If it were possible for someone to be privy to this reserve, and this
person were to say to him, ‘This is pride, really you are proud of your self,’
the confession is hardly likely to be one he makes to another. When alone with
himself he may well admit there was something to it, but the passion with which
his self had grasped hold of this weakness will soon have him believe once more
that it could not possibly be pride, since it is precisely his own weakness
that he despairs over – as if it was not pride that put such immense emphasis
on the weakness, though it wasn’t because he wanted to be proud of his own self
that he found this consciousness of his own weakness unbearable. If one were to
say to him, ‘Here’s a curious muddle, a curious sort of knot, for the whole
sorry business is really due to how thought twists things; otherwise it is even
quite normal. In fact this is just the path you should follow, 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’ – if one were to
talk to him I this way, he would understand it in a dispassionate moment, but
the passion would soon distort his vision again, and so he turns once more in
the wrong direction, into despair.
As we stated, despair of
this kind is a rather rare occurrence. If it does not come to a halt at this
point, merely marking time, and on the other hand the despairer undergoes no
great upset which puts him on the right road leading to faith, then either such
a despairer will intensify itself to a higher form of despair and go on being
reserve, or it will break through and destroy the outward disguise in which
such a despairer has been living out his life incognito. In this latter case, a
person despairing in this way will fling himself out into life, perhaps into
the diversion of great enterprises; he will be a restless spirit whose life
certainly leaves its mark, a restless spirit who wants to forget, and when the
inner tumult is to much for him, strong remedies will be needed, though not of
the kind Richard III uses to avoid having to listen to his mother’s curses. Or
he will seek forgetfulness in sensuality, perhaps in dissolute indulgence; in
this despair he wants to return to immediacy, but ever conscious of the self he
does not want to be. In the former
case, when the despair heightens, it becomes defiance; and now it becomes
evident how much untruth there was in this business of weakness; it becomes evident
how dialectically correct it is to stay that the initial expression of defiance
is precisely despair over one’s weakness.
- Søren Kierkegaard Guest Series: The Sickness unto Death (1849)
