Kierkegaard experienced much suffering in his relatively short life. By the age of 25 he had lost both his parents, and five of his six siblings. In addition to this, his sensitive temperament, his tendencies to melancholy and anxiety, and his difficult relationships to his father and his one-time fiancée Regine gave him an intimate understanding of various kinds of psychological pain. Rather than avoiding or denying suffering, Kierkegaard was unusually willing to confront it and investigate it. His sensitivity to suffering extended to others: one of his friends remembered that “he gave consolation not by covering up sorrow, but by first making one genuinely aware of it, by bringing it to complete clarity”.
This approach characterises Kierkegaard’s philosophical work as well as his personal life. In his 1844 book The Concept of Anxiety, he writes that “Every human being must learn to be anxious in order that he might not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing in anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.” He expresses a similar attitude to despair in his later work The Sickness Unto Death. So, what is the “right way” to suffer, and how can this be learned?
The first point to note is that Kierkegaard regards our capacity for anxiety and despair as a mark of our spiritual nature. We suffer in these ways only because we have some awareness that we are spiritual beings who are related to God, and that in many ways we fail to be true to this religious relationship. In fact, Kierkegaard suggests that when we’re not faithful to our God-relationship, we are unfaithful to ourselves. He suggests that we have a tendency to lose ourselves – and this loss, together with the suffering it brings, is what he means by despair.
In The Sickness Unto Death, this account of despair is offered as an interpretation of the Christian doctrine of original sin. In this text, Kierkegaard suggests that despair, like sin, is a condition that is shared by everyone, whether or not they are aware of it:
“Anyone who really knows mankind might say that there is not one single living human being who does not despair a little, who does not secretly harbour an unrest, an inner strife, a disharmony, an anxiety about an unknown something or a something he dare not even try to know, an anxiety about some possibility in existence or an anxiety about himself.”
Because the deep existential suffering of despair signals awareness of one’s spiritual nature and relationship to God, Kierkegaard regards this kind of suffering as something positive, however difficult it is to live with. It is a sign of spiritual maturity. However, he also suggests that our tendency to lose ourselves is bound up with a tendency to avoid suffering, to ignore our spiritual being and instead let ourselves be consumed by “the world”. But, in Kierkegaard’s view, this strategy of avoidance is doomed to fail, because we are spiritual beings, and our very evasiveness only confirms this fact.
This account of human existence leads to an emphasis on the virtue of courage in Kierkegaard’s works. Courage means confronting what one fears, instead of fleeing from it. A courageous person is prepared to suffer when she knows that this is required of her. For Kierkegaard, the “requirement” of suffering arises simply from being fully human. In Fear and Trembling, for example, he praises the courage of Abraham, who did not attempt to avoid the suffering involved in taking the decision to kill his son. Instead, Abraham did what was necessary in order to honour his relationship to God.
Does Kierkegaard’s insistence on suffering amount to masochism, and perhaps an unhealthy inclination to martyrdom? In response to this question, we should note that in his philosophy, the opposite of suffering is not joy, but rather cowardice and evasiveness. Since suffering is simply unavoidable, it is a matter of responding to it in the right way. In fact, Kierkegaard suggests that by courageously confronting suffering, a person can find great joy in life.
Many people regard suffering as an obstacle to religious belief, and even as an argument against the existence of God. They ask how we can believe that a loving, all-powerful God created a world like this one, so full of suffering. This presents theologians with the task of reconciling belief in God with the fact that life is so often unsatisfactory. For Kierkegaard, however, the problems posed by suffering are existential rather than intellectual: he is concerned less with the objective fact of God’s existence or non-existence than with the individual’s subjective relationship to a God whose existence is always an uncertainty, never a fact. Kierkegaard points out that one way of maintaining religious belief in the face of suffering is to give up hope of happiness within this life, deferring such hope to an afterlife – and he acknowledges that it is possible, but not easy, to relate to God in this way. However, he argues that the Christian’s highest and most difficult task is to endure suffering while continuing to believe that she is loved by God – that God cares about the smallest details of her life – and to regard this painful, difficult life as a gift from a loving God. Even in the midst of suffering, the person who relates to God in this way feels blessed.