Kierkegaard on Necessity, Possibility, and Despair

In The Sickness Unto Death, the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard argued at length about despair, the self, and "sin". He argues that humans have "the task of becoming itself in freedom," and both "possibility and necessity are equally essential to becoming" (XI 148). If a person has one but not the other, that individual is in despair. What is meant by these words, and how do they relate?

The necessity of the self refers to what the self already is; the possibility of the self refers to the task one has of becoming oneself. Necessity serves as "the constraint in relation to possibility" (ibid). So, one ought to become oneself(possibility), but one ought not disregard who they already are (necessity). For now, I'm not going to talk about what "the self" actually is; rather, let's talk about what happens if one has an overabundance of possibility or necessity in one's life.

If humans were radically free (as the existentialists, a group I would probably choose not to associate Kierkegaard too closely with), and humans were all possibility with no necessity, "the self becomes an abstract possibility; it flounders in possibility until exhausted but neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives anywhere" (XI 149). This results in possibility seeming "greater and greater to the self; more and more it becomes possible because nothing seems actual. Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self". After awhile, possibilities "follow one another in such rapid succession that it seems as if everything were possible, and this is exactly the final moment, the point at which the individual himself becomes a mirage" (ibid).

What is missing in a life lived in pure possibility, without necessity or actuality playing a vital role? It is "the power to obey, to submit to the necessity in one's life, to what may be called one's limitations. Therefore, the tragedy is not that such a self did not amount to something in the world; no, the tragedy is that he did not become aware of himself, aware that the self he is is a very definite something and thus the necessary" (ibid). Through this, one loses oneself. There are multiple manifestations of this sort of imbalance, but Kierkegaard identifies the two primary ones as desiring/craving and the melancholy-imaginary. The former involves one chasing possibilities at the expense of who he is, of his necessity. The latter involves one anxiously pursuing a single possibility at a time until he has been led so far away from himself that his is a victim of the anxiety he employed.

The second possibility, that necessity belongs to the self but possibility no longer does, has two possible instantiations: "everything has become necessary" or "everything has become trivial" (XI 152). The former option is held by determinists and fatalists, who Kierkegaard compares with King Midas: he "starved to death because all his food was changed to gold" (ibid). He argues that, "if there is nothing but necessity, man is essentially as inarticulate as the animals" (XI 153). One cannot input or shape themselves, one is as one is, and thus one despairs.

If one has an overabundance of necessity in accordance with the second option, wherein "everything becomes trivial", then one has a "philistine-bourgeois mentality" (ibid). Such a person "lacks every qualification of spirit and is completely wrapped up in probability, within which possibility [which cannot be altogether exterminated] finds its small corner" (ibid). He or she "lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to how things go, what is possible, what usually happens" (ibid). If imagination does not "raise him higher than the miasma of probability", giving him hope and fear, "the philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks that it controls possibility, that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability" (XI 154).

Kierkegaard notes the consequences of each element of the imbalance: "the person who gets lost in possibility soars high with the boldness of despair; he for whom everything becomes necessity overstrains himself in life and is crushed in despair; but the philistine-bourgeois mentality spiritlessly triumphs".

The conclusion? Embrace necessity; you are who you are. You have limits. Know what makes you yourself, and know yourself fully. However, know also who you are (this implies a goal or end for your person), and acknowledge, through hope, faith, and fear, that you can become as you ought to become.