despair and bad faith

This will be more of an I'm-trying-to-put-things-together entry; almost like a dialogue between me and myself for the sake of eventually understanding some of these concepts yet knowing that it won't happen by the end of this one "session".

I've been really trying to focus on Kierkegaard lately because what I have read throughout the class is so interesting and a lot of the time quite profound. And I think that I've got some of his stuff understood (through reading the Sickness Unto Death) in terms of the self and despair. In class today we were talking about Sartre, and some of his ideas reminded me of Kierkegaard and I saw a lot of similarities, and I think some differences too (as they are bound to come up since God is so fundamental to Kierkegaard's thinking).

Kierkegaard said that "Man is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short it is a synthesis." And the human self is a "relation which relates itself to its own self," but also is a "relation relating itself to that which constituted the whole relation." The "that which constituted the whole relation" is God, and a self can only "attain and remain in equilibrium and rest" by "relating itself to that Power which constituted the whole relation [God]." Thus despair is a disrelationship in the self, and if there is disrelationship in the self that disrelationship "reflects itself infinitely in the relation to [God]." So despair, if I can understand this, is a disrelationship between the infinite and the finite, and/or a disrelationship between freedom and necessity, etc.

The thing with Sartre is that I'm finding it hard to reconcile some of the statements he makes. He says that there is no human nature, that man is first of all nothing and will be what he makes of himself. Since existence proceeds essence, humans have complete freedom, and cannot excuse themselves with the "determinism" of a given human nature. This all made me think about Kierkegaard's despair in the sense that there is all possibility for man, no necessity. But then in class and in "support" group, we talked about the being-in-itself and for-itself, and using an example of a homosexual, it was said that a gay person who says "i'm gay and will never be but gay" is in bad faith because he conceives of himself only as his being-in-itself, and loses the possibility of transcending the in-itself. And also the gay man who says "I'm not gay and I can be whatever I want to" is in bad faith because he has denied his in-itself. But isn't being-in-itself the being of a table or road sign, just "extended stuff"? And if it is and humans have being-in-itself in which they cannot simply deny or be without doing so in bad faith, but have no human nature, then is the being-in-itself of a human the sum of past actions? Because if that is being-in-itself then bad faith and kierkegaardian despair coincide insofar as the being-in-itself is analogous to necessity and being-for-itself is analagous to possibility (or freedom). But then when the person is born, and he is nothing, it is all possibility, all freedom, and so right from the start there is no necessity and thus despair...Unless being-in-itself is an actual necessity, but that would seem to be human nature, and so the problem of reconciliation.

I also think there is a problem with his statement about the determinism of human nature. He says, "For if indeed existence precedes essence, one will never be able to explain one's action by reference to a given and specific human nature; in other words, there is no determinism." But even within his framework I think somebody who says "Human nature is sinful so I can't help myself" lives in bad faith because that person doesn't recognize the possibility of striving to righteousness. And if Sartre understood Christianity, or even Kierkegaard, he would recognize this (especially with Kierkegaard's tension between the competing factors of the synthesis). I think it's just a very weak statement to make...

Obviously the biggest difference between K's despair and S's bad faith is the emphasis on the self's relation to God in K's, and the emphasis on the non-existence of God in S's. This brings about the difference of necessity/possibility, and so for K, S would definitely be in despair simply because he is not relating to God, but I think also because he lacks necessity, even though the denial of being-in-itself is a mode of bad faith.