Risk is central to any meaningful life, according to Kierkegaard. If we want our lives to have significance, we must commit to projects that might fail or beliefs that might be false.
But what happens when our commitments don’t work out? Projects sometimes go belly-up; things don’t always go our way. What are we supposed to do then? When the source of meaning in our lives collapses, how do we go on?
Kierkegaard’s writings often touch on this dilemma. He offers us extended meditations on how to handle despair. His quintessential answer comes in “Patience in Expectancy,” a neglected essay on Anna the Prophetess, a minor figure in the Christian Bible. We meet her briefly in the Gospel of Luke as an aside in the account of Jesus’ baptism. Yet, as Kierkegaard sets up Anna’s story, it captures the central human problem of loss and reveals why moving on is so hard.
Anna is someone who followed Kierkegaard’s advice. She had a great passion: her relationship with her husband. His love was the source of all meaning in her life. It had “decisive significance” for her, as Kierkegaard puts it. But seven years into their marriage, Anna’s husband died. Because her love for her husband ran so deep, Anna couldn’t move on. Instead, she copes by turning to God. She spends her remaining days praying and fasting in the temple.
It’s no surprise that Kierkegaard’s hero finds solace in religion. He repeatedly casts faith as salve for pain and cure for despair. Religious readers may warm to this advice of turning to God in troubled times. But secular readers may find the idea off-putting—especially in Anna’s case. Her retreat to the temple seems more like escapism than a solution. So, why does Kierkegaard recommend this path to us?
It’s especially odd that Kierkegaard doesn’t consider a more obvious solution: Why not tell Anna to pick up the pieces and move on? Why not encourage her to find a new partner, somebody to help her forget the pain? He might add that this is just how life goes. When you take risks, sometimes you lose. But when that happens, you don’t give up; you get up and try again. I suspect most of us would offer Anna a version of this advice. It’s also what most of us would attempt ourselves, if we were in her shoes. We’d go through a grieving period and then start over. It wouldn’t be easy, of course. But we’d find a way.
Kierkegaard claims this popular path isn’t open to Anna. Why not? He says Anna wouldn’t be “true to herself” if she moved on this way. Fair enough, we might say. But so what? What’s wrong with that? Suppose moving on means not being true to her old self. Suppose it means becoming a new and different self. That kind of change can be hard, to be sure. But what exactly is wrong with it? Insisting we must not change who we are sounds puritanical. It’s also the kind of thinking that traps people in miserable lives.
Kierkegaard insists that each of us has a “true self”— an inner essence that defines who we are. Anna’s essence had to do with her late husband. It involved being in an intimate relationship with him. Thus, moving on wouldn’t be a matter of exchanging an old self for a new self. It would be a matter of betraying her true self. It would involve becoming inauthentic. In today’s language, we might say Anna’s husband was “the one.” He was the only person she could truly love. No one else would do.
On my view, the problem with the idea of “a true self” or “the one” is that you can get unlucky, and when that happens, it’s impossible to go on. You’re trapped by the thought that you can’t live without Mr. or Mrs. Right. We should reject the notion that there’s only one person or one way of life for us. It’s certainly the more prudent approach.
But let’s set this matter aside. Suppose Anna insists on remaining true to her old self and holding on to her love for her late husband. We can’t fault Anna for it. But does it really entail that she can’t move on? Is continuing to love her late husband inconsistent with coming to love someone new?
Answering “yes” conceives of love as a zero-sum game. It’s as if there is only so much space in our hearts. We can give real estate to a new person only by taking it away from an old person. I admit love often feels this way. But it seems like a mistake to me. At least it does if we think about love in terms of care and affection, which are not zero-sum. We can feel increased affection for one person without feeling reduced affection for someone else. This is obvious when it comes to children. Having a new child doesn’t mean caring less about your old ones. Of course, you have to divide your time, energy, and resources a bit more. But few parents would accept this as the measuring stick of their love.
In fairness, Kierkegaard admits that it’s possible for people to move on. But if they do, he says, it proves their love for their late spouses wasn’t “decisive.” It didn’t reach the level of Anna’s love for her late husband. This response seems speculative and also a bit cruel. Why think it’s true? Clearly, Kierkegaard is building a lot into his notion of “decisive love.” It amounts to something like “you’re my everything now and forever.”
This view has some oddities. For instance, if you have “decisive love” for your spouse, how can you have any love left over for your children? Or your friends? Or your vocation? Your spouse would’ve gotten all you had. And what about God? If Anna’s late husband is her everything, how can she have room in her heart for Him? One might protest that these are different kinds of love—romantic, filial, religious, etc.—and they don’t compete with each other. Fair point. But, interestingly, it resembles the talk of people who have moved on from their deceased spouses. They say their new love doesn’t compete with their old love. It’s just different.
Yet, maybe this just won’t work for Anna; maybe it just isn’t how she’s wired. For her, moving on is perhaps psychologically impossible. I imagine a lot of people feel this way. So, instead of belaboring the point, let’s shift our focus to Kierkegaard’s solution. Kierkegaard says Anna finds solace by turning to God—and so will we. But how is this supposed to work? How is spending our days praying and fasting in the temple going to help?
Kierkegaard’s thinking goes in two different directions at this point. There’s a side of him that believes we must let go of the world. Indeed, we must “die to the world,” as he puts it in some places. The temporal realm offers us only suffering. If we want joy, we have to look to eternity, heaven, or the afterlife. Yet, there’s another side of Kierkegaard we mustn’t overlook. In some texts, including Fear and Trembling, he suggests faith in God will bring hope for this life. We don’t need to leave the world behind after all. It’s this second side of Kierkegaard that I’d like to develop.
On the line of thinking I have in mind, what Anna does after the death of her husband—spending her remaining days in the temple—is a mistake. In fact, it’s a form of despair. It’s what Kierkegaard calls in Sickness Unto Death “the despair over necessity.” He defines this kind of despair as a deterministic or fatalistic attitude that says, “Nothing can be done about my situation.” Like all despair, it’s cured by faith in God. But Kierkegaard’s reasoning here is striking. Turning to God helps, he writes, because “God is this—that everything is possible.” It’s a puzzling claim. But Kierkegaard appears to be proposing that to believe in God is just to think that, no matter how dire the situation, there is nevertheless hope. Even though it seems absurd, even though it seems impossible according to all human calculation, things can be made right again.
If this is correct, then Anna’s faith is the wrong kind of faith. It’s the wrong way of turning to God. In his essay, Kierkegaard describes Anna as hoping for the end times. She remains in the temple because she’s looking forward to the eschaton. But what Anna ought to have believed is that her world could be redeemed right now. She ought to have hoped that she could become happy again in this life. Perhaps even with a new husband. Certainly, this would’ve gone against everything she understood. It would’ve contradicted her beliefs about decisive love. And it would’ve conflicted with what she knew about her own psychological makeup. But this is Kierkegaardian faith: to believe even the absurd is possible.
I think secular readers today can embrace this version of Kierkegaard’s message. His view isn’t that when despair hits us, we need to retreat to the temple. He’s not saying that the way to cope with loss is to turn away from the world and seek God’s redemption in the afterlife. The kind of faith Kierkegaard is recommending doesn’t require belief in supernatural beings or heaven. It just requires embracing the idea that anything is possible—even being happy again in this world after we’ve lost everything we cared about.
Photo: “The Prophetess Anna in the Temple” by Rembrandt, National Galleries of Scotland (via Wikimedia Commons)
Antony Aumann
Antony Aumann is an associate professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University. He is the author of Art and Selfhood: A Kierkegaardian Account and co-editor of New Kierkegaard Research.
This blog post is an extended version of my comments in response to Michael Au-Mullaney’s paper, “Kierkegaard’s Widow,” which he presented at the 2019 Central Division Meeting of the APA.