Wishing I Had Read Kierkegaard

 Reading Zachary Hardman's Kierkegaard's philosophy of love (Engelsberg ideas) explains some things about my depression and, I think, why I feel like I am on a much more even keel now.

I recognize my feelings while depressed in these paragraphs:

How, then, might the spiritual self be rescued? To answer that, we should briefly look at his earlier companion piece, The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, or angst, for Kierkegaard, the natural consequence of our fallen nature, is, far from being a negative emotion or an illness, the thing that marks us out as spiritual. Unlike animals – which are not, strictly, selves – we are conscious of myriad choices about how to live our lives. This produces in us anxiety – the ‘dizziness of freedom’ – as though we were looking into a chasm. The chasm is the boundlessness of our own possibilities. There is something infinite about possibility. Where we have possibility, we have imagination, desire, a movement toward becoming. In short, God. For Kierkegaard, God is that ‘all things are possible’.

If we lack possibility we live by pure necessity, from moment to moment, as animals do. Or in a world of triviality. This, for Kierkegaard, is spiritlessness. The spiritless subject ‘tranquilises itself in the trivial’ and, therefore, does not even know it is in despair. Spiritlessness manifests itself today in a rational-scientific attitude that whatever cannot be measured does not exist, in the banality of consumer culture, in the distractions of modern media. Kierkegaard asks: what are we distracting ourselves from? Without the distractions that prevent us from seeing the emptiness at the heart of our lives, we would have no choice other than to despair. For Kierkegaard, that would be a very good thing. The closer we come to despair, the closer we come to the remedy.

I mean feelings, not thoughts. The latter I pigeonhole as rational. Despondency - the word I favor for depression - deranges the rational; what feels like logical thought is only rational to the despondent. Feelings swamp and colonize the logical, and they are not pretty, happy, shiny thoughts. 

My feelings come within these categories:

There are two forms of self-conscious despair he highlights. The first is the despair of not wanting to be ourselves. The desire here, really, is to be rid of the despair of being ourselves. We may despise being ourselves or pine after being someone else, perhaps a famous actor. But this – wanting to be rid of our despair – only intensifies our feelings of despair, which Kierkegaard calls ‘the rising fever in this sickness of the self’. The second type of despair he mentions is the despair of ‘wanting in despair to be oneself’. Though we may earnestly want to be ourselves, in perhaps trying to invent some better, less despairing version of ourselves, we avoid actually becoming ourselves. We may decide we must become prime minister, for example, but this is not really our self, so our despair intensifies even further.

I read similar things in Orthodox Christian writers:

Yet it is only when we are brought to the ‘utmost extremity, where in human terms there is no possibility’ that, for Kierkegaard, we accept ‘for God all things are possible’, which is to have faith. The person of faith puts his or her trust in God – for whom ‘all things are possible’ – knowing full well ‘that humanly speaking his destruction is the most certain thing of all’. This is irrational: ‘to have faith is precisely to lose one’s mind’.

Orthodox Christian recognizes explicitly the idea of a fool for Christ, Fool-for-Christ (OrthodoxWiki).

Back to the original essay, this helps me understand why I think of myself divorced from my old despondency:

Whether we rid ourselves of despair is, ultimately, our choice alone. But this notion of the single individual standing alone before God in fear and trembling is often held to be the weakness of Kierkegaard, who is criticised – including by some existentialists – for forsaking social relations for religious asceticism. When we dig deeper, we find this is only partly true. In the later Works of Love – his inquiry into the biblical commandment to love one’s neighbour – Kierkegaard writes that: ‘Love is a relationship between: man-God-man, God is the middle term… For to love God is to love oneself in truth; to help another human being to love God is to love another man; to be helped by another human being to love God is to be loved’. If God, for Kierkegaard, is that ‘all things are possible’, then to love another person is to see the infinite possibility that dwells within them and to help them on the way to their realisation of the spiritual self. As we cannot fully know the other, this is an act of faith. It is to hope....

On the other hand, I had reams of philosophy in my head and my despondency censored all of it. It may be that I would have failed to recognize myself in what I knew.

See, I also ignored a favorite Lou Reed song.

What I would like to say now is that I was given enough breathing room to put what I had learned from philosophy, what I was learning from Orthodox Christian writers, what I knew from Lou Reed, was putting all this information into a system that let me live, to get past the self-destructiveness of my despondency, the utter revulsion I had towards living in this universe. In short, knowing the parts did not help until I found a way to connect them all.

If I did this, so can you. Oh, yeah, those who feel despondent do read Kierkegaard sooner than later. Like, in many ways, I am no one to emulate.

sch 6/22