It is one thing to despair from challenging circumstances, to struggle with life’s possibilities, and a completely different thing to despair from the possibilities of life itself, a life that might suddenly seem appallingly confined. In greatest danger or in our silent moments, we sometimes realise “that desire nevertheless ends some day and ends in disgust, that hardship some day ends in despair,” but for Kierkegaard, this is mere “miserable commonsensicality” that “therefore thinks that the sagacious thing to do is to take care to be neither cold nor hot” (To Preserve One’s Soul In Patience, p.198). The knowledge of life’s finitude is, after all, not the same as the immediate experience of our own looming demise.

Indeed, that “some day” is already a sign that we don’t take the thought of death seriously, that we postpone the necessary end to a distant future, as an incident that will only concern us when it arrives. But this premonition of a distant threat pales in comparison with the insight that the catastrophe might occur the very next moment. We can thrust the question of our death aside, because we view it in light of probability, for how likely is anything to happen while I’m sitting quietly in my room? But it is different when it’s the question of possibility, namely that anything can happen at any time. It is in this radical form that Kierkegaard asks us to understand Possibility — which is why I am capitalising it — namely that the most dreadful thing, our death, can indeed happen at any given moment. Just let your fantasy roam freely, accept even the most unlikely scenario, remember how many times something happened out of the blue, suppress your inner optimist who keeps telling you that everything will work out fine…

In this experience of Possibility, where death is no longer a distant horizon, but follows us like a shadow, the whole issue gains a moment of urgency: An all-embracing uncertainty reminds us that we might have to let go of it all in this very moment, so that every distraction becomes a terrible waste. We usually don’t really know how to react to that thought — and indeed, ‘live each day as if it’s your last’ makes a very poor mantra, because if you really imagine this very moment to be your last, there’s no possible action that would miraculously render it all meaningful. Everything that you’ve lived for will suddenly appear pale and senseless, life itself small and confined because there is nothing you can do to make this feeling of dread go away — except by getting distracted and once again postponing the idea of death to a distant future. In that sense, even if we manage to fulfil all our wishes, even if all our plans come to be realised, even if we reach the highest success imaginable, it will all be taken away by death, the great equaliser,

“which without envy and without preference makes everyone equal, equally poor, equally powerless, equally miserable, the one who possessed a world and the one who had nothing to lose, the one who left behind a claim upon a world and the one who was in debt for a world, the one whom thousands obeyed and the one whom no one knew except death, the one whose loveliness was the object of people’s admiration and the poor wretch who sought only a grave in order to hide from people.” (ibid, p.185)

In light of Possibility, we perceive the ridiculous triviality of even our greatest desire, for if death will come the very next moment, it will be swallowed forever in indifference; indifference, because it will not matter if we’ve attained our goals or not, or if we’ve had more or fewer experiences. Indeed, it all ends “in disgust” and “in despair.” But instead of doing what we intuitively do when confronted with this thought — trying to get rid of it as soon as possible — Kierkegaard asks us to hold on to it. It is namely in that moment of truth that we realise that the actual danger lies not in the possible failure to fulfil our wishes, in death coming too soon, but in the possibility that their fulfilment is all that we can hope for:

“the danger would be right there if a person was able to obtain something by wishing in this way, because then it would be impossible to save him; and the danger is precisely that it is supposed to be better to become great in this way, because then life would be without meaning and without truth.” (ibid, p.190)

How should we understand this paradoxically sounding sentence? Despite what many people, especially those who have attained success, believe, the materialisation of our wishes will always depend on exterior circumstances. At the same time, if our worldly activities truly manage to change us in an essential way, so that our very existence is defined and exhausted by them, then we ourselves become something exterior — objects among objects. Can our very being be fully described, for example in a eulogy or a biography? There is, in that sense, the question of dependency and of commensurability. This is what Kierkegaard calls becoming-objective, and if our only possibility “to obtain something” was by becoming-objective, then our lives would indeed become meaningless as they’d dissolve in complete exteriority where nothing could protect us from the cold grasp of death.

In his Upbringing Discourse To Gain One’s Soul In Patience, Kierkegaard discusses this aspect by exploring the logic of possession. Indeed, the desire to realise one’s dreams can be understood as the desire to possess the world, whatever goods it is in the end that one wishes to acquire. We want to possess the world, because it gives us a sense of security. As we try to control the things around us, we attempt to oppose a hostile universe; at the same time, we try to replace Possibility with probability, thereby gaining the opportunity to distract ourselves from our dreadful thoughts. But the experience of Possibility, once we acknowledge it, shows us that any such certainty is illusionary.

Yet, distracting ourselves from this experience is not only futile, it is also harmful, because we risk losing our most treasured possession — ourselves. But how do we ‘possess’ ourselves, our souls (as Kierkegaard says in the Discourses) or selves (as he says in The Sickness Unto Death)? Is it the same way we possess things? This would be fatal, because, again, the more our existence depends on exterior circumstances, the more we depend on the ‘mercy’ of the world to accommodate to them and we ourselves become indistinguishable from mere objects. And if we only become selves if our circumstances allow us to, then the self is not an existential category, something that concerns all of us, but something accidental.

The more we try to fulfil our lives by trying to possess the world, the more we become possessed by it, as our selves stop belonging to us and become completely dependent on circumstance. And of course, this is just the way we enter the world, for in our birth, we are not yet fully distinguished from our surrounding and completely dependent on it:

“What people aspire to — to possess the world — a person was closest to it in the first moment of life, because his soul was lost in it and possessed the world in itself, just as the undulation of the waves possesses in itself the restlessness of the sea and its depths and knows no other heartbeat than this, the infinite heartbeat of the sea.” (To Gain One’s Soul In Patience, p.164).

It seems that we cannot escape this vicious cycle, no matter where we direct our efforts:

“[T]he world can be possessed only by its possessing me, and this in turn is the way it possesses the person who has won the world, since one who possesses the world in any other way possesses it as the accidental, as something that can be diminished, increased, lost, won, without his possession being essentially changed. If, however, he possesses the world in such a way that the loss of it can diminish his possession, then he is possessed by the world.” (ibid, p.165, my emphasis).

This is a difficult, but central passage. Clearly, the last sentence refers to all worldly possessions, the ‘normal’ case: I possess my wealth in such a way that if I spend it, it is diminished, if I earn more, it is increased. The same counts for success, knowledge, or experience. We can see that this does not only concern materialist and superficial ways of life, it is a general condition. We shouldn’t read too quickly here and think that what Kierkegaard proposes is to renounce all these things and live a monastic life. What is at question here is not “how should I live my life,” because that would once again only concern exterior aspects, it’s the question of the self and how it is to relate to the world, to itself, and to its own mortality. The point is therefore not that a life spent, say, traveling, is worthless, but rather that if travel is all that defines a given subject, it has lost its subjectivity; and indeed, attempts to escape from oneself through travel are common enough. The consequence would be that an individual that has traveled more is ‘more’ of a self than another that was able to travel less, and this pushes us once again to categories of exteriority.

But the crucial part of the passage above lies in the expression “in any other way,” the idea of a kind of relation where the world is possessed as “the accidental” so that the external circumstances can not change the subject’s possession. This then is the possibility of escaping the vicious cycle, but what exactly does that mean? We can intuitively understand, where this is going: If dependency coincides with becoming-objective, then it is through independence that we become-subjective. The Idealist would be done here: Objectivity leads to dependency, ergo posit a subjective entity. But Kierkegaard asks, where could such an entity come into play? If it is somewhere, then how can we distinguish it from a mere object?

“[I]f a person with troubled imagination conjured up anxieties he was unable to surmount, while he still could not leave off staring at them, evoking them ever more alarmingly, pondering them ever more fearfully, then we shall not praise him, even though we praise the wonderful glory of human nature. But if he brought out the horror and detected the mortal danger, without any thought of providing people, by pointless talk, with subject matter for pointless pondering, but grasped that the danger had to do with himself — if, then, with this in mind, he won the strength of soul that horror gives, this would in truth be praiseworthy, would in truth be wondrously wonderful.” (To Preserve One’s Soul In Patience, p.183, my highlight)

This passage describes two individuals: The first person discovers death as a generality, as an aspect of life that concerns us all. They will teach others about the necessity to cherish life and to remember death. But the second person discovers their own death, a death that concerns them only, and it is through that experience, that they discover themselves as singular selves. While looking at our lives from the general perspective, in light of our worldly achievements and possessions, we see ourselves as general beings with general qualities (“All men are mortal…”). Only through the experience of Possibility, where we stare into the eyes of our very own death, we also manage to see ourselves in our singular and personal existence. The generalisation of the first individual is already an abstraction, an alteration so that the danger becomes universal and no longer seems to concern them personally. Kierkegaard makes this point even clearer in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript:

“If death is always uncertain, if I am mortal, then this uncertainty cannot be understood in general terms, unless I too am a sort of human being in general. But this, after all, is not what I am, and it is something only distracted people […] are. And even if I am that to begin with, it is after all life’s task to become subjective, and as much as I become that, correspondingly the uncertainty interpenetrates my subjectivity dialectically more and more. …

This “uncertainty” refers to Possibility that we’ve talked about above: that the most horrid thing can happen at any time. The becoming of subjectivity — “becoming” implying that we’re not dealing with an essence, but, as Sartre would later say, with existence — strictly coincides with the integration of this uncertainty into one’s life, so that only through the awareness of one’s own death does one become a subject.

… It thus becomes increasingly important for me to think it into every moment of my life, for since its uncertainty is there at every moment, it can only be overcome by my overcoming it at every moment. If, on the other hand, the uncertainty of death is just a something in general, then my own dying is itself only a something in general. Perhaps dying is also a something in general for systematicians, for distracted people. […] But for me, my dying is not at all a something in general; maybe for others my dying is a something in general. Neither, for myself, am I such a something in general; maybe for others I’m a something in general. But if the task is to become subjective, then every subject will for himself become the very opposite of such a something in general.” (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, p. 140)

This is why Kierkegaard asks us to hold onto the thought of Possibility, to hold on the idea that our lives could end in any moment. Because it is through this experience that we experience that it is our lives that we’re talking about, something that concerns nobody but ourselves. In that sense, subjectivity is not, as the Idealist would posit, a general entity, but a singular one, it is existential. But where are we to go from here? After all, even in its positive aspect of letting us discover our own selves, the experience of Possibility is dreadful and leaves us in “fear and trembling.” Kierkegaard is very clear about this, it is a question of love.