The Sickness Unto Death by Soren Kierkegaard & Alastair Hannay

Author:Soren Kierkegaard & Alastair Hannay
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Philosophy, Classics, Kierkegaard
ISBN: 9780141928449
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2004-06-24T04:00:00+00:00

Part Two

DESPAIR IS SIN

A. Despair is Sin

Sin is: before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not wanting to be oneself, or wanting in despair to be oneself. Thus sin is intensified weakness or intensified defiance: sin is the heightening of despair. The emphasis is on: before God, or on there being the conception of God. What makes sin, dialectically, ethically, religiously, what lawyers would call ‘aggravated’ despair, is the conception of God.

Although there will be neither space nor opportunity in Part Two, and least of all in the present section, A. for a psychological portrayal, we can cite here the most dialectical borderline case between despair and sin, namely what could be termed a poet-existence inclined towards the religious, an existence which has something in common with the despair of resignation except for the presence in it of the conception of God.52 Such a poet-existence, as may be seen from the conjunction and position of the categories, will be the most eminent poet-existence. From the Christian viewpoint, every poet-existence (all aesthetics notwithstanding) is sin, the sin of writing instead of being, the sin of relating oneself in imagination to the good and true instead of being it, or rather, of striving existentially to be it. The poet-existence here referred to differs from despair in that it has the conception of God, or is before God. But it is immensely dialectical and an impenetrable dialectical tangle as far as the extent of its obscure consciousness of being sin is concerned. A poet like this can have a very profound religious need, and the conception of God is a component in his despair. He loves God above everything, God who is the only comfort in his secret torment, and yet he loves the torment, he will not let go of it. He would be only too happy to be himself before God, but not in respect of that fixed point at which the self suffers; that is a point at which, in his despair, he does not want to be himself. He hopes eternity will remove it; but here in time, however much he suffers from it, he cannot resolve to make it part of himself, to humble himself under it in faith. And yet he continues to relate himself to God, and that is his only salvation; it would be for him the greatest of horrors to be without God, ‘it would drive him to despair’; and yet in fact, perhaps unconsciously, he allows himself poetically to falsify God just a little, rather more in the guise of the fond father who all too indulgently humours the child’s ‘only’ wish. As a person who becomes unhappy in love turns into a poet and then blissfully extols the joys of love, that is how he became the poet of religiousness: He has become unhappy in religiousness; he realizes vaguely that what is required of him is to let go of this torment, that is, to humble himself under it

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