7KH7UDQVSDUHQF\RI6HOI/RYH".LHUNHJDDUGYV)UDQNIXUWPia Sltoft

MLN, Volume 128, Number 5, December 2013 (Comparative LiteratureIssue), pp. 1115-1131 (Article)

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The Transparency of Self-Love? Kierkegaard vs. Frankfurt

Pia Sltoft

In Works of Love, Kierkegaard offers six precise descriptions of what it is to not love oneself in the right way, and of how these negative forms of self-love express themselves in a person. The text is therefore concerned with descriptions of selfish forms of self-love as these find expression in someone who does not love herself correctly.

These six descriptions of negative self-love are collected in a long exposition given in the second discourse of Works of Love, which bears the title You Shall Love (Kjerlighedens 25 / Works 17).1 In what follows, I will break this long exposition up into its six individual descriptions, in order to highlight the six different ways in which selfish self-love can be expressedsix ways which all have negative implications for a persons relation to themselves. These six negative forms of self-love are represented by the following types:

1. The Bustler (the Busy one)2. The Light-minded3. The Heavy-minded4. The Person (visibly) in Despair5. The Self-tormentor6. The Suicide

Kierkegaard offers these descriptions in the form of questions to the reader, which suggests that we must ask ourselves whether we can recognize these descriptions of selfish self-love from our own relation-ship to ourselves. This question is necessitated by the fact that self-love

1References to Kierkegaards works will be given first to the Danish original, followed by the English translation.

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usually keeps itself hidden or else takes a form other than its own. For this reason, Kierkegaard connects negative self-love with double-mindedness, and in order to shed light on the significance of this I will draw upon H.G. Frankfurts discussion of self-love in The Reasons of Love.

1. Negative forms of Self-Love

In Works of Love, Kierkegaard first asks: When the bustler wastes his time and powers in the service of futile, inconsequential pursuits, is this not because he has not learned rightly to love himself? (Kjer-lighedens 30 / Works 23). The bustler is someone who wastes his time, and thereby his life, in trivial and insignificant business. The bustler allows himself to be defined exclusively by the prevailing opinion of the time. This is a matter of negative self-love because such a person, who is exclusively taken up with what the times demand, overlooks the fact that he has a self that is fundamentally intended to love itself, and not a self that is only loveable if it lives up to the demand of the times. The bustler is altogether too busy mirroring the spirit of the times. And Kierkegaard does not hesitate to call this form of self-love despair. It is a manner of despair because, properly speaking, the bustler does not love himself, but only the self he makes himself into by living up to the trends of the times. The self he loves is one that others have deemed loveable on the basis of a set of contemporary, and therefore relative, criteria.

Kierkegaard goes on to ask: When the light-minded [letsindige] person throws himself almost like a nonentity into the folly of the moment and makes nothing of it, is this not because he does not know how to love himself rightly? (3031 / 23). The light-minded person, who throws himself into the folly of the moment, is someone who never thinks more deeply about what he is doing with himself, indeed, never reflects at all that he has a self that does not simply take shape by abandoning itself to the moment. The light-minded person can be described as someone who allows himself to be lured by the pleasure of the now, the euphoria of raw experience, the momentary fame. The light-minded person finds it all too easy to let himself go, such that he throws himself away. This person is thus also one who does not know how to love himself rightly; a person who is fundamentally in despair over himself and therefore finds it so easy to let go of it.2

2Arne Grn claims that this description of the negative forms of self-love in Works of Love can shed light on the analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death (cf. Der

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And Kierkegaards description goes on: When the heavy-minded [tungsindige] person desires to be rid of life, indeed, of himself, is this not because he is unwilling to learn earnestly and rigorously to love himself? (31 / 23). Paradoxically enough, the heavy-minded person also lets go of himselfof his selfall too easily, but for the opposite reason to the light-minded person. The heavy-minded person wishes to do away with himself because he views himself as something bur-densomeas something he must endure, and so would be better off without. A heavy-minded person might even attempt to drown himself in self-abuse or self-deprivation. This shows that the heavy-minded person does not love himself in the right way, but instead thinks of himself as something one can master and handle, or in any case intoxicate and numb. The depressed persons selfish self-love is therefore despair: a despairing attempt to be rid of oneself.

Kierkegaard goes on to ask: When someone surrenders to despair because the world or another person has faithlessly left him betrayed, what then is his fault (his innocent suffering is not referred to here) except not loving himself in the right way? (3 / 23). The person who despairs because he is struck by misfortune or unfaithfulness in the world shows precisely thereby that he does not love himself in the right way. When disastrous events occur in nature, culture or in relation to other people, the very foundations of our lives are shaken. When a child dies, a loved one disappears, or we are struck by illness or natural catastrophe, it is hard to continue to love a self that has been treated so grievously. This is not because Kierkegaard advocates a kind of stoic implacability when the self is hit by such catastrophes.3 On the contrary, he stresses that in all the cases just mentioned one must sorrow, one must take things to heartbut one must not despair:

I do not have the right to become insensitive to lifes pain, because I shall sorrow; but neither do I have the right to despair, because I shall sorrow; and neither do I have the right to stop sorrowing, because I shall sorrow.

Begriff 54f.). In the following section I will take the opposite perspective, in that we will allow the analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death to shed light on the negative forms of self-love in Works of Love.

3Therefore it is with good reason that Rick Anthony Furtak maintains that Kierkegaard has a completely different approach to suffering than that of the Stoics: According to Stoic moral psychology, emotions (or passions) are cognitive responses to perceived value in the world, and therefore we can eradicate them by changing our beliefs about what really matters in life. I draw upon the writings of Sren Kierkegaard to develop an alternative philosophy according to which the emotions can be understood as embodying a kind of authentic insightand even, perhaps, enabling us to attain a uniquely truthful way of seeing the world (xixii).

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So it is with love. You do not have the right to become insensitive to this feeling, because you shall love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love; and just as little do you have the right to warp this feeling in you, because you shall love. You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love. (50 / 43)

Once again, our attention is drawn to the close connection between love and a persons self, as well as to the fact that love and feeling are bound up with each othereven when it comes to self-love. But what is crucial in this quote is that despair is forbidden. Why so? If a person despairs on the basis of the catastrophes just mentioned, she despairs over her tormented self, and so this despair shows that she was, at bottom, already in despairbecause she did not love herself in the right way but only loved herself through the things she possessed: her health, her wealth, her happiness. Such a despairing person has her self at second hand and therefore does not really love herself, but only what this self is in relation to others. Despair is the abandonment of every hope. If a person despairs, she gives up herself.

Kierkegaard asks further: When someone self-tormentingly thinks to do God a service by torturing himself, what is his sin except not willing to love himself in the right way? (31 / 23). Through various self-devised punishments, the person who self-tormentingly tortures herself for Gods sake shows that she does not love herself in the right way. She invents a suffering self in the hope that this self will be pleasing to God. In a wider sense, the self-tormentor is someone who in one way or another attempts to injure or disfigure herself, perhaps metaphorically, perhaps literally. The self-tormentor simply does not love herselfjust as little as she denies herself, in that a fundamental element of self-torment is inventing a self that one believes that another will love because of its suffering. That the self-tormentor is also in despair requires no further justification.

Having radicalized the idea of self-torment, Kierkegaard concludes by asking: And if, alas, a person presumptuously lays violent hands upon himself, is not his sin precisely this, that he does not rightly love himself in the sense in which a person ought to love himself? (31 / 23). Like the heavy-minded person, someone who lays violent hands upon herself (and who may well be heavy-minded herself), a suicide, wishes to do away with herselfbut goes to extreme lengths. She does not seek merely to dull the pain of her troublesome self through self-abuse or self-denial, but takes the final step and tries to

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end that selfs life.4 Nor does the suicide love himself in the right way.5 He thinks of his self as something he can get rid of, do away with, and he thereby volatilizes the idea that the self is something that lies in the foundation of every person.

Kierkegaards point in these six descriptions of erroneous self-love is to show how selfish self-love looks when we focus upon the inward direction in a person. It is necessary to describe selfish self-loves expres-sions in such detail and then ask about their recognizability because these selfish forms of self-love are not immediately accessible to observa-tion.6 Selfish self-love hides beneath bustling, light-mindedness, heavy-mindedness, despair, self-torment and the wish to commit suicide, and so cannot immediately be seen. The negative forms of self-love just described do therefore not seem to be very transparent. Lets turn to Frankfurts argument for the transparency of self-love and later connect his arguments with Kierkegaards descriptions.

2. Frankfurt on Self-Love

In the third chapter of The Reasons of Love, which bears the title The Dear Self, H.G. Frankfurt argues that self-love constitutes the purest form of love. The qualification of self-love as pure must in no way be understood as a moral qualification. The word pure indicates that self-love is the form of love that most clearly meets the four criteria

4Kierkegaard and H.G. Frankfurt have quite divergent views when it comes to suicide. Whereas Kierkegaard understands suicide as a despairing attempt to be rid of oneself, and thereby looks deeper than the problems that upon immediate inspection might appear to be the suicides cause, Frankfurt thinks that suicide can be traced back to the psychological, physical and other problems that may plague the suicidal person. Frankfurt says: Even of people who commit suicide because they are miserable, it is generally true that they love living. What they would really like, after all, would be to give up not their lives but their misery (47). I will look more closely at this divergence between Kierkegaard and Frankfurts view of self-love below.

5Kierkegaard defines his view of suicide more precisely as follows: In the physical and the external sense, I can fall by the hand of another, but in the spiritual sense there is only one person who can slay me, and that is myself. In the spiritual sense, a murder is inconceivableafter all, no assailant can murder an immortal spirit; spiritually, only suicide is possible (Kjerlighedens 329 / Works 333).

6Oh, there is a lot of talk in the world about treachery and faithlessness, and, God help us, it is unfortunately all too true, but still let us never because of this forget that the most dangerous traitor of all is the one every person has within himself. This treachery, whether it consists in selfishly loving oneself or consists in selfishly not will-ing to love oneself in the right waythis treachery is admittedly a secret. No cry is raised as it usually is in the case of treachery and faithlessness. But is it not therefore all the more important that Christianitys doctrine should be brought to mind again and again, that a person shall love his neighbor as himself, that is, as he ought to love himself? (31 / 23).

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which Frankfurt believes must be fulfilled in order for us to call a given relation love.

Frankfurt thus sees self-love as the form of love that has the highest degree of transparencyfollowed very closely by parents love for small children, which according to Frankfurt has a similar transparency. Let us take a closer look at Frankfurts arguments concerning the transpar-ency of self-love, so that we might be able to use this as a basis upon which to further qualify Kierkegaards understanding of self-love.

Like Kierkegaard, Frankfurt presumes that self-love is something that naturally belongs to a person. Furthermore, he states by way of introduction what he takes to be a general presumption that self-love is a negative quality:

It is widely presumed that for a person to love himself is so natural as to be more or less unavoidable; but it is also widely presumed that this is not such a good thing. Many peopleespecially when they imagine that the pro-pensity to self-love is both ubiquitous and essentially ineradicablebelieve that this headlong tendency of most of us to love ourselves is a grievously injurious defect of human nature. (The Reasons 71)

Frankfurt however does not share this one-sidedly negative assessment of self-love. He therefore wishes from the outset to distance himself not just from the general presupposition concerning the negative character of self-love, but also from the ethical disqualification of self-love implicit in Kants moral philosophy, with which The Reasons of Love is fundamentally a confrontation. Frankfurt agrees with Kant that it makes no sense to reward someone and give her moral points for something she did simply out of natural disposition and therefore out of sheer desire; but nonetheless Frankfurt accuses Kants view of self-love of being out-of-focus (76). Frankfurt uses the commandment to love the neighbor as an argument against Kant, claiming that the commandment that we love our neighbor as our selves does not reject self-love as something negative, but on the contrary points towards a way in which self-love can be understood as a moral ideal:

Indeed, it does not in any way suggest that self-love is an enemy of virtue, or that it is somehow discreditable to hold the self dear. On the contrary, the divine command to love others as we love ourselves might even be taken to convey a positive recommendation of self-love as an especially helpful paradigma model or ideal, by which we ought seriously to guide ourselves in the conduct of our practical lives. (77)

Frankfurt argues that the commandment is not about making self-love into an ideal, but about getting us to love others with the same intensity with which we love ourselves:

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On this reading, the point is merely that we should bring to our love of others the same wholehearted and persistent devotion that we characteristi-cally display toward the dear self. It is not self-love as such that is offered as a model, in other words, but only the exceptionally fulsome manner in which we typically love ourselves. (78)

This last interpretation of the importance of self-love for neighbor-love lies very close to Kierkegaards interpretation. And even if Frankfurt, unlike Kierkegaard, does not differentiate between several forms of negative self-love, he nonetheless has the same view of self-loves respective positive and negative connotations. Where Kierkegaard calls negative self-love selfishness and despair, Frankfurt speaks of self-indulgence as a negative form, which strictly speaking is not in fact self-love: self-indulgence is something else entirely (ibid.). Frankfurts point is that both Kant and the general view of self-love as a privation seem to confuse self-love with self-indulgence. But a per-son who loves herself is precisely not self-indulgent, but is rather very much aware of what is good for her. The person who loves herself therefore does not allow herself to merely be controlled by her desires and drivesquite the contrary. Self-love can therefore, precisely qua consciousness, control the dispositions; and this is why, according to Frankfurt, Kant gets it wrong when he completely refuses any moral respect for self-love.

3. Self-love as the Purest Form of Love

In his wider definition of self-love as the most transparent form of love, Frankfurt operates with four criteria (conceptually necessary features; 78) which must be met in order for something to be called love: 1) A disinterested concern for the well-being of the beloved. 2) A personal relation. 3) An identification with the beloveds interest. 4) A control over the will.

The more criteria are fulfilled, the purer the form of love. The first criterion is that a disinterested concern for the wellbeing of the beloved must be present in the one who loves (a disinterested concern for the well-being or flourishing of the person who is loved; ibid.). This is such a fundamental criterion for Frankfurt that in order to be love, love must seek the good of the beloved for no reason other than that it is the good of the beloved. Concern for the well-being of the beloved, with no motive other than the beloveds well-being, is natu-rally fulfilled in self-love, in which one simply loves oneself without any interest other than ones own.

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Secondly, love, according to Frankfurt, is always personal. In this, love differentiates itself from charity, for example, in that the person one loves cannot be substituted for someone else. It is therefore a criterion of love that it be another concrete person that is loved. This second criterion also seems to be fulfilled in self-love, which is indeed love for a very specific and therefore irreplaceable other person: oneself and no other.7

Third, it is, according to Frankfurt, a criterion of love that the lover identify herself with her beloved in such a way that she makes the beloveds interests her own. Obviously, this third criterion of love must be said to be satisfied quite literally in the case of self-love. But here Kierkegaard is in considerable disagreement with Frankfurt, which stems from Kierkegaards view that a person can love themselves in an improper waya way which is not merely self-indulgent, but is, as weve seen, directly in despair. The self struggles with itself in self-love. The difference between Frankfurts understanding of self-love and Kierkegaards is here due, first and foremost, to Frankfurts failure to see the possible ambiguity of self-love. But the distance between them is also owing to the fact that Kierkegaard does not share the view that identifying with the others interests is characteristic of love. He says:

If your beloved or friend asks something of you that you, precisely because you honestly loved, had in concern considered would be harmful to him, then you must bear a responsibility if you love by obeying instead of loving by refusing a fulfillment of desire. A human being, however, you shall onlybut no, this is indeed the highesta human being you shall love as yourself. If you can perceive what is best for him better than he can, you will not be excused because the harmful thing was his own desire, was what he himself asked for. If this were not the case, it would be quite proper to speak of loving another person more than oneself, because this would mean, despite ones insight that this would be harmful to him, doing it in obedience because he demanded it, or in adoration because he desired it. But you expressly have no right to do this; you have the responsibility if you do it, just as the other has the responsibility if he wants to misuse his relation to you in such a way. (Kjerlighedens 2728 / Works 1920)

This means that there can be a divergence between the interests of the lover and those of the beloved. And this applies both for self-love

7Kierkegaard, too, points out this aspect of love. This same thought is consistently carried through in the discourse Our Duty to Love the People We See in Works of Love: When it is a duty in loving to love the people we see, then in loving the actual individual person it is important that one does not substitute an imaginary idea of how we think or could wish that this person should be. The one who does this does not love the person he sees but again something unseen, his own idea or something similar (164 / 164).

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and love for another. Perhaps I do not know what is best for myself? Or perhaps, through my own self-insight, I know better than the other does what the other needs? So we experience a clash. If the lover thinks she knows better what is good for the beloved, this can lead to a conflict that can, in extreme cases, come to look like hate on the lovers part.

The fourth and last criterion according to Frankfurt is that love can control the will. It is, quite simply, not up to us who we love or who we do not love. Love is not a matter of choice, but is determined by something that our will is unable to control. And this fourth criterion too is, Frankfurt believes, present in self-love, because he understands self-love as naturalwhich is why a person cannot choose to love him-self by an effort of will, but does so immediately. My former account of the six negative forms of self-love demonstrates that Kierkegaard fundamentally disagrees on this point. According to Kierkegaard and the analysis of the six negative forms of self-love we started out with, we do not love our-selves immediately.

According to Frankfurt these four above-mentioned criteria together constitute a definition of love. And because all four criteria, still according to Frankfurt, are present in self-love in a very distinct way, self-love can be defined as the purest form of love. Pure in the sense of transparent. Self-love is transparent in the sense that it is the form of love wherein we can see most clearly that all four criteria of love are fulfilled.8 So it is not that, according to Frankfurt, self-love is the best or most venerable form of love. He simply maintains that self-love is the form of love that is most unequivocal and unmixed. It is thus the form of love that is easiest to identify, and which displays the nature of love in the clearest possible way, by allowing these four criteria to shine through it.

Kierkegaard is of the diametrically opposed view when it comes to the transparency of self-love, which is particularly evident in his relation to the last two criteria which Frankfurt posits: identification with the interests of the beloved, and the role of consciousness. This does not mean, however, that Kierkegaard does not consider self-love to be love; but he is of the view, contra Frankfurt, that self-love is far from transparent. The controversy is fundamentally due to Frankfurts viewing self-love as identical with being satisfied with oneself: Loving ourselves is desirable and important for us because it is the

8Given these as defining features of love, it is apparent that self-lovenotwithstand-ing its questionable reputationis in a certain way the purest of all modes of love (Frankfurt 80).

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same thing, more or less, as being satisfied with ourselves (97). This is a far cry from Kierkegaards conception of self-love, regardless of which form it takes. For Kierkegaard, self-love is murky, and this opacity covers up the fact that, more often than not, self-love is built upon a self-dissatisfaction, which is why the self is loved in a distorted, a despairing, a double-minded way.

4. Double-Minded Self-Love

I have now clarified how, in Frankfurts view, the four criteria that he posits as definitive for love are present in self-love. But we are still left with a remarkably empty form of love. Up to this point we have been dealing exclusively with determining self-love to be the purest form of love. But what does it actually mean to love oneself? According to Frankfurt, at the heart of all love is the lovers willing of the good for the beloved. This also holds for self-love, where the lover therefore wills the good for herself. Frankfurt now claims that what a person loves determines what is important for her. But in that case self-love is simply a persons love for that which the person must love. We hereby end up with a definition devoid of content: self-love is to love that which one loves.9 But Frankfurt does not want to leave things at that. For he thinks that it is also possible for a person to love themselves, even though they do not love anyone else.10 Frankfurt therefore says:

in order to obey the commands of love, one must first understand what it is that love commands. The most rudimentary form of self-love, then, consists in nothing more than the desire of a person to love. That is, it consists in a persons desire to have goals that he must accept as his own and to which he is devoted for their own sakes rather than merely for their instrumental value. (87)

It is of course no coincidence that Frankfurts little book is titled The Reasons of Love, and even though he stresses that love overpowers the will, he nonetheless does not want to claim that it also wins out over reason. Frankfurts definition of self-love therefore ends up being that self-love is a persons desire to be committed to his own goals for their own sake.11

9Thus self-love seems to collapse into nothing more than a love of the things one loves (87).

10Love is a configuration of the will, which is constituted by various more or less stable dispositions and constraints (ibid.).

11When a person desires to love, what he desires is that he be in a position to act with confident and settled purpose. [L]ove saves us both from being inconclusively

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Shortly thereafter, Frankfurt comes to discuss the double-mindedness that can arise within someone when they love something, but do not want to love it. But he completely fails to notice that this conflict can also apply to self-love, something of which, as weve seen, Kierkegaard is quite aware. According to Frankfurt, the solution to the conflict consists in a person becoming clear about which side of the conflict they find themselves on. To be wholehearted is to love oneself (95). Frankfurt here alludes directly to Kierkegaard and the large confes-sional discourse, An Occasional Discourse, that makes up the first section of Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits (En Lejligheds 115-250 / An Occasional 3154) and concludes that: Self-love consists, then, in the purity of a wholehearted will (Frankfurt 95).

Lets take a closer look at the confessional discourse. In this dis-course, Kierkegaard takes James 4:8 as his starting point and then spends about two hundred and fifty pages elaborating upon its theme: purity of heart is to will one thing. The problem with Frankfurt refer-ring to this confessional discourse on the idea of willing one thing, however, is that Kierkegaards point in this discourse is utterly different to the one Frankfurt makes: for in the discourse, Kierkegaard points to the non-transparency of self-love.

Kierkegaard begins his confessional discourse by stipulating that the person who in truth wills only one thing can will only the good, and the person who wills only one thing when he wills the good can will only the good in truth (En Lejligheds 138 / An Occasional 24). Naturally, it is this definition that Frankfurt has in mind when he speaks of the purity of a wholehearted will. But Kierkegaards aim in this long discourse is to show just how difficult is to become so transparent to oneself that one can be said to will one thing: In truth to will one thing can therefore mean only to will the good, because any other one thing is not a one thing and the person who wills only that must therefore be double-minded, because the one who craves becomes like that which he craves (147 / 34).

Kierkegaard therefore highlights a number of different factors which tell against the purity of the will, because they call into question whether a person really is in such a frame of mind that they only will one thing and thereby will the good. Kierkegaard says:

arbitrary and from squandering our lives in vacuous activity that is fundamentally pointless because, having no definitive goal, it aims at nothing that we really want. Insofar as self-love is tantamount just to desire to love, it is simply a desire to be able to count on having meaning in our lives (90).

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At times [the discourse] has described a specific error and the state of mind of the erring one on an enlarged scale so that one can better note and identify what seldom appears unmixed in the minor situations of daily life and therefore is more difficult to identify as this particular error. The discourse, as it consistently held fast to the requirement to will one thing, has become acquainted with many errors, delusions, deceptions, and self-deceptions; it has tried to track double-mindedness down its hidden path, to discover its hiddenness. (223 / 122)

In the confessional discourse, Kierkegaard seeks to magnify (for-estrre) that which immediately hides itself. Through this, something inwardthe erroneous state of mindis made knowable as something outward, in which we can see ourselves reflected.12 The readers are then encouraged to look inside themselves, for perhaps there they can recognize some of the various forms of double-mindedness.13 And maybe recognize some of the six negative forms of self-love we began this paper by describing.

In the discourse, Kierkegaard mentions four factors that problema-tize the idea of willing one thing and which therefore point towards double-mindedness as a universal human problem. The four problematic factors are: first, only willing the good for the sake of reward (cf. 152f. / 37f.); second, only willing the good out of fear of punishment (cf. 156f. / 44f.); third, only willing the good in willfulness14 (cf. 169f. / 60f.); and fourth, only willing the good to a certain degree (cf. 172f. / 64f.).

It is willful double-mindedness that generates the most problems, and so it is this form of double-mindedness that we will consider here. Moreover, willful double-mindedness stands out as the form of double-mindedness that is best able to keep itself hidden, precisely because it presents itself as being its opposite: willing one thing. The double-mindedness of the willful person is therefore painfully difficult to uncover:

12To achieve this, the discourse must decisively require something of the listener, and not merely require what has been required up to this pointthat he as reader share the work with the one speaking. At this point it must unconditionally require his decisive self-activity, upon which everything depends (223 / 122).

13No, the speaker is the prompter; there are no spectators, because every listener should look inwardly into himself (225 / 124).

14This form of double-mindedness is harder to discover as this double-mindedness is more cunning and concealed, is even more presumptuous than that obvious and obviously worldly double-mindedness [of willing the good for the sake of reward or out of fear of punishment] (169 / 60). But for Kierkegaard, there is no doubt that this form, willing the good willfully, must also be characterized as double-mindedness: He does not will the good for the sake of reward; he wills that the good shall be victorious; but he wills that it shall be victorious through him, that he shall be the instrument, he the chosen one (170 / 61).

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Such a double-minded person is perhaps more difficult to recognize in this world, because his double-mindedness is not obvious within the world and has no informer and no confidant in the worlds rewards and punishments, since he has overcome the world, although by a higher deception, since his double-mindedness is first recognizable at the boundary where time and eternity touch each other. (171 / 63)

In all four forms of double-mindedness highlighted by Kierkegaard in the confessional discourse we hear about cases of a non-transparency that problematizes wholeheartednessthat very wholeheartedness that Frankfurt highlights as characteristic of self-love. Returning to the topic of self-love, it is clear that Kierkegaard sees this as far more problematic than Frankfurt. I began my first section The Negative Forms of Self-Love with Kierkegaards description of the bustler, a person who does not love herself in the right way and therefore can be said to be in despair. In the confessional discourse, this despair is further qualified as double-mindedness, which corresponds to the analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death: Or is not despair [Fort-vivlelse] actually double-mindedness [Tvesindethed]; or what is it to despair but to have two wills! [E]veryone in despair has two wills, one that he futilely wants to follow entirely, and one that he futilely wants to get rid of entirely (En Lejligheds 144 / An Occasional 30). The despairing person indeed has two wills, each pointing in a different direction, which is why the negative forms of self-love turn out to be despair. In the confessional discourse, Kierkegaard has this to say of the bustler, the busy-one:

So, then, in busyness there is double-mindedness. Just as the echo lives in the forest, just as stillness lives in the desert, so double-mindedness lives in busyness. Therefore, that someone who wills the good only to a certain degree is double-minded, has a distracted mind, a divided heart, scarcely needs to be explained. But the basis may well need to be explained and developedthat in busyness there is neither the time nor the tranquility to acquire the transparency that is necessary for understanding oneself in willing one thing or for just temporarily understanding oneself in ones unclarity. (En Lejligheds 175 / An Occasional 67)

Self-love, then, is in no way straightforward and transparent according to Kierkegaard. It possesses a murky ambiguity, which can conceal the fact that it is fundamentally not a matter of self-love at all, but a matter of despair.

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5. Selfish Self-Love is Despair

The basis of the descriptions of the six negative forms of self-love in Works of Love that I began with is the fundamental assumption that all these forms of self-love are despair. Given the descriptions discussed above it makes sense that Kierkegaard maintains that the bustler, the light-minded, the heavy-minded, the immediately despairing, the self-tormentor and the suicide are all characterized by not loving themselves in the right way. But why is this despair? This can best be explained if we bring the analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death into our discussion. In that work, Anti-Climacus distinguishes between two fundamental forms of despair, and as we shall see, we can recognize both these fundamental forms in the figures of selfish self-love.

In The Sickness Unto Death the two fundamental forms of despair are described as 1) despairingly not willing to be oneself, and 2) despairingly willing to be oneself (cf. Sygdommen 129 / Sickness 13), which correspond to the ways in which the forms of selfish self-love are described above: 1) selfishly not willing to love oneself and 2) selfishly loving oneself.15 The two forms of selfish self-love can be traced back to each other, which is also true of the two fundamental forms of despair.16

That there are, in any case, two forms of despair in the strict sense in The Sickness Unto Death is due to Kierkegaards understanding that no person has created themselves. A persons self is, on the contrary, created by something other:

The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates to itself and in relating to itself relates to another. This is why there can be two forms of despair in the strict sense. If a human self had itself established

15This treachery, whether it consists in selfishly loving oneself or consists in selfishly not willing to love oneself in the right way (Kjerlighedens 31 / Works 23).

16In the debate between Michael Theunissen, Alastair Hannay and Arne Grn over which of the conscious forms of despair is the most fundamental, I thus follow Hannays and Grns position, in that I argue that despairingly willing to be oneself is the basic form of despair. My description of the immediate self-love substantiates this claim, in that we are here operating under the presumption that a self immediately loves itself, but that an idea comes between the self and its original self-love such that the self cannot truly come to love itself. It therefore tries to love itself despairingly. Theunissens standpoint is critical of Kierkegaards own statements in The Sickness Unto Death that the basic form of despair is despairingly willing to be oneself. Theunissen maintains, on the basis of a critical analysis of The Sickness Unto Death, that the opposite seems rather to be the first form i.e. it is despairingly willing not to be oneself that is the basal form of despair. Theunissens view is published in Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Hannay discusses this view in his article Basic despair in The Sickness unto Death, and Arne Grn in his Der Begriff Verzweiflung. These articles are followed by Michael Theunissens rejoinder Fr einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwnden von Arne Grn und Alastair Hannay.

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itself, then there could be only one form: not to will to be oneself, to will to do away with oneself, but there could not be the form: in despair to will to be oneself. The second formulation is specifically the expression for the complete dependence of the relation (of the self), the expression for the inability of the self to arrive at or be in equilibrium and rest by itself, but only in relating to itself, by relating to that which has established the entire relation. (Sygdommen 130 / Sickness, 14; trans. modified)

In the same way we must understand that the forms of negative self-love distinguished through the six descriptions given in Works of Love that I began with point back towards the fundamental assumption that a person is not herself the source of her love. Love dwells within and is established within every person by God. And it is only on the basis of this idea that love is fundamentally given in every person that it makes sense to distinguish between several different forms of mistaken self-love.

If the person herself had been the source of her love, there could only have been one mistaken mode of loving oneself despairingly, namely, selfishly not willing to love oneself; whereas selfishly willing to love oneself would not have been possible. The latter presupposes a normativity that is given in and with the presupposition that God is the source of all love in heaven and earth also of self-love (cf. Kjerlighe-dens 12 / Works 3). Let us briefly consider the famous passage from The Sickness Unto Death that postulates just this dependency of the self upon a power outside itself, and explains this dependence on the basis that there can be two forms of despair. It is only in a positive relation to the power that has established or created the whole relation, the power that has established love in the foundation of every person, that despair can be annulled: The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it (Sygdommen 130 / Sickness 14; trans. modified). Prior to this affirmation of a humans dependence upon God, it is stressed that the one form of despair (despairingly not willing to be oneself) can be traced back to the other form (despairingly willing to be oneself), because both these forms of despair point in the same direction: the self is oriented wrongly both in relation to itself and in relation to the power that has established or created it.17 In the same way, one can say that when someones self-love degenerates into a

17Yes, this second form of despair (in despair to will to be oneself) is so far from designating merely a distinctive kind of despair that, on the contrary, all despair ulti-mately can be traced back to and resolved in it. If the despairing person is aware of his despair, as he thinks he is, and does not speak meaninglessly of it as of something that is happening to him (somewhat as one suffering from dizziness speaks in nervous

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selfish self-love, then within that selfish self-love lies an unwillingness to love themselves in the right way, such that the one form of selfish self-love (not loving oneself in the right way) can be traced back to the other form (selfishly loving oneself).18

6. Conclusion

I have now briefly pointed out the identity between the analyses of despair in relation to The Sickness Unto Death and the descriptions of selfish self-love in Works of Love. But what does it really mean to say that selfish self-love is despair? Kierkegaard does not merely say that selfish self-love can lead to despair. He says, quite directly, that it is despair.

The definition of selfish self-love as despair depends upon the volatilization of the authentic self, the self that one shall love because it has been bestowed upon one. In The Sickness Unto Death, despair comes to be defined as a misrelation within the selfa misrelation that springs from the negative ways in which the self relates to itself. The same is the case with selfish self-love. Selfish self-love is despair because it springs from a persons negative relation to her love and thereby to herself. There is an unbreakable relation between a persons self and her love, and this unbreakable relation becomes seriously evident when we place the analyses of despair alongside the descrip-tions of selfish love.

But the most serious problem when it comes to self-love accord-ing to Kierkegaard is that it hides itself under various negative forms: busyness, light-mindedness, heavy-mindedness, despair, self-torment and suicide make it hard for us to see what is going on in self-love. To Kierkegaard self-love is therefore by no means as transparent as H.G. Frankfurt would like us to think. To Kierkegaard the opaque-ness of self-love is on the contrary the overall stumbling block when it comes to the assignment that every human being must take up in

delusion of a weight on his head or of something that has fallen down on him, etc., a weight and a pressure that nevertheless are not something external but a reverse reflection of the internal) and now with all his power seeks to break the despair by himself and by himself alonehe is still in despair and with all his presumed effort only works himself all the deeper into deeper despair. The misrelation of despair is not a simple misrelation but a misrelation in a relation that relates to itself and has been established by another, so that the misrelation in that relation that is for itself also reflects itself infinitely in the relation to the power that established it (Sygdommen 130 / Sickness 14; trans. modified).

18Arne Grn therefore describes despair as a form of obsession (Subjektivitet 114).

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order to be herself: to love herself in a right way and her neighbor in the very same way.

University of Copenhagen

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