The Finite and the Infinite in Kierkegaard

ACADEMIC PAPER

In this paper, I examine Kierkegaard’s notion of the self as a synthesis, focusing particularly on his division of the self into its finite and infinite aspects.

Introduction

The matter of selfhood is one that has divided philosophy since ancient times. Questions such as, “What is the self?”, “How does one come to be a self?”, and “Is the self inborn or acquired?” have fascinated thinkers for over two thousand years, and continue to animate contemporary philosophy. For Plato, the self was eternal, as was the soul in which it resided. The qualities inhabiting it were there inborn, deposited during past lives and simply waiting to be retrieved by the individual possessing the skills to do so. For Aristotle, the self was similarly bound up with the concept of the soul, but could perhaps be encapsulated as the sum total of concepts, ideas and impressions that reside in the soul as “objects either of perception or thought”[1]. Similarly for Descartes and Locke, the self, had it been explicitly defined by them, may have defined in terms of its epistemological contents. Descartes, whose conception of the individual was as a res cogitans, thinking thing[2], might have designated the self as the sum total of a priori concepts that reside in the conscious mind. Locke, on the other hand, might rather have seen it as a life-long progression from zero. There are no innate ideas, and we are born tabula rasa; the self is built progressively, as we are exposed to the world and absorb its contents through sense perception[3]. While some have thus debated the origins of the self, claiming it to be, on the one hand, innate and discovered, and on the other, made and acquired, others have doubted its existence altogether. For the skeptic Hume, the self was but a theatre of impressions, a ghostly stage across which impressions passed and vanished[4], lacking any structural coherence, any centre around which said impressions could safely orbit. They thus could no more be seen as being bound up with a specific person than with any other – an idea echoed both by Pascal[5] and Musil[6]. More recently, some theorists have utilised literary metaphors to understand the self. Daniel Dennett, almost as if in answer to Hume, has described the self as a “narrative centre of gravity”, that is, a centrifuge of consciousness around which self-alimenting stories coalesce, forming a sort of novelistic singularity. The biological determinists, on the other hand, have argued that the self is no more than an automaton, the product of millions of years of evolutionary adaption, and can be said to be no more than a set of programmed responses to naturally imposed questions.[7] 

The debate on the self, as we can see, is as alive now as it has always been. While some argue that self is predetermined, many of our most recent theories, as Evans has pointed out, are lamentably one-sided[8], and reduce what is a complex question to an uncomfortable narrowness. It is in light of this reductionistic tendency that we could perhaps turn back, with delight, to Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855), and examine his critical contributions to the theory of selfhood. In several of his works, but perhaps most remarkably in Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard provides a framework for considering the self that compels to this day, and arguably remains unsurpassed for its coherence, complexity and multidimensionality. For Kierkegaard, the self exhibited, rather, a complex interplay of the opposing poles we have hitherto discussed. The self is, both innate and acquired, both bound by necessity and also freed by possibility. Though partly tied to a deterministic tether, in a manner Heidegger may have called Geworfenheit, the self is also amenable and responsive to actionable alternations. One can, to a large extent, steer one’s selfhood in one direction or another. Selfhood is thus an achievement, meaning both that it can be striven for and worked toward, and that it does not present itself automatically to the individual. It is, in Evan’s words, “something one must become.”[9] More precisely, perhaps, it is something that one must both create and discover. For the self one becomes is, for Kierkegaard, not so much a foreign acquisition as the uncovering of an authenticity that already lies within. And thus the act of becoming, here, is as much a revelation as an invention, or rather, an invention by way of revelation. One acquires one’s self by seeing and bringing forth what has been there all along. This process of self-becoming is one that moves through various points, and progresses dialectically, “through Kierkegaardian aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages”[10], and the effort required to do so involves the active assuming of a personal responsibility. One must choose to become a self and avoid losing oneself in the opposite – in a state Kierkegaard called despair. For Kierkegaard, to the Delphian oracular imperative, “Know Thyself”, could be added a second, equally important one, “Create Thyself”, for, as we have said, it is through a combination of these active and actionable strategies, that one becomes a self. The self is, furthermore, relational. It both relates to itself and to others. In Kierkegaard’s words, the self is a “relation that relates itself to itself” by “relating itself to another”[11]. This intersubjective notion of self, which vivdly recalls Hegel’s theory of recognition[12], suggests a complex relational network existing not only inter- but intra-personally. The self is dependent on externality for its own definitions, and relates to itself by means of another, but it is also internally relational, that is, comprised of varied aspects that relate both to each other and to their polar opposites. The self, in fact, is a synthesis, as Kierkegaard notably declared, one composed of various diametrically opposed poles: the necessary and the possible, the eternal and the temporal, and the infinite and the finite. It is my intention, in this paper, to explore these poles, their meanings and their implications to selfhood, concentrating mainly on the final pair, the infinite and the finite, as they are outlined by Kierkegaard in Sickness unto Death.

The self is a synthesis

In Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard[13] describes the self as a synthesis of opposing aspects:

A human being is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two terms.[14]

This can be taken, in effect, to be a summary of Kierkegaard’s entire philosophy of the self, for it contains both the categorisation into polar opposite aspects, along with its three different manifestations, and also the notion of the relation. In other words, the notion of the self for Kierkegaard is a not only a composite, but also a mobile one, involving not only the parts that comprise it but also the subtle ways in which they interact with each other. The finite and the infinite represent two primordial existential polarities in relation to which, whether we are aware of it or not, we are forced, in virtue of our natal conditions and also conditions shaping the course of our lives, to define ourselves. They capture our relationship with – and battle against – the opposing forces of natural contingency and agency, of conditioned facticity and essential liberty, of deterministic bondage and free choice. The finite aspect is, for Kierkegaard, the “confining factor”[15]. It can, perhaps a little vulgarly, be described as those parts of us that cannot be changed, to which we are bound as if by cosmic magic, and from which it is all but impossible escape. It includes all the natural forces that condition us necessarily, like gravity, time and space, as well as all the specific circumstances imposed on us through no choice of our own, like the time and place of our birth, the identity of our parents, our humanity and our mortality. Then infinite then, is its polar opposite: the “expanding factor”[16], that is, all that falls in the realm of possibility, all that doesn’t exist necessarily but could possibly be. If the finite is that part of us that must necessarily stay the same, then the infinite corresponds to those parts of us that can change, or haven’t yet been actualised but might.

The synthesis between finite and infinite calls to mind a rather powerful double-edged identity peculiar to humans. A human self, like everything else that falls under the cosmic order, is conditioned by the whim of nature, and yet, at the same time, its active agency renders it capable of wrenching itself, at least partly, from the completeness of this stranglehold. As Evans puts it, “…human history involves a double contingency. It shares the contingency of all of nature, since it is part of the natural order that has been actualized by a ‘freely effecting cause’. The second level of contingency is found in human actions, which also involve the exercise of free causality.”[17] We are, in this sense, a part of nature and yet, at the same time, oddly apart from it, both conditioned by it and, at the same time, conditioning it and ourselves. This double identity calls to mind the stoic conception of the human as fundamentally bivalent, a composite of the material and the divine, of the body and the logos. It also recalls the body-soul dualism of Aristotle and Descartes, as well as the ideas of the fifteenth-century Florentine, Pico della Mirandola, who, in his Oration on the Dignity of Man, Mirandola argues that we are “neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal”[18]. Ernest Becker gives perhaps the most eloquent modern analysis of this duality in his Denial of Death. He writes: “The essence of man is really his paradoxical nature, the fact that he is half animal, half symbolic”[19]. This paradox, he argues, is the root cause of many of humanity’s deepest anxieties, not least of which our paralysing fear of our mortality.

The other two designations for the finite/infinite couplet – eternal and temporal, freedom and necessity – can be seen as both directly synonymous of the first and nuanced re-iterations of it expressed under different aspects[20]. The poles, needless to say, do not represent an either/or dichotomy, but a continuum along which a self can slide in one direction or another, depending on circumstances and the exact point of their journey in which it finds itself. The three couplets relate, both within themselves to their polar opposite, and also to each other, and it is by means of and as a result of complex relational network that the self is said to be a self. The musical analogy put forth by Mooney is helpful here[21]. We imagine, here, a string sextet comprised of two violins, two violas and two cellos. Each instrument is both independent and also subsumed under two greater groupings: the chair it shares with its fellow instrument and, of course, the whole ensemble. Each instrument must relate to its pair, each pair to the other pairs, and each instrument and pair to the entire ensemble: “This threefold set of juxtaposed factors or vectors relating positively, actively, to itself, is relational selfhood, self as an ensemble[22].” In all this it may appear that, because of its multi-polarity, its synthetic nature, the self is a relation or relation of relations merely, and that it can therefore be argued to have no centre. And if it has no centre, no gravitational core, then it can surely be thought of as amorphous and therefore identity-less. We have seen that this was the Hume’s view. This is, however, not the case for Kierkegaard. The self may be synthetic, and it may lack a supreme governing force, or – as Mooney puts it – a “little king”[23], but it is far from amorphous. Its shape and identity is given by its relational field, by the sum total of its relational interactions, which, since they gather along an axis, serve as the very fulcrum that at first may be doubted to exist. The self is, in this way, like like a constellation of stars orbiting around a singularity, a central point that they themselves have created by the force exerted by their ‘gravity’ and their combined relational forces. In this sense, Kierkegaard may have agreed with Dennett[24] – at least in the big picture if not in the details. Once again, Mooney uses a musical metaphor to illustrate this idea:

The self is an authoritative centre in the way musical keys or centres of gravity can be authoritative. The structure and orientation of a self determine, lay our or author the meaning, weight and import of elements in a field.[25]

In other words, just as a key provides a piece of music with a tonal centre around which to organise its various melodic and harmonic elements, so to are the aspects of the self oriented by the self in a way that structures the whole. And this is how the self is made, by tweaking the elements within it in one way or another and, in so doing, eventually arriving at a sort of internal gravitational harmony.

Key in this process is the function played by god, who, for Kierkegaard, is the ontological foundation of the self: “…self becomes self only,” writes Mooney, “as it finds itself willingly in a transparent relationship to God as a constituting power.”[26] God is inescapable for a self if it wants to understand itself, and a necessary precondition for a self to be a self[27]. When a self looses God, so too it loses itself. This, as we shall see in a minute, is what Kierkegaard meant by despair. Every self that is not aware of itself as grounded in God, as a spirit accountable before God, is not a self, and therefore in despair[28]. One may, at this point, wonder how a self can be both necessarily grounded in God and yet, at the same time, free to determine itself through its own choices – and this is where we enter into subtle philosophical territory. Though ontological determined by, in and through God, the self is, in effect, ethically free from him. God constituted a human person, yes, but constituted them as a relation, and in creating them, thus, released them ethically from the bondage of initial ontological determination. Thus, tough the self may have no choice but to ground itself in god, it can also, at the same time, find ethical identity in a variety of other choices. Or as Evans puts it, “There is no ontological freedom from God, but there is ethical freedom.”[29] It is from this ethical freedom that both choice and responsibility come, the responsibility of becoming a self.

The despair of not being a self

What happens if the responsibility of becoming a self is side-stepped by the self? What happens if an individual refuses their own selfhood? If they fail, for one reason or another, to take on this most necessary of spiritual tasks? The result of this ultimate shirk is ‘despair’, which Kierkegaard defines thus: “An imbalance in a relational synthesis, a relation which relates to itself.”[30] In other words, despair is a condition in which one or more of the various elements comprising the self is tweaked too far toward one end of the continuum or another, resulting in a disequilibrium. It is, to this extent, a sickness of the spirit rather than of the body or the mind. One can be in despair but be totally unaware of it, can feel, on the outside, as if one is in optimal mental and physical health, while, on the inside, the despair is slowly eroding the self. “The biggest danger, that of losing oneself,” Kierkegaard writes, “can pass off in the world as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, an arm, a leg, five dollars, is bound to be noticed”[31]. This state of ignorance, of being in despair and not knowing it, is described by Kierkegaard, a “pure immediacy”, or a state in which one has “no infinite consciousness of the self, or what despair is, or of the state’s being one of despair.”[32] This terminology – ‘pure immediacy’ – is surely Hegelian. In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel also speaks of a ‘pure I’ who, before it understands it is necessarily recognised in and by other, exists in a state of ‘immediacy’[33]. This is the first, spiritually impoverished-but-necessary step a consciousness must take along the path of recognition, the first moment it must experience in order to become a fully-fledged self-consciousness. For Kierkegaard as for Hegel, this state of pure immediacy is an initial starting point, and yet it is a starting point that many fail to see as such. Many, instead of turning inward, examining themselves, and seeing their despair for what it is, will prefer to direct their attention outward, to anything that will distract them from this very act of self-examination.

There are, broadly speaking, two ways in which despair can happen, and these follow the division we have been discussing. A self can be in despair either by allowing itself to get bogged down in the finite, or by getting lost in the infinite. Both are equally pernicious. In the first, the self is convinced that there are more aspects in its reality that it cannot change; it accepts, unquestioningly, the beliefs about god it has inherited, takes on blindly the gender roles society has imposed, persuades itself it has no alternative but to stay in an unhappy marriage or an unfulfilling career. It treats these issues as if they were imbued with all the fixedness of the truly factitious, as if they were as unchangeable as the place and date of their birth and their mortality. To live like this is to live a life lacking in infinitude, and to lack infinitude is “despairing confinement, narrowness”[34]It is, in other words, an existence that unfolds within limits that are unnecessarily tight, a state in which the self is not given ample enough room to become a self. In this way, the self is cheated of its self – and it is cheated of itself by others:

By seeing the multitude of people around it, by being busied with all sorts of worldly affairs, by being wise to the ways of the world, such a person forgets himself, in a divine sense forgets his own name, dares not believe in himself, finds being himself too risky, finds it much easier and safer to be like the others, to become a copy, a number along with the crowd.[35]

Here, Kierkegaard’s message is clear: finitude’s despair is primarily social in nature. It is the despair of the conventional slave, or the person who, obsessed with fitting it, will, in the process, forget themselves, convince themselves that it is far easier to be as others expect them to be than to challenge the status quo and rebel against it. It is to live in Sarte’s Mauvaise Foi, or in a state of Heideggerian Uneigentlichkeit, to live as if one were a cipher, a mere number in a mathematical equation, or – in Dostoevsky’s wording – the mere “keys of a piano.”[36]

The opposite form of despair is an excess of the polar opposite of the finite: an excess of the infinite. If, rather than getting bogged down in finitude, the self gets lost in the infinite, then the fate experienced by the self is the exact contrary of an excessive and crippling limitation: an excessive and volatilising expansion. The self, who is fundamentally in need of equilibrium, is, here, suddenly beset by an internal condition in which necessity is outstripped by possibility, and the self escapes from itself. Since the self can’t keep up with the speed and scope of its own ambitions, it gets lost. It has no landing pad to settle on: “The self runs away from itself in possibility so that it has no necessity to return to”.[37] The result is despair, or more precisely, the despair of possibility. It is the despair of the Knight who gets lost in the wilderness in search of a rare bird that continues to escape it. Where finite’s despair is that of societal restriction, of enslavement to convention, infinite’s despair is its foolish, wanton and feckless evasion. It is the vanity of the rebel, who, deciding she is hemmed in by structure, feels she is in need of none of it at all, and spends her life fruitlessly dodging it. It is the misguided arrogance of the lone wolf who, insisting he does not need the love or companionship of others, sets out on a never-ending solo road trip and dies of loneliness. It is also the confusion of Dostoevsky’s Underground Man who, unable to settle on one mode of being, gets lost in the refuse of his own hyperconscious mind, and is forever nonplussed. The individual who despairs in infinitude is, it can be claimed, endowed with a rare gift: they can perceive that which isn’t there but could possibly be. They are like Musil’s ‘men of possibility’[38] who, understanding reality as they arbitrary thing it is, see that it could just as easily be some other way. This is the gift of infinitude, and a certain amount of it is necessary in the formation of the self. And yet if one overindulges it, if one steers oneself too far in its direction at the negligence of the finite, the result is a self-evasion, a loss of the self every bit as dangerous as its opposite, and every bit as necessary to avoid.

Concluding remarks

Kierkegaard’s division between the finite and the infinite has its equivalents in the thought of a number of different thinkers. Musil, as we have seen, divides humanity into ‘men with an ordinary sense of reality’ and ‘men with a sense of possibility’. In Dostoevsky, we see a similar distinction between ‘men of action’, or ‘hommes de la nature et de la vérité’[39], and ‘hyperconscious men’. The first are those who, blissfully ignorant of possibility, take reality on face value and are able to act accordingly. The second are those so tormented by possibility that they are unable to settle on one way of being to the exclusion of all others. Both, for Kierkegaard, are in despair: the first because they are bogged down in the finite, the second because they are volatilised in the infinite. The first extend the reach of the finite to those areas of reality and the self to which it need not be applied. The second commit the opposite error: they attempt, endlessly, to shake up that which ought to be allowed to settle and solidify. Kierkegaard’s concepts of infinitude and finitude also invite neurological and psychoanalytical explications. Does the finite correspond to those parts of the psyche that nature has buried beyond conscious reach, and are all but unmodifiable – even by the most intensive of psychotherapeutic interventions? Conversely, is the infinite that which either bobs above the surface or just directly below it in a substratum that, though beyond the reach of everyday conscious thought excursions is nonetheless accessible with the right professional tools? Is the finite all that which makes us animal, our limbic fluctuations and instinctual drives, and infinite, the sum total of our prefrontal cortical functions, all that which enables us to carry out higher level actions and behaviours, problem solve, modify, improve and innovate? Most neurologists and biologists would agree that, to a certain extent at least, we are biological automata, programmed to mindlessly execute – in the words of Nietzsche – “predetermined decision and answer to predetermined, chosen questions.”[40] And yet, as we have seen, such a view might rightly be seen as reductive. There is an aspect of self that goes beyond the merely robotic, the naturally determined and evolutionarily programmed. This part, which Kierkegaard calls the infinite, sits alongside its polar opposite, and contributes with it to the synthetic wholeness of the self. To overindulge one aspect over the other is to throw the self off, put it out of balance. Each is requires an equal amount of care and, at the same time, must remain free of a reckless or absentminded overindulgence. In this sense, Kierkegaard still has much to teach us of the self. More than any thinker, even in recent times, he highlights this delicate synthesis, and the importance of keeping it nourished and equilibrated.

[1] De Anima, loc. 3424

[2] Meditations on First Philosophy, p. 108

[3] An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book 1, Ch. 2

[4] Pp. 198-200

[5] “And if someone loves me for my judgement, for my memory, is it me they love? No, because I can lose these qualities without losing myself. Where is the self, then, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul?” (p. 130)

[6] “All the personal qualities he had gained in this way were no more intimately bound up with him than with other people who might also happen to possess them” (Vol. 1, p. 173)

[7] See Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: “We are survival machines—robot vehicles, blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes.”

[8] P. 264

[9] P. 265

[10] Mooney, p. 91

[11] Sickness unto Death, pp. 13-14

[12] “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself by way of its existing in and for itself for another.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, ¶178)

[13] Kierkegaard wrote Sickness unto Death under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, but for the sake of ease I will refer to its author by his own name

[14] P. 41

[15] Sickness unto Death (SUD), p. 58

[16] Ibid.

[17] P. 267

[18] P. 117

[19] P. 26

[20] Mooney provides the following [musical] explanation of the three divisions: “Each of these contrasting vector-pairs can be specified as follows: a) as psychological factors within a self; b) as they might be modelled by a musical ensemble; or c) as they resonate at the level of divine grounding power.” (p. 93)

[21] P. 91

[22] Ibid.

[23] P. 98

[24] The self is a “narrative centre of gravity”

[25] P. 100

[26] P. 92

[27] SUD, p. 67: “…for a person who has no God has no self either.”

[28] SUD, p.73

[29] P. 271

[30] SUD, p. 45

[31] SUD, p. 63

[32] SUD, p. 76

[33] ¶ 176: “The Pure I without distinctions is its first immediate object.”

[34] SUD, p. 63

[35] SUD, p. 63-4

[36] Notes from Underground: Part 1, Ch. 8

[37] SUD, p. 66

[38] Man without Qualities, p. 13: “The man with an ordinary sense of reality resembles a fish that nibbles on the hook and doesn’t see the line, while the man with a sense of possibility pulls a line through the water without any notion whether there is bait on it or not.”

[39] Notes from Underground: Part I, Ch. 3

[40] Beyond Good and Evil, § 231

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