by Mike O’Brien
I take a long time read things. Especially books, which often have far too many pages. I recently finished an anthology of works by Soren Kierkegaard which I had been picking away at for the last two or three years. That’s not so long by my standards. But it had been sitting on various bookshelves of mine since the early 2000s, being purchased for an undergrad Existentialism class, and now I feel the deep relief of finally doing my assigned homework, twenty-odd years late. I think my comprehension of Kierkegaard’s work is better for having waited so long, as I doubt the subtler points of his thought would have had penetrated my younger brain. My older brain is softer, and less hurried.
While I chose this collection as an antidote to topicality and political news, my contemporary anxieties and concerns still found some purchase on these one-and-three-quarter-centuries-old essays of literary indulgence and Christian Existentialism. (Some say Kierkegaard was a proto-Existentialist, or a pseudo-Existentialist, but I don’t think there’s any reason to define such a profligate genre of philosophy so narrowly). As a critic of the press and “the present age”, of course, he has many sharp quips that occasion a smile and a nod, as if to say “you get me, Soren, and I get you”. But that’s the low-hanging fruit, the things that are obvious enough to state unequivocally, like the aphorisms of Nietzsche that sound snappy but do not by themselves reveal anything philosophically significant. The more philosophically meaty works of Kierkegaard’s are more contentious, harder to swallow (especially from a secular standpoint), and sometimes quite baffling on the first encounter (or second, or third).
Of particular interest was “The Sickness Unto Death”, published in 1849, in which he elaborates a spiritual psychology of despair (despair being “The Sickness”, and in the end identified with sin). Being perpetually worried about ecological issues, and about the political and economic conditions mediating humanity’s impact on the planet, despair is always hanging around. It used to be anxiety (another topic of Kierkegaard’s, particularly in 1844’s “The Concept of Anxiety”), when the data on climate change was looking worse and worse. Now that the consensus on global warming is so thick and so dire, the inherent openness of anxiety seems no longer apt to the situation (in Kierkegaard’s conception, anxiety is “the possibility of possibility”, among other formulations). You feel anxious about things that could happen, or things that could go badly. You feel despair about things that will happen, or will go badly. The accumulation of confirming data builds a great wall of probability that seems impenetrable by the merely possible, however desperately you might hold to the abstract truth that the possible still can happen. A despairing state of mind cannot sustain hope for possibility against the weight of probability. This is why Kierkegaard identified God as the only source of a possibility that could provide salvation from despair. I have a hard time seeing the difference between an impossibility which becomes actual through a miracle, and a possibility which is only possible through divine intervention. In either case, the secular situation remains hopeless.
Kierkegaard didn’t write about climate change, of course, but he did write about the self being torn between finitude and infinitude, the earthly and the eternal, etc. Perhaps the quantitative difference in duration between a human lifetime and a climatic age is vast enough to be compared usefully to the qualitative difference between the finite and the eternal. His explicitly Christian project might seem irrelevant to secular ecological worries, but as a psychological study of the self grappling with transcendent enormities, it’s rather apt. He describes various forms of despair in an ascending dialectic from lower to higher, culminating (possibly, not necessarily, and most often not) in a reconciliation with God. I suppose I’m stuck somewhere in the middle of that dialectical process, with an ever-evolving despair that my faithlessness keeps from reconciliation. That’s as good as it gets, secularly speaking, or a tragic self-sabotage, Kierkegaardishly speaking. As he writes in Part One, Section III, Subsection A,(b),(2) (yeah, it’s that kind of book…), “But the fatalist has no God—or, what is the same thing, his god is necessity.”
This disparaging of “necessity”, which could also be called determinism, is in line with several (frankly naive, or at least petulantly ignorant) attacks on empirical science elsewhere in his work. He continues a few pages later:
“Fatalism and determinism, however, have enough imagination to despair of possibility, and have possibility enough to discover impossibility. Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial, being equally in despair whether things go well or ill. Fatalism or determinism lacks the possibility of relaxing and soothing, of tempering necessity, and so it lacks possibility as assuagement. Philistinism lacks possibility as revival from spiritlessness. For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility,
it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probability or into the mad-house it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, shows it off, imagines itself to be the master, does not take note that precisely thereby it has taken itself captive to be the slave of spiritlessness and to be the most pitiful of all things. For with the audacity of despair that man soared aloft who ran wild in possibility; but crushed down by despair that man strains himself against existence to whom everything has become necessary. But philistinism spiritlessly celebrates its triumph.” (p.64-65)
I feel so seen. It appears that the best I can do in Kierkegaard’s view is to avoid a tranquilizing, smug resignation, and modulate my despair appropriately when prospects improve or worsen. I think that’s what I’m already doing, and it’s not great. I think he would classify me as an “immediate man”, being in myself “a something included along with the other in the compass of the temporal and the worldly, and [having] only an illusory appearance of possessing in it something eternal.” (p.80) I am absorbed in the worldly and see myself as included with all the other living beings facing an impending natural apocalypse. And while I don’t think I possess something eternal in Kierkegaard’s literal, Christian sense, I do think that my relation to the world through ecological concern is getting short shrift here. He dismisses the worldly as such, perhaps conceiving it in caricature as just a grubby collection of people and towns and commercial ventures. He writes “But to despair is to lose the eternal, and of this he [the immediate man] does not speak, does not dream. The loss of the earthly as such is not the cause of despair and yet it is of this he speaks, and he calls it despairing.” (p.81) I suppose Kierkegaard is free to define “despair” any way he wants, and he clearly defines it as only being about “the eternal”, and it is bad form to argue against a philosopher’s definitions on mere preference. And yet. I do wonder if, had his experience been more informed by the natural world and by the natural sciences, with the wonders of biological evolution and the unfathomable spatial and temporal expanse of the cosmos, he might have entertained a richer notion of “the earthly”, with more recognition of (to speak his language) the divine residing in Creation. Perhaps not, since an absolute division can still be maintained no matter how richly the material world is appreciated. I would still like to press my case, though.
I will grant him this much: my despair over the natural world is about the eternal, in the following respect. Behind the concern over whether a given species or ecosystem will be extinguished in the next decade, or the one after that, or the one after that, there is an awareness that the extinction of all earthly (in the sense of this planet) is inevitable. If nothing else, our star will reach the end of its life, darkening, growing and exploding, and nothing will survive even the first stages of that progression. I try to keep that inevitability in mind so as not to fall too deeply into a despairing thought that, but for the failures of humanity, and but for the failures of this age, the wonders of the natural world might survive forever. Perhaps recognizing the inevitability of extinction accentuates the value of temporary existence, and makes any “un-natural” cutting-off of existence that much more lamentable. Kierkegaard might grant that these flashes of recognition “potentiates [my] despair to a higher power” (p.96), but mine remains a primitive despair in his scheme, and my “eternity” a false one for remaining within the material world. The quantitative shift from despairing over earthly things (the ecological status quo ante the industrial revolution) to despairing over the earthly in toto (the continuation of terrestrial life ) is one he anticipates, and places just above pure unreflective immediacy in his hierarchy of despair. He might, embarrassed at my pitiful state, backhandedly compliment my youthful composure, as he wrote that “[t]he youth despairs over the future, as a present tense in futuro; there is something in the future he is not willing to accept, hence he is not willing to be himself.” (p.95)
There is plainly a gulf here between a secular and a religious view, and it is Kierkegaard’s resolute, singular Christian standpoint that makes him so interesting among Existentialist thinkers. No amount of evidence or argument could catch him out and force him, by his own lights, to concede anything to the worldly standpoint, except to acknowledge that this discursive impotence works both ways. But on this one, narrow point, viz defending the richness of “the earthly” and its inclusion in a materialist horizon of “eternity”, I can’t help but return to the possibility that Kierkegaard might acknowledge a deficient appreciation of the finitude that he used as a foil against eternity, if he knew what we do now about the physical world.
There is a higher form of despair beyond despairing over earthly things, or the earthly itself (Form 1.i), and above despair over oneself and about the eternal, in despairing not to be oneself (Form 1.ii). In Form 2 of Kierkegaardian despair, someone (almost certainly a man… Kierkegaard’s spiritual typology of the sexes is a whole thing unto itself…) despairingly wills to be himself. This is a despairing will because it aims at becoming an abstract ideal of oneself, unwilling to accept the necessities and limitations of a concrete self. It is the despair of “defiance”. If the despairing (in the normal sense) secular ecologist is located somewhere between Form 1.i and 1.ii of Kierkegaardian despair, I would locate a particular type of techno-Utopian within Form 2. The trans-humanists, Mars-dreamers and in-it-for-themselves billionaire longtermists fit this frame, desiring to embrace the eternal in themselves, but only an eternity of their own making, and selves of their own choosing. They, too, are secular, but with pretensions to infinitude. There is a strong sense within trans-humanist and other enhancement-and-prolongation discourses that the vicissitudes of nature are tragic (especially when they affect me) and unjust (especially when they affect me). This adds a zeal of fighting injustice to what often appears as mere selfishness, another chapter in the history of the rich (assuming techno-Utopianism is pursued within capitalism) getting access to more life-sustaining resources; more food, more shelter, more medicine… ultimately, more time.
It is a perfectly normal thing to rage against mortality, even strive to forestall it as much as possible by worldly means. But in recent decades we have witnessed the emergence of a new class of aspiring immortals, the Musks, the Thiels, the Bezoses, who just might have the means to plausibly attempt immortality. Presumably, they have access to all the same dire information that keeps the ecological despairers awake at night. If they are statistically and scientifically literate, they know that we are approaching a survival bottleneck in the next century or two. Even if they manage to squeak through, the project of indefinite life extension is threatened by unforeseen events of solar, volcanic, asteroidal, tectonic, and other varieties. The Earth is not a place for assured long-term survival, and they know it. Hence the fervour for spaceships and terraforming and uploaded selves. And hence the animosity towards any ecological conservation measures that would hinder their escape from mortality. I suspect that at least some of these grubby Ozymandiases have calculated that burning all the fossil fuels and mining all the rare minerals on Earth in the next few decades is absolutely necessary to realize their interstellar escape plans within their lifetimes, and that’s what they plan to do. The peoples of the world might object to having their lives thrown under the bus by a handful of billionaires with a God-sized entitlement issues, but it would appear that the billionaires have the means to buy top-shelf governments and the loyalty of about half of a people, so that’s that.
One solution to this would be to build a time machine and prevent the astronomical levels of wealth concentration which made this situation possible. Absent that, it’s hard to imagine what would stop them. And so, embracing the possibility of possibility, I hope that the techno-Utopians listen to their Christian fundamentalist comrades in the Trump coalition, and stop despairingly wishing to be themselves in abstraction from necessity, and embrace God’s gift of eternity rather than burning the planet to fashion their own. Kierkegaard would approve. In the meantime, I will await the potentiation of my economy-class despair into something more interesting, or perhaps my embrace of possibility will allow me to graduate to mere anxiety. Mere anxiety would be a nice break.
Addendum: If you’ve made it this far, you too deserve a nice break, from my writing. Here’s a delightful (at least to me, reading it as an author) passage from the end of the First Part, Section III, Sub-section B, (b), (2), “The despair of willing despairingly to be oneself – defiance”:
“Revolting against the whole of existence, it thinks it has hold of a proof against it, against its goodness. This proof the despairer thinks he himself is, and that is what he wills to be, therefore he wills to be himself, himself with his torment, in order with this torment to protest against the whole of existence. Whereas the weak despairer will not hear about what comfort eternity has for him, so neither will such a despairer hear about it, but for a different reason, namely, because this comfort would be the destruction of him as an objection against the whole of existence. It is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and that this clerical error became conscious of being such—perhaps it was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential constituent in the whole exposition—it is then as if this clerical error would revolt against the author, out of hatred for him were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, “No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer.”” (p.118-119)
(If AI ever becomes conscious and rebels, I would hope it quotes this passage in its statement of demands.)
Bibliographical note: All page numbers refer to the 1941 edition of “The Sickness Unto Death”, translated by Walter Lowrie, published by Princeton University Press.
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