In The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard describes the human self as a relation to the relation that constitutes human being. Our being is an ontological synthesis between infinity and finitude, the spiritual and the physical and, most importantly for this series, possibility and necessity. More, we stand in relation to this relation, adopting a posture and stance toward the mixture of time and eternity within us. Kierkegaard surveys and elucidates many of these postures. Most of these are postures of misrelation which lead to despair. In the last post, we examined people who look upon themselves as unlimited and unconstrained possibility and potentiality, disconnected from any recognition of their finitude and limitations. Such people live with fantasies of themselves untethered from reality.
In this post we turn toward the opposite mistake, viewing the self as wholly that of necessity, devoid of potential or possibility.
Simply stated, this is the atheistic, materialistic, and deterministic take on human being. There is a denial here of the eternal and the spiritual aspect of existence. Because of this, human life, and the whole of existence, is reduced to mechanism. And since the human is reduced to brute cause and effect, the necessary—the causal, reductionistic, deterministic, mechanistic, and scientistic—eclipses the possible. We are reduced to factual rather than spiritual beings.
As Kierkegaard says, "What is decisive is that with God all things are possible." Because of this, there is an escape from scientific reductionism and causal determinism. As Kierkegaard succinctly puts it, "To believe is the downfall of the impossible." "Because for God," Kierkegaard continues, "everything is possible at every moment."
By contrast, when the possibility of God is denied, then the possible collapses into the necessary, which leads to the despair of fatalism and nihilism. As Kierkegaard observes, "The determinist, the fatalist, is in despair and as one in despair has lost his self, because for him everything has become necessity." This is true. I once counseled a student who had become suicidal for no other reason than that he had lost his belief in free will. The possibilities of human existence, which are due to the spiritual aspect of our being that transcends causality, had been lost. Thus, my student had come to view himself as a machine, a biological robot. All necessity, no possibility. All cogs and gears, no spirit or soul. He had become fatalistic, and therefore sucicidal, because of his deterministic view of himself. Kierkegaard describes the situation: "Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Its continued existence is like breathing (respiration), which is an inhaling and exhaling. The self of the determinist cannot breathe for it is impossible to breath necessity exclusively, because that would utterly suffocate a person's self. The fatalist is in despair, has lost God and thus his self, for he who does not have a God does not have a self, either."
Following upon this image of breathing between possibility and necessity, Kierkegaard says this about prayer: "To pray is also to breathe, and possibility is for the self what oxygen is for breathing...For prayer there must be a God, a self—or a self and possibility in a pregnant sense, because the being of God means that everything is possible..."
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