The Problems of Boredom, Anxiety, and Despair
Boredom, anxiety, and despair are the human psyche’s major
problems, and Kierkegaard spends most of his writing diagnosing
these three ills. People are bored when they are not being stimulated, either
physically or mentally. Relief from boredom can only be fleeting.
Passion, a good play, Bach, or a stimulating conversation might provide
momentary relief from boredom, but the relief doesn’t last. Boredom
is not merely a nuisance: a psychologically healthy human must find
some way to avert boredom. Conflicts between one’s ethical duty
and one’s religious duty cause anxiety. Social systems of ethics
often lead one to make choices that are detrimental to one’s spiritual
health, and vice versa. The tension between these conflicting duties
causes anxiety, and like boredom, anxiety must be escaped for a
person to be happy. Finally, despair is a result of the tension
between the finite and the infinite. Humans are frightened of dying,
but they are also frightened of existing forever. Kierkegaard believed
that everyone would die but also that everyone had an immortal self,
or soul, that would go on forever. Boredom and anxiety can be alleviated
in various ways, but the only way to escape despair is to have total
faith in God. Having total faith in God, however, was more than
simply attending church regularly and behaving obediently. Faith
required intense personal commitment and a dedication to unending
self-analysis. Kierkegaard thought that having total faith in God,
and thus escaping despair, was extremely difficult as well as extremely
important.
The Aesthetic as the First Stage on Life’s Way
Kierkegaard proposed that the individual passed through
three stages on the way to becoming a true self: the aesthetic,
the ethical, and the religious. Each of these “stages on life’s
way” represents competing views on life and as such potentially
conflicts with one another. Kierkegaard takes the unusual step of
having each stage of life described and represented by a different
pseudonymous character. Thus, it becomes too difficult to ascertain
which propositions Kierkegaard himself upholds. This fits with Kierkegaard’s
characteristic tendency to avoid dictating answers. He preferred
that readers reach their own conclusions.
The aesthetic is the realm of sensory experience and pleasures. The
aesthetic life is defined by pleasures, and to live the aesthetic
life to the fullest one must seek to maximize those pleasures. Increasing one’s
aesthetic pleasures is one way to combat boredom, and Kierkegaard
described many methods of doing so. He proposes that the anticipation
of an event often exceeds the pleasure of the event itself, and
so he suggests ways of drawing out anticipation. One suggestion
is to leave all of your mail for three days before opening it. Unplanned
events can, at times, lead to pleasures as great as anticipation,
but the pleasure of planned events is almost entirely in the anticipation.
The importance of the aesthetic is acknowledged, but it
is also presented as an immature stage. The aesthete is only concerned
with his or her personal enjoyment, and because aesthetic pleasure
is so fleeting, an aesthete has no solid framework from which to
make coherent, consistent choices. Eventually, the pleasures of
the aesthetic wear thin, and one must begin seeking the ethical
pleasures instead. The ethical life actually offers certain pleasures
the aesthetic life cannot. An aesthete can never do something solely
for the good of someone else, but we all know that doing things
for others without personal motives can actually be incredibly enjoyable.
The Ethical as the Second Stage on Life’s Way
Ethics are the social rules that govern how a person ought
to act. Ethics are not always in opposition to aesthetics, but they
must take precedence when the two conflict. The aesthetic life must
be subordinated to the ethical life, as the ethical life is based
on a consistent, coherent set of rules established for the good
of society. A person can still experience pleasure while living
the ethical life. The ethical life serves the purpose of allowing
diverse people to coexist in harmony and causes individuals to act
for the good of society. The ethical person considers the effect
his or her actions will have on others and gives more weight to
promoting social welfare than to achieving personal gain. The ethical
life also affords pleasures that the aesthetic does not. Aesthetics
steers one away from consistency, since repetition can lead to boredom.
An ethical person doesn’t simply enjoy things because they’re novel
but makes ethical choices because those choices evoke a higher set
of principles. Kierkegaard uses marriage as an example of an ethical
life choice. In marriage, the excitement of passion can quickly
fade, leading to boredom and a diminishing of aesthetic pleasure.
However, by consistently acting for the good of one’s spouse, one
learns that there are enjoyments beyond excitement. Still, the ethical
life does little to nurture one’s spiritual self. The ethical life
diverts one from self-exploration since it requires an individual
to follow a set of socially accepted norms and regulations. According
to Kierkegaard, self-exploration is necessary for faith, the key
requirement for a properly religious life.
The Religious as Third Stage on Life’s Way
Kierkegaard considers the religious life to be the highest
plane of existence. He also believes that almost no one lives a
truly religious life. He is concerned with how to be “a Christian
in Christendom”—in other words, how to lead an authentically religious
life while surrounded by people who are falsely religious. For Kierkegaard,
the relationship with God is exclusively personal, and he believed
the large-scale religion of the church (i.e., Christendom) distracts
people from that personal relationship. Kierkegaard passionately
criticized the Christian Church for what he saw as its interference
in the personal spiritual quest each true Christian must undertake.
In the aesthetic life, one is ruled by passion. In the
ethical life, one is ruled by societal regulations. In the religious
life, one is ruled by total faith in God. One can never be truly
free, and this causes boredom, anxiety, and despair. True faith
doesn’t lead to freedom, but it relieves the psychological effects
of human existence. Kierkegaard claims that the only way to make
life worthwhile is to embrace faith in God, and that faith necessarily
involves embracing the absurd. One has faith in
God, but one cannot believe in God. We believe
in things that we can prove, but we can only have faith in things
that are beyond our understanding. For example, we believe in gravity: we
feel its effects constantly, which we recognize as proof of gravity’s
existence. It makes no sense, though, to say we have faith in gravity,
since that would require the possibility that, someday, gravity
would fail to materialize. Faith requires uncertainty, and thus
we can have faith in God because God is beyond logic, beyond proof, and
beyond reason. There’s no rational evidence for God, but this is exactly
what allows people to have faith in him.
The Pleasures of Repetition and Recollection
Repetition and recollection are two contrasting ways of
trying to maximize enjoyment. Repetition serves multiple purposes
for Kierkegaard. First, it has an important aesthetic function.
People want to repeat particularly enjoyable experiences, but the
original pleasure is often lost in the repeating. This is due to
the expectation that things will be just the same the second time
as the first time. The pleasure of expectation clouds the fact that
the original experience wasn’t undertaken with a specific idea of
the joy it would cause. Repetition can produce powerful feelings
but usually only when the experience occurs unplanned. In this case,
the pleasure might even be magnified at the sudden resurgence of
happy memories—in other words, the recollection. There is pleasure
in planned repetition, but it is a comfortable pleasure, not an
exciting one. While repetition offers the joy of anticipation—joy
that seldom materializes in the actual event—recollection offers
the joy of remembering a particularly happy event. Recollection
can be cultivated along with the imagination to increase one’s day-to-day
aesthetic pleasure. Often, recalling a pleasant occurrence is more
enjoyable than repeating the same event: remembering the Christmases
of your childhood is often more pleasant than Christmas is in adulthood.
Indeed, much of the pleasure of Christmas, for an older person,
can come from nostalgia. The pleasures of recollection, which are
best enjoyed alone, are well suited to the aesthetic life. Unplanned
repetition is a truly aesthetic pleasure as well, while planned
repletion, such as that represented by marriage, affords more ethical
pleasures than aesthetic ones.
