Balancing the Self With Kierkegaard

I. In Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, the self, “at every moment it exists, is in a constant process of becoming.” It is at once identical with itself and continuously projecting into the future, seeking itself or some improved form or fully realised form of itself. This seems right to me, in being such a self I have my character traits, memories, opinions, quirks, idiosyncrasies: what I have, my actuality of self. But I also have hopes, dreams, goals, dispositions or desires: what I could have, my possibilities of self. He then goes on to say the self is a synthesis of the finite and infinite (among other things), which is the subject of this essay. Both can be thought of as psychological states, or dispositions of the self, that concern how we comport ourselves towards our possibilities. Of course, each self is not literally one or the other, nor do they switch between the two discretely, but we each dwell somewhere along the continuum between the two extremes. Kierkegaard outlines only what it is to be situated, as a self, at each polarity and the danger posed in being there.

It is not a question of supremacy between the two, but balance. The true, the powerful, the content self – the self with a well-attuned relationship with that which is not himself – is one situated appropriately between the finite and the infinite, in something of a golden mean. To both be appropriately aware of one’s material and psychological limitations (finitude), and to have a sufficiently active and aspirational imagination about one’s possibilities for change, creativity, risk-taking and sacrifice (infinitude), is the highest self-consciousness. In much of the text, Kierkegaard invokes imagery of bodily sickness to prime us to think of the self in the same way. To stray too far, into the infinite or finite, is for the self to be sick, to comport oneself appropriately between the two is be in health. Just like the body though, we do not just cure it for good, we must keep it in good health by cultivating and protecting it, and just like the body it slips in and out of sickness, our moods and attitudes change all the time, so we oscillate in and out of these extremes.

II. The finite is the confining factor, roughly corresponding to thought of the parts of the self that simply are, the actualities. The self who is overly finite gives himself utterly to the world; they accept things the way they are, they live in a narrow set of possibilities, confined in stunted imagination. Kierkegaard writes that “limitation and narrowness…is to have lost oneself, not being volatilised in the infinite, but by being altogether finitised, by instead of being a self, having become a cipher, one more person, one more repetition of this perpetual one-and-the-same.” He even goes as far as to say that the finite self has “from a spiritual point of view to have emasculated oneself.” The finite self sees his life as a script he is forced to follow instead of a pluralistic spring of possibilities bubbling at the surface to be embraced. He can’t even imagine there is another way. And in this action, he severs himself from a crucial aspect of a self – our possibilities. He literally becomes less of a self, less of a real person because of it.

This all sounds pretty grim, but remember these are the extremes; few carry the burden of being robbed of all possibility. (But when they do it is often perhaps for material reasons like inhumane work hours, or extreme poverty, we are quite literally robbing them of themselves.) But many, in their lives, even day to day moods, oscillate in and out of this pathology. And it is just that, a pathology. We settle for things because we think that it is all we can get, we flow through parts of our lives as if with the tide, instead of making our ourselves explicit and concrete forces in the world, individuating ourselves as a wave. The image of our own anxiety we see in ourselves about our possibilities is the only thing stopping us from acting and asserting selfhood. In our bouts of finitude, it is often not that there really is no other way just that we are choosing not to forge our own path.

III. The infinite is the expanding factor of the self; it is boundless; it is the thought of what could be, the aspirational. The medium in which the infinite is expressed is our imagination. “What feelings, understanding, and will a person has depends in the last resort upon what imagination he has – how he represents himself to himself”. This makes sense – the way that we see ourselves, the self we think we are, we think we have, is imagined by us and is the entity that limits our possibilities. My conception of myself determines the kinds of things I think I can and will end up doing. Unlike before, where we saw the dangers of having a stilted imagination of ourselves that confines one to quietude, we risk a danger going too far in the other direction.

Of the overly infinite self, Kierkegaard posits three domains in which the self is lost. When the emotions become too fantastic, the self becomes volatile in that it reacts to everything. It tries to grieve, weep for, and celebrate everything. The object of this performance is devalued as the self is at the beck and call of life’s commotion and change. When everything is worth getting upset about, nothing is. The self, instead of appropriately emoting important particulars, gets lost and exhausted in that it participates in an infinitely expanding set of possibilities, which can ultimately only be engaged in abstractly. When the understanding becomes fantastic is when scholars and theorists lose themselves in the infinite realm of a kind of inhuman knowledge. At some point, the acquisition of new ways of speaking and thinking stop being ways of understanding one’s self in the world and instead become a fruitless chasing of phantasms. When the will becomes fantastic, when the self thinks himself invincible, he also similarly becomes too infinite. He is lost in possibilities he cannot achieve. Even though I said earlier that the self often ought to seek new possibilities, going the complete other way will only lead to ruin. Someone who thinks they can do all will necessarily never succeed, and any moments they do, it is only an infinitely small part of the entire project, thus rendered unsatisfying.

IV. The balance here seems to me to be a kind of aspirational realism. When we lose ourselves in chasing every emotion (I think of people watching and getting upset about the news every day), we ought instead to step away from them, but only so that we can delegate them wisely. Remain an open font of emotional health but ground it in the things close, concrete, and important to us. A too fantastic understanding ends up producing constructions in which we organise our lives, in which we fight for, but fail ever to sublimate. We lose ourselves in the infinite variations that never pay dividends. We need instead to observe and see ourselves in the world of things and people, not of thoughts and books. Similarly, those who will all, who demand that the changes required are infinite and either settle for nothing less or never count their blessings are lost to the boundless, beyond any reasonable possibilities. We need instead, a genuine appreciation for the things that we are blessed to have. A stance toward the world that appreciates the given, but challenges and defies it when necessary.

(To be honest, this is a pretty poor interpretation of Kierkegaard (or at least Anti-Climacus’). His solution in The Sickness Unto Death is by no means this kind of aspirational realism; it is in God. My interpretation isn’t faithful as much as I am just taking some kernels to develop my own ideas. I take his diagnostic of the self as a mirroring relationship and a balancing act to have truth, but his solution is demanding and unfair. Even my explanation of the finite and infinite are not exactly right for him; they have more to do with a deficient relationship with God, not the world as I talk about it. Indeed, he thinks we ought to despise ‘earthly’ things; to him, it is a dire state of despair to be worried at all about the material, or physical unless it leads to (spiritual) self-consciousness – the spiritual takes precedent above all else. I guess what this essay is more than anything else is using some of the tools he set up as a way of expositing my own view. What I’ve said above, while approximate to his view, is really just what I think.)