“A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”
-Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 13
The human being, as a synthesis between freedom and necessity, has the doom of being able to see what could be otherwise. When he sees a hearse upon the road, a man can imagine what could have been had the person not died and the funeral had been unnecessary. It is he who can see not only the emptiness of the blank slate, but also its future potential. In turn, when our own plans are foiled by unforeseen events, we are so often frustrated because we have the potential, as free beings, to imagine what could have been had those plans bore fruit.
Accepting that we are stuck between the dialectic of freedom and necessity is no easy task, and it is one of the marks of a sage that she can accept even the most bitter cup set before her by the necessities of the world with a slow smile.1 There is also the Stoic belief that there is a cosmic purpose that moves all things, including human beings, towards certain ends, and the corresponding belief that any deviation from where the cosmic purpose directs is certainly an evil2 Here is a great trust in cosmic Providence that guides all things towards their proper state, and a great faith that whatever happens will happen – Seneca: fata ducunt volentem, nonvolentem trahit. Acceptance, though, does not mean that one is immune from the effects of being torn apart by the dialectic that Kierkegaard described for no man or woman is immune to the slings and arrows of fate.
The reason is found in the very nature of men and women as syntheses. Though we may try to be content with the necessary in life and to only use our freedom in a manner conditioned by those necessities, we are able to see beyond the necessary. The imagination, whether a curse of blessing, assures this. There will always be times when the finite and the infinite will rend the person they inhabit to pieces and it is here that the opportunity for despair to enter the soul of that person. This despair, this sickness unto death leads the person to then will their own destruction so that he could be free of the dialectic between the finite and the infinite. The ravine between potential and actuality has become so great that the human being caught within the dialectic wishes self-consumption, but the despair is impotent since no person can rid himself of himself. We necessarily are, and even by suicide we do not rid ourselves of ourselves since either we are immortal (and thus we can never not not exist) or by annihilating ourselves, we rid ourselves entirely rather than riding ourselves of ourselves3. Ultimately, who we are is both a blessing and a curse, and a curse that can lead to the deepest despair.
Πάντα ῥεῖ. That is a basic truth of this world, without which neither we ourselves nor our progenitors would not be. Though the death of fire is not the death of air just as the death of air is not the birth of water, the world is in a constant flux, and making sense of whether we can ever step into the same river twice is a question that has eluded some of the greatest human minds. Not only does the flux and strife of the world perplex, the two tear about the necessity within the human person from his freedom by tearing about the is from the ought. It sunders the dreams of human beings, frustrates their desires, and leads them down paths they would have preferred to have left untrodden; for those unprepared, this flux can bring about despair as they find themselves that their image of who they are no longer corresponds to the reality. Within a world in which even the most beautiful flower must wilt, the most excellent human being die, and the most breath-taking landscape erode, all human ideas about how the world ought to be are but delusions that cannot stand the test of time for the world is but flux and all must into being according to flux.4 Perhaps this is the ultimate wound that living within a fallen world will inflict upon every human being: No matter how fervently we may thirst for Eden, no matter how hard we may work for it, and no matter how real Eden seems to be in our lives when the world's flux favors us, it cannot last; the synthesis of freedom and necessity will eventually be torn in two different directions: the is and the ought. Even the most blissful moments, when we seem to have found a joy that seems in the moment resilient to whatever the world matches against it, cannot last, and thus the despair creeps into our lives when we discover we no longer will to be ourselves, but something different.
After all, the human being is between freedom and necessity. With his freedom, he may choose his own Platonic image of himself, build a wall around it in his mind against the strife of the world, but ultimately he will be as much a creation of necessary conditions in the world around him as that Platonic image. Indeed, that the human being is can have his image of himself depart from the actuality of the world, even if that brings about the occasion for despair, is a mark of his superiority over the world of pure necessity, and the excellence that it is even to be capable of despair.5 After all, it marks that we are capable of imagining more than what is, and that with our freedom we may choose, however impotently, to follow against the direction that the strife of the world necessarily drags him along. What then is the human being supposed to do with his freedom? Within a fallen world of strife, the only way to be able to unto the splendid visions of a world that ought to be in contrast to what is is to embrace the tragic. To accept that the pain and despair of wishing for the sublime despite what is is itself a more excellent state than the apathetic acceptance of whatever the natural order of things brings about.
After all, like the love that Kierkegaard speaks of in Either/Or our concepts of what ought to be are eternities built upon the churning froth that is the temporal world.6 They may be able to be realized in moments and in fleeting visions (or hallucinations) of an empyrean heaven where the ought necessarily is and where there is no strafe to change it, but that is all. Like romantic love, our romantic ideals of the world seek eternity, and by that they seek not so much an infinite time-horizon, but rather an unchanging state of affairs where freedom and necessity are aligned., in Either/Or, Kierkegaard describes first love as this unification.7 Just as Kierkegaard reflects melancholically about the impossibility of ever fully realizing the hopes of first love, so to we can reflect upon the inevitable failure to fulfill the demands of the Romantic image of what ought to be. Indeed, the failure of ever fulfilling the hopes of first love that Kierkegaard writes about, is but an example of the more universal truth that the human being is a synthesis that is rent apart by the two different forces constituting that synthesis: one a necessity that finds its genesis in the strife of a fallen world, the other in an elevated capability of choosing otherwise.
When the synthesis will inevitably be pulled in opposing directions and when the opportunity for despair lurks everywhere, ready to throw even the most excellent human being into the sickness unto death, we must remember that the possibility of the sickness is itself an excellence of sorts. After all, if the possibility of despair were to be annihilated from the world, then it would also annihilate the human potential to recognize the ought and to perceive, even if but for a fleeting moment, that empyrean heaven that strife will never allow for in the world. After all, one need not recognize the opportunity for despair without drinking from its cup, and the recognition that there is a schism between freedom and necessity can itself be a beautiful, if not melancholic, realization.8 This is where the human fascination for the tragic comes in for how else would pieces like Sophocles' Three Theban Plays endure through history, touch the human soul, be so widely considered beautiful, and yet be constituted by so many opportunities for despair if there was not something wonderfully excellent about the tragic? Without despair, without that sickness that can drown the human spirit in sorrow, then there is no capability to discern the is from the ought, to see beyond the grim reality of the actual, and to see the tormentingly blissful potential of what could be.
Just as the Heraclitean strife of the world is necessary, so too is the sickness unto death. If human beings are to be free agents, then they must be able to fathom more than simply is, and to be able to strive towards ends that they have decided ought to be. However, that does not mean that those ends will become reality, and that in turn can tear the free agent apart as he sees the potential yet must live within the actual. Thus the human being's very nature as a free agent is all that's needed to create the opportunity for the sickness unto death to invade his soul, and ergo there is something beautifully tragic about that affliction whose potential must be celebrated because it is rooted in our free nature.
1“laetus in praesens animus quod ultra est
oderit curare et amara lento
temperet risu.”
-Horace, Odes II.xvi
2“There are thus two reasons why you should be contented with whatever happens to you. Firstly, that it was for you that it came about, and it was prescribed for you and stands in a special relationship to you as something that was woven into your destiny from the beginning and issues from the most venerable of causes, and secondly that, for the power which governs the whole, that which comes to each of us individually contributes to its own well-being and perfection, and, by Zeus, its very continuance. For the perfection of the whole suffers a mutilation if you cut off even the smallest particle from the coherence and continuity of its causes no less than of its parts; and you do this, so far as you can, whenever you are discontented, and, in a certain sense, you destroy it.” -Marcus Aurelius, Meditations 5.50
3“For example, when the ambitious man whose slogan is 'Either Caesar or nothing' does not get to be Caesar, he despairs over it. But this also means something else: precisely because he did not get to be Caesar, he now cannot bear to be himself.” - Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 19.
4“You should know that war is comprehensive, that justice is strife, that all things come about in accordance with strife and with what must be.” -Heraclitus as quoted by Origen in Against Celsus VI xliii.
5“The possibility of this sickness is man's superiority over the animal, and his superiority distinguishes him in quite another way than does his erect walk, for it indicates infinite erectness and sublimity, that he is spirit. “ - Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, pg. 15.
6“It has now become apparent how romantic love was built upon an illusion, and that its eternity was built upon the temporal and that, although the knight remained deeply convinced of its absolute constancy, there nevertheless was no certainly of this, since its trial and temptation had hitherto been in an entirely external medium.” -Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 28.
7“So we turn back to the first love. It is the unity of freedom and necessity. The individual feels drawn by an irrestibile power to another individual but precisely therein feels his freedom.” - Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 45.
8“It is beautiful and healthy if a person has been unfortunate in his first love, has learned to know the pain of it but nevertheless remains faithful to his love, has kept his faith in this first love; it is beautiful if in the course of the years he ht times very vividly recalls it, and even though his soul has been sufficiently healthy to bid farewell, as it were, to that kind of life in order to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful in order to dedicate himself to something higher; it is beautiful if he then sadly remembers it as something that was admittedly not perfect but yet was so very beautiful.” -Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or, pg. 37.