity, for in moving away from spirit,
we move away from ourselves en masse. As we look at this despair, we will find
that what we view as a normal and comfortable life is in reality an insidious
trap that threatens to plunge Western civilization into irretrievable despair.
To relinquish the infinite is not simply to stop growing, or to stop moving
ahead, but is actually to begin a retrogression, as the 'ideals' and requirements
for a human being become less and less. One need only watch advertisements
on television for a few hours - paying attention to the 'ideals' they hold up, the
goals they offer and present, and their definition of success to get a sense of
this narrowing reductionism.
The Secular Mentality or Worldliness

Sensibleness and Levelheadedness
Kierkegaard says, 'worldliness is precisely to ascribe infinite value to the indif-
ferent'. 58 For Kierkegaard, to speak of'infinite value' is to point to that which
encompasses and defines one's entire life; the 'indifferent' is that which has
nothing to do with the task of becoming oneself. Thus, in this form of despair,
one gives one's entire life over to what has no connection to the task of becom-
ing oneself. One is 'intoxicated in one's attachment to this earthly life, the tem-
poral, the secular, and the selfish'.59 The goal of existence for the secular
mentality is, first and foremost, to secure for itself an earthly comfort, which,
of course, will take one's entire life to gain. As for the task of becoming oneself,
this is meaningless, because, after all, the point is not to gain oneself, but to
gain self-satisfaction. The self does not take on infinite importance, only its
comfort does. Feeling at home, secure and comfortable in the world is the one
goal that spans the individual's entire existence, and all tasks gain significance
only in relation to how they help attain creature comforts, Kierkegaard says,
'The lostness of spiritlessness, as well as its security, consists in its understand-
ing nothing spiritually and comprehending nothing as a task, even if it is able
to fumble after everything with its limp clamminess.'
The despair that abides in the finite does not comprehend the loss of the self
and its task, because it is too busy being a success in the world:
A man in this kind of despair can very well live on in temporality; indeed he
can do so all the more easily, be to all appearances a human being, praised
by others, honoured and esteemed, occupied with all the goals of temporal
life. Yes, what we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one
may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities,
amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations,
etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves.
In a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could ven-
ture everything, no self for God - however selfish they are otherwise.61
The first action that must take place, before there is any hope of being a success
in the world, is the abandonment of the task of becoming oneself.62 One cannot
have both an infinite, eternal concern for one's self, and seek to be a success in
the world. This is because of the qualities necessary for succeeding in the
world: sensibleness, levelheadedness, and sagacity. These are all qualities we
readily perceive as good to have, and yet for Kierkegaard, these are the planks
on which we walk into spiritual death.
Levelheadedness and sensibility speak to moderation; the infinite and eter-
nal, on the other hand, are immoderate, demanding and risky. When the secu-
lar mentality seeks moderation, it is not seeking a balanced relation between
the finite and infinite, but the safest course of action. Moderation seeks medioc-
rity, which it then goes on to interpret as worldly success. The point in mod-
eration is to keep from having to face inconveniences, difficulties and anything
that can possibly disrupt one's tranquillity. When it comes to the earnest aim
of life, Kierkegaard thinks in terms of the possibilities and ideals that face each
individual, and before which all worldly aims are low indeed. In the face of
these eternal and infinite ideals, the wisdom of moderation is pathetic: 'Too
little and too much spoil everything. If he were to think the thought in its eter-
nal validity, it would promptly aim a fatal blow at all his worldly thinking,
aspiring, and pursuing, turning everything upside down for him, and this he
cannot long endure.' 63
Kierkegaard views the mentality that seeks to guard against inconveniences
as dangerous because it is actually guarding itself against the infinite — that
which disrupts the flow of the finite current. In order to stay within the
flow of the finite one must keep from making any sudden or grand moves in
existence, and one must definitely not commit oneself to anything, for who
knows where the current will turn next - one might accidentally commit one-
self to something which, next week, runs against the current. Thus, 'Clever-
ness strives continually against commitment. It fights for its life and its
honor, for if the decision wins, then cleverness is put to death.' One evades
the decision in which one would need to stake oneself, the decision that comes
along with the idealizing passion - the resolute choice for oneself. In this des-
pair, the self remains a mere potential self by never conceiving of an actualiza-
tion. Thus, spiritlessness and denial are held fast through a conventional
wisdom that continually esteems the self in its mere potentiality. By neglecting
the infinite pole of the self, it comes to rest in its current state of despair, and
finds its satisfaction in the relative safety and predictability of the finite.
Probability
The problem with any ideal is that there is no guarantee of success, and one
never knows for certain what will happen in one's life if it is actualized.
So moderation and prudence call for continual reflection on the probability of
success. Seeking probability, however, is nothing other than a rejection of the
infinite, because the infinite is beyond the realm of the probable. The closer
one is clamped to the finite, the more certainty that is needed in order to
'act', and so there are those within the secular mentality who proclaim,
T stick to the facts. I am neither a fanatic nor a dreamer nor a fool, neither
drunk nor crazy. I stick to the facts; I believe nothing, nothing what-
ever, except what I can touch and feel; and I believe no one, not my
own child, not my own wife, not my best friend; I believe only what can
be demonstrated — because I stick to the facts.'
Such a person is incapable of moving in any essential or transforming way,

because he or she is always gathering more facts and evidence. Even those
who venture out a little further than the facts, will still never choose against
the probable.
Kierkegaard views this use of probability as a spiritual issue, and goes so
far as to say that 'probability, Ghristianly understood, is perhaps the most
dangerous defilement'. 67 The issue of probability moves us into the ethico-
religious concerns that are always at the heart of Kierkegaard's critiques.
Simply put, he views the probable as rebellion against oneself and God:
'A person who never relinquished probability never became involved with
God. All religious . . . venturing is on the other side of probability, is by way
of relinquishing probability.' This is because the probable deals only with
the finite, and is familiar only with the facts; the ethico-religious, on the other
hand, deals with good and evil, truth and falsity. A person living by what is
merely probable will give lip-service to these latter categories, but not act on
them. Kierkegaard writes,
The person who inquires about the probable and only about that in order to
adhere to it does not ask what is right and what is wrong, what is good and
what is evil, what is true and what is false. No, he asks impartially: which is
the probable, so that I can believe it - whether it is true is a matter of indif-
ference or is at least of less importance; which is the probable, so that I can
adopt it and side with it whether it is evil or wrong is a matter of indiffer-
ence or is at least of less importance.
From time to time, an individual is called on to act against the probable, to

risk loss for the chance at gain. I am not talking here about anything analogous
to a gambler's risk, where one gives up a part of one's material possessions for
the chance to gain more. Rather, the risk is with one's own existence. Not that
one will lose oneself— for the self is lost as a result of never taking this type of
risk - but one may step out into the infinite, and find that the ideal is an illu-
sion. No doubt, where there is risk, there is also potential for making a mistake,
but venturing and risk are necessary for human development, and only by
stretching beyond the probable can the highest human potential be discovered
and attained. Kierkegaard writes,
The world thinks it is dangerous to venture in this way, and why? Because
one might lose; the prudent thing is not to venture. And yet by not venturing
it is so dreadfully easy to lose what would be hard to lose by venturing and
which, whatever you lost, you will in any case never lose in this way, so
easily, so completely, as though it were nothing — oneself. For if I have ven-
tured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't
ventured at all, who helps me then?
William James said that we must, in a sense, meet truth halfway, put life
to a test and see what boils over. 71 We must move out into the tension and
danger of life; if we simply sit in complacent probability, then we will discover
nothing of what it means to be human, and nothing of what it means to be
before God. We seldom consider whether there may be an unconditioned
requirement laid upon us by existence, or that we only become ourselves by
seeking to fulfil this requirement. Instead of pondering this possibility, we con-
ceal 'ourselves in finitude and among the finitudes in the same way as Adam
hid among the trees'. 72
To move beyond the finite is considered fanatical. Think of the power
behind the accusation of being a fanatic, and how we so readily shrink from
any action or belief that would put that label on us. A fanatic is intoxicated,
even dangerous — think of all the religious fanatics. Indeed, we cannot deny
that many of these fanaticisms are dangerous, but Kierkegaard is not propos-
ing a fanaticism that has no contact with the finite, but asks us to venture into
the infinite with an eye to a return to the finite, by which we are continually
disciplined and corrected for our false fanaticism — that is, if we remain open
to correction, and do not hold onto our infinite ideals at the cost of the finite.
Kierkegaard is not chiding the secular mentality for not being open to fanatics
(though there are times when he seems to relish such openness), but for its
inability (that is, unwillingness) to fathom that there is a passionate, enthu-
siastic and earnest movement toward the ideal that flies in the face of probabil-
ity, moderation, and all the other virtues of the secular mentality.
The Ultimate Rebellion of Spiritlessness

Here we see how the seeds (or potential) for evil are found in the structure of
the self, particularly in terms of how the spiritless self abides in a rebellion
against the Good. This rebellion consists of an unwillingness on the part of
the secular mentality to come to terms with an unconditioned require-
ment — that is, with an ideal upon which one will stake one's entire life, with-
out demanding control over the consequences that follow from it. Indeed, the
secular mentality seeks to abolish the unconditioned. Kierkegaard says that in
abandoning the unconditioned requirement 'it is really you [God] that people
want to abolish, and this is why I cling so firmly to it and denounce sensible-
ness, which by abolishing the unconditioned requirement wants to abolish
you'. ' This is, in Schelling's words, an attempt to usurp the universal will,
and to establish existence on the basis of one's particular will, or a humanly
established order. Kierkegaard views this as the idolatry of our age. The
secular mentality wants to be in control of existence - determine the order of
existence — and to this end it must become the sole judge of reality, even God's
reality. With this we move into an area of rebellion where spiritless pride
becomes apparent; we attempt, as C. S. Lewis says, to put 'God in the dock'.
Lewis writes,
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person
approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the
judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a
reasonable defence for being the God who permits war, poverty and disease,
he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the
important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock. 75
Kierkegaard expresses this same idea:
God is not like something one buys in a shop, or like a piece of property that
one, after having sagaciously and circumspectively examined, measured
and calculated for a long time, decides is worth buying. With regard to God,
it is the ungodly calmness with which the indecisive person wants to begin
(indeed, he wants to begin with doubt), precisely this that is the insubordi-
nation, because in this way God is thrust down from the throne, from being
the master. When one has done that, one actually has already chosen another
master, self-will, and then becomes the slave of indecisiveness.
What Kierkegaard despises about this rebellion is its movement toward an

indolent, disconsolate spiritlessness, as the attempt is made to put the particu-
lar self-will in the place of the universal will. The secular mentality is the
means by which the modern age has sought to achieve this most human of
endeavours. It has found that the best way to get rid of God's universal will is
not through a frontal attack, but by simply letting God slip from our mem-
ories. Kierkegaard would welcome a wholehearted (unconditional) attack
against God; at least this is passionate, and therefore contains something of
spirit in it. To be offended by God may be an unhappy relationship to the infi-
nite and eternal, but at least it is a relationship — at least one is still before God.
For all Nietzsche's atheism, his enthusiastic attacks were at least right in the
face of God.
What Kierkegaard detests is 'disconsolateness': a refusal to find any conso-
lation in what is higher. Disconsolateness chooses to sink into spiritless empti-
ness, where it can be left alone in its own little world, see itself as king and
master, and find at least some contentment within its little kingdom:
What is disconsolateness? Not even the wildest scream of pain or the pre-
sumptuousness of despair, however terrible, is disconsolate. But this under-
standing with oneself, arrived at in dead silence, that everything higher
is lost, although one can still go on living if only nothing reminds one of
it - this is disconsolateness. Not even to grieve disconsolately, but to have
entirely ceased to grieve, to be able to lose God in such a way that one
becomes utterly indifferent and does not even find life intolerable — that is
disconsolateness and is also the most terrible kind of disobedience, more ter-
rible than any defiance — to hate God, to curse him, is not so terrible as to
lose him in this way or, what is the same thing, to lose oneself.77
It is here where we see the notion of evil begin to become dialectical in Kier-
kegaard, for when he speaks of defiance, he is speaking of a radical, spiritual
evil that consciously rages against the Good or God. This is, in a way, the
strongest intensification of evil. And yet here he says spiritless disconsolateness
is more terrible still. This seems inconsistent, in that he sees the weakest form of
evil (a mere potential for evil) as more terrible than the more actualized forms.
What Kierkegaard sees as terrible in disconsolateness, however, is not its
weakness, but the comfortable and secure way it unconsciously gives up the
Good, and the fact that it has so easily spread throughout Western society.
Kierkegaard condemns the established order of Western society as being thor-
oughly permeated by a rebellion against the Good, and just because the rebel-
lion is unconscious and takes place in the most normal and 'moral' actions does
not mean that it is less dangerous and perhaps even more insidious than con-
scious evil. What is so terrible about disconsolateness is not that it acts in
'immoral' or criminal ways, but that it rebels with such happy lukewarmness.
It may appear pious, and yet it lacks all conscience:
Of course, a lack of conscience does not manifest itself as criminal acts —

which would be foolish, stupid, and ill-advised — no, no, it manifests itself
with moderation, to a certain degree, and then with taste and culture; it
makes life cozy and comfortable - but yet is it not too much to make it into
earnestness and culture!',78
Such people put their individual wills over the universal will. They are com-
pletely self-centred, seeking only what brings them comfort. If called on by the
'right' circumstances, the most horrendous acts will be enthusiastically com-
mitted, though not out of any conscious defiance of the Good, but simply for
the sake of comfort. This form of evil is most likely to be committed against
those who have come to be viewed as enemies of such comfort.
What is also terrible about this form of rebellion is that the self has lost com-
plete contact with the Good. When this happens we become too spiritless to see
the loss we have suffered, and we lack the concern for ourselves necessary to be
passionate about the 'death of God'. Kierkegaard lived in a time when God's
death was taking place. He is, in a sense, the Nietzschean 'madman', at whom
the crowd laughs. He has not overstated the loss of spirit, but I believe it is
more likely that we have not sufficiently appreciated our loss. We no longer
have enough spirit even to grieve the death of God. When Nietzsche pro-
claimed that God was dead, he asked,
Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the

breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more
night coming all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we
not hear anything yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God?
Do we not smell anything yet of God's decomposition? Gods too decompose.
God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, the
murderers of all murderers comfort ourselves?'>79
We comfort ourselves through the disconsolateness of worldliness, and

mock any ideal not conditioned (sanctioned) by our culture. Like Nietzsche,
Kierkegaard recognizes that the death of God is a trivial joke for Western
civilization, and believes it will remain so. To feel the loss of God would be a
sign of earnestness and spirit, but to lose God as if one has lost nothing at all,
this is what makes spiritlessness so offensive to Kierkegaard:
To lose something trivial in such a way that one does not pick it up, well,
that perhaps is all right, but to lose one's own self (to lose God) in such a
way that one does not even care to bend down to pick it up, or in such a
way that it entirely escapes one that one has lost it! Oh, what terrible perdi-
tion! Not only is there certainly an infinite difference between what one loses
and what one loses, but also between how one loses. To lose God in such a
way that one takes offense at him, is indignant with him or groans against
him; to lose God in such a way t h a t . . . one despairs over it - but to lose God
as if he were nothing, and as if it were nothing!
The Single Individual

It is with this that we come to one of Kierkegaard's most important categories:
'the single individual'. The difference between one who feels the death of God
in the innermost being, and those who are spiritlessly disconsolate, is that the
former is a single individual, while the latter are lost in the crowd. One can
relate to God - whether in faith or defiance only as a single individual,
never as a member of the crowd: 'only as an individual can a man ever relate
himself most truly to God, for he can best have the perception of his own
unworthiness alone; it is impossible to make this really clear to another
person.' In the midst of the crowd, one no longer feels the heat of the univer-
sal will's all-consuming fire, nor does one shiver in the coldness as the fire goes
out. The spiritless person is never alone, because there is tranquillity and com-
fort within the established order and the crowd. It is because of this deadly
comfort that Kierkegaard picks up the category of 'the single individual'
with such fervency. He says that Tn times of peace the category "the single
individual," is the category of awakening; when everything is peaceful,
secure, and indolent - and the ideal has vanished - then the single individual
is awakening.'
In order to see why this category is so important for awakening from the
spiritless despair that abides in the finite, we will first examine what Kierke-
gaard calls the 'established order'.
The Established Order and the Crowd

According to Kierkegaard,
The worldly point of view always clings closely to the difference between
man and man, and has naturally no understanding (since to have it is
spirituality) of the one thing needful, and therefore no understanding of that

limitation and narrowness which is to have lost oneself, not by being volati-
lized in the infinite, but by being altogether finitized, by instead of being a
self, having become a cipher, one more person, one more repetition of this
perpetual Einerlei [one-and-the-same].
It is ironic that those within the secular mentality look for ways to distinguish
themselves from others — distinguish in the sense of gaining honor, being 'on
top', succeeding, being more talented, and so forth - and yet do so from
within a levelling that seeks to destroy all distinctions. This is the case because,
within the crowd, one is always looking to others to see what it means to be a
successful human being, so that one discovers who one is and what is possible
only from the crowd. This causes a narrowing of possibilities, in which one
loses oneself to the way things are done within the established order, to the
possibilities it gives, and to what it requires of an individual. In a spiritless
group 'one becomes a human being by aping others. One does not know by
himself that he is a human being but through an inference: he is like the
others — therefore he is a human being. Only God knows whether any of
us is that!'
Kierkegaard is not against human communities and groups per se, but only
as they are used as sources of evasion. When this happens, it is necessary to
point to the single individual as the only way in which a person can again feel
the responsibility of what it means to be a human being:
Nowadays the principle of association . . . is not positive but negative; it is an

escape, a distraction and an illusion. Dialectically the position is this: the
principle of association, by strengthening the individual, enervates him; it
strengthens numerically, but ethically that is a weakening. It is only after
the individual has acquired an ethical outlook, in face of the whole world,
that there can be any suggestion of really joining together.
For Kierkegaard, then, pointing to 'the single individual' is an attempt to

awaken the conscience in the person who has become lost in the crowd:
Wanting to hide in the mass or the crowd, to be a little fraction of the crowd,
instead of being an individual, is the most corrupt of all escapes. Even if this
makes life easier by making it more thoughtless in the din — this is not the
question. The question is that of the responsibility of the individual — that every
individual human being ought to be a single individual, ought to make up
his mind about his conviction, just as in the next world eternity will single
out the busy one who thought he was in a group, single out the poorest
wretch who thought he was overlooked, single him out as individually
responsible, so distinctly individual that an eternity seems to lie between
him and the next man.
To destroy the sense of one's responsibility, is to destroy the unconditioned, or,

what amounts to the same thing, to make it conditioned on the established
order. The unconditioned requirement cannot be felt while being a part of
the crowd. Only by realizing one is singled out by all eternity, only then can
the full force of the unconditioned requirement be felt. And yet it is this that
the established order and crowd cannot tolerate: 'nothing so offends sensible-
ness as the unconditioned, and . . . sensibleness will never unconditionally
acknowledge any requirement but continually claims itself to be the one that
declares what kind of requirement is to be made'.88
While spirit seeks the ascension and expansion in the consciousness that
comes from being before the unconditioned requirement as a single individual,
spiritlessness seeks to make life easier by a continual lowering of the bar;
indeed, it seeks to get rid of the bar altogether, replacing the universal will
with the particular will of the established order. This, of course, is all done in
such a way as to create the illusion that we are all ascending. Kierkegaard
gives an analogy of this lowering that interprets itself as an ascension:
Imagine a school, let it have a class of one hundred pupils, all of the same
age, who are supposed to learn the same thing and have the same criterion.
To be number seventy and below is to be far down in the class. Now, if the
other thirty pupils from number seventy had the idea that they might be
allowed to form a class by themselves. If so, then number seventy would
be number one in the class. That would be an advancement, yet, well, it
might be put that way, but according to my conception that would be sink-
ing even lower, sinking into contemptible false self-satisfaction, because it is still
much higher to put up willingly with being number seventy according to a
genuine criterion. . . . What is spiritlessness? It is to have changed the criterion by
leaving out the ideals, to have changed the criterion in accord with how we human beings
who now live here in this place happen to be.89
Kierkegaard is speaking to Christendom here, to those who profess to be

Christians, and yet whose criterion has become so low as to abolish Christian-
ity altogether. He says that instead of imitating Christ as an ideal, 'there is ...
being like everybody else, and being a little bit better is greatness'. In the
midst of this regression there will be a continual message that progress is
taking place, though the reality is that we are becoming less and less human.
Only as the single individual facing eternity - God or death - is one able to
break free from this illusion. The situation is much like that described by
Ivan Ilych as he faced death:
'It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up.
And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the
same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there
is only death.'"
One finds one's worth in conformity with the crowd, while detachment from
the group becoming a single individual is to become insignificant. The
crowd also provides a sense of significance and worth when everything has
lost its meaning, and in this way helps us maintain our self-deception.
Primitivity
To ape others is to lack primitivity. Primitivity is to stand before God as a
single individual — in one's particularity an individual with a facticity and
past, and who is also open to the ideal and the future. Evading oneself by
hiding in the crowd is based on the presupposition that one cannot go wrong
in life if one simply does what everyone else is doing, and remains within the
status quo. However, it is in this place of comfort and security that one loses
oneself. Kierkegaard writes,
For every human being is primitively organized as a self, characteristically

determined to become himself; and although indeed every such self has
sharp edges, that means only that it is to be worked smooth, not ground
away, not through fear of man wholly abandon being itself, or even through
fear of man simply not dare to be itself in that more essential contingency
(which precisely is not to be ground away) in which a person is still himself
for himself.
The unconditioned requirement, before which each person stands and gains
significance, differs from person to person, for we each have our own facticity
to deal with, our own limitations to be overcome and transcended, and our
own needs. We are rough to begin with, and must be worked smooth, but
our shape is given by the unconditioned itself, and is done only as a single indi-
vidual - definitely not in any comparison to others. There is to be no turning
to the right or to the left, checking oneself against others, seeing how one
measures up against them. The only concern is to stand alone before God, and
take up the task existence has laid upon you. One cannot check to see if one is
fulfilling one's task by comparing oneself to others. No other person can
be used as a crutch or support. We are called to be engaged with God, to be
uplifted, and transformed. The infinite requirement calls us to the task of
becoming more than we were before. The crowd and the established order
know absolutely nothing about this uplifting; indeed, it is their goal to make
sure the criterion for being human becomes more and more paltry, all for the
sake of comfort and self-esteem. Actually, the established order does not really
provide a criterion, but an evasion of all criteria, for nothing is sacred, and
nothing is free from the danger of being overthrown tomorrow - replaced by
its opposite.
Given all this, the problem becomes how, in a completely spiritless age, we
can become a 'single individual', and begin the journey toward spirit. Kierke-
gaard has little optimism of being able to free ourselves from finitude's despair
and its concomitant levelling: 'The abstract levelling process, that self-com-
bustion of the human race, produced by the friction which arises when the
individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue, like
a trade wind, and consume everything.' This lack of optimism may be
another reason Kierkegaard focuses in on the category of'the single indivi-
dual'. He is pessimistic about a mass movement toward spirit: such a move-
ment would be, given the current situation, a contradiction. Thus, the only
hope is for each individual to move toward spirit alone by picking up the
unconditioned requirement. A movement out of spiritlessness is possible, if
we are willing to recognize and choose despair. It is a somewhat paradoxical
choice, but Kierkegaard sees it as essential for a movement out of the spiritless-
ness of the aesthetic stage of existence. With this choice the self takes itself, for
the first time, as a task to be picked up. This does not mean despair is comple-
tely overcome; it may be the case that despair is intensified, for there are forms
of evil that are neither weak, ignorant, nor lacking in spirit. We will now turn
to this movement out of spiritlessness.
Notes
1. EUD, pp. 162-3.

2. EUD, pp. 163-4.
3. SUD, p. 43.
4. John W. Elrod. Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works. Princeton:
Princeton UP, 1975, p. 40.
5. Elrod, 10.
6. EUD, p. 164.
7. EUD, p. 165.
8. Niccolo Machiavelli. The Prince. Trans. Daniel Donno. New York: Bantam
Books, 1985, p. 84.
9. CD, pp. 21-2.
10. EUD, p. 165.
11. SUD, pp. 43-4.
12. EUD, p. 167.
13. There are several syntheses by which to analyze the structures of the self (for
example, the eternal and the temporal, possibility and necessity, ideality and
actuality). I have chosen the synthesis of the infinite and finite because of the par-
ticular issues it presents in terms of a potential or spiritless evil.
14. Karl Rahner. Theological Investigations: Volume II (Man in the Church). Trans. Karl-
H. Kruger. Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1967, p. 248.
15. Karl Rahner, The Hearer of the Word. Trans. Joseph Donceel. New York: Conti-
nuum, 1994, pp. 79-80.
16. Nietzsche was also aware of the distinction between acts of freedom, and 'acts'
which are born out of bondage to the external. He writes, 'All truly noble moral-
ity grows out of a triumphant self-affirmation. Slave ethics, on the other hand,
begins by saying no to an "outside," an "other," a non-self, and that no is its crea-
tive act. This reversal of direction of the evaluating look, this invariable looking
outward instead of inward, is a fundamental feature of rancor. Slave ethics
requires for its inception a sphere different from and hostile to its own. Physio-
logically speaking, it requires an outside stimulus in order to act at all; all its
action is reaction' (Friedrich Nietzsche. The Geneaology of Morals. The Birth of Tra-
gedy and The Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Francis Golffing, pp. 146-299. New York:
Doubleday, 1956, pp. 170-1).
17. SUD, p. 134.
18. SUD, p. 134.
19. SUD, p. 134 (my emphasis).
20. Frederick Buechner. Listening to Your Life. Ed. George Connor. San Francisco:
Harper/Collins, 1992, p. 267.
21. CUP, pp. 312-13.
22. Quoted in Louis P. Pojman's Classics of Philosophy, New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998, pp. 902-3.
23. CUP, pp. 16-17.
24. CA, p. 149 (my emphasis).
25. CA, p. 149 (my emphasis).
26. It should be noted that it is in these leaps that evil finds its intensification, just as
all selfhood is intensified in these qualitative leaps. The self finds more and more
integration (integrity) within its personality as it is in-gathered through these
passionate leaps.
27. CA, p. 149.
28. SUD, pp. 59-60.
29. Merold Westphal. 'Kierkegaard's Psychology of Unconscious Despair' in Interna-
tional Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness Unto Death. Ed. Robert L. Perkins,
pp. 39-66. Macon, Georgia: Mercer UP, 1987, p. 56.
30. SUD, p. 59.
31. SUD, pp. 60-1.
32. JRNLII,#1832.
33. EUD, p. 93 (my emphasis).
34. PH, p. 118.
35. SUD, p. 61.
36. PH, pp. 1 1 3-14 (my emphasis).
37. Nietzsche, 1956, p. 189.
38. SUD, p. 62.
39. JFY,p. 135-6.
40. JFY, p. 133.
41. FS, p. 44.
42. JFY, p. 115-16.
43. Nicolas Berdyaev. The Destiny of Man. New York: Harper & Row, 1960, pp. 6—7.
44. JFY, p. 105.
45. JFY, p. 115.
46. JFY, p. 116.
47. Not only is faith without works dead, but so is knowledge without works.
48. JFY, p. 118.
49. SUD, p. 61.
50. PA, pp. 67-9.
51. JFY, p. 118.
52. FS, p. 38.
53. 2 Samuel 12: 1-13.
54. JFY, p. 119.
55. CUP, pp. 306-7.
56. CUP, p. 545.
57. SUD, p. 47.
58. SUD, p. 63.
59 JFY, p. 118.
60. CA, p. 95.
61. SUD, p. 65.
62. 'Precisely by losing himself in this way, such a person gains all that is required for
a flawless performance in everyday life, yes, for making a great success out of life.
. . . Far from anyone thinking him to be in despair, he is just what a human being
ought to be' (SUD, p. 64).
63. EUD,p.300.
64. PH, p. 127.
65. JFY, p. 97.
66. JFY, p. 99.
67. JFY, p. 102.
68. JFY, pp. 99-100.
69. JFY, pp. 104-5. In Christian Discourses Kierkegaard writes, 'The world does not
truly hate evil but loathes what is unsagacious, that is, it loves evil' (p. 181).
70. SUD, pp. 64-5.
71. William James. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Ed. John
J. McDermott. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977, p. 312.
72. JFY, p. 113.
73. JFY, p. 167.
74. JFY, pp. 102-3.
75. C. S. Lewis. God In the Dock: Essays On Theology and Ethics. Ed. Walter Hooper.
Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1970, p. 244.
76. CD, pp. 88-9.
77. CD, p. 90.
78. FS, p. 40.
79. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Gay Science. From The Portable Nietzsche. Trans, and Ed.
Walter Kaufmann, pp. 93-102. New York: Penguin, 1976, p. 95.
80. CD, p. 90.
81. JRNL II, #2009.
82. JRNL II, #2014.
83. SUD, p. 63.
84. CD, p. 40.
85. JRNL III, 3,558.
86. PA, p. 79. This same theme of evasion is expressed in The Sickness Unto Death: 'By
seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly
affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a
divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself
too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a
number, along with the crowd.' (pp. 63-4).
87. JRNL II, 1996 (my emphasis).
88. JFY, p. 155.
89. JFY, pp. 199-200 (my emphasis).
90. JFY, p. 200.
91. Leo Tolstoy. The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories. Trans. Aylmer Maude,
pp. 95-156. New York: Signet, 1960, p. 148.
92. PA, pp. 52-3.
93. SUD, p. 63.
94. PA, pp. 55-6.
2
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence
In the preceding chapter we looked at despair in terms of the structure of the

self, specifically, in how the structure allows for the possibility of spiritless
forms of despair. As we move into the intensification of despair, the issues of
self-consciousness and freedom become central, because the self becomes
more and more conscious of its state of despair, and begins to choose itself in
this self-knowledge. This choosing involves the basic distinction between good
and evil. With regard to the choice of evil, an increase in consciousness results
in an intensification of despair. The most intense despair is completely trans-
parent to itself. Kierkegaard writes, 'The devil's despair is the most intense
despair, for the devil is pure spirit and to that extent absolute consciousness
and transparency: in the devil there is no obscurity as a mitigating excuse; his
despair is therefore the most absolute defiance.'
The ability to evade despair is central to the issue of self-consciousness. The
less consciousness one has of oneself, the more pockets that exist in which to
hide from facing one's rebellion against the Good. If despair persists as con-
sciousness grows, there are less pockets of obscurity, and the act of despair
becomes more and more a conscious act — a growing awareness that one is
seeking to evade the Good. If consciousness continues to develop, then the
pockets become practically non-existent. At this point the rebellion against
the Good is no longer a matter of seeking a place in which to evade one's
responsibility, but a conscious willing against the Good. It should be noted,
however, that both spiritlessness and defiance are grounded in a despair over
the Good, and the self s misrelationship to it.
In the preceding chapter I have argued that, according to Kierkegaard, the
weaker forms of despair have their own modes of danger, and are able to
engage in horrendous acts in order to evade responsibility to the Good. Spirit-
less despair has no concern about the Good, and relates to the world and itself
in terms of comfort and security. We have seen that, at times, Kierkegaard
wishes the more intense forms of despair would manifest themselves in place
of the weaker; what he is really wishing for is more consciousness, and more
self-knowledge. Just as Socrates recognized that those who are unaware of
their own ignorance are furthest from the Good (wisdom), Kierkegaard
knew that those who are unaware of their despair have the least relation to
the Good. The danger of spiritlessness is this lack of relation. The more intense
forms of despair have a closer relationship to the Good (this closeness is
something to be desired), and yet because their rebellion against the Good is
more intense, there is an intensification of despair and evil (something that
is not desirable).
The strongest form of despair is more dangerous than spiritlessness in terms
of its qualitative character - it is qualified as spirit. As spirit it is not concerned
about comfort, but has taken possession of itself in its opposition to the Good.
Although those in unconscious despair are capable of enthusiastically commit-
ting terrible atrocities, they can still be kept in check — tamed, if you will — if
by nothing else than the fear of punishment. They are malleable, and are often
very law-abiding, though their obedience is based on self-concern, rather than
concern for the Good. A defiant evil, on the other hand, cannot be kept in
check so easily. It is spirit, and this means that it determines itself from itself,
and will do what it wills in self-conscious freedom. In this, it can become extre-
mely destructive.
We now turn to this intensification of despair by examining the move from
the aesthetic stage to the beginnings of the ethical stage. In the remaining chap-
ters we will be examining the ethical and religious stages in more detail. These
existence-stages move toward an ever-increasing consciousness of the self. The
development of this consciousness is portrayed by Kierkegaard in his pseudon-
ymous writings. Kierkegaard used pseudonyms in his authorship because each
book was written from the standpoint of someone within a particular existence-
stage; thus, since these books do not necessarily represent Kierkegaard's own
standpoint, he did not author them under his own name. Kierkegaard goes so
far as to say that nothing written by a pseudonym should be attributed to him,
just as one would not attribute a line spoken in Hamlet to a belief Shakespeare
himself held. The pseudonyms are to be regarded as performers in an extended
portrayal of the different stages of existence.
In The Sickness Unto Death, the pseudonym Anti-climacus looks at the
increase of consciousness - from spiritlessness to defiance — in terms of an
intensification of despair. This analysis coincides with the general growth
of consciousness portrayed in Kierkegaard's other pseudonymous works.
Because this movement from one existence stage to another is always accom-
panied by the despair of the preceding existence-stage, it would be reasonable
to expect that what is written in The Sickness Unto Death will tie in well with the
movement through the various stages of existence. I believe this is the case.
However, since Kierkegaard was no system builder, it is by no means worked
out systematically. Existence does not allow for a completely closed system,
because consciousness fluctuates, as does despair, and so the various forms of
despair can be found in the various existence-stages. Still, a relatively cohesive
exposition can be given of the movement of consciousness, and its concomitant
movement of despair. What will be discovered is an ever-increasing inability
to evade oneself and one's task, along with a growing consciousness of how
weak one is in relation to this task. Despair arises out of this sense of weakness
and lack of control. In the end, the question is whether we will be crushed by
the responsibility placed on us — thereby having a heavy and hopeless rela-
tionship to the Good - or humbled by it, and so uplifted into a joyful relation-
ship with the Good through faith.
The Aesthetic Stage of Existence
Immediacy and the Enjoyment of Life

The spiritless form of despair falls under the aesthetic stage of existence. As we
have already seen, at this stage the self lives in such a way that it is not con-
scious of its self in any Kierkegaardian sense of the term. Two important qua-
lities characterize the aesthetic stage. First, it exists in immediacy, though this
does not mean aesthetes are devoid of reflection. Judge Wilhelm, who looks at
the aesthetic stage from the vantage point of the ethical, recognizes that
aesthetes may often live in very intense modes of reflection, though this reflec-
tion is by no means self-reflection. He writes,
It is not at all my intention to deny that in order to live esthetically . . .

a multiplicity of intellectual gifts may be necessary, indeed, that these may
even be intensively developed to an unusual degree, but they are still
enslaved and lack transparency. For example, there are animal species
that possess much sharper, much more powerful senses than human beings
do, but they are in bondage to animal instinct.
Thus, the reflection within the aesthetic stage is never able to separate
itself completely from its immediacy, no matter how philosophical or poetic
it may be.
The second quality of the aesthetic stage is the meaning and purpose it pro-
poses for life: aesthetes believe that the meaning and purpose of life is to enjoy
life. This life-view has as many variations as there are definitions of enjoyment,
though all the variations have in common the belief that certain conditions
must be met in order for life to be enjoyable, conditions that are 'not there by
virtue of the individual himself.
For some these conditions are completely external to the individual, such as
wealth, honour, status or free time (retirement). Thus, the task of existence
is found in the attainment of these conditions. For others, however, a condi-
tion for enjoyment may be found within the individual. As the Judge says,
'It is a talent for practical affairs, a talent for business, a talent for mathe-
matics, a talent for writing, a talent for art, a talent for philosophy. Satisfac-
tion in life, enjoyment, is sought in the unfolding of this talent.' This remains
immediacy because, at this level, the self remains a conglomeration of disorga-
nized forces, in which there is nothing higher than the immediate moment to
bring some talent, mood or thought to the fore. The aesthete does not have
control over these forces, and in this sense lacks a self that has taken hold of
itself. Aesthetes are at the prey of the moment, and have not developed person-
alities that encompass their entire lives. These forces are analogous to Schel-
ling's dark ground, which remains a seething cauldron of disorganized powers,
because it has not yet been penetrated by a higher ideal. No doubt certain
talents or capacities may be developed, but there is still no self that rules over
them as a whole; thus, they are organized by the need of the moment — what
the need is calling on for the sake of enjoyment.
The Various Forms of Spiritless Despair in the Aesthetic Stage of Existence

We will now move to the various forms of despair within the aesthetic stage.
While there is a rise in consciousness in these forms, none of them break com-
pletely free from immediacy, nor is the true nature of despair understood
by them.
The first form of despair is an unconsciousness of being in despair. To a
person at this level of despair, if life is pleasant and enjoyable, it would seem
ridiculous to speak of being in despair. Comfort and satisfaction are proof
enough that all is well. Anti-climacus tells us, however, that we are not to
trust the word of a completely sensate person concerning the self s health.
The person who measures human existence in terms of enjoyment has such a
low conception of the self that he or she is unable to assess the truth concerning
the health of the self. Anti-climacus writes: 'However vain and conceited
people may be, the conception they usually have of themselves is very
humble; that is, they have no conception of being spirit, the absolute that a
human can be.' What concerns and interests such people is not whether they
are in despair, but whether they are happy. What they fear more than being in
despair - what they fear more than being in error about the meaning of exis-
tence is being uncomfortable or bored. Anti-climacus says, however, no
matter how happy they are, they are nevertheless in despair:
Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally con-
scious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not
grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some
abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply
takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of
where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something; if
there were any question of accounting for its inner being, every such exis-
tence, however astounding its accomplishments, however much it can
account for even the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoy-
ment: every such life is none the less despair.
Though life goes on without a hitch, and grand things are accomplished,
one may nevertheless be in despair, because despair has reference to a deep
and profound level of the self — so deep that although the whole world be
gained, the despair will remain untouched. Despair can be felt only in the
shudder whose tremors reverberate deep into the soul. In the face of that
depth of the self, all the externals are merely diversions. Pascal illustrates this
well in his Pensees:
When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole
universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost
in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he
has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing
anything, I am moved to terror. . . . Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not
drive people to despair. I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask
them if they are any better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then
these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive
objects to which they become addicted and attached.
Though people are not 'moved to despair', Kierkegaard and Pascal have
recognized the depth of their hopelessness: they have such a meagre concep-
tion of the self, that they are unable to grasp the longing and pain that under-
lies all their activities. They cannot fathom that despair is not an issue of
circumstances — whether they are pleasant and enjoyable — but concerns a
lack of development, and hence the meaninglessness of their existence.
A higher form of despair may eventually arise in the aesthetic individual, a
form Anti-climacus calls 'Pure Immediacy'. In this form of despair there is
a small rise in reflection within the aesthetic stage, due to a person's inability
to make the world go his or her way. While despair is acknowledged, its true
source remains dark - it is still essentially ignorant of despair - because it
believes as life becomes better, the despair will disappear. The person in pure
immediacy believes despair consists in losing something in the world or some-
thing temporal, when in reality it consists in the loss of the self— the self's
unwillingness to grasp its eternal validity, and the task for which it was estab-
lished. The presence of despair is felt within 'pure immediacy' only because an
item that was being used to cover up the real source of despair was lost. Thus,
with the loss of this item, the despair hidden beneath the surface shows itself,
though the true source of despair is not recognized. When the fortunes of the
world are good, life is enjoyable; when the fortunes turn bad, one 'despairs'.
This is a passive relation to the world, in which the self relates to itself through
the conditions of its circumstances: 'there is no infinite consciousness of the self,
of what despair is, or of the state's being one of despair. The despair is mere
passivity, a succumbing to external pressure; it comes not at all from within
,9
as an action.
Thus, despair is thought to be the result of unfortunate external circum-
stances. The self is so connected and possessed by the world, the only way for
it to sense its despair is for the world to deal it a blow:
So he despairs . . . he calls it despair. But to despair is to lose the eternal —
and of this loss he says nothing, he doesn't dream of it. To lose the earthly is
not in itself to despair, and yet that is what he speaks of and he calls it
despair.
He is unaware that the struggle of life is not found in seeking what is tem-
poral — that which brings enjoyment to the sensate, and satisfies his immedi-
ate desires but in seeking what is eternal. And so he points at the wrong
object of despair: 'he stands there pointing at something that is not despair,
explaining that he is in despair, and yet, sure enough, the despair is going on
behind him unawares'.
As in all forms of the passive despair of spiritlessness, this is ultimately an
unwillingness to be oneself. 12 Since the self does not even have enough self to
will to be itself, it wishes it were someone else: it says to itself, 'If only I could
have been born wealthy (or beautiful, athletic, intelligent, and so forth), then
I would be a happy self People at this level of consciousness have come to
identify themselves so much by externals that they believe they can change
their selves by changing their externals. They try to gain a different self by
buying a better model car, changing careers, wearing designer clothes, per-
haps losing some weight, undergoing any number of surgical augmentations,
or even by changing relationships. Anti-climacus says, 'One imagines a self
(and next to God there is nothing so eternal as a self), and then one imagines
it occurring to a self whether it might not let itself be another — than itself.' *
If life has dealt a sufficient number of blows, more reflection might arise,
though without moving the person out of immediacy. Eventually the realiza-
tion may arise that life is not always — or even often — enjoyable, and so the
belief that life brings enjoyment simply of itself begins to fade. Enjoyment is
no longer to be found immediately in the experience, but reflectively. One
now becomes aware of one's enjoyment, and thus begins to enjoy one's enjoy-
ment — one enjoys oneself. This enjoyment is still connected to the external
world because 'although he, as he says, enjoys himself only in the enjoyment,
but the enjoyment itself is linked to an external condition'.
Since the external world has let one down so many times, the capacity to
lose oneself completely in the world is weakened. This shows that a separation
has taken place — however small and ethically insignificant between the
external and internal, so that there is a recognition that the self is somewhat
disconnected from the external. The importance of this is that the conditions of
enjoyment can, to some extent, be discarded, so that one is not so easily
amused by bread and circuses. One's tastes become more refined, and there is
a desire for higher forms of amusement. What the moment offers is no longer
enough, because one knows it will more than likely leave one dissatisfied and
even bored in the end; therefore, one dresses up what the moment gives,
adding to it through reflection, and enjoying oneself reflectively. Through
the despair of pure immediacy, one has learned that the world does not
always flow with milk and honey, no guarantees have been handed out by exis-
tence, and so one must learn to intercede on one's behalf. Still, the purpose of
such a life-view, no matter how much it is couched in the language of self-
development (see, for instance, Oprah], is still enjoyment within the temporal,
and so remains enamoured by a temporal goal.
This life-view also ends in a particular type of despair, which Anti-climacus
calls the despair of'reflective immediacy'. Whereas pure immediacy comple-
tely identified itself with the world, and thus could only sense its despair when
the world dealt it a blow, reflective immediacy has come to realize that its self
is 'essentially different from the environment and the external world and their
effect upon it'.15 Thus a small amount of reflection becomes the basis for this
despair. This can happen in two ways. First, the self may reflect upon itself in
terms of its situation, and come to recognize weaknesses and imperfections
that make it recoil.1 As in all cases of spiritless despair, its despair is in its
unwillingness to be itself, to own this less-than-adequate self. The second way
it despairs is through its imagination, which is able to discover a possibility
that would wrench it out of its immediate contact with the world. Perhaps it
reflects on a possible physical illness, or a failure in some worldly endeavour.
Whatever it may be, this reflection causes it to despair.
In all this, however, the aesthete remains in immediacy in a very important
sense: the thought of the possibility of a catastrophe or failure is still always
related to the external world. The weakness found is seen as something to des-
pair over only because one is still relating to the world in an immediate way.
Reflective immediacy is too possessed by the finite to venture into the infinite
in any ethical sense:
The difficulty he has stumbled on requires a complete break with immedi-
acy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that.
He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from all
externality. This self, naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self
of immediacy. 17
Thus, although one has a sense of being separate from the world, a com-
plete break with it has not been achieved, and so one cannot stop seeking one's
nourishment from the world. In the end, one still loves the world too much to
give it up.
Anti-climacus uses an analogy to clarify what is happening within reflective
immediacy:
His relation to the self is like that of a man to his place of residence which
may come to disgust him because of the smoke or whatever other reason.
So he leaves it, but he does not move away, he does not establish a new resi-
dence, he continues to regard the old one as his address, he reckons the pro-
blem will pass. So too with the person in despair. As long as the difficulty
remains, he dares not (as the saying so suggestively puts it) 'come to
himself; he does not want to be himself. But no doubt it will vanish, perhaps
it will change, the sombre possibility will surely be forgotten.
The despair has become more personal at this point, in that the self is becom-
ing something over which one despairs, though the self is still not self-conscious
enough to remain with itself, and to face its failures in any decisive manner.
If the difficulty does not pass, it may decide to give up reflection and this whole
business of inwardness, diving back into pure immediacy, and again lose itself
in the world and its desires. If, however, it has sufficient strength to stay with
the difficulty, it may move into a deeper form of aestheticism ('despair itself),
where the knowledge of human failings and weaknesses actually become a
source of enjoyment. At this level, the self is no longer at stake in the fortunes
and misfortunes of external circumstances, because it recognizes that all of
existence ends in misfortune. Still, it does not give up the view that the purpose
of life is enjoyment. The aesthete has recognized the despair of finding life in
external conditions, though this recognition is not grasped in a way that the
aesthetic existence itself is despaired of. True to the aesthetic stage of existence,
the aesthete has found this despair to be interesting. Although such
aesthetes' thinking and art may reach depths beyond any of their predecessors,
both the philosopher and artist stand 'outside' existence as observers and non-
participants (that is, remain indifferent to their own existences), and so
remain within the aesthetic stage.
Thus, the aesthete may come to the place of recognizing the meaningless-
ness, incoherence, and emptiness of the aesthetic existence. The author of
Part I of Either/Or is called simply 'A', and is a representative of the aesthetic
stage of existence. He writes,
My life is utterly meaningless. When I consider its various epochs, my life is

like the word Schnur in the dictionary, which first of all means string, and
second a daughter-in-law. All that is lacking is that in the third place
Schnur means camel, in the fourth a whisk broom. 20
Just as there is nothing unifying the various meanings of the word Schnur, so
there is nothing that unifies the various decades or years of A's life. True,
the general purpose and meaning are said to be enjoyment, but because the
objects and conditions of this purpose change from moment to moment, there
is nothing higher that ties these moments together into a meaningful whole.
As an aesthete, A does not become horrified by this knowledge; indeed, he
seems barely to have been touched by it. He does not grieve for himself, for
others, or for the human race in general. Ever the aesthete, he simply finds
his source of enjoyment in this meaninglessness. He writes,
When I was very young, I forgot in the Trophonean cave how to laugh; when
I became an adult, when I opened my eyes and saw actuality, then I started
to laugh and have not stopped laughing since that time. I saw that the mean-
ing of life was to make a living, its goal to become a councilor, that the
rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of
friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was
whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to give a
speech, that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars, that cordiality was
to say 'May it do you good' after a meal, that piety was to go to communion
once a year. This I saw, and I laughed. 21
While A can see through the shallowness of the lowest levels of love, friendship,
passion, courage, cordiality and religion he is much too cynical to see the pos-
sibility of any higher manifestations of these human pursuits. He can access
and understand them only in regards to his low conception of human exis-
tence. All higher ideals appear to be nonsense to him, because they are beyond
his meaning-structure.
Kierkegaard calls this type of recognition of meaninglessness 'finite resigna-
tion', because the aesthete does not resign the finite for the sake of something
higher - namely, to become himself- but does so for the sake of enjoying the
finite.22 The irony in this situation is that, although A realizes nothing in
the finite can satisfy him, this very thought does, somehow, satisfy him. In the
initial stage of finite resignation, there can be a light-heartedness that takes
nothing seriously, and often such aesthetes can have an amazing sense of
humour, as they make light of, and show the insignificance of others' self-
importance and pretentiousness. In all of this, however, the aesthete is evading
the task of becoming a self. A uses his laughter in order to cover over what is
missing in his life: because his life is empty, all of existence becomes trivial
for him, a mere joke for his own amusement. He finds great satisfaction in his
ability to see what others cannot recognize, and pats himself on the back for
his astute observations of the finer nuances of this great comedy. In all this,
however, A laughs to hide his fear: he does not have the courage to appropriate
the despair existentially, because when he does he will have transcended the
aesthetic stage, and will have surrendered enjoyment as the meaning of life.
As finite resignation increases, the greatest danger the aesthete faces is bore-
dom, and so this dark spiritlessness drinks from the cup of enjoyment in ever
deeper gulps in its attempt to escape boredom's persevering encroachment;
this, in turn, causes the cup to be emptied even quicker. Spiritlessness finds it
more and more difficult to be interested in anything for very long, and must
have a constant flow of novelty. There is a growing hunger, which nothing in
the world seems to satisfy, and yet which demands a constant flow of new
diversions. As something new is discovered, it is ravenously seized upon;
then, when it has been consumed, the spiritless person again sinks into inactiv-
ity, not out of satisfaction, but in a boredom that remains starved.
At this point life becomes a dark comedy, and this darkness provides the
sustenance the aesthete desires. A begins to feed off the intense feelings of
the darker and more sorrowful aspects of life. He writes, 'Life for me has
become a bitter drink, and yet it must be taken in drops, slowly, counting.' 23
He feels alive only in the midst of his pain. It is not surprising, then, that
depression becomes a constant — and often welcome - companion. A says,
'My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known no wonder, then,
that I return the love.' Depression becomes a refreshing relief from the dry-
ness of existence. Pain and sorrow at least have an intensity desire can latch
onto, while the malaise of a lukewarm existence feels like death. And so A wel-
comes pain as a relief. He writes,
Cornelius Nepos tells of a general who was kept confined with a consider-
able cavalry regiment in a fortress; to keep the horses from being harmed
because of too much inactivity, he had them whipped daily in like
manner, I live in this age as one besieged, but lest I be harmed by sitting
still so much, I cry myself tired.
In its most intense forms, the aesthete may seek out physical pain as a means of
relief from the encroaching consciousness of despair.
The aesthete at this level has too much reflection to go back to pure imme-
diacy, and yet all enjoyment has been sucked out of life. In the face of this des-
pair, the Judge gives some strange advice: Choose despair! The Judge tells A to
choose himself in his eternal validity - the task of self-becoming - by choosing
despair. A is to leap into the ethical stage of existence by despairing of the aes-
thetic life. He must appropriate the despair into himself, thus moving beyond
it. Choosing despair is a choice for becoming oneself, and for gaining one's
personality, by gathering oneself away from the multiplicity of immediacy.
In choosing despair one 'activates' one's will for the first time, gathering one's
life around this absolute choice. In reality, choosing despair is not something
an aesthete does, it is an ethical act.
The Ethical Stage of Existence: Self-Choice
The Negative Choice of Choosing Despair

The ethical stage consists in choosing oneself. It begins, however, with the
negative choice of choosing despair, which brings about a leap from the aes-
thetic stage into the ethical. The last form of aestheticism described above is a
kind of transitional point: it is still connected to the aesthetic view that life is to
be lived for enjoyment, though it has discovered that sorrow and unhappiness
are the inevitable results of this pursuit. Even if the aesthete tries to cover this
realization through busyness or diversions, it can never be completely
escaped: 'it will still break out at certain moments, more terrible than ever.
. . . What, then, is there to do? I have only one answer: Despair, then!'26
The Judge says that A is like a woman in labour who is terrified at what is
demanding to be born, and distressed at the pain it will cause. What A fears is
the responsibility of the task his self puts on him. He wants to continue to take
existence lightly, and yet, because the eternal remains a part of who he is, the
triviality of his light-mindedness is too sorrowful for him to stand. And so the
Judge tells him to give birth to his despair, which is nothing less than giving
birth to himself.27
As I watch and interact with my students who are in the midst of this strug-
gle, and I listen to their dissatisfaction with what the world has to offer, I am
struck by their refusal to free themselves from the world — that is, to give up on
the world. If I ask them about an ideal they might want to live for, they can
usually formulate some vague 'something' they feel passionate about — some
thing that has nothing to do with worldly success and enjoyment. If I ask what
this ideal might mean for them, they have a sense that it would entail a radical
change in the direction of their lives, and a revaluation of their values (how
they measure what is significant and insignificant). As we talk about this
change, it does not take long before the uncertainty that is a part of every
ideal causes the student to wonder whether the risk would be worth it ('it',
meaning the world that will be given up). This is the fear and trembling the
Judge is pointing to in the analogy of the labouring woman. This struggle,
according to the Judge, is not an intellectual issue (a matter of certainty
about one's ideal), but a question of whether one has the courage to choose
against the worldly. He would say that this struggle is not with intellectual
doubt, but with 'personality's doubt'. 28
The Judge says that doubt is thought's despair, while despair is personality's
doubt. In other words, doubt is often less about intellectual honesty, than
about fear and timidity; unwilling to risk one's life on a thought content that
is uncertain, one puts doubt between the thought and the action. When this
unwillingness to risk is attached to one's very existence, and to the overall
direction of one's life (to the personality, or the self one is), then one remains
hidden in dreams, terror and depression. Thus, Kierkegaard does not regard
doubt as a sign of intellectual freedom (freedom from prejudices, ideologies
and so forth), but as that which oppresses, entraps and keeps one from acting.
Despair, then, is the personality's unwillingness to give birth to itself because
of its doubt and fear its lack of faith, if you will. This doubt is not broken by
methodically working through life's uncertainties — which would be an end-
less task anyway. To choose despair is to take hold of one's existential doubt
in a free resolution. In this choice one moves beyond personality's doubt into
the openness of freedom and self-knowledge. This break is not done quantita-
tively - through a methodical building up of knowledge - but through a leap.
The Judge tells A, 'Generally speaking a person cannot despair, a person
must will it; but when he truly wills it, he is truly beyond despair. When a
person has truly chosen despair, he has chosen what despair chooses: himself
in his eternal validity.' 29
Self-Knowledge
As always, this process is not simply about choice (freedom), but also about
self-consciousness. A needs to come to the point where he understands despair,
not as something suffered from outside, but as a matter of the self. He inter-
prets the despair he feels as coming from the world, and so the world becomes
his enemy that which brings trouble and boredom, and thwarts his attempts
at enjoyment. Because his focus remains in the world, he is oblivious to the true
abode of despair. He does not recognize that the 'job' of despair - one of its
formative lessons — is to destroy his immediate relation to the world, so that
he can find himself and his task. A realizes the meaninglessness of the aesthetic
existence, but rather than actively shouldering this despair, he passively suf-
fers under it. He has no sense of what leaping out of the aesthetic stage would
mean for his life, and this 'unknown' fills him with dread (angst). In a sense, he
is unconsciously fighting for his life — that is, to keep the only view of life he has
ever known.
In choosing despair, one becomes conscious of how much one has been
fighting the task of self-becoming. Jeremy Walker, in his book Kierkegaard:
The Descent into God, says that 'the first important outcome of the project of
self-knowledge is the knowledge that one is essentially opposed to the whole
project'/ In other words, one's ignorance of one's self or lack of self — is a
'willed' ignorance; one is choosing to ignore oneself. The movement out of des-
pair, and actually part of the work of despair, is to become conscious of this
self-deceit. The first movement of self-knowledge is to recognize and admit
the barriers one builds to this knowledge. There is no doubt that one knows
things about oneself, but this accidental self-knowledge is only knowledge of
the self's relation to what is not the self— the world. An inauthentic self-
knowledge is nothing but a mask behind which the self can hide from itself.
Genuine self-knowledge is knowledge of the self s relation to itself. At this
point, the aesthete must allow 'the power of despair . . . [to] consume every-
thing until he finds himself in his eternal validity . . . because the one who des-
pairs finds the eternal human being'.
Despairing Over the Earthly In Toto

This issue of the eternal in the human being brings us again to Anti-climacus'
analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death, specifically the despair he calls
'despairing over the earthly in toto'. This form of despair is the next step in the
consciousness of despair, and serves as the basis by which the aesthete 'chooses
despair'. This consciousness is a movement from despairing over the loss of
some particular earthly thing (or some particular weakness or possibility
one's reflection has discovered) to a type of despair that gives access to the
category of totality. To despair over something earthly points to a particular
loss, while despairing over the earthly itself is a totalizing despair. In describ-
ing this, Anti-climacus writes, 'When with infinite passion the self despairs in
imagination over something earthly, the infinite passion makes of this particu-
lar, this something, the earthly in toto [as a whole], that is to say the totality
concept is inherent in and belongs to the despairer.' Despairing over the
earthly leads to an understanding that, in order to despair over a finite loss
infinitely, or a temporal loss eternally, the infinite and eternal aspect of this
despair must come from the self, since no particular thing in the world is infi-
nite or eternal.
Thus, despairing over the earthly in toto mediates between immediacy and a
despair directed inwardly as despair over oneself or of the eternal. The
aesthete may come to see that it is not the loss of an individual item that
causes despair, but the despair of the eternal within the self— that which
gives totalizing meaning to the world. Spiritlessness may come to see that the
true nature of its despair is not that it lacks something in the world, but that it
lacks spirit. It is this realization that becomes the basis for choosing despair:
one comes to realize that, when one loses some particular thing in the world,
and despairs over 'the earthly' (that is, when the world becomes meaning-
less and hopeless because of a number of particular loses), this means that the
self 'increases the total loss infinitely, and then despairs over the earthly
in toto'.33 One recognizes, in other words, that one has attributed infinite worth
to the finite.
This can be made clearer by looking at Kierkegaard's Christian Discourses,
and the distinction between the goal of temporality and the goal of eternity.
In despairing over the earthly in toto, one comes to see that one has given
oneself completely over to temporality's goal, and that this 'giving oneself over
completely' is actually to despair of eternity's goal. Kierkegaard writes,
[T]he sufferer himself is a synthesis of the temporal and eternal. If now tem-
porality inflicts upon him the greatest loss it is able to inflict, then the issue is
whether he, traitorous to himself and to eternity, will give temporality's loss
the power to become something totally different from what it is, whether he
will lose the eternal, or whether he, true to himself and the eternal, does not
allow temporality's loss to become anything else for him than what it is, a
temporal loss. If he does this, then the eternal within him has won the vic-
tory. To let go of the lost temporal thing in such a way that it is lost only temporally, to
lose the lost temporal thing only temporally, is a qualification of the eternal
within the loser, is the sign that the eternal within him has been victorious.
On the other hand, in bestowing the temporal with eternal value, one does not
value the eternal at all, and has, in a deeper sense, lost the eternal - despaired
of the eternal. One is not earnest about oneself, but has fixed 'a temporal loss
eternally fast in your soul'. J When one comes to see that 'despair' over a tem-
poral loss is actually despair over the eternal, a deeper understanding of the
true nature of despair has been gained. One finally realizes it is not the world
one despairs over, but one despairs over oneself - one despairs over the self one
is, and so is unwilling to be oneself.
The Ethicist has Chosen Despair
This consciousness of despair, and the concomitant choosing of it, is the nega-
tive aspect of choosing oneself. As long as A is simply 'in despair', he despairs
over the world, and remains immediately connected to it. If he would choose
despair, however, he would change the direction of his life from the immediate
and the temporal, and begin to move toward freedom, transparency, and him-
self in his eternal validity. This is to discover that the self is more than the sum
total of its relationships to things within the world.
In the Postscript, Climacus says that 'The ethicist has despaired. . . . In despai
he has chosen himself... . Through this choice and in this choice he becomes
open.'' What is this openness? Later Climacus writes, 'With the passion o
the infinite, the ethicist in the moment of despair has chosen himself out
of the terror of having himself, his life, his actuality, in esthetic dreams, in
depression, in hiddenness.' 37 One chooses oneself out of the hiddenness,
where everything is done behind masks. In coming out of hiding into openness,
one becomes open to one's task the very thing one was hiding from. The self
is open to receiving its task, and so is open to the light that will bring more
self-knowledge.
This is no easy choice. The Judge says that it is 'an act that takes all the
power and earnestness and concentration of the soul'.38 This is because it is
the self's first real act, an act rising up from within the self, apart from any
other propulsion, if you will. In the aesthetic stage the self reacts, being
moved by the determination of the sensual desires over which it has no control.
In choosing despair one chooses by the determination of one's own will. The
Judge says, reminiscent of what was discussed in The Sickness Unto Death as des-
pair of the earthly in toto,
When I despair over losing the whole world, I damage my soul, for I make it
finite in the very same way, since here again I see my soul is established by
the finite.... Every finite despair is a choice of the infinite, for I choose it just
as much when I attain it as when I lose it, for my attaining is not under my control,
but my choosing it certainly is. Finite despair is, therefore, an unfree despair; it
does not actually will despair, but it wills the finite, and this is despair.39
When one wills and is lost in the finite, one is bound by necessity, by fate, and
ultimately by its triviality. When I despair of it by choosing it, then I, for the
first time, take control of the direction of my life, for I am no longer bound by
what is external to me, but bind myself to myself in my eternal validity -
I bind myself to the Good. I am no longer defined by what is not me, but begin
to define myself in terms of my task. To 'choose despair' is an act of resolve, in
which a person 'chooses himself in his eternal validity'.
Notes
1. SUD,p. 72.
2. Kierkegaard discusses his use of pseudonyms in 'A First and Last Explanation'
(CUP, pp. 625-30). Since at this point the movement between the existence-
stages becomes crucial for our examination of evil, I will begin to use the pseudo-
nyms' names when pointing to specific books.
3. E / O I I , p . 179.
4. E / O I I , p . 180.
5. E / O I I , p . 183.
6. SUD, p. 73.
7. SUD, p. 76.
8. Blaise Pascal. Pensees. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1984, p. 88.
Kierkegaard echoes Pascal's sentiments concerning diversions: 'Or perhaps he
tries to keep his own condition in the dark by diversions and other means, for
example, work and pressure of business, as ways of distracting attention, though
again in such a way that he is not altogether clear that he is doing it to keep himself
in the dark' (SUD, pp. 78-9).
9. SUD, pp. 80-1.

10. SUD, p. 82.
11. SUD, p. 82.
12. SUD, pp. 82-3.
13. SUD, p. 84.
14. E/O II, pp. 190-1.
15. SUD, p. 85.
16. SUD, pp. 84-5.
17. SUD, pp. 85-6.
18. SUD, p. 86.
19. This is, to some extent, like those who dabbled in the French rendition of existen-
tialism, not out of a concern for the self, but out of an aesthetic enjoyment of the
dark themes presented by it. One may see it today in certain strains of rock music,
in the 'Goth' culture, and in an aesthetic enjoyment of art that focuses on the gro-
tesque. There is a particular kind of pleasurable quality in reflecting on despair.
Still, this despair does not lead such people to pick up the task of the self, but actu-
ally calls for an ever increasing intensification of the bizarre.
20. E/O I, p. 36.
21. E/O I, p. 34.
22. Those who are spiritual also recognize the emptiness of the finite, yet they are able
to gather themselves in what Kierkegaard calls 'infinite resignation'. Those in
infinite resignation are able to resign the finite for the sake of something infinitely
higher.
23. E/O I, p. 26.
24. E/O I, p. 20.
25. E/O I, p. 21.
26. E/O II, p. 208.
27. E/O II, p. 206.
28. E/OII,p.211.
29. E/O II, p. 213.
30. Jeremy Walker, Kierkegaard: The Descent Into God. Montreal: McGill-Queen's UP,
1985, p. 147.
31. E/O II, p. 209.
32. SUD, p. 91.
33. SUD, p. 91.
34. CD, p. 141.
35. CD, p. 139.
36. CUP, p. 253-4.
37. CUP, p. 258.
38. E/O II, p. 208.
39. E/O II, p. 221 (my emphasis).
40. E/O II, p. 221.
3
Ethical Self-Choice
The Positive Self-Choice
Choosing Freedom
Choosing despair is an absolute choice:
When I choose absolutely, I choose despair, and in despair I choose the

absolute, for I am myself the absolute; I posit the absolute, and I myself am
the absolute. But in other words, with exactly the same meaning I may say:
I choose the absolute that chooses me; I posit the absolute that posits me
for if I do not keep in mind that this second expression is just as absolute,
then my category of choosing is untrue, because it is precisely the identity
of both. 1
I choose myself absolutely, and yet only the self, as absolute, is able to make such
an absolute choice. I, in one and the same act, choose the absolute and become
the absolute that does the choosing. Here, again, we find the paradox of the
self-positing of the self. The paradox consists in the fact that, while what is
chosen already exists - otherwise it would not be chosen, but created - it comes
into existence only by my choosing it: 'It is, for if it were not I could not choose it;
it is not, for it first comes into existence through my choosing it, and otherwise
my choice would be an illusion.'
What the absolute choice brings into existence — though does so only as
already existing — isfreedom. When I choose myself as free, I do not create free-
dom, because if it did not already exist, I could not choose it; yet this freedom
does not exist until I choose it. Further, this choice is more than simply a choice
concerning abstract freedom, it is a choice to become oneself:
He chooses himself - not in the finite sense, for then this 'self would indeed
be something finite that would fall among all the other finite things — but in
the absolute sense, and yet he does choose himself and not someone else. .. .
This self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the
choice, and yet it has existed, for it was indeed 'himself
This is an absolute choice because one chooses absolutely - one absolutely

despairs of the aesthetic existence. At the same time, this absolute choice
posits the ethical. It is an absolute choice, not simply because it changes

the direction of one's entire life, and the categories by which one confronts the
world, but more importantly, because through it one discovers oneself in one's
eternal validity. The Judge says,
[T]o become conscious in one's eternal validity is a moment that is more

significant than everything else in the world. . . . It is an earnest and signifi-
cant moment when a person links himself to an eternal power for an eternity,
when he accepts himself as the one whose remembrance time will never
erase, when in an eternal unerring sense he becomes conscious of himself as
the person he is.4
Self-identity is radically altered in this knowledge and choice: it is to choose

oneself as one whose remembrance time will never erase. Whether this eternity
be conceived within a Judaeo-Christian view of an eternity with God, or in the
Nietzschean conception of an eternal recurrence, it is to shoulder the eternal
within oneself. Indeed, this is what is chosen:
[Wjhat is it, then, that I choose - is it this or that? No, for I choose abso-
lutely, and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to choose
this or that, I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in
my eternal validity. Something other than myself I can never choose as
absolute, for if I choose something else, I choose it as something finite and
consequently do not choose it absolutely.''
The phrase 'eternal validity' does not speak to some substance of the self that I
choose, but speaks to my essence as freedom. Freedom becomes, for the first
time, my responsibility and task. I give myself the task of becoming myself —
becoming more free and more transparent as spirit.
The problem of evil arises around this issue of self-possession. As tradition-
ally conceived, evil is problematic because it is difficult to determine where a
rebellion against Being can originate. If it originates in Being itself, how can it
be considered a rebellion against Being? Whatever exists is within Being, and
so would be within the inner necessity of Being — would be a part of its order,
and so, it seems, could not be a rebellion against this order. Thus, according to
the traditional view, evil, as a rebellion against Being could not exist — that is,
evil is a privation or lack of Being, a movement into nothingness and nones-
sence. But is evil really devoid of essence?
The description of freedom as an absolute self-positing is the answer ideal-
ism gives to this question. Idealism came to see that the Being of humans is
freedom, which means that this Being itself is to be chosen. For Schelling,
man posits freedom by his own deed, a deed that is possible only through
freedom. This is what Kierkegaard is struggling to make clear through Judge
Wilhelm's ethical understanding of existence. Kant and Schelling were able to
resolve the difficulties inherent in this self-positing by pointing beyond time.
In other words, by the time we philosophers come upon the issue, the positing
has already taken place in the eternal - it is, in an important sense,finished,in
that freedom has already been posited. Kierkegaard, however, believes this
choice takes place in time, at the moment when one takes hold of oneself, and
determines one's essence as free. In this, one determines oneself for the first
time by taking possession of oneself. Only in this choice is the inner necessity
of one's Being determined from oneself.
It is in this self-determination, which is a part of the inner necessity of Being,
that a rebellion against Being can find its place. As a dissolubility between the
dark depths and the light of reason, the inner necessity of Being dictates
(ordains) that I should have the ability to determine my own inner necessity
apart from the universal will of Being itself, for I exist as the contradiction of
the deepest pit and the highest heaven. It is this prescribed inner necessity
of Being that allows for the possibility of radical evil: I have been granted,
from Being itself, the possibility of determining myself in opposition to the
universal will of Being. This possibility arises from the structure of the self,
a structure in which the self is born out of the principle of contradiction
through which I must choose myself: 'whereas nature is created from nothing,
whereas myself as immediate personality am created from nothing, I as free
spirit am born out of the principle of contradiction or am born through my
choosing myself.'
As we move deeper into an understanding of the self in terms of conscious-
ness and freedom, we will find an intensification of the self around its relation
to the Good. Although the ethical is usually viewed as the highest relation to
the Good, we will find areas of evasion that show the ultimate despair of this
relation. To discover this we must examine Kierkegaard's analysis of the ethi-
cal stage of existence.
Choosing One's Facticity

In choosing oneself as free, one does not annihilate the aesthetic; rather, in
this choice,
the esthetic is absolutely excluded or it is excluded as the absolute, but rela-

tively it is continually present. In choosing itself, the personality chooses
itself ethically and absolutely excludes the esthetic; but since he nevertheless
chooses himself and does not become another human being by choosing
himself but becomes himself, all the esthetic returns in its relativity.
Although an individual's concrete contents or capacities are given by nature,

when the ethical self posits itself, these capacities are transformed by finding
their proper place in the individual's life. They become determined by the
self, rather than externally determined. As the ethical individual is gathered
away from the external through the absolute self-positing, a new consciousness
of the aesthetic qualities that is, the talents, moods, social influences, incli-
nations, and so forth — is gained. Before choosing oneself these capacities were
simply seen as things nature bestowed upon the individual, products of fate, if
you will; after the choice, these become things for which one is now responsi-
ble. Aesthetes do not feel responsible for the moods or social influences they
suffer, nor can they help the talents and inclinations given to them by nature
or their upbringing. The ethicist, however, feels responsible for these concrete
contents, and shoulders them as the material out of which one becomes oneself.
Further, in choosing oneself, one begins the movement of self-possession, or
in-gathering. Aesthetes have their lives on the periphery, living in immediate
contact with things; the ethicists, on the other hand, reside in the centre, in the
heart and core of the self- the home of personality and so their concrete
contents find their meaning in the choices that personality makes. It is in
these choices that all the relative or accidental qualities of the self- its facti-
city - become transformed into essential qualities, and so are products of
the self. While these qualities always existed as a part of the self, they are,
for the first time, produced by the ethical self in the sense that they now find
their meaning as a part of a newly integrated whole. They are undefined raw
material until the self becomes absolute enough to define and form them out
of itself. These capacities, which the ethicist always had, are for the first time
coming into existence as his. No longer has he merely been thrust into exis-
tence, forced into forms not of his own making, given desires and goals not of
his own choosing, but he has taken hold of himself, and now places himself into
the world in absolute terms. The Judge says,
As a product he is squeezed into the forms of actuality; in the choice he
makes himself elastic, transforms everything exterior into interiority.
He has his place in the world; in freedom he himself chooses his place — that
is, he chooses this place. 10
We are moving into the realm of spirit here. Spirit is not tossed around by
circumstances, nor is it taken in by what the world presents as desirable and
worthy of pursuit. Spirit moves within itself, deciding for itself what its exis-
tence means, and what it is to do. Its passions, talents, desires and tastes no
longer make sense apart from the meaning given to them by the self. The task
of the ethical individual is to gather all these qualities into a well integrated
whole or personality. Every feature of the self is to be transformed from a
mere finite ability, into an ideal and a task. Thus, my talents become infini-
tized through the possibilities the ideal presents me. They do not exist simply
so I can create conditions for my enjoyment, but as the contents I must work
on as a self that has absolutely chosen itself. Through choosing myself I
become aware of the responsibility I have for what I have been given by
nature and by society, so that what has been given to me is posited for the
first time as mine — as my responsibility.
The Self as a Task
The Transformation of Existence: The Actual and the Ideal; The Particular and
the Universal
For the aesthete, the task of existence is to find means of enjoyment, and a
pleasant (secure and comfortable) existence. In ethical self-choice the task
changes, in that one recognizes oneself as a task to be taken up and performed.
The self is both the task and that which fulfils the task. !! Thus, in this absolute
self-choice, I come to myself as both actual and ideal. Above it was said that
the self becomes pregnant with itself in the ethical self-choice. This is possible
because one is always both the actual and the ideal, but only potentially so.
This ideal remains as a mere potential until one gives it to oneself.12 The
self's ethical task is to actualize this ideal in the concrete contents and situa-
tions of its life. The Judge says,
What he wants to actualize is certainly himself, but it is his ideal self, which
he cannot acquire anywhere else but within himself. If he does not hold
firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all
of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.
The ideal does not exist out beyond the stars, disconnected from the indivi-
dual, in which case the individual's task would be to claw his or her way to
some abstract ideal. We possess an inner teleology that fits with the concrete
contents of our individual lives. This means the ideal is intimately connected
to the finite contents that make up the material self.
How do I know or discover who I am to become? How do I know the direc-
tion that will ennoble my talents, capacities and other such concrete contents?
The Judge answers these questions vaguely, stating that it is the ideal of every
human being to become the 'paradigmatic human being': 'Every person,
if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing offhis
accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. But he
ennobles them by choosing them.' 14 The ethical individual has a vision of the
ideal as the paradigmatic human being, and the task of the self is to actualize
this ideal. Another way to say this is that one is, as a particular individual, to
become the universal individual. This is not to become someone completely
different, as though one dies to one's particularity to become the universal.
One does not throw off all one's aesthetic concretions, but gets under them,
and emerges through them. The Judge describes this transformation as self-
becoming because the universal human being is within the individual as a
potentiality:
[T]o transform himself into the universal human being is possible only if I
already have it within myself Kara Sufaîf [potentially]. .. . If the univer-
sal human being is outside, there is only one possible method, and that is
to take off my entire concretion. This striving out into the unconstraint
of abstraction is frequently seen. . . . But that is not the way it is. In the act of
despair, the universal human being came forth and now is behind the con-
cretion and emerges through it.
Duty: Taking Responsibility for One's Future

Repentance is the way in which one shoulders the responsibility for one's past;
duty is the way in which one shoulders the responsibility for one's future.
Repentance is the recognition that one has chosen to be self-centred rather
than gaining the view of the universal, and is a decision to turn from this mind-
set (metanoia}\ duty is the working out of this change of mind in the future by
transforming one's particularity into the universal. For example, when a
person marries, the particularities of love come under the universal; the uni-
versal is then actualized, because love has found its place and calling by
being put under the realm of freedom. In this transformation, love is no longer
something one 'suffers', if you will, but is chosen, committed to and affirmed
through this free choice. In this actualization of the universal, the concrete
contents are not thrust away, but find their deeper expression in marriage.
Thus, one's concern for the beloved is no longer simply a matter of mood —
which may pass - but becomes the basis of a promise, and is thus posited by
one's freedom. One's accidental characteristics are put under the universal,
transforming them from mere immediate and contingent passions, to a life-
long commitment. Indeed, the marriage vows are an expression of a move-
ment from aesthetic to ethical love. It is a promise that, no matter how things
change, one will remain concerned about the welfare of the beloved, and will
care for the beloved with deep ethical passion. This concern is no longer an acci-
dental quality of love something that burns hot and then fades away — but is
now an essential quality of one's love for the beloved, for without this concern,
love is not expressed.
This is but one example of the expression of one's duty; it is one's task to
become the universal in all aspects of one's life. I am becoming myself because
the universal I am to become is accessed through my particularity. Thus, it is
said that I have my duty. This means that freedom consists in self-determina-
tion. If duty is seen as a multiplicity of particular rules and regulations I am to
obey, then it comes to be something standing outside myself. This would mean
ethics is a working away from who I am in order to become someone else; how-
ever, ethics is not a task whereby I continually fight against myself as I try to
cover myself with the universal - trying to keep my ugliness from spilling
out - but is a type of self-actualization. When the ethical task is seen as
simply following rules, the task becomes heavy, burdensome, and even detest-
able. These rules become means I must suffer through because I want to
keep out of trouble, stay out of hell, or not look bad in the eyes of others. These
are all pitiful teleologies, because they do not touch the deeper personality,
and remain externally directed. But when I grasp the universal within
myself, see its beauty and security, and desire it above all else, then ethics
becomes beautiful and full of joy. I no longer do what is 'right' in order to
avoid unpleasant circumstances, but discover the meaning and purpose of my
existence from within, and gather my life in such a way that it makes sense as
a coherent whole.
To say that humans have an inner teleology is to point to every individual as
an end in himself or herself. Human dignity consists in being this end. The
Judge expresses this dignity in terms of beauty:
If at times I have a free hour, I stand at my window and look at people, and I
see each person according to his beauty. However insignificant he may be,
however humble, I see him according to his beauty, for I see him as this indi-
vidual human being who nevertheless is also the universal human being.
I see him as one who has this concrete task for his life; even if he is the lowliest
hired waiter, he does not exist for the sake of any other person. He has his
teleology, he actualizes this task, he is victorious. . . . He is bound to be vic-
torious, of that I am convinced; that is why his struggle is beautiful.
This beauty is seen from a couple of different aspects. First, because the teleol-
ogy is internal to the individual, the Judge has confidence that the individual
will be victorious in the ethical struggle. The Judge is both confident and opti-
mistic that the battle to actualize the universal is not a futile undertaking, and
will end in victory. Second, and closely connected to this, the beauty and dig-
nity of a human being consists in the fact that he or she is self-sufficient. The
individual has an inner teleology, and it would be a contradiction for Being to
require something of the individual that he or she is incapable of fulfilling;
therefore, the individual is self-sufficient in regards to this teleology.
While we are self-sufficient in regards to the ethical task, even the most
ethical person realizes there are several things in the self that will not readily
bend to the universal. What are we to make of the times we fail to discharge
our duty? The first step in overcoming this failure is to repent. To repent is
to sorrow over one's personal failures. This sorrow arises because of one's
love for the universal. The Judge grieves over standing outside the universal:
'At this point, he [the ethicist] says, I have placed myself outside the uni-
versal; I have deprived myself of all guidance, the security, and the reassur-
ance that the universal gives; I stand alone, without fellow-feeling, for I am
an exception.' 18 He comforts himself in the midst of failure by viewing his
grief as a sign that he is still within the universal, and submitted to it. It is
those without an ethical consciousness who do not grieve over their failures,
and so the grief of failure brings solace to the ethicist.
If ethicists are to have stability and integrity, however, then they must do
more than grieve over their failures, they must overcome them; if they cannot
be overcome, then the ethicist is neither sovereign over the self, nor self-
sufficient. Thus, the ethical person must continue to act in such a way as to
bring all aspects of the self under the universal. The Judge says,
The person who lives ethically will also be careful about choosing his place
properly, but if he detects that he has made a mistake, or if obstacles are
raised that are beyond his control, he does not lose heart, for he does not
surrender sovereignty over himself. He promptly sees his task and therefore is in
action without delay.
Although his task may begin in the sorrow of repentance, as sovereign and self-
sufficient, he is to act in such a way that this split within his personality is
healed, and he again becomes a well-integrated whole.
The Judge is confident of the ultimate victory of the ethical life. If it could
not be victorious, then the personality is not absolute — is not its own objec-
tive. This would be to confess that the aesthetic stage of existence is the truly
consistent stage. To believe there is a place where the self is not self-determined
is to confess that ultimately the self is not free — that freedom is not its
essence and is bound by the whims of circumstances. In order for the ethical
stage to be consistent, personality must be absolute, and must determine the
world, rather than being determined by the world. If there is any area where
the personality is not self-determinative, then it is no longer absolute, but is
conditioned by that which constitutes its failure to achieve continuity.
The Despair of the Ethical Stage of Existence
The Law Judges

The ethical existence has opened up the self to freedom, self-consciousness and
self-possession. It is a movement from the immediate and scattered existence of
the aesthete, into the realization that one is not a self as a matter of course.
Still, as the ethical stage progresses, problems arise, contradictions that will
not allow the self to gain the repose it believed was possible. As transparency
within the ethical stage deepens — as more and more pockets of evasion are
infiltrated by the light of self-consciousness - an underlying anxiety begins to
make itself felt: the ethicist comes to suspect that the ethical stage itself has
become an evasion of the self s task - that is, that the ethical stage also ends
in despair. To recognize this is not to say the self took a wrong turn by becom-
ing ethical, but that, while the ethical stage is necessary for the self to become
itself, it is not sufficient. Despair arises from the attempt to remain within the
ethical stage after the contradictions have become apparent. Kierkegaard
calls this despair because one is unwilling to continue to take the steps neces-
sary for becoming oneself.
The overarching contradiction arising within the ethical stage is due to the
ethical individual's inability to bring the ideal to fruition. The pseudonym
Vigilius Haufniensis writes in The Concept of Anxiety:
Ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality. . . . Ethics points to ideality

as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions.
Thus ethics develops a contradiction, inasmuch as it makes clear both the
difficulty and the impossibility. What is said of the law is also true of ethics:
it is a disciplinarian that demands, and by its demands, only judges but does
not bring forth life.
The authentic purpose of the ethical stage is not to find existential victory or
repose in the ideal, but to gather the individual from lostness in the world.
The ideal within the ethical stage lifts the face upward, ennobling the indi-
vidual's stature. The self is no longer shuffling along with its head down,
focused on dust. Its gaze has been raised to a much broader horizon, and
this lifting of the gaze is the task of the ethical. However, to believe that the
ability to lift one's gaze is somehow a sign of one's capacity to put one's life in
order - to bring order to all one sees within the horizon - is a mistake, and a
source of despair.
Self-Sufficiency
Self-sufficiency with regard to the task of the self is always defiance. Glenn
writes,
It is the ultimate self-reliance that he [Judge Wilhelm] has in common with

the defiant types of despair described in The Sickness Unto Death. He under-
stands an unconditional self-affirmation, whereas Kierkegaard thought that
affirmation of our true selves is ultimately dependent on a 'condition' that

can be given only by God.
We have already seen that Kierkegaard believed despair could be overcome

only by transparently resting in the power that established the relation of the
self to itself, but our neediness before God will become even more apparent as
we look at the despair of the ethical stage, and its fulfilment in the religious
stage. The problem with the ethical stage is that it seeks to establish itself by
its own power — through self-choice — and yet the power needed to bring
together ideality and actuality, infinitude and finitude, the universal and the
particular, is not within it. And so the ethical stage's self-sufficiency becomes
its despair. This self-sufficiency is the despair of all systems of ethics. While
these systems may offer guidance in right action, and may provide reasonable
accounts of what we ought to do, they do not provide any internal power for
fulfilling the ethical requirements. They may provide incentives, reasons, and
even a kind of passion for what is right, but they do not offer the kind of inter-
nal oneness with the Good that is necessary for ethical victory. Ultimately they
do not allow for what Augustine called 'wholly willing' the Good. The human
self is fractured, in self-contradiction, and the best ethics can do is determine
this failure negatively as a judgement: no one measures up to what a true ethi-
cal system demands (by 'true ethical system' I mean one that does not lower
the demands of the ideal in order for human beings to attain to the demands of
the 'ethical').
Ethical self-sufficiency turns God into an 'invisible, vanishing point', and
so cuts itself off from the source of power necessary for self-becoming. While lip
service is given to God by the Judge - and perhaps even held in the highest
regards in the end God becomes superfluous to the ethical task. What is
important for the ethical individual is how to relate to one's duty. Although
the Judge says that one's duty in civic life is the same as one's duty to God,
God does not play any essential role in this relationship, except as the one
who ordained the whole situation. The pseudonym of Fear and Trembling,
Johannes de Silentio, says,
The ethical is the universal and as such, in turn, the divine. It is therefore
correct to say that all duty is ultimately duty to God; but if one cannot say
more one says in effect that really I have no duty to God. The duty becomes
duty to God by being referred to God, but I do not enter into relation with
God in the duty itself.
Duty finds its essence in being traced back to God in the sense that he estab-
lished the relationship of the self to itself (established the inner teleology),
and so ordained the self as that which gives itself the task of becoming itself.
However, when duty becomes the emphasis - as it always does for the ethical
stage - then God becomes unnecessary. The ethical stage sets up a kind of
Deistic notion of God with regards to the self. Just as Deists view God as a
being who created the universe, set it in motion, and then left it to itself in
order to run according to its own efficient mechanisms, so the ethicist views God
as having created the self and its relations, thus allowing the self to fulfil itself
according to the freedom given to it by God - that is, by its own sufficient capa-
cities. The Deistic God is needed to establish everything, but once this is done,
he becomes superfluous to its ongoing movement - its becoming. Just as the
universe has been given the requisite conditions for continuing in its eternal,
circular motions, so too, according to the Judge, the self has been given the
requisite conditions for fulfilling itself. And so de Silentio says that in the
ethical stage,
The whole of human existence is ... entirely self-enclosed, as a sphere, and

the ethical is at once the limit and completion. God becomes an invisible,
vanishing point, an impotent thought, and his power is to be found only in
the ethical, which fills all existence. So if it should occur to someone to want
to love God in some other sense than that mentioned, he is merely being
extravagant and loves a phantom which, if it only had the strength to speak,
would say to him, 'Stay where you belong, I don't ask for your love.'
Because the self is self-contained, this containment defines and fills all exis-
tence. God becomes defined and related to in terms of how he fits into the
notion of duty. This is what is meant by saying that God is not related from
interiority, but only through the exteriority of duty. Ethics cannot compre-
hend anything outside its own demand, and so it cannot recognize any telos
beyond itself. De Silentio says that ethics 'rests immanently in itself, has noth-
ing outside itself that is its telos but is itself the telos for everything outside, and
when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go'.23
The ethical seeks to bring the self into repose by confining it in the straight-
jacket of the universal. But then there is no breathing room for spirit. By seek-
ing to tame and constrain spirit, it disregards the self as both the highest
heaven and the deepest pit. Or more to the point, it believes the deepest pit
can be fully integrated into the highest heaven. The deepest pit, however,
cannot be overcome in self-choice; it cannot, by power of the human will, be
forced to conform to the universal will. The longings and cravings of the dee-
pest pit continually attach to certain objects or actions to which a person
becomes addicted. The Judge is optimistic that all these areas will soon be
brought under the universal, and just this is his despairing evasion of reality.
Gerald May, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on addiction, notes in
his book Addiction and Grace, 'For the addicted person . . . struggling only with
willpower, desire to continue the addiction will win. It will win because . . . it is
always operative. Willpower and resolutions come and go, but the addictive
process never sleeps.' No human is strong enough to get under, and shoulder
the dark ground. It is infinite in depth, and never rests in its demand for
satisfaction. True, we may be able to behave, to act as if we have integrated
our wild longings into our meaning structure, but if they are not truly trans-
formed (if they are only subdued), they will eventually find an opportunity
to seek satisfaction. The problem the ethicist faces is not that he or she has
occasional lapses (as the Judge believes), but that the 'process never sleeps'.
The task of spirit, then, is not to enslave the dark energies under the power of
the highest heaven, because this cannot be done, and any attempt to do so
will end in despair.
By its continual failures, the self shows it is not absolute in this task, and
remains relative and contingent: it can fulfil the ethical ideal only to a certain
degree. Thus, in its despair, it seeks to dissolve the painful tension by relating
to only one pole of the self. While the spiritlessness of the aesthetic stage relates
only to the longing and cravings of the self, the ethical stage relates only to
the call of duty. The ethical stage has done its work in awakening the self
to the universal (to that which is above the cravings and longings of the parti-
cular will), though it becomes blind to the power of its original darkness, and
to the inability of primordial longing to be satisfied in resolutions and 'abso-
lute' choices. As Berdyaev says, 'Man is a free being and there is in him an
element of primeval, uncreated, pre-cosmic freedom. But he is powerless to
master his own irrational freedom and its abysmal darkness. This is his peren-
nial tragedy.'
This darkness is not revealed until the end of the ethical stage, when its
attempt to tame this wild, seething cauldron of forces by its own strength
ends in despair. One of the tasks of the ethical stage is to bringjust this darkness
to light, and it does this very well. If one remains earnest in the task of self-
becoming, then by the end of the ethical stage one comes to realize just how
infinitely wild and dark the human heart is, and much of the early optimism
begins to fade, being replaced by guilt and judgement.
The Ethical Stage's Over-Optimism

The State of Sin
The despair of the ethical stage rests in the fact that it is unable to fulfil its own
requirement. Michael Wyschogrod writes,
The basic characteristic of the ethical situation is that full justice can never
be done to ethical demands. Being universal in nature, ethical rules set up a
horizon towards which the ethical personality strives without ever being
able to reach it. The expression for this situation is guilt for guilt is an ethical
determination, the ethical expression for ethical failure. But guilt is also the
extreme point of ethics, the point at which ethics is destroyed. The magni-
tude of guilt that is the inevitable result of a strictly ethical point of view is
staggering to the subject. He is lost in the sheer impossibility of the ethical
demands. At this point a new leap takes place.28
None of us are truly naive enough to believe that we always measure up to the
ethical demand, but we do not always see the infinite gap between the require-
ment and where we stand; we believe that freedom is able to span the separa-
tion between what we should be and what we actually are. The Judge believes
that he is able to fulfil the demands of ethics through free resolutions. For
instance, the guilt of lust can be overcome by the resolution to love only one,
and this resolution is expressed in the duty of marriage. If he did not believe
this, then he would not be in the ethical stage, but the aesthetic. The longings
and cravings that drive the aesthetic individual must be transformed through
the power of freedom and the light of reason by willing the universal. Desire,
which before had been a wild force, enslaving one under its power, becomes
tamed and made beautiful by the power of ethical freedom. George Connell
points out, however,
While this optimism about the human condition is the basis for ethical
endeavor, the repeated process of resolution and failure makes the self
increasingly recognize the depth of its guilt. Thus, the collapse of the ethical
caused by bringing the self to the threshold of the discovery of sin can, in a
sense, also be described as its culmination. . . . [The] ethical stage is an
unstable form of selfhood; it naturally develops toward immanent religious-
ness if the self is honest with itself.29
Instead of leading to a right relation with the particular and universal, the
ethical stage actually increases the tension. As freedom and transparency
become awakened and increased, it is much more difficult to hide failures
from oneself. It is not much different from what happens as one increases
one's knowledge in certain areas: the more one learns, the more one discovers
how little one knows. In terms of the ethical: the more one actualizes the ideal,
the more one discovers how far one truly is from actualizing the ideal. This
tension finds its highest pitch in the consciousness of sin. Sin is a religious
category, and as such, is a category upon which ethics becomes shipwrecked:
ethics is incapable of dealing with sin, because it is outside its sphere of influ-
ence. Ethics may understand individual sins, or the breaking of individual
laws and rules, but the category of sin is totalizing, in that sin is a state of
being. It is this state of sin that ethics is incapable of comprehending, except
as that which is its limit. Haufniensis writes,
Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is ship-
wrecked with the aid of repentance. If ethics is to include sin, its ideality
comes to an end. The more ethics remains in its ideality, and never becomes
so inhuman as to lose sight of actuality . . . the more it increases the tension of
the difficulty. 31
Ethics, then, is not that which actualizes the ideal, but it brings about the col-
lision and tension between the ideal and the actual. The Judge speaks about
the particular and universal as if the positing of the self in ethical self-choice
necessarily brings about a reconciliation between the actual and the ideal.
He acts as if the ability to bring the actual and ideal together in a single sen-
tence is a sign that they can be held together in existence, if only enough ethical
passion is present. And yet, as transparency progresses, the individual comes
to discover how really impotent are the ethical passions and resolutions. What
the ethical ideal actually accomplishes (its true task), is to bring to light the
religious ideality as the ideality that can be actualized. In the end, ethics is a
stage that points beyond itself. Its ideal cannot be actualized, and so it points
to that upon which it is shipwrecked. The ideal is not abandoned in the reli-
gious stage, nor is it lowered; the ideal remains just as stringent, but an indivi-
dual's relationship to it is transformed by the leap into the religious stage.
In bumping up against the religious stage, the ethical comes in contact
with categories that suspend it. Those with even a limited acquaintance with
Kierkegaard have heard faith described as the ideological suspension of the
ethical, in which one apprehends an absolute duty to God', however, Kierke-
gaard also stresses sin as that which suspends the ethical. Climacus writes in
the Postscript:
The ideological suspension of the ethical must have an even more definite
religious expression. The ethical is then present at every moment with its
infinite requirement, but the individual is not capable of fulfilling it. This
powerlessness of the individual must not be seen as an imperfection in the
continued endeavor to attain an ideal, for in that case the suspension is no
more postulated than the man who administers his office in an ordinary way
is suspended.
One is not to see one's powerlessness as a weakness to be overcome ethically;

rather, it is to be seen as that upon which the ethical itself is shipwrecked.
It is not simply that one is currently powerless with regard to fulfilling the
ethical ideal, but that one is, as Climacus puts it, heterogeneous with the ethi-
cal requirement. In other words, one does not have it in oneself to fulfil the
ethical requirement, and this is what the ethical, in its despair, ignores. Clima-
cus writes,
The suspension consists in the individual's finding himself in a state exactly
the opposite of what the ethical requires. Therefore, far from being able to
begin, every moment he continues in this state he is more and more pre-
vented from being able to begin: he relates himself to actuality not as possi-
bility but as impossibility. Thus the individual is suspended from the ethical
in the most terrifying way, is in the suspension heterogeneous with the ethi-
cal, which still has the claim of the infinite upon him and at every moment
heterogeneity is only more definitely marked by heterogeneity.
Although the ethical is not completely ignorant of its guilt, it is, by its
very nature, optimistic of the possibility of fulfilling its task. As we know,
according to the traditional formulation of evil, guilt is seen as a weakness
of will; ethics is optimistic this weakness can be overcome by positing the
absolute, and through resolutions. Kierkegaard, however, does not view
the problem as simply weakness of will — whatever that may be — but as
a radical, ontological opposition to the ethical requirement, which 'is sin as a
state in a human being'.
Against the persistence of the state of sin in which humans find themselves,
the spiritless answer is to lower the requirement to a place where people can
reach it. This is no longer an option for the ethical, since it has become too
much of a self for such a digression. 5 The ethical stage's initial answer to fail-
ure is repentance, and so it returns to this repentance after every failure.
Repentance
Kierkegaard holds that ethics is shipwrecked with the 'aid of repentance'.
What does this mean? Repentance is the means through which the ethical
seeks to gain control of its past failures. By repenting of its guilt, it accepts
its responsibility, and then seeks to transform itself into the universal. The
problem is that repentance can only deal with guilt by sorrowing over it,
and has no power over the possibility of future guilt. Ethical repentance
is never able to get ahead of guilt, but must always follow behind it. This
is its grief. In the face of its failures, the highest the ethical can attain is to
grieve over its guilt — it cannot do away with it. As the sense of guilt increases
with a greater self-consciousness, one expends all one's energy repenting.
In Fear and Trembling, de Silentio says that the ethicist, 'can make the move-
ment of repentance under his own power, but he also uses absolutely all his
power for it and therefore cannot possibly come back under his own power
and grasp actuality again'.36 Sorrow over failure is 'the deepest ethical self-
contradiction'. There comes a point when the ethical has reached its
limit, and the continual sorrow over its ethical failure leads freedom back into
necessity and fate.
Kierkegaard comes at the same point from another direction in The Concept
of Anxiety. As long as the Judge stands firm in the conviction that the ethical
life will end in victory, the sorrow of repentance is sweet — like the sweet
aroma of a sacrifice given to the ethical requirement. Its sweetness is found in
being of one mind with the requirement, and knowing the requirement is
derived from within oneself as an inner teleology. As the ethical existence pro-
gresses, however, the state of sin becomes more and more disclosed. At first this
is not disclosed in consciousness, but in a disclosure arising from anxiety. The
sweet sorrow begins to turn more and more into dread, as a presentiment
that something deeper and uglier resides in the self than initially thought.
The original darkness and the universal are not so easily reconciled, and this
darkness demands to be affirmed as a part of the self. The tension of this inter-
nal contradiction begins to make itself known, and the ethicist senses the het-
erogeneity with the ethical requirement. Seeking to remain within the
universal, the ethicist's only course of action within this rising consciousness
of guilt is to repent. This repentance, however, leads the ethicist further and
further away from freedom - that is, deeper and deeper into the discovery of
the state of sin. As the tensions of the poles within the self begin to unravel,
anxiety takes hold of the individual. At this point, repentance is no longer a
means of freedom, but becomes the work of a slave. Haufniensis describes this
movement in The Concept of Anxiety:
Sin advances in its consequences; repentance follows step by step, but

always a moment too late. It forces itself to look at the dreadful [the dreadful
exemption], but like the mad King Lear . . . it has lost the reins of govern-
ment, and it has retained only the power to grieve. At this point, anxiety is
at its highest. Repentance has lost its mind, and anxiety is potentiated into
repentance. . . . Sin conquers. Anxiety throws itself despairingly into the
arms of repentance. Repentance ventures all. It conceives of the conse-
quence of sin as suffering penalty and of perdition as the consequence of
sin. It is lost. Its judgment is pronounced, its condemnation is certain, and
the augmented judgment is that the individual shall be dragged through life
to the place of execution. In other words, repentance has gone crazy.
This is a description of the despair of the ethical. It anxiously senses itself to

be in a state over which its willpower is powerless, and yet this discovery has
not yet become conscious and chosen. Repentance remains its only defence
against this growing consciousness. It soothes its battered identity by asserting
that its sorrow at least shows it is a lover of the universal. However, as its
powerlessness against its sin grows more and more conscious, it begins to
wonder if its repentance is truly sorrow. After all, if one were truly sorrowful,
why does one continue to fail?
In its powerlessness over guilt, repentance eventually goes crazy. Kierke-
gaard means by this that repentance is no longer the sweet sorrow of an ethicist
who is optimistic of victory, but is now driven by the anxiety of being unable to
get out from under the guilt. Repentance begins to lose its bearings in this diz-
zying anxiety. Its continuous failure becomes so all consuming that the ethical
person begins to see the ideal, not as a beautiful goal, but as that which is
beyond its reach. Eventually it no longer even seeks to actualize the ideal,
but expends all its power in repentance. The growing consciousness of its
weakness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: having gone crazy, it actually
produces sin. For example, an alcoholic who becomes conscious of his or her
problem, and the suffering it has caused, may become obsessed with the power
alcohol holds over him or her. When this happens, the tension created by the
fixation on the ideal (sobriety), and one's past failures to reach this ideal, may
become so tightly wound that something has to give, and so the alcoholic goes
on a drinking binge. Kierkegaard writes concerning repentance that has
gone crazy:
The most terrible punishment for sin is the new sin. This does not mean that
the hardened, confident sinner will understand it this way. But if a man
shudders at the thought of his sin, if he would gladly endure anything
in order to avoid falling into the old sin in the future, then the new sin is the
most terrible punishment. There are collisions here (especially in the sphere
of sinful thoughts) in which anxiety over the sin can almost call forth the sin.
When this is the case, a desperate wrong turn may be made. Vigilius Hauf-
niensis described it thus: Repentance loses its mind.
As consciousness grows, it begins to sense itself as an exemption from the

ethical, and yet this takes place in anxiety. Its conscious understanding of life
is still defined by ethical categories; its anxiety is due to a presentiment that
there is something beyond the conscious limits of the ethical existence — it is
anxious over what is beyond its horizons, and in this sense its anxiety is without
an object. What is so dreadful for the ethicist is the realization — held just
below the surface - that humans do not will the good simply by becoming
conscious of it, that our freedom does not always tend toward the universal,
and that we may actually choose against it. The ethicist is anxious about the
ideological suspension of the ethical.
De Silentio quotes from Richard III in order to give an example of how sin is
the suspension of the ethical:
I, that am rudely stamped, and want love's majesty

I strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtailed of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,

Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them. .. .42
De Silentio says people like Gloucester cannot be saved by fulfilling their civic
duty or by obeying the order of society: 'Ethics really only makes fun of
them.' 43 These 'half made up' human beings are not necessarily more imper-
fect than others, but they have become conscious of the contradiction of the
self, and their inability to reconcile their particularity with the universal.
The conscious realization that one cannot measure up begins to bring about
a break with the ethical/44
The Ethical Stage's Despair: Inclosing Reserve

The criticism implicit in Kierkegaard's view of the despair of the ethical stage
is that ethical systems do not take into account that we are imperfectible. If an
ethical system were to take sin seriously, it would thereby exceed itself, for it is
powerless to overcome sin. On the other hand, if ethics ignores sin, it is a futile
discipline, calling on people to do the very thing they are incapable of. In the
end, the ethical stage must be despaired of, though hope calls from beyond this
despair; it calls from the religious stage of existence.
As we saw with regards to the aesthetic stage, in order to leap into the next
stage of existence, one must choose to despair of the existence-stage (the mean-
ing-structure) one is in. In being chosen, despair becomes an act, rather than
something passively suffered. This choice for despair is an intensification of
despair. As despair intensifies, a greater consciousness of the actual nature of
one's despair increases. Further, this intensification of despair is closer to sal-
vation, because in the awareness of what despair is, there is a chance one will
seek to obtain the cure. The more clear one's conception of despair, the more
apparent it becomes what is needed for its cure.
In this greater consciousness, there is also a greater freedom. The Judge
understood this freedom in terms of self-determination. In this, the self's eter-
nal validity is the absoluteness of the task of positing itself. As the consciousness
of failure at this task grows, the requirement is no longer seen as something
uplifting, but as something that crushes the self. One correctly sees one is too
weak to lift or fulfil the requirement, but continues to believe that it is one's
duty to do so. The decision one is confronted with at this point is whether
to be completely crushed over not being able to wrench oneself from this
weakness, or to be broken and humbled by it — whether one will continue in
pride, or become poor in spirit. As Kierkegaard says, 'What lifts up more, the
thought of my own good deeds, or the thought of God's grace'.45 To be
humbled by one's powerlessness is to leap into the religious stage of existence
by choosing to despair of the ethical stage; to take pride in one's weakness is to
intensify one's despair, and move into the form of despair that transcends the
ethical stage: inclosing reserve.
In transcending the ethical, inclosing reserve falls under the spiritual
category of the 'demonic', though it is still not yet outright spiritual defiance.
Kierkegaard calls inclosing reserve demonic because it is despair and anxiety
over the Good. In the ethical stage, where one still holds onto the belief that
one can fulfil the ethical requirement, one's weakness is sensed in the mood of
anxiety over evil ~ that is, it is the possibility of new guilt that causes the ethi-
cal person to become anxious. In the movement into the demonic, one has
despaired so much over one's guilt that one accepts and chooses oneself as
guilty — which is the right thing to do, since one is guilty — but does so in des-
pair and anxiety, rather than humility. Pride begins to manifest itself more
powerfully in this anxious despair, in that one gains strength from one's
guilt — becomes proud of one's guilt — though still in a brooding and only rela-
tively conscious manner. 46
Kierkegaard says that anxiety over the Good is an unwillingness to be open
to redemption. It has lost the optimism of the ethical stage, and in this sense is
on the brink of defiance; it differs from defiance only in the sense that its des-
pair becomes something it chooses to suffer under, rather than something it freely,
willingly and defiantly takes upon itself. Another way to put this difference is
that defiance is freedom choosing or willing to be itself against the Good, while
inclosing reserve wills against the Good in unfreedom — and so wills not to be
itself, that is, itself as free.
Thus, a strange state of affairs has arisen within inclosing reserve, in that a
deeper self-knowledge has led to unfreedom rather than freedom. And yet, this
is neither the unfreedom of spiritlessness, nor that of being externally deter-
mined; rather, this unfreedom is posited by freedom: 'Freedom is posited as
unfreedom, because freedom is lost.' The freedom that is lost is the optimistic
ethical freedom of autonomy and self-sufficiency. The ethical requirement
cannot be fulfilled, and so one realizes one is not self-sufficient. This recogni-
tion is posited by self-conscious freedom as unfreedom. It is still a free choice,
because the reaction to one's failures and weaknesses is self-chosen. Hauf-
niensis says that freedom 'underlies unfreedom or is its ground'.
This choice for unfreedom is inclosing reserve's attempt to close itself
off from the Good - that which is freedom, openness, truth and disclosure.
Its continual torment is just this inability to close itself off from the Good.
If it could turn away from the Good, there would be no sense of weakness,
and so no torment, but it is too conscious to return to such spiritless dis-
consolateness. It has become a single individual before the Good, and so
remains in continual anxiety. 50 As Dostoevsky's 'Underground Man' puts

this unfreedom:
The more aware I was of goodness and of everything 'lofty and beautiful,'
the deeper I sank into my slime, and the more likely I was to get mired down
in it altogether. But the main point is that all seemed to take place within me
not by chance, but as though it had to be so.
This is not an external determination, but an internal determination to lock

himself up inside his own wretchedness, in hopes of breaking all contact with
the Good. He wants to be left alone by the Good so that he can at least lick his
wounds in peace. Haufniensis writes,
The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdi-
tion. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying, as did the demoniac
in the New Testament with regard to salvation: rieôi KOti aoi [What have
I to do with you]? Therefore it shuns every contact [with the Good],
whether this actually threatens it by wanting to help it to freedom or only
touches it casually.. .. Therefore, from such a demoniac is quite commonly
heard a reply that expresses all the horror of this state: Leave me alone in my
wretchedness/52
Inclosing reserve yearns for solitude. This solitude is not the deeper spiritual
ability to be away from the world due to one's contentment with oneself, but is
a need to be alone with one's torment. Kierkegaard explains this need for soli-
tude in an Upbuilding discourse:' [T]he troubled person expects no victory; he
has all too sadly felt his loss, and even if it belongs to the past, he takes it along,
expecting the future will at least grant him peace to be quietly occupied with
his pain.' j3
A twisted knot becomes tightened within inclosing reserve: it despairs over
its weakness, and hates itself because of this weakness, and yet it cannot stop
reflecting on this weak self, becoming completely consumed with itself. This is
why Anti-climacus characterizes it as pride/ Inclosing reserve is proud of
itself: it is proud it cannot stand this weakness within itself. While one can
easily imagine a proud person saying to someone else, T am too good for
you', inclosing reserve says this to itself. It is proud of itself for having such a
high conception of what the self is, and of being conscious that its own self does
not measure up. It is proud of being determined by spirit, even though this
determination comes through its weakness.
Obviously, it does not completely identify itself with its weakness: in an eva-
sion of itself, it identifies itself more as that which is tormented by its weakness,
than by its actual weakness. It has moved beyond the ethical consciousness
into a consciousness that the Apostle Paul described in his letter to the
church in Rome:
For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do
not wish. But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the
one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who
will set me free from this body of death?
What makes inclosing reserve what it is, is that it does not ask the question
Paul asked - it does not seek to be free from its body of death. It despairs in
the face of the Good - abiding in its wretchedness - rather than maintaining
hope in the possibility of redemption.
This makes its relationship to the Good extremely complex. On the one
hand, the self desires to close itself off from any contact with the Good, because
this contact is its torment; on the other hand, this weakness is its source
of pride, and so it finds pleasure in it. The pleasure it feels is pride's self-
satisfaction that, although the self is weak against the Good, it is strong in
its consciousness of this misrelation to the Good. Its torment consists in its
unfree relation to the Good; its pleasure consists in its ability to 'rise above'
the weakness as self-consciousness. The torment and pleasure it feels over its
weakness is an expression of its contradiction as unfree self-consciousness. Dos-
toevsky's Underground Man expresses this pleasure of inclosing reserve:
But it is precisely in this cold, loathsome half-despair, half-belief, in this

deliberate burying of yourself underground for forty years out of sheer
pain, in this assiduously constructed, and yet somewhat dubious hopeless-
ness, in all this poison of unfulfilled desires turned inward, this fever of vacil-
lations, of resolution adopted for eternity, and of repentances a moment
later that you find the very essence of that strange, sharp pleasure I spoke about.56
Earlier the Underground Man describes this pleasure in terms of self-

consciousness:
This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degra-
dation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is
despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out,
that you will never become a different man; that even if there were still time
and faith enough to change yourself, you probably would not even wish to
change; and if you wished, you would do nothing about it anyway, because,
in fact, there is perhaps nothing to change to.
We see here a man who is falling in love with his despair, beginning to embrace
it with some gusto, and finding pleasure in his conscious misrelation to the
Good. Indeed, even if there were time to change, he would probably not wish
to, since he has come to define himself through his despair. At this point, he is
unwilling to imagine moving beyond this despair, and is content to stay within
the horizons of inclosing reserve — his underground dwelling.
Kierkegaard says that the person in inclosing reserve has a right conscious-
ness about his or her weakness - Kierkegaard would find nothing wrong with
the consciousness of guilt described by the Apostle Paul. The wrong turn is
taken in trying to establish the self (one's identity) on the basis of this weak-
ness: 'you must go through with this despair of the self to get to the self. You
are quite right about the weakness, but that is not what you are to despair
over; the self must be broken down to become itself, just stop despairing over
it.' By both despairing over and loving its weakness (that is, finding its mean-
ing in its weakness), inclosing reserve does not move beyond it. It sees its weak-
ness as its only strength. It is not, however, to be strengthened in its weakness,
but broken by it; only in this way can it go beyond inclosing reserve into a
deeper consciousness of the self.
We find a clue to this movement in a letter written to Judge Wilhelm by an
old friend, who is now a priest in the Jutland of Denmark. The Priest's upbuild-
ing thought is that, in relation to God, we are always in the wrong. Although
this sermon is written by a Christian priest, it does not express the specifically
Christian existence; it is a movement into what Kierkegaard calls immanent
religion or Religiousness A. Immanent religion is part of the religious stage of
existence, though it is not a fully actualized spirit. In this stage the self becomes
conscious of total guilt, and so leaps into the infinite.
In Relation to God One is Always in the Wrong

From the vantage point of spirit, we can see that all forms of despair revolve
around whether one will relate to the Good in humility or in pride. Inclosing
reserve is a prideful reaction to the realization that, before the absolute, one is
always in the wrong. The pride comes out in its focus on itself, its unwillingness
to be itself before the absolute, and in its anxiety and despair about the abso-
lute the dread inherent in its contact with the Good. The Priest gives three
clues to a right (humble) relation to the absolute: acceptance of total guilt, the
development of an absolute, unconditional, and infinite relation to God, and a
radical turn from temporality's goal to eternity's goal.
Total Guilt
There is a gnawing pain that accompanies the consciousness of one's own
weakness before the absolute, and there are also several means of finding
relief. We have already looked at two despairing attempts at relief: one may
evade the requirement by lowering it to an acceptable (that is, achievable)
level, or one may despair over one's weakness in inclosing reserve, thus gaining
some relief by having transcended the weakness in despair. The Priest adds a
third despairing means, which he calls doubt:
If a person is sometimes in the right, sometimes in the wrong, to some degree

in the right, to some degree in the wrong, who, then, is the one who makes
that decision except the person himself, but in the decision may he not again
be to some degree in the right and to some degree in the wrong . . . ? Is doubt
to rule, then, continually to discover new difficulties, and is care to accom-
pany the anguished soul and drum past experiences into it?
How can we ever determine whether we are in the right or in the wrong?
Where do I go outside of my existence in order to judge whether, and to what
extent, my existence measures up to the requirement? I can remember many
times when I have been either too harsh or too lenient with myself. The fact
that there is no way to get outside our existence in order to make such a judge-
ment can easily lead to doubt or scepticism - much as the Learner's Paradox
led to the Sophists' ethical scepticism. One becomes frozen in the knowledge of
being unable to make any judgement concerning one's standing ethically.
Since personality has no absolute or secure place to situate itself in existence,
one may come to believe that the ethical requirement is a subjective undertak-
ing, and the Good should be discussed only in emotive terms. Once this hap-
pens the doubt spirals out of control, and eventually the whole notion of the
Good dissolves into sophistry.
There is another approach, however: one can transcend the ethical stage
by appropriating the thought that 'in relation to God we are always in the
wrong', and so admits the defeat of the ethical stage. Louis Mackey says
'the Judge is no stranger to guilt. But he takes his guilt as a moral challenge,
when in fact he would be better advised to see it as a moral defect.' To bring
out why it is necessary to admit one's total guilt, the Priest describes how lovers
relate to each other when a wrong has been committed. He does this in order to
show that the Judge's attempts to justify his wrongs — and even his sorrow
over them - exhibit how little love he actually has for the absolute and God.
In reality the Judge is more impressed with himself and his own self-sufficiency
than with the demand of the requirement, though he continually tells others
about his love for the absolute. The Priest says that, when a wrong has been
committed, the heart of a true lover would never seek to be right in relation
to the beloved. It is hard to imagine a person in love seeking to shift blame to
the beloved, or trying to make excuses to the beloved for the wrong. The
Judge, however, in the midst of the wrong committed, maintains he is in
the right. He does not blame the absolute, but maintains that his sorrow over
having committed his wrong shows he is not in conflict with the absolute.
He seeks to justify himself in the face of his failings. This conflict cannot be
overcome through justification, but only by confessing that one is always com-
pletely wrong in relation to it. Mackey writes:
[T]he priest tells his hearers, choose yourself. But choose yourself as you are:
in the wrong against God. You lose yourself eternally as long as you con-
tinue to absolutize your freedom. You gain yourself eternally as soon as
you recognize your nothingness. The decision for absolute guilt — and it is
a decision, not reached by calculation but taken in freedom - is the only
edifying (constructive) decision available. This is the act of freedom by
which a man's self acquires absolute worth: the choice of his self as worthless
in relation to God.
Infinite Resignation As an Absolute Relation to the Absolute

The choice for oneself as totally guilty is an absolute and infinite choice. The
Priest writes,
[Wjishing to be in the wrong is an expression of an infinite relationship, and

wanting to be in the right, or finding it painful to be in the wrong, is an
expression of a finite relationship! Hence it is upbuilding always to be in
the wrong — because only the infinite builds up; the finite does not!
The Priest is accusing the Judge of being disingenuous toward the abso-
lute. The Judge claims to have chosen the absolute absolutely — that is, to be
in an infinite relation to it - and yet he is not. All ethical relationships are
finite and conditional in the sense that sometimes one is right and sometimes
wrong. In other words, one relates contingently to the absolute, for one some-
times does not relate to it rightly. The Judge seeks to cover this contingent
relationship by saying that even when he is wrong he sorrows over it. How-
ever, the Judge is sorrowful because he is not absolutely connected to the
absolute, and so shows that his relationship to the Good is contingent on
other things — for instance, his weakness, or the desires that are in opposition
to the absolute.
If one confesses one is always in the wrong in relation to the absolute, then
one absolutely relates to the absolute as absolutely in the wrong. In this confes-
sion the self becomes infinitized, and makes a passionate leap into the religious
stage of existence. The ethical existence is often nothing more than the worship
of one's own self-sufficiency and self-righteousness; it is simply the particular
will seeking to glorify itself by means of the universal will. The Priest says that
if the Judge were truly interested in himself as a task - in his eternal validity
and responsibility to the absolute — then he would choose what the Priest
espouses: total guilt. In this he would leap into the religious stage of existence,
and find himself as nothing before God, and yet still remain infinitely and
unconditionally engaged with Him.64
The Change from Temporality's Goal to Eternity's Goal

In this choice for total guilt, there is also the first radical movement away from
temporal goals. Although the Judge says his choice is a choice for eternal valid-
ity, his actual existence expresses interest in his civic duty. In this, the eternal
goal comes to be seen only in terms of temporal goals, and gets split up into the
various activities of one's civic life. To fully comprehend the eternal goal of an
eternal happiness one must make a decisive break with the temporal. The ethi-
cal life does not make this decisive break, but attempts to raise the temporal
and finite up to the eternal and ideal by ennobling them. It is incapable of
doing this, and so remains mired within intrinsically relative activities — rela-
tive to conditions, circumstances and the activities of others.
In the end, the victory and security the Judge had expected actually
increases the tension between the eternal and temporal, ideal and actual,
absolute and relative. Eventually the tension between these poles becomes so
great that a kind of energetic discharge looms, and a leap into the religious
stage is possible. Here the emphasis is on the absolute telos of an eternal
happiness. Religiousness A consists in a radical break from the finite and con-
tingent, in hopes of finding repose within an infinite and absolute understand-
ing with God. One's happiness and joy is found in a break from the world,
so that one'sjoy rests completely in one's relationship with God. We will now
examine this decisive break with the finite, in order to see the rise in self-
consciousness and freedom that results from it.
Notes
1. E/OII,p.211.
2. E/O II, pp. 213-14.
3. E/OII,p.215.
5. E/O II, p. 214.
6. E/O II, pp. 215-16.
8. Jeremy Walker says, 'The man who is living aesthetically may have a normally
clear and accurate picture of himself, his likes and dislikes, his talents, goals,
etc. But he will never have asked himself what it all means. So, naturally, he will
be unable to answer the question that marks the ethical: What does your life
mean?' (p. 167).
9. E/OII,p.251.
10. E / O I I , p.251.
11. E / O I I , p. 262.
12. E / O I I , p. 259.
13. E / O I I , p. 259.
14. E / O I I , p. 262.
15. E/O II,pp. 261-2. Again, one senses the Aristotelian theme here of the fulfilment
of one's form through acts which are themselves the fulfilment of the form.
16. E/O II, p. 263.
17. E/O II, pp. 275-6.
18. E/O II, p. 330.
20. CA, p. 16.
21. John D. Glenn Jr. 'The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard's
Works' in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness Unto Death. Ed.
Robert L. Perkins, pp. 5-21. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1987, pp. 14-15.
22. FT, p. 96.
23. FT, p. 96.
24. FT, p. 96.
25. FT, p. 82.
26. Gerald May. Addiction and Grace. San Francisco: Harper/Collins, 1988, p. 52.
27. Berdyaev, p. 103.
28. Michael Wyschogrod. Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 88.
29. George Connell. To Be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaard's Thought. Macon,
GA: Mercer UP, 1985, p. 183.
30. Kierkegaard distinguishes between two modes of religious existence, which he
calls Religiousness A (immanent religion) and Religiousness B (paradoxical reli-
gion, or Christianity). Sin is a category of the latter, and is actually a category
that distinguishes it from Religiousness A (which knows only guilt, and not sin).
For our purposes, the religious stage will be dealt with more generally, and so
there will be a mixure of the two modes. The reason for this is because Kierke-
gaard's criticisms of the ethical stage are sometimes given from within the aspect
of Religiousness A and sometimes within Religiousness B. Since we are looking at
the despair of the ethical stage, and not specifically at these two modes of religious
existence, I will be using criticisms from both modes without explicitly distin-
guishing between them.
31. CA, pp. 17-19.
32. CUP, p. 266.
33. CUP, pp. 266-7.
34. CUP, p. 267.
35. 'The more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by
the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk
is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity.
Ethics will have nothing to do with bargaining; nor can one in this way reach
actuality' (CA, p. 17).
36. FT, pp. 99-100.
37. FT, p.98n.
38. CA, pp. 115-16.
39. This self-fulfilling prophecy could have many rationales behind it. For instance,
one's fixation on the ideal and one's continual failure may cause one to believe
that one cannot overcome the 'dependency' on alcohol, and so one simply
acquiesces. Or the alcohol itself becomes a means by which one tries to forget the
struggle. In either of these instances, there is a release which takes place. Even-
tually there must be relief from this situation, and since one does not have it in
oneself to fulfil the ideal, one succumbs to the temptation.
40. CA, p. 173.
41. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is rooted, as a concept, in an anxiousness over nothing.
This is contrasted with fear, which has a specific object.
42. FT, p. 130.
43. FT, p. 130.
44. This realization of being an exception is an initial break with the ethical; after
it, a further question arises as to whether one will make the break in defiance
or in faith. As yet that has not been decided. What one has become conscious
of, however, is that one is outside the universal. This consciousness of radical
guilt has the effect of making one a single individual, perhaps singled out for
all eternity.
45. JFY, p. 153.
46. By 'relatively conscious' I mean that it is not yet the defiance which draws its exis-
tence from its conscious hatred and despair of the Good.
47. CA, p. 123.
48. '[Ujnfreedom is a phenomenon of freedom and thus cannot be explained by nat-
uralistic categories. Even unfreedom uses the strongest possible expressions to
affirm that it does not will itself, it is untrue, and it always possesses a will that is
stronger than the wish' (CA, p. 135n).
49. CA, p. 123.
50. CA,p. 123.
51. Fydor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York:
Bantam, 1992, p. 6 (my emphasis).
52. CA,p. 137.
53. EUD, p. 20.
54. SUD,p.96.
55. Romans 7:19-20, 24.
56. Dostoevsky, p. 12 (my emphasis).
57. Dostoevsky, p. 7 (my emphasis). While it is true that it is only through having
become spirit that these twisted knots begin to form in consciousness, it is not an
'excessive consciousness' that causes one's guilt, but the defiance and pride that
intensifies with this growing consciousness. The defiance and pride are present
even at the lowest levels of (un)consciousness, but they become intensified and
felt - in all their torment and pleasure - as consciousness intensifies.
58. SUD,p.96.
59. E/O II, p. 346. The Priest is speaking directly to the Judge's own definition of
despair as personality's doubt. The question of guilt eventually becomes a ques-
tion of the degree of guilt. In seeking to assess the degree of guilt we arrive
nowhere else than in the personality's doubt, for it is unable to determine these
degrees from itself (unless it is willing to take the leap which consists in the abso-
luteness of the thought that in relation to God one is always in the wrong, which is
just what the Priest proposes).
60. Louis Mackey. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1971, p. 90.
61. E/O II, pp. 347-8.
62. Mackey, p. 94.
63. E/O II, p. 348.
64. JFY, p. 106.
65. E/O II, p. 353.
4
The Final Movement Toward Defiance: Infinite Resignation
The Self's Primary Object of Relation
The Distinction between the Stages

The Priest's letter at the end of Either/Or II ushers in a change in the primary
object of relation for the individual. In the ethical stage of existence, the indi-
vidual is primarily related to himself or herself— the Judge stands before his
duty, and has the criterion within himself as the paradigmatic human being.
In the religious stage, the individual's primary relationship is to God. This
change in the highest object of existence makes a difference in how one under-
stands oneself and one's telos. In The Sickness Unto Death, Anti-climacus writes:
The progression in consciousness we have been concerned with up to now

occurs within the category of the human self, or of the self that has man as
its standard of measurement. But this self takes on a new quality and speci-
fication in being the self that is directly toward God. This self is no longer the
merely human self, but what, hoping not to be misinterpreted, I would call
the theological self, the self directly before God.
What is stressed here is the individual's object of passion. The aesthetic person
is passionate about what is external, and will gladly and 'heroically' surrender
the self in order to gain this object of'infinite' worth; the ethical person has the
self as the object, and will gladly give up all in the world in order to gain this
o _ . . . *^
self. For the religious stage, the object of existential focus becomes God. It is
in focusing on what is beyond both the world and the self that the religious
existence arises.
A movement into the religious stage of existence prepares an individual to
be open to the highest human good. Kierkegaard believed that an individual's
will, passions and intellect are not initially set or prepared to receive the high-
est good.4 Self-becoming is just this preparation, whereby the individual is
continually transformed through an infinite movement away from the world
and self-sufficiency — that is, from what it is initially lost in. Kierkegaard
understood this preparation in terms of his Christian context, and so spoke of
the highest good as an eternal happiness expressed in a relationship with God,
which is viewed as the absolute telos of human life. Eternal happiness is a right
relation to the will of God - a right relation to the ground of our Being.
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 103
He believed that each of the stages has a relation to this eternal happiness,
which impacts a person's will, passions and intellect.
The aesthete views the eternal happiness as a great source of inspiration for
poetic, theatrical or philosophical works. This type of relation to an eternal
happiness is essentially disinterested: it is outside the poet as a muse, and not
as something which essentially alters or affects his or her existence. Aesthetes
are oblivious to their despair of the eternal, and simply seek the pleasure found
in the contemplation of an eternal happiness. What an eternal happiness may
actually mean for their lives is not something aesthetes find interesting.
The ethical stage places an eternal happiness alongside all the other aspects
of duty. It is a matter of interest, but only in its relation to the fulfilment of
one's inner teleology. In other words, an eternal happiness finds its relative
place within the overall ethical task of becoming oneself. Climacus writes,
I do not know whether one should laugh or weep on hearing the enumera-
tion: a good job, a beautiful wife, health, the rank of a councilor of justice —
and in addition an eternal happiness, which is the same as assuming that the
kingdom of heaven is a kingdom along with all the other kingdoms on earth
and that one would look for information about it in a geography book.
For the ethical person, an eternal happiness is something tacked on at the end
of a good life. One's main concern while living is the fulfilment of one's duty,
and if this is fulfilled - if one becomes the paradigmatic human being - then
an eternal happiness can be expected as a reward. Certainly the Judge will say
that he is interested in the Good, but he conceives the Good as inseparable
from the self, and understands it in terms of an inner teleology not some-
thing distinct from the individual as his or her ground. There is no sense of
standing before God as a single individual. One's responsibility is conceived in
terms of personal duty, not personal relationship.
Where does one find an eternal happiness when the awareness of total
guilt arises, and one admits to an inability to fulfil one's inner teleology?
If ethics doesn't lead to the highest human good, what does? In what does the
highest human good consist? An understanding of the highest human good
comes through a leap into the religious stage of existence, in which one is
transformed. The change is not merely, or even essentially, intellectual in
content, but existential — that is, it involves the whole person, and changes
one's relationship to the world, to oneself, and to God. Climacus says that
Religiousness A
does not base the relation to an eternal happiness upon one's existence but
has the relation to an eternal happiness as the basis for the transformation of
existence. The 'how' of an individual's existence is the result of the relation
to the eternal, not the converse, and that is why infinitely more conies
out than was put in.6
In an ethical existence, one measures and understands one's relationship to

the Good in terms of how one has succeeded or failed in one's duty. One's
existence determines one's relationship to the Good. In the religious stage, it
is the possibility of an eternal happiness that determines one's existence, in
that one's existence is transformed in the relation to it. In other words, in the
leap from the ethical to the religious stage, the focus changes from the self-
sufficiency of the individual in fulfilling the Good, to God's power to trans-
form a person's existence. In the ethical existence, it is the individual who has
the power; in the religious existence, it is God whose power alters the indivi-
dual's existence, if only the individual is willing.
Self-Knowledge
Essential self-knowledge consists in a purification from the evasive self-
knowledge which knows itself only in relation to what is external to itself. This
purification takes place in the ethical stage through a distancing of oneself
from the world through an absolute choice. As we have seen, however, the
ethical stage is ultimately divided by a multiplicity of civic roles and duties
connected to the world; an ethical person is too much in love with the multi-
plicity of worldly tasks to find the purity needed for relating directly to
God. As the despair of this stage is confronted and chosen in a more transpar-
ent manner, the ethical person conies to realize that all ethical efforts were
ultimately attempts to be something — that is, they were attempts at self-
glorification: 'The genuinely humble man is he who conies to see that all his
efforts at humility have really been efforts to express his pride, the genuinely
loving man he who sees that his acts of love have been acts of self-glorification.
And so on.' There comes a point in the growth of consciousness when
the pride of the ethical existence shows itself: all one's expressed love for the
absolute or others is really self-love, and all one's righteousness is self-
righteousness, since the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing.
Paul Ricoeur puts the distinction between the ethical and religious existence
in 'Guilt, Ethics, and Religion' in such a way as to show that the rise in reli-
gious consciousness is able to plumb the depths of the evil inherent in the
purely ethical existence:
Evil, in moral consciousness is essentially transgression, that is, subversion

of a law; it is in this way that the majority of pious men continue to consider
sin. And yet, situated before God, evil is qualitatively changed; it consists less in
a transgression of a law than in a. pretension of man to be master of his own
life. The will to live according to the law is, therefore, an expression of evil ~ and
even the most deadly, because the most dissimulated', worse than injustice is one's
own justice. Ethical consciousness does not know this, but religious con-
sciousness does.
Nietzsche showed how the 'darker' drives behind the ethical life are subli-
mated and hidden within the ethical standards of society and the individual.
He came to see this drive to be the master of one's own life as the very Being of
existence, and all the ethical pretensions of humility and duty as spiritless and
nihilistic attempts at will to power. Unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard does not
chastise the ethical stage for its ideals, but for its evasions. The ethical ideals
are to be upheld, though it is an illusion to believe one is fulfilling them. Kier-
kegaard believed we are to move beyond this ethical evasion, and become con-
scious of the fact that our most ethical actions, while often holding to the letter
of the law, are usually opposed the spirit of the law. The religious existence
understands the heart is deceitful and corrupt, evasive and comfort-seeking,
and the motives which drive the ethicist are far from pure. Within the religious
stage there is enough self-consciousness to understand the heart, and enough
freedom to allow for a purification through the existential pathos of infinite
resignation, guilt and suffering.
What holds this three-dimensional pathos together, and gives it a trans-
forming energy, is the thought that to need God is one's highest perfection.
The ethical existence found its perfection in self-sufficiency, and its relation
to God was the same as the Deists': 'Thank you very much for what you have
done, but I can manage from here.' The religious existence finds its perfection
to be the opposite of this autonomous self-sufficiency:
Through a more profound self-knowledge, one learns precisely that one

needs God, but at first glance the discouraging aspect of this would frighten
a person away from beginning if in due time he were not aware of and
inspired by the thought that precisely this is the perfection, inasmuch as
not to need God is far more imperfect and only a misunderstanding.
Ethical self-sufficiency is a misunderstanding of oneself and one's relation to

God. Part of the transformation that takes place in the movement into the reli-
gious stage is a change in this knowledge of oneself and God: one discovers that
one's highest perfection is to need God, and that one is capable of nothing on
one's own. This leads to a rather simple, and yet radical, consciousness of God:
Insofar as a person does not know himself in such a way that he knows that
he himself is capable of nothing at all, he does not actually become conscious
in a deeper sense that God is. Even though a person mentions his name
at times, calls upon him occasionally, perhaps in the more momentous
decisions thinks he sees him and is moved . . . he is nevertheless somewhat
piously deceived if he therefore believes it is manifest to him that God is or
that the being of God would not have another manifestness in this earthly
life, the meaning of which is continually confused if God is not implicitly
understood. 10
Only those who understand what it means to be poor in spirit - that one is
spending one's years making an uproar for nothing — only they understand
that their highest perfection is found in their poverty before God.
This leads us to an analysis of the existential pathos of the religious exis-
tence. The analysis of this rise in consciousness and freedom will help us under-
stand the depths of defiant despair, and the most vehement form of evil.
The Initial Expression of an Existential Pathos: Infinite Resignation
A Human Being's Highest Perfection begins with the Knowledge that One is
Capable of Nothing
What does it mean to be an excellent human being? The Judge had no pro-
blem answering this question: fulfilling one's duty, and becoming the para-
digmatic human being. This, however, has been called into question: the
impossibility of fulfilling one's ideal shows this cannot be the criteria for
humans. We have looked at three wrong reactions to this problem: lower-
ing the ideal, the despair of inclosing reserve, and a scepticism that mocks
ethics. Kierkegaard says religious existence gives a different view of human
excellence:
But what is a human being? Is he just one more ornament in the series of
creation; or has he no power, is he himself capable of nothing? And what is
his power, then; what is the utmost he is able to will? What kind of answer
should be given to this question when the brashness of youth combines with
the strength of adulthood to ask it, when the glorious combination of willing
to sacrifice everything to accomplish great things, when burning with zeal it
says, 'Even if no one in the world has ever achieved it, I will nevertheless
achieve it; even if millions degenerated and forgot the task, I will neverthe-
less keep on striving - what is the highest?' Well, we do not want to defraud
the highest of its price; we do not conceal the fact that it is rarely achieved in
this world, because the highest is this: that a person is fully convinced that he
himself is capable of nothing, nothing at all.
Kierkegaard is convinced that the meaning of human existence is never found

without going through this thought, and that one knows oneself best only
when this thought is existentially understood. It is difficult to fully grasp and
accept this until one has an understanding with oneself— that one is ulti-
mately dependent on a power other than oneself.
Religious existence, then, is a move from self-sufficiency to this total depen-
dence. It is a coming to terms with this dependence on God, and the realiza-
tion (perhaps 'acceptance' would be a better term) that this dependence is
itself the meaning and good of human existence. To be capable of nothing
is to realize one's impotence in fulfilling the ideals required of a human being.
Such a contradiction makes no sense within the ethical stage, but the religious
person has grasped its significance: it takes the focus off oneself and puts it on
God. Inclosing reserve sensed it was capable of nothing, but this was its tor-
ment, because it sought to remain independent from the Good — that is, to be
something good in its own right. The despairing move of inclosing reserve is to
refuse to relate to anything higher than its own weakness. Although it knows it
is capable of nothing, it still thinks that being capable of something is human
perfection. Indeed, the more independent and self-sufficient a person is, the
more perfect he or she is said to be. Inclosing reserve is what it is because it
has consciousness enough to know it cannot reach this perfection, yet not
enough consciousness to realize this is not human perfection. We are not to
despair of our weakness, but work ourselves through it into a dependence on
God. It is in this transformation of the human ideal that one becomes con-
scious that God is. 13
Human success is not to be measured by external exploits or fulfilments of
duty, but by this relationship to God. Kierkegaard is writing to Christendom,
to those who claim to know God, to have a close relationship with God because
they are members of the Danish Church, yet who believe they are capable of so
very much, and who take this self-sufficiency as a sign of their perfection. Kier-
kegaard wonders what part God plays in this self-sufficiency. In the end, he
finds that God is simply a relative help used in order to take care of those few
aspects of existence in which the individual presently feels weak.
Given this relationship to God, it is not surprising that religion came to be
viewed as a crutch for the difficulties of human existence. This came out espe-
cially in Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Religion in general, and Christianity in
particular, came to be seen as the opium of the people, the expression of spirit-
lessness and nihilism, and the illusion that spares people from falling into neu-
roses. The Deist God was no longer even needed to set up the drives and telos of
human life, because the dark longings and cravings of human existence
became the forces that guide and move our lives - the ground of life. This too
is beyond the ethical, and has its own view of human perfection: to see through
the illusion of one's need for God.
Kierkegaard lived just prior to, and during, the period in which the
masters of suspicion wrote. He was also suspicious of Christendom, and sensed
humanity's need to be roused from its slumber. He did not believe, however,
that religious consciousness or Christianity were the causes of spiritlessness,
but the self-sufficiency which was reigning within Christendom. Existentially
speaking, God was dead in Christendom, because self-sufficiency became
the criterion for perfection. Thus, self-sufficiency is the illusion that needs
to be exposed, and the resulting transparency will lead us, he hoped, to see
more clearly our need for God, and not, as the masters of suspicion thought,
our independence from the idea of God. Kierkegaard said, 'to need God
is nothing to be ashamed of but is perfection itself, and that is the saddest
thing of all if a human being goes through life without discovering that he
needs God.'
Kierkegaard does not deny that human beings are capable of accomplishing
many finite, relative and contingent ends, but he is pointing out the illusion of
believing that these relative ends are absolute (which is to think that one is
capable of something), or that one is to relate oneself to them absolutely
(which is to think that one is something). To think one is capable of something
is to absolutize what is, by nature, relative, and to give infinite value to what is
finite. For instance, Schopenhauer recognized the ultimate nothingness we
confront when we authentically face death; not simply the nothingness of
death itself, but how the nothingness of death also swallows up — in its infinite
nothingness - all ourfiniteachievements:
That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never
been. But of everything that exists you must say, in the next moment, that it
has been. Hence something of great importance now past is inferior to some-
thing of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and
related to the former as something to nothing.
Kierkegaard knows that eternity's goal — the goal of an eternal happi-

ness — seems like nothing in relation to what is being accomplished in this
bustling world. In relation to eternity's goal, however, all this busyness and
our human accomplishments within the established order come to nothing.
It is not the temporal and finite goals that are capable of moving all of exis-
tence, but the eternal and infinite goals - and yet these seem to be nothing
to the world.
Here we discover why the deeper the movement into spirit, the more ambig-
uous the outward manifestations. The most outstanding Christian in the
church, whose character is beyond reproach, and whose accomplishments
are readily observable to all who would look may be losing himself in the
world; at the same time, the most reprobate sinner, sitting at the bar, may be
gaining the eternal, though there are no outward manifestations. Kierke-
gaard writes,
The infinite in the guise of being nothing, purely and simply 'man' (some-
what like the lily and the bird, which indeed are not something), is in the
world the point outside the world which can move all existence. . . .
On the other hand, everything which wants primarily to be something in
the world is not a moving power but becomes the untrue established order of
things, a kind of secular dovetailing, which the established order is, which
stretches itself out complacently in earthly security.
A change from the ethical existence to the religious appears to be nothing,

relatively and finitely speaking, and yet from the aspect of spirit, it is that
which moves all existence. It is the infinite in the guise of nothing. One's
entire existence is transformed, and yet relatively and finitely speaking noth-
ing happened. As long as one is directed outwardly, seeking to be something
and capable of something, one is closed off to the consciousness that God is,
and to the infinite which moves and transforms one's existence.
Dying To ...
This moves us into an important characteristic of infinite resignation, which
Kierkegaard expresses as 'dying to . . . ' With a growing awareness of being
capable of nothing, and a greater dependence on God, life is no longer found
in the world. Life becomes defined by one's relation to God — however unde-
fined one's idea of God may be at this point. In other words, one thrusts away
temporality's goal, and in the seeking of eternity's goal, the external becomes
less and less a concern. This movement toward inwardness is what it means to
be spirit. In the Postscript Climacus speaks of this 'dying to . . . ' in terms of an
inward activity in which one cuts the ties to what is outward:
But before God he inwardly deepens his outward activity by acknowledg-

ing that he is capable of nothing, by cutting offevery teleological relation to
what is directed outward, all income from it in finitude, even though he still
works to the utmost of his ability and precisely this is the enthusiasm.
The ethical stage understands the inner teleology in terms of an outward

direction, so that the ethicist is necessarily immersed in the external and its
relative ends. The Judge's will expressed its sovereignty and self-sufficiency
in terms of bringing the finite under the power of his absolute, good will, and
this power was an expression of freedom. In infinite resignation, the self has
come to see that this transformation is not possible by one's own power, and
so its teleology is severed from what is externally and finitely directed. A new
conception of freedom is arrived at: it is a decisive break with the external -
that is, the will is cut off from all concerns with conforming the external to the
absolute. The emptiness of one's finite tasks consist in an existential recogni-
tion that they are worthless in fulfilling one's absolute telos. Walker writes,
'Resignation' simply means giving up all claims on any object, person, or

achievement in this world. It is the exact correlative of the discovery that I
can essentially do nothing. For it is the form in which this discovery is
expressed in the will. To discover that I can do nothing is to detach my will
from all possible results of my acts, all possible achievements. It is, among
other things, to cease to be influenced in my decisions by any desire for
worldly achievable goods and any fear of worldly ills. This does not entail
ceasing to desire and fear. It only requires that my decisions no longer be
determined by such motives.
When we look at the finite and contingent, we are unable to become con-
scious that God is, because his ways and thoughts are infinitely higher than
ours; this is why dying to the world is so important for an understanding and
consciousness of God: in order to know God, to know ourselves, and to com-
prehend our own relationship to God and his to us, we must cease viewing our
existence from the aspect of the relative and comparative. Religiousness A is
this initial, negative step toward God. It is a renunciation of the finite, and as
such, a merely negative choice. As we will see, the vacuum or openness created
by resignation does not get filled, at least not within Religiousness A.
While 'dying to . . . ' includes a death to being nourished by the finite and the
worldly, as well as a death to every earthly human hope, the most important
thing one is dying to is one's own self-centered existence in the world. As Kier-
kegaard says,
Therefore, death first; you must die to every merely human hope, to every
merely human confidence; you must die to your selfishness, or to the world,
because it is only through your selfishness that the world has power over
you. . . . But naturally there is nothing a human being hangs on to so
firmly - indeed, with his whole self! - as to his selfishness! Ah, the separa
tion of soul and body in the hour of death is not as painful as being forced
to be separated from one's soul when one is alive. And a human being
does not hang on to physical life as firmly as one's selfishness hangs onto
its selfishness.'19
Human existence and perfection are not about being the centre of the uni-
verse, about getting one's due, or about being the master of one's domain.
In Religiousness A one sets oneself into a different universe, and one's exis-
tence is thereby transformed.
The aesthetic existence is completely self-centred, knowing nothing other
than its own pleasure, in which the universe and other people exist for its own
enjoyment. This is a very small self. The ethical existence understands that the
self exists for more than enjoyment, and that there is a higher ideal for which it
must strive. Though this self has been enlarged by the ideal, it is still the centre
of its own existence, even when dutifully helping others. In religious existence,
one discovers that one is a bit player in the universe, if you will. While it is true
one is still concerned about oneself— indeed, one's concern is infinitely more
concentrated on oneself — this self is no longer the self-centred self. A new
understanding of the self arises, and this understanding leads to a transforma-
tion in one's existence. The self recognizes that all its earthly goals were
attempts to be something, and yet this 'something' comes to nothing in the
end; all its striving was for merely finite and contingent gains, though they
were taken as the ultimate and absolute. Religiousness A realizes that the self-
ish energy expended by the ethical individual in the attempt to defend the per-
ception of his or her 'right' relation to the Good is ultimately selfish energy; it is
an energy filled with self-justifying posturing, criticalness toward those who
threaten this self-perception and a drive to dominate anyone who questions
its correctness. The religious existence has, to put it succinctly, seen through
the illusion that governs most human existence. At this point it has not only
died to the world, but it has died to its selfishness.
What is left after this death of the self? The nothingness of freedom. In dying
to oneself, the individual is enlarged into the infinite form of the self, as it floats
over an abyss of nothingness. Unlike inclosing reserve, where the self is filled
with dread and anxiety in the face of this nothingness, the religious self senses it
has become more transparent to itself. It senses a clarity, arising through the
death of its illusions of self-sufficiency. It does not have anything positive to
hold onto at this point, and so has nothing (no-thing) by which to define
itself. Still, this is a deeper understanding of itself than it has ever had before,
and existence is purified through this transparency. We will gain a deeper
understanding of this nothingness of the self by examining the absolute telos of
human beings.
An Absolute Relation to the Absolute Telos

In infinite resignation and 'dying to . . . ' , the self is seeking to develop an abso-
lute relation to its absolute telos. The absolute telos can be put in many ways: an
eternal happiness, the highest human good, a right relation to oneself and
God. All of these remain ambiguous to the person in infinite resignation,
though they point to some meaning beyond the finite and relative. The abso-
lute and unconditional task of gaining oneself remains, though it has become a
purely negative task in Religiousness A — a purification.
In infinite resignation, one begins to understand that the earthly must be
surrendered in order to relate absolutely to one's absolute telos. Climacus
argues that there can be no mediation of the absolute telos. All mediation is
relative, serving as a conditioning element, and making the end relative to
the mediation. Climacus writes, 'All relative willing is distinguished by willing
something for something else, but this highest TE\OS must be willed for its own
sake. And this highest ri\o^ is not a something, because then it relatively cor-
responds to something else and is finite.'2 In the ethical stage, the absoluteness
of the goal of self-becoming is also asserted, though it remains tied to the finite
and relative; however, the use of relative ends — one's career, marriage, civic
responsibilities, and so forth — is no longer to be absolutely related to an abso-
lute telos, but only to relative ends. Success, victory and one's highest good
become measured by social standards and values, which are governed by the
established order. The paradigmatic human turns out to be a socially con
structed identity. Given this, infinite resignation believes the only way to
relate to the finite is to die to it. As long as one holds onto anything finite, one
does not relate absolutely to the absolute.
A temptation arises at this point, which will allow us to see how radical the
renunciation is. The temptation is that even the renunciation of all finite and
temporal things may simply be a means to an eternal happiness. If this is the
case, then it is not an absolute and infinite act, but relative to one's renuncia-
tion. When one uses this renunciation as a means to become something, then
one is, even in this renunciation, willing the finite — willing the finite as
renounced for the sake of an eternal happiness (eternal happiness as perfect
self-identity). This was the mistake of the Middle Ages. According to Climacus,
in its renunciation of the world, it sought to use this act as an outward expres-
sion of its relation to the absolute telos - for example, in a vow of poverty, celib-
acy, flagellation and so forth. The Middle Ages sought to relate to the absolute
through the relative and finite, and to this extent had more to do with ethical
existence than religious. Climacus says that whenever the infinite and absolute
seeks to express itself outwardly in the finite and relative, the former ends up
losing itself to the latter as a source of identity. 21 If one seeks to use the resigna-
tion of the finite in order to gain one's highest goal, then one will eventually
crave the finite, if for nothing else than to renounce it. This renunciation then
becomes an ethical act (one's duty), rather than a religious one.
Thus, the task is to keep the distinction between the finite and the infinite -
and the external and internal — firmly in mind. One continues to live in the
finite, looks like everyone else, and yet is dead to the world. Climacus writes,
In immediacy, the individual is firmly rooted in the finite; when resignation

is convinced that the individual has an absolute orientation toward the
absolute rl\oq, everything is changed, the roots are cut. He lives in the finite, but
he does not have his life in it. ... He is a stranger in the world of finitude, but he
does not define his difference from worldliness by foreign dress (this is a
contradiction, since with that he defines himself in a worldly way); he is

incognito, but his incognito consists in looking just like everyone else.
One performs one's tasks in the world, but none of them hold any allure, and
they are empty of any reward. One transcends them while in their midst. The
alienation this transcendence creates is so complete that it can feel as if one is
merely watching some other self in its daily tasks.
Through the focus on an absolute telos, existence is gathered and consoli-
dated in a new way. Eternity entered time in the moment of resolution, in
which one gathered oneself in an infinite and absolute choice to relate to
one's absolute telos. A moment came that emptied the finite of significance,
and the meaning of existence needs to be defined anew. One ventures every-
thing upon the discovery of the absolute good. One's life is focused and gath-
ered around the realization that, before God, one is nothing, and that the
highest human perfection is to need him. There is no sense of victory carried
with this in-gathering, at least not the kind of victory found in the Judge's
explication of the ethical life. One confronts emptiness everywhere, is unable
to be at home in the finite, and life becomes a longing for the infinite — which,
of course, is emptied of content.
As we will see when we look at the pathos of suffering, this is a very painful
existence. One is alienated in every external situation. The finite goals and
objectives that unite people are not available. The excitement and uproar
others are making is often unappealing, holding no fulfilment, meaning or sig-
nificance. One must still perform the finite and external responsibilities, but
not in such a way that one's life is found in these activities. Rather, life is
found in the internal struggle of repetition.
In infinite resignation the roots to the finite are cut, and so there is no way
even to communicate the struggle going on inside, since those caught up in the
finite could not understand this absolute relation — so foreign to them is the life
of the infinite. In infinite resignation, one remains alone before God and the
struggle of the infinite. The finite world would become a mere shadow, if not
for the finite aspect of the self, which demands to be taken into account. One
remains continually confronted by the finite and its goals, feels the pain of
loneliness, and perhaps at times longs to be able simply to enjoy the finite
again. From time to time the finite comes to one as a temptation, because
there is no concrete identity to be found within the pure infinite, and so the
dream of victory and success in relative ends remains a seductive whisper in
one's ear. The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed that new mercy is offered every
morning, and while this is good news, it implies that new temptations and fail-
ures are also being confronted daily. Every day brings with it a new set of finite
tasks to become lost in. Repetition is the only thing that brings coherence in
this situation.
Thus, the task of Religiousness A is repetition: one must repeat, throughout
one's temporal life, the movement of resignation. At times the repetition
comes easily and naturally, for the finite is bitter and empty; at other times
the repetition is difficult, and one must again leap into the infinite. We will
never be finished with this task: 'let us not forget that it was the case at least
in school that the mediocre pupil was recognized by his running up with his
paper ten minutes after the task was assigned and saying: I have finished.'23
The positive effect of this repetition is not that we find a calmness within the
infinite, but that we bring more freedom to the struggle against the world -
and ourselves. The finite no longer has the hold it once did on us, though
it continually demands to be taken account of. And so we must repeat our res-
ignation as long as we exist.24 This continual repetition, taking place as it
does in ever new circumstances and trials, allows one to gain a deeper con-
sciousness of oneself.
The Essential Expression of an Existential Pathos: Suffering
This tension between the finite and infinite becomes the basis of the second
dimension of the existential pathos of religious existence: suffering. The puri-
fied desire for the infinite and absolute is continually defiled by a renewed
desire for finite fulfilment. Although the finite's illusions have been seen
through, the silence and emptiness of the infinite can be so painful that the
finite tempts with its enchanting tangibility, and at times we fall into it
again. It is this continual foundering that is at the heart of the suffering of
Religiousness A.
By 'essential' Kierkegaard means that without this expression — without
this particular type of suffering — the person is not in the religious stage of exis-
tence. The suffering is essential because it flows out of infinite resignation as a
matter of course. It is due to the longing of the dark depths, which continually
seeks to find fulfilment and satisfaction through attaching its longing to the
tangible world, in an attempt to gain self-identity - that is, self-revelation.
However, since the finite has become drained of meaning, the self has lost its
taste for the finite, and often has difficulty even stomaching it. One must con-
tinue to work, deal with other people, and fulfil the responsibilities of the finite,
all with the intense awareness of the emptiness of these activities, their worth-
lessness in fulfilling the task of the self, and with the gnawing hunger of the
dark depths still intact. One lives within the finite, and yet does so as if floating
over an abyss. Climacus writes,
Whereas esthetic existence is essentially enjoyment and ethical existence is

essentially struggle and victory, religious existence is suffering, and not as a
transient element but as a continual accompaniment. Suffering is, to recall
Prater Traciturnus' words, the 70,000 fathoms of water upon whose depths
the religious person is continually.
The abyss is the infinite which has completely devalued the finite. This abyss
becomes that out of which one's existence flows — that is, out of which one's
freedom and self-consciousness find their source. As a deeper movement
toward becoming oneself, this is a move in the right direction, but the darkness
of this source of self-conscious freedom means there is nothing positive on
which to hang one's hope. Thus, while the emptiness and darkness is the
source of one's freedom, it is also the source of one's suffering. To surrender
the latter, would be to forfeit the former.
This can be seen in Gerald May's analysis of addiction and withdrawal.
He speaks of the infinite in terms of'spaciousness', which
seems to have no bounds, no qualities, no form. It is unconditioned and

unconditional. It has no objective attributes that we can grasp and relate
to other systems. Since we can neither make an adequate cellular represen-
tation of it nor incorporate it into our preexisting systems, we cannot adapt
to it. 27
He then points out that this spaciousness is really freedom, and it is this free-
dom that the addicted person is struggling with. Now obviously the addicted
person is struggling to be free from the addictive behaviour, but May rightly
regards the struggle to be with freedom itself — that is, not simply overcoming
one addiction by filling the empty spaciousness with something else (as when
one quits smoking, and ends up gaining weight because one exchanges cigar-
ettes for food), but staying in the spaciousness or emptiness of freedom itself.
May writes,
In addition to minimizing withdrawal symptoms, the substitution of one

normality for another allows us to avoid the open, empty feeling that
comes when an addictive behavior is curtailed. Although this emptiness is
really freedom, it is so unconditioned that it feels strange, sometimes even
horrible. If we were willing for a deeper transformation of desire, we would
have to try to make friends with the spaciousness; we would need to appreci-
ate it as an openness to God.28
As spaciousness and openness, there is nothing to which the self can attach
itself in order to gain a sense of identity. Infinite resignation's suffering is due
to this continual struggle of being unable to define oneself in relation to any-
thing finite. It would actually be quite easy to express this struggle if one were
to become something through it. However, in the religious stage one comes to
oneself as nothing, and so one's identity of oneself dissolves into this nothing-
ness. Of course, one is not to be consoled by this nothingness, in the thought
that this becoming nothing is becoming 'something'. Indeed, the attempt to
become a little 'more nothing' is the constant temptation of infinite resigna-
tion. Climacus says, 'the ultimate spiritual trial by tried and tested religious
persons is always that the utmost effort wants to delude one with the notion
of self-importance, that it is something.' And so one would be willing to
suffer in order to become a martyr, if only in one's own eyes. This, however,
is not the suffering of infinite resignation. The particular kind of suffering
characteristic of infinite resignation is to undergo the struggle, and gain nothing
from it. Although the self in its self-centredness yearns to be something, cries
out to be affirmed as essential in existence, and to reveal itself as unique and
significant, infinite resignation continually comes behind it in order to give its
devastating blow: 'You are nothing, and all your supposed self-importance is
an illusion.'
Simone Weil's description of this death emphasizes selfishness' relation to
longing and desire:
The extinction of desire (Buddhism) - or detachment - or amor fati -

or desire for the absolute good - these all amount to the same: the empty
desire, finality of all content, to desire in the void, to desire without
any wishes.
To detach our desire from all good things is to wait. Experience proves
that this waiting is satisfied. It is then we touch the absolute good.30
Elsewhere she writes,
We possess nothing in the world — a mere chance can strip us of every-

thing — except the power to say 'I.' That is what we have to give to God —
in other words, to destroy. There is absolutely no other free act which it is
given to accomplish — only the destruction of the T.'
These two quotes speak to the same task. It is desire and longing that empow-
ers the T', and is its ground and drive. Combined with attachment to material
and finite things, the T finds a multiplicity to desire, and disperses itself self-
ishly around its hunger for more. The only free act, and the absolute good to
which Weil points, is infinite resignation.
Weil also speaks of waiting, and this indeed has its place in infinite resigna-
tion. But it is closer to Kierkegaard's thinking to see this waiting as prep-
aration. Meister Eckhart wrote,
God does not work in all hearts alike but according to the preparation and
sensitivity he finds in each. In a given heart, containing this or that, there
may be an item which prevents God's highest activity. Therefore if a heart is
to be ready for him, it must be emptied out to nothingness, the condition of
its maximum capacity. So, too, a disinterested heart, reduced to nothing-
ness, is the optimum, the condition of maximum sensitivity.
To speak of venturing everything in infinite resignation is to point to this emp-
tying out to nothingness. What is emptied is self-assertion and the finite, and
what is left is the nothingness of the infinite. The only consolation is that there
is an opening created for the appearance of God, if he desires to appear. This
emptying of the self before God is both an absolutely free act, as Weil puts it,
and a removal of all the pockets of obscurity that desire and longing create
when they put their sights on anything other than God. There is no repose in
this, but a continual repetition, and so a continual struggle in which one gains
an ever deeper transparency.
Not only is transparency deepened in terms of the nature of the finite and the
self, but one comes to understand the source of human freedom. When one
looks out into the world in infinite resignation, and one's desires are no longer
tied to the finite, freedom is seen as coming from the infinite. One experiences
freedom as something arising out of a transcendence of all one knows and can
be known, for its source is beyond the concrete and even idealized contents of
our existence - that is, beyond the contents of the aesthetic and ethical stages.
The landscape of one's existence changes with infinite resignation, and this
change of landscape deconstructs, and then reconstructs, the view of one's
ultimate source of freedom: freedom does not consist in choosing between
a multiplicity of finite goals and desires (aestheticism), nor does it consist in a
self-sufficiency out of which the autonomy of the self reigns (the ethical), but is
a source beyond all finite values and all self-sufficiency.
As beyond self-sufficiency, infinite resignation comes to understand freedom
as something that is offered to one, a gift, if you will. It is not created by oneself,
but chosen, and as chosen its source lies outside of oneself. Still, freedom is
one's task, and in this sense it is one's own freedom, though always as some-
thing to be chosen or accepted. If it can be accepted, then it can also be
rejected - given up for the sake of security, self-assertion and the pleasures of
the world. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor saw this clearly. The Inquisitor
recalls for Jesus the temptation with which the 'wise and dread spirit' con-
fronted Him:
' " 'Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with
some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural
unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread - for noth-
ing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than
freedom. But seest Thou these stones in the parched and barren wilderness?
Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of
sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou with-
draw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.' But Thou wouldst not deprive
man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking what is that freedom
worth, if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives
not for bread alone." '~,33
The Inquisitor applies this to humanity several pages later when he says,
' "Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to
make all men bow down to Thee alone - the banner of earthly bread. And
Thou has rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of heaven.
"Behold what though didst further. And again in the name of freedom!
I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some-
one quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which he is
born. But only one who can appease his conscience can take over his free-
dom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread,
and man will worship Thee, for nothing is more certain than bread." '
In Religiousness A one gains the painful understanding that the acceptance of

freedom means the rejection of that with which humans normally comfort
themselves. The certainty and comfort of the finite can be so peaceful, and
although one knows it is empty, at least it is tangible; the emptiness of freedom
does not give anything one can put one's hands or mind around, but remains
simply the discovery of the infinite as the spaciousness within which God may
be approached.
The task of self-becoming brings a consciousness of the nature of freedom: it
is a barren wilderness, an openness that offers no tangible comfort. The person
in Religiousness A comes to realize that this suffering of freedom is the contin-
ual lot of human existence, and is placed upon the individual by existence
itself - by the structure of the self. The suffering was always there (as the Bud-
dha's First Noble Truth states), though as we have seen, spiritlessness has
found many ways to evade it - or better, to reject it. The everydayness in
which spiritlessness has its life is, for the most part, nothing more than the
attempt to cover up the suffering of existence. It covers up the emptiness of
the self by gaining identity through comparison. In this it hands over its free-
dom for the comfort and security of earthly bread.
Those in infinite resignation have become too conscious for this. They have
seen the nature of human existence and it is too late to go back. Climacus says,
from the religious point of view all human beings are suffering, and the point
is to enter into the suffering (not by plunging into it but by discovering that
one is in it) and not escape the misfortune. Viewed religiously, the fortunate
person, whom the whole world favors, is just as much a suffering person, if
he is religious, as the person to whom the misfortune comes from outside.
Fortune or misfortune define neither the self, nor its sense of victory or failure.
As transparency rises, the understanding of existence as suffering becomes
more explicit to the individual; as the illusions used to cover up suffering are
exposed, one is able to come to terms with the fact that human existence is an
inherent struggle. With the growing transparency, the reality that lies under-
neath the illusions can no longer be denied, even though this reality is the
source of suffering. What is revealed is that the finite web of means-ends rela-
tionships are without fulfilment. It remains a web of self-enclosed relationships
that go nowhere, and offer only the evasion of the reality that lies underneath.
The pain inherent in infinite resignation would be overcome if perfect self-
identity with the infinite and eternal could be attained, but such self-identity
with the eternal is closed off by existence itself. The self is eternal and absolute,
and yet it is not, and can never be this in any immediate sense of perfect iden-
tity. It holds within itself both the principle of particularity and the principle
of the universal, but in a divided manner. It is itself, then, only within a process
of becoming. The absolute telos of an existing human being is this process, and
can never be the stasis of perfect self-identity with the eternal.
This division of the self means that those in infinite resignation continually
waver in existence because of their alienation from the finite aspect of the self.
They can make the movement of infinity by themselves, and also relate to the
unconditional (which is why Kierkegaard calls Religiousness A the religion of
immanence), but they are unable to make the transformation back down into
the conditional. In other words, they are unable to affect a synthesis between
the infinite and the finite on their own. They remain drawn to the eternal
happiness, and the eternal consciousness of God's love for them, though it is a
captivation that leaves them foundering in existence when the inevitable des-
cent into the finite becomes necessary.
There is a hope of some kind of birth within infinite resignation, that the
suffering of self-becoming will yield to an eternal happiness. The deep longings
continue, and though one knows they must not be attached to anything tangi-
ble, the expectation is that the emptiness of freedom will open up to something
wonderful. Gerald May expresses the hope that resides in the suffering of
infinite resignation:
The specific struggles we undergo with our addictions are reflections of a
blessed pain. To be deprived of a simple object of attachment is to taste the
deep, holy deprivation of our souls. To struggle to transcend any idol is to
touch the sacred hunger God has given us. In such a light, what we have
called asceticism is no longer a way of dealing with attachment, but an act
of love. It is a willing, wanting, aching venture into the desert of our nature,
loving the emptiness of that desert because of the sure knowledge that God's
rain will fall and the certainty that we are both heirs and cocreators of the
wonder that is now and of the Eden that is yet to be.36
There is the expectation that rain will fall, but one does not know what this
rain is, when it will come, or even if it will come in this lifetime. One is at a
standstill (one has done all one can do), and wonders if all that is left is to
twist in the wind forever.
The Decisive Expression of an Existential Pathos: Guilt
The task of religious existence is simultaneously to relate oneself absolutely to

the absolute telos and relatively to relative ends. We have seen that this turns
out to be the struggle with oneself as a self-contradiction, and entails the suf-
fering described above. One has died to immediacy and to oneself, and gained
a deeper understanding of true freedom. Though great strides of self-con-
sciousness and freedom are made in infinite resignation, Climacus regards it
as 'the enormous detour'. What he means is that Religiousness A creates a
situation where one is never able to get to the point where one moves on in ful-
filling one's task; instead, one expends all one's energy in the beginning — res-
ignation — and ends up suffering under the contradiction of being both finite
and infinite, rather than synthesizing these poles. Upon entering the religious
stage of existence, one immediately recognizes the task — to relate absolutely
to the absolute and relatively to the relative — but one is unable to actualize
this right away. As time moves on, this task continues to be neglected, for one
remains consumed by the beginning. Climacus writes,
[T]he task is given to the individual in existence, and just as he wants to

plunge in straightway . . . and wants to begin, another beginning is discov-
ered to be necessary, the beginning of the enormous detour that is dying to
immediacy. And just as the beginning is about to be made here, it is discov-
ered that, since meanwhile time has been passing, a bad beginning has
been made and that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty, and
from that moment the total guilt, which is decisive, practices usury with
new guilt.
It is no surprise that guilt is so decisive for religious existence, since the leap
into this stage consisted of the thought that, in relation to God, one is always in
the wrong. The whole situation is strewn with guilt, which rises up before one
in each moment of infinite resignation, because in this movement one is only at
the beginning of fulfilling the religious task. One is continually having to die
to the world, and is never able to get beyond this. A growth in freedom and
self-consciousness even comes to a halt, as one abides within the enormous
detour. This guilt-consciousness is so decisive for the religious existence, that
to be without it is to show that one is not relating oneself to one's eternal hap-
piness. Thus, one finds the strange paradox that the decisive expression for
relating to one's eternal happiness is guilt — one would think that guilt would
be an expression for not relating to one's eternal happiness. Guilt, however, is
the only way a human being can express a relation to the absolute telos. Thus,
as it is with suffering so it is with guilt: one is guilty simply by virtue of existing.
One is not only guilty of particular transgressions, but guilt is one's position
in existence.
While we are normally conscious of particular instances of guilt, these par-
ticular instances are grounded in (made possible by) our total guilt. To speak
of the particular guilt or innocence of specific actions is to think in compara-
tive and relative terms. However, there cannot be relative guilt in terms of
one's relation to the absolute; either one is guilty in one's relation, or one is
innocent. To see only particular instances of guilt is to measure guilt in
degrees. This is to look at guilt in terms of the external and relative, which
allows one to see oneself as guilty in some instances, but innocent in others.
Kierkegaard is simply pointing out that guilt in any area is to be totally
guilty of not relating to the absolute absolutely. Covering up this total guilt
by focusing only on particular instances is an evasion of one's true relationship
to the absolute. Climacus describes this by saying,
With regard to guilt-consciousness, childishness assumes that today, for

example, he is guilty in this or that, then for eight days he is guiltless,
but then on the ninth day everything goes wrong again. The comparative
guilt-consciousness is distinguished by having its criterion outside itself. . . .
When he is in good company on Monday, it does not seem so bad to
him, and in this way the external context determines an utterly different
interpretation."
What the 'enormous detour' and total guilt show is that Religiousness A ends
in despair. The individual is doomed to a continual need of having to die to the
finite, for fear that it will become absolute. At the same time, the finite aspect
of the self can never be completely denied.
The Despair of Religiousness A
A Merely Negative Act: Nihilism

Although Religiousness A ends in despair, there has been a rise in conscious-
ness due to a recognition of the source or ground of freedom, as well as the
self-understanding that one's significance and identity is not tied to finite
ends. These are very transformative realizations, because the self gains a
more integrated, purified and absolute existence around them. There has also
been an intensification of a particular kind of human strength or actualiza-
tion: one is more self-determined than ever before. We saw in our analysis
of Kant, that freedom is connected to the notion of self-determination, which
for Kant meant to act out of the internal law of practical reason. As the ground
of the will, the practical law acts as that which determines the will, so that
people hold the ground of their freedom within themselves. Any motive
not arising from this ground is not free, but externally determined. The most
free and actualized person is the one who acts out of this self-grounded
action. Kant, however, could not imagine a type of evil that would act out
of this ground.
For Kierkegaard, freedom is connected to the infinite, which pulls one out
from the relative and external ends that most often serve as motives for choice.
In aesthetic existence forces, desires and cravings arise up out of the dark abyss
of longing, and gain form through their connection with the world. One's deep
longing becomes prey to the resplendent forms of the world. In the ethical
stage an ideal is gained; this ideal acts as that which brings order to the forces
of the dark abyss. Schelling wrote of this in terms of the penetration of the light
of reason into the dark depths. For the Judge, the ideal was to penetrate into
every aspect of the self, and bring it under the order and rule of the ideal. In the
religious stage it is discovered that this dark ground is not so easily penetrated
and ordered. It must remain dark in order to serve as the ground of reason, and
so there always remains a raw longing. It is this relation between the dark
ground and the light of reason that accounts for the continual struggle within
human existence. As a longing toward revelation, the dark abyss within us
seeks to be more and more revealed (we seek identity or self-revelation),
though it ultimately cannot serve as the basis of our revelation. We long to
gain identity and become something, and yet we do not have the power to get
under this longing - to establish self-identity out of ourselves.
For Kierkegaard, the ground of human freedom consists in this contradic-
tion of being both infinite and finite, absolute and relative, light of reason and
dark depths. Human actualization takes place in the working out of this self-
contradiction. The ethical individual transcends the aesthetic view of free-
dom, in which one is 'free' to do whatever one desires at any given moment,
no matter how chaotic these desires may be. Through the ethical stage it
is learned that the ground of human freedom is not simply the dark abyss.
It takes the religious individual to discover that freedom is also not simply the
light of reason, as Kant's ethical view claims, because the light of reason
cannot get its ground under itself. The religious conception of the ground of
human freedom is that it consists of both the dark longing and the light
of reason. The negative act of freedom in infinite resignation consists of a
conscious penetration of the infinite abyss of nothingness (the dark depth that
grounds finite forms, and which reason can only conceive as no-thing — as the
mere potential of form and order), in which one remains within the spacious-
ness or openness of this abyss this raw craving for form and order.
The more self-conscious and free one becomes, the more one realizes that
one cannot remain forever in the 'enormous detour' of infinite resignation,
and that there is no middle ground in this self-actualization or self-becoming:
one understands that self-conscious freedom is ultimately expressed in terms of
a choice for good or evil. The struggle inherent in human existence forces one
to choose whether to become oneself in defiance of the universal will (the
Good), or through faith in it. All the evasive and lukewarm insipidness of
spiritlessness has been shattered, and one is left with how one will confront the
painful struggle of human existence: since diversion and evasion are no longer
an option for those who have become spirit, they must choose whether to be
themselves in despair of the Good, or in faith of the Good.
It is this recognition of the ground of human freedom that allows for an
understanding of a more fully actualized form of evil: defiance. As a recipient
of the highest heaven (the light of reason), one has the tools to penetrate the
dark depths, and create one's own particular order out of it, without thereby
weakening the ground of freedom — that is, weakening human actualiza-
tion. Indeed, the more one acts out of this dichotomous ground of freedom,
the more actualized one has become, even if this actualization takes place
by asserting one's particular will over the universal will. Thus, evil can be
expressed in authentic, self-conscious and free selfhood.
The despair of infinite resignation brings one to the brink of this choice,
because one is finally forced to decide how to relate to God. Religiousness
A is not, itself, a positive relationship with God, and just this is its despair.
Although the self of Religiousness A has come to the consciousness of itself as
nothing before God - has died to the world and to itself - and has come to se
that its pride and worldliness get in the way of relating to God, this is only a
negative act, a getting-out-of-the-way; it is an essential act for coming to know
God, but it is not able to provide the positive act in which such knowledge
takes place. It remains within the nothingness and emptiness of freedom, and
is thus a form of nihilism.
To remain in Religiousness A is to remain at the stage of preparation for an
eternal happiness, and so never to walk into the relationship itself. One recog-
nizes that the highest human perfection is to need God, is able to die to oneself,
and yet goes no further than the recognition of neediness and death. The dread
confronted is the infinite distance from God, and the powerlessness to do any-
thing about it. Guilt and weakness leave one at an infinite distance from one's
absolute object ofjoy.
As a negative form of religious existence, Religiousness A is the essential
form for a God-relationship: the truly positive relationship to God can take
place only through the negative - through the consciousness of barriers.
Elrod notes the relation to God of Religiousness A, and its importance to the
task of self-becoming:
The edifying element in the sphere of religiousness A is essentially that of

immanence: it is the annihilation by which the individual puts himself out
of the way in order to find God, since precisely the individual himself is the
hindrance. Quite rightly the edifying is recognizable here also by the nega-
tive, by self-annihilation, which in itself finds the God-relationship, is based
upon it, because God is the basis when every obstacle is cleared away, and
first and foremost the individual himself in his finiteness, in his obstinacy
against God.39
Infinite resignation is the essential form for coming to God and becoming one-
self, and yet within this negative form are the positive forms of faith and defi-
ance. One must not stop in infinite resignation, for 'the positive is continually
in the negative', and so to stop is to fall into despair. To understand how faith
and defiance are within this negative form, we will examine how infinite resig-
nation relates only to one pole of the synthesis of the self, and so is not yet a
complete self.
The Possibility of Defiance

As we saw, infinite resignation cannot find a way to relate to the finite pole of
the self, but only suffers under it. While it can infinitely abstract itself from
the finite, and think God and the God-relationship, it cannot think the God-
relationship together with the finite. De Silentio portrays this as a beautiful
dance, but one that is alienated from the concrete world:
The knights of infinity are dancers ... and they have elevation. They make
the upward movement and fall down again, and this too is no unhappy pas-
time, 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.
As the knights of infinite resignation soar in the infinite, they seem to rise
above all the defilements and spiritlessness of the finite and comparative.
However, they cannot remain aloft, and when they come down, they waver,
and this wavering shows the despair and heaviness of this type of existence.
There is no diversion, no possibility of moving away from the consuming
recognition of the emptiness of the finite. One's existence is concentrated into

the single thought of one's nothingness and the nothingness of the world in
which one resides; in this, one's existence becomes condensed and heavy, and
there is nothing available with which to lift the weight of the infinite from
one's shoulders. It would be easy to shoulder it if one could stay aloft in the
exquisite dance of the infinite, and become something in this dance. However,
freedom and the infinite remain empty, and, surrounded by the emptiness,
one becomes tempted by a more intense form of despair. This despair is no
longer the spiritless temptation of the finite — that internal temptation with
which the dread spirit initially tempted Jesus, and continually tempts human-
ity. No, now the temptation is that to which the dread spirit and Grand Inqui-
sitor themselves gave into: defiance. Defiance is what tempts spirit. It is the
temptation of those who have grown tired of the enormous detour - of
remaining prepared for something that lies beyond their own control. When
the impatience of despair arises, the temptation to defiance emerges. As the
Grand Inquisitor says to Jesus,
' "Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou has only the elect, while we give
rise to the rest. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones
who could become elect, have grown weary of waiting for Thee, and have
transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth
of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner
against Thee." '
In this heaviness, something has to give. The self exists on the watershed of two
directions of authentic selfhood: defiance and faith. We will now look at defi-
ance, through which the essence of radical evil will be revealed.
Notes
1. SUD, p. 111.
2. It should be noted that this 'giving up' of everything is not an internal act, but an
external act. As Climacus says, 'So when a man says, for example, that for the sake
of his eternal happiness he has suffered hunger, cold, been in prison, in peril at sea,
has been despised, persecuted, whipped, etc., these simple words are a testimony
to ethical pathos inasmuch as they quite simply refer to what he, acting, has suf-
fered. Wherever the ethical is present, all attention is called back to the individual
himself and to acting' (CUP, p. 390). We will see that this is neither the resigna-
tion nor the suffering the religious individual undergoes for the sake of an eternal
happiness. The difference between the two lies in the dialectic between outward
and inward suffering, outward and inward acting, and the reference to oneself as
one's object versus God as one's object.
3. As we will see, this object is called an eternal happiness in 'Religiousness A', which
is to say that one gains an eternal happiness in being rightly related to God. Kier-
kegaard uses various expressions for this same idea, such as the absolute telos, a
human being's highest good, purity of the heart, and salvation. It does not neces-
sarily entail a specifically Western religious tone - though this is the tone Kierke-
gaard uses - but could also fit within Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The point is
that one believes that happiness is to be found outside the typical, everyday
worldly concerns - whether these concerns are viewed as Maya, or an ignorance
that seeks permanence in a world of interdependent arising.
4. 'Even though Christianity assumes the subjectivity . . . is the possibility of receiv-
ing this good, it nevertheless does not assume that as a matter of course the sub-
jectivity is all set, as a matter of course has even an actual idea of the significance
of this good.' (CUP, p. 130).
5. CUP, p. 391.
6. CUP, p. 574.
7. Walker, pp. 153-4.
8. Paul Ricoeur. 'Guilt, Ethics, and Religion'. Conflict of Interpretations. Ed. Don
Ihde, pp. 425-39. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974, p. 438 (my emphasis).
9. EUD, pp. 317-18.
10. EUD, pp. 321-2.
11. Matthew 5:3, Psalm 39:6.
12. EUD, p. 307.
13. EUD, p. 322.
14. EUD, p. 303.
15. Arthur Schopenhauer. 'Studies in Pessimism'. The Works of Arthur Schopenhauer:
The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays, pp. 215-305. Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black,
1932, p. 231.
16. JRNL II, #2089.
17. CUP, p. 506
18. Walker, p. 176.
19. FS, p. 77-8.
20. CUP, p. 394.
21. CUP, pp. 407-8.
22. CUP, p. 410 (my emphasis).
23. CUP, p. 408.
24. CUP, pp. 410-11.
25. CUP, p. 288. Frater Taciturnus is another of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, and
makes this comment on page 444 in Stages on Life's Way.
26. The longings and cravings of the dark depths are nothing other than the source of
all human addictions, whether to alcohol, shopping, gambling, sex, power, or
pleasing others.
27. May, p. 103.
28. May, p. 147.
29. CUP, p. 464.
30. Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace. Trans. Emma Graufurd. New York: Routledge,
1992, pp. 12-13. It should be noted that, while Religiousness A may include a
Buddhist conception of existence, infinite resignation is not, for Kierkegaard,
a uniquely Buddhist quality. Kierkegaard does not believe there can be a detach-
ment from the empirical ego. While the empirical ego's desires are not to be made
absolute, neither are they to be annihilated. Without the desires of the finite
aspect of the self, we are not able to be our true self. The desires that arise out of
the ground of who we are must find their place within a freedom that transpar-
ently wills for the absolute good.
31. Weil, p. 23.
32. Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart. Trans. Raymond Bernard Blakney. New York:
Harper, 1941, p. 88. I read the phrase 'disinterested heart' in this quote, not in
terms of how Kierkegaard uses the term 'disinterested', but as synonymous with
what Weil calls 'detachment'. It is a disinterest in the external, arising from a
maximum of inward earnestness.
33. Fydor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karam.oz.ov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York:
Signet, 1980, p. 233 (my emphasis).
34. Dostoevsky, 1980, p. 234.
35. CUP, p. 436.
36. May, p. 181.
37. CUP, p. 525.
38. CUP, p. 531.
39. Elrod, p. 197.
40. CUP, p. 524.
41. FT, p. 70.
42. Dostoevsky, 1980, p. 238.
5
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil
Transparent Despair
In infinite resignation, the self s transparency to itself has moved into an

authentic understanding of the self as infinite. By infinitely abstracting from
the finite, the comparative, and the relative, the self gathers itself in the infinite
source of freedom, and rests transparently in the knowledge derived there.
Although this is authentic selfhood or spirit, it is still despair, in that the self is
unable to relate to the finite. The self is confronted with a choice: whether it
wills to be itself in despair or in faith. There is the possibility of an authentic
despair, which allows for an intense form of evil that is transparent to itself,
and grounds its self-actualization in its rebellion against the Good.
Kierkegaard does not agree with the Socratic view that if one knows the
Good, then one will do it. Socrates' argument is that no one would willingly
harm himself or herself, and since rebellion against the Good is harmful, once
one knows the Good, one will embrace it. For Kierkegaard, however, there is
the possibility that, due to pride, one may be offended by the Good. While
Socrates believed that actions follow upon the understanding as a matter of
course, we have come to see that there is an infinite gap between the under-
standing and the will, because the will maintains an independence from the
understanding by serving as its basis. For Kierkegaard, both defiance and
faith have a self-conscious relationship before God, but they differ on how
they choose this relationship: to choose against it is to remain in despair, and
in a self-consciously free rebellion against God and what is good. If spirit is
offended by what a God-relationship entails, it can transparently choose to
despair of this relationship, and so will to be itself in despair, rather than
faith. Kierkegaard puts the distinction between knowing and choosing the
Good in terms of the possibility of evil:
[A] person certainly must know his soul in order to gain it, but this knowing is
not the gaining, inasmuch as in knowing he ascertains that he is in the hands of
an alien power and that consequently he does not possess himself or, to
define it more closely, he has not gained himself. When the devil believes
and yet trembles, there is a self-knowing in this believing, and the more
perfect it is, the more he will tremble, precisely because he does not will to
gain himself/
The devil, whom Kierkegaard regards as a symbol of the most intense form
of evil, is transparent to himself and to his relationship with God, and yet
in despair, he does not will this relationship, and so he trembles before God.
Defiance is authentic spirit that stands as a single individual before the alien
power that established and holds the self, and it does this through the pathos of
'offense': the defiant spirit is offended by God's ways.
In Kierkegaard's time the memory of God was still strong, and so the rebel-
lion still took place in the face of God, even if this was done in the proclamation
that God is dead. Times have changed since then, so the power that estab-
lished the self s existence is less defined, and is hidden behind the murkiness
that belies human weakness itself. Human rationality can only go so far in dis-
covering what has become hidden, and beyond that there is nothing — a trans-
cendence which is without content, yet nevertheless able to be related to
negatively. Whatever the name or connotation given to it, there is a 'power'
which human existence, in its very being, always runs up against. There
remains a power standing as the limit of our existence, and, as our limit,
remains something with which we must deal. We have been looking at the var-
ious inauthentic ways it is dealt with, and have seen that there are those who
use various means to hide or ignore it, or those who dive into scepticism in the
face of this darkness. Religiousness A, however, brings an authentic and con-
scious confrontation with it, by remaining with the implications of this dark
boundary. As the despair of Religiousness A becomes manifest, the question
becomes whether one will have faith in the goodness of this source, and
expect a clarifying word, or whether one will try to create and reveal oneself
out of the dark depths by standing in defiance of this power.
Defiance: An Unhappy Relation to Superiority
In Christian Discourses, Kierkegaard compares defiance to envy. He says that

admiration is a happy relation to superiority, though 'admiration's first feel-
ing is one of pain . . . that if someone senses superiority but admits reluctantly,
not joyfully, then he is far from being happy: on the contrary he is exceedingly
unhappy, in the most distressing pain.' Kierkegaard continues by saying,
God is infinitely the strongest; basically everyone believes that and to that
extent, willing or not, feels God's infinite superiority and his own nothing-
ness. But as long as he only believes that God is the stronger one - and, to
mention something terrible, believe it even as the devil also believes - and
trembles; as long as he only believes it in such a way that he shrinks from the
admission, as long as he believes it only in such a way that he does not
become joyful, the relationship is painful, unhappy, and his feeling of weak-
ness is a tormenting sensation.
13 0 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Although the mass of spiritless people sense, at some level, that God is the
strong one, they would never admit this to themselves, but seek to remain
secure in their own 'strength' and abilities. They either put God in the
dock — often coming to the conclusion that he does not exist — place him in
some small safe, out-of-the-way corner of their lives, tame him through their
doctrines and beliefs, or simply ignore him altogether. In all these reactions
they stand on their own strength, and it is this illusion of strength that allows
them such innocuous, indifferent, and even comical attitudes toward God.
Spirit, however, is aware of its own nothingness, and is conscious of itself as
weak before the power out of which its existence flows — that power over
which it has no power. This consciousness becomes the torment that defines
the existence of those in defiance.
Kierkegaard says that the consciousness of weakness should give way to
worship. Worship begins in wonder over the mystery of God, is a happy rela-
tion to the mystery of this power, and finds joy in being nothing before this
awesome mystery. Defiance also senses the mystery of its source, and its dis-
tance and opaqueness; what should be wonder, however, becomes a catalyst
for a transparent rebellion, and its existence becomes a 'dark saying', as Kier-
kegaard puts it.
The Possibility of Defiance is Due to the Structure of the Self

We are now in a better position to see how the movement of self-becoming
which is grounded in the structure of the self— allows for defiance. Defiance
begins to arise out of the failure of infinite resignation. We have seen that this
infinite self is an empty self. It is this emptiness that at first gives defiance the
hope that it can create itself, for the infinite self is abstract, and so can imagine
a myriad of possibilities for the self. Anti-climacus writes,
In order to want in despair to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an

infinite self. However, this infinite self is really only the most abstract form of
the self, the most abstract possibility of the self. And it is this self the des-
pairer wants to be, severing the self from any relation to the power which
has established it, or severing it from the conception that there is such a
power. By means of this infinite form, the self wants in despair to rule over
himself, or create himself, make this self the self he wants to be, determine
what he will have and what he will not have in his concrete self.
Infinite resignation is the negative form of the self in which all finite determi-
nations have fallen away. Whether this has happened through the movement
of Religiousness A (which was still a possible movement in Kierkegaard's
time), or in the more modern secularized versions,8 the point is that through
the infinite and eternal the self has escaped all finite determinations. It has
died to the finite determinations of itself, which is an essential step in the move-
ment toward a true faith in God, though its defiance arises out of an unwilling-
ness to fully relinquish the last remaining strongholds of selfishness and pride.9
It is out of the emptiness of infinite resignation that defiance first desires to
create itself ex nihilo. Perhaps ex nihilo seems too radical a self-creation, for the
self of defiance is self enough to recognize the concrete contents of its self. How-
ever, as the infinite self, it desires to create a radically new self in infinite
abstraction from these contents. Anti-climacus writes,
His concrete self, or his concreteness, has indeed necessity and limits, is this
quite definite thing, with these aptitudes, predispositions, etc, in this con-
crete set of circumstances, etc. But by means of the infinite form of the nega-
tive self, he wants first to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to
get out of it a self such as he wants, produced by means of the infinite form of
the negative self — and it is in this way he wants to be himself.
Here we have an intensification of freedom in despair. To speak of the 'infinite

form, the negative self, is to point to that freedom which comes, not from the
finite world, but from the self — that is, out of the self s own structure. In defi-
ance, the self seeks to create itself (give form to itself) out of the dark abyss,
combining the deepest pit and the highest heaven through its own power of
creation. It is untethered from all valuations of finitude, and it has suspended
all valuations of the ethical universal. It is radically free in the sense of choos-
ing out of itself being its own ground. It seeks to create itself in such a way
that its concrete contents become what they are only in this creation. So yes,
it can be said that it creates out of nothing (a formless void), in that its con-
crete contents are determined by this creation, rather than determining this
self-creation.
Anti-climacus says that at this stage of defiance, we see that the defiant one
wants to begin a little earlier than other people, not at and with the begin-
ning, but 'in the beginning'; he does not want to don his own self, does not
want to see his task in his given self, he wants, by virtue of being the infinite
form, to construct himself.
He seeks to take the light of reason, and reveal himself out of the dark abyss as
his own ground. He does not ignore the concrete contents of the self, but
through his infinite form, he denies that these contents will determine who
and what he becomes. These contents are merely the forces that have become
manifest or revealed out of the dark abyss due to forms not under his own
power — for example, when his longings became attached to objects in the
world, or through the valuations given to him by the established order. But
there is infinitely more that can come out of the depths, and perhaps the
concrete contents one now has — which have determined one's existence so
far - will be negligible in comparison to what is created by one's own freedom.
We can think of it this way. To some people, the colour of one's skin is a sig-
nificant determination of whom one essentially is. This is the highest concep-
tion of selfhood that such people are capable of, and so they are unable to see
beyond the colour of their own, or another person's skin. To a person who has
risen above this low-level valuation of selfhood, character traits and personal-
ity become central, and the colour of one's skin becomes meaningless in the
definition of who one is. The infinite self, as having resigned all finite determi-
nations, believes that the movement of infinity can go in an infinite number of
different directions. Defiance is at the point where, with the help of infinite
resignation, it has died to all finite valuations - that is to say, all valuation,
since valuations are determined through the comparisons and relations cre-
ated in finite existence. And so, although the concrete self has its finite neces-
sity and limitations, the freedom which flows from the infinite annihilates the
significance and value of these qualities, and they become just as meaningless
to a person's self as does the colour of another's skin to one who judges by char-
acter or spirit alone.
The Movement of Defiance

In defiance the self has become conscious of its despair (that it has been unwill-
ing to be itself), and that its despair does not come from outside itself, but from
within. It is aware of despair as a self-induced response to its relation to itself.
In the first form of defiance, the self wills to be itself out of the source of its own
existence. When this fails, a deeper transparency is obtained, and defiance
begins to turn nasty. We will see that in both forms of defiance — what Anti-
climacus calls the active self and the self as passive — the self attempts to be
itself from out of itself, rather than by transparently and contentedly resting
in the power that established it. Thus, in both forms there is a misrelation
with the source of its existence. It is defiant in its relation to this power, because it
proclaims itself as issuing out of itself. The 'active self takes the power coming
from its source, and believes this power gives it the ability to become its own
source; the defiant self as passive reacts to the autonomy of this power — that it
does not bend to the self s will - and in this reaction seeks to be itself. In this
latter case the self seeks to draw strength from out of its own weakness.
Active Self: Creator of Its Own Self
In the active self, the self tries to take within itself the power out of which it
exists, and use that power as the source of its own self-creation. It is this
source, as the combination of the dark principle and light of reason, which
allows humans to be independent from God. Philosophy has sought to comple-
tely purge the dark basis through the light of reason, and yet Kierkegaard
viewed this as impossible. The self continually comes to grief upon its attempts
to bring these two principles together under its own power. It cannot get under
the light of reason enough to penetrate the dark abyss. Its reason is always
partial and insufficient to this task.
Another approach, which has essentially the same effect as getting reason
under one's own power, is to assert one's particular will as the universal will.
Some of the most vicious, destructive and shocking acts on earth are due to the
attempt of a particular will to assert itself over an area of the earth — whether
it be over regions or the entire earth. The individuals who seek this dominion
obviously need the spiritless to join the enterprise, but the following they
garner shows the power with which they wield their vision. These defiant indi-
viduals are not weaker and more ignorant than the rest of us, as the traditional
view of evil would have it, but are more free and self-conscious.
While they are more actualized than others, they remain human. In other
words, their particular wills can never become the universal will, just as cancer
will never create a new form of'health' (order) within the body. It erupts into
revelation, sometimes with 'glorifyingly' hideous results, but it will always fail
in its attempts at dominion and self-revelation, because in comparison to the
universal will, it is impotent, and ultimately capable of nothing at all.
The eruption into revelation by the 'active self is 'constantly relating to
itself only experimentally, no matter what it undertakes, however great, how-
ever amazing and with whatever perseverance'. It has resolve, to be sure, for
it has gathered its existence around a particular idea, and it may actually
spend its whole life in this idea. This idea is of its own creation, and is its
attempt to take hold of the 'light of reason', plunging into the dark depths to
create itself from out of its own power. It seeks to be something by asserting
itself in existence, yet in itself it remains only a human being and not a god.
In the end, its entire existence can become simply an imaginary construction.
To use the term 'imaginary' immediately points to the imagination, which
is the self s power to conceive or think the ideal (perfection) in an infinite dis-
tance from actuality. The self, in becoming itself, has become the infinite self.
In this form of defiance, its imagination can run free, and it can create the self
it wants to create, apart from any of the 'ideals' of the established order -
apart from the possibilities handed it from this order - and in a way in which it
creates itself out of itself. The problem, however, is that there is nothing which
gives this imaginary construction reality, for it is also conceived apart from
any unconditioned ideal an ideal of the universal will of God. True, the
person may act on this 'ideal', and his or her existence may yield sometimes
devastating effects, but in the end, their significance and meaning are not
under the defiant person's power. This is due to a lack of earnestness - or
rather, to the mere appearance of earnestness or seriousness. The active self
recognizes no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks ser-
iousness and can only conjure forth an appearance of seriousness, even
when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible attention. That is
a specious seriousness. As with Prometheus' theft of fire from the gods, this
is stealing from God the thought - which is seriousness - that God takes
notice of one, in place of which the despairing self is content with taking
notice of itself, which is meant to bestow infinite interest and significance
on its enterprises, and which is exactly what makes them experiments.13
The problem the active self faces is that there is nothing binding and intrinsi-
cally stable in any of its endeavours. As Anti-climacus says, in 'the whole dia-
lectic in which it acts there is nothing firm; at no moment does what the self
amounts to stand firm, that is eternally firm'. The binding power of this
self and its resolve is to be found only within the individual's freedom, and yet
just this is its despair:
The negative form of the self exerts the loosening as much as the binding
power; it can, at any moment, start quite arbitrarily all over again and,
however far an idea is pursued in practice, the entire action is contained
within a hypothesis. So, far from the self succeeding increasingly in being
itself, it becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self.
The self no longer acts out of the arbitrariness and otherness of the estab-
lished order, nor even out of the understanding in a purely rational sense;
instead, the self creatively acts into the dark depths, making the self it wants
to be. This creation is not irrational, because, in the creativity and spontaneity
of its own freedom, it is attempting to establish its own order by the ordering
power of the light of reason. Its authenticity is that it seeks to master its own
existence, rather than being mastered by the established order — that is, it
seeks to be itself. Its ultimate despair is that there is nothing to bind it to its
choice and its ideal, except its own resolve. Although it may, theoretically at
least, keep this resolve for a lifetime, the ultimate emptiness of the resolve
is that, as its own master, it can change everything in an instant, and every-
thing that has been pursued with earnest resolve can come to nothing by its
own dictates. The despair of this defiance is due to the fact that the very free-
dom which allows the self to create itself is the same freedom that can dissolve
this self-creation. Freedom is not sufficient in itself for the self to become itself,
but freedom must rest transparently in the power that established it — a power
that is unconditioned. As Anti-climacus puts it,
The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master; and
exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and joy.
But it is easy on closer examination to see that this absolute ruler is a king
without a country, that really he rules over nothing; his position, his king-
dom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate
at any moment. Ultimately it is arbitrarily based upon the self itself.16
Kierkegaard appears to view this despair as ultimately going no further

than the individual, and since the individual alone has no power to bring his
or her order into the world, it comes to nothing. As insightful as Kierkegaard is
about the individual, I do not believe he was able to see how the defiant indi-
vidual could become an absolute ruler - a king with a country. Because the
established order is a continual levelling of individuals, he could not fathom
that a single individual could usurp this established order, and thus create
one of his own. He believed any relation to the established order and the
finite would necessarily lead to compromise, and so a weakening of freedom.
However, part of the pathos of a defiant person is a desire for domination over
people - that is, self-revelation through a new established order. For the par-
ticular will to establish itself as universal will, it needs to extend its will, and
gain more self-revelation. Nietzsche realized the 'great man' is not content
simply to establish his own order over his particular life, but will seek to estab-
lish it over the entire world. He writes,
The great man feels his power over a people, his temporary coincidence with
a people or a millennium; this enlargement in his experience of himself as
causa and voluntas is misunderstood as 'altruism'; it drives him to seek
means of communication: all great men are inventive in such means. They
want to embed themselves in great communities; they want to give a single form
to the multifarious and disordered; chaos stimulates them.
The society of men and women, then, become raw material out of which those
in defiance seek to fulfil their self-creation. The material for self-creation no
longer simply comes from the dark abyss - out of which they can create them-
selves but also out of the disorder and chaos residing in every established
order. The more disordered and chaotic it is — the more filled with dark and
undefined longings - the easier it can be re-formed by the powerful indivi-
dual. Further, in a situation where this disorder and chaos exists, there is no
need for the great man to compromise, since spiritless people long for nothing
more than comfort and security, and will follow those who promise to deliver
such things and appear to have the power to back up their promises. The
masses will do almost anything for them, including the commission of horren-
dous acts against others. In the end, however, even this external ordering of
society does not have 'staying power' for all the reasons already given.
The active self has taken hold of itself in authenticity, sought to relate to
both the infinite and finite, and yet it remains in despair, for it has willed
to be itself in defiance of the power that established it - that power which
binds it to itself in steadfastness. It is a strange twist, for out of the conscious-
ness of its weakness in regards to the finite and temporal, the self, through
the power of the infinite, has sought to be strong by stamping its will upon the
finite. This remains despair, because it is unwilling to allow the power that
established it to appropriate it. In other words, in willing to be itself, it is
unwilling to be itself.
The Self that is Defiantly Passive

The self that is defiantly passive is the form of defiance that has come to better
understand its relationship to its source. Thus, it has a deeper consciousness of
itself and its relation to the power that established it than does the active self.
This rise in consciousness, however, becomes its torment: in the face of the
power that established it, it is a king without a country, and a god without
ultimate power. When defiance comes to realize that it does not appropriate
transcendence as its own — that it cannot reveal itself in its particularity as
something all-consuming, stable, and unconditioned - then it develops a tor-
mented relation to transcendence and the power that established it. Its reac-
tion to this power is intensified as it finds itself unable to either wiggle free
from, or gain control of, its own source. In the consciousness of this power
over which it has no control, defiance comes to feel itself as cornered and
trapped within the limitations of its own existence. With this, defiance has
taken a disturbing turn: it begins to lash out at existence and its source. If we
call this power the Good, we can see how this defiance becomes a radical evil,
in that it is an evil whose very existence is defined by its hatred and rebellion
against the Good. We will now look at the transition from the active self to the
passive self, and see the nature of the latter's defiance.
The active self may live in its defiance its whole life, though, because it
is so transparent to itself, it will likely discover that it is not its own master
after all. Perhaps it recognizes a limitation or weakness that brings down the
whole imaginary construction. Or perhaps it becomes conscious of the dialec-
tic of the active self, and thus becomes aware of its despair. Whichever way
this consciousness comes, the infinite 'negative self feels itself nailed to this
restriction'.20 Anti-climacus speaks of such a person becoming conscious of a
specific 'thorn in the flesh', which will not allow the infinite self to continue
its imaginary constructions. Whether this thorn is a specific limitation or the
consciousness of the general despair of self-creation, the direction of defiance
is the same:
If he is convinced (whether it is really the case or his suffering only makes it

seem to be so) that this thorn in the flesh gnaws too deeply for him to be able
to abstract from it, then he wants, as it were, to take eternal possession of it.
It offends him, or rather, he uses it as an excuse to take offence at all exis-
tence; he wants to be himself in spite of it, but not in spite of it in the sense of
without it (for that, indeed, would be to abstract from it, which is something
he cannot do, or it would be the movement towards resignation); no he
wants to spite or defy all existence and be himself with it, take it along with
him, almost flying in the face of his agony.
The unfulfilled longings, the limitations of reason and the pain and suffering
of transparency all go to prove that God is a second-rate creator, or at least not
to be trusted. Despair at this stage has felt the full force of its weakness, and
suffers under it. In this suffering it does not will to be itself by faith in God — a
joyful relation to God - but now wills to be itself through an anguished rela-
tion to God. Through infinite resignation, it knows the suffering of freedom or
spaciousness. It had hoped for an eternal happiness, a self-becoming that
might break through into a true identity of freedom. It has also come to see
the despair of the active self, it knows the pain of not being able to create itself
by piercing the darkness with its imagination. It loses confidence in the possi-
bility of any clarifying word, and no longer believes that 'God's rain will fall',
as May put it. Indeed, defiance is at the point where it becomes offended by
this possibility: these promises of rain only mock its infinite thirst. Existence
becomes for it a dark saying, and it holds onto this darkness in order to nourish
its growing discontent, pride and defiance.
Kierkegaard describes this move in one of his Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses:
[Pjerhaps you were too old to nourish childish ideas about God, too mature
to think humanly about him; you perhaps wished to move him by your defi-
ance. You probably admitted that life was a dark saying, but you were not,
in keeping with the apostle's admonition, swift to hear a clarifying word;
contrary to his admonition, you were swift to anger. If life is a dark saying,
so be it; you would not trouble yourself about the explanation - and your
heart grew hard. And the chill of despair froze your spirit, and its death
brooded over your heart.
The contradictoriness of existence becomes settled in one's mind, and one

embraces the darkness one confronts. In this acquiescence to the darkness of
existence, a strange power begins welling up within oneself. One decides
to bow to the contradictoriness of existence, not out of humility for the
power that established it, but one bows to the power welling up out of this
consciousness. This is not the power of the active self, but a power which flows
from torment, hatred and defiance of one's existence and its source. It is a refu-
sal to wait for a clarifying word, and a growing desire for one's particularity to
be revealed in existence through one's torment and longing. The dark ground
longs for clarification, and yet the defiant one believes this longing exists
simply to mock human existence.
Anti-climacus says, 'he would rather be himself with all the torments of
hell than ask for help'. The defiant one becomes disgusted at the desire for
the Good and its clarifying word. There is no room for hope in existence,
at least not the hope that existence will gain meaning and value. As Camus
has written, the absurd man 'knows simply that in that alert awareness there
is no further place for hope'.24 The despair of Camus' absurd man does
not, however, simply acquiesce to the dark abyss, but in coming to see life as
a dark saying, he asserts that it is inauthentic to seek a clarifying word in
this darkness:
It is a matter of living that state of the absurd. . . . I ask what is involved in

the condition I recognize as mine; I know that it implies obscurity and
ignorance; and I am assured that this ignorance explains everything
and that this darkness is my light. . . . One must therefore turn away.
Kierkegaard may shout a warning: Tf man had no eternal consciousness,
if at the bottom of everything, there were merely a wild, seething force pro-
ducing everything, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions, if
the bottomless void that nothing can fill underlay all things, what would life
be but despair?' This cry is not likely to stop the absurd man. Seeking what is
true is not seeking what is desirable. If in order to elude the anxious ques-
tion: 'What would life be?' one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses of
illusion, then the absurd man, rather than resigning itself to falsehood, pre-
fers to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard's reply: 'despair.'
Camus sees no help, no transcendent and ordered reality that undergirds

existence and makes sense out of it; rather, darkness is the ground of all
reality — the ultimate power against which we collide — and order, which sits
as a thin veneer over all existence, only serves to mock our human yearning
for meaning.
Kierkegaard's analysis points out that the absurd man sees no help, not
because the help cannot be found, but because he prefers not to be helped.
This defiant despair refuses to relinquish itself completely, and divest itself of
the last remaining seeds of pride. Defiance refuses to accept God's help because
it refuses to be helped on God's terms. It wants to determine how the help will
come, and since existence, as it presents itself in its darkness and emptiness,
does not offer help on those terms, defiance will stand by absurdity.
Philosophy has always sought to be 'helped' through reason. It is the exis-
tentialists' belief, however, that reason points to its own limitations — that is, it
points to the boundary at which darkness brushes up against human existence.
Camus speaks of this brushing up of human reason and the dark abyss as the
evidence upon which the absurd man makes his stand:
My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evi-
dence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the
world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe
and the contradiction that binds them together.
The evidence is in, and reason must accept what has been presented: life is a
dark saying, and the hope and expectation of reason for a clarifying word will
not be fulfilled - such expectations only intensify the absurdity and pain of
existence. For Camus, we must accept the darkness that encompasses our exis-
tence as the ultimate reality.
Kierkegaard also points to the limits of reason, though he does not come to
the same conclusion as Camus. For Kierkegaard the limits of reason point out
that we are not in control of how we will be helped, and that the clarification of
existence is not within our own power; however, this does not mean that no
clarification of existence is possible. Kierkegaard writes,
You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your
ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and
earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to
share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father. In your childish
impatience, you wanted, so to speak, to distort God's eternal nature, and
you were blinded enough to delude yourself, as if you would be benefited if
God in heaven did not know better than you yourself what was beneficial for
you, as if you would not some day discover to your horror that you had
wished what no human being would be able to endure if it happened. .. .
In defiance one will not relinquish the last fortress of the self: the desire to be
able, at the very least, to choose the means by which one is helped in existence.
There is a suspicion, given the way existence has been unfolding up until now,
that the cure will be worse than the disease, and so although this is the sickness
unto death, the defiant one refuses treatment for despair - that is, chooses
itself in its despair.
Defiance grows and intensifies to such an extent that it becomes that out of
which one finds one's existence. It is an act of freedom in the highest sense, in
that, as Heidegger put it, an individual 'has himself decided originally for
the necessity of his essence'. It is in this sense that Anti-climacus speaks of
defiance as the despair that wills to be itself. It chooses to exist out of its tor-
ment, thus choosing its torment as its essence:
Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of his agony, but he
was kept waiting, and now all that's past; he prefers to rage against every-
thing and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the
one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on
hand, so that no one will take it from him — for then he would not be able to
convince others and himself that he is right.
Defiance has the same self-contradiction within itself as inclosing reserve.

Inclosing reserve desired to be rid of its agony by getting rid of the Good, and
yet it needed the Good in order not to lose the strange, prideful pleasure of its
pain. In the same way, the defiant person does not want to acknowledge any-
thing over itself, for just this is its pain; yet it is through this torment that it has
gathered itself and come to be who it is. Defiance cannot take place in a
vacuum; the very category carries within it the power it defies. To escape the
Good is to bring an end to one's defiance; to cease being defiant is to become the wounded,
broken, pitiful creature one despises. Therefore, one is careful to maintain a close
relationship with the power against which one rages.
As demonic rage increases, what had previously been an acquiescence to
its pain and lostness, changes into a more positive power of spirit. Kierke-
gaard writes,
He did not seek peace and tranquility in externals, and yet his heart contin-
ued to be troubled. . . . [I]t seemed to him . . . as if he were a child of wrath,
and yet he could not come any closer to understanding or explaining how
this could be. Then his innermost being rebelled within him, then he did
what is related in an old devotional book: 'he boasted that he was lost,' and that
it was God himself who had plunged him down into damnation. Then the inner being
within him froze/30
He boasts about his lostness because he himself now becomes evidence against
all existence. He wants to maintain his torment in order continually to accuse
existence of its wretchedness. Defiance has chosen itself as lost, demanding
that its existence be heard, and in this revelation, judgement is proclaimed
against all existence and its source. Anti-climacus writes,
It is, to describe figuratively, as if a writer were to make a slip of the pen, and
the error became conscious of itself as such - perhaps it wasn't a mistake but
from a much higher point of view an essential ingredient in the whole pre-
sentation - and as if the error wanted now to rebel against the author, out of
hatred for him forbid him to correct it, and in manic defiance say to him:
'No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against you, a witness to
the fact that you are a second-rate author.'
The self is tormented by its existence as a self-contradiction, and it believes

that this contradictoriness bears witness against the author of its existence.
Kierkegaard does not regard this contradictoriness as an error, but as a sign
of the author's greatness: freedom and self-consciousness have been bestowed
on Being through human existence. In this, the 'error' comes to be seen as an
essential part of the whole production, perhaps even that around which the
entire production revolves. For Kierkegaard, the 'error' is not in the author's
production, but in human despair, which refuses to exist as the painful struggle
it is. The contradictions of the self give rise to the 'terror of life' Schelling
pointed to, which drives man out of the centre. This terror is the anxiety of
being consumed by the centre, swallowed up by the universal will, and forced
into forms not of one's own making. As we saw in the introduction, this terror
of life is an awakening of spirit. It is not itself evil, but is the possibility of good.
It provides the independent basis through which it may be conquered by the
Good through faith.
As we have come to see, it also provides the independent basis through
which it may rise up in defiance of the Good. Defiance wants to determine
the part it will play in the 'whole production'. Having become conscious
of its weakness and its lack of power over being, it has chosen to determine
itself out of its pain and disappointment with God. Its defiance of the Good
will be its identity and integrity, as well as its self-revelation within the 'whole
production':
It is horrible to see a man seek comfort by hurling himself into the whirl-
pool of despair. But this coolness is still more horrible: that, in the anxiety
of death, a man should not cry out for help, T am going under, save me';
but that he should quietly choose to be a witness to his own destruction!
Oh, most extreme vanity, not to draw man's eyes to himself by beauty, by riches,
by ability, by power, by honor, but to wish to get his attention by his own
destruction.
Defiance does not seek to stand out or be 'on top' through the compari-
sons afforded by finitude, but, if it draws attention to itself, it does so in its
resolute defiance against the Good. This 'attention' is not necessarily per-
ceived as evil or destructive, and can fit in quite well with the established
order, externally speaking.
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a good example of this. The Inquisitor's
defiance was expressed in a distorted (that is, a defiant) 'love' for humanity,
which sought to close off the way of freedom and self-consciousness to the
masses. This, the Inquisitor says (in irony, I believe), is for the good of
the masses, that they may at least be happy in their miserable existences,
though their happiness was (and the Grand Inquisitor is fully aware of this)
the sickness unto death. Ivan asks Alyosha, what if the Inquisitor had
'wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could not shake off his incurable
love for humanity? In his old age he reached the clear conviction that noth-
ing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort
of life for the feeble, unruly, "incomplete, empirical creatures created in
jest." And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of
the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and accept lying
and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction. He sees that he
must deceive them all the way so that they may not notice that they are
being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think them-
selves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose ideal
[love] the old man had so fervently believed all his life long.'33
The Inquisitor decides that he will help the masses by blinding them to their
task, and taking away their freedom — thus, taking away their suffering.
He will be perceived more as a saint and saviour than a devil, though intern-
ally the act is one of self-conscious destruction: the desire of watching the
masses plod comfortably and contentedly to hell. Further, his task becomes
the ideal around which his life is integrated. What he calls love is actually his
own disappointment with existence. He could not wait for the rain or the con-
soling word, and came to despise even the thought of it — so offended by it's
tardiness was he. Thus, he seeks to close off the Good for all other people; he
does this under the banner of love, though it is defiance against love. At this
point, defiance is radically evil.
As we have seen, especially in terms of infinite resignation, Kierkegaard
does not deny that existence is traversed on a painful road; indeed, he spent
the end of his life and most of his small fortune trying to intensify this suffering
by attempting to awaken the single individual to the terror of life. Existence is
confusing, sometimes empty, desperate, and exhausting, though he believed
that the consciousness of existence would awaken spirit to its ultimate free-
dom. No doubt he knew that some who were awakened would choose defiance,
though he believed, as distant as defiance is from the Good in one sense, in
another it is closer to it than spiritlessness.
Conclusion: The Category of Offense
We must now bring our reflections together in the context of a focused treat-
ment of the question of evil. From the standpoint we have reached in our
analysis, we are now able to gain a deeper understanding of the passion at

work in evil. We have seen that defiance has an anguished relationship to the
Good. We may now say that the passion at the heart of this unhappiness
is offense of the Good. To relate to the Good out of misery, is to be offended
by the Good. Just as despair grows in intensity as the self becomes more self-
conscious and free, so this offense becomes more intense. As we will see, this
offense is at all levels of despair, but when it becomes that passion around
which one gathers one's life, evil becomes radical and aggressive.
Karl Jaspers has described the aggressiveness inherent in the despair and
evil that has gripped our age:
What took over the rebels' [those who have given up the question of truth
and falsehood] state of mind was simply the lust of being against' \_sic\, of
destruction as such, of smashing traditions, orders, measures; it was aggres-
siveness in itself, the brazen avowal of vulgarism in word and deed. The
delight of the 'we' in joint unsubstantiality caused the illiberal intolerance
of a No born of nothing. Everything is to become nothing, except for this
No itself.'.34
This No is not an evil that is a negation or privation of the Good in the tradi-
tional conception, but it is a Yes. It is a position (a positive stance toward
Being), and not simply a privation (not simply a failure to comply with some
universal standards put forth by human or divine decree). While there is no
doubt that the dialectic of evil entails a No to hope and faith, it is to be under-
stood, more primordially, as a continual invitation (a Yes) to despair and
offense. Evil gathers its existence around the destructive passions.
Purity of the Heart is to Will One Thing

Kierkegaard's understanding that purity of the heart is to will one thing is not
new. Augustine's Confessions already contains an explanation of this purity
of heart, in which the will wholly wills the Good. In regard to this Augus-
tine wrote,
The mind gives the body an order, and is obeyed at once: the mind gives
itself an order and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move and
there is such readiness that you can hardly distinguish the command from
the execution. Yet the mind is mind, whereas the hand is body. The mind
commands the mind to will, the mind is itself, but it does not do it. Why this
monstrousness? And what is the root of it? The mind I say commands itself
to will: it would not give the command unless it willed: yet it does not do
what it commands. The trouble is that it does not totally will: therefore it does
not totally command. It commands in so far as it wills; and it disobeys the com-
mand in so far as it does not will. The will is commanding itself to be a will -
commanding itself, not some other. But it does not in its fullness give the
command, so that what it commands is not done. For if the will were so in
its fullness, it would not command itself to will. It is therefore no monstrous-
ness partly to will, partly not to will, but a sickness of the soul to be so
weighted down by custom that it cannot wholly rise even with the support
of truth. 35
While this lack of whole willing is a sickness of the soul for Augustine, it is not
yet 'monstrousness'; it is merely a lack of health, a privation of a fully inte-
grated will. With this view of the pure heart, evil becomes a lack or privation
of this willing of one thing - the Good. Thus, concerning the nature of sin
(evil), Augustine writes,
[WJhen I now asked what is iniquity, I realized that it is not a substance, but
a swerving of the will which is turned towards lower things and away from
You, O God, who are the supreme substance: so that it casts away what is
most inward to it and swells greedily for outward things.
Kierkegaard understood this purity of the heart that wills wholly for the
Good, but he also realized that there is a purity of the heart that wholly wills
by turning toward the Good in defiance. Within this recognition, Kierkegaard
was able to tap the tradition moving from Kant to Schelling. In originally
working out his ethics Kant, like Augustine, also held the view that moral
action came from the pure will — the good will — which fulfilled its duty out
of respect for the law. We noted that, for Kant, reason infallibly determines
the will, in that if one acts according to reason, then one's will is necessarily
good. It is this purity of the origin of the will that gives moral worth to actions.
When one does not will from reason, then one is acting from natural impulses
or inclinations. Since this is not acting from the will, one cannot be said to be
acting out of freedom. Kant came to realize, however, that if the only free
actions are moral actions, and those done against duty are done merely from
inclinations, then there is no place for immoral actions: all actions are either
moral or amoral.
In Schelling a malignant reason is indeed possible. The connection between
will and reason is not a preordained, established relation for human beings.
Rather, in Schelling's ontology, there is a sense of becoming in which con-
sciousness arises out of unconsciousness through the light of the understan-
ding's penetration into the dark depths of longing and will. The problem of
good and evil plays itself out in this development from unconsciousness to con-
sciousness (the development of freedom), which is a struggle of the particular
will against the universal will. The connection between will (the dark depths)
and reason (the light of the understanding) is not set in stone, but is fluid in its
development. Evil becomes radical when one chooses to determine one's free-
dom on the basis of one's particularity against the universal will of reason.
This is possible because the dark depths of longing and the light of reason are
dissoluble in human beings, so one may use the light of reason in order to
create a false unity out of the dark depths. Evil is not, then, a discord in which
there is the chaos and disorder of the various desires and passions which drive
the individual from one appetite to the next; rather, the light of reason has
penetrated the darkness and separated the forces, creating a unity, albeit a
false unity. It is not the incentives that act as the rule of the will's maxim (to
put it in Kantian language), but reason itself.
While Kierkegaard took much from Schelling's analysis, he did not accept
that the determination of one's will (the basis of freedom) is posited in the eter-
nal past, a dimension reaching back before one's birth. According to Schel-
ling, we have always already chosen to determine our will according to
selfishness, and have chosen from a 'place' outside time. This choice — which
has already been made by the time we come into existence - is his definition of
radical evil: 'Only an evil which attaches to us by our own act, but does so from
birth, can therefore be designated as radical evil.''
Freedom arises out of this originality of disposition, in which the individual
determines the purity of the will from out of a choice. As a system builder,
Schelling could not allow freedom to remain as a loose end, and so, as philoso-
phy has always done, he closed his system by use of the Platonic notion of recol-
lection — that is, the eternal from the aspect of the past.
Kierkegaard moves the issue into existence, and looks at it in terms of exis-
tential passion and concern; it is in the concern for one's existence that all gen-
uine self-understanding arises. In this concern one comes up against limits
reason cannot, by itself, transcend. The grasping of Being is not simply — or
even primarily — directed by reason, but through existential leaps, which are
driven by reaching the boundaries of a particular stage or life-view. The
movement from spiritlessness to self-conscious freedom is a movement in
which the self comes up against the limits of its existence-stage, and finds the
nourishment in the passions by which one leaps into another stage of existence,
and by which the knower is transformed. This transformation is a movement
into further transparency and freedom.
As the self moves from stage to stage, what keeps it moving is the expectation
that the nourishment will come, and that it will be 'good'. What it means
by 'the Good', however, is often a self-centred conception such as, what
is good for me, my 'just desserts'. In other words, the self continues to define
the Good solely within its own horizons. Still, as it grows in self-consciousness,
these pockets of selfishness, which it has been evading, begin to come to light.
The self is being transformed by some principle of nourishment that accompa-
nies the need it continually confronts. In the end, however, we discover that at
the limit of self-conscious freedom, when much of the self-centredness attached
to the 'Good' has become apparent, the self may still be offended at the very
nourishment the Good provides. Perhaps the nourishment did not come as
one had desired and expected, or as quickly as one felt it should have. Perhaps
it is offensive that one should require supplementary nourishment of this sort.
Whatever the case, one despairs of such nourishment, becomes offended at
existence, and moves into a defiance in which the will is unified around one's
offense at existence itself. There can arise, then, at the pinnacle of freedom,
an offense and despair that causes the self to recoil, in that it discovers that
it can neither tame nor control the Good. When this happens it is offended at the
way existence has been 'set up' by the Good, and despairs of any desire or hope
for a clarifying word.
Despair is, across all modes of self-consciousness and freedom, a sense of
hopelessness toward existence. At some point one becomes offended by exis-
tence — its contradictions, its mysteries, its lack of definitive answers, the suf-
fering and seeming injustice of the world, and the fact that the universe does
not revolve around one's own existence - and so gives up hope and faith in the
Good. We have come to see that this hopelessness may eventually turn into a
defiance that despairs of receiving a clarifying word out of the infinite mystery
that encompasses us.
This offense arises out of the pride that believes it can somehow move
God by its suffering, complaint and resounding voice. Indeed, we find that
although it had admitted its weakness, it never relinquished its selfishness
and pride, but thought it had been feeding itself through its weakness — that
it had, through its brooding and self-effacement, moved and manipulated God
to act. By admitting its need, the nourishment always came, and yet, when
freedom has absolutely nothing to rest on, nothing by which to evade its utter
dependence on God, and when it floats over the abyss, the selfish and insolent
demand for nourishment that was always there shows itself. This pride is also
within spiritlessness, but becomes most apparent when it has been actualized
in spirit; from this perspective we may now look back and see that it is this
offense at existence which is also at the heart of spiritlessness, though it is able
to evade this despair by ignoring the limits and needs that offend it.
The Movement from Spiritless to Spiritual Offense

Spiritless despair has unconsciously given up hope in the ultimate meaningful-
ness of existence. It evades the consciousness of this despair by seeking to
ignore not only the contradictions and sufferings of existence, but also the mys-
tery that surrounds it. We examined how the established order becomes a
means of evasion, and that the self despairs of becoming itself by denying the
need and limitations. Spiritlessness is offended by mystery, because it is out-
raged at almost anything beyond its control — even something as mundane
as how fast the line at the supermarket is moving. Its pride and anxiety
cannot allow anything to stand outside its control, and so it seeks to wrap
its mind around Being through sticking to the facts, probability, or thinking
sub specie aeterni. Anything that cannot be grasped under these categories is
nothing - at least nothing important. It creates for itself its own safe haven
by lowering any ideals beyond its capabilities, gaining its identity through
aping others, and creating its own little established order — an order it feels
it can control.
In ignoring this nothing, the self ignores its limitations, thus evading its ulti-
mate concern; by ignoring this concern, it closes itself off to the self-conscious-
ness and freedom that comes out of the nothing. In Kierkegaard's terminology,
it closes itself off to the eternal and absolute within itself. It is offended by the
mystery that limits it, and out of which it has its being. With the death of mys-
tery (the sacred), life becomes trivial. The tragedy is that, in its poverty, its
desire is not to become richer, but to become more impoverished.
This offense is the leaven of evil. It is the pride behind the assertion that
we should be the judges of God's managerial effectiveness, or we should
have control over existence and manage it according to our own conceptions
of the meaning of Being. This prideful offense, which despairs of existence and
the self, is the issue around which the problem of evil revolves. We cannot gain
deep philosophical understanding of its nature until we recognize that each of
us is also immersed in evasion and despair that is, in evil. A philosophical
understanding of evil is approachable only through a philosophical ^//ûnder-
standing, because the ground and essence of evil is found within the human
heart. Evil, in its genuine and radical character, cannot be correctly under-
stood abstractly, but is grasped only through the knower's relationship to
it - only as the evil of the knower. Evil is not to be approached objectively,
like a scientist studying and observing an object under a microscope in order
to discover its nature. While one may find many interesting and impor-
tant things about evil under the microscope, one will not discover its actual
existential nature, because evil is in the heart of the one looking through the
microscope. Thus, to address the problem of evil, we must confront our own
offense and despair, and it is this very confrontation that begins the process of
self-becoming in the individual. One must, as Judge Wilhelm said, choose des-
pair. In this absolute choice the self is awakened to its task of becoming itself.
While the ethical self awakens to its despair, it may evade its offense and
pride by abiding in its own self-sufficiency. In choosing despair, one awakens
to the absolute and the ideal, though selfishness and pride are barely touched,
and so one begins to fulfil the ideal by one's own strength — that is, one
maintains autonomous control over the ideal. God may have given the self
existence as a gift, but it is up to us to choose to become a self through the
freedom of ethical action. If the ethicist remains earnest in the task of self-
becoming, however, the offense at existence comes out: the ethicist becomes
offended at his or her inability to fulfil the universal. At this point another
choice is faced: one can evade this growing consciousness of the despair of the
ethical existence, or one can again recognize the need, and feed on the nourish-
ment that comes only with this recognition. This nourishment consists of the
existential passions which allow one to leap into the religious stage of existence.
With each awakening of the despair of self-sufficiency and pride, one takes
more and more possession of oneself, and the heart becomes purified around a
single, absolute telos. We have noted several problems that arise in the ethical
relation to the absolute telos. First, we are not sufficient in ourselves to fulfil
the ideal. Second, the whole notion of the ideal remains ambiguous, since
existence has not provided us with an obvious and certain how-to instruc-
tion manual in which we may move unambiguously, step by step, into an eter-
nal happiness. Third, the ethical seeks to fulfil itself in relative ends. Thus,
the continual temptation is to 'solve' the other two problems by lowering the
ideal to the socially accepted norms, and then call this the 'paradigmatic
human being'.
The leap into Religiousness A is the realization of just this lack of a manual
for existence. In place of this non-existing manual, the religious offers mystery,
infinite otherness and the darkness of the Nothing. Although these qualities
sound abstract, all non-manipulative (free) personal relationships are char-
acterized by degrees of mystery, otherness, and even darkness; when the rela-
tionship is to God, these qualities become absolute and infinite. Freedom arises
out of this nothingness, and through the consciousness that one can only gain
oneself by way of the spaciousness and openness provided by the Nothing.
Purity of the Heart: The Passions of Offense and Faith

The movement toward God is radically individual. To look to others in order
to steady oneself, to look for a how-to manual, or to seek any other form of
human security is, according to Kierkegaard, to move away from oneself by
seeking identity from the external, rather than from out of one's absolute rela-
tionship to God. Even if one does not seek identity through the external, one
may still remain offended at the darkness that remains beyond one's con-
trol. If only existence provided us with a clear path toward meaning (an
instruction manual), then life would be so much easier. Philosophical under-
standing would consist in reading this manual with the help of reason; self-
knowledge would consist of comparing oneself with this manual; freedom
would consist in wholly willing the instructions provided by the manual; evil
would consist in the lack of fulfilling these instructions, whether due to ignor-
ance or weakness. In terms of this failure, the emphasis would be on the
particular instances in which one transgressed the instructions, and so one
would be good insofar as one kept its directions or rules, and evil insofar as
one did not. Thus, one may be good Sunday through Thursday, and then be
evil on Friday and Saturday. One may hope, then, that an eternal happiness
consists in being good at least five-sevenths of the time.
This is not how existence has been handed to us. Just a perusal of Western
and Eastern philosophy as well as the major and minor religions of both
hemispheres — will show that existence is a messy affair. A study of the best
human wisdom and knowledge available does not simply boggle the mind,
but leaves one numb and confused. This, however, is not such a bad thing, at
least according to Kierkegaard - or to Socrates, for that matter. We are
forced to admit that we do not know nearly as much as we think we do. Over-
coming our offense at this mystery is not accomplished through an accumula-
tion of knowledge a penetration of reason into the darkness — but through a
particular, passionate relationship to the source of this mystery.
Anti-climacus makes clear that evil is not about particular sins, but about a
position of sinfulness. The more self-consciously free one becomes, the more
this evil is intensified - that is, the more it becomes the principle out of which
one lives, and the origin of one's disposition. At its highest potency, offense and
despair are chosen in a self-conscious freedom that has lost faith and hope in
the grace and goodness of God. This is why Anti-climacus has correctly stated
that the opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith. 39 When the darkness of the
storm overwhelms one's life, the question is not whether one can continue to
fulfil the universal, because the storm brings the universal itself into question; the
question is whether one will curse God and despair, or continue to humble
oneself and worship. Kierkegaard gives no rational arguments for God's good-
ness, because it does no good to add to the plethora of'answers' given through-
out human history (though he may relish the irony of adding to the confusion
by giving more answers). He does not possess or control the clarifying word the
defiant person needs. The only message he gives to defiance is that it must
humble itself under its suffering, have faith in the goodness of God, and hold
onto the hope that is against hope - the Paradox of the Incarnation.
Perhaps the biggest reason Kierkegaard did not say much concerning how
to overcome defiance is because he is not really writing to those in defiance,
who have, after all, made their choice. He is writing to the spiritless, hoping
to awaken them from their spiritual slumber. He understood the individual
needs to be awakened to the seeds of pride, offense and despair. He sought to
awaken the individual to earnestness, in hopes that the spiritual journey may
at least begin. He knew full well the journey could end in defiance, but at least
defiance is earnest, and so it might someday move from offense to faith,
whereas spiritlessness does not even have the capacity for faith. Kierkegaard's
authorship is an attempt to confront the single individual with the limitations
of existence, and the weakness of the self in overcoming these limitations, in
hopes of awakening the need for God. All pursuit and love of wisdom must
remain within this existential neediness.
Socrates was thoroughly aware of the limitations within existence, and the
place these limitations played in the philosophical pursuit. This is perhaps
most clearly seen in his recounting of the myth told to him by Diotima con-
cerning the birth of Eros. Eros was born from Resource and Need, and so
It has been his fate to always be needy; nor is he delicate and lovely as most
of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the
naked earth, in doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of
heaven, and always partaking of his mother's poverty. But, secondly, he
brings his father's resourcefulness to his designs upon the beautiful and the
good, for he is gallant, impetuous, and energetic, a mighty hunter, and a
master of device and artifice - at once desirous and full of wisdom, a lifelong
seeker after truth, an adept in sorcery, enchantment, and seduction. 40
For Socrates, Eros is the passion that drives the pursuit of wisdom, and which
longs for the Good to give birth in oneself and others. He recognized the frailty
and neediness in this pursuit, and continually expressed this in the ignorance
that drove his questioning. It did not take long, however, for Resource to
become the focus of the philosophical pursuit (it took place in Plato himself),
and to leave the consciousness of our neediness behind as a nuisance, or at least
that which is to be overcome. By focusing on Resource — by being offended by
our neediness — we look to our own self-sufficiency, and put too much stock in
our own power. By losing the need, we tend to put all value on what we have
thought, on what we know with certainty, and on the order we have created.
In this, we move from setting our designs upon the beautiful and the Good,
and put our eyes only on what we have done, and on those aspects of existence
we can control. There is no doubt that we have shown ourselves to be masters
of device and artifice, but we have given up the greater part of our Being in
doing so. What is tragic is that we have come to use our resourcefulness against
ourselves: we have so enchanted and seduced ourselves by our own resources,
that we are unable to see that we are barefoot and homeless.
Notes
1. SeeSUD, pp. 120-8.

2. Defiance is defined as that despair which, in willing to be itself, wills not to be itself
(SUD,p.98).
3. EUD, pp. 173-4 (my emphasis).
4. CD, p. 131.
5. CD, p. 131.
6. CD, pp. 131-2.
7. SUD, p. 99.
8. Camus is a good example of this type of infinite resignation. In his book, The Myth
of Sisyphus, one finds an instance of a secularized infinite resignation: 'it happens
that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory,
meal, streetcar, four hours at work, meal sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday
Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm - this path is easily
followed most of the time. But one day the "why" arises and everything begins in
the weariness tinged with amazement. "Begins" - this is important. Weariness
comes at the end of the acts of a mechanical life, but at the same time it inaugu-
rates the impulse of consciousness. It awakens consciousness and provokes what
follows. What follows is the gradual return to the chain or it is the definitive awa-
kening' (Albert Camus. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin
O'Brien. New York: Random, 1955, p. 10).
9. 'But just because it is despair by means of the eternal, it is in one sense very close to
the truth. And just because it is very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away. The
despair which is the corridor to faith is also due to the help of the eternal; through
the eternal the self has the courage to lose itself in order to win itself. But here it
will not begin by losing itself; it wants, on the contrary, to be itself (SUD, 98).
10. SUD, p. 99.
11. SUD, p. 99.
12. SUD, p. 100.
13. SUD, p. 100.
14. SUD, p. 100.
15. SUD, p. 100.
16. SUD, p. 100.
17. Friedrich Nietzsche. The Will to Power. Trans. Walter Kaufman and R. J. Hol-
lingdale. New York: Random, 1968, p. 506 (my emphasis).
18. It should be noted that simply because this defiance has outward effects does not
mean that it is more evil than the defiance that does not manifest itself. Evil is
independent of its effects, because it is an ontological issue. It has to do with free-
dom and self-consciousness, and not with the external. No doubt, the external
effects display the power inherent in this evil; however, the manifestation is not
the power of the evil, but the power of evil is what grounds such manifestations.
19. In the Postscript Climacus speaks of the need for the self to appropriate the truth,
and in this sense truth becomes subjective. It is because of statements like this that
Kierkegaard is often pegged as a subjectivist and relativist of the most radical
type. In reality, Kierkegaard knew that we do not appropriate the truth, creating
it according to our own will, for he recognizes the despair of such a project.
Rather, the truth is what appropriates us. To say that truth is subjectivity, then,
is not to say that we control or create our own truth, but that we have allowed the
truth to control us. In the same way, the freedom of the self does not mean that we
control the source of our existence - that we are self-sufficient - but freedom is
the means by which we open ourselves to being controlled by the source of our
existence. Human existence is such that it must serve something - must worship
something, even if this worship takes the form of envy and resentment.
20. SUD, p. 101.
21. SUD, pp. 101-2.
22. EUD,pp.37-8.
23. SUD, p. 102.
24. Camus, p. 28.
25. Camus, pp. 30-1.
26. Camus, p. 37.
27. EUD, p. 37. The same idea is expressed by Anti-climacus in The Sickness Unto
Death: 'someone suffering has usually one or more ways in which he could wish
to be helped. If then someone helps him, well yes, he is glad to be helped. But as
soon as the question of being helped begins . . . to be serious, especially when the
help is to come from a superior, or the most exalted of all - then comes this humi-
liation of having to receive unconditional help, in whatever form, of becoming
like a nothing in the hands of the "helper" for whom everything is possible ...'
(SUD, pp. 102-3).
28. Heidegger, 1985, p. 155.
29. SUD, p. 103.
30. EUD, pp. 97-8 (my emphasis).
31. SUD, p. 105.
32. PH, p. 65 (my emphasis).
33. Dostoevsky, 1980, p. 241 (my emphasis).
34. Karl Jaspers. Philosophical Faith and Revelation. Trans. E. B. Ashton. New York:
Harper & Row, 1967, p. 295.
35. Augustine. Confessions. Trans. F.J. Sheed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992, pp. 141-2
(my emphasis).
36. Augustine, p. 121.
37. Schelling,p.67.
38. See SUD, pp. 138-41.
39. SUD, pp. 114-15.
40. Plato. Symposium. The Collected Dialogues of Plato. Ed. Edith Hamilton and Hun-
tington Cairns, pp. 526-74. Trans. Michael Joyce. Princeton: Princeton UP,
1961, pp. 555-6.
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Index
absolute, the 74-6, 88, 95-8, 102, 104, conditional, conditioned 9, 50, 52, 81,
110-14, 116, 119-21, 147 97, 119
choice 67-8,74-5,78,97,104,113, consciousness 16,27,31,36,38,52,
147 58-9, 61, 63-4, 67, 70-1, 76-7, 81,
aesthete, aestheticism 25, 30, 39, 54, 86, 89-91, 94-5, 102, 104-10, 114,
58-70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 85-6, 91, 118-19, 121, 123-4, 130, 136, 136,
102-3, 110, 117, 122, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150
absurd man, the 138-9 ethical 81,93,105
abyss 11, 111, 114, 115, 122, 123, 131, contingent, contingency 8, 26, 38, 53,
133, 135, 138, 139, 146 79,85,97-8,108, 110-11
addiction 84-5,115,119 continuity 29-32,81
Ahab 9 control 14, 17,26,60-61,72,81,88,96,
amoral 2, 5, 144 125, 136, 139, 146-50
anxiety 17, 40, 82, 89-90, 92-3, 95, corruption 5-6,9
111, 118, 141, 147 craving(s) 12-13, 84-6, 107, 122~3,
Aristotle 24 126n.26
Augustine 8,83,143-4 criteria, criterion 52-4, 102, 106, 108,
authentic, authenticity 70, 82, 108, 121
123, 125, 128-9, 134, 136 crowd, the 43, 49-53
autonomous, autonomy 2-4, 92, 105, cruelty 35
117, 132, 148
awaken, awakening 17-18,20,27,41, dark see also abyss, ground
50-1,85-6, 141-2, 147-50 depths 12-13,16,76,114,122-3,
129, 133-4, 144-5
longing 107, 122, 135
being 10-13, 15, 18-19, 23-4, 31, 34,
principle 13,16,20,133
41, 50, 54, 75-6, 80, 102, 105, 129,
saying 130,137-9
140-1, 143, 145, 147, 150
darkness 12-13, 16, 18, 67, 85, 89, 115,
Berdyaev, Nicolas 38, 85
129,137-9, 145, 148, 150
bored, boredom 61,64,67,69
death 8, 30, 44-5, 52-3, 67, 94, 108,
Buddhism 116
110-11, 116, 123, 137, 139, 141-2,
Buechner, Frederick 29-30
147
decision(s) 6, 17, 29-30, 32, 37, 45, 79,
Camus, Albert 138-9 91,96-7, 106,110
categorical imperative 2~3 defiance 9,15,18, 48-50, 58-9, 82, 92,
chaos 11,13,16,135,145 102, 123-5, 128-44, 146, 149
Christendom 52, 107-8 demonic, the 92-3, 140
clarifying word 129,137-9,146,149 dependence 107-9, 128, 146
comfort 43-4,49-50,53-4,58-9,61, depths 11-17,20,65, 104, 106, 115, 132
81, 105, 118, 135, 141 of longing 12, 16
comparison 8,53,118,132-3,141 depravity 42
158 Index
depression 67,69,71 system 91

desire(s) 3-6, 26, 35, 38-9, 59, 63-5, task 78,80,82-3,103
67,72, 77,80,85-6,94,97, 110, ethics 42, 80, 82-4, 86-8, 91, 103-4,
114-17, 122,131, 135,138-40,142, 106, 144
145-7 evasion 23, 27-8, 32, 34, 36, 38-40, 42,
devil, devilish 9-10, 58, 129-30, 142 51,54,76,82,84,93, 105, 119, 121,
disconsolate, disconsolateness 48-50, 123, 147
92 evil 4-20, 27-9, 32-3, 42, 46-9, 54,
disinterested 32, 38, 41, 103, 117 58-9, 75, 88, 92, 94, 104-6, 122-3,
disorder 12, 15-16, 135, 145 128-9, 133, 141-5, 147-9
disposition 7, 18, 29, 31-2, 131, 145, good and 1,7,10-13,16-20, 45-6,
149 58,123,144
dissoluble, dissolubility 13-14, 17, 76, as negation 15,143
145 problem of 1,10-11,23,75,147
diversion(s) 41, 62, 67-8, 123-4 propensity to 7-8, 10, 20
Dostoevsky, Fydor 93-4 radical 1,5-6,8,13,20,40,76,125,
doubt 48, 68-9, 96 136, 142, 145
dread 69,89,95,111,117,123,125 as weakness 7-10,149
duty 2,8,79-81,83-7,91,98,102-7, existence 19, 23, 30-4, 36, 38-41, 43,
112,144 45-7, 59, 61-2, 64-8, 74, 76-7, 80,
dying to 109-11 84, 96, 98, 102-5, 107-9, 111,113,
117, 119, 125, 130,132-3, 136-42,
earnestness 29-32, 34, 38, 40, 49-50, 145-50
72, 127n. 32, 134, 149 aesthetic 65, 69, 74, 110, 114, 122
earthly 43,63,70,106,109-11,118 ethical 41,81,89-90,97, 104-5, 109,
in toto 70, 72 111-12, 114
emptiness 48,65, 110, 113-15, 118-20, human 29,41,61,66,84,106-7,
123, 125, 130-1, 134, 138 110-11, 118-19, 122-3, 138-9
energeia 23-4 religious 41,102,104-7,111,114,
enjoy, enjoyment 31, 39, 60-9, 78,111, 120-1, 124
113-14 self's 23,28,122,129
enormous detour 120-1, 123, 125 task of 27,53,60,78
envy 18, 26, 129, 152n. 19
established order, the 42-3, 47, 49-54, facticity 53, 76-7
108-9, 111, 131, 133-5, 141, faith 18, 29, 50, 56n. 47, 60, 67, 69, 87,
146-7 94, 123-5, 128-9, 131, 137, 139, 141,
eternal, the 24-5, 27, 30-3, 44, 48, 63, 143, 146, 148-50
67,70-1,75-6,98, 103-4,108,119, fanatic, fanaticism 45—7
131, 145, 147 feeling 15,18-19,67,81,115,129
happiness 98, 102-4, 108, 111-12, infinitized 25, 34-6, 42
119, 121,123, 137, 148-9 moral 6-7
recurrence 75 finitude, the finite 16, 24-5, 28, 32-6,
validity 44, 62, 67, 69-70, 72,75,91, 42-7, 50, 54,64, 66-7, 70-1, 74-5,
97-8 78,83,97-8,108-16, 128, 130-6,
eternity 19-20,30,51-2,70-1,75, 141
94-5,98, 108-9, 113 forces 1, 12, 14, 52, 61, 85-6, 89, 107,
ethical 8, 41,51, 59-60, 64, 67, 75-93, 122-3, 131, 137-8, 145
96-8, 102-5, 107, 109, 111-14, 117, nexus of 15-16,18
122, 131, \W-% see also stages freedom 1-4, 6-7, 9-10, 14, 16-20,
requirement 83, 87-8, 92, 96 23-5, 28-9, 31-3, 58-9, 69, 71,
Index 159
74-7, 79-81, 84-6, 88-93, 97-8, immediacy 14,60-1,67,70,112,120
105-6, 109, 111, 114-15, 117-23, pure 62-5,67
125, 128, 131-2, 134-5, 137, 139, reflective 64-5
141-2, 144-9 immoral, immorality 1, 5-6, 49, 144
Freud, Sigmund 107 inclosing reserve 91—6, 106—7, 111,
140
God 10-14,17-18,26-7,30,41-2, indifference 29,46
44-53, 62-3, 75, 83-4, 87, 92, 95-8, infinitude, the infinite 24-5, 27~8,
102-11, 113, 115-20, 123-4, 33-8, 42-51, 53, 63-4, 72, 83,85, 88,
128-31, 133-4, 137-41, 144, 95,97, 109, 111-15, 117-20, 122-3,
146-50 125, 128, 130-3, 136, 148
death of 49-50 passion 30~2, 70-1
Good, the 10-12,15-17,20,27,29, integrity 55n. 26,81,141
39-42, 47-9, 58-60, 72, 76, 83, 90, intoxicated, intoxication 39-40, 43,
92-7, 103-4, 107, 111, 123, 128, 136, 46
138, 140-6, 150
Grand Inquisitor 117-18,125,141-2 James, William 46
ground 4-6, 12, 15-16, 18-19, 61, 85, Jaspers, Karl 143
92, 102-3, 107, 116, 121, 131, 138, Jesus 117,125
147 joy 30,39,80,98,123,130,135
of God 11
of the will 2-3,7-8,13,122-3 Kant, Immanuel 1-10, 13-14, 16-17,
guilt 19-20, 85-6, 88, 90, 92, 105, 123 19,23,28,31,76, 122, 144-5
consciousness of 89,95,121 knowledge 8, 19, 30, 39-40, 65, 75, 86,
total 95-8, 103, 120-1 92,96, 120, 123, 128
infinitized 25, 34, 38-40, 42
happiness 4, 98, 142 see also eternal objective 41-2
health 15,61,133,144 self- 34, 38-9, 41-2, 58, 69-71,
Heidegger, Martin 12,139 104-5, 148-9
heart 8, 10, 17,40,77,81,85,96, 105,
116-17, 125, 137, 140, 147, 148 law
purityof 126n. 3,143-4,148 moral 2-10,14,19,32,81-2,86,
Hitler, Adolf 9 104-5, 122, 144
hope 44, 54, 91, 94, 110, 115, 119, 130, levelheadedness 43-4
138-9, 143, 146, 149 leap 67-9, 86-7, 91-2, 95, 97-8, 103-4,
hopeless, hopelessness 15, 60, 62, 70, 94, 114, 120, 145, 148
146 qualitative 31-2
humble, humility 18, 27, 61, 80, 92, 95, levelling 42-3,51,54,135
104-5, 137, 149 Lewis, C. S. 47
longing 26,62,113,137
ideal, ideality 25, 27, 33-4, 36~8, as basis 11-12
40-1, 43-7, 49-50, 52-3, 61, 66, 68, depths of 12-13,16,84-6,107,114,
78-9, 82-3, 85-7, 90, 98, 105-7, 116-17, 119, 122, 131, 135, 138,
111, 122, 133-4, 142,147-8 144-5
illusion 15-16, 18, 35, 46, 51-2, 74, lost, lostness 24-7, 32, 44, 46, 49-51,
105, 107-8, 111, 114, 116, 119, 130, 62,71-2,82,86,89,92, 102, 113,140
138 love 7, 9, 14-15, 18, 20, 35, 65-7, 79,
Ilych, Ivan 52 81,84,86,90,94,96, 104, 119,
imagination 25, 33-6, 38, 64, 70, 133, 141-2, 150
137 lukewarm 49,67,123
160 Index
Machiavelli, Niccolo 26 potential, potentiality 3, 36, 46, 79, 123

Marx, Karl 107 for evil 28,33,47-8
masses, the 135, 142 self 28-9,32,44
maxim 2-3,6-10,28,145 power 9-10, 12-16, 18, 27-8, 35-6, 38,
May, Gerald 84,115,119,137 43, 46, 70-2, 75, 83-6, 88-90,
meaning 104-7, 109-10, 116, 122, 128-41,
of life 29-30,60-1,66-7,80,106-7, 150
111, 113-14, 138, 146-8 predisposition 7, 18, 131
meaningless, meaninglessness 43, 62, pride 27, 47, 91-5, 104, 123, 128, 131,
65-6,69-70, 132 137-8,146-9
Meister Eckart 116 primitivity 53
moderation 43-5, 47, 49 privation 15-16, 75, 119, 143-4
moral probability 43,45-7,147
action 1-2,10,49 purification 104-5,111
multiplicity 28, 60, 68, 80, 104,
116-17 Rahner, Karl 28
mundane 36—7, 147 reason 4, 6-7, 11-14, 28, 133, 137, 139,
144-5, 148-9
light of 13-14, 16,76,86, 122-3, 131,
Napoleon 9
133-4, 145
narrowing reductionism 43
limits of 139,145
neediness 83, 123, 150
malignant 8-9, 144
Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 48-9, 75, 105,
practical 2-3,5-6,8,122
107, 135
rebellion 10, 15, 40, 42, 45, 47-9,
nihilism 107,121,123
58-60, 75-6, 128-30, 135-6
norms 8,42, 148
redemption 92,94
nothingness 75,97, 108, 111, 116-17,
reflection 36, 45, 60, 62~5, 67, 70, 119
123, 125, 129-30, 148
relative ends 108-9, 112-13, 120, 122,
148
offense, offended 18, 48, 50, 128-9, 137,
religion 54, 66, 95, 107, 119, 149
142-3, 146-50
Religiousness A 95, 98, 99n. 30, 103,
openness 47,69,71,92, 110, 115, 118,
110-11, 114, 118-21, 123-4,
123,148
129-30, 148
order 8-9, 11-15,42,47, 75,91, 122-3,
repentance 79,81,87-90,94
133-5, 138, 143, 147, \50seealso
repetition 29-31, 36, 51, 113-14, 117
established order
resignation
finite 66-7
pain 30, 42, 48, 62, 67-8, 93-5, 113, infinite 73n. 22, 97, 105-6, 109-20,
119, 129, 137, 139-41 123-4, 128, 130-32, 137, 142
Pascal, Blaise 62 resolution 35-8, 69, 85-8, 94, 113
passion 17, 32, 35, 39, 66, 77, 79, 83, responsibility 29, 31, 33, 42, 51-2, 58,
138, 143, 145, 148, \50seealso 60,68,75,78-9,88,98, 103
infinite revelation 11-12, 18-20, 122, 133, 140
ethical 79,87 Ricoeur, Paul 104
idealizing 30-1,33,45 risk, risky 44, 46, 66, 68
moment of 29—31, 36
object of 102 Schelling, F. W. J. 1, 9-20, 23-4, 31,
personality 7, 9-10, 13, 16, 18, 28, 41, 47,61,75-6, 122, 141, 144-5
67-9,76-7,80-1,85,96,132 Schopenhauer, Arthur 108
Plato 7, 145, 150 secular mentality, the 43-5, 47-8, 51
Index 161
self, the 5,7, 11, 14-15, 17-19,24-9, single individual, the 50-4, 92, 103,
32-9, 42-7, 49-51, 54, 58-65, 125, 129, 135, 142, 150
69-72, 74-89, 91, 93-5, 97, 102, Socrates 58, 128, 149-50
111, 113, 117-19, 122, 125, 128-32, sovereign, sovereignty 81,109,135
139, 141, 145-8 spaciousness 115,118,123,137,148
active 132-8 spirit 7-8, 13-18, 20, 24, 29, 32-4, 36,
defiantly passive 132,136-41 38, 43, 48-50, 52, 54, 58-9, 61, 70,
empirical 4 75-7,84-5,91,93,95, 105-6,
misrelation of 24, 42 108-9, 117, 123, 125, 128-30, 132,
as negative unity 25, 28 137, 140-2, 146
noumenal 4, 19 spiritless, spiritlessness 18, 25-9, 31, 34,
phenomenal see empirical self 36, 40, 42-5, 47-52, 54, 58-61,
poles of 24-5, 34, 36, 42, 85, 124 63-4, 67, 70, 85, 88, 92, 105, 107-8,
as a relation 23-4, 32, 70, 83 118, 123-5, 130, 133, 135, 142,
structure of 23,26-8,47,58,76, 145-7, 149-50
130 sin 18,29,42,90-91,94,104,144,
syntheses of 25,33,124 149
as task 78 consciousness of 29, 86
task of 23,28,44,68,71,78,82,85, state of 85-9
114 stages of existence 25,59, 102-3, 145
self-actualization 80, 123, 128 aesthetic 39, 54, 59-62, 65, 67-9, 72,
self-becoming 23-5, 28, 31-3, 37, 42, 81,85,91
67, 69, 79, 83, 85, 102, 112, 118-19, ethical 59,67-8,76,81-8,91-2,96,
123-4, 130, 137, 147-8 102-5, 107, 109, 112, 117, 122
self-centered 35,49,79, 110-11, 116, religious 59,83,87,91-2,95,97-8,
145-6 102-5,114-15, 120, 122-3, 148
self-consciousness 25, 28, 36, 58, 69, strength 9, 16, 26, 43, 65, 84-5, 92, 95,
81-2,88,94,98, 105, 115, 120-1, 106, 122, 130, 132, 147
141, 145-7 struggle 18,20,24-5,27,42,63,68,
self-contradiction 24, 83, 88, 120, 122, 80, 113-17, 119-20, 122-3, 141,
140-1 144
self-deception 28, 32, 34, 37-8, 42-3, suffering 89-90, 105, 113-16, 118-21,
54 137, 142, 146, 149
self-determined, determination 1, 76, surrender 1 2 , 2 6 , 8 1 , 1 0 2 , 1 1 1 , 1 1 5
80-1,91, 122 synthesis see self
self-knowledge see knowledge
self-legislation 2-4 talent(s) 60-1, 77-8
self-love 7-9, 104 telos 23,84,102,107
self-possession 29, 75, 77, 81 absolute 98,110-13,119-21,148
self-revelation 11, 14-16, 18, 114, 122, temporal, temporality 23-6, 31,33,
133, 135, 141 43-4, 62-4, 70-1, 95, 98, 108-9,
self-sufficient, sufficiency 80-3, 92, 112, 114, 136
96-7, 102, 104-5, 107-9, 111, 117, tension(s) 12, 34, 38, 42, 46, 85-7,
147-8, 150 89-90,98, 114
self-will 13-14,17,48 terror 69, 71
selfhood 14, 17-18,20,28,32,87, 123, of life 17-18,141-2
125, 128, 132 tranquil, tranquillity 42, 44, 50, 140
selfish, selfishness 16, 18, 20, 43-4, transform, transformation 20, 32, 53,
110-11, 116, 131, 145-7 77-9,85-8, 102-5, 107, 109-11,
Shakespeare 59 115, 119, 145-6
162 Index
transparent, transparency 36, 58, Weil, Simone 116—17
60-1, 71, 75, 82-3, 86-7, 104, 108, wickedness 8—9
111, 117, 119, 128-30, 132, 134, will, the 2-14, 17-18, 25, 28, 34, 37, 49,
136-7, 145 67, 72, 84, 88, 102-3, 109-10, 122,
trivial, triviality 29, 49-50, 66, 68, 72, 128, 136, 143-6
147 autonomy of 2~3
corruption of 5-6
unconditional, unconditioned 46-8, freedom of 28
52-4,82,95, 111,115, 119, 133-4, infinitized 36-8
136 origin of 2, 4, 144
Underground Man 93—4 particular 13-15, 17-18, 24-5, 47,
unfreedom 92~3 52,85,97, 123, 133, 135, 145
unruliness 11-12, 117 universal 13-18, 24-5, 47-50, 52, 76,
unwillingness 36-7, 39, 47, 62-4, 68-9, 84,97,123,133,135, 141,145
92,95, 131 Wille 6-8, 10, 13-14
Willkiir 6-8, 10, 13-14
venture, venturing 13, 40, 44-7, 64, 89, world, the 11,13, 23-8, 30, 34, 37, 39,
113, 117, 119 43-4,46, 51, 58, 62-5, 67-72, 75, 77,
victory 71, 80-3, 89-90, 93, 98, 81-2, 93, 98, 102-4, 106, 108-14,
112-14, 119 116-17, 119-20, 122-5, 131, 135,
vision 78, 133 139-40, 146
intelligible 4-5, 19
weakness 42, 49, 60, 64, 70, 87-8, sensible 4-5
90-7, 107, 123, 129-30, 132, 136-7, worldliness 26-7, 42-4, 49, 112, 123
141,146, 150 worship 18,97,118,130,149

Kierkegaard On Radical Evil

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KIERKEGAARD'S ANALYSIS OF

Kierkegaard: A Guidefor the Perplexed - Claire Carlisle

© David Roberts 2006

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Roberts, David, 1962-

Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol

An Historical Introduction: Kant and Schelling on Radical Evil 1

The Struggle of Self-Becoming: Spiritless Self-Evasion 23

The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 58

The Final Movement Toward Defiance: Infinite Resignation 102

Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 128

CA: The Concept of Anxiety. Trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert

PF: Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong.

In a non-dualistic formulation of Being, the Good is that which is — the

Kant's Moral Theory in Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals

A hypothetical imperative presents a potential action as something that is

As a mere member of the intelligible world, all my actions would completely

freedom of the willvv is of a wholly unique nature in that an incentive can

The moral law is not rejected, but is made a conditional incentive.

Far from languishing in the impotency of personality demanded by Kant's

Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom

opposites, is completely undetermined with respect to either one. He regards

1. Immanuel Kant. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Immanuel Kant: Philosophi-

The Self as a Relation

The process of self-becoming consists in the continual struggle of bringing the

This is to be a slave tofortuna, a slave to the ever-changing whims of tempor-

The Spiritless Evasion of the Self

Spiritlessness and Choice

For Kierkegaard, an understanding of evil can be arrived at prior to all onti-

While Kierkegaard does not believe an individual makes a self-conscious

Freedom and Repetition

Kierkegaard believes human existence gains continuity in a moment of pas-

Although these moments are unrepeatable in an aesthetic or immediate

There is something missing in my life, and it has to do with my need to

earnestness . . . is the acquired originality of disposition, its originality pre-

The Task of Becoming Oneself

oneself, in an infinitizing of the self, and in infinitely coming back to oneself in

The Despair that Abides in Infinitude

Imagination is what providence uses to take men captive in actuality,

understood himself or tried to understand himself, if he truly was concerned

[I]n selfish shortsightedness his conviction is continually being altered. If it

people kept on using this assurance: Tf it were required of me, I would be

Earnestness is precisely this kind of honest distrust of oneself, to treat oneself

The only way radically to distinguish between philosophy and science is to

To come to oneself in self-knowledge. . . . In any other knowledge you

The Despair that Abides in Finitude

The Secular Mentality or Worldliness

Such a person is incapable of moving in any essential or transforming way,

From time to time, an individual is called on to act against the probable, to

The Ultimate Rebellion of Spiritlessness

Kierkegaard expresses this same idea:

What Kierkegaard despises about this rebellion is its movement toward an

Of course, a lack of conscience does not manifest itself as criminal acts —

Are we not straying as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the

We comfort ourselves through the disconsolateness of worldliness, and

The Single Individual

The Established Order and the Crowd

spirituality) of the one thing needful, and therefore no understanding of that

Nowadays the principle of association . . . is not positive but negative; it is an

For Kierkegaard, then, pointing to 'the single individual' is an attempt to