Kierkegaard warns that the despairer might not embrace the eternal, W. says. That he will not, despairing over himself in his weakness, as one incapable of such an embrace.
And he warns of another temptation: that such despair leads not to an excessive weakness, but an excessive strength – to that prideful refusal of the embrace, to the rejection of any sense of his own perfection, such that he might turn himself over to the perfection of God.
And a third temptation, which is really an exacerbation of the second: that the despairer wills to be what he is in his imperfection, that demonically, pridefully, he rises up to spite his creator. But what would I know of these, the final temptations? What, when hope was still alive in me?
W. despairs, he says. He despairs of me, for one thing. He despairs of my presence in his life. And he despairs of himself, whose fate is linked to mine. But quite apart from that, he despairs of the earthly, and especially me, who am an embodiment of the earthly, of the limits of the earthly! Of W.'s limits with respect to the earthly!
W. has, he thinks, a sense of the eternal, although Kierkegaard warns you can go wrong there, too – there is a form of despair, he says, in which the imagination runs wild; in which, no longer limited by anything concrete, it resorts to conjuring up dreams and fantasies.
Is that the eternal, for him, simply a dream and fantasy? Is his notion of God – of unconfinement, of freedom – only the correlate of confinement and imprisonment? But then his notion of God is only the hopeless dream of his salvation from me, who am the real cause of W.'s despair.
Lars Iyer's Blog 