psychologist with what he needed, ready at hand, “just as in a well-equipped
house one does not need to go down to the street to fetch water, but has it
piped upstairs under pressure.” And Anti-Climacus—as the pseudonymous
author of this new work styled himself—was also familiar with life in a
modern city. This is made clear by his repeated mention of false doors as
metaphors for the inaccessible and mysterious regions of the self (“In the
deeper sense, the entire question of the self becomes a kind of false door in
the background of his soul, behind which there is nothing”). It also emerges
from the depiction of a grand prospect of the self as a construction, the self
as the house of I: “Imagine a house, consisting of a cellar, a ground floor,
and a second floor, occupied and furnished in such a manner that either
there is or is supposed to be a difference in social class between the occupants
of each floor. And if you would compare what it is to be a human being
with such a house, then unfortunately it is both lamentable and ridiculous
that most people prefer to live in the cellar of their own house. Every human
being is a psycho-physical synthesis intended to be spirit—that is the build-
ing—but he prefers to live in the cellar, in the domain of the senses. More-
over, he does not merely prefer to live in the cellar—no, he loves it to such
a degree that he is indignant if someone suggests to him that he move into
the ‘belle e ́tage’ [the second floor], which is vacant and available for his occu-
pancy, because it is his own house he is living in, after all.”
“To Poetize God into Something a Bit Different”
As a rule, Kierkegaard himself lived on the attractivebelle e ́tage, but he was
quite familiar with the cellar dweller’s demonicdownwardinclination, one
of the many forms of despair.The Sickness unto Deathcontains a series of
detailed diagnoses of a person’s desirenotto want to be himself or herself, to
be anything and everything other than oneself, not merely a more successful
version of oneself but really—perhaps most preferably—to be no self what-
ever, an anonymous being, just like “the others,” “a copy,” “a number,
part of the multitude.” Anti-Climacus calls this desire “despair,” defining it
further as “sin.” He states this formulaically in his book’s second major
subdivision: “Sin is:Before God, or with the conception of God, in despair not to
want to be oneself, or in despair to want to be oneself.”
In this same section, Anti-Climacus presents us with a “poet existence
tending toward the religious,” and he explains that from a Christian point
of view such an existence is “sin, the sin of poetizing instead of being, of
relating oneself to the good and the true via the imagination instead of being
it—that is, striving existentially to be it.” This has been heard before in