Insecure self-confidence: an exploration into the notion of insecurity in reflexive modernisation

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Insecure self-confidence

an exploration into the notion of insecurity in reflexive modernisation

Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam

2015

Master thesis Philosophy T.C. Stribos, MSc August 2015

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2 INSECURE SELF-CONFIDENCE

an exploration into the notion of insecurity in reflexive modernisation

Master thesis Philosophy Faculty of Humanities University of Amsterdam August 2015

Tess Catharine Stribos, MSc

Supervisor Dr. T.M.T. Coolen

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3 To the train passenger Sylvia Nasar

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Anecdote

In the first year of high school the subject of Health Care was obligatory. I dreaded the subject as it was little concerned with interesting new information and more with practical things as nutrition personal health, household and products. I had figured that the closer you sit to the front, the less turns you receive. So I sat in the in the first row of the classroom, in front of the teacher's desk. Our teacher held a closing speech on the consequences of physical and psychological changes in puberty. The teacher announced an inquiry to show that everyone feels insecure about something about his or her body and that it was good to discuss these thoughts.

She started at the far back and asked first the tall guy who always sat in the far corner (to goof off unnoticed I assumed). She continued student after student. You were supposed to name one thing you liked about your appearance and one thing you'd like to change. People mentioned their hair, their height, and their belly. I sensed it was a troubling experience for most of us. Even I felt confronted and a feeling of insecurity crept up to me. What was happening? I recognised the inescapability of disclosing thoughts about myself in this situation. I could not really think of something I disliked about myself, so this did not frighten me. I never wondered about myself in that way. Maybe I was alarmed not by the fact that I felt confronted but that I had no clue with what. Did I need to dislike something about myself? An uneasiness resided as I gave some answer. I was puzzled by these new feelings.

We were 12 year-old children who were confronted with a question that entailed a private evaluation of ourselves. In hindsight I think I was too young to fully understand the teacher’s question or her questionable didactics. This anecdote signifies my first memory of feelings of insecurity and self-doubt. It was this incident that drew my attention to the subject ever since. I tried to distinguish differences in the heap of insecurities and their objects I could not further specify. What is insecurity?

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Summary

In this thesis I follow Giddens’ premises that both uncertainty and insecurity have been always part of human existence, now and in pre-modern times. As has the need for a sense of belonging and place in the world. This is what Giddens terms ‘ontological security’. Ontological security is a constant and a-historical component of human existence. Giddens argues, however, that the manner and form in which ontological security is brought about now differs from a pre-modern constitution of belonging and ontological security. Giddens convincingly discusses the traditional, pre-modern social order in comparison with our current high modern society, providing insights into why and how there are different threats to our sense of self-identity.

The importance of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the individual is formed by the dimension that Kierkegaard’s anxiety and despair bring to Giddens’ philosophical-anthroposophic outlook on the human being. In this thesis I examine the hypothesis that parallel to this dynamic of ontological security, the notion of insecurity takes on a new form as well in high modernity. Giddens’ idea that the core of modernity is increasingly interlacing global and local may be very well true. I have used his ideas and terminology to look at the effect on the level of the individual and can conclude that some structuring features at the core of modernity have extended far into the human psyche altered the structure of modern self-identity. It is the driving force that explains why insecurity has become a core part of our self.

Insecurity obtains a fundamental quality in self-identity as a result of the internally referential systems that organise the reflexive project of the self. The sensation of insecurities we feel fits into a greater scheme; ultimately, on philosophical grounds, two types of insecurity can be distinguished. “Empirical insecurity”, firstly, can be seen as an effect of reflexively organised self-identity. This form of insecurity is actually a result of the second type, a more fundamental insecurity that emerges parallel to Giddens’ mechanisms of self-identity. This type I term “Existential insecurity” and I conclude that it operates similar to Kierkegaardian despair. The main difference derives from their foundation or origin. Even though despair is a possibility of the synthesis of the individual, a possibility of the spirit in a misrelation, this is not a necessity. Existential insecurity, on the other hand is a necessary consequence of the reflexive and internal referential organisation of the self-identity. Thus, existential insecurity is part of the modern predicament.

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6 This thesis focuses on existential insecurity as part of the predicament of high modernity. It elaborates on the notion of modernity and addresses the mechanisms of self-identity that have emerged from this. The threats of modernity are seen to impinge on the identity of the self and lead to a sense of despair. Three ideal typical attitudes can be identified, as described by Coolen, that either further help understand the nature of the existential despair that can overcome the modern individual, or further entangle them in a search to annihilate the generalised uncertainty inherent to modernisation In two of the three attitudes, insecurity is not considered as fundamental part of the self identity. In the third, it is - and as such allows for a sense of confidence and esteem unrelated to the circumstantial situation of the individual. Insecure self-confidence is existential insecurity recognised as reflexively controlled in the self-identity and as such is the only way in which an individual can uphold his existence in the face of the modern predicament.

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Introduction

What is insecurity? What are personal insecurities and how does modernity influence these? The anecdote at the start of this thesis serves as a way to put ‘insecurity’ and affiliated topics as the subject of this thesis, just as briskly as our teacher made our insecurities the topic of a group questioning. The anecdote shows a clash the teacher engineered, but a clash of what? It was an uneasy situation and I felt everyone perceived it as such. The communal uncertainty that was brought about during that lesson can maybe attributed to our lack of known manners of conduct and thus made us feel insecure, or maybe we were not yet able to explain ourselves in words to another, or maybe we were ashamed to answer her question.

These issues of social conduct, discursiveness and shame I want to take into a larger context. The context of the reflexive modernity, as Anthony Giddens explains in his work, is that in late modernity the ‘macro’ scale of (reflexive) modern institutions and the ‘micro’ scale of individual life and the self become interlaced. Giddens is concerned with the ‘ontological security’ of an individual, which presupposes ‘a sense of continuity and order in events’ (including remote or mediated events). The concept of ontological security is further explained in accessible language by Philip Cassel, a follower and propagandist of Giddens, as ‘a psychological state that is equivalent to feeling ‘at home’ with oneself and the world and is associated with the experience of low or manageable levels of anxiety’. Much of this state takes place on the behavioural level. Routines and resources are established to maintain an ontological security, here closely related to a comforting level of predictability as Cassel continues that ‘disruptions of the routine will typically be experienced as unsettling and care will be taken to ensure that events unfold predictably’1.

It is this predictability that is rapidly diminishing in the world of high modernity. Uncertainty and uneasiness are notions with which modernity can be characterised, and in fact modernity is recognised as a process that leads to increasing uncertainty2. As a result, individuals are even more driven to create a sense of security through their own social activities. The dangers of a loss of

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Cassel 1993:14

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10 predictability outside oneself, as opposed in traditional contexts where tradition provided frameworks of value and social conduct, forms the breeding ground for lurking anxieties. Giddens recognises ontological security as such as a characteristic of human existence and as a non-historical phenomenon. Its form and manifestation however, Giddens argues, has transformed through modernity and is in this sense different from traditional times.

This eventually has implications for the personal insecurities and individual experiences and how they differ from pre-modern times. In the first instance this insecurity is related to the objects of our world, but as it progresses, also one’s personal identity and place in the world are increasingly uncertain. Giddens explains that contemporary experiences of insecurity are due to the radically different form and function of modern institutions compared to all preceding forms of social order. Mechanisms of self-identity are shaped by and shape the institutions of modernity. They impair traditional habits and have a global influence. More precisely, in our current society day-to-day social life is transformed by the development of institutional reflexivity and it is impossible for anyone to disengage completely from this process of modernity.

Giddens claims can seem alarming, but we cope with these new and modern uncertainties through a strategy of self-identity to maintain our sense of the world and self. This coping strategy is the ‘reflexive project of the self’ and is sustained through a personally controlled narrative of self-identity. To this end, ‘ontological security’ is paramount to the success of a self(-identity) in the face of consequences of high modernity. A secure person, according to Giddens, has a normal sense of ‘ontological security’.

Giddens introduces his concept of ‘ontological security’ as the obverse of Laing’s discussion on self-identity from 19653 in which the latter describes the ontological insecure individual. Whereas Laing’s object is the fractured self, Giddens discusses the characteristics of a normal sense of self-identity. Giddnes symptomatic writing style prompts the question if the form of insecurity sought after in this thesis is then Laing’s concept of ontological insecurity. I argue that it is not - for the reason that Laing describes a state of the individual as a dysfunctional person4 beyond the possibility of healing or

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Giddens 1991:53. Giddens makes use of Laing’s diagnosis and description of individuals with ‘a fractured or no self’. See Laing, R.D., 1965, The divided self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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11 reestablishment. Laing’s concept of ‘ontological insecurity’ takes form in the field of psychology. The subject I choose to write my final thesis on is unquestionably on a tangent with psychology, and occasionally touches upon it. However, in this thesis I do not want to discuss symptomatic cases of Laing’s concept, but to understand ‘insecurity’ in the sense of ‘unsafeness’ with the self. The feeling of ‘not being at home’ with oneself. In other words, a more philosophical reflection on the notion of insecurity. Modernity is – quite rightly according to Giddens – agreed to increasingly produce mastery over all modes of life. The reflexive project of the self produces ‘programmes of actualisation and mastery’. Mastery takes on an even more prominent place; it ‘substitutes for morality’5. How can insecurity then persist? It actually does so on a wholly different level, namely an existential one, which makes it impossible to resolve with modern technocracy. The form of insecurity in high modernity is fundamentally related to the looming threat of personal meaninglessness, which according to Giddens is generally countered by day-to-day activities within internally referential systems. Yet, the internally referential quality of self and reality renders secure social and natural frameworks fragile.

The fragile status of our sense of security is due to ‘the reflexive-modern loss of extrinsic reality’6, as Coolen terms this threat that is the underlying existential issue now that the self is a reflexive project. The internally referential quality is a modernisation process that takes place on the level of the individual. The status of psychological image is important to discuss when dealing with existential matters. This is apparent in both Giddens’ structure of his book and in literature from Kierkegaard7. Although Kierkegaard aims to put Christianity as the final answer to human struggle of and in life, I agree with Habermas that the Kierkegaardian idea of a construction of a self-narrative (life history) and the absolute responsibility for oneself are relevant now and can be read in a ‘somewhat more secular way’8. The existential issues Kierkegaard raises are – still, or even increasingly more so now – recognisable. The Kierkegaardian portrait of selfhood is in fact very applicable to post-traditional questions of identity. It is his picture of the self and also what that self is, that ties in very well with Giddens’ observations of modern social life. With shifting social events as the backdrop, a person 5 Giddens 1991:9,202 6 Coolen 2002:178 7

Giddens introduces in his second chapter a stratification model for the over-all mental image of the human being to aid in the understanding of self-identity. Kierkegaard’s works on the themes of anxiety and despair carry subtitles referring to the psychological nature of his inquiry. Both are discussed in the second chapter of this thesis.

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12 needs to understand his lifespan as a unity through the achievement of inner authenticity, a term that signifies the conversion of Kierkegaard’s authenticity and Giddens’ idea of a successful self-identity; a continually reflexive understanding of the self9.

Relating this to the anecdote I described previously, it remains a question whether the teacher was perhaps trying to appeal to something different in us. If not for our self-identity, what was she asking for? There was another sensation during class. We were (or I was) just too much of a child10 to assert ourselves discursively. I had, however, already started to question who I was and what the world was. Questions you generally refer to as ‘philosophical’. These issues did not affect my self-image or identity yet. The teacher asked for a physical trait you were unhappy with or afraid others would dislike about you. I assumed that the insecurity the teacher asked for was something different from the insecurity (as opposed from security) that arises in a person when he or she recognises a form of doubt about his or her own place in world. Perhaps these two feelings of insecurity are distinct, but nonetheless related.

In my exploration of the notion of insecurity, I have coined two terms to describe the distinct ways in which an individual is confronted with insecurity in our day and age: existential and empirical insecurity. Existential insecurity I see as a more fundamental form of insecurity that is inherently related to – and thereby unavoidable in - living in high modernity. It is a form of insecurity that is related to the responsibility that we have for ourselves – the responsibility that we shape by means of the reflexive project of the self. This security is simply there, and cannot be avoided. Furthermore, with this type of insecurity, failure can only be attributed to oneself and not to any form of fate. This fundamental type of insecurity resembles the notion of anxiety as described by Kierkegaard: an individual is aware of his freedom and all the possibilities that (high modern) life encompasses; which includes the possibility of failure and the resulting sense of responsibility of oneself. This is related to the threat of meaninglessness.

The other way in which I consider insecurity, dubbed empirical insecurity, is as a more superficial form: insecurity as a result of the reflexive project of the self. This form of insecurity originates when

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Giddens 1991:215

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With ‘Child’ I suggest that the subject (I) did not have a reflexive understanding of herself. A person at 13 years old is developing conscious self-identification. Following the (probably incomplete but sufficient) psychological explanation Giddens provides. See ‘basic trust in the infant’ Giddens 1991:38-40

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13 the individual is confronted with his or her ideal self in the process of the reflexive project of the self, but is unable to achieve this. In this case, the insecurity can in fact be addressed: either by working harder to achieve the ideal self after all or by adjusting one’s expectations with respect to this ideal self.

1.1 Aim of the project

Summarising the previous, the modern form of identity is a constructed identity, created by the person himself. This self-identity is, according to Giddens, the post-traditional fashion in which safeness of existence, trust in the object-world and others is brought about. He calls this ‘the reflexive project of the self’. It is an undertaking we continually work and reflect on by creating, revising and having to maintain sets of biographical narratives11. These stories explain our past and are focused on an anticipated future. The project of the self is necessary for modern individuals to create a sense of secureness and successful self-identity. The result of this successful self-identity in turn is a stable sense of ontological security. The notion of security, as in the safeness of existence, is recognised by Giddens as a constant and a-historical component of human existence. He argues, however, that the manner and form in which this security is brought about now differs greatly from a pre-modern constitution of security and place in the world. This thesis takes as a starting point the possibility that such a transformation from the pre-modern world to modernity can also be found for insecurity. It aims to discuss the notion of insecurity on the basis of both Giddens’ and Kierkegaard’s work in order to elaborate on this notion as on the one hand an existential insecurity predominantly conceived of as an inherently necessary aspect of the reflexive project of the self, and on the other hand an empirical insecurity that is a consequence of the reflexive project of the self, as set out in the introduction.

1.2 Structure of thesis

As described previously, this thesis discusses the work of predominantly Giddens and Kierkegaard with respect to the mechanism of self-identity and the reflexive project of the self, as a way of

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14 exploring the notion of insecurity which forms the main focus of this thesis. In this exploration, it also makes use of Coolen’s work to show the function of these two types of insecurity in the typical attitudes he describes towards the problem of meaninglessness, or the so-called ‘modern predicament’.

In the first chapter of this thesis, I elaborate on the concept of modernity. In the following two chapters, I address new mechanisms of self-identity that have emerged and that shape and are shaped by modern institutions, on the basis of Giddens’ 1991 book. The second chapter particularly addresses Giddens’ account of the mental constellation of the individual. Giddens provides a picture of the psyche of the individual using philosophical and psychological insights from Kierkegaard and others, in order to explain how an individual constructs his sense of identity in high modernity. This is truly a substantial contribution of Giddens to anthropological science in general and provides ground for philosophical elaboration specifically. The terms in this picture Giddens derives from Kierkegaard are further elaborated with primary work of Kierkegaard in order to come to a better understanding of the self as a relation. The third chapter is dedicated to the modern institutions and the fashion in which processes of modernity alter our social actions. Here the threats of modernity are discussed and the way in which they impinge on the self-identity using Giddens analysis primarily. The result is an overwhelming sense of uncertainty of which we have to make sense. There are three attitudes or coping styles to deal with these threats, discussed in the fourth chapter. Lastly the thesis concludes with an exploration into the possibility that ‘insecurity’ has undergone a similar transformation as ‘ontological security’. The discussion, but moreover the combination of relation thinking, or dialectic thinking, from Giddens, Kierkegaard and Coolen, offers a philosophical perspective on the notion of insecurity in reflexive modernisation.

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Chapter 1 The concept of modernity

A preliminary understanding of all things within ‘modernity’ is provided in this first chapter. I assume most readers will have an idea of its extent and period and most importantly, its prolonging. This chapter is meant to provide an overview of the scope I take into account as backdrop for this thesis. Modernity is a post-traditional order, but does not replace the sureties and accepted habits of tradition with absolute or scientific certitude. Uncertainty remains part of life, but the forms of uncertainty prevalent in our contemporary social activities are threatening our individual existence and do so differently than uncertainty, or the unknown, did in pre-modern times. The modern organisation of uncertainty also involves responsibility. A human responsibility that continues to expand from the responsibility for personhood to the responsibility for the world at large. Giddens’ work is more concerned with the relation between global and personal and how transmutations due to modern institutions interlace with individual life. In this thesis I want to look closer at the individual self and the transmutations within an individual caused by ‘modernity’. By modernity I mean here the generalised uncertainty and modern threats that impose on our self-identity.

The German sociologist Ulrich Beck, although not the originator of the term ‘reflexive modernisation’, has used it extensively in his writings and has been one of the leading exponents of its use. Reflexive modernisation describes in essence that we are moving into a third stage of social development within modernity12. Beck’s ‘Reflexive modernisation’(1994) is a collaborative book with Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash. Giddens’ account on the self-identity and ontological security is the subject of this thesis, thus it is necessary to introduce the idea of ‘reflexive modernisation’ as the backdrop of his book Modernity and self-identity: self and society in the late modern age. In this work Giddens claims that the societal transformations are interlacing with individual life and with the self13.

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and thus, that there is no such thing as a post-modern society

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1.1 Linear and reflexive modernisation

In the introduction of Beck’s most known work, Risk society (1986), the modern society is suggested to view as replacing ‘pre-modern traditional society’ by ‘simple modernity’ which currently is developing in ‘reflexive modernity’14. This is the theoretical framework in which Giddens places his account on self-identity and the theoretical backdrop for this thesis as well. Through these stages the tacit nature of modernity can be briefly explained. It will be subject further on again more elaborately. According to Beck, traditional society was first displaced by industrial society. In this period classes emerged, wealth accumulated and rapid scientific progress advanced. These social dynamics brought the perception of modernity as being ‘linear’. Beck describes the sociology of simple and reflexive modernisation in his Reinvention of politics: rethinking modernity in the global social order (1997). Where linear modernity had the ambition to concur and overcome the forces of nature and subdue it for the benefit of humankind, the second stage of modernity deals with 'problems resulting from techno-economic development itself'15_.

Because of this shift Beck recognises the reflexive stage as distinct from the simple modernisation theory. It is in the shift in object of mastery the term 'reflexive' is meant, not as a reflection or mirror, but subject and problem for itself. In high modernity we have to tackle the problems that arise from the development of industrial society, from modernisation itself. These consequences will be uncontrollable or unforeseeable and are 'self-confronting' according to Beck16. Beck summarises several ‘fundamental assumptions of linear modernisation’. For now it sufficient to say that it is precisely this premises; the assumptions of ‘limitless growth’ (fordism), ‘the certainty of progress’ and ‘contrasting of nature and society’ that counteract the idea of a linear road to human mastery of the world. It is precisely the ‘normal, continued modernization (..) [that] breaks up the contours of classical industrial society’ 17. And doing so, we have found ourselves in the stage of reflexive modernisation. 14 Beck 1986:3 15 Beck 1997:19 16 Beck 1997:6 17 Beck 1997:23,25,12

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1.2 Uncertainties typical for modernity

For the purpose of this thesis two areas of these uncertainties, in the form of threats, shall be introduced. The epistemic and the high-consequence risk threat. Modernity institutionalises the principle of radical doubt and this philosophical concept permeates into everyday life. Claims that may be true become in principle open to revision and may have to be abandoned at some point. All knowledge takes the form of hypotheses, but since doubt, a pervasive modern feature, has entered everyday life, conviction and belief, such as religious belief in an transcendent entity (a given in traditional order) has transformed from necessity to a possibility. The high modern threat in episteme is that on the level of the individual, one’s place and even the whole world order become hypotheses in a certain way. A consequence is that the identity can no longer follow from one’s social or natural/cosmic place, but has to be established by the individual, for which he is responsible.

The second type of threat follows also from a uncertainty that is a function of modernity. Although modernity reduces the overall riskiness of life, it introduces new risk parameters largely or completely unknown to the preceding traditional social order. This type of risk unveiled itself as a negative side of the globalised character of the social systems of modernity. Late modernity, or high modernity, is apocalyptic18. Not because we are heading towards inevitable catastrophe, but because high modernity, the advancement of technology, introduces risks that are unknown to previous generations. Examples of this are nuclear weapons, the risks of ecological catastrophes or global economic crises. Again these risk scenario’s are understood as responsibilities of human kind. A global responsibility, as follows from the idea of progressing mastery of nature, society and the psyche. According to Giddens, in high modernity, distant happenings have an influence on local events, and even the intimacy of the self and this transition becomes more and more commonplace. Ultimately, modernity steers us towards the threat of personal meaninglessness. It does so because modernisation does not provide a basis for morality, it only replaces traditional sureties with tentative claims about all areas of life, organised by the scientific method of doubt. Giddens works towards the concept of ‘life politics’ to confront this issue. Life politics is a concept concerned with the self and its actualisation, in the context of a dialectic relation between local and global. He

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18 demands an encounter with specific moral dilemmas. Dilemmas which modernity institutionally excludes from facing19. It is connected to the epistemic threat I discussed above. Giddens refers to this mechanism as the ‘failed Enlightenment project’20. This particular development by which the true nature of modernity can be recognised is more substantively investigated by Maarten Coolen. I have taken his explanation into account in chapter 4 as his explanation of the threat of meaninglessness leads to the issue of our ‘attitude’ and answer to(wards) it21.

With traditional claims of value and meaning collapsing, or ‘disembedding’22, it is a prime existential question in modern times. Giddens summarises that it is life politics that should address existential questions in four domains23. Of these four domains it is the smallest nucleus that is of concern for this thesis: self-identity in the moral area of personhood. Giddens’ concept of life politics is that it binds political issues stemming from high modern the interlaced structure of self and global strategies24. This point is of limited concern in the course of this thesis. It is just the smallest domain Giddens recognises, the individual, that is the subject matter and already provides an enormous problem, a typical modern problem; the fear of meaninglessness that is an ontological side-effect’ of modernisation’. In high modernity, modernisation becoming reflexive has forced us to recognise this, as other existential issues are intrinsically flawed. Flawed in the sense that for these problems no technocratic or scientific solution can be found. That mastery cannot subdue existential matters was already recognised by Kierkegaard, be it on in the area of public media and personal commitment25. This is Giddens reason to introduce life politics; to form a bridge between the moral-ridden high modern natural, social and psychic contexts and existential questions demanding a moral value system. As such, fearing there is no meaning of life confronts the existential question of meaning and this is recognised by Giddens as the fundamental psychic threat for (late) modern individuals26.

19 Giddens 1991:9, 145, 221 20 Giddens 1991:83 21 Coolen 2002 22

Giddens 1991:17-8, 192; Beck 1992 part II, 1997:12-3,40

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Giddens 1991:209ff. See Chapter 7, ‘the Emergence of life politics’, particularly p. 227 where an overview of the existential questions is given.

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Giddens 1991:2014

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Kierkegaard’s problem with the press is discussed in chapter 2 and in the conclusions.

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1.3 Answering to modern uncertainty

The philosophical question is how individuals cope with all this? Giddens’ answer is quite simply put as ‘maintaining their ontological security and continually work on their own project and trajectory of the self’. In his book he goes on explaining how this all works, by first providing a psychological account of the human being. This and the reflexive nature of the self in high modernity is his focus. The focus of this thesis is what position insecurity has when individuals sustain their existential validation of life and existence in circumstances of high modernity. To this end I emphasise on the psychological outlook Giddens provides by supplementing his understanding with Kierkegaard’s ideas on the individual. Through reflexive processes the project of the self is internally referential organised. This ‘emergence of new mechanisms of self-identity’ give ontological security a new form, but subsequently may have implications for the position of insecurity on the level of the individual as well. Perhaps insecurity attains a fundamental seat in this modern organisation of the self. In this respect it may operate similar to Kierkegaardian anxiety and despair in the individual. If this is the case, any person who aims to eradicate feelings of insecurity, may find himself in ‘despair’ as this may be, inherent to the position of insecurity in the reflexive project of the self, impossible.

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Chapter 2 Ontological security and anxiety

The importance of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the individual for Giddens’ philosophical-antroposophic outlook on the human being is the dimension Kierkegaard’s dread, or anxiety, brings to this outlook. Kierkegaard moves beyond anxiety, taking place on the individual’s mental-emotional level to a spiritual level where anxiety comes into a relation with infinitude and becomes despair. There are three types of despair. A person can be in three conditions of despair. The despair of not realising one is in despair, the despair in which one desires to not be himself (be some other) and the despair to will to be oneself.

According to Kierkegaard every individual is in despair, it is so to say, part of what it is to be a human being. An individual who does not recognise his despair is the aesthete running from one pleasure to the other wondering how to retain his satisfaction. Once he realises his despair he is aware that he has to choose to be a better person, for himself and before god. Thus, the ethical commitment comes in sight stage. On this latter notion later more, because here I want to stress that Kierkegaard’s idea that choosing oneself is not only a possibility, but a necessity is a modern perception of the individual. Giddens’ account shows that this notion becomes even more explicit in high modern times. This chapter is deployed to first display Giddens’ philosophical-antroposophic outlook on the human being with some additional emphasis on secondary literature he uses. Secondly, I focus on Kierkegaard, one of the authors Giddens draws upon, and supply Giddens’ account with a philosophical articulation of Kierkegaard’s idea on the individual. This is done in relation to ontological security and insecurity in particular, at first limited to the terms Giddens borrows from Kierkegaard’s nineteen-century perspective on the individual in order to keep Kierkegaard relevant for the topic in this thesis. Finally, some broader ideas of Kierkegaard are treated to embed and contextualise his view of the individual and support some of my arguments further on.

The self in high modernity is an identity "... not to be found in behaviour, nor - important though it is - in the reactions of others, but in the capacity to keep a particular narrative going."27_{. This narrative}

is constructed with concepts such as 'colonisation of the future', 'risk', 'trust' and 'lifestyles'. Concepts

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21 that bundle together comprehensively understood as the ‘reflexive project of the self’, which shall be elaborated on further in this chapter. Placing Giddens in dialog with Kierkegaard this chapter aims to render Giddens’ social understanding of the self into a philosophical account of what a modern human agent is and how insecurity appears both as a fundamental aspect of the self as a reflexive project and insecurity as result of this continues process modern individuals undertake for self-identity and sense of ontological security

2.1 An introduction to Giddens’ ontological security

Giddens argues that a 'stable' sense of self-identity presupposes the acceptance of reality of things and others. These are elements of ontological security. He refers to Charles Taylor for a simple description of this state of being. 'Ontological' security can be described as 'a sense of who we are, (...) of how we have become, and of where we are going' 28. The secure part comes in when this sense of one’s identity is wholesome. According to Giddens ontological security, feeling like having a place and belonging in the world is derived from a narrative of the self. This narrative envelops past, present and future around the self and does so continually. The constant nature of perceiving one's self in time is a reflexive act. These characteristics of the modern self makes a stable sense of self-identity reflexively controlled. This continuous character can be compared to the individual who has to 'work' to 'become himself'. With this formulation I refer to the work of Søren Kierkegaard, who was (one of the) first to understand the individual as a relation and formulate a first-perspective philosophy on the human being. I presume that Kierkegaard can provide an interesting contribution to notions of security and insecurity on the level of the individual.

First, however, I discuss concisely Giddens’ terminology on the self and on the modern identity. He uses a psycho-philosophical discussion of the self as a foundation for his terminology. Here I shall reproduce his concepts on the modern self-identity first and discuss his psychological and philosophical foundation afterwards. I do so for the sake of my argumentation. I want to elaborate on the philosophical thoughts he borrows from phenomenology and existentialism, particularly of Kierkegaard’s concept of the individual and how anxiety (or dread) and despair feature in it. In this

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22 argumentation I try to work out in more detail the hypothesis that insecurity on the level of the individual has transformed comparable to ontological security, the latter of which is Giddens’ claim in Modernity and self-identity. In his work Giddens at a certain point asks and immediately describes:

“What to do? How to act? Who to be? These are focal questions for everyone living in circumstances of late modernity - and ones which, on some level or another, all of us answer, either discursively or through day-to-day social behaviour.” 29

These are existential questions and I do expect they resonate with the reader in recognition, as Giddens himself supposes so as well. Everyone has to deal with these issues that we ourselves produce and pose to ourselves as problematical. As most of us manage to maintain normal social behaviour and appear as coherent identities before others, we apparently all answer them. For Giddens, fundamentally, these answers are ‘lodged on the level of behaviour’30. Possibly for this reason, these questions are commonplace, but at the same time, they are appealing to an issue that tries to transcend the person asking them. This quality is commonly known as they are ‘difficult’ questions especially when explicitly asked.

Answering existential questions discursively is less of Giddens’ concern as his work is organised as an analysis of current social practice and phenomena to both portray and constitute the fields of social action and development31. For Giddens, to be an ontological secure person is to possess answers to fundamental existential questions, particularly on the level of the unconscious and practical consciousness32. Giddens positions the existential question of self-identity in close relation to the biography, which the individual creates for himself. The biography must continually integrate events from the external world and cannot be based purely on fictive understanding of the individual of himself. Although this reflexive act requires some level of conscious deliberation with oneself towards the outside world, it generally is not a discursive act; it is not perceived by the self as confronting an existential question, except for rare ‘fateful moment’33.

A discursive dealing with these answers is all the more treated by Søren Kierkegaard. To incorporate the modern dynamism of ‘insecurity’ I use mainly his works The concept of anxiety and The sickness 29 Giddens 1991:70 30 Giddens 1991:48 31 Giddens 1991: 2,70 32 Giddens 1991:35-7 33 Giddens 1991:54-5, 85, 112

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23 unto death. Giddens says that ‘anxiety in a certain sense comes with human liberty’ and agrees with Kierkegaard that human freedom is not a given characteristic of the individual34. This endeavour will conclude with (the possibility of) human freedom, but first I want to introduce an issue with the term ‘anxiety’. I do so by making a comparison of the use and understanding of this term by both Giddens and Kierkegaard. The importance of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the individual for Giddens’ philosophical-antroposophic outlook on the human being is the extensiveness Kierkegaard’s anxiety (or dread) contributes to this outlook. Giddens’ account shows that this becomes even more explicit in high modern times.

2.2 The self: a reflexive project

Giddens says considering individuality purely as a modern phenomenon would be imprecise. With this position he opposes the perspectives of Baumeister and Durkheim on the traditional individual. Paraphrased, their stance can be comprised in the claim that the ‘individual’ did not exist in traditional cultures and individuality had no place in it. Individuality here is aligned with modern phenomena of labour and other emergent dynamics of modern societies. The individual is part of these emerging social forces. However, Giddens does not think the existence of ‘the individual’ ‘as a distinctive feature of modernity (..) and even less so the self’35 is at stake. He argues that individuality, to varying limits, is present in traditional societies. He tracks something different about the individual as particular to modernity. He says we should forget the general terms of individual and self. Instead, he proposes to analyse the traits of the modern self in further detail. The self:

- is seen as a reflexive project,

- forms a trajectory of development from past to anticipated future, - is continuous and all-pervasive,

- presumes narrative of the self, - actualisation’s control of time, - extends to the body,

- balances risk and opportunity,

34

Giddens 1991:47. Giddens interprets Kierkegaard’s idea of freedom as a derivative of a grip of external reality and personal identity.

35

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24 - actualisation of authenticity

- perceives the life course as series of passages - is internally referential36

Giddens asks us to hold questions on the validity of these conceptions as they ‘hold something real about self and self-identity in the contemporary world – the world of late modernity’37. Giddens does so by connecting them to institutional transformations of high modernity. This will be discussed in relation to lifestyle and choice, where I will make a connection to Kierkegaard., but first I discuss Giddens’ conceptions of the self and focus on the set that brings us closer to the modern form of insecurity on the level of the individual.

The first three of these conceptions are main features in which the modern individual can be set apart from a traditional self. Through these main characteristics other elements listed above will be incorporated as well. First and far most has to be noted that the self is a reflexive project. It carries responsibility for its own development. We are what we make of ourselves. Being responsible, the awareness of this for one’s identity is the most important feature of a modern individual. This opens an entirely new type of risk to the existence into being. The risk of not living up to our own expectations is now a source of anxiety and related to the notion of an ‘ideal self’38_{and risk the}

possibility to be ‘overwhelmed by shame’39. Responsibility being one of the many contributors to the risk society we live in40. Giddens stresses that this does not mean that a traditional self does not face risk. What is at stake for a self in high modernity is the ‘secular consciousness of risk’41 that are inherent part of the control of time and construction of a trajectory. The self actively engages the future, thought to be full of possibilities, by producing calculative strategies to access the opportunities of the future. The self is actively oriented towards risks by relating an anticipated future to their goals and narrative.

36

Giddens 1991:74-80; Here Giddens provides a summary of traits of a modern self, informed by a psychological self-help book (titled Self-therapy, by Rainwater, 1989).

37 Giddens 1991:80 38 Giddens 1991:68 39 Giddens 1991:178 40

The new found responsibility for the self creates new threats to existence and therefore require a different form of ontological security. At the end of this chapter this will be further discussed and phenomena posing threats on an existential level is the topic of the next chapter.

41

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25 Secondly, the self forms a trajectory from the past to the anticipated future. This trajectory is coherent from cognitive awareness of phases of lifespan. The lifespan is in this narrative a dominant foreground figure. Opposed to a more traditional self, outside events or institutions are of less relevance and are only taken into the trajectory when they give support for the self-development. Thirdly, the reflexivity of the self is continuous. As it is reflexive, it does so in a continuant fashion. Both the past and the future can be differently perceived along the course of one's life trajectory. The previous two elements are constituent for the forth element; that self-identity presumes a narrative. The narrative of the self is explicit. The emergence of the genre autobiography is at the core of modern social life. Every person has such a literary work for himself to place events, lifestyle and the sort. This narrative has to be worked on, as the self is reflexive and one's shifted outlook requires to adjust the narrative.

The self-identity is to be found in the capacity to a continues narrative, not the particular narrative itself, but the ability to form a biography that integrates events from the external world into the trajectory of the self and thus reaffirms its identity. The capacity to self-identity is not equal to the construction of a narrative, but in the definition to 'keep a particular... going' is a specific sense of 'purely self-centredness' hidden. By this I mean that self-identity is a term comprising of several traits that enable an individual to personhood. Keeping a particular narrative going entails the capacity to adaptation of the narrative (without damaging its value), the projected lifespan under change and the capacity to execute transitions to life-planning. All these sectors have to be reflexively controlled and put in accordance in the narrative of the self. Modern self-identity supposes the capacity to relate the external world to the personal. Capacity here can also indicate the capacity to choose, the possibility of human freedom is in sight. This will be further discussed in paragraph 2.6.

The four existential questions Giddens discusses are the existence and being, finitude and human life, the experience of others and the continuity of self-identity. These questions are treated using Laing’s study of fractured or disables senses of self. This is what Laing calls an ontological insecure individual. The traits of a normal sense of self-identity is the obverse, according to Giddens. These are (i) a feeling of biographical continuity, able to grasp reflexively and communicate, (ii) has established a protective cocoon, (iii) ability to accept the integrity of this in itself as worthwhile42.

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26 This understanding of a human identity is radically different from pre-modern times, where a cosmic order was unquestioned and to which individuals were subjected and subjected themselves to. In this sense someone's faith meant her life's purpose was preordained, but a mystery until it disclosed itself. Faith currently has a different meaning, but not as radically different according to Giddens. Giddens concludes on his discussion of anxiety that it is a “generalised state of the emotions of the individual”43 that does not follow repression of, but that repression and behavioural symptoms associated with it are created by anxiety. Anxiety is fear that has lost its object and is ‘free-floating’ on an unconscious level. Contrary to some contemporary psychological theories Giddens believes that anxiety is both normal and neurotic. “normal because the mechanism of the basic security system always involve anxiety-generating elements, and neurotic in the sense that anxiety ‘has no object’, in Freud’s usage of that phrase.”44

2.3 Psychic stratification of the individual

As explained in the introduction of this chapter the psychological up building Giddens employs to attach his first concepts on the modern mechanisms of self-identity to have been discussed prior to this psychological outlook. It is his psychological outlook and the particular use of anxiety and other references to Kierkegaard that I want to take a closer look at by comparing his terminology of the self with that of Kierkegaard.

To draw the overall picture of psychological make-up of the human, Giddens’ point of departure is founded in the phenomenology, with strong references to Husserl in particular. But the elements Giddens borrows from Kierkegaard and existentialism in general I consider paramount for the topic and purpose of this thesis. The layers of this image are based on various strands of philosophical thought on the individual and self in the world, borrowed from several modern philosophers, of which phenomenology (Husserl) and existentialism (Kierkegaard) are key contributors. The first because he sets out from the premise that ‘to be a human being is to know, virtually all the time, (..) both what one is doing and why one is doing it45’. Habits and social conventions are reflexively

43 Giddens 1991:43 44 Giddens 1991:43 45 Giddens 1991:35

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27 monitored by the agent. This phenomenological premise and the concept of natural attitude are influences of Husserl. The latter contributor to Giddens’ psychological image of the individual is more determinative, both in terminology as in spherical setting.

2.3.1 Phenomenological foundations

Giddens sets of with the premise that all humans know ‘virtually all the time’ what and why they are doing something. They ‘continuously monitor the circumstances of their activity as a feature of doing what they do, and such monitoring always has discursive features’. Individuals have a reflexive awareness that is characteristic of all human action, but this is not discursive per se46. Giddens connects this premise to the idea of a stratified human knowledgeability; consciousness, unconscious and non-conscious. He argues that many of the elements of being able to 'go on' are carried at the level of practical consciousness.

This practical consciousness can be related to Husserl’s concept of ‘natural attitude’. From a phenomenological perspective, in everyday life, we see the objects of our experience such as other people and things as real and simply existent. In our daily lives we do not question everything that exist: we perceive our experiences as facts. This attitude, which is inherently not recognised as a perspective, is termed the “natural attitude” by Edmund Husserl47. Giddens takes the inherently tacit quality of the natural attitude as ‘integral to the reflexive monitoring of action, but it is ‘non-conscious’. Here Giddens prepares the ground for an understanding of ontological security on a deep, psychological level. This exposes the playing field of the ontological security, which has practical consciousness as the cognitive and emotive basis and is characteristic for large sections of human activity, regardless of culture48. Giddens point here is that the notion of ontological security is not only not culture-bound, but also not historical. This means that a sense of ontological security is an element of human existence in general. By placing ontological security in the fundamental psychological make-up of the human being, it is a fundamental element of human existence. Its function is to enable individuals to engage successfully in social activities by creating an ‘as if’ environment facing existential issues. Giddens continues on the topic of practical consciousness that

46 Giddens 1991:35 47 Husserl 1982:5 48 Giddens 1991:36

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28 it provides ‘modes of orientation which, on the level of practice, ‘answer’ the questions which could be raised about the frameworks of existence.’ 49.

Giddens tries to show that modernisation is not the cause of the need of a sense of ontological security, it has an effect on this type of security. Existential questions, presumed to be posed by all human beings, concern the meaning of life and what our identity is. It is the way in which we answer these questions that have altered in modern times. This dealing with existential issues is done within the sphere of the natural attitude as long as the individual has a sense of continuity and order in events. It is this latter condition that is of interest to Giddens. The perception of the self as a continuity is what he calls ‘ontological security’, but, as he claims this security has drastically changed in the fashion it is brought about. In this regard the terms ‘attitude’ and ‘answer’ are of interest.

2.3.2 Basic trust

From Basic trust surfaces everywhere Giddens ventures in to dealing in modern social life. It is a core constituent of every aspect of the modern self, of the traits discussed in 2.2. Apart from establishing an early sense of ontological security in the infant, it also is called upon in several social and personal environments where risk is involved. Giddens explains how basic trust:

- Keeps ‘feelings of dread’ under control that otherwise might surface - Is necessary element of pure relationships

- Aids cultivated risk-taking and demonstration of courage - Directly and pervasively related to shame (more than is guilt)50

The basic trust children built up in early childhood is an ‘emotional inoculation’ against doubt. Basic trust is the main support of a protective cocoon. In this sense it protects from feelings of anxiety that might surface. This psychological based notion of (unconscious) control over anxiety relates closely to Giddens’ explanation of the base of ontological security. The base of ontological security lies, according to Giddens and Erikson, in the development of a basic trust established by the socialization of infants in their first human contact with their caretakers. From this a first sense of security arises

49

Giddens 1991:37

50

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29 that counters diffused anxieties. Giddens formulates via these rather psychological premises, the sociological concept of ontological security.

You do not think about yourself normatively or how you occur to others51. Basic trust, or trust in general as it is applied by Giddens I want to relate to Kierkegaard’s notion of faith, since trust counteracts anxieties and faith is the only way for a person to not be in despair.

2.4 An issue with the status and origin of anxiety

Following Giddens’ depiction of fencing off anxiety by developing a protective cocoon a psycho-biological concept of ‘anxiety’ is established52. I am not going to argue if and if so exclusively anxiety’s origin lies in early psychic development, but Giddens’ usage of the term may limit the understanding of anxiety and possibly miss the extent with which Kierkegaard employed this term. Maybe Giddens takes the notion of ‘anxiety’ too narrow when he says that “Anxiety has its seeds in fear of separation from the prime caretaking agent..”. By this statement he restrains the playground of anxiety to the psychological. Giddens follows Winnicott and indirectly ideas from Freud in this instance. The result is trust, or ‘basic trust’ as the remedy for anxiety53.

This notion differs from Kierkegaard’s understanding of anxiety considering the respective arena’s of development psychology and ‘religiousness’, but first I want to point out a similarity. Both Giddens and Kierkegaard agree that anxiety is a universal phenomenon, but they differ, with great implications, in the moment of universality. For Giddens anxieties are at hand in early human development of infant and child. In this period they establish a protective cocoon that enables them also in adulthood to carry on in daily activities without major existential issues. In the latter anxiety is a human disposition of which no escape is possible and a remedy or solution lies not at all in trust in caretakers or the external world or even in a ‘protective cocoon which all normal individuals carry around (..) as a means whereby they are able to get on with the affairs of day-to-day life’54. For

51 Giddens 1991:35-40 52 Giddens 1991:37-42 53 Giddens 1991:45-6 54 Giddens 1991:40

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30 Kierkegaard, this ‘solution’ would be an aesthetic attempt to not deal with it properly. What is proper and what is aesthetic will be subject of discussion later on.

In an attempt to mimic the imagine-provoking writing style of Kierkegaard, I propose an analogy of young and inexperienced prison guards as the psychological based idea of the protective cocoon. Giddens’ explanation to deal with anxiety for Kierkegaard would be as the decision of these inexperienced prison guards to delay the execution of a dangerous murderer until further notice and keep him tucked in an insufficiently safe prison that is in desperate need for structural renovation. All because they don’t know where the execution field is and how to follow this procedure at all. These guards are bound to find that their prisoner at a given point in time will be at large and there are no means at their disposal anymore to control him.

Maybe not the most refined analogy, but what I am driving at is that for Kierkegaard, ‘trust’ will not be sufficient to establish a psychic balance of an individual and let him cope with anxiety. The mechanism Giddens describes would contain feelings of insecurity, whereas in Kierkegaard’s terminology anxiety can be eliminated, but only through genuine ethical commitment, through faith – as the opposite of sin55. The prisoner obviously stands for anxiety, but once broken free, he has developed into despair. It is despair that is of existential importance to the individual. To Kierkegaard, despair is ‘the sickness unto death’. His similarly named work on despair will be used to draw the concept of anxiety and of the self in a more philosophical understanding. This will help understand anxiety in a fundamental existential relation to the disposition of the human being, his reliance on faith56 and ultimately, human freedom.

2.5 Ontic anxiety and existential despair

Anxiety is maybe not merely a fear that has lost its object, although in ordinary usage it may be well be precisely this if it has an externally constituted object. The distinction between fear and anxiety as neurotic and normal anxiety is dismissed by Giddens in favour of an explanation that says all anxiety is both normal and neurotic. Giddens says anxiety ‘depends fundamentally on unconscious

55

Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus) 1980:124

56

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31 operations’, so both faculties of anxiety lie within the unconscious as well. He reasons that anxiety is normal, because it is part of the human psychological organisation that generates elements of anxiety and it is also neurotic, because it ‘has no object’ in Freud’s sense of the phrase. A little bit further Giddens continues that anxiety has its origin in fear of separation from the prime caretakers. My understanding is that his explanation of anxiety carries a lot further into psychology and Freud’s psychoanalysis than Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety (and despair for that matter). Kierkegaard would have agreed with Giddens that anxiety is both normal and neurotic, but his explanation would lie in the universality of anxiety, because it is a qualification of spirit and relates to the eternal in man. Kierkegaard understands anxiety as a quality of spirit. Spirit is the third entity in which the human synthesis of psychical and physical are united. To Kierkegaard, anxiety ‘differs altogether from fear and similar concepts that refer to something definite’. The object of anxiety is nothing57. Maybe in this sense he could agree with Giddens when he borrows Freud’s ‘no object is anxiety’ idea, as only definite things can be object of fear. Although also for Kierkegaard anxiety is clearly dependant on unconscious operations (a man can be in despair [a deeper expression for anxiety] and not know he is in despair)58, this definition in psychological terms is transcended by Kierkegaard when he defines anxiety as ‘freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibilities’59. Here hints of the deeper issue Kierkegaard actually addresses with his notions of anxiety and despair come about.

With his concept of the self as a reflexive project Giddens understands the modern self as a relation that relates itself to itself, since it monitors its actions reflexively and sustains a self-identity similarity. This sort of understanding of the individual is also present in Søren Kierkegaard’s concept of the self. In the Point of View for My Work as an Author, where he contemplates his own work in retrospect, it can be understood as “related to Christianity, to the problem ‘of becoming a Christian,’ with a direct or indirect polemic against the monstrous illusion we call Christendom, or against the illusion that in such a land as ours all are Christians of a sort”60. Although Christianity is in not the subject I wish to discuss, it is related as the end, the solution, to the disposition of despairing human beings as synthesis of physical and psychical, of finitude and infinitude. It is Kierkegaardian despair and its forms and shapes that is of interest to me. Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘becoming’ or ‘choosing 57 Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus) 1980:17; 2014:50-53 58 Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus) 1980:42-4 59

Kierkegaard (Vigilius Haufniensis) 2014:51

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32 thyself’ can be related to the Giddens’ concept of ‘reflexive project of the self’ . The idea that the self is a relation and self-chosen is key to Kierkegaard’s understanding of the individual. Giddens’ concepts of lifestyle and biography tie in well with these notions. Where it is the task for each individual, with man as the centre of all things, to create essence or meaning61 out of the contingent facts of his existence. For the reason the Kierkegaardian portrait of despair and the self is discussed.

2.6 Despair as the sickness

In The sickness unto death Kierkegaard lets Anti-Climacus62 provide a detailed account of the development of the self. In this context ‘despair’ must be set apart from the common meaning of the word, which I refer to here as ‘psychological despair’. This concept is evoked in many references Giddens makes to anxiety when he relates it to basic trust in psychological development of the individual63. Similar to the differentiation of fear and anxiety in paragraph 2.2 we can consider psychological despair in ontic terminology, because we can identify their causes and provide explanations for our despair. It’s solution is a matter of reorientation or acceptation of that particular situation. Existential despair, the subject of The sickness unto death is fundamentally different. Anti-Climacus discusses a despair that refers to an inner darkness of the structures of the self. Despair constituted over the disclosure of the futility of existence as-such. This despair cannot be ‘overcome’ as the previous sort, because it has no specific cause. Despair is never grounded in something outside of ourselves; it emanates from within and may be projected outwards. If we conclude we despair over something external, something in the world, we are wrong. We despair over ourselves. 2.5.1 The self as synthesis

At the start of part one of the sickness unto death a dense passage on the essence of the human being. Many important concepts of the self are taken into account in this somewhat cryptic opening. I choose to provide it here in full and afterwards discuss elements in detail.

61

The loss of extrinsic reality, or the modern predicament’ as it is often referred to in this thesis will be discussed in chapter four and further.

62

In the introduction of The sickness unto death H. Hong comments that ‘Anti’ does not mean ‘against’, but is an old prefix of ‘anticipate’ (before me), see xxii. The work concerns an idealised Christianity. Anti-Climacus is a ‘higher’ Christian than Johannes Climacus. Anti-Climacus is a pseudonym Kierkegaard uses not to deceive, but to distance himself humbly.

63

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33 “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; the self is not the relation but is the relation's relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self.

In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.” 64

The self is a mediating activity (relation’s relating) that resides within opposites. Kierkegaard retains here the oppositions that in Hegelian theory would be lifted in synthesis of thesis and antithesis. This is precisely why he opposed Hegelianism. Kierkegaard cherished the contradictions that are in play in the human self65. For Kierkegaard the self is found in the activity of the relation. This does remind of Giddens reflexive project of the self, as it is a continues activity to sustain coherence of self. The self’s quality (activity), a dynamic that Giddens might understand as internal referentiality, is for Kierkegaard evidence that it originates from God. He says:

“If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation." 66

This dynamic aspect of the self ‘the positive third’ possesses the possibility to relate itself back to God. This is where the oppositions or contradictions come in again. If we would possess a static essence, than we would be unable to perform an inner dialogue, let alone relate ourselves to God, is what Kierkegaard seems to be saying. The elastic nature of the self is essential for Kierkegaard’s psychology. Anti-Climacus says that ‘there can only be two forms of despair in the strict sense’. Why it is necessary that the ‘relation that relates itself to itself’ has to be established by another and not by itself is because in the last instance it would only make one form of despair possible; ‘to will to do away with oneself’, but not be ‘in despair to will to be oneself’. Ultimately, all despair can be traced

64

Kierkegaard (Anti-Climacus) 1980:13

65

See particularly section ‘A. Despair considered without regard to its being conscious or not, consequently only with regard to the constituents of the synthesis’.

66

Insecure self-confidence: an exploration into the notion of insecurity in reflexive modernisation