Rereading Kierkegaard’s early pseudonymous texts is of course a delight – but it is frustrating, too, because one knows one is one is not in possession of the full picture. There are so many clues and intimations. Read The Sickness Unto Death and things become clearer, although this text, written by the ‘higher’ pseudonym Anti-Climacus, is condensed and difficult. Anti-Climacus – this name is mean to suggest the Christian Johannes Climacus (another pseudonym) was trying to be: not ‘anti-‘, then, but ‘ante’, before, in anticipation. The Sickness Unto Death is an urgent text; though dense, it aims to communicate simply and directly. (Why, then, a pseudonym necessary?)
In the text as in others by Kierkegaard, the task is to delineate what it means to become a self; it is necessary to actualise what you are as yet only in potential. To become a self is a matter of relation, of joining the two sides of the human being – the finite and the temporal with the infinite and the eternal; the physical and the necessary with the psychical and freedom. This is possible only through despair, which translates the Danish fortvivlelse. Beabout, whose study is immensely helpful, observes the etymological link of tvivl, doubt, with fortvivlelse. But if it is doubt that is at issue here, this is a doubt concerning one’s existence. Beabout: ‘Just as in English there is an etymological connection between doubt and double, and in German there is a connection between Zweifel and zwei, there is a connection between the Danish tvivl and the concept “two,” though it is not as obvious in Danish as it is in English or German’.
In the first kind of despair, there is only a negative relationship between these two poles – we might recognise, the form of existence with characterises the aesthetical sphere. To step into the ethical sphere, choice is necessary – one has to choose to choose oneself, to draw upon a power of freedom that was previously unsuspected. In this way, the two sides of the human being are dynamically joined: a self is born in their union. One should remember Judge William’s admonishment to the aesthete in Either/Or: choose yourself. But then Kierkegaard shows us that the Judge, who presents himself as one who has made a choice – who has chosen to choose himself – does not grasp the origin of this capacity. The self does not give birth to itself; is not born through an act of will. If it produces itself, this is only by actualising a latent self-relation. But the relation itself was created; it owes itself to a transcendent source. To step into the religious sphere is possible only insofar as the self relates to God. God was there before (ante) everything. The self achieves itself in this relation and thus it is free to be itself.
To remain in despair is to forgo this possibility. Despair happens when the self does not relate to itself properly as a self. Only the religious sphere is without misrelation. Misrelation, then, is irresoluteness: the inability to decide, to leap ahead. But what if one cannot become a self through an act of resolve? What if the resolve itself fails, or meets with no help from above? What if the self itself dissolves in an experience of the infinite? Then the relation which would allow one to leap out of despair is subject to an indefinite detour and it is as if God has a demonic double. This, perhaps, is the ‘doubling’ that only the doubter (the despairer) experiences: the bifurcation which makes the leap of faith, the saltus mortale (is this how you spell it?), a death leap. For the Christian, one might die to one’s old life and be reborn – dying is a passageway. But for the non-Christian?
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