Existential Analysis 29.1: January 2018
Anxiety, Despair And The Knight Of Faith:
The Ontological, The Ontic And The
Transcendent In Søren Kierkegaard
Richard Swann
Abstract
Two cases in the existential-phenomenological literature, Ellen West and
Rita, are re-examined in the light of Kierkegaard’s powerful critique of
Anxiety and Despair in his so-called ‘psychological works’. An attempt is
made to show how Kierkegaard’s ideas can be humanized and secularized
for the work of therapy.
Key Words
Kierkegaard, existentialism, anxiety, despair, bereavement, psychotherapy,
Binswanger, van Deurzen
Introduction
Drawing on Søren Kierkegaard’s (1813-1855) ‘psychological’ works this
article proposes to examine three key philosophical concepts described
by Kierkegaard in these works. The article will concentrate on Anxiety,
or sometimes translated from the Danish as Dread, the related, but
significantly different idea of Despair, and finally the concept of the
Knight of Faith; the latter concept being Kierkegaard’s notion of a state
of being that conquers and transcends the Despair of the individual. It
will explore whether the idea of the Knight of Faith is useful to modern
existential psychotherapy or whether the act of becoming a Knight of
Faith, in Kierkegaard-ian terms, by making the Leap to Faith, is more
useful. Key concepts will be related back to two case studies in the literature,
Rita, a patient of the existential therapist and theorist, Emmy van Deurzen,
and Ellen West, a patient retrospectively interpreted by the Swiss existential
psychiatrist, Ludwig Binswanger.
The choice of themes is an attempt to exemplify some aspects of the
nature of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project, although the choice can in
no way encompass the totality of Kierkegaard’s extremely fertile and
productive writing life. Nevertheless, each of these concepts acts as a
doorway to open up other key themes. The concept of Anxiety cannot be
elucidated without notions of sin, freedom and choice. The concept of
despair is inextricably linked with notions of aesthetic and ethical living,
as well as subjectivity, immediacy and the enduring difficulty of change.
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Anxiety, Despair And The Knight Of Faith
The Knight of Faith goes hand-in-hand with central themes of love,
transcendence, the infinite and the event of liberation.
However, fundamental to Kierkegaard’s mode of thinking is his idiosyncratic
dialectic, a sense of movement in his thinking, unfolding toward a greater
understanding of himself, his position in the world and his relationship to
God. Kierkegaard is irreducibly a religious thinker in the Christian tradition,
and this poses problems for many modern psychotherapeutic practitioners
and thinkers for whom the terminology of God and sin and the absolute
nature of these concepts, are hard to incorporate in the predominantly
secular twenty-first century Western discourse on mental health and
psychotherapy. Perhaps even more fundamentally, the Leap to Faith, or
Leap of Faith, whatever the religious flavour these phrases may connote,
presage powerful images of the idea of change, in its evental, even irrevocable,
nature: so much more powerful in its implications and consequences than,
for example, the trivialized notions, wrapped in the language of modern
marketing mavens, used to sell the next generation of digital wonder tools
with the promise to ‘change everything’.
The Kierkegaardian Dialectic (Simplicimus!)
To begin with the concept of Anxiety is to begin with an exploration of
Kierkegaard’s ideas of what constitutes existence; one might call this the
thesis, but also an ontological statement about the world in which human
life is immersed. The antithesis might then be posed as a question of how
we are to live in this world of anxiety and sin. Kierkegaard observed that
one way of doing so is to live in Despair; we might also call this the ontic
state of living. Finally, to resolve the dialectic, he poses the question of
how can we live better, beyond the ontic state of Despair. Kierkegaard’s
Knight of Faith resolves this dialectic but in a mode that is fundamentally
unphilosophical, anti-logical and antithetical to the formal Hegelian nature
of the dialectic. The choice of case studies is designed to illustrate, in
more modern psychotherapeutic settings, the failure of one patient, Ellen
West, to find any resolution to her ontic despair, and in the contrasting
case of Rita, a woman who, out of despair, was able to take steps, that
might be called small leaps of faith, to realize a renewed sense of living
in the world.
Some Historical Context
Kierkegaard lived and wrote in the first half of the nineteenth century, at
a time when the power of Enlightenment thought and its rational, scientific
and increasingly materialistic influence was gathering great momentum
to change the lives of modern Europeans. His writings in response to
these changes form an acute critique of the alienating effects of mass
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industrialisation and urbanization in nineteenth century society. The work
is important, partly because Kierkegaard was so early to see the implications
of the evolutionary path of his society, but also because his critique was
so direct, personal and uncompromising. Kierkegaard wrote not about
change at the societal level or the overarching trajectory of change and
its implications for the destiny of society. Kierkegaard was emphatic in
his rejection of the work of the German philosopher, G.W.F. Hegel (17701831) and the school of thought inspired by his work. Not for Kierkegaard
was the analysis of human thought and history into a synthesis proving
the inexorable progress of mankind toward ‘freedom’. Kierkegaard believed
firmly that such thinking was abstract, illogical, inhuman and unethical.
Instead he posed the question of how there could be a teleologically driven
dialectic to ‘freedom’, not as a philosophical problem to be solved, but
as a condemnation of the spirit of the notion as an affront to individual
dignity and sanctity. Kierkegaard’s life work was to wrench this philosophical
project back toward an examination of what it was to be a single human
being, thrown into a world of sin and suffering, alone. This determined
focus on the individual is one of the greatest legacies left to the existential
movement and to psychotherapy in particular. Kierkegaard’s principled,
committed and personal approach to the analysis of his own existence is
a basic template for the approach of the psychotherapist in dealing with
the questions of existence posed by the troubled client. It was an approach
emulated by two other towering figures in the development of modern
psychotherapy, Nietzsche and Freud (May, 1983).
Thesis: ‘The Concept of Anxiety’
In his book, The Concept of Anxiety (1980), first published in 1844,
Kierkegaard approached the ontological question of what conditions
frame the existence of the individual. It is a book that reflects a deep
personal preoccupation with anxiety. In his diaries of 1837, he wrote
‘Deep within every human being there still lives the anxiety over the
possibility of being alone in the world…and he hardly dares think of how
he would feel if all this [the world] were taken away’ (ibid: p 171). This
anxiety of aloneness for Kierkegaard was heightened further by the thought
of being abandoned by God. There were, for him, few more terrifying
moments in all literature than the biblical verse of Mark 15:34: ‘My God,
My God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ (ibid: p155), a question posed by
Christ on the point of death on the cross at Calvary. It may also be worth
noting that Kierkegaard, by this stage in his life, had broken off an
engagement with Regine Olsen, believing that he could only continue his
work alone and could not make demands of a wife to share this burden.
This may have heightened his own sense of loneliness and coloured
much of what he wrote on the themes of anxiety, abandonment and the
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pain of creating the event of change, in this case occasioned by the break
from Regine.
If even the sinless (personified in the figure of the Christ) can be abandoned,
then what of the rest of humanity, and what anxiety must they exist in with
that knowledge? But from where did this anxiety spring from originally?
Kierkegaard explored the beginnings of biblical history by minutely examining
the creation story, in particular the fall of Adam and Eve and subsequent
expulsion from the Garden of Eden. For Kierkegaard, Adam was the first
sinner and, after the Fall, Adam had to live with the consequences of the
first sin. Critically, he posits the notion that Adam did not invent sin but
instead ate from the Tree of Knowledge within the framework of a preexisting state of sin. God explicitly exhorted Adam not to eat the fruit of
the tree of knowledge, therefore, in God-given terms, there was a preexisting sense of what one can do, i.e. not eat, which is good, or can’t do,
which is eat and therefore is evil because it is against God. By eating, a
choice reached through his own decision making, Adam did not invent the
sin but expressed the first articulation of sin.
Kierkegaard set apart Adam as the unique first sinner; there can be no
other and therefore his sense of anxiety is, also, like no other – Adam’s is
the post hoc facto anxiety, realised as consequence but not anticipated.
Mankind, subsequent to the first sin, now lives in the anxiety of anticipation
– sin is not potential, it is already expressed in the world. Sin is in the
fabric of human living and the choice of whether to sin or not to sin is
ever present. Not only that, humankind’s imperfect and fallen nature
predisposes an inevitability to sin. Even the Christ figure commits the sin
of Despair, in the moment of death by losing Faith in his God-Father. One
could argue that if sinning is inevitable why there is any anxiety; surely
anxiety can only arise out of a sense of uncertainty? But this is Kierkegaard’s
point. There is no inevitability for the individual on the ontic level. There
is always a choice for the single individual. And then the anxiety comes
at a threefold level: firstly will the choice to sin be taken, secondly what
are the consequences of the transgression and, thirdly, will God abandon
us in our sinfulness?
Logically, within a broadly Christian theological framework where sin
exists, the state of being in sin is an ontological condition, because humankind
in general has furnished enough examples of transgression to approach
the point where sinfulness can be posited as a universal condition, and yet
sin is committed at the level of the individual, making choices, and therefore
must be ontic. What is ontological is the anxiety over sin – this we must
all live with all of the time both as individuals and as humankind. It is
inescapable. In a secular world, or at least in the personal lives of those
many millions who have chosen not to profess a belief or faith in God,
there is nevertheless a pervasive sense of good and evil, that right or wrong
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choices can be made and that the freedom to make the choices, as well as
the choices themselves, cause anxiety, sometimes so overwhelming that
external assistance needs to be sought to rebalance an individual’s relationship
with anxiety. Kierkegaard wrote that ‘Whoever has learnt to be anxious
in the right way has learned the ultimate’ (ibid: p 156). The human response
to anxiety, the ‘how to live?’, and the propensity to Despair forms the next
stage in the dialectic process.
Antithesis. Despair as the ‘The Sickness unto Death.’
If Anxiety is humankind’s inescapable, ontological state in trying to actualize
the possibilities presented by the future, then Despair is the individual’s
personal response, the ontic response. The Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard,
1849/1989) has been described as one of the greatest works of depth
psychology ever written (May, 1977: p 36) and in it Kierkegaard explores
the manifestations and gradations of Despair in the individual. The book
is one of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works written under the name AntiClimacus. The pseudonym makes reference to a seventh century religious
hermit, St. John Climacus, associated with a book describing thirty one
stages to becoming a good Christian and ascending to a closer relationship
with God. Climacus, from the Greek, implies a ladder and an ascent.
Kierkegaard’s choice of pseudonym is deliberately made to capture this
implication. In his exploration of the nature of Despair, he details a distinct
hierarchy of despairing states as the individual attains higher degrees of
self-consciousness and approaches ever closer to the point of being able
to make the Leap to Faith (Kierkegaard, 1989: Part 1B), and enter into a
direct and immediate relationship with God. Kierkegaard emphasizes that
the more self-consciousness an individual attains, the greater the intensity
of despair that they experience (ibid: p 72).
Kierkegaard carefully describes a hierarchy of Despair and the significance
of each stage. To be in Despair requires both a concept of Despair and a
concept of Self. Despair is not always realized or acknowledged, therefore
one can be living in Despair without knowing it which, in Kierkegaard’s
terms, is the same as living as if without God, as a pagan, and is the lowest
form of self-consciousness. From there, the ladder of Despair ascends.
Despair over the earthly, where one does not realize the weakness leading
to Despair. Kierkegaard describes this as the self being locked behind a
door which might be an escape from Despair, but one which is false. It is
a volatile and unself-conscious form of despair. Then there is Despair of
the eternal, a more self-conscious and depressive state; the self is behind
the door but the door is real and locked. Finally, the Despair of wanting,
in despair, to be oneself, which Kierkegaard calls a form of defiance and
a state in which the individual knows why they do not wish to be themselves.
Consciousness of one’s Despair, at all levels, leads to ways of avoiding
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or denying Despair such as seeking sensual distractions or embracing despair
as a calculated mode of being, a form of wilful self-abnegation, perhaps,
even bordering on the pride of sanctimony.
Taking God out of the equation, it is evident that these ideas are directly
related to Sartre’s notions of living in Bad Faith and denying ‘a future
transcendence’ (Sartre, 1943/2003), denying that one’s life choices have
led to a greater denial of the true self and its ability to express itself.
Kierkegaard speaks of Despair manifesting when the self’s mode of living
has unbalanced itself in relation to certain key axes of life, notably the
balance between the necessary and the possible, the finite and the infinite
and the temporal and eternal. The elements of time and space are of crucial
importance in this analysis. To be in despair is to have lost a sense of
moving continuously through time in an eternal process of becoming, and
to dwell on fixed packets of time, which might be remembered moments
of relief, pleasure or pain, and trying to seek them again and again. Similarly,
the sense of the necessary and the possible is vulnerable to a fixed posture
by the self, either not to accept the givens of the world and act accordingly,
or to accept them as too rigid to contemplate change. In each case, each
chosen stance, the possibility of the Leap to Faith or of the evental moment
of change is denied, even wilfully stymied.
Paradoxically, the Leap to Faith, while predicated on a growing sense
of self-consciousness, becomes ever harder to achieve, and this is what
Kierkegaard means by saying that it is a qualitative act, not a quantitative
problem. The gap between the life of Despair and the life in Faith is always
chasma, but the leap is never about distance; it is about an absolute
commitment. In modern psychotherapeutic terms a practitioner such as
Spinelli might use the term ‘sedimented’ (2006: p 219) to indicate the
degree to which a client might be so rooted in a set of attitudes and behaviours,
however clearly elucidated and understood, that they are unable to shift
their position. Such a term captures very well the deep emotional investment
that someone may have in their chosen mode of living and the almost
tectonically powerful movement required to shift out of such a mode, and
to instigate a leap to/of faith.
The Case of Ellen West
Binswanger’s analysis of the case of Ellen West (ed. May, 1958: p 267)
illustrates extremely well the different levels of Despair that she encountered
in her life. West (1888-1921) was a young woman who committed suicide
at the age of thirty three after experiencing what we might term nowadays
a long-standing eating disorder. Until the age of about eighteen she
maintained a defiantly, rebelliously tomboy-ish attitude to the world.
Kierkegaard might have recognized this bearing as the Despair of not
wanting to be oneself because of an unacknowledged imbalance between
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the necessary and the possible. Later existential terminology might say
that she did not accept her thrown-ness into the world of the late nineteenth
century as a woman.
As a result of a first love, she shifted her mode of living to accept more
conventional notions of femininity contemporary to the early twentieth century
in Europe, and began strongly to equate ideals of female beauty with lightness
and thinness; and the opposite, fatness, with ageing and dying. Ellen became
trapped in a mode of existence that, on the one hand, demonstrated a great
desire to be free of the constraints and realities of the physical universe, to
be light and ethereal, but on the other hand overlooked an inability to achieve
this because of the limitations of her body and her appetites. Ellen binged
and starved herself for the rest of her life. In the dialectic of lightness and
heaviness, satisfaction and starvation, beauty and ageing/death, that became
so unbreakable that she killed herself, Kierkegaard would have recognized
a growth in self-consciousness to the Despair of the Self wanting, in Despair,
to be oneself. Binswanger analyses the final acts of Ellen’s life as shrouded
in a false optimism, of having chosen the release of suicide but hoping for
a rebirth with a body more suited to her wishes. Kierkegaard could equally
have described this resolution as the ultimate negative act of Despair, and
the suicide as a black parody of the Leap of Faith.
Synthesis: The Knight of Faith and Fear and Trembling
Kierkegaard saw the resolution to the problem of Despair in taking the
Leap to Faith and to become a Knight of Faith. The biblical story of
Abraham and God’s command to sacrifice his son Isaac in Fear and
Trembling, forms the template for Kierkegaard’s exploration of the ideas
of the Knight of Faith (1843, 1994). Kierkegaard rhapsodised his sheer
wonder at Abraham (ibid: p 29) to be able to set aside the morality of his
society, accept God’s exhortation, and carry through the command to
sacrifice, only to be reprieved in the final moment; and after that to be
able to continue with life in good Faith. From this exploration, we can
posit that the Knight of Faith enters into a relationship with God that is
intensely personal, that has laid aside the demands of societal/ethical
norms and is free from Despair, although not from anxiety.
The Knight of Infinite Resignation
Kierkegaard describes the Knight of Faith as being deeply engaged with
the living of life and he contrasts this with the stage before making the
Leap to Faith, the Knight of Infinite Resignation (KoIR). Kierkegaard
conceptualizes the KoIR in terms that are similar to Kipling’s poem If
which encourages the individual to live a life of intensity but to be able
to treat joy and sorrow with equanimity, although there is more to it than
a manly Victorian stoicism. Kierkegaard sees the KoIR as a passionate
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individual who has allowed love to permeate their mode of living, but
nevertheless is in a mode of living short of making the final leap.
The KoIR remains rooted in the ethical framework of society. The Knight
of Faith must step beyond and Kierkegaard describes the difference between
the two as the KoIR having renounced everything in the world, but by
making the Leap to Faith, to become the Knight of Faith, the renunciation
is renounced, and the leap is into infinite possibility. Hannay (1982:
pp 83-84) speaks of the Leap to Faith as being the ultimate reversal of the
Hegelian conception of self-hood. Hegel conceived the ultimate realization
of self-hood as the transcendence of the particular, an individual consciousness,
to participate in the general human consciousness or weltgeist. The KoIR
is similar to this state of being, but for Kierkegaard there is another step
to make to transcend the generality of humanity to a sense of selfhood so
complete, particular and unique that there is both everything and nothing
to say about it. Hannay calls this the ‘Unsayable’ (1982: p 83). It is no
accident that the pseudonym used to write Fear and Trembling was Johannes
de Silentio, or John the Silent.
The Knight of Faith and the Leap to Faith are troubling concepts in the
context of contemporary therapy and, indeed, society in general. Is the
Knight of Faith simply too overpowering, transgressive or idealised to be
useful and what value does the concept have when stripped of its religious
dimensions? Gamsu (2010) thinks that bereavement therapy can draw
inspiration from the act of the Leap. The deeply bereaved are, in a sense,
in a place of infinite resignation, where it is easier to remain in a state of
grieving because there might be peace and repose in a renunciation of the
world in order to preserve memory. Gamsu suggests that this is protection
from life without renewal – it is a rational and emotionally economical
choice. The alternative choice is to re-embrace life, to take the risk of
renewing commitment to life, in other words to make a leap to life. Lodge
(2007) also sees the deconstruction of the Leap to Faith, to leaps of faith,
as a useful way to describe the day-to-day courage needed to overcome
despair. Neither of which suggested re-interpretations of Kierkegaard’s
concepts are to under-estimate the power of stasis and sedimentation that
prevent or stymie the event of the Leap, even when pared back to a less
cosmic and religious dimension.
The Case of Rita
Deurzen’s (1997) case of Rita perhaps exemplifies the possibility of being
able to retail Kierkegaard’s cosmic notions at a more human level. Rita,
a deeply grieving young women, lost her husband and son in a fatal car
accident and blamed herself for the loss. Her despair was profound and
in Kierkegaard’s sense she was in a state of ‘Despair of the eternal’; in
other words, this was not a spontaneous mood but a lasting and sedimented
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response to trauma. For the sake of the memory of her husband and son,
she did not wish to move forward to claim a new sense of self in life.
She could not take the L(l)eap to L(l)ife/F(f)aith. Kierkegaard (1989,
p 144) discusses the problem of those who cannot forgive themselves as
a strategy of preventing the self from being itself. While it is difficult
not to render judgement through Kierkegaard’s language, to pass blame
for a failure to live life in as fully expressed state of self as possible, I
do not believe Kierkegaard is making judgement in this manner, but
instead is acknowledging the sometimes appalling necessity of the
consequences of breaking with the past.
Through therapy Rita was able to accept that she was not responsible for
the deaths, and that she could forgive herself. Furthermore, she could encompass
the memories of her husband and son in a bearable manner that then allowed
her to reconnect with her former worlds of work and other human relations.
Eventually she was able to form a new loving relationship. Each act was a
small, human-sized leap of faith, a faith in life in a secular world. Perhaps
it is in the Leap rather than the Knight, the act rather than the state, the event
rather than the identity, that contemporary therapy can draw most inspiration
from Kierkegaard’s powerful ideas, and it must surely be a privilege for the
therapist to witness such acts of bravery and be able to say: ‘I helped my
client to do that’ and tip one’s hat to the gloomy Dane.
Concluding Thoughts
It is perhaps worth reiterating just how troubling Kierkegaard’s ideas can
appear to the secular age of twenty-first century evidence based medicine
and therapy where the precautionary ethics of ‘safety first’ demand that
change, wrought through therapy, is conducted in as sanitized a form as
possible. Di Nicola, in a recent blog post on the APA’s website (23rd
November 2017), has highlighted a critique of the positivistic approach
to the scientific progress of psychiatry (and psychotherapy), encapsulated
in Auguste Comte’s old dictum of ‘Order and progress’ that is increasingly
veering toward what he calls ‘methodolatry’. He acknowledges the
critique as emerging from the tradition of Continental philosophy, and
partly arises from post-Jasperian progress to examine the phenomenon
of psychiatric disorders in a purely empirical tradition, while
ignoring Jaspers’ own warning that the exclusion of philosophy will
eventually and fatally undermine the purely scientific pursuit of modern
clinical psychiatry.
For all the refinement of diagnosis and techniques of treatment achieved
through scientific research, and now increasingly supplemented by the
aspirations of neuroscience, there still seems to be little acknowledgement
that the process of improvement, alleviation and/or cure, in the framework
of mental health provision, not only lacks a clearly articulated sense of
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what is change when it comes to getting better, other than the self-referential
term of ‘getting better’, but also barely acknowledges just how difficult
and horrifying change can be. Kierkegaard so brilliantly encapsulates this
sense of the infinite pain of change in the figure of the Knight of Infinite
Resignation. Kierkegaard, at least, articulates how difficult it can be to
relinquish cherished but unfulfilled modes of existence in order to embrace
new and more rewarding lives. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s extraordinary
insights into the causes of anxiety and the taxonomy of Despair tend to
leave the reader wanting more than an exhortation to embrace the fullness
of God’s love, as a route map to change.
Having already written on a small aspect of how the preconditions for
change might be activated in therapy (Swann, 2017) by exploring Wittgenstein’s
complex ideas of how to unfix the constellations of propositions that we
hold within ourselves to describe and explain the world, this author would
like to pursue the idea of what is, what can be and how change can be
effected. Di Nicola (2017), points to work being done in the modern
Continental philosophical tradition by Alain Badiou, in his work Being
and Event (2005). A significant overlap is acknowledged between the
concept of trauma and the concept of event, both of which contain a sense
of rupture, a radical breaking with the past, thus acknowledging the violence
inherent in both, but also their historical natures as moments in time. A
future paper might try and explore Badiou’s ideas further, to explore the
phenomenology of the Event as a moment of change. But, to conclude this
particular article, this writer would like to come full circle back to Kierkegaard
to point to the Leap to/of Faith as an event, a trauma and a rupture, filled
as it may be with pain and violence, but one that releases, as in the case
of Rita, rather than annihilates as in the case of Ellen West.
Richard Swann, MA (Oxon.), MBA (Lond.), MA (UoW), ADEP, UKCP
(reg) is a writer and thinker, currently living in Dubai, where there is a
Ministry of Happiness.
E-mail: richardmswann1@btinternet.com
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