Who is this pallid figure, listless as the shade of someone dead?

Ah my first post. Like cracking open a bottle of 2 dollar wine. Cheap thrills.
With my first post I shall analyze my favorite essay by Kierkegaard, The Unhappiest One, but first a brief synopsis of this book.

Kierkegaard wrote this book under a pseudonym, who is only referred to as The Editor. In the book, the introduction, the Editor buys an escritoire (a fancy desk) and discovers a false bottom filled with papers. He organizes these papers and discovers they were written by two distinct men. The first man is an aestheticist, the second an ethicist. The Editor then organizes these pages according to each writer and then publishes them. Referring to the authors as A and B. This book is these two sets of papers.

Now, The Unhappiest One is an essay by A, the aestheticist, and it tackles the rather morbid question "who deserves to be the unhappiest"

The passage is set as a speech, as most passages are, to a group called the Symparanekremonoi (try saying that when you're drunk) which loosely translates to "The Society of the Dead" He opens by saying that in England there is a grave, the grave is empty and its tombstone merely says "the unhappiest one" (TUO). A then begins his mission to discover who can to gain this title.

After some prattling on, A concludes from his Hegelian source that the source of sadness for TUO is from memory and that being unhappy stems from being absent in the present and living in the past or future. He further specifies that these two people are either "remembering" or "hoping" He also produces a small factoid, saying that unhappiness cannot stem from a single blow and that this single blow still leaves him present and not absent. This shows that TUO has had a lifetime of sadness.

A now examines the sadness of the individual who lives in the future, or lives for hope. He explains this by saying that the individual who hopes renounces his past, stays out of the present and looks constantly towards the future. However, he says that the hoping individual can only be unhappy if he loses his hope, finds another one, loses it and finds it and is therefore periodically absent in the future, thus unhappy.

Here we can see the key ideal starting to form, that to be happy, you must always be present in either the past, present or future. He applies the same rule to those that remember, but this is not explained as well. A also explains another rule of happiness, that in order for these two types of individuals to be happy, their conscious must have a reality. Lets take the hoping individual. If he looks to a future that is unreal and cannot happen, then he will eventually lose this hope and find another one. However with the remembering individual this is not explained as well, instead we are provided with examples, my personal favorite is that of the teacher.

This example is of a person whom has never had a childhood, his years just passed him by without discovering any joy or significance. He became a teacher and now we sees everything he missed out on by examining his students and looks back on his reality and regrets. Although this does not really fit the two rules above it is a perfect candidate of TUO

"Unhappy individuals who hope never have the same pain as those who remember. Hoping individuals always have a more gratifying disappointment. The unhappiest one will, therefore, will always be found among the unhappy rememberers"

Now this passage is eternally fascinating to me due to its ambiguity. Does the term gratifying disappointment signify some sort of happiness, or does it mean that it just means less. Even then, how can one quantify the level of happiness in disappointment. Although all of those who know aesthetics know this statement is true, how can you identify the greater sadness between those who hope and those who remember?

Now that we have examined the two primary forms, lets look at how A sees a combination of these two. As a simple rule before proceeding, he tells us that hope stops us from remembering and that remembering stops us from hoping. This passage is possible one of the more difficult sections of the book to understand, so I will be brief.

The form of the combination individual is thus, he hopes for something he should remember but his hope is constantly disappointed because his hope has moved further in a timeline, but he has also experienced this same hope.

This section completely pushes the boundaries of aesthetic thought and a confounding problem due to its inherent duality, so here is this section which shows his supposed mental anguish.

"He has no passion, not because he lack it, but because in that same instant he has the opposite, he has no time for anything, not because his time is taken up with something else, but because he has no time at all. He is powerless, not because he lacks strength, but because his own strength makes him impotent"

Now we have examined all of the forms of unhappiness and A starts listing and describing some of the contenders that have come to claim the title of TUO. We see a young girl, who is revealed as Niobe. According to Greek legend, her children and her husband were killed, so she fled to Mount Sipylus where she turned to stone and wept.

We see the biblical figure Job, who lost all he had to his God. His children, his wife, servants, house and everything he owned, all because God made a bet with the devil that Job would still praise his name despite his suffering.

We see a Martyr that was broken by the world, he carried too much shoulders and he cracked under the pressure. Although he wished to be a martyr for his cause, he was burned alive for his beliefs instead of being nailed to the cross. Even the smallest detail that goes wrong in your cause, even if you achieve it, will taint the victory.

We see a woman whose husband was unfaithful. She cannot hate him because she cannot remember and sorrow because he was not a deceiver, nor can she hope for him because he was a riddle. Here we see the combination of unhappiness. She is forever stuck in a limbo, in heartache for her lost love.

And now we see him, The Unhappiest One. Much to my annoyance, he was barely described in a philosophical sense, instead A chose to ramble on about how he deserved the title of TUO. Even A pointed out this direct ambiguity at the end of the passage.

"See, language fails and thought is confounded; for who is the happiest but the unhappiest, and who the unhappiest except the happiest. And what is life but madness, and faith but folly, and hope but reprieve, and love but salt in the wound"

So in the end we are not sure who TUO is. All we know and are left with is that TUO is actually still alive. When A addresses his council when TUO arrives, he is actually joyous at the sight of him. He even directly says to TUO "may no one understand you, but all envy you" Again we can see a duality referring to unhappiness. If he is the unhappiest, then should he be, by the quotation in the previous paragraph, the happiest?
-Deimos-