Kierkegaard and Death

Patrick Stokes, Adam J. Buben, Patrick Stokes, Adam J. Buben, PATRICK STOKES, ADAM J BUBEN

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253223524
• eBook ISBN: 9780253005342
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

"This impressive [anthology] succeeds admirably at demonstrating how the Kierkegaardian corpus presents . . . a philosophy of finite existence" ( Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews).
Few philosophers have devoted such sustained, almost obsessive attention to the topic of death as Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard and Death brings together new work on Kierkegaard's multifaceted discussions of death and provides a thorough guide to the development, in various texts and contexts, of Kierkegaard's ideas concerning death.
Essays by an international group of scholars take up essential topics such as dying to the world, living death, immortality, suicide, mortality and subjectivity, death and the meaning of life, remembrance of the dead, and the question of the afterlife. While bringing Kierkegaard's philosophy of death into focus, this volume connects Kierkegaard with important debates in contemporary philosophy.

1.

Knights and Knaves of the Living Dead: Kierkegaard’s Use of Living Death as a Metaphor for Despair

George Connell

Despair is the sickness unto death, this tormenting contradiction, this sickness of the self, perpetually to be dying, to die and yet not to die, to die death. For to die signifies that all is over, but to die death means to experience dying, and if this is experienced for one single moment, one thereby experiences it forever.

—KIERKEGAARD, THE SICKNESS UNTO DEATH

For some time now the impression has been growing on me that everyone is dead.

It happens when I speak to people. In the middle of a sentence it will come over me: yes, beyond a doubt, this is death. There is little to do but groan and make an excuse and slip away as quickly as one can. At such times it seems that the conversation is spoken by automatons who have no choice in what they say. I hear myself or someone else saying things like: “In my opinion the Russian people are a great people, but—” or “Yes, what you say about the hypocrisy of the North is unquestionably true. However—” and I think to myself: this is death.

—WALKER PERCY, THE MOVIEGOER

Among the endlessly repeated motifs of the horror genre, none more reliably evokes a shudder than the idea of the undead, of humans doomed to wander between life and death. This response has a variety of deep psychological sources. Our anxiety in the face of our own mortality plays a part, as does a physiological revulsion to decaying bodies. Further, the sense of the living dead as ontologically other evokes in us a sense of numinous dread. Following Mary Douglas, the way such beings transgress the boundary separating life and death renders them both dangerous and impure.¹

Given the resonances such imagery evokes, it is significant that Kierkegaard’s pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, frames his discussion of despair in The Sickness unto Death in terms of living death. This, however, has not figured large in scholarly discussions of the book. This scholarly silence is perhaps largely explained by the way Anti-Climacus makes little explicit use of death as a metaphor for despair after the opening sections of the book. There is also, no doubt, a tendency for literal-minded philosophers to dismiss talk of living death as either “mere metaphor” or bald contradiction. Still, the despair-death identification is central in the “Preface,” “Introduction,” and “Part One, A” of The Sickness unto Death. What sense, then, can we make of the idea that despair is a sort of living death? What agendas lead Anti-Climacus to evoke this imagery in his analysis of despair? Since Anti-Climacus is a different sort of pseudonym from all others in the authorship, addressing these questions stirs up major questions concerning Kierkegaard’s overall project and how we should place it in the context of contemporary thought and culture.² Specifically, Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair as living death highlights his ambiguous relation to contemporary consciousness. One aspect of his analysis, his account of conscious despair as living death, is profoundly resonant with contemporary ideas and fears. But alongside the Kierkegaard who surprises readers by his preternatural contemporaneity stands another, antimodern Kierkegaard. This other Kierkegaard is nowhere more evident than in his analyses of unconscious despair. I will argue that his idea of unconscious despair as living death sets Kierkegaard in sharp opposition to irony as described by Richard Rorty, liberalism as described by Alasdair MacIntyre, and secularism as described by Charles Taylor. Since irony, liberalism, and secularism are defining features of the contemporary scene, this second aspect of his analysis of despair as living death starkly highlights the antimodern Kierkegaard. Having shown the countercultural spirit of Kierkegaard’s analysis of unconscious despair, I conclude by examining the basis of his judgment: from what vantage point, in terms of what evidence, and by what authority does he pronounce the apparently contented lives of ordinary people to be forms of living death?

Living Death: A Plausible Notion?

Before we can appreciate the simultaneous timeliness and untimeliness of Kierkegaard’s analyses of despair, it is crucial to establish the coherence of the idea of living death in the first place. On its face, the notion of living death seems contradictory. There are, however, a variety of ways in which we can make good sense of it. First, the notion of despair as living death has the deepest possible roots in Kierkegaard’s development as a thinker. One of his first significant intellectual undertakings was an analysis of the “three great ideas,” Don Juan, Faust, and Ahasverus, who represent to the Middle Ages three forms of existence outside of faith: sensuality, doubt, and despair. Ironically, Ahasverus, who represents despair, is doomed to a living death precisely by being condemned to a deathless life.

Kierkegaard’s investigations of the three great ideas eventually bear fruit in the first volume of Either/Or. There, the linkage of despair and living death is emphatic, both in the name of A’s morbid confraternity, the Symparanekromenoi (the society of the already dead), and especially in A’s essay, “The Unhappiest One.” There, A identifies the winner of a contest for that dubious title specifically as the one who cannot die, the one whose grave is empty not because he rose from the dead, but because his curse denies him the peace of death.³ Additionally, one can see Johannes the Seducer as a vampire who must repeatedly parasitize the immediate desire of his female victims to sustain his own jaded interest in life. Clearly, Kierkegaard’s analysis in The Sickness unto Death of despair as living death needs to be read against the backdrop of his early explorations of that theme.

Showing that the notion of despair as living death is deeply rooted in Kierkegaard’s thought does not suffice to render it plausible. We need to unpack this metaphor to discern its phenomenological basis, its experiential “cash value.” If we try to take it literally, we run into several problems. First, to speak of a form of life that is simultaneously death seems to violate the principle of noncontradiction. Further, despair typically designates a form of suffering, while death designates the cessation of awareness. Kierkegaard points a way beyond these dead ends when he writes, “For to die signifies that all is over, but to die death means to experience dying” (SUD, 18/SKS 11, 133). In this passage, Kierkegaard distinguishes between the idea of death as the end of all experience and dying as the experience of the movement from life to death. But if dying is what he means when he speaks of living death, then doesn’t his preference for paradoxical metaphors simply muddy the waters? Wouldn’t it be better to keep the terms “death” and “dying” clearly distinct from each other? By sharply demarcating the two terms, one implies that dying is a process that leads to a result that is entirely separate from the process itself. Epicurus is, no doubt, the thinker who most starkly draws out the consequences of this sharp demarcation when he argues that as long as I am, death isn’t, and as soon as death is, I no longer am.⁴ Since death and I can never be co-present, it need not concern me. Against this Epicurean thinking, Kierkegaard invokes the idea of dying as living death to say that death is not sharply demarcated from life, that it can encroach upon life so that it becomes experientially present.⁵

While Kierkegaard himself describes this blurring of lines between life and death, a brief look at Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich serves to show the variety of forms such encroachment takes.⁶

a. Death as failure of the body: At the most basic level, death is the breakdown and failure of the body to carry out the physiological processes of life. During the dying process, that breakdown and failure are often vividly present to the one dying, resulting in a fundamentally altered experience of one’s embodiment. Tolstoy captures this powerfully in a scene late in Ivan’s illness by juxtaposing the ways Ivan and his daughter experience their bodies. Ivan’s body is weak and wasting, already showing the pallor of death. Each new pain and each lost capacity carries with it a message of his imminent death. In contrast, his daughter lives her body exultantly as the locus of her youthful flourishing: “His daughter came in all decked out in a gown that left much of her young flesh exposed; she was making a show of that very flesh which, for him, was the cause of so much agony. Strong, healthy, obviously in love, she was impatient with illness, suffering, and death, which interfered with her happiness.”⁷

b. Death as impotence and dependency: The failure of the dying body is closely associated with a more general impotence associated with death. To be dead is to lose one’s capacity to effect one’s will in the world. Even when one leaves a last will and testament, disposing of one’s assets and imposing one’s intent on the living, one depends radically on others to see that those wishes are carried out. Ivan experiences this impotence and dependency already in his illness. Tolstoy sensitively portrays Ivan’s dependency on Gerasim, a peasant boy assigned to care for him. While Ivan does move from embarrassment and resentment at such dependency to gratitude and a sense of connection, Tolstoy shows that the impotence and dependency of death already pervade the consciousness of the dying Ivan.

c. Death as isolation: One of the most terrifying features of death for both the dying and for their surviving loved ones is the thought of severed ties and resulting isolation. While Ivan does establish a connection with Gerasim, Tolstoy portrays him as increasingly isolated from his wife, children, friends, and co-workers as his illness progresses. Clearly, the loneliness of the grave is already experienced in the isolation of the sickbed. Tolstoy writes, “During the last days of the isolation in which he lived, lying on the sofa with his face to the wall, isolation in the midst of a populous city among numerous friends and relatives, [he experienced] an isolation that could not have been greater anywhere, either in the depths of the sea or the bowels of the earth.”⁸

d. Death as closing the future: Tolstoy presents Ivan as an ambitious social climber, always looking for the main chance to advance in the bureaucracy and associated social world that are the limits of his imagination. As such, he is constantly projecting ahead of himself, living vicariously in an anticipated (and idealized) future. Just as death slams the door on the future, the dying Ivan experiences this closure already in his illness as the anticipation of death displaces all other hopes and plans for the future.

e. Death as emptying the present: Death doesn’t just close the future; it obliterates the present. Before Ivan’s illness, he delighted in losing himself in the present moment of inconsequential amusements such as card games, but the ill Ivan loses this ability. The proximity of his death, the nearing moment when he will have no present moment, prevents him from fully living in the present moments he still has left. The resulting vacuity of the actual present gives rise to boredom and restlessness, just as his incessant pain makes the present an ordeal to escape rather than a precious fleeting moment to savor.

f. Death as re-evaluating the past: Because we understand human lives in terms of their narrative unity, there is something necessarily provisional about all evaluations of lives that are still running their courses.⁹ Solon captures this provisional quality in his famous dictum that we should judge no one happy prior to his or her death. Death, however, reduces this indeterminacy in two ways: first, it fixes the set of events and experiences with which the interpreter must potentially deal, and second, the manner of the end of a life retroactively influences the significance and meaning of earlier moments of life.¹⁰ Typically, as mourners gather at a funeral, they endeavor to fit together their memories of the deceased life into a coherent sense of who the deceased fundamentally was. Once again, this feature of death is already very much part of the dying process. Tolstoy writes, “[D]uring the last days of that terrible isolation, Ivan Ilyich lived only with memories of the past. One after another images of his past came to mind. His recollections always began with what was closest in time and shifted back to what was most remote, to his childhood and lingered there.”¹¹ Ivan’s death struggle increasingly becomes a struggle to reassess his life in a manner radically different from the complacent self-image of his adult years. He cries out in “moral agony” the question, “What if my entire life, my entire conscious life, simply was not the real thing?”¹² Only when he manages to accept a radical renarration of his life, one that holds up as true even in the harsh light of imminent death, does Ivan find peace.

These six parallels between death and dying suffice to show that the metaphor of living death has a solid experiential basis. Death is not just a result that ensues upon the completion of the dying process; it encroaches upon life, making itself manifest in a variety of ways. While Tolstoy’s classic literary exploration of dying establishes the bona fides of the notion of living death, Kierkegaard uses the notion as a way to characterize despair. How apt is this use?

Despair as Living Death

While much of The Sickness unto Death shows a passion for taxonomy that seems more like Linnaeus than Kierkegaard, “Part One, A: Despair Is the Sickness unto Death” speaks of despair in an encompassing way. Before viewing it from multiple perspectives and in its multiple forms, Anti-Climacus says that all despair is a sickness of the spirit, a failure of the self to relate properly to itself and to the power that created it. It is overwhelmingly in this brief opening section of the book that Anti-Climacus identifies despair as living death. The penultimate paragraph of this section reads:

Such is the nature of despair, this sickness of the self, this sickness unto death. The despairing person is mortally ill. In a completely different sense than is the case with any illness, this sickness has attacked the most vital organs, and yet he cannot die. Death is not the end of the sickness, but death is incessantly the end. To be saved from this sickness by death is an impossibility, because the sickness and its torment—and the death—are precisely this inability to die (SUD, 21/SKS 11, 136).

By following this encompassing diagnosis of the universal human malady with differentiated and even counterposed analyses of specific forms of despair, Anti-Climacus unavoidably opens himself to the possibility that the living death metaphor will seem more apt when applied to some forms of despair than others. Of Anti-Climacus’s differentiations, none is more significant than his contrast bet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. Knights and Knaves of the Living Dead: Kierkegaard’s Use of Living Death as a Metaphor for Despair
• 2. To Die and Yet Not Die: Kierkegaard’s Theophany of Death
• 3. Christian Hate: Death, Dying, and Reason in Pascal and Kierkegaard
• 4. Suicide and Despair
• 5. Thinking Death into Every Moment: The Existence-Problem of Dying in Kierkegaard’s Postscript
• 6. Death and Ethics in Kierkegaard’s Postscript
• 7. The Intimate Agency of Death
• 8. A Critical Perspective on Kierkegaard’s “At a Graveside”
• 9. Life-Narrative and Death as the End of Freedom: Kierkegaard on Anticipatory Resoluteness
• 10. Heidegger and Kierkegaard on Death: The Existentiell and the Existential
• 11. Kierkegaard, Levinas, Derrida: The Death of the Other
• 12. Derrida, Judge William, and Death
• 13. The Soft Weeping of Desire’s Loss: Recognition, Phenomenality, and the One Who Is Dead in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love
• 14. Duties to the Dead? Earnest Imagination and Remembrance
• 15. Kierkegaard’s Understanding of the Afterlife
• Contributors
• Index