Kierkegaard by Mark A. Tietjen

Author:Mark A. Tietjen [Tietjen, Mark A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780830899517
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
Published: 2016-02-25T16:00:00+00:00

THE DEEP SELF: DESPAIR AND SIN

Anxiety is therefore closely tied to sin, but it is not identical to sin. Despair, on the other hand, Kierkegaard identifies with sin. This may strike us as odd for at least two reasons. First, despair seems like an emotional state—it literally means the loss or absence of hope—and yet most of us don’t think of sin as an emotional state. Second, given the emotional connotation, we tend to tie despair to depression, and often we do not think of those who are depressed as somehow culpable before God for their depression. As we will see, Kierkegaard’s view of despair is something rather different.

First, despair is a condition or state of the self, and while he believes despair may rise to the surface and materialize in the form of some mood, that is by no means necessary, and neither does he think such despair is common. This means that despair like we usually think of it could be a subset of Kierkegaard’s broader category of despair, but it would by no means exhaust that category. Second, we tend to think of despair as necessarily having an object—as despair over lost love or despair over bad news. Kierkegaard claims that ultimately despair’s object is always the self, and therefore the despairing moods we sometimes experience really reflect a subterranean problem of selfhood. Though there seems to be a resemblance, despair in Kierkegaard’s sense cannot be identified with the modern psychological category of depression. Depression is a complex state, with many possible types of causes, but the general view of depression seems to be that it is a pathological medical condition, at least sometimes caused by physiological factors in the brain. For Kierkegaard, despair, since it is identical to sin, is universal among humans, something that is only overcome through faith in God, and even then, perhaps only partially for many people. It is not a disease caused by physical factors or even a state that is induced by some external problem, but a spiritual state grounded in the choices of the self. Of course despair in this sense can overlap with cases of depression, but it cannot simply be identified with depression. Many people psychologists would consider in good mental health are in despair according to Kierkegaard.

If despair is identical to sin, then by definition despair is basically a failure to be oneself or to be a self at all. Specifically, despair, like sin, pertains to not choosing (or willing) to be the self God created one to be, and if every human self is a complex balance of the sets of paired concepts noted above, then one way of gaining clarity about despair is through a symptomatic analysis that considers the ways these relational pairings are manifest properly or improperly in the personality, that is, what happens when the finite or infinite parts of the self, for example, are not balanced. Let us look at a few of different forms despair can take.

Infinitude’s despair. Despair of infinitude occurs when one lacks finitude.

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