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Kierkegaard On Radical Evil
Kierkegaard On Radical Evil
Kierkegaard On Radical Evil
RADICAL EVIL
Related titles
DAVID ROBERTS
continuum
LONDON NEW YORK
Continuum
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
15 East 26th Street, New York, NY 10010
ISBN:0-8264-8682-7
Ab vii
P ix
Ethical Self-Choice 74
The Positive Self-Choice 74
The Self as a Task 78
The Despair of the Ethical Stage of Existence 81
Bibliography 153
Index 157
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations have been used for S0ren Kierkegaard's works:
This choice is not a matter of keeping or breaking rules and regulations, but is
concerned with whether one relates to God in humility (faith) or in pride
(offense and defiance). As we will see, this change in our understanding of
evil will have a profound effect on how each individual understands the evil
residing within his or her own heart. Evil, as an essential possibility, will be
less about specific actions, than about the indescribable depths in which one's
existence is grounded.
We will begin the analysis with a historical review of Kant's and Schelling's
examination of the ground of radical evil. We will find that there arises out
of these two idealist philosophers an understanding of freedom which is
intimately connected to the problem of evil; indeed, we will see, especially in
Schelling, that the issue of human freedom cannot be separated from the
problem of evil.
In Chapter 1 we will examine Kierkegaard's analysis of the structure of the
self in terms of what he calls 'spiritlessness'. A spiritless individual is merely a
potential self, a self that has not yet invested itself with self-consciousness and
freedom. Existence, for such a self, is spent in the evasion of its task. We will
also find that the potential for evil exists within this type of existence, and
that its seeds are found within the spiritless evasions of itself. It is out of this
spiritlessness that each individual must break free in order to become a self.
Several conclusions will be drawn from this analysis, two of which will be espe-
cially important in guiding the remainder of the examination. The first of
these establishes that the nature of the self is not such that it is something fin-
ished and accomplished; rather, each individual has the task of becoming a self
through a rise in self-consciousness and freedom. The second conclusion points
to the way we must approach the problem. We will not understand human
freedom and evil by examining it objectively from a distance - but only by
'owning' our own evil, and exposing the evasions by which we cover the evil
within our own hearts.
The remaining chapters will consist of an analysis of the self in terms of this
rise in self-consciousness and freedom. We will use as our guide the three Kier-
kegaardian stages of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious.
Chapter 2 will be an analysis of the relative increase in consciousness and des-
pair within the aesthetic stage, in which the self remains lost within the multi-
plicity of its desires. Enjoyment and pleasure are the passions of this stage, and
so it remains bound to the immediate moment, and the pleasure that can be
found therein. We will find that there is a movement within this stage that may
bring the self to the brink of a consciousness of its despair.
In Chapter 3 we will discover that this consciousness of despair allows for
the possibility of a leap from the aesthetic stage to the ethical. In choosing to
despair of the aesthetic existence, the individual, for the first time, makes an
absolute choice, and thereby moves from the contingencies of aestheticism
xii Preface
into the choice for self-becoming — a choice that defines ethical existence.
In this chapter, we will examine the ethical stage, and see how the absolute
choice for oneself brings a rise in self-consciousness and freedom. We will also
discover that, as necessary as the ethical stage is for gaining oneself, it ulti-
mately ends in despair, as it uncovers the evasions it uses in order to hide
from the guilt and evil it continually carries within itself.
This will bring us, in Chapter 4, to the religious stage of existence. In this
chapter we will discover a further actualization of the self in its self-conscious-
ness and freedom. We will see that, as the self becomes more and more itself, it
does not leave evil behind, but may gather itself around its offense and defi-
ance of the Good. A fully actualized self (spirit) is conscious of itself before
the Good - it is transparent to the Good - and yet it may be offended by the
Good, and so rebel against it in defiance.
In the final chapter the category of offense will be examined in relation to all
the stages of existence. Offense is at work in even the most spiritless forms of
human existence, though it has no actuality or energy behind it. It evades
and hides from its offense, and so its evil remains a mere potential — that is, it
falls under the traditional view of evil as a negation or privation. As the self
rises in self-consciousness and freedom, it becomes more aware that it is
offended by the Good, and may choose to gather its existence around this pas-
sion of offense. In its most transparent and self-determined form, evil becomes
a radical choice against the Good — it becomes defiance.
An Historical Introduction: Kant and Schelling on Radical Evil
The problem of evil is a human problem, and is of such central significance for
understanding the human situation that, whenever there is a discussion on
what it means to be human, evil cannot be ignored for very long - for we will
inevitably feel its bite. The capital insight of this investigation is that the capa-
city for freedom is inseparable from the problem of evil; therefore, an initial
step toward investigating evil is to problematize human freedom.
In this introduction, we will undertake just such an investigation by looking
at the views of Kant and Schelling. In a book on S0ren Kierkegaard, this may
seem an arbitrary choice. In fact, however, it is highly relevant — called for by
Kierkegaard's own approach to the problem of evil. There is a specific devel-
opment of the themes of freedom and evil from Kant to Kierkegaard, by way
of Schelling. As we will see in examining Kant and Schelling, an ontology of
freedom will be developed in the space opened up by the moral division
of good and evil.
For Kant, freedom consists in a capacity to act through an internal catalyst
which is free from externally influenced or directed incentives. Freedom, in
other words, is to be self-determined rather than other-determined. Such an
account of freedom has a decisive impact on Kant's moral theory, which he out-
lines in his Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Kant must develop a moral
theory that divorces itself from all expected results, including any anticipated
gain from acting morally (whether staying out of jail, the respect of others, or
getting into heaven). Such expectations move the incentive for action outside of
oneself, and are no longer free. For Kant, such an action is, in a way, notanaciat
all, so much as a flowing together of heteronomous forces.
As we examine Kant's moral theory, it will become apparent that, while
Kant is able to provide a foundation for moral action, he is unable to account
for immoral actions. Kant himself comes to recognize this, and seeks to rectify
this problem in his book Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. It is in the Reli-
gion that Kant provides a basis for the notion of'radical evil'.
Schelling extends Kant's analysis of freedom in his Treatise on the Essence of
Human Freedom, where freedom is shown to be based on the possibility of choos-
ing between good and evil. In providing a basis for such a choice, he shows that
the ontological structure of freedom is in this very choice itself. In other words,
freedom is the freedom^cr good and evil. It is through our discussion of this
2 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
treatment that we will make our own transition to what is of central impor-
tance here - the work of Kierkegaard.
Kant
ground of the world of sense and hence of its laws, the intelligible worldis (and must be
conceived as) directly legislativefor my will, which belongs wholly to the intel-
ligible world.
It is for this reason that the laws of the intelligible world provide the laws
that are taken by me to be categorically binding for my actions. Since I am a
member of the sensible world, the laws of the intelligible world hold for me as
an 'ought' (I 'ought' to conform to the laws of this world). The will of the intel-
ligible world contains the supreme condition of the sensuously affected will.
These 'two' wills are the same will: 'besides my will affected by my sensuous
desires there is added the idea of exactly the same will as pure, as practical itself,
and belonging to the intelligible world. . . .'14 Given this relation namely,
that even as I will in the sensible world, the basis for such willing is the
pure, practical will it follows that even in acting contrary to this will, I will
this will — that is, I always will what is in accordance with practical reason.
As Kant puts it,
there is no man, not even the most malicious villain (provided he is other-
wise accustomed to using his reason), who does not wish that he also might
have these qualities. But because of his inclinations and impulses he cannot
bring this about, yet at the same time he wishes to be free from such inclina-
tions which are burdensome even to himself. 15
Here we come to a pause. This 'malicious villain's' actions are depicted, not
as immoral, but as amoral. No one may willfully choose against the moral law.
Instead, the 'villian's' actions are determined by his inclinations and impulses
(the laws of nature), which have no bearing on his will, since his will is a
member of the intelligible world. Thus, it follows that no one is able to willfully
choose against the moral law. At times Kant does speak of a good will and bad
will. l b Yet this is inconsistent, because there is only one root of will, and this is
purely rational. Thus, what he calls the 'bad will' is not a will at all, but a suc-
cumbing to the laws of nature, which might better be described as a lack of
will. Since we are not responsible for our inclinations and impulses we do
not attribute them to our proper self (that is, our will ) the notion of evil is
left out of the equation.
Kant further closes the door to evil by saying, 'that to which inclinations
and impulses and hence the entire nature of the world of sense incite him
cannot in the least impair the laws of his volition as an intelligence'. 18 The
laws of the intelligible world cannot be corrupted (the will cannot be cor-
rupted), and so another door by which to explain evil is closed. As we will see
in the next section, Kant's analysis in the Religion shows that a corruption of
the will can and does take place. It is in this corruption that radical evil finds
its place within Kant's moral theory.
6 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Kant's Theory of Radical Evil in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone
In the Religion, Kant rather abruptly adapts his position. He now allows for a
corruption of the will. Not that the law of reason is corrupted, but the will may
choose incentives other than this law for its rule. How is this possible, given
that in the Foundations Kant defines the will as practical reason? Kant accom-
plishes this by distinguishing between three 'parts' of the will. John R. Silber,
in his analysis of Kant's change in the understanding the will, says,
The will according to Kant is a unitary faculty. But, like reason and the
understanding, it is subject to division into 'parts' for the purpose of analy-
sis. These parts, to which Kant refers by the terms ' Willkiir,' 'Wille,' and
'Geisinnung,' are aspects or specific functions of this essentially unified faculty
of volition.
The distinction between the Willkiir and the Wille is a distinction between
that aspect of the will that chooses according to the rule of its maxim (Willkilr),
and that aspect of the will that is rational (Wille}. In the Foundations, Kant
asserts that the will is identical with practical reason; in the Religion he draws a
distinction between these two capacities - will and reason. The Wille does not
make decisions or adopt maxims, but is a source of a strong incentive in Will-
kiir. According to Silber, Wille can determine the Willkiir, in which case it is
practical reason itself. However, Wille is not free, ' Wille is rather the law of
freedom, the normative aspect of the will, which as a norm is neither free nor
unfree'. The Wille is able to arouse desires or aversions in the Willkiir,
namely, the 'moral feeling', which is respect for the moral law. When the Will-
kiir is determined by the Wille, the will as a whole is as it was described in the
Foundations when Kant proclaims that the will is practical reason. However, by
distinguishing between the will as practical reason, and the will as that which
adopts its maxim, Kant allows for a capacity of the will to freely choose con-
trary to practical reason. In looking at this capacity we will come to see
Kant's view of radical evil.
In the Foundations neither the sensuous nature nor the practical law could
serve as a source of immoral acts. Sensuous nature could not be the ground of
immoral acts because it determined actions according to natural inclina-
tions and impulses; the practical law could not be the ground because it was
incapable of being corrupted. Kant holds to this in the Religion. The important
difference, however, is that, while in the Foundations Kant took reason's incor-
ruptibility to prove the will's incorruptibility (that is, even when the malicious
villain acts contrary to the moral law, he still wills the moral law), in the Reli-
gion he allows the will to be corrupted by choosing against the moral law.
Thus, Kant says that evil 'can only lie in a rule made by the willw [Willkiir] for
the use of its freedom, that is, in a maxim'. Whereas in the Foundations the will
An Historical Introduction 7
necessarily chose as its ground the laws of reason, in the Religion, the Willkur is
viewed as a capacity of the will to adopt maxims contrary to reason - that is,
contrary to the Wille. The Willkur is the ultimate ground for determining
action, and so maintains itself in freedom, though it does so by adopting good
maxims or evil maxims. As Kant says,
In other words, the Willkur adopts a maxim by which it determines the rules
of its action. In the Foundations, the Willkur had one incentive: respect for the
law of reason. Kant now allows for other incentives to be incorporated into
the free will, which can serve as the maxim of the Willkur. If the moral law
is one's incentive, and if one makes it one's maxim, then one is morally good.
On the other hand, if one adopts as a maxim an incentive other than the moral
law, one is morally evil.
The third aspect of the will is disposition (Geisinnung], which is the ground or
basis out of which we adopt our maxims. The disposition is adopted by the
Willkur, and is never indifferent, but either J good or evil. The 'subjective
ground or cause of this adoption [of the disposition] cannot further be
known'," and so Kant regards it as a 'property' of the Willkur — something
that belongs to the Willkur by nature.
Every human being has three predispositions, which are able to become
the source of the incentives of the Willkur. They are called predispositions
because they are not chosen, and are a part of us naturally. These three predis-
positions loosely follow Plato's three parts of the soul. The first of these pre-
dispositions is 'animality'. This is mechanical love, and has within it the social
impulses, as well as the drives for preservation and propagation. The second
predisposition is 'humanity'. This is self-love, and seeks to acquire worth in the
opinion of others. Finally, there is personality. Kant says that this is respect for
the moral law within us, and is the source of moral feeling. None of these pre-
dispositions contradict the moral law, but are predispositions toward good, in
that they can join in the observance of the law - just as, for Plato, reason may
rule over the appetites and spirit. Of course, animality and humanity can be
used contrary to their ends, which gives rise to evil within the self.
According to Kant, evil is not a predisposition, although humans have a
'propensity' toward it that is, a possible inclination to which all humanity
is liable. Kant gives three degrees of propensity to evil. The first is 'frailty' or
'weakness'. This is summed up by the Apostle Paul's discussion in Romans 7,
8 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
where he asserts that he does not do what he wants to do. This is also the weak-
ness of will described in Augustine's Confessions, and is important to the tradi-
tional view of evil as weakness. For Kant, in 'weakness' one adopts the good
(the law) into the maxim of one's Willkur, though the maxim is weak in com-
parison to some inclination one faces. One wills the moral law, but allows an
inclination to override one's will.
The second degree is 'impurity of the human heart'. In this case the maxim
is not purely moral. The maxim is good in that it intends to observe the law,
but it has not adopted the law alone as its all-sufficient incentive. In other words,
other incentives are needed for it to act according to the law. As Kant says,
'actions called for by duty are done not purely for duty's sake'. Thus, motives
beyond simply duty are needed in order to observe the law. Silber says that
'Whereas the weak-willed individual is strengthened by the knowledge of his
weakness and purified by the Wille that condemns his vice, the impure indivi-
dual is dying the quiet death (euthanasia) of morality through his confusion of
moral and non-moral incentives'. Here we see another 'rendition' of the
view of evil as weakness; this time, rather than the will being weak or divided,
it is confused — ignorant.
Both weakness and ignorance can be the grounds for all sorts of evil actions,
and so the traditional view of evil is not completely mistaken when it attributes
evil to these grounds. The problem with the traditional view, however, is that
it goes no further. In his Religion, Kant goes beyond these grounds, and takes
the initial step toward a more actualized form of human evil. This is the third
degree of the propensity to evil, which he calls 'wickedness'. Here the Willkur
acts against the incentives that spring from the moral law, in favour of those
that are not moral. It reverses the ethical order of incentives of the Willkur.
It should be noted, however, just because the moral law is neglected, does not
mean a wicked person acts against social norms, morals, or laws. Indeed, it
may be that acting lawfully is the best way to fulfil the will's evil incentive.
Thus, Kant distinguishes between the letter of the law and the spirit. Those
who conform outwardly to the moral law, while inwardly being determined
by incentives contrary to the moral law, simply obey the letter of the law.
In this case the outward obedience to the law is accidental - that is, contin-
gent on the situation. Those who obey the spirit of the law have, as their suffi-
cient incentive, the law in itself.
According to Kant, a man is evil when he 'is conscious of the moral law but
has nevertheless adopted into his maxim the (occasional) deviation there-
from'. By the term 'radical evil', Kant points to an evil that corrupts the
ground of all maxims. Having said this, it should also be noted that, for Kant,
the Wille can never be corrupted. If the Wille were to be corrupted, then we
would have a practical reason which is 'exempt from the moral law, a malignant
reason as it were (a thoroughly evil will)'. Kant denies the possibility of such a
An Historical Introduction 9
corruption, for this would set up opposition to the law itself as an incentive.
In other words, the incentive would not be merely self-love or sensuous nature,
but opposition to the moral law itself. Every action would be motivated
by a maxim whose rule is to act contrary to the spirit of the moral law. Kant
cannot fathom such a human being (though, as we will see, Schelling can),
because it is a contradiction to speak of a reason that acts against reason
itself. As Silber writes,
To assert . . . that there are devilish beings who defiantly and powerfully
reject the moral law itself, presupposes a conception of freedom which,
according to Kant, is hopelessly transcendent and without foundation in
human experience. In human experience, he insists, our knowledge of free-
dom is revealed exclusively by the moral law and its realization depends
upon the incorporation of that law in volition. Hence, speculation about
devilish beings is either transcendent superstition, or, since the most evil
mode of free expression is wickedness, devils must be responsibly portrayed
in the weakness of wickedness.
Humans are evil only insofar as they reverse the moral order of their incentives.
There is no repudiation of the moral law in this, but
the moral law [is adopted] along with the law of self-love; yet when he
becomes aware that they cannot remain on a par with each other but that
one must be subordinated to the other as its supreme condition, he makes
the incentive of self-love and its inclinations the condition of obedience to the
moral law.
As the title of Schelling's book implies, the issue around which the origin of evil
revolves is freedom. In Kant's Foundations, freedom was freedom for moral
action; indeed, all actions contrary to the moral law were deemed unfree
acts. In his Religion, freedom is still freedom for moral action, but he now
allows that freedom can be used for evil; still, the primary focus of the power
of freedom is the Wille, in which the moral law comes to us as an incentive.
Thus, to commit evil is, for Kant, to subordinate the very power of the will to
other incentives, which are adopted as the maxim of the Willkur.
In Schelling, we will see that freedom is freedom for good and evil; freedom
finds its essence in the choice for good and evil itself. Schelling's Treatise shows
that the ontological structures of human beings do not simply allow for this
choice, but demand it. It is this analysis to which we will now turn.
Evil is a problem because of the difficulty of trying to understand a universe
in which all is not good. This seems obvious enough, but when one tries to dis-
cover how a 'rebellion' could arise within Being how something which is a
part of Being could turn against Being, and so itself - it would seem that one is
left with only two choices, neither of which are very enticing. The first choice
is that of dualism: there is not one Being (Substance), but two eternal Beings;
these Beings are in a continual battle with each other, and part of this battle is
fought within the soil of the human heart. The other is that of monism, in
which there is one Being, of which evil is a part. In this latter view, there are
two tendencies of rectifying this seeming contradiction: first, we could say that
what we conceive as evil is not actually evil; everything in Being is good, and
so it is our limited perspective that sees something as evil. Second, we may
echo Baudelaire's belief that if there is a God, he most certainly is the devil —
that is, there is no good. Both these answers give away too much, whether
downplaying evil, or defiling the purity of the Good. In both cases one loses
the sense of the difference and opposition that is good and evil, and so is not
An Historical Introduction 11
so much left with an answer to the problem, as with a denial that the problem
actually exists.
Schelling's Treatise seeks to allow for the difference between good and evil,
without succumbing to dualism. He does this by creating a theodicy which
draws a distinction between the basis or ground of God's existence, and
God's existence itself.' The basis is not God, though it is a part of God as his
basis. In other words, as the basis of God's existence, the ground is not God in
his existence itself, yet as the basis of this existence, the ground is inseparable
from God - no basis, no God. The basis precedes God's existence as an abyss
or chaos, a mixture in which nothing is separated. This abyss is not God, but is
nonetheless necessary for his existence (ek-sistence) or revelation.
Schelling says this basis is 'the longing which the eternal one feels to give
birth to itself. This longing seeks to give birth to God, i.e., the unfathomable
unity, but to this extent it has not yet the unity in its own self. Thus, the basis
is the longing of God to reveal himself. This longing is not the revelation itself,
but the impetus of this revelation. Just as water is never revealed to a fish at the
bottom of the ocean, because there is no basis by which the water can stand out
for the fish, there is no revelation of God without the opposition or basis. It is in
this sense that the basis (the longing for revelation) is not God, and yet is inse-
parable from God, for without this longing for revelation of existence, God
would not ek-sist - stand out.
As longing, the basis is also to be understood as will. This will, as the basis, is
a kind of blind willing whose movement is toward understanding. The under-
standing is what eventually gives guidance or content to the will. Thus, one
finds here the same distinction between understanding and will as was found
between God and his basis. The will is the basis of understanding, just as long-
ing is the basis of God. In both cases the ground is unconscious of its object,
though we may say that it longs and wills for that which it serves as a basis.
After the eternal act of self-revelation, the world within which we dwell pos-
sesses rule, order, and form.
Schelling calls the ground the 'incomprehensible basis of reality in things,
the irreducible remainder which cannot be resolved into reason by the great-
est exertion but always remains in the depths'. 36 Science's attempt to wrap
everything up under its covering-laws is a doomed enterprise, for unruli-
ness pervades all that exists. Indeed, apart from unruliness there is no rule;
apart from unreasonableness there is no reason, for true reason is born of
unreasonableness.
This notion that order, reason, and rule are not original is very important
for Schelling's understanding of evil. As we saw, the problem of evil is in
coming to understand how it can arise out of Being — out of the Good, out of
the rule and order of all that is. For Schelling, however, order and rule are not
primordial and so evil does not arise out of them. The issue changes, then, for it
12 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
is not an issue of how evil arises out of the more original, already established
Good, but how the possibility for good and evil arises out of the seed of unruli-
ness. The question in which Schelling must find his way, then, is how order
arises from disorder.
As we have seen, the primal longing is a longing for God's revelation,
though this longing is unconscious of its object. Since God is pure light, Schel-
ling speaks of the primal longing as 'turning towards reason'. The formation
or informing of Being can be understood in terms of the tensions within the
longing itself. Examining these tensions will allow for a more detailed under-
standing of how order arises from disorder.
Schelling says that the first effect of reason is the separation offerees. There
is a hidden and unconscious unity within the depths of longing, and it is
through reason's separation of these forces that this unity unfolds and devel-
ops. The forces were always in the depths, though the unity was not conscious
of itself as this unity. In other words, it was a chaotic mix, a seething cauldron
offerees, which, like a witch's brew, holds within itself a power to change the
order of things — or in this case, the disorder of things. Creation itself is this
separation of ever more varied and diverse forces. This separation brings to
light, at the same time, the hidden unity within the chaotic. It is this primal
nature that is the eternal basis of God's existence or revelation.
Schelling says that the basis 'must contain within itself, though locked
away, God's essence, as a light of life shining in the dark depths'. 3 In this we
find that the basis holds within itself both light and darkness, though the dark-
ness rules and the light remains hidden. But once aroused by reason,39 longing
strives to preserve the light within itself. Reason 'rouses longing (which is a
yearning to return into itself) to divide the forces (to surrender darkness) and
in this very division brings out the unity enclosed in what was divided, the
hidden light'. Heidegger, in his commentary on this text, describes this
yearning of the longing to return to itself as the ground's craving to be more
and more ground:
The ground thus wants to be more and more ground, and at the same time it
can only will this by willing what is clearer and thus striving against itself 'as
what is dark.
Thus it strives for the opposite of itself and produces a separation
in itself/• 4 1
The ground can seek to satisfy its yearning to be more and more ground only
by willing the light (that which is not ground as such). As the ground wills the
light in order to differentiate it from itself, the longing becomes the basis
(ground) of the light, thus becoming more and more ground. Longing surren-
ders the chaotic darkness to the light, and a separation offerees evolves into
An Historical Introduction 13
ever more differentiation, though in such a way that a higher unity conies
about. In the end, all creation and arising of Being is this longing to bring
order to what is chaotic, and to bring to light what is hidden in the chaos.
Indeed, according to Schelling, nature itself is this combination of order and
longing: there are two principles in nature, the longing of the dark depths and
the light of reason. Schelling points out, however, that these principles are
really one and the same, though 'regarded from the two possible aspects'.43
One can see how these principles are the same by thinking in terms of the
will. Schelling says the principle of the darkness is the self-will of the creature,
a will that is devoid of understanding and thus blind. This is mere craving and
desiring in itself. On the other hand, there is the universal will of reason. These
principles differ in that one is a self-will toward the particular, while the other
is a universal will toward the light. Still, both are will., and in this sense the
same. The will of the self-will, and the will of the universal will are the same
will, though seen from two possible aspects.
The self-will is opposed to reason as longing is opposed to the light of under-
standing. Self-will seeks to differentiate itself more and more from the univer-
sal will, and yet in this it becomes a tool for the universal will, serving as its
ground. In most things of the world, the particular will remains a tool. For
example, the animal does not ordinarily venture outside its species. When such
a thing happens we often find the result to be grotesque, and are repelled by
the ugliness of a self-will asserting itself against the order of the universal will.
In humans, however, the 'inmost and deepest point of original darkness' is
revealed. The power of this particular will is given over to humans, and yet it
is revealed by the light that is, made conscious, given understanding. Thus,
Schelling says that in humanity 'there are both centers — the deepest pit and
the highest heaven'. Since humans are creatures (natural) who arise from
the depths, they contain the dark principle that is independent from God.
This principle is transfigured by the light, though it remains basically dark.
In terms of will, the particular self-will is transfigured by the light into the uni-
versal will of understanding. In Kantian langauge, the Willkur (particular
will) has as its motive the Wille (the universal will of reason).
It is this unity, arising in nature only in humans, which Schelling designates
as spirit. It is the deepest pit and the highest heaven in one. This transfigura-
tion of the particularized self-will by light allows for spirit to arise in human
beings. It is because the two principles are 'dissoluble' in humans that the pos-
sibility of good and evil arises, since the particular will may try to assert itself
in place of the universal will. In other words, it is the combination of both prin-
ciples in humans that makes them spirit, and it is the dissolubility of these
principles that allows for the possibility of evil. In Kantian terms, it is the pos-
session of the Willkur and the Wille that allow for personality (spirit); it is the
dissolubility of the two wills that allows for radical evil.
14 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
This unity is indissoluble in God, for he maintains the basis within himself,
keeping it under his control through Love. His particular will is the universal
will - the Wille cannot be separated from the Willkiir in the divine will -
which means there is no possibility of evil in God. With the dissolubility of
these two principles in humans, the depths may rise up and assert themselves
against the universal, against the light of reason. The principle of the depths
(self-will) is that which allows humans to be independent from God, and is the
principle of selfhood (self-will) in them. There is no possibility of a person
becoming completely swallowed up by the universal will so that he or she no
longer has the particular will. This is because the principle of the depths forces
itself on humans - that is, forces humans to be themselves. To be completely
swallowed up in the universal will is to deny oneself, for one is, in one's very
ontological structure, distinct from God (necessarily so) by having one's own
will. Humans have a will that is free from the order of the universe. Kant called
this the Willkiir, or an aspect of the will that could choose against the universal
will of reason (the Wille).
Thus, spirit is able to hold itself in complete freedom, 'no longer the tool of
the universal will operating in nature, but above and outside all nature'. 47 It is
transcendent in the sense that it is able to break with immediacy.
The separation of these two principles can take place in two possible ways:
through good or through evil. The first possibility is that of good, in which
'man's self-will remains in the depths as the central will, so that the divine rela-
tion of the principles persists'.48 In Kant's terminology, the Willkiir chooses
as its incentive respect for the law - the Wille. Here, 'the spirit of love rules
[in the will] in place of the spirit of dissension which wishes to divorce its own
principle from the general principle'. One relates correctly to the relation of
the self by relating to the power that established (combined) the relation —
that is, love. Thus, the choice is between love and dissension.
The second possibility of freedom is that of evil. As Schelling puts it,
Self-will may seek to be, as a particular will, that which it is only in its iden-
tity with the universal will. It may seek to be at the periphery that which it is
only insofar as it remains at the center. . . . It may seek to be free as creature
(for the will of creature is, to be sure, beyond the depths, but in that case it is
also a mere particular will, not free but restricted). Thus there takes place in
man's will a division of his spiritualized selfhood from the light (as the spirit
stands above light) - that is, a dissolution of the principles which in God
are indissoluble/50
Spirit is faced with the possibility of defying the unity of the self, by moving out
from the centre and asserting itself at the periphery. It seeks self-revelation, or
better, self-glorification. Kierkegaard will call this attempt at self-glorifica-
tion despair, because this desperate attempt of the particular will to usurp
An Historical Introduction 15
the universal will is a truly hopeless enterprise. Schelling also saw evil as a
doomed enterprise, because he did not believe the particular will has enough
power within itself to establish itself as a universal will. Schelling writes,
Will, which deserts its supernatural status in order to make itself as general
will also particular and creature will, at one and the same time, strives to
reverse the relation of the principles, to exalt the basis above the cause, and
to use that spirit which it received only for the center, outside the center
and against the creature, which leads to disorganization within itself and
outside itself/
The particular will's defiance against the order of love leads to disorganization
within and outside itself. It is in this sense we may say this relation of the self to
itself is despair, for the end which it seeks ultimately leads to its own destruc-
tion. This defiance is ultimately self-destructive because the particular will
does not have the power within itself to organize and unite the nexus of
forces; rather, each force seeks to organize the individual around itself.
At this point Schelling is careful to distinguish his view of evil as disorder,
from a view of evil as a negation of all order. He is not of the belief that evil is
a mere negation or privation of the Good, just as he does not believe that disease
is a mere privation of health. He writes,
Disease of the whole organism can never exist without the hidden forces of
the depths being unloosed; it occurs when the irritable principle which
ought to rule as the innermost tie offerees in the quiet deep, activates itself,
or when Archaos is provoked to desert his quiet residence at the center of
things and steps forth into the surroundings. 52
Disease is not a privation of health, nor is evil a privation of Good, in that these
disorders are the grounds of a new order. A particular will which has asserted
itself, does not lose the forces which make it up, but it sets these forces loose.
Disease is the effect of an attempted self-revelation of the depths, which should
5
remain in the centre, an attempt of the depths to move toward the periphery.
For example, cancer is the process of cells dividing in a 'disorderly' manner.
This is not a mere privation, for it rivals order in intensity, even to the point
that it ultimately destroys the body of which it was a part which is, of course,
the despair of such rebellions. The reason this attempt at a new order ulti-
mately leads to destruction is because the cancer cells do not have the power
to establish their order as a general order upon the body. Schelling says of dis-
ease that it 'is indeed nothing essential and is actually only an illusion of life
and the mere meteoric appearance of it - a swaying between being and non-
being - but nonetheless announces itself in feeling as something very real. Just
so is the case with evil.''
16 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Evil is not a mere privation, because it is attempting to create a form (its
own form) with the forces of the dark ground. In other words, evil is not dis-
order in the sense of going back to pure chaos (the longing of the depths in
which the light remains hidden), because the light has penetrated the darkness and so
has separated out theforces — consciousness has arisen. Instead, evil is discord and
disorder in the sense of having built a false unity out of these forces.
In the physical realm one could think of a malformed animal in which the
parts are all there, but they have been put in the wrong places or grotesquely
deformed. It is a false unity, in that it does not abide by the form of the species,
and seeks to 'assert' its particularization through this false unity — a desperate
attempt at self-revelation, if you will. This often strikes us with horror, and so
the self-assertion announces itself as very real; still, it is a mere illusion of the
species, an oddity, something finite, for it is in a losing battle against its entele-
chy, its universal will.
The positive aspect of evil is grasped by seeing that it is not derived simply
from the dark principle, or the creaturely, but from the dark principle being
brought into an intimacy with the light that forms a nexus offerees. As Schel-
ling says,
evil is not derived from the principle of finitude in itself, but only from
the dark or selfish principle which has been brought into intimacy with the
center. And just as there is an ardor for the good, there is also an enthusiasm
for evil.
It is this 'enthusiasm for evil' that Kant held to be unthinkable. Yet evil, too,
has personality; evil is also born of spirit. We know this to be true, for there is a
temptation to explain good and evil within a dualistic framework, where evil
is personified, and carries a power near or equal to the good. It is monism
that has had difficulty dealing with this issue, for it seems unfathomable that a
power could arise that is contrary to the source of power, a strength that is
strong without strength. According to Schelling, it is the division between the
dark depths of longing and the light of reason that allows for an actualized
form of evil.
The division between the two principles takes place only within humans
(animals are not moral creatures), and so it is in humanity where the possibi-
lity of good and evil finds its source. It is this very possibility that turns out to
be the essence of human freedom for Schelling:
Man has been placed on that summit where he contains within him the
source of self-impulsion towards good and evil in equal measure; the nexus
of the principles within him is not a bond of necessity but of freedom.
He stands at the dividing line; whatever he chooses will be this act.
An Historical Introduction 17
What is paradoxical about this situation is that, as the dividing line, as the
self-impulsion toward good and evil in equal measure, it would seem that he
stands at the place of indecision. But this is not possible, for 'he cannot
remain in indecision because God must necessarily reveal himself and because
nothing at all in creation can remain ambiguous'. Thus, for Schelling there
must be a 'solicitation to evil, even if it were only to the principles within him
to life, that is, to make him conscious of them'/
Here we have a movement beyond where Kant was willing to go. Schelling
will attempt to uncover this 'solicitation of evil'. What brings humanity out of
its seemingly structural indecisiveness? Given the analysis thus far, it is clear
that this solicitation does not come from outside of humanity; indeed, the soli-
citation is built into humanity's very ontological structure. Nothing is given to
explain evil 'except the two principles of God'.
As we have seen, evil is the continual self-willing of selfhood to get itself
under its own control, and thus define the centre in itself. This self-willing
comes from the depths. However, it would be a mistake to say that evil comes
from the depths, or that the will of the depths is evil's primal cause, 'for evil can
only arise in the innermost will of one's own heart, and is never achieved with-
out one's own deed'. j9 Thus, the depths are not the solicitation to evil. Instead,
Schelling writes about the 'terror of life' as that which drives a man out of the
centre. This terror is the horror of being consumed and crushed by the centre,
6
of being swallowed up by the universal will by what seems to the particular
will to be a foreign will. The depths, as self-will, is driven to the periphery,
because it fears the annihilation of itself by the universal will. It is this reaction
which 'awakens in the creature passions or the individual will, but it awakens
this only so that an independent basis for the good may be there and so that it
may be conquered and penetrated by the good'.
This awakening, this terror that drives the self-will out toward the periph-
ery is not evil, but is actually the possibility of good. Indeed, it provides the
independent basis through which it is conquered by the good. It is only in crea-
tures other than humans that the particular will is not terrorized by the uni-
versal will. Or to put it another way, it is the dissolubility of the two principles
that allow for this arousal of the depths in humans, and it is this arousal itself
which activates the freedom as the possibility between good and evil. This soli-
citation of evil will not allow humans to remain indecisive, but arouses and
awakens us to our freedom - namely, to the anxiety-ridden decision for good
or for evil.
We cannot get out from under this contradiction, because the very working
out of this contradiction is what it means to be a self, to be spirit. True, people
may tranquilize themselves in various ways, and in this show themselves to
be unwilling to be both particular and universal will, but this is nothing more
than a rather innocuous method of choosing against the universal will. It is, as
18 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
we will see in the next chapter, a spiritless form of despair. This spiritless-
ness seeks to hide freedom from itself by blinding itself to the choice of good
and evil.
True humanity consists in an intensity of personality, where selfhood is
activated by being self-consciously and freely before the universal will as a par-
ticular will. This intensity is not, by necessity, driven to evil (is not a predispo-
sition to evil), but is that which awakens slumbering goodness. The terror of
the universal will remains in the awakening, and so there remains a continual
struggle to annihilate the particular will's attempts at self-glorification. The
self is this very struggle itself, whether it chooses for good or for evil.
Evil arises, then, out of this struggle, for one is receptive to the non-being
(the ground) which seeks revelation, and this reception is supported by one's
inclination toward evil. In this, one gives into the illusion inherent in the
false nexus or combination of forces. Schelling gives a compelling description
of this process, a process built on the ever increasing power of selfishness:
So the beginning of sin consists in man's going over from actual being to
non-being, from truth to falsehood, from light into darkness, in order him-
self to become the creative basis and to rule over all things with the power of
the center which he contains. For even he who has moved out of the center
retains the feeling that he has been all things when in and with God. There-
fore he strives to return to this condition, but he does so for himself and not in
the way he could, that is, in God. Hence there springs a hunger of selfishness
which, in the measure that it deserts totality and unity becomes ever needier
and poorer, but just on that account more ravenous, hungrier, more poiso-
nous. In evil there is that contradiction which devours and always negates
itself, which just while striving to become creature destroys the nexus of
creation and, in its ambition to be everything, falls into non-being.
Humans are potentially spirit, which is to say they do not possess 'activated'
selfhood as a matter of course. The self is activated or actualized in the self-
conscious choice between good and evil. This choice arises as the 'terror of
life' is consciously faced in the individual. The choice comes down to this: do
I allow the terror of the universal to drive me toward self-revelation and self-
glorification, or do I allow the terror to show me my need for the universal
will's revelation and glorification? It is a distinction between defiance and
humility, despair and faith, offense and worship, envy and adoration, dissen-
sion and love.
A problem arises around this view of freedom. If the ability to truly choose is
something only a free person can do, and yet freedom is something which itself
must be chosen, how can one choose freedom before possessing it?63
According to Schelling, the 'usual conception' of freedom is that it is a
capacity of the will, which, when faced with a choice between contradictory
An Historical Introduction 19
Though this idea may seem beyond the grasp of common ways of thought,
there is in every man a feeling which is in accord with it, as if each man felt
that he had been what he is from all eternity, and had in no sense only come
. i . ,- 70
to be so in time.
What is this feeling? Schelling points to a guilt that seems to have been
invested to us at our births, and yet for which we are somehow responsible.
Schelling does not look deeper into this feeling, nor does he examine how it
relates to the solicitation of evil. It remains as dark as it did for Kant, who
attributed this self-positing beyond the empirical and phenomenal world of
time and space: for Kant the choice is made from the intelligible world — by
the noumenal self.
20 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
What we discover in Schelling is that evil is a choice though it is a choice
chosen at birth. In this sense we may speak of the pre-destiny of evil in man.
Schelling writes, 'When, through the reaction of the depths to revelation, evil
in general had once been aroused in creation, man from eternity took his stand in
egotism and selfishness; and all who are born are born with the dark principle of evil
attached to them. .. .'71 Thus, we have chosen to stand on the side of selfishness
from eternity, and have determined our lives in this choice. This is radical evil,
for 'Only an evil which attaches to us by our own act, but does so from birth,
can therefore be designated as radical evil'. It is radical because it is not a
determination from without, but from within. This choice remains dark for
Schelling, since it took place in the eternal past; however, for Kierkegaard
this is a choice made in time — it is an existential choice. We will now turn to
an examination of this choice between good and evil, as well as to the ontolo-
gical guilt under which we find ourselves. At this point, suffice it to say that at
some level we are in time as already guilty; it is in this guilt that we spend our
lives, and with which we must struggle. This guilt means that freedom finds
itself solicited by evil in terms of a radical egoism and selfishness. It is the task
of freedom to pick up this basis (for the spirit of evil provides a basis for the
spirit of love) and be transformed through a self-positing which allows the
good to be manifested through one's selfhood. In other words, we must
awaken to the possibility of good and evil, and allow the good to arise out of
this propensity to evil.
Notes
appearance of his nature and the way in which his consciousness is affected.' (Kant,
1986, p. 114 [my emphasis]).
12. Kant, 1986, p. 115.
13. Kant, 1986, p. 116 (my emphasis).
14. Kant, 1986, p. 116 (my emphasis).
15. Kant, 1986, p. 117.
16. Kant, 1986, p. 117.
17. Kant, 1986, p. 120.
18. Kant, 1986, p. 120.
19. John R. Silber. 'The Ethical Significance of Kant's Religion'. Introduction to Reli-
gion within the Limits of Reason Alone, pp. Ixxix—cxxxiv. New York: Harper, 1960,
p. xciv.
20. Silber, p. civ.
21. Immanuel Kant. Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone. Trans. Theodore M.
Greene and Hoyt H. Hudson. New York: Harper, 1960, p. 17. In the translation
by Greene and Hudson, the Willkur is translated as 'will"" in order to differentiate
it from Wille.
22. Kant, 1960, p. 19.
23. Kant says that the disposition is 'the ultimate subjective ground of the adoption of
maxims' (1960, p. 20).
24. Kant, 1960, pp. 20-1.
25. Kant says that these predispositions have 'immediate reference to the faculty of
desire and the exercise of the will w ' (1960, p. 23).
26. Kant, 1960, p. 25.
27. Silber, p. cxxii.
28. Kant, 1960, p. 27.
29. Kant, 1960, p. 30.
30. Silber, p. cxxv.
31. Kant, 1960, p. 31.
32. Silber, p. cxxix.
33. Silber, p. cxxix.
34. Much of Schelling's language and approach may seem foreign to our 21 st century
ears, but some profound insights about Being can be drawn from them, and these
insights will be essential for Kierkegaard's approach to the problem of evil.
35. F. W. J. Schelling. Of Human Freedom. Trans. James Gutmann. Chicago: Open
Court, 1936, p. 33.
36. Schelling, p. 34.
37. Schelling, p. 35.
38. Schelling, p. 36.
39. How does this arousal happen? In this question we find the reason for Schelling's
allegorical language. He explains it as God's imaginative response. In other
words, it is a creative act, and in this sense remains a part of the dark depths -
that is, it remains hidden in the basis of God's existence.
40. Schelling, p. 36.
22 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
41. Martin Heidegger. Schelling's Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom. Trans. Joan
Stambaugh. Athens, OH: Ohio UP, 1985, p. 136.
42. This analysis reminds me of a quote sometimes attributed to Michelangelo:
'Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to dis-
cover it.'
43. Schelling, p. 37.
44. The 'self-will of creatures stands opposed to reason as universal will, and the latter
makes use of the former and subordinates it to itself as a mere tool' (Schelling,
p. 38).
45. Schelling, p. 38.
46. Schelling, p. 38.
47. Schelling, p. 41.
48. Schelling, p. 40.
49. Schelling, p. 41.
50. Schelling, p. 40.
51. Schelling, p. 41 (my emphasis).
52. Schelling, pp. 41-2.
53. Schelling, p. 42.
54. Schelling, p. 48.
55. Schelling, p. 50.
56. Schelling, p. 50.
57. Schelling, p. 50.
58. Schelling, p. 51.
59. Schelling, p. 79.
60. Schelling, p. 79.
61. Schelling, p. 69.
62. Schelling, p. 69.
63. This problem will unfold more fully as we examine Kierkegaard's view of evil, so
it is not necessary to grasp the problem completely at this point.
64. Schelling, p. 59.
65. Schelling, p. 60.
66. Schelling, p. 61.
67. Schelling, p. 63.
68. Schelling, p. 63 (my emphasis).
69. Schelling, p. 64.
70. Schelling, p. 64.
71. Schelling, p. 66 (my emphasis).
72. Schelling, p. 67.
1
The Struggle of Self-Becoming: Spiritless Self-Evasion
The task of every human being is to become a 'self. The self is not a ready-
made, substantial entity that we possess simply by virtue of existence; rather,
it is a choice. As we have seen, both Kant and Schelling believe the self must
choose itself in its freedom, though this choice is made outside time (for Kant
all free acts transcend the phenomenal world which comes to us through time,
and for Schelling it was a choice made in the eternal past). Kierkegaard, how-
ever, believes this choice is made within time, and that the nature of the self
should be conceived in terms of a self-becoming. He develops this view in
terms of the unique structure of the human self. Further, it is clear from The
Sickness Unto Death - the work in which this structure is most systematically
presented that self-becoming is connected to the problem of evil.
We begin at the paradox of human freedom discussed at the end of the intro-
duction - namely, that 'man's being is essentially his own deed'. The proble
can be stated in a question: If we are to choose and become ourselves while in
temporal existence, who are we while in the midst of this becoming? In his
upbuilding discourse 'To Gain One's Soul In Patience', Kierkegaard proble-
matizes this issue in terms of gaining what is already possessed:
[I]f a person possesses his soul, he certainly does not need to gain it, and if he
does not possess it, how then can he gain it, since the soul itself is the ultimate
condition that is presupposed in every acquiring, consequently also in gain-
ing the soul. Could there be a possession of that sort, which signifies precisely
the condition for being able to gain the same possession?1
For Kierkegaard, the human self finds itself in just such a condition, in that
self-becoming is its very nature. Thus, the change that takes place in self-
becoming is not like the Aristotelian notion of kinesis, where the change, pro-
cess, or telos of the action is geared toward the creation of another object — for
example, the telos of the act of building a house is found in the house that is
built. Rather, it is along the lines of the Aristotelian notions ofenergeia and ente-
lechy, where the process is the telos, and where change is internal and bound
24 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
within the form or structure of the process itself. Becoming a self is what the self
is', our Being is in the process of (self) becoming. Kierkegaard writes,
One who comes naked into the world possesses nothing, but the one who
comes into the world in the nakedness of his soul does nevertheless possess
his soul, that is as something that is to be gained, does not have it outside himself
as something new that is to be possessed.2
This situation is due to the ontological structure of the self as a relation that
relates itself to itself, and to the structure of the self as a self-contradiction.
Kierkegaard gives his structural definition of the self in The Sickness Unto Death:
A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the
self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which
is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating
to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the
temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis.
A synthesis is a relation between two terms. Looked at in this way a human
being is not yet a self. In a relation between two things the relation is the
third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation,
and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of
soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation
relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and thais is the self.
What is the temptation that in itself is many temptations? Certainly it is not the
glutton's temptation to live in order to eat. . . . [I]t is to live in order to slave.
The temptation is this, to lose oneself, to lose one's soul, to cease to be a
human being and live as a human being instead of being freer than the
bird, and godforsaken to slave more wretchedly than the animal. Yes, to
slave! Instead of working for the daily bread, which every human being is
commanded to do, to slave for it — and yet not to be satisfied by it, because
the care is to become rich. . .. Instead of being willing to be what one is,
poor, but also loved by God . . . to damn oneself and one's life to this slaving
despondent greed day and night, in dark and brooding dejection, in spirit-
less busyness, with heart burdened by worry about making a living. . . .
At the same moment he is different from the world, and he senses this resis-
tance that does not follow the movements of the world's life. If he now wants
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 2 7
to gain the world, he must overcome this disquiet until once again, like the
undulation of the waves, he vanishes in the life of the world - then he has
won the world. However, if he wants to gain his soul, he must let his resis-
tance become more and more pronounced and in doing so gain his soul, for
his soul was this very difference: it was the infinity in the life of the world in
its difference from itself.10
This resistance is the eternal, the infinite, the ideal, and the possible, which do
not allow for complete and utter lostness. So even while lost to itself, the self
continues to possess itself in, and as, this difference - as something to be
gained away from the world. While lost in the world, the self remains, at some
level, heterogeneous to the life of the world.
It is the structure of the self as a self-relating relation that allows the self to
become free from the world in which it is lost. But this is not all that is at work
in becoming oneself, because the structure of the self is a derived relation.
In other words, this structure is established by an Other, which for Kierke-
gaard is God. 11 The possibility of despair is due to the fact that God has
released the self from his hand, and yet the self only becomes itself by freely
turning and relating itself back toward God - whether in humility or pride.
Thus, we are released from the hand of God that we may choose ourselves in
him. The task of existence is to free ourselves from worldliness, in order to find
ourselves in the power that established the structure of the self. Thus, Kierke-
gaard says that one's soul is gained from God, aw ay from the world, and through
oneself. This is a difficult task, which is why most people abandon it, and thus
abandon themselves. Kierkegaard's authorship is an attempt to make us feel
the contradictions within ourselves, in hopes of awakening us to the struggle of
becoming a self. We will begin our analysis of despair and evil by examining
our least awakened state of consciousness: spiritlessness.
a free act is originally not so much the positing of something else, of some-
thing external, of some effect which is distinct from and opposed to the free
act itself. It is rather the self-fulfillment of one's own nature, a taking posses-
sion of oneself, of the reality of one's own creative power over oneself. Thus,
it is coming to oneself, as self-presence in oneself.
In the introduction we saw that for Kant freedom of will is not found in the
willing of heterogeneity, but in willing one thing — the maxim of reason —
and in this, one gains the unity of character found in personality. Kierkegaard
is very Kantian (and Rahnerian) in this regard: freedom, as the seat of self-
hood, is not the ability to 'undo' oneself from moment to moment (the ability
to posit the opposite of what has been posited up until now), nor to will in a
number of different directions, but is taking possession of oneself, and project-
ing oneself in a single direction.
The Struggle of Self-Becoming
The willing or choice that arises out of this self-possession is qualitatively
different from that which arises out of the merely potential self. The potential
self does not so much choose, as avoid existential decisions - those choices that
project and posit the self. A spiritless self runs from all situations that require
creative choice, and simply reacts to what is happening around it externally.
Kierkegaard does not attribute any actualization to the spiritless self. Even in
the case of evil, he finds it questionable whether we could call a potential self a
self that sins:
Where in all the world could one find a real sin-consciousness . . . in a life so
immersed in triviality and chattering mimicry of 'the others' that it can
hardly - is too spiritless to - be called sin, and merits only, as the Scripture
says, to be 'spewed out'.
Just because one has a moment of passion around which one's life is poten-
tially gathered, does not mean it will continue to be gathered in the future.
To gain continuity, one must repeat the passion in an existential decision. This
'idealizing passion' intensifies the interest in one's existence, and yet, since
one's existence is not finished, it does not define one's life onceandfor all. Because
we are in the process of becoming, there is the ever present possibility of losing
this passion. Thus, while the earnestness of the eternal manifests itself in infi-
nite passion, the passionate decision may, in time, come to nothing. Kierke-
gaard discusses this in terms of Jesus' parable of the foolish maidens:
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 31
I prefer to remain where I am, with my infinite interest, with the issue, with
possibility. . . . The five foolish maidens had indeed lost the infinite passion
of expectancy. So the lamp went out. Then a cry arose that the bridegroom
was coming. . . . The door was shut and they were shut out, and when they
knocked at the door, the bridegroom said to them: I do not know you. This
was not just a quip by the bridegroom but a truth, for in a spiritual sense
they had become unrecognizable through having lost the infinite passio
Repetition is the oil in the lamp that keeps the flame of infinite passion burn-
ing, and gives to existence the continuity of the eternal. Repetition brings to
each moment the same originality found in the moment of passion, around
which one's life was gathered. One may gather one's life in a moment of pas-
sion, but to bring continuity over one's entire life, one needs repetition.
Repetition, in its 'maturity' - when it is self-conscious is earnestness.
Kierkegaard says that
Repetition and earnestness point to the responsibility laid upon every human
being to acquire and preserve the 'originality of disposition'.
When Kierkegaard speaks of the originality of disposition, he is pointing to
the essence of freedom. Kierkegaard took from Kant and Schelling the view
that disposition is something chosen and acquired ('man's being is his own
deed'}, though he rejects that an acquired originality of disposition takes
place outside time: he sees it as an historical development. This development
is not simply a quantitative building up of experiences, but a rise in conscious-
ness and freedom through a series of qualitative leaps. In The Concept of Anxiety
he writes: 'When the originality of earnestness is acquired and preserved, then
there is succession and repetition, but as soon as originality is lacking in repeti-
tion, there is habit. The earnest person is earnest precisely through the origin-
ality with which he returns in repetition'. 3 Self-becoming is a matter of
acquiring and preserving. The acquiring takes place as qualitative leaps in the
moment; the preserving is the continual repetition of these leaps throughout
one's life. 6 To be earnest is to keep the originality of the acquired disposition
ever before one. True, the moment is the important element of acquiring a
continuity of disposition, but this still must take place in temporality, for one
may only repeat what is in time.
Kierkegaard gives an example that will be helpful:
32 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Every Sunday, a clergyman must recite the prescribed common prayer,
and every Sunday he baptizes children. Now, let him be enthusiastic, etc.
The fire burns out, he will stir and move people, etc., but at one time more
and at another time less. Earnestness alone is capable of returning regularly
every Sunday with the same originality to the same thing.
Take away the originality from disposition and one has habit. Perhaps one
gains enthusiasm once in a while, but mostly one is simply going through the
motions. Earnestness, on the other hand, comes before the same leap (the same
existential, passionate decision) with the same originality, by which all things
again become new. Without this originality, one loses passion and becomes dis-
interestedly involved.
Think back to the foolish maidens who had lost their infinite passion. Kier-
kegaard says they became unrecognizable to the bridegroom through their
having lost the earnestness of their infinite passion. They were unrecognizable
because they did not have the same disposition; they did not have the same disposition because
they did not have it in its originality. It is true that one may make all the right exter-
nal movements when one lacks this originality of disposition (one may obey the
letter of the law), but these actions are derived, not from passion (the spirit of
the law), but from habit.
Kierkegaard says that most of us live our lives without any true direction,
without a grasp of the eternal and what is required of us. There are some, how-
ever, who, at some moment in their lives, find the passion in which all things
become new. Their existence is transformed by being gripped by a new mean-
ing, which gives continuity to their lives through the realization of a task they
have as human beings. The problem, however, is that after time they lose the
original passion that accompanied this transformation, and so they now 'fulfil'
this task out of habit. To speak of habit, however, is simply to speak of having
lost the sense of one's task.
This brings us back to the issue of spiritlessness, and its evasion of freedom's
task. In the remainder of this chapter we will be examining the self-deception
of spiritlessness, with a continual eye on how the self is able to maintain itself as
a mere potential of selfhood. This will give us a basis by which to examine how
evil is actualized through the self s relation to itself. Further, through this ana-
lysis we will come to see the characteristics, aims, and dangers of remaining as
a mere potential self.
As infinite the self must move away from itself, never becoming a one-
dimensional self that allows the given to define the horizon of reality. But
as finite the self must always come back to itself, recognizing that our
dreams not only should, but also do, exceed our grasp.29
While our dreams exceed our grasp, we are to take what we can from them and
make them concrete. This is why Kierkegaard expresses self-becoming as
becoming concrete: 'To become oneself.. . is to become something concrete.
But to become something concrete is neither to become finite nor to become
infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis.'
Whenever the self loses itself in the expanding poles of its syntheses (the eter-
nal, infinite, possibility, ideality), what it needs is self-understanding, because
in its expansion it has lost sight of the self it is. When the self loses itself in the
contracting poles (the temporal, finite, necessity, reality), it needs freedom,
that which allows it to choose itself in its becoming. To be spirit is to be con-
scious of oneself in one's freedom, and thus relate oneself to both one's limita-
tions and one's possibilities. We will come to see that the responsibility and
meaning of the self is found in the attempt to fulfil this task. Further, the poten-
tial for evil arises out of this task.
Imagination
Above we noted that the idealizing passion is that around which a person gath-
ers his or her life. The imagination is the capacity that allows for the infinitiz-
ing of the self. It is through the imagination that we are taken beyond
ourselves into the possibilities and ideals that exceed our present situation.
In his journal, Kierkegaard writes:
The imagination helps the self get out of its given situation, and the way the
world normally comes to it. According to Kierkegaard, there are far too many
people who never take in the expanding breath of infinitude, and so remain
within the categories of the purely sensate. Life comes to them as pleasant or
unpleasant, fortunate or unfortunate, and so forth. What they lack, and need
more of, is imagination.
Imagination presents a danger, however: while it is necessary for moving
beyond oneself, it does not, by itself, move back into the self— it does not
make the imagined possibilities and ideals its own. If the imagination is
not combined with earnestness, then it becomes a capacity that moves the
self away from itself, dissolving the tensions within the self. Kierkegaard says
that if a person
These flights of fancy are evasions in which fantasy becomes the mode of exis-
tence. The evasion takes place by giving the imagination free reign to lead one
farther and farther away from the finite pole of the self. Since imagination has
only a negative relation to the finite - as that which it seeks to move beyond
and away from — it is up to spirit to bring the meanings and possibilities which
imagination envisions down into one's finite situation. Spirit will not allow
one's limitations to be evaded, and continually keeps its eye on the place to
which it is to return — namely, the self.
We will examine several concrete forms of this despair by looking at the
imagination's influence over the capacities of feeling, knowing, and willing.
Kierkegaard says of the person whose imagination is given free reign, that
'His feeling is purely immediate, his knowledge only strengthened through
contemplation, his will not mature'. 34 We will look at each of these capacities,
beginning with infinite feeling, and ending with infinite knowing. This will
show us that spiritlessness is able to maintain itself in self-deception, and has
a profound need for self-knowledge, in order to overcome its despair.
Infinite Feeling
Feelings and emotions are extremely important for Kierkegaard, because they
are what often give the impetus for movement within a person's life. One need
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 35
only see how love can determine the direction of life to understand how this is
the case. The problem is that feelings can become completely grounded in
imagination. In this, feelings lose all relation to finite limitations, and one
becomes emotionally 'moved' by a phantasm. While feelings arising only
within the imagination may seem to have an affective power, this is an illusion,
for even this 'power' is based on the imagination.
For example, some people speak eloquently about their love for humanity,
and about their desire for everyone to be at peace with one another. These
feelings show themselves to be real, however, only when confronted by an
actual person. What makes the feeling concrete is the love one has and shows
toward one's neighbour, or even more telling, one's ability to be at peace with
one's adversary. It is all too easy to love 'humanity', the difficulty comes in
loving the person who just cut in front of you in line. Indeed, it is usually
those who profess such love that are unable to concretize it, for they assert it
only to reassure themselves - and others of their love; the one who truly
loves people spends his or her time and energy in action - in actually doing
what love requires. When feelings are infinitized in this way, 'the self is
simply more and more volatilized and eventually becomes a kind of abstract
sensitivity which inhumanly belongs to no human'. Thus, one imagines
oneself to be other than who one is, and evades oneself in despair over one-
self. Being unwilling to face one's true relationship with others - one's self-
centredness and cruelty - one deceives oneself by imagining a kind of abstract
or displaced love for humanity.
Infinitized feeling can take another form. There is a feeling of fond resolu-
tion that can seem all-consuming, but which has no staying power (passion)
behind it. Such a feeling is captured by the circumstances of the moment, but
as soon as the circumstances change, the conviction and feeling disappears.
The feeling is never made concrete, because it cannot remain stable and con-
sistent throughout the changes of the finite. Although the feeling lacks the
power necessary to make the resolution concrete, it can be held fast in the ima-
gination, and may actually be held onto for quite a while, even though it
remains unreal. Kierkegaard characterizes this as shortsightedness:
Infinite Willing
Like infinite feeling, infinite willing is a matter of evasion: one imagines one is
willing, and yet this willingness is a fantasy. With infinite feeling one is caught
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 3 7
up in doing great things, making great changes, and imagines one is willing
to act on these resolutions. The problem is that in order to fulfil resolutions,
one must usually start with the small things, those which are, more often
than not, mundane, and not very extraordinary. A garden is not created by
throwing an arm full of flowers on the ground, but one must till the soil, dig
holes, plant, weed, water, and the like. A will becomes infinitized when it is
unwilling to start with these 'small' tasks, and when it despises the moments
of small beginnings:
[T]he more it [the will] is infinitized in its purpose and decision, the closer
and more contemporaneous it becomes with itself in that small part of the
task which can be carried out now, immediately . . . so that when furthest
away from itself (when it is most infinitized in its purpose and decision), it is
simultaneously as near as can be to itself in the carrying out of the infinitely
small part of the task that can be accomplished this very day, this very
oo
hour, this very moment.
Thus, using the example of the garden, the will is infinitely away from itself as
it imagines a beautiful garden, with all sorts of exotic specimens and colours;
simultaneously, however, the will is concrete in its carrying out of the smallest
tasks that such infinitized will necessitates.
The will can maintain itself in the infinite by the continual reassurance that
the resolution will be carried out when the time is right. Kierkegaard says the
problem with these assurances is that the time is always right - there is always
a step to be taken in the direction of the fulfilment of the resolution. What
keeps the will infinitized is the little word 'if:
A concrete resolution knows nothing about this ' i f . . . ' , because the require-
ment of such a resolution is to act, not to assure. However, this assurance is
the means by which the self remains unconscious of its self-deception, and
thus evades the task of self-becoming. To test one's resolution one must
merely see the path one's life has taken since the resolution arose: Tf year
after year my life continually expresses that I am just like everybody else,
then I shall at least shut up about assurances 'that if...
We see again that the issue revolves around a self-deception — namely, an
unwillingness to become concrete with regards to one's will. The unwilling-
ness is due to the difficulty involved in concretizing the possibilities and ideals
38 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
of imagination. In the end, one is not honest about one's desires or abilities to
fulfil the resolution. Kierkegaard says that self-knowledge does not consist in
the ready assurances of despair, but in eyeing these assurances suspiciously:
It is not easy to admit that one does not have the power of self to face the
difficulties and tensions of becoming oneself, or that one is more interested in
being comfortable than in actualizing one's ideals. If the courage to face this
knowledge about oneself is not present, then the imagination can be used to
hide this reality.
If these evasions start to fall apart, and consciousness of despair begins to
arise, the self has still another way to deceive itself in its infinite willing: one
may see the action of the will as something that follows — as a matter of
course — upon the consideration of how to proceed in one's resolution. Such a
view believes that the problem is in the planning, in the 'making certain', and
in understanding. As Kierkegaard says, 'We make out that if we only under-
stand the right it follows automatically that we do it. What a grievous misun-
derstanding or what a sly fabrication!' 42 Here again, we find a self-deception
based on a continual assurance that what is grasped infinitely in the moment
will become concrete if or when the time is right — when one has all the facts
and contingencies worked out. This leads to the issue of infinite knowing.
Infinite Knowing
Infinite knowing is an accumulation of knowledge that one fails to relate to
one's existence. There is an objective and disinterested kind of knowing that
moves away from the self. Nicolas Berdyaev, in his book The Destiny of Man,
explains the importance for philosophy to keep an existential connection to
the issue it seeks to understand:
This type of knowledge can become a place where the self can hide itself from
its task. For Kierkegaard, the significance of all knowledge is measured in
whether, and how, it is appropriated by the individual. All knowledge
becomes essential by becoming self-knowledge.
As we will see, self-knowledge is the only knowledge the value of which is
without qualification. Knowledge not related to oneself may be interesting,
but it can also be dangerous to the task and purpose of one's existence:
For the person in the aesthetic stage of life — whether the aesthetic individual
is an artist, a professor, a political analyst, or any other of a number of occu-
pations that traffic in knowledge - whose overarching goal is to enjoy
life, knowledge is significant to the extent that it brings pleasure and joy.
No doubt, to understand has its pleasures. The issue of life, however, is not
about what one knows and can espouse, but about how one is:
[W]e all know how to talk about the good; no cultured person would put up
with being thought ignorant of it, with being thought personally unable to
describe it profoundly and eloquently, because to understand . . . is a plea-
sure. But personally to strive to be the honest, upright, and unselfish one —
no, that would indeed be an effort. "
One can spend a lifetime studying various views of what is good and worth
pursuing, but if one does not act on it, then, in one's hands, the knowledge
becomes empty and a means of evasion.
This is the case because, in the end, it is not knowledge that changes one's
life, but action. Most agree that action is what changes one's circumstances,
but Kierkegaard says more than this: one becomes oneself only in action. One
relates to oneself and to the Good through action, for it is in action that one's
desires, passions and goals are tested and evaluated. I can learn all about how
I should relate to the Good, but if I do not act on this knowledge, then my life is
not changed in any substantial way, and the knowledge is superfluous.
More often than not, this knowledge becomes a means of evading one's
unwillingness to relate one's life to the Good, and knowledge about the Good
40 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
is viewed as a sufficient relationship to it. This is the case because one's knowl-
edge can be far ahead of what one is capable of at the present moment:
'In every human being there is a capacity, the capacity for knowledge. And
every person - the most knowing and the most limited - is in this knowing
far beyond what he is in his life or what his life expresses'.
Most of us already know far too much for our own good; what we need is to
come back to ourselves and act on what we know. Knowledge can become a
means of venturing off into boundless territories that have nothing to do with
our own existence. Kierkegaard says 'the more understanding increases, the
more it becomes a kind of inhuman knowledge in the production of which
man's life is squandered'.49 Knowledge is not in itself bad, but the state of knowl-
edge is.50 Knowledge is to be understood as the prerequisite to action; if one
does not start with the small tasks the Good requires in the moment, then one
is being led away from the Good by knowledge of it.
Kierkegaard views this abstract state of knowledge as a spiritless form of
rebellion against the Good. Spiritlessness is not the conscious and earnest
movement against the Good we will come to see as radical evil, but is a weak
evasion and lack of earnestness toward one's existence, and one's relationship
with the Good. Spiritlessness' conscious belief is that it is on the side of the
Good, and assures itself that when enough knowledge has been gained, it will
certainly act accordingly. As usual, these assurances are evasions. It evades
and denies its actual relationship to the Good, because it is possessed by an
unconscious anxiety of what will be found if it relates its knowledge to its life:
One fears that one's knowing, turned inward toward oneself, will expose the
state of intoxication there, will expose that one prefers to remain in this
state, will wrench one out of this state and as a result of such a step will
make it impossible for one to slip back again into that adored state, into
intoxication.
Anyone who has applied the ideal to one's life knows how dangerous it can be,
how when it is allowed to inspect one's heart and character, one's identity and
self-estimation can be decimated. So the ideal is kept at arms length, and never
allowed to penetrate one's life.
Kierkegaard says the failure to apply the ideal to one's life is a lack of con-
science. He shows this by pointing to the story of David and Bathsheba in 2
Samuel. Although Bathsheba was married to another man, David had her
brought to the palace, slept with her, and she became pregnant. To cover this
up, David had Uriah — Bathsheba's husband — put at the front line of the
battle, whereupon the army withdrew, leaving Uriah to be killed. David
then took Bathsheba as his wife. During this time David felt no remorse
for his action, though it went against the ideal he himself claimed to follow.
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 41
So God sent the prophet Nathan to tell David a story. Nathan told David
about a grave injustice. There was a poor man who owned nothing but a
lamb. The man loved this lamb, and treated it as one would treat a child.
There was also a rich man who had many sheep. When a traveller came to
visit the rich man, the latter had the poor man's lamb killed in order to serve
it to the traveller. Kierkegaard says,
I imagine that David listened attentively and thereupon declared his judg-
ment, did not, of course, intrude his personality (subjectivity) but imperson-
ally (objectively) evaluated this charming little work. . . .
Then the prophet says to him, 'Thou art the man.'
See, the tale the prophet told was a story, but this 'Thou art the man' - this
was another story - this was the transition to the subjective.
When the story became personal when the issue was no longer about a king
objectively rendering judgment over a matter within his kingdom — David
gained radical self-knowledge, his conscience awakened, and he repented.
Kierkegaard uses the story in order to question whether one really comes to
know the ideal through objective knowledge of it. If the ideal is not applied
to existence, one does not know it, for the ideal is what it is only in relation to human
existence. Until it is expressed in life - until it is given flesh and blood, one's
own flesh and blood — one does not truly understand what the ideal is calling
for what it means. Kierkegaard says that to believe that a disinterested
knowledge in the Good is in some way to relate correctly to the Good is self-
deception; to claim to be dealing with ideals, with what is good and meaning-
ful for human existence, and then to be completely unrelated to them in one's
own life is hypocrisy.
Kierkegaard believes that valuing an objective and speculative form of
knowledge of the Good will eventually lead to a loss of all ethical and reli-
gious - that is, earnest forms of existence:
Prior to the outbreak of cholera there usually appears a kind of fly not other-
wise seen; in like manner might not these fabulous pure thinkers be a sign
that a calamity is in store for humankind — for example, the loss of the ethi-
cal and the religious? Therefore, be cautious with an abstract thinker
who not only wants to remain in abstraction's pure being but wants this to
be the highest for a human being, and wants such thinking, which results
in the ignoring of the ethical and a misunderstanding of the religious, to be
the highest human thinking.J
By the choice of the method of thought, the objective thinker is using thought
as a diversion from something. What is being diverted is the individual's
42 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
misrelation to his or her own self. The abstract thinker blocks the path of exis-
tential self-knowledge, with its inherent struggles and tensions, in order to
evade the path of self-becoming.
As against this comfortable and safe infinitizing of feeling, willing and
knowing, Kierkegaard would rather we commit outright sins and evil acts,
for then we could at least have the self-understanding that we are wretched,
instead of this deceitful rebellion against the Good in the complacency of
objective knowledge about the Good. It has always been the judgement of
Christianity, according to Kierkegaard, that it is better to face God as a tax
collector, harlot and a swindler, than as a self-righteous Pharisee. In this,
Christianity turns 'ethics' on its head, and we find that the rebellion against
the Good is often perpetrated by those who are most religious, whereas the
irreligious - if they feel the pain of their weakness - are closer to God than
the Pharisee ever was: 'it is terrible living life to become mold on the immanen-
tal development of the infinite. Then instead let us sin, sin outright, seduce
girls, murder men, rob on the highways — that at least can be repented, and
God can at least catch hold of such a criminal'.
Somewhat ironically, it turns out that the spiritless, cultured rebellion
against the Good holds within itself a great danger. It seems sophisticated,
and while it is adept at keeping within the norms of society, it uses infinite feel-
ing, willing, and knowledge to evade its true relation to the Good. Its deprav-
ity only becomes apparent when the norms of a society, which such a person
willingly and even conscientiously follows, calls for the butchering of other
human beings — something we saw happen over and over again in the twenti-
eth century, and which continues on into the twenty first. This is due to the fact
that spiritlessness always sides with the expedient, the comfortable, the secure,
and the tranquil. If the established order is relatively humanitarian or 'civi-
lized', then the people within that order will live accordingly; however, if it
becomes fearful, defensive and barbaric, then the people will follow those
norms. A spiritless rebellion against the Good loses sight of that which can lift
it out of this danger. This will become more clear as we now turn to the despair
that abides in finitude.
In this form of despair, the evasion becomes a cultural affair. As we will see,
worldliness develops a system whereby the individual may evade the responsi-
bility of becoming a self, by the levelling of all selves down to the lowest
common denominator. To relate only to the finite pole of the self is to become
trapped within the established order and its modes of existence, because it is
the infinite that allows the self to transcend the established order of things.
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 43
Kierkegaard develops many categories (strewn throughout his authorship) to
describe this form of despair, such as, worldliness, the secular mentality, sensi-
bility, probability, sagacity, moderation, and the levelling of the crowd. Each
of these processes work together in order to clamp down on the individual,
making sure he or she does not try to rise above the established order within
the culture. The clamp does not have to be very tight though, because this is
not a trap the individual wishes to escape: one can find great comfort in the
despair that abides in the finite, for the 'strength' of this despair is that it
allows one to feel quite at home in the world, and provides numerous means
of maintaining one's denial and self-deception.
As we look at this form of despair, we will see that Kierkegaard has a parti-
cularly strong distaste for its inner workings, because he saw it as the power
behind the spiritlessness that was overwhelming his age. His, and ours, is an
age of spiritlessness that has turned its back to spirit.5 Kierkegaard sees this
as the greatest tragedy to happen to humanity, for in moving away from spirit,
we move away from ourselves en masse. As we look at this despair, we will find
that what we view as a normal and comfortable life is in reality an insidious
trap that threatens to plunge Western civilization into irretrievable despair.
To relinquish the infinite is not simply to stop growing, or to stop moving
ahead, but is actually to begin a retrogression, as the 'ideals' and requirements
for a human being become less and less. One need only watch advertisements
on television for a few hours - paying attention to the 'ideals' they hold up, the
goals they offer and present, and their definition of success to get a sense of
this narrowing reductionism.
A man in this kind of despair can very well live on in temporality; indeed he
can do so all the more easily, be to all appearances a human being, praised
by others, honoured and esteemed, occupied with all the goals of temporal
life. Yes, what we call worldliness simply consists of such people who, if one
may so express it, pawn themselves to the world. They use their abilities,
amass wealth, carry out worldly enterprises, make prudent calculations,
etc., and perhaps are mentioned in history, but they are not themselves.
In a spiritual sense they have no self, no self for whose sake they could ven-
ture everything, no self for God - however selfish they are otherwise.61
The first action that must take place, before there is any hope of being a success
in the world, is the abandonment of the task of becoming oneself.62 One cannot
have both an infinite, eternal concern for one's self, and seek to be a success in
the world. This is because of the qualities necessary for succeeding in the
world: sensibleness, levelheadedness, and sagacity. These are all qualities we
readily perceive as good to have, and yet for Kierkegaard, these are the planks
on which we walk into spiritual death.
Levelheadedness and sensibility speak to moderation; the infinite and eter-
nal, on the other hand, are immoderate, demanding and risky. When the secu-
lar mentality seeks moderation, it is not seeking a balanced relation between
the finite and infinite, but the safest course of action. Moderation seeks medioc-
rity, which it then goes on to interpret as worldly success. The point in mod-
eration is to keep from having to face inconveniences, difficulties and anything
that can possibly disrupt one's tranquillity. When it comes to the earnest aim
of life, Kierkegaard thinks in terms of the possibilities and ideals that face each
individual, and before which all worldly aims are low indeed. In the face of
these eternal and infinite ideals, the wisdom of moderation is pathetic: 'Too
little and too much spoil everything. If he were to think the thought in its eter-
nal validity, it would promptly aim a fatal blow at all his worldly thinking,
aspiring, and pursuing, turning everything upside down for him, and this he
cannot long endure.' 63
Kierkegaard views the mentality that seeks to guard against inconveniences
as dangerous because it is actually guarding itself against the infinite — that
which disrupts the flow of the finite current. In order to stay within the
flow of the finite one must keep from making any sudden or grand moves in
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 4
existence, and one must definitely not commit oneself to anything, for who
knows where the current will turn next - one might accidentally commit one-
self to something which, next week, runs against the current. Thus, 'Clever-
ness strives continually against commitment. It fights for its life and its
honor, for if the decision wins, then cleverness is put to death.' One evades
the decision in which one would need to stake oneself, the decision that comes
along with the idealizing passion - the resolute choice for oneself. In this des-
pair, the self remains a mere potential self by never conceiving of an actualiza-
tion. Thus, spiritlessness and denial are held fast through a conventional
wisdom that continually esteems the self in its mere potentiality. By neglecting
the infinite pole of the self, it comes to rest in its current state of despair, and
finds its satisfaction in the relative safety and predictability of the finite.
Probability
The problem with any ideal is that there is no guarantee of success, and one
never knows for certain what will happen in one's life if it is actualized.
So moderation and prudence call for continual reflection on the probability of
success. Seeking probability, however, is nothing other than a rejection of the
infinite, because the infinite is beyond the realm of the probable. The closer
one is clamped to the finite, the more certainty that is needed in order to
'act', and so there are those within the secular mentality who proclaim,
T stick to the facts. I am neither a fanatic nor a dreamer nor a fool, neither
drunk nor crazy. I stick to the facts; I believe nothing, nothing what-
ever, except what I can touch and feel; and I believe no one, not my
own child, not my own wife, not my best friend; I believe only what can
be demonstrated — because I stick to the facts.'
The person who inquires about the probable and only about that in order to
adhere to it does not ask what is right and what is wrong, what is good and
what is evil, what is true and what is false. No, he asks impartially: which is
the probable, so that I can believe it - whether it is true is a matter of indif-
ference or is at least of less importance; which is the probable, so that I can
adopt it and side with it whether it is evil or wrong is a matter of indiffer-
ence or is at least of less importance.
The world thinks it is dangerous to venture in this way, and why? Because
one might lose; the prudent thing is not to venture. And yet by not venturing
it is so dreadfully easy to lose what would be hard to lose by venturing and
which, whatever you lost, you will in any case never lose in this way, so
easily, so completely, as though it were nothing — oneself. For if I have ven-
tured wrongly, very well, life then helps me with its penalty. But if I haven't
ventured at all, who helps me then?
William James said that we must, in a sense, meet truth halfway, put life
to a test and see what boils over. 71 We must move out into the tension and
danger of life; if we simply sit in complacent probability, then we will discover
nothing of what it means to be human, and nothing of what it means to be
before God. We seldom consider whether there may be an unconditioned
requirement laid upon us by existence, or that we only become ourselves by
seeking to fulfil this requirement. Instead of pondering this possibility, we con-
ceal 'ourselves in finitude and among the finitudes in the same way as Adam
hid among the trees'. 72
To move beyond the finite is considered fanatical. Think of the power
behind the accusation of being a fanatic, and how we so readily shrink from
any action or belief that would put that label on us. A fanatic is intoxicated,
even dangerous — think of all the religious fanatics. Indeed, we cannot deny
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 47
that many of these fanaticisms are dangerous, but Kierkegaard is not propos-
ing a fanaticism that has no contact with the finite, but asks us to venture into
the infinite with an eye to a return to the finite, by which we are continually
disciplined and corrected for our false fanaticism — that is, if we remain open
to correction, and do not hold onto our infinite ideals at the cost of the finite.
Kierkegaard is not chiding the secular mentality for not being open to fanatics
(though there are times when he seems to relish such openness), but for its
inability (that is, unwillingness) to fathom that there is a passionate, enthu-
siastic and earnest movement toward the ideal that flies in the face of probabil-
ity, moderation, and all the other virtues of the secular mentality.
The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person
approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the
judge: God is in the dock. He is quite a kindly judge: if God should have a
reasonable defence for being the God who permits war, poverty and disease,
he is ready to listen to it. The trial may even end in God's acquittal. But the
important thing is that Man is on the Bench and God in the Dock. 75
God is not like something one buys in a shop, or like a piece of property that
one, after having sagaciously and circumspectively examined, measured
48 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
and calculated for a long time, decides is worth buying. With regard to God,
it is the ungodly calmness with which the indecisive person wants to begin
(indeed, he wants to begin with doubt), precisely this that is the insubordi-
nation, because in this way God is thrust down from the throne, from being
the master. When one has done that, one actually has already chosen another
master, self-will, and then becomes the slave of indecisiveness.
What is disconsolateness? Not even the wildest scream of pain or the pre-
sumptuousness of despair, however terrible, is disconsolate. But this under-
standing with oneself, arrived at in dead silence, that everything higher
is lost, although one can still go on living if only nothing reminds one of
it - this is disconsolateness. Not even to grieve disconsolately, but to have
entirely ceased to grieve, to be able to lose God in such a way that one
becomes utterly indifferent and does not even find life intolerable — that is
disconsolateness and is also the most terrible kind of disobedience, more ter-
rible than any defiance — to hate God, to curse him, is not so terrible as to
lose him in this way or, what is the same thing, to lose oneself.77
It is here where we see the notion of evil begin to become dialectical in Kier-
kegaard, for when he speaks of defiance, he is speaking of a radical, spiritual
evil that consciously rages against the Good or God. This is, in a way, the
strongest intensification of evil. And yet here he says spiritless disconsolateness
is more terrible still. This seems inconsistent, in that he sees the weakest form of
evil (a mere potential for evil) as more terrible than the more actualized forms.
What Kierkegaard sees as terrible in disconsolateness, however, is not its
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 49
weakness, but the comfortable and secure way it unconsciously gives up the
Good, and the fact that it has so easily spread throughout Western society.
Kierkegaard condemns the established order of Western society as being thor-
oughly permeated by a rebellion against the Good, and just because the rebel-
lion is unconscious and takes place in the most normal and 'moral' actions does
not mean that it is less dangerous and perhaps even more insidious than con-
scious evil. What is so terrible about disconsolateness is not that it acts in
'immoral' or criminal ways, but that it rebels with such happy lukewarmness.
It may appear pious, and yet it lacks all conscience:
Such people put their individual wills over the universal will. They are com-
pletely self-centred, seeking only what brings them comfort. If called on by the
'right' circumstances, the most horrendous acts will be enthusiastically com-
mitted, though not out of any conscious defiance of the Good, but simply for
the sake of comfort. This form of evil is most likely to be committed against
those who have come to be viewed as enemies of such comfort.
What is also terrible about this form of rebellion is that the self has lost com-
plete contact with the Good. When this happens we become too spiritless to see
the loss we have suffered, and we lack the concern for ourselves necessary to be
passionate about the 'death of God'. Kierkegaard lived in a time when God's
death was taking place. He is, in a sense, the Nietzschean 'madman', at whom
the crowd laughs. He has not overstated the loss of spirit, but I believe it is
more likely that we have not sufficiently appreciated our loss. We no longer
have enough spirit even to grieve the death of God. When Nietzsche pro-
claimed that God was dead, he asked,
To lose something trivial in such a way that one does not pick it up, well,
that perhaps is all right, but to lose one's own self (to lose God) in such a
way that one does not even care to bend down to pick it up, or in such a
way that it entirely escapes one that one has lost it! Oh, what terrible perdi-
tion! Not only is there certainly an infinite difference between what one loses
and what one loses, but also between how one loses. To lose God in such a
way that one takes offense at him, is indignant with him or groans against
him; to lose God in such a way t h a t . . . one despairs over it - but to lose God
as if he were nothing, and as if it were nothing!
The worldly point of view always clings closely to the difference between
man and man, and has naturally no understanding (since to have it is
The Struggle of Self-Becoming 51
It is ironic that those within the secular mentality look for ways to distinguish
themselves from others — distinguish in the sense of gaining honor, being 'on
top', succeeding, being more talented, and so forth - and yet do so from
within a levelling that seeks to destroy all distinctions. This is the case because,
within the crowd, one is always looking to others to see what it means to be a
successful human being, so that one discovers who one is and what is possible
only from the crowd. This causes a narrowing of possibilities, in which one
loses oneself to the way things are done within the established order, to the
possibilities it gives, and to what it requires of an individual. In a spiritless
group 'one becomes a human being by aping others. One does not know by
himself that he is a human being but through an inference: he is like the
others — therefore he is a human being. Only God knows whether any of
us is that!'
Kierkegaard is not against human communities and groups per se, but only
as they are used as sources of evasion. When this happens, it is necessary to
point to the single individual as the only way in which a person can again feel
the responsibility of what it means to be a human being:
Wanting to hide in the mass or the crowd, to be a little fraction of the crowd,
instead of being an individual, is the most corrupt of all escapes. Even if this
makes life easier by making it more thoughtless in the din — this is not the
question. The question is that of the responsibility of the individual — that every
individual human being ought to be a single individual, ought to make up
his mind about his conviction, just as in the next world eternity will single
out the busy one who thought he was in a group, single out the poorest
wretch who thought he was overlooked, single him out as individually
52 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
responsible, so distinctly individual that an eternity seems to lie between
him and the next man.
Imagine a school, let it have a class of one hundred pupils, all of the same
age, who are supposed to learn the same thing and have the same criterion.
To be number seventy and below is to be far down in the class. Now, if the
other thirty pupils from number seventy had the idea that they might be
allowed to form a class by themselves. If so, then number seventy would
be number one in the class. That would be an advancement, yet, well, it
might be put that way, but according to my conception that would be sink-
ing even lower, sinking into contemptible false self-satisfaction, because it is still
much higher to put up willingly with being number seventy according to a
genuine criterion. . . . What is spiritlessness? It is to have changed the criterion by
leaving out the ideals, to have changed the criterion in accord with how we human beings
who now live here in this place happen to be.89
'It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up.
And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the
same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there
is only death.'"
One finds one's worth in conformity with the crowd, while detachment from
the group becoming a single individual is to become insignificant. The
crowd also provides a sense of significance and worth when everything has
lost its meaning, and in this way helps us maintain our self-deception.
Primitivity
To ape others is to lack primitivity. Primitivity is to stand before God as a
single individual — in one's particularity an individual with a facticity and
past, and who is also open to the ideal and the future. Evading oneself by
hiding in the crowd is based on the presupposition that one cannot go wrong
in life if one simply does what everyone else is doing, and remains within the
status quo. However, it is in this place of comfort and security that one loses
oneself. Kierkegaard writes,
The unconditioned requirement, before which each person stands and gains
significance, differs from person to person, for we each have our own facticity
to deal with, our own limitations to be overcome and transcended, and our
own needs. We are rough to begin with, and must be worked smooth, but
our shape is given by the unconditioned itself, and is done only as a single indi-
vidual - definitely not in any comparison to others. There is to be no turning
to the right or to the left, checking oneself against others, seeing how one
measures up against them. The only concern is to stand alone before God, and
take up the task existence has laid upon you. One cannot check to see if one is
fulfilling one's task by comparing oneself to others. No other person can
be used as a crutch or support. We are called to be engaged with God, to be
uplifted, and transformed. The infinite requirement calls us to the task of
becoming more than we were before. The crowd and the established order
know absolutely nothing about this uplifting; indeed, it is their goal to make
sure the criterion for being human becomes more and more paltry, all for the
54 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
sake of comfort and self-esteem. Actually, the established order does not really
provide a criterion, but an evasion of all criteria, for nothing is sacred, and
nothing is free from the danger of being overthrown tomorrow - replaced by
its opposite.
Given all this, the problem becomes how, in a completely spiritless age, we
can become a 'single individual', and begin the journey toward spirit. Kierke-
gaard has little optimism of being able to free ourselves from finitude's despair
and its concomitant levelling: 'The abstract levelling process, that self-com-
bustion of the human race, produced by the friction which arises when the
individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue, like
a trade wind, and consume everything.' This lack of optimism may be
another reason Kierkegaard focuses in on the category of'the single indivi-
dual'. He is pessimistic about a mass movement toward spirit: such a move-
ment would be, given the current situation, a contradiction. Thus, the only
hope is for each individual to move toward spirit alone by picking up the
unconditioned requirement. A movement out of spiritlessness is possible, if
we are willing to recognize and choose despair. It is a somewhat paradoxical
choice, but Kierkegaard sees it as essential for a movement out of the spiritless-
ness of the aesthetic stage of existence. With this choice the self takes itself, for
the first time, as a task to be picked up. This does not mean despair is comple-
tely overcome; it may be the case that despair is intensified, for there are forms
of evil that are neither weak, ignorant, nor lacking in spirit. We will now turn
to this movement out of spiritlessness.
Notes
something to be desired), and yet because their rebellion against the Good is
more intense, there is an intensification of despair and evil (something that
is not desirable).
The strongest form of despair is more dangerous than spiritlessness in terms
of its qualitative character - it is qualified as spirit. As spirit it is not concerned
about comfort, but has taken possession of itself in its opposition to the Good.
Although those in unconscious despair are capable of enthusiastically commit-
ting terrible atrocities, they can still be kept in check — tamed, if you will — if
by nothing else than the fear of punishment. They are malleable, and are often
very law-abiding, though their obedience is based on self-concern, rather than
concern for the Good. A defiant evil, on the other hand, cannot be kept in
check so easily. It is spirit, and this means that it determines itself from itself,
and will do what it wills in self-conscious freedom. In this, it can become extre-
mely destructive.
We now turn to this intensification of despair by examining the move from
the aesthetic stage to the beginnings of the ethical stage. In the remaining chap-
ters we will be examining the ethical and religious stages in more detail. These
existence-stages move toward an ever-increasing consciousness of the self. The
development of this consciousness is portrayed by Kierkegaard in his pseudon-
ymous writings. Kierkegaard used pseudonyms in his authorship because each
book was written from the standpoint of someone within a particular existence-
stage; thus, since these books do not necessarily represent Kierkegaard's own
standpoint, he did not author them under his own name. Kierkegaard goes so
far as to say that nothing written by a pseudonym should be attributed to him,
just as one would not attribute a line spoken in Hamlet to a belief Shakespeare
himself held. The pseudonyms are to be regarded as performers in an extended
portrayal of the different stages of existence.
In The Sickness Unto Death, the pseudonym Anti-climacus looks at the
increase of consciousness - from spiritlessness to defiance — in terms of an
intensification of despair. This analysis coincides with the general growth
of consciousness portrayed in Kierkegaard's other pseudonymous works.
Because this movement from one existence stage to another is always accom-
panied by the despair of the preceding existence-stage, it would be reasonable
to expect that what is written in The Sickness Unto Death will tie in well with the
movement through the various stages of existence. I believe this is the case.
However, since Kierkegaard was no system builder, it is by no means worked
out systematically. Existence does not allow for a completely closed system,
because consciousness fluctuates, as does despair, and so the various forms of
despair can be found in the various existence-stages. Still, a relatively cohesive
exposition can be given of the movement of consciousness, and its concomitant
movement of despair. What will be discovered is an ever-increasing inability
to evade oneself and one's task, along with a growing consciousness of how
60 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
weak one is in relation to this task. Despair arises out of this sense of weakness
and lack of control. In the end, the question is whether we will be crushed by
the responsibility placed on us — thereby having a heavy and hopeless rela-
tionship to the Good - or humbled by it, and so uplifted into a joyful relation-
ship with the Good through faith.
Thus, the reflection within the aesthetic stage is never able to separate
itself completely from its immediacy, no matter how philosophical or poetic
it may be.
The second quality of the aesthetic stage is the meaning and purpose it pro-
poses for life: aesthetes believe that the meaning and purpose of life is to enjoy
life. This life-view has as many variations as there are definitions of enjoyment,
though all the variations have in common the belief that certain conditions
must be met in order for life to be enjoyable, conditions that are 'not there by
virtue of the individual himself.
For some these conditions are completely external to the individual, such as
wealth, honour, status or free time (retirement). Thus, the task of existence
is found in the attainment of these conditions. For others, however, a condi-
tion for enjoyment may be found within the individual. As the Judge says,
'It is a talent for practical affairs, a talent for business, a talent for mathe-
matics, a talent for writing, a talent for art, a talent for philosophy. Satisfac-
tion in life, enjoyment, is sought in the unfolding of this talent.' This remains
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 61
immediacy because, at this level, the self remains a conglomeration of disorga-
nized forces, in which there is nothing higher than the immediate moment to
bring some talent, mood or thought to the fore. The aesthete does not have
control over these forces, and in this sense lacks a self that has taken hold of
itself. Aesthetes are at the prey of the moment, and have not developed person-
alities that encompass their entire lives. These forces are analogous to Schel-
ling's dark ground, which remains a seething cauldron of disorganized powers,
because it has not yet been penetrated by a higher ideal. No doubt certain
talents or capacities may be developed, but there is still no self that rules over
them as a whole; thus, they are organized by the need of the moment — what
the need is calling on for the sake of enjoyment.
Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally con-
scious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not
grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some
abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about its self, simply
takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of
where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something; if
there were any question of accounting for its inner being, every such exis-
tence, however astounding its accomplishments, however much it can
62 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
account for even the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoy-
ment: every such life is none the less despair.
Though life goes on without a hitch, and grand things are accomplished,
one may nevertheless be in despair, because despair has reference to a deep
and profound level of the self — so deep that although the whole world be
gained, the despair will remain untouched. Despair can be felt only in the
shudder whose tremors reverberate deep into the soul. In the face of that
depth of the self, all the externals are merely diversions. Pascal illustrates this
well in his Pensees:
When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole
universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as though lost
in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he
has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing
anything, I am moved to terror. . . . Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not
drive people to despair. I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask
them if they are any better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then
these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive
objects to which they become addicted and attached.
Though people are not 'moved to despair', Kierkegaard and Pascal have
recognized the depth of their hopelessness: they have such a meagre concep-
tion of the self, that they are unable to grasp the longing and pain that under-
lies all their activities. They cannot fathom that despair is not an issue of
circumstances — whether they are pleasant and enjoyable — but concerns a
lack of development, and hence the meaninglessness of their existence.
A higher form of despair may eventually arise in the aesthetic individual, a
form Anti-climacus calls 'Pure Immediacy'. In this form of despair there is
a small rise in reflection within the aesthetic stage, due to a person's inability
to make the world go his or her way. While despair is acknowledged, its true
source remains dark - it is still essentially ignorant of despair - because it
believes as life becomes better, the despair will disappear. The person in pure
immediacy believes despair consists in losing something in the world or some-
thing temporal, when in reality it consists in the loss of the self— the self's
unwillingness to grasp its eternal validity, and the task for which it was estab-
lished. The presence of despair is felt within 'pure immediacy' only because an
item that was being used to cover up the real source of despair was lost. Thus,
with the loss of this item, the despair hidden beneath the surface shows itself,
though the true source of despair is not recognized. When the fortunes of the
world are good, life is enjoyable; when the fortunes turn bad, one 'despairs'.
This is a passive relation to the world, in which the self relates to itself through
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 63
the conditions of its circumstances: 'there is no infinite consciousness of the self,
of what despair is, or of the state's being one of despair. The despair is mere
passivity, a succumbing to external pressure; it comes not at all from within
,9
as an action.
Thus, despair is thought to be the result of unfortunate external circum-
stances. The self is so connected and possessed by the world, the only way for
it to sense its despair is for the world to deal it a blow:
So he despairs . . . he calls it despair. But to despair is to lose the eternal —
and of this loss he says nothing, he doesn't dream of it. To lose the earthly is
not in itself to despair, and yet that is what he speaks of and he calls it
despair.
He is unaware that the struggle of life is not found in seeking what is tem-
poral — that which brings enjoyment to the sensate, and satisfies his immedi-
ate desires but in seeking what is eternal. And so he points at the wrong
object of despair: 'he stands there pointing at something that is not despair,
explaining that he is in despair, and yet, sure enough, the despair is going on
behind him unawares'.
As in all forms of the passive despair of spiritlessness, this is ultimately an
unwillingness to be oneself. 12 Since the self does not even have enough self to
will to be itself, it wishes it were someone else: it says to itself, 'If only I could
have been born wealthy (or beautiful, athletic, intelligent, and so forth), then
I would be a happy self People at this level of consciousness have come to
identify themselves so much by externals that they believe they can change
their selves by changing their externals. They try to gain a different self by
buying a better model car, changing careers, wearing designer clothes, per-
haps losing some weight, undergoing any number of surgical augmentations,
or even by changing relationships. Anti-climacus says, 'One imagines a self
(and next to God there is nothing so eternal as a self), and then one imagines
it occurring to a self whether it might not let itself be another — than itself.' *
If life has dealt a sufficient number of blows, more reflection might arise,
though without moving the person out of immediacy. Eventually the realiza-
tion may arise that life is not always — or even often — enjoyable, and so the
belief that life brings enjoyment simply of itself begins to fade. Enjoyment is
no longer to be found immediately in the experience, but reflectively. One
now becomes aware of one's enjoyment, and thus begins to enjoy one's enjoy-
ment — one enjoys oneself. This enjoyment is still connected to the external
world because 'although he, as he says, enjoys himself only in the enjoyment,
but the enjoyment itself is linked to an external condition'.
Since the external world has let one down so many times, the capacity to
lose oneself completely in the world is weakened. This shows that a separation
has taken place — however small and ethically insignificant between the
64 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
external and internal, so that there is a recognition that the self is somewhat
disconnected from the external. The importance of this is that the conditions of
enjoyment can, to some extent, be discarded, so that one is not so easily
amused by bread and circuses. One's tastes become more refined, and there is
a desire for higher forms of amusement. What the moment offers is no longer
enough, because one knows it will more than likely leave one dissatisfied and
even bored in the end; therefore, one dresses up what the moment gives,
adding to it through reflection, and enjoying oneself reflectively. Through
the despair of pure immediacy, one has learned that the world does not
always flow with milk and honey, no guarantees have been handed out by exis-
tence, and so one must learn to intercede on one's behalf. Still, the purpose of
such a life-view, no matter how much it is couched in the language of self-
development (see, for instance, Oprah], is still enjoyment within the temporal,
and so remains enamoured by a temporal goal.
This life-view also ends in a particular type of despair, which Anti-climacus
calls the despair of'reflective immediacy'. Whereas pure immediacy comple-
tely identified itself with the world, and thus could only sense its despair when
the world dealt it a blow, reflective immediacy has come to realize that its self
is 'essentially different from the environment and the external world and their
effect upon it'.15 Thus a small amount of reflection becomes the basis for this
despair. This can happen in two ways. First, the self may reflect upon itself in
terms of its situation, and come to recognize weaknesses and imperfections
that make it recoil.1 As in all cases of spiritless despair, its despair is in its
unwillingness to be itself, to own this less-than-adequate self. The second way
it despairs is through its imagination, which is able to discover a possibility
that would wrench it out of its immediate contact with the world. Perhaps it
reflects on a possible physical illness, or a failure in some worldly endeavour.
Whatever it may be, this reflection causes it to despair.
In all this, however, the aesthete remains in immediacy in a very important
sense: the thought of the possibility of a catastrophe or failure is still always
related to the external world. The weakness found is seen as something to des-
pair over only because one is still relating to the world in an immediate way.
Reflective immediacy is too possessed by the finite to venture into the infinite
in any ethical sense:
The difficulty he has stumbled on requires a complete break with immedi-
acy, and he does not have the self-reflection or the ethical reflection for that.
He has no consciousness of a self that is won by infinite abstraction from all
externality. This self, naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self
of immediacy. 17
Thus, although one has a sense of being separate from the world, a com-
plete break with it has not been achieved, and so one cannot stop seeking one's
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 65
nourishment from the world. In the end, one still loves the world too much to
give it up.
Anti-climacus uses an analogy to clarify what is happening within reflective
immediacy:
His relation to the self is like that of a man to his place of residence which
may come to disgust him because of the smoke or whatever other reason.
So he leaves it, but he does not move away, he does not establish a new resi-
dence, he continues to regard the old one as his address, he reckons the pro-
blem will pass. So too with the person in despair. As long as the difficulty
remains, he dares not (as the saying so suggestively puts it) 'come to
himself; he does not want to be himself. But no doubt it will vanish, perhaps
it will change, the sombre possibility will surely be forgotten.
The despair has become more personal at this point, in that the self is becom-
ing something over which one despairs, though the self is still not self-conscious
enough to remain with itself, and to face its failures in any decisive manner.
If the difficulty does not pass, it may decide to give up reflection and this whole
business of inwardness, diving back into pure immediacy, and again lose itself
in the world and its desires. If, however, it has sufficient strength to stay with
the difficulty, it may move into a deeper form of aestheticism ('despair itself),
where the knowledge of human failings and weaknesses actually become a
source of enjoyment. At this level, the self is no longer at stake in the fortunes
and misfortunes of external circumstances, because it recognizes that all of
existence ends in misfortune. Still, it does not give up the view that the purpose
of life is enjoyment. The aesthete has recognized the despair of finding life in
external conditions, though this recognition is not grasped in a way that the
aesthetic existence itself is despaired of. True to the aesthetic stage of existence,
the aesthete has found this despair to be interesting. Although such
aesthetes' thinking and art may reach depths beyond any of their predecessors,
both the philosopher and artist stand 'outside' existence as observers and non-
participants (that is, remain indifferent to their own existences), and so
remain within the aesthetic stage.
Thus, the aesthete may come to the place of recognizing the meaningless-
ness, incoherence, and emptiness of the aesthetic existence. The author of
Part I of Either/Or is called simply 'A', and is a representative of the aesthetic
stage of existence. He writes,
When I was very young, I forgot in the Trophonean cave how to laugh; when
I became an adult, when I opened my eyes and saw actuality, then I started
to laugh and have not stopped laughing since that time. I saw that the mean-
ing of life was to make a living, its goal to become a councilor, that the
rich delight of love was to acquire a well-to-do girl, that the blessedness of
friendship was to help each other in financial difficulties, that wisdom was
whatever the majority assumed it to be, that enthusiasm was to give a
speech, that courage was to risk being fined ten dollars, that cordiality was
to say 'May it do you good' after a meal, that piety was to go to communion
once a year. This I saw, and I laughed. 21
While A can see through the shallowness of the lowest levels of love, friendship,
passion, courage, cordiality and religion he is much too cynical to see the pos-
sibility of any higher manifestations of these human pursuits. He can access
and understand them only in regards to his low conception of human exis-
tence. All higher ideals appear to be nonsense to him, because they are beyond
his meaning-structure.
Kierkegaard calls this type of recognition of meaninglessness 'finite resigna-
tion', because the aesthete does not resign the finite for the sake of something
higher - namely, to become himself- but does so for the sake of enjoying the
finite.22 The irony in this situation is that, although A realizes nothing in
the finite can satisfy him, this very thought does, somehow, satisfy him. In the
initial stage of finite resignation, there can be a light-heartedness that takes
nothing seriously, and often such aesthetes can have an amazing sense of
humour, as they make light of, and show the insignificance of others' self-
importance and pretentiousness. In all of this, however, the aesthete is evading
the task of becoming a self. A uses his laughter in order to cover over what is
missing in his life: because his life is empty, all of existence becomes trivial
for him, a mere joke for his own amusement. He finds great satisfaction in his
ability to see what others cannot recognize, and pats himself on the back for
his astute observations of the finer nuances of this great comedy. In all this,
however, A laughs to hide his fear: he does not have the courage to appropriate
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 67
the despair existentially, because when he does he will have transcended the
aesthetic stage, and will have surrendered enjoyment as the meaning of life.
As finite resignation increases, the greatest danger the aesthete faces is bore-
dom, and so this dark spiritlessness drinks from the cup of enjoyment in ever
deeper gulps in its attempt to escape boredom's persevering encroachment;
this, in turn, causes the cup to be emptied even quicker. Spiritlessness finds it
more and more difficult to be interested in anything for very long, and must
have a constant flow of novelty. There is a growing hunger, which nothing in
the world seems to satisfy, and yet which demands a constant flow of new
diversions. As something new is discovered, it is ravenously seized upon;
then, when it has been consumed, the spiritless person again sinks into inactiv-
ity, not out of satisfaction, but in a boredom that remains starved.
At this point life becomes a dark comedy, and this darkness provides the
sustenance the aesthete desires. A begins to feed off the intense feelings of
the darker and more sorrowful aspects of life. He writes, 'Life for me has
become a bitter drink, and yet it must be taken in drops, slowly, counting.' 23
He feels alive only in the midst of his pain. It is not surprising, then, that
depression becomes a constant — and often welcome - companion. A says,
'My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known no wonder, then,
that I return the love.' Depression becomes a refreshing relief from the dry-
ness of existence. Pain and sorrow at least have an intensity desire can latch
onto, while the malaise of a lukewarm existence feels like death. And so A wel-
comes pain as a relief. He writes,
Cornelius Nepos tells of a general who was kept confined with a consider-
able cavalry regiment in a fortress; to keep the horses from being harmed
because of too much inactivity, he had them whipped daily in like
manner, I live in this age as one besieged, but lest I be harmed by sitting
still so much, I cry myself tired.
In its most intense forms, the aesthete may seek out physical pain as a means of
relief from the encroaching consciousness of despair.
The aesthete at this level has too much reflection to go back to pure imme-
diacy, and yet all enjoyment has been sucked out of life. In the face of this des-
pair, the Judge gives some strange advice: Choose despair! The Judge tells A to
choose himself in his eternal validity - the task of self-becoming - by choosing
despair. A is to leap into the ethical stage of existence by despairing of the aes-
thetic life. He must appropriate the despair into himself, thus moving beyond
it. Choosing despair is a choice for becoming oneself, and for gaining one's
personality, by gathering oneself away from the multiplicity of immediacy.
In choosing despair one 'activates' one's will for the first time, gathering one's
life around this absolute choice. In reality, choosing despair is not something
an aesthete does, it is an ethical act.
68 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
direction of one's life (to the personality, or the self one is), then one remains
hidden in dreams, terror and depression. Thus, Kierkegaard does not regard
doubt as a sign of intellectual freedom (freedom from prejudices, ideologies
and so forth), but as that which oppresses, entraps and keeps one from acting.
Despair, then, is the personality's unwillingness to give birth to itself because
of its doubt and fear its lack of faith, if you will. This doubt is not broken by
methodically working through life's uncertainties — which would be an end-
less task anyway. To choose despair is to take hold of one's existential doubt
in a free resolution. In this choice one moves beyond personality's doubt into
the openness of freedom and self-knowledge. This break is not done quantita-
tively - through a methodical building up of knowledge - but through a leap.
The Judge tells A, 'Generally speaking a person cannot despair, a person
must will it; but when he truly wills it, he is truly beyond despair. When a
person has truly chosen despair, he has chosen what despair chooses: himself
in his eternal validity.' 29
Self-Knowledge
As always, this process is not simply about choice (freedom), but also about
self-consciousness. A needs to come to the point where he understands despair,
not as something suffered from outside, but as a matter of the self. He inter-
prets the despair he feels as coming from the world, and so the world becomes
his enemy that which brings trouble and boredom, and thwarts his attempts
at enjoyment. Because his focus remains in the world, he is oblivious to the true
abode of despair. He does not recognize that the 'job' of despair - one of its
formative lessons — is to destroy his immediate relation to the world, so that
he can find himself and his task. A realizes the meaninglessness of the aesthetic
existence, but rather than actively shouldering this despair, he passively suf-
fers under it. He has no sense of what leaping out of the aesthetic stage would
mean for his life, and this 'unknown' fills him with dread (angst). In a sense, he
is unconsciously fighting for his life — that is, to keep the only view of life he has
ever known.
In choosing despair, one becomes conscious of how much one has been
fighting the task of self-becoming. Jeremy Walker, in his book Kierkegaard:
The Descent into God, says that 'the first important outcome of the project of
self-knowledge is the knowledge that one is essentially opposed to the whole
project'/ In other words, one's ignorance of one's self or lack of self — is a
'willed' ignorance; one is choosing to ignore oneself. The movement out of des-
pair, and actually part of the work of despair, is to become conscious of this
self-deceit. The first movement of self-knowledge is to recognize and admit
the barriers one builds to this knowledge. There is no doubt that one knows
things about oneself, but this accidental self-knowledge is only knowledge of
70 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
the self's relation to what is not the self— the world. An inauthentic self-
knowledge is nothing but a mask behind which the self can hide from itself.
Genuine self-knowledge is knowledge of the self s relation to itself. At this
point, the aesthete must allow 'the power of despair . . . [to] consume every-
thing until he finds himself in his eternal validity . . . because the one who des-
pairs finds the eternal human being'.
oneself completely over to temporality's goal, and that this 'giving oneself over
completely' is actually to despair of eternity's goal. Kierkegaard writes,
[T]he sufferer himself is a synthesis of the temporal and eternal. If now tem-
porality inflicts upon him the greatest loss it is able to inflict, then the issue is
whether he, traitorous to himself and to eternity, will give temporality's loss
the power to become something totally different from what it is, whether he
will lose the eternal, or whether he, true to himself and the eternal, does not
allow temporality's loss to become anything else for him than what it is, a
temporal loss. If he does this, then the eternal within him has won the vic-
tory. To let go of the lost temporal thing in such a way that it is lost only temporally, to
lose the lost temporal thing only temporally, is a qualification of the eternal
within the loser, is the sign that the eternal within him has been victorious.
On the other hand, in bestowing the temporal with eternal value, one does not
value the eternal at all, and has, in a deeper sense, lost the eternal - despaired
of the eternal. One is not earnest about oneself, but has fixed 'a temporal loss
eternally fast in your soul'. J When one comes to see that 'despair' over a tem-
poral loss is actually despair over the eternal, a deeper understanding of the
true nature of despair has been gained. One finally realizes it is not the world
one despairs over, but one despairs over oneself - one despairs over the self one
is, and so is unwilling to be oneself.
This consciousness of despair, and the concomitant choosing of it, is the nega-
tive aspect of choosing oneself. As long as A is simply 'in despair', he despairs
over the world, and remains immediately connected to it. If he would choose
despair, however, he would change the direction of his life from the immediate
and the temporal, and begin to move toward freedom, transparency, and him-
self in his eternal validity. This is to discover that the self is more than the sum
total of its relationships to things within the world.
In the Postscript, Climacus says that 'The ethicist has despaired. . . . In despai
he has chosen himself... . Through this choice and in this choice he becomes
open.'' What is this openness? Later Climacus writes, 'With the passion o
the infinite, the ethicist in the moment of despair has chosen himself out
of the terror of having himself, his life, his actuality, in esthetic dreams, in
depression, in hiddenness.' 37 One chooses oneself out of the hiddenness,
where everything is done behind masks. In coming out of hiding into openness,
one becomes open to one's task the very thing one was hiding from. The self
is open to receiving its task, and so is open to the light that will bring more
self-knowledge.
72 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
This is no easy choice. The Judge says that it is 'an act that takes all the
power and earnestness and concentration of the soul'.38 This is because it is
the self's first real act, an act rising up from within the self, apart from any
other propulsion, if you will. In the aesthetic stage the self reacts, being
moved by the determination of the sensual desires over which it has no control.
In choosing despair one chooses by the determination of one's own will. The
Judge says, reminiscent of what was discussed in The Sickness Unto Death as des-
pair of the earthly in toto,
When I despair over losing the whole world, I damage my soul, for I make it
finite in the very same way, since here again I see my soul is established by
the finite.... Every finite despair is a choice of the infinite, for I choose it just
as much when I attain it as when I lose it, for my attaining is not under my control,
but my choosing it certainly is. Finite despair is, therefore, an unfree despair; it
does not actually will despair, but it wills the finite, and this is despair.39
When one wills and is lost in the finite, one is bound by necessity, by fate, and
ultimately by its triviality. When I despair of it by choosing it, then I, for the
first time, take control of the direction of my life, for I am no longer bound by
what is external to me, but bind myself to myself in my eternal validity -
I bind myself to the Good. I am no longer defined by what is not me, but begin
to define myself in terms of my task. To 'choose despair' is an act of resolve, in
which a person 'chooses himself in his eternal validity'.
Notes
1. SUD,p. 72.
2. Kierkegaard discusses his use of pseudonyms in 'A First and Last Explanation'
(CUP, pp. 625-30). Since at this point the movement between the existence-
stages becomes crucial for our examination of evil, I will begin to use the pseudo-
nyms' names when pointing to specific books.
3. E / O I I , p . 179.
4. E / O I I , p . 180.
5. E / O I I , p . 183.
6. SUD, p. 73.
7. SUD, p. 76.
8. Blaise Pascal. Pensees. Trans. A. J. Krailsheimer. New York: Penguin, 1984, p. 88.
Kierkegaard echoes Pascal's sentiments concerning diversions: 'Or perhaps he
tries to keep his own condition in the dark by diversions and other means, for
example, work and pressure of business, as ways of distracting attention, though
again in such a way that he is not altogether clear that he is doing it to keep himself
in the dark' (SUD, pp. 78-9).
The Despair of the Aesthetic Stage of Existence 73
Choosing Freedom
I choose myself absolutely, and yet only the self, as absolute, is able to make such
an absolute choice. I, in one and the same act, choose the absolute and become
the absolute that does the choosing. Here, again, we find the paradox of the
self-positing of the self. The paradox consists in the fact that, while what is
chosen already exists - otherwise it would not be chosen, but created - it comes
into existence only by my choosing it: 'It is, for if it were not I could not choose it;
it is not, for it first comes into existence through my choosing it, and otherwise
my choice would be an illusion.'
What the absolute choice brings into existence — though does so only as
already existing — isfreedom. When I choose myself as free, I do not create free-
dom, because if it did not already exist, I could not choose it; yet this freedom
does not exist until I choose it. Further, this choice is more than simply a choice
concerning abstract freedom, it is a choice to become oneself:
He chooses himself - not in the finite sense, for then this 'self would indeed
be something finite that would fall among all the other finite things — but in
the absolute sense, and yet he does choose himself and not someone else. .. .
This self has not existed before, because it came into existence through the
choice, and yet it has existed, for it was indeed 'himself
[Wjhat is it, then, that I choose - is it this or that? No, for I choose abso-
lutely, and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to choose
this or that, I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in
my eternal validity. Something other than myself I can never choose as
absolute, for if I choose something else, I choose it as something finite and
consequently do not choose it absolutely.''
The phrase 'eternal validity' does not speak to some substance of the self that I
choose, but speaks to my essence as freedom. Freedom becomes, for the first
time, my responsibility and task. I give myself the task of becoming myself —
becoming more free and more transparent as spirit.
The problem of evil arises around this issue of self-possession. As tradition-
ally conceived, evil is problematic because it is difficult to determine where a
rebellion against Being can originate. If it originates in Being itself, how can it
be considered a rebellion against Being? Whatever exists is within Being, and
so would be within the inner necessity of Being — would be a part of its order,
and so, it seems, could not be a rebellion against this order. Thus, according to
the traditional view, evil, as a rebellion against Being could not exist — that is,
evil is a privation or lack of Being, a movement into nothingness and nones-
sence. But is evil really devoid of essence?
The description of freedom as an absolute self-positing is the answer ideal-
ism gives to this question. Idealism came to see that the Being of humans is
freedom, which means that this Being itself is to be chosen. For Schelling,
man posits freedom by his own deed, a deed that is possible only through
76 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
freedom. This is what Kierkegaard is struggling to make clear through Judge
Wilhelm's ethical understanding of existence. Kant and Schelling were able to
resolve the difficulties inherent in this self-positing by pointing beyond time.
In other words, by the time we philosophers come upon the issue, the positing
has already taken place in the eternal - it is, in an important sense,finished,in
that freedom has already been posited. Kierkegaard, however, believes this
choice takes place in time, at the moment when one takes hold of oneself, and
determines one's essence as free. In this, one determines oneself for the first
time by taking possession of oneself. Only in this choice is the inner necessity
of one's Being determined from oneself.
It is in this self-determination, which is a part of the inner necessity of Being,
that a rebellion against Being can find its place. As a dissolubility between the
dark depths and the light of reason, the inner necessity of Being dictates
(ordains) that I should have the ability to determine my own inner necessity
apart from the universal will of Being itself, for I exist as the contradiction of
the deepest pit and the highest heaven. It is this prescribed inner necessity
of Being that allows for the possibility of radical evil: I have been granted,
from Being itself, the possibility of determining myself in opposition to the
universal will of Being. This possibility arises from the structure of the self,
a structure in which the self is born out of the principle of contradiction
through which I must choose myself: 'whereas nature is created from nothing,
whereas myself as immediate personality am created from nothing, I as free
spirit am born out of the principle of contradiction or am born through my
choosing myself.'
As we move deeper into an understanding of the self in terms of conscious-
ness and freedom, we will find an intensification of the self around its relation
to the Good. Although the ethical is usually viewed as the highest relation to
the Good, we will find areas of evasion that show the ultimate despair of this
relation. To discover this we must examine Kierkegaard's analysis of the ethi-
cal stage of existence.
The Transformation of Existence: The Actual and the Ideal; The Particular and
the Universal
For the aesthete, the task of existence is to find means of enjoyment, and a
pleasant (secure and comfortable) existence. In ethical self-choice the task
changes, in that one recognizes oneself as a task to be taken up and performed.
The self is both the task and that which fulfils the task. !! Thus, in this absolute
self-choice, I come to myself as both actual and ideal. Above it was said that
the self becomes pregnant with itself in the ethical self-choice. This is possible
because one is always both the actual and the ideal, but only potentially so.
This ideal remains as a mere potential until one gives it to oneself.12 The
self's ethical task is to actualize this ideal in the concrete contents and situa-
tions of its life. The Judge says,
What he wants to actualize is certainly himself, but it is his ideal self, which
he cannot acquire anywhere else but within himself. If he does not hold
firmly to the truth that the individual has the ideal self within himself, all
of his aspiring and striving becomes abstract.
The ideal does not exist out beyond the stars, disconnected from the indivi-
dual, in which case the individual's task would be to claw his or her way to
some abstract ideal. We possess an inner teleology that fits with the concrete
contents of our individual lives. This means the ideal is intimately connected
to the finite contents that make up the material self.
How do I know or discover who I am to become? How do I know the direc-
tion that will ennoble my talents, capacities and other such concrete contents?
The Judge answers these questions vaguely, stating that it is the ideal of every
human being to become the 'paradigmatic human being': 'Every person,
if he so wills, can become a paradigmatic human being, not by brushing offhis
accidental qualities, but by remaining in them and ennobling them. But he
ennobles them by choosing them.' 14 The ethical individual has a vision of the
ideal as the paradigmatic human being, and the task of the self is to actualize
Ethical Self-Choice 79
this ideal. Another way to say this is that one is, as a particular individual, to
become the universal individual. This is not to become someone completely
different, as though one dies to one's particularity to become the universal.
One does not throw off all one's aesthetic concretions, but gets under them,
and emerges through them. The Judge describes this transformation as self-
becoming because the universal human being is within the individual as a
potentiality:
[T]o transform himself into the universal human being is possible only if I
already have it within myself Kara Sufa^if [potentially]. .. . If the univer-
sal human being is outside, there is only one possible method, and that is
to take off my entire concretion. This striving out into the unconstraint
of abstraction is frequently seen. . . . But that is not the way it is. In the act of
despair, the universal human being came forth and now is behind the con-
cretion and emerges through it.
The person who lives ethically will also be careful about choosing his place
properly, but if he detects that he has made a mistake, or if obstacles are
raised that are beyond his control, he does not lose heart, for he does not
surrender sovereignty over himself. He promptly sees his task and therefore is in
action without delay.
Although his task may begin in the sorrow of repentance, as sovereign and self-
sufficient, he is to act in such a way that this split within his personality is
healed, and he again becomes a well-integrated whole.
The Judge is confident of the ultimate victory of the ethical life. If it could
not be victorious, then the personality is not absolute — is not its own objec-
tive. This would be to confess that the aesthetic stage of existence is the truly
consistent stage. To believe there is a place where the self is not self-determined
is to confess that ultimately the self is not free — that freedom is not its
essence and is bound by the whims of circumstances. In order for the ethical
stage to be consistent, personality must be absolute, and must determine the
world, rather than being determined by the world. If there is any area where
the personality is not self-determinative, then it is no longer absolute, but is
conditioned by that which constitutes its failure to achieve continuity.
The authentic purpose of the ethical stage is not to find existential victory or
repose in the ideal, but to gather the individual from lostness in the world.
The ideal within the ethical stage lifts the face upward, ennobling the indi-
vidual's stature. The self is no longer shuffling along with its head down,
focused on dust. Its gaze has been raised to a much broader horizon, and
this lifting of the gaze is the task of the ethical. However, to believe that the
ability to lift one's gaze is somehow a sign of one's capacity to put one's life in
order - to bring order to all one sees within the horizon - is a mistake, and a
source of despair.
Self-Sufficiency
Self-sufficiency with regard to the task of the self is always defiance. Glenn
writes,
The ethical is the universal and as such, in turn, the divine. It is therefore
correct to say that all duty is ultimately duty to God; but if one cannot say
more one says in effect that really I have no duty to God. The duty becomes
duty to God by being referred to God, but I do not enter into relation with
God in the duty itself.
Duty finds its essence in being traced back to God in the sense that he estab-
lished the relationship of the self to itself (established the inner teleology),
and so ordained the self as that which gives itself the task of becoming itself.
84 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
However, when duty becomes the emphasis - as it always does for the ethical
stage - then God becomes unnecessary. The ethical stage sets up a kind of
Deistic notion of God with regards to the self. Just as Deists view God as a
being who created the universe, set it in motion, and then left it to itself in
order to run according to its own efficient mechanisms, so the ethicist views God
as having created the self and its relations, thus allowing the self to fulfil itself
according to the freedom given to it by God - that is, by its own sufficient capa-
cities. The Deistic God is needed to establish everything, but once this is done,
he becomes superfluous to its ongoing movement - its becoming. Just as the
universe has been given the requisite conditions for continuing in its eternal,
circular motions, so too, according to the Judge, the self has been given the
requisite conditions for fulfilling itself. And so de Silentio says that in the
ethical stage,
Because the self is self-contained, this containment defines and fills all exis-
tence. God becomes defined and related to in terms of how he fits into the
notion of duty. This is what is meant by saying that God is not related from
interiority, but only through the exteriority of duty. Ethics cannot compre-
hend anything outside its own demand, and so it cannot recognize any telos
beyond itself. De Silentio says that ethics 'rests immanently in itself, has noth-
ing outside itself that is its telos but is itself the telos for everything outside, and
when that is taken up into it, it has no further to go'.23
The ethical seeks to bring the self into repose by confining it in the straight-
jacket of the universal. But then there is no breathing room for spirit. By seek-
ing to tame and constrain spirit, it disregards the self as both the highest
heaven and the deepest pit. Or more to the point, it believes the deepest pit
can be fully integrated into the highest heaven. The deepest pit, however,
cannot be overcome in self-choice; it cannot, by power of the human will, be
forced to conform to the universal will. The longings and cravings of the dee-
pest pit continually attach to certain objects or actions to which a person
becomes addicted. The Judge is optimistic that all these areas will soon be
brought under the universal, and just this is his despairing evasion of reality.
Gerald May, a psychiatrist who has written extensively on addiction, notes in
his book Addiction and Grace, 'For the addicted person . . . struggling only with
Ethical Self-Choice 85
willpower, desire to continue the addiction will win. It will win because . . . it is
always operative. Willpower and resolutions come and go, but the addictive
process never sleeps.' No human is strong enough to get under, and shoulder
the dark ground. It is infinite in depth, and never rests in its demand for
satisfaction. True, we may be able to behave, to act as if we have integrated
our wild longings into our meaning structure, but if they are not truly trans-
formed (if they are only subdued), they will eventually find an opportunity
to seek satisfaction. The problem the ethicist faces is not that he or she has
occasional lapses (as the Judge believes), but that the 'process never sleeps'.
The task of spirit, then, is not to enslave the dark energies under the power of
the highest heaven, because this cannot be done, and any attempt to do so
will end in despair.
By its continual failures, the self shows it is not absolute in this task, and
remains relative and contingent: it can fulfil the ethical ideal only to a certain
degree. Thus, in its despair, it seeks to dissolve the painful tension by relating
to only one pole of the self. While the spiritlessness of the aesthetic stage relates
only to the longing and cravings of the self, the ethical stage relates only to
the call of duty. The ethical stage has done its work in awakening the self
to the universal (to that which is above the cravings and longings of the parti-
cular will), though it becomes blind to the power of its original darkness, and
to the inability of primordial longing to be satisfied in resolutions and 'abso-
lute' choices. As Berdyaev says, 'Man is a free being and there is in him an
element of primeval, uncreated, pre-cosmic freedom. But he is powerless to
master his own irrational freedom and its abysmal darkness. This is his peren-
nial tragedy.'
This darkness is not revealed until the end of the ethical stage, when its
attempt to tame this wild, seething cauldron of forces by its own strength
ends in despair. One of the tasks of the ethical stage is to bringjust this darkness
to light, and it does this very well. If one remains earnest in the task of self-
becoming, then by the end of the ethical stage one comes to realize just how
infinitely wild and dark the human heart is, and much of the early optimism
begins to fade, being replaced by guilt and judgement.
The basic characteristic of the ethical situation is that full justice can never
be done to ethical demands. Being universal in nature, ethical rules set up a
horizon towards which the ethical personality strives without ever being
86 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
able to reach it. The expression for this situation is guilt for guilt is an ethical
determination, the ethical expression for ethical failure. But guilt is also the
extreme point of ethics, the point at which ethics is destroyed. The magni-
tude of guilt that is the inevitable result of a strictly ethical point of view is
staggering to the subject. He is lost in the sheer impossibility of the ethical
demands. At this point a new leap takes place.28
None of us are truly naive enough to believe that we always measure up to the
ethical demand, but we do not always see the infinite gap between the require-
ment and where we stand; we believe that freedom is able to span the separa-
tion between what we should be and what we actually are. The Judge believes
that he is able to fulfil the demands of ethics through free resolutions. For
instance, the guilt of lust can be overcome by the resolution to love only one,
and this resolution is expressed in the duty of marriage. If he did not believe
this, then he would not be in the ethical stage, but the aesthetic. The longings
and cravings that drive the aesthetic individual must be transformed through
the power of freedom and the light of reason by willing the universal. Desire,
which before had been a wild force, enslaving one under its power, becomes
tamed and made beautiful by the power of ethical freedom. George Connell
points out, however,
While this optimism about the human condition is the basis for ethical
endeavor, the repeated process of resolution and failure makes the self
increasingly recognize the depth of its guilt. Thus, the collapse of the ethical
caused by bringing the self to the threshold of the discovery of sin can, in a
sense, also be described as its culmination. . . . [The] ethical stage is an
unstable form of selfhood; it naturally develops toward immanent religious-
ness if the self is honest with itself.29
Instead of leading to a right relation with the particular and universal, the
ethical stage actually increases the tension. As freedom and transparency
become awakened and increased, it is much more difficult to hide failures
from oneself. It is not much different from what happens as one increases
one's knowledge in certain areas: the more one learns, the more one discovers
how little one knows. In terms of the ethical: the more one actualizes the ideal,
the more one discovers how far one truly is from actualizing the ideal. This
tension finds its highest pitch in the consciousness of sin. Sin is a religious
category, and as such, is a category upon which ethics becomes shipwrecked:
ethics is incapable of dealing with sin, because it is outside its sphere of influ-
ence. Ethics may understand individual sins, or the breaking of individual
laws and rules, but the category of sin is totalizing, in that sin is a state of
being. It is this state of sin that ethics is incapable of comprehending, except
as that which is its limit. Haufniensis writes,
Ethical Self-Choice 87
Sin, then, belongs to ethics only insofar as upon this concept it is ship-
wrecked with the aid of repentance. If ethics is to include sin, its ideality
comes to an end. The more ethics remains in its ideality, and never becomes
so inhuman as to lose sight of actuality . . . the more it increases the tension of
the difficulty. 31
Ethics, then, is not that which actualizes the ideal, but it brings about the col-
lision and tension between the ideal and the actual. The Judge speaks about
the particular and universal as if the positing of the self in ethical self-choice
necessarily brings about a reconciliation between the actual and the ideal.
He acts as if the ability to bring the actual and ideal together in a single sen-
tence is a sign that they can be held together in existence, if only enough ethical
passion is present. And yet, as transparency progresses, the individual comes
to discover how really impotent are the ethical passions and resolutions. What
the ethical ideal actually accomplishes (its true task), is to bring to light the
religious ideality as the ideality that can be actualized. In the end, ethics is a
stage that points beyond itself. Its ideal cannot be actualized, and so it points
to that upon which it is shipwrecked. The ideal is not abandoned in the reli-
gious stage, nor is it lowered; the ideal remains just as stringent, but an indivi-
dual's relationship to it is transformed by the leap into the religious stage.
In bumping up against the religious stage, the ethical comes in contact
with categories that suspend it. Those with even a limited acquaintance with
Kierkegaard have heard faith described as the ideological suspension of the
ethical, in which one apprehends an absolute duty to God', however, Kierke-
gaard also stresses sin as that which suspends the ethical. Climacus writes in
the Postscript:
The ideological suspension of the ethical must have an even more definite
religious expression. The ethical is then present at every moment with its
infinite requirement, but the individual is not capable of fulfilling it. This
powerlessness of the individual must not be seen as an imperfection in the
continued endeavor to attain an ideal, for in that case the suspension is no
more postulated than the man who administers his office in an ordinary way
is suspended.
Although the ethical is not completely ignorant of its guilt, it is, by its
very nature, optimistic of the possibility of fulfilling its task. As we know,
according to the traditional formulation of evil, guilt is seen as a weakness
of will; ethics is optimistic this weakness can be overcome by positing the
absolute, and through resolutions. Kierkegaard, however, does not view
the problem as simply weakness of will — whatever that may be — but as
a radical, ontological opposition to the ethical requirement, which 'is sin as a
state in a human being'.
Against the persistence of the state of sin in which humans find themselves,
the spiritless answer is to lower the requirement to a place where people can
reach it. This is no longer an option for the ethical, since it has become too
much of a self for such a digression. 5 The ethical stage's initial answer to fail-
ure is repentance, and so it returns to this repentance after every failure.
Repentance
Kierkegaard holds that ethics is shipwrecked with the 'aid of repentance'.
What does this mean? Repentance is the means through which the ethical
seeks to gain control of its past failures. By repenting of its guilt, it accepts
its responsibility, and then seeks to transform itself into the universal. The
problem is that repentance can only deal with guilt by sorrowing over it,
and has no power over the possibility of future guilt. Ethical repentance
is never able to get ahead of guilt, but must always follow behind it. This
is its grief. In the face of its failures, the highest the ethical can attain is to
grieve over its guilt — it cannot do away with it. As the sense of guilt increases
with a greater self-consciousness, one expends all one's energy repenting.
In Fear and Trembling, de Silentio says that the ethicist, 'can make the move-
ment of repentance under his own power, but he also uses absolutely all his
power for it and therefore cannot possibly come back under his own power
and grasp actuality again'.36 Sorrow over failure is 'the deepest ethical self-
contradiction'. There comes a point when the ethical has reached its
limit, and the continual sorrow over its ethical failure leads freedom back into
necessity and fate.
Ethical Self-Choice 89
Kierkegaard comes at the same point from another direction in The Concept
of Anxiety. As long as the Judge stands firm in the conviction that the ethical
life will end in victory, the sorrow of repentance is sweet — like the sweet
aroma of a sacrifice given to the ethical requirement. Its sweetness is found in
being of one mind with the requirement, and knowing the requirement is
derived from within oneself as an inner teleology. As the ethical existence pro-
gresses, however, the state of sin becomes more and more disclosed. At first this
is not disclosed in consciousness, but in a disclosure arising from anxiety. The
sweet sorrow begins to turn more and more into dread, as a presentiment
that something deeper and uglier resides in the self than initially thought.
The original darkness and the universal are not so easily reconciled, and this
darkness demands to be affirmed as a part of the self. The tension of this inter-
nal contradiction begins to make itself known, and the ethicist senses the het-
erogeneity with the ethical requirement. Seeking to remain within the
universal, the ethicist's only course of action within this rising consciousness
of guilt is to repent. This repentance, however, leads the ethicist further and
further away from freedom - that is, deeper and deeper into the discovery of
the state of sin. As the tensions of the poles within the self begin to unravel,
anxiety takes hold of the individual. At this point, repentance is no longer a
means of freedom, but becomes the work of a slave. Haufniensis describes this
movement in The Concept of Anxiety:
The most terrible punishment for sin is the new sin. This does not mean that
the hardened, confident sinner will understand it this way. But if a man
shudders at the thought of his sin, if he would gladly endure anything
in order to avoid falling into the old sin in the future, then the new sin is the
most terrible punishment. There are collisions here (especially in the sphere
of sinful thoughts) in which anxiety over the sin can almost call forth the sin.
When this is the case, a desperate wrong turn may be made. Vigilius Hauf-
niensis described it thus: Repentance loses its mind.
De Silentio says people like Gloucester cannot be saved by fulfilling their civic
duty or by obeying the order of society: 'Ethics really only makes fun of
them.' 43 These 'half made up' human beings are not necessarily more imper-
fect than others, but they have become conscious of the contradiction of the
self, and their inability to reconcile their particularity with the universal.
The conscious realization that one cannot measure up begins to bring about
a break with the ethical/44
The more aware I was of goodness and of everything 'lofty and beautiful,'
the deeper I sank into my slime, and the more likely I was to get mired down
in it altogether. But the main point is that all seemed to take place within me
not by chance, but as though it had to be so.
The utmost extreme in this sphere is what is commonly called bestial perdi-
tion. In this state, the demonic manifests itself in saying, as did the demoniac
in the New Testament with regard to salvation: rie^oi KOti aoi [What have
I to do with you]? Therefore it shuns every contact [with the Good],
whether this actually threatens it by wanting to help it to freedom or only
touches it casually.. .. Therefore, from such a demoniac is quite commonly
heard a reply that expresses all the horror of this state: Leave me alone in my
wretchedness/52
Inclosing reserve yearns for solitude. This solitude is not the deeper spiritual
ability to be away from the world due to one's contentment with oneself, but is
a need to be alone with one's torment. Kierkegaard explains this need for soli-
tude in an Upbuilding discourse:' [T]he troubled person expects no victory; he
has all too sadly felt his loss, and even if it belongs to the past, he takes it along,
expecting the future will at least grant him peace to be quietly occupied with
his pain.' j3
A twisted knot becomes tightened within inclosing reserve: it despairs over
its weakness, and hates itself because of this weakness, and yet it cannot stop
reflecting on this weak self, becoming completely consumed with itself. This is
why Anti-climacus characterizes it as pride/ Inclosing reserve is proud of
itself: it is proud it cannot stand this weakness within itself. While one can
easily imagine a proud person saying to someone else, T am too good for
you', inclosing reserve says this to itself. It is proud of itself for having such a
high conception of what the self is, and of being conscious that its own self does
not measure up. It is proud of being determined by spirit, even though this
determination comes through its weakness.
Obviously, it does not completely identify itself with its weakness: in an eva-
sion of itself, it identifies itself more as that which is tormented by its weakness,
than by its actual weakness. It has moved beyond the ethical consciousness
94 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
into a consciousness that the Apostle Paul described in his letter to the
church in Rome:
For the good that I wish, I do not do; but I practice the very evil that I do
not wish. But if I am doing the very thing I do not wish, I am no longer the
one doing it, but sin which dwells in me. . . . Wretched man that I am! Who
will set me free from this body of death?
What makes inclosing reserve what it is, is that it does not ask the question
Paul asked - it does not seek to be free from its body of death. It despairs in
the face of the Good - abiding in its wretchedness - rather than maintaining
hope in the possibility of redemption.
This makes its relationship to the Good extremely complex. On the one
hand, the self desires to close itself off from any contact with the Good, because
this contact is its torment; on the other hand, this weakness is its source
of pride, and so it finds pleasure in it. The pleasure it feels is pride's self-
satisfaction that, although the self is weak against the Good, it is strong in
its consciousness of this misrelation to the Good. Its torment consists in its
unfree relation to the Good; its pleasure consists in its ability to 'rise above'
the weakness as self-consciousness. The torment and pleasure it feels over its
weakness is an expression of its contradiction as unfree self-consciousness. Dos-
toevsky's Underground Man expresses this pleasure of inclosing reserve:
This pleasure comes precisely from the sharpest awareness of your own degra-
dation; from the knowledge that you have gone to the utmost limit; that it is
despicable, yet cannot be otherwise; that you no longer have any way out,
that you will never become a different man; that even if there were still time
and faith enough to change yourself, you probably would not even wish to
change; and if you wished, you would do nothing about it anyway, because,
in fact, there is perhaps nothing to change to.
We see here a man who is falling in love with his despair, beginning to embrace
it with some gusto, and finding pleasure in his conscious misrelation to the
Ethical Self-Choice 95
Good. Indeed, even if there were time to change, he would probably not wish
to, since he has come to define himself through his despair. At this point, he is
unwilling to imagine moving beyond this despair, and is content to stay within
the horizons of inclosing reserve — his underground dwelling.
Kierkegaard says that the person in inclosing reserve has a right conscious-
ness about his or her weakness - Kierkegaard would find nothing wrong with
the consciousness of guilt described by the Apostle Paul. The wrong turn is
taken in trying to establish the self (one's identity) on the basis of this weak-
ness: 'you must go through with this despair of the self to get to the self. You
are quite right about the weakness, but that is not what you are to despair
over; the self must be broken down to become itself, just stop despairing over
it.' By both despairing over and loving its weakness (that is, finding its mean-
ing in its weakness), inclosing reserve does not move beyond it. It sees its weak-
ness as its only strength. It is not, however, to be strengthened in its weakness,
but broken by it; only in this way can it go beyond inclosing reserve into a
deeper consciousness of the self.
We find a clue to this movement in a letter written to Judge Wilhelm by an
old friend, who is now a priest in the Jutland of Denmark. The Priest's upbuild-
ing thought is that, in relation to God, we are always in the wrong. Although
this sermon is written by a Christian priest, it does not express the specifically
Christian existence; it is a movement into what Kierkegaard calls immanent
religion or Religiousness A. Immanent religion is part of the religious stage of
existence, though it is not a fully actualized spirit. In this stage the self becomes
conscious of total guilt, and so leaps into the infinite.
Total Guilt
There is a gnawing pain that accompanies the consciousness of one's own
weakness before the absolute, and there are also several means of finding
relief. We have already looked at two despairing attempts at relief: one may
96 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
evade the requirement by lowering it to an acceptable (that is, achievable)
level, or one may despair over one's weakness in inclosing reserve, thus gaining
some relief by having transcended the weakness in despair. The Priest adds a
third despairing means, which he calls doubt:
How can we ever determine whether we are in the right or in the wrong?
Where do I go outside of my existence in order to judge whether, and to what
extent, my existence measures up to the requirement? I can remember many
times when I have been either too harsh or too lenient with myself. The fact
that there is no way to get outside our existence in order to make such a judge-
ment can easily lead to doubt or scepticism - much as the Learner's Paradox
led to the Sophists' ethical scepticism. One becomes frozen in the knowledge of
being unable to make any judgement concerning one's standing ethically.
Since personality has no absolute or secure place to situate itself in existence,
one may come to believe that the ethical requirement is a subjective undertak-
ing, and the Good should be discussed only in emotive terms. Once this hap-
pens the doubt spirals out of control, and eventually the whole notion of the
Good dissolves into sophistry.
There is another approach, however: one can transcend the ethical stage
by appropriating the thought that 'in relation to God we are always in the
wrong', and so admits the defeat of the ethical stage. Louis Mackey says
'the Judge is no stranger to guilt. But he takes his guilt as a moral challenge,
when in fact he would be better advised to see it as a moral defect.' To bring
out why it is necessary to admit one's total guilt, the Priest describes how lovers
relate to each other when a wrong has been committed. He does this in order to
show that the Judge's attempts to justify his wrongs — and even his sorrow
over them - exhibit how little love he actually has for the absolute and God.
In reality the Judge is more impressed with himself and his own self-sufficiency
than with the demand of the requirement, though he continually tells others
about his love for the absolute. The Priest says that, when a wrong has been
committed, the heart of a true lover would never seek to be right in relation
to the beloved. It is hard to imagine a person in love seeking to shift blame to
the beloved, or trying to make excuses to the beloved for the wrong. The
Judge, however, in the midst of the wrong committed, maintains he is in
the right. He does not blame the absolute, but maintains that his sorrow over
Ethical Self-Choice 97
having committed his wrong shows he is not in conflict with the absolute.
He seeks to justify himself in the face of his failings. This conflict cannot be
overcome through justification, but only by confessing that one is always com-
pletely wrong in relation to it. Mackey writes:
[T]he priest tells his hearers, choose yourself. But choose yourself as you are:
in the wrong against God. You lose yourself eternally as long as you con-
tinue to absolutize your freedom. You gain yourself eternally as soon as
you recognize your nothingness. The decision for absolute guilt — and it is
a decision, not reached by calculation but taken in freedom - is the only
edifying (constructive) decision available. This is the act of freedom by
which a man's self acquires absolute worth: the choice of his self as worthless
in relation to God.
The Priest is accusing the Judge of being disingenuous toward the abso-
lute. The Judge claims to have chosen the absolute absolutely — that is, to be
in an infinite relation to it - and yet he is not. All ethical relationships are
finite and conditional in the sense that sometimes one is right and sometimes
wrong. In other words, one relates contingently to the absolute, for one some-
times does not relate to it rightly. The Judge seeks to cover this contingent
relationship by saying that even when he is wrong he sorrows over it. How-
ever, the Judge is sorrowful because he is not absolutely connected to the
absolute, and so shows that his relationship to the Good is contingent on
other things — for instance, his weakness, or the desires that are in opposition
to the absolute.
If one confesses one is always in the wrong in relation to the absolute, then
one absolutely relates to the absolute as absolutely in the wrong. In this confes-
sion the self becomes infinitized, and makes a passionate leap into the religious
stage of existence. The ethical existence is often nothing more than the worship
of one's own self-sufficiency and self-righteousness; it is simply the particular
will seeking to glorify itself by means of the universal will. The Priest says that
if the Judge were truly interested in himself as a task - in his eternal validity
98 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
and responsibility to the absolute — then he would choose what the Priest
espouses: total guilt. In this he would leap into the religious stage of existence,
and find himself as nothing before God, and yet still remain infinitely and
unconditionally engaged with Him.64
Notes
1. E/OII,p.211.
2. E/O II, pp. 213-14.
3. E/OII,p.215.
4. E/O II, p. 206 (my emphasis).
5. E/O II, p. 214.
6. E/O II, pp. 215-16.
7. E/O II, p. 177 (my emphasis).
8. Jeremy Walker says, 'The man who is living aesthetically may have a normally
clear and accurate picture of himself, his likes and dislikes, his talents, goals,
etc. But he will never have asked himself what it all means. So, naturally, he will
Ethical Self-Choice 99
be unable to answer the question that marks the ethical: What does your life
mean?' (p. 167).
9. E/OII,p.251.
10. E / O I I , p.251.
11. E / O I I , p. 262.
12. E / O I I , p. 259.
13. E / O I I , p. 259.
14. E / O I I , p. 262.
15. E/O II,pp. 261-2. Again, one senses the Aristotelian theme here of the fulfilment
of one's form through acts which are themselves the fulfilment of the form.
16. E/O II, p. 263.
17. E/O II, pp. 275-6.
18. E/O II, p. 330.
19. E/O II, p. 252 (my emphasis).
20. CA, p. 16.
21. John D. Glenn Jr. 'The Definition of the Self and the Structure of Kierkegaard's
Works' in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Sickness Unto Death. Ed.
Robert L. Perkins, pp. 5-21. Macon, GA: Mercer UP, 1987, pp. 14-15.
22. FT, p. 96.
23. FT, p. 96.
24. FT, p. 96.
25. FT, p. 82.
26. Gerald May. Addiction and Grace. San Francisco: Harper/Collins, 1988, p. 52.
27. Berdyaev, p. 103.
28. Michael Wyschogrod. Kierkegaard and Heidegger: The Ontology of Existence. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954, p. 88.
29. George Connell. To Be One Thing: Personal Unity in Kierkegaard's Thought. Macon,
GA: Mercer UP, 1985, p. 183.
30. Kierkegaard distinguishes between two modes of religious existence, which he
calls Religiousness A (immanent religion) and Religiousness B (paradoxical reli-
gion, or Christianity). Sin is a category of the latter, and is actually a category
that distinguishes it from Religiousness A (which knows only guilt, and not sin).
For our purposes, the religious stage will be dealt with more generally, and so
there will be a mixure of the two modes. The reason for this is because Kierke-
gaard's criticisms of the ethical stage are sometimes given from within the aspect
of Religiousness A and sometimes within Religiousness B. Since we are looking at
the despair of the ethical stage, and not specifically at these two modes of religious
existence, I will be using criticisms from both modes without explicitly distin-
guishing between them.
31. CA, pp. 17-19.
32. CUP, p. 266.
33. CUP, pp. 266-7.
34. CUP, p. 267.
35. 'The more ideal ethics is, the better. It must not permit itself to be distracted by
the babble that it is useless to require the impossible. For even to listen to such talk
100 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
is unethical and is something for which ethics has neither time nor opportunity.
Ethics will have nothing to do with bargaining; nor can one in this way reach
actuality' (CA, p. 17).
36. FT, pp. 99-100.
37. FT, p.98n.
38. CA, pp. 115-16.
39. This self-fulfilling prophecy could have many rationales behind it. For instance,
one's fixation on the ideal and one's continual failure may cause one to believe
that one cannot overcome the 'dependency' on alcohol, and so one simply
acquiesces. Or the alcohol itself becomes a means by which one tries to forget the
struggle. In either of these instances, there is a release which takes place. Even-
tually there must be relief from this situation, and since one does not have it in
oneself to fulfil the ideal, one succumbs to the temptation.
40. CA, p. 173.
41. For Kierkegaard, anxiety is rooted, as a concept, in an anxiousness over nothing.
This is contrasted with fear, which has a specific object.
42. FT, p. 130.
43. FT, p. 130.
44. This realization of being an exception is an initial break with the ethical; after
it, a further question arises as to whether one will make the break in defiance
or in faith. As yet that has not been decided. What one has become conscious
of, however, is that one is outside the universal. This consciousness of radical
guilt has the effect of making one a single individual, perhaps singled out for
all eternity.
45. JFY, p. 153.
46. By 'relatively conscious' I mean that it is not yet the defiance which draws its exis-
tence from its conscious hatred and despair of the Good.
47. CA, p. 123.
48. '[Ujnfreedom is a phenomenon of freedom and thus cannot be explained by nat-
uralistic categories. Even unfreedom uses the strongest possible expressions to
affirm that it does not will itself, it is untrue, and it always possesses a will that is
stronger than the wish' (CA, p. 135n).
49. CA, p. 123.
50. CA,p. 123.
51. Fydor Dostoevsky. Notes from Underground. Trans. Mirra Ginsburg. New York:
Bantam, 1992, p. 6 (my emphasis).
52. CA,p. 137.
53. EUD, p. 20.
54. SUD,p.96.
55. Romans 7:19-20, 24.
56. Dostoevsky, p. 12 (my emphasis).
57. Dostoevsky, p. 7 (my emphasis). While it is true that it is only through having
become spirit that these twisted knots begin to form in consciousness, it is not an
'excessive consciousness' that causes one's guilt, but the defiance and pride that
intensifies with this growing consciousness. The defiance and pride are present
Ethical Self-Choice 101
even at the lowest levels of (un)consciousness, but they become intensified and
felt - in all their torment and pleasure - as consciousness intensifies.
58. SUD,p.96.
59. E/O II, p. 346. The Priest is speaking directly to the Judge's own definition of
despair as personality's doubt. The question of guilt eventually becomes a ques-
tion of the degree of guilt. In seeking to assess the degree of guilt we arrive
nowhere else than in the personality's doubt, for it is unable to determine these
degrees from itself (unless it is willing to take the leap which consists in the abso-
luteness of the thought that in relation to God one is always in the wrong, which is
just what the Priest proposes).
60. Louis Mackey. Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva-
nia Press, 1971, p. 90.
61. E/O II, pp. 347-8.
62. Mackey, p. 94.
63. E/O II, p. 348.
64. JFY, p. 106.
65. E/O II, p. 353.
4
The Final Movement Toward Defiance: Infinite Resignation
What is stressed here is the individual's object of passion. The aesthetic person
is passionate about what is external, and will gladly and 'heroically' surrender
the self in order to gain this object of'infinite' worth; the ethical person has the
self as the object, and will gladly give up all in the world in order to gain this
o _ . . . *^
self. For the religious stage, the object of existential focus becomes God. It is
in focusing on what is beyond both the world and the self that the religious
existence arises.
A movement into the religious stage of existence prepares an individual to
be open to the highest human good. Kierkegaard believed that an individual's
will, passions and intellect are not initially set or prepared to receive the high-
est good.4 Self-becoming is just this preparation, whereby the individual is
continually transformed through an infinite movement away from the world
and self-sufficiency — that is, from what it is initially lost in. Kierkegaard
understood this preparation in terms of his Christian context, and so spoke of
the highest good as an eternal happiness expressed in a relationship with God,
which is viewed as the absolute telos of human life. Eternal happiness is a right
relation to the will of God - a right relation to the ground of our Being.
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 103
He believed that each of the stages has a relation to this eternal happiness,
which impacts a person's will, passions and intellect.
The aesthete views the eternal happiness as a great source of inspiration for
poetic, theatrical or philosophical works. This type of relation to an eternal
happiness is essentially disinterested: it is outside the poet as a muse, and not
as something which essentially alters or affects his or her existence. Aesthetes
are oblivious to their despair of the eternal, and simply seek the pleasure found
in the contemplation of an eternal happiness. What an eternal happiness may
actually mean for their lives is not something aesthetes find interesting.
The ethical stage places an eternal happiness alongside all the other aspects
of duty. It is a matter of interest, but only in its relation to the fulfilment of
one's inner teleology. In other words, an eternal happiness finds its relative
place within the overall ethical task of becoming oneself. Climacus writes,
I do not know whether one should laugh or weep on hearing the enumera-
tion: a good job, a beautiful wife, health, the rank of a councilor of justice —
and in addition an eternal happiness, which is the same as assuming that the
kingdom of heaven is a kingdom along with all the other kingdoms on earth
and that one would look for information about it in a geography book.
For the ethical person, an eternal happiness is something tacked on at the end
of a good life. One's main concern while living is the fulfilment of one's duty,
and if this is fulfilled - if one becomes the paradigmatic human being - then
an eternal happiness can be expected as a reward. Certainly the Judge will say
that he is interested in the Good, but he conceives the Good as inseparable
from the self, and understands it in terms of an inner teleology not some-
thing distinct from the individual as his or her ground. There is no sense of
standing before God as a single individual. One's responsibility is conceived in
terms of personal duty, not personal relationship.
Where does one find an eternal happiness when the awareness of total
guilt arises, and one admits to an inability to fulfil one's inner teleology?
If ethics doesn't lead to the highest human good, what does? In what does the
highest human good consist? An understanding of the highest human good
comes through a leap into the religious stage of existence, in which one is
transformed. The change is not merely, or even essentially, intellectual in
content, but existential — that is, it involves the whole person, and changes
one's relationship to the world, to oneself, and to God. Climacus says that
Religiousness A
does not base the relation to an eternal happiness upon one's existence but
has the relation to an eternal happiness as the basis for the transformation of
existence. The 'how' of an individual's existence is the result of the relation
104 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
to the eternal, not the converse, and that is why infinitely more conies
out than was put in.6
Self-Knowledge
Essential self-knowledge consists in a purification from the evasive self-
knowledge which knows itself only in relation to what is external to itself. This
purification takes place in the ethical stage through a distancing of oneself
from the world through an absolute choice. As we have seen, however, the
ethical stage is ultimately divided by a multiplicity of civic roles and duties
connected to the world; an ethical person is too much in love with the multi-
plicity of worldly tasks to find the purity needed for relating directly to
God. As the despair of this stage is confronted and chosen in a more transpar-
ent manner, the ethical person conies to realize that all ethical efforts were
ultimately attempts to be something — that is, they were attempts at self-
glorification: 'The genuinely humble man is he who conies to see that all his
efforts at humility have really been efforts to express his pride, the genuinely
loving man he who sees that his acts of love have been acts of self-glorification.
And so on.' There comes a point in the growth of consciousness when
the pride of the ethical existence shows itself: all one's expressed love for the
absolute or others is really self-love, and all one's righteousness is self-
righteousness, since the left hand always knows what the right hand is doing.
Paul Ricoeur puts the distinction between the ethical and religious existence
in 'Guilt, Ethics, and Religion' in such a way as to show that the rise in reli-
gious consciousness is able to plumb the depths of the evil inherent in the
purely ethical existence:
Nietzsche showed how the 'darker' drives behind the ethical life are subli-
mated and hidden within the ethical standards of society and the individual.
He came to see this drive to be the master of one's own life as the very Being of
existence, and all the ethical pretensions of humility and duty as spiritless and
nihilistic attempts at will to power. Unlike Nietzsche, Kierkegaard does not
chastise the ethical stage for its ideals, but for its evasions. The ethical ideals
are to be upheld, though it is an illusion to believe one is fulfilling them. Kier-
kegaard believed we are to move beyond this ethical evasion, and become con-
scious of the fact that our most ethical actions, while often holding to the letter
of the law, are usually opposed the spirit of the law. The religious existence
understands the heart is deceitful and corrupt, evasive and comfort-seeking,
and the motives which drive the ethicist are far from pure. Within the religious
stage there is enough self-consciousness to understand the heart, and enough
freedom to allow for a purification through the existential pathos of infinite
resignation, guilt and suffering.
What holds this three-dimensional pathos together, and gives it a trans-
forming energy, is the thought that to need God is one's highest perfection.
The ethical existence found its perfection in self-sufficiency, and its relation
to God was the same as the Deists': 'Thank you very much for what you have
done, but I can manage from here.' The religious existence finds its perfection
to be the opposite of this autonomous self-sufficiency:
Insofar as a person does not know himself in such a way that he knows that
he himself is capable of nothing at all, he does not actually become conscious
in a deeper sense that God is. Even though a person mentions his name
at times, calls upon him occasionally, perhaps in the more momentous
106 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
decisions thinks he sees him and is moved . . . he is nevertheless somewhat
piously deceived if he therefore believes it is manifest to him that God is or
that the being of God would not have another manifestness in this earthly
life, the meaning of which is continually confused if God is not implicitly
understood. 10
Only those who understand what it means to be poor in spirit - that one is
spending one's years making an uproar for nothing — only they understand
that their highest perfection is found in their poverty before God.
This leads us to an analysis of the existential pathos of the religious exis-
tence. The analysis of this rise in consciousness and freedom will help us under-
stand the depths of defiant despair, and the most vehement form of evil.
A Human Being's Highest Perfection begins with the Knowledge that One is
Capable of Nothing
What does it mean to be an excellent human being? The Judge had no pro-
blem answering this question: fulfilling one's duty, and becoming the para-
digmatic human being. This, however, has been called into question: the
impossibility of fulfilling one's ideal shows this cannot be the criteria for
humans. We have looked at three wrong reactions to this problem: lower-
ing the ideal, the despair of inclosing reserve, and a scepticism that mocks
ethics. Kierkegaard says religious existence gives a different view of human
excellence:
But what is a human being? Is he just one more ornament in the series of
creation; or has he no power, is he himself capable of nothing? And what is
his power, then; what is the utmost he is able to will? What kind of answer
should be given to this question when the brashness of youth combines with
the strength of adulthood to ask it, when the glorious combination of willing
to sacrifice everything to accomplish great things, when burning with zeal it
says, 'Even if no one in the world has ever achieved it, I will nevertheless
achieve it; even if millions degenerated and forgot the task, I will neverthe-
less keep on striving - what is the highest?' Well, we do not want to defraud
the highest of its price; we do not conceal the fact that it is rarely achieved in
this world, because the highest is this: that a person is fully convinced that he
himself is capable of nothing, nothing at all.
That which has been exists no more; it exists as little as that which has never
been. But of everything that exists you must say, in the next moment, that it
has been. Hence something of great importance now past is inferior to some-
thing of little importance now present, in that the latter is a reality, and
related to the former as something to nothing.
Dying To ...
This moves us into an important characteristic of infinite resignation, which
Kierkegaard expresses as 'dying to . . . ' With a growing awareness of being
capable of nothing, and a greater dependence on God, life is no longer found
in the world. Life becomes defined by one's relation to God — however unde-
fined one's idea of God may be at this point. In other words, one thrusts away
temporality's goal, and in the seeking of eternity's goal, the external becomes
less and less a concern. This movement toward inwardness is what it means to
be spirit. In the Postscript Climacus speaks of this 'dying to . . . ' in terms of an
inward activity in which one cuts the ties to what is outward:
When we look at the finite and contingent, we are unable to become con-
scious that God is, because his ways and thoughts are infinitely higher than
ours; this is why dying to the world is so important for an understanding and
consciousness of God: in order to know God, to know ourselves, and to com-
prehend our own relationship to God and his to us, we must cease viewing our
existence from the aspect of the relative and comparative. Religiousness A is
this initial, negative step toward God. It is a renunciation of the finite, and as
such, a merely negative choice. As we will see, the vacuum or openness created
by resignation does not get filled, at least not within Religiousness A.
While 'dying to . . . ' includes a death to being nourished by the finite and the
worldly, as well as a death to every earthly human hope, the most important
thing one is dying to is one's own self-centered existence in the world. As Kier-
kegaard says,
Therefore, death first; you must die to every merely human hope, to every
merely human confidence; you must die to your selfishness, or to the world,
because it is only through your selfishness that the world has power over
you. . . . But naturally there is nothing a human being hangs on to so
firmly - indeed, with his whole self! - as to his selfishness! Ah, the separa
tion of soul and body in the hour of death is not as painful as being forced
to be separated from one's soul when one is alive. And a human being
does not hang on to physical life as firmly as one's selfishness hangs onto
its selfishness.'19
Human existence and perfection are not about being the centre of the uni-
verse, about getting one's due, or about being the master of one's domain.
In Religiousness A one sets oneself into a different universe, and one's exis-
tence is thereby transformed.
The aesthetic existence is completely self-centred, knowing nothing other
than its own pleasure, in which the universe and other people exist for its own
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 111
enjoyment. This is a very small self. The ethical existence understands that the
self exists for more than enjoyment, and that there is a higher ideal for which it
must strive. Though this self has been enlarged by the ideal, it is still the centre
of its own existence, even when dutifully helping others. In religious existence,
one discovers that one is a bit player in the universe, if you will. While it is true
one is still concerned about oneself— indeed, one's concern is infinitely more
concentrated on oneself — this self is no longer the self-centred self. A new
understanding of the self arises, and this understanding leads to a transforma-
tion in one's existence. The self recognizes that all its earthly goals were
attempts to be something, and yet this 'something' comes to nothing in the
end; all its striving was for merely finite and contingent gains, though they
were taken as the ultimate and absolute. Religiousness A realizes that the self-
ish energy expended by the ethical individual in the attempt to defend the per-
ception of his or her 'right' relation to the Good is ultimately selfish energy; it is
an energy filled with self-justifying posturing, criticalness toward those who
threaten this self-perception and a drive to dominate anyone who questions
its correctness. The religious existence has, to put it succinctly, seen through
the illusion that governs most human existence. At this point it has not only
died to the world, but it has died to its selfishness.
What is left after this death of the self? The nothingness of freedom. In dying
to oneself, the individual is enlarged into the infinite form of the self, as it floats
over an abyss of nothingness. Unlike inclosing reserve, where the self is filled
with dread and anxiety in the face of this nothingness, the religious self senses it
has become more transparent to itself. It senses a clarity, arising through the
death of its illusions of self-sufficiency. It does not have anything positive to
hold onto at this point, and so has nothing (no-thing) by which to define
itself. Still, this is a deeper understanding of itself than it has ever had before,
and existence is purified through this transparency. We will gain a deeper
understanding of this nothingness of the self by examining the absolute telos of
human beings.
argues that there can be no mediation of the absolute telos. All mediation is
relative, serving as a conditioning element, and making the end relative to
the mediation. Climacus writes, 'All relative willing is distinguished by willing
something for something else, but this highest TE\OS must be willed for its own
sake. And this highest ri\o^ is not a something, because then it relatively cor-
responds to something else and is finite.'2 In the ethical stage, the absoluteness
of the goal of self-becoming is also asserted, though it remains tied to the finite
and relative; however, the use of relative ends — one's career, marriage, civic
responsibilities, and so forth — is no longer to be absolutely related to an abso-
lute telos, but only to relative ends. Success, victory and one's highest good
become measured by social standards and values, which are governed by the
established order. The paradigmatic human turns out to be a socially con
structed identity. Given this, infinite resignation believes the only way to
relate to the finite is to die to it. As long as one holds onto anything finite, one
does not relate absolutely to the absolute.
A temptation arises at this point, which will allow us to see how radical the
renunciation is. The temptation is that even the renunciation of all finite and
temporal things may simply be a means to an eternal happiness. If this is the
case, then it is not an absolute and infinite act, but relative to one's renuncia-
tion. When one uses this renunciation as a means to become something, then
one is, even in this renunciation, willing the finite — willing the finite as
renounced for the sake of an eternal happiness (eternal happiness as perfect
self-identity). This was the mistake of the Middle Ages. According to Climacus,
in its renunciation of the world, it sought to use this act as an outward expres-
sion of its relation to the absolute telos - for example, in a vow of poverty, celib-
acy, flagellation and so forth. The Middle Ages sought to relate to the absolute
through the relative and finite, and to this extent had more to do with ethical
existence than religious. Climacus says that whenever the infinite and absolute
seeks to express itself outwardly in the finite and relative, the former ends up
losing itself to the latter as a source of identity. 21 If one seeks to use the resigna-
tion of the finite in order to gain one's highest goal, then one will eventually
crave the finite, if for nothing else than to renounce it. This renunciation then
becomes an ethical act (one's duty), rather than a religious one.
Thus, the task is to keep the distinction between the finite and the infinite -
and the external and internal — firmly in mind. One continues to live in the
finite, looks like everyone else, and yet is dead to the world. Climacus writes,
One performs one's tasks in the world, but none of them hold any allure, and
they are empty of any reward. One transcends them while in their midst. The
alienation this transcendence creates is so complete that it can feel as if one is
merely watching some other self in its daily tasks.
Through the focus on an absolute telos, existence is gathered and consoli-
dated in a new way. Eternity entered time in the moment of resolution, in
which one gathered oneself in an infinite and absolute choice to relate to
one's absolute telos. A moment came that emptied the finite of significance,
and the meaning of existence needs to be defined anew. One ventures every-
thing upon the discovery of the absolute good. One's life is focused and gath-
ered around the realization that, before God, one is nothing, and that the
highest human perfection is to need him. There is no sense of victory carried
with this in-gathering, at least not the kind of victory found in the Judge's
explication of the ethical life. One confronts emptiness everywhere, is unable
to be at home in the finite, and life becomes a longing for the infinite — which,
of course, is emptied of content.
As we will see when we look at the pathos of suffering, this is a very painful
existence. One is alienated in every external situation. The finite goals and
objectives that unite people are not available. The excitement and uproar
others are making is often unappealing, holding no fulfilment, meaning or sig-
nificance. One must still perform the finite and external responsibilities, but
not in such a way that one's life is found in these activities. Rather, life is
found in the internal struggle of repetition.
In infinite resignation the roots to the finite are cut, and so there is no way
even to communicate the struggle going on inside, since those caught up in the
finite could not understand this absolute relation — so foreign to them is the life
of the infinite. In infinite resignation, one remains alone before God and the
struggle of the infinite. The finite world would become a mere shadow, if not
for the finite aspect of the self, which demands to be taken into account. One
remains continually confronted by the finite and its goals, feels the pain of
loneliness, and perhaps at times longs to be able simply to enjoy the finite
again. From time to time the finite comes to one as a temptation, because
there is no concrete identity to be found within the pure infinite, and so the
dream of victory and success in relative ends remains a seductive whisper in
one's ear. The prophet Jeremiah proclaimed that new mercy is offered every
morning, and while this is good news, it implies that new temptations and fail-
ures are also being confronted daily. Every day brings with it a new set of finite
tasks to become lost in. Repetition is the only thing that brings coherence in
this situation.
114 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Thus, the task of Religiousness A is repetition: one must repeat, throughout
one's temporal life, the movement of resignation. At times the repetition
comes easily and naturally, for the finite is bitter and empty; at other times
the repetition is difficult, and one must again leap into the infinite. We will
never be finished with this task: 'let us not forget that it was the case at least
in school that the mediocre pupil was recognized by his running up with his
paper ten minutes after the task was assigned and saying: I have finished.'23
The positive effect of this repetition is not that we find a calmness within the
infinite, but that we bring more freedom to the struggle against the world -
and ourselves. The finite no longer has the hold it once did on us, though
it continually demands to be taken account of. And so we must repeat our res-
ignation as long as we exist.24 This continual repetition, taking place as it
does in ever new circumstances and trials, allows one to gain a deeper con-
sciousness of oneself.
This tension between the finite and infinite becomes the basis of the second
dimension of the existential pathos of religious existence: suffering. The puri-
fied desire for the infinite and absolute is continually defiled by a renewed
desire for finite fulfilment. Although the finite's illusions have been seen
through, the silence and emptiness of the infinite can be so painful that the
finite tempts with its enchanting tangibility, and at times we fall into it
again. It is this continual foundering that is at the heart of the suffering of
Religiousness A.
By 'essential' Kierkegaard means that without this expression — without
this particular type of suffering — the person is not in the religious stage of exis-
tence. The suffering is essential because it flows out of infinite resignation as a
matter of course. It is due to the longing of the dark depths, which continually
seeks to find fulfilment and satisfaction through attaching its longing to the
tangible world, in an attempt to gain self-identity - that is, self-revelation.
However, since the finite has become drained of meaning, the self has lost its
taste for the finite, and often has difficulty even stomaching it. One must con-
tinue to work, deal with other people, and fulfil the responsibilities of the finite,
all with the intense awareness of the emptiness of these activities, their worth-
lessness in fulfilling the task of the self, and with the gnawing hunger of the
dark depths still intact. One lives within the finite, and yet does so as if floating
over an abyss. Climacus writes,
The abyss is the infinite which has completely devalued the finite. This abyss
becomes that out of which one's existence flows — that is, out of which one's
freedom and self-consciousness find their source. As a deeper movement
toward becoming oneself, this is a move in the right direction, but the darkness
of this source of self-conscious freedom means there is nothing positive on
which to hang one's hope. Thus, while the emptiness and darkness is the
source of one's freedom, it is also the source of one's suffering. To surrender
the latter, would be to forfeit the former.
This can be seen in Gerald May's analysis of addiction and withdrawal.
He speaks of the infinite in terms of'spaciousness', which
He then points out that this spaciousness is really freedom, and it is this free-
dom that the addicted person is struggling with. Now obviously the addicted
person is struggling to be free from the addictive behaviour, but May rightly
regards the struggle to be with freedom itself — that is, not simply overcoming
one addiction by filling the empty spaciousness with something else (as when
one quits smoking, and ends up gaining weight because one exchanges cigar-
ettes for food), but staying in the spaciousness or emptiness of freedom itself.
May writes,
As spaciousness and openness, there is nothing to which the self can attach
itself in order to gain a sense of identity. Infinite resignation's suffering is due
to this continual struggle of being unable to define oneself in relation to any-
thing finite. It would actually be quite easy to express this struggle if one were
to become something through it. However, in the religious stage one comes to
116 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
oneself as nothing, and so one's identity of oneself dissolves into this nothing-
ness. Of course, one is not to be consoled by this nothingness, in the thought
that this becoming nothing is becoming 'something'. Indeed, the attempt to
become a little 'more nothing' is the constant temptation of infinite resigna-
tion. Climacus says, 'the ultimate spiritual trial by tried and tested religious
persons is always that the utmost effort wants to delude one with the notion
of self-importance, that it is something.' And so one would be willing to
suffer in order to become a martyr, if only in one's own eyes. This, however,
is not the suffering of infinite resignation. The particular kind of suffering
characteristic of infinite resignation is to undergo the struggle, and gain nothing
from it. Although the self in its self-centredness yearns to be something, cries
out to be affirmed as essential in existence, and to reveal itself as unique and
significant, infinite resignation continually comes behind it in order to give its
devastating blow: 'You are nothing, and all your supposed self-importance is
an illusion.'
Simone Weil's description of this death emphasizes selfishness' relation to
longing and desire:
These two quotes speak to the same task. It is desire and longing that empow-
ers the T', and is its ground and drive. Combined with attachment to material
and finite things, the T finds a multiplicity to desire, and disperses itself self-
ishly around its hunger for more. The only free act, and the absolute good to
which Weil points, is infinite resignation.
Weil also speaks of waiting, and this indeed has its place in infinite resigna-
tion. But it is closer to Kierkegaard's thinking to see this waiting as prep-
aration. Meister Eckhart wrote,
God does not work in all hearts alike but according to the preparation and
sensitivity he finds in each. In a given heart, containing this or that, there
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 117
may be an item which prevents God's highest activity. Therefore if a heart is
to be ready for him, it must be emptied out to nothingness, the condition of
its maximum capacity. So, too, a disinterested heart, reduced to nothing-
ness, is the optimum, the condition of maximum sensitivity.
To speak of venturing everything in infinite resignation is to point to this emp-
tying out to nothingness. What is emptied is self-assertion and the finite, and
what is left is the nothingness of the infinite. The only consolation is that there
is an opening created for the appearance of God, if he desires to appear. This
emptying of the self before God is both an absolutely free act, as Weil puts it,
and a removal of all the pockets of obscurity that desire and longing create
when they put their sights on anything other than God. There is no repose in
this, but a continual repetition, and so a continual struggle in which one gains
an ever deeper transparency.
Not only is transparency deepened in terms of the nature of the finite and the
self, but one comes to understand the source of human freedom. When one
looks out into the world in infinite resignation, and one's desires are no longer
tied to the finite, freedom is seen as coming from the infinite. One experiences
freedom as something arising out of a transcendence of all one knows and can
be known, for its source is beyond the concrete and even idealized contents of
our existence - that is, beyond the contents of the aesthetic and ethical stages.
The landscape of one's existence changes with infinite resignation, and this
change of landscape deconstructs, and then reconstructs, the view of one's
ultimate source of freedom: freedom does not consist in choosing between
a multiplicity of finite goals and desires (aestheticism), nor does it consist in a
self-sufficiency out of which the autonomy of the self reigns (the ethical), but is
a source beyond all finite values and all self-sufficiency.
As beyond self-sufficiency, infinite resignation comes to understand freedom
as something that is offered to one, a gift, if you will. It is not created by oneself,
but chosen, and as chosen its source lies outside of oneself. Still, freedom is
one's task, and in this sense it is one's own freedom, though always as some-
thing to be chosen or accepted. If it can be accepted, then it can also be
rejected - given up for the sake of security, self-assertion and the pleasures of
the world. Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor saw this clearly. The Inquisitor
recalls for Jesus the temptation with which the 'wise and dread spirit' con-
fronted Him:
' " 'Thou wouldst go into the world, and art going with empty hands, with
some promise of freedom which men in their simplicity and their natural
unruliness cannot even understand, which they fear and dread - for noth-
ing has ever been more insupportable for a man and a human society than
freedom. But seest Thou these stones in the parched and barren wilderness?
Turn them into bread, and mankind will run after Thee like a flock of
118 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
sheep, grateful and obedient, though for ever trembling, lest Thou with-
draw Thy hand and deny them Thy bread.' But Thou wouldst not deprive
man of freedom and didst reject the offer, thinking what is that freedom
worth, if obedience is bought with bread? Thou didst reply that man lives
not for bread alone." '~,33
The Inquisitor applies this to humanity several pages later when he says,
' "Thou didst reject the one infallible banner which was offered Thee to
make all men bow down to Thee alone - the banner of earthly bread. And
Thou has rejected it for the sake of freedom and the bread of heaven.
"Behold what though didst further. And again in the name of freedom!
I tell Thee that man is tormented by no greater anxiety than to find some-
one quickly to whom he can hand over that gift of freedom with which he is
born. But only one who can appease his conscience can take over his free-
dom. In bread there was offered Thee an invincible banner; give bread,
and man will worship Thee, for nothing is more certain than bread." '
from the religious point of view all human beings are suffering, and the point
is to enter into the suffering (not by plunging into it but by discovering that
one is in it) and not escape the misfortune. Viewed religiously, the fortunate
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 119
person, whom the whole world favors, is just as much a suffering person, if
he is religious, as the person to whom the misfortune comes from outside.
Fortune or misfortune define neither the self, nor its sense of victory or failure.
As transparency rises, the understanding of existence as suffering becomes
more explicit to the individual; as the illusions used to cover up suffering are
exposed, one is able to come to terms with the fact that human existence is an
inherent struggle. With the growing transparency, the reality that lies under-
neath the illusions can no longer be denied, even though this reality is the
source of suffering. What is revealed is that the finite web of means-ends rela-
tionships are without fulfilment. It remains a web of self-enclosed relationships
that go nowhere, and offer only the evasion of the reality that lies underneath.
The pain inherent in infinite resignation would be overcome if perfect self-
identity with the infinite and eternal could be attained, but such self-identity
with the eternal is closed off by existence itself. The self is eternal and absolute,
and yet it is not, and can never be this in any immediate sense of perfect iden-
tity. It holds within itself both the principle of particularity and the principle
of the universal, but in a divided manner. It is itself, then, only within a process
of becoming. The absolute telos of an existing human being is this process, and
can never be the stasis of perfect self-identity with the eternal.
This division of the self means that those in infinite resignation continually
waver in existence because of their alienation from the finite aspect of the self.
They can make the movement of infinity by themselves, and also relate to the
unconditional (which is why Kierkegaard calls Religiousness A the religion of
immanence), but they are unable to make the transformation back down into
the conditional. In other words, they are unable to affect a synthesis between
the infinite and the finite on their own. They remain drawn to the eternal
happiness, and the eternal consciousness of God's love for them, though it is a
captivation that leaves them foundering in existence when the inevitable des-
cent into the finite becomes necessary.
There is a hope of some kind of birth within infinite resignation, that the
suffering of self-becoming will yield to an eternal happiness. The deep longings
continue, and though one knows they must not be attached to anything tangi-
ble, the expectation is that the emptiness of freedom will open up to something
wonderful. Gerald May expresses the hope that resides in the suffering of
infinite resignation:
The specific struggles we undergo with our addictions are reflections of a
blessed pain. To be deprived of a simple object of attachment is to taste the
deep, holy deprivation of our souls. To struggle to transcend any idol is to
touch the sacred hunger God has given us. In such a light, what we have
called asceticism is no longer a way of dealing with attachment, but an act
of love. It is a willing, wanting, aching venture into the desert of our nature,
120 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
loving the emptiness of that desert because of the sure knowledge that God's
rain will fall and the certainty that we are both heirs and cocreators of the
wonder that is now and of the Eden that is yet to be.36
There is the expectation that rain will fall, but one does not know what this
rain is, when it will come, or even if it will come in this lifetime. One is at a
standstill (one has done all one can do), and wonders if all that is left is to
twist in the wind forever.
It is no surprise that guilt is so decisive for religious existence, since the leap
into this stage consisted of the thought that, in relation to God, one is always in
the wrong. The whole situation is strewn with guilt, which rises up before one
in each moment of infinite resignation, because in this movement one is only at
the beginning of fulfilling the religious task. One is continually having to die
to the world, and is never able to get beyond this. A growth in freedom and
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 121
self-consciousness even comes to a halt, as one abides within the enormous
detour. This guilt-consciousness is so decisive for the religious existence, that
to be without it is to show that one is not relating oneself to one's eternal hap-
piness. Thus, one finds the strange paradox that the decisive expression for
relating to one's eternal happiness is guilt — one would think that guilt would
be an expression for not relating to one's eternal happiness. Guilt, however, is
the only way a human being can express a relation to the absolute telos. Thus,
as it is with suffering so it is with guilt: one is guilty simply by virtue of existing.
One is not only guilty of particular transgressions, but guilt is one's position
in existence.
While we are normally conscious of particular instances of guilt, these par-
ticular instances are grounded in (made possible by) our total guilt. To speak
of the particular guilt or innocence of specific actions is to think in compara-
tive and relative terms. However, there cannot be relative guilt in terms of
one's relation to the absolute; either one is guilty in one's relation, or one is
innocent. To see only particular instances of guilt is to measure guilt in
degrees. This is to look at guilt in terms of the external and relative, which
allows one to see oneself as guilty in some instances, but innocent in others.
Kierkegaard is simply pointing out that guilt in any area is to be totally
guilty of not relating to the absolute absolutely. Covering up this total guilt
by focusing only on particular instances is an evasion of one's true relationship
to the absolute. Climacus describes this by saying,
What the 'enormous detour' and total guilt show is that Religiousness A ends
in despair. The individual is doomed to a continual need of having to die to the
finite, for fear that it will become absolute. At the same time, the finite aspect
of the self can never be completely denied.
Infinite resignation is the essential form for coming to God and becoming one-
self, and yet within this negative form are the positive forms of faith and defi-
ance. One must not stop in infinite resignation, for 'the positive is continually
in the negative', and so to stop is to fall into despair. To understand how faith
and defiance are within this negative form, we will examine how infinite resig-
nation relates only to one pole of the synthesis of the self, and so is not yet a
complete self.
The knights of infinity are dancers ... and they have elevation. They make
the upward movement and fall down again, and this too is no unhappy pas-
time, nor ungracious to behold. But when they come down they cannot
assume the position straightaway, they waver an instant and the wavering
shows they are nevertheless strangers in the world.
As the knights of infinite resignation soar in the infinite, they seem to rise
above all the defilements and spiritlessness of the finite and comparative.
However, they cannot remain aloft, and when they come down, they waver,
and this wavering shows the despair and heaviness of this type of existence.
There is no diversion, no possibility of moving away from the consuming
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 125
' "Thou art proud of Thine elect, but Thou has only the elect, while we give
rise to the rest. And besides, how many of those elect, those mighty ones
who could become elect, have grown weary of waiting for Thee, and have
transferred and will transfer the powers of their spirit and the warmth
of their heart to the other camp, and end by raising their free banner
against Thee." '
In this heaviness, something has to give. The self exists on the watershed of two
directions of authentic selfhood: defiance and faith. We will now look at defi-
ance, through which the essence of radical evil will be revealed.
Notes
1. SUD, p. 111.
2. It should be noted that this 'giving up' of everything is not an internal act, but an
external act. As Climacus says, 'So when a man says, for example, that for the sake
of his eternal happiness he has suffered hunger, cold, been in prison, in peril at sea,
has been despised, persecuted, whipped, etc., these simple words are a testimony
to ethical pathos inasmuch as they quite simply refer to what he, acting, has suf-
fered. Wherever the ethical is present, all attention is called back to the individual
himself and to acting' (CUP, p. 390). We will see that this is neither the resigna-
tion nor the suffering the religious individual undergoes for the sake of an eternal
happiness. The difference between the two lies in the dialectic between outward
and inward suffering, outward and inward acting, and the reference to oneself as
one's object versus God as one's object.
126 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
3. As we will see, this object is called an eternal happiness in 'Religiousness A', which
is to say that one gains an eternal happiness in being rightly related to God. Kier-
kegaard uses various expressions for this same idea, such as the absolute telos, a
human being's highest good, purity of the heart, and salvation. It does not neces-
sarily entail a specifically Western religious tone - though this is the tone Kierke-
gaard uses - but could also fit within Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The point is
that one believes that happiness is to be found outside the typical, everyday
worldly concerns - whether these concerns are viewed as Maya, or an ignorance
that seeks permanence in a world of interdependent arising.
4. 'Even though Christianity assumes the subjectivity . . . is the possibility of receiv-
ing this good, it nevertheless does not assume that as a matter of course the sub-
jectivity is all set, as a matter of course has even an actual idea of the significance
of this good.' (CUP, p. 130).
5. CUP, p. 391.
6. CUP, p. 574.
7. Walker, pp. 153-4.
8. Paul Ricoeur. 'Guilt, Ethics, and Religion'. Conflict of Interpretations. Ed. Don
Ihde, pp. 425-39. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1974, p. 438 (my emphasis).
9. EUD, pp. 317-18.
10. EUD, pp. 321-2.
11. Matthew 5:3, Psalm 39:6.
12. EUD, p. 307.
13. EUD, p. 322.
14. EUD, p. 303.
15. Arthur Schopenhauer. 'Studies in Pessimism'. The Works of Arthur Schopenhauer:
The Wisdom of Life and Other Essays, pp. 215-305. Roslyn, NY: Walter J. Black,
1932, p. 231.
16. JRNL II, #2089.
17. CUP, p. 506
18. Walker, p. 176.
19. FS, p. 77-8.
20. CUP, p. 394.
21. CUP, pp. 407-8.
22. CUP, p. 410 (my emphasis).
23. CUP, p. 408.
24. CUP, pp. 410-11.
25. CUP, p. 288. Frater Taciturnus is another of Kierkegaard's pseudonyms, and
makes this comment on page 444 in Stages on Life's Way.
26. The longings and cravings of the dark depths are nothing other than the source of
all human addictions, whether to alcohol, shopping, gambling, sex, power, or
pleasing others.
27. May, p. 103.
28. May, p. 147.
29. CUP, p. 464.
The Final Movement Toward Defiance 127
30. Simone Weil. Gravity and Grace. Trans. Emma Graufurd. New York: Routledge,
1992, pp. 12-13. It should be noted that, while Religiousness A may include a
Buddhist conception of existence, infinite resignation is not, for Kierkegaard,
a uniquely Buddhist quality. Kierkegaard does not believe there can be a detach-
ment from the empirical ego. While the empirical ego's desires are not to be made
absolute, neither are they to be annihilated. Without the desires of the finite
aspect of the self, we are not able to be our true self. The desires that arise out of
the ground of who we are must find their place within a freedom that transpar-
ently wills for the absolute good.
31. Weil, p. 23.
32. Meister Eckhart. Meister Eckhart. Trans. Raymond Bernard Blakney. New York:
Harper, 1941, p. 88. I read the phrase 'disinterested heart' in this quote, not in
terms of how Kierkegaard uses the term 'disinterested', but as synonymous with
what Weil calls 'detachment'. It is a disinterest in the external, arising from a
maximum of inward earnestness.
33. Fydor Dostoevsky. The Brothers Karam.oz.ov. Trans. Constance Garnett. New York:
Signet, 1980, p. 233 (my emphasis).
34. Dostoevsky, 1980, p. 234.
35. CUP, p. 436.
36. May, p. 181.
37. CUP, p. 525.
38. CUP, p. 531.
39. Elrod, p. 197.
40. CUP, p. 524.
41. FT, p. 70.
42. Dostoevsky, 1980, p. 238.
5
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil
Transparent Despair
[A] person certainly must know his soul in order to gain it, but this knowing is
not the gaining, inasmuch as in knowing he ascertains that he is in the hands of
an alien power and that consequently he does not possess himself or, to
define it more closely, he has not gained himself. When the devil believes
and yet trembles, there is a self-knowing in this believing, and the more
perfect it is, the more he will tremble, precisely because he does not will to
gain himself/
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 129
The devil, whom Kierkegaard regards as a symbol of the most intense form
of evil, is transparent to himself and to his relationship with God, and yet
in despair, he does not will this relationship, and so he trembles before God.
Defiance is authentic spirit that stands as a single individual before the alien
power that established and holds the self, and it does this through the pathos of
'offense': the defiant spirit is offended by God's ways.
In Kierkegaard's time the memory of God was still strong, and so the rebel-
lion still took place in the face of God, even if this was done in the proclamation
that God is dead. Times have changed since then, so the power that estab-
lished the self s existence is less defined, and is hidden behind the murkiness
that belies human weakness itself. Human rationality can only go so far in dis-
covering what has become hidden, and beyond that there is nothing — a trans-
cendence which is without content, yet nevertheless able to be related to
negatively. Whatever the name or connotation given to it, there is a 'power'
which human existence, in its very being, always runs up against. There
remains a power standing as the limit of our existence, and, as our limit,
remains something with which we must deal. We have been looking at the var-
ious inauthentic ways it is dealt with, and have seen that there are those who
use various means to hide or ignore it, or those who dive into scepticism in the
face of this darkness. Religiousness A, however, brings an authentic and con-
scious confrontation with it, by remaining with the implications of this dark
boundary. As the despair of Religiousness A becomes manifest, the question
becomes whether one will have faith in the goodness of this source, and
expect a clarifying word, or whether one will try to create and reveal oneself
out of the dark depths by standing in defiance of this power.
God is infinitely the strongest; basically everyone believes that and to that
extent, willing or not, feels God's infinite superiority and his own nothing-
ness. But as long as he only believes that God is the stronger one - and, to
mention something terrible, believe it even as the devil also believes - and
trembles; as long as he only believes it in such a way that he shrinks from the
admission, as long as he believes it only in such a way that he does not
become joyful, the relationship is painful, unhappy, and his feeling of weak-
ness is a tormenting sensation.
13 0 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
Although the mass of spiritless people sense, at some level, that God is the
strong one, they would never admit this to themselves, but seek to remain
secure in their own 'strength' and abilities. They either put God in the
dock — often coming to the conclusion that he does not exist — place him in
some small safe, out-of-the-way corner of their lives, tame him through their
doctrines and beliefs, or simply ignore him altogether. In all these reactions
they stand on their own strength, and it is this illusion of strength that allows
them such innocuous, indifferent, and even comical attitudes toward God.
Spirit, however, is aware of its own nothingness, and is conscious of itself as
weak before the power out of which its existence flows — that power over
which it has no power. This consciousness becomes the torment that defines
the existence of those in defiance.
Kierkegaard says that the consciousness of weakness should give way to
worship. Worship begins in wonder over the mystery of God, is a happy rela-
tion to the mystery of this power, and finds joy in being nothing before this
awesome mystery. Defiance also senses the mystery of its source, and its dis-
tance and opaqueness; what should be wonder, however, becomes a catalyst
for a transparent rebellion, and its existence becomes a 'dark saying', as Kier-
kegaard puts it.
Infinite resignation is the negative form of the self in which all finite determi-
nations have fallen away. Whether this has happened through the movement
of Religiousness A (which was still a possible movement in Kierkegaard's
time), or in the more modern secularized versions,8 the point is that through
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 131
the infinite and eternal the self has escaped all finite determinations. It has
died to the finite determinations of itself, which is an essential step in the move-
ment toward a true faith in God, though its defiance arises out of an unwilling-
ness to fully relinquish the last remaining strongholds of selfishness and pride.9
It is out of the emptiness of infinite resignation that defiance first desires to
create itself ex nihilo. Perhaps ex nihilo seems too radical a self-creation, for the
self of defiance is self enough to recognize the concrete contents of its self. How-
ever, as the infinite self, it desires to create a radically new self in infinite
abstraction from these contents. Anti-climacus writes,
His concrete self, or his concreteness, has indeed necessity and limits, is this
quite definite thing, with these aptitudes, predispositions, etc, in this con-
crete set of circumstances, etc. But by means of the infinite form of the nega-
tive self, he wants first to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to
get out of it a self such as he wants, produced by means of the infinite form of
the negative self — and it is in this way he wants to be himself.
wants to begin a little earlier than other people, not at and with the begin-
ning, but 'in the beginning'; he does not want to don his own self, does not
want to see his task in his given self, he wants, by virtue of being the infinite
form, to construct himself.
He seeks to take the light of reason, and reveal himself out of the dark abyss as
his own ground. He does not ignore the concrete contents of the self, but
through his infinite form, he denies that these contents will determine who
and what he becomes. These contents are merely the forces that have become
manifest or revealed out of the dark abyss due to forms not under his own
power — for example, when his longings became attached to objects in the
world, or through the valuations given to him by the established order. But
132 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
there is infinitely more that can come out of the depths, and perhaps the
concrete contents one now has — which have determined one's existence so
far - will be negligible in comparison to what is created by one's own freedom.
We can think of it this way. To some people, the colour of one's skin is a sig-
nificant determination of whom one essentially is. This is the highest concep-
tion of selfhood that such people are capable of, and so they are unable to see
beyond the colour of their own, or another person's skin. To a person who has
risen above this low-level valuation of selfhood, character traits and personal-
ity become central, and the colour of one's skin becomes meaningless in the
definition of who one is. The infinite self, as having resigned all finite determi-
nations, believes that the movement of infinity can go in an infinite number of
different directions. Defiance is at the point where, with the help of infinite
resignation, it has died to all finite valuations - that is to say, all valuation,
since valuations are determined through the comparisons and relations cre-
ated in finite existence. And so, although the concrete self has its finite neces-
sity and limitations, the freedom which flows from the infinite annihilates the
significance and value of these qualities, and they become just as meaningless
to a person's self as does the colour of another's skin to one who judges by char-
acter or spirit alone.
In the active self, the self tries to take within itself the power out of which it
exists, and use that power as the source of its own self-creation. It is this
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 133
source, as the combination of the dark principle and light of reason, which
allows humans to be independent from God. Philosophy has sought to comple-
tely purge the dark basis through the light of reason, and yet Kierkegaard
viewed this as impossible. The self continually comes to grief upon its attempts
to bring these two principles together under its own power. It cannot get under
the light of reason enough to penetrate the dark abyss. Its reason is always
partial and insufficient to this task.
Another approach, which has essentially the same effect as getting reason
under one's own power, is to assert one's particular will as the universal will.
Some of the most vicious, destructive and shocking acts on earth are due to the
attempt of a particular will to assert itself over an area of the earth — whether
it be over regions or the entire earth. The individuals who seek this dominion
obviously need the spiritless to join the enterprise, but the following they
garner shows the power with which they wield their vision. These defiant indi-
viduals are not weaker and more ignorant than the rest of us, as the traditional
view of evil would have it, but are more free and self-conscious.
While they are more actualized than others, they remain human. In other
words, their particular wills can never become the universal will, just as cancer
will never create a new form of'health' (order) within the body. It erupts into
revelation, sometimes with 'glorifyingly' hideous results, but it will always fail
in its attempts at dominion and self-revelation, because in comparison to the
universal will, it is impotent, and ultimately capable of nothing at all.
The eruption into revelation by the 'active self is 'constantly relating to
itself only experimentally, no matter what it undertakes, however great, how-
ever amazing and with whatever perseverance'. It has resolve, to be sure, for
it has gathered its existence around a particular idea, and it may actually
spend its whole life in this idea. This idea is of its own creation, and is its
attempt to take hold of the 'light of reason', plunging into the dark depths to
create itself from out of its own power. It seeks to be something by asserting
itself in existence, yet in itself it remains only a human being and not a god.
In the end, its entire existence can become simply an imaginary construction.
To use the term 'imaginary' immediately points to the imagination, which
is the self s power to conceive or think the ideal (perfection) in an infinite dis-
tance from actuality. The self, in becoming itself, has become the infinite self.
In this form of defiance, its imagination can run free, and it can create the self
it wants to create, apart from any of the 'ideals' of the established order -
apart from the possibilities handed it from this order - and in a way in which it
creates itself out of itself. The problem, however, is that there is nothing which
gives this imaginary construction reality, for it is also conceived apart from
any unconditioned ideal an ideal of the universal will of God. True, the
person may act on this 'ideal', and his or her existence may yield sometimes
devastating effects, but in the end, their significance and meaning are not
134 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
under the defiant person's power. This is due to a lack of earnestness - or
rather, to the mere appearance of earnestness or seriousness. The active self
recognizes no power over itself; therefore in the final instance it lacks ser-
iousness and can only conjure forth an appearance of seriousness, even
when it bestows upon its experiments its greatest possible attention. That is
a specious seriousness. As with Prometheus' theft of fire from the gods, this
is stealing from God the thought - which is seriousness - that God takes
notice of one, in place of which the despairing self is content with taking
notice of itself, which is meant to bestow infinite interest and significance
on its enterprises, and which is exactly what makes them experiments.13
The problem the active self faces is that there is nothing binding and intrinsi-
cally stable in any of its endeavours. As Anti-climacus says, in 'the whole dia-
lectic in which it acts there is nothing firm; at no moment does what the self
amounts to stand firm, that is eternally firm'. The binding power of this
self and its resolve is to be found only within the individual's freedom, and yet
just this is its despair:
The negative form of the self exerts the loosening as much as the binding
power; it can, at any moment, start quite arbitrarily all over again and,
however far an idea is pursued in practice, the entire action is contained
within a hypothesis. So, far from the self succeeding increasingly in being
itself, it becomes increasingly obvious that it is a hypothetical self.
The self no longer acts out of the arbitrariness and otherness of the estab-
lished order, nor even out of the understanding in a purely rational sense;
instead, the self creatively acts into the dark depths, making the self it wants
to be. This creation is not irrational, because, in the creativity and spontaneity
of its own freedom, it is attempting to establish its own order by the ordering
power of the light of reason. Its authenticity is that it seeks to master its own
existence, rather than being mastered by the established order — that is, it
seeks to be itself. Its ultimate despair is that there is nothing to bind it to its
choice and its ideal, except its own resolve. Although it may, theoretically at
least, keep this resolve for a lifetime, the ultimate emptiness of the resolve
is that, as its own master, it can change everything in an instant, and every-
thing that has been pursued with earnest resolve can come to nothing by its
own dictates. The despair of this defiance is due to the fact that the very free-
dom which allows the self to create itself is the same freedom that can dissolve
this self-creation. Freedom is not sufficient in itself for the self to become itself,
but freedom must rest transparently in the power that established it — a power
that is unconditioned. As Anti-climacus puts it,
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 135
The self is its own master, absolutely (as one says) its own master; and
exactly this is the despair, but also what it regards as its pleasure and joy.
But it is easy on closer examination to see that this absolute ruler is a king
without a country, that really he rules over nothing; his position, his king-
dom, his sovereignty, are subject to the dialectic that rebellion is legitimate
at any moment. Ultimately it is arbitrarily based upon the self itself.16
The great man feels his power over a people, his temporary coincidence with
a people or a millennium; this enlargement in his experience of himself as
causa and voluntas is misunderstood as 'altruism'; it drives him to seek
means of communication: all great men are inventive in such means. They
want to embed themselves in great communities; they want to give a single form
to the multifarious and disordered; chaos stimulates them.
The society of men and women, then, become raw material out of which those
in defiance seek to fulfil their self-creation. The material for self-creation no
longer simply comes from the dark abyss - out of which they can create them-
selves but also out of the disorder and chaos residing in every established
order. The more disordered and chaotic it is — the more filled with dark and
undefined longings - the easier it can be re-formed by the powerful indivi-
dual. Further, in a situation where this disorder and chaos exists, there is no
need for the great man to compromise, since spiritless people long for nothing
more than comfort and security, and will follow those who promise to deliver
such things and appear to have the power to back up their promises. The
masses will do almost anything for them, including the commission of horren-
dous acts against others. In the end, however, even this external ordering of
society does not have 'staying power' for all the reasons already given.
136 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
The active self has taken hold of itself in authenticity, sought to relate to
both the infinite and finite, and yet it remains in despair, for it has willed
to be itself in defiance of the power that established it - that power which
binds it to itself in steadfastness. It is a strange twist, for out of the conscious-
ness of its weakness in regards to the finite and temporal, the self, through
the power of the infinite, has sought to be strong by stamping its will upon the
finite. This remains despair, because it is unwilling to allow the power that
established it to appropriate it. In other words, in willing to be itself, it is
unwilling to be itself.
The unfulfilled longings, the limitations of reason and the pain and suffering
of transparency all go to prove that God is a second-rate creator, or at least not
to be trusted. Despair at this stage has felt the full force of its weakness, and
suffers under it. In this suffering it does not will to be itself by faith in God — a
joyful relation to God - but now wills to be itself through an anguished rela-
tion to God. Through infinite resignation, it knows the suffering of freedom or
spaciousness. It had hoped for an eternal happiness, a self-becoming that
might break through into a true identity of freedom. It has also come to see
the despair of the active self, it knows the pain of not being able to create itself
by piercing the darkness with its imagination. It loses confidence in the possi-
bility of any clarifying word, and no longer believes that 'God's rain will fall',
as May put it. Indeed, defiance is at the point where it becomes offended by
this possibility: these promises of rain only mock its infinite thirst. Existence
becomes for it a dark saying, and it holds onto this darkness in order to nourish
its growing discontent, pride and defiance.
Kierkegaard describes this move in one of his Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses:
[Pjerhaps you were too old to nourish childish ideas about God, too mature
to think humanly about him; you perhaps wished to move him by your defi-
ance. You probably admitted that life was a dark saying, but you were not,
in keeping with the apostle's admonition, swift to hear a clarifying word;
contrary to his admonition, you were swift to anger. If life is a dark saying,
so be it; you would not trouble yourself about the explanation - and your
heart grew hard. And the chill of despair froze your spirit, and its death
brooded over your heart.
My reasoning wants to be faithful to the evidence that aroused it. That evi-
dence is the absurd. It is that divorce between the mind that desires and the
world that disappoints, my nostalgia for unity, this fragmented universe
and the contradiction that binds them together.
The evidence is in, and reason must accept what has been presented: life is a
dark saying, and the hope and expectation of reason for a clarifying word will
not be fulfilled - such expectations only intensify the absurdity and pain of
existence. For Camus, we must accept the darkness that encompasses our exis-
tence as the ultimate reality.
Kierkegaard also points to the limits of reason, though he does not come to
the same conclusion as Camus. For Kierkegaard the limits of reason point out
that we are not in control of how we will be helped, and that the clarification of
existence is not within our own power; however, this does not mean that no
clarification of existence is possible. Kierkegaard writes,
You wanted God's ideas about what was best for you to coincide with your
ideas, but you also wanted him to be the almighty Creator of heaven and
earth so that he could properly fulfill your wish. And yet, if he were to
share your ideas, he would cease to be the almighty Father. In your childish
impatience, you wanted, so to speak, to distort God's eternal nature, and
you were blinded enough to delude yourself, as if you would be benefited if
God in heaven did not know better than you yourself what was beneficial for
you, as if you would not some day discover to your horror that you had
wished what no human being would be able to endure if it happened. .. .
In defiance one will not relinquish the last fortress of the self: the desire to be
able, at the very least, to choose the means by which one is helped in existence.
There is a suspicion, given the way existence has been unfolding up until now,
that the cure will be worse than the disease, and so although this is the sickness
unto death, the defiant one refuses treatment for despair - that is, chooses
itself in its despair.
Defiance grows and intensifies to such an extent that it becomes that out of
which one finds one's existence. It is an act of freedom in the highest sense, in
that, as Heidegger put it, an individual 'has himself decided originally for
the necessity of his essence'. It is in this sense that Anti-climacus speaks of
140 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
defiance as the despair that wills to be itself. It chooses to exist out of its tor-
ment, thus choosing its torment as its essence:
Once he would gladly have given everything to be rid of his agony, but he
was kept waiting, and now all that's past; he prefers to rage against every-
thing and be the one whom the whole world, all existence, has wronged, the
one for whom it is especially important to ensure that he has his agony on
hand, so that no one will take it from him — for then he would not be able to
convince others and himself that he is right.
He did not seek peace and tranquility in externals, and yet his heart contin-
ued to be troubled. . . . [I]t seemed to him . . . as if he were a child of wrath,
and yet he could not come any closer to understanding or explaining how
this could be. Then his innermost being rebelled within him, then he did
what is related in an old devotional book: 'he boasted that he was lost,' and that
it was God himself who had plunged him down into damnation. Then the inner being
within him froze/30
He boasts about his lostness because he himself now becomes evidence against
all existence. He wants to maintain his torment in order continually to accuse
existence of its wretchedness. Defiance has chosen itself as lost, demanding
that its existence be heard, and in this revelation, judgement is proclaimed
against all existence and its source. Anti-climacus writes,
It is, to describe figuratively, as if a writer were to make a slip of the pen, and
the error became conscious of itself as such - perhaps it wasn't a mistake but
from a much higher point of view an essential ingredient in the whole pre-
sentation - and as if the error wanted now to rebel against the author, out of
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 141
hatred for him forbid him to correct it, and in manic defiance say to him:
'No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against you, a witness to
the fact that you are a second-rate author.'
It is horrible to see a man seek comfort by hurling himself into the whirl-
pool of despair. But this coolness is still more horrible: that, in the anxiety
of death, a man should not cry out for help, T am going under, save me';
but that he should quietly choose to be a witness to his own destruction!
Oh, most extreme vanity, not to draw man's eyes to himself by beauty, by riches,
by ability, by power, by honor, but to wish to get his attention by his own
destruction.
Defiance does not seek to stand out or be 'on top' through the compari-
sons afforded by finitude, but, if it draws attention to itself, it does so in its
resolute defiance against the Good. This 'attention' is not necessarily per-
ceived as evil or destructive, and can fit in quite well with the established
order, externally speaking.
Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor is a good example of this. The Inquisitor's
defiance was expressed in a distorted (that is, a defiant) 'love' for humanity,
which sought to close off the way of freedom and self-consciousness to the
142 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
masses. This, the Inquisitor says (in irony, I believe), is for the good of
the masses, that they may at least be happy in their miserable existences,
though their happiness was (and the Grand Inquisitor is fully aware of this)
the sickness unto death. Ivan asks Alyosha, what if the Inquisitor had
'wasted his whole life in the desert and yet could not shake off his incurable
love for humanity? In his old age he reached the clear conviction that noth-
ing but the advice of the great dread spirit could build up any tolerable sort
of life for the feeble, unruly, "incomplete, empirical creatures created in
jest." And so, convinced of this, he sees that he must follow the counsel of
the wise spirit, the dread spirit of death and destruction, and accept lying
and deception, and lead men consciously to death and destruction. He sees that he
must deceive them all the way so that they may not notice that they are
being led, that the poor blind creatures may at least on the way think them-
selves happy. And note, the deception is in the name of Him in Whose ideal
[love] the old man had so fervently believed all his life long.'33
The Inquisitor decides that he will help the masses by blinding them to their
task, and taking away their freedom — thus, taking away their suffering.
He will be perceived more as a saint and saviour than a devil, though intern-
ally the act is one of self-conscious destruction: the desire of watching the
masses plod comfortably and contentedly to hell. Further, his task becomes
the ideal around which his life is integrated. What he calls love is actually his
own disappointment with existence. He could not wait for the rain or the con-
soling word, and came to despise even the thought of it — so offended by it's
tardiness was he. Thus, he seeks to close off the Good for all other people; he
does this under the banner of love, though it is defiance against love. At this
point, defiance is radically evil.
As we have seen, especially in terms of infinite resignation, Kierkegaard
does not deny that existence is traversed on a painful road; indeed, he spent
the end of his life and most of his small fortune trying to intensify this suffering
by attempting to awaken the single individual to the terror of life. Existence is
confusing, sometimes empty, desperate, and exhausting, though he believed
that the consciousness of existence would awaken spirit to its ultimate free-
dom. No doubt he knew that some who were awakened would choose defiance,
though he believed, as distant as defiance is from the Good in one sense, in
another it is closer to it than spiritlessness.
We must now bring our reflections together in the context of a focused treat-
ment of the question of evil. From the standpoint we have reached in our
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 143
What took over the rebels' [those who have given up the question of truth
and falsehood] state of mind was simply the lust of being against' \_sic\, of
destruction as such, of smashing traditions, orders, measures; it was aggres-
siveness in itself, the brazen avowal of vulgarism in word and deed. The
delight of the 'we' in joint unsubstantiality caused the illiberal intolerance
of a No born of nothing. Everything is to become nothing, except for this
No itself.'.34
This No is not an evil that is a negation or privation of the Good in the tradi-
tional conception, but it is a Yes. It is a position (a positive stance toward
Being), and not simply a privation (not simply a failure to comply with some
universal standards put forth by human or divine decree). While there is no
doubt that the dialectic of evil entails a No to hope and faith, it is to be under-
stood, more primordially, as a continual invitation (a Yes) to despair and
offense. Evil gathers its existence around the destructive passions.
The mind gives the body an order, and is obeyed at once: the mind gives
itself an order and is resisted. The mind commands the hand to move and
there is such readiness that you can hardly distinguish the command from
the execution. Yet the mind is mind, whereas the hand is body. The mind
commands the mind to will, the mind is itself, but it does not do it. Why this
monstrousness? And what is the root of it? The mind I say commands itself
to will: it would not give the command unless it willed: yet it does not do
what it commands. The trouble is that it does not totally will: therefore it does
144 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
not totally command. It commands in so far as it wills; and it disobeys the com-
mand in so far as it does not will. The will is commanding itself to be a will -
commanding itself, not some other. But it does not in its fullness give the
command, so that what it commands is not done. For if the will were so in
its fullness, it would not command itself to will. It is therefore no monstrous-
ness partly to will, partly not to will, but a sickness of the soul to be so
weighted down by custom that it cannot wholly rise even with the support
of truth. 35
While this lack of whole willing is a sickness of the soul for Augustine, it is not
yet 'monstrousness'; it is merely a lack of health, a privation of a fully inte-
grated will. With this view of the pure heart, evil becomes a lack or privation
of this willing of one thing - the Good. Thus, concerning the nature of sin
(evil), Augustine writes,
[WJhen I now asked what is iniquity, I realized that it is not a substance, but
a swerving of the will which is turned towards lower things and away from
You, O God, who are the supreme substance: so that it casts away what is
most inward to it and swells greedily for outward things.
Kierkegaard understood this purity of the heart that wills wholly for the
Good, but he also realized that there is a purity of the heart that wholly wills
by turning toward the Good in defiance. Within this recognition, Kierkegaard
was able to tap the tradition moving from Kant to Schelling. In originally
working out his ethics Kant, like Augustine, also held the view that moral
action came from the pure will — the good will — which fulfilled its duty out
of respect for the law. We noted that, for Kant, reason infallibly determines
the will, in that if one acts according to reason, then one's will is necessarily
good. It is this purity of the origin of the will that gives moral worth to actions.
When one does not will from reason, then one is acting from natural impulses
or inclinations. Since this is not acting from the will, one cannot be said to be
acting out of freedom. Kant came to realize, however, that if the only free
actions are moral actions, and those done against duty are done merely from
inclinations, then there is no place for immoral actions: all actions are either
moral or amoral.
In Schelling a malignant reason is indeed possible. The connection between
will and reason is not a preordained, established relation for human beings.
Rather, in Schelling's ontology, there is a sense of becoming in which con-
sciousness arises out of unconsciousness through the light of the understan-
ding's penetration into the dark depths of longing and will. The problem of
good and evil plays itself out in this development from unconsciousness to con-
sciousness (the development of freedom), which is a struggle of the particular
Defiance: The Essence of Radical Evil 145
will against the universal will. The connection between will (the dark depths)
and reason (the light of the understanding) is not set in stone, but is fluid in its
development. Evil becomes radical when one chooses to determine one's free-
dom on the basis of one's particularity against the universal will of reason.
This is possible because the dark depths of longing and the light of reason are
dissoluble in human beings, so one may use the light of reason in order to
create a false unity out of the dark depths. Evil is not, then, a discord in which
there is the chaos and disorder of the various desires and passions which drive
the individual from one appetite to the next; rather, the light of reason has
penetrated the darkness and separated the forces, creating a unity, albeit a
false unity. It is not the incentives that act as the rule of the will's maxim (to
put it in Kantian language), but reason itself.
While Kierkegaard took much from Schelling's analysis, he did not accept
that the determination of one's will (the basis of freedom) is posited in the eter-
nal past, a dimension reaching back before one's birth. According to Schel-
ling, we have always already chosen to determine our will according to
selfishness, and have chosen from a 'place' outside time. This choice — which
has already been made by the time we come into existence - is his definition of
radical evil: 'Only an evil which attaches to us by our own act, but does so from
birth, can therefore be designated as radical evil.''
Freedom arises out of this originality of disposition, in which the individual
determines the purity of the will from out of a choice. As a system builder,
Schelling could not allow freedom to remain as a loose end, and so, as philoso-
phy has always done, he closed his system by use of the Platonic notion of recol-
lection — that is, the eternal from the aspect of the past.
Kierkegaard moves the issue into existence, and looks at it in terms of exis-
tential passion and concern; it is in the concern for one's existence that all gen-
uine self-understanding arises. In this concern one comes up against limits
reason cannot, by itself, transcend. The grasping of Being is not simply — or
even primarily — directed by reason, but through existential leaps, which are
driven by reaching the boundaries of a particular stage or life-view. The
movement from spiritlessness to self-conscious freedom is a movement in
which the self comes up against the limits of its existence-stage, and finds the
nourishment in the passions by which one leaps into another stage of existence,
and by which the knower is transformed. This transformation is a movement
into further transparency and freedom.
As the self moves from stage to stage, what keeps it moving is the expectation
that the nourishment will come, and that it will be 'good'. What it means
by 'the Good', however, is often a self-centred conception such as, what
is good for me, my 'just desserts'. In other words, the self continues to define
the Good solely within its own horizons. Still, as it grows in self-consciousness,
these pockets of selfishness, which it has been evading, begin to come to light.
146 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
The self is being transformed by some principle of nourishment that accompa-
nies the need it continually confronts. In the end, however, we discover that at
the limit of self-conscious freedom, when much of the self-centredness attached
to the 'Good' has become apparent, the self may still be offended at the very
nourishment the Good provides. Perhaps the nourishment did not come as
one had desired and expected, or as quickly as one felt it should have. Perhaps
it is offensive that one should require supplementary nourishment of this sort.
Whatever the case, one despairs of such nourishment, becomes offended at
existence, and moves into a defiance in which the will is unified around one's
offense at existence itself. There can arise, then, at the pinnacle of freedom,
an offense and despair that causes the self to recoil, in that it discovers that
it can neither tame nor control the Good. When this happens it is offended at the
way existence has been 'set up' by the Good, and despairs of any desire or hope
for a clarifying word.
Despair is, across all modes of self-consciousness and freedom, a sense of
hopelessness toward existence. At some point one becomes offended by exis-
tence — its contradictions, its mysteries, its lack of definitive answers, the suf-
fering and seeming injustice of the world, and the fact that the universe does
not revolve around one's own existence - and so gives up hope and faith in the
Good. We have come to see that this hopelessness may eventually turn into a
defiance that despairs of receiving a clarifying word out of the infinite mystery
that encompasses us.
This offense arises out of the pride that believes it can somehow move
God by its suffering, complaint and resounding voice. Indeed, we find that
although it had admitted its weakness, it never relinquished its selfishness
and pride, but thought it had been feeding itself through its weakness — that
it had, through its brooding and self-effacement, moved and manipulated God
to act. By admitting its need, the nourishment always came, and yet, when
freedom has absolutely nothing to rest on, nothing by which to evade its utter
dependence on God, and when it floats over the abyss, the selfish and insolent
demand for nourishment that was always there shows itself. This pride is also
within spiritlessness, but becomes most apparent when it has been actualized
in spirit; from this perspective we may now look back and see that it is this
offense at existence which is also at the heart of spiritlessness, though it is able
to evade this despair by ignoring the limits and needs that offend it.
would consist in the lack of fulfilling these instructions, whether due to ignor-
ance or weakness. In terms of this failure, the emphasis would be on the
particular instances in which one transgressed the instructions, and so one
would be good insofar as one kept its directions or rules, and evil insofar as
one did not. Thus, one may be good Sunday through Thursday, and then be
evil on Friday and Saturday. One may hope, then, that an eternal happiness
consists in being good at least five-sevenths of the time.
This is not how existence has been handed to us. Just a perusal of Western
and Eastern philosophy as well as the major and minor religions of both
hemispheres — will show that existence is a messy affair. A study of the best
human wisdom and knowledge available does not simply boggle the mind,
but leaves one numb and confused. This, however, is not such a bad thing, at
least according to Kierkegaard - or to Socrates, for that matter. We are
forced to admit that we do not know nearly as much as we think we do. Over-
coming our offense at this mystery is not accomplished through an accumula-
tion of knowledge a penetration of reason into the darkness — but through a
particular, passionate relationship to the source of this mystery.
Anti-climacus makes clear that evil is not about particular sins, but about a
position of sinfulness. The more self-consciously free one becomes, the more
this evil is intensified - that is, the more it becomes the principle out of which
one lives, and the origin of one's disposition. At its highest potency, offense and
despair are chosen in a self-conscious freedom that has lost faith and hope in
the grace and goodness of God. This is why Anti-climacus has correctly stated
that the opposite of sin is not virtue, but faith. 39 When the darkness of the
storm overwhelms one's life, the question is not whether one can continue to
fulfil the universal, because the storm brings the universal itself into question; the
question is whether one will curse God and despair, or continue to humble
oneself and worship. Kierkegaard gives no rational arguments for God's good-
ness, because it does no good to add to the plethora of'answers' given through-
out human history (though he may relish the irony of adding to the confusion
by giving more answers). He does not possess or control the clarifying word the
defiant person needs. The only message he gives to defiance is that it must
humble itself under its suffering, have faith in the goodness of God, and hold
onto the hope that is against hope - the Paradox of the Incarnation.
Perhaps the biggest reason Kierkegaard did not say much concerning how
to overcome defiance is because he is not really writing to those in defiance,
who have, after all, made their choice. He is writing to the spiritless, hoping
to awaken them from their spiritual slumber. He understood the individual
needs to be awakened to the seeds of pride, offense and despair. He sought to
awaken the individual to earnestness, in hopes that the spiritual journey may
at least begin. He knew full well the journey could end in defiance, but at least
defiance is earnest, and so it might someday move from offense to faith,
150 Kierkegaard's Analysis of Radical Evil
whereas spiritlessness does not even have the capacity for faith. Kierkegaard's
authorship is an attempt to confront the single individual with the limitations
of existence, and the weakness of the self in overcoming these limitations, in
hopes of awakening the need for God. All pursuit and love of wisdom must
remain within this existential neediness.
Socrates was thoroughly aware of the limitations within existence, and the
place these limitations played in the philosophical pursuit. This is perhaps
most clearly seen in his recounting of the myth told to him by Diotima con-
cerning the birth of Eros. Eros was born from Resource and Need, and so
It has been his fate to always be needy; nor is he delicate and lovely as most
of us believe, but harsh and arid, barefoot and homeless, sleeping on the
naked earth, in doorways, or in the very streets beneath the stars of
heaven, and always partaking of his mother's poverty. But, secondly, he
brings his father's resourcefulness to his designs upon the beautiful and the
good, for he is gallant, impetuous, and energetic, a mighty hunter, and a
master of device and artifice - at once desirous and full of wisdom, a lifelong
seeker after truth, an adept in sorcery, enchantment, and seduction. 40
For Socrates, Eros is the passion that drives the pursuit of wisdom, and which
longs for the Good to give birth in oneself and others. He recognized the frailty
and neediness in this pursuit, and continually expressed this in the ignorance
that drove his questioning. It did not take long, however, for Resource to
become the focus of the philosophical pursuit (it took place in Plato himself),
and to leave the consciousness of our neediness behind as a nuisance, or at least
that which is to be overcome. By focusing on Resource — by being offended by
our neediness — we look to our own self-sufficiency, and put too much stock in
our own power. By losing the need, we tend to put all value on what we have
thought, on what we know with certainty, and on the order we have created.
In this, we move from setting our designs upon the beautiful and the Good,
and put our eyes only on what we have done, and on those aspects of existence
we can control. There is no doubt that we have shown ourselves to be masters
of device and artifice, but we have given up the greater part of our Being in
doing so. What is tragic is that we have come to use our resourcefulness against
ourselves: we have so enchanted and seduced ourselves by our own resources,
that we are unable to see that we are barefoot and homeless.
Notes
absolute, the 74-6, 88, 95-8, 102, 104, conditional, conditioned 9, 50, 52, 81,
110-14, 116, 119-21, 147 97, 119
choice 67-8,74-5,78,97,104,113, consciousness 16,27,31,36,38,52,
147 58-9, 61, 63-4, 67, 70-1, 76-7, 81,
aesthete, aestheticism 25, 30, 39, 54, 86, 89-91, 94-5, 102, 104-10, 114,
58-70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 82, 85-6, 91, 118-19, 121, 123-4, 130, 136, 136,
102-3, 110, 117, 122, 142, 144, 146, 148, 150
absurd man, the 138-9 ethical 81,93,105
abyss 11, 111, 114, 115, 122, 123, 131, contingent, contingency 8, 26, 38, 53,
133, 135, 138, 139, 146 79,85,97-8,108, 110-11
addiction 84-5,115,119 continuity 29-32,81
Ahab 9 control 14, 17,26,60-61,72,81,88,96,
amoral 2, 5, 144 125, 136, 139, 146-50
anxiety 17, 40, 82, 89-90, 92-3, 95, corruption 5-6,9
111, 118, 141, 147 craving(s) 12-13, 84-6, 107, 122~3,
Aristotle 24 126n.26
Augustine 8,83,143-4 criteria, criterion 52-4, 102, 106, 108,
authentic, authenticity 70, 82, 108, 121
123, 125, 128-9, 134, 136 crowd, the 43, 49-53
autonomous, autonomy 2-4, 92, 105, cruelty 35
117, 132, 148
awaken, awakening 17-18,20,27,41, dark see also abyss, ground
50-1,85-6, 141-2, 147-50 depths 12-13,16,76,114,122-3,
129, 133-4, 144-5
longing 107, 122, 135
being 10-13, 15, 18-19, 23-4, 31, 34,
principle 13,16,20,133
41, 50, 54, 75-6, 80, 102, 105, 129,
saying 130,137-9
140-1, 143, 145, 147, 150
darkness 12-13, 16, 18, 67, 85, 89, 115,
Berdyaev, Nicolas 38, 85
129,137-9, 145, 148, 150
bored, boredom 61,64,67,69
death 8, 30, 44-5, 52-3, 67, 94, 108,
Buddhism 116
110-11, 116, 123, 137, 139, 141-2,
Buechner, Frederick 29-30
147
decision(s) 6, 17, 29-30, 32, 37, 45, 79,
Camus, Albert 138-9 91,96-7, 106,110
categorical imperative 2~3 defiance 9,15,18, 48-50, 58-9, 82, 92,
chaos 11,13,16,135,145 102, 123-5, 128-44, 146, 149
Christendom 52, 107-8 demonic, the 92-3, 140
clarifying word 129,137-9,146,149 dependence 107-9, 128, 146
comfort 43-4,49-50,53-4,58-9,61, depths 11-17,20,65, 104, 106, 115, 132
81, 105, 118, 135, 141 of longing 12, 16
comparison 8,53,118,132-3,141 depravity 42
158 Index