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Gordon Marino more than anyone has sought to bring the ethical and moralpsychological precepts to be found in Kierkegaard’s writings to bear on today’s society. The most general of these, it can be claimed, is Kierkegaard’s stress on not blurring important distinctions. The distinction Marino takes up is that between psychological and spiritual disorder, a distinction that Kierkegaard makes much of but is nowadays “effaced” by an age that treats what we still might want to call spiritual disorders as though they were ailments to be put right by handing ourselves over to professionals. The distinction is traced in Kierkegaard’s journal entries concerning his personal depression (Marino’s term for Tungsind). One from 1846 Marino finds particularly relevant. It contains a notion (of spirit as a relation to the psychosomatic compound that we are) that enters into the argument both of The Concept of Anxiety and of The Sickness unto Death and also occurs in Postscript, a work completed by the end of that same year. The entry says that Kierkegaard’s unhappiness is due to some disharmony between soul and body but that this does not affect his spirit. This implication is that he is still in principle able to observe, grasp, and perhaps also deal with this discord. But as Marino suggests , it seems that Kierkegaard himself never gets rid of his depression. Indeed, depression in this sense is something very hard to get rid of except perhaps by procedures far more drastic than the use of powders and pills. One is stuck with one’s depression, or melancholy, but in Kierkegaard’s case, thanks to this spiritual dimension, we find someone able to hold it at a distance, have it as a topic, even make a career out of it. The authorship, as Marino notes, was not just “from first to last” a religious undertaking; it was also the author’s way of dealing with (though not getting rid of) his depression. Why not go further and include the religion itself? Marino mentions Peter 11. Kierkegaard on Melancholy and Despair AlastairHannay 148 · Alastair Hannay Christian Kierkegaard, the elder brother whose depression finally caught up with him, the former bishop ending his days as a ward of state. Might it not fairly be said that it was the elder brother’s faith that actually caused his depression ? That it did so by presenting him with a set of ready-made models of conduct and attitude that in the end he found he had been unable to emulate? In Søren’s case the models are grabbed hold of and subjected to an acute scrutiny. Then it is not just the undertaking itself, with its opportunity to exercise and demonstrate mental and literary skills, that saves him from drowning in his depression ; what puts him above it is also the picture of religion that his religious undertaking brought to light. Kierkegaard takes over religion, steals it from the hands of those who administer it. In its concisely drawn nosology of despair, The Sickness unto Death, which (along with Practice) is the culmination of the religious undertaking, consigns the whole of Denmark, if not humankind, to despair (and sin). The work, at its close, seems clearly to be nailing its indictment of Christendom on the door of the primate himself. Marino’s essay invites yet another reflection. It stresses Kierkegaard’s often recorded attachment to his own melancholy. One might consider this as analogous to the way that Karl Marx’s proletariat saw things as they were because under the weight of an exploitation others were unwilling or unable to detect or to describe. Kierkegaard writes as though the melancholic who seizes the opportunity to be active enjoys privileged access to truth. Being “in the power of a congenital mental depression” puts one in the best position from which to appreciate the help that God offers and, accordingly, to grasp what God’s love really means. That is, so long as the hope that the knowledge that one is in despair is not lost sight of in the hopelessness that results from the distinction between depression and despair being effaced. Depression may be a state one is stuck with, but the analysis of despair shows how it is possible either to drown oneself in it or to rise above it, putting it to constructive use. One can even end up praising God that one has been given it. Marino’s other main focus is on how...

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