DE Weekly: Mortality, Psyche, & Kierkegaard At a Graveside
Below is an archived email originally sent on April 27, 2026.
Mortality, Psyche, & Kierkegaard At a Graveside
The English word “psyche” comes from the Greek psyche (𝜓𝜐 𝜒𝜂′), meaning soul, self, life, mind, or inner being. It derives from the word psucho (𝜓𝜐 𝜒𝜔), meaning “breath” or “to breathe.” This is because the psyche, that is, the soul, is the animating energy behind the self in each person.
In the modern day, I wish we would treat the words “psyche” and “soul” in the English language as interchangeable. They should be, in fact; after all, when one feels one’s soul is lacking in something they seek a psychologist.
I’ve read before (it escapes me where and when) that the feeling of depression comes as a result of your soul––your psyche––rejecting your current existence.
In a philosophical sense, if you are living a life that is unfulfilling and untrue to your inner self, your psyche will ultimately reject it, manifesting a feeling of deep unease within you. “I am not happy with the life we are living,” your psyche tells you.
It is urging you to change something, to live differently; instead of the way you have been going, it is calling you to live meaningfully.
Søren Kierkegaard, the early nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian often called the father of Existentialism, wrote of a man who read the obituary column in his morning newspaper, and was shocked to find his own name in it: he did not know that he had died because he had never lived.
In his Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, Kierkegaard’s “At a Graveside” meditates on death. Specifically, it explores how death can be a teacher of earnestness.
For Kierkegaard––indeed, this is true for most of the existentialists––contemplating our own mortality can provide a profound sense of peace in our lives, allowing us to realize the immense level of personal responsibility we all have in order to live an authentic life (one lived in earnestness).
The earnestness we are supposed to feel and act with comes from the solemnity of death itself. Death is indeed a solemn teacher, and this is not lost on Kierkegaard: that each of us lead a finite existence will surely cause each of us some level of distress at some point.
However, rather than avoiding the thought of death by treating it as a distant and abstract event, Kierkegaard suggests we engage in a state of honest reflection before God to truly understand our mortality, and the responsibility that comes with it.
The message communicated in “At a Graveside” is this: if we reflect on and understand that we could suffer an uncertain death, say, the second we walk out of the door in the morning, it creates within us an instinct of action.
Why waste time on those things that do not matter, on those things that are morally and spiritually empty? On things that do not fulfill our psyche?
Standing at a graveside of someone no longer living is sometimes what it takes, Kierkegaard proved, to have such insight.
What will we feel when death puts his icy hand on our shoulder and says to us, Det er forbid (It is over)?
Kierkegaard's Christianity informed all of his philosophy. It’s no surprise, then, that he adopted the ancient etymology of the word psyche, calling the human being a “spirit” that sculpts itself by relating to itself and to God.
He saw the sculpting of the soul as an act of becoming: it is something that must be worked on throughout our lives, enduring the long battle of life in the world so we might preserve our soul in eternity.
To do this, Kierkegaard argued, we must endure “the sickness unto death” (a Biblical reference and a symptom detailed in his 1849 book of the same name), finding a way to live authentically by aligning our actions with our conscience––our conscience, that is to say, God.
The “sickness unto death” is despair, and for Kierkegaard, there are two main kinds of despair, one being better than the other.
The first form of despair is to will to be oneself (before God), and the second is not to will to be oneself.
The “good” kind of despair is the former. If you stand before God, it means you stand in that earnest reflection Kierkegaard described you feel at a graveside; in this state, you can will to be yourself (your true Self), and nurture your psyche.
On the other hand, if you will not to be yourself, you are denying your psyche its desire, the desire of the soul, that of the true Self.
Kierkegaard’s Christianity separates him in many regards from the later existentialists, many of whom were atheists. Interestingly, though, on the issue of the “soul” (the psyche), they are not too far apart.
A popular existentialist idea was that, whether or not a soul existed, a Self did exist, and the true Self was shaped in the same way a soul is: through active “soul making” choices that move you out of a state of Bad Faith and into one of conscious earnestness.
To start this newsletter, I explained how a feeling of depression can come from you leading an existence that is not in line with the desire of your soul, your psyche.
Your psyche rejects such an existence because it is not the life you are supposed to be living. Because it is not meaningful.
If we do feel depressed then, like we are leading meaningless lives that leave our souls empty, what are we to do? How does one orient the body toward the desire of the soul?
Shed the Ego, and realize the Self.
In other words, let go of everything that doesn’t matter, and pursue everything that does. This can be accomplished by turning inward, like Kierkegaard instructed, and asking the psyche what is most meaningful to you.
“Am I living my life?”, you should ask. The answer is: only if you are serving the psyche, the soul.
It is not what you say, what you do, or what you feel, it’s what it does inside of you––is it really good and really meaningful, or are you serving the desires of the Other rather than that of your own soul?
“I found I had less and less to say, until finally, I became silent, and began to listen. I discovered in the silence, the voice of God.” –– Søren Kierkegaard
Thanks for reading.
Sincerely,
Brandon J. Seltenrich
P.S.––
I have been reading a lot of Kierkegaard recently, and he has rapidly risen as one of my top philosophers and writers. I can’t recommend his writings enough.
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