The Sickness Unto Death Part 2 Section A

Overview and Argument

The second and final part of The Sickness Unto Death deals with the theological implications of previous chapters. At the end of part 1, Kierkegaard had established the his idea of despair and its various implications and developments in and of the self. Now, we turn our attention to faith, God, and sin in the context of despair. The title of this section, Despair is Sin, clearly relays the overarching ideas of Kierkegaard's philosophy.

Chapter 1: The Successive Stages in the Consciousness of the Self

Sin is, to Kierkegaard, "before God, or with the the conception of God, in despair not wanting to be oneself, or wanting in despair to be oneself". In other words, Sin is an intensified weakness or an intensified defianceThis should make sense after understanding part 1. To start the process of explaining this idea, the idea of the "poet-existence" is introduced. A poet, aligning with modern-day intiution in a sense, is someone who has a deep awareness of spiritual truthsThink along the lines of suffering, love, faith, religion but just expresses them instead of actually living them. The poet-existence is characterized by how "he loves God above everything, God who is the only comfort in his secret torment, and yet he loves the torment, he will not let go of it". Already, we can see similarities with the last part, where as the sense of self becomes stronger and heightened, so does the despair and the realization that one is doing something "wrong", but still this intensified despair becomes part of one's self and his relation with God, making it impossible to let go. The poet-existence persists until "he has become unhappy in religiousness" and he must "let go of this torment, that is, to humble himself under it in faith and take it on him as part of the self -- for he wants to hold it at arm's length but that means precisely keeping hold of it."

The self that stands before God is a distinct and qualified version: the theological self. As opposed to the simple human self in which he have been discussing, the theological self stands before God and is measured against the standards of religion. In simpler terms, the distinction between these forms of self lies in what they are being measured against, "everything is qualitatively whatever it is measured by". This has interesting implications on actions and consequences. An aggravated crime is one that is committed under certain circumstances that drastically increase the severity of the action. To Kierkegaard, any despair before God is sin in the same sense as an aggravated crime. Admittedly this can be slightly misleading since it is not as if the offense is greater to the victim, in this case God, but it is greater since the culprit has greater knowledge, more understanding of what it is, and in the process of relating the self to God, one has ensured they remain in despair. Kierkegaard puts it plainly, "the self is intensified in proportion to the standard by which the self measures itself, and infinitely so when God is the standard". How, then, do we find a way out? If we try to do it ourselves, Kierkegaard questions, "how often sis one devil not driven out with the devil's own help". By this, he means that by trying to eliminate one form of sin or weakness, humanity often does so by feeding an equally problematic force. For example, if one were to abandon sensuality but resulted in that some person becoming vain and judgmental, what was really gained? The answer to the extermination of sin is not found in the realm of humanity, but with God. This notion helps to paint another definition of faith: "the self in being itself and in wanting to be itself is grounded transparently in God".

At this point, the text hones in on a new dilemma: the offense created by sin and Christianity. A "critique" of religion and specifically Christianity is how dark and dismal it can be. Notably, the severity of sin to eternal damnation draws criticism from those that are not religious or those that believe otherwise. Well, Christianity teaches that every single human is before God and can talk to God at any time with certainty of being heard. He has the "most intimate footing wiith God!" Yet every person who "does not have the humble courage to dare to believe it is offended. But why is he offended?" Because it is too exalted for him, because he cannot make sense of it because he cannot be open and frank in the face of it, and therefore must have it removed". Offense to Kierkegaard is unhappy admiration, and the degree to which the offense consumes one is directly dependent on the passion of admiration.

In the face of this offense, is it the Christian's duty to defend his religion? No. To defend is to "connive if only unconsciously with offense by making Christianity out to be some miserable object that in the end must be rescued by a defense... the person who first thought of defending Christianity is Christendom is de facto a Judas... to defend something is always to discredit it". A question that I had upon reading this is: How would Kierkegaard spread the gospel if defending it is to offend the religion?" While the answer is not in this book, I would venture to guess that rather than argue or defend his beliefs, Kierkegaard would try to point his counterpart to his inner faults or gaps in a way that led him to Christianity. I digress.

Chapter 2: The Socratic Definition of Sin

The Socratic definition of sin is ignorance. This doesn't really answer any questions we are curious about, but instead just creates more. What is ignorance? Is it acquired? Is it natural? Suppose someone obscures his knowledge so as to not be aware of sin. If this person was not clearly conscious of what he was doing, then his knowledge is already somewhat obscured. However, if he began to obscure his knowledge and "was clearly conscious of doing so, then the sin is not in the knowledge but in the will". This opens a concept to a deeper set of questions, namely how far can ignorance go, and in what forms does it show up? Tying back to the poet-existence, Kierkegaard discusses those that have "understood" the concept of sin but yet this understanding "exercises no influence at all on people's lives", something that can drive one to both laughter and tears" in its irony. It follows that there must be a difference between "understanding and understanding". That is, understanding in a purely theoretical manner compared to understanding in a way that causes one to live and act by the principles. It is "infinitely comical that a person can understand the whole truth about how wretched and petty the world is" and then at "the same moment he is off joining in the same wretchedness and pettiness". This feeble derivative of understanding is "an illusion; his protestation of understanding is a misleading message". For if a person does not do the right thing, "then neither has he understood it".

The problem with modern philosophy in the context of understanding is that it treats truth as systematic knowledge, a component removed from the will. He specifically mentions René Descartes' famous cogito here, and attacks Hegel in the same breath. Anything that reduces human life to something that can be explained within a system and tries to merge itself into or in parallel with Christianity is false. Sin is not something that is an intellectual or developmental stage, and that is Kierkegaard's gripe with this socratic defintion of sin as well as modern philosophy. For to "not do the what is right the very second he knows it is the right thing to do -- then, for a start, the knowledge comes off the boil". Knowledge is not enough; the will is required. And for those that lack the will but posses the knowledge, they distract themselves by obscuring their "ethico-religious knowledge" whilst they "expand their aesthetic and metaphysical knowledge."

Chapter 3: The Sin is not the Negative but the Affirmative

A direct followup from the last chapter, Kierkegaard's main point here is to refute the idea that sin is done in passivity. Sin as negation means that a person ought to love God but doesn't, a common way to relay this would be that someone "lacks faith". However, Kierkegaard belives that the sinner actively wills against God. Instead of missing something, sin is positing something and the self establishes itself in intensified defiance. If one adopts the ideology that sin is in the negative sense, than it can be comprehended away. One can easily fit sin into a system, for example:

1. Humans are finite
2. Finitude leads to error
3. Error is sin

By trying to comprehend sin, it becomes something one can explain away conceptually. In doing so, it robs sin of the harmfulness that is inherent in its nature. However, sin as an act can not be comprehended away, and any act of trying to comprehend sin removes the aspect of free will from the equation. This idea seems intuitive for Kierkegaard, as he admits that "this, to my mind, is the right thing. Once all the attempts at comprehension are shown to be self-contradictory, the matter will appear in its proper light; it will then be quite clear that whethre one is willing to believe it or not must be left to faith."

If you recall from part 1, the first form of despair was that of complete unconsciousness. It was said that the vast majority of humanity is in despair without being aware of it. It is this despair that is the furthest away from salvation, but also the most painless. These ideas carryover into this discussion as well. Given that sin is despair before God, it makes sense that when onewho is so out of touch with himself before God sins, that this pain is the most manageable and discreet. While true, Kierkegaard warns, "but this does not dispose of the matter... How does it come about that a person's life becomes so spiritless that it seems impossible to bring Christianity to bear on it all, just a a jack can't be used where there is no solid ground... Is it something that happens to a person? No, it is the person's own fault". There is no natural blocker for faith and belief; all of humanity is capable. Yet even the most "devout" believers who go to worship and go to Church suffer the same fate of spiritlessness. Even pastors, when they give "three reasons for concluding that it pays to pray, as though the price of prayer had fallen so low that three reasons were needed to help give it some crumb of esteem" are unequivocally demonstrating spiritlessness and a lack of absolute faith. For no "reasons" lie within the scope of understanding, and in the attempts to justify prayer or worship we have belittled Christiniaty into something that needs defense.