First chapter posted!

In the little blurb at the top of this page it says I'd like to furnish an atheistic meaning of life. I bet a lot of people snicker at that. What a wanker. Biting off a bit more than you can chew pal? Well...

Booyakah! Chapter 1 for your enjoyment. I think I've got what amounts to an answer and I am currently writing it up as a book. I've been working on this for about 7 years now but I've only just started writing the big project. I'm hoping to have everything done by the end of June. Obviously this is a bit ambitious but my motto has always been 'aim high and hit'.

I must confess that this chapter is rather rough at the moment but once I have finished the other chapters I will have a better idea of what needs to be changed. The key things to take out of this chapter are:
1. the dialectic nature of consciousness and the seeming impossibility of being (I invite comment on the sense in calling it dialectic. Leaving that word out might make what I am getting at more precise).
2. the concept of despair as the first building block of 'the question we want answered'
3. the idea that starring despair in the face takes strength, while being religious (in most cases, Luther being an obvious exception) is the soft option.

I am about half way through the introduction, which I will post in about 10 days. I would like to give this more than a week to stay at the top of the page because it 10 000 words and I feel it deserves some exposure.

I will be trying to get this book published at some point and so I won't be posting all the chapters, nor will I be posting the refined versions. After the introduction the next chapter I post will probably be the chapter on tranquility as it is very accessible and addresses themes that I have already written small pieces on here in this blog.

So without further ado...

Chapter 1 - Despair: Kierkegaard and the ontology of man

I have chosen to begin the substantial part of this study with an analysis of Kierkegaard for two reasons. First, he is (arguably) the first author to engage philosophically with the question of the meaning of life. His writing featured several themes that would later underpin the ontological work of Heidegger and Sartre, among others. He was hugely influential on existentialism in general. Second, he provides, in my opinion, one of the most thorough and systematic explanations of what I called the faith-based solution to despair. Despair is a term largely of Kierkegaard’s own creation which refers to the feeling of meaninglessness and being lost that accompanies awakening consciousness. It is similar in meaning to nausea as used by Nietzsche and Sartre. This concept—despair—is the first piece in the jigsaw of just what exactly we are talking about when we refer to ‘the meaning of life’. Kierkegaard outlines how Christianity, and more specifically ‘faith’ in the infinite possibility that is God (‘the strength of the absurd’, he calls it), allows the individual to surmount despair. Kierkegaard is thus an ideal starting point for our inquiries because he identifies a problem—‘despair’—and provides a solution: faith. Even better, his solution is precisely that solution against which atheism campaigns. By starting with Kierkegaard we can begin the process of pinning down exactly what it is that we talking about when ask the question of the meaning of life, and make a start at eliminating some proposed solutions to the problem.

Eliminate is perhaps too harsh a word. Kierkegaard provides a somewhat compelling explanation of how faith can overcome despair. While I have my doubts as to whether or not such a solution to despair is possible for everyone, I must admit that it works for a great number of church going or otherwise religious individuals. I will argue extensively in the next chapter against the faith based account on several grounds, but I will not ‘eliminate’ it, merely try to show how it is ‘not good enough’. I will suggest that the faith based approach, based as it is on ‘the strength of the absurd’, is inherently incompatible with rationality and avoids being proved. This poses problems not only for society, which is difficult to manage when large sections of the population hold rationality to be a principle they can only apply in some matters, and also for the individual, because by definition faith operates in a realm in which you ‘can never know’. Some people need certainty, and doubt has a nasty habit of intruding on faith. I will also argue against the faith based approach along various lines to do with the fact that we have no good proof for the existence of God. One could reply that this is irrelevant when your faith in God is in ‘the absurd’ but the issue is slightly more complicated, as will be seen. After exhausting these lines of argument I will, however, concede that for some people the burden of proof in these matters is lower than mine and for them ‘faith’ might work quite well.

In this chapter I will gradually proceed through Kierkegaard’s main contribution to this discussion, ‘The Sickness unto Death’. The Sickness unto Death is concerned with the various forms of despair and with explaining how faith in the absurd overcomes each of them. I will discuss each form in turn, paying special attention to the final mode: the rejection of God. By way of this analysis I will identify some of the key aspects of despair, thereby making it a useful term for our inquiry. An analysis of Kierkegaard’s forms of despair will also produce a rough image of the inner world of the individual psyche and provide opportunities for opening up inquiries into themes that will be of crucial importance later, such as the notion of confirmation, the nature of consciousness and the importance of Being to our investigation.

After explicating Kierkegaard’s notion of defiance and his attitude to atheism I will argue against his characterisation of atheists as weak or base. I will suggest that it is in fact theists who are weak, fearful and seeking an escape. I will argue that one of the barriers to atheism is that it requires a great deal of strength and determination to accept despair and nausea and create one’s own meaning. This critical reflection will be relatively brief. I will move on to the next chapter, which discusses the faith based solution. At that point a full picture of Kierkegaard’s theory will be available, and a thorough criticism possible. 

The origin of despair

Kierkegaard, like almost all philosophers of existence that came after him, begins his inquiry from the cogito (the ‘I think’); that is, from self-consciousness, and what about us (humans) makes it possible for us to despair. He begins by stating that ‘the human being is spirit’ and asking ‘but what is spirit’. His answer is, I am afraid, comically arcane:

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. 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.[1]

I cannot help but feel that Kierkegaard’s approach to pinning down the self suffers from two stylistic pitfalls. First, it is exceedingly brief. Something ten times as long would open the possibility of being clear. Second, it is intractably bound up with Hegelian dialectics, which is good because the processes of consciousness are quite dialectic, but also bad because Hegel is unparalleled even among German philosophers when it comes to being unnecessarily (and deliberately) unfathomable. Kierkegaard appears to have conformed to this fashion.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. What is Kierkegaard saying here? He is saying that ‘spirit’ is the unique aspect of the individual—‘Spirit is the self’—what makes the individual x rather than ‘a human’. By way of a simple example, a significant part of the spirit of the human being referred to as ‘Usain Bolt’ is that he once ran the 100m sprint in <9.6 seconds. This is something that makes him ‘Usain Bolt’ and not just a member of the more generic category: ‘a human being’.

Moving on, Kierkegaard says that ‘the self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself’, and here he loses most people. But what he is saying is really as simple as ‘the self is that part of our psyche which is self-reflective, or rather, it is precisely the self-reflection’. That is to say, the self is consciousness. The self is that part of the psyche that can seize the moment and make a free decision.[2] I will come back to this in a moment but first, let’s look at the next sentence: ‘A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity’.  As I understand it, this refers to the fact that the individual is unique from moment to moment. We are constantly self-reflective, caught in ‘the moment’—the point between past and future—yet we are aware of ourselves as a unique entity across time; we are aware not just of the moment but also of the past and the future. This is despite the fact that we undergo significant changes across time, such as aging and identity development. We are a synthesis of the infinite—the future, possibility—and the finite—the past, the here and now—because when we, as consciousness, seize upon the moment (the space between the past and the future); we are aware of how we got here and the possibilities of the future open up before our contemplative faculties like a galaxy of alternate pathways.

Freedom and necessity refer to the two halves of the self—the conscious and unconscious of psycho-analysis (I will introduce my own terms in two chapters time). It is important to note that the unconscious is more than just will. Will is the animal part of us, that part that we had before we evolved consciousness.[3] It is only a little bit more than instinct, and typically manifests as urges, primordial drives and passions. The unconscious is all these things but also incorporates aspects of the ‘synthesis’ as Kierkegaard calls it. Here I will have to explain dialectics.

Dialectics was a new way of thinking about logic pioneered by Hegel and his disciples. It sounds very fancy but is actually quite simple. Basically, you start with a proposition, such as ‘increases in production led to materialist society’ and then find a counter proposition, such as ‘the desire to consume led to materialist society’. In the ensuing debate between these two positions a synthesis is reached. This may involve the complete rejection of one point of view or a combination of the two of them. You are left with a single new proposition. This proposition is contested by a new counter-proposition, and the cycle continues. The psyche works much this way. The conscious and the unconscious compete for primacy of the self until a synthesis is reached (typically manifesting as a decision made comfortably), at which point the conflict starts over again. This is part of the reason why we often feel that our personality is in flux. The unconscious is more than will because it incorporates not just our animal aspect but also those elements of our conscious that have been integrated into our self over time. Conscious reflection, that is, the application of reason, often causes us to change our mind about certain things, or decide that our will has gotten something wrong. A common example is a young man who has an initial reaction of horror or unease towards homosexual conduct on the part of his peers but comes, through rationality, to accept the behaviour, tolerate it and ultimately think it is perfectly normal and healthy. In future dialectical battles between his conscious and unconscious his unconscious may come from a position of pro-homosexual conduct rather than his purely instinctive position of homophobia. It is easy to see why the unconscious often takes the role of the initial proposer and the conscious, armed as it is with rationality, of the counter-proposition. By and large, we default to those values, opinions and practices that are imbedded in our unconscious. It is only when confronted with some new scenario or information that the contest between conscious and unconscious opens up again, with the new information represented by the conscious and old habits by the unconscious.

Returning to Kierkegaard, he says that the self is a synthesis of freedom and necessity. Necessity is the unconscious and the will; mostly the will. It is the part of us that does things instinctively, by wrote, and it can be quite pushy. We default to it when making decisions. But consciousness, that is, awareness of ‘the moment’ and the fact that we are confronted with a choice at each moment, allows freedom of choice, or rather, as Sartre so famously noted, it condemns us to freedom. There is no escaping the choosing of a pathway from many possible options. Man must choose. We are thus a synthesis of necessity, our fundamental character—our will—driving us onwards through thousands of decisions we make, and freedom, which allows us to override our instinctive decisions. This interplay, as will come to be seen in later chapters, is at the heart of finding satisfaction in life, as both the conscious mind and the will must be satiated in order for us to achieve authenticity (or ‘inner peace’ if you like).        

I might just briefly note that it is obvious from the analysis thus far that the expression ‘free will’ is misleading. It is not the will that is free, but the self. The will drives and urges and incites; but it is up to the synthesis of the will and freedom—the self—to make the final decision. Nietzsche says this quite well here....

Let’s finish off Kierkegaard’s definition of spirit. He says that the self is a synthesis. We have established that this refers to the halves of the psyche, for now referred to as the conscious and the unconscious, the ‘consciousness’ that transcends their dialectical battle and the decisions that emerge as the synthesis of these dialectical positions. The self then, is that aspect of the psyche that is born (for a just a moment) of the synthesis of conscious and unconscious. Or, as Kierkegaard puts it: ‘if, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self’.[4]

The final part of Kierkegaard’s definition is where things get really interesting. He says ‘A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self’. In what sense is a human not yet a self? Surely in achieving the synthesis of conscious and unconscious in consciousness and decision making the individual arrives at self-hood? This, I think, is true (at least a little), and will be one of the pillars upon which I base much of my later analysis. But I am getting ahead of myself again. Kierkegaard is referring to the fact that as soon as someone achieves a synthesis and makes a decision they are immediately confronted with a new moment and a new decision. The previous synthesis is absorbed into the unconscious and merely forms part of the new proposition to be met by the counter-proposition. Thus, our identity is constantly up in the air even though, as I will argue, we do carry a part of ourselves with us across time. As soon as we affirm our identity in one decision that identity is immediately up for grabs again as we are confronted by a new moment and a new decision. Thus we are always under-construction. We are always in a state of becoming. We are always on the way to who we are even though we are already somebody:

If, on the other hand, the self does not become itself, then it is in despair, whether it knows it or not. Yet a self, every moment it exists, is in a process of becoming; for the self potentially is not present actually, it is merely what is to come into existence. In so far, then, as the self does not become itself, it is not itself; but not to be oneself is exactly despair.[5]

Simone de Beauvoir says here that ‘man is always “to be”’; Kierkegaard simply says a human being is not yet a self. A self then, would imply some kind of stasis of identity. This state is typically referred to as ‘Being’. Unlike gold, whose being is to be comprised of 72 atoms, man’s being is ‘to be’. We, as individuals, are always in flux.

This aspect of being is of crucial importance to finding meaning in life but I will not be able to explain why until chapter 5, by which time I will have established some parameters for the analysis. Let us return to setting out these parameters and continue our explication of Kierkegaard. 

We have now arrived at an understanding of Kierkegaard’s conception of self. I hope I have made it sufficiently clear. From here we need to move on to discuss the concept of despair and what it means for Kierkegaard. He introduces it thus:

Despair is a sickness of the spirit, of the self, and so can have three forms: being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair), not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself.[6]

But what exactly is the ‘sickness’? Kierkegaard never actually says, but he gives a clue when he states:

The possibility of this sickness is man’s advantage over the beast, and it is an advantage which characterises him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness of loftiness of his being spirit.[7]

Man’s advantage over the beast is that he is self aware. If you put a dog in front of a mirror it will think its reflection is another dog. Man is not like that. But consciousness places us in the state of identity flux elaborated above. It is this feeling of flux, of ambiguity, that is despair—the sickness. Kierkegaard then, in talking about despair, is referring to man’s desire ‘to be’, that is, to have a set identity, a set nature, stable, and his inability to achieve this ‘being’ because of the fact that consciousness, our advantage over the beast, forces us to constantly seize each moment and be aware not only of ‘possibility’, but also of our power to choose from amongst all possibilities—our existential freedom. This is quite different to Nietzsche who, it will be seen, was concerned with Nausea—the experience of the world and life as meaningless. Both issues are taken up by the French existentialists, namely Jean Paul Sartre and especially Simone De Beauvoir.

But there is more to Kierkegaard’s concept of despair. We can infer this from his comment:

Where then does despair come from? From the relation in which the synthesis relates to itself, from the fact that God, who made man this relation, as it were lets go of it; that is, from the relation’s relating to itself’

When consciousness is held by God then consciousness is freed of its requirement to choose; the correct choice is obvious—it is revealed by God in his infinite and perfect wisdom. Once God ‘let’s go’ of the relation, it no longer relates to the absolute, but to itself. At this point, the truth is no longer given, and thus the individual must choose between possibilities at each moment. At each choice the only knowledge they have to work with is their own, which is not absolute. Thus they doubt. They are uncertain. They do not know whether their behaviour is correct, right, good, just, profitable, sensible etc. And this uncertainty is brought up every time they make a major decision. It is inescapable:

For despair is not a result of the imbalance, but of the relation which relates to itself. And the relation to himself is something a human being cannot be rid of, just as little as he can be rid of himself, which for that matter is one and the same thing, since the self is indeed the relation to oneself.

The French existentialists would refer to this feeling of uncertainty as ‘anguish’. Anguish is an aspect of despair just as wanting to have being is. In a way they are related, because in purely theoretical terms, something always behaves according to its being. If a particular self were to achieve a being that was not in flux it would overcome the doubt element because its decision making values would be set.

We are now armed with an understanding of what Kierkegaard means by despair. We must now apply our conception of despair—i.e. the feeling of wanting to be and the feeling of uncertainty—to Kierkegaard’s three ‘forms’ of despair: being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair), not wanting in despair to be oneself, and wanting in despair to be oneself. This will give us a clearer picture of the psychology of despair and assist us in establishing parameters for our inquiry.   

Being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair)

This is the most primordial form of despair. I will not discuss it at length because I presume that anyone reading this book is not suffering from it. ‘Being unconscious in despair of having a self’ means a lack of awareness of oneself as spirit. Kierkegaard associates it with pagans and all other pre-Christians (or really, pre-monotheists). A lack of awareness of the fact that we are spirit equates to a lack of awareness of the potential for truths, especially of moral truths, and for authenticity.  According to Kierkegaard, the pagan sees the world as a random hodgepodge of chance, fate and the whims of the Gods. In this world he must make do as he can. There is no grand plan or cosmic order. Certainly there is no divine law. The pagan’s life is his own to do with as he wishes, though likely he will be caught up in the grand games of the Gods and tossed this way and that by the random blows of chance. The pagan does not agonise over decisions other than in regards to how they affect him. Pagan value systems focus on things like greatness, honour and other uniquely individual and self-regarding virtues. Alternatively they might focus on pleasing mysterious forces to gain favour and make life less miserable. In this way the pagan, according to Kierkegaard, is unaware of the need to be ‘good’ and/or ‘certain’ that leads to anguish. There can be no question of being objectivity ‘good’ because there are no ethics written into the firmament and no question of being certain as everything comes down to fate, chance, the gods, or a mixture in the end anyway. The pagan is thus unconscious of his nature as spirit. Unconscious, that is, of his potential to live authentically, in command of his own power and the owner of his actions. 

This mode of being is a form of despair according to Kierkegaard because it means the pagan always acts inauthentically. The pagan gives himself up and hands himself over to the fates. He disowns his actions and himself. He is in despair because he is not even aware of the potential for meaningful endeavour.

I think it fair to argue that some individuals in Pagan times transcended this simplistic picture. I am thinking here of characters like Odysseus and Sigur and real life individuals like Alexander the Great and Xerxes—individuals who appear to have taken a very real ownership of their actions and made authentic choices. Individuals who did not give themselves up to the whims of the gods but who instead made a mark on the earth. It is ironic that many of them considered themselves divine. But these individuals are not a counter to Kierkegaard’s conception. They come under his third type of despair, which we will come to shortly—‘wanting in despair to be oneself’.

Outside of these rare individual the great mass of mankind in the early days of civilisation may well have been inauthentic. Quite possibly they toiled to survive and were thankful to whatever mysterious power graced them with sustenance. Whether or not they experienced life as worth-while remains questionable; people did get on with things, so presumably life was not so bad. There is a degree of peace to be found in giving oneself over to fate. Like Kierkegaard, I do not think this mode of existence is ideal, but I also don’t think it is a tragic way to live. Regardless, such individuals are rare today, particularly in the developed world for which this book is largely written. Those reading are, I suspect, deeply troubled by their anguish and their despair. As such, I will move on.

Not wanting in despair to be oneself (weakness)

This second category of despair comes in two varieties: wanting to be rid of oneself, and in despair not wanting to be a self. The two varieties are quite different, and I am afraid that I have committed a small injustice against Kierkegaard because he does not classify ‘wanting to be rid of oneself’ under ‘not wanting in despair to be oneself’, though his discussion of ‘not wanting in despair to be oneself’ comes after his discussion of being unconscious in despair of being spirit. In any case, the concept is important for our analysis and it fits best under this heading, so this is where I will discuss it.

Wanting to be rid of oneself is a feeling that occurs when we fail to live up to a particular aspiration. For example, I may want to score well on a test. When I fail to do so I want to be rid of myself because I am now something other than what I want to be: I wanted to be someone who scored well on the test. Kierkegaard puts it thus:

In despairing over something he was really despairing over himself, and he wants now to be rid of himself. Thus when the power-crazed person whose motto is ‘Caesar or nothing’ doesn’t become Cesar, he despairs over that. But this indicates something else: that he cannot stand being himself precisely because he failed to become Cesar. So really he is in despair not over not becoming Caesar, but over himself not having become Caesar. This self which, had it become Caesar, would have been everything he desired—though in another sense just as much in despair—this self is now what he can bear least of all. In a deeper sense what he cannot bear is not that he did not become Caesar; what is unbearable is this self which did not become Caesar; or better still, what he cannot bear is that he cannot be rid of himself. By becoming Cesar he would have despairingly been rid of himself, but now he did not become Caesar, and, despairingly, cannot be rid of himself. He is really in despair either way, for he does not have his self, he is not his self. By becoming Caesar he would still not have become himself, he would have been rid of himself. And by not becoming Cesar he despairs at not being able to be rid of himself.

This analysis from Kierkegaard incorporates many important points, and I will endeavour to address each in turn. First, there is the point I expressed above with the analogy of the test, that when we fail to achieve an aspiration we feel bad about ourselves. Our self-esteem takes a blow and we wish we could be different—‘we wish we could be rid of ourselves’. Importantly, we do not despair over not achieving the goal, but over the fact that our ‘self’ is not of that sort which achieves the goal. As Kierkegaard says: ‘So really he is in despair not over not becoming Caesar, but over himself not having become Caesar.’ I call this an ‘existential fail’. An existential fail is where we set up a target by which we intend to confirm the kind of person we are—to disclose our being—and then fall short of the target. When we suffer an existential fail a kind of vacuum opens up in our identity. It is revealed to us that we are not in fact the person we believed ourselves to be. Whatever conception of our ‘being’ that we had must be jettisoned and replaced with a new one that takes into account our inability to surmount our aspiration. We are derailed from the path of affirmation that we were on and must re-establish our sense of self, our identity. I will return to this notion of existential fail in chapter 5 when discussing the coalescence of being.

Skipping ahead a bit we come to the statement: ‘By becoming Cesar he would have despairingly been rid of himself, but now he did not become Caesar, and, despairingly, cannot be rid of himself’. Here I think Kierkegaard is wrong in his analysis. He is suggesting that the individual’s motivation for wanting to become Caesar was to be rid of himself and his despair. The individual is under the assumption that if he was something greater or at least different to what he is now then he would no longer despair. For example, a nerd may hope to be part of the football team under the assumption that if he were a jock and a ‘winner’ he would no longer feel insecure. There is an element of truth to this but I think Kierkegaard is wrong to express it in the negative form ‘to be rid of himself’. In fact, what the individual wants to do is to confirm himself. That is to say the individual wants to be given evidence that he is of a certain sort. Consider the test analogy given above. I want to do well on the test not to be rid of myself but to confirm that I am smart. Allow me to nuance this with an example from my own life. It was crucial to me that I receive a first class mark for my honours year because I had built up an identity, a view of myself, which was founded in large part on the notion that I was the kind of individual who gets a first class honours. I believed myself to be smart, intellectual, academic, studious etc. In the results of my honours year I sought confirmation of this identity. I wanted proof in the world and in the eyes of others that I was, in fact, this individual that I believed myself to be. When I fell short of a first class (by 1 mark no less) I experienced a tremendous existential fail. This event suggested to me that I was not smart, intellectual, academic, studious etc. Now obviously my grade was not disastrously bad but it did require me to significantly rethink my conception of who I was (though not so much who I wanted to be). I certainly despaired at this time, but not so much that I could not be rid of myself, but that I was not what I believed myself to be. I was lost again. I would need to rebuild my identity on different principles and find some way to confirm them. The only individuals who want to be rid of themselves in despair are those who despise what they are fundamentally. In later chapters I will discuss the notion of understanding not just who you want to be but who you are by nature. Many people, particularly those who are bullied excessively at school or suffer from extreme parental pressure, concern themselves too much with who they want to be and spare no thought for the individual they are at base. It is such people that will perhaps despair that they cannot be rid of themselves, but they are going about the process of finding satisfaction in life in a poor manner and I hazard to say that they will not be successful.

Kierkegaard is, I think, aware of this positive expression, that is, confirmation rather than ‘being rid of’, as he states at the end of the above quote: ‘He is really in despair either way, for he does not have his self, he is not his self’. Here he expresses the notion that if his identity had been confirmed by ascending to Caesar he would be himself, he would ‘have’ himself. His being would have been disclosed to him and his identity confirmed, but instead he is left drifting in identity flux.

The next bit is crucial: ‘By becoming Caesar he would still not have become himself, he would have been rid of himself. And by not becoming Cesar he despairs at not being able to be rid of himself’. Here Kierkegaard suggests that even if the individual had become Caesar he would still have been in despair; he would not have achieved self-hood. This is because consciousness is confronted eternally at each moment and certainty is never acquired. By becoming Caesar the individual does not achieve Being, but only a new form of facticity. His physical form—what can be described by the expression ‘that is’—has changed but it will continue to change. There is no stability. For Kierkegaard the setting of goals and their achievement does not provide a means to Being. In my philosophy it can; I will explain how in Chapter 6.  

II. in despair, not wanting to be oneself

This concludes my analysis of ‘wanting in despair to be rid of oneself’. I will now discuss, briefly, what Kierkegaard means by ‘in despair not wanting to be oneself’, which is much better expressed as ‘in despair, not wanting to deal with being a self’. This form of despair is experienced by those people who just ‘get on with it’. Those individuals who are perhaps, every now and then, troubled by questions of being and existence, but who, rather than dwell on them, push them into the back of there mind and continue with whatever it was that they think is important or worthwhile. There is a rare moment of clarity in Kierkegaard when he describes this type:

He takes possession of what, in his language, he calls his self, that is to say, whatever aptitudes, talent etc. he may have been given, all this he takes possession of but in the outward direction of what is called ‘life’, real life, active life. He deals very warily with the modicum of reflection her has in himself, lest this thing in the background comes up again. Then gradually manages to forget it. In the course of the years he comes to think of it as well-nigh ridiculous, especially when in the congenial company of other capable dynamic men with a sense and aptitude for real life.[8]

Some of the world’s most successful people fall into this category. All those individuals who think something is important and spend a great deal of time making it happen. These people, like the philosophers of metaphysics that I discussed in the introduction, aren’t pestered by despair and uncertainty because they have found a pursuit that they experience as meaningful. By way of example allow me to offer Professor Peter Drysdale, the architect of APEC and my one time boss. By all accounts Peter worked more after he retired and remains one of the most influential economists in Asia at the age of 74. His work is concerned largely with the economic development of the Asian region and particularly with the establishment of various regional institutions for economic cooperation and dialogue. I don’t get the impression that Peter has ever been bothered by questions of whether or not his endeavours are meaningful in the grand scheme of the cosmos, whether they are worthwhile or not, or whether he could be better spending his time and energy doing something else. For Peter the issues in his work are of paramount importance and he would be a fool not to dedicate as much time and effort as possible to their resolution. I have often remarked that he seems to genuinely believe that if he retires the world will disintegrate in economic chaos and de-regionalisation.

People like Peter do not suffer from despair. Kierkegaard would argue that they are nonetheless in despair. It is a part of the human condition that can only be annihilated by faith in the absolute. According to Kierkegaard such people avoid confrontation with the fact that they are spirit. They may ignore the fact that they are a self but they are still in despair. But I would argue that such people experience despair as an irritating voice that sometimes emerges from their subconscious. For the most part, they are too busy to pay it any attention. For all practical intents and purposes, they have overcome despair. I doubt that many such people will be reading this book. Ironically, my thesis in the latter parts of this book makes significant use of the method of such people to overcome despair. That is, I suggest that individuals must identify endeavours that they experience as meaningful and then pursue those endeavours. Provided that life is experienced as meaningful despair over whether it is in fact meaningful becomes little more than an occasional nuisance. 

Wanting in despair to be oneself

The final form of the self is the most interesting to us because it represents precisely that attitude to despair that the atheist takes. Kierkegaard refers to it in general terms as ‘defiance’. It comes in two forms. The first form is a kind of disappointment that there is God and a transcendental moral code. The second is an outright rejection of God, though Kierkegaard always maintains that there is God. If you reject him and deny he exists that doesn’t stop him from existing or change the ontology of the world.

Let’s begin our analysis of this final form of despair with Kierkegaards introduction to the notion of an individual who is quite fond of his subjectivity and would like to be in charge of his life and choices, that is, the individual who wants to be himself:

In order to want in despair to be oneself, there must be consciousness of an infinite self [possibility]. 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 despairer 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 what he will not have in his concrete self. His concrete self, or his concreteness, has indeed necessity and limits, is this quite definite thing, with these aptitudes, predispositions etc., in this concrete set of circumstances, etc. But by means of the infinite form, the negative 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. That is to say, he wants to begin a little earlier than other people, not at and with the beginning, 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 it himself.[9]

Kierkegaard is describing an individual who is aware of his potential as an individual—his possibility. He is aware that he could be something grand, though his notion of ‘grand’ will be determined by many things. He may consider ‘grand’ to be Caesar, or he may be very enthusiastic about living a simple life at an idyllic location on the Central Coast of Australia. In any case, he has ambition, and his ambitions inspire him. What’s more, while aware that he is restricted by his physical form, he believes it quite possible to attain his ambition.

The line about the negative self here is quite confusing. It refers to the fact that consciousness allows us to consider possibility, which is that part of ourself which does not exist. All of our potential is in us, but it has not yet been actualised. This fact formed the beginning of Sartre’s inquiry into human nature. He asked, ‘what is it in man that allows “nothing” to come into the world’, where nothing is a concept that only we, as conscious creatures, can contemplate. The individual who wants to be himself wants to create his own self out of his possibility. He wants to fashion himself through endeavour, choices and actions. Put bluntly, he wants the opportunity to try and achieve his ambitions regarding who he could and would like to be in the world.

Unfortunately, God has a plan for all of us, and the universe is imbued with objective values and meanings, at least in Kierkegaard’s Christian Ontology, which means that we must, to an extent, conform to external forces. Hence in order ‘be one’s self’ the individual must first ‘severe the self from any relation to the power which has established it, or [severe itself] from the conception that there is such a power’. This involves not wanting to ‘see his task in his given self’ and not ‘donning oneself’. In order to take charge of one’s existence one must first break away from the theistic nature of the world.

The problem with breaking from God is that God is the only source of truth. Nothing that the individual who breaks away does off his own back has any meaning or value outside of that which he subjectively ascribes to it (and others ascribe to it). That is to say, only in keeping with God’s plan and his value structure is the individual able to play a part in the transcendental meaning of the world. It is in this context that Kierkegaard says of the self that wants to be itself:

It recognises no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks seriousness and can only conjure forth an appearance of seriousness, even when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible attention.[10]

The quest for ‘seriousness’ is at the heart of despair. We want to be certain that our life and our actions are important and that we are living correctly. The feeling that our life lacks seriousness is the feeling of Nausea—that the world and life has no meaning. Kierkegaard argues that the only way to get at meaning is to accept God. God is the absolute. He transcends everything. He is the truth. By contrast, the naked self—the individual detached from God—is only the endless churning of consciousness: ‘No derived self, by taking notice of itself, can make itself more than it already is; it remains itself from first to last, in its self-duplication it still becomes neither more nor less than the self’.[11] As a result, any self that breaks away from God to ‘do its own thing’ is doomed to exist in the dialectic limbo between unconscious and conscious. They will never have being and they will never have certainty. They can never have the absolute, only the ambiguous:

In the whole dialectic in which it acts there is nothing firm, at no moment does what the self amounts to stand firm, that is eternally firm. 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 with a hypothesis.[12]

In the latter part of the above quote Kierkegaard begins to explore the idea that without grounding in something absolute, the actions of the individual are intransient. Furthermore, when consciousness is not ‘grounded transparently in God’, that is, when it is not held firm in being, the self is always in flux. No matter how much the individual tries to affirm himself, to create himself out of possibility into the individual he would like to be, some new input can always set the dialectical process of unconscious vs. conscious spinning and make him lose belief in the value of his current pursuit, his current identity and his accomplishments to date:

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 kingdom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate at any moment.[13]

No matter how established we may feel in our identity, we are always in a position to change our identity. Our identity never becomes set. We never achieve being. The self is always a relation, and the dialectical processes of that relation force us to question our identity at each moment.  Kierkegaard notes that, ‘just when [the self] seems on the point of having the building finished, at a whim it can dissolve the whole thing into nothing’.[14]

This form of despair can be experienced by a theist as well as an atheist, provided the theist simply does not like the idea of falling into the designs of another entity. Here the individual despairs because he would like to create his own destiny and his own values. He does not like the idea of fate or that values are given from God. Ironically, most atheists despair precisely because they can find no extrinsic justification for their values. For many atheists, if a moral truth was discovered somehow they would rejoice, for they would suddenly have seriousness.  It is no coincidence that some of the world’s strictest moralists are to be found in atheist schools of ethics, particular the utilitarian school. The utilitarian maxim – the good is the greatest pleasure for the greatest number—is felt by many to be true in the manner of 1+1=2. Hence they are quite strict in applying this maxim in all their ethical experiences. They believe this maxim to be ‘the word’. In living by its precepts they experience their actions as correct and meaningful.

In this book I will argue that atheists need to embrace the former attitude of wanting to create values for themselves, but to couple this attitude with a healthy atheism. In such a scenario there is still plenty of potential for despair and nausea, but I will outline a method for overcoming both feelings, and for getting at ‘happiness’, the nature of which will be discussed in chapter 4. The yearning for objective meaning is essentially a yearning for submission, often with the best intentions. Those who would like to do this would like to know what ‘the good’ is. But unfortunately we must decide it for ourselves. In latter chapters I will outline why we must embrace this, why we should think that this is a liberating, empowering and awesome state of affairs. I will outline why this atheistic ontology and subjectivist attitude not only opens up, for the first time, the genuine potential for authenticity, but also how it connects ethical behaviour with self interest, something which no extrinsic moral code is capable of doing.

First, however, we must conclude our analysis of Kierkegaard. There is one more form of despair to be discussed—that of pure defiance—and then I will move on to his faith-based solution to despair, which will receive its own chapter.

The penultimate form of despair is best characterised as defiance. It is not the sad disappointment of the individual who would create himself if only there was no over-encompassing God.  It is a raging hatred of a God who designs a creature that wants to create itself but is cursed with despair if it tries to do so:

It wants to be itself in hatred towards existence, to be itself according to its misery; it does not even want defiantly to be itself, but to be itself in sheer spite; it does not even want to sever itself defiantly from the power which established it; it wants in sheer spite to press itself on that power, importune it, hang on to it out of malice. And that is understandable—a malicious objection must, of all things, take care to hand on to that to which it is an objection... It is, to describe it figuratively, as if a writer were to make a slip of the pen, and the error became of itself as such—perhaps it wasn’t a mistake but from a much higher point of view an essential ingredient in the whole presentation—and as if this 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.[15] 

Christopher Hitchens in his send-up of theism—God is not Great—expresses this attitude on several occasions. He frequently asks how an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent creator could create something that finds it so difficult to do as he would like it to. My favourite example is giving humans the ability to tremendously enjoy sexual intercourse and then prohibiting masturbation and the enjoyment of sex. Why did he give women a clitoris if it is evil to enjoy sex?

Amongst modern atheists this attitude finds its expression chiefly amongst those people who have a bone to pick with organised religion, like Hitchens. My impression is that there are no longer many people who genuinely believe in God but also think he is a ‘second rate author’. Much more common today is the individual experiencing Kierkegaard’s final form of despair:

The sin of abandoning Christianity modo ponendo [positively] of declaring it to be untruth. This is sin against the Holy Spirit. Here the self is at the height of despair: it not only throws all of Christianity aside, but makes it out to be lies and falsehood—what a stupendously despairing conception such a self must have of itself!

According to Kierkegaard, the individual who rejects theism and declares it to be lies and fabrication is in the ultimate state of despair. Here we see confirmed, as in many of the latter forms of despair, that Kierkegaard thinks God is given. He certainly exists and His nature is described in the Bible. Those who do not believe this to be the case are in denial. Interestingly, Kierkegaard seems to find his proof for God precisely in the fact that man despairs. In The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard claims that despair proves not only that man has an immortal soul, but also that God exists. These conclusions are reached by what I can only regard as a typically weak theistic argument, namely:

Socrates proved the immortality of the soul from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as the body’s sickness consumes the body. One can similarly prove the eternal in a man from the fact that despair cannot consume his self, that this is precisely the torment of contradiction in despair. If there were nothing eternal in a man, he would simply be unable to despair.[16]   

There is quite clearly a step here which does not follow. In Socrates case, the fact that depression does not kill someone the way a ruptured spleen does has no bearing on whether the ‘soul’ continues on after electrical impulses have stopped in the body. In Kierkegaard’s case, a mortal psyche is just as capable of despair as an immortal because it is aware of possibility, in particular the possibility of death. Precisely what eats up a great many people and drives many to religious belief is the horror of realising that once we die we turn to dust and the achievements of our life gradually come to mean nothing. We despair because our actions have no eternal significance. We are aware, in the moment of consciousness, of the open possibility of our future and the stamp we have left in our past. We see how we are defined and we hope that we are defining ourselves correctly in the time we have on this earth, in this life. An objective standard of value like those laid down in the various holy books of the theistic religions would allow an escape from this torment. Thus, it is despair that leads people to invent the eternal! To suggest that the eternal produces despair is a nefarious sleight of hand. 

For Kierkegaard, the positive rejection of God is the ultimate form of despair because it represents the highest consciousness of the issue of despair: ‘It is the rising level of consciousness, or the degree to which it rises, that is the continual intensification of despair: the more consciousness the more intense the despair’.[17] It is at this point that the individual is most in touch with their spiritual needs. They are however, disgusted with the remedy offered by God. They are disgusted, according to Kierkegaard, with the idea that they are to ‘give themselves up’, to supplicate themselves before the divine machine of the universe. They are disgusted with the notion that they should give up their self—their identity, their individuality, their drive to life, their will to power, and be merely a part of something bigger. And in their disgust they reject God to wander the torturous roads of an existence outside of God’s bosom. Why are they so disgusted by this narrative? Because ‘it is too exalted for them’:

Christianity teaches that this single human being and so every single human being, whether husband, wife, servant girl, cabinet minister, merchant, barber, student, etc, this single human being is before God—this single human being, who might be proud to have spoken once in his life with the king, this human being who hasn’t the least illusion of being on an intimate footing with this or that footing, this human being is before God, can talk with God any time he wants, certain of being heard; in short this human being has an invitation to live on the most intimate footing with God! Furthermore, for this person’s sake, for the sake of this very person too, God comes to the world, lets himself be born, suffers, dies; and this suffering God, he nigh-well begs and implores this human being to accept the help offered to him! Truly, if there is anything one should lose one’s mind over, this is it! Every person who does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended. But why is he offended? Because it is too exalted for him, because he cannot make sense of it, because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it, and therefore must have it removed, made into nothing, into madness and nonsense, for it as if it were about to choke him.[18] 

This statement must rank as one of the most offensive things that can be said to an atheist. What Kierkegaard is essentially saying is that I cannot bear to be a Christian because it is too good for me. I need something lower, something dirtier, something more ‘of the earth’. What Garbage. In this statement Kierkegaard is performing another nefarious sleight of hand. He suggests that ‘anyone who does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended’. This is similar to his twist earlier when he suggested that the yearning for the absolute was absolute in origin. Here he suggests that those who are strong enough (the words Nietzsche used to describe them) to walk away from the absolute, to accept that the world has no intrinsic meaning, to embark on the arduous regime of self creation and affirmation, to acknowledge that they will always despair, are in fact scared and over-proud. It is those who seek to annihilate themselves and their subjectivity in the greater power of God that are actually courageous. It is those who are too weak for themselves who are truly strong. In wanting desperately to have an end to their despair, an intrinsic meaning to the universe and a simple standard of right and wrong, and in accepting faith as a result, that they are acting with the bravery of Galahad.

Conversely, many atheists (notably Nietzsche) reject theism precisely because it is too low, too base, too easy, too convenient and not rigorous enough in the sense that it does not conform to reason and evidence: it is a neat solution, but one based on the strength of the absurd. Kierkegaard notes that Christianity allows the ‘lowest’ individual to converse directly with God—the highest entity. Why, in the context of such an observation, does he not consider the possibility that theism is a creation of the weak and cowardly rather than the strong and brave? Is it not possible that the individual who rejects the notion of God does so not out of fear, dishonesty or even contempt, but merely because the notion just isn’t good enough? The various fundamental texts of the theistic texts are full of fine stories, including the one where ‘God comes to the world, lets himself be born, suffers, dies’, but this does not mean that these things in fact happened, or that Jesus was in fact God, or that God even exists. More importantly, this is just a story, like that of the flying spaghetti monster or the book of Mormon; a story from a time when the vast majority of people were illiterate, suffering terribly and all too eager to believe in something that so conveniently resolved their existential issues. While the bible is (arguably) a story that makes each and every individual special and is thus ‘exalted’, that doesn’t make it real, merely convenient. The atheist does not spit on the bible because it is too exalted for him, but because it is too easy. It is so obviously a sham for his benefit that he would be disrespecting his intellectual faculties and strength of spirit to accept it.

Deeper in this book I will return to discuss the idea that theistic theory is felt by the atheist ‘as if it were about to choke him’. I will also discuss in greater detail what it means to have the strength to accept despair. But right now I must turn to discuss Kierkegaard’s theory of faith and give it a fair hearing. This will require its own chapter. Hopefully by the end of the next chapter we will have an idea of the state of mind of the individual who walks away from the possibility of higher powers and objective values. For now, I hope I have given the reader a solid understanding of the concept of despair. Despair is the desire for being; the yearning for stability and a sense of self. It is also the frustration and misery of being uncertain at all times. It is the feeling of being lost. Despair is what drives us to find certain confirmation of value-truths. It is what makes us want to find something we can be certain is good, true and correct. In some cases despair is the impression that the world is meaningless, and the yearning for meaning, though for this feeling I prefer the word nausea, which we will explore in Chapter 3 when discussing Nietzsche. In Kierkegaard’s philosophy, Despair manifests in several forms. First, in the individual who is unconscious of himself as a capable of meaningful endeavour—the individual who throws his arms up in defeat at the machinations of the gods, fate and chance. Second, the individual who is aware of his capacity for meaning but is upset because he does not have the requisite power to achieve what he considers meaningful—the individual who wants to be rid of himself. Third, in the individual who is aware of God, faith and the road to salvation, but would prefer to make his own way and can’t because there is a standard that must be followed. Fourth, the individual who acknowledges God but spits in his face because he thinks God should not have given him the faculty of consciousness and then denied him the possibility of a subjective existence. And finally, the individual who denies God outright, the individual who stares long into despair, into the abyss. This finally character will be the hero of the latter parts of this book, where I will endeavour to equip him with the wherewithal to walk ‘on tightropes over abysses’.[19]          

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[1] Sickness unto death pg. 9

[2] I am not a determinist. I do not want to debate the reasons for and against the theory of determinism in this book, because I don’t care, because it bores me, and because the things that I discuss in this book are not possible in a deterministic world. As in many things, my experience of the world is that it is not deterministic and that is good enough for me. I, like most people, have enough difficulty figuring out how to enjoy life without getting bogged down in discussions of whether I am in control of my actions or, for that matter, whether the world is real or I am just a brain in a vat, in the matrix, or the victim of a vicious dream inception. Full respect to anyone who spends their hours pondering these questions, but I just don’t care.

[3] This theory of the origin of consciousness is highly contested.

[4] The sickness unto death pg. 9, emphasis added

[5] sickness unto death, pg. 31

[6] Sickness unto death pg. 9

[7] Sickness unto death pg. 11

[8] Sickness unto death pg. 66

[9] sickness unto death pg. 83

[10] Sickness unto death pg. 83

[11] sickness unto death pg. 84

[12] Sickness unto death pg. 84

[13] Sickness unto death pg. 84

[14] sickness unto death pg. 85

[15] Sickness unto death pg. 90

[16] Sickness unto death pg. 19

[17] The Sickness unto death pg. 45

[18] The Sickness unto Death, pg. 105

[19] Nietzsche