Reflexion about the Sickness unto Death

Reflexion about the Sickness unto Death and the role that other “selves” play in it

Reading Kierkegaard’s reflexions on Despair, its different ways of expression and of course its meaning for the self, I was focusing more and more on an idea, a question. If Despair, or what Kierkegaard calls Despair, is the impossibility to be a self, or more precisely itself/oneself, could it really happens alone? I agree that this formulation is a bit confused. But what I mean is : if we are alone, we don’t need to become ourselves, we don’t need this dynamic relationship between a body, a soul and other bodies and souls (and God apparently even if I don’t agree this argument’s relevance). We just “are”, in the moment, like animals. It is really what I found out reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis : Gregor Samsa is absolutely not afraid of his new bug’s condition the moment he wakes up until he opens the door and everybody sees it/him. It’s like the Schroedinger cat’s experience : while he hasn’t open the door, he can be still himself. But when he opens and meets everybody’s reaction, there’s no doubt anymore.

He is now in Despair but still wants to be oneself, and obviously itself as he was before. And that is what makes him survive. In opposite, this all ends by death because Gregor abandon his/its only mark left, when he thinks he doesn’t belong to his/its family anymore (and probably because he has a rotting apple perforating his back too but that’s not the metaphoric point here). And that is what illustrates the most the “Sickness UNTO Death” to me.

But that doesn’t happen fast or directly, it’s a long negation of what made Gregor’s self by his family. For an example just take the moment Gregor’s sister and mother are taking his/its furniture out of the room. The Samsa family negates Gregor’s self by taking away his attributes. Because they don’t think it will use it anymore. His attributes as Gregor Samsa are replaced by its attributes as “the giant bug”, that means trashes. It’s a long negation but we see that Gregor tries to resist and proof that “he” exists (that play-on-word with France Gall’s song wasn’t purposeful). He tries to keep that picture of a model because that proves that he is still Gregor.

That’s what makes me say, or write right now, that the key to built a self (or to destroy it in Kafka’s case) is THE OTHER ONE.

The other “selves” roles

Kierkegaard makes fun in the beginning of the Sickness unto Death saying : “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation (…)”. He meant it as an intrinsic relation but I think it would be more interesting to consider it as a relation between two selves in power.

I know that I’m completely in an Hegelian perspective and that Kierkegaard reacted vigorously against his conclusions. But let’s give it a try. If a self is the balance between the infinite (a soul) and the finite (a body), there is a tension, a paradox : the infinite of the soul wants to exceed the body, and as an infinite it can do it easily, just with the doubt the body exists. And the possibilities are many. The “vertigo of possibilities” happens just here and “Despair” follows quickly because we can’t be sure of what we are, we can’t meet our “selves” anymore. It’s impossible to recognize ourselves as a self because something is missing. And that’s the other one. Because we need the other to recognize us the way we recognize ourselves.

Others can recognize us a different way as we recognize ourselves but I’m not going to focus on it here.

We depend on the look everybody else put on us. After all, if we follow the mind of Sartre, we can only reach the “me”, the identity we have through the look of another people. This other self confirms that we are a self. And against the infinitude of the soul, someone’s look shows finitude : when another tries to define our “self”, he can’t define the infinitude. So we meet a reassuring finitude.

And when we miss it, when we miss the other, we are confronted with “loneliness”. What I call “loneliness” is a condition of a mind where it can only interact with itself. That is to say if it doesn’t go mad all of a sudden, it divide in two or more and each part interact with the other parts, that is itself. And that is not good for the mental health. Moreover, there is nothing to discover in such interactions because the mind is a unique thing and every asking part knows the answers already.

To explain this in a better way, let’s use the example of the film Cast Away, by Robert Zemeckis. Tom Hanks plays the role of Chuck Noland, a FedEx employee whose plane crashes in the Pacific Ocean. He only survives and land on a desert island. So he must do the human technical evolution all over again but he can’t build another human. So he creates Wilson, a volley ball with a face (drawn in Noland’s blood by the way). And that’s the only way he can’t go mad, because he creates a real relationship with this ball, that doesn’t answer though! But it’s for him another human, another self.

That’s why Chuck is confronted to a cruel dilemma during this scene :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHtgKIFoQfE

Or he leaves his raft and hopes to join the civilisation again. Or he leaves Wilson, his “Friday” we could say, the only other person he ever met on its island. So he’s sincerely sorry.

The necessity of others, according to Kierkegaard

I will take now the example of “the man that needs a certain level of sociability” to show another point of view. This man does not “long for solitude”. That means there is a possibility for everybody, theoretically, to spend time alone and survive. More than that, this man considers it a necessity, like breathing or eating. We can’t be sure that Kierkegaard is defending his point of view but he says a constant social life isn’t a necessity for a self to be sure he is a self. Could we sometimes be alone and not despair then? Why not?

But then we could ask : if it is not always necessary, meeting another self, is it an actual state or just a possibility? I mean : we need another self, but does it have to be constant in our mind or just be like a medication when we get sick, when the vertigo comes back?