Photographer I am fond of
I have found myself in want about this essay. I do not want to write something that is not valuable, that will not be appreciated, that will not be desired to read or desired to be cognitively engaged with. So I had not even began. I had found it much easier to continue to engage the material that this essay is prompted to stem from. To read, reread, think about, cognize, conceptualize, process, theoretically diagram, correlate with other material. But in all this theory I had yet to find anything that I foresaw as worthy to be written, to be read, engaged; that is, to be valued by others. Thus I kept on keeping on the same path until this moment. Like that spider, whom “flings itself from a fixed point down into its consequences, it continually sees before it an empty space in which it can find no foothold, however much it stretches.” I was in want; I held a desire that was never satiated. In that, I was a Kierkegaardian esthete; in constant paralyzing want.
Of course, I have a strong feeling that my cries of want have not been as beautiful as Kierkegaard’s depiction; and I sense that I have a more favorable outlook on human-nature; and then there is the esthetic philosophy of never starting, stopping in the beginning, and thereby no regret – I am obviously not holding on to that philosophy right now, but I do suppose that I had held on to it up until the point that I typed out, “I have found . . .” On the other hand, I do have a “passion for possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere.”
Why do I do this though? Why do I find passion in possibility? Is it because I love to live in want? Or is it because through faith I have found anxiety to be educative, have thus consumed finite ends and discovered their deceptiveness; and through that, even when actuality has rested heavily on me, I remember that this actuality is far lighter than possibility was? Dare I answer? I say both! For that passion has been with me throughout time’s infinite succession; and I have enjoyed possibility in both lights. The key difference though, between anxiety as freedom’s possibility being educative and the passion for possibility that the esthete lives by, I dare to say, is faith. And in moments I have had faith; and in moments I have not.
Painter Harvey Bayliss
Like that moment I started typing the words “I have found . . .” In that moment I infinitely resigned all the despair and anguishing anxiety! But I didn’t stop there; I then did the absurd! Even with all the endless and agonizing possibilities that confronted me by starting (i.e.; starting to write); and even with a sickening, moribund despair (before God), SIN! , that I had infinitely resigned, I began writing what will be known as the best 1000 word essay on Kierkegaard’s Psychology of Religion. In that moment eternity and time touched each other. There was no longer distinguished past and future, but only the infinitely contentful present, the eternal (and thus also the future and past). Succession had been annulled. All things made new.
Prior to this moment my relation that relates itself to itself was in misrelation, I was in despair. Not only was I in despair, but there was also a possibility of me coming to be in despair, and I found that despairing. This all began with possibility too, in a distant fashion. I was first despairing over the possibilities of this paper and the possible effects of writing and turning in this paper. Though at that moment I was just despairing over something; despair proper had not yet declared itself. But then, oh then, despair really hit me. In presuming my inadequacies of writing an essay that fit the criterion of my desire I wanted to rid of myself. For perhaps in ridding of myself I could become Caesar and produce an essay deemed worthy to be written. Of course, this just left me in despair to will to not be oneself.
The worst thing is not that I wasn’t being true to myself; that I wasn’t realizing that my unique self, that psyche and body connected by spirit, that relates itself to itself, is more than adequate to move a mountain in faith before God. The worst thing was that I was in despair before God! I was in Sin. I was in want to be other than me, before God! I was imagining the good and the true instead of being that, existentially striving to be that. I was in despair that the world was not like “the novel, where one has hardhearted fathers and nisses and trolls to battle, and enchanted princesses to free,” and a self that could write words that would cause the reader’s environment to transform into a psilocybin-ed dream; and doing so before God. But, you see, what I didn’t see was that I have a self in which there is something eternal. I had a conception of God and was not willing as God wills, I was not relating to myself proper, I was not relating to myself as myself should relate to myself before god, as a self that is existentially being my infinite self before God as a knight of faith.
Subsequently, here I write. The Knight of faith:
Self-Explanatory
“He finds pleasure in everything, takes part in everything, and every time one sees him participating in something particular, he does it with an assiduousness that marks the worldly man who is attached to such things. . . . He enjoys everything he sees, the swarms of people, the new omnibuses, the Sound. Encountering him on Strandveien, one would take him for a mercantile soul enjoying himself. He finds pleasure in this way, for he is not a poet . . . Toward evening he goes home, and his gait is as steady as a postman’s. On the way, he thinks that his wife surely will have a special hot meal for him when he comes home. . . . If he meets a kindred soul, he would go on talking all the way to Osterport about this delicacy with a passion befitting a restaurant operator. It so happens that he does not have four shillings to his name, and yet he firmly believes that his wife has this delectable meal waiting for him. If she has, to see him eat would be the envy of the elite and an inspiration to the common man, for his appetite is keener than Esau’s. His wife does not have it – curiously enough, he is just the same. On the way he passes a building site and meets another man. They converse for a moment; in an instant he erects a building, and he himself has at his disposition everything required . . . he thinks to himself: “Well, if it came right down to it, I could easily get it.” . . . With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd.”
May I be this knight of faith. May I come to faith by way of despair and annul the succession of time to find the eternal in the moment, before God. May I not want, but existentially live before God, and live as the knight of faith. May anxiety just be seen in this eternal freedom of possibilities, before God of course. And may I love, with the presupposition of love; and thus my life, may love be upbuilding, for that is what love is.
Dive Right In
Bibliography
Kierkegaard’s Writings, I-XXVI, Princeton University Press, 1978-2000:
Soren Kierkegaard. Either/Or, A Fragment of Life. KW I 2-56. Fear and Trembling, Dialectical Lyric. KW III 57-115. The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychological Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. KW IV 355-423. The Sickness unto Death, A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening. KW XI 127-241.
