The Denial of Death (13 page)

This is precisely the condition of depression, that one can hardly breathe or move. One of the unconscious tactics that the depressed person resorts to, to try to make sense out of his situation, is to see himself as immensely worthless and guilty. This is a marvelous “invention” really, because it allows him to move out of his condition of dumbness, and make some kind of conceptualization of his situation, some kind of sense out of it—even if he has to take full blame as the culprit who is causing so much needless misery to others. Could Kierkegaard have been referring to just such an i
maginative tactic when he casually observed:

Sometimes the inventiveness of the human imagination suffices to procure possibility… .
³¹

In any event, the condition of depression might permit an inventiveness that creates the illusion of possibility, of meaning, of action, but it does not offer any real possibility. As Kierkegaard sums it up:

The loss of possibility signifies: either that everything has become necessary to man or that everything has become trivial.
³²

Actually, in the extreme of depressive psychosis we seem to see the merger of these two: everything becomes necessary
and
trivial at the same time—which leads to complete despair. Necessity with the illusion of meaning would be the highest achievement for man; but when it becomes trivial there is no sense to one’s life.

Why would a person prefer the accusations of guilt, unworthiness, ineptitude—even dishonor and betrayal—to real possibility? This may not seem to be the choice, but it is: complete self-effacement, surrender to the “others,” disavowal of any personal dignity or freedom—on the one hand; and freedom and independence, movement away from the others, extrication of oneself from the binding links of family and social duties—on the other hand. This is the choice that the depressed person actually faces and that he avoids partly by his guilty self-accusation. The answer is not far to seek: the depress
ed person avoids the possibility of independence and more life precisely because these are what threaten him with destruction and death. He holds on to the people who have enslaved him in a network of crushing obligations, belittling interaction, precisely because these people
are his shelter,
his strength, his protection against the world. Like most everyone else the depressed person is a coward who will not stand alone on his own center, who cannot draw from within himself the necessary strength to face up to life. So he embeds himself in others; he is sheltered by the necessary
and willingly accepts it. But now his tragedy is plain to see: his
necessity
has become
trivial,
and so his slavish, dependent, depersonalized life has lost its meaning. It is frightening to be in such a bind. One chooses slavery because it is safe and meaningful; then one loses the meaning of it, but fears to move out of it. One has literally died to life but must remain physically in t
his world. And thus the torture of depressive psychosis: to remain steeped in one’s failure and yet to justify it, to continue to draw a sense of worthwhileness out of it.
^‡

Normal Neurosis

Most people, of course, avoid the psychotic dead ends out of the existential dilemma. They are fortunate enough to be able to stay on the middle ground of “philistinism.” Breakdown occurs either because of too much possibility or too little; philistinism, as we observed earlier, knows its real enemy and tries to play it safe with freedom. Here is how Kierkegaard sums up the three alternatives available to men; the first two correspond to the psychotic syndromes of schizophrenia and depression:

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 … 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.
³³

In other words, philistinism is what we would call “normal neurosis.” Most men figure out how to live safely within the probabilities of a given set of social rules. The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience; philistinism works, as Kierkegaard said, by “tranquilizing itself with the trivial.” His analysis was written almost a century before Freud spoke of the possibility of “social neuroses,” the “pathology of whole cultural communities.”
³⁴

Other Urges to Freedom

Kierkegaard’s threefold typology does not exhaust the character of man. He knows that all men are not so “immediate” or shallow, so automatically built into their culture, so securely embedded in things and in others, so trustingly a reflex of their world. Also, comparatively few people end up on the psychotic extremes of the continuum of human defeat; some win a degree of self-realization without surrender to complete spiritlessness or slavery. And here Kierkegaard’s analysis becomes the most telling: he is attempting to ferret people out of the lie of their lives whose lives d
o not look like a lie, who seem to succeed in being true, complete and authentic persons.

There is the type of man who has great contempt for “immediacy,” who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the “introvert.” He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect, perhaps to nurse ideas about his secret self, what it might be. This, after all is said and done, is the only real problem of life, the only worthwhile preoccupation of
man: What is one’s true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique, and how can he express this uniqueness, give it form, dedicate it to something beyond himself? How can the person take his private inner being, the great mystery that he feels at the heart of himself, his emotions, his yearnings and use them to live more distinctively, to enrich both himself and mankind with the peculiar quality of his talent? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life s
uck us up into standardized activities. The social hero-system into which we are born marks out paths for our heroism, paths to which we conform, to which we shape ourselves so that we can please others, become what they expect us to be. And instead of working our inner secret we gradually cover it over and forget it, while we become purely external men, playing successfully
the standardized hero-game into which we happen to fall by accident, by family connection, by reflex patriotism, or by the simple need to eat and the urge to procreate.

I am not saying that Kierkegaard’s “introvert” keeps this inner quest fully alive or conscious, only that it represents somewhat more of a dimly aware problem than it does with the swallowed- up immediate man. Kierkegaard’s introvert feels that he is something different from the world, has something in himself that the world cannot reflect, cannot in its immediacy and shallowness appreciate; and so he holds himself somewhat apart from that world. But not too much, not completely. It would be so nice to be the self he wants to be, to realize his vocation, his authentic talent, but it i
s dangerous, it might upset his world completely. He is after all, basically weak, in a position of compromise: not an immediate man, but not a real man either, even though he gives the appearance of it. Kierkegaard describes him:

… outwardly he is completely “a real man.” He is a university man, husband and father, an uncommonly competent civil functionary even, a respectable father, very gentle to his wife and carefulness itself with respect to his children. And a Christian? Well, yes, he is that too after a sort; however, he preferably avoids talking on the subject… . He very seldom goes to church, because it seems to him that most parsons really don’t know what they are talking about. He makes an exception in the case of one particular priest of whom he concedes that he knows what he is talking about, but he doesn’
t want to hear him for another reason, because he has a fear that this might lead him too far.
³⁵

“Too far” because he does not really want to push the problem of his uniqueness to any total confrontation:

That which as a husband makes him so gentle and as a father so careful is, apart from his good-nature and his sense of duty, the admission he has made to himself in his most inward reserve concerning his weakness.
³⁶

And so he lives in a kind of “incognito,” content to toy—in his periodic solitudes—with the idea of who he might really be; content to insist on a “little difference,” to pride himself on a vaguely-felt superiority.

But this is not an easy position to maintain with equanimity. It is rare, says Kierkegaard, to continue on in it. Once you pose the problem of what it means to be a person, even dumbly, weakly, or with a veneer of pride about your imagined difference from others, you may be in trouble. Introversion is impotence, but an impotence already self-conscious to a degree, and it can become troublesome. It may lead to a chafing at one’s dependency on his family and his job, an ulcerous gnawing as a reaction to one’s embeddedness, a feeling of slavery in one’s safety. For a strong person it may becom
e intolerable, and he may try to break out of it, sometimes by suicide, sometimes by drowning himself desperately in the world and in the rush of experience.

And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness, who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, a self-created man. He will not be merely the pawn of others, of society; he will not be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer, nursing his own inner flame in oblivion. He will plunge into life,

into the distractions of great undertakings, he will become a restless spirit … which wants to forget … Or he will seek forgetfulness in sensuality, perhaps in debauchery… .
³⁷

At its extreme, defiant self-creation can become demonic, a passion which Kierkegaard calls “demoniac rage,” an attack on all of life for what it has dared to do to one, a revolt against existence itself.

In our time we would have no trouble recognizing these forms of defiant self-creation. We can see their effects so clearly on both personal and social levels. We are witness to the new cult of sensuality that seems to be repeating the sexual naturalism of the ancient Roman world. It is a living for the day alone, with a defiance of tomorrow; an immersion in the body and its immediate experiences and sensations, in the intensity of touch, swelling flesh, taste and smell. Its aim is to deny one’s lack of control over events, his powerlessness, his vagueness as a person in a mec
hanical world spinning into decay and death. I am not saying that this is bad, this rediscovery and reassertion of one’s basic vitality as an animal. The modern world, after all, has wanted to deny the pe
rson even his own body, even his emanation from his animal center; it has wanted to make him completely a depersonalized abstraction. But man kept his apelike body and found he could use it as a base for fleshy and hairy self-assertion—and damn the bureaucrats. The only thing that might be undignified about it is its desperate reflexivity, a defiance that is not reflective and so not completely self-possessed.

Socially, too, we have seen a defiant Promethianism that is basically innocuous: the confident power than can catapult man to the moon and free him somewhat of his complete dependence and confinement on earth—at least in his imagination. The ugly side of this Promethianism is that it, too, is thoughtless, an empty-headed immersion in the delights of technics with no thought to goals or meaning; so man performs on the moon by hitting golf balls that do not swerve in the lack of atmosphere. The technical triumph of a versatile ape, as the makers of the film
2001
so chillingly convey
ed to us. On more ominous levels, as we shall develop later on, modern man’s defiance of accident, evil, and death takes the form of skyrocketing production of consumer and military goods. Carried to its demonic extreme this defiance gave us Hitler and Vietnam: a rage against our impotence, a defiance of our animal condition, our pathetic creature limitations. If we don’t have the omnipotence of gods, we at least can destroy like gods.

The Meaning of Manhood

Kierkegaard did not need to live in our time to understand these things. Like Burckhardt he already saw them prefigured in his own day because he understood what it costs to lie about oneself. All the characters he has so far sketched represent degrees of lying about oneself in relation to the reality of the human condition. Kierkegaard has engaged in this extremely difficult and unbelievably subtle exercise for one reason and for one reason alone: to be able finally to conclude with authority what a person would be like
if he did not lie
. Kierkegaard wanted to show the many ways
in which life bogs down and fails when man closes himself off against the reality of his condition. Or at best, what an undig
nified and pathetic creature man can be when he imagines that by living unto himself alone he is fulfilling his nature. And now Kierkegaard offers us the golden fruit of all his tortuous labors: instead of the dead-ends of human impotence, self-centeredness, and self-destruction, he now shows us
what true possibility
would be like for man.