The problem presented in Either/Or is essentially the problem the young Adrian Leverkühn resolves, in Mann's novel, by making his pact with the Devil. Too cold or too clear-sighted to go on playing the game of composition as Strauss and Mahler are playing it, yet desperate to compose, he needs something that will carry him over to the other side, as it were, give him back the excitement of composition. Stravinsky found that something in the Orthodox Church; a novelist like Muriel Spark in the Catholic Church; for a German Protestant like Leverkühn perhaps it could only be the Devil. Kierkegaard, though, went on believing that it had to be God. If he could only work his way through the Romantic disease of excessive freedom, he knew God would be waiting for him. But how? Two years after Either/Or he devoted an entire work to this mysterious disease. He called it The Concept of Anxiety. Anxiety, he points out, is to be distinguished from fear. Fear refers to something definite, ‘whereas anxiety is freedom's actuality, the possibility of possibility’. This opaque formulation is partly elucidated by the later examination of ‘the anxious possibility of being able’ and of the fact that ‘anxiety is the dizziness of freedom’. But however suggestive some of his phrasing is, the book remains relentlessly abstract. Five years later though, in The Sickness Unto Death, he hits upon a method that will do justice to his subject.
He begins from the obvious fact, also highlighted by Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground, that Plato misunderstood the nature of man since he held that sin is ignorance and can therefore be rectified by knowledge, whereas Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky follow St Augustine in believing that sin is a misdirection of the will. The grim refrain of Notes from Underground is that man is a perverse creature who will often do things he knows will harm him merely to prove to himself that he is alive and free. The classic example is the young Augustine's attempt to steal the pears from the orchard when he knows it is wrong, because he is driven by some powerful inexplicable impulse to do so. Hell, as Dante brings out so powerfully, is the fall into despair because we both want and do not want to do certain things, just as the addict both wants his drug and, clearly aware that it is ruining him, does not want it. Why some will allow the wanting to triumph and others will be able to overcome it is a mystery, one that the Augustinian tradition fully respects. For Kierkegaard it is the problem of the young man and the Judge translated into a religious dimension. To deal with it he adopts what he calls ‘the dialectic method’, his version of that Hegelian method he both admired and loathed. This means always seeing the topic under consideration alongside its opposite, never allowing it to take centre stage alone. Thus man, he says, is a synthesis of finite and infinite, temporal and eternal, freedom and necessity. He begins his discussion of possibility and necessity, for example, with the point that ‘a self that has no possibility is in despair, and likewise a self that has no necessity’. This he proceeds to develop in almost musical fashion:
Now if possibility outstrips necessity, the self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to. This then is possibility's despair. Here the self becomes an abstract possibility; it exhausts itself in floundering about in possibility, yet it never moves from where it is nor gets anywhere, for necessity is just that ‘where’ … Thus possibility seems greater and greater to the self; more and more becomes possible because nothing becomes actual. In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.
Remember Picrochole? And Dürer's Melencolia? Do the words not apply perfectly to them? ‘In the end it seems as though everything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.’ What the self lacks here is necessity. And wherein does necessity lie? ‘What is really missing’, says Kierkegaard, ‘is the strength to obey, to yield to the necessary in one's self, what might be called one's limits.’ But here we come up against the same problem as that which rendered the Judge's side of the argument so unconvincing in Either/Or. It was much easier to find one's own limits when there were external limits in place, precisely those limits which began to be called into question in the Renaissance and the Reformation and which had been abolished once and for all, in principle at least, by the French Revolution. In the modern world necessity seems too often a form of imprisonment rather than release, ‘for without possibility it is as though a person cannot draw breath’. Thus ‘necessity's despair is to lack possibility’. Is this not a striking analysis of the situation Raskolnikov finds himself in? And Emma Bovary? But — and this is why we must stick to the dialectical method — at the same time possibility's despair is to lack necessity. That is why when Raskolnikov or Emma Bovary or Anna Karenina acts, not tragedy but a kind of dreadful farce ensues. Agamemnon may, in his wife's eyes, have been wrong to sacrifice their daughter; Clytemnestra, in her son's eyes, may have been wrong to murder her husband: but in each case they were driven by an objective and clearly defined necessity — to allow the fleet to sail and thus fulfil his obligation as brother of Menelaus and commander of the Greeks on his part, to avenge the murder of her daughter on hers — and thus what ensues is tragedy. The contrast with Raskolnikov, Emma and Anna could not be clearer.
In the later portions of his book Kierkegaard explores ‘the despair of not wanting to be oneself’ as well as ‘the despair of wanting in despair to be oneself’. Not surprisingly, he finds confirmation of his insights not in other philosophers, who have rarely recognised the unfathomable complexities of the self, but in the poets, and especially in Shakespeare. Not Hamlet, this time, but Macbeth. ‘It is a psychological master-stroke’, he remarks, ‘that Shakespeare has Macbeth say (Act III, Scene 2): “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.” In other words, sin has an inner consistency and in this consistency of evil it also has a certain strength.’ And again, quoting the lines in Act II, Scene I, ‘For from this instant [the murder of Duncan] there's nothing serious in mortality: All is but toys: renown and grace is dead.’ ‘What is masterly is the double stroke in the final words (renown and grace)’, he comments. Here Kierkegaard is drawing attention to the brilliance with which Shakespeare, in three words, conveys Macbeth's loss of both public and private realms, the older, Homeric realm of kleos, fame, honour among one's peers, and the newer, Christian realm, in which one is alone before God, on whose grace one's eternal life depends.
Though Kierkegaard sets out The Sickness Unto Death as an argument built up step by step, it is difficult, unless perhaps one is his kind of Christian, to follow it as such. Rather, it seems to me, the book is a compendium, an encyclopaedia of the sickness that has befallen man in the nineteenth century. On every page there are remarkable formulations, worth any number of books on Romanticism or Modernism, such as: ‘If one wants to compare running astray in possibility with the child's use of vowels, then lacking possibility is like being dumb. The necessary is as though there were only consonants, but to utter them there has to be possibility.’ Does this not provide us with a way of grasping the mixture of silence, confusion and despair evident in so many of the greatest nineteenth-century novels — Michael Kohlhaas, Madame Bovary, The Devils? In fact, as we will see, whatever aspect of Modernism we look at, Kierkegaard will be an invaluable guide.