The Truth Is a Trap

In his very flesh, Jesus was an insult to reason. For Kierkegaard, approaches to Jesus that abnegate this offense (à la Jesus was a sage with a message about teaching us to love one another) annul the need for and possibility of faith.

A physicist and philosopher, Dr. Ben Yacobi sincerely states it:

The concept of “authenticity” is a human construct, and as such it has no reality independent of minds. But is authenticity possible, or even desirable? . . . This steers us toward an interpretation of the concept of authenticity as an absolute, but in general the search for absolutes is fruitless.2

Can you be an existentialist and a Tibetan monk? I don’t see why not.

The desert monks of the third century wrote of the dangers of acedia, the noonday demon, a state marked by agitation, weakness, lack of motivation, and above all indifference to the good and to oneself. Indeed, the roots of the Greek for acedia are a (without) keidos (care). The cure often prescribed for acedia was none other than manual labor, which seems like something my high school principal would have come up with.

In their The Loss of Sadness, authors Allan Horwitz and Jerome Wakefield contend that with the medicalization of just about everything, we have arrived at treating ordinary sadness as if it were a depressive illness.

Apparently, the present only acquires significance for us as a stepping stone to the pedestal of some triumphant future moment.

A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation.

For those who do not immediately pitch the book across the room, Kierkegaard continues, “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”8 It has nothing to do with feeling down; at first glance despair occurs when there is an imbalance in this synthesis.

After taking a stab at a definition, Kierkegaard presents a veritable portrait gallery of the forms that despair takes. Too much of the expansive factor, of infinitude, and you have the dreamer who cannot make anything concrete. Too much of the limiting element yields the narrow-minded individual who cannot think of anything more serious in life than bottom lines and spreadsheets.

Anxiety, however, is always about possibility.

According to Rieff, who as my mentor will be a regular presence in this book, Americans would soon come to regard just about everything as a subject for a class of expert-like therapists offering counsel and workshops on how to think and talk about grief, ethics, race—you name it.

For me, there is always something to be anxious about, and if there weren’t, I would probably look for, or most likely invent, some pretext for anxiety.