The Denial of Death (12 page)

Kierkegaard gives us some portrait sketches of the styles of denying possibility, or the lies of character—which is the same thing. He is intent on describing what we today call “inauthentic” men, men who avoid developing their own uniqueness; they follow out the styles of automatic and uncritical living in which they were conditioned as children. They are “inauthentic” in that they do not belong to themselves, are not “their own” person, do not act from their own center, do not see reality on its terms; they are the one-dimensional men totally immersed in the fictional games being playe
d in their society, unable to transcend their social conditioning: the corporation men in the West, the bureaucrats in the East, the tribal men locked up in tradition—man everywhere who doesn’t understand what it means to think for himself and who, if he did, would shrink back at the idea of such audacity and exposure. Kierkegaard gives us a description of

the
immediate
man … his self or he himself is a something included along with “the other” in the compass of the temporal and the worldly. … Thus the self coheres immediately with “the other,” wishing, desiring, enjoying, etc., but passively; … he manages to imitate the oth
er men, noting how they manage to live, and so he too lives after a sort. In Christendom he too is a Christian, goes to church every Sunday, hears and understands the parson, yea, they understand one another; he dies; the parson introduces him into eternity for the price of $10—but a self he was not, and a self he did not become… . For the immediate man does not recognize his self, he recognizes himself only by his dress, … he recognizes that he has a self only by externals.
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This is a perfect description of the “automatic cultural man”—man as confined by culture, a slave to it, who imagines that he has an identity if he pays his insurance premium, that he has control of his life if he guns his sports car or works his electric toothbrush. Today the inauthentic or immediate men are familiar types, after decades of Marxist and existentialist analysis of man’s slavery to his social system. But in Kierkegaard’s time it must have been a shock to be a modern European city-dweller and be considered a Philistine at the same time. For Kierkegaard “philistinism” was tr
iviality, man lulled by the daily routines of his society, content with the satisfactions that it offers him: in today’s world the car, the shopping center, the two-week summer vacation. Man is protected by the secure and limited alternatives his society offers him, and if he does not look up from his path he can live out his life with a certain dull security:

Devoid of imagination, as the Philistine always is, he lives in a certain trivial province of experience as to how things go, what is possible, what usually occurs… . Philistinism tranquilizes itself in the trivial… .
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Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience, of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is
socially
possible. I think this is the meaning of Kierkegaard’s observation:

For philistinism thinks it is in control of possibility, it thinks that when it has decoyed this prodigious elasticity into the field of probabilit
y or into the madhouse it holds it a prisoner; it carries possibility around like a prisoner in the cage of the probable, shows it off… .
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Kierkegaard as Theorist of the Psychoses

But now something new enters our discussion. Kierkegaard talks about decoying the prodigious elasticity of freedom “into the madhouse” where it is held prisoner. What does he mean by such a condensed image? To me he means that one of the great dangers of life is
too much possibility,
and that the place where we find people who have succumbed to this danger is the madhouse. Here Kierkegaard shows that he was a master theorist not only of “normal cultural pathology” but also of abnormal pathology or psychosis. He understands that psychosis is neurosis pushed to its extreme. At least
this is how I read many of his observations in the section of his book called “Despair Viewed Under the Aspects of Finitude/ Infinitude.”
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Let us pause on this, because if my reading is correct it will help us understand further how the most extreme forms of mental derangement are clumsy attempts to come to grips with the basic problem of life.

Kierkegaard is painting for us a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure, ways in which man succumbs to and is beaten by life and the world; beaten because he fails to face up to the existential truth of his situation—the truth that he is an inner symbolic self, which signifies a certain freedom, and that he is bound by a finite body, which limits that freedom. The attempt to ignore either aspect of man’s situation, to repress possibility or to deny necessity, means that man will live a lie, fail to realize his true nature, be “the most pitiful of all things.” But
man is not always so lucky, he cannot always get by with just being pitiful. If the lie that he attempts to live is too flaunting of reality, a man can lose everything during his lifetime—and this is precisely what we mean by psychosis: the complete and utter breakdown of the character structure. If Kierkegaard is to be considered a master analyst of the human situation he must show us that he understands the extremes of man’s condition as well as the everyday cultural middle.

This is precisely what he does in his discussion of the extreme
s of too much and too little possibility. Too much possibility is the attempt by the person to overvalue the powers of the symbolic self. It reflects the attempt to exaggerate one half of the human dualism at the expense of the other. In this sense, what we call schizophrenia is an attempt by the symbolic self to deny the limitations of the finite body; in doing so, the entire person is pulled off balance and destroyed. It is as though the freedom of creativity that stems from within the symbolic self cannot be contained by the body, and the person is torn apart. This is how we und
erstand schizophrenia today, as the split of self and body, a split in which the self is unanchored, unlimited, not bound enough to everyday things, not contained enough in dependable physical behavior.
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And this is how Kierkegaard understands the problem:

For the self is a synthesis in which the finite is the limiting factor, and the infinite is the expanding factor. Infinitude’s despair is therefore the fantastical, the limitless.
^23
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By “infinitude’s despair” Kierkegaard means the sickness of the personality, the opposite of health. And so the person becomes sick by plunging into the limitless, the symbolic self becomes “fantastic”—as it does in schizophrenia—when it splits away from the body, from a dependable grounding in real experience in the everyday world. The full-blown schizophrenic is abstract, ethereal, unreal; he billows out of the earthly categories of space and time, floats out of his body, dwells in an eternal now, is not subject to death and destruction. He has vanquished these in his fantasy, or perhap
s better, in the actual fact that he has quit his body, renounced its limitations. Kierkegaard’s description is not only eloquent, it is also precisely clinical:

Generally the fantastical is that which so carries a man out into the infinite that it merely carries him away from himself an
d therewith prevents him from returning to himself. So when feeling becomes fantastic, the self is simply volatilized more and more… . The self thus leads a fantastic existence in abstract endeavor after infinity, or in abstract isolation, constantly lacking itself, from which it merely gets further and further away.

This is pure Ronald Laing’s
The Divided Self,
over a century ago. Again:

Now if possibility outruns necessity, the self runs away from itself, so that it has no necessity whereto it is bound to return—then this is the despair [sickness] of possibility. The self becomes an abstract possibility which tries [sic: “tires”?] itself out with floundering in the possible, but does not budge from the spot, not get to any spot, for precisely the necessary is the spot; to become oneself is precisely a movement at the spot.
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What Kierkegaard means here is that the development of the person is a development in depth from a fixed center in the personality, a center that unites both aspects of the existential dualism—the self and the body. But this kind of development needs precisely an acknowledgment of reality, the reality of one’s limits:

What the self now lacks is surely reality—so one would commonly say, as one says of a man that he has become unreal. But upon closer inspection it is really necessity that man lacks… . What really is lacking is the power to … submit to the necessary in oneself, to what may be called one’s limit. Therefore the misfortune does not consist in the fact that such a self did not amount to anything in the world; no, the misfortune is that the man did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is, is a perfectly definite something, and so is the necessary. On the contrary, h
e lost himself, owing to the fact that this self was seen fantastically reflected in the possible.
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Of course, this description touches everyday man as well at the extreme of schizophrenia, and it is just the cogency of Kierkegaard’s analysis that the two can be placed on the same continuum:

Instead of summoning back possibility into necessity, the man pursues the possibility—and at last cannot find his way back to himself.
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The same generality holds true with the following, which could describe the average man who lives in a simple world of billowing inner energy and fantasy, like Walter Mitty or what we today call “ambulatory schizophrenics”—those whose self and body are in a very tenuous relationship but manage nevertheless to carry on without being submerged by inner energies and emotions, by fantastic images, sounds, fears, and hopes they cannot contain:

But in spite of the fact that a man has become fantastic in this fashion, he may nevertheless … be perfectly well able to live on, to be a man, as it seems, to occupy himself with temporal things, get married, beget children, win honor and esteem—and perhaps no one notices that in a deeper sense he lacks a self.
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That is, he lacks a securely unified self and body, centered on his own controlling ego energies, and facing realistically up to his situation and to the nature of his limits and possibilities in the world. But this, as we shall see, is Kierkegaard’s idea of consummate health, not easy to attain.

If schizophrenic psychosis is on a continuum of a kind of normal inflation of inner fantasy, of symbolic possibility, then something similar should be true of depressive psychosis. And so it is in the portrait that Kierkegaard paints. Depressive psychosis is the extreme on the continuum of
too much necessity,
that is, too much finitude, too much limitation by the body and the behaviors of the person in the real world, and not enough freedom of the inner self, of inner symbolic possibility. This is how we understand depressive psychosis today: as a bogging down in the demands of others—family
, job, the narrow horizon of daily duties. In such a bogging down the individual does not feel or see that he has alternatives, cannot imagine any choices or alternate ways of life, cannot release himself from the network of obligations even though these obligations no longer give him a sense of self-esteem, of primary value, of being a heroic contributor to world life even by doing his daily family and job duties. As I once speculated,
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the schizophrenic is not enough built into his world—what Kierkegaard has called the sickness of infinitude; the depressive, on the other hand, is built into his
world too solidly, too overwhelmingly. Kierkegaard put it this way:

But while one sort of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, a second sort permits itself as it were to be defrauded by “the others.” By seeing the multitude of men about it, by getting engaged in all sorts of wordly affairs, by becoming wise about how things go in this world, such a man forgets himself … does not dare to believe in himself, finds it too venturesome a thing to be himself, far easier and safer to be like the others, to become an imitation, a number, a cipher in the crowd.
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This is a superb characterization of the “culturally normal” man, the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be oneself, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe framework of social and cultural obligations and duties.

Again, too, this kind of characterization must be understood as being on a continuum, at the extreme end of which we find depressive psychosis. The depressed person is so afraid of being himself, so fearful of exerting his own individuality, of insisting on what might be his own meanings, his own conditions for living, that he seems literally
stupid
. He cannot seem to understand the situation he is in, cannot see beyond his own fears, cannot grasp why he has bogged down. Kierkegaard phrases it beautifully:

If one will compare the tendency to run wild in possibility with the efforts of a child to enunciate words, the lack of possibility is like being dumb … for without possibility a man cannot, as it were, draw breath.
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