Despair and Respair
An introduction to Kierkegaard
I knew of Søren Kierkegaard, the 19th century Danish philosopher, but it wasn’t until last September, the 10th day, to be precise, that I picked him up; and it was not even until the last few weeks of the year 2024 that I truly began to get him. I bought my copy of The Sickness unto Death at Walt Whitman’s “wonderland of books”1 in Paris’s 5th arrondissement. The young woman who rang up my selections asked me, “Would you like them stamped?” She had a stamp for marking people’s purchases with a circular logo around the head and the ruff of Shakespeare himself: SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY KILOMETER ZERO PARIS.2 I thought, Wow, and said, “Yes, please.” (Words failed me that day in Paris, my second day being absolutely awestruck in the French capital.)3 My Kierkegaard is stamped! Ain’t I special? I go on about the bookstore, but really, no words can do it justice. At any rate, the Wikipedia page for it is quite well done. There are pictures too. I got there before it was open, so I was part of the queue. Yes, there was a line to get in. I took a few pictures outside the shop, but the staff do not permit photography on the inside. (It’s not that they mind photographs of its interior being on the internet; it’s more the distraction of the “pleasant environment”4 they seek to maintain which they find objectionable.)5
I was content, however, to ignore my iPhone once inside the beautiful space. Indeed, even outside the space there was plenty to admire. It is, after all, right next to the Seine, almost directly across from the spot where sits Notre Dame. (Hence, the Kilometer Zero affiliation, the ‘Kilometre Zero’ stone being set in the cobblestones in front of the fabled and fabulous cathedral.) Moreover, the staff begin setting up the outdoor book stalls well before the doors are opened. You can also pass the time reading the Walt Whitman quotes written in chalk around the windows and on benches.
Enough about the bookshop.6 I know the pictures are beautiful. My first and thus-far only visit in Paris remains in a sacred place in my heart. I have as yet only spoken of and written about it sparingly. Nevertheless, here are some of my own iPhone photographs of the place below:
I bring it up here principally to convey the magical genesis of my acquaintance with the venerable Mr. Kierkegaard. I first began to read this little text, translated into English from original Danish by Alastair Hannay, while sitting on a chair at the fountain in the Luxembourg Gardens. I began reading the preface, written by Kierkegaard in 1848: “The form of this ‘exposition’ may strike many readers as odd: to them it would seem too rigorous to be edifying and too edifying to have the rigour of scholarship.”7 He went on to say he had no opinion as to its being too edifying to be academic/scientific enough, but he did not think it was too rigorous at all, and in fact he thought that everything in a Christian context ought to be edifying. Apparently, Kiekegaard wrote The Sickness Unto Death (in Danish: Sygdommen til Døden) under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-climax indeed! It is, I suppose, anti-climatic to learn that despair, far from being the undesirable and horrific fate commonly misattributed to it, is actually the only path by which one can “know God.” To live without being in despair is to be in eternal misery, and that’s far worse. (Here, I can’t help smirking as I recall Woody Allen’s words to Diane Keaton in Annie Hall: “The world is divided into the horrible and the miserable.” Despair, though, is not horrible either; it is not nearly as horrifying, wrote Kierkegaard, as to live without it—to live without it being pure misery.
Kierkegaard was a devout Christian of a rare sort. His Christianity seems to me more akin to mysticism and even more comparable to Eastern philosophies than the Christianity commonly conceived of today. I’ve written before about Eckhart Tolle, a spiritual guru with Kierkegaardian shades.8 Kierkegaard does not, however, distinguish between the human and the being as Eckhart Tolle does. The human being as a whole is Spirit. The goal of the human being (the spirit) is to become a self. But what is a self? Kierkegaard calls the self a “relation which relates to itself.”9 A human being, as a spirit, is a “synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”10 In this temporal world (the finite) the human being is not yet a self. Most humans exist either in Freedom (alternatively called Imagination, an abstract realm) or in Necessity (or what Tolle calls Form—these are the concrete structures of life, in other words, the realm of doing.) Neither of these realms are ideal. Freedom (Imagination) lacks discipline. There, you are controlled by your emotions. Necessity, though it is very disciplined, lacks possibility. I like Kierkegaard’s analogy between possibility and the vowel.11 Imagine trying to speak without the use of vowels. Possibility in a consonant-only universe would be Pssblty, which is nor has no possibility at all. While the realm of Freedom and Imagination can take us to endless possibilities (where “everything is possible,”12 as Kierkegaard puts it) it keeps us perpetually asunder from the self. In contrast, Necessity does keep us on the ground, allowing us to do things and be successful in the world, but the narrow-minded worldly path leaves no room for self-development, let alone self-consciousness. Synthesis is the key, according to Kierkegaard. One way takes you so far away from any chance of a synthesis, the endless possibilities in fact creating more distance between you and the becoming of Self; the other way simply chokes it off. He uses an analogy for this too: every self has “sharp edges.” Necessity rubs the edges until they are “smooth as a pebble”13—advantageous, perhaps, in a world that prizes outward neatness and beauty, but so far from being a unique Self as to be just like everyone else, indeed “as exchangeable as a coin.”14
I’m going to step away from Kierkegaard for a second and try to put this in a more popular framework. I can certainly relate to the person who ‘gets carried away’ by imagination, swept up and governed by emotions, which is no governance at all. In fact, it’s absolute anarchy. It is chaotic to be knocked around by one’s emotions. It’s moving around from place to place in order to find “your home,” “your tribe,” or changing careers often to “find your passion.” It is no less a worldly (and finite, and ultimately miserable) pursuit than the path of Necessity in that it keeps you constantly a stranger to yourself. While you seek fulfillment outside of yourself, you will never find the Self where it truly resides—internally! That’s the path of Imagination, where you may feel that the world is your oyster because endless possibilities present themselves, but it won’t show you the way to stillness. “Becoming oneself,” says Kierkegaard, “is a movement one makes just where one is. Becoming is a movement from some place, but becoming oneself is a movement at that place.”15 He means that when we become something, we are indeed moving, or shifting from one state to another, but becoming one with Self can only happen internally and in the stillness of the present moment. Right here, right now. Therefore, as the adage says, “wherever you go, there you are.”16
I have a harder time relating to the Necessity path. I see plenty of people around me walking it—mostly people I intensely dislike. I could name them, but that would be rude, so I’ll pull examples from fiction instead—Scrooge and Marley amassing obscene wealth, but still paying their most devoted employee, Bob Catchett, barely a living wage. This is actually a great example because we can carry it from Scrooge’s lived experience (his story) as detailed in A Christmas Carol onward to what happens to Marley’s spirit in the afterlife. In life, the business partners acted in such a way that was quite ordinary. Who in observing them could find anything strange in their workaholic behavior, their greed, their ambition? These are qualities which are so commonplace, they hardly raise an eyebrow—unless, of course, carried to such bizarre extremes as the cases of tech billionaires who are household names or the leaders of war-torn countries who seal themselves off in luxurious fortresses while the citizenry live in squalor. But the normal ambition, say in American suburbia, to have a big house and luxury car is so widespread, people rather think it more strange to live modestly and to not upgrade one’s iPhone every year. Indeed, Scrooge and Marley lived in rather subdued circumstances (their modern-day counterparts certainly do not replace their iPhones every year) because their greed overruled any liking to be comfortable or trendy. They would rather wrap up and sit in the light of a single candle to waste coal on unnecessary fires. Nevertheless, these were men who, in a worldly sense, were highly accomplished. They were clever, miserly, and unkind—as narrow as the path they chose to dominate. Kindness has no value in the Necessity realm, where it can even be felt to be a disadvantage and a weakness. It is unnecessary to be kind in order to do quite well in the realm of Form. Cleverness, though! Discipline! Conservatism and maintenance of the status quo! You can be admired, celebrated even! If you happen to be clever and also kind, you might even be remembered as a great person, like Jimmy Carter. But I digress… Scrooge was shown very little kindness as a boy and he learned to rely solely on his own systems from an early age. Marley died without knowing that he was a stranger to himself. He had no understanding that there was even such a thing. If someone had asked him, “Who are you?” he might have said, “I’m a man of business.” Just another cog in the wheel of capitalism. In other words, nothing. His afterlife was one of eternal despair. In death, he became aware of the problem, but had no recourse except to convince his business partner to avoid the same fate. Marley was chained to his narrow-minded vision of success. If he had lived differently, as he hoped Scrooge might do, Marley might have experienced the Kierkegaardian synthesis—the spirit joining the infinite realm, knowing God, knowing itself, emerging from the sickness (the despair) into infinitely expanding consciousness. Instead, Marley was a lost soul, forever and painfully aware of his self-estrangement, and desperate to warn his only friend.17
I saw someone post on Bluesky a curious, and sadly obsolete word from the 16th century: Respair. It means “fresh hope, and a recovery from despair.”18 Kierkegaard wrote about salvation, “the most impossible thing of all in human terms; but for God everything is possible!”19 Kierkegaard’s respair/salvation is the best thing that can happen to a human, and it only comes out of real despair. A life of ease will never know despair, never know God, and thus never be conscious of what it is missing. It will be a cog in the wheel, a coin indistinguishable amongst every coin in the realm.
Halverson, Krista (2016). Shakespeare and Company: Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Shakespeare and Company Paris.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilometer_Zero & https://frenchlanguagesalon.com/french-stories-en/paris-road-starting-point/
The previous day, I had been equally numbed in the brain by the treasures in the Louvre!
https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/prepare-your-visit
There is a lovely photo of the interior used on the Wikipedia page: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:SCO_Front_Lib_Be_Not.jpg
I bought two other books here besides the Kierkegaard. These were Dead Poets Society, a novel by N.H. Kleinbaum, and a beautiful little French-language book about Versailles, printed and copyrighted in 1950.
The Walter Lowry translation, from Princeton University Press in 1941, is: “To many the form of this exposition will perhaps seems strange; it will seem to them too strict to be edifying, and too edifying to be strictly scientific.” https://archive.org/details/in.ernet.dli.2015.189042/page/n21/mode/2up
The author of A New Earth has made a huge dent in my armchair philosophizing: https://heavycrownpress.substack.com/s/heavy-crown-philo
Kierkegaard p.9, Penguin Books © 2008, translation © 1989
p.9
p.41
p.41
p.36
pp.36-37
p.39
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wherever_You_Go,_There_You_Are:_Mindfulness_Meditation_in_Everyday_Life
https://bsky.app/profile/susiedent.com/post/3lemqvqasac2t
Kierkegaard p.43