despression, despair - troubled mind, troubled spirit
noauth
By Gordon Marino
The New York Times
October 28, 2009
All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away
some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and
Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin.
And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in
terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has
become pass�. Galileos of the inner world, such as Soren
Kierkegaard (1813-1855), have been packed off to the museum
of antiquated ideas. Yet I think that the great and highly
quirky Dane could help us to retrieve a distinction that has
been effaced.
These days, confide to someone that you are in despair and
he or she will likely suggest that you seek out professional
help for your depression. While despair used to be classified
as one of the seven deadly sins, it has now been medicalized
and folded into the concept of clinical depression.
If Kierkegaard were on Facebook or could post a You Tube
video, he would certainly complain that we, who have
listened to Prozac, have become deaf to the ancient
distinction between psychological and spiritual disorders,
between depression and despair.
There is abundant chatter today about �being spiritual�
but scarcely anyone believes that a person can be of troubled
mind and healthy spirit. Nor can we fathom the idea that the
happy wanderer, who is all smiles and has accomplished every
thing on his or her self-fulfillment list, is, in fact,
a case of despair. But while Kierkegaard would have agreed
that happiness and melancholy are mutually exclusive, he
warns, �Happiness is the greatest hiding place for despair.�
Despair is marked by a desire to get rid of the self, an
unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are.
Kierkegaard was called �the Fork� as a child because of his
uncanny ability to find people�s weaknesses and stick it to
them. His lapidary �Sickness Unto Death� is a study of
despair, which in the Danish derives from the notion of
intensified doubt. Almost as a challenge to keep out the
less than earnest reader, Kierkegaard begins �Sickness�
with this famous albeit slightly ironic bit of word play:
A human being is a spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is
the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that
relates itself to itself or is the relation relating itself
For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the
room, the magister continues, �A human being is a synthesis
of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the
eternal, of freedom and necessity.� Despair occurs when
there is an imbalance in this synthesis. From there
Kierkegaard goes on to present a veritable portrait gallery
of the forms that despair can take. Too much of the
expansive factor, of infinitude, and you have the dreamer
who cannot make anything concrete. Too much of the limiting
element, and you have the narrow minded individual who
cannot imagine anything more serious in life than bottom
lines and spread sheets.
Though it will make the Bill Mahers of the world wince,
despair according to Kierkegaard is a lack of awareness of
being a self or spirit. A Freud with religious categories
up his sleeves, the lyrical philosopher emphasized that
the self is a slice of eternity. While depression involves
heavy burdensome feelings, despair is not correlated with
any particular set of emotions but is instead marked by a
desire to get rid of the self, or put another way, by an
unwillingness to become who you fundamentally are. This
unwillingness often takes the form of flat out wanting to
be someone else. Kierkegaard writes:
An individual in despair despairs over something.
So it seems for a moment, but only for a moment;
in the same moment the true despair or despair in
its true form shows itself. In despairing over
something, he really despaired over himself, and
now he wants to be rid of himself. For example,
when the ambitious man whose slogan is �Either Caesar
or nothing� does not get to be Caesar, he despairs
over it � precisely because he did not get to be Caesar,
he cannot bear to be himself.
In America, there is endless talk of the importance of
having a dream � that is, a dreamed-up self that you
will to become: a millionaire, a surgeon, or maybe the next
Dylan or George Clooney. But master of suspicion that
Kierkegaard was, he goes on to note that while the man
who has failed to become Caesar would have been in seventh
heaven if he had realized his dream, that state would have
been just as despairing in another way � because in that
giddy self-satisfied condition, he would never have come to
grasp his true self.
On the issue of depression of which Kierkegaard and his
entire family were very well acquainted, Kierkegaard could
have been a reductionist. He seems to have recognized that
we could be born into the blues. In 1846, he sighed:
I am in the profoundest sense an unhappy individuality,
riveted from the beginning to one or another suffering
bordering on madness, a suffering which must have its
basis in a mis-relation between my mind and body, for
(and this is the remarkable thing as well as my infinite
encouragement) it has no relation to my spirit, which on
the contrary, because of the tension between my mind and
body, has gained an uncommon resiliency.
The spirit is one thing, the psyche another: The blues one
thing, despair another.
How might Kierkegaard have parsed the distinction for the
Doubting Thomas who will only believe what he can glean on
an M.R.I.? Perhaps he would describe it this way.
Each of us is subject to the weather of our own moods.
Clearly, Kierkegaard thought that the darkling sky of his
inner life was very much due to his father�s morbidity.
But the issue of spiritual health looms up with regard to
the way that we relate to our emotional lives. Again, for
Kierkegaard, despair is not a feeling, but an attitude,
a posture towards ourselves. The man who did not become
Caesar, the applicant refused by medical school, all
experience profound disappointment. But the spiritual
travails only begin when that chagrin consumes the
awareness that we are something more than our emotions
and projects. Does the depressive identify himself
completely with his melancholy? Has the never ending
blizzard of inexplicable sad thoughts caused him to
give up on himself, and to see his suffering as a kind
of fever without significance?
If so, Kierkegaard would bid him to consider a spiritual
consultation on his despair, to go along with his trip to
the mental health clinic.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Gordon Marino is professor of philosophy and director of
the Hong/Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in
Northfield, Minn. He is author of "Kierkegaard in the
Present Age," and co-editor of "The Cambridge Companion
to Kierkegaard."
mmmousemaid
> Kierkegaard on the Couch
> By Gordon Marino
> The New York Times
> October 28, 2009
>
> http://tinyurl.com/ykk3ggo
>
> All progress paves over some bit of knowledge or washes away
> some valuable practice. Within a few years, e-mail and
> Twitter moved the art of letter writing to the trash bin.
>
> And in an age when all psychic life is being understood in
> terms of neurotransmitters, the art of introspection has
There are many great authors who have suffered despair and depression,
e.g. Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Wittgenstein, Camus, Johnson (check out
famous
people with depression on Wikipedia). But isn't it amazing how
taking a drug, maybe even an illegal drug, completely eliminates those
moods?
Mmousemaid
Anonymous
> But isn't it amazing how taking a drug, maybe even an
> illegal drug, completely eliminates those moods?
are you serious?
mmmousemaid
Yes, i think it's miraculous; analogous to using anesthesia for
surgery;
isn't amazing how a person goes to sleep while the operation is done,
and then wakes up again?
Mmmousemaid
Anonymous
> But isn't it amazing how taking a drug, maybe even an
> illegal drug, completely eliminates those moods?
really?