If you are like me you probably own more nice looking notebooks than you have finished writing in. Buying a notebook is mostly like buying a difficult but impressive book to read. When you buy it you are buying what it promises to be for you. It promises to make you well read, or in the case of the notebook, it promises that you will have ideas worth writing down.
Starting a blog is like this.
This blog is part of a naive attempt to be more public with my ideas and to work harder at drawing myself out into the wider world. This is not my inclination so it will be difficult. The choice of the title comes from Kierkegaard’s Sickness Unto Death, and I find it fitting for myself today.
The despair of possibility is the crippling feeling you get in front of a blank page. Or more broadly it is the feeling you get in the face of the blank rest of your life. There are a number of ways to try to resolve this despair. (I might be wrong about applying this category here.) We can devote ourselves to our own fulfillment or an ethical ideal. We can even devote ourselves to a religion in an act of faith. Kierkegaard spends a lot of time on these different categories, and it is easy to get caught up in trying to think of them as simply a system.
That’s fine in many cases, but today I am interested in looking at how each of Kierkegaard’s ways of resolving the despair of possibility can be understood as not only responses to the life project, but also as responses to individual projects and tasks in our lives. How do the various responses to despair interact with the terror of the blank page?
What would it mean to take these categories into particular bits of life? In many of our areas of life we face things like the despair of possibility. I suppose the way forward is to choose one of Kierkegaard’s three options. We can choose to please ourselves with our work. And that provides some guidance. We can choose to try to make our work good in itself and for others. That maybe provides more guidance. Or we can do it for God. What this means I do not really know. It has to somehow include the other options, but what this means is tricky. I need more time to find out what this means. Maybe it involves doing things for others and for yourself, but all somehow as an offering. Both you and others perfectly served but neither for themselves all somehow pointing beyond. Also, Kierkegaard had this idea of faith being the holding of the infinite within the finite. There is somehow a realization of meaning within existence. Maybe that is part of it as well.