On Kierkegaard, Anxiety and Selfhood
Disclaimer: These are not factually Kierkegaard’s views, but some of his conceptions on which I have built upon and offered not an interpretation, but a reinterpretation of the broad structure of his argument.
Before the advent of modern medical psychology, the ills of mind were an ailment of the soul for philosophers, but semantics defining the mind and the soul might change, the afflictions do not. Kierkegaard, who is considered to be the father of modern existential philosophy, in his attempt to analyze these afflictions are so contemporary, that anybody who feels existential angst, anxiety, and depression needs to give him a read, which has one of the simplest and lucid analyses of these phenomena.
There are two concepts which form the basis of his analysis. These are the Finite, and the Infinite. Quite simply explained, the infinite represents the realm of absolute freedom of choices and possibilities, while the Finite represents the realm of necessity and actualities of life.
The key to selfhood, which might correspond to the attainment of fulfilment of life represents the balance between these two forces, and any imbalance in the two causes the dread and despair of life.
While losing oneself to the finite is mundane and stifling, and looks forward to the infinite possibilities that life offers, the one lost in the infinite is equally haunting, for the individual then looks towards safety and security of the finite. An analogy is the preference towards living in a gated neighborhood to one living in the wild. Such overwhelming is the infinitude of possibilities in this realm, that one enacts no choice in the possibilities of infinite choice, akin of finding the perfect choice for your life on Tinder. There is always the chance of finding someone better, and hence right swiping ad infinitum.
From my experience, the imbalance between the two is quite simply evident in the transition from college to a career, the infinite offers a desire which is never fulfilled, so we make do with what we get, which rests in the realm of the finite. And once unemployed, the safety of our peers in their own jobs become a source of anxiety, irregardless of them looking for new opportunities in the Infinite.
In more abstract terms, anxiety stems from being in the finite as analogous to standing on the edge of the realms separating these two planes, with the chains of the security of the finite keeping you from jumping to the infinite. This anxiety is what Kierkegaard terms as ‘dread’, or the modern conception of anxiety. The risky attraction. As we age, the responsibilities of life make the chain stronger and tighter, but the temptation of the infinite remains more than ever, so that the dread turns to ‘despair’ , or what we might term depression. The opposite exists in the realm of the infinite as well, where staying too long can make one tempt towards the finite. The desire being that elusive object, makes the individual settle for the necessity or actuality, and in temporary relief the person forgets that the rope towards the finite overtime become chains of his own making, to seek escape from.
The switching between the realms gives one a false notion of the ‘Self’, the realization of one’s meaning in life. The subjective excuses masks one from the objective truth of the suffering in this Sisyphean task, for the objectivity manifests itself only in the infinite relative comparisons between the two realms. Unfortunately, our life is too short for that. Let me illustrate this more clearly. A choice x can only be judged in terms of a choice y. But the true comparison exists in jumping back to x from y, so that we may find truly that x was better all along, rather than in our imagination, but this then means that to truly judge our choices becomes jumping between the two many times (logically infinite times).
In this vicious cycle, Kierkegaard came up with a solution of finding the self ultimately in one’s life, and I believe this solution not only to be rational, but extremely powerful.
Phase I- The Freedom Phase
The freedom phase comprises of letting go in the infinite, without adherence to any security or safety. The only way to make choices in the infinite is to make many, and indulge oneself in the aesthetic pleasures of art, love and pleasure. This way one separates himself from the society, through non conformist choices without fear of finite justice. There are two ways to go about the freedom phase, one is the vulgar aestheticism, which satiates too quickly, or a refined controlled aestheticism, which burns like a slow burning coal, until it dies out. The lure of the infinite and search for stability as expected, is inevitable, which leads to the second phase. I define it as a quarter life crisis of the transition stage.
Phase II – The Ethic Phase
The individual now in his relief joins the safety of the finite, but the freedom phase allows one to not just choose out of the dread of safety, but the consciousness of the first phase lets him to choose something courageous, so that the bridge between desire and necessity is narrowed. Over time, as the rigidity of the new realm sets in, the virtues and values of one becomes concrete, even if they’re misaligned with one’s true self. The individual reunites with society, in line with his values, and the meaning of life gradually shifts from an aesthetic world-view to one of social duty.
As one makes his bonds within the society, a new dread dawns over him. The signal of the end of a productive life, the ailments which slow one down, and a gradual realization of the certainty of mortality makes one question whether this was all to life, to which the answer comes back, it can’t be. Man is not born to be chained to a role till his death, the minds wants comprehension which the nature itself provides, rather than what he attributes to it. The lure of the infinite strikes back, but one cannot just break his chains and get to the freedom phase now, nobody has the energy nor will. In this impasse, Kierkegaard comes to the third and final state. The transition to this phase I call the mid-life crisis.
Phase III – The Spirit Phase
Though Kierkegaard referred to this phase as the Religious phase, the change in our society can present this phase through a parallel where religion can be substituted by the spirit phase, which encompasses religion, soul, mind, whatever one sees something beyond the materialism of life.
The key problem of this phase is to find the infinite in the domain of the finite, and find a synthesis of the two, which can proxy as a balance between the two.
In this stage of life, one cannot just abandon the finite which has now shackled him from all sides. So the individual finds the relief of the infinitude within. While one escapes to introspection to find the objective truth of reality, one cannot just fathom and accept that the reality is just as is, so there is nothing mystical about it. But then how does the infinitude offer itself in introspection?
So one goes through an infinitude of subjectivities on an objective truth, such as the objective certainty of death, on which the infinitude offers itself through either religion, since divine understanding is the desire, because desire as we have now established never fulfils itself. So accepting faith and life after death becomes the ultimate conception of infinity according to Kierkegaard, and finally one finds the infinite in the finite, and the balance is restored, so that dread and despair vanish altogether.
This is an illusion, but if the illusion makes one’s self to be complete, how is it an illusion but something our consciousness was allowed free will for? As Alan Watts recalls a Zen saying- ‘You can give a crying child a yellow leaf which it takes as for gold’.
This phase is characterized not by the need for looking beyond the veil of our immediate reality to a supposedly cosmological reality, which we can never know for fact, so instead we hold on to the desire and expectation (or faith) of such a veil which will someday open up to us, and deep inside we will never want the veil to open until our time is up.