“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.