Summary: Either/Or (page 7)

For Kierkegaard, doubt is a mere methodological tool, useful for objective reflection and speculation: it belongs to the intellect. Despair, on the other hand, is an existential notion, one that engages the personality itself; it surpasses and encompasses the intellect: Doubt is the despair of the intellect; despair is the doubt of the personality. ¹

Doubt serves to secure the objectivity of thought. It concerns subjectivity so little that one can doubt everything serenely: When doubt is actualised, the intellect finds the absolute and rests in it. This objective and restful 'doubt' is worlds apart from 'despair', in which the self, taken as a whole, confronts itself in its unhappiness.

The doubt of objective speculation can even be a way of distracting oneself—that is, of fleeing one's subjectivity, and therefore the despair that necessarily affects it. Kierkegaard takes the example of certain German philosophers—one immediately thinks of Hegel: Their intellect is tranquillised […] they are in despair even as they distract themselves with objective speculation; for a man can distract himself in many ways, and there are scarcely any narcotics as effective as abstract speculation, because it consists in remaining as impersonal as possible.

Kierkegaard can therefore conclude, summing up this essential distinction: Doubt and despair thus belong to wholly different spheres; different sides of the soul are shaken […] Despair represents an expression far deeper and far more complete than doubt, and its movement is much wider. Despair is properly representative of the personality; doubt is representative only of the intellect.

There is, then, an essential link between despair, choice, and the self:

In choosing in the absolute sense, I choose despair; and in despair I choose the absolute, for I myself am the absolute […] But then what is it that I choose—this or that? No […] I choose the absolute, and the absolute—what is that? It is myself in my eternal validity.

Despair is what allows one to leave behind aesthetic frivolity—and the melancholy it necessarily generates—and to become serious again:

Despair, then, and your frivolity will no longer wander like a fickle spirit, like a ghost among the ruins of a world that is lost to you; despair, and your spirit will never again sigh with melancholy, for the world will once more be beautiful and joyful for you.

We reach the point to which Judge Wilhelm wished to lead his interlocutor: to tear you away from the illusions of the aesthetic […] so that you may become conscious of the seriousness of the spirit.

Now that this first conception of existence has been described in its essential moments—what defines it, what makes it problematic, and what allows one to escape it—we are in a position to examine the ethical conception: I now wish to set before you […] an ethical conception of life.

Its defining characteristic is mediocrity: Mediocrity is a principal quality of everything ethical—a quality that may seem rather strange to one who comes from the opulence of the aesthetic.

One naturally thinks of Horace's 'golden mediocrity', which refers to the notion of the mean. In fact, Kierkegaard simply means here that the ethical person has nothing in common with the flamboyant, seductive, witty, fascinating figure of the aesthete. Nothing distinguishes him outwardly: Nil ad ostentationem, omnia ad conscientiam—that is, 'nothing for display; everything according to conscience'. Such a person inspires no dreams, possesses no particular charisma, and cannot serve as a model in that sense.

But this new stage of existence—the ethical stage—appears in its full light only through the opposition Kierkegaard has already set out: It has been said that the aesthetic in a man is that by which he is immediately what he is; the ethical is that by which a man becomes what he becomes.

The time has come to clarify this. Kierkegaard seems to be suggesting that the aesthete does not evolve, that he is untouched by change, that he makes no progress in life. In reality, there is development—but of a very particular kind: One must by no means conclude that the man who lives aesthetically does not develop; but he develops by necessity, not by freedom. No metamorphosis takes place in him, nor that infinite movement by which he reaches the point from which he becomes what he becomes.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Kierkegaard: A Close Reading