English translation
AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
AI-assisted English translation. The Japanese original remains authoritative.
Originally published:
This material was published on the Japanese website. Dates and notices in the text reflect the original publication.
Despair and the Possibility of Release through Circumstance
A Rebuttal of Kierkegaard's Philosophy
Seishu Hamano
1. We Should Free Ourselves from “Ethics” and Investigate “Existence”
Philosophers, every last one of them, are willful creatures. They insist that their own way of thinking alone governs this world, that their own approach is the sole legitimate authority for defining it, and will not yield. In terms of weather, their arguments are a “downpour.” Even if ordered to change their hearts and aim for clear skies, the heavy rain goes on falling without end. Kierkegaard's “theory of despair” is particularly overbearing and appalling. Interpretive leaps, deviations and outrageous arguments are jumbled together in confusion. 『死に至る病』 (Japanese translation, 1949) is a typical example. Though one of his representative works, it is so arbitrary as to be irrepressible. He develops his views freely around the central issue of “despair,” but the examples supporting his logic are biased, illuminating only one side throughout. City dwellers who regularly experience some measure of “despair” and are accustomed to overcoming it understand the complexity of its many-sided character. I think they would neither follow the route Kierkegaard lays out nor rush into such extremes. This essay proceeds from that position.
Everyone experiences “despair” several times in human life. But when someone falls into it, the very act of defining it as “sin” in a calculation of good and evil is mistaken. If “despair” means “the moment when hope is cut off,” the person responsible for cutting off hope may be considered sinful. The person whose hope has been cut off, however, is a victim upon whom despair has been imposed, and is no “sinner.”
Suppose an “old writer” with little life remaining has just one hope: “to live with his son and leave his works to posterity.” If that son lives separately and declares that they will never live together, the old writer will spend his remaining years enveloped in despair. Yet if the son later recognizes his fault, changes his heart and returns to his father, the despair will immediately dissolve, and the long anguish of the past will no longer cause pain. In this case neither father nor son is a sinner or an offender. Ultimately this is not a question of moral law.
2. Kierkegaard's Failure to Introduce Many-Sided Factors
Kierkegaard does not undertake case studies like those in the Bible, nor does he take account of the validity of paradoxes such as the “Prodigal Son.” At the beginning of 『死に至る病』 he states: “The sickness unto death is despair.” This idea, or thesis, contains grounds for disagreement, yet it is an apt definition. He says that despair is a sickness in the self and has three forms: first, when one is not conscious of one's “self”; second, when one despairs and does not wish to be oneself; and third, when one insists on being oneself. These are the three. At this stage, despair belongs to epistemology, distinct from good and evil or ethical questions, so the argument is understandable. Defining despair as a state in which “possibility” or “actuality” is cut off may also be appropriate in certain cases.
But he brings “necessity” and “finitude” into despair. The logic that “the despair of possibility lies in a lack of finitude” and that “a lack of necessity lies in an absence of possibility” is also one side of the truth. Yet we must consider that possibility and necessity are not all: probability also intervenes. Otherwise the logic is incomplete.
On the other hand, viewed through the theory of relativity, “right” sometimes becomes “wrong,” and “wrong” sometimes becomes “right.” For example, a host calmly preparing a tea gathering suddenly realizes, five minutes before it is to begin, that he has forgotten to arrange the flowers. Realizing that he has shown the greatest discourtesy to an honored guest to whom he has long been indebted, he falls into despair. But suppose his foremost pupil brings flowers just before the gathering, and the honored guest, arriving immediately afterward, praises him for having such a good pupil, so that the gathering becomes all the more congenial. An unforeseen occurrence in which forces beyond his control and an unusual event wipe away the crisis resolves the despair. His years of effort in the tea ceremony are vindicated, and “happiness” prevails in place of the “anguish” of despair. This kind of absurdity often becomes a factor that transforms human action. Kierkegaard lacks consideration of this kind. 夏目漱石 and Einstein have already referred to such matters. While circumstances always exist as a many-sided whole, Kierkegaard's theory of despair conspicuously disregards changes in the external world.
3. Kierkegaard Received “Life” Without Wishing for It
Regarding his own birth, Kierkegaard questions his “being-there” as a “birth without necessity,” a birth without a “law of causality.” He came into this world as the child of his father and a female employee, socially considered illegitimate. I myself, however, do not make an issue of the absence of a law of causality that existed in my own case too.
Many great figures in history came into this world unwanted. Christ was one; Benjamin Franklin, called a father of American independence, was also born to prolific parents as the thirteenth of sixteen siblings. Quite apart from Christ, Franklin too was not discouraged by this. From his youth he published such works as Poor Richard’s Almanac(1760), making his own presence permeate the lives of farmers in colonial North America. I regard the emergence of a human being from “nothing” into “being” as weighty, irrespective of family background. Kierkegaard is said to have suffered the additional burden of physical frailty, but that misfortune may instead be seen as helping to impress his presence upon readers' consciousness.
What were the political circumstances of the society in which Kierkegaard lived? Did they threaten his existence? In considering this, I wish to reflect in light of the circumstances of my own survival. Like Kierkegaard, I received life under incomprehensible and unwelcome conditions. Like him I was physically frail and coexisted with “death” from early childhood. Our country was also in a ferocious war; in my infancy, it was taken for granted that at any moment we might be struck by hellfire exploding in the dark sky. When the strange smell of damp mud in the air-raid shelter filled the midnight hours, it became normal, until I became a creature unable to sleep soundly without it. Dodging raging fire in the dark, being blown into a filthy stream together with corpses, and becoming accustomed to seeing bodies burns away even one's human sensibility, like Meursault, the protagonist of Albert Camus's 『異邦人』. No: my childhood meant surviving in a state of exhaustion even greater than Meursault's. Absurdity was normal. Nor was this true of me alone. Under circumstances in which the fiery days of twentieth-century warfare had to be accepted a priori, such “life” was the ordinary condition of almost everyone walking the streets.
4. On the Interpretation That “Despair Is Sin”
Out of this jumble of incomprehensibilities I favored an existential orientation: rejecting hedonism and utilitarianism, becoming neither a moralist nor a nihilist, I continued productive efforts in my boyhood. In other words, while neither resisting pre-existing values nor withholding understanding from them, I neither took refuge in them nor converted to them. I advanced toward existential philosophy, diligently putting my way of living in order, and went on to the institution of learning called a university. As soon as I entered, life with Sartre and Camus began. Kierkegaard joined them; I lived with the three, keeping Hemingway, Malraux, Saint-Exupéry and Freud nearby.
In Part Two of 『死に至る病』, Kierkegaard includes a section on “the sin of despairing over one's own sin.” Examining it makes his concept of “sin” clear. “Despair over one's own sin” knows that the bridge behind the self has been cut away. It therefore clings to the self alone and stubbornly attempts to shut itself up within itself. For that reason he calls it sin. It has made it impossible any longer to desire the “good.” As a result, so to speak, it bears “the sin of despairing over the forgiveness of sins.”
The interpretation around this point may be one typical example of what is commonly called the “hikikomori phenomenon.” The characteristics of psychiatric patients lie entirely in this kind of “solidity,” but I maintain that it is possible to avoid despair by making use of the relationship between despair and multidimensional circumstances. After all, we do not have to agonize over this-or-that within a single framework. (End)
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