Troy Southgate

Dec 02, 2024

WRITING in his 1849 work, The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard makes an interesting point about the evaporation of personal identity:

“The greatest hazard of all, losing one’s self, can occur very quietly in the world, as if it were nothing at all. No other loss can occur so quietly; any other loss – an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. – is sure to be noticed.”

This is a very pertinent observation and something which can also be applied to how we deal with the soulless atomisation that one finds within modern society. The Danish philosopher went on to say that

“by losing himself in this way, such a man has gained an increasing capacity for going along superbly in business and social life, for making a great success in the world. Here there is no delay, no difficulty with his self and its infinite movements; he is as smooth as a rolling stone, as courant as a circulating coin. He is so far from being regarded as a person in despair that he is just what a human being is supposed to be.”

Kierkegaard is addressing mankind’s efforts to retain a semblance of normality as a means of concealing one’s inner despair and this is a process that is almost invariably subconscious and can even lead an individual

“to keep himself in the dark about his state through diversions and in other ways, for example, through work and busyness as diversionary means, yet in such a way that he does not entirely realise why he is doing it.”

Again, there is much truth in this observation, but it is also interesting to consider how such attempts to project a degree of so-called respectability are maintained whenever the subject in question is confronted by those who find it more difficult to hide their own personal suffering. Whilst Kierkegaard never discusses the fact that there are various layers of despair, nor how they may relate to one another, consider the homeless, the addicted, the outsiders and the insane, none of whom enjoy the comparative luxury of perpetuating any convincing semblance of social conformity among the denizens of society as a whole.

Indeed, it may even be said that those who fall into one or more of these categories make it easier for the secretly despairing accountant and angst-ridden factory worker to mask his or her own disillusionment with a higher stage of everyday functionality. It was this kind of disassociative hypocrisy on the part of the great social pretenders that later inspired the rise of the twentieth-century Existentialists.