Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

KIERKEGAARD AND PHILOSOPHY

Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays makes seventeen of the most important papers on Kierkegaard available in one place for the first time. Their author, renowned Kierkegaard scholar Alastair Hannay, has substantially revised many of his earlier essays and prepared three new essays especially for this volume. In the first part, Alastair Hannay concentrates on Kierkegaard’s central philosophical writings, offering closely text-based accounts of the salient concepts Kierkegaard uses. The second part looks at other thinkers treatments of shared themes including Aquinas on despair. Wittgenstein on theChristian faith, and Lukàcs on subjectivity and shows their relevance to interpretations of Kierkegaard. The concluding chapter provides a reason Kierkegaard himself would give for disagreeing with those who claim his texts are infinitely interpretable. The collection is held together with a new introduction to each part, and a new preface explaining the justification behind this volume. Written by the world’s foremost Kierkegaard scholar and translator, Kierkegaard and Philosophy is an indispensable resource for all students of Kierkegaard’s work. Alastair Hannay is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oslo. He has translated several of Kierkegaard’s works, and was for many years the editor of the journal Inquiry. His publications include Mental Images: A Defence (1971), Kierkegaard (1982), Human Consciousness (1990) and Kierkegaard: A Biography (2001). He is co-editor of the Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard (1997).

KIERKEGAARD AND PHILOSOPHY Selected Essays

Alastair Hannay

First published 2003 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © 2003 Alastair Hannay All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hannay, Alastair. Kierkegaard and philosophy: Selected essays /Alastair Hannay p.cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Kierkegaard, SØren, 1813-1855. I. Title. B4377 .H349 2003 198’.9--dc21 2002036627 ISBN 0-203-42319-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-42494-8 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–28371–X (Print Edition)

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgements

vii ix

PART I

Philosophy

1

Introduction

3

1 Climacus among the philosophers

9

2 Philosophy of mind

24

3 Faith and probability

42

4 Having Lessing on one’s side

49

5 ‘Spirit’ and the idea of the self as a reflexive relation

64

6 Basic despair

76

7 A question of continuity

89

8 The ‘what’ in the ‘how’

105

PART II

Connections and confrontations

121

Introduction

123

9 Commitment and paradox

126

10 Humour and the irascible soul

137

11 Proximity as apartness

150

12 Levelling and Einebnung

163 v

CONTENTS

13 Solitary souls and infinite help

179

14 Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark revisited

190

15 Two ways of coming back to reality: Kierkegaard and Lukács

201

16 Nietzsche/Kierkegaard: prospects for dialogue?

207

17 Decisively disconnected

218

Notes Bibliography Index

221 245 254

vi

PREFACE

Several aims can lie behind publishing a selection of one’s own essays written over the years. Some are self-indulgent, like the pleasant but economically unjustifiable notion of seeing one’s scattered and yellowing efforts crisply contained within two covers. Another aim, perhaps no less self-indulgent, is an audience wider than that available on first publication. Here, aside from most of the essays being in fact fairly recent and three entirely new, the very fact that might tempt one to envisage a whole new generation of potential readers might equally suggest that the discussions in question are out of date: namely that some are over twenty years old. As for that, my own sense of things is that, given the time it has taken to get Kierkegaard on the philosophical agenda, these older discussions are not only still topical but also daily becoming more so. Speaking for this is the circumstance that among the many possible approaches to Kierkegaard’s writings some are unduly neglected. Although I should hesitate to say that my own approach is a case in point, it is certainly true that much of the discussion in accredited philosophical fora, both about Kierkegaard and around him, has lacked the backing of a close study of what Kierkegaard actually wrote. If there is a single principle underlying the present collection, it is that before writing Kierkegaard off as a philosopher, or extending to him the doubtful courtesy of placing him in the company of others, one should have both a close and an extensive look at the texts, preferably of course in their Danish original. With only a few exceptions, as for instance the first chapter, the majority of the essays included here appeared in publications not widely accessible to a philosophical public. Two are from Festschriften and at least five from publications aimed exclusively at Kierkegaard specialists. Therefore it may not be merely a wishful expectation on my part that the present collection will reach a wider audience. Most of the essays have been revised and given new titles. They are all offered as freshly published. The annotations for the separate chapters remain selfcontained but are supplemented where desirable with new references to the original Danish text, wherever possible to the new critical edition, Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter. At the time of writing this has reached Concluding Unscientific Postscript, which is fortunate since, along with The Sickness unto

vii

PREFACE

Death, it is one of the two texts most frequently referred to. The translations in the references vary depending in some cases on which was used by the author discussed. As for the translations themselves, where available I have generally preferred my own renderings in the Penguin Classics series. Certain inconsistencies have been retained. Thus Judge William sometimes appears as Assessor Wilhelm or vice versa. Alastair Hannay Oslo 2002

viii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The author acknowledges in accordance with the terms of the transfer of copyright agreements in question the following sources of materials reproduced in whole or in part in the chapters identified below, and where appropriate thanks the original publishers and editors for permission to use the material. Chapter 1. ‘Kierkegaard and What We Mean by “Philosophy” ’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 8, 1, 2000, 1–22. Chapter 2. ‘Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Mind’, Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey, 4, ed. G. Fløistad, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, pp. 157–83. Copyright © Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, The Hague, Boston and London. Chapter 4. ‘Having Lessing on One’s Side’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, 12: Concluding Unscientific Postscript to ‘Philosophical Fragments’, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997, pp. 205–26. Chapter 5. ‘ “Spirit” and the Idea of the Self as a Reflexive Relation’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary, 19:The Sickness unto Death, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1987, pp. 23–38. Chapter 7. ‘The Judge in the Light of Kierkegaard’s own Either/Or: Some Hermeneutical Crotchets’, in Robert L. Perkins (ed.), International Kierkegaard Commentary: Either/Or Pt. 2, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1996, pp. 183–205. Chapter 8. ‘The “What” and the “How” ’, in D. F. Gustafson and B. L. Tapscott (eds), Body, Mind, and Method: Essays in Honor of Virgil C. Aldrich, Synthese Library 138, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979, pp. 17–36. Copyright © 1979 by D. Reidel Publishing Company. Chapter 9. ‘Commitment and Paradox’, in I. C. Jarvie and Nathaniel Laor (eds), The Enterprise of Critical Rationalism: Essays for Joseph Agassi, vol. II, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 162, Dordrecht, Boston and Lancaster: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1995, pp. 189–202. Copyright © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Chapter 10. ‘Kierkegaardian Despair and the Irascible Soul’, Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1997, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1997, pp. 51–68.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Chapter 11.‘The Dialectic of Proximity and Apartness’, in Arne Johan Vetlesen and Harald Jodalen (eds), Closeness: an Ethics, Oslo: Scandinavian University Press, 1996, pp. 167–84. Chapter 12. ‘Kierkegaard’s Levellings and the Review’, Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1999, ed. Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Hermann Deuser, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999, pp. 71–95. Chapter 13. ‘Solitary Souls and Infinite Help: Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein’, History of European Ideas, 12, 1, 1990, 41–52. Chapter 14. ‘Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark Revisited: Pörn on Kierkegaard and the Self’, Inquiry 28, 2, 1985, 261–71. Chapter 15. ‘Two Ways of Coming Back to Reality: Kierkegaard and Lukács’, History of European Ideas, 20, 1–3, 1995, 161–6. Chapter 16. ‘Nietzsche and Naturalism’, The European Legacy, 2, 4, 1997, pp. 647–52. http://www.tandf.co.uk.

x

Part I

PHILOSOPHY

INTRODUCTION

The essays collected here were written over a period of more than twenty years. Their general focus is philosophical rather than literary or biographical, and the philosophy they represent falls naturally to someone with my fairly traditional leanings. The essays themselves form a logical sequel to my first effort in this area, a volume in a series entitled ‘The Arguments of the Philosophers’. Not everyone looks for philosophy in Kierkegaard, let alone arguments. And if they do look, especially if they are philosophers themselves and like me trained in the Anglo-American analytic tradition, they will be hard put to it to find either. Kierkegaard’s many-faceted thought resists that tradition’s linear format, just as his ways of writing seem often to be a deliberate travesty of normal academic communication and dispute. And since in a thinker of such psychological acuity, with such a huge literary talent, and such a fertile imagination, there is much more than philosophy to dwell upon and learn from in his writings, it isn’t strange that these latter aspects have caught the imagination of literary theorists and thinkers of a less analytical bent. Yet there is room, in my view, for a sharp and sustained focus on the philosophical content of Kierkegaard’s work. I am far from being alone in this engagement, but at a time when Kierkegaard’s writings are being tapped by such a variety of styles and schools of thought that their philosophical content tends to be undervalued or overlooked, any occasion to speak up for it can help. That said, all those old provisos spring once more to mind: Kierkegaard’s own negative attitude to academic philosophy; his apparent unwillingness that those who do pick up the philosophy in the texts should actually read it as such, or take it too seriously; the many masks from which the philosophical language (or is it only an ironically transmitted jargon?) issues in varying doses and selections. Whatever we ourselves decide to do with the texts, we must at least ask whether Kierkegaard himself ever wanted to be counted a philosopher. Not so long ago, while watching a French television current-affairs programme discussing Easter, sacrifice and Middle-East politics, a French philosopher citing some lines from Fear and Trembling referred to its author as le philosophe danois. Leaving aside the usual insouciance on the subject of pseudonymity, what intrigued me first was that the book Kierkegaard himself said he was most likely to

3

PHILOSOPHY

be remembered by should be considered still topical in a context as burning as this. But there was also the unqualified description of Kierkegaard as a colleague by someone in a land which, though notoriously permissive in its use of the term, generally fails to recognize Kierkegaard as a philosopher, unlike, for instance, Foucault, Derrida and Levinas. Not even the example of the heroes of the French Enlightenment, termed les philosophes in full awareness that they had few pretensions to be thus labelled, can be appealed to on Kierkegaard’s behalf, so little has his thought in common with theirs. What were Kierkegaard’s own views on the matter? Well, he had considerable respect for philosophers. As a student he was even regarded by his teacher as a Hegelian. But he was even more taken by subversive thinkers, also of some literary bent, like Hamann, early on, and later Schopenhauer. Perhaps the Shakespearean epigraph provided for Philosophical Fragments, ‘Better well hanged than ill wed’, means that he would prefer to be trashed than that the fragments, or ‘crumbs’, as the better translation would have it, should fall into the hands of the wrong philosophers. Still, after reading the pseudonyms together with what journal entries say about philosophy and philosophers, it is hard to erase the thought that, asked if he’d like to be remembered as a philosopher at all, Kierkegaard’s answer would be: ‘Heaven forbid!’ That answer, however, as Kierkegaard would have been the first to appreciate, is radically ambiguous. Someone scandalized on philosophy’s behalf might utter it at the very thought that a writer who tackles its problems in such a shamefully unprofessional way might be counted as a colleague. But equally it could be uttered by someone who thought there was something better to do than philosophy. The reputation of philosophy is based on its status as a superior form of objective thinking. Kierkegaard voices no objection to objective thinking as such, so long as it does not claim to answer questions its terms of reference make it unfitted to pose. A scientific approach to knowledge of the external world would not be exposed to that charge, and if that is the sort of question that philosophy has come to regard as its speciality, so be it. But apart from the importance of distinguishing the kind of issues that a philosophy based on science concerns itself with from those that Kierkegaard’s Climacus pseudonym says call for subjective thinking, the range of considerations relevant to an individual’s commerce with a reality outside it is far more complex than those dealt with either in traditional philosophy or in those scientific projects that belong to a newly ‘naturalized’ philosophy. Besides reason it also requires something which, though evident enough in thinkers like Augustine and Aquinas, is not so often associated with philosophy, or if at all, then only indirectly, namely psychological insight. Kierkegaard’s contributions in this area are often taken to outshine his services to philosophy.1 It could also be otherwise: that these are contributions to a ‘thickened’ philosophy that takes fuller account of the ways in which we find ourselves in a world and of our ways of responding to these. Whether philosophy survives such a thickening is really no more than a variable matter of what practices we prefer to honour with its name. 4

INTRODUCTION

Put roughly and not a little contentiously, the burden of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the work mainly discussed in Part I, is to regenerate a notion of truth proper to moral and religious experience, showing that neither Hegelian philosophy nor any other kind of ‘objective’ approach can do justice to these. Yet the work says nothing about what topics might still be left to objective thinking once the traditional ones have been properly redistributed. Nor, on the other hand, does it say out loud that the regenerated notion is still a philosophical notion. Few would deny that it is the philosopher’s job to think objectively, or that philosophy as practised today essentially employs a form of objective thinking. Most would agree that, barring the Sophists and Socrates, philosophy always has done. But now, in no small degree due to Kierkegaard himself, existentialism has become part of the philosophical tradition, and Kierkegaard’s influence on Unamuno, Jaspers, Sartre, de Beauvoir and especially Heidegger is now part of the lore. The fact that Kierkegaard’s writings are, as has been aptly said, ‘highly charged with a realistic sense of life’2 can strongly dispose a generation of thinkers that has no difficulty in calling Heidegger, Sartre and Nietzsche philosophers also to think of Kierkegaard in that light. To some, the fact that the concepts central to a realistic sense of life in Kierkegaard’s writings are religious appears not only drastically to narrow their focus but, by the same token, also to marginalize them as a surviving cultural resource. Several contemporary commentators attempt to remove what they consider this impediment to treating Kierkegaard’s writings seriously as philosophy – writings they otherwise respect for their exceptional insight.s How much better, they think, if this religious component or premise could simply be ignored. Yet others, drawing on that realistic sense of life expressed in Kierkegaard’s writings, and with an interest in turning it to the advantage of what Hume called the ‘science of Man’, later developed into philosophical anthropology, would not ignore the religious component but rather place it just a little further along in the order of things. Because anthropology accounts for the full spectrum of human responsiveness, religious experience belongs there as much as any other, as much as, say, aesthetic experience or the different faces of morality, and science itself, not to say philosophy. The essays collected here are arranged in two sections. Those in this first section, which I have called ‘Philosophy’, based as they are on a fairly close reading of the texts, are both expository and interpretative; they take pretty well at face value what the texts seem to be saying on their surface, and since the language is predominantly that of philosophy, the result is something like an attempt to lay bare some of the anatomy of the concepts the texts employ: truth, subjective thinking, faith and history, humour, selfhood, despair. Two of the essays even try to link what Kierkegaard uses these concepts to say with philosophy as we know it. Chapter 2 tries within the format of a survey of relevant literature published in the decade before 1980 to construct from the pseudonymous works the anatomy of what I was then willing (on being asked) to call ‘Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Mind’. Since then of course the literature has 5

PHILOSOPHY

expanded explosively, and it would be impossible to undertake an updating. On the other hand, the essay’s point is not one that has become redundant. Its aim is to indicate ways in which Kierkegaardian concerns of the kind that are relevant to any comprehensive philosophy of mind can contribute to what currently goes by that name. In the period since 1983, when the survey in which the essay was included was published, not much in the philosophy of mind or philosophical psychology or cognitive science has altered the picture, except perhaps to indicate, as the very labels suggest, an increasing imperviousness to the kinds of topic in question. That the only slightly revised version published here is called simply ‘Philosophy of Mind’ is due to reasons already adumbrated in Chapter 1 for doubting that Kierkegaard would take kindly to the idea that, among his principal activities as a writer, had been the intention to deliver a theory of the mind. The idea of the essay is to bring the philosophy in Kierkegaard’s writings, whatever his purpose in putting it there, into visible contact both with the tradition in which he wrote and with current philosophy, the latter with the intention of indicating ways in which it might benefit from an infusion of Kierkegaardian ideas. The final chapter in this section, having something like the same purpose, attempts to place one of these ideas in a context of current philosophy out of which it might seem to emerge quite naturally on its own. As for the nature of Kierkegaard’s own purpose with all this philosophy, it may help to note and also stress one life-long concern. Both the pseudonymous works and the journals overwhelmingly convey the conviction that religion and philosophy should be kept apart. This may seem normal enough. Most philosophers have deeply religious colleagues who prefer to keep religion out of their discipline. The point is that with Kierkegaard the position is the reverse: it is philosophy he wants to keep at bay, thus leaving room for religion, and the ethics he believed depended on it. The context of his concern is clear enough, his prime target being the Hegelian view that the language of philosophy supervenes upon that of religion. Although Hegel neither reduces religious language to that of philosophy, nor eliminates it because that cannot be done, it is philosophy that provides insight into the truths in the religious narrative. It is in the light of his polemic against this view, as well as weaker versions such as Kant’s and also Schleiermacher’s, in which religion has at least some token autonomy, that one must follow Kierkegaard’s life-long concern. The polemic is hardly one that survives today, but there are areas in philosophy where Kierkegaard’s concern to preserve the autonomy of religion receives nods of approval. A Wittgensteinian language-game approach can seem a fruitful way of reading Kierkegaard’s concern. Another area is philosophical anthropology, for here too religion remains a valid topic; or, again closer to Wittgenstein, the philosophy of language in its dealing with, among others, the special forms of religious judgement.3 Religion is treated here as part of the repertoire of specifically human responses and a legitimate topic for philosophy. What Kierkegaard would oppose in these developments is their confinement to the human point of view. Kierkegaard repeatedly insists that any religious reality genuinely confronted 6

INTRODUCTION

exerts its own demands upon us. This may also be Wittgenstein’s understanding. Once you invoke the world of which religious believing is true, you have no right to expect it to be designed just to satisfy human needs, even those needs you have evoked that world to satisfy. Such a world makes its own demands of humankind, though not in a sense that implies they are not, when properly grasped, also demands humans should make of themselves qua human. To grasp them in that way calls for a revision of common assumptions about what it is to be truly human, revisions that concern also reason. If the more-than-ordinarily-human-world is real and not just a figment of our minds, it is one that we must face without a prior assumption of our capacity to know it. It is ‘other’ analogously to the way in which the world of mores into which a child is socialized is ‘other’ until the child is socialized and has internalized the appropriate conventions. For a philosopher likeKant, of course, that would not be sufficiently ‘other’; for him, and since the essence of morality is accessible to us in the medium of reason, the truly human being is one whose will freely conforms to the moral law. But Kierkegaard stretches things further. For him the religious view of reality is one we personally live in a direct relationship to the Godhead, not glimpsed dimly in the idea of a greatest good without which the institution of morality would not make sense. This account is designedly rough and selective. But it does show one way of piecing together a Kierkegaard who stands in recognizable relationship to other thinkers who undeniably qualify as philosophers. This spirit of mutual identification is one way in which a focus on the philosophical content of Kierkegaard’s writings can bear fruit. Disturbingly, however, the focus ignores those special features of Kierkegaard’s style of delivery that seem to be telling us that he does not want to be read in this way – for example, that his work is neither argumentative nor even in any ordinary way discursive, or if arguments occur they are cited rather than used, while the passages closest to being philosophical are interspersed with comedy and anecdote as well as the whole being couched in an ironic tone that seems designed to resist not only the attention of philosophers but also serious scholarly scrutiny of any kind. It would surely be a serious breach of scholarship itself to ignore such features, inseparable as they are from the texts in which we chiefly identify Kierkegaard. Indeed, plain common sense advises us to examine the possibility that the attitude and style of the writer are part of what must be understood in grasping just what sort of project he saw himself engaged in. Some hint of what Kierkegaard took that project to be, and how that question might be answered affirmatively, may be gleaned from an addendum to a retrospective claim about what it was not. In 1849 he wrote under the heading ‘On My Authorship’ that rather than ‘everything being translated into the objective’ so as to give the misleading impression that ‘what we have’ here is ‘a new doctrine’, the reader of Concluding Unscientific Postscript should understand that its real topic is ‘personality’.4 Personality, or personhood, was widely current as a Bildung concept in the philosophy of the time. As the locus of a proper view of things, as one might 7

PHILOSOPHY

say, it had its central place both in the Enlightenment version of that view of things and in that of the Romantic reaction. It is a concept Kierkegaard had inherited from his teacher and early mentor, Poul Møller, and a term that appears in both titles of the long sections forming the ‘or’ part of Either/Or. At the time cultivation of the person would be thought a valid task as well as topic of both literature and philosophy. The thought that philosophy might contribute to it in the form of ‘doctrines’ specifying the structure and composition of mature selfhood would not be alien. There might be some sense to an objective theory of personality, that is to say, a theory that can be arrived at by considering certain features of human existence in general and then notifying the individual of the theory along with the arguments for it, thus presenting the theory as a blue-print to which an individual life must conform. Kierkegaard of course discounts any such theory as an evasion of the real task, which is to generate a sense of what fulfilled personhood requires from one’s own experience. The task of selfhood is placed firmly upon the self, which also means upon his reader. In another entry from 1849 he writes, this time with the heading ‘On My Authorship as a Whole’: In a sense it is a question of contemporaneity in the form of a choice; one must choose to make either the aesthetic into an all-embracing thought and then explain everything in that manner, or the religious. There is something of awakening in just this.5 We see then that, whatever the truth of its gestation, Kierkegaard conceives his work in retrospect as presenting its reader with a choice about how to carry on his or her life. And of course a choice of the form of one’s own individual life is not something to which the presentation of a general doctrine, applicable to anyone or everyone, will contribute – unless you wish to forget the local habitation to which your own self is assigned, and the form you choose is that of submission to the authority of ‘whatever stands to reason’ – just the move Kierkegaard’s writing seems most motivated to resist. The essays in this section begin with Postscript and a good deal of the later discussion focuses on this work, as does much of it also on The Sickness unto Death. The reader will find that the terms and tenor are those of the universe of traditional philosophical discourse. Their topics are Kierkegaardian but not their tone or style. They follow Kierkegaard’s criticism of the tradition, detail it and try to characterize it. One aim is to indicate why questions which philosophy has wrongly addressed as though they were capable of objective solutions can only be approached by individuals who grasp themselves as moral beings. I tend to think of this as a philosophical project. Would Kierkegaard still say ‘Heaven forbid!’?

8

1 CLIMACUS AMONG THE PHILOSOPHERS

Against some fashionable views to the contrary, I argue here that Concluding Unscientific Postscript is not in whole or part an elaborate joke. The work contains a serious though negative argument designed to locate the place of faith in relation to reason. Given that the text makes claims on our reason in this way yet its pseudonymous author describes himself as a humorist, the question of where the work’s humour lies needs to be freshly confronted. After humour has been distinguished from comedy (as a point of view from which unconscious comedy in the enactment of life-views becomes visible), and both from absurdity, I conclude that a fundamental aim of Postscript, once the negative argument has been given, is to cast light self-referentially on the comedy of humour itself. The paper has three sections. The first asks in what way Postscript, given that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, nevertheless makes claims on our reason. Granting for contextual reasons that it does, the second asks where the humour lies. The final section asks what bearing Postscript’s humour can have on whatever philosophy means to us today. 1 The fact that its pseudonymous author is a self-styled humorist, along with the light tone and occasional sheer comedy of what many regard as Kierkegaard’s most substantial excursion into philosophy, has always discouraged a serious reading. Many conclude from the assumption that Postscript is an elaborate joke that there is no point in ploughing through its six hundred pages in search of an argument. But others have suggested otherwise. They claim that in order to share the joke we must do exactly that. For the joke is not just on the philosopher, it is also, remedially perhaps, for the philosopher. It lies in the fact that Postscript comically fails in whatever philosophical task a straightforward reading must assign to it, something only a philosopher is in a position to see. As for the target of the joke – well, we all know it is Hegel, or at least his local supporters at the time in Copenhagen. The thesis appears recently in James Conant’s claim for Postscript that ‘the work as a whole represents an elaborate reductio ad absurdum of the philosophical project of clarifying and propounding what it is to be a Christian’.1 However, the locus classicus (in the English-language literature) for the view is Henry E. Allison’s early essay, ‘Christianity and Nonsense’,2 and it is to the latter that my 9

PHILOSOPHY

comments will chiefly be addressed. Allison claims that the ‘doctrinal content [of Postscript] must be regarded as an ironical jest, which essentially takes the form of a carefully constructed parody of the Phenomenology of Mind’ (p. 290). The reason why it must be so regarded is that, to the trained eye, what purports to be the main argument is, or involves, a ‘misologism’. I do not deny there is parody in Postscript. I also accept that what is offered there in doctrinal trappings may not be meant to instruct or lay claim to truth. Moreover, a joke may be intended in the thought that this is just how people will read it. Nevertheless, what purports to be doctrine in Postscript, quite independently of its setting and of any quasi-literary intentions, either behind or in the work, is not itself a joke. Whatever comical uses it may be put to, the argument Allison points to is neither a reductio nor misologistic but constructive and rational. Allison’s case for the misologistic consequences of Postscript goes as follows: (1) The work presents objective reflection and subjective reflection as alternative methodologies for arriving at the truth. Objective reflection is shown to be inappropriate for truths that concern us personally; here the truth-seeker ‘loses himself in his speculations’ (p. 292), by the same token losing sight of what personally concerns him. Subjective reflection is then offered as an alternative that preserves and develops that concern in an appropriate manner. (Here one must note that the pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, makes no claim to be resorting to subjective thinking himself; his task is to give what purports to be an account of it – at least he goes through what look like philosophical motions of the kind that would be needed to make clear what the proposed alternative to objective reflection amounts to.) Now (2) since subjective reflection aims at truth (its ‘wish’ is to be ‘truth’s reflection’ [være Sandhedens] ),3 it must supply a method for arriving at it. (3) The method is contained in the infamous thesis that truth is subjectivity; it says that (the) truth corresponds to the greatest possible degree of inwardness and then specifies the required degree as that caused by the intellectually repellent realization that the truth in question is absurd. Unlike any general methodology, which aims only to provide criteria for determining whatever truths come within its scope, this criterion evidently claims to pick out one truth in particular, namely (that of) Christianity. However, (4) the method proves unable to specify reflection’s truth more narrowly than as the truth which a person continues to believe in the face of its absurdity, or even just as the state of mind itself of a person who so continues to believe. Therefore, (5) there is no provision for distinguishing Christianity as the one absurdity in which the believer should be continuing to believe. But if it is as nonsense that Christianity must be believed in for the believing to be true, and no distinction can be provided for between Christianity and any other kind of nonsense, then the project of showing the way to subjective reflection’s truth signally fails. Since Postscript is to all outward appearances a philosophical critique of ‘the Hegelian philosophy’ and seems to be offering at the same time the basis of a better understanding of ‘religious life’ and a ‘Christian apologetic’ (p. 289), this appearance must be a sham and the explanation of that fact 10

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must be that the argument has some quite different purpose. As for Postscript’s real purpose, Allison’s proposal is that the work is designed to stop people ‘theorizing … in an “existential” sense about Christianity’ (p. 290). Stephen Mulhall has generalized this conclusion by suggesting that Postscript’s task is to indicate that existential challenges are, as such, not to be converted into intellectual problems.4 And yet the text, as Allison duly acknowledges, clearly does distinguish nonsense from absurdity, calling Christianity absurd not nonsensical. The word ‘nonsense’ is used in contexts where it is translatable as ‘gibberish’ (Vrøvl og Nonsens),5 and what is claimed is that nonsense cannot be believed against the understanding since to the understanding it is transparently nonsense (‘thi Forstanden vil netop gjennemskue at det er Nonsens’).6 So Postscript, in its doctrinal aspect, and in whatever way we are to treat that aspect, assumes there is a type of nonsense that is sheerly nonsensical and bears its meaninglessness on its face. Absurdity is something else: we find the word ‘absurd’ used appositively with ‘inexplicable’, ‘unintelligible’, ‘incomprehensible’ (det Uforståelige).7 Allison, seeing the anomaly, explains it by appeal to another. He finds an internal inconsistency between what the pseudonymous author says here and a claim made in the same pseudonymous author’s Fragments. Appealing to one inconsistency to dispose of another may seem an odd way of pre-empting the verdict that Kierkegaard is ‘muddleheaded’ (p. 315), Allison’s prime motive for concluding that Postscript is deliberate parody rather than a repository of unintentional howlers. But the appeal seems defective also for another reason. Allison says that on the earlier account of knowledge, doubt and belief are claimed in general to be a matter of will, so ‘it seems rather difficult to see just how our understanding of anything, even nonsense, could “prevent” our belief’ (p. 314). Surely, however, the admission of a sheerly transparent form of nonsense renders that view – the view that one can will oneself into believing it – implausible, and it would be just as reasonable to conclude that the earlier work’s claim was not intended to include cases of the kind. The most compelling evidence that Kierkegaard is not planting deliberate mistakes is that his performance under Postscript’s pseudonym was something he clearly felt proud of. When Hans Lassen Martensen’s Dogmatics came out three years later, Kierkegaard exclaimed: ‘Gentle Father of Jesus! My own most popular work is more rigorous in its conceptual definitions, and my pseudonym Joh. Climacus is seven times more rigorous in his’.8 That Climacus should, on his own terms, have every reason to sustain a distinction between nonsense and absurdity seems clear enough. His main question is, ‘What does it mean to become a Christian?’ The very question presupposes Christianity’s ability to engage his will, and it turns out, as we know, that it is in the will that the intensity of inwardness required of the answer is to be generated. How could Christianity possibly engage the will if the only expressions of it were transparently nonsensical? What engages the Christian is of course the narrative of the Incarnation, something which towards the end of Postscript Climacus gives the formulation ‘God fusing with man’.9 There is, he says, no difficulty understanding this, that is to 11

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say, Christianity, as a ‘project’,10 even if, as Climacus is also at pains to stress, to do so is a misunderstanding. But it is a necessary misunderstanding. The wouldbe Christian must begin with something that appears intelligible, something ‘apparently familiar’, even if in the end it turns out to be ‘absolutely foreign’ (absolute fremmede).11 What is absolutely foreign is the idea of an actual event such as the form of words ‘God fusing with man’ purports to represent. Although the words can say something to us, as a description of an event they are actually unintelligible. This idea that something foreign can be grasped in a way designed to keep it within range of the familiar is no innovation on Kierkegaard’s part. Whether he realized it or not, the notion had a solid precedent in Kant’s so-called ‘schematism of analogy’. To have any hold on what lies beyond the limits of reason, human understanding must employ figurative forms of expression, typically in poetry and scripture (also largely a form of poetry). Though the resort is indispensable, we must be careful, says Kant, not to take the pictorial versions to provide additions to our knowledge. According to Kant, to transform a schematism of analogy into ‘a schematism of objective determination’ involves an anthropomorphism that has serious moral consequences.12 In Postscript Kierkegaard’s closest philosophical interlocutor, however, is not Kant but Hegel. We know that in Hegel the narrative version of the Incarnation was supposed to be replaced by a conceptual, that is to say, philosophical grasp. Indeed, the philosopher will be able, retrospectively, to grasp the narrative of the Incarnation as a metaphor for the real fusing of infinite with finite in reason. Hegel was able to regard the narrative version as poetically rich but conceptually degenerate because merely pictorial rendition of what would become clear in quite other terms under the all-embracing grasp of the speculative idea. The Incarnation was foreign only in the sense of our not yet having found the proper vehicle for its familiarity. This differs from Kant’s case, of course, since for Kant the narrative strives usefully but unavailingly to capture a reality that must and should remain foreign. But that is because Kant sees in what he calls the ‘practical point of view’ all the reality we need to put us in touch with what forever eludes the understanding: our ‘morally legislative reason’ embodies the ideals of Christian belief in as real a way as we can or should expect.13 The important point is that the ideals are available to reason and that they work practically, as they are designed to. To try to penetrate, impossibly, to an objective moral reality beyond reason’s limits would merely distract and demoralize us. In terms of what Kant and Hegel share, it is easy to see the combined address of Kierkegaard’s Climacian riposte. As against Hegel, Postscript says that the narrative grasp of the foundational Christian belief has to be converted into something non-pictorial, namely a form of the will. This, at least in so many words, would also have been Kant’s objection to Hegel. But unlike Kant, Climacus insists upon the absolute foreignness of the saving truth itself and all that follows from it for morality. For Kierkegaard, Kant’s moral rationalism implies a complacent domestication of God according to which a rational prin12

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ciple is already at work in Creation needing only to be discovered. God has been painlessly reduced to a regulative idea and morality – in a way not so very different from Hegel – to something already embedded in our actual practices. Absurdity, or Climacus’s insistence that the narrative of the Incarnation is ‘inaccessible to all thought’,14 comes to the fore in Kierkegaard simply because where Kant thinks you can translate an intellectually impenetrable narrative into the universal discourse of a rationally moral will, Postscript claims that appreciation of the impenetrability of the narrative is itself a precondition of the individual’s appropriation of truths that do and should resist representation. Whether the text and conceptual apparatus of Postscript contain the resources to clarify and establish a distinction between nonsense and absurdity is another matter. Postscript is not a work of philosophy in the ordinary sense; it doesn’t stop to analyse or argue for the distinctions and assumptions it needs for its purposes. But then why should it? They are, after all, fairly obvious distinctions and the work’s title tells us not to expect too much professionalism. It is an ‘unscholarly’ (uvidenskabelig – a little misleadingly translated ‘unscientific’) work. On the other hand, and in light of the comparisons just made with Kant and Hegel, we should expect the alternative to those two philosophers’ accounts to be offered as a serious option. Yet according to another argument offered by Allison, it fails to do so; and its not doing so Allison takes to be a further indication of the special rhetorical role played by the work’s ‘argument’. For Allison, this argument, as we saw, concerns the truth of subjective reflection, a truth which Climacus seems, just like Kant and Hegel, to want to tell us how and how not to get hold of. As with them, truth is understood as a fusion of finite and infinite, or vice versa. Allison notes that Climacus nevertheless admits that the truth which is the truth of subjective reflection – or subjective reflection’s truth – namely that unity of finite and infinite (the eternal in time) which is Christianity’s absurd proposal, ‘can only take place in the imagination’ (p. 295). That does sound serious. For isn’t union in imagination only a virtual union? If so, then the whole project of Christian faith must be in vain. And if this is all Climacus can offer as an alternative to Hegel and Kant, the project he is engaged upon seems truly pointless. The more reason, then, for regarding his whole undertaking as an elaborate joke. But let us follow Climacus’s actual words. He says two things: that the ‘existing’ individual can ‘be in a unity of infinite and finite’ but only momentarily (momentviis) – ‘[t]his moment’, says Climacus, ‘is the instant of passion’ – and that the individual can be in it ‘in imagination’.15 The first of these certainly sounds unpromising – how can an instant of passion provide anything but a feeling of unity in relation to what is said to be aimed at? As against this, however, the second part says nothing about the unity being ‘only’ in imagination. On the other hand, there is a hint of this in the Swenson/Lowrie translation’s introduction of a term of art not found in the original. Allison quotes a sentence which in literal translation says: ‘In the passion the existing 13

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subject is made infinite in imagination’s eternity, and yet remains at the same time most definitely himself.’ Swenson/Lowrie render the passage as: ‘In passion the existing subject is rendered infinite in the eternity of the imaginative representation.’16 This seems to be where the problem lies. At least in traditional philosophical terms, to imagine some state of affairs is to have a representation of it. It is at least true whenever what is imagined is some external circumstance. But external circumstances are not all we can imagine. Or as Kant observed, not all our notions correspond to or are expressible in the form of representations. Conspicuous among those that cannot be so expressed is the ‘I think’, the condition of representation that cannot itself be represented. ‘Imagination’ (Phantasien), as used by Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms (at least when they are not convicting philosophers of ‘fantastically’ forgetting that they exist), refers to a faculty in which the self envisages its own possibilities. Among these possibilities is that of orienting itself beyond the world of finite representations. As the later pseudonym, Anti-Climacus, says: ‘Imagination is in general the medium of infinitization.’17 How might being a unity of finite and infinite be among the existing self ’s possibilities? To revert again to Kant, the possibility might be possessed in the form of a regulative idea that structures its actions, the ‘I think’ now properly extended into the existential format of ‘I do’. The unity would not be real, even though the idea of it would inform action itself suitably and genuinely unified in the instant of passion. But so long as one retains the idea of there being a God’s point of view outside existence, as Climacus does (it is part of his job), that there is such a point of view must be part of the object of faith. What for the existing individual can never be more than a regulative idea may, for all we know, be being cashed in divine currency into the actual fact of unification. The thought is this: what cannot be cashed into representational form can, for that very reason, possess possibilities exceeding the bounds of what can be represented. The thought may strike us as lunatic but that doesn’t prevent it being one that Climacus would wish his reader to retain. True, Postscript provides no conventional philosophical defence of the view and even fails to make this particular claim explicit. But that imagination is the faculty by which the self imagines its possibilities does become an explicit thesis in the writings of Climacus’s successor and partial reincarnation, AntiClimacus.18 One way of looking at Postscript’s own project is to see it as designed to effect a reversal of the direction in which philosophy has traditionally assumed to take its devotees. Rather than making its readers familiar with the foreign, its line of thought is the gradual transformation of the familiar to the foreign. In Climacus’s version what we have in Christianity is a set of beliefs which, as Climacus, to this extent echoing Kant, insists,19 could never have occurred to man – so that any version devised by reason (for reason devises, it doesn’t divine), just as much as by poetry, is not Christianity. But of course, as we have noted, before Christianity can take shape in the human will in a form appro14

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priate to its foreignness, it must plant itself in the human mind. In other words, the mind must grasp it in one way before it can grasp with its own powers of reason that it cannot be grasped in that way, thus leaving the way open to the proper appropriation of its truth. That makes it perfectly sensible for Climacus to provide, as Allison says, an ‘elaborate dialectical analysis’, an analysis which requires ‘a good deal of understanding’. To Allison, however, since the analysis ends in a misologism, its presence merely accentuates the paradox of the work’s intellectual antiintellectualist stance (p. 306). Conant claims similarly that the ‘central contradiction embedded in the dialectical structure of the Postscript lies in the fact that Climacus’s argument also seems to require that the believer retain his understanding in order to use it to discriminate between the objective absurdity of Christian doctrine and less repulsive forms of nonsense’.20 If it were truly paradoxical that in order to ‘crucify’ reason you must keep enough reason to be able to see that it is properly crucified, then Kant’s entire critical enterprise would be paradoxical. And if reason is required in the crucifixion of rational metaphysics and rational psychology, why not also in the critique of faith? Reason, surely, has a place in any attempt to set its own limits. To see the intended role of his pseudonym’s dialectical analysis, we need only consult Kierkegaard himself: When … I believe this or that on the strength of everything’s being possible for God, what is the absurd? The absurd is the negative property which ensures that I have not overlooked some possibility still within the human range. The absurd is an expression of despair: humanly it is impossible – but despair is [just] the negative mark of faith.21 This can be set alongside other remarks in which recognition of the absurdity of Christian doctrine is presented as essential to faith: Hence the unholy confusion about faith. The believer is not dialectically consolidated [dialektisk consolideret] as ‘the single individual’, and cannot put up with this double vision – that the content of faith, seen from the other side, is the negative, the absurd. – This, in the life of faith, is the tension in which one must hold oneself. But the tendency everywhere is to construe faith in the straightforward manner. Such an attempt is the science which wants to comprehend faith.22 Dialectical consolidation seems as good a goal as any for reason to contribute to, and the elaborate dialectic would be particularly apt for anyone disposed to believe that faith can be part of a science of man. Allison rightly observes a difficulty here, however. Isn’t the understanding required to satisfy the negative condition of faith beyond the scope of the 15

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‘simple believer’ who Climacus is always praising ‘at the expense of the pretentious speculative philosopher’ (p. 306)? Are only those who are able to follow an elaborate argument in a position to acquire faith? The question seems to invite either of two answers: the required tension might be produced in other ways than by reflection, for instance by giving due weight to the manifest presence of evil, of suffering, doubt and despair; or faith is something you can ‘get’ to without any such tension. Perhaps because his main role seems to be the chastening of intellectuals, Climacus is ambiguous on this matter.23 Perhaps his guiding hand, Kierkegaard, has two but not mutually inconsistent considerations in mind: on the one hand, ‘ordinary’ people should not be impressed by the reputation the philosophertheologians of the time enjoyed as experts in matters of faith; but, on the other hand, although intellectuals have the opportunity to appreciate better than others how faith fits into a life in which reason and understanding also play a part (in addition, that is, to imagination and feeling), their own commitment to understanding means they have an extra hurdle to surmount – on the by no means certain assumption that it is faith they are after. To grasp its truth they must (rationally) lose their faith in reason. In another entry, where Kierkegaard reflects that it is ‘impossible that [the paradox] should ever become popular’, he says that this is not because people cannot understand that it is the paradox, but because ‘it flatters human vanity to presume to comprehend’.24 A typically Kierkegaardian addendum would be to say that it can also flatter human vanity to comprehend that the paradox is truly paradoxical. To suppose that one has a superior form of faith just because one takes pains to ensure that it goes against the understanding might be to flatter one’s vanity just as much. What, then, are we to conclude about misology and Postscript? ‘Misology’ is Plato’s term and it means hatred of reason. But Kant has a more recent use of it that brings us more directly to the point. According to Kant, this hatred can arise particularly among those who are committed to reason. When they find it produces difficulties they start ‘envying, rather than despising, the more common stamp of men, who keep closer to the guidance of mere instinct, and do not allow their reason much influence on their conduct’.25 Kant believes the role of reason is to form in us an inherently good will, so that we can rise above instinct. However, on the reading of Postscript proposed here, we can take its message to be essentially Kant’s but concerning specifically the will – though with a twist. With regard to the will, unlike Kant, reason in Kierkegaard has a negative role: we need reason to know that our wills are not driven by respect for the authority of reason. Only then can we know that when we have faith it is we that have faith and also that faith is what we have. So what is Kierkegaard saying? Reasoning can make things harder rather than easier, and one may come to envy the insouciance of those who do not reason hard enough to realize just how difficult faith is. In other words, feeling the strain of the repulsion of the absurd due to the conclusion of the elaborate

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dialectic may lead one to resent reasoning and to envy those of an easier faith. So far, not so very far from Kant. Yet misology would not be Climacus’s main concern. There is something else and more important about intellectuals – we might call it logomania26 – an excessive love of reason. By employing their reason in the way Climacus tries to counteract, that is to say, in trying to comprehend faith, they escape rather than induce the tension due to the repulsion of the absurd. It would be an unusual suggestion to say that the resort to reason was a surrender to instinct, and many would regard it as a scandalous one. But how sure can we be that the resort to reason is not at times, indeed often, if not as a rule, instinctive? The very prestige of reason that tends to excuse one from ever asking the question can arouse suspicion. Such a well-protected resort can easily serve as a refuge, an impersonal realm of understanding from which the conflict out of which faith should emerge becomes lost from view. And there is something very misleading about describing the believer who does maintain his faith in the face of the crucifixion of his reason (about faith) as misologistic, at least in Kant’s sense. The elaborate dialectic, if and once you follow it, must effectively destroy any instinctual component left in a faith that survives the dialectic and its negative conclusion. The point of the dialectic is exactly to remove faith from the realm of instinct and thus place it within the grasp of the will. 2 So Postscript’s argument, though negative, is serious. But doesn’t Climacus call himself a humorist? Where then is the joke?27 To answer this question it helps not to assume from the start that the humour of Postscript is to be found in the form of jokes in the text, in the telling, so to speak. Climacus describes humour as a capacity to detect comedy, not to be comical, though as we shall see, that does not mean that humour may not be able to detect comedy in itself. The comical, says Climacus, is ‘present in every stage of life’28 but it takes humour, and also, at a lower level, irony, to see it. While irony occupies the boundary area between the aesthetic and the ethical, humour is ‘the confinium between the ethical and the religious’.29 The difference between irony and humour is that where both of them ‘level’ everything in the cause of an abstraction, irony does so ‘on the basis of humanity in the abstract’ while the humorist does so ‘on the basis of the abstract God-relationship’. But they both form a kind of barrier to taking the next step into, in irony’s case, actual ethical practice and, in humour’s case, an actual God-relationship. The humorist is, then, one who, on reaching the point at which the God-relationship makes sense, turns away at the last moment and ‘parries with his jest’.30 But, then, aren’t those right after all who see Postscript in its entirety as an elaborate joke? Isn’t it the jest that Climacus parries with? But the work also says so much about humour that it might be read as much as a disquisition on humour as a humorous disquisition. Far from being in its entirety a joke, it 17

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might, on the contrary, be an entirely serious work explaining with suitable examples what it means to be in a position to detect unconscious comedy. Climacus dignifies the comic with the professional label ‘contradiction’. He says that ‘wherever there is life there is contradiction, and wherever there is contradiction, the comical is present’.31 This makes good sense when we note that the so-called contradictions occur not in thought but ‘in life’.32 What the ethicist-not-yet-humorist lacks which the humorist-not-yet-believer has is the Christian conception of God, a conception that brings everyday life conceived in terms of human autonomy, the ethicist’s position, into comic relief; what is our autonomy once we stand individually in relation to God? Other comedies come to view to those who see things from other levels, for instance what to everyday common sense (den endelige Forstandighed) seem the comically shortsighted enthusiasms of ‘immediacy’. Sensible people see this as amusing, but from Climacus’s position the commonsensical resolution of the contradiction appears to be (and, because the position is privileged, is) ‘even more comical’.33 The position on which that of the humorist borders is ‘hidden inwardness’. But because it is hidden, this position (called Religiousness A) offers none of the visible incongruities Climacus’s eye is trained to discern. Briefly, by prescinding from earthly goals, the religiosity of hidden inwardness deprives itself of the opportunity to make a fool of itself. Knowing what humour is, it knows how deliberately to avoid such contrasts. Indeed, avoiding them by retreating inwards is exactly hidden inwardness’s way of life. Although hidden inwardness is, to quote Climacus (in a piece of almost pure Hegel – parody or tongue partly in cheek?), ‘eo ipso inaccessible to comic [and accordingly to the humorist’s own] apprehension’, humour is something religiosity has ‘brought to its own consciousness’ and possesses in itself as ‘what is lower’. So the comedy ends here, where the religiosity of hidden inwardness (A) is ‘armed absolutely against the comical, or is by means of the comical secured against [it]’.34 But not quite, for the comedy uncovered from Postscript’s stance carries over into the stance – and thus, after all, into Postscript as a whole – unconscious comedy, that is, which is now recognizable even if the humorist, far from being armed against the comical, is still in its grip, though, as a humorist, he is equipped nevertheless to see that this is so. What is the comedy of the humorist’s position? Defining the comic as it appears from his own point of access, Climacus contrasts its contradiction as ‘painless’ to that of the tragic as ‘suffering’. Humour takes no account of difficulties involved in actually adopting the ‘way out’ from suffering offered by religion; it just keeps the solution in mind (in mente) in the literal sense of confining it to the level of thought. Tragedy concludes, for its part, from actually trafficking with the difficulties, that there is no (‘human’) resolution to the contradiction, no possibility of doing what the humorist sees is required. So tragedy is to confront the ‘contradiction’ as an actual challenge but at the same time see no way of meeting it.35 Just keeping the contradiction in mente (even more so just having a concep18

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tion of God, or even having a conception of God at all) is itself a comically inappropriate way of ‘dealing’ with the project whose nature it has nevertheless been the privilege of the humorist to uncover. Climacus, as a thinker with the self-awareness needed to see that the humorous position from which the comedy becomes visible is also a visibly comical one, is able in a postscript (Tillæg) to Postscript (‘for an understanding with the reader’) not only to ‘revoke’ the work but also to announce that it is ‘superfluous’.36 The philosophical apparatus and the discursive appearance of the text would lead a reader, at that time, to suppose that the philosophy in Postscript was the philosophy of Postscript, an account of the way to the truth offered as an alternative to Kant or Hegel, except that here the truth is subjective. But all the reader gets is a series of philosophical-looking assertions that go against the traditional grain of philosophy itself, and if there is anything that might be called Postscript’s own ‘philosophy’, it is that, with regard to what a human being may hope for or expect, the familiar is destined to become foreign. However, to say even that, let alone spell it out, is to create an illusion of understanding and familiarity. So once Postscript has said what the obstacles are, and thereby presented its radically untraditional point of view, there is nothing more it can do. There is no point in staying around to make things clearer or to defend theses or distinctions, not if you are really interested in the truth. If, on the other hand you are a philosopher … well …. So much for the comedy of Postscript itself (as distinct from the comedy implicit in much of its tone). It is just one more ‘contradiction’ of the kind that Climacus’s disengaged concern is designed to uncover – except that this time, in uncovering it, the humorist sees that he has both come to and represents the limits of his own position. What Climacus has disclosed is the ‘ultimate’ contradiction – being detached about something deadly serious. This is not just the usual distinction between theorizing and practice, since in the usual way of things nearly any practice can benefit from some theorizing. But here theory can enhance the practice only negatively, by making practitioners (advantageously for their faith?) aware that to understand what they are doing is to misunderstand it. It is easy to misread ‘absurd’ and think that in advancing from hidden inwardness (A) to the so-called paradoxical religiousness (B), the believer exposes himself once more to Climacus’s sharp eye for the comical – his special(ized) ‘sense’ of (or for) humour. In B, after all, inwardness is now no longer totally enclosed; it is directed outwards to an event that, if described as it must be to sustain the believer’s interest in truth, is unthinkable. One might assume, therefore, that this absurdity is reflected in a corresponding absurdity in the believer himself, and therefore in the form of some comical contrast in his life. Further, if the comedy really did stop short at hidden inwardness, Postscript would become redundant at that point and not, as our earlier discussion about the need for dialectical consolidation implied, at the close of this move into the Absolute Paradox. But although absurdity is conventionally associated with comedy, here it is a logical not a literary notion. There may be room for rueful irony in the 19

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thought that the truth that matters most is absurd in the logical sense – and not least amusement in the idea that this, in another manner of speaking, ‘makes nonsense’ of Hegel. But there is no hint that the absurdity Climacus points to is meant to amuse; no therapeutic purpose could be served by laughing at the absurdity of what Christians have to believe.37 Since the humorist’s humour depends neither on the comedy of the humorist’s own stance nor on the absurdity of Christianity, Postscript’s final pages may be read as simply the completion of Climacus’s ‘dialectical’ survey. The portion assigned in Postscript to B is in fact quite short, a final twist to the achievement of religious inwardness (A). B is said to preserve the inwardness of Religiousness A (so B ‘presupposes’ A, just as B presupposes humour).38 Here, in terms of the dramatic or literary notion of absurdity, it is Climacus who becomes the more absurd by persisting in his intellectualizing of the existential, not the believer the conditions of whose faith he persists in negatively defining. None of this precludes parody as forming some part of Postscript’s rhetorical armoury. Indeed the work’s subtitle suggests it does: A Mimic-Pathetic-Dialectic Composition. Parody is a time-honoured function of mimicry. That the work is indeed a parody is suggested by the delicious irony in Kierkegaard’s use of the Phenomenology’s scenario to travel in virtually the opposite direction – ending up with no concepts for the truth instead of finding it in the Concept. But we should be careful here. The exploitation of the scenario need not in itself be parodic. Kierkegaard may just have borrowed the scenario to put it to another use. 3 If parody is indeed found in Postscript, we might be a trifle complacent in supposing someone so ‘foreign’ as Hegel to be its sole target. The same might be true about unconscious comedy. What, for example, if we too were part of the comedy Climacus uncovers? The possibility suggests a dilemma. Either we have nothing to fear from Climacus because he has nothing to say to us; or Climacus has something to say to us but then we are laughable. We are laughable in either case since if Climacus has nothing to say to us, why are we discussing him? The situation deserves scrutiny. First, it has to be said that few if any of us are would-be Christians doing something that might pass, though laughably, as a misguidedly intellectual way of grasping the Christian truth. Nor are we ‘town-criers of inwardness’.39 We do not trumpet the cause of an unostentatious sincerity, even if we sometimes speak of that whereof we should be silent. We are in general rather cool customers interested in fairly abstract questions. The greater comedy occurs, so evidently to us and without Climacus’s help, when our engagement in abstract topics sometimes arouses us to such extraordinary heights of passions. A case might be made for our immunity to Climacian humour. In early journal entries Christianity itself is described as humorous. From this it might be inferred that Climacus’s own humour is due simply to his speaking for a view that Kierkegaard calls ‘intrinsically’ humorous. Those who do not have that view in their sights can then safely assume they are not among its targets. But what is it 20

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about Christianity that is humorous? And to whom? Christianity is humorous because its claims appear incongruous to common sense, such claims as, for instance, that its truth lies ‘hidden’ in the mysteries instead of being revealed there, something that ‘humorizes’ worldly wisdom to ‘the highest degree’. In other words, Christianity makes nonsense of common sense. Similarly, by ‘professing its own wretchedness’ while having the form either of a ‘noble pride’ or of a ‘haughty isolation from the ordinary course of events (the historical nexus)’, Christian humility is a polemic ‘against the world’. What makes Hamann Christianity’s most humorous representative is his self-induced Socratic ignorance: ‘forcing oneself down to the lowest position and looking up (that is, down) at the common view, yet in such a way that behind this self-degradation lies a high degree of self-elevation’.40 Thus the humour of Christianity lies in what to common sense are its patent incongruities. They are, if you like, absurdities in the view itself when seen in a worldly perspective. They include others, such as, for example, Christianity’s claim to speak for the whole world and yet also and at the same time for each individual singly. If such incongruities offend common sense, they must also offend philosophy. For what is philosophy but well-edited common sense, or human wisdom in its most articulate form? But the incongruities which it was Climacus’s sense of humour to be able to recognize as comedy were seen, as it were, from the top-down. It was through his having the Christian conception of God that Climacus was able to see comedy in the ethicist’s notion of personal autonomy; just as one could say it is by having a notion of personal freedom that the ironist can see comedy in bourgeois selfimportance, and the possession by the bourgeois of a notion of respectability that makes the short-sighted enthusiasms of ‘immediacy’ look comical to them. In talking of the humour inherent in Christianity, Kierkegaard seems to be looking in the other direction. The humour is due to a deficiency, an inability to make sense of the required conception of God. It is when one looks up from a lower position than it that Christianity appears in an incongruous light. It would, however, be a mistake, I believe, to talk here of two different directions. Seeing why gives us a grip on the position Climacus occupies in the authorship and throws light on the relationship of Postscript’s text to philosophy. Climacus speaks not for the Christian truth but about it. He is not a Christian, nor a fortiori is he a subjective thinker. He does not think in the way he knows and tells us that the individual must in order to become a Christian. Subjective thinking is a private and personal affair involving silence as much as utterance. What utterances do emerge from subjective thinking will be indirect and possibly humorous, the humour providing the kind of cover that Climacus calls an ‘incognito’. But since he is only fictional and has no hidden inwardness to protect, Climacus himself has nothing to hide. He is, one might choose to say, ‘cover-an-sich’, an abstracted part of what it would be to be a being capable of subjective thought. Humour, as it belongs to what we have of Climacus, attaches to him in two related ways: he speaks of Christianity in the language of worldly wisdom, and thus in full 21

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cognizance of its incongruities. That is what he must do if he is to talk about Christianity. So he too is looking up from a position lower than Christianity. Indeed, in spite of what was said above, its incongruities are really only visible from below. For an engaged Christian they vanish from view, not overcome in a new vision but simply put out of sight. People who say Christianity is humorous are not so engaged and of course need not be Christians, though even Christians when not engaged can see the humour in the position. But when, in talking about Christianity, Climacus says that its themes are matters for subjective thinking, he is saying something important but also saying it in the language of objective thinking, the language his readers are used to finding employed with deadly seriousness in philosophical tracts about truth. From one angle we could view the unorthodox style of Postscript as a kind of incognito; the protection provided by treating matters lightheartedly is against what is said, and said seriously, being misread as just another philosophical tract about truth. But there is another angle, that of the higher view itself as seen from below. To make the point one might say, a little exaggeratedly, that what Climacus realizes is that, ‘humorizing’ worldly wisdom as it does to ‘the highest degree’, philosophy is from a Christian point of view no longer an organon but just a plaything. Truth requires something quite different. Not only that, truth is something quite different. Nevertheless philosophy’s language can be used to show how the kind of thinking appropriation of the truth requires bears no traces of that worldly wisdom at which philosophy is traditionally acknowledged to excel. Whether we say the serious use of the language playfully concealed is philosophical or the playful use betokens something other than philosophy may seem to us, if not to Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, a distinction without a difference. In a time inured to the idea that philosophy can be designed just as much to edge us away from false ideas as to urge us in the direction of true ones it matters little whether we read Climacus as an innovative philosopher or deny that the critical thinking he engages in is philosophy. No one can seriously deny, however, that he thinks, and does so seriously. One way of putting what Climacus does is to say that he is positioning the subjective thinker in the space of philosophy. However humorous that project may appear when looking up from below or below from above, it requires thought, ‘objective’ thought. It is doubtful, however, if Postscript has some one main purpose, that this is it. On the background of the authorship it looks more as though it were intended as a necessary prolegomenon to subjective thinking, the philosophy serving the purpose of keeping the subjective thinker on his or her toes, and ensuring that the thinking is properly subjective. Yet it would be a paradoxical result of any investigation into God’s truth that only philosophers or intellectuals are in a position to appreciate what that truth requires, particularly if seeing what the truth requires is necessary for its appropriation. And it would be strange to have to attribute to Kierkegaard or his pseudonym, both of whom mostly write as though the Hegelian philosophy were a quite unnecessary evil, the view that the human situation generally must be understood from the point of view of Hegel aufgehoben, as if Hegel’s 22

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language were necessary for formulating a falsehood one has to appreciate in order to grasp something essential to being human. So we may look with a good conscience for ways of making Kierkegaard’s Climacus more than a creature of his context. One way would be to read the conceptual apparatus of Postscript as ‘adverbial’ to the primary concern, which is to rescue the category of personality from oblivion. The following from the journals can serve as chapter and verse for the general gist of this essay’s argument. Kierkegaard writes: The reason why Concluding Postscript is made to appear comical is precisely that it is serious – and people think they can better the cause by taking separate theses and translating them into pieces of dogma, the whole thing no doubt ending in a new confusion where I myself am treated as a cause, everything being translated into the objective, so that what is new is that here we have a new doctrine, and not that here we have personality.41 For Kierkegaard, rescuing this category meant catching it somewhere between the frying pan of Romantic disintegration and the fire of Hegelian abstraction. Dismissive of Romantics like Novalis as he was of Fichte,42 Kierkegaard proposed a non-philosophical notion of the unified personality in which the unifying factor is faith in the inherent (though God-given) value of what we are and have. For us, placed quite otherwise as we are, the project would be different; in fact we would have to rebuild it from scratch. But even if this were not possible within the bounds of philosophy alone, that fact alone should invite a certain modesty among philosophers. And if philosophy is not sufficient to this task, might not philosophers themselves ascend to a perspective that reveals the unconscious comedy in the cartoon cut-outs that they have used as stand-ins for human beings in their scholastic attempts to fit human mentality into antecedent physicalisms?43 But why complain that philosophy has lost sight of the person when in all likelihood it cannot help doing that? Its disability may be its strength, and when philosophy claimed to speak to the person there could still be comedy. There is no reason to take Climacus’s position to be that all philosophical questions are existential. Certainly that wasn’t Kierkegaard’s view: the footnotes and Nachlass address many philosophical positions in a learned and conventionally philosophical spirit. Philosophers may not be inherently figures of fun, but when they assume the solutions they offer are as good as, better than, even are answers to existential questions, then they come close to the kind of comedy Climacus was invented to help us see.

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2 PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

The influence of Søren Kierkegaard’s writings on the course of philosophical debate in the 1960s and 1970s was predictably less than the burgeoning literature on this profound and complex thinker would ordinarily suggest. Those acquainted with Kierkegaard’s writings could appreciate the reasons – not least the complexity of the thought, the difficulty of reducing it to a systematic or at any rate consistent locutionary series, or even to a string of clearly defined and independently contestable claims. There is also the apparently insoluble problem of the illocutionary force to be attributed to the various works themselves, individually or in their appointed categories (aesthetic, dialectical, religious) – the difficulty, among others, that the works in the two former categories may not be intended to express Kierkegaard’s own claims, or even to claim assent at all, but, as Louis Mackey’s Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet1 proposes, to address the reader’s intelligence in some less direct way. On top of that is (to what is for the most part a studiously agnostic professional public) the apparent parochialism of the announced principal theme of the work taken to be most philosophical, ‘how to become a Christian’ – or even more narrowly, ‘how to become a Christian in Christendom’. Not necessarily finally, but surely most decisively, there is the absence of any clear connection between the highly interesting claims Kierkegaard or his pseudonyms seem to make and the problems occupying the centre of the wider philosophical stage in the 1960s and 1970s. In view of the difficulties of interpretation (the first and second reasons), it is not surprising that a large proportion of the work on Kierkegaard, indeed a significant part of almost every work on him in the period in question, is concerned with offering one theory of how to read him and with rebutting rival theories. There is obviously a genuine need to solve such difficulties, and the depth and detail of some publications, whether they aim to provide a systematic interpretation of the entire corpus (as in the very different cases of Mackey’s A Kind of Poet and Gregor Malantschuk’s Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard, translated as Kierkegaard’s Thought2), or a part (as, for instance, in John W. Elrod’s Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works and Mark C. Taylor’s Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self3), have helped in large measure towards doing so. But readers can hardly be expected to

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judge the merits of the new proposals without a comprehensive acquaintance with the original texts; and even where, as in the latter two works, the discussion is of quite specific and central Kierkegaardian concepts and theses which could well prove interesting and constructive in a larger forum, the exegetical burden tends to inhibit the further analyses and comparisons needed to make them available there. The general effect, it might be said, is to preserve whatever is excellent in the renaissance of Kierkegaard scholarship (and there is very much) for an already established, even if expanding, circle of Kierkegaard scholars. Some Kierkegaardians may not be troubled by this. They may say that the socalled centre of the philosophical stage is only that part of it which happens, for essentially trivial reasons and only for the time being, to be best lit. Time will show that the framework and manner in which Kierkegaard presents his thought is the enduring one, and that, as Mackey claims, ‘in parting company with [the then] modern philosophy’, Kierkegaard, although ‘perhaps the most extreme antiphilosopher of modern times’, was actually ‘rejoin[ing] the philosophia perennis’.4 It would, however, be presumptuous as well as complacent to assume that the issues which occupy present modern philosophy, as well as the methods with which it deals with them, were entirely foreign to the philosophia perennis; and if participation in the philosophia perennis really matters, it would be safer to assume that the more lasting results would be obtained by a joint exertion that allows concessions from both sides. In the remainder of this chronicle I draw attention to a few topics where I suggest it might be profitable to search for links between the interesting things Kierkegaard seems to be saying, though not always with the greatest precision and clarity, and certain familiar problems and points of view in current philosophy of mind, broadly conceived. The point of the exercise is to chart the extent to which Kierkegaardian issues have their counterparts in (let us tendentiously call them) less sectarian discussions, to gain some idea of the degree of mutual interest and relevance. 1 Kierkegaard describes the person or self in terms which to the casual eye suggest the now widely discredited Cartesian polarity of res cogitans and res extensa. Since most contemporary discussion in current philosophy of mind is concerned with the elaboration of acceptable alternatives to Cartesian dualism, this could be one place where the connection can be made quite straightforwardly. But that is not so. Or at least it is not a connection that can be made straightforwardly with the contemporary critique and attempted replacement of Cartesian dualism. The terms which Kierkegaard uses to describe the person or self as a synthesis of two elements (infinitude/finitude, possibility/necessity, eternity/temporality) are drawn not from Descartes but from Hegel (and through him Aristotle). There are two very important differences between the Hegelian and the Cartesian polarity. In the first place, in the tradition stemming from Descartes, philosophy of mind focuses attention on the relation between mind, or consciousness, and its physical vehicle, the body; the debate is one in fundamental ontology as to whether the human mind is sui generis or can be explained in principle as a complex natural (that is, physical) 25

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phenomenon. But the relation upon which the Hegelian tradition focuses is that between mind, or consciousness, and its object, the world. Secondly, for contemporary philosophy of mind, as for Descartes himself, the notion of the mind’s object is that of an ‘outside’ (that is, extra-mental) reality which true judgements ‘represent’ in consciousness. In the Hegelian tradition it would be more apt to say that the mind’s object is contained in rather than that it was represented by our true thoughts; or, as one commentator puts it, that ‘thought and the determinations through which it operates (the Denkbestimmungen, or categories) are not the apanage of a subject over against the world, but lie at the very root of things’.5 The Hegelian idea of an objective world is linked to that of shareable meaning rather than to that of common reference. Roughly, the commonness of the common world lies in the Fregean idea that a thought must be something people can have in common rather than in the Strawsonian idea of a unique system of publicly observable and enduring spatiotemporal entities.6 These aspects of the Hegelian polarities determine the nature of the philosophical problems posed by the oppositions in question. The overriding problem is that of reconciling them. Why is that a problem? Because the latter element in each opposition represents a limitation of the subject’s fundamental nature. Traditionally finitude or finiteness is the limitation of distinctness and is a logical consequence of being something of a certain sort; necessity is the logical property of something’s being as it has to be by power of reason; while temporality implies successiveness and so exposure to change. As Mark Taylor points out in his discussion of the oppositions, Kierkegaard not only departs from the traditional use of these terms but also tends to regard them as interrelated aspects of the same limitation.7 Broadly, and in the corresponding order, the aspects are being merely particular, being constrained by accidents of environment and endowment, and lacking a stable centre, or essence. The most crucial departure from the tradition is the use of the term ‘necessity’ in connection with situational rather than rational or logical constraint; Kierkegaard denies8 that anything actually occurs with necessity and, in the absence of its previous function of determining choices, applies the term by association to factors limiting them. Again broadly, and the parallel here was as far as I know first pointed out by Jean Wahl,9 the problem facing the subject is the one described by Hegel in his account of the Unhappy Consciousness as the subject’s separation from the source of its own nature. What the ‘particular individual’ needs is (in Hegel’s terms) its ‘oneness …with the Unchangeable’, or ‘the reconciliation … of [its] individuality with the universal’.10 One difference between today’s philosophy and the philosophy Kierkegaard so violently opposed is that for the former this is not a genuine problem at all. The Aristotelian framework of essences and unchangeable truths in which Hegel’s philosophy is embedded has gone the way of all metaphysics. But then Kierkegaard’s reason for opposing his philosophical contemporaries was that neither did he believe it was a philosophical problem. So how do Kierkegaard and our (post-positivist, linguistically turned) contemporaries differ? And if 26

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Kierkegaard’s point is that the problem is genuine but not philosophical, how can this be reconciled with the claim that in opposing his own philosophical contemporaries he was rejoining the philosophia perennis? First, Kierkegaard’s opposition to speculative idealism is that it claims the problem can be solved conceptually. The oneness and reconciliation are to be unifications in thought, brought about by advancing to a higher point of view. According to Hegel, consciousness ‘becomes Spirit by finding itself therein’, in an ‘aware[ness] of the reconciliation of its individuality with the universal’. Its ‘joy’ is then found in the ‘peace’ of ‘self-assurance’, and its ‘blissful enjoyment’ is that of perfect ‘vision’.11 In these quotations we see the tendency in Hegelian philosophy to personify abstract ideas, and Kierkegaard’s argument is in effect that once the problem is, as it should be, really posed by actual persons of themselves, it becomes clear (for reasons given in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) both that the conceptual solution is abstract, irrelevant and self-defeating, and that it involves misconceptions simultaneously of the nature of personal existence and of the role of philosophy in helping to solve the problem as it does indeed arise there. If it is true that post-positivist philosophy would in general reject whatever metaphysical assumptions must be made for the problem to be able to arise there, this would not put it in a position significantly different from that of speculative idealism in Kierkegaard’s eyes. Speculative idealism thinks it is addressing the issue but isn’t. Post-positivist philosophy isn’t addressing it either; the difference is simply that it doesn’t aim to do so. Kierkegaard’s criticism of the philosophical style of his contemporaries is one he would no doubt find good reason to repeat today: If thought in our time had not become something queer, something one learns parrot-fashion [noget Tillært], thinkers would make a quite different impression upon people, as was the case in Greece, where a thinker was also someone whose thinking inspired him to a passionate interest in his own existence; and as was also once the case in Christendom, where a thinker was someone whose faith inspired him to try to understand himself in the existence of faith.12 The answer to the second question, then, as the reference indicates, is that Kierkegaard saw himself as returning to the Greek tradition. More specifically, he saw himself as returning to and continuing from where Socrates had left off. Kierkegaard describes himself (in the shape of his philosophical or ‘dialectical’ persona, Johannes Climacus) as ‘going further than Socrates’.13 The respect in which Socrates was going in the right direction was that he was an existential thinker; while the respect in which he did not go far enough in that direction was that (in Plato’s version; see the important footnote in Postscript on Socrates14) he continued to assume that essential truth lay within the scope of human cognitive capacity. Kierkegaard’s proposed (or, as he presents it, hypothetical) ‘advance’ on Socrates is to reject this assumption; while it was the philosophical tradition’s 27

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acceptance of it which made the culmination of that tradition in Hegel’s ‘System’ a colossal diversion. Ideally, Kierkegaard’s own philosophical project should have been that of showing the path out of Greek philosophy (paganism), via Socrates (existential thought and irony), to the anti-philosophical, non-humanist position where the only saving truths have to be conceived as based on paradox (religiousness B). But there were obstacles: the philosophical tradition itself and its offshoot, organized religion. Kierkegaard had to contend with an ideology which offered easy ways out of the hard epistemological truths of his advanced position, which encouraged people to believe that they could be saved by being incorporated into the essential truth simply as effective members of existing Danish society, or even that they were already saved because they had been baptized into the Danish State Church. In respect of the ideology, Kierkegaard saw himself as a Socrates15 demolishing the protective fabric of illusions that prevented people from posing the problem of reconciliation as a personal one, as a problem their reflection on which could inspire them to a passionate interest in their own existence. If we now return to the schema of oppositions which we said formed the basis of Kierkegaard’s account of the person or self, we find two things which distinguish the account from the kinds with which we are most familiar in contemporary philosophy. In the first place, the oppositions apply differently according to the subject’s understanding of its own relation to essential truth. Thus in paganism, or in what Kierkegaard calls ‘immanent’ positions generally, the subject as it were straddles the opposition; the assumption is that it can establish its relationship to the essential truth (to the eternal) by some form of action or style of life within the subject’s own power of performance – in the ethical but not yet religious sphere by asserting a social self, and in the as yet only paganly religious sphere by a form of self-annihilation involving withdrawal from existence. In either case existence, the individual’s existence, whether in self-assertion or in self-annihilation, is thought to be in some way encompassed by the eternal; while in Kierkegaard’s advanced position, instead of the opposition occurring within existence, it is placed ‘absolutely between existence and eternity’.16 The second distinctive feature is Kierkegaard’s use of the term ‘self’. It is introduced into the schema as a ‘third term’ which ‘mediates’ the opposites, establishing them as elements in a ‘synthesis’. Against the Hegelian background with its method of conciliation one might expect the synthesis to be the solution of the problem, the reconciling of the opposites in a higher unity; but it appears rather to be the first grasp of the problem itself. In a discussion of sin and sensuality we are told that ‘the synthesis is first posited in the sexual as a contradiction … and, like every contradiction, as a task the history of which begins at that very moment’.17 In an often-quoted passage, often assumed to be a parody of the Hegelian style but proving on explication to be a neat though spare definition of the self’s place in the synthesis, we read: The 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 28

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synthesis is a relation between two. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. … In a relation between two things the relation is the third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation, and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.18 In plainer language, the self is not to be identified simply with a relation which allows us to classify human beings as a species of psychophysical entity; for then the self would be a merely dependent factor, mirroring the interactions of the other two. Kierkegaard’s self is a controlling rather than a controlled factor, this being the respect in which it is said to belong properly to the category of ‘spirit’. In Hegelian terms ‘spirit’ is synonymous with ‘freedom’, and the freedom of spirit is that spirit exists ‘in and with itself’.19 Kierkegaard need not deny that psychophysical organisms lacking a self are nevertheless controlled, in the sense that they have an organized repertoire of advantageous responses to their immediate environments. But beings whose mental life is correctly located in the category of spirit are not confined in this way to the instinctual closure of immediacy. Kierkegaard refers (in The Concept of Anxiety) to spirit as a kind of function or force ‘present’ in man, and which ‘constitutes’ the psychophysical synthesis, whose components, soul and body, are variously said to be ‘united’, ‘bound’, ‘sustained’ by, or to ‘rest’ in it. Spirit also ‘posits’ the synthesis, though only when it, that is to say, spirit, ceases to be merely ‘dreaming’ in man, or present only ‘as immediate’.20 The presence of spirit implies not merely an ability to envisage other environments than the immediate one; it implies a kind of distancing of the mind from the finite world of particular environments altogether. If we allow that animals are exclusively finite beings in the terms of this discussion, their minds (souls) do not have this distance, they live ‘immediate’ lives, and the synthesis in their case contains no ‘opposition’, ‘contradiction’ or ‘task’, while even if a human being who lives the life of immediacy (as in the ‘aesthetic sphere’) finds no contradiction in his existence, it is still there ‘outside’.21 The contradiction is not between soul and body, but between spirit and the soul in its instinctual role. What Kierkegaard means by saying that man is ‘determined as spirit’22 is that man is always, even if at first only implicitly, conscious of being essentially underdetermined as a merely finite being. An interesting parallel can be drawn between Kierkegaard’s ‘spirit’ and Hegel’s ‘consciousness’. In Hegel this term, distinguished in a corresponding way from ‘soul’ (Seele), refers specifically to the kind of awareness, allegedly specific to man, in which he is set apart from the immediate, instinctual side of his existence, an idea with which Hegel, also with Kierkegaard, associates the notion of spiritual freedom and selfcontained existence.23 Hegel talks of the path of natural consciousness … the way of the soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the 29

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stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit. The path laid out for the soul ‘presses forward to true knowledge’ or ‘Science’, and the point of the journey is to provide the soul with a ‘completed experience of itself’ in which it finally achieves ‘awareness of what it really is in itself’.24 Kierkegaard’s existing individual is denied any such awareness, and it is instead the full awareness of this fact that forms the goal of its journey along the path of consciousness. On the other hand, Kierkegaard’s spirit is, like Hegel’s, the realization of a potentiality specific to the human soul. And also like Hegel’s, the special characteristic of this soul is its sense of a disproportion between natural and merely finite existence, on the one hand, and the requirements of its autonomy and fulfilment, on the other.25 But in the case of Kierkegaard’s ‘soul’, the ideals of fulfilment and freedom are always a ‘task’, for instance the task of ‘winning the sexual into the [eternal] category of spirit’ (at vinde det ind i Aandens [evige]Bestemmelse).26 The instinctual life does not conform itself to ‘the category of spirit’, it has to be brought actively into conformity with it; the instinctual life poses a practical problem requiring the individual’s active intervention. How, then, are this practical task and its solution related to the overriding problem of reconciling the opposites, and to its solution? Indeed what kind of reconciliation is at all possible in the absence of a perfect vision of the kind providing it in Hegel? And even if there is one, what advantages, corresponding to the ‘joy’, ‘blissful enjoyment’ and ‘self-assurance’ afforded by the Hegelian vision, can the individual expect from such a reconciliation? Unless there is some sense of its being not only the right but also a satisfying thing to do, unless, at the very least, there is the prospect of some compensation for the losses involved in elevating the instinctual life to the level of spirit, the project will be as ‘abstract’ as Hegel’s own and a matter of indifference to the concretely situated individual to whom Kierkegaard appeals. The answers, given here very briefly, provide introductions to our remaining topics. First, that Kierkegaard does contemplate some form of reconciliation, and that what he calls ‘transfiguring sensuousness into spirit’27 is a necessary part of it, can be understood, once again, in terms of the Hegelian programme which Kierkegaard’s is intended (it is not always sufficiently stressed) to replace as well as to subvert. Hegel’s is a monist system in which matter tends towards ideality and spirit in the end encompasses everything. The material world exists merely in order to give spirit embodiment; spirit has to ‘externalize’ itself as nature before ‘returning to’ itself as concrete spirit. For Kierkegaard, however, this monistic scheme leaves out the problematic and compound category of existence. In describing the human being as a compound (of infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, and eternity and temporality), he is, as we have seen, referring to the situation of the merely particular, concretely situated and unstabilized individual concerned with the possibility of reconciling these limitations with their opposites. Since conceptual mediation is an illusion from the point of view of 30

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existence,28 the tendency in thought should rather be to stress the absolute distinction between these elements. Any tendency to conflate the two, to see the finite as a manifestation of the infinite, as if the terms of this contradiction were still within existence, and the reconciliation within the individual’s power through ethical self-assertion or religious self-annihilation, must be regarded as a human weakness. The same applies if the tendency is to say that the infinite is totally different from the finite and yet to treat or conceive it as if it belonged to the familiar realm of the finite all the same.29 The two must be held absolutely apart. But there is still the possibility of a situation corresponding to that of the ‘embodiment’ of spirit in nature. It is for the acting individual to subordinate finite ends to an absolute end, at least to try to reach that ‘maximum’ which is to ‘maintain simultaneously a relationship to the absolute telos and to relative ends, not by mediating them, but by making the relationship to the absolute telos absolute, and the relationship to the relative ends relative’.30 ‘If for any individual’, says Kierkegaard, ‘an eternal happiness is his highest good, this will mean that all finite considerations [Momenter] are once and for all actively [handlendeJ reduced to what has to be given up in relation to the eternal happiness.’31 By ‘giving up’ the finite (Kierkegaard also talks of ‘resignation’32 and of ‘renouncing everything’,33 the latter as ‘the first true expression of one’s relationship to the absolute telos [there are later expressions, first suffering, the ‘essential’ expression, then guilt, the ‘decisive’ expression] ), Kierkegaard does not mean turning one’s back on it. ‘The individual does not cease to be a human being, nor does he divest himself of the manifold composite garment of the finite in order to clothe himself in the abstract attire of the cloister …’34 The point is rather that the individual consciously subjects the finite goals that confront him to an overordinate, nonfinite end, genuinely conceived as non-finite. The result, in form, corresponds to the Hegelian subordination of matter to spirit – putting matter to spiritual use. The difference is that here the transformation of the material occurs not in the material world as such, in things and processes, but in the manner in, or nature of the intention by, which changes are brought about in that world by individuals, in their projects, aims and choices. The unification, which in Hegel’s account of spirit is the result of matter striving (self-destructively, as Hegel says) after the realization of its idea, is for Kierkegaard introduced into the world by human agency. But it is not introduced in the sense that a change in the world due to human action of the kind in question is an objectively identifiable manifestation of the infinite. In this respect action is not a substitute for mediation. The unification has a purely ‘subjective’ location, in the individual will. Secondly, why, when living in the category of spirit35 requires the individual to be a ‘stranger in the world of the finite’,36 should the individual nevertheless choose that life? Now although the reference to eternal happiness indicates that there is meant to be some form of ultimate satisfaction in it for the individual, it appears that the threshold of satisfaction to which Kierkegaard appeals is considerably lower than in Hegel. It is true that Kierkegaard speaks of a kind of certainty (Vished) paralleling Hegel’s ‘self-assurance’, but otherwise, rather than ‘joy’ or 31

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‘blissful enjoyment’, all that he offers his individual is the absence of despair. And even the certainty turns out to be the product of a consciously irrational decision, an ‘act of daring’ (Vovestykke) in which the individual ‘risks everything’, including his ‘thought’, which means that the capacity to determine logical possibility has to be renounced if an eternal happiness is to be even so much as an option.37 Whatever gravitational pull the prospect of an eternal happiness originally has is replaced, as the consequences of Kierkegaard’s advanced position emerge, by the intellectually blind choice, in what he calls the ‘passion of the infinite’,38 of a goal about which all that can be said is that it is ‘the manner of its acquisition’.39 However, we are not to take this to imply a corresponding decrease of interest in the goal of reconciliation itself. On the contrary, it is when, in the deepest despair, one faces the full impact of the absolute transcendence of the eternal that being rid of despair becomes the greatest thing one could wish (as water to someone parched with thirst) and differentially on a par with Hegel’s joy and blissful enjoyment. The reason why, as Kierkegaard concedes, so few even attempt the life of spirit is not that it has no inherent attraction, it is, he says, because ‘most people have still not gone particularly deep in their despair’.40 Despair is described as an incongruity or imbalance (Misforhold) ‘in the relation comprising the synthesis’.41 The incongruity, it should be noted, is not the fact that the terms in the synthesis stand opposed to one another: that they do so is a given fact of human existence; and in any case ‘it is not up to the existing [individual] to make existence out of finitude and infinity [by putting them together], but being himself composed of [these] to become qua existing one of them [namely infinite] …’.42 Furthermore, [if] the synthesis [itself] were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair, it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone.43 It is essential to Kierkegaard’s view that there is an alternative to despair, that despair is an option that the individual chooses, or at least remains in by default. So the incongruity is a feature not of the synthesis, but of the self. More accurately, it is that whereby this ‘third’ factor fails to establish itself, or be ‘posited’ as a self, fails to ‘relate to itself’ and thus to become the ‘positive’ third factor in the synthesis. Yet this is not the whole story. Despair is said to have two main forms: one is the individual’s reluctance to be a self, and the other is the ‘posited’ self’s reluctance to accept that it is ‘established by another’.44 In Hegel’s language this latter reluctance would be the posited self’s insistence that it has its ‘essence’ in itself. Hegel’s ideal of spiritual freedom as the spirit’s existing ‘in and with itself’ would therefore appear from Kierkegaard’s position as a form of despair. The ‘formula’ for reconciliation, or the ‘condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated [is]: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power which established it’.45 ‘The self is freedom’, 32

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or the achievement by the synthesis (or by the relationship which comprises it) of relating to itself.46 But if the self now freely refuses to consider itself a ‘derived’ (deriveret) relationship and presumes to exist (as Hegel would put it) ‘in and with itself’, it has still failed to be rid of its despair. The self is ‘healthy’ and ‘free from despair’ only when, ‘having despaired’, it is ‘grounded transparently in God’.47 Both these answers imply the centrality of will: the first says that reconciliation is a kind of exercise of will, the second that it is an achievement of will. The latter is obviously logically prior: the existence of the achievement is presupposed by the claim that it takes the specified form. The combined view is that reconciliation is the result of the individual’s own effort, something which, first of all, points to the truth in the Kierkegaardian share in the frequent claim that the problems Hegel treated as capable of conceptual solution Marx and Kierkegaard interpreted in their different ways as practical; and thereby, secondly, allows us to place Kierkegaard’s views on the relation of body, soul and spirit in their proper philosophical context, which is that of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, not philosophy of mind in the modern, more specialized sense. The pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety says it is not necessary for his purpose to enter into any ‘pompous philosophical discussion about the relation between soul and body’ (though he adds enough to indicate that he could if he wanted); it suffices to say that ‘the body is the organ of the soul and thus, in turn, of the spirit’.48 Transforming the soul/body synthesis into the organ of the spirit is the task that first appears, or the ‘history’ of which begins, with the ‘positing’ of the synthesis and culminates in the constituting of a ‘self’ properly so called: a free individual in the sense of one who, to adapt Marx, has brought the psychological conditions of life under conscious control – conditions which, in Marx’s terms, if abandoned to chance acquire an independent existence over against the individual. The ‘synthesis’ is the framework in terms of which Kierkegaard describes fulfilment: the individual’s decision to ‘risk everything’ is one by which he does, in a way, ‘become infinite’;49 it is a choice in which he accepts an identity apart from and superordinate to the finite, even though, in order to avoid the second main form of despair, this requires accepting that possession of the infinite must take the form of dependence upon God. But it is also the framework within which the problems and failures of fulfilment are to be described. The synthesis provides, in its pairs of opposite terms, the basis of a typology of failures, that is, of forms of despair (in The Sickness unto Death), as well as a kind of hierarchy of growth-levels – first the psychophysical compound in which the body is the organ of soul, and in respect of which spirit is only an open ‘possibility’, and then this compound as the organ of spirit in the state Kierkegaard calls freedom – which allows him to describe (in The Concept of Anxiety) the states of anxiety attending the idea of a transition from a finitely based identity to an infinitely based one. To understand the role of the component terms in the synthesis it would be misleading to think of them, as in contemporary discussion of psychophysical connections, as logically independent coevals in some kind of hierarchically ordered relation to one another. The soul, 33

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for instance, is not to be regarded, along with its characteristic bodily expression, as an independent though junior and more earthbound partner of an ascetic spirit. It is rather the state or stage to which the self may regress when under pressure, a state in which the body becomes the organ of the soul rather than of the spirit, although Kierkegaard claims that in thus shunning its spiritual possibility or freedom the self entering this state is divided and the state therefore is a morbid one. This attempted regression in fact comprises one important category in Kierkegaard’s typology of anxiety, what he calls ‘freedom lost psychosomatically’ (Friheden tabt somatisk-psychisk). It is an anxiety which shuns the good, and among the ‘countless multiplicity of [whose] nuances’ will be found ‘an exaggerated sensibility, nervous affections, hysteria, hypochondria, etc.’50 The circumstances of which these can be symptoms might be called conditions of life which have acquired an independent existence over against the individual. 2 One way of reading the two main works Kierkegaard devotes to psychological themes is as providing the conceptual tools necessary for the individual’s conscious control of such conditions. What these works describe are the psychological attitudes of the individual in its relation to the presupposed and personally demanding ideal of freedom. In The Concept of Anxiety we have an account of the individual’s growing anxiety in the face of the ideal, both before it takes clear shape in consciousness and after. In The Sickness unto Death we are given classified descriptions of the morbid and psychologically unstable conditions of those who shun the ideal and try, against their better judgement, but also – it is suggested – against the inherent tendency of human consciousness, to make do with something less demanding. Both accounts could be said to provide the conceptual background the individual needs to know his place within the psychological economy, thus enabling him to direct his own psychological affairs instead of being directed by them. This interpretation strikes me as largely correct but in need of careful qualification, in two respects. First, there is the emphasis Kierkegaard places on the will. It isn’t just understanding that the individual lacks, as if he already had the correct desire (selfhood, freedom) and needed only the knowledge of what actions will satisfy it; indeed Kierkegaard’s assumption seems to be that the gist of the account is something with which the individual is already acquainted, and the details of which will be readily recognized as true. What someone who is a victim of his own psychological economy lacks is, partly, the will to put the knowledge into practice. But only partly, since a significant factor in the weakening of the will is the individual’s own description of the attitude he adopts in failing to act so as to satisfy his desire for selfhood and freedom; thus he might say that the conditions really do have an independent existence and that he really is a victim and so not free to do otherwise, or that the attitude is freely adopted because it affords an alternative satisfaction that is the really preferred one. What Kierkegaard gives is an alternative description, a description of the attitude as an inferior option which the individual has chosen deliberately or by default; that is to say, as an accountable failure to act 34

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on an actually preferred judgement. Here, then, we should be able to find a link with contemporary discussions of akrasia, or weakness of will, and self-deception.51 But there are obvious differences. These discussions are often formal, with examples, usually fairly trivial and nearly always artificial, concocted to make particular logical points. Kierkegaard focuses on one example and seems to claim it is universal. His discussion really belongs to moral psychology, not conceptual analysis; in addition to which it takes for granted an ethico-religious framework that even moral psychologists would consider old-fashioned – a framework which to many will seem simply to have been imposed upon the psychological phenomena from above, though this would be to go too far: Kierkegaard’s moral psychology is in the first instance phenomenological; its descriptions of psychological states appeal, if not to common experience, at least to what Kierkegaard might plausibly claim are generally available insights. It might be more fruitful to regard the ethical framework not as being arbitrarily superimposed but as an attempted reconstruction of more or less familiar phenomena in terms of a particular theory of human development, a theory which gives a central place to individual responsibility and choice. A better indication of the kind of relation Kierkegaard’s moral framework has to his psychological descriptions is to be found in the objection that the framework is arbitrary in another sense: namely that it is simply an ideological solution to admittedly real but not universal psychological problems, problems revealed to Kierkegaard in his own neurosis and by his exceptional powers of self-observation. In other words, that the framework of sin, faith and redemption is a piece of wishful thinking. For even if the criticism is misguided (and perhaps it is not altogether), its functional interpretation of the relationship between the ethical superstructure and psychological base does at least express recognition of a way in which it would be correct to say that the two are not logically independent of one another. The second qualification to the claim that the psychological works provide the knowledge the individual needs to be able to control his own psychological economy concerns the role often assigned to knowledge in such a case. Scientific descriptions are parts of scientific explanations, and we usually think of these as causal. Discounting mere curiosity or wonder, the rationale for such descriptions is that, if true, they contribute to our ability to predict and, in principle, by manipulation of the causal antecedents, to prevent, compensate for or contrive the occurrence of the phenomenon in question. Although it is perhaps physical phenomena we think of first here, there seems no reason in principle why at least some psychological phenomena should not be open to similar manipulation. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard’s descriptions of psychological phenomena are not intended to enable us to avoid problems. His account of the conditions of the ‘real’ possibility of sin (The Concept of Anxiety, Ch. I), for example, is not intended to enable us to avoid the problem of sin by control of these conditions. Certainly there is a sense in which he intends it to enable us to solve the problem of sin. However, the solution requires us not to avoid the problem but to face it head-on.52 The descriptions are in fact best understood 35

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as reconstructions of certain psychological phenomena in a non-scientific terminology which interprets them from the point of view of that problem. The aim is to make us aware both of the kind of practical solution needed and of the destructive consequences of not giving it that kind of solution. The descriptions are thus in a sense diagnostic and cautionary. But unlike scientific psychologists, whose cautions consist in predictions of undesirable consequences (pain, death, insanity) of present psychological conditions, predictions which only then disclose to those affected that they are confronted with a (prudential or ethical) choice, Kierkegaard interprets the conditions as themselves outcomes of choice in conscious defiance of what the choosers already know to be right. Establishing causal connections between (it is usually insisted) logically independent events is only one way of enlarging the scope of our understanding. The connections can also be, and perhaps must always necessarily be in part, conceptual. According to Hegel’s conception of science (philosophical science), they are exclusively conceptual. Phenomena which appear to be only contingently related, or which our currently best descriptions even force us to regard as conceptually irreconcilable, are grasped – that is to say, a conceptual solution of the theoretical problem they confront us with is provided – only if they can be logically united or reconciled under the cover of a new, embracing concept. The ability to come by such concepts, Hegel’s speculative reason, has in principle no limits. Hegelian science is therefore all-embracing. Hegel classified psychology, along with (in his senses of these terms) phenomenology and anthropology, as a science of Subjective Spirit, a topic comprising, roughly, the attitudes and dynamics of spiritual emergence from the point of view of consciousness – in contrast to ‘objective spirit’, by which Hegel meant the public manifestations and historical forms of this emergence, including legal institutions and social morality (Sittlichkeit), but also the socially significant aspects of individual conscience (Moralität). In intending his science of spirit to be all-embracing, Hegel meant that no aspect of human life, not even the concepts and principles of individual and social morality, lay beyond its grasp. It is this view which Kierkegaard attacks: the belief that ethical concepts, principles and problems can be understood by incorporating them within a systematic understanding of the world in general. This, on Kierkegaard’s view, is precisely to misunderstand the nature of ethical problems. It is to interpret them not as practical dilemmas facing individual persons and their lives, practical problems, that is, which require specifically ethical, not technical, solutions, but as in the end theoretical problems to be solved by advances in comprehension, as if the solutions were to be found rather than made. 3 Making a solution, in Kierkegaard, means creatively embodying the unity of the infinite. Feuerbach said that speculative philosophy’s mistake was to conceive the path of philosophy as ‘from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideal to the real’. This was to put things upside-down: the starting-point should be the finite, without which ‘the infinite cannot be conceived’. Feuerbach observes that ‘[t]he transition from the ideal to the real takes place only in practical philosophy’.53 36

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Whatever he meant by that, it is clear that Kierkegaard, too, holds that the proper direction is the reverse of Hegel’s and that the problem is a practical one. However, in regard to this practical problem Kierkegaard prescribes a path that not only reverses Hegel’s by having the finite (individual) as its beginning and the unity of the infinite as its goal, but is its reverse in another respect too. Hegel’s path of natural consciousness goes from private to public, from inner to outer, from individuality to a consummation of the individual in a publicity offering fulfilment in ready-made social roles. The progress is outward from ‘immediacy’ to the public domain in which spirit finds its own home, and in relation to which any pockets of privacy in the public fabric are wrinkles to be flattened out in further extensions of the common vision of objective truth. Kierkegaard’s journey is inwards, as greater insight reveals the inability of the public world to provide for the individual’s consummation, and as the role of will (or ‘heart’) and personal choice are revealed as the resources with which the finite agent must secure any consummation that may be in store for it. In this respect the force of Kierkegaard’s injunction to ‘become subjective’, and of his claim that this is the ‘highest task’ confronting every individual,54 is that, apart from having to be stood on his head, Hegel also has to be turned outside-in. 4 We said earlier that the Hegelian idea of an objective world was linked to that of shareable meaning rather than common frame of reference. By, at this level of analysis, an admittedly crude and facile inference one might suppose that from the Hegelian point of view the degree to which a person succeeds in becoming subjective correlates inversely with the amount of meaning that person has to share, and perhaps that at the extreme of subjectivity a person has no meaning at all to share. Now, as it notoriously happens, this thesis, or rather a thesis answering to this general formulation, is the one presented in Fear and Trembling and exemplified in the extreme moral individualism of the knight of faith. The knight of faith, portrayed in a version of the Genesis story of Abraham’s willingness, on God’s command, to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as proof of his faith, is one who acts in ‘concealment’ and ‘cosmic isolation’.55 His isolation is that of one who cannot make himself understood, who, whatever he might say in explanation of his action, will not be able to convey its moral point to others. He is a radically recalcitrant wrinkle in the public fabric. The question is whether his ‘privacy’ has any actual connection with the notion that objectivity is essentially linked to that of shared meaning – or of common conceptual vision – and if so, with what implications for the wider philosophical debate; or whether the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’, as Kierkegaard calls the situation exemplified by Abraham, is a breach not of some alleged principle of meaning, but, less radically, of a preferred theory of morality. The latter interpretation is suggested by Kierkegaard’s explanation of Abraham’s ‘concealment’ as being due to his ‘[doing] nothing for the universal’.56 That is to say, there is no overriding communal goal that his action serves and which in the eyes of common morality would justify what to those 37

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eyes must otherwise appear to be an incomprehensible repudiation of parental love and responsibility. One might think that Abraham’s own reason for his action (that it is a test of his faith – not, of course, in God’s existence, since even disobeying God’s command demonstrates that, but in God’s justice) is one that he, Abraham, understands. So that if there were enough knights of faith to form a community, it might be said of them that they shared a common vision of morality, one for which doing something for the universal was not an absolute norm. If the knight of faith’s isolation is ‘absolute’, however, we would expect knights of faith to be just as isolated, in the relevant respect, from one another as from those with whom they do not share this vision. It seems that the clue to what this respect is and to what makes the isolation absolute is to be found in Kierkegaard’s (or his pseudonym’s) saying that the basis of the knight of faith’s actions is a principle which defies thought and ‘remains in all eternity a paradox’. The principle is that ‘the individual is higher than the universal’.57 Hegel says in the Phenomenology that there is something which, if you try to convey it in language, you will always misrepresent: namely the particular ‘sensuous’ content of your experience. Language can only express generality. So what you might mean to say in this case will be ‘refuted’ by what you actually succeed in saying. Hegel’s view is that it is what you say that is ‘the more truthful’,58 as we would expect if objective truth is the content of a perfect vision whose content is conceptual, that is, a system of relationships, and not some particular or particulars to which you stand in a definite relation. Kierkegaard apparently accepts this view of what language can and cannot express (‘As soon as I speak I express the universal’ and ‘the relief of speech is that it translates [one] into the universal.’59) But his view as to where there is more truth is the opposite of Hegel’s – at least with regard to ‘eternal’ truth, an essential component in which is the definite relation of the individual to the content (the ‘how’ of the utterer’s relationship to the objective ‘what’ of his utterance), as the distinction is made in Postscript,60 and therefore also, in the present case, with regard to the transcendent source of eternal value. What is primary in this respect is the ‘absolute relationship’ in which the individual stands to this ‘Absolute’. The relationship itself is absolute because it is unconditional upon any finite consideration on the part of the individual. Apart from this, however, and the fact that the absolute, being transcendent, could not be identified by any general description applicable within the space-time order in any case, the relationship to this transcendent source is parallel to that to the immediate content of experience, or perhaps to any particular thing we try to consider in itself, without the ‘mediation’ of the universal. What is paradoxical is the idea that the individual, in regard to what he essentially is and ought to do, should be prior to the universal, that is, to what can be thought and said about the individual. It is paradoxical in so far as in order to ‘understand’ the utterances and actions of the individual who adopts this idea, we would have to describe them in terms that constitute a breach of a principle of describability. That the idea defies thought would then simply be a consequence of the (not at all self-evident) principle that whatever can be thought can be said. 38

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Most discussion of Fear and Trembling in the period covered by these chronicles has focused on the figure of Abraham and the question of the morality and/or general defensibility of his intended action. Although little of this debate comes more than marginally within the philosophy of mind, it is perhaps worth remarking that a fuller appreciation of the general Hegelian background – of the logical background as well as the practical background presented by Bernstein61 – would have obviated the need for a good deal of it and perhaps directed attention more fruitfully upon the general issues. It is clear, for example, that Kierkegaard does envisage a teleological suspension of the ethical, at least in the sense of an Hegelian Sittlichkeit ethics, but that he does not mean this to imply a relativization of morality as such to a supramoral authority;62 and also that we are to take Abraham as an illustration not of the total irrelevance to morality of our moral intuitions but of the unintelligibility of faith.63 So there should be advantages both in the present context and in general in a fuller and closer investigation of the principles of meaning and reference underlying Kierkegaard’s potentially important accounts not only of the unintelligibility and enforced silence of the knight of faith, but of course also of subjectivity and ‘inwardness’ (Inderlighed) in connection with the concepts of truth and communication. A more useful point of departure for such an investigation would be what Kierkegaard says about the distinction between inner and outer.64 The potential relevance of this distinction for contemporary philosophy of mind should be clear. Kierkegaard’s insistence on the distinction itself and more particularly on the centrality of the inner goes against the grain of most recent philosophy of mind, as also (even more so) his claim that faith, the category in which the inner has to be understood if it is to have that centrality Kierkegaard claimed for it, is an aspect of the inner life which has no specific outward manifestation.65 In view of Kierkegaard’s conception of his own role as that of Socratic gadfly, encouraging people, as it might be said, to prise the mystical shell of absolute idealism away from whatever existential kernel is to be found in Hegel’s dialectic, it would be an interesting test of the durability of his thought to place it in contexts where, if true, it should prove fruitfully corrosive. One such context might be the general area of post-Rylean and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind with its questions of ‘other minds’, the logic of mental concepts, the question of outward criteria for their application, and of the relationship of the inner life to the outer as well as of the implications of this for the learning of the vocabulary of the inner life.66 Another might be that of the analysis of ‘intentionality’ or propositional attitudes. Kierkegaard’s distinction between the thought’s ‘how’ and its ‘what’ comes close enough to a current distinction between the ‘psychological mode’ of a person’s concern about some objectively identifiable segment of (past, present or future) reality and the ‘representative content’67 of the corresponding thought to prompt the possibility of extending the modest range of rather simple modes usually mentioned in such analyses to include Kierkegaard’s more sophisticated modes (irony, 39

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humour, faith, anxiety, despair), as well as the more philosophically interesting ‘life-views’ corresponding to the well-known stages or spheres of existence, since these after all are said to be ways of experiencing reality. 5 Finally, there is an underlying issue affecting the question of the contemporary philosophical relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought quite generally, namely the status of the ethico-religious framework in which it is embedded. For many the ‘superimposition’ of this framework will weaken the ties of relevance and interest, while for others its being ‘presupposed’ will strengthen them. Superficially this difference looks non-philosophical, at least in the sense that philosophical differences are held to be ones which can be – and perhaps also actually tend to be – discussed philosophically. However, as was suggested earlier, the connection between the ethical superstructure and psychological base is closer than the notions of superimposition and presupposition imply. A better idea of the connection is conveyed by Wittgenstein’s remark that, as he sees it, ‘the Christian faith … is refuge in [an] ultimate distress’.68 Wittgenstein’s comments on religion are clearly coloured by his reading of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, ‘refuge’ (Zuflucht), with its connotation of ‘shelter’, suggests flight from reality, and one may wonder how that notion can be part of the framework within which reality itself is what one is attempting to describe. The answer must of course be that it is a description of human reality that the framework is designed to provide. But then a similar question arises in that context too: Why should a framework which selects this refuge be the one that accounts most satisfactorily for human reality? If, as Wittgenstein also says, ‘[t]he Christian religion is only for the one who needs infinite help, that is only for the one who suffers infinite distress’,69 why should the special needs of this one be thought to have universal significance? Now although at first glance it would seem self-defeating to answer this latter question by saying, ‘Well at least it can seem so to one who has these needs’, there is an important point here none the less. It comes to light if we read the claim that the Christian religion is only for the one who needs infinite help as saying not that it has nothing to say to others, but that if you are to understand what it does say you must have or acquire the kind of inner life in which the Christian concepts of sin, faith and redemption apply. Hampshire has argued that ‘[e]ntry into a certain “form of life” is a necessary background to using and attaching sense to [the] concepts … [which correspond] to the more refined distinctions within the vocabulary of sentiment and emotion’.70 The form of life Hampshire refers to is the ‘adult human form of life’ with its habits of controlled expression in word and deed. But if, following Cavell’s lead,71 we regard Kierkegaard’s religious stage as a Wittgensteinian form of life, Hampshire’s arguments – to the effect that the ‘concept of feeling and sentiment’ is derived from that of inhibited behaviour, in such a way that ‘the order in which a person learns the use of two classes of expression’ is also that in which he ‘acquires the faculties of mind to which the expressions refer’72 – might be extended or adapted to the feelings and sentiments (needs and hopes) of the person about whose form of expression Wittgenstein says, ‘A cry of distress cannot be greater than that of 40

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one human being ‘(’Ein Notschrei kann nicht grosser sein, als der eines Menschen’).73 In order to account for the ‘faculty of mind’ Kierkegaard calls ‘spirit’, as a sense of distance from the finite world, we must allow for both a widening and a transforming of the contexts in which it makes sense to talk of privation (the root sense of the German Not here translated ‘distress’) and correspondingly of refuge or restitution. Thus, beyond the inhibiting of behaviour, we have to focus on the expansion in or of a person’s consciousness which occurs ‘in conjunction with his power to dissociate his inclinations from their immediate natural expression’.74 The solitary individual’s cry of distress to which Wittgenstein refers is of course not a natural expression, but a manifestation of sensibility possible only for an expanded consciousness involved in a complex and manylevelled relationship with its environment. These remarks indicate a way of linking Kierkegaard’s thought to a discussion in philosophy of mind that has flagged in the years under review. Attention to Kierkegaard might help to revive it. They also define an area where the question of the status of the ethico-religious framework might be fruitfully discussed without prejudice or prior commitment. Hitherto work within or on the expanded consciousness of the ‘spiritual’ faculty has tended to place itself, and be placed, outside the thronging publicity of the philosophical mainstream. Some of the best of it has appeared in journals of religion and theology.75 It will be interesting to see what developments, or what expansions of the general philosophical consciousness, the chronicler of future work will have to report.

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3 FAITH AND PROBABILITY

Some twenty years back, but given a new lease of life by its inclusion in a recently published textbook, Robert M. Adams’s ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion’ gave a fairly detailed account of those passages in Postscript that deal with faith and history. Adams claims on its basis that the passages in question contain some faulty reasoning. I will begin by briefly outlining Adams’s case against the reasoning and then suggest that no such reasoning is to be found there. In fact there is no reasoning at all as such. What Kierkegaard’s pseudonym does there is make something more like what Wittgensteinians call a grammatical observation. (Except where I am quoting Adams I shall, in deference to Kierkegaard’s appended remarks on the pseudonymity of the relevant texts, refer simply to Postscript.) 1 Adams claims that Postscript contains an Approximation Argument (to which I shall refer as the Argument) designed to show the unsuitability of objective reasoning with regard to historical claims when the latter are motivated by a passionate interest in their truth. He also claims it is a ‘bad’ argument.1 Put into the kind of language Adams uses, the Argument says that where an interest in the belief assumes the scope and intensity appropriate to religious conviction, no possibility of error can be disregarded on normal prudential grounds. Any possibility of error at all arouses an anxiety that it requires a decisive choice to disregard. The choice to go ahead all the same is faith. The connection with prudent disregard of the possibility of error might be illustrated in this way: even where a historian, who is concerned professionally with the truth of some statement made in the Bible, might take some given risk of error to be too small to bother about, if in addition to his professional interest he had a ‘passionate and infinite interest’ in the truth or falsity of the very same claim, it would be impossible for him personally to disregard the distance, however small, from what would make him certain. As Adams points out, this allows Kierkegaard to say what he wants to say in any case, namely that belief in an eternal happiness based on historical facts is possible independently of the evidence for them. For that is how Christians must believe.2

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There are two features of the Argument to bear in mind in what follows, and whose connection will emerge as we proceed. First, the Approximation Argument is distinguished from two other arguments: the Postponement Argument and the Passion Argument, also recoverable from this part of Postscript’s text. Secondly, it involves a kind of re-enactment in the would-be believer of the conditions of philosophical scepticism, those conditions that lead the philosopher when ‘talking shop’ to deny from the very possibility of doubt, understood here as lack of objective certainty, the possibility of knowledge. But whereas the philosopher can leave his profession on a clothes peg in the office, the religious believer has no such day-dividing recourse. Instead of logical scruples about making an illegitimate inference, scruples one may ignore over a game of billiards, what makes the gap – however little – insuperable here is the ‘infinite’ importance to the wouldbe believer of the truth of the belief in question. This also allows Adams to construe the argument in the language of probabilities. When the stakes are ‘infinitely’ high, a belief which, if one’s interest in it were merely historical, it would be both rational and unproblematic to maintain in spite of the deficit, calls for a decisive personal choice. The rational case for disregarding the possibility of error has run out, so the Argument goes, and, if the possibility of error is still to be disregarded, something else – or, rather, we ourselves qua sheer will – must take over. As Adams sees it, the Argument fails because Kierkegaard has not seen that there can be a reason for disregarding the possibility of error that is not ruled out by a passionate infinite interest. Instead of the lively risk of the possibility of error being something the religious believer must decisively discount in the absence of objective reasons, objective reasoning can itself dictate that the possibility of error be discounted. To capture such a case, Adams first distinguishes it from another. In this other case a personal but not yet infinite interest is at work. What this case shows is how prudence (conclusions arrived at by objective reasoning about what, given certain desires, it is rational to do) can do the job, that is to say, provide a reason for disregarding a possibility of error. A woman with a profound interest in her husband’s love for her finds nevertheless some room for doubt about his really loving her, just a tiny doubt but still enough to cause her anxiety. However, given that among her desires is the desire not to be deceived, a desire that is at least as strong as her desire not to ‘hedge her bets’ if he does love her, objective reasoning tells her she should disregard that risk of error. If, say, the tiny amount is a one in one thousand chance, the objective evidence in favour being 99.9 per cent, then in acting upon it there would be 999 times as great a risk of ‘frustrating one of these desires’. (Actually, I am not sure that the smallness of the chance of error is so important here, for one could think of cases where the evidence against was quite massive and still the decision to believe might be rational. Someone might be unsure as to whether their dead parent had really loved them, where there were not insignificant indications that it was not the case that the parent did so. Yet, if it is more comforting to believe the quite slight 43

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evidence that exists in favour of the opposite opinion, the choice to stick by it might still be rational.3 A caution against wishful thinking is always in place, yet it too is subject to a notion of rationality that takes into consideration the situation and general interests of the would-be believer.) Adams reads the Argument against this kind of case. What it says, as we saw, is that where the interest is infinite as well as passionate, the practical solution is unavailable. That is so because the doubt will always be too needling to give the practical consideration a chance. What Kierkegaard has failed to see, according to Adams, is that the rational consideration can still be seen to work in favour of the belief the believer is interested in holding. In the crucial case, we are to imagine someone trying to base an eternal happiness on a relation to Jesus, and with an infinite passionate interest in whether it is historically true that Jesus declared Peter and his successors to be infallible in matters of religious doctrine. We are further to suppose that the historical evidence makes it 99 per cent probable that he did. Now, although the 1 per cent deficit will indeed make a person anxious, objective reasoning itself should here lead the person to a commitment to the probable conclusion, thus disregarding the risk of error. As Adams says, ‘the risk of not disregarding the possibility of error would be greater than the risk of disregarding it’;4 or in other words, the person can take the possibility of error rationally in his or her stride even in the interests of a passionate desire for the truth. It is surely, as Adams says, ‘prudent to do what gives you a 99 per cent chance of satisfying your strong desire, in preference to what gives you only a one per cent chance of satisfying it’.5 Kierkegaard is accordingly mistaken in thinking that the passionate believer must defy objective reasoning in disregarding the possibility of error, however small. What the case shows is that, even in the case of an infinite passionate interest, it can be more dangerous (and therefore imprudent) not to ignore the possibility of error (and so more prudent to do so) than to ignore it. 2 Without devoting too much space here to textual evidence, it is certainly fair to say that some of Postscript’s comments lend themselves to being read in the way Adams requires. He quotes two premises: (1) ‘certainty with regard to anything historical is merely an approximation’, and (2) ‘an approximation, when viewed as a basis for an eternal happiness, is wholly inadequate’.6 Kierkegaard might well be read as wanting to conclude from these that ‘objective reasoning cannot justify [a would-be believer] in disregarding any possibility of error about the object of faith’,7 so that something subjective has to be coupled in if the need for certainty that faith caters to is to be satisfied. However, there are textual indications that this is to turn Kierkegaard’s point altogether around. It is not that faith comes in where normal epistemic reasoning will no longer allay one’s anxiety; rather, wherever normal epistemic reasoning is in place, we are no longer talking about faith. What is wrong in the question of faith is to start out looking at history. In historical terms Christianity is, as Postscript says in the first sentence of Book I, a res in facto posita.8 That is how 44

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both the historical and the speculative points of view regard it and also what makes them regard Christianity as something the truth of which is to be investigated ‘in a purely objective manner’. This latter is the position that Postscript is out massively to subvert, and it does so by making the case for a subjective grasp of the object of faith. Whatever that means, it will not mean that subjectivity is to be brought to bear on history. On the contrary, the focus on history is misdirected from the start. Or rather, it is a diversion that (Postscript would say designedly) postpones the difficult decision that religious belief is: ‘When the subject is treated in an objective manner it becomes impossible for the subject to face the decision with passion.’ Note how the passage continues: It is a self-contradiction and therefore comical to be infinitely interested in that which in its maximum still always remains an approximation. If in spite of this, passion is nevertheless imported, we get fanaticism. For an infinitely interested passion every jot will be of infinite value. The fault is not in the infinitely interested passion, but in the fact that its object has become an approximation object.9 That ‘every jot will be of infinite value’ for an infinitely interested passion might sound like the point just attributed: no possibility of error will be too small to ignore, the claim glossed critically by Adams in pointing out that it can nevertheless be irrational not to ignore it. But the passage says other things that once explicated present the sentence ‘every jot will be of infinite value’ in a different light. A contemporary admirer of Kierkegaard, Professor Rasmus Nielsen, put the matter thus with regard to ‘approximation’. He says it ‘is a category [Bestemmelse] based on degrees of difference within the same quality, which is to say it is a quantitative category’.10 What the Postscript passage seems clearly to say is that, in treating the object of passion objectively, one treats it in such a way that it becomes an approximation object, but that such an object can never be an object of faith, just because it is an approximation object. The passage is not saying that, in the case of any approximation object, there is an uneliminable possibility of error that a passionate interest in its truth can never discount and can therefore only be ignored by an act of faith. It links an interest in every jot not with faith but with fanaticism. The smallest jot becomes ‘infinitely’ important not because an interest in something historical is in this case itself ‘infinite’, but because an infinite interest is wrongly focused on an approximation object. Concern with such objects, in the case of faith, will inevitably lead to an anxiety about the ability of jots to destabilize one’s belief in exactly the way the Argument shows. Adams may be right to describe Postscript’s faith as a form of decision-making, but it is not of the kind he describes. Kierkegaard is made to say, within the framework of probabilistic reasoning supplied by Adams, that an infinite passionate interest makes an otherwise superable possibility of error too vivid to be overcome without a correspondingly passionate commitment to disregard it. 45

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The decision is to disregard the possibility of error. Adams’s counterexample then shows that passionate interests can actually be served by probabilistic reasoning. Yet according to Postscript it is a ‘misunderstanding to seek an objective assurance’ in any case. The way Adams presents it, the Postscript’s comment that ‘[i]t goes without saying that it is impossible in the case of historical problems to reach an objective decision so certain that no doubt can disturb it’ is a way of saying: ‘That is why with regard to these problems faith is needed.’ But the comment can also be read as saying: ‘That is why such investigations have nothing to do with faith.’ If there is anything that can be called an approximation argument in Postscript it is one whose conclusion is that no historical fact, even one assumed to contain the possibility of an eternal happiness, can be the proper concern of someone passionately interested in that possibility. Again, it is not because in the epistemic nature of the case there is an inexpungeable element of doubt or possibility of error. Even if (per impossibile) the fact in question were presented immaculately before us, in a way that our doubts would have no chance of surviving, the concern thus appeased would still not be faith. The difference between this and the (Approximation) Argument is marked. While the latter has a passionate infinite interest make an otherwise superable possibility of error too vivid to be overcome without a correspondingly passionate commitment/decision to disregard it, here what faith amounts to is not our courageously taking a critical possibility of error in our stride, but our rising above the question of objective truth and error. Thus the decision made by the believer is not to treat the residue of uncertainty as if it wasn’t there; it is to leave the problem of residual jots aside and focus on the object of faith. Before commenting on what that object might be, let me try to give flesh to this idea of ‘rising above’. Take the case of bomb-disposal experts, whose mortal interest in residual jots of uncertainty pertains to the future rather than the past. Their lives are obviously on the line in a way that is not true of historians or weather forecasters. If historians always disregarded the possibility of error, we would be unable to sift history from hearsay, just as for them never to disregard the risk would be to leave history unwritten. But, as Adams’s account shows so well, once a mortal interest in the truth obtrudes, sceptical considerations are reintroduced for reasons other than the traditional sceptical ones but with the same result. A historian who took his life to depend on some historical truth would be unable to write the piece of history that included that truth without a personal decision to treat it as all other historical truths. The bomb-disposal expert is dealing with such ‘truths’ all the time. Even when all professional bombdisposal rules have been followed, there is still that life-threatening possibility of error that calls for a personal extra beyond the dictates of objective reasoning. But note a crucial difference here between two possible attitudes such a professional may take. One attitude would consist in putting any residual errors exceeding his professional capacity into the care of God. He trusts in God to see him through. That is certainly a kind of faith, but it is not rising above the question of jots. It is coping with them in this special way. One might even call it superstition. The 46

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other attitude would consist in disregarding the dangerous contingencies that outreach professional capacities. The bomb-defuser places himself in the hands of God whatever the outcome. It strikes me that the latter exemplifies better than the former the manner in which an infinite passionate infinite interest rules out a reason for disregarding the possibility of error ordinarily thought to be too small to worry over. The first attitude is no different from that of the historian who ‘decides’ to keep believing the history at the appropriate point, a decision that copes with this particularly sensitive because, he assumes, mortally interesting area of uncertainty. That his mortal interest should be directed differently is another thing. In the second attitude the sensitive extra is not passed on to God to be taken care of by Him but simply taken out of the reckoning. The defuser’s finite interest in staying alive is replaced by an acceptance that he may not, together with an understanding that sub specie aeternitatis his anxiety in this respect would prove exaggerated. He has adopted, chosen, decided upon, a position above, or beside, or in some way independent of that of ‘approximation’. 3 As we have seen, according to Adams, Kierkegaard says that someone with an infinite passionate interest can never admit that the risk is too small to be worth worrying about, and faith is then having that worry and going on, on the assumption that the finite facts are not as one still nevertheless fears they may be. The Argument has to do with a belief in historical fact simpliciter, divorced from what gives it its religious significance, the latter merely supplying the strong desire to adhere to the true historical opinion, a desire which, like the wife’s in the counterexample, must go into the equation. Adams says that although the believer’s strong desire to adhere to true historical opinion may depend on a belief ‘for which no probability can be established by purely historical reasoning, such as the belief that Jesus is God’, nevertheless ‘any difficulties arising from this point are distinct from those urged by the Argument, which itself presupposes the infinite passionate interest in the historical question’.11 I contest this. Again, the passage quoted above from Postscript links a too-strong desire for the true historical opinion with fanaticism. This points to what is surely otherwise fairly obvious: the approximation ‘argument’ actually to be found in Postscript includes the presupposition in its premise. Indeed the presupposition is what is required for the conclusion to follow, as it then does. If (the first premise) faith must be unconditional and global, then (the conclusion) for absolutely any approximation object, however closely we can approach it epistemically, there will be a zero probability that it is identical with the object of our infinite passionate interest. Accordingly, no practical argument about whether or not to disregard some possibility of error with regard to a claim about such an event will be relevant. A fortiori, then, and pace Adams, there can never be, in the case of an infinite passionate interest, any occasion for such an interest overruling a practical reason for some possibility of error. And, as for his example of there being a greater risk in not ignoring such a possibility than for disregarding it, that, as we noted earlier, also treats the histor47

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ical event merely as historical and thus fails to come within range of Postscript’s actual approximation ‘argument’, though, as I have said, it is less in the nature of an argument than of an explication of the grammar of faith. That said, it has to be admitted that the explication is not stated in these unequivocal terms in the chapter(s) in question. There is, however, a contextual reason for that. The notion of a qualitative as opposed to quantitative change relies on the notion of the leap still to be introduced in the two chapters on Lessing that follow. What Postscript’s chapter on ‘The Historical Point of View’ does is point out that approximation objects are mistakenly identified as targets of religious belief, and that this has to do with the externality of these objects. It is when the ‘subject[-matter]’ is treated in an ‘objective manner’ and the ‘object of faith’ has thus become an approximation object that the Argument applies, but of course inappropriately as far as the subject-matter is concerned. (So, in saying that ‘[w]hen the subject is treated in an objective manner it becomes impossible for the subject to face the decision with passion’, Postscript is not implying that the same subject-matter could be dealt with in a subjective manner.) What looks like an approximation argument actually points to this inappropriate objectivity that arises when the world of facts is treated as though among the facts it contained are facts of a specially religious kind. Postscript’s vision, if one may call it that, is that we can never be in a position to know or even think that, not at least in conceptual terms. The question then is, of course, on what is faith directed if not the alleged historical events on which Christianity builds? One might think that the expressions ‘the truth of Christianity’(which occurs in the heading of the third of the three sections of Postscript dealt with here and by Adams) and ‘the object of Christian faith’ were interchangeable. However, the former has an ambiguity the latter lacks. Often one means by it the truth of claims about there being the Christian’s God, the Incarnation, and its implications for personal salvation – in other words quite general theological claims of a cosmological kind. Their falsity would be implied by there being no such implications, or no such God, or no God at all. But Postscript’s question is not about truths of this general kind (‘the objective question of the truth of Christianity’), it is about ‘what Christianity is’.12 Along with the infinite passionate interest noted by Adams, the objective truths are presupposed or simply omitted. The truth of Christianity in Postscript’s sense is not what can be established, say, in the letter once it is established as canonical, but of the manner of one’s adherence to what one may immediately grasp in the letter independently of the precise circumstances of its origin or of the accuracy with which it has been transmitted through the centuries.

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Why does Kierkegaard have his pseudonym give prime space in Postscript to a long-dead littérateur? Surely not to seek respectable sponsorship for unfashionable ideas; that would be contrary to the work’s manifest message that authority has no place in matters of faith. Indeed in the very first sentence of the main chapter, Climacus himself assures us he is not invoking Lessing to have someone to ‘appeal’ to.1 Nor is it just a matter of giving credit to sources; the two chapters dedicated to Lessing form far too elaborate an expression of gratitude for that. There are other possibilities: Kierkegaard may have seen in Lessing’s scant comments on the leap a conveniently sketchy and therefore congenial basis upon which to define his own conception. Further, as an able apprentice of Lessing’s ironic style, he might hope that favourable comparison would allow some of the great man’s literary prestige to rub off on his own efforts. Not least, an advertised alliance with such a cultural eminence could show those who refused to recognize his genius locally that his talent might well have made its mark. In less parochial surroundings. None of these trivial explanations, whatever partial truths they hide, hits the mark. The real explanation is of a far more subtle and strategic character and is to be found in the text. Ostensibly, Climacus presents his tribute to Lessing as an independent thinker’s call for outside help. A poor lodger, he looks down wonderingly from the heights of his garret and sees all that is being done to expand the building itself and to improve the façade, but cannot help worrying about the foundations. Commentators often identify the building with Hegel’s System, but it can be in every sense more closely identified with the cultural Hegelianism of J. L. Heiberg. Heiberg was a professed and professing Hegelian but as it happens, in light of his eclectic reputation as poet, dramatist and critic, also Copenhagen’s best-qualified candidate for the status of a local Lessing. The real Lessing, of course, was not a Hegelian. So much the better. Nor indeed, though professing himself a Spinozist, had Lessing articulated any consistent or systematic philosophical position. Indeed, so eclectic had been the real Lessing’s contribution to late eighteenth-century German culture, and so piecemeal his expressed views on philosophical matters, that all attempts to place him in the philosophical landscape would be in vain. In a comment, whose style also gives excellent support to one of our subsidiary explanations, Climacus says:

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Lessing, of course, has long since been left behind, a vanishing little way-station on the systematic railway of world-history. To rely on him is to damn oneself, to confirm every contemporary in the objective judgement that you cannot keep up with the times, now that one travels by train – and the whole art is to jump into the first and best carriage and leave it to world-history.2 For Climacus the advantage of Lessing is that he is a writer whose work the expanding Hegelian edifice has been unable, or not even sought fit, to accommodate. Deference to Fragments’ motto ‘Better well hanged than ill-wed’ would always lead Kierkegaard to do all he could to prevent having his work interpreted and judged by the System. But in a polemic against the System it would serve his purpose well if he could find an ally in someone the System itself had been unable to assimilate. Better well hanged than ill-wed, but better still a good marriage if only the virtues of the match can be expressed in a way that does not automatically make it a bad one. Climacus’s irony tells us there would clearly be no harm in a marriage with someone so passé as Lessing. But such a high-profile wedding needs some more solid tie than the mere ability to survive the System. What might that be? The answer could be a common (but of course in Lessing’s case posthumous) interest in presenting exclusion from the System as due to a shared point of view from which the System itself can be successfully debunked. This indeed is essentially the gist of my discussion. Its arguments lie on a scale of increasingly defeasible but never altogether implausible claims: first a thesis directly confirmable by the text to the effect that Kierkegaard presents Lessing in the guise of a subjective thinker; second, a claim that this provides the affiliation Kierkegaard needs to place his own authorship on the immediate and recent cultural landscape, not least in relation to a notion much current in the late eighteenth century, that of the leap of faith; third, the not implausible contention that, of the main actors on the cultural scene from that period, an alliance with Lessing alone afforded the negative identification Kierkegaard needed; and, finally, the significant but here unargued suggestion that the alliance constitutes not just another philosophical position but a point of view from which the limits of rational inquiry become visible. We must note how carefully prepared is Climacus’s portrait of Lessing. First everything upon which Lessing’s fame rests is stripped off; we are told to disregard the scholar, the legendary librarian, the poet, the turner of phrases, the aesthetician, sage, and so on.3 These are the externals which have been duly flagged on the map of eighteenth-century German culture, though fortunately too scattered to be collected under a single rubric suited to the System. Once out of the way, they can be replaced by a plausible portrait of a subjective thinker. Accordingly, in the second and longer of his two chapters on Lessing, Climacus begins by attributing two of his own theses to Lessing rather than positions textually attributable to the historical Lessing himself. One of these clarifies the difference between objective and subjective thinking and introduces 50

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the notion of double reflection as characteristic of the subjective thinker. The other ties comedy and pathos to the same subjective thought, presenting the idea that what sounds like a joke can nevertheless be meant and grasped as deep earnest. In this way Lessing becomes an even better match. The plan clearly is to present Lessing as someone whose ironical remarks can be interpreted in a Socratic vein as expressions of subjectively reflected thought. The theses crucial to Climacus’s own exposition are linked to Lessing’s name via Socrates and then used as boundary markers to define the hermeneutic horizon within which to interpret the theses ‘actually’ attributable to Lessing. Chief of these latter is Lessing’s use of Leibniz’s distinction between contingent truths and truths of reason to state that eternal truths of reason cannot be inferred from accidental truths of history. This thesis forms the background to the problem raised by Fragments: how to base an eternal happiness on something historical. Then in Postscript to Fragments, our topic here, Leibniz’s distinction defines the parameters of what Climacus, following Lessing, calls the leap, and which, whatever it turns out to mean, is central to Climacus’s notion of faith. Since faith is in turn the principal topic of Postscript, we can see how, under Climacus’s astute direction, Lessing is rescued from systematic oblivion and placed polemically in centre-stage. If world history records only externals, then of course the Lessing brought to life in these two chapters is not the historical Lessing. The portrait may be nowhere near a likeness of the actual Lessing. On the other hand it may be, I simply cannot tell, which is just what the position to be outlined would lead you to expect. Whether or not the portrayal is fictitious, there is a sense worth noting in which any portrait of a subjective thinker cannot help but be based on guess-work and the result in that sense a fiction. However, the picture Climacus presents is on all accounts far from incredible, especially in light of the fourth thesis, in which Lessing confesses to being a searcher rather than a finder. Lessing says that, if offered the choice by God, he would prefer the lifelong pursuit of truth to truth itself,4 which underpins Climacus’s admiring observation that Lessing has no ‘result’. To his contemporaries Lessing appeared to personify the Enlightenment, but it would be nearer the truth to say that Lessing was the Enlightenment on the move. His thought was that of an inquirer who never adopted or attempted to develop a clearly defined position; his positions changed and evolved as he engaged with the movements of the time, upon which his comments exerted a great influence in turn – in his drama, his work on aesthetics, and above all in his criticism. So much was Lessing on the move, indeed, that it is often hard to say where his thinking counts as the current state of the Enlightenment art or forms the makings of fundamental criticism. Yet, throughout the changes, his attitude appears consistently to have reflected the kind of trust in human self-sufficiency, in the long run, that forms the deep basis of all Enlightenment thought. He saw humankind as he saw himself, as in constant development, not self-consciously on course towards absolute self-consciousness, as the System would later have it, but precisely with the kind of opportunistic contextuality which allowed his writings to 51

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escape the System’s clutches. Though not all of his actual views would appeal to Kierkegaard,5 something in Lessing’s attitude to Christianity would certainly do so; always sympathetic to Christian ideals, Lessing remained neutral towards the ways in which these ideals were expressed in current forms of Christian belief and practice. Thus the kinship Climacus seeks with Lessing, in the ironic spirit of Lessing himself, lies at the level of subjective thinking, that is, the thinking of someone in continual development and never resting on a ‘result’. How deep a kinship he seeks we cannot tell, but we might test the plausibility-range here by boldly hypothesizing on Climacus’s, or at least Kierkegaard’s, behalf that Lessing’s grasp of subjective thinking would have been good enough for him to write Postscript himself. What better way of having Lessing on your side, especially when you have elevated him to the stature of a Socrates, than by allowing that he could have written your book? Historically, of course, he could not have done that; world history was still awaiting Hegel’s arrival. Climacus himself remarks that Lessing never had to drag the principle of mediation along with him.6 Nevertheless, kinship at the level of subjective thought would still not be a sufficient basis on which to forge an alliance with Lessing. If subjective thought were enough, Kierkegaard might have settled straightaway for Socrates. What is needed is to be found in the indications provided by scattered remarks to the effect that Lessing had a better grasp than his contemporaries of the notion of a leap of faith and, connected with this, as Kierkegaard writes in a journal from 1848, a considerably clearer notion of the true problem concerning the relation between Christianity and philosophy than ‘the common herd of modern philosophers’. This problem is specified in the threefold theme of Fragments: how to reach an historical point of departure for an eternal consciousness; how such a point of departure can be of more than historical interest; and how to build a personal happiness on a piece of historical knowledge. Kierkegaard adds: ‘Lessing uses the word Sprung [leap] as if its being an expression or a thought didn’t matter. I take it as a thought …’7 Exactly what distinction Kierkegaard had in mind here is not clear, especially since Climacus will later tell us that the leap is not a thought but a decision. Maybe he means that the word expresses a thought about a decision; at any rate, as we shall see, Climacus does tend to think that when talking of a leap Lessing is playing with words and images rather than with concepts. In order to grasp what it is that Lessing has understood better than the common herd of modern philosophers, let us, by way of a contrast Climacus himself makes, look at the two representative thinkers mentioned in the chapters on Lessing: J. G. Hamann and F. H. Jacobi. It is significant that both are well known for their contributions to what is called the spirit of the counter-Enlightenment. Accordingly, one question we face is why Kierkegaard, the alleged irrationalist, should cast in his lot with the great Enlightener himself, rather than with these two renegades and potential existentialists. 52

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Answering that question requires uncovering some of the anatomy of the period during which the currently somewhat glibly named ‘Enlightenment project’ had lost much of its impetus and had begun to be undermined. What was undermining it was the apparent inability of the programme of free inquiry and criticism to achieve its anticipated political goals. As in any time when culture divides, parties form and thinkers are jockeying for position on one side or the other, it was also a time of creeds.8 The Enlightenment’s own official creed had been reason but in the movements constituting the counter-Enlightenment it was exactly faith in reason that had begun to crumble, due as much as anything to the transparency reason had been able to bring upon itself, above all in the critical philosophy of Kant. Kant remained a rationalist, but in some quarters faith in reason gave way to – in a manner of speaking to be made a little clearer below – faith in faith. In others even the grounds for faith in faith appeared in turn to be crumbling as the conspicuous successes of natural scientific reasoning seemed to destroy the very humanist assumptions upon which the original Enlightenment goals were based. The thinkers we are considering remained unaffected by this deeper crisis. This meant that their break with the Enlightenment was a correspondingly ambiguous affair. Often the Enlightenment is in retrospect spoken of as if it were based on a narrow conception of human rationality, reason in a ‘thin’ sense. It is not just more accurate but also more revealing to regard the Enlightenment as a movement of thought based on a basic trust in the human being’s capacity to secure its own basis for the traditional supports of human life (morality, religion and the state); Enlightenment was to replace a capricious tradition and unsupported appeals to revelation, scriptural authority and the like. But then any nascent doubt in the ability of human powers of systematic reasoning on its own to perform this role need not in the first instance lead to an abandonment of the high aims of Enlightenment itself. One may suppose rather that the first natural reaction within the Enlightenment horizon will be to appeal to some other human capacity, or perhaps review the account currently given of what human capacity amounts to. Such a review may lead in the end to revision even of such a key notion as that of reason itself, as indeed happened in the cases of both Kant and Hegel. That is to say, one need not abandon the project of reconstituting human values and practices on a human basis simply because human reason as currently conceived proves inadequate to the task. An example of this was the new liberalism which appeared late in the eighteenth century in such figures as Schiller, Humboldt and Forster, though also Lessing and Jacobi were involved. Here we find the shrinkage of reason compensated by an attribution to individuals of a native ability to take care of their own welfare, religion and morality. The new liberalism urged characteristically that states should protect human rights but not actively intervene in promoting stability and welfare. That would be to inhibit an innate human capacity to promote these goods, and thus in the end to let it atrophy. Seen in this light, even the extreme form of liberalism – anarchism – is simply a projection of Enlightenment thought. It assumes an 53

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inherently human talent to produce organization at the level of the individual from below. A romantic dream no doubt, but still within the terms of the project. The same, however, can be said of Romanticism itself and the Sturm und Drang. Here too we have an extension of Enlightenment faith, even if the typical interpretation of Romanticism sees it, as did Hamann himself, as a polemic against the Enlightenment. Hamann, an early hero of Kierkegaard’s, proposed the life of artistic feeling and expression, or indeed of lived experience in general, as the proper source of the truths humanity needed and to which reason had been inappropriately applied. One might say that Hamann saw in lived experience the locus or source of truths that would lead to a radical revision of the humanizing project of the Enlightenment, so that through Hamann that project in fact acquired a nature and dimension it had all along lacked, and that therefore this is a genuine polemic against the Enlightenment. But if we look at the Enlightenment in terms of its goals rather than its chosen method, we may also see both the liberal and the Romantic developments as attempts to save the project rather than replace it. Both developments involve typically ‘immanent’ points of view, pushing reason aside to give room to a power of appreciation and apprehension which has been unnecessarily ignored and suppressed. That this is not the normal way of looking at the Enlightenment project, least of all that of those like Hamann who began to criticize it, is due mainly to the project’s being identified with those philosophers who, despite these criticisms, continued to believe that the crucial human truths could be established solely by reason, as they conceived that capacity. Hamann called his new sense of life and artistic feeling ‘faith’. But there is no invocation here to look or leap beyond reason. Hamann, for whom the rational horizon merely defines the limits of a shallow, debilitating intellectuality, proposes instead a return to experience not a leap beyond it. As has often been pointed out, there is a strong ‘existentialist’ strain in Hamann to which Kierkegaard early responded.9 Not only does the appeal to lived experience as the place to which to address significant human questions, as well as the place from which to ask them, have its clear counterpart in the writings of Climacus, but what Hamann himself wrote based on his own lived experience provides an important source for just those psychological concepts Kierkegaard was to exploit in his own ‘experimental’ writings, for example. anxiety or dread. Kierkegaard is also clearly influenced by the way Hamann reappropriated the Enlightenment’s hero, Socrates, to turn the tables on the Enlightenment by focusing on Socratic ignorance.10 Hamann’s thought, however, lacks dialectic. Although for Hamann ‘faith is not the work of reason, and therefore cannot succumb to its attacks’, there is no thought of faith being antagonistic to reason. And even if faith ‘happens as little for reasons as do tasting and sensing’,11 it still happens in much the same way as do these latter. Hamannian faith is an immediate trust in one’s sense of things, and although Kierkegaard acknowledges Hamann’s understanding of how the common understanding of religion errs, he does not see Hamann occupying the point of view of religion developed by Climacus in Postscript. Nor, whether it was 54

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due to inadequacy of perspective or to his own failure to do the perspective justice, did Hamann’s criticism in fact survive in a way that would make him a suitable ally. What about Jacobi? In spite of his zealous criticism of current exponents of Enlightenment thought, Jacobi still held on to the ‘humane’ goals of the Enlightenment. Since he was also satisfied that he had identified the limits of reason, for him the choice was obvious. If you cannot prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul in the way that, for instance, Moses Mendelssohn thought one could,12 you must accept these vital truths on faith. For Jacobi, reason’s cognizance of its own limits leads the rationalist to atheism, but in his uncritical refusal to countenance that conclusion he too is a proper heir of the Enlightenment and his faith merely a change of horses in midstream – from faith in reason to faith in faith itself. Anticipating one side in the recent debate between Popper and his critics as to whether rationalism is inherently irrational because itself the result of a basic choice, which therefore cannot itself be rational, Jacobi saw faith as a basic human attitude to which even the rationalist must resort to choose reason.13 This and a continued belief in revelation, and also his ‘leap of faith’, earned for Jacobi an anti-Enlightenment and irrationalist label. But exactly as with Hamann’s so-called ‘irrationalism’, Jacobi’s was merely a concern to keep reason within its own bounds – bounds that do not define the limits of human understanding in a large sense but, when defined, allow for another mode of this understanding. Later on in Postscript, in the conclusion of his chapter on subjective truth, Climacus acknowledges the contributions of both Hamann and Jacobi but finds neither suitable for his project. Typical of the tone of high irony preserved throughout the two chapters on Lessing, Climacus’s manifest reason for not allying himself with either of these thinkers is the inherent or simply de facto inability of their work to resist Hegelian compartmentalization. I won’t hide the fact that I admire Hamann, though freely admitting the pliancy of his thought lacks proportion, and his extraordinary vitality lacks self-control for working in any coherent way. But his aphorisms have the originality of genius, and the pithiness of the form is entirely suited to the casual throwing off of a thought. Life and soul, and to the last drop of his blood, he is captured in a single phrase: a highly gifted genius’s passionate protest against an existential system. But the System is hospitable, poor Hamann! you have been reduced by Michelet to a §. Whether some stone marks your grave I do not know; whether it is now trodden under I do not know; but this I do know, that with the devil’s might and main you have been pressed into the §uniform and pushed into the ranks.14 Certainly, Hamann’s single-minded and passionate protest against a rational metaphysics of life was a blow in the right direction; and it was a shame, if true, that he had been rendered impotent by being acknowledged by the System. But 55

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Kierkegaard’s real criticism of Hamann is that the appeal to lived experience is still the expression of an aesthetic point of view. This is made clearer by noting that, in Hamann’s case, reason and faith are not actually in conflict with each other; they simply have different roles, lived experience now being given the due of which the Enlightenment’s ‘thin’ reason had unfairly deprived it. Hamann’s understanding of the roles of faith and reason is not unlike that commonly ascribed to Wittgenstein, a language-game view in which reason and faith each has its independent part in the complex structure of our language-based practices; so that it would be wrong to apply the standards of one language-game to the practices of the other. But if reason is not in conflict with faith, then faith neither is nor requires a leap beyond reason; one merely switches from one game to the other, simply making sure not to confuse the standards appropriate to each. Jacobi too is dismissed for surviving merely as a section in the System’s Encyclopaedia. Poor Jacobi! Whether anyone visits your grave I do not know, but I know that the §-plough overturns all your eloquence, all your inwardness, while a few scant words are registered as what you amount to in the System. There it is said of him that he represents feeling with enthusiasm … . As Climacus says, ‘a reference like that makes game of both feeling and enthusiasm, whose secret is precisely that they cannot be reported second-hand …’.15 But, in Climacus’s words, ‘now to Lessing’.16 If Jacobi’s weakness was to have said too much, clearly Lessing’s merit is to have said very little and, in respect to what he did say, to have ‘remained a riddle’. His strength, as Climacus says, is that ‘it was quite impossible to have Lessing killed and worldhistorically butchered and tinned in a §’.17 That could be said to be the ironical explanation to be read as evasive humour by those able to grasp only secondhand explanations. The serious point, to be picked up first-hand by subjective thinkers, has to do with the leap and what it means to have faith. It is here that Climacus turns the ‘riddle’ of Lessing to his own, and he would have us assume Lessing’s, advantage. The third thesis, an actual thesis of Lessing’s in this case, is that ‘accidental truths of history can never serve as proof for eternal truths of reason, and the transition by which one would base an eternal truth upon historical testimony is a leap’.18 According to Climacus, what Lessing ‘constantly’ opposes is the ‘direct transition from the historically reliable to the eternal decision’,19 or any attempt to ‘quantify oneself into a qualitative decision’.20 Lessing uses the distinction between historical contingency and necessary truths of reason to mark the illegitimacy of any attempt to convert the purely historical facts on which Christianity is based into the eternal Facts constitutive of Christian faith. As historical contingencies they cannot amount to the eternal truths embodied in Christian belief. As Lessing says, ‘The letter is not the spirit, and the Bible is not religion, so that 56

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objections against the letter, or against the Bible, are not ipso facto objections against religion.’21 Climacus reminds us that Lessing describes the unbridgeable gap between letter and spirit as a ‘ditch’ that is ‘repugnant’ and ‘wide’,22 and also that Lessing says he has tried, ‘often and earnestly’ but without success, to leap over it.23 There are several puzzling aspects to Lessing’s remarks. Apart from the fact that, as Climacus immediately points out, they involve serious conceptual confusions, there is doubt even as to the direction in which Lessing would have us believe he has attempted the leap. As Climacus formulates the problem of Fragments, you might expect the problem to be that of the transition from the historical to the eternal. But as the quotation above indicates, Lessing seems already to be standing on the other side, the side of reason for which historical evidence is at least in principle neither here nor there. Did the historical Lessing think there was some basis other than the historical claims made both by and for the Bible that delivered the spirit which the letter could not, for instance something he might have called subjective thinking? From what Lessing says we cannot even tell that the ditch played any part at all in his own intellectual life. Why, then, should he use the term ‘repugnant’? Was he saying no more than that, since no one could claim to bridge the gap from contingent to historical truth rationally, the very attempt would be repugnant because intellectually disreputable? Climacus himself suggests it may be just a ‘stylistic turn of phrase’ on Lessing’s part.24 Climacus focuses instead on the width of the ditch, and he points to two glaring mistakes in Lessing’s account. First, the ‘leap’ is a decision (‘the category of decision’, says Climacus), which means that you either do it or you don’t; there is nothing that can be called trying or failing to leap. The idea of ‘having been quite close to doing something’ has in itself something of the comical about it, but ‘to have been very close to making the leap is nothing whatever’.25 Secondly, if there can be no trying to leap, then ‘earnest’ cannot pertain to the attempt, and Climacus’s next comment is that the notions of trying and earnest can only apply here in the attempt ‘with the utmost earnest to make the ditch wide’, indeed ‘infinitely wide’, so that it becomes ‘equally difficult for someone who cannot jump at all, whether the ditch is wide or narrow’.26 Here the attempt is in the intellect; whatever it is positively to make the leap of faith, it cannot be done unless one grasps the absolute nature of the distinction between the contingent and the eternal.27 It is worth considering here what we ordinarily mean by leaping over a distance. Ordinarily, a leap is an attempt to treat the distance as if it were nothing, an attempt which, if successful, has the result that we take the gap ‘in our stride’. Taking a gap in our stride, whatever training may have been involved in making our stride sufficiently long, is in effect to make nothing of the distance, which, before we trained for it, may well have seemed beyond us. But none of this resembles what Kierkegaard suggests we should be doing. What he calls the ‘leap’ is not a huge stride from one foothold to another; the trick is rather, as Johannes de silentio says, ‘to transform the leap in life to a gait, to express the sublime in the 57

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pedestrian absolutely’.28 In short, it is the leaper who changes, not the location. Outwardly the leaper just keeps going, and if there is anything corresponding to a space or a void, it is the thought that, for all the leaper knows, the ground over which he continues to walk might not be what in his faith he believes it to be – not the space of his own and of God’s possibilities but what Kant once referred to as the ‘black abyss’ of a world without providence.29 From this it is tempting to conclude that Kierkegaard’s notion of faith is badly represented by the notion of a leap, even that it is not a notion with which he would have liked to have become as closely associated as nowadays in the encyclopaedias of latter-day ‘§-ploughers’. We might even conjecture that the reason why Climacus resorts to the notion of a leap in the Postscript is mainly to provide Lessing with an opportunity to make a mockery of the whole notion, at least as conceived in the ‘leap’-literature of the time. In any case, we should be wary of treating the notion too figuratively. One thing at least is clear. Climacus presents Lessing’s words about the leap as essentially comical. Their comical nature is presented as the visible aspect of that Socratic combination of comedy and pathos which characterizes the existing thinker. Climacus goes so far as to concede that Lessing himself has in fact employed his earnest in the appropriate manner, that is, to make the ditch wide rather than ‘try’ to leap over it – wide enough to give room for this combination of pathos and comedy. He describes Lessing’s whole account as that of a ‘wag’ (Skjelm),30 as indeed it would have to be if Lessing’s earnest is that of a subjective thinker. In conclusion Climacus subtly brings Lessing’s humour to bear on Hegel by introducing a ‘more popular’ way of poking fun at the leap: ‘you shut your eyes, you seize yourself by the scruff of the neck à la Münchhausen, and then – then you stand on the other side, on the other side of sound common sense, in the promised land of the System’.31 The presentation is a subtle mix of irony and polemical strategy, but the argument underlying it is no less subtle. Climacus admits that Lessing has ‘very little to say’ about the leap and therefore there is little to be said about ‘Lessing’s relation to the leap’. Nor is it ‘altogether dialectically clear what Lessing has wanted to make of it’.32 Yet on the way he has been careful to bestow on Lessing just those features which would lead one to expect him to say very little. His words have acquired a Socratic ‘complexion’,33 and in addition to ‘poetic imagination’ he has the ‘sceptical ataraxy and religious sensibility needed to become aware of the category of the religious’.34 Lessing’s evasive facetiousness can, in short, be read as Socratic jest, just as the brevity of his comments can be taken to demonstrate his constant ability ‘cleverly to exempt himself, his dialectical insight, and inside that his subjectivity, from every busy delivery service to the bearer’35 – all of which, again, is consistent with the thesis that Lessing is a subjective thinker. Climacus’s argument in a nutshell is this: Lessing says little about the leap, but the little he does say is consistent with a genuine understanding of the leap, which will then explain why he says so little. The clearest picture we are given of Lessing as someone able to avoid answering in ways which would betray his grasp of what the question asked is in 58

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Climacus’s rendition of part of the famous conversation between Jacobi and Lessing, a report of which Jacobi published after Lessing’s death.36 Here, says Climacus, we have Lessing’s ‘last word’ on the leap. This last word follows Lessing’s famous confession to Jacobi that he is a Spinozist. The original goes as follows: Lessing: Jacobi: Lessing: Jacobi: Lessing: Jacobi:

Lessing:

So we won’t be parting company over your credo? We don’t want that by any means. But it isn’t in Spinoza that my credo lies. I would hope it doesn’t lie in any book. Not just that. I believe in an intelligent and personal cause of the world. Ah, so much the better! Now I must be about to hear something quite new. Don’t get too excited on that account. My way out is with a salto mortale; but you aren’t one to take much pleasure in standing on your head? Don’t say that, just as long as I don’t have to follow suit. And you’re going to end up on your feet anyway, aren’t you? So, if there’s no mystery, I want to see what’s in it.37

Then following a fairly lengthy discussion of fatalism, the conversation resumes as follows: Jacobi:

As I see it, the researcher’s first task is to reveal and to disclose existence [Dasein zu enthüllen]. … Explanation is only a means, a way to this goal: it is the first goal but never the last. The last goal is what cannot be explained: the irresolvable, immediate and simple … .38

To this Hamannian proposal Lessing ironically responds: Lessing:

Jacobi: Lessing:

Good, very good, I too can use all that; but I can’t do it in the same way. On the whole, your salto mortale does not displease me; and I can see how a man with a head of that kind will want to stand on his head to get somewhere. Take me with you if it works.39 Just step on the elastic spot which catapulted me out and it will go of its own accord.40 That already requires a leap that I can no longer ask of my old legs and heavy head.41

By publishing his account of this conversation in 1785, Jacobi hoped to bring the Enlightenment’s faith in reason into disrepute. If Spinozism is where reason takes you, so much the worse for reason. Climacus’s account does justice to this part of Jacobi’s intention by taking Lessing’s ironic reply to be a recommendation 59

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to lighter heads and younger legs to accept the invitation which Lessing declines. But in Climacus’s hands the remark that ‘anyone with young legs and a light head can very well leap’42 is aimed ironically at Jacobi himself. For Jacobi has not understood the full dimensions of the leap. He has failed to see that the leap is an ‘isolating act’ and so cannot be taught or conveyed, or done in company. The Lessing to whom the ‘possible’ thesis on the dialectic of inwardness and communication has already been attributed sees the folly in Jacobi’s asking him to leap with him, and in declining, Lessing makes it sound as though the leap spanned a ditch so that once again it is its width that is too much for his heavy head and old legs. Really, however, it was Jacobi who made the absurd suggestion that there can be a ‘transition’ to a decision,43 hence the possibility of a run-up and failure to gather sufficient impetus. Lessing is simply humouring Jacobi, ‘realiz[ing] very well that the leap, or the crux, is qualitatively dialectical and allows no approximating transition’. Lessing’s answer is therefore ‘a jest’.44 Climacus concludes his account of the Jacobi–Lessing exchange by summarizing the psychological difference between the two: ‘Lessing rests in himself, feels no need of fellowship; so he parries ironically and slips away from Jacobi on his old legs.’45 Lessing may of course have slipped away on his old legs simply to avoid further pestering by the persistent Jacobi. However, Jacobi exploits Lessing’s last word for his own ends. And Climacus does the same. He wants to point out that faith for Jacobi is a cheap surrender of his human gift of understanding. No doubt it is also an uncritical faith, a faith in ‘truths’ already identified and aimed at under the aegis of reason, and with the slack now seen to be left by an ineffectual reason conveniently made up by faith. But faith, as Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms present it, requires you to open yourself to practical uncertainties and to the realization that Enlightenment goals can only be secured by a relationship to God – in other words through a radical break with Enlightenment. Furthermore, if your interest in continuing beyond the bounds of human possibility is in any genuine sense religious, the leap you envision will disqualify you if you fail to evince a grasp of the fact that religious belief engages the whole person and not just the intellect. In short, Jacobi’s anti-Enlightenment stance is confined to the criticism of reason. What Jacobi egregiously lacked, in Climacus’s language, is that ‘passionate dialectical abhorrence [Avsky] for a leap’ which makes the ditch ‘so infinitely wide’.46 But that abhorrence is just what, in Climacus’s portrayal, we are prodded into thinking Lessing did possess – which now provides us with another possible explanation of why the ditch appeared so ‘repugnant’. Here it is not because leaping from finite to infinite, or vice versa, is intellectually disreputable; nor is the repugnancy the frustration typically felt by a rationalist who would have so liked his reason to convey him across. It is the abhorrence one feels at the brink when one acquires enough negative dialectic to realize what is risked when the gap between finite and infinite is itself infinite. Whatever Lessing meant by the phrase, it is undeniable that the commitment to reason and the acceptance of Spinozistic conclusions – and for Jacobi it was these which were repugnant – brings Lessing within reach of the existential dialectic 60

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expounded in the two chapters we have been exploring. The moral, then, surely, is that precisely because it involves a clear break with the Enlightenment, the latter is a better background against which to grasp Kierkegaard’s thought than the various moves made to save it in the so-called counter-Enlightenment.. The crux is that Climacus’s leap is reserved for those whose commitment to reason is strong enough for them to feel the full force of Johannes de silentio’s ‘shudder of thought’ (Tankens Gysen) in Fear and Trembling.47 According to Frederick Beiser’s rewarding account, Jacobi’s publishing the record of the conversation was calculated to bring the weight of Lessing’s reputation behind the counter-Enlightenment, making it clear, as he puts it, that it was Lessing and not Mendelssohn who was the ‘true Socrates of his time’.48 The Enlightenment Socrates was the tireless seeker of truth. But, as we noted, the tireless search was proving fruitless. Beiser describes Jacobi as preparing the hemlock that would solve the tragic Socratic dilemma confronting mainstream Enlightenment thinkers once it became obvious that the programme was not achieving its expected goals. Lessing was to be portrayed as someone willing to see the vanity of philosophy – a determinist who saw that rational speculation, consistently carried out, leads in the end to atheism and to fatalism. The solution was to leap out of philosophy. Hamann, as we saw, and as Kierkegaard noted, had gone even further and turned Socrates, the persistent confessor of ignorance, into a counter-Enlightenment symbol. Climacus’s two chapters on Lessing are in the same tradition. Like Jacobi, Climacus sees Lessing as a Socrates whose jest betrays a sense of the objective uncertainty of all that is important.49 Like Socrates, Lessing with his wit and evasiveness can be someone who ‘conceives infinity in the form of ignorance’ which must then be expressed in the form of irony, in speech which to the uninitiated must sound like that of a ‘madman’.50 But what does Climacus make of Lessing’s alleged Spinozism? In referring to it he neither approves nor indeed comments. He does, however, say on the strength of a remark of Lessing’s reported by Jacobi51 that it is ‘no wonder’ that Lessing was declared a pantheist.52 But there need be nothing wrong with pantheism from Kierkegaard’s point of view, so long as it does not take a form that prevents it developing into true Christianity. In Postscript, however, pantheism is clearly associated in a bad sense with Hegel, who offers no future in that direction and, according to Climacus, even blocks it. The publication of Jacobi’s Briefe led to the famous Pantheism Controversy, which, as Beiser says, ‘threw the Aufklärung back on the defensive’, in the end ‘completely [changing] the intellectual map of eighteenth-century Germany’.53 The way in which Spinoza was received was part and parcel of that change, and by Kierkegaard’s time Spinoza was in the custody of the likes of Herder and Goethe. His pantheism had come to be associated, in a way that Jacobi had not calculated, with Hamannian ‘lived life’, and Spinoza’s texts were now treated as a mould into which to pour whatever existential ballast one needed to flesh out their ‘geometry’. Kierkegaard would hardly be attracted to that Spinoza, and we gather from the distribution of entries on Spinoza in the journals that, although he had read the Tractatus as a student, it was not until 61

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1846 that he looked seriously at the Ethics. Yet there is nothing in principle that would have prevented him appreciating Lessing’s Spinozism, at least as Jacobi understood it – as the best that reason can do. Climacus’s consistency might still be questioned. In the very chapter which crucially denies the possibility of an existential system, he praises someone who he acknowledges is a confessed Spinozist. One might defend this by saying that Spinoza’s system is not existential and therefore does not make the mistake of Hegel, whose System did have such pretensions. But a failure even to raise existential issues can hardly be a virtue in a work whose clear aim is to move those issues to centre-stage. Again, however, in terms of the dialectic which Climacus is concerned to elucidate in Postscript, and if we grant Lessing his own reading of Spinoza, the portrayal of Lessing as a rationalist and committed to staying within the bounds of reason is essential to the portrayal of Lessing as the thinker who understands what is and what is not meant by the ‘leap’. Only someone who knows that he stands at the brink can grasp what is involved in going beyond it. Finally, there is that question again of how Kierkegaard can ‘attach himself’ to Lessing on the subject of the leap in a work whose clearest message is that in this matter appeals to authority have no place. We noted at the beginning that Climacus denies that he is invoking Lessing as an authority. Yet in a subtle twist of counterfactual reasoning he contrives to have it both ways. Lessing is appealed to as someone who would agree that, if he could be appealed to, then the project that calls for his support would not be the right one. There can be no acknowledgement, but at least you know that, if there was, then someone has certainly got it wrong. Attachment on that point should be beyond reproach. You see, that’s how hard it is to approach Lessing in religious matters. If I were to present the individual ideas, ascribing them to him directly and in parrot fashion, if I were to enfold him politely, obligingly in my admiring embrace, as the one to whom I owed all, then he might smilingly avoid my embrace and leave me in the lurch, an object of ridicule. If I were to keep his name quiet, come out bawling joyously over this matchless discovery of mine, which no one before me had made, then that polumetis Odysseus [wily Odysseus], if I imagined him there, would no doubt put his hand on my shoulder and, with an ambivalently admiring look on his face, say: ‘You you are right in this, if only I’d known.’ And then I, if no one else, would understand that he had the better of me.54 In the same way that true knights of faith can never be teachers but only witnesses,55 truly religious writers can never cite each other as authorities. For Kierkegaard there is something in the nature of the relation of religious discourse to religious experience that makes it clear to one who understands 62

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that discourse (and therefore its relation to experience) that if another writer were to embrace him as a colleague, the right thing to do would be to look at one’s watch and plead another appointment. A religious thinker seeing someone do that might suspect he had found an ally.

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5 ‘SPIRIT’ AND THE IDEA OF THE SELF AS A REFLEXIVE RELATION

The Sickness unto Death opens forthrightly enough by declaring that a human being is ‘spirit’, and amplifies this by saying that spirit is ‘the seIf’. This latter notion is then elaborated as ‘a relation that relates to itself’, an intriguing suggestion but hardly forthright, and the reader awaits some clarification. But is it forthcoming? The notorious passage that follows has seemed to many an attempt on Kierkegaard’s part not to help the reader understand this idea of a self-relating self, but to parody the impenetrability of Hegelian prose. Anti-Climacus continues: The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating 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 terms. Looked at in this way, a human being is not yet a self. … In a relation between two things, the relation is the third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation, and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. (p. 43 [13] )1 If this were no more than a dig at Hegelian obscurity, one might conclude that the idea of a self-relating self is not in need of clarification, but only obscure when clothed in pretentious philosophical jargon. Perhaps, whatever difficulties attend an analysis of the notion, the notion itself is nothing more exotic than that of the self-evident ability of human beings to reflect upon what they do and think, and to form their own self-images. But Anti-Climacus’s definition of the self as a relation that ‘relates to itself’ is neither empty parody nor a pretentiously decked-out truism. It states elegantly, and I believe accurately, a crucial principle of Kierkegaard’s thought – only, however, to the appropriately programmed reader. By this I mean a reader familiar with the tradition from which Kierkegaard’s terms derive their connotations: the Hegelian tradition. It is now of course something of a formality

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among Kierkegaard scholars to warn against letting Kierkegaard’s unrelenting onslaught on Hegel blind one to the extent of the shared assumptions on which that onslaught is based. Yet often it is quite general, methodological assumptions that are referred to (notions of ‘negativity’ and ‘dialectic’, for example), or mere points of terminology where Kierkegaard uses Hegel’s terms to deny what Hegel asserts (the identity of thought and being, and so forth). But there are several points of agreement in basic framework too, and an important one of these is the concept of self-consciousness. Hegel makes two sets of distinctions. One, within the general category of ‘subjective spirit’, distinguishes ‘consciousness’, ‘immediate self-consciousness’ and ‘universal self-consciousness’ (see Sämtliche Werke 6, §§ 307 – 44).2 These, in outline, are phases in a development from simple awareness of a distinction between inner and outer (see Phenomenology, § 143), through a sense of the inner as the centre of things but with these things themselves quite independent, to a grasp of the inner and outer as combined in the unity of consciousness and reality (Sämtliche Werke 6, § 400; Phenomenology, § 394). The latter phase – though each phase itself contains a development – provides the terms for defining ‘spirit’, or reason as full awareness of itself as being all of reality (Phenomenology, § 438). The second distinction is between ‘natural’ consciousness, or soul, and spirit. In the Phenomenology Hegel talks of the path of natural consciousness … the way of the soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit. This path ‘presses forward to true knowledge’, or ‘Science’, and the goal of the journey is to give the soul a ‘completed experience of itself’, in which it finally achieves ‘awareness of what it really is in itself’ (Phenomenology, § 77). These passages contain all three of the terms used by Anti-Climacus in the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death to define the self as a self-relating relation. We have ‘self’, ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. My suggestion is that what Kierkegaard wants us to understand by his idea of a self as a self-relating relation is something that coincides to a considerable extent with what Hegel says about soul, consciousness and spirit, yet departs from Hegel radically at a point to be determined; and my discussion here is an attempt to determine that point. 1 Let us begin with Hegel’ s metaphor of a path that the soul goes along to purify itself for the life of the spirit. For Hegel, ‘soul’ (Seele) denotes a set of possibilities ranging from those limited to (as with Aristotle) organic life as such (see Phenomenology, § 265), through those inherent in animal life, to those specific to human life. The ‘paths’ of these possibilities are of different length; that of human life (or consciousness) is one on which the soul progresses through its ‘appointed stations’ to ‘purify itself for the life of the Spirit’. One 65

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could read this as saying that the soul can itself acquire the characteristics of spirit, as if spirit was a qualification of the specifically human soul, something it can become and still remain soul. But Hegel would want us to read it the other way around. Spiritual life is already contained in posse in the initial soul, which in its most general characterization is the ‘animating principle of the body’ (Enc., § 34). Spirit is what, in the human case, this animating principle is destined to become. It is the human end-state, the human soul’s ‘completed experience of itself’ and ‘awareness of what it really is in itself’. As noted, for Hegel this means not just a grasp of human consciousness as an actually existing subject-pole in relation to its ‘negative’, the ‘other’ (see Phenomenology, §§ 347 – 59), but awareness of a unity between thought and being themselves. A full philosophical account of selfconsciousness is one that gives a total grasp of the relation of mind, or consciousness as reason, to its objective environment, and sees this goal of comprehension as a potentiality not just of ‘natural consciousness’ but (having escaped the limitations of a merely natural consciousness) of the natural and social world itself. This conveniently, but I think not altogether accidentally, picks out for us the target of Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel’s philosophy. If the term ‘science’, as in Hegel, is taken to embrace knowledge not only of the environment but also of a harmony between it and thought – a harmony so total as to give selfconsciousness, among other things, the status of ‘the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life’ (Philosophy of Right, § 21) – then, says the criticism, science is not at all the end-state of natural consciousness. What end-state would Kierkegaard propose instead? And what would be the corresponding Kierkegaardian life of the spirit? One plausible suggestion regarding the endstate would be ‘awareness of the fact that there is no such completed experience of itself’. As for Kierkegaard’s life of the spirit, the apt answer would be to say that for both Hegel and Kierkegaard the life of the spirit is the life of clearsightedness. In Hegel’s case the clarity is that of the ‘standpoint of Science’ (Phenomenology, § 8), taking this to include all ethical life, while in Kierkegaard’s it is that of scepticism. This would allow us to see Kierkegaard’s ‘journey’ along the path of natural consciousness as merely a truncated version of Hegel’s. For, according to Hegel, natural consciousness proves only to have the idea, or notion, of itself as knowing, and not – as it itself believes – the reality of that; and for it the path to spirit proves to be one of loss of its status of real knower: what is in fact the realization of the Notion [that is, rational knowledge] counts for it rather as a loss of its own self … [t]he road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair … [f]or this path is conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge. (Phenomenology, § 78, original emphasis) 66

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Hegel is saying that natural consciousness has to give way to spirit, which is for him the standpoint of science, from which knowledge of appearance has given way to ‘true’ knowledge (cf. Phenomenology, § 76). The nature/spirit distinction used here is a development of the traditional one going back as far as Aristotle’s pneuma, for him a kind of divine stuff (compared by Aristotle in one place to the aither) that preserves the unity of the organism, which would dissolve into its constituent elements if these were allowed to obey their natural laws of motion.3 In Hegel’s use of the distinction, nature is what appears to consciousness as external, which appearance is replaced in the standpoint of science – of spirit – by true knowledge. If the spiritual development is inhibited, one receives only the ‘doubt’, ‘despair’ and ‘loss of self’ of the awareness that phenomenal knowledge is not real. This sounds remarkably like Anti-Climacus’s account of the individual’s path to despair, in light of the failure of people even to ‘make so much as the attempt at this life’ (p. 88 [57]). In the journals Kierkegaard draws the distinction in exactly Hegel’s terms by talking of a ‘world of spirit’ lying ‘[b]ehind this world of actuality, phenomena’.4 Might we not simply say, then, that spirit for Kierkegaard is the life of one who realizes, on the one hand and like Hegel, that the natural world is only phenomenal, but, on the other, contrary to Hegel, that there is no standpoint of science from which true knowledge (including knowledge of right, morality and ethics) can be attained, and squarely faces the consequent uncertainty about human nature’s standing and also the prospect of nihilism? It is clear, however, that this is not what Anti-Climacus would have us call the life of the spirit. Such a life would in Kierkegaard’s as well as in Hegel’s terms be purely negative; it would involve no more than the realization of loss – loss of presumptive knowledge and of self. Spirit, again for Kierkegaard as well as for Hegel, has a positive content; it involves the realization that human existence is grounded in an eternal telos. Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about itself simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something, should there be any question of accounting for its inner being - every such existence, however astounding its accomplishment, however able to account even for the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoyment: every such life is none the less despair. (p. 76, translation modified [46] ) The passage says that a life not grounded transparently in God is a life of despair; yet it appears also to say that the life of spirit has to be one that is grounded transparently in God, but then, surely, it is not a life of despair. However, since for 67

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Anti-Climacus the opposite of despair is faith, it looks as though the end-state he envisages, faith, and the life of spirit are one and the same. Of course the humanly existing subject cannot know that it has God as the source of its powers to produce; at most its ‘becoming aware’ of where it has them from is precisely a matter of faith. But then that, on this interpretation, would be the Kierkegaardian alternative to the Hegelian spirit’s self-knowledge. To buttress the interpretation we could turn to Anti-Climacus’s remark that pagans ‘lacked the spirit’s definition of a self’ because they ‘lacked the God-relationship and the self’ (p. 77 [46] ). They lacked the God-relationship because pagan belief finds God in nature, and the God-relationship Anti-Climacus refers to presupposes his predecessor Climacus’s account of the ‘break with immanence’;5 and they lacked the self because they had no sense of an identity other than in terms of what they could blame one another for (theft and fornication, for example), while adopting a lenient attitude to suicide (p. 77 [46] ). Should we say then that what we have here is Anti-Climacus’s version of the life of the spirit in its properly positive guise? Much of The Sickness unto Death might be read in this light, for example passages like that in which AntiClimacus says that the only one whose life is truly wasted is he who has so lived it, deceived by life’s pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware – and gained in the deepest sense the impression – that there is a God there and that ‘he’, he himself, his self, exists before this God, which infinite gain is never come by except through despair. (p. 57 [26 – 7], emphasis added) Much also gainsays the proposal. For instance we have the starkly unambiguous assertion that ‘the devil is pure spirit’ (p. 72 [42] ). Clearly the devil (in Greek diabolos, or defamer) stands in no God-relationship of the kind AntiClimacus is talking about. So it looks as if the latter here employs a more neutral concept of spirit. And since it is the devil’s ‘absolute consciousness and transparency’, and the fact that in him there is therefore ‘no obscurity which might serve as a mitigating excuse’, that earns him the description ‘pure spirit’, it might look rather as though we were forced back upon our original and merely ‘negative’ notion. Yet that is not so. Although (like Hegel’s natural consciousness) the devil despairs, he does not doubt, nor does he suffer any loss of self – at least not as far as we are directly told. Indeed Anti-Climacus says ‘[t]he more consciousness, the more self [and will]’ (p. 59 [29] ), though also ‘the greater the conception of God, the more self’ (pp. 111 and 146 [80 and 113] ); but it is easy to imagine someone having a strong conception of God without yet having faith. In fact the devil’s despair is not analogous to that of Hegel’s natural consciousness, for his despair is that not of uncertainty but of ‘the most absolute 68

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defiance’ (p. 72 [42] ), and that presupposes not only a conception of God but also something like a standing assumption that God exists and exerts power. The devil could not be a defamer if there were no one for him to defame. (According to early ecclesiastical writers, the devil was created by God as an angel, Lucifer, who, for his rebellion against God, was punished by being thrown into the abyss, where he became the prince of darkness.) And this seems generally true of what Anti-Climacus classifies as despair. The despairer of The Sickness unto Death, the one who lacks faith, is one who will not affirm what is recognizably the standing assumption that God exists and that one ought to stand before God. True, at the very end of The Sickness unto Death we are told of a form of despair, the culminating despair, that denies Christ, ‘declares Christianity to be untruth and a lie’ and makes of Christ ‘an invention of the devil’ (pp. 164 – 5 [131] ). Yet calling Christianity an invention of the devil still acknowledges the God that created the devil. Moreover, that Anti-Climacus says this denial of ‘everything Christian: sin, the forgiveness of sins, etc.’ is itself a ‘sin against the Holy Ghost’ (ibid.), indeed sin’s ‘highest intensification’, shows quite clearly that for him the framework of the standing assumption, and the assumption itself, remain sacrosanct. In other words, if Anti-Climacus were to claim further, from within this framework, that nihilism too was an invention of the devil, he would not be taken seriously by the nihilist; for nihilism denies the framework and so cannot be grasped by one who must consider it to be defiance in Anti-Climacus’s sense. Anyone who asserts that nihilism is the invention of the devil must assert it diagnostically from a point of view not shared by the one whose beliefs are diagnosed. I strongly suspect that Kierkegaard intends Anti-Climacus’s diagnoses to be ones that those in the conditions he describes are predisposed, however unwillingly, to acknowledge. It appears then that Anti-Climacus’s ‘spirit’ embraces not only faith but also that form of its absence which is despair. There is much to support this interpretation. ‘[R]egarded as spirit (and if there is to be any question of despair, man has to be regarded under the aspect of spirit), the human condition is always critical’ (p. 55 [25] ). Unlike a normal illness where the issue of health or sickness is topical only for so long as the illness lasts, within the category of spirit the issue is always alive: ‘spirit’ connotes a perpetual tension between faith and despair. Apart from in The Sickness unto Death itself, the reading is supported by most of what Kierkegaard says about spirit elsewhere, in the pseudonymous works and the journals. He consistently links the idea of spirit with such partly ‘negative’ attitudes as irony and indifference (to the worldly) as well as resignation – all preliminaries to fundamental choice. In Anxiety, although spirit (like truth and freedom) is said to be ‘eternal’, spiritual consciousness seems to require no more than the possession of the concept of time or temporality as such sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from a position as it were outside time, if only in that intersection of time and eternity that is the ‘instant’.6 Finally, scattered throughout the journals are numerous remarks on spirit as transcendence of nature. Spirit is also linked with individuality as such, and with the individual’s task of fulfilment itself.7 69

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2 Let us then return to where we began, with the question of how to interpret the idea of a self as a reflexive relation. The passage (with the translation slightly modified) reads as follows: The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation’s relating to itself. The 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. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. … In a relation between two things the relation is the third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation, and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. (p. 43 [13] ) The passage might be read in one of two ways: (1) as a description of ‘health’ (faith), (2) as a description of ‘crisis’. According to (1), the identity of spirit and the self is that of spirit and the true self. (Anti-Climacus does say that the ‘opposite’ of despair, that is, faith, is ‘to will to be the self he truly is’ [p. 50 (20) ].) The idea of a self as a selfrelation can then be identified as that of the (to use a neutral term) subject’s conforming itself to what we have called the standing assumption – that there is a God and a need to stand before that God. The distinction between a ‘synthesis’ in which soul is the determining category and one where, on the contrary, the self (and thus spirit) is ‘positive’ will then be read as follows: when the self fails to relate to itself, which is to say when it is in despair, then the fact that the true self is not related to is a matter of letting the soul be the determining category. This suggests a gloss on remarks in Anxiety on the ‘bondage of sin’.8 In sin a person is willing to be ‘determined’ by temporal goals and is in ‘an unfree relation to the good’.9 The claim that, as spirit, man’s condition is ‘always critical’ could then be understood as asserting that, even when the subject does relate to his true self, the situation still remains critical because the possibility of a reversion to soul-determining despair is always present (cf. p. 146 [114] ). In fact Anti-Climacus says that when the human being is regarded spiritually it isn’t just sickness that is critical, but health too (p. 55 [25] ). According to (2), spirit is not to be equated with the true self but with the self aware of the options of health and sickness from the standpoint of either, though initially from that of sickness, that is, the standpoint from which conforming to the true self is a task. Here the point of distinguishing spirit (and self) from the soul, where the relation forms a ‘negative unity’, could be that human beings live initially ‘immediate’ 70

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lives, in the sense that (and in a way corresponding to Hegel’s ‘natural consciousness’) their goals are located outside them as external sources of satisfaction, and in such a way that they do not yet conceive of the finite world (their ‘environment’) as a whole as something in relation to which they are not properly at home. Here they are not yet selves because they have so far no consciousness of something ‘eternal’ in them (p. 93 [62] ), and since despair proper (that is, as a ‘characteristic of the spirit’ [p. 54 (24) ] ) is always ‘despair of the eternal or over oneself’ (p. 91 [60] ), they have yet to reach the threshold of crisis. But immediacy inevitably gives way to a sense of selfhood as transcending the world of temporal goals. There is an ‘act of separation in which the self becomes aware of itself as essentially different from the environment and the external world and their effect upon it’ (p. 85 [54] ). The scene is thus set for the ‘positive’ third factor’s travails in the realm of spirit: the subject enters upon the critical condition that embraces both the health and the sickness of spirit. Most importantly, even in sickness (that is, despair) it is not true that the bondage of sin is a condition in which the soul takes over from spirit as though from outside, for ‘despair … is not merely a suffering but an action’ (p. 93 [62] ). However hedged around by ‘mitigating excuses’, despair is itself an action of the spiritual subject unwilling to conform to its true self, the mark in varying degree of the open defiance of the devil’s ‘sheer spirit’. One might propose a third reading in which ‘spirit’ denotes the realm of task and travail while the idea of the self as a reflexive relation is that of the goal, the true self, the self being truly itself; and there is even a fourth possibility that inverts these two, the reflexive self being the self of travail and spirit the self being itself truly. But both seem unduly complicated and the latter is in any case inconsistent with what the above makes it most plausible to identify with spirit, a spirit shared with the devil, namely the area of acceptance or defiance. Of the two main readings the second is overwhelmingly to be preferred. It is not only more consistent than the first with respect to what Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms say elsewhere of spirit and the self, it also preserves the identity of spirit and self. As far as external consistency is concerned, we have Johannes de silentio’s assertion that the world of spirit is the one in which one must work to ‘get bread’.10 Haufniensis, for whom ‘spirit’ and ‘freedom’ are interchangeable, says in Anxiety that the ‘secret of spirit’ is that it ‘has a history’,11 and he talks of two ‘syntheses’: one the initial fusion or unity of soul and body in which spirit is not yet ‘posited’; the other the positing itself, which is the same as spirit’s positing the ‘second’ synthesis, that of time and eternity, as an ‘expression’ of the first.12 The point seems to be this: prior to positing the second synthesis, the two terms, soul and body, are understood from the point of view of immediacy as forming a synthesis on their own, or rather (since ‘synthesis’ in at least a popularized Hegelian context implies the union of apparently incongruent terms under the auspices of a third) a unity with these two aspects, as though naturally unified as in the case of psychophysical organisms lacking a spiritual possibility. This is the case in natural human consciousness before spiritual consciousness emerges; but the 71

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emergence of spiritual consciousness is itself the idea that what appears initially to be a unity is really a juxtaposition of opposites. This realization is evidently what Kierkegaard means by the emergence of spiritual consciousness; for spiritual consciousness, or positing spirit, is recognizing an identity apart from, and superordinate to, the finite mentality of the first synthesis. The emergence of spirit is that of a problem. Since both The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death have as their topic the obstacles to its solution, it seems likely that, in having his author describe the human being in the first sentence of the main text of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard is drawing the reader’s attention to a feature of consciousness which, once it emerges, presents a set of specific problems. The set itself is indeed specified in the triad of opposites, that is (in their consistent order), infinity and finitude, eternity and temporality, freedom and necessity, mentioned in the opening passage. The latter element in each pair represents a limitation for a subject, now a self, that has emerged from immediacy into eternal consciousness. Traditionally, finitude is the limitation of distinctness or determinacy, necessity that of rational constraint, and temporality that of exposure to change. In AntiClimacus these become something like the limitations of mere particularity, genetic and environmental determination (‘facticity’ in Heidegger’s or Sartre’s sense), and lack of a stable centre in which to reside or ‘repose’. (The most obvious departure from the tradition is the use of ‘necessity’ in connection with contingent rather than logical constraint.) A human being subject to the limitations but not conscious of them as such lives the life of immediacy, though such a life is also attempted (actively), by those who do feel them as limitations yet due to anxiety will not venture beyond the closure of immediacy. According to our preferred reading, the category of spirit applies as soon as the limitations are felt as such, and therefore applies even to those who try to revert to immediacy. If we read the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death in this way, we must also understand the ‘synthesis’ of the limitations with their opposites as the setting of a task rather than as, what might seem more plausible terminologically, its completion. This means that there is at least one prima facie Hegelian analogy to discard. My proposal here is that ‘synthesis’ in both Anxiety and Sickness be linked to what was earlier called the standing assumption that God exists and we must stand before Him if we are to be truly ourselves. Thus the standing assumption is that the eternal is a positive category in the sense that it ‘posits’ a telos outside nature and the task of holding the elements – for example, freedom and necessity – together in a way that expresses this fact. It is useful here to call attention to Kierkegaard’s notion of ‘finite spirit’, of which he says it is the ‘unity of necessity and freedom … of consequence [Resultat] and striving’.13 Elsewhere we are told that spirit posits the synthesis as a contradiction; spirit ‘sustains’ the contradiction,14 that is to say, it does not resolve it. Conceptually, however, a synthesis cannot consist merely of a contradictory pair;15 there must be some framework for conceiving the opposites as congruent within a unity. In Anxiety the ‘instant’ is the intersection of time and eternity, and the idea of ‘finite spirit’ 72

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combines necessity and freedom as ‘consequence’, or product, and ‘striving’, or effort, in human existence. We might say that the unity of the opposites is sustained, as in Spinoza, by a conatus in suo esse perseverandi which here beams in on the absolute telos. What ‘synthesis’ actually means on this reading, then, is the conceiving of the opposites in the light of the presumption that it is right to side with infinity, eternity, freedom, though never losing sight of the limitations. This belief is essential to spirit’s being more than a merely negative notion (of doubt, despair and loss of self), but it is not yet the faith of the true self. The presumption can always be defied, even when it is not denied. There is still a problem. Anti-Climacus describes despair as an ‘imbalance’ or ‘misrelation’ (Misforhold) (p. 44 [14] ). This can easily suggest that despair and the relation (Forhold) are mutually exclusive, which leaves us with the idea that it is only the true self to which the expression ‘relates to itself’ applies. Yet this problem, too, can be overcome. What Anti-Climacus actually says is that ‘the imbalance of despair is not a simple imbalance but an imbalance in a relation that relates to itself’ (ibid., emphasis added). In other words, the reflexive relation already exists as a precondition of the possibility of an imbalance. From what we have said, this precondition can be identified as the self with its spiritual conatus. The self relates itself conatively to what it fundamentally recognizes, accepts or has perhaps chosen as its ideal self. The imbalance is then an inability to sustain, or direct defiance of, a spiritual inertia, prompted by the contrary inertial influence of the natural, instinctual ‘synthesis’ which the despairing individual exploits as a protective device in the anxiety of spiritual emergence. Anti-Climacus does not simply say that the relation in which the imbalance occurs relates to itself, but also that it is ‘established’ by something else (ibid.). The imbalance is the selfrelating relation’s unwillingness to orient itself to something other, and non-finite, that posited it. 3 This interpretation has the important consequence that, without the standing assumption, there is no synthesis. The synthesis is ‘sustained’ by spirit only so far as ‘spirit’ is understood positively, though only in task terms. This raises important questions for the interpretation of Kierkegaard’s works as a whole. Why, for instance, do the pseudonymous works not envisage a nihilistic alternative in which, according to the above, a synthesis would not be an initial part but itself an option? Does the assumption have some transcendental status, for example as a regulative idea? Or are the pseudonymous works deliberately confined to a framework in which the standing assumption has the status of an axiom? And if so, can that be seen as strategy on Kierkegaard’s part, or is it rather an indication of his failure to take account of a more comprehensive kind of despair? Answering these questions is far beyond this essay’s scope, but I can usefully conclude by plotting the space of possibilities in which the answers might be sought. Let us take that space to be bounded by two extremes. On the one hand Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the Christian framework can be read as determined and passive. We know he broke with Christianity briefly in his early twenties, but 73

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this was also a crisis in his relationship with his father, so we are not forced to conclude that the resumption of the framework was other than simply a return to normal. On this view, Kierkegaard’s own belief in, or disposition to believe, the truth of Christian doctrine is essential to the way we read him, and Kierkegaard himself is well placed in the context of a society which, for the most part unlike ours, professed Christian doctrine. At the other extreme whatever Kierkegaard himself believed is not essential at all – the important thing is that his readers professed Christian faith. Positing the Christian framework as an axiom is simply a piece of strategy on Kierkegaard’s part: his aim is to show readers what their professions of faith really commit them to – not, on this interpretation, because Kierkegaard himself accepts the content of that faith, even if that is nevertheless true, but because he would insist that whatever a person believes (and in the case of his intended readers it happens to be Christian doctrine), the belief should be formed in full clarity about the options between which it adjudicates. This reading, contrary to the first, gives us a radically de-contextualized Kierkegaard, who might conceivably be transported into the present, where he might put on the framework of disbelief in order to test modern man against the over-complacent acceptance of agnosticism and atheism. Surely neither extreme captures the truth of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Nor indeed is it even likely that the motivational complex behind his activity can be referred to any single point between, not even if we confine ourselves to just one phase, say that of Anti-Climacus. As a suggestion on how the space of possibilities might be exploited, I propose elsewhere that we pick out two different points corresponding to a ‘passive’, or unreflective, ‘problem’ aspect and an ‘active’, deliberate ‘solution aspect’.16 The passive aspect corresponds to a need, the kind of need that leaves one wanting a religious framework, and the active element to the adoption of that framework as a solution to the need. Whatever else may be said of the proposal, it at least has the merit of providing a ready explanation of the exclusion of the nihilistic alternative in Anti-Climacus’s works. Anti-Climacus speaks for the solution, from a point of view for which the nihilistic alternative does not exist; denying Christ is either backsliding within the framework and to be described as the framework specifies, as falling in with the devil’s invention for example, or it is leaving the framework of the solution and stepping back into that of the need. Problem and solution thus belong to two different stages. Put succinctly, the reason why the framework is a solution is that it no longer contains the conceptual resources for describing what gave rise to it as a ‘need’. The framework heals the breach by 1eaving no room for the problem; instead, by ‘engag[ing) man [in eternity] absolutely’ and making life ‘infinitely more strenuous than … when one is not involved in Christianity’,17 it redefines our needs. Once God is there the need is to stand transparently before Him, which is quite different from the need for there to be a God to be able to stand transparently before. Any account of the ‘problem’ stage will be coloured by the framework in which it is given. Much of Kierkegaard, particularly Anti-Climacus, reads as though all that goes before is to be grasped from the point of view of what 74

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comes last, namely religiousness. In the aesthetic works (as Kierkegaard calls them), however, religiousness is approached prospectively, from a dialectical distance, reminding us of Hegel. Just as natural consciousness breaks down on close scrutiny but in the same instant points beyond itself to a higher unity, so the psychical closure (where soul is the determining category) opens in a splitting of finite and infinite, leaving the self no saving option but to grant its establishment by ‘something else’ in eternity and to relate itself to that ideal or ‘measure’. But – as Anti-Climacus does not make explicit – that there is this saving option is not given unless we adopt the religious, or indeed the Christian, framework, and before doing that we will have to grant that nihilism might equally be true. That is the problem to which the framework is the solution. Whether colouring the account of what goes before in the dispassionate anthropological way of this proposal takes us nearer to the heart of Kierkegaard or further away is, I think, an open question. But to grant that it does take us nearer is to allow still further questions to be raised. Is the need for which the framework is a solution itself ‘passive’ in the sense of our first extreme, and thus local in cultural time and place (as by now many others besides Marx and Freud would claim), or has Kierkegaard unearthed a universal spiritual need? Secondly, is the fact that Christian doctrine commends itself as the only solution also passive in that sense, that is to say, it only seems inevitably so, or is it really the only way out? The vindication of Kierkegaard’s thought in this area for our or any time would seem to call for the latter answer in each case.

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6 BASIC DESPAIR

The Sickness unto Death distinguishes between two types of ‘authentic’ despair: ‘not wanting to be oneself’ and ‘wanting to be oneself’.1 The heading to the first section (A) in Part One identifies another and prior type: ‘being unconscious in despair of having a self (inauthentic despair)’. But the author only begins to discuss this unconscious form of despair later, in a section on coming to consciousness of one’s despair. There, although he admits one might wonder whether this third type should be called despair at all, he goes on to say that this form of despair, the inauthentic one, is the ‘most common’ of all.2 That it is so is, however, already anticipated in the second section (B): It is as far as possible from the truth that the common view is right which assumes that anyone who doesn’t think or feel he is in despair is not in despair, and that only the person who says he is in despair is so. On the contrary, he who says without pretence that he despairs is, after all, a little nearer, a dialectical step nearer being cured than all those who are not regarded and who do not regard themselves as being in despair. But as most authorities on the psyche will concede, the normal situation is this: that most people live without being properly conscious of being characterized as spirit – and to this one can trace all the socalled security, contentment with life, etc., which is exactly despair.3 The difficulties have to do with the fact that despair is analysed as a relationship involving the self, but, according to the analysis, what makes the third, or, in point of genealogy, first, form of despair inauthentic is that in this form of despair there is no consciousness of self. But before the matter of its credentials can be settled there is a prior question of how to understand the two authentic forms and their interrelationship. It is to this question that this essay is devoted. From the start Kierkegaard says quite unequivocally that ‘all despair can in the end be resolved into or reduced … to the second form’,4 that is, ‘wanting to be oneself’. Before asking why this form should be regarded as the general one, let us be clear what the formula for this second form of authentic despair actually says. It sounds at first sight paradoxical. Surely being contented with the self one is or has become is the very opposite of despair? But as Kierkegaard himself stresses at the 76

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very beginning, the kind of despair he says is basic could not be a form of despair at all without the idea that the self is established by God. The word ‘spirit’, just encountered in the above quotation, suggests a teleology in which a form of selfhood is, for all human beings, in the offing. The very first sentence in The Sickness unto Death asserts that ‘[t]he human being is spirit’. And to the question ‘But what is spirit?’ it answers ‘Spirit is the self’. What the formula for despair ‘wanting to be oneself’ means, then, is ‘wanting to be one’s own self’ rather than the self that is grounded in God, or, as Anti-Climacus says more circumspectly, a self ‘established by something else’, by a ‘power’. The state in which despair is rooted out is one in which, ‘in relating to itself and in wanting to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power that established it’.5 Thus there are two ways of wanting to be oneself. One is a despairing way, in which one sees oneself as no more than what one can make of oneself. The other, the ‘formula’ for riddance of despair, is where, whatever one makes of oneself, that self is seen as owing to a power to which its own origin and destiny are due. The former turns out to be sin, the latter faith. The disjunction here, the either/or that makes the contrast between despair and its opposite conveniently lexical, might itself indicate that the form of despair called ‘wanting (in despair) to be oneself’ is the basic one. If all despair can be perspicuously distinguished from faith as wanting to be one’s own (that is, self-posited) self, the question then is how to bring the first form of authentic despair under this general formula. It is, we recall, ‘not wanting (in despair) to be oneself’. How can this be seen to be a special case of the former? It is possible to interpret the formula ‘not wanting to be oneself’ in different ways. One is to take it that the self one does not want to be is the self as spirit, or as developed spirit. The idea here is that spiritual teleology goes against the grain. That would make the occurrences of ‘self’ in both formulae tidily synonymous. But, perhaps in the light of difficulties with this talk of a teleology and its going against the grain, one might take ‘self’ in the special case to be simply the self one finds oneself being, to be who one is in the here and now. Even if that should solve whatever the difficulties might be, it would upset the tidy synonymy. However, if the difficulties proved sufficient, we might conclude that the formulae did not order themselves in the conveniently lexical fashion, and if Kierkegaard’s claim about which is basic is based on it, we might also conclude that his account should be modified accordingly. I once assumed unquestioningly that Kierkegaard as Anti-Climacus had good reason to claim that the second form of despair represents despair in general and is therefore the basic form. The reason was not so much the tidily definitional either/or so much as my finding it natural to read the text in that way. The first authentic form of despair was a shunning of the trials of spirituality. Naturally, then, I took the further question of whether there is something to call ‘inauthentic’ despair to be a matter of whether there is an unconscious, perhaps preconscious, form of despair satisfying the second authentic form – something that raises the difficulties Kierkegaard himself recognizes before dismissing them. 77

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Michael Theunissen, however, in a paper to which this essay and earlier versions are responses,6 claims that if we reconstruct Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair we find that Kierkegaard is indeed mistaken; according to the implications of his own analysis, Kierkegaard should have said that the basic form of despair is the first, the kind he calls not wanting to be oneself. Accordingly, Theunissen proposes in his reconstruction as the Grundsatz of Kierkegaard’s analysis: ‘Immediately, we want not to be what we are [in our selves, our pre-given Dasein, and our human being].’ However, the issue is to some extent complicated by the fact that Theunissen offers significantly different readings of the two authentic forms of despair (in terms that he also applies to the inauthentic, or, as he says, ‘non-real’, form). Glossing the first form, as we have just seen, as not wanting to be ourselves in our pre-given existence, Theunissen, if that is to be the basic form, must then read the second form as a special case of the same. That is to say, and against the text as I read it, he must treat it as an unwillingness to be oneself in one’s pre-given existence. The text itself has ‘fortvivlet at ville være sig selv’. To achieve the required result the expression ‘fortvivlet’ must be given the force of negation, so that we can read it as saying that the despair consists in the willing to be oneself being somehow impeded – a despairing of the very willing (to be oneself), as against the reading to be defended here: that this is a form of willing to be oneself that, because it ignores the spiritual teleology, amounts in itself to despair. Consistency does of course require that the qualifying expression ‘fortvivlet’ be used similarly in both formulae, and we assume this is the author’s intention. In the case of the first authentic form of despair, which is ‘not wanting to be ourselves in our pre-given existence’, it could be a matter of, say, ‘despairing of being any other self than the one we are’. Theunissen offers a lexical argument of his own. He points out that the despair of not wanting to be oneself cannot be analysed into that of wanting to be another. You can very well want not to be yourself without at the same time wanting to be another, but whenever you want to be another you are still wanting not to be yourself. So not wanting to be yourself (or a self at all) is the basic form of despair. I shall not comment on this argument until the conclusion. First we must confront the readings it is based on. They are clearly not implausible and they may even stand the test of extensive exposure to the rest of the text. But even were they to fail this test to some extent, they may be thought to offer a better basis than the text’s for an analysis of the phenomenon of despair in our own time. They at least relieve the analyst of the burden of allegiance to the religious premise that prefixes much of the pseudonymous literature, particularly the work of AntiClimacus. Whether they do stand up to the test of their context is another matter that I shall not judge. I confine myself to attempting to vindicate my own reading of the formulae and the text in which they are embedded. As Kierkegaard himself stresses at the very beginning, without the idea of a self established by God, the kind of despair he says is basic could not be a form of despair at all. There would only be the despair of not wanting to be oneself. 78

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And were that indeed the only form available, it would be extremely paradoxical to be told that you are still in despair even if you do indeed want to be yourself. The only escape would be indifference as to whether or not you are yourself, and that is obviously not what Kierkegaard intends when he talks of a state in which ‘despair is completely eradicated’.7 If we understand in a quite straightforward way what not wanting to be ourselves is, that is, where we have some idea of the self or person we are and we don’t want to be that person – the kind of case Theunissen’s Grundsatz refers to – and we are told that this is a state of despair, we could quite naturally assume that the way to avoid despair is to be content with being this self, to be that self willingly, go along with being it – unless, that is, we are also told, as we are by Kierkegaard, that willingly being oneself still need not be being one’s self in its spiritual form. For in that case we can see how even if we are willingly the self we are, we may still be in despair. We need some idea, then, of a true selfhood to contrast with a selfhood we are willing to take on, in order for willing to be the self we take on still to count as a form of despair. We need some notion of a ‘true’ form of selfhood. Does it have to be that of a God-established self, though? Might it not just as well be, for instance, Heidegger’s notion of a self authentically related to death as its ‘utmost, though indefinite, yet certain possibility’, the possibility before which, in Heidegger’s functional equivalent of Kierkegaardian despair, ‘Dasein flees in everydayness’?8 We could go further. Even within everydayness, anyone with a notion of an ideal or better self can allow that now willingly being the self one previously didn’t like the thought of becoming may still fall short of some better self one still doesn’t like the thought of becoming. And if that is all that the despair of wanting to be oneself – of willingly being what one is – amounts to, we could always envisage escaping despair either by becoming a still better self or by adjusting to some everyday specification of selfhood we don’t immediately want to be confined to, though in some respects we allow it is this confined self we indeed really are. But none of this captures Kierkegaardian despair. According to Kierkegaard, it is still possible in either case to be in despair, because no self at all we become and like, and no self we didn’t like but are now satisfyingly adjusted to being, is our real, proper, best or ‘true’ self. To be that self, one has to make a Uturn and look and move in quite the opposite direction. That direction is not the Heideggerian one of confronting one’s utmost possibility. For according to The Sickness unto Death, thinking that ‘death is the end or the end death’ is precisely to despair.9 So not only is it not enough just to have upgraded one’s self according to some ideal within everydayness, it is not even enough to emerge from one’s refuge in everydayness to face one’s finitude. Indeed, embracing death as the end proves to be the Kierkegaardian paradigm of the properly despairing self. So Anti-Climacus claims that there is this notion of selfhood that is a notion of a God-established self, and asserts that any striving after a goal of selfhood that is not an acceptance of this ideal is despair. In a way, I suspect, he is really claiming that any striving after a goal of selfhood at all is despair – any striving to become a ‘better’ self than the self one is – because to strive in this self-improving way is to 79

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try to be a self in a way that is not that of being a God-established self, and only the latter gives you the condition in which you can be rid of despair. At any rate, I understand the text’s main claim to be that the fundamental form that despair takes – that is, the way in which despair manifests itself, the behaviour we should call despair in the most basic sense – is that of aiming at, or willingly accepting, specifications of selfhood that do not have the form of a selfhood established by God. The case where this behaviour is most conscious (to the subject or agent in question) is what Anti-Climacus calls ‘defiance’. But Kierkegaard says that there is an element of defiance in all despair.10 It is both tempting and plausible to suppose that Kierkegaard would include here the case of inauthentic despair, where there is as yet no conception of being a self about which one can raise questions of wanting to be it or not. If Kierkegaard is right in this – though perhaps he isn’t, in which case I think this is where we should first look to find out whether he is mistaken – all ‘trying to be/being willingly a self’ is a way of trying to escape or deliberately disregard the form of a God-established selfhood; that is, of not wanting to be one’s true, God-established self. To elaborate, let us look at the brief summary of the concept of despair which appears in the third section (C) of Part One entitled ‘Despair is the Sickness unto Death’. Anticipating the fuller account that follows, the text says here that despair first appears in the form of a despair over something, but that the real and underlying target is the self. There are several difficulties of interpretation with regard to these two pages. One of them has to do with what the text here says is true of all despair, that it is an attempt to be rid of the self. We may feel that we can understand this notion in the case of despairing over something important enough in relation to the person’s self-image for the despair to count as despair over the self; wanting rid of the self which proves incapable of something of that importance makes sense at least figuratively, but perhaps even literally if some theoretically appropriate sense of ‘self’ can be found. But how can we move from that idea to another also given in the text, namely that even succeeding in something of this importance is an attempt to be rid of the self? First let us itemize the claims that appear to be made in the text. Two illustrations are provided which, when combined, look as if they give us a synopsis of the main points to be made about despair. One is the example of the power-crazed person (den Herskesyge, lit. the power-sick) whose motto is ‘Either Caesar or absolutely nothing.’11 The other is that of a young girl who despairs over the loss of her loved one (whether through death or betrayal). If we suppose they fail in their projects, they remain selves they do not want to be. What is made explicit in the case of the young girl is that if she succeeded in becoming his, she would not have become herself but become his; she would have been rid of her self (though ‘in the most blissful manner’). This indeed was her project. But as it happens, she fails and is left with the self she did not want to be. The formerly hopeful self is now a self of ‘torment’, in the form of a ‘loathsome void’, if in fact he died, or, if it was a betrayal, of a ‘despicable reminder’.12 The text suggests that, having failed, she wants even more to get rid of this self, but to the comment ‘You are consuming 80

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herself’ she is made to reply ‘Oh, no! The agony is just that I can’t’.13 Here, then, we have a case complying with the first half of Theunissen’s lexical argument for the fundamental status of the despair that is not wanting to be oneself: You can very well want not to be yourself without at the same time wanting to be another. Of course, such a person might have thought ‘How nice to have been a self-sufficient self and consolable self instead’, but the case of the girl is presented as one in which she has no such alternatives in mind and just wants to be rid of herself tout court. We recall the argument is that since you can want not to be yourself without wanting to be another but not conversely, wanting not to be yourself is the basic form of despair. There is, however, an alternative reading of the girl’s case and what she wants rid of, though in vain. According to this reading, the self she vainly tries to escape with no other in view is a self that is independent and free in respect of all its relationships with the world, a self that does not need to try to be rid of itself by surrendering to another, being another’s. The sickness unto death is, on this reading of the unriddable self, the futile attempt to shirk one’s spiritual destiny. As the text puts it: just as Socrates proved the soul was immortal ‘from the fact that the sickness of the soul (sin) does not consume it as the body’s sickness consumes the body … [so can one] similarly prove the eternal in a man from the fact that despair cannot consume his self’.14 Let us move on now to the power-crazed person. We can say that his very hunger for power is an expression of his unwillingness to be himself. Part of this is that he wants not to be a self that is unable to become Caesar, but that is a part of the project that may not be clear to him until he fails to become Caesar and then wants to be rid of the self that was too weak to become Caesar. This regressive ‘wanting not to be the self that cannot’ is called ‘the heightened formula for despair, the rising fever in this sickness of the self’. It sounds as if the regress is meant to be infinite – ‘what [the despairer] despairs over is … that he cannot consume himself, cannot become nothing’.15 That is, each failed attempt to be rid of a self that fails in its attempt to be rid of a self simply produces yet another attempt to get rid of the most recently failing self. Since the regress is infinite, becoming nothing is not an alternative to becoming Caesar. Now this suggests, just as before, that we might take the self that the power-crazed person vainly tries to become to be this weak self that cannot become Caesar, just as at a more modest level of attainment a would-be Kierkegaard scholar might not want to be a self that cannot master Danish. However, there is an inherent weakness in this. It is practically a tautology to say that the attempt to change one’s given self is to try to get rid of the self; it is just another way of saying that one wants to change its specifications. In this sense any kinds of change, including the kinds that we call development, getting educated, realizing oneself, and so on, would be classified as cases of wanting to be rid of one’s self, of what one is. But the stakes are surely higher here, almost as though the would-be Kierkegaard scholar would prefer not to be a human being at all if he or she couldn’t master Danish. In another sense, and I believe the textual and contextual evidence strongly favours this reading, the 81

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self the would-be Caesar wants to be rid of is the self he should become and in relation to which the project of becoming Caesar is entirely incompatible. Becoming Caesar would be to go in the direction opposite to that of the self which the would-be Caesar would be rid of. If he became Caesar. And the latter is a self which as yet he is not, not a self that he currently knows himself as being and finds unsatisfactory. The would-be Caesar is, by heading in the Caesar direction, looking for a way of not facing up to the project of selfhood that confronts him, and he does it by seeking quite the wrong kind of satisfaction. This, we can introject here, complies with the second half of Theunissen’s lexical argument for the position enjoyed in the analysis by wanting not to be oneself: whenever you want to be another you are still wanting not to be yourself. To give our alternative reading some preliminary backing, let us go back five years to the answer Assessor Wilhelm gives to the question he himself poses in Either/Or when, in connection with the notion of choosing oneself, he asks: ‘But what, then, is this self of mine?’ As what he calls ‘a first shot at a definition’, he says, ‘the most abstract thing of all which yet, at the same time, is the most concrete thing of all – it is freedom’.16 Thus it is not in any ordinary sense a merely factual self. It is not the self one knows oneself as being just by virtue of possessing finite properties; indeed, as the term ‘freedom’ suggests, it has more to do with possibility than with actuality. Perhaps a clue to why the power-crazed person does not want to be this self may be found in this latter fact. We can develop this idea by linking it to the notion of a ‘negative’ self developed later in the first part of The Sickness unto Death. There we find terms like the ‘infinite form’ of the self, and of its ‘negative’ form, and also of the self’s ‘infinite abstraction’.17 However, we can see from remarks Wilhelm makes in Either/Or why the self considered simply as the most abstract thing of all is not a self. It is what we would call a transcendental self, a self or ‘I’ that remains identical whatever changes of finite properties it may undergo. But as Wilhelm says, it is a mistake for a person to think of himself as ‘remaining himself though everything were changed’. It is to suppose that there were ‘something in him that is absolute in relation to everything else, something whereby he is the one he is, even if the change he obtains through his wish were the greatest possible’.18 Such a self, says Wilhelm, which a person might conceive of himself as remaining under all conceivable change, ‘as if his inmost being were an algebraic entity that could stand for whatever it might be’, is not a self one could ever choose to be. Moreover, all you can say about this ‘most abstract expression for the “self” ’ is that it is ‘freedom’. Finally, although ‘the self I despair over is a finitude as every other finite thing’, the self I choose, if I do choose a self, is ‘the absolute or my self according to its absolute validity’.19 Given the central part played in The Sickness unto Death by the notion of ‘spirit’ and the fact that the theme of the work is the difficulties people experience entering or staying within this category, it seems clear that the component expression ‘self’ in ‘despair over oneself’ reaches much further than the finite self simply as it is. The power-crazed person is placing undue significance on finite matters; it matters too much to him that he becomes Caesar, so that if he fails to become 82

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Caesar, this self of his will be the most intolerable thing of all, much worse than that of the young girl, whose torment is that she did not become another’s. So, even if it is a failure of the finite self that makes the power-crazed person unable to ‘bear’ being that self,20 the very project which defines the failure is itself pathological, a case of despair. So we could say, as our first shot at a definition, that the self the power-crazed person does not want to be is a self which from the point of view of the negative self must in finite terms be counted a ‘nothing’, a self for which no finite properties are essential but also for which no non-finite properties are available. The power-crazed person is avoiding the necessity of having to choose between, as it says in A Literary Review, ‘be[ing] lost [fortabes] in the dizziness of abstract infinity or be[ing] infinitely saved in the essentiality [Væsentlighed] of religiousness’.21 The force of the motto ‘Caesar or nothing’ will then be that it is preferable to become Caesar than to face the alternatives that emerge when the negativity of selfhood is fully recognized: a loss of selfhood altogether or the surrender of selfhood to God. The text’s characterization of the power-crazed person’s kind of despair introduces briefly the notion of a true self, of a self which one is ‘in truth’. Here, says Anti-Climacus, ‘[t]he self which, in his despair, he wants to be is a self he is not (indeed, to want to be the self he is in truth, is the very opposite of despair) …’.22 It makes perfect sense, therefore, to identify the self which the power-crazed person wants rid of as the true self. The same passage says that ‘the second form of despair – wanting in despair to be oneself – can be traced back to the first – in despair not wanting to be oneself’.23 The man who wants to be Caesar is, by virtue of that very fact, not wanting to be his true self, the self chosen ‘in truth’, as it says here, or as Wilhelm put it, the self ‘in its eternal validity’. So the would-be Caesar’s attitude is that of one who has some grasp of the negativity of selfhood. He is on the threshold of knowing himself as an abstraction for which all finite characterizations are contingent. He is trying to be rid of his negative self by exploiting its freedom to reconstitute himself as a Master in the finite world. This invites the thought that the force of the ‘Caesar or nothing’ example in this early section of The Sickness unto Death is to indicate that the tyrannous person is someone peculiarly sensitive to the negativity of selfhood, that is, to the fact that before acknowledging that the self one is is established by God, one must first achieve an abstract vantage-point from which alone that finite self can be chosen absolutely. But this negativity is only one side of the true self, and by the same token it is only one of the aspects of selfhood that the power-crazed person wants rid of, and indeed it is not clear that he does want rid of it, since the vantage-point is one whose ‘freedom’ allows him to choose a tyrant as his role model. What the tyrant is really trying to hide from himself is the prospect of having to return, from the point of view of that negativity, to his historical self with all its limitations. Nor, from the negative vantage-point he shuns but at the same time exploits, is limitation just a matter of contingent impossibilities. From there any possibilities at all will be seen to suffer from the categorial limitation of being purely contingent and inessential. Thus true selfhood has a twofold nega83

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tivity: on the one hand, the abstractness of a self separated from all finite determinants; and, on the other, the thought of the radical contingency of all that makes up the finite self. Instead of taking his historical self to have ‘validity’ after all, a thought which the freedom of the abstract vantage-point both necessitates and articulates (as what it means to appropriate the true self), the power-crazed person chooses another self, a finite self – he chooses to (try to) become Caesar. But in doing so he is mixing categories, though he, unlike the young girl, is at least on the verge of realizing they are indeed distinct. As Wilhelm has said, ‘oneself’ is the only thing one can choose absolutely.24 The power-crazed person fills the void with a fixed fivite idea, instead of accepting the challenge of the choices and tasks confronting his given self. Should we take the motto we are focusing on to apply only to this sensitive kind of case? Given the prominence the text gives to the example, it seems much more likely that the motto and example are chosen precisely because this sensitive kind of case is thought to throw most light on the wider phenomena to be included in this concept of despair. This would conform with AntiClimacus’s assertion that it is the second form of authentic despair – the defiant form – that is paradigmatic for despair (and also for inauthentic despair). However, does Kierkegaard really mean to say that all the human phenomena he designates as ‘despair’ are cases of not wanting to be this Godgiven self? If so, isn’t this notion of a true self simply a gratuitous piece of theology, a prejudice prefixed to the phenomenology of despair rather than a concept which emerges from it? Further, as we saw, the notion of a true self arises explicitly only in connection with the second authentic form of despair (wanting to be one’s own self). Is it not then conceivable that Kierkegaard intends the notion of a true self to refer to something that emerges only when there is an awareness of the infinite abstraction of selfhood, that is to say, the negative self as discussed above? As far as the first authentic form of despair is concerned, it might be enough to make do with the less ambitious and psychologically more realistic notion of ‘not wanting to be oneself, or not wanting to be a self at all’. Well, let us assume for the moment, with regard to the first authentic form of despair, that we can read the text quite neutrally as to whether the self the despairer does not want to be is any kind of self at all or the true, God-posited self. And the text does in fact seem to fit both readings; there is no obvious point at which the concept of a true self need play a part. After all, as indicated by the section entitled ‘Despair Viewed under the Aspect of Consciousness’, the notion of a true self as adumbrated does not emerge until the self has a grasp of its own negativity, that is to say, until there is a notion of being an unspecified self in relation to which all finite characteristics are merely contingent. So why not simply hold the diagnostic notion of ‘true self’, the theological prefix, in abeyance? Why not, in the fashionable phrase, simply ‘defer’ it? True, we cannot defer it forever, since the text does not allow similar liberties in the case of the second authentic

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form of despair. But at least here we might find a piece of pure philosophical anthropology uncontaminated by the presupposition of Christianity. It is clear that in general anthropological terms there is something to be said for taking the disinclination to be a self tout court to be the most fundamental form of despair. Selfhood is a threat one faces before reaching the point where an alternative is conceivable to the self one is, simply because selfhood has to be in place in some sense before alternatives can be considered.25 There may also be some reason to regard it as the most significant form, though that claim would need special pleading and we would have to be clear whose reason it is. But let us allow that it is indeed plausible to assert that not wanting to be a self at all, in the sense in question, is the basic form of despair in Western society. ‘Basic’ here can also mean not just ‘prevalent’ but also fundamental in the metaphysical or perhaps anthropological sense that it confronts the issue of selfhood at the roots. So perhaps Kierkegaard would agree. Indeed perhaps this is what he means when he describes the first authentic form of despair as ‘not wanting to be oneself’. After all, according to the account he goes on to develop, and of which the two pages we have focused on here form only a very short summary, what someone on the way to becoming the true self has to confront is precisely this unspecified self now so familiar to readers of post-existentialist literature, that is, the prospect of a merely formal particularity in relation to which all ‘worldly’ modes and manners of identity are external and subject to radical choice. And if this is perhaps not what Kierkegaard meant, then, in presenting the first form of despair, might we not say that he should have confined himself to what is also phenomenologically the truer account? Yet what about the second authentic form of despair? There is no textual excuse here for removing the notion of a true self. It is clear that Kierkegaard intends us to understand this despair as the defiant attempt to be rid of the true self. He also makes it quite clear that he considers this form to be in a certain sense basic: ‘so far from its being simply the case that this second form of despair (wanting in despair to be oneself) amounts to a special form on its own, all despair can in the end be resolved into or reduced to [opløses i og tilbageføres til] it’.26 In what sense does Kierkegaard claim the second can be resolved into or reduced to the first, and what can be his reasons? One reason could be the following. Any attempt to avoid selfhood takes the form of being what I shall call here ‘a self of sorts’. By that I mean roughly the way in which a person who lives in the Heideggerian category of das Man understands his or her ‘self’. This is nowhere near a true self, and does not even approach the negative self; it is a self formed out of ready-made roles and manners and defined by similarities and differences between these. It may not always be possible to define oneself in this way; ‘one’ may lack the social opportunity or be psychologically incapable of assimilating the das Man role(s) available which would make one a self of sorts. But typically, and on a scale large enough for social criticism to find a target, refusing the project of personal selfhood would mean seeking cover in some such guise or other. (One becomes and remains a self 85

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of a sort, or of several sorts, as parent, teacher, politician, chairman of the local rifle club, and so on; one does what ‘is done’ even if, less sociably but no less protectively, it is to join a street gang.) Barring insanity, there is no alternative for someone who does not want to approach true selfhood via the narrow pass of the negative self, though insanity itself is indeed, in a manner of speaking, a way out. In other words, the characteristic manoeuvre of someone who does not want to face selfhood is to be a self of sorts, a sort of a self, a self answering to some general social description. That is of course a contradictory project in terms of what it means actually to be the true self, for the latter must be appropriated from the vantage-point of the negative self. In other words, the typical manifestation of not wanting to be an unspecified ‘I’ is to be a self of sorts. There is admittedly a difficulty with this suggestion. If defiance consists in the wilful replacement of the goal of true selfhood with an alternative self, a self of one’s own design and making, the vantage-point of the negative self must already be reached. The self one wants to be in this second form of despair is a full-blown self, a kind of Nietzschean Übermensch, adopted from the vantagepoint of the negative self. In that case none of the ‘selves of sorts’ adopted by the weaker person whose despair is that of not wanting to be him- or herself will count; in that kind of despair there is, strictly speaking, no self that one is substituting for the true self. There is, however, an answer to this. One does not have actually to reach the vantage-point of the negative self in order to respond defiantly to its challenge; a premonition of it could be enough for one’s way of life to acquire features answering to the model of defiance. Thus the power-crazed person with his motto ‘Caesar or nothing’ may have no very clear conception of actually being the negative self, that is to say, ‘nothing’; what he understands by it may be more in the form of a premonition that unless he becomes Caesar his life will have absolutely no value. His position may be that of the person who demonstrates his despair merely symptomatically by attributing infinite value to something finite. It is only in his behaviour that he shows that he has some concept of the infinite; his self-conception is not yet one in which finite and infinite are separated in practice. Consequently, and if we accept this version of the power-crazed person’s defiance, the goal of becoming Caesar may count both as a case of defiance and as an attempt to become a self of sorts, a Caesar-self, a self which does as Caesars do. This would indicate, as the text indeed has it, that there is no clear-cut distinction between the two authentic forms of despair. We would be free, therefore, to look for expressions of defiance in authentic despair of the first kind too. In support of this possibility it could also be pointed out that it is unlikely in principle that there should be a determinable transition from not wanting to be oneself to wanting to be one’s own self. The likelihood is that many cases of not wanting to be oneself are also well described as cases of wanting not to be oneself. There is, in the idea of not wanting something, already a hint of defiance, an active stance against something of which one has a premonition perhaps but also to which one is at the same time disposed to give 86

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one’s assent. As the text says, we are all constitutionally disposed to become spirit. The claim that all despair has the form of defiance makes allowance for the correlative reluctance or fear generated by this disposition. Despair here is the traditional notion of desperatio, a negative stance in response to an evaluation of the possibilities of succeeding in something assumed to be worthwhile, opposed to hope. Aquinas captures this when he writes: regarding a good not yet possessed, in which the notion of the arduous can be verified because of the difficulty of obtaining it, if that good is judged to exceed the capacity of the one seeking it, despair ensues; but if it is judged not to exceed that capacity, hope arises.27 What is both novel and crucial in Kierkegaard’s account is that this notion of despair is applied to patterns of social behaviour which are not, and could not be, the result of any conscious evaluation of capacities or possibilities. Further, the less consciously the evaluation occurs, the more complex becomes the psychology of evaluation itself: capacities can be strategically undervalued in order to make despair appear more appropriate; or the goals themselves, what is hoped for, can be undervalued so as to become attainable at less cost. It is worth remembering whom Kierkegaard was writing for, namely people who, he believed, grossly simplified the requirements of the life of spirit, people who spoke its language but did not live its life. These were people who saw themselves as selves of a spiritual sort, when spirit requires that you do not see yourself as a self of any sort at all. What especially concerned him were the protective guises which gave selves of certain sorts names which made them sound as if they were actually facing the tasks of true selfhood when in fact their behaviour was a travesty of the very notion. In reading The Sickness unto Death it is surely relevant to consider the extent to which it is a work directed at a specific society, a society in which people were contented in their (spiritual-sounding) roles. If openly refusing to take up the task of what the members of that society, being nominal Christians, would have to admit was a task of true selfhood is the most obvious form of despair, for Kierkegaard it was the more widespread, unobvious forms that mattered, not just because they were more prevalent, but also because they were psychologically more difficult to break out of. These forms include willingly being the sort of self, the being which is in fact to turn away from that task, but also immersing oneself in manners and practices which are the protective measures society, in its own defence but also at the hands of fearful individuals who have had a say in its making, has accumulated over time. Kierkegaard’s concept of a God-posited self is not that of an ideal self which has to be specified then aimed at and then appropriated, or put on as though it were a new suit of clothes, a self in which one must take up habitation in place of one’s actual self with all its limitations. Being God-posited is Kierkegaard’s theological specification of the self one already is, the given self and its limitations, the self of one’s Dasein. That is why so much of Theunissen’s Korrektur 87

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seems right-minded. Wanting to be rid of oneself is a state common both to all those disinclined to engage in the project of selfhood at all, and to those – and perhaps there are not many nowadays – who can be appropriately described as unwilling to conceive of their given selves as God-posited because they have some notion of this idea but are offended by it. Still, you cannot treat the project of selfhood with no God in view and of appropriating the fact that you are God-posited as if they were one and the same. To reduce the latter to the former would be to empty it of all that Kierkegaard has put into it. Defining despair as the attempt to be rid of the true self gives the notion a significance which is lacking if it is defined simply as a reluctance to become a self at all. As was noted in connection with the power-crazed man, what the despairer is reluctant to do is, in Either/Or terms, to accept his given and limited self as eternally valid. In Anti-Climacus’s terms it is a reluctance to make the given self the vehicle of an ethico-religious life based on a direct relation to God.28 On this reading, the self one does not want to be is the self acknowledged as true in the sense adumbrated. On the alternative reading, the religious category enters at the end as the condition under which the self one initially does not want to be, the given self simpliciter, need no longer be reluctant to be itself. The latter may sound a more cogent account of despair than the former, and superficially they may seem hardly to differ. I hope I have said enough, however, to show that they do differ and significantly. Finally, and by way of further support for the reading I advocate, let us recall Kierkegaard’s personal obsession with lost immediacy. The state in which selfhood first becomes an issue is where the closed circle of ‘immediacy’ is broken by reflection and finds it is only an assumption. We might say, in a Hegelian spirit, that it is at this point that the notion first emerges of the divine, as that crucial notion upon which the embrace is seen now to depend. Why not then say that what the budding self shuns is just this prospect of loss of that initial state? If so, then the proper description of someone in the first form of real despair would be: not wanting to be the God-established self in any other way than that of immediacy. This would lend another kind of support to the case for my claim that the notion of a true self should also enter into the analysis of the first authentic form of despair. As for Theunissen’s lexical argument, its conclusion was that wanting not to be oneself was basic because uniquely common to both forms of despair. My argument has been that there is a case for saying that wanting to be oneself, though in some guise other than that of one’s true self, is what the phenomena embraced by The Sickness unto Death share. Consequently the text is right to make paradigmatic the form of despair it calls defiance.

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Although Either/Or was Kierkegaard’s best-seller, his later attitude to the ethical view of life he seems to be defending there would lead you to expect embarrassment at a folie de jeunesse rather than any kind of proprietary satisfaction. He seems, indeed, even in the very writing of the book, to have been on the way to disowning its manifest message; and in the retrospective and self-justificatory Synspunket for min Forfatter-Virksomhed (Point of View), Kierkegaard’s posthumous report to history, Either/Or is described as ‘pre-religious’. Yet the Point of View was originally intended to accompany a second edition of Either/Or1 as part of a public declaration on Kierkegaard’s part that his pseudonymous authorship had been a religious project from the start. How convincing is that claim, and what justification is there for it? More particularly, what continuity could Kierkegaard expect his readership to discern between the avowedly pre-religious Either/Or and the subsequent pseudonyms? Indeed, given Kierkegaard’s disparaging remark the year before his death that what Judge William says about ‘the woman’ is ‘what you would expect from a married man who champions marriage with ethical enthusiasm’, another on marriage as part of an ‘intricate plot’ designed to destroy the man’s spirit, and numerous remarks on the ‘mediocrity’ of ‘the human’,2 we may even ask how Kierkegaard could possibly square this evident lack of enthusiasm for marriage with the claim that Either/Or was still part of the ongoing corpus. There was a clearly economic motive in republishing Either/Or: In view of his failing finances Kierkegaard sorely needed the revenue from further sales of his best-seller to support the later religious production. Still, it seems certain that he was willing and able to persuade himself that Either/Or was a genuine precursor to that production and indeed a religious work itself,3 though not manifestly. Because its readership had overwhelmingly responded to the work as an aesthetic product, he feared that if the second edition appeared on its own the impression that readers would receive of his production overall would be of an aesthetic author,4 with the result that the productivity’s religious point would be ‘lost’.5 Hence the intended accompaniment by a ‘careful explanation’ in the Point of View. Because Kierkegaard regarded it as ‘crucial’ that since the time of writing Either/Or he had ‘stepped into the character of a religious author’,6 to make it 89

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quite clear that publication of the second edition did not mean that he was stepping out of that character, he planned to include The Sickness unto Death in the package, under his own name. In the event, for reasons Kierkegaard himself details,7 he changed his mind about publishing the Point of View in his lifetime, while The Sickness unto Death, written in the immediate aftermath of 1848, was published only after some delay and now under a (new) pseudonym.8 Despite Kierkegaard’s qualms, however, the second edition of Either/Or came out, on 14 April 1849. It was accompanied by a manifestly religious work: The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air. Unlike the first edition, the second came in a single volume, thus preventing new readers from succumbing too readily to the temptation to read the ‘either’ without troubling to look into the ‘or’.9 An important question remains unanswered. There is no doubt that Either/Or is set apart from the subsequent production. The Point of View – the explanation itself – says that Either/Or had been a poetic ‘emptying’ (Udtømmelse) which gets ‘no further than the ethical’.10 How, then, are we to grasp the Point of View’s claim that Kierkegaard had been a religious author in a sense which is specific enough to be of interest and also spans Either/Or and the later pseudonymous works? Indeed, I would like to widen that question just a little. Could Kierkegaard at the end of his career, given the changes in his attitude to the values defended in Either/Or, Part Two, honestly lay claim to having been the author of that work in the capacity of the religious author whose character he had now stepped into? 1 In this essay I discuss several possible answers, some at least at first sight more plausible than others. Let me begin with what I call the Socratic answer. It is provided by Kierkegaard himself in the Point of View. In explaining the necessity of the ‘deceit’ of pseudonymity, Kierkegaard talks about ‘going along with the other’s delusion’.11 The aesthetic production, as he now calls it, is as a whole devoted to showing the way ‘back’ to the religious.12 Because the point is not to dogmatize about religion but to capture its living content, the aesthetic production deliberately adopts the aesthetic point of view as a heuristic device to show how the living content of religion is inadequately grasped from an aesthetic point of view, by those who live ‘in aesthetic categories’.13 Accordingly, even if Either/Or’s actual author experienced the work as a kind of poetical expurgation of the aesthetic from his system, its function for its readers, as it now turns out from the proffered ‘point of view’, proves to be that of showing them the way to the religious. If, as Kierkegaard himself says, Either/Or gets ‘no further’ than the ethical, it does at least get that far, and there is of course more to come. The Socratic aspect is further accentuated in the thought, as Kierkegaard puts it, that the aesthetic works are designed (as is now clear) to show the reader the way not so much to the religious as ‘back’ to the religious, as if religiosity were a feature of some uncorrupted state from which all-too-human nature separates a person and which the aesthetic point of view then distorts, but which can be regained, perhaps for the first time adequately once the aesthetic misunderstanding has 90

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been brought fully to consciousness. So the religious is lying there somewhere in the background waiting to be recovered if not to be rediscovered. It requires a considerable stretch of hermeneutic imagination, however, to read Either/Or as a work designed to uncover the religious. The direction of its manifest message is onward from the aesthetic to the ethical, upon which the religious as such, as yet indistinctly, and even indistinguishably, supervenes. With the debatable exception of the appended sermon, there is nothing in Either/Or that tends to reveal any defect in the ethical position as such. The crucial question for the Socratic explanation, then, is whether the sermon affords a Socratic bridge ‘back’ to the religious. At least on the surface it does not do that. Rather than being offered in any Socratic spirit, the sermon, sent on by Judge William to his young friend, A, the aesthete, is more like an afterthought, an insert even, or an advertiser’s flyer, promising a new point of view but not putting the reader in a position to grasp its point existentially. Against this, it is clear that at least William himself regards the message of the sermon as a development from within his own universe, which is certainly compatible with a Socratic kind of advance. He recommends the sermon to A for saying ‘more felicitously’ (p. 594 [2, 337] )14 what he himself has tried to say to A. However, we should note that the terms in which William annexes the sermon to his own point of view argue sharply against its representing, for him at least, an advance to what later pseudonyms mean by a specifically religious point of view. In asking A not to ‘sneeze at’ the sermon just because the priest ‘is confident that he will make every farmer understand it’, William observes that the ‘beauty of the universal consists precisely in everyone being able to understand it’ (p. 594 [2, 328] ). But then it is clear that, at least in William’s eyes, the sermon does not introduce what Climacus calls the ‘doubly reflected religious categories in the paradox’.14 Neither the priest nor the farmers are presented as in Abraham’s position of being denied that relief of speech which is that it ‘translates me into the universal’.15 And if it is argued that Kierkegaard does not require us to read the sermon in William’s way, Climacus, who does know how to distinguish the ethical from the religious, tells us unequivocally that Either/Or is ‘ethically’ and not ‘religiously planned’ and its categories are those of immanence.16 It could be said that the same is true of Socrates, according to the Fragments’ distinction between positions A and B. And it might be claimed that by following a procedure properly called Socratic you will never exceed the categories of immanence in any case, for immanence, as against the leap, is precisely what the A/B distinction turns on. Well, if that is true, the conclusion still follows. In Either/Or there is no Socratic advance beyond the ethical, and so no Socratic explanation of the alleged continuity between that work and the later pseudonyms. If it is not true, on the other hand, because the term ‘Socratic’ can mean something else, then the point again holds. What would be required is a maieutic advance out of the categories of immanence and into those of the paradox. But not only is nothing of the kind to be found in Either/Or, the argument can be strengthened in the light of what Climacus says about sermons in general. Sermons belong to 91

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‘what is Christian’.17 If they speak from Christianity, they cannot very well be used to show someone the way back to it. Climacus also says that at the time of Either/Or the task of ‘connecting Christianity with existence’ had yet to be carried out, as it would be, by himself, in Fragments.18 In fact, far from cracks appearing in the case for the ethical, William’s ‘enthusiastic’ defence bears all the marks of a spirited apologia from the hand of Kierkegaard himself. If we are meant to see defects in the ethical view, it seems clear that the author would have us see our criticism not as the dawning of a specifically religious consciousness but as due to the continuing hold upon us of aesthetic values. No doubt, Kierkegaard himself, who had given up any plans to marry, had his personal premonition that the way to go was back to religion. But in order for the inadequacies of the ethical view to come more Socratically to light, we readers have to wait (though not very long) for Fear and Trembling and Repetition. Later the defects of William’s view, as Kierkegaard comes to see them, become quite obvious; they are pointed out in very un-Socratic fashion in the section of Postscript entitled ‘A Contemporary Effort in Danish Literature’, from which the above references are drawn and where Climacus presents a survey of the pseudonymous authorship to date. William’s creator is taken to task for assuming that to choose himself ‘in his eternal validity’ simply means finding himself ‘in the despair’, as if he could make the choice all on his own,19 whereas properly to despair is to give up the idea of there being any human platform from which, or any procedure whereby, to establish one’s kinship in thought and action with God. Perhaps the work that best lives up to the Socratic interpretation is Stages on Life’s Way; in that case, if the Socratic answer were the right one, we would rather expect that work, despite its literary weaknesses, or even Repetition, and not Either/Or, to have been part of the later package announcing Kierkegaard’s career-spanning religious deed. 2 Stages, however, offers support for what for many Kierkegaardians must seem another and indeed the most obvious answer to our question. In that work the ethical ‘sphere’ is described quite explicitly as a ‘passage’.20 This conveys the plausible idea that the ‘stages’ form vantage-points from which alone insight into the next stage can be achieved. Just as religiousness A provides a moral-psychological platform of inwardness from which alone the structure of consciousness corresponding to religiousness B can be appropriated, so it can be said that the ethical provides some similar precondition for appropriation of the religious. This might be called the ‘linear’ view. And if we look at the stages in this way we can see quite well how, even if Either/Or does not come as far as the religious, by getting as far as the ethical it does at least provide the point of view from which the religious can now be discerned. Indeed, if we judge the linear interpretation on its own and demand no Socratic component in the passage between, Kierkegaard himself offers a very good explanation in line with the linear reading. A journal entry talks of Either/Or providing something needed even before a Socratic maieutic can get started, namely an ethical strengthening.21 Either/Or 92

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can be read as a kind of propaideutic to the Socratic approach, and then the remainder of the pseudonymous production may be understood as complying with both the Socratic and the linear readings. For the linear interpretation it is not a problem that, or if, the concluding sermon fails to bring off a maieutic connection with the religious works. It is enough that the baton is, as it were, handed on to the next runner. Even if the Jutland priest’s message that against God we are always in the wrong reads more like an advertisement for, or even a warning about, religion, it could still be described as indicating the way from the ethical to the religious. It does so by presenting the possibility that the religious is something other than the straightforward choice of the ‘universal’. As for showing how the religious can be conceived in this way or why we should be interested in so conceiving it, all of this comes later with the problems which motivate a ‘repetition’, or a return to the universal from a higher point of view. One difficulty with the linear reading, however, has to do precisely with the idea offered in Stages of the ethical as a passage to the religious. When we read Stages we see quite clearly that what is offered there is not a development of the ethical point of view in Part Two of Either/Or but rather a reversion to the problem out of which the ethical was offered there as a solution but prematurely. This can throw new light on the sermon attached to Either/Or. We could read it as an admission of failure on the part of William and a generous offer to leave the matter in the potentially more mature hands of the aesthete. Where William has failed, his young friend, or some new version of him, may do better. At any rate what emerges in Stages is that the ethical proves to be an inadequately prepared anticipation of the task of realizing the universal because it fails precisely to give that task a properly religious dimension. A proper preparation requires one to go back to a development within and out of the aesthetic. From Stages we are led to understand that the manifest message of the subsequent works – picking up a theme on which William ends his second letter – follows Kierkegaard’s own path as a social exception and thus a departure from the ethical paradigm. In any case, the ideas introduced in Fear and Trembling radically undermine the suggestion presented in Either/Or that life presents us with a radical and exhaustive choice between an aesthetic and an ethical view of existence. The ethical view is now presented as a limitation, as a kind of recourse, something one might even feel tempted to adopt in order to escape the rigours of true individuality, a comforting and self-satisfying reduction of life to what is intelligible, grasping at the relief of translatability into the universal. In this respect, then, there is no strict linearity in the progression through the stages. Although the ethical does represent an advance by virtue of, as it were, modelling the situation in which the universal is realized, as a view of life on its own terms it is no more than a failed solution to the problem of realizing it. Some might claim that the lack of linearity marked by Fear and Trembling is a matter of Kierkegaard’s departure from the goal of realizing the universal. This, I suspect, is mistaken. What is new is not a positing of some alternative 93

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goal but a raising of the question of how this goal is to be evaluated in relation to those who have exceptional difficulties in realizing it. The difficulties involve precisely those concepts or categories that give meaning to religiousness. It may of course be too simplistic to put the matter in that fashion; we should really ask whether it is the manner in which the problems are posed that introduces the religious categories, thus leaving open the possibility of posing them in other ways that do not presuppose the religious categories, so allowing these to be part of what is chosen in the solution. It is at least not clear that the problems are of a kind that call for religious categories in their very definition. But this secondary question is a vast one which fortunately finds no place in the present discussion. What is of interest here is the fact that there is also a personal side to our question, which we must decide here and now whether or not to discount. 3 We have already noted Kierkegaard’s report that while presenting his conservative but comprehensive and to sympathetic ears convincingly sincere case for marriage in the wise counsels of William, he himself had already given up any plans to marry, or, as he puts it, ‘of reducing life pacifyingly to marriage’. He tells us that ‘religiously’ he was ‘already in the cloister’, a fact ‘concealed’ in the very choice of the pseudonym ‘Victor Eremita’, and, ‘strictly speaking’, the cloister is where Either/Or is written.22 Now of course a sincere apologist for marriage need not himself be married. However, given the focus in the subsequent pseudonymous writings on the problem of exceptionality it is difficult to separate the personal from the systematic issue. This difficulty is often used as an excuse for discounting Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings, for rejecting them on the grounds that they provide nothing but anecdotal interest or at best a richly documented case study of someone writing himself out of an existential dilemma. Others, myself included, would rather see in the close intertwining of matters of person and principle in these works their proper contribution to existential thought. For us, then, it will be a matter of much interest in unravelling the structure and intentions of his writings to follow Kierkegaard into and out of the cloister. I now offer, then, what I call a ‘subtextual’ explanation of the fact that Kierkegaard saw no discontinuity between Either/Or and the late religious works. It is based on the fact that when he was portraying William’s way of life, he himself had already rejected it. It exploits this fact to suggest that the text of Either/Or already contains the later criticism of marriage, but implicitly, that is, not as part of its manifest message but as a latent message to be picked up by the discerning reader. This leaves several questions. If there is such a latent message, has it found its way there unconsciously, gratuitously even, so that it is to the embedding text we should look for the main import, or is the embedding text just an excuse for the latent message, an envelope for the telegram as it were? We do know, or are told, that Either/Or has a perlocutionary purpose, that it was written ‘for her sake’, that is, for Regine, ‘in order to clear her out of the relationship’,23 and the same question might arise here, whether the locutionary medium is to be taken merely as the occasion for the elaborate attempt 94

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to repel Regine, or whether repelling Regine was the occasion for making a start as a religious author. But that is not a matter for our discussion. Moreover, it was the ‘either’ that was supposed to repel Regine, not the ‘or’, and our question focuses on the latter. What the subtextual reading suggests is that in the ‘or’ there is a message to be decoded which is its real import. The subtextual reading exploits this possibility by noting the significance of the fact that the notions of the universal and of mutual understanding form cornerstones of William’s defence of marriage, though lacking the implication later introduced by Johannes de silentio in Fear and Trembling that they provide ‘relief’ from an enforced insularity or from the knight of faith’s tragic inability to make himself understood. In William’s universe the universal and mutual understanding are presented, at least on first appearances, as normal demands of human interaction, failures to fulfil which can typically be laid to the door of aesthetic egoism and romantic wishful thinking. William points in particular to the romantic misunderstanding that the ‘particularity’ of true love is incompatible with social ceremony, with marital vows, and with the establishment of household and family. According to William, the wedding ceremony ‘offers … a survey of the genesis of the human race, and thereby fastens the new marriage onto the great body of the race. It offers thereby what is general, the purely human, calls it forth in consciousness’ (p. 428 [2, 89–90] ), and ‘[t]he great thing is not to be the singular, either immediately or in a higher sense, but in the singular to possess the universal’ (p. 429 [2, 90] ). As for mutual understanding, William insists that partners to a marriage be able to fulfil demands of mutual frankness. This must be part of what Kierkegaard means when he later explained his choice of marriage as the theme of his original ‘or’ by saying that it struck him as being the deepest form of ‘the revelation of life’.24 It is not a matter simply of telling true stories about oneself (p. 449 [2, 1189] ); marriage is an historical phenomenon and the partners’ mutual understanding is therefore under ‘constant development’. As William insists: It is the same as in an individual life. Just because one has arrived at clarity about oneself, has had the courage to be willing to see oneself, it by no means follows that the story is now over; it is now that it first begins, acquires for the first time a proper meaning through referring each lived moment to this total view. So too in marriage. The immediacy of first love founders upon this revelation, yet is not lost but assumed into the knowledge the marriage shares. With this the story begins, and the particular is referred to this shared knowledge, in this lies its felicity, an expression in which again the historical character of marriage is preserved, and which corresponds to the blitheness, or what the Germans call Heiterkeit, which first love has. (p. 449 [2, 118] ) The ability constantly to reveal oneself to one’s partner is the other side of the coin of the ‘secretiveness’ in which the aesthetic content of first love is said to 95

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be preserved (p. 439 [2, 10] ). Secretiveness here belongs to the particular, the exclusivity of the relation of love when one is ‘in’ love. William insists of course that this secretiveness cannot survive on its own (‘on an uninhabited island’); part of the sense in which, in marriage, one is the ‘singular’ but possesses the universal is that the institution provides the social context in which the secretiveness is preserved in (or in spite of, amid the din of, perhaps even constituted in its opposition to) multiplicity (ibid.). But there is a message clearly inserted in the text, and it should make us wonder whether the first appearances are to be trusted. If the demands of frankness cannot be fulfilled, ‘when the complications of the individual life are such that it is unable to reveal itself’, then one should not marry. Kierkegaard makes it clear he is thinking of himself. If the history of your inner development contains something unutterable, or if your life has made you privy to secrets – in short, if in one way or another you have gorged yourself on a secret which cannot be dragged out of you without costing you your life, then never marry. (p. 448 [2, 117] ) What should we make of this? Kierkegaard is not simply describing normal requirements of married life, and arguing that in satisfying these requirements the aesthete will find that the aesthetic content of his love is preserved and enriched, and indeed that this is the only way in which it can be preserved at all. He seems to be insisting on such strenuous demands of married life that one might suppose very few are able to fulfil them, not because they are specially gifted and self-centred misfits like the aesthete, but because these demands might even seem to call for too much even in a magnanimous person. Although we can hardly envisage the aesthete portrayed in the ‘either’ deciding to enter into marriage, it is easy to imagine him as someone who would see the point of the ideal demands the ‘or’ makes of such a step though preferring not to submit himself to them. But it might only require some minor adjustment to the welladjusted William’s biography to have even him fail to reach the altar. So apart from being told under what conditions a dedicated aesthete will find the proper fulfilment of his aesthetic goals, we are also told very clearly under what conditions one should refrain from marriage. Might it not be, then, that, far from presenting the case in general for married and civic life, Kierkegaard is here making it subtly clear under what fairly normal conditions one should not marry? This might, as was earlier suggested, have a purely autobiographical significance. Kierkegaard could be more or less deliberately setting up as standards for such a life certain ideals which he himself conspicuously fails to satisfy, and thus paving his getaway into the cloister. Perhaps, in the spirit of ‘Skyggerids’ (‘Shadowgraphs’, or ‘Silhouettes’ in the Hongs’ translation), he is trying to erase the traces of his past and its path towards marriage with Regine by the well-tried expedient of ‘ambiguating’ his footprints(their obliteration being precluded by the nature of the case). 96

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Still, it need not be a purely personal matter. By presenting marriage as something for exceptionally good people, and at the same time suggesting that exceptional people are likely to be prevented from expressing their goodness, or providing a convincing revelation of life, in the normal way, Kierkegaard is already systematically opening the way to his later criticism and even denigration of the institution of marriage. At one level that is already implicit in the high demands which most people affecting marriage will not be able to measure up to owing to their mediocrity; they will be the kind of people who marry for the reasons William attacks in defending the intrinsic value of marriage (as a school for character, for the propagation of the race – he mentions also such banal reasons as having a home, or a refuge for old age, to inherit wealth, and so on, but considers these to be beneath his notice). At another level, however, the criticism includes William too in his enthusiastic ‘ethical defence’ of marriage. William turns out to be symbiotically dependent on his wife.25 If, as is suggested, this is a bad thing, marriage proper seems to become ever less possible. In that case the more ‘marriages’ there are, the less likely it will be that they are proper. Moreover, if those who intended to marry were as good as they should be, they would be more likely to encounter the difficulties that William mentions, and which, when insuperable, are a sufficient reason for not marrying. Finally, if the symbiotic relation exemplified by William and his wife disqualifies their marriage, because it shows that William has a motive for marrying that subverts the notion that the value of marriage is intrinsic (p. 448 [2, 63] ), then the conditions of independence (and spirituality) that William falls short of begin to look as though they implied that marriage is neither possible nor desirable in any case. For what is marriage, in the ‘human’ conception, if not a shared admission of mutual dependency? If that is a cogent line of argument (defenders of the human conception will no doubt wish to distinguish between benign and malignant forms of symbiosis), the subtextual answer aims to establish a continuity in content between Either/Or and the later criticism of William and marriage. It claims that although the text seems to be offering a defence of marriage, it in fact conveys that marriage is really an ideal state for those few who have the spiritual strength to support it, but who precisely because of that strength are more prone to encounter (or, even worse, must have encountered and suffered) the kinds of difficulty that give rise to the problem of exceptionality. One notes that the theme on which William’s defence of marriage ends (one might even choose to say ‘in which it culminates’) is precisely that of exceptionality, or uncommonness. William remarks on how he ‘love[s] existence and being human far too much to believe that the path to becoming an uncommon man is easy or without temptations’. One can be an exception in ‘this more noble sense’. Such an exception will nevertheless ‘always admit that it would be more perfect still to take possession of the whole of the universal’ (p. 589 [2, 332] ). So marriage is now an ideal. The later works, however, cease to treat the ethical framework of marriage, as portrayed and exemplified by William, as an ideal. The later pseudonyms will even stress that among the temptations the noble exception 97

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must face is the lure of the ethical itself. Taken literally, William’s description of the ‘truly extraordinary man’ as the ‘truly ordinary man’ (p. 586 [2, 328] ) even suggests that uncommonness in the relevant respects could be fairly common. And the possibility of the exception’s being reconciled nevertheless with the universal ‘through his sorrow at being uncommon’ (p. 589 [2, 331] ) leaves the reader well on the way to seeing that the problem is not to choose marriage but to grasp and even have sympathy for what it is that makes such a choice impossible. We can note an entry in the journals from 1849 ‘where Kierkegaard says that the matter of ‘the single individual’ appears in every one of the pseudonymous works’, and ‘was already posed by the Judge in Either/Or in regard to being excepted from marrying’.26 The subtextual reading is by no means implausible. 4 To summarize so far. The Socratic explanation is tempting because it actually appears to require some kind of hiatus between Either/Or and the later works; it is the reader who is to test the adequacy of the categories of immanence and take the step beyond. There were difficulties with that explanation, which were however, to some degree overcome by the linear explanation, which sees the works as standing in a series of transitions the unity of which is simply that they conform with a programme which the reader can make out just by reading further. Against this in turn, however, were grounds for suspecting that the proper point of departure for the works subsequent to Either/Or is the ‘either’ and not the ‘or’, or at least a return to the ‘either’ in the light of the inadequacies of the ‘or’. If so, then the progression is not straightforwardly linear, and that applies whether the course of the development is ‘thickened’ by adding a maieutic component or is left ‘thin’ enough to allow the Jutland priest’s sermon to serve as a transition to the religious even if, as I myself would suggest, it lacks such an ingredient. 5 We have, however, still another way of testing the alleged continuity of the pseudonymous works. Rather than looking at the linkages between the stages and asking ourselves whether they support the kind of transitivity that would justify Kierkegaard’s later claims to have been writing, as he might say, uno tenore, we can look in Either/Or for religiously relevant concepts, laid down and explicated there, and then see if they persist throughout the pseudonymous works and perhaps even provide a link between these and the views Kierkegaard champions in criticism of the ‘present age’, or even further, that is, in the direction of the later pseudonyms and even the final attack on the Church. That difficulties arise in taking it that far is clear from a late entry in the journals (from 1852). There Kierkegaard remarks on the fact that in the aftermath of the success of Either/Or that title had become his own nickname. And suggesting that, at least at that date, he did indeed regard his best-seller as a folie de jeunesse, he writes: 98

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What a series of ways I have run through of specifying what my Or means! I marked out27 marriage as Or, but marriage was not my own life’s Or; I am further still from that Either. For that Either means gratification in the most licentious sense. Then there are all in-between positions: gratification but with an admixture of ethics. But that isn’t where my Or is. Then comes gratification with an admixture of the ethico-religious; but this is still not my Or. So there is only one Or left: Suffering, renunciation, the religious, becoming less than nothing in this world. If I am a dialectician by origin, a dialectician by nature, then I can find rest only in the last Or, not in any intermediate Or; for only when one comes to rest in the last Or is the Either–Or exhausted.28 Not much room here for Williamesque ideals. Surely not marriage anyway. Well, let’s not be too hasty; although the subtextual reading focused our attention on that part of William’s portrayal of the ethical life in which he seems to be saying that a human being should be exceptional enough to be disposed to find marriage ethically a problem, marriage might still be the way to ‘take possession’ of ‘the whole of the universal’, and still be prized as the deepest form of revelation of life, however rare may be a marriage that actually performs that role. And although Kierkegaard’s late remarks on marriage do sound as though he was willing to let that institution go the way of the ‘human’-ethical because actual marriages are typically refuges for that vast majority of people who fail to live their lives in the category of spirit, it is still possible to envisage a marriage which is that more perfect state. Kierkegaard seems nevertheless steadfastly to ignore that possibility and even to find Scriptural authority for doing so: The New Testament puts it in this way: ‘Give up all these trifles, this egoistic trifling with which people at large fill their lives, business, marriage, having children, being something in the world; drop it, make a complete break with it – and let your life be dedicated to loving God, to being sacrificed for the human race, “Be salt”!’ This is what Our Lord, Jesus Christ, calls Christianity. If a man stands up and wants to marry, the invitation (cf. the Gospel) comes to him: Drop that – and become a Christian. When a man has bought six pair of oxen and is about to take them out to try them out, the invitation comes: Drop that – and become a Christian. [But] Christianity has now become the exact opposite; it has become the divine blessing upon all of finitude’s trifling and grit-picking and temporal enjoyment in life. The lovers summon the priest – he blesses them: that is Christianity.29 99

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There seems an obvious objection. How can your sacrifice be on behalf of humanity except by participating in the available modes of production and reproduction? Indeed, how could there be a humanity on whose behalf you could sacrifice anything at all unless people devoted themselves to just these pursuits? One rejoinder is that Kierkegaard does not mean to say that life should not contain these things, only that it should not be filled with them. But a more compelling rejoinder is this: Kierkegaard here is no longer talking in his Williamesque vein of ideal marriages but talking of actual marriages, marriages entered into for any of the evasive or egoistic reasons mentioned in William’s defence of the intrinsic value of marriage. We must recall that Kierkegaard has now (1854) emerged from the cloister and is confronting society as he finds it, a trifling, grit-counting and spiritless society. In the entry just quoted he is not specifying conditions under which some ideal of selfhood may be achieved and held fast to; he is observing how people refuse the challenge of selfhood and, worse, are encouraged in the name of Christianity to do the opposite of what the New Testament itself enjoined. So this Scripturally backed assault on, amongst other things, marriage need not be incompatible with William’s ethically enthusiastic defence of it. There is something unsatisfactory, however, in making marriage the normative hinge upon which the pseudonymous works swing. It is too specific an institution to do the job. After all, marriage was chosen because it was the ‘deepest form of the revelation of life’, and that indicates that there is some wider norm at work and thus a more likely candidate for our continuity-seeking project. So whether or not Kierkegaard’s views on marriage changed, perhaps we ought really to be looking for the authorship’s normative unity at some more embracing level. Let us try the ethical. We recall the remark in Fear and Trembling that relativizing the ethical (suspending it) does not imply that the ethical is done away with.30 May we not hope to find in this remark some indication of a continuity between this work and its predecessor? Perhaps Fear and Trembling, instead of marking a radical break with Either/Or as is often assumed, actually forms an ethical bridge between the latter ‘pre-religious’ work and its successors, extending even right on to the non-pseudonymous Church polemic. Given the strong, even analytical, relation that seems to obtain between ethics and the universal in Kierkegaard’s texts, this invites the conjecture that the later Kierkegaard, whether as pseudonym or himself, would still accept that realizing the universal (pp. 586–9 [2, 330–2] ) was the proper form of the ethical, even if, as it seems, familial, social, political and even ecclesiastical institutions have to lose their constitutive roles in this respect. Yet there are clear difficulties with this proposal. The universal as presented in Either/Or appears much too closely bound up with Williamesque ethics for the latter to be dropped without also dropping the former, and if we drop the ideal of realizing the universal, little if anything of the Either/Or project remains. We might try to save the proposal by doing for realizing the universal what Johannes de silentio did for the ethical and envisage a teleological suspension of the 100

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universal in which the goal of its realization is nevertheless ‘not done away with’. There is indeed support for the idea in a late journal entry where, in a remarkable piece of conceptual acrobatics, Kierkegaard actually connects the idea of realizing the universal with being an exception: ‘now at long last I see that the exceptional for me is what Christianity would call the universal, the normal, that Christianity insists on the single state and rather makes marriage the exception’.31 An obvious difficulty here, however, is that instead of providing the cohering link we are looking for, the idea of realizing the universal has here undergone such a radical change in its application that the problem only reappears as one about the inner coherence of the idea itself. But let us not give up too soon. Another attempt can be made which preserves the idea’s original sense. In the terms of William’s concluding remarks, the priorities between ‘mere’ reconcilation with the universal and ‘possession of the whole of the universal’ could be reversed. Reconciliation with the universal after encountering the difficulties that present a person living in the category of spirit with compelling ethico-religious scruples against marrying can then be ‘higher’ ethico-religiously than such possession where the difficulties have not been encountered by someone living in that category. This in turn will be higher than full possession of the universal in the case of one who fails to live in the category of spirit (for example, petit-bourgeois possession), though from the new point of view someone who fails to live in that category may well be thought incapable of possessing ‘the whole of the universal’. Here the goal of realizing the universal is not done away with; it is merely reinterpreted within the requirements of the life of spirit, which thus takes priority, in the way that the particular individual does, for the first time explicitly, in Fear and Trembling. Indeed the position as outlined begins to look not unlike a simple reformulation of Fear and Trembling’s ‘paradoxical’ hypothesis. ‘Spirit’ now becomes the structural pivot that bears the whole pseudonymous structure from the ethical to the ethico-religious. Or maybe ‘choice of self’ is that pivot, or it could be the idea of that self’s ‘eternal validity’, or even ‘revelation’ of the self, in Either/Or’s case a revelation to man and in the case of the subsequent works first of all to God. Is this stretching things too far? Perhaps. The proposed normative basis does seem rather too abstract to provide a hinge strong enough to support the development which ends in Kierkegaard’s own exhaustive either/or. If, for example, revelation were indeed the normative hinge, it is hard to unite William’s notion of transparent ethical accountability with Kierkegaard’s inward turn to transparency before God, just as hard as to unite the idea of realizing the universal in William’s sense with that of realizing it through being an exception. In both cases we are buying coherence only at the cost of new incoherence lurking under a homonym. The same applies to the changing content in concepts like choice of self and even of ‘eternal validity’. If we resort to too impoverished and abstract a structural axis, the door (the production as a whole) begins to turn the hinge and the door itself is left swinging in the wind. In that case its movements will be prone to explanation in terms of all sorts of factors external to the structure itself and the 101

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authorship exposed to assessments like that of the early Lukács, who saw Kierkegaard’s work and career as a tragic vengeance wrought by a protean and intractable reality on one who dared by existential choice single-handedly to impose eternal forms upon it.32 In his concluding polemical period Kierkegaard’s topic and target became for the first time actual institutions. When he looked at the facts of marriage what he saw beneath the ‘holy gloss’ was ‘faint-heartedness and worldliness’.33 What struck him was how, although professing faith in the Christian God, his own society had failed to make even the first of the two movements of faith expounded in Fear and Trembling by Johannes de silentio. Prior to belief one must resign and repent. But, germane to our own purpose, the same idea is prefigured in Either/Or in the notion of choosing despair, a necessary prolegomenon to choosing oneself in one’s ‘eternal validity’. Despair in this sense, which is not that of The Sickness unto Death (where it is exactly a way of protecting oneself from choice of oneself), reappears later in Religiousness A as what is called ‘dying from immediacy’, or dying to the world. In a journal entry from 1850, under the heading ‘The World’s Turning-point’, Kierkegaard writes that the ‘time of immediacy is past’, not in the sense that the world has gone beyond it, but rather because there is now no going back, and ‘everyone has to learn in earnest to be himself the master, to guide himself without the intercession of guides and leaders’. Just as Quidam, the test case in the psychological experiment in Stages on Life’s Way, ‘sees that the matter is comic and yet tragically clings to it on the strength of something else’,34 so too is social life a manifestation of the fear of taking the next step and a desperate clinging to the forms that protect individuals from entering upon the life of spirit. 6 In conclusion, then, let me suggest a more relaxed interpretation of the continuity. The operative word here is ‘corrective’. The term ‘corrective’ is Kierkegaard’s own.35 It suggests a dialectical relationship between the established and what is needed to bring it further. Thus a corrective must be understood not on its own but in terms of what has to be rectified. A corrective is one-sided, but, as Kierkegaard points out, necessarily so. To anyone who complains about that, you can only say it is easy enough to ‘add the other side’ again, but then the corrective ‘ceases to be the corrective’ and you become the establishment once more.36 What is the most pressing need for a society whose pernicious ethos is that the individual’s fulfilment comes to expression only in the form of political association and religious community? Surely, it is to establish a foothold for the single individual from which the world can be reappropriated in authentically Christian terms. For that purpose the determinedly spiritless institutions of a petit-bourgeois society must be comprehensively vacated before alternatives based on true selfhood, or spirit, can be formed to replace them. The corrective reading says that the polemic is a political version of William’s injunction to A to choose despair: only after society has ‘despaired’ can it choose itself in its ‘eternal validity’. That in itself might be thought enough to establish the continuity we 102

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have been looking for. But one may go further. There is no reason why, once resurrected, human society could not conform with William’s ideals, even if its conforming with them will consist in a ‘repetition’– that is to say, the same but from a higher point of view – of William’s own manner of doing so. As noted at the beginning, Kierkegaard’s purpose in including the second edition of Either/Or in the 1849 package may simply have been to set the record straight, to make it clear that the authorship in all its diversity and multipseudonymity had been the single-minded effort of one person with a religious purpose. This is indeed the kind of reason he himself gives. Here, however, we have been exploring various ways in which that ‘pre-religious’ work can be related thematically to those openly religious works which came later. The search seemed necessary because Kierkegaard’s claim that he had a religious purpose from the start does not entail that the works written with that purpose disclose to the reader a unity of theme or content, and, moreover, his own utterances even tend to undermine any claim to such unity. In seeking thematic unity we have placed ourselves, as is only proper, somewhere between Kierkegaard’s pen and his page. Taking up a position behind the pen would give us a different and in the end an unlimited set of hermeneutic possibilities. One such is exceptionality, which from this perspective might well present itself as the definitive theme of the pseudonymous works. It is clear from the texts, however, that exceptionality is not so much the topic as the motivating circumstance. The texts present various horizons in which exceptionality impinges on a moral world and in its disrelationship with the latter seeks a new equilibrium. From even further behind Kierkegaard’s pen his thorn in the flesh comes into view, a topic for all sorts of speculation. The Pharisees had their thorns too; indeed it was these eponymous separatists who first came up with the idea. But the pain induced by their thorn-ringed garments was merely an excuse to affect a superior sanctity which allowed them to refuse dealings with others, in other words to enjoy being exceptions. Whatever the nature of Kierkegaard’s own thorn, to which he constantly recurs, it never played that role, nor does anything in Kierkegaard suggest that exceptionality is praiseworthy, least of all enjoyable. On his deathbed he insisted that despite the thorn and his exceptionality he was no different from anyone else, echoing perhaps William’s claim that the truly extraordinary man and the truly ordinary man are the same, and William’s startling pronouncement that ‘in a sense’ everyone is ‘the universally human and at the same time an exception’ (p. 589 [2, 332] ). This, together with the thought that ‘emancipation’ from the universal on ‘one point’ (pp. 587–8 [2, 330] ) does not bring you beyond the universal on all points, might tempt one with the wisdom of hindsight to read the final pages of William’s second letter as an anticipation of Kierkegaard’s own destiny and a frame for the authorship as a whole, in which the universal is a ‘severe master’ to those who ‘have it outside’ (p. 588 [2, 331] ). That Kierkegaard himself never lost sight of the goal of realizing the universal is testified to in such entries in the journals as the 103

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one where he affirms that he would gladly have married his fiancée had not his ‘wretchedness’ got in the way, though that had indeed enabled him to grasp the deep meaning of Christianity’s recommendation of the unmarried state;37 and another in which he opines that, though unmarried, he had written ‘one of the most gifted defences of marriage’, and had done everything to explain that his solitary state, far from being ‘higher’ than marriage, was ‘something much lower’.38

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8 THE ‘WHAT’ IN THE ‘HOW’

Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Climacus remarks unexceptionably that ‘the objective accent falls on what is said, the subjective accent on how it is said’.1 But then notoriously he goes on to identify truth not with what one believes but with how one believes it. Nothing in Kierkegaard seems to offend philosophical sensibility more than the assertion that truth is subjectivity. Some associations might temper our horror. A result of the familiar realism/anti-realism and externalism/internalism debates has been precisely to draw attention away from the all-too-elusive ‘what’ of truth and towards howlike considerations of the conditions under which ‘what’-claims can be asserted. The residual demon of scepticism pushes us in the same direction: let’s leave the truth to God and get on with better believing. But Kierkegaard won’t let go of God’s truth. At the same time he seems to tell us that if believing occurs in the prescribed way, it doesn’t matter that the ‘what’ of truth has been correctly identified. Some uncritically take this to imply with regard to what is taken to be true that any ‘what’ may count, an absurd relativism that finds no other support in Kierkegaard. Others would say that Kierkegaard means only that if you fail to adopt the right relationship to what is in fact true, you will be further from that truth than you would be if you adopted the right relationship to what is an over-simplification or even a quite serious distortion of the truth. I am not concerned here to argue the rights and wrongs of such interpretations. I focus instead on something that the wider context of Climacus’s remarks on the subjective accent presupposes and towards which it transpires they are directed, namely an account of moral experience as the medium in which truth is disclosed. For this we need to take both a broader and a closer look at the distinction between what is said and how one says it. Part of this requires questioning a tendency to identify the ‘what’ of a thought with a reality that is mind-independent and therefore thought-independent, and a corresponding tendency to assume that any specification of a thought’s content for which there is no counterpart in the thought’s strictly public reference must be relegated to what is commonly regarded as the lowly status of a subjective ‘how’. 105

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1 I begin with Frege, whose name comes both naturally and usefully to mind here. Naturally, because although I think it would be misleading to attribute the assumption to Frege himself, the prevalence of the tendency just mentioned is in large measure due to the influence of his work in mathematical logic. But usefully also, because Frege too insists that the sense of a thought must be carefully distinguished from contingent psychological factors involved in the thought’s occurrence, and which he too calls ‘subjective’ factors in opposition to the objective nature of the sense or content of the thought as such. So let us look briefly at Frege’s own brief remarks. At first glance Frege’s examples might indicate that the point he is making is a fairly trivial one. He mentions, for instance, the different images hearers or readers may ‘connect’ with a word even when they all grasp the same sense: for example, the different horse-descriptions or horse-aspects people may have in mind when thinking uniformly of Bucephalus.2 What may seem more interesting here is Frege’s willingness to treat sense-impressions on a par with mental images.3 For according to this the way objects actually appear may be included among the subjective factors to be excluded from the sense or content, and by extension even the distinguishing traits of objects themselves, for example the wide variety of ways in which particular horses can display their horsehood. Even Frege’s other example, namely the ‘colouring and shading which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense’, and which is ‘not objective’ because it must be ‘evoked by each hearer or reader according to the hints of the poet or the speaker’,4 could be accepted as separating out some aspect of meaning that lies outside what might be called the ‘cognitive core’, this latter being Frege’s main topic. However, the general reason Frege gives for distinguishing these factors from the sense, and so, on his definition, also from the thought, indicates something far less trivial. For according to Frege, what distinguishes the thought’s sense from its ‘connected’ idea is that the same sense – or thought – can be ‘grasped by many’, and that one person can ‘convey’ it – the self-same thought – to another;5 while on the other hand, the idea is, so to speak, a mere biographical particular, in referring to which ‘one must, strictly speaking, add to whom it belongs and at what time’.6 Frege calls the idea a mere ‘mode of the individual mind’,7 and it will be of some relevance for what follows to connect this formulation with another of Frege’s, where he describes the task of logic and mathematics, that is, his own task, as being the investigation not of ‘minds and the contents of consciousness whose bearer is the individual person’, but of ‘Mind’.8 We should note here that Frege’s criterion would include on the side of ‘mere’ ideas potentially more interesting kinds of ‘how’, for example Kierkegaard’s ‘the relationship sustained by the existing individual, in his own existence, to the content of his utterance’.9 That is a notion to which it is by no means implausible to attach philosophical significance. And although Kierkegaard too, as we noted, would distinguish this ‘how’ from the ‘what’, and therefore, also on this definition, from the content of the thought, his claim that it is the more important of the two – together with his explicit insistence 106

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that it can only be conveyed indirectly (‘the truth not being a circular with signatures attached’10) and, like poetic colouring and shading, has to be evoked in the hearer or reader – all this indicates that to dismiss the ‘how’ in general as mere biographical incident at least requires some general justification. It may even suggest that in defining the scope of the topic of his logical and mathematical investigations, namely Mind, Frege is being unduly selective. Let us pursue this and Frege just a little further. In his review of Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetik, Frege gives as a reason for saying that ‘the constituents of thought, and a fortiori things themselves, must be distinguished from the images that accompany in some mind the act of grasping the thought’, the fact that one never has somebody else’s image, and therefore can never know ‘how far [one’s] image (say) of red agrees with someone else’s’.11 Now that might sound as though it was the privacy of the image that was what prevented it from being, or being part of, the sense. ‘In order to be able to compare one man’s mental images with another’s,’ he goes on, ‘we should have to have united them into one and the same state of consciousness, and to be sure that they had not altered in the process of transference.’ The suggestion seems to be that if only the comparison could be carried out, it would be possible for one person to ‘convey’ his mental image (or his sense-impression) to another so that, like a thought, it too could be ‘grasped by many’.12 But against this, Frege’s willingness to talk of perception in terms of sense-impressions seems to imply that comparison of the contents of different persons’ consciousnesses is impossible in any case, even where the ‘ideas’ are referred to presently appearing public objects. So the fact that images are ‘mental’ in the ordinary sense doesn’t seem to be the feature that prevents their conveyability. Nor, correspondingly, does the simple publicity of common objects of reference seem sufficient to provide the kind of conveyability that Frege attributes to sense. What Frege apparently means is that when a person thinks (or ‘judges’), this involves two distinct items: on the one hand, the sense or thought-proper, which, by virtue of its publicizable linguistic form, can be conveyed to and grasped by others; and, on the other, the experience or total psychological context in which the sense is embedded but which plays no part in the sense. Indeed what Frege seems really to be saying is that the image cannot function as a meaning because it is a particular and not a universal – a private particular certainly, like a twinge of pain or an itch, but precisely a particular, a piece of (in this case) psychological bric-à-brac which vanishes into history just like every other timeable event. In the special context of Frege’s critique of psychologism, this, if true, would be an important point. Psychologism treats philosophical problems, in particular those traditionally assigned to logic conceived as an investigation of the a priori, as if they could be answered by a posteriori empirical investigations. It is because the image is a mere particular that no investigation into it can provide information into the nature of meaning. The same would apply to an investigation into any particular, even a public one like last night’s sunset. Psychologism fastens on private particulars like mental images simply because their privacy 107

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seems to betoken their mentality. But meanings are essentially different. As universals it makes no sense to pin them down to particular biographical events. And yet we can and do give names and times to thoughts, for thoughts are people’s thinkings and as such comprise one very important kind (or perhaps several more or less important kinds) of event in those people’s lives. What is it, then, that makes it possible to say of two thinkings that they are thinkings of the same thought? An answer, possibly even the right one if properly construed, is, first, that thinkings are ‘intentional’ in the sense of being ‘about’ things (events, states of affairs) other than themselves, and, secondly, that they are thinkings of the same thought when (a) they are about the same thing and (b ) ‘say the same’ about that thing. Some might be tempted to add the condition (c) that the thing be a public reference. But since we can talk and think about our own and others’ mental states, to say nothing of abstract things like numbers, that condition would clearly be too strong. It might yet still be a condition of there being two thinkings of the same thought if construed as saying that even our abstract and private references have to be tied, perhaps epistemically or maybe only semantically, to public ones. Strictly speaking, though, since a thought is by definition repeatable, the condition would really be one of thought in general, that is, of anything’s being a thought. Be that as it may, let us at any rate agree that a thought is a universal. But then, again strictly speaking, it is indeed the thought’s repeatability, not its shareability, that is its basic characteristic. The shareability is simply the special and in some ways more complex case of repeatability where the thought’s recurrence is not confined to the experience (using this term here as a mass noun) of one person. Assuming, then, the thought’s essential repeatability in principle, let us now exploit Peirce’s well-known distinction between types (listable words) and tokens (their occurrences) and say that a thinking is always a token of a type that can be tokenized in another thinking. My questions are now: (1) Can the notion of thought-content ever be reasonably expanded to embrace elements drawn from the ‘how’ of the thought for the thinker, that is, from something peculiar to the tokenizing of the type? If that question can be answered affirmatively, I want then to ask: (2) Can those elements ever reasonably be promoted to the status of the thought’s ‘what’, that is, to what most would regard as objective status? More briefly: Can token-specific aspects of the thought provide specifications of things in the world? In Fregean this would go something like this: Can a mode of the individual mind enter into the sense by virtue of which a definite description refers to something? 2 In order to set the scene, however, we need a thought with more body than Frege provides, a thought whose ‘how’ includes not just representational and presentational variation but also the sort of variety proper to human transaction in the world, for example the kind of thing philosophers call propositional attitudes. Here we may help ourselves further by drawing on an analysis of intentionality proposed by John Searle. The analysis offers a useful example not only because it 108

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gives us a more full-bodied thought, but also because the terms of the analysis seem to preclude, or at least not to take account of, the possibility of a positive answer to our questions. Searle distinguishes between, on the one hand, the propositional content of our thinking, by virtue of which an intentional state represents (though not necessarily in imagery) objects and states of affairs, and, on the other hand, the ‘psychological mode or manner’ in which the ‘representative content’ occurs.13 The exception is perception, for here the objects and states of affairs are presented, not represented. Searle’s account corresponds to a commonsense model of the subject’s active contact with the world. There is, first, a referential core of our thinking, a propositional part which either represents or fails to represent those segments of reality which form the targets of our anticipations, surmisings and recollections. Surrounding that core there is a mental state or attitude corresponding to the psychological mode of our thinking, whether hope, fear, expectation, relief, belief, disbelief or whatever. If, as Searle has also put it, intentionality is ‘how the mind grasps other things’,14 then the psychological mode forms the practical ‘how’ of our engagement while the referential core forms the cognitive ‘what’, with perception functioning as a testing ground and continuing control. Equating the thought with the notion of intentionality allows us now to equip the thought with two sources of specifications, both of which together or either of which separately can be used to determine the type of which a given occurrence of thinking is a token. In effect, then, a given occurrence of thinking can be classified under different types, depending on the source(s) of specification. Treated as a biographical event, the thinking’s type would usually be identified by means of both sources: we are interested in what a person does in and correctly or incorrectly believes about the part of the world in which he finds himself. But as natural scientists we would be interested more in the referential core than in the psychological mode, while the reverse would very likely be the case if we were psychiatrists interested in the subject’s mental’ life. However, although we are now offered a wider concept of thought in which the thought’s type (its content) is to be determined not only by its referential ‘what’ but also by its attitudinal ‘how’, the possibility of the two interacting is not yet allowed for. In fact Searle’s faithfully commonsensical account of intentionality fits, and is in fact no doubt based upon, the naïve notion of the world and of our perception of it which most of us unreflectingly accept. According to this view, the world is, roughly, a unitary space-time continuum containing assorted and, at the level of perception, fairly unfugitive matter. The matter provides common vistas for suitably placed perceivers, and the basic form of access to these vistas is direct acquaintance with whatever public objects, states of affairs and events a view of them affords. Perception, thus conceived, is like viewing things from a window, viewing things which others can view from other windows, windows from which anyone could look. A description of those things provides the ‘what’. As for the ‘how’, the events or states comprising a psychological mode are at least not obviously unlocatable in the public world. No doubt hope, fear, desire, 109

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regret, and so on, do have a private aspect in addition to their public one, but that aspect does not seem to call too insistently for accommodation in some kind of mental space (though here one may prefer to put the emphasis on ‘space’). The ‘what’ and the ‘how’ can be conceived as two independent aspects of the common world, combined in the active subject’s thought. 3 Perhaps they can, but must they be? Can they not combine with each other, the ‘how’ maybe assuming the status of a ‘what’? Let us begin our inquiry into the possibility of the infection of the ‘what’ by the ‘how’ by looking at the visual ‘how’, an interesting phenomenon not usually accounted for in philosophical analyses of perception. The reason for its exclusion may be linked to acceptance of the naïve model of perception with its implicit assumption that the ‘what’ is the province of scientists, journalists and photographers while the ‘how’ remains a kind of window-colouring and shading’ that can be left to specialists in aesthetics. But as Virgil Aldrich has shown, aesthetics construed as the aesthetics of perception can be a richer source of insight into the inherent complexity of perception than, say, an analysis of epistemic concepts or appeals to common understanding. The significance of the visual ‘how’ is that it is a ‘how’ whose specification necessarily enjoys the referential position. It does so simply because any specification of a visual ‘how’ is a specification of how some public object appears to be. Since the varieties of the visual ‘how’ are familiar to most philosophers these days, due to the writings of the later Wittgenstein, there is no need to catalogue them here. All that is required is to recognize the possibility of seeing the self-same object under different ‘aspects’, where a change of aspects is a modification of visual or sensory experience not due to any material change in the thing that is visible. The standard example is the shopworn but still serviceable duck–rabbit. The essential point is that a description of an aspect includes an object-phrase that is a specification not simply of something outside the mind but also, at least in part, of how the mind grasps that thing which is ‘other than it’. But what exactly is the significance of this? Well, first it indicates that the referential core is not incorruptible: it is susceptible to the influence of modes or manners of seeing. Secondly, it undermines the naïve understanding of perception: how can visual characteristics not true of things in their strictly public space and status nevertheless appear to be true of them? And, thirdly, it leaves us with the problem of the true identity of the bearer of these aspects: Is there still an incorruptible core to the corruptible ‘what’, or does the possibility of the invasion of the ‘what’ by the ‘how’ somehow reduce the referential core of perception as a whole to ‘subjective’ or ‘mental’ status? The linguistic tradition in philosophy tends to leave these matters untouched. It is not that the phenomena or the distinctions are ignored, but simply that they are dealt with at a level where the crucial problems don’t arise or else are susceptible to merely linguistic and therefore facile solutions. Thus there is talk of two languages of perception: the language of ‘appearing’, in which the object-phrases of verbs of perception are specifications of things that exist outside minds; and the 110

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language of ‘appearance’, in which verbs of perception (perhaps the very same verbs but with different uses) have as their complements specifications not necessarily applicable to whatever (if anything – it may be pure imagery) appears in the former sense.15 This may give rise to the problem of the ontological status of the merely intentional objects of appearance-descriptions, but then, in the timehonoured manner of philosophical book-keeping, one seeks to eliminate these rogue references by treating the object-phrases corresponding to them as ‘oblique’ references to public things not presently appearing: they are references contained in clauses specifying how some presently appearing object ‘looks’. Thus the true description ‘I see two pennies’ when there is only one penny to be seen is said to be elliptical for ‘I see what looks like two pennies’.16 The result seems to be that one can go away satisfied that all descriptions of visual content are ‘ultimately’ descriptions of how publicly perceivable objects appear or look, and that no descriptions of how they appear or look include specifications of things which are not publicly perceivable. Now this may effectively rid us of such rogue references as ‘The two pennies I now see but only in my mind’, but it does not rid us of the very apparent ability of ordinary public references to give us roguish looks, and it is this ability that gives rise to the problems just listed. However, these problems can be presented in an even more pointed way. It may be the case that descriptions of looks are always descriptions of public things that look that way, but it is certainly not the case that their looking that way always corresponds to some specification of them in their publicly perceptible state. Consider the following: I am a university man of settled, scholarly ways and limited interests, bound for the most part to my study, and perhaps to those of a circle of similarly narrow-minded acquaintances. But one day I happen to be brought, say by a rich and worldly friend, into quite different surroundings, seeing new and unfamiliar sights, and acquiring new visual and other information about my environment. On returning home, I find my study itself has an altogether new and unfamiliar ‘feel’. It has acquired definite characteristics which it did not have before; it has become spartan (at best), less ‘central’, and (at worst) tawdry and insignificant. But it quickly loses these characteristics as the memory of the unfamiliar fades and restores to my study its old familiarity.17 The tale is one from which various morals may be drawn: for instance, that things and places may have properties in experience that they are not recognized as having or as having had until, perhaps only momentarily, they cease to have them. (A simple case: you only realized the tap had been audibly dripping when it stopped.) The properties may not be the ones that find their way most often into our sentences, but they are properties none the less, and it would be tendentious to regard them as mere ‘shading’ or ‘colouring’. But for us the main moral is that the range of properties mentioned – familiarity, tawdriness, centrality, and so on – are attributable in experience to things and places on the basis of an impression received, and yet cannot be construed as properties of the things and places themselves. Take the predicate ‘familiar’. ‘Familiar’ is always implicitly ‘familiar to someone’, and the familiarity which X has for A is not a quality of X B could ever 111

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be said to have failed to detect, or which A could reasonably chide B for not detecting. ‘Familiar’ is not an observational predicate, in spite of the impressive quality of the corresponding property. The conditions of its application may, like Frege’s shading and colouring, be evoked by the presentation of some object or situation, but they cannot be reduced to a description of whatever it is that is presented. Nor, being an observational predicate, can its corresponding property be depicted. If it is attributable to what is depicted, that is simply because what is seen evokes that way of seeing what is depicted. Properties of the above kind and their predicates may be termed ‘situational’. They are in some way tied to the manner of the perceiving subject’s experience of the particular things and events in its environment. In this respect they resemble the properties Aldrich has analysed and calls ‘aesthetic’. For these, ‘situational’ is a less apt term, since aesthetic properties are in important respects more closely linked to the actual objects that are seen to have them. But the logic of aesthetic predicates is significantly the same: they cannot be classified as observational predicates because here too there are no specifiable physical conditions which would suffice to confirm the correctness or incorrectness of their application. Aldrich maintains that aesthetic predicates are space-qualifiers with a special use or meaning.18 The terms themselves, for example ‘flat’, ‘solid’, ‘deep’, ‘whole’, and so on, can also have an observational meaning or use: that is, they are applicable in their literal (and perhaps primary) sense to things as they present themselves – or as they look in mind-independent respects. But in their aesthetic use they are metaphors which have no observational application: aesthetic flatness, solidity, depth and wholeness cannot be attributed to things as objects fully observable to any sensorily normal observer. Although Aldrich has called the space in which the properties appear ‘picture space’ (also ‘aesthetic space’), it is important to note that these properties are not representational; they describe something presented. Otherwise the predicates in question would not have a special use or meaning. Thus the three-dimensional depth of a depicted scene is an observational property of the scene depicted, not an aesthetic property of the depicting object. If ‘depth’ is to have an aesthetic meaning, it must be by virtue of a property of which, as Wittgenstein puts it (though his own example is of a picture’s representational theme), one cannot say: ‘what a picture must be like to produce this effect’.19 Of course if, as has been claimed, three-dimensionality is itself an effect which one cannot say what a picture must be like to produce, then this aspect of a picture would also be similar to situational familiarity: its conditions of application could only be evoked in the individual minds so disposed, although in this case the disposition would no doubt be fairly widespread. But if the depth which Aldrich says can be ‘exhibited’ – along with movement, energy and rest – in picture space is a non-observational property, then the parallel with familiarity is more significant. Like familiarity it cannot be true of an object qua observed. Nor, therefore, can it be depicted or imagined, though it might be ‘evoked’ by something that can be depicted or imagined and no doubt even by 112

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that thing’s being depicted or imagined. But it isn’t just evoked in the way a feeling may be evoked, that is, as a modification of a person’s psychological state; it is also exhibited. What does all this show? It shows at least that the visual ‘what’ can be corrupted by the visual ‘how’. But the aesthetic experience is special, it will be said; in particular it has nothing to do with our practical engagement in the world and the full-bodied thoughts we were talking about in that connection. So the corruptibility of the referential core in these respects has no obvious bearing on the two-sided thought we were left with in the previous section. Whatever the phenomenological curiosities of the aesthetic and the situational ‘how’, the general terms of Searle’s analysis of intentionality remain unaffected. There is still the referential part, on the one hand, and the attitudinal part, on the other. This is, however, to underestimate the significance of the visual ‘how’. For after all, what its possibility shows is that the world of experience is the kind of world that can be the expression of the experiencing, and acting, subject’s situational and conceptual viewpoint, to say the least. (To say more one might add the moral viewpoint.) In that case the idea that a thought in the wider sense combines two distinct parts could well be inadequate. The ‘what’ (answering to Searle’s ‘representative content’) is not straightforwardly a world of common things in the way assumed by our concept of the world as providing a common vista. It is not a world that can be specified independently of what is special to the modes of individual minds. If the world of experience can indeed express the subject’s situational, conceptual and whatever other viewpoints, the objects and situations identified in it will be able to reflect or mirror the complex of attitudes which find expression in thoughts in the wider sense, and, what is more, be identified in terms of these reflectings and mirrorings. This complex of attitudes will include not only aesthetic and situational but also dramatic categories, corresponding to the practical judgements or evaluations we make and which are reflected in our perceptual environments – where events appear in this or that light and actions are interpreted according to this or that motive or role. Thoughts in this wider sense are judgements about objects and situations, about people and actions, and perception contains a ‘what’ that provides the judgements with their ‘objective’ correlates. But in the perceptual experience itself the ‘what’ can match the ‘how’, the world-as-seen can live up, or down, to the attitudes with which it is approached. So even if we retain the distinction between a mental attitude and its reference, the barrier between them is less impregnable than it sounds. All of which goes to show the falsity of the narrow-minded view of perception with its ‘what’ delivered neat to suitably placed observers. The narrow-minded view appeals because we all know what it is like to look out of a window. It even appeals to sophisticated philosophers who assume that the alternative analogy must be looking at a screen with the ‘what’ hidden irrevocably behind it. Aren’t those things out there that we do see all the ‘what’ we need? And while we can make out things and events in space, where can we 113

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place these screens? Where (literally) on earth could they be? In people’s heads perhaps? Difficulty with that idea pushes one back into robust realism. But robust realism dislocates the phenomenological homogeneity of perception; it artificially separates the ‘what’ from the ‘how’ and then finds no place for the latter. Philosophers content with words and signs don’t see the problem. For them everything is transformed into distinctions in the logic of expressions, a province where the ‘what’ and the ‘how’ can happily coexist without our even suspecting the problem of their true relationship. 4 But with what does one replace the narrow-minded view of perception if not with a mental screen? Aldrich has another proposal. The world as we experience it immediately in space is a ‘primary perceptual field’ or ‘space of first-order extention’ (with Aldrich’s ‘t’ to distinguish this spatial notion from the logical one). The attraction of the proposal is that it claims to make the space mental (in a sense) without letting it become a screen. The common objects of our everyday references actually appear in it, but because this space in which they appear is primary in respect of the ways in which we say that we see things as they are in their own space, or as we say that we see them corrupted by the modes of individual minds, these alternatives being secondary, the claim allows for a kind of incorruptible ‘what’ that can manifest itself in different ways. The space of the primary perceptual field is a space of ‘material things’ with ‘the potential for categorially aspecting [or “functioning”] as physical or nonphysical “objects” ’, and in which ‘category-neutral’ references (‘mongrels’) belong and are ‘simply seen’.20 Aren’t there problems, however, with this mongrel and its space? Take the mongrel first. How can a continuing space-occupier possess, even in turn, properties belonging to mutually exclusive categories? In particular, how, if an object-term can genuinely take predicates which, in Frege’s terminology, specify modes of individual minds, can one avoid classifying those predicates which apply to any physical-object guise that the material thing might assume as also being merely specifications of modes of individual minds? In short, how can the self-same thing function alternately as a physical object in a determinate physical space21 and as an aesthetic object in some other space? Isn’t this stretching both the thing and its visual versatility too far? To this one may say that there is no mystery in general (as against the specifically visual case) about how the same thing can be referred to under different descriptions. We already know that ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ can pick out the same physical object at two different stages of its career. But the fact that the two stages correspond to different senses or thought-contents directed at what is in fact the same thing is not, unless actually specified, part of either thought-content. It will nevertheless be part of the sense of each that some such identity statement is true. In general, therefore, it is not at all necessary for a specification of the content of a thought about some physical object to include a specification of its physical identity; there need only be the implication that some such specification could be added. Thus even Blake’s personally 114

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phrased request to the Evening Star to ‘speak silence with [her] glimmering eyes’ and to ‘wash the dusk with silver’22 can be, as indeed it was presumably intended to be, ‘about’ the physical object in space, even if no merely physical body could possibly comply with this or indeed with any other request. Why then should we not treat the visual case as just another instance of sense or thought-content in general where, as in aesthetic vision, a specification of the sense need not include a specification of the object of the experience in its physical state? In that case we could understand Aldrich’s mongrel as a material thing whose material, or, rather, merely physical, aspects can be more or less shut out in favour of aesthetic and other aspects. The ‘sense’ of the aesthetic experience will nevertheless always contain the idea that the physical aspect can be brought back into view. I am not sure that I follow Aldrich’s account of this material thing. He wants it to function as something that is ‘simply’ seen because ‘not yet bifurcated by the categorial physical–mental dichotomy’.23 But as instances of this ‘neutral starting-point for perception’24 he wants to include the ordinary references of daily discourse, for example persons (aspectable mentalistically, as when you see in someone their intention or point of view – perhaps the purpose in her eyes – or physicalistically, as mere occupants of physical space – the eye perhaps now a mere organ of sight or a lens) and pictures (aspectable as aesthetic or physical objects but not both). This seems to me to exaggerate the simplicity of our ordinary acts of reference. Persons and pictures (to limit ourselves to these examples) are already bifurcated, usually in favour of their non-physicalistic senses. A person in ordinary unreflective experience is a ‘who’, with all that this implies, and not a ‘what’. A picture generally confronts us as a representational or an aesthetic object or both. In both cases it requires a conscious effort to switch to the purely physicalistic experience. Therefore it seems to me that a better candidate for a neutral starting-point would be something more abstract than the things of everyday experience. If what is common to the visual experiences is that they are acknowledged to be ways in which one and the same object, or set of objects, can appear, then the idea of the object that can appear in these ways is, I suggest, not that of a further object that could appear in yet another, neutral way. It is of something in the world as yet unaffected by mental modes presenting some coloured spatiotemporal configuration (or configuration of configurations) that can be experienced in different ways. One might say that the idea of the neutral thing should be linked more to that of the stimulus of the experience rather than to its conscious target; or, if not that, to the as yet uncorrupted response to the stimulus, something like the traditional sensepresentation as the notion of how the physical environment first impinges on a mind, though it may never or seldom in fact impinge on a mind as blank (as unaffected by its own or its community’s modes) as the notion implies. Now a sense-presentation is not the kind of thing we usually talk about. Nor is it what we see – at least not ‘simply’, in Aldrich’s sense. But it is at least the kind of thing we could mean when we talk theoretically about a common 115

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reference in the strictest sense, that is, of something other than the mind which may be grasped by individual minds in various ways. However, it is quite clear that our normal visual experience of ‘common’ things departs very widely from this bleak ideal. We see most physical things as more than simply physical items; we see them as tools, valuables, currency, symbols, and so on. And we see (yes, actually see) people as related to one another and to ourselves in certain roles and functions and bearers of certain intentions. Our perceptions of the ‘common’ world is ‘coloured’ by, and may be said therefore to reflect, our culturally or personally ‘local’ beliefs, expectations and environments, as well as our understanding of other environments and the beliefs and expectations special to these. In so far as this is the case, and because, as is admitted, a perceptual description ‘refers’ to its object in virtue of its ‘sense’, the ‘common’ world we see is a function of whatever cultural, social or personal factors enter into that sense. The bearers of these factors are individual minds, and the factors themselves are modes of individual minds, but not quite as Frege meant it. As we saw, Frege apparently assumed that a mode of the individual mind can only be a psychological event, a private reference; he doesn’t seem to have thought that it might be the (more or less idiosyncratic) sense by which a mind picks out its reference. What now of the mental space? If we think of that as somehow analogous to a mode of individual minds in Frege’s sense, the fact that ‘common’ things appear there will be very puzzling. Indeed it will be difficult to understand how they could be common at all, as for each person everything will appear in his or her individual space, and the spaces of others in which the ‘same’ things are said to appear will be ‘transcendent’ and therefore invisible. I know of no satisfactory solution to this problem. It does seem to be a necessary first step to its solution, however, that we get rid of the idea of mental space as in any way analogous to modes of the individual mind. And one might do that in a suitably Fregean spirit by insisting that mental space is a universal and not a particular – a property or form of sense rather than a private reference. We might say in this same spirit that the mentality of this space consists in its being a feature of Mind, not of minds. But this no doubt raises its own problems. Just what these may be and how mystifying they really are we must leave aside. 5 We began by asking two questions: first, whether the notion of thoughtcontent could ever reasonably be expanded to include elements drawn from the ‘how’ of the thought for the thinker; and, secondly, whether, if that was the case, the elements thus included could be such as to provide specifications of the thought’s reference. In effect we have already given affirmative answers to both questions: to the first by simply expanding the concept of a thoughtcontent to include its psychological mode, and to the second by allowing the mode (and other rather more elusive features) to ‘corrupt’ the referential core. In conclusion I would like to try to give added point to these answers by asking a third question, namely: Must this corruption of the referential core 116

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really be regarded in this negative light? Aren’t there contexts in which what the mind adds to the core has some kind of importance in the scheme of things? There may also be ‘cognitive’ contexts, but the ones I am interested in are practical. To gain access to such a context let us recall our earlier example of the changing of situational properties. It involved a kind of changing of aspects, but there was no suggestion there that one of the aspects might be better, perhaps more ‘adequate’, than the other. But now let us try to introduce this element of grading. To give the change of aspects a practical import we must enlarge the scope of the situation to embrace also the field of opportunities, wants, needs, rights, and so on, which provide the targets and goals of ordinary purposive action. We can enlarge it sufficiently to accommodate also a practical concern with conspicuously absent as well as perceptually present objects, persons and situations. (They are nearly always both and interconnectedly involved.) If we enlarge it this far, we have a practical or moral and not just epistemological or aesthetic context. It is important that there be persons as well as objects and situations – other persons, that is. For morality, as opposed to mere practice, involves more than active engagement on the part of the perceiving subject in his or her perceptual environment, more than the supplementation of beliefs by wants. The beliefs will have to include appraisals of the motives, opportunities, rights and duties of others, and an evaluation of their comparative importance and worth, both in themselves and in relation to the subject’s wants. Having widened the screen sufficiently, let us put a human story on it. The theme is the forlorn love of a young scholar (once more a scholar, a Latin scholar – the example is from Hermann Hesse) for a girl who has shown him intermittent, mainly merely friendly, but still disturbing interest. During a period in which he has not seen her for a while he learns of her engagement to another. This becomes a personal tragedy through which he nevertheless lives, eventually regaining some equanimity. Then one day he meets her in the street. She is distraught, an accident has crippled her betrothed. She asks Karl, our Latin scholar, to accompany her to the hospital while she visits the patient. Karl goes with her and waits outside the ward. Eventually she comes out, says things are a little better, that he is expected to regain consciousness soon. She thanks Karl and bids him goodbye. The narrative continues: She [Tina] slipped into the room and closed the door on which Karl for the hundredth time unthinkingly read the number 17. His only recently recaptured happiness had left him, but what he felt now was no longer the ache of lost love, it was embedded in a much wider and larger feeling. He saw his own despair reduced to absurdity by this disaster that had so unexpectedly crossed his path. And all at once it came to him that his own little sorrow did not amount to much, that it was not a cruel exception, and that those whom he had regarded as fortunate were also subject to inexorable fate.25 117

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The tale is clearly a moral one. It is moral because it doesn’t just describe a transition from one interpersonal perspective to another; it suggests that the transition is to a less narrow point of view. Karl acquires a situational understanding from which the points of view of others are also taken, or are taken more realistically, into account. He appears to have attained a perspective from which the relevant world is seen as a domain in which other persons are understood to be selves with their own solicitudes and sufferings. There is the hint also of a psychological accompaniment, the awakening of a moral sentiment, a feeling ‘larger’ than self-pity, and, it seems also, a new awareness of himself as one whose own despair is ‘reduced to absurdity’. We have become used to being told that persons are nothing but systems of beliefs and wants. Whether systems can also be free agents in the sense that they can deliberately choose other wants than those they presently have, can choose to become characterologically different persons, is a contested issue. But regardless of whether the changes are free in this sense or not, or of whether, if so, persons cannot be nothing but systems, the change could not occur unless the options were presented as ‘modes of the individual’s mind’. (The change to the possessive is significant here.) And to be presented as that, they must be either experienced or imagined. One cannot undergo a moral change unless comparison between the two perspectives is available. Mere criticism, whether the objection is moral or rational, is not enough, either as an objection to what one does as a way of achieving an admitted goal, or as an objection to the goal itself. The view that moral intentions, or even acts in general designed to promote good, are the result of the computation of context-independent consequences against weighted norms is just another expression of scholarly narrowness. Suppose that changes of moral character are made, freely or not, in response not to instruction or criticism from others, even from respected superiors, but to events (actual or represented) that reveal the inadequacy of one’s current stock of goals and concerns and at the same time possibilities of growth. A view of this kind underlies Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship and the account of ‘stages’ or ‘spheres’ of life outlined in Postscript. The works presuppose that there is this kind of appeal. The view implies that morality is not subservience to the will (‘ethical rigorism’, as Kierkegaard says26) or to the authority of convention or of reason; it is a form of personal growth in which a better self is revealed, a self that can be shunned as well as appropriated, and a prospect that exposes whatever may count here as a will to strategies of self-deception and to what Kierkegaard calls ‘despair’. From an author’s point of view, to get people to modify their desires in the direction of courses of action which afford longerterm or more widely distributed benefits, to ‘edify’ them, one has to get them to see their personal and interpersonal situations from another perspective, one from which goals previously aimed at and appraisals previously made can be seen to be inadequate. The ‘how’ here is the medium of moral change; it is only by acquiring a new and more embracing situational understanding that a person can transcend a narrow or egocentric, less moral, point of view. A person’s 118

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moral character can be said to consist in the kinds of beliefs and wants he or she has, these forming that person’s relationship to the common world (though recall that we have allowed that the descriptions a person gives of this world can be affected by the attitudes). 6 First I indicated ways in which the ‘how’ of a thought can be incorporated into the thought itself once the latter is conceived sufficiently widely and also, I would claim, realistically. I then suggested a way in which the burden of responsibility for conveying what is true can be borne by the ‘how’. The idea that it can do so is by no means new, though that fact is partly due to a certain flexibility in the way that the ‘what’how’ distinction can be applied. Kant’s sensory manifold is a notional ‘what’ that when structured by the ‘how’ of the categories becomes the ‘what’ of human perceptual experience. Carried in one direction, the Kantian case can even lead to an inversion of the relation of ‘what’ to ‘how’ as understood hitherto: the ‘how’ is nothing but the mere datum of experience and has nothing to contribute to truth. Why? Because [o]nly through the conceptual comprehension of an entity given in the sense-world, does the what of that which is given to perception attain to manifestation. … The content of that which is perceived cannot be expressed for the reason that this content is limited entirely to its how – that is, to the form of its coming to appearance.27 This is Platonism. What is publicly shareable hence objective is the Eidos, or Idea with a capital ‘I’, while ‘ideas’ (with a small ‘i’), what contemporary cognitive psychology takes to be our first contact with public reality in the form of a response to a distal stimulus, are just the individual mind’s manner of access and therefore subjective. But with this inversion we appear to have returned, full circle, with Frege, for whom objectivity is the world of thought or Mind into which minds in their individual ways enter,28 while the accidents of these individual manners of entry are irrelevant psychological details to be separated from the content of the thought itself, that which any thinker can share. For Frege, however, the Eidos is not yet said to be something requiring the cultivation by Mind of a particular way of grasping things. All it amounts to is a meaning available to the public world in the form of a sentence, or in what Johannes Climacus would call a certain sort of circular to which signatures may be attached. I have argued here that this is far too narrow a notion to grasp what there is in a thought quite generally, and more particularly for a notion of content capable of capturing moral experience. I said I was interested on Kierkegaard’s behalf in an account of moral experience as the medium in which truth is disclosed. But we must be careful here. In stressing the ‘subjective accent’, Kierkegaard is not referring to some special truth-giving occurrence or feature in a subjective domain. In fact he has to be particularly careful not to say that. In his time the subjective domain was much to 119

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the fore as the locus of everything from divine revelation to the key to understanding nature. There was a strong tendency, it was even a fashion at the time, for philosophers to believe that the subjective was the domain of cognitive intuition where the truth could manifest itself. For Hegelians, after all, the subjective domain was that of self-conscious spirit, in which the world was first able to present itself in the form of thought. As one would expect, Kierkegaard’s polemic is directed against such views. In affirming that truth is something on which the subjective accent falls, he is not saying that what makes something in that area true is some guarantee of intuition. Whatever truth is conveyed in the ‘what’ of moral experience is not the truth, either God’s or that of morality. Climacus’s negative epistemology, not far from positivism, leaves the truth out of our grasp. His unthinkable hypothesis is that in Christianity the eternal has taken on the form of time, and the example of Christ is revelatory only on the vanishing chance that against all reason it is so. Whether one takes the chance or not is up to the individual. Yet Kierkegaard’s other pseudonyms, the ‘aesthetic’ as opposed to the ‘dialectical’, try with consummate literary skill and powers of psychological observation, and a talent for irony, to bring the inadequacies of aesthetic views of human fulfilment to the reader’s attention. No doubt it takes a reader in tune with the project to see his or her own life, in its supposedly fulfilling moments, in the ways the pseudonyms present their narratives. But for those who can see it, the inadequacy will stand there, ‘revealed’ let us say, as a truth about having taken a step in the right direction, a truth, if you like, about the person in question in respect of what kind of foothold he or she has in the moral universe.

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Part II

CONNECTIONS AND CONFRONTATIONS

INTRODUCTION

The question of what and how much some thinker means for a certain philosophical tradition, or even just for another thinker, is a fearfully complex one. Many factors intervene to distance a thinker’s own or even his contemporaries’ conception of his work from the place it receives, though always only provisionally, in a current history of ideas. Often a thinker’s writings may influence a culture not only in ways never intended but also in ways the thinker could never have imagined; indeed there may have been no long-term intention or expectation on the thinker’s part to influence the future at all. This is particularly true of a polemical author like Kierkegaard, where the authorship unfolds within a clearly defined arena in response mainly to locally defined targets. Indeed Kierkegaard provides an excellent illustration. Take Either/Or, which is perhaps the work of Kierkegaard’s that has made the widest impact outside Denmark. Kierkegaard claims in his journals that he was quite prepared for the work to have no impact whatever, it might even be ‘meaningless’, but whatever happened it would at least have proved something: namely that it was possible ‘without the warm poultice of sympathy’ both to write a large literary work in Copenhagen and do so without anyone noticing it was being written. And if it did turn out to be meaningless, as far as he was concerned it was still ‘the pithiest epigram’ he had written over ‘the gibberish’ of his ‘philosophical contemporaries’.1 Yet this epigram over local gibberish is the book Alasdair MacIntyre, in his widely read After Virtue, says presents a discovery of the greatest possible cultural importance, namely the fundamental arbitrariness of our moral culture. Either/Or, says MacIntyre, is ‘the outcome and epitaph of the Enlightenment’s systematic attempt to discover a rational justification for morality’.2 We are led to ask, when identifying the influence of a thinker, how far the way in which the manifest content is understood by later generations, or even the thinker’s own contemporaries, reflects their own preoccupations rather than the author’s. In MacIntyre’s case we may be fairly sure that the significance he attaches to the manifest content of Either/Or mirrors a later generation’s preoccupations more than it mirrors Kierkegaard’s. MacIntyre reads into Either/Or the post-existentialist and practically post-modern idea of a criterionless choice. This leads to many difficulties with his interpretation: for example, why just the two alternatives presented in the text, and why does Either/Or have, in spite of everything, the 123

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form of a dialogue? But leaving this particular problem aside, let us just focus on the general point, namely that the influence a thinker exerts may as often as not depend on a lack of understanding of what lies in the texts. The essays in this section discuss or criticize the ‘connections’ found or made between Kierkegaard and other thinkers – not only later thinkers: they include Aquinas and Rousseau. They are in general critical of comparisons of Kierkegaard with these thinkers, for tending to exaggerate the similarities, suggesting perhaps that we have learned what we can from him, and are indeed able to pinpoint the shortcomings of his thought. That Wittgenstein acknowledges his debt to Kierkegaard in regard to religion leads one to assume that the two think alike in this matter, but that is not quite the case. Lukács, along with many other influential thinkers early in the twentieth century, was both influenced and provoked by what he knew of Kierkegaard’s writings, but later held Kierkegaard partly responsible for the existentialist cult of ‘fetishized inwardness’. An important feature of Kierkegaard’s treatment of subjectivity, a dialectical aspect which, as an Hegelian, Lukács should have appreciated but didn’t, sets Kierkegaard apart from the existentialists. Though Nietzsche never read Kierkegaard and Kierkegaard couldn’t have read Nietzsche, cultural historians still find it easy to say what these two pioneer critics of their age have in common, and slide easily into the misinterprtetation that they had much of their thinking in common too. What I think we observe in general when looking at the alleged influence of Kierkegaard on any tradition at all is that the readings tend, like MacIntyre’s, to say more about the tradition than they say about Kierkegaard. This is true also outside Anglo-American traditions. It is true, for instance, in German philosophy. True but unfortunate, because there is a tendency in this to obscure whatever critical potential may still lie in Kierkegaard’s thought. Of course, to think along the lines of Kierkegaard’s own thought, their latent ‘offence’ to philosophy may be part of the very motive to secure this domestication. Sometimes it is less a case of Kierkegaard influencing the tradition than of the brand name ‘Kierkegaard’ providing it with more or less specious sponsorship. This is regrettable, not because the connections made are always altogether wrong; the risk is rather that they miss the deeper point, the crucial difference. Thus, though MacIntyre’s perception is that Either/Or’s ‘meaning’ today is its ‘discovery’ that modernism is unsustainable – that is to say, that the project of rational justification, be it of morals or knowledge in general, is impossible – looking back we see that Kierkegaard’s most sustained intellectual enterprise was to defend religion against philosophy, not to show philosophers where they should turn, or to where they should turn back, within philosophy if they were to re-establish morality or knowledge. The material Kierkegaard presents is offered to readers as a stimulus to ‘self-activity’,3 a project which Kierkegaard accused Hegelian philosophy of doing away with. Most who call themselves philosophers today would agree that it was a project their philosophy had never even contemplated. The new Nietzscheans preach the end of history and the redundancy of philosophy. The same can be said of philosophers satisfied that the nature of the 124

INTRODUCTION

human spirit can be settled for ever by science. For both it is all over bar the shouting (or scholarly backbiting). The paradox, as many besides Kojève have remarked, is that spirit’s final satisfaction should occur just as humankind seems to be reverting to barbarism. If they are right, but hope is to be preserved, some space must be negotiated in which to present the aim of the restoration of humanity in an alternative idiom. Should we call it philosophical and the space philosophy? Adorno said that ‘[p]hilosophy should not let itself be talked out of doing what it has not succeeded in doing simply because humankind has not yet succeeded in doing it’.4 That seems to be saying yes. Putnam, expressing the hope that ‘philosophical reflection may be of some real cultural value’ even if it has not been ‘the pedestal on which the culture rested’, thinks we should not let ‘the failure of a philosophical project – even a project as central as “metaphysics” – [lead us to] abandon ways of talking and thinking which have practical and spiritual weight’.5 Indeed, if talking and thinking can bring the clarity essential to self-activity, and peace on earth, then perhaps they can have that effect. In that case we might still want to call this talking and thinking philosophy, even if the professionals still submerge themselves in ‘internal’ problems. The term ‘philosophy’ is certainly resilient enough, but then so is philosophy. Gilson said: ‘Philosophy always buries its undertakers.’6 If we were to give Kierkegaard the last word, he might point out, however, that there is an inveterate tendency to talk too much and grasp too little.

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9 COMMITMENT AND PARADOX

Kierkegaard’s claim that Christianity came into its own in this modern age yet with a contradiction in its heart sounds excitingly paradoxical.1 It’s as if the momentum that carried the Christian tradition well beyond the Enlightenment check-point had finally been halted but now had to be set deliberately in motion again in outrageous breach of the Enlightenment’s commitment to science and reason. For those who glimpse deep insights in Kierkegaard on moral and/or religious issues, the claim that authentic religiosity is based on an absurdity is an embarrassment. It is understandable, therefore, that much has been attempted by way of mitigation of the scandal. I believe, however, that such efforts are misguided. In support of this I shall address three increasingly comprehensive targets. I examine first the attempt to foist on Kierkegaard a Wittgensteinianism, to which there is indeed a slight family resemblance in his thoughts on religion but which I believe has been exploited uncritically to obscure and domesticate those very features which set him radically apart. Secondly, I look at these features in order to bare the wires, so to speak, and let whatever sparks emerge fly where they will, dying out in nothing maybe, but possibly forging new links with discourse about the moral life and about religion. Finally, I address the general issue of rationalism and the claim that has been made that where basic options can genuinely be faced, commitment has already given way to rationality, and rationality so that rationality is ‘really a part of our way of life’.2 I suggest that rationality forms just one side of that way of life and commitment forms another. 1 First the scandal of Kierkegaard. The central work here, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, is a seemingly ramshackle but nevertheless coherently constructed monster of a book and presumably written to some purpose. But to what purpose? A popular view among Kierkegaard’s detractors was once to see him as mainly destructive, an irrationalist, his reputation to be saved perhaps only by tracing an ancestry to those early critics of the Enlightenment, revilers of the thin formalism of neo-classical intellectualism, who saw greater truth in the fullbodied understanding of a life embedded ‘concretely’ in situation and tradition, and not least in the life of poetic feeling that has its source in these. Apart from the fact that de(con)struction is nowadays the thing and those who see Kierkegaard as a destroyer are no longer his detractors, a Romantic attachment 126

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can hardly be the clue to his polemic on behalf of the passion of faith. Kierkegaard’s works definitely oppose the idea that poetry, in a wide sense, is where you find truth; on the contrary, poetry vaporizes reality, it does not provide or uncover it, for the poetic life absolutizes the creative moment while refusing to fix itself in its creation. Another way of saving Kierkegaard from irrationalism has been to put a strategic interpretation on Postscript. It is a cautionary work, demonstrating what happens when two distinct ‘spheres’ of life – science and religion – are confulated. Some see its pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, as an assassin hired to take the stuffing out of Hegelianism, employing its concepts playfully in order to wean people away from the false assumption that faith mixes with science. Others read Kierkegaard’s purpose more positively, as guiding the reader into a subjective approach to the problem of becoming a Christian, away from the search for ‘results’. A related reading even makes Fragments and its Postscript into prolegomena to any future philosophy of the Christian religion: in short a revolutionary apologetics. But it is far from clear that Kierkegaard needs saving. The irrationalism, or what counts as that, may well be serious and essential to what he means by faith. The notoriety, then, if called for, may have to stick. Let us begin to see why that may not be so scandalous by first noting what seem to be obvious defects in the ‘language-game’ model that has been offered as a way of bringing to light the distinctive ‘logical grammar’ of religious practices and utterances. The significance of the language-game metaphor is that it offers a palliative to the paradox by supporting a kind of compartmentalization of religion and science (and poetry for that matter) into self-contained practices with distinctive, not mutually applicable, criteria of acceptability and appropriateness. Thus one may read Postscript as saying, through the ideas of paradox and absurdity, that although from a scientific point of view religion must be regarded as absurd, that is no criticism of religion, because religious practices and discourse have their own criteria of appropriateness. 2 I borrow the framework here from D. Z. Phillips’s ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-Games’.3 Apart from its inherent virtues as a discussion of religious belief, the essay puts us well on the road by offering a second-line defence of the language-game approach to religious belief in general. Phillips acknowledges the force of criticisms made against what we can call a ‘vulgar’ language-game conception of religious beliefs – criticisms which we may here accept so that we can conveniently begin already with Phillips’s own more refined account, in order to throw light on the paradox in a way that shows how it functions as a necessary ingredient in Kierkegaard’s concept of faith. According to Phillips, we must not see religion as so ‘distinctive’ a languagegame that it can have no connection with other aspects of life, for otherwise it would be difficult to see any point in religious beliefs; if they are to be intelligible, they must be more than ‘esoteric games, enjoyed by the initiates but of little significance outside the internal formalities of their activities’. It seems wrong, 127

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furthermore, that religion should be allowed to carry on thus in isolation and ‘outside the reach of any possible criticism’.4 On the other hand, while religious beliefs must have a point, the price of their having it must not be that the ‘why’ of faith is made to look as though it were just another case of ordinary rational justification. What Phillips stresses in particular is that the distinctively absolute nature of religious judgements of value must not be lost from view.5 Opening religious beliefs to criticism does not mean that they can be judged according to criteria of rationality common to believers and non-believers alike. There are two things to note about Phillips’s account. First, the examples he uses to illustrate religious believing (a boxer crossing himself before a fight; a mother placing a garland on a statue of the Virgin Mary; parents praying for their child lost in a wreck)6 are excellent stereotypes, but what they most clearly typify are manifestations of religious belief either in not completely industrialized and urbanized societies, or in those enclaves of industrial and urban societies which have resisted Weberian ‘rationalization’ (and Entzauberung), or at the level of particular persons in such societies on ‘existential’ occasions, for example, birth, danger and death, where anyone with sufficient sensitivity, and despite all principled resistance, may find him- or herself praying. At least it would be wrong, I think, to regard them as stereotypes of that modern age into which Kierkegaard actually claimed that Christian belief had come into its own. Secondly, the way Phillips describes the difference between the attitude of factfinding and of religious believing plays down the way these might actually compete with one another for the same ground. As he states it, the normal activity of fact-searching and fact-finding involves guessing and then checking against experience; beliefs here are, as he points out, ‘testable hypotheses’, scientific or everyday. Religious beliefs, on the other hand, ‘are ways of reacting to and meeting [certain] situations’.7 That seems a too narrowly anthropological way of describing such beliefs. The believers themselves will not be content with being told that they were reacting to certain situations.8 They will not like to be told that their religiousness is just a way of reacting to birth, danger and death. They will want to say more, namely that birth, danger and death are rightly conceived in the religious way from the start, and their reactions are appropriate to that conception. Even when an urbane, highly civilized person, say an eliminative materialist jetting to a philosophy conference, finds herself in a moment of sudden danger and prays, then, subsequent protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, she would not at that moment correctly describe her way of belief as a reaction, but as the momentary takeover of another – she will no doubt insist antiquated or primitive – way of interpreting the scheme of things. There is an inescapably factual aspiration in religious belief; at the time it is held it wants the scheme of things to be true that makes the reaction appropriate. There is a passage in the journals often cited as evidence of Kierkegaard’s acceptance of the factual import of faith. It says that ‘there is a “how” which has this quality, that if it is truly given, the “what” is also given; and that is the “how” of “faith” ’.9 This is surely reasonable. Even if truth is subjectivity, in the 128

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end there must be, in some wide sense of ‘objective’, an objective correlate of faith, some particular scheme of things answering to the maximum degree of inwardness which is what Kierkegaard identifies as faith. It is not that religious belief is only a matter of acquiring the right (‘authentic’) frame of mind while factual discourse is something altogether alien to it. It is only alien in the sense that fact-finding can be of no help in establishing the frame of mind appropriate to the particular scheme of things when a necessary ingredient in that scheme is a contradictory thought: that ‘God has existed in time’.10 This essential truth is one that Postscript says we shall never ‘lay hold of’.11 Now the paradox is not merely a rhetorical device saying, ‘The road of science is not the way!’ We should read it literally and positively as saying, ‘The way is in part to see that it is paradoxical.’ To show this let me again have resort to Phillips, who recognizes that defending the distinctiveness of religious beliefs vis-à-vis science will be a futile task unless they can be distinguished in turn from mere superstition. To pinpoint this latter distinction, Phillips offers the example of a mother seeking the Virgin Mary’s protection of her new-born child. This, for Phillips, would be a case of superstition if (i) the mother put her trust in ‘non-existent, quasi-causal connections’, in the hope that some longgone historical personage, referred to as the Virgin Mary, can, if she so desires, protect the child, and (ii) the Virgin Mary is seen as a means to ends also intelligible without reference to her (for example, a long, healthy and prosperous life, for which good food, vaccination, non-exposure to pollutants, violent people, fast-moving traffic, and so on, would be alternative means). Where these conditions are satisfied, the Virgin Mary is reduced, as Phillips says, to a ‘lucky charm’; and ‘the homage has no independent status in itself’.12 As against this, a religious attitude would involve the belief that the protection must be understood in terms of the special beliefs and attitudes (wonder, gratitude, humility, and so on) contained in the person of Mary, she being for the believer a paradigm of these. Here, instead of the protection determining the result, the holiness of the Virgin determines the nature of the protection. This is a very fruitful distinction which I have myself tried in several other places to show is the one Kierkegaard also makes when distinguishing natural from spiritual goals.13 To call upon religion to satisfy a need when all natural remedies have failed is to treat it merely as a supernatural extension of ordinary remedy-finding. That is superstition. Spiritual goals are different; they are fixed by something other than the worshipper’s ‘natural’ wants, goals and aims, and their content is presented in a paradigm such as the Virgin Mary, or, for Kierkegaard, the God-man. In faith, then, one is not choosing religious solutions to problems that in more favourable circumstances other solutions could also solve; choosing a religious solution is also choosing a religious way of looking at the problem – it might even be a way in which the original problem vanishes.14 However, Kierkegaard would not be satisfied with the distinction as a basis for marking out a specifically Christian form of religious belief. Certainly, the worshipper paying homage to the Virgin Mary is religious rather than superstitious 129

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in her belief, because the Virgin Mary is for her a paradigm of Christian motherhood. She is seeking protection for her child on God’s terms, not her own; as in Fear and Trembling, Abraham received Isaac again on God’s terms, having written him off as a human possibility. But why does she accept this as her paradigm of wonder, gratitude, humility? Surely, it is because she has inherited a belief to the effect that there are such paradigms of absolute value in the world and that this is one of them; that is, the two thousand (and some) years have given weight to this paradigm, and the worshipper simply believes that the world contains such accredited paradigms of eternal values. Her religiousness is that of Kierkegaard’s, pre-Christian, Religiousness A. She assumes that the truth which saves lies within her reach. She is blind to the absurdity of this belief and her belief therefore lacks the ‘dialectic’ that calls for ‘thought-passion’, which is a passionate desire to understand, not the paradox, but what it means to break thus with the understanding, and with thinking and with immanence, in order to lose the last foothold of immanence, eternity behind one [the Platonic conception of a recoverable eternity], and to exist constantly on the extremest verge of existence by virtue of the absurd.15 3 That this talk of ‘dialectic’ is not just a strategic excursion into speculative idealism on Kierkegaard’s part is shown by remarks in his journals, which it is reasonably safe to assume directly express his own thought, on how the quality of the believer’s God-relationship is a function of the level of passion.16 Kierkegaard marks three levels on an ascending scale of religiosity. The weakest form of faith is merely an expression of a desire for God’s approval of what one is. Next there is a desire to have one’s accountable failures forgiven, which assumes a conscious disparity between the actual and an ideal self, the tension inherent in the introduction of moral space, one might say. Finally there is the ‘dialectical’ relationship to God, in which this tension assumes a quite different character: one’s own wish is now in potential conflict with God’s, and wish-fulfilment is not something attainable, or to be attained, by setting certain expedients in motion. A passage from Postscript comes appropriately to mind: Prayer would seem to be something extremely simple, one might think it to be as easy as buttoning one’s suspenders; and if there were no other hindrance, one ought soon to be free to take on world-historical problems. And yet how difficult! Intellectually I need to have an entirely clear conception of God, of myself, of my relation to God, and of the dialectics of the particular relationship which is that of prayer, lest I confuse God with something else, so that it is not God I pray to; lest I confuse myself with something else, so that it is not I that pray; and in order that I may be able to preserve, in the relationship of prayer, the distinction and the relationship.17 130

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We have seen how someone seeking God’s protection might be mistaken about her identity in this way. If the wish is an expression of her personal interest in her child and does not stem from the ‘self’ that for Kierkegaard is dialectically constituted in an absolute relation to God, then there is the possibility that her wish is not God’s wish, while to be her true self’s wish it must be God’s wish too. But what about the second term in the prayer-relation? How could keeping the paradox in mind enable one positively to identify God as the recipient of one’s prayers? The problem is the requirement that the object of faith be the absurd. Henry Allison puts it succinctly when maintaining that Postscript, viewed as a ‘relatively straightforward albeit bizarre argument for the “subjective truth” and uniqueness of the Christian faith … is a colossal failure’.18 Kierkegaard, Allison claims, is unable to distinguish Christianity as the unique object of a passionately inward faith directed at what is unthinkable. Indeed the project is hopeless from the start. Even if one assumes that the religious individual needs ‘the belief that our eternal happiness is based on an objective absurdity … to raise passion to its highest level’, this does not single out Christianity as the sole absurdity; indeed, as far as the argument goes, Kierkegaard is unable to distinguish Christianity from any other common-or-garden nonsense. Since the project is evidently an ‘utter failure’ and Kierkegaard is no fool, Allison concludes that Postscript in its entirety must be interpreted as a prolonged joke, a Socratic sting designed to undermine apologetics as a whole.19 I think Postscript is indeed designed to undermine apologetics. But not in the form of a joke. Moreover, the attempt to give merely rhetorical status to the claim that the object of faith is ‘the absurd’ meets at least one objection. The same claim appears in journal entries, which is a strong indication that this is indeed what Kierkegaard himself really came to believe,20 though perhaps not as eagerly as the paradox-loving image many have of him would suggest, something that could prompt the reflection that a thinker’s devotion to rational belief, too, can be a ‘dialectical affair’ exposed to moments of weakness when one finds it a disadvantage that one’s devotion is so absolute. But there could be a way to dispose of the apologetics without losing the absurdity claim nevertheless, a solution suggested by the notion of a ‘language-game’. What we have to do is to revise the conventional way of treating Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’ or ‘spheres of existence’ as separate phases in a biographical development, each connected by a blind leap and the last of them landing us in Christianity. A reading of the texts shows that what ordinarily counts as religious belief, according to Phillips’s stereotypes, can be found throughout the stages, as is quite obvious in the case of the ethical stage exemplified by Judge William, but even in the aesthetic stage. What these stages lack, for Kierkegaard, is not religion, one might say, but religiosity proper: something stronger and less context-dependent than a specifically religious reaction to isolated crises. Instead, therefore, of taking Postscript to be a piece of revolutionary apologetics, homing us in on the true object of faith, as if (contrary to its own 131

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message) the dialectic can deliver this ‘result’, we can regard it as a kind of device, a thumb-screw perhaps, forcing us to arrive at a consistency that has belief apply to all aspects of life – not just fortune and misfortune and moments of existential agony – and forcing us to base that consistency clearly upon the understanding that in this serious matter human understanding provides no support. What Postscript ‘teaches’ in that case is that a ‘dialectic’, or tension, otherwise manifested merely externally in alternating patterns of behaviour, going in and out of the language-game of religious believing, must be turned inward and become a stable, synchronic feature of a unified, religious consciousness, the tension being held fast in the believer’s mind. 4 But does this help us to understand the precise point of the paradox? Not obviously, because one can still think of this synchronic tension being a feature of someone praying under religiousness A assumptions. Thus the mother seeking protection for her child is prepared to accept it in a form that would not have occurred to her had this paradigm not presented itself as an independent source of value, of absolute value. So what further condition might there be that would take us over into religiousness B? We have already had one suggestion. The mother’s submission to the paradigm is not ‘hers’ in the strong sense required, because although she may have ‘broken with the understanding’ by doing something she cannot understand, she still believes there are people who do understand, or that there are authorities that know and on whom she relies. To be hers the submission must be consciously made in full recognition of the unthinkability of the Incarnation. The question then is whether this difference should be crucial. Why put so much weight on a requirement that makes this obviously good, and in all reasonable senses Christian, woman fall short of genuine Christian faith? Here is a possible answer which gestures slightly in the direction of those who like to see the hired assassin at work in Kierkegaard’s ‘dialectical’ works. The requirement matters much more for people, like Hegelians, who think they have solid backing for the view that these things can be known – indeed that faith will give way to knowledge – than it does for someone who does not approach the rigours and crises of life with the backing of this complacent, abstract and radically mistaken assumption. Postscript, then, is designed for professors rather than serving-maids, but this is quite compatible with Johannes Climacus’s optimism about an eternal happiness awaiting both.21 In this case it is clearly the professor (representing the apotheosis of the rationalist tradition) who has got himself into trouble, but his error does at least pave the way to a clearer view of their shared faith. Against this discriminatory background we can now read what Kierkegaard himself has to say to our question. In Postscript we read that the ‘believing Christian … uses understanding to make sure that he believes against the understanding’.22 And in the posthumous papers we read: 132

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When … I believe this or that on the strength of everything’s being possible for God, what is the absurd? The absurd is the negative property which ensures that I have not overlooked some possibility still within the human range. The absurd is an expression of despair: humanly it is impossible – but despair is the negative mark of faith. The passage goes on to say that the absurdity of the Paradox is the negative side of the frame of mind properly characterized as faith: ‘The absurd rounds off the sphere of faith, which is a sphere for itself.’ It ‘throws light on faith negatively’.23 We could draw the following conclusions. First, that the Christian believer must keep in mind that what he believes is unthinkable, absurd, on pain of not entering as himself into the God-relation, or if as himself, then not into relation with God. This is the negative factor, not because it marks a boundary between faith and something else, for example scientific understanding, but because, considered in this way, it is really a blank wall and the occasion for despair. Secondly, there is a positive counterpart, or alternative, to despair, namely faith, which takes you beyond the blank wall. But there is a slight problem. In so far as the believer believes, the absurd is not the absurd – faith transforms it; but in every weak moment it is, for him, again more or less the absurd. The passion of faith is the only thing that has the measure of the absurd – if not, the faith is not faith in the strictest sense but a kind of knowing.24 A straightforward reading suggests that the absurdity of the absurd has to be blurred in the believer’s mind by the force of his faith, and when the faith weakens, the absurdity comes back into view. However, that cannot be right since the affair would no longer be dialectical, but a see-saw, disjunctive relation that remains indecisively either the one or the other: in weak moments when faith falters, one has the absurdity in mind, then faith again takes over and the absurdity slips into the background. The structure of a situation called ‘dialectical’ is one in which one term is internally related to the other, and the internality must in some sense be part of what is represented in a mind, in a vertical, or synchronic, tension of some kind. What Kierkegaard means by faith having the measure of the absurd is perhaps simply this: that the kinds of interest distinctive of religious belief motivate faith at different levels of critical awareness of human limits. Kierkegaard is addressing the modern age, and he is saying that for a modern consciousness these interests have to be sustained in the face of a clearly acknowledged lack of understanding. In tentative rebuttal, then, of Allison’s reason for describing Postscript as a total flop as apologetics, namely that it cannot distinguish Christianity from nonsense in general, let me link what has just been said with the fact that Kierkegaard himself clearly thinks the object of faith is not indistinguishable 133

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from ordinary nonsense, and that once we grasp that something is indeed a piece of pure nonsense we simply find it impossible to believe: Nonsense … he cannot believe against the understanding, for precisely understanding will discern that it is nonsense and prevent him believing it; but he makes enough use of the understanding to become aware of the incomprehensible, and then holds on to this believing against the understanding.25 Couldn’t we say that if the believer can go on believing the absurd in the case of Christianity, that is because its doctrines have a hold on his deeper instincts, and due to the special and fundamental accommodation a Christian faith makes with human reality, particularly that of each individual? Unlike sheer nonsense, the utterances and practices of Christian belief make some kind of sense by virtue of their embeddedness in fundamental human interests. So however unintelligible the doctrine of incarnation may be, the promise to which it is attached can still ‘inform’ a person’s practical life and motivate a desire to retain it in the face of the unintelligibility. Moreover, the unintelligibility may be attributed to insurmountable limitations of the human perspective, so that the option of faith remains open at least to non-rationalists. As an appendix to the remarks on language-games, it might even be argued that the level at which beliefs of the kind have a grip on our activities is such as to prevent their amenability to rational criticism. Postscript then reappears as a cautionary tale about what happens when professors insist on bringing religion to the level of the concept; religious beliefs are immune not because they have their own criteria of appropriateness, as the language-game interpretation has it, but because there is little chance of testing them against anything so articulate as a criterion. 5 Rationalists will of course be unimpressed. The idea that there are more basic well-springs of action than a clearly conceived thought is entirely inimical to the rationalist outlook. One attempt to undermine rationalism has been to allege that rationalism must itself be the outcome of a choice, but that such a choice cannot be rational in the required sense, so that rationalism is really at root as much a form of irrationalism as any of its opponents. It may help to throw light on our discussion if, in conclusion, we look at one reply to this ‘tu quoque’ argument that rationalism rests ultimately on a commitment that cannot itself be rational. Agassi argues that where basic options can genuinely be faced, commitment has already given way to rationality. Moroever, rationality is, to borrow a phrase, the form of life in which we all presently engage, rationalists and irrationalists alike. To put a finer point on it, one could add that at the level of truly basic commitment there simply is no choice as such. Choice presupposes preferences, and where options are not preferentially ordered we can only pick, we cannot choose.26 Fundamental commitment is the limiting case where 134

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principles of preference are themselves what we are supposed to choose between, so that if we can choose to commit ourselves to an irrationalism, we are already beyond the alleged form of commitment. The crux is that the true option is between rationalism and commitment. The rationalist’s dedication is to experimental open-mindedness, while commitment is the opposite. So the rationalist can regard commitment only as an attempt to retreat to a naïve way of life that is neither his nor the irrationalist’s. Of course, commitment is something the rationalist is free to prefer, but just because he is in a position to choose it ‘he is already beyond that choice’.27 His real options are, therefore, liking rationality or not liking it, ‘driv[ing] it to its limits and expand[ing] it or tak[ing] it as it comes and be[ing] content or even try[ing] to avoid it and repress it’. He may even succeed in the latter.28 Since the ‘life’ that rationality is part of is shared also by the irrationalists ‘in our midst’, the latter’s advocacy of commitment is inherently objectionable. The ‘immorality’ of the irrationalists is that they ‘willingly recommend a leap of faith … that we take as above or beyond criticism at least one major dogma, religious, social, or political’. The main objection, however, is ‘the recommendation that the leap of faith should be final – that the act of leaping should be one act that should suffice for a whole life-time’.29 Kierkegaard must undoubtedly be immoral. But hasn’t our discussion told us that our way of life is not uniform, even about what to do with evidence? We can praise those who plough boldly into nature to wrest from it alone what facts it can disclose, come what may, and are ready at any moment to be proved wrong but will plough on in another direction rather than relax or relapse into dogma. But why not praise equally those who hold fast to a dogma which responds to a naïve interest if they sustain that interest and perhaps even the dogma, come what may? In the one case we praise a mind open to the world, in the other a stand in the face of the world. Of course, if we say ‘commitment’ in the face of the evidence and are thinking of evidence in the limited context of fact-finding, then the alternative to an open mind seems to be a closed one. But it depends how far your world extends. If it amounts to more than a mere accumulation of facts, then commitment can be a virtue, the virtue of withstanding pressures of exposure to the world, comparable to the fact-finder’s virtue of boldly giving himself up to them. There may even be a kind of hierarchy in which commitment comes out higher than rationality. Significantly, the pressures straining commitment are not so much the facts to which critical rationalism boldly exposes itself. Rather, the pressure on commitment is the strong temptation to believe that the rationalist way of life is the only one there is. It could be a temptation one should resist. The rationalist ensures that the world gets to him as uncontaminated as possible by any prior commitment. A hero of commitment might be one who protects himself against the deception that he can get through life as a journalist and not also as an author, believing that ‘critically’ editing whatever scripts he can get the world to submit to him is an adequate specification of life’s fulness. The rationalist’s optimism (or naïveté 135

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perhaps?) might be a self-deceiving response to the same deep-seated interests that elicit commitment among those whom the rationalists describe as irrational. Rather than think too highly of the rationalist if he represses this interest, we might conceivably find it in us to praise the leaper of faith for defending his dogma even unto the last ditch of absurdity.

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10 HUMOUR AND THE IRASCIBLE SOUL

The author of Postscript says just once, right out of the blue, that ‘all despair is a kind of bad temper’ (‘al Fortvivlelse er en Art Arrigskab’).1 No clarification or support is provided, nor is despair described in that way in The Sickness unto Death, which is the main source for the concept, or anywhere else in the corpus, so far as I know. One may suspect there is no deep point here, just a writer indulging a penchant for vivid expression. But is it out of the blue? If in the context and at first glance the expression looks unmotivated, we can at least guess which part of the blue it comes out of. Bad temper can have many names: ‘peevishness’, ‘irritability’ and, in the old Humour days, ‘choler’. But another term just as venerable would be no stranger to someone as familiar with ancient and medieval philosophy as Kierkegaard, namely ‘irascibility’ (something choler was supposed to cause). Not only that, readers of Thomas Aquinas will know that for Thomas the ‘irascible’ is the home of despair. But can there be a connection? And if so, can it be intended; or is this just a random case of retrieval from a collective classical memory? The context can in fact help us here, but in order not to exclude too peremptorily a wider question about the context itself, I shall postpone this consideration until the end. This wider question has to do with how far the parallel between Aquinas’s desperatio and Kierkegaard’s Fortvivlelse can be extended and with what results for the comparison. 1 Irascible’ is a scholastic term and it derives from Plato’s well-known distinction within the irrational soul between appetite pure and simple, epithumia, traditionally translated ‘concupiscence’and having the special connotation of a longing for worldly things, and a ‘spirited’ element, thumos, meaning ‘spirit’ but in the everyday sense in which showing courage is to be ‘spirited’.2 Plato needs thumos to fill a motivational gap between desire, on the one hand, which he sees as blind impulse, and reason, on the other, or the ability to calculate or judge. One may judge that giving in to some blind impulse will have a damaging effect for society or oneself, but it still requires thumos to resist the impulse. Thumos, too, is an appetite of sorts, but one that is informed by a judgement. 137

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Without thumos we would never move away from things that attract us, nor intervene in situations where our judgement tells us that something bad is happening. The word (orge) Socrates uses in the passage where the tripartite soul is introduced in the Republic can mean ‘temper’ in a wider, non-specific sense, but the examples he gives do favour translation as ‘anger’ or ‘indignation’. If we think of a person’s concerned engagement in the world broadly enough to include expectations, fears and hopes (as well as frustrations and regrets), then the irascible soul can be seen to embrace hopes in the mode of their frustration, and therefore despair. Plato’s tripartite soul is a theory of psychological organization intended to throw light on the constitution of the city-state. Aquinas, on the other hand, considers the irascible soul in its relation to the prospect of religious salvation. But the basic psychological mechanism remains the same. Aquinas describes the difference between hope and despair in quite general terms. For the ‘irascible power’ to come into play there must be some good ‘not possessed’, otherwise the necessary element of ‘the arduous’ is not present. An irascible power responds to an assessment of some situation salient enough for it to be sensitive to; the typical example would be of some difficulty that lies in one’s path. [R]egarding a good not yet possessed, in which the notion of the arduous can be verified because of the difficulty of obtaining it, if that good is judged to exceed the capacity of the one seeking it, despair ensues; but if it is judged not to exceed that capacity, hope arises.3 A good possessed, naturally enough, provokes no irascible power. Not so, according to Aquinas, when what is possessed is an evil, for here there is the difficulty of becoming rid of it. If in one’s judgement this difficulty cannot be overcome, then, on Aquinas’s view, no irascible power can be incurred; there remains only the ‘passion of sadness’, which is not an irascible but a ‘concupiscible power’.4 But in the case of an evil not yet possessed, the irascible power of fear is evoked if the difficulty of avoiding it is judged beyond one’s capacity, whereas if, on the other hand, one believes that one can avoid it, then the irascible response is boldness.5 You might think that the response to admitting to yourself an inability to be rid of an evil possessed would be despair. You might think this not necessarily because despair seems a better candidate than sadness, since it might well occur to you that the response could be one of despair in the form of sadness; just as despair in something like the form of sadness would be evoked by a corresponding inability to acquire some good. So why, in this respect, are failing to be rid of an evil and failing to acquire a good not symmetrical? The only possible answer seems to be this: (1) irascible powers are by definition those which respond to difficulties standing in the way of interests that are still operational; (2) there are states in which the interests which the difficulties once stood in the way of are no longer operational; (3) despair belongs to the former while sadness belongs to the latter. When an interest is no longer opera138

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tional, then the difficulties in the way of it are no longer salient. The reason for their no longer being salient here, unlike the case where the appetite is satisfied, is that the possibility of attainment has been pushed aside. A word that fits nicely here is ‘resignation’, and sadness does seem the more fitting response than despair. In resignation the good in question is taken out of the realm of considerable options; in despair that is not so. In the case of resignation this need not mean a total loss of interest in the good; the interest may survive in some latent form or be elevated consciously to a level where it is protected from life’s contingencies. Either way, because, by being shelved, the good in question is effectively removed from the irascible soul’s reach, the project of attaining this good will have been taken off the operational agenda. Readers of Fear and Trembling will see limned here in outline the move made by the ‘knight of infinite resignation’, whose impossible love on earth for his princess is ‘transfigured into a love for the eternal being’.6 As Johannes de silentio says: ‘In infinite resignation there is peace and repose.’7 In other words the difficulties are shelved. But there can still be sadness, which is a passion (as also its counterpart, joy – according to Aquinas, both are ‘in the concupiscible’8). Their responses could be said to be postagonistic. But why should despair be agonistic? ‘Appetite’, says Aquinas, ‘is the source of movement and an agent is moved only towards what is possible; certainly no one would be attracted by an object which he considered impossible.’9 You could say that one way in which despair differs from resignation is that in despair there is still the attraction, in the sense of a desire for the object. In resignation you resign your desire and (or in order to) forget the attraction. But in despair you still have the desire and you are still attracted: ‘we neither hope for nor despair of what we do not desire’.10 In plain desire (a concupiscible power) no difficulty intervenes (or at least not such as to mobilize judgement as to whether it lies in one’s powers to overcome it or not). Hope and despair arise only when the object of desire is ‘something arduous, attainable only with difficulty’.11 You hope when you think that something you desire is attainable, albeit with difficulty; you despair when you think it is not attainable. But then how does one characterize the irascible ‘passion’ of despair? How can it still be a passion when what it desires is considered to be out of reach? What is despair? Aquinas says that, rather than a giving up of the desire, despair is ‘avoidance’ or ‘flight’. This might deserve to go down as an original contribution to depth psychology, but Thomas, as ever unswerving in his devotion to the Philosopher, gives the credit to Aristotle. He quotes him twice. The first quotation says: ‘What affirmation and negation are in thinking, pursuit [dióksis] and avoidance [fugé] are in desire’;12 and the second says: ‘When men come upon something impossible, they turn away.’13 You could say that they are put off. What Aquinas himself says is that, instead of being attracted by the object, they are now repelled by it: ‘If the object is considered impossible to attain it becomes repulsive.’14 Paraphrasing the analysis, Gilson writes of a ‘retreat of the appetite from itself’. 139

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Hope is interior; it is maintained in the face of some obstacle, annihilating it so to speak by desire; and thus it belongs with the passions of the irascible. If the difficulty becomes extreme to the point of appearing insurmountable, a sort of hate succeeds the desire. Then, not only is the pursuit abandoned but we no longer wish to hear this impossible good so much as mentioned. This retreat of the appetite from itself, and the accompanying rancour against its former object, is called despair.15 Although Kierkegaard nowhere refers to the passages in Aquinas here paraphrased – indeed there are very few references to Thomas at all, and none of his works is listed in the inventory of books put up for auction on Kierkegaard’s death – and even if his concept of despair (Fortvivlelse) in fact owed nothing consciously to Aquinas’s, there are nevertheless remarkable similarities. One of them is captured in Gilson’s expression ‘we no longer wish to hear this impossible good so much as mentioned’. It is of course not impossible that Gilson is projecting his own familiarity with Kierkegaard into his paraphrase, but the expression captures exactly the defining characteristic of the despair called ‘reserve’ (Indesluttethed) in The Sickness unto Death. In that work despair is presented under the general formula: ‘to want to be rid of oneself’.16 Reserve, or keeping one’s self to oneself, is a person’s retreat from the difficulties of being (in some sense) one’s self as these gradually dawn on him. The retreat manifests itself in, for instance, not wanting to hear anything said about this self. The reason given in The Sickness unto Death is that the self has ‘something eternal’ in it, which in Aquinas’s terms would also be something ‘arduous’. One will not hear about this self which it is too arduous for one to become, even though one now realizes, however dimly, that one is such a self. Or the retreat might manifest itself in chiding those who do speak of it for the indelicacy of not realizing that such things are too precious to be spoken of in public.17 The pseudonymous author, Anti-Climacus, talks of the reserved despairer keeping his self behind a closed door. That the realization is dim is an advantage, of course, because that makes it easier to keep out of mind the idea of being such a self. The question Anti-Climacus poses rhetorically is whether a self kept under cover can nevertheless play a part in everyday life. Has he taken flight from reality into the wilderness of the monastery, the madhouse? Is he not a real person, fully dressed like others or going about as they in the usual kind of coat? Yes indeed! Why not? But this matter of the self he takes up with no one, not one soul; either he feels no urge to do so or he has learned to suppress it.18 2 There is an apparent conundrum to solve before further examining this and other possible similarities. How can someone be both attracted and repelled at the same time by the same object? There is no difficulty of course in the ordinary 140

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case where some aspect attracts and another repels. But here we are to assume that it is the object as a whole, or the object under just one aspect, that first attracts but then, once it proves beyond reach, repels. It was proposed above that it is the continued attraction of an object that distinguishes despair from resignation. So if, in Gilson’s paraphrase, despair is the appetite’s retreat from itself to the accompaniment of rancour against its former object, the question is in what way can the object nevertheless remain attractive to the despairer? There are three broadly different situations in which it may be conceded that it was so. At one extreme is the person (like Kierkegaard’s reserved despairer) who has learned to suppress all thought of what, until he found it was beyond his reach, attracts him. The attraction is still there but its power to attract is overridden, overpowered, pushed into the background by dedication to daily matters and a refusal to think of the object of attraction. At the other extreme is someone who very clearly appreciates what attracts him but in the face of the difficulty turns away from it, in hatred. How is that possible? Though the hatred is directed at the object of attraction, it is not ascribed to it in virtue of some feature of the object itself. It is a property projected or redirected on the object in some complex way that enables the despairer to avoid the thought that it is his own impotence that he should hate rather than the object. This means that it can still be thought of by us, or even the despairer, as desirable. If the complexity is unravelled, we see that the object continues to be attractive rather than repulsive. In between these two extremes is a third kind of situation, that of the person who ‘solves’ the conflict by persuading himself that something not beyond his powers is ‘as good as’ (even identical with) what he is powerless to obtain. Some complex mechanism may be at work here too, but in this case (or cases of this kind) what is suppressed is the thought not of the object, as in the first extreme, or of its attractiveness, as in the second, but of the ‘arduous’ features that would make it repulsive if they were too arduous. In all three cases we see what might be called despair’s ‘strategies’, part at least of what Anti-Climacus refers to in one place as ‘the cunning and sophistry present in all despair’.19 Perhaps they should be called strategy-like mechanisms rather than strategies, for the latter suggests some consciously adopted expedient. However, it is not hard for us today to accept the idea that such mechanisms are at work below the conscious surface, mechanisms that can at least be described metaphorically in the language of conscious action. Wilting before the enormity of some task in which we are engaged hopefully, we acquire a new interest in which we hopefully engage, namely that of playing down the extent of the effort needed to accomplish the original task. (It is of course quite another thing if one responds by trying to improve one’s given capacities, what one is currently able to do, to the point of being able to achieve the originally impossible goal.) One does not want to appear to oneself a loser. A fantast might come to believe he has reached the goal by ignoring the factual evidence that he has not, while a less imaginative person, the philistine for example, might take it that he has done so by being persuaded that he embodies, even in his very person, all the evidence there could 141

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be. If neither strategy works, so that at least in one’s own eyes one cannot help but appear a loser, there is then the further resort of making the effort required seem unworthwhile because the enterprise itself is in any case just not worth the candle: the ‘sour grapes’ manoeuvre. Readers of The Sickness unto Death will be struck by the similarity between several of these alternatives and the two directions in which equilibrium can be lost in the ‘synthesis’ which forms the self.20 The idea of metaplans hopefully engaged in which can go awry and which call for still further defensive maneouvres engaged in hopefully, and so on, all of them potentially too arduous and in an in-principle infinite regress, is also memorably captured in Kierkegaard’s description of despair as ‘impotent self-consumption’.21 With ‘strategy’ as a component in Kierkegaard’s account of despair we have something which explains the possibility of attraction and repulsion in respect of the same ‘good’, and which in addition provides a seemingly fruitful elaboration of an idea already present in Aquinas – if not indeed also Aristotle. We may now proceed to note further similarities. 3 One such is Anti-Climacus’s talk of a ‘dialectic’. Hope and despair are to be defined in terms of each other: despair as the loss of hope and hope as the sustained absence of despair.22 This captures Thomas’s idea (as Gilson expresses it) that despair is the idea of an appetite’s retreat from itself. Despair is not a new appetite replacing an old one, hope, but an accommodation to the fact that the object of hope can no longer be hoped for.23 Kierkegaard uses this idea of a dialectic also to explain that feature which makes a person ‘spiritless’. The feature in question is the person’s being beyond or beneath hope and despair. The obstacle against which hope triumphs and in the face of which hope gives way to despair is something the petit-bourgeois person protects himself from ever having to face, as in the third and in-between position outlined above. A spiritless person is one who is therefore impervious to Socratic suggestion and needs to be shocked into spiritual development. Kierkegaard’s pseudonym exploits the depth-psychological potential in Aquinas’s account even more by introducing a distinction between finite despair, a kind of piecemeal, everyday despair, and despair proper, which is total. This helps us to gloss a sentence which we have not yet quoted from the passage in which Johannes Climacus refers apparently out of the blue to despair as ‘Arrigskab’. He says that ‘despair is always the infinite, the eternal, the total’, though in its case in ‘the instant of impatience’.24 We will return to this last remark in conclusion. The point here is that despair proper is total because, as distinct from mere doubt, which has to do only with the intellect, it infects a person’s whole life. Certainly, to lose finite things in which one invests ‘one’s life’ makes one ‘despair’ in an everyday sense, even to the point of ‘losing the earthly’ as such, at least it seems so, and not just some part of it about which one had great expectations. But this is not the real despair we should attribute to a person in the event of such a felt loss. The real despair is ‘going on behind him unawares’. It is ‘to lose the eternal’25 by placing such a heavy investment in the earthly. 142

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An everyday, finite despair may, however, turn your focus in upon yourself, specifically upon your inability to avoid such earthly failures. You can then be said to despair over yourself, which is nearer the mark but still pointing in the wrong direction. The truth of the matter, on the one hand, only evident to one who can see the absurdity, lies in the disproportion between the massive investment a person makes in earthly success, and a consequent touchiness about failure to achieve finite goals, and the paltriness of the dividend on the other (if one only reflects on it). So despair proper is the attempt to escape the realization that human being cannot find its fulfilment in finite enterprises. It is a failure to relinquish the hold of the world, to fight concupiscence, and a flight from the idea that one is not just a finite thing among others in the world but qua existing somehow continually beyond it. Now although the ‘object’ of hope and of despair in Aquinas and in Kierkegaard is not quite the same, the two are closely related and similar in relevant respects. In Aquinas, as Gilson puts it, ‘[h]ope is intimately bound up with man’s constant effort to live, act and realize himself, and beats in the heart of all’.26 What one hopes is not so much to avoid, say, illness or misfortune as to achieve some form of fulfilment, though of course in order to avoid thereby being unfulfilled. For example, ‘from grace and merits’ one achieves ‘beatitude’.27 Grace and merit are goals before which the world and human nature place obstacles. One hopes that one may receive grace and merit when one believes one can surmount these obstacles; when you fail to sustain this hope you despair. The ‘object’ of your despair might be the goal of beatitude itself; but it could also be the obstacles to attaining that goal, the fact that you need to receive grace and to show merit. In that case you cease to believe, wrongly, that your despair is due to the contingencies of the world, to misfortune; you see that the fault lies with yourself or (since you may not feel the fault is exactly yours) at least with something ‘about’ you. But you still fail to see where the real fault lies; you fail to see that it lies in the fact that your goals are merely finite. Of course, you might retain the goal of beatitude by grace and merit and, instead of turning against it, you turn against your own impotence by denying that you are powerless and taking it that beatitude is yours for the asking. You would then be distorting the goal, not in the sour grapes way but in one of the three broadly distinct ways outlined above. You assume beatitude has been reached because you have escaped either from reality into fantasy, or from imagination (the ability to envisage possibilities for yourself that are not yet realized) into (let us say) Heideggerian das Man. If these face-saving expedients fail, you might then turn, rancorously and openly, against the goal of beatitude itself. That would be the despair Anti-Climacus calls ‘defiance’, but also the main form of despair, and also ‘sin’. Sin, for Anti-Climacus, is standing before God and not accepting that one is a sinner. The defiant way of doing that is to declare Christianity to be ‘untruth and a lie’. Along with the ‘denial of everything Christian’ go ‘sin, the forgiveness of sins’, and so also, of course, beatitude.28 On truth and untruth, Aquinas says they are in the intellect while good and evil are ‘in the appetite’. To want that which is correctly apprehended is good.

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(Note another point of similarity: that what is good is the wanting, not just the good itself.) Similarly, ‘any inclination matching the mind’s false judgment is evil in itself, and thus a sin’.29 From a Christian viewpoint the goal – beatitude or eternal blessedness – is always possible. The judgement that it is so is therefore true. That much is in the intellect. What Aquinas and Anti-Climacus have in common of course is not that truth is in the intellect but that, whatever the appropriate epistemic attitude to it may be, there is this truth, namely that an eternal happiness is available. For both thinkers, despair or hope in this regards involve the abandonment or retention or , respectively, of an expectation of a future state the achievement of which cannot be assumed simply as a matter of course but whose possibility is presupposed. Despair involves a false appraisal and hope a true appraisal. Aquinas distinguishes despair in the religious context from that in which despair would correspond to a true appraisal. Someone who despairs ‘along the road’ (in statu viæ) over something he is innately incapable of achieving responds appropriately to the truth, as does the doctor who despairs of curing a terminally ill patient.30 To defy the facts in these cases would mean going on trying – ‘desperately’ in this other and still legitimate sense – to do what was manifestly impossible. ‘Despair’ here has another sense: it is the despairing refusal to give up hope when it is clear that there is none. But despair in the sense that Aquinas and Anti-Climacus have in common is the opposite case: it is giving up hope when hope and not despair conforms with the true appraisal that an eternal happiness is within reach. But there is this huge difference that while Aquinas believes this truth can be known, for Kierkegaard it is ‘known’ only in faith. For Kierkegaard, indeed, the circumstances of its truth, what makes it true or how it can be true at all, is beyond all human grasp; and not merely does it defy understanding, in terms of what we take understanding to be, it goes against all possible understanding – from the point of view of reason it is absurd. So for Kierkegaard there are difficulties even in the way of putting the framework of grace and merit in place. One may hope that it is there in spite of these fundamental epistemological difficulties; one may also hope to keep believing that it is there in spite of them, but unless you can open yourself to this ‘offence’ to human reason you will despair even of the very possibility of starting to acquire merit and receive grace. Clearly the Anti-Climacus pseudonym is someone who has withstood this test. Which is why his and Aquinas’s accounts so far go in parallel. But to someone who does not share Aquinas’s or Anti-Climacus’s theological premise, the framework of grace and merit as goals through which one can either hope to attain or despair of attaining beatitude will not be in place. Where for both Aquinas and Anti-Climacus its not being in place would be a sin, or, to be more precise, the conscious denial that it was in place would be a sin (AntiClimacus says it is ‘highest intensification of sin’31), for such people the very idea of sin would be false. Naturally, it is open to anyone to deny that the framework is in place. They may give as the reason the insuperable ‘arduousness’ of believing the theological premise. Whatever Aquinas or Anti-Climacus would say about 144

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your disbelief or denial (that it was despair), you may affirm that Aquinas’s judgement and Anti-Climacus’s faith are inappropriate to the facts. For you there is no eternal blessedness in store. Or rather, in order not to mix the views, for that could also be a statement from within the framework, from your point of view you cannot believe that such a thing is in store. In that case your judgement with regard to those who believe that it is indeed in place is that they are in the position of Aquinas’s wayfarer and doctor and, at least from any interest in acting appropriately to the facts, should cease to hope. However, an important point, even for those who do believe that the framework is in place, that is, for those who do not, as Aquinas and AntiClimacus would have to say, despair on this epistemological point, and who do believe in and hope for an eternal happiness, their belief may still be a false one, though in another sense. If, for example, what for the religious writer is objectively true is not believed in the right spirit, is misconstrued, or is made too easy both to believe and to earn, that too would be a kind of false belief. For Kierkegaard, at least in his Johannes Climacus vein, you do not believe truly unless you believe that what you believe is an intellectual absurdity. Indeed anything short of a clear and unqualified acceptance of the prospect of an eternal happiness, in full view of the difficulties, might be said to count as a case of false believing – even more so in the case of someone who simply has no conception of the framework, someone who is not yet ‘spirit’. Even if you think you do have that conception, your life ‘from a Christian point of view’ can still be ‘too spiritless to be called sin in a strict Christian sense’. AntiClimacus observes that this is true of ‘the lives of most people’ who live what they call Christian lives.32 For Anti-Climacus, then, true belief is possible only ‘before God’, that is, in God’s presence. One might put it epigrammatically by saying that in the question of Christianity a precondition of believing truly is truly believing, and for that there must be a vivid conception of God.33 For Aquinas, on the other hand, truth is a matter of judgement; it is what is correctly apprehended in the traditional philosophical sense of a relation established by argument between a statement and what it says – that includes statements about what it is good to do.34 Among Christian truths is the truth that an eternal happiness is within reach. As we noted, like any inclination matching the mind’s false judgement, despair for Aquinas is ‘evil in itself, and thus a sin’.35 It is a failure of will. Now Aquinas places the will on the side of reason. He says: ‘The faculties of the soul are commonly divided into the rational, the concupiscible, and the irascible. But the will is distinguished from the irascible and the concupiscible. It is therefore contained within the rational.’36 But Anti-Climacus’s view is quite different. For him if any faculty contained the will, it would have to be imagination. AntiClimacus points out, though, that imagination is no ordinary faculty; if you want to call it that, it is really the faculty for all faculties. Imagination is the faculty with which we envisage possibilities. The range of possibilities someone envisages defines his feelings, understanding and will.37 There is a progression: ‘The more 145

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consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self.’ So a self is not something pre-determined but ‘what it [the self at any time] has as its standard of measurement’,38 and that depends on imagination. Will, in Kierkegaard, appears in general to be a broad notion covering what today we would call motivation. Rather than calling it, as does Aquinas, a faculty of the intellective soul, on Kierkegaard’s account we should in terms of Aquinas’s classification probably call it a faculty of the irascible soul. It is not the executive arm of a tripartite psychological economy but more like a state of the economy itself. Both despair and hope are expressions of will. In a signed work Kierkegaard says that ‘every despairer has two wills’, and he calls despair ‘double-mindedness’ (Tvesindethed).39 In The Sickness unto Death Anti-Climacus describes the will as ‘dialectical’ and as having ‘beneath it the whole of a person’s lower nature’. When knowledge of the good becomes ‘suitably obscure’, the apparent distance between what is ‘known’ to be good and what is desired decreases. ‘In the end’ knowing and willing enter into a collusion in which knowing ‘goes over to the will’s side and lets it be known that what the will wants is quite right’.40 But can’t we simply transcribe this into Thomas’s terminology by reserving will for an agency that effectively executes actions matching true judgement of what is good, leaving to our lower natures the production of actions due to judgements based only on what is desirable? Pressure exerted on our wills by these natures will then be understood as threats to the will to resist which the will must then steel itself against them or be reinforced from without; rather than as manifestations of a second will expressing the demands of our lower natures. 4 That, however, would seriously obscure the phenomenological advance made by Kierkegaard over Aquinas. Allowing the will to stand for a variable state of a ‘dialectical’ economy in which knowing and desiring are at odds with each other, and seeing its variety in terms of strategies which confer truth on propositions easier or more convenient to accept than those that correspond to true judgement, avoids both the rationalistic bias and the abstraction of Aquinas’s account. It places despair, as the sum of these strategies, realistically within its living psychological context, as what, as Anti-Climacus often expresses it, pretty well all of us in our whole being are. Kierkegaard’s account provides the will with a history, a history of the will’s ambivalence: the will to fulfilment, on the one hand, and the will to reduce the developing ‘dissonance’, on the other, between what is possible and what is desirable. In the beginning there may be no will at all in Kierkegaard’s sense (that is, a will whose magnitude is proportional to some standard of selfhood which implies ‘arduousness’). For that there must be some distance and some difficulty, and ‘someone who has no will at all is no self’. The distance and difficulty can be understood in the terms of Hegel’s Phenomenology as the development from a state of undifferentiated union through differentiation to a higher reunion in differentiation. The attractions and repulsions of the irascible soul enter the picture once the differentiation has begun. From then on the two faces of the will are magnified in 146

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proportion to what standard the ‘self’ measures itself by, and the will to ‘will one thing’ becomes ever more arduous. We must not confuse the situation in which distance has not yet occurred (phenomenologically) with that in which its absence is the result of a subconscious stratagem whereby distance is erased by conveniently manufactured ‘knowledge’. Such stratagems are not necessarily ‘in the mind’, that is to say, conscious; they can be latent, for instance, in petit-bourgeois habits of life and thought which offer no scope to imagination. Accepting such habits may be a stratagem all the same, and a very effective one at that, the protective measure that Anti-Climacus calls ‘spiritlessness’. As noted earlier, these habits safeguard those who live according to them from the dialectic of despair and its opposite, from the positive movement possible for the ‘double-minded’. Such people believe they already will the good, which for Kierkegaard (here unprotected by any pseudonym) is the only thing that can be willed ‘as one thing’.41 But of course imaginative people too can produce this illusion by leading their lives in fantasy. What is common to them is that they are turned away from some higher standard of selfhood. As Anti-Climacus says, ‘they contrive gradually to obscure the ethical and ethico-religious knowledge which should lead them into decisions and consequences not endearing to their lower natures’.42 For lower nature read ‘concupiscence’. We noted earlier that the theological connotation of this term embraced a longing for worldly things. In Kierkegaard this longing has a deeper side: it is a clinging desperately to the worldly in order to escape unendearing thoughts about what it means to be a self. Choosing something less arduous (and ‘lower’) serves to obscure knowledge of something more arduous (and ‘higher’). Despair at its highest levels is sin. ‘Sin’, says Anti-Climacus, ‘does not consist in man’s not having understood what is right, but in his not wanting to understand it … .’43 Note again that it is not the desperation of the clinging that is Kierkegaardian despair. Whether or not also desperate, despair itself is always a kind of evasion or flight. Normally, it is true, we think of evasion and flight as typically rational notions: if one steps aside or seeks cover, one does so for reasons that are obvious. Kierkegaard’s account of despair assumes one may take avoiding action without realizing it. That is a difficult idea but surely not an implausible one. As Anti-Climacus says, each human being is ‘primitively organized as a self’.44 Selfhood in his sense is a strain because it is seen in terms of a selfhood ‘established’ by God and not by your affiliations or by yourself;45 so much of a strain, indeed, that no one outside or inside Christendom escapes despair, except perhaps the odd ‘wholly’ true Christian.46 What is ‘arduous’, in Thomas’s sense, is the fact that to be this self requires a radical deconstruction of what we normally call selfhood. The selves we like to think of ourselves as being or becoming must first be ‘broken down’.47 Giving way to the deeply implanted resistance to this is despair. 5 So far we might say that Kierkegaard’s concept of despair is basically Thomas’s. Differences have appeared but some of them, as in the case of faith 147

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versus knowledge, are irrelevant to the basic notion of despair as flight or evasion. Others, as in the case of will, are real but still do not directly affect the basic notion. One might therefore feel justified in suspecting that the isolated remark in Postscript about despair being peevishness has a secret Thomist origin, or that Aquinas’s desperatio and Kierkegaard’s Fortvivlelse share a common origin. On the other hand you might not suspect that at all. Indeed you might suspect something altogether different, namely that this whole examination has been misdirected from the start. Anyone at all familiar with Postscript may think that. I said at the beginning that Climacus’s remark that all despair is a kind of bad temper comes ‘out of the blue’. But the remark about peevish despair comes at the end of a long discussion of humour and so not really out of the blue at all. A word we could have been using all along is ‘ill-humour’. Surely all that is intended is some sort of contrast between a sense of the comic and despair as two distinct and opposed attitudes to ‘it all’. But I said I had a reason for not mentioning this. I would like to turn the tables on those who would respond in this way. Where they will point out, as is correct, that ‘Arrigskab’ can be translated as ‘ill-humour’, and that the term has no other origin than the need to mark humour’s ‘other’, I propose that it was worth considering that Kierkegaard’s ‘humour’ is introduced as the irascible’s other. The point can be made quite briefly. What Climacus says is that ‘despair is always the infinite, the eternal, the total’, though in its case, and as against humour, in ‘the instant of impatience’. Impatience is obviously enough within the irascible; but humour is not, for in humour, just as in sadness, delight, and so on, there is no sense of a difficulty to be overcome. Yet humour can certainly be appropriate to the appreciation of difficulty, especially someone else’s difficulty, or – to get to the point – of a difficulty an sich without special reference to anyone’s being in or having it, in particular without any reference to the very person who sees the comedy in the situation. What is the situation? As Climacus describes it, it is the ‘contradiction’ between the subjective inwardness of religious concern and the externality of our everyday concerns, but included in the latter our ethical concerns as these are conventionally understood. Humour is ‘the confinium between the ethical and the religious’.48 Religiousness (Climacus’s remarks on humour come at the end of his discussion of Religiousness A’s ‘decisive’ expression) requires, and in part necessarily is, what Kierkegaard calls inwardness. But to develop a relationship of inwardness to God is to isolate oneself from the surrounding world to the point where one’s subjective relation to God and the view one still has on the world as the place for ethical concern appear mutually ‘incommensurable’. The humorist sees the ‘contradictions’ arising here and, because he is an observer and not a true believer (‘he does not relate himself to God’49), is able to see the comic in the contrast. But also, it is only because he has humour that he can see them. The humorist occupies a ‘jesting and yet profound transition area’ where an adequate conception of God brings everyday life as a whole into comic relief. Using the 148

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contrast between comedy and tragedy to make the point, Climacus says ‘the comic is a painless contradiction’, while the tragic is a ‘suffering contradiction’.50 Humour and tragedy both ‘see’ the contradiction, but humour escapes the pain by looking at the ‘way out’ in an uninvolved manner, intellectually, while tragedy looks at it full in the face as an impossibility and ‘despairs’.51 Humour is therefore an essential addition to Thomas’s account. It is not an irascible passion, but it is concerned with the difficulties that irascible passions respond to. Humour is a non-irascible attitude to those difficulties. Like resignation it has no part in the pull and push with which what Aristotle, following Plato, calls the ‘spirited faculty’ occupies itself,52 but it understands the difficulties from above, or perhaps below. Clearly, as a meta-irascible passion, humour is not in the concupiscible. There is room therefore for more than Aquinas’s scheme allows. In confrontation with difficulties in respect of a salient good, besides hope and despair there is also humour. But just because it is a meta-position, or transitional as Johannes Climacus says, like despair, humour sees only totality. Despair, seeing the contradiction but no way out, shrinks from entering the ethico-religious sphere. Despair’s way of being ‘always the infinite, the eternal, the total’, is the ‘impatient’ way. This contrasts with humour, which knows the way out but is not irascibly engaged in testing itself against the difficulty to see if it can actually take that way. But then should we not bend the rules to allow that the humorist is in despair all the same? Isn’t intellectual insouciance in the presence of such matters just another case of flight? Placing it apart from the irascible in the way proposed might be thought itself to be an irascible move on the part of a philosopher, an attempt to avoid the stigma of despair. One answer, satisfactory or not, would be to point to Climacus, who actually insists he is a humorist and admits to being an ‘outsider’.53 Like any philosopher, or at least thinker (he is not a system-builder but a clarifier of concepts, a philosopher in a sense we are better able to recognize than were Kierkegaard’s own contemporaries), he is in the business of clarification. In this case, unlike many thinkers, what concern him are vital matters. They need clarification too, but so also does the individual’s relationship to them, the dynamics of hope and despair. The flight of the humorist is in their service but need not be prolonged beyond what is necessary. The humorist’s position is that of anyone who merely lays out the conceptual facts of some personally important matter, but to do so must take leave of the irascible life which the concepts he uses articulate. Kierkegaard is one step ahead of Aquinas. He takes account of the individual’s relation to the truth. One must suppose that Aquinas would see comedy in the very idea that the contradictions and incommensurabilities Climacus humorously points to are structures of human being made visible to humour. But humour only comes into its own in philosophy when the traditional claims for thought can no longer be upheld.54

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How can we be concerned with one another without sharing values and interests, without being relevantly similar or even the same? The answers seem too obvious for the questions themselves to be more than rhetorical. Yet there are other questions, just as rhetorical, whose obvious answers seem directly to conflict with these. How can I be concerned with you unless I regard you as the independent source of your own interests, as relevantly ‘other’. And how can I regard you in that way without releasing myself from the hold upon me of the web of my own personal interests in which my concern with you is interwoven? How, in other words, can you come within the scope of my authentically moral concerns without standing before me as someone totally alien? One might pose these questions under the once fashionable rubric ‘dialectic’. But the dialectic of proximity and apartness here is not Hegelian. If it were, then the conflict would be merely apparent; it would be the result of seeing the terms – you and I – too abstractly and in isolation, of failing to appreciate that in properly ethical contexts closeness and apartness are related to each other internally. On the contrary, I shall suggest that the closeness required of the true ethical relationship presupposes genuine apartness. The philosophical affiliation here is not with Hegel but with Levinas, though it is in Kierkegaard that we find its first as well as clearest expression.1 A mind-catching but potentially misleading way of putting it would be to say that true sharing is the prerogative of mutual aliens. I am suggesting a sense of apartness in which the object of our moral concern eludes conceptualization. What is shared simply gets in the way, and only by removing it does the object become visible. Only then does the ‘other’ come within moral reach. 1 That the object of moral concern should be nearby is a well-entrenched principle of European moral thinking. It finds its historical expression in the New Testament injunction to love one’s neighbour as oneself.2 Of course, ‘neighbour’ need not refer to someone living next door; the word (plesios) as it occurs in the commandment (ton plesion) means ‘the one close by’, and in the everyday marketplace that could be anyone. Yet it is clear that the settled contiguity implicit in the idea of one’s neighbour had special moral significance in the history of the time. To be asked to love the one next door to you is to be asked 150

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to show, even feel, love just at that boundary where equitable relations with your fellow humans are exposed to their severest test, at the wall or fence where the distinction between what is yours and what the other’s is most evident. The significance of neighbour-relations for a society split between local and Roman allegiances is not hard to see; in the face of oppression from above there is clearly room for an alternative way of cementing social relations from below. That might be the origin of the ideal of neighbour love, but it is not how it has come down to us. For us it has the form of a universal principle; we are to love the neighbour as ourself be he friend or foe, at home, in the marketplace, and in the field of conflict. The question is whether the notion contains any ethically viable core that survives this radical de-contextualization. For the modern world, the literal interpretation of the commandment to love one’s neighbour as oneself has clear limitations. First, it is exactly that, a commandment, and Kant’s question immediately arises, whether it is possible to obey it even in the case of those to whom one is not inclined by nature, or social habit, to extend one’s loving concern.3 Second, in the modern world the test of ethicality presented by next-door neighbour relations is more than outweighed by an even greater test, namely the challenge of distance: the physical and psychological distances which, because they remove the immediate perception of others as sharing in our lives, so easily cause moral concern for these others (or any others) to dissipate. Modern technological society, besides pressing individuals out of those community and other consolidating contexts in which moral intuitions were once traditionally fostered and reinforced, allows an enormous expansion of the possibilities of acting in contexts which are morally relevant but where one’s acts of commission and omission have an impact on persons one never has to face at all, let alone across the garden fence. In our own day, moral indifference and callousness present a (to put it mildly) serious and special challenge, not least to our powers of moral imagination. Moreover, the causes of indifference and callousness are not confined to demographic distance; they extend, owing to dissolutional factors of the kind just mentioned, to various forms of psychological distance manifested in an inability or refusal to consider others as sharing in our life. An important inadequacy of the garden-fence analogy is that, besides assuming actual demographic contiguity, by presenting the parties as physical neighbours from the outset it prescinds from all those ethically relevant factors (racism, élitism and other self-serving forms of partiality) which prevent such actual, social contiguity from occurring in the first place. This is clearly a valid objection to any proposal to present the literal interpretation of the injunction to love one’s neighbour as a viable vehicle for serious ethical reflection in our own age. The question then is whether we can find in the New Testament commandment some more far-reaching, perhaps universal, ethical message, not its historical intention perhaps, but some insight to which an original locally good idea has nevertheless given rise and, owing to the spread of Christianity, allowed to become an integral part of a moral culture to which large parts of the world pay at least lip-service. Clearly, a version of the 151

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homely metaphor which abstracts from its homeliness need not inherit objections which apply to it because of its homeliness. There may be something of general significance there after all. And indeed, at least one morally sensitive thinker in our time has fastened on the dialectic of proximity and apartness pinpointed by the next-door neighbour metaphor to construct the makings of a deep-rooted ethics which is advertised also as an ethics of love. That thinker is Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard’s special perspective, from the point of view of the individual, brings certain aspects of the ethical relationship into sharp focus. Whether that perspective is sufficient, or the case for the commandment acceptable, is hard to decide, and there will be no attempt to resolve the matter here. But a preliminary examination of Kierkegaard’s views does help to throw light on questions fundamental to morality. Granting that ethical concern is the active acknowledgement of the interests of persons, Kierkegaard’s claim is in effect that it is not until a person whose concern it is has achieved a state of autonomous selfhood that that address becomes available. There are familiar, not least communitarian, objections to such a view. Let us first see what the view is and then what the objections amount to. 2 First, in order to lay bare the structure and implications of Kierkegaard’s view, it is useful to contrast its apparently fundamental atomism with an opposed view which seeks to establish social ethics on the basis of a supposedly innate communality. Kierkegaard’s ‘I’-based position can be compared with (or contrasted to) Rousseau’s ‘we’-based position. The comparison with Rousseau is especially revealing since Kierkegaard and Rousseau both agree that group identities and distinctions impede advancement to the ethical situation, though in opposite directions. For Rousseau, the non-divisive standpoint of ethics is that of what he calls commonality. It is the notion of a concretely abstract ‘we’, such that, in respect of myself, the other with whom I acknowledge my oneness in the first-person plural is seen in terms of a sameness, a shared generality. From the latter there grows a natural respect for beings capable of referring to themselves individually, that is, able to relate to themselves in the first-person singular. What we share at the level of greatest generality, and what distinguishes us from mere animals, is precisely this self-referential capacity. It is this capacity, therefore, that forms the basis of our commonality. The moral psychological basis for this claim is that the ability to refer to ourselves enables us by the same token to direct a sense of pity at others. A pity directed at others as such is a pity unmediated by the social, political and economic differences which separate us from them. Thus Rousseau’s ‘pity’ is a spontaneous feeling of compassion; it is not a feeling evoked by comparison with others, as would be a pity directed from one or another position of superiority, which then slides so easily into contempt, just as easily as its counterpart, envy, stemming from a position of inferiority slides into resentment. That there is such an uncorrupted pity, based upon the use of the self-referential ‘I’, is due to the alleged fact that self-identities are themselves ‘mediated’, not of course by any social categories, but 152

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by other self-identities, or rather by the sense of interacting directly with others at a level transcending that of social mediation. Why the operative sensation should be pity in particular is explained by Rousseau, in Émile, as follows: We are drawn towards our fellow-creatures less by our feeling for their joys than for their sorrows; for in them we discern more plainly a nature like our own, and a pledge of their affection for us. If our common needs create a bond of interest our common sufferings create a bond of affection. … Imagination puts us more readily in the place of the miserable man than of the happy man. … Pity is sweet because, when we put ourselves in the place of the one who suffers, we are aware, nevertheless, of the pleasure of not suffering like him.4 Any view which can posit a ‘species-ability’ as the basis of human unity has a considerable initial appeal. It provides a focus of ethical attention even where humanity is divided, so that it is possible, by appealing to something all humans have in common, to address one’s fellows across present barriers and work together to eliminate them. There is a sense, then, in which even if universal respect could only reign unhindered in a society where that goal was achieved, it may also reign in the form of a good will in a world where actual distinctions still obstruct social, political and economic unity. There are nevertheless severe defects in any such view. In the first place, the unity posited is merely abstract: a species-function is selected, in this case that human beings are particulars in a special, self-reflective way. The ability of every human being to ascribe that same function to other human beings is made the basis of an innate or primordial sense of ‘we’. But what is the ethical content of this notion? Indeed what content does it have at all beyond providing one means of differentiating the human species from others? In order to have ethical content, the notion would have to address the relations in which human beings stand to one another, yet all the notion can provide is a metaphor which represents humanity in all its plurality and division suspended as though from a single peg. Finally, even if that metaphor could be translated into a position with relevance for either politics or ethics, the implications of that position would not speak at all convincingly for it. Politically, it is exposed to the objection that society is of necessity differentiated (Hegel’s objection to the abstract ‘citizenship’ of the French Revolutionaries). It is also exposed to the same objection that can be levelled at Marxism, namely that it is uncritical, not to say naïve, to assume an innate but repressed first-person-plural unity whose spontaneous flowering waits only upon the removal of the institutions that divide people externally. Ethically, it is exposed to the objection that even were non-divisive political unity possible, ethics is directed in the first instance at fellow beings in their present divisions and differences. Here Rousseau’s pity, an ability vicariously to feel the other’s sorrow, may seem to do service. But remember, this is no ordinary pity; it is a pity uncontaminated 153

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by relative positions in social space. The pitier is to conceive him- or herself and the pitied as sharers in a common humanity by virtue of a general characteristic beyond social differentiation. But what is it in that characteristic which counts as something actually being shared? The question is analogous to that posed of membership in Kant’s kingdom of ends, and the only answer we seem able to give is an abstract defining characteristic of human being. No doubt pity and concern for human suffering and sorrow are an essential part of moral psychology, but regrettably they are not a universally defining characteristic of human being, and if the claim is that pity would not even be possible but for the special manner of human particularity, then the answer is that the very same is true of failure to show pity or concern, of callousness and every form of inhumanity. Indeed, if we look more closely at this special manner of human particularity, the way in which human being becomes an object for itself, it may appear that what comes first to light in this capacity for self-reflection is not the notion of human being at all, a general concept, but particularity, the self and its own interests. And not the general concept of particularity either, but particularity itself. 3 It is just this that underlies Kierkegaard’s contrasting view. For Kierkegaard, generalities are not merely modes of human differentiation and possible division; more fundamentally, they are protective devices shielding the individual from a desolate sense of its sheer particularity. Or, more to our point, they are psychological strategies shielding the individual from the unwanted insight into a fact which the ability to refer to oneself in the first-person singular brings with it, namely that the differentiating social and political categories in terms of which we fashion our self-images are pure contingencies and not the clothes of any lastingly true selfhood. Let us, in outline, note the main strands of Kierkegaard’s thought here: first his criticism of the belief that one must always act as a member of a group or association on behalf of group aims, and the corresponding belief that human freedom and fulfilment are to be found in the idea of a universal affiliation. This associational idea is by no means foreign to political rhetoric; it has formed the ideological underpinning for many a political movement. Kierkegaard refers to it as ‘levelling’. This is not so much a refusal to accept exceptionality per se, getting everyone to step in line, as a refusal to see the ethical agent except under some socio-political category, so that one never acts on one’s own beliefs and behalf. At bottom, then, levelling is an evasion, a refusal to accept the challenges and claims of individuality. It is a flight into abstraction, and levelling itself is, as a motivating factor, ‘an abstract power’ and its influence ‘abstraction’s victory over individuals’.5 In levelling, Kierkegaard writes, ‘the dialectic turns away from inwardness and wants to render equality in the negative; so that those who are not essentially individuals constitute an equality in external association …’.6 The unity of association is a ‘negative unity’ involving a ‘negative mutuality’.7 It is negative because, in Kierkegaard’s categories, it places sociality in the external and temporal instead of in the subjective and eternal. Similarly, negative mutuality is the mutuality of an overriding commitment to common rules of association, of shared duties and 154

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rights, under an associative umbrella which covers associates indiscriminately and protectively. The most inclusive umbrella of all is the ‘higher negativity’ of ‘pure humanity’,8 the association of all associations, which Kierkegaard considers the typical fabrication of an age of reflection. It enables people to suppose quite spuriously that they have a personal identity simply by being human. What precisely are the claims and challenges of individuality? The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s main text on selfhood, talks of an ‘act of separation in which the self becomes aware of itself as essentially different from the environment and the external world and their effect on it’.9 There are several ways of reading this notion of separation, but it is clear that what Kierkegaard refers to is not simply the ability to refer to oneself in the first-person singular. The separation comes as a development within what is normally called self-consciousness. In general terms one might say it was a sense of an essential distinction, even an incongruity, between the ‘I’ as possessor of all and whatever predicates make up its sense of a continuing identity and these predicates themselves. The incongruity could even be said to stem from the general capacity to refer to oneself in the first-person singular, simply because this capacity of the ‘I’ is the continual possibility of reviewing, looking upon, the characteristics with which it is identified, but from a position which transcends not only them but also the ‘I’ itself. The ‘I’ is always one jump ahead of the characteristics with which it would identify itself and systematically eludes its own glance. This is a Sartrean manner of expression but captures the general point. However, in Kierkegaard’s case, the predicates in question are special by being those which define some respect or respects in which the project of personal fulfilment has been essayed. We may think of them in particular as being those predicates specifying social roles whereby, in sharing these predicates with others, we aspire to some form of human universality, or perhaps just respect and honour – as though that was what counted for fulfilment. The act of separation is, then, one in which it is acknowledged that personal fulfilment cannot be provided by any such predicate. The first consequence of the act of separation is the acknowledgement that the ‘I’ is essentially bare. But then, since the appropriateness of ascribing a predicate to the self is the only way in which the ‘I’ can be said to share any characteristic or property at all with other ‘I’s, in finding itself bare or naked (‘naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy’10), the ‘I’ also finds itself radically alone, in the face not only of its peers but also of transcendent reality and, if He exists, God. Here, then, we have one term in the dialectic of proximity and apartness. Aloneness is apartness. But what ethical implication has this? As the quotation above asserts, the difference in kind implied by the act of separation also means that the naked self sees that its nature, if it is to have one, is not the ‘effect’ of the environment and the external world. Here we can detect a Kantianism in Kierkegaard’s thought: the naked self deprived of the fulfilments which seemed available in the state of its ‘immediate’ consciousness through common, roletaking attribution, recognizes that in order to be itself, whatever that may be, it must at least prevent such attributions from motivating whatever activities are to 155

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be its fulfilling ones. So, the naked and alone ‘I’ is also in a sense autonomous, but only in a negative sense. For according to Kierkegaard, this is only the ‘first form of the infinite self’; it is the ‘progressive impulse’ which sets in motion the process of fulfilment, ‘the entire process through which the self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages’.11 4 The kernel of Kierkegaardian ethics (not, be it noted, that of the quasiHegelian ethical life-view depicted in Part Two of Either/Or, in which the implications of the religious aspect have not been drawn out as they are in the works that followed) lies in this notion of taking possession of the ‘actual’ self. But what does that mean? A comparison with Kant can help. Kant’s categorical imperative is designed to guarantee motivation by the idea of membership of the association of all human associations. In acting morally you take the side of humanity in general and focus upon an ideal of impartial considerateness, and you do that by removing yourself in the moral moment from the push-and-pull of inclination. The categorical imperative is, as Kant says, a compass which the moral agent carries around so as to be able to chart the moral course in any event or situation.12 There is no provision for the possibility that pushes and pulls of inclination can themselves be transformed in a way that would make the compass redundant. That, by contrast, is exactly what becoming, or taking possession of, the actual self is intended to amount to. Instead of the notion of a natural self, with its affections and partialities in the situation, being set aside in favour of an impartial but abstract ideal of agency, we have the notion of an actual self primed to respond impartially to its immediate environment. At a pinch, the ideal of impartiality might be called love, love of one’s neighbour, or loving one’s neighbour as oneself. If we ignore the emotive overtones of the term ‘love’ for a moment, we can see that the notion of love and of an ethical relationship coincide. Or at least we can see this if we allow that ethics is primordially an interest in the interests of others. Further, and still retaining something of the form of love, if not yet admitting any clear foothold for its content, an ethical concern for the other is a concern that is not hedged about with conditions. Of course there are forms of love which are so hedged about. You love the other because you are attracted to the other, so that if the other or your own susceptibilities changed significantly, then the love would cease. Preference, clearly, is an expression of such a condition, the condition under which you prefer, or are attracted by, one person in preference to another. Preferential love, then, is self-regarding at least in the sense that it does not address itself fully to the other. Kierkegaard claims that ‘to love the one who is preferentially nearer one than all others is self-love’.13 What would it be fully to address the other? What or who is the other? Any individual is a continuous, finite subject of experiences, with a sense of identity through experiences, and with a focus of its own interests for the future. How do you address such a person? What is it to love them? Surely it is to consider the whole history as it has been and how it may be, subject to whatever changes may 156

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occur. Suppose the one you love preferentially suffers a transformation, disfiguration perhaps, plus some significant personality change, as in Alzheimer’s disease, possibly acquiring characteristics by which, in Kant’s words, you are no longer attracted but ‘repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion’.14 Love will require that none of this makes any difference; for if it did, your love would be shown to be conditional. It would by the same token be preferential, because, given the same susceptibilities, you would prefer another with the preferred characteristics to the one who once had them but, having now lost them, has lost also the ability to attract you.15 5 The ideal of adequately addressed love of the concrete other is in effect a transformation of the abstract ‘we’. Both it and the ‘we’ of membership of the association of associations are specifications of the notion of ‘anyone’. The difference is that by bringing the notion of anyone to earth in the shape of the other, the ‘we’ is now specified under the category of the particular and not of the universal. Instead of ‘we’ being innately, primordially, even politically derivable from human nature, we see it now as having to be constituted in and by the particular itself, the individual, in the relation it establishes to the other. ‘We’ now embraces particulars not by virtue of accidents of affection or affiliation which abstract from the ‘I’s in the relation, but by virtue of being a relation between genuinely concrete ‘I’s. Your ‘neighbour’ – the one hard by, on any morally relevant occasion – is such an ‘I’, another ‘I’ accessible or ‘visible’ for the first time as such only when the veil of preference has been lifted. The essence of the view is that the ethical sense of the universal is one of a commonality that must be established by human beings, and is not inherent in any given property whereby the beings that are human are picked out as such, or whereby those animals that are human are picked out as human animals. Establishing this sense of commonality is itself a task for the individual, the task of becoming ethical. Indeed, for Kierkegaard this is what selfhood means. Selfhood, becoming an ‘I’, is for Kierkegaard therefore a rigorous concept. But until we have this ‘I’, we cannot have a ‘we’ either. For ‘we’ does not express some characteristic innate to humankind, and if ‘we’ has any ethical reference, it is not to any feature of our social forms but to the individual will, which may or may not be expressed in social forms. The primordial sense of ‘we’ is the will to society, and that will has to be cultivated and maintained. Before that intention can be acquired in its adequate form, the ‘I’ must be wrested from immediacy in the face of the blandishments, subterfuges and protective devices of association. One has to become an individual apart from other individuals before one can establish a relation with those other individuals, who in terms of their ‘actual’ selves are also individuals apart and faced with the same task of realizing those selves so as to be able to will society. 6 As one would expect, there are several objections to be raised. At this stage, however, I shall be mentioning just two, because these are based partly on 157

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misunderstandings and should be ignored. The first of these objections is that the conception of ethical relationships here is excessively, even maximally, atomistic; and the second is that the whole idea is based on an illegitimate extension of the notion of love, so that even if a relation of the form described were feasible, ‘love’ could never be the right word to describe its content. Limitations of space preclude my entering into detailed discussion of these questions,16 but I shall offer some comments directed at the misunderstandings. The objections, and replies, fit quite neatly into a distinction between ‘affiliation’ and ‘affection’. (a) The first objection (today it would be called communitarian) is that affiliative ‘we’-relations are of the essence of ethics or social morality, and therefore the claim that an ‘I’–‘I’ relation forms the basis of ethics is misconceived. In respect of Kierkegaard, however, the objection would itself be misconceived, because it ignores the way in which his notion of taking possession of the actual self involves accepting the self as it is in its situation, in all its affiliative relations, but now addressing both itself and its relationships from an ethical point of view which focuses on the individuals in these relationships. Of course, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, the objection would be misconceived in any case if it stemmed from the idea that ethical relations are to be understood on the model of affiliation. But in denying that, Kierkegaard is not making the Kantian (or Rawlsian) mistake which communitarians point to, namely that the categorical imperative (or the veil of ignorance) is a compass designed to determine the ethical (or equitable political) course in defiance or ignorance of personal ties and reciprocal sympathies based on shared interests.17 This form of reply may not appease every communitarian scruple, for it may still be objected that by making the unconditionality of one’s address to the other itself so unconditional, even such ordinary yet ethically significant relationships as maternal and paternal love will fail the test. And Kierkegaard does indeed say things which might suggest that. Thus because even the requirement that I might be the one to bestow love on the other is a condition on the love, this again means that the love fails to be addressed to the other. But if love has the form of an interest in the interests of the other (ignoring here how these interests are to be determined), there are surely cases where the interest of the other is exactly that I or perhaps you should be the one to bestow that love. Having the interest in question, that is, in the interests of the other, is subject to an appreciation of what the interests of the other are, and these may well be expressed in the expectations aroused in the other by the mores which would lead to a sense of desolation and abandonment if the love were not directed from the accepted source but came, for instance, in the form of a welfare cheque. Of course, in another society that might be the expectation, and if the legitimate interests of the other include not having such expectations disappointed, that would have to be known by the person intent on doing the loving thing. But, at a guess, in most societies the child’s interests would include having its interests catered to by a parent or the human functional equivalent. 158

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(b) Kant concluded, when faced with the Christian commandment of universal love, that whatever the form of a moral intention, its content cannot be what we call ‘love’, for what we mean by that is by its very nature instinctual. Consequently acts of will are superfluous where love already exists, and ineffectual where it does not. He recommended, therefore, that, in interpreting the commandment, we replace the impossible duty to love one’s neighbour with that of trying to like practising one’s duties towards one’s neighbour.18 One reply would be to say that it is tendentious of Kant to adopt as his model of love something which tends in the direction of infatuation. He might have done better to consider the ‘cooler’ Aristotelian notion of friendship (philia), which Aristotle distinguishes from the ‘emotion’ of liking (philesis), because unlike the latter it is based on a ‘fixed disposition’.19 We note that Aristotle’s description of friendship conforms with our own proposal concerning at least the form of love; he says that it is ‘those who wish the good of their friends for their friends’ sake who are friends in the fullest sense’.20 Since dispositions can be trained, why not propose that one’s friendship can be trained to cover the ‘anyone’ who fills the role of ‘neighbour’? A difficulty with this is pinpointed by Aristotle’s own remarks about what motivates true friendship. It has to be something that elicits the affection, and even though Aristotle allows there to be some absolute quality of goodness in a person that attracts the affection of friendship, it is still a quality of the person, whereas, as we saw, the ideal of universal love has to overcome, as Kant rightly says, the case where you are ‘repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion’. Also, it seems, as Aristotle also points out, that the affection of friendship has to be ‘prompted by similarity’,21 and since the similarity here is not universal, in terms of universal love that would be just another manifestation of preference and therefore conditionality. A promising solution might be to say that universal love, and the feature that warrants the use of that word as an extension at least of the Aristotelian friendship model (but perhaps even more), is based not on any recognizable feature, not, that is, on any actually perceived goodness or whatever, but on the decision to ascribe some notion of autonomous value to every human being. The Kantian notion of ‘end in itself’ comes to mind. But Kant believed the attribution to be backed by objective reason, which is just another form of cognitive realism, in this case a characteristically rationalistic form. The point, initially, is that the values people (and animals and things) have are not functions of the pleasure others derive from them, or their power to attract in others friendly relations of concern. Why? One reason is that pleasure and utility provide a poor perspective from which to discern inherent value. That would also be an objection to Aristotelian friendship based on what mutual friends took to be the instrinsic good that they both shared; the particular quality they find likeable in each other may not be the good that really resides in them. But according to the assumptions of the present proposal there would be no such value to be found residing there anyway. What the solution says is that the value is attributed on the basis of the idea that all 159

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things, including persons, have their own value, and in the case of persons, that this value belongs to what can be achieved from the position of particularity. 7 This may sound no better than the abstract feature which we criticized Rousseau for positing. Indeed, we may seem merely to have come full circle, the only change being – and it may not seem a gain – that now we have the ethical agent arbitrarily positing the feature in order to justify ethical performance, instead of deriving it, as Rousseau himself did, from some agreed aspect of human existence. And yet, by positing this feature, we place the other – any other with whom we enter into a morally relevant relation, and however lacking in the properties that would normally elicit concern in us – in a context of mutual moral development. We add to his or her recognizable features a dimension our attribution of which to them is already, on our part, an expression of good will or love. In addition, this feature is still nevertheless one that ‘attracts’ us to them in terms of what can be done to bring them, too, to the point of moral self-insight, from which they in their turn can posit this feature in others. This may not seem sufficient to attract us to them; but if not we can still add what in Kierkegaard’s thought is clearly the real source of the attraction. In seeing the other in this light we are partaking in God’s (distributive) love of humankind. Whatever further objections arise at this point, and it is not hard to anticipate their tenor, there is at least something to be said in terms of the autonomy of moral discourse itself for a solution which posits, as a principle of ethical relationship, some property the very positing of which is itself a moral act. A further fact in favour of the view is that to decide to treat others as autonomous centres of moral development is the exercise of a specifically human ability, just as much a feature of human being as the ability to refer to oneself in the firstperson singular. And when it comes to deciding, in terms of ethical relations, which of these two deserves to be called foundational, there is something to be said for preferring the former. After all, in the light of the view as we have outlined it, exercising this particular ability is the only way in which the world can actually manifest itself to human beings in genuinely moral terms, the only way in which there can be a world of which a disinterested regard for the other is a universally defining feature. 8 But is that not an exaggerated and unnecessary demand? Perhaps morality should be seen instead as a Manichaean conflict in which basically good (or other-regarding) and basically evil (or self-regarding) people struggle for supremacy or survival. Many will object on post-Nietzschean grounds to a morality based on Christian compassion and might be willing to dispense with the notion of morality in any case, or at least under that loaded name. Others would not be seriously disturbed philosophically if the world betrayed no moral dimension but morality had to be worked out by humans contractually, or perhaps, as Habermas would have it, simply by living up to the ideals implicit in the very nature of their discourse. 160

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Still, it would be wrong to dismiss the Kierkegaardian perspective too quickly, either on Nietzschean grounds or more generally. In the first place, Kierkegaard’s insistence on the particularity of the individual brings several easily obscured aspects of the ethical relation into focus. One of these is the reality of the other as a separate subject of experiences, a fact easily lost sight of in traditional theories of ethics, which, by marginalizing the individual’s own sense of moral integrity, tend to denature rather than elicit the moral personality. Secondly, systems of law, political institutions and social habits are usually assumed to be ethically effective, and necessary, extensions of private morality. They extend the scope of natural concern to morally relevant reference groups and serve as guarantees of the exercise of such concern where moral feeling is no longer present, or, if present, no longer works. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, however, they appear in the guise of surrogate moral agents which, by relieving actual agents of their own responsibilities, allow those very dispositions to atrophy which motivated the laws, practices and institutions in the first place, thus leaving political institutions to be steered by more sinister forces. 9 It is here, finally, that Kierkegaard’s thought provides an interestingly particularistic, though undeveloped, parallel with Nietzsche. What they have in common is the idea that excellence is the outcome of struggle. The agon in Nietzsche is one in which Dionysian chaos is channelled into creative order; conflicting and mutually destructive forces are converted into constructive activity, and energies which otherwise work divisively, and in the ends of power, are harnessed into socially creative ends.22 In Kierkegaard this motif appears in the ontogenesis of the ethical agent, first in Either/Or where the destructive aesthetic forces which ‘poetize’ the other out of reality are brought under the stabilizing influence of selfhood,23 and later where motivations that split the self are brought together under the unifying ideal of the eternal. Just as in Nietzsche the power play of politics is favoured because the social politics of pity serves merely to conceal lack of the strength and dignity to stand alone, so in the struggle out of which Kierkegaard’s individual emerges there is a hardening against the pity one is disposed to feel for human suffering, and the emergence of an ethics in which suffering is accepted as an inescapable challenge. Pain and suffering then become part of the struggle out of which alone true individuality and ethical excellence can be sustained. Accordingly, as with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard too opposes prudentialism and social programmes which presuppose in their beneficiaries fear, insecurity and self-interest.24 Unlike Nietzsche’s, Kierkegaard’s agon is decidedly moral. Its telos, or ‘excellence’, is the formation of a genuinely social intention. His idea is that the latter implies treating others as autonomous generators of value, and this requires the would-be moral agent to struggle free of attachments to the other, since these reduce the metaphysically incontrovertible otherness of the other to a feature of the would-be moral agent’s own world. Similarly, morality is not the immersion of individuality in common projects, but a devotion to being the kind of being a human being is, a being capable of individual and autonomous ethical reflection.25 161

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This devotion is expressed in situ, in daily dealings with one’s fellows, the neighbour or the one close by. ‘Neighbour’ means anyone with whom one stands in relations of responsibility. ‘Close by’ means anything from visibly across the garden fence to invisibly at the receiving end of a ballistic missile.

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A main motif in the subsection of A Literary Review entitled ‘The Present Age’ (Nutiden) is something Kierkegaard calls ‘levelling’ (Nivellering). The metaphor of levelling has many applications. Most historical examples are literally down to earth. The Irish levellers were agrarian agitators who tore down hedges enclosing common ground. They were preceded, in English history, by a group of levellers so-called for removing park palings as well as hedges, in this case from crown lands. But both had an underlying political motive which in a more abstract sense is what really gave them their name. That sense became quite explicit with certain radicals in the time of Charles I and the Commonwealth; they were ‘levellers’ because they insisted that everyone should have equal eligibility to public office. What Kierkegaard means by levelling is something more ethereal even than politics. In his first reference to levelling in the Review he describes it as a ‘quiet, mathematically abstract affair … [that] avoids all fuss [Ophævelse]’.1 That it cannot be political is obvious, at least not in the way usually associated with egalitarian ideals being framed and fought for by removing physical and other kinds of barriers to free association and opportunity, forcibly if need be. The levelling Kierkegaard speaks of is at odds with any kind of passion or the forceful pursuit of ideals. A rather curious observation in the same passage says that the process called ‘levelling’ blocks the channels for passionate action, with the result that enthusiasm can only occur in the stunted form of fads and crazes and, as here, even the longing for something calamitous to happen if only to gain some sense of life itself: ‘While the eruptive short-term enthusiasm might look despondently for some misfortune, just to taste the strength of existence, nothing can help the apathy that succeeds it, any more than it helps the levelling engineer.’ To pinpoint this notion of levelling I shall compare it with two others, both of which, besides being distinguishable from it, are relevant in our Kierkegaardian context. One kind of levelling, also abstract, is that of the Stoics in their strategic withdrawal from the vicissitudes of the world. But it is strategic and thus not abstract in the sense of Kierkegaard’s levelling. The aim of the Stoics was to cultivate a kind of self-immunization from what they considered to be irrational responses that embraced all forms of guilt and regret. Their aim was the edifying one of impassivity in the face of the ups 163

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and downs of direct personal engagement. You could indeed call the result of this form of levelling a kind of apathy, but unlike the apathy Kierkegaard mentions in the above quotation, the cultivated ‘apathy’ of the Stoic is not an indolence, such as Kierkegaard says people in his time are prone to. Apathy with the Stoics is due to strenuous efforts of self-cultivation on the part of individual levellers. This idea of cultivating personality, or as one might say in the case of the Stoics a kind of impersonality, is at the roots of the traditional notion of the moral point of view. Stoic levelling thus points to a paradigm according to which levelling takes the form of an ideal elimination of the subject, or agent, as a locus of purely personal interests, and its replacement by a point of view beyond and ‘above’ such interests. The notion here of levelling-up, or levelling as elevation, may suggest the opposite of levelling considered on the analogy of the levelling engineer, who usually levels down. But this elevation can just as well be described by a metaphor of descent, a levelling with the wider reference group that climbs down from the obtrusions of private interests.2 If we ask whether Kierkegaard represents this tradition in his writings, we will have to say that he does, even though, as the above remarks indicate, it is not this that concerns him in the Review. That is not to say, however, that the latter is not to be understood on the background of that tradition. In Kierkegaard’s published works the verb ‘to level’ (at nivellere) occurs first in the dissertation on the concept of irony. He says there that what ‘typifies irony is the abstract measure through which it levels everything’.3 Here again we note the reference to abstraction. To grasp Kierkegaard’s meaning we need to consider two sides to the levelling engineer’s purposes. He first creates an even surface upon which then to build something new. It is an interesting feature of Kierkegaard’s work on irony, both in the dissertation and subsequently, that it moves from a focus on the negative aspects of irony to irony’s edifying possibilities, or the cultivation of what Kierkegaard, in compliance with his tradition, calls ‘personality’. If we follow the story up to the end of the first part of Either/Or, we will see how, having going through the various infra-stages of the aesthetic point of view, the increasingly self-conscious aesthete is left with the problem of perpetually creating and trying to re-create his own aesthetically satisfying world. It is at this point that the ethicist confronts the aesthete with the proposition that his life is one of despair4 and that what he is despairing of is being a self, something that the ethicist then claims requires a life in conformity with our first paradigm. Without the edifying possibilities drawn from the idea that the levelling engineer is preparing the ground for something new, we are left with what might be called Dostoevskian or Karamazovian levelling: the levelling that occurs when God is pronounced dead and anything or everything is possible or permitted. This provides our second paradigm of levelling. It can be called nihilism. Out of the unlimited freedom of choices with which such levelling leaves you, you are free also to choose your own moral point of view, a position outlined in Sartre, which could be called an ethicist’s version of Karamazovian levelling. But there is also a post-modern or Nietzschean version, aesthetic rather than ethical: Karamazovian 164

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levelling gives one a chance to demonstrate the quintessentially post-modern virtue of being a self-with-its-world that one has designed from scratch. The ultra-liberal, cosmopolitan, non-exclusionary culture whose negative aspect earns it the title of ‘modern nihilism’ is a culture in which we are left with the aweinspiring but sub specie aeternitatis ludicrous challenge of designing or defining our own worlds. In the progression through the infra-stages of the aesthetic mode of existence marked out in the first part of Either/Or and culminating in the melancholy, boredom and despair of the later, reflective stages, the world as it appears to the aesthetic mode of existence becomes drained of significance. It levels. Note that the aesthetic mode in the long run actually finds the world in this way. It is not a way in which the aesthete actively ‘defines’ the world. The designer-world of Karamazovian aestheticism is not itself designed; it is more like a condition of things brought about unwittingly through some inner logic of the prior position or attitude. According to Either/Or, it is only in the reflective stage of the aesthetic mode of life, and in its defiant attempts to exploit its self-consciousness in favour of the position, that the definition of the aesthetic point of view as deficient takes shape. This then marks the point at which the positive aspect appears. The sense in which irony levels is one in which it discloses the (ethical) space in which a self can appear, if only the subject will move into that space instead of fleeing it, as the reflective aesthete more or less deliberately does, or instead of refusing to enter into it in spite of a latent acknowledgement that it is the place to go. This flight is part of what Kierkegaard calls despair, a shunning of the next step, turning one’s back upon it, giving up of hope. Irony’s levelling then, in spite of the Romantic features of melancholy, and so on, associated with it, which make subjectivity a problem, indeed which largely eradicate it, has a positive part to play.5 In order now to place Kierkegaard in relation to our first paradigm of levelling I would like briefly to locate the notion of personality and its cultivation in the context of what Kierkegaard inherits from the Romantics. The concept of personality in a philosophic context stems in the first instance, or so I believe, from Novalis. It was a means of conveying a broadened conception of the self in which imagination and the power of poetic feeling and expression play their part. The Romantics retained the title of ‘philosophers’ because, for them, the unity of finite and infinite, reality and ideality, was still a goal. The tradition felt it had grounds for claiming a superior, because more ‘real’ or ‘actual’, understanding of that goal. It required, in a way that parallels Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel, a fuller engagement of the person than was the case in what was considered to be Fichtean ‘intellectualism’. Truth could be expressed in forms of experience available to a well-tuned personality. Truth, or awareness of it, became a matter of degree tied to the extent of a human being’s participation in it. An epistemic value came in this way to be conferred on the idea of a unified personality. Hegel, who, as we shall later note, also adopts the notion of personality, offers 165

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a traditionally philosophical account of the unified personality. In contrast, one can say that Kierkegaard’s notion of unity is non-philosophical. But, and this marks a limitation of the parallel with the Romantics’ criticism of Fichtean intellectualism, it is still properly called dialectical, like Hegel’s, and so in another sense might also claim to be philosophical. The Postscript, written just before the Review, says in effect that human beings lack the resources required for unifying themselves, but that personal unification can be brought off if the individual is ‘dialectically consolidated’ in faith.6 The theme of personal unification surfaces in the Review, where Kierkegaard writes of the individual being brought ‘into the closure of agreement with himself ’ (‘i den sluttede Enighed med sig selv’) by the ‘creative omnipotence implicit in the passion of the absolute disjunction’, a strength that has now been ‘transformed into the extensity of common sense and reflection’.7 His own age was one that was dispiritedly removing the dialectical tension required of unified (and unifying) personalities. The remark about extensity and reflection gives us some purchase on what to expect in regard to the levelling that is a main topic of the Review. Levelling here is no part of a spiritual ascent; on the contrary it impedes spiritual growth, although Kierkegaard says that carried to its conclusion it will leave people with a hard choice, the same choice to which Climacus seems to lead the reader more gently.8 Far from being itself part of a spiritual advance, the levelling Kierkegaard talks of in the Review is a process of spiritual stultification, and were it not for the fact, according to him, that it had come to the point where nothing could stop it, it might even look like a deliberate attempt to flee the thought that personality needs to be cultivated at all. But the levelling is not deliberate in any literal sense, since no one actually chooses this stultifying path, and everyone is in any case to some extent on it, as though on an escalator: it is a ‘quiet, mathematically abstract affair’ which ‘avoids all fuss’. One could, however, say it was deliberate in the weaker sense in which people go along with the pressures that impede spiritual progress, rather than regretting them, or trying to delay the inevitable, attempting to go back along the escalator. Compare this with our other two notions of levelling. Unlike the levelling that is sustained in the service of a cultivation of personality or a moral point of view, this requires absolutely no effort; one levels simply by falling in with the ways of others, or finding oneself already having done that. As for what we described as Karamazovian levelling, there the subject still felt a need to become itself by choosing itself and its world. Indeed the sense of alienation only accentuated the need and with it the sense of the almost overpowering importance and difficulty of the choice. Here, however, it is precisely choice that becomes eclipsed, and with it the need to ‘be oneself’. Readers of Being and Time and the lectures preceding that work will recognize here a model for what Heidegger calls Einebnung, a culture in which Dasein is ‘deprive[d] … of its choice, its formation of judgments, and its 166

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estimation of value’, and which ‘relieves Dasein of the task … to be itself by way of itself’.9 Heidegger’s remarks, so close to Kierkegaard’s that we can all but see the well-thumbed copy of the Review’s German translation lying there zuhanden, provide a notion of levelling which invites careful comparison with Kierkegaard’s. It is tempting to assume that Heidegger drew also on Kierkegaard’s journals. Kierkegaard says in one entry, I know of no man whom it is in the strictest sense true that his life has reached actuality. … No one says ‘I.’ One person talks in the name of the century, another in the name of the public, another in the name of science, another by virtue of his office, and their lives are everywhere guaranteed by tradition, that ‘others,’ ‘the others’ are doing the same thing.10 Still, it becomes clear that the accounts have significantly different foci. Heidegger’s Einebnung is one element in an account of the way in which Dasein can be dominated by its das Man mode. Heidegger pinpoints a ‘phenomenon’ which he labels Abständigkeit. There are various relationships that might call for this metaphor of distance (or distantiality or apartness, as the English translations have it), and the reader may be excused for not seeing immediately which of these Heidegger has in mind. But Abständigkeit turns out to be a deeply embedded concern with difference, so deeply embedded that even the concern to get rid of difference is evidence of it: ‘this concern constantly lives in the concern [Sorge] over being different …even if only to equalize that difference’.11 The difference Heidegger refers to is the way we not only measure ourselves against one another but also identify ourselves by our proximity or apartness (better or worse than) in these respects. So Abständigkeit is not the presence or measure of any specific distance between oneself and others, or ‘the’ others; it is concern with difference überhaupt, whether with measuring up to or even seeing oneself as superior to others, or else the concern to be just like them, whether they are higher or lower, even the concern that everyone should be like everyone else. Abständigkeit is, in short, a way or mode we have of being with others, a structural feature of Dasein as such. But the nature of this concern with difference is to draw Dasein in the direction of the ‘average and everyday’, and the result an absorption in das Man in which there is a ‘levelling of all differences’.12 This is so like Kierkegaard that anyone who has already read him might be inclined to think that what Heidegger means by the ‘distantiality’ involved in measuring oneself in terms of others (and particularly a tendency in doing so to discount or eliminate the differences) is the way in which this concern holds one at arm’s length, so to speak, from one’s own possibilities. The fewer the differences, the greater the absorption, and the less contact with the indexical self or what Heidegger, again echoing Kierkegaard, calls ‘naked being-in-the-world’.13 In other words, Abständigkeit might be the distance such concern with difference creates between Dasein in its das Man mode 167

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and Dasein in some authentic mode. In that case the significance of this distantiality would be that it prevented Dasein from becoming a place, locus or location for the disclosure of truth (about what it is to be with others and to share a world). The thought here would be that in order to become close to others as others, one must be in relation to them at the level of selves, of disclosed selves; whereas the absorption in das Man, although from a certain point of view it may seem an excellent way of getting or acting together, working cooperatively, a selfless way of being about things, in actual fact distances us from each other just as, and because, it distances us from ourselves.14 We have just seen, however, that this is not what Heidegger means by Abständigkeit.15 The phenomenon he points to under that label is concern with difference, not with the distance such concern creates between sharing practices, on the one hand, and being ourselves as particular selves, on the other. This is not to say that Heidegger has no sense of the distance that being part of the anonymous public makes between it and you, and of the implications of being more and more anonymous. Indeed, on some readings of Heidegger, these are matters that concerned him a great deal. It remains true, however, not only that this is not what Abständigkeit is about, but that Heidegger’s remarks on this other dimension, authenticity, remain both sketchy and abstract. The point is that the view here that it would be a mistake to attribute to Heidegger on the strength of his remarks on Einebnung is exactly what Kierkegaard says in the Review. The key word is Udsondring (Udsondring or den individuelle inadvendte Udsondring, but sometimes just indre Sondring).16 Udsondring means a separating or singling out.17 To grasp the notion, we have to see its connection in the text with ‘Idea’, sometimes ‘the Idea’. To many this Hegelianism may sound no more than a piece of empty jargon, a useless relic of the very philosophy Kierkegaard so successfully demolished. It is interesting therefore to see how insistently the terminology persists even in this (just) post-Postscriptian work. Unlike Heidegger, in whom no such Hegelian residue would be expected, Kierkegaard seems to have seen his own task as in some sense a conversion and not just a subversion of the Hegelian enterprise. While Heidegger sets himself up as a steadfast dismantler of traditions, doing his best to dispense with the traditional terminology he thinks connotatively tied to them, Kierkegaard takes hold of the terminology ‘appropriated by speculative thought’18 in order to direct it back upon its proper tasks. In his observations on distantiality, averageness and levelling, Heidegger is opposing a particular tradition. It is, however, one whose links with Hegel are in fact quite tenuous. As many have pointed out, especially Hubert Dreyfus, Heidegger is opposing a way of thinking that takes the subject of experiences to be preconstituted before it can itself constitute a world. He is also, naturally, by the same token opposing the philosophical project that takes its task to be the explanation of how the subject does that. According to Heidegger’s Daseinanalyse, there is not and cannot be such an entity as a subject without its world. It is important to stress, however, that the notion of a worldless subject is entirely antithetic to Hegel’s philosophy. Nor does it occur in Kierkegaard, for all 168

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the accutions of subjectivity heaped on him by latter-day Hegelians. But there is another problem which both Hegel and Kierkegaard do address while Heidegger does not. What it is and how it differs from the allegedly specious question of a worldless subject can be put in the terms of a useful quotation from Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, which goes as follows: For personality, however, as inherently infinite and universal, the restriction of being only subjective is a contradiction and a nullity. Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above this restriction and to give itself reality, or in other words to claim that external world as its own.19 The problem Hegel is expressing here in terms, we note, of personality is one he thinks can be solved or overcome; it is the problem of the subject that experiences itself as no more than subjective and as unable to claim the external world as its own. This is not a version of the problem of the external world as traditionally conceived in post-Cartesian epistemology. There is no question in Hegel of there being a worldless subject, but only of the world there is not being a world in which the subject sees anything of itself. It would be inappropriate therefore to think of Heidegger as beginning where Hegel wrongly thought his long journey down the path of despair could take us. Hegel’s project, though rightly called a unifying one, was of quite another kind; and if Heidegger ever claimed to have put that speculative project in the museum, the reason would have to be not that his Daseinanalyse showed the project to be redundant, but that it showed how Hegel exaggerated the role of philosophy. As to the precise relation of Heidegger’s project to one like Hegel’s, some, and not only Hegelians, may see Heidegger’s Daseinanalyse as a view fixated in the stance of the Hegelian Unhappy Consciousness (think of the notion of ‘naked being-in-the-world’) but with a bargain-basement solution. The answer it gives to the problem of claiming the external world as ‘one’s own’ is that the world is in any case ‘ours’ in the sense of presenting itself in the form of equipment, but also, secondly, in the possibility of the equipmental world of human projects being appropriated individually. Others may see this instead as Heidegger’s virtuous conformity with the philosophical (but also Lutheran) principle that one should live within one’s means. What is in any case clear is that Heidegger’s structural interests lead him to look at authenticity from a perspective diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard’s. Heidegger’s problem is for Dasein to resist its tendency to be absorbed from below; to be ‘still itself ’20 in spite of the pressures that drag it into anonymity. In his pseudonymous works, the problem for Kierkegaard is the reverse. These works are directed at enlarging the self ’s sense of its possibilities though without losing sight of the limitations of existence. Indeed the ‘dialectic’ depends on these two straining against each other, the possibility that the finite is not only finite being the theological requisite of the unity of person169

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ality. When he came to write the Review, however, it looks as if Kierkegaard is seeing the danger from the same point of view as Heidegger. Levelling is an impediment to the grasp of the individual’s own possibilities tout court, with or without the possibility for which there is a theological requisite. I have suggested that the key to the difference lies in Kierkegaard’s retention of the Idea. Outside its specifically Hegelian ramifications, ‘Idea’ signifies a goal of unified understanding of the kind most philosophy up to and including Hegel has been concerned with. It isn’t even an exclusively philosophical notion, belonging also as it does to theology and cosmology as well as politics. When, in the Review, Kierkegaard complains that ‘no big event or idea gripped’ his time,21 he is saying that there is no sustained enthusiasm for such goals. In a reflective age, ideals that had once seized people and inspired them to passionate activity were now just headings for discussion, and there was as much interest, even more, in the principles for undertaking such discussions as in the topics themselves. Some might call this nihilism, but if so it is not of the Karamazov variety. It would be nihilism in the culture-critical sense that values still professed had lost their living content. Not having that content, they are no longer values in the true sense; they do in their spirit as well as letter guide and energize lives. Kierkegaard seems clearly to think that unifying goals should seize people ‘personally’, and that their doing so is the necessary beginning of anything that can be achieved in the general terms of reference within which Hegelian philosophy operates. Ideals that once fuelled the French Revolution were now fashionable expressions of principle on party political agendas. And as for principles and the current call to act on them, Kierkegaard says that a ‘principle’ in its ‘proper sense’ is the Idea taking shape in (and taking the shape of) feeling’s ‘unopened form’.22Looking back now, at the revolutionary times which the author of Two Ages had contrasted with the present, Kierkegaard saw these as having been a time of revelation too.23 The Idea had indeed unfolded and opened, yet not fully. Unlike the more recent post-1830 political movements he had earlier criticized for trying to impose forms on life, the revolutionary age had at least been seized passionately by the Idea, so that its inspiration among the ‘inspired’ still had ‘truth’ in it, for at that time ‘inwardness [was] not abolished’.24 But the Age of Revolution was nevertheless still an expression of human immaturity, a lapse back into immediacy. According to a typology of concerted activity sketched in the Review, at the lowest end of the scale is the raw and formless behaviour of the crowd, in short mob behaviour. Here the crowd is not even informed collectively by an Idea; it lacks a centre of gravity, indeed it lacks any internal structure at all; the crowd is at the mercy of suggestion and governed by primitively holistic psychological reactions. Revolutionary contexts differ. Here a crowd is related en masse to an Idea. But the members are still not separated or singled out as enthusing individually for the ideals inspiring the 170

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revolution; there is passion, certainly, as against a cold formalism, but it is due to the mutual encouragement of numbers and results in violence. If they are so singled out, and the numbers are sufficient, so that effectively concerted action, which of course need not be revolutionary, is on the cards, then the revolution or change will be carried out in the ‘unanimity of the singled-out’.25 In his own time, however, instead of the individual’s relation to the Idea being ‘perfect and normal’ because it ‘singles out individually … and unites ideally’,26 the proper flowering of the Idea in the individual had been brought to a stop by an externalizing of its goals. Politicians, whose close links with the press were a marked feature of the times, aimed to introduce equality in such a way that, as Kierkegaard says, ‘the dialectic turns away from inwardness and wants to render equality in the negative; so that those who are not essentially individuals constitute an equality in external association’. Levelling, he adds, is ‘the faked anticipation of eternal life, which people have done away with as a “beyond” and now want to realize here in abstracto’.27 The remark calls to mind one of Hegel’s that it is a basic mistake of religion to ‘introduce the eternal, the Kingdom of Heaven, on earth’.28 Rather than contradicting Hegel on this point, Kierkegaard can be read as saying that politicians had expropriated the religious goals along with the basic mistake, thinking they could introduce the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Kierkegaard would insist that religious goals are personal, and that means individual, which in turn means ‘individually appropriated’. There is still some conflict: Hegel would have disagreed about this location for the Idea. But they would agree about it being a mistake to introduce the ideals in question in any institutionalized form, be it political or religious. We can readily see now that what is entirely negative about levelling in the Review is that it abstracts from and ideally eradicates the unique locus of human fulfilment, the only place where the ideal can arise in the way it must, that is, in the form of sustained concern on the part of the individual. In a reflective age, enthusiasm is marginalized and manifests itself in brief eruptions, last-ditch protests at the gradual disappearance of ‘personality’. These outbursts are just futile attempts to revert to spontaneous immediacy; they can only last so long and are followed by indolence. Levelling in the Review turns out to be a special case of Abständigkeit: it is that special concern with difference that is the concern to eliminate difference. In Kierkegaard’s analysis the process is not claimed, as in Heidegger, to be structural, although if we put what Kierkegaard says here in conjunction with The Concept of Anxiety, something like a structural claim might well emerge. As it is, Kierkegaard’s eye is trained on the cultural manifestations of what appeared to him to be an unstoppable process. Levelling, for all its inevitability, had its ‘reasons’. One might think, not inappropriately in the light of this typically Hegelian thought, that the reasons were to be found in 171

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the grip of Hegel’s thought (the idea of the Idea) on the times. In the Hegelian System, after all, ‘reduction’ to the rank and file can be the way to spiritual ascent. But by the time the Review was written the Hegel craze was over and there are few grounds for reading it as a criticism of Hegelian politics.29 If the Review addresses politics at all, it speaks to the exaggerated concern shown by liberal politicians towards what Kierkegaard considers mere externals – not so much symbolic externals such as palings and hedges, but the institutional conditions that give priority to formal rights over experience and responsibility. However, the criticism goes much wider than that; indeed it embraces the whole of culture, ways in which people interrelate at all levels. The target is one that Kierkegaard encapsulates in the notion of envy: ‘one wants to drag down the great’.30 So deep is it in the collective consciousness, or so far in the background, that nobody sees it for what it is: it is ‘self-establishing’.31 It is one that wants to drag down; it is Dasein in its das Man mode that does it, not envious individuals, at least not singled-out individuals. In fact, if you were to look for someone responsible for levelling, worse than there being no one at home when you knocked on the door, there would be no door to knock on. What has levelled (in the transitive sense) in such a case is ‘the public’.32 The Review contains a little allegory which in outline captures Kierkegaard’s own fate at the hand of the Corsair. The public is personified by a bored Roman Emperor who has a dog (identified as ‘literary vilification’) let loose on someone just for amusement, knowing he can then blame the dog (by common consent a mere cur) for whatever harm was done.33 Kierkegaard’s colleagues were to ‘go public’ in just this negative sense when they refrained from defending him when he was exposed to scurrilous attacks in a journal they could well pretend they wouldn’t stoop to reading. It is as Heidegger says: ‘The public is involved in everything but in such a way that it has already always absolved itself of it all.’34 Exceptions are quietly suppressed by, as Heidegger also says, ‘the polished averageness of the everyday interpretation of Dasein’, which ‘watches over every exception that thrusts itself to the fore’.35 We have looked at two paradigms of levelling that can be distinguished from Kierkegaard’s in the Review, and also at Heidegger’s near-Kierkegaardian notion. But although we devoted some space to the levelling of irony which in itself is purely negative, we still have no clear picture of Kierkegaard’s position with regard to the first paradigm, the levelling that belongs to a deliberately cultivated moral attutude. A clue can be found in the role assigned towards the end of the Review to ‘the unrecognizables’ (de Ukjendelige).36 Where das Man levelling is the order of the day, no visible authority, either individual or corporate, can stem its progress: no single man – the eminent person in terms of superiority and the dialectic of fate – will be able to halt levelling’s abstraction, for the single man’s is a negative elevation and the age of heroes is over. No 172

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congregation [a reference to the Grundtvigian movement] will be in a position to halt levelling’s abstraction, because in the context of reflection the congregation is itself in the service of levelling. Not even the individualities of nations will be able to halt it, for the abstraction of levelling reflects on a higher negativity, namely that of pure humanity.37 The only hope is that certain individuals by their example, or other forms of indirect influence, succeed in awakening in others a sense of what is positive, namely the weight of moral and social responsibility that lies on each individual. Exerting an influence in this hidden way requires sacrifice and suffering. Summarizing, in a journal entry, not only his experience in the Corsair affair and its aftermath but also his later position in Copenhagen in general, Kierkegaard says: I posed … the problem the whole generation understands: equality between man and man. I posed it executively in Copenhagen. That’s more than writing a few words about it; I expressed it approximately in my life. I have levelled in a Christian sense, but not in the rebellious sense against power and worth which with all my might I have upheld.38 What Kierkegaard means by a Christian way of levelling may be interpreted in the light of a passage in the Review in which he observes that ‘more and more have to renounce the modest yet so copious and God-pleasing tasks of the quieter life in order to realize something higher …’.39 The Christian as such has no special tasks beyond those that confront the ethically concerned individual locally; even in a Christian context, Dasein as such has no possibilities that exceed the range of das Man – I take it that Kierkegaard would agree here with Heidegger. Certainly, there is a clear parallel with Heidegger’s insistence that Dasein is unable, however much it may try or even in imagination succeed, ‘really [to] extricate’ itself from its original das Man mode. But there is also a clear difference. For Kierkegaard, in a properly Christian world no outer distinction would count for your true worth. Living as though that were true would be what it means to answer as well as pose the problem of equality between man and man in practice, the problem Kierkegaard says he expressed ‘approximately’ in his life. Heidegger offers no basis for any worth to be gained beyond that of facing the fact of the finitude of one’s own portable perspective on things. For Kierkegaard, the initially empty portable perspective, what in The Sickness unto Death is called the ‘naked and abstract self ’,40 is where truth begins, the point of view from which one tries to resurrect or reconstitute immediacy, a second immediacy, a happily conscious reabsorption in the world. In Heideggerian terms, the reabsorption might even be described 173

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in terms of a regained but this time self-conscious anonymity – a kind of unrecognizability. Pursuing the anachronism of das Man still further, we can say that just as levelling down in Heidegger’s sense is a ‘levelling of all differences’, 41 so in Kierkegaard’s re-entry project the goal is to take no account of differences as such – not to eliminate them but to allow for them but make them of no consequence. The point in terms of Abständigkeit would be to defy Abständigkeit, in short to cultivate an indifference to difference. In this we see the germ of what Kierkegaard takes true equality to be. It is to be ‘committed’ to bearing the differences one sustains with regard to others but not having them count either for or against one. And if in other people’s eyes they do count, then that too is an insignificant fact. It doesn’t matter who one is or what one does, as long as one gets on with the ‘the modest tasks of the quieter life’, the tasks which he says people ‘more and more renounce … in order to realize something higher’. What in this reflective age they think is higher, he says, is to think over the relationships of life in a higher relationship [until] in the end the whole generation becomes a representation – representing … well, there’s no saying who; a representation that thinks over the relations … well, it’s hard to say for whose sake.42 This would be a negatively levelled world, a common world that is no one’s. As a final addendum to this list of parallels, it could also be said, and against what might seem the obvious objection, namely that Heidegger’s ‘originary’ das Man mode is pre-reflective while Kierkegaard talks of the levelling of a reflective age, that what Kierkegaard means here is nevertheless still very close to Heidegger. What characterizes his age, as he sees it, is not that individuals reflect on their own account but that reflection is the general background mode of the shared life that is anyone’s and correspondingly no one’s. The reflection of a reflective age has none of the intensity of reflective irony, for it has lost its foothold in the individual, or ‘subjectivity’. True, we must observe Heidegger’s remark in the Letter on Humanism that the ‘public realm’ is currently typified by the ‘dominance of subjectivity’.43 But even here the congruence may hold. In one sense to call an age reflective is by the same token just to say that the background mode of the shared life that is anyone’s has a general form best described in terms of the subject–object relation. And the reflective stance is exactly one that freezes the things one unreflectively ‘goes about’ into objects of attention, but precisely for that reason for a ‘subject’ of the kind that was the focus of Heidegger’s criticism, a subject abstracted from its living commerce with things. We can even see an accentuation of this idea in Kierkegaard’s use of mathematical metaphors to convey the character of the underlying and controlling force he calls levelling. A society in which subjects actually become abstract in this way is one in which they themselves become 174

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governed by truly abstract laws, laws no longer associated with nature or psychology. Levelling is not an individual’s action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power. Just as one calculates the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces, so too can one calculate the law of levelling. For the individual who himself levels a few is carried along too, and so it goes on.44 Of course, superficially, one might suspect Heidegger of taking Kierkegaard actually to be preaching the dominance of subjectivity. But even if that suspicion were true, or even if the charge could in some sense be justified from a Heideggerian stance, in Kierkegaard’s mind the subject–world relation is properly and primarily a relation between ‘real’ (that is, unified) subjects and their shared world, a world in which it would, moreover, be quite inappropriate to say that subjectivity was dominant, since ideally the relation is one of equilibrium. To measure one’s worth in a way in which nothing external counts leaves you with no distinguishing marks at all. This is the merciless logic of levelling as Kierkegaard presents it in the Review. In essence it is the ‘ascendancy of the category of the generation over that of individuality’,45 and carried to the limit its ascendancy leads to the idea of that ‘higher negativity’: pure humanity. It is what you are left with after the elimination of external measures of distinction and a totally empty way of defining selfhood and the self. The self that defines itself in that way becomes a mere atom or a particle, on the one hand unrelated to any external structure (just as Hegel feared) and, on the other, lacking any internal structure of its own (just as Kierkegaard diagnosed when he talked later of the ‘negative’ self waiting either to redesign its external structure from scratch or to re-relate itself to the external structure it had ironized, or ‘reflected’, itself out of but now actively, that is, with a selfformed inner structure, took upon itself again in terms of an ethico-religious task).46 At its extreme, therefore, levelling leaves you with a clear choice: either you really are nothing in worldly terms, and you are left to make your own self, or you are what you are in those terms, but these are to be grasped as given to you by God, as the ‘equipment’ you have been provided with to do, to the best of your ability, God’s work. So, in extension of the original thought of irony’s potentially edifying levelling being in the service of spirit by making room for it, the levelling that has arisen from the cult of reflection and is now being driven by its own momentum has one benefit in prospect. Though initially motivated by a fear of individuality, the very process through which people prone to reflection efface their individuality by seeking identity through group membership will, if carried to the limit 175

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(forcing them to identify themselves only as members of that group of all groups, pure humanity), force them to face the very thing they are trying to escape. They will see that they must either ‘be lost’ in the ‘dizziness of abstract infinity’ or be ‘infinitely saved’ in the ‘essentiality of religiousness’.47 I offer in conclusion some tentative remarks on nihilism. I do not think, partly because of what I have already noted, that Kierkegaard takes the main problem of his time to be what today we may be inclined to call nihilism, though that does of course depend on what we do refer to by the term. There are two senses in which Kierkegaard could be seen to regard his time as nihilistic. One is the sense of nihilism already hinted at earlier and which Heidegger finds so important in Nietzsche, namely that the values to which people still pay lip-service mean nothing to them in practice. Reflection had dissolved the assumptions that sustained the old hierarchical order, but the titles and even the positions remained, though no longer able to keep people harmlessly in their place. It was a society in which people clung desperately to their manners and ways of speech just to keep the rootlessness of their society out of sight. Another sense is whatever it means to say that the time was one of reflection, an age gripped by no idea. Ideas, as we saw, are what inspire people to the kind of activity that gives one a sense of one’s life itself having meaning, a sense one can express in the Hegelian formula of ‘personality claiming the world as its own’. The old hierarchical structure had seemed to provide those activities on a plate, but the world of the 1840s was one of disruption if not chaos. ‘Having the world as one’s own’ is a formula for individuals able to feel that the part they play in life, however ‘modest’ and ‘quiet’, fulfils a universal human function none the less. This was the thought Hegel intended his System to legitimize, and perhaps Heiberg was the last person in Kierkegaard’s culture to believe or at least hope that philosophy provided that grasp of the unity of all quiet and modest as well as grander tasks. Kierkegaard wants us to believe something else, namely that what life’s increasing diversification and loss of unity shows is that the time for true religiosity has finally arrived. Whether you get back to religion in the ways expressed in the pseudonymous writings, rising through irony out of the aesthetic to the ethical and the religious, or get there by being forced into an ultimate choice by being levelled unto non-entity, you will have the opportunity to grasp life as a life of meaning even if the meaning it can have is no longer written on the face of the world itself. If nihilism is the thought that there is no such option to choose, then of course the Review is not concerned with that. This is not to say that Kierkegaard himself never entertained nihilistic thoughts, either directly or, as a writer, vicariously. We have only to look at ‘Diapsalmata’ and the later, reflective stages of the 176

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aesthetic life-view to see how well versed he was in nihilism. But nihilism is a consequence of the aesthetic life-view, which, when worked out to its limits, leaves the aesthete desperately devising ways of making life liveable (as the emperor looks desperately for ever more sources of amusement). It is also worth noting that, at least according to his own account, Kierkegaard early on decided that what would give his own life meaning was to restore to religion its primitivity, against all comers, whether rationalistic theologians, Hegelians or Grundtvigians. What gave Kierkegaard a sense of the meaningfulness of his own life may have been his approximation to Christian levelling, his martyrdom in the cause, or, on a more enduring scale, it could have been his exceptional ability to promote the point of view, in his own writing as well as his person, that this is what was needed. We should be careful, however, in expressing Kierkegaard’s relation to nihilism in the way that Bert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin do when they say that ‘Kierkegaard’s interest, and ours in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in how we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful’. 48 In a general way, drawn from remarks I have already made and interpreted in their light, that may be true. But if the remark is taken to represent the problem Kierkegaard saw his society facing, as Dreyfus and Rubin intend, it is misleading. Certainly, levelling would make it increasingly difficult for individuals to engage in society in a way that would make their lives appear to be individually meaningful. But this was a period of the early flowering of liberal idealism, in which people held in prospect all those improvements that only in our own time have formed the basis of a new kind of aesthetic boredom. I do not think it would be true to say of Kierkegaard’s time, as against certain individuals who were more or less self-conscious ‘outsiders’, including perhaps he himself, that people then were by and large conscious of living in a nihilistic culture. If they were, then his analysis of his age is wrong. If it is right, then most people had few or no problems with their culture or themselves. That was precisely what Kierkegaard thought was wrong with it and them; rather than busily performing the well-programmed functions of a reflective age in a flattened Being-with-one-another, as Heidegger would come to say, they should have felt, as he saw, that they were simply reinforcing a tendency to leave no headroom for what they should really be tr ying to do, namely become themselves. This required Udsondring. We have to see that Kierkegaard’s Udsondring in no way implies having ‘a world of one’s own’, and is very far from the post-modern self-design aesthetic. As in Hegel, though with the individual rather than the generation as the medium through which the external world can be appropriated and the self become ‘actual’, Udsondring is the way to claim the world as one’s own, not to claim a world of one’s own. The emphasis Kierkegaard puts on it is in terms of 177

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having a part in the world, and thus some sense, in spite of the massive disunities, of the world being one, and of getting the world back from the ‘contradictory’ null-point Hegel mentions in the passage I quoted, the point at which the subject thinks of itself as a ‘nothing’ facing not no world but a world that is alien. Returning finally to our three paradigms of levelling: there is no basis for describing Kierkegaard’s work as proposing a design-yourself solution to a levelled culture. That would be the kind of formalistic solution he opposed from the very beginning. There is a much better basis for seeing in the Review what we might have called, had we not known what Heidegger owed to that work, anticipations of Heidegger. Kierkegaardian levelling is a special case of Abständigkeit. But that basis must be seen in the light of the very different focus Kierkegaard’s work brings to bear on the Abständigkeit ‘phenomenon’, and which is to be understood within the edifying terms of the first of our paradigms, as a Christian ‘overcoming’ of Abständigkeit.

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In a collection of his reflections on ‘culture and value’ (assembled under that title), Wittgenstein says: The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite distress. … The Christian faith – so I believe – is a man’s refuge in this ultimate distress.1 What this utmost distress consists in may seem to have a distinctively Kierkegaardian flavour. It has to do with the ‘single’ individual and its sense of abandonment. The whole Earth cannot be in greater distress than one soul. … [n]o greater distress can be greater than what a single person can suffer. … There is no greater distress to be felt than that of One human being. For if someone feels himself lost, that is the ultimate distress.2 This might tempt us to add the above remarks to others in Culture and Value, and elsewhere, which confirm the influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein’s thoughts on religion.3 But there are difficulties in calling these, and some other connected remarks, Kierkegaardian in the sense that one might reasonably expect to find parallel expressions of closely similar views in Kierkegaard’s own writings. These stem from the fact that Wittgenstein’s remarks express the point of view of a person who understands a problem to which Christian faith is a (or even the) solution, while Kierkegaard’s point of view is of one who (at least writes as if he) is totally committed to the solution. There is indeed a crucial disparity regarding what can or is to be said about Christianity as between a person who sees the need it satisfies and one who ‘uses’ it to satisfy that need. (The quotes here already signal that disparity.) I shall return to this below. But there is also a crucial disparity regarding what is or can be said about Christianity as between a person who does not and one who does see the need which it satisfies, whether or not in the latter case it is used to satisfy that need. Kierkegaard wrote that the ‘suffering, sins, and fearful introversion’ that made his need for Christianity so great also made him 179

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‘unintelligible’ to others.4 The fact that these others numbered many who called themselves Christians testified, in Kierkegaard’s mind, to the spiritlessness of the institutionalized religion he called ‘Christendom’. Wittgenstein, on the other hand, though not it seems a professed Christian, clearly appreciated the kinds of need to which Christian faith might minister. And this provides us with the basis for a distinction I wish to make between an ‘outside’ point of view, from which Christian faith is understood as a solution to a problem that is not in itself inherently religious, and the ‘inside’, or believer’s, point of view, from which Christian faith – it might seem paradoxically – is precisely not intelligible as a solution to that, but only to a religious problem. We can begin to chart the boundary between these two points of view by indicating four ways in which Wittgenstein’s remarks implicitly depart from the views expressed by Kierkegaard and those of his pseudonyms who represent the (supposedly authentic) Christian viewpoint. 1 Take Wittgenstein’s idea of Christian belief as a ‘refuge’ (Zuflucht). This sounds as if it were some kind of shelter in an emergency. But Kierkegaard writes of Christianity less as a refuge than as a special vantage-point. True, he often describes faith in the traditional way as an absolute certainty; but if this is a refuge it is also a ‘fortification’ in which ‘the good man … is stronger than the whole world’.5 And although faith does indeed protect – the advantage of Christian over natural love, we are told, is that the former is ‘eternally secure against every change’,6 and Christian faith in general screens one from the vicissitudes of nature and ‘fate’7 – Kierkegaard wants to say that faith confers a unique advantage which means that the emergency that leads one to take refuge in it is not one that a person ought to seek to avoid. On the contrary, in order to secure the special advantages of the Christian life this kind of emergency should be cultivated. Whatever it is, it offers people their only insight into the true nature of human fulfilment, and thus their only chance of actually being fulfilled. ‘The possibility of [despair]’, says the strictly religious Anti-Climacus, is man’s advantage over the beast … an advantage which characterizes him quite otherwise than the upright posture, for it bespeaks the infinite erectness or loftiness of his being spirit … to be aware of [it] is the Christian’s advantage over natural man; to be cured of [it] is the Christian’s blessedness.8 Far from authentic Christian faith’s being a refuge for the despairing soul, from Anti-Climacus’s own vantage-point the sanctuary which despairing souls seek is worldliness and the respect of their fellows. 2 Wittgenstein connects the idea of Christian faith with that of sickness. He writes: ‘People are religious to the extent that they believe themselves to be not so much imperfect, as sick. … Anyone who is half-way decent will think himself 180

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utterly imperfect, but the religious man thinks himself wretched.’9 But then so does Kierkegaard. The original words replaced by ‘despair’ and ‘it’ in the immediately preceding quotation are ‘this sickness’. Thus Christianity is a cure for a sickness, the recognition of which, and therefore also its very possibility, are prerequisite for that fulfilment unique to human beings in which the cure consists. Now Wittgenstein’s remark could be interpreted in various ways. It might be read as saying that to be religious amounts in itself to being ill; that is, having religious beliefs, or specifically Christian ones, is either a symptom of sickness or (if this is different) itself a manifestation of sickness. More likely, however, Wittgenstein means that the kind of help religion provides is only suitable for people who diagnose their own condition as sickly and who then turn to or apply Christian faith as a cure. This, of course, might simply mean that what makes a person religious is a sickly surrender to wishful thinking, but the interesting reading would be that faith requires belief in a constitutional incapacity to attain fulfilment without the special kind of help that Christian faith provides. We can thus distinguish between (i) a person’s being sick just because his faith is itself a form of illness, or (ii) a person’s having faith just because he is pathologically weak-kneed or irrational, and (iii) a person’s having faith in so far as he believes the incapacity he suffers from is one for which, unlike other kinds of unfulfilment, he believes he needs ‘infinite’ help if it is to be remedied. But none of these captures Kierkegaard’s meaning. What we have in Kierkegaard, or more exactly in Anti-Climacus, is a concept of illness, or sickness, which already assumes the framework of the cure. In (iii) one first acquires the belief in one’s sickness, then reaches out to religion as the framework in which health can be recovered. In Anti-Climacus, however, there is no room for a non-religious state of deprivation (a sickness of the soul, let us call it) to remedy which one then adopts religion in order to exploit the resources uniquely available there. The sickness which is the ‘sickness unto death’ is not one which has religion as such as its cure; it is a sickness which has faith as its cure, a sickness all of whose symptoms are to be described as forms of sin, that is, in terms which already presuppose the religious framework. The despair which is the sickness Kierkegaard is concerned with is therefore not a condition in which ‘natural man’, however solitary and abandoned, can find himself. It is the condition in which someone, who more or less consciously acknowledges his divine origin, fails in practice or refuses outright to conform to the requirements of that origin. The sickness of despair, for Kierkegaard, is resistance to the challenges of the promise of everlasting life. It is the attempt to reject that challenge, in effect an attempt to die. But it is a useless attempt, because the project of becoming merely finite is countermanded by the more basic project, on pain of total isolation, of standing alone before God. The sickness of despair is a self-inflicted sickness, defined against the background of this more basic project which Kierkegaard’s pseudonym regards as constitutional for humankind. If Christian faith were to be construed as some kind of response appropriate only to people who feel ‘ill’ or ‘wretched’, this on Kierkegaard’s 181

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view, can be coherently expressed only by saying that the state of illness or misery is one which people must ascribe to themselves in view of a prior acceptance of the Christian way of defining humankind, that is, as sinning, in need of redemption, and so on. Of course, an abandoned, solitary person might choose that self-definition in order to escape a certain kind of natural deprivation (particularly the kind one would be inclined in purely naturalistic terms to classify as a sickness of the soul), but, at least for Anti-Climacus, this choice can only occur to a person who, by adopting the self-definition, knows he is dealing with the ‘sickness unto death’. And the sickness unto death is not a natural deprivation. On the contrary, it is a vain attempt to accept that natural deprivation is the only kind of deprivation there is. 3 Wittgenstein’s remarks are at least compatible, however, with the deprivation being of some normal, let us say, naturally remediable, kind. The refuge of religion would then be a resort for those unfortunates who are deprived in practice, but not necessarily (that is, qua human beings) in principle, of the means of satisfying these normal, natural demands of human fulfilment. Religion is a resort where what is possible in principle is not so in practice. But once natural remedies are applied and favourable conditions restored, the refugees can return once more to their homeland of normal daily rounds and humanly fulfilling occupations. Religion is presented here as a surrogate satisfaction of essentially natural needs, that is, of needs whose ultimate satisfaction consists in providing the human species with what is already naturally congenial to it. On the other hand, Wittgenstein might have meant something else. He might have meant that the problem to which religion is a solution is one that first emerges in the ultimate distress. This could be understood trivially, as merely saying that so long as you avoid the distress of solitary abandonment you escape the problem, but the best solution is to avoid solitary abandonment. This would not be Kierkegaard’s view, and perhaps it is not the one we should attribute to Wittgenstein either. His remarks may have been intended to convey the view that such abandonment gives the solitary individual privileged access to a problem which in the normal daily round goes unnoticed; and one might even surmise whether Wittgenstein approached the characteristic Kierkegaardian position that the normal daily round is in some sense exploited, more or less consciously, to keep the problem at a distance. If the problem to which Christian faith is a solution is indeed one which emerges first in the emergency of that ultimate distress, then this makes it harder to dismiss the beliefs forming the solution as merely ideological. It is quite easy, of course, to see a religious solution to human misery as being chiefly significant for its ability to ameliorate the natural needs of those who endure undue oppression and loneliness in this life, by not only enabling them to look forward to restitution or better in a life to come, but also lending some ultimately positive cosmic significance to their wretched condition in the 182

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present. But it is easy only if it is assumed that the problem would vanish were the oppression and loneliness to be remedied in this life. If the problem raised is some new form of misery, and it is not a problem to which any possible remedies in this life can be applied, then it is plausible to conceive of Christian faith as in some sense an appropriate, or at least not a specious, remedy. But thinking of it in this way is to go beyond Kierkegaard. Nowhere outside the journals will one find in Kierkegaard’s writings the notion that Christian faith is a solution to a problem. On the contrary, the Christian framework defines the problems and whatever options are open to the problem-solver. There is no room in the Kierkegaardian universe for a problem of solitariness or forsakenness that the problem-solver might decide to leave unsolved rather than accept the solution which Christianity offers. If a person is confronted with the choice of believing in Christ or rejecting Christianity, the latter alternative is specified within the Christian framework as sin, indeed as the ‘highest intensification’ of sin, as the final page of The Sickness unto Death has it. There is no position from which the framework itself presents itself as a genuine option, that is, as an alternative the rejection of which might be accorded the status of an authentically human choice. As for conceiving Christianity as a remedy that humankind has hit upon or devised to minister to its utmost distress, Kierkegaard tries hard to scotch that idea by insisting that no human intellect could ever have contrived the paradox of the Incarnation.10 4 The very idea of refuge or escape suggests that the remedy Wittgenstein speaks of should afford protection from the suffering he mentions. But although I think it is true that Kierkegaard means to say that there is some aspect of the suffering that the remedy is supposed to banish, according to him religious belief is not a protection against normal suffering, against misfortune or those kinds of unwanted eventualities that defeat our hopes and expectations and which lie outside our control. Rather it is a way of coming to terms with suffering, of seeing normal suffering not as an expungeable blot on the human landscape, or even as an unexpungeable blot, but as an integral part of life itself.11 In this way it is not a flight from suffering so much as a preparation, or at least a preparedness, for it.12 It would be proper in this context to refer to it as a way of ‘accommodating’ suffering. Admittedly, there is a connection between ‘normal’ suffering and Kierkegaardian despair. Too much normal suffering may cause a person to despair of authentic selfhood before God, just as too little may enable a person to live through life without realizing that his attitude to good and bad fortune is due at bottom to fear of the challenge of such an ideal of selfhood. But this again does not mean that Kierkegaardian despair has normal despair as its ‘intentional’ object. Nor does it mean, therefore, that the solution to despair (for Kierkegaard, or Anti-Climacus, faith) is also a means of circumventing or mitigating normal suffering. Indeed, not only does the solution to despair not mitigate normal suffering, it introduces a further dimension of suffering: the notion of guilt that can deprive one of the 183

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consolation even after the ‘solution’ of faith has been applied. The thought that one may not deserve the consolation, says Climacus, ‘reduces [what is] absolutely the only consolation [to its] minimum’.13 What these four points of divergence mark is a difference of viewpoint as between that on a problem (an utmost distress) and that on the solution (the adoption of the Christian framework). Wittgenstein’s remarks are those of one who understands that there can be an emergency which only Christian faith can deal with. Kierkegaard writes as a committed religious author for whom that help has arrived. Let us call these the ‘outside’ and the ‘inside’ viewpoint. The outside viewpoint is humanistic, or perhaps one might call it anthropological. Its topic is human response and reaction, and its perspective relates these to common experience, human needs and human problems. The inside view denies itself that perspective because its framework relates those experiences, needs and problems to solutions that redefine them. You might think that all a person calling on infinite help is looking for is some exotically new form of solution to an already identified problem, all ‘finite’ remedies for which have proved fruitless. This makes the natural man’s situation analogous to that of the driver who resigns himself to the fact that no normal procedures (tinkering with the engine, filling the tank, reinflating the tyres) will get the car moving again and in jest or desperation admits that only magic or a miracle will do the job. Similarly, if anything is to help the natural man in his ‘utmost distress’, it has to be ‘infinite’ help. It might be right to say his need (Wittgenstein’s Not also translates as ‘need’) is of the kind that only infinite help will satisfy, and that only those placed in such a predicament resort to such measures. But this is how it looks only from the outside point of view. It doesn’t admit the perspective from which the person in need can say, ‘There is a form of infinite help and now I need it!’, as the would-be driver might, though most likely would not, say, in all seriousness, ‘We can still hope for a miracle!’. Infinite help is not grasped at as one more resort, only this time the last, and offered from a ‘beyond’. One can only grasp at it by reconceiving oneself as a being with the enlarged range of possibilities necessary for receiving help from such a source. Natural man must first reconceive himself as more than natural. By the same token, it might be said, he must reconceive himself as sick or handicapped; not ‘naturally’ handicapped in the sense that he might have been complete qua natural, but handicapped precisely qua natural, that is, handicapped even if naturally whole. And the point of calling the help he now avails himself of ‘infinite’ is that the distance between his present repertoire of abilities and his ideal of fulfilment, as now conceived, is not one he can close either by his own effort or by the efforts of others. For a person to believe that religion will help him, he must first take the step of redefining himself as congenitally handicapped as a ‘mere’ human being but as not thereby condemned to (in Wittgenstein’s words) imperfection and wretchedness. Careful account must be kept of the disparity between the problem and solution as seen from the outside, and the problem and solution as seen from the 184

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inside. From the outside point of view, religion is the way out of a nihilistic alternative. If one grants Kierkegaard’s Climacian conception of the incoherence or fundamental unintelligibility of the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, Christian faith is a desperate way out, and therefore not desirable in general or in itself, although it will be desired – though not necessarily accepted – by someone with the appropriate need, and one may understand why a person does accept it. But it is not possible for such a person to construe his faith as an escape from a nihilistic alternative, since his adopted framework leaves no room for that alternative. From the point of view of the solution, the notion of being rescued from that option is redefined as that of being rescued, or of rescuing oneself, from the sin of renunciation of one’s divine origin. Faith is now the avoidance of untruth, not of nihilism, and nihilism itself is a sin. This means that from the point of view of the solution, faith is no longer the solution to the problem that leads one to faith. Nor therefore can it any longer be considered a desperate solution to that problem, as one that is not desirable in general or in itself but only for people in a pitiable condition. From the point of view of the solution, what the pitiable condition allows one to do is reap the rewards of one’s properly human advantage. Our distinction between an outside and an inside viewpoint corresponds significantly to that between ‘left’ and ‘right’ as applied originally in the interpretation of Hegelian theology and Christology. Those on the left, conspicuously Feuerbach, saw Christianity as a symbolic representation of purely human goals of fulfilment; religious concepts were to be explained and justified by reference to basic human psychology, and God and Christ were fashioned in the image of a fulfilment projected onto the natural human future. Those on the right saw Christianity and its key concept of the Incarnation as betokening the divinity in principle of finite persons and events. In terms of this distinction, talking of the Christian vision as a refuge is decidedly leftist, while talking of it as though it were literally true is rightist. Kierkegaard’s authorship is consistently rightist, and this invites the judgement that he is a kind of half-way modernist who, although he rejects the traditional rationalist epistemology, retains in a religious form the traditional rationalist conclusions that the epistemology was once (and more recently again in Hegel) thought to justify. There are two ways of qualifying this judgement. One, which I have discussed elsewhere,14 involves prefixing to Kierkegaard’s view from the right a leftist account of the function of a religious life-view. This means starting from the left and ending at the right, but leaves the problem of justifying acceptance of a life-view that is inherently irrational. This is indeed a problem for someone who prefixes his rightist view with a leftist one, presumably in the attempt to justify the belief that infinite help is available; for there has to be some justification for preferring that belief to the nihilist alternative, and so long as the Christian religion is presented as a refuge from utmost distress it will be exposed to the objection that wanting to believe something cannot be the only, or even the decisive, reason for taking it to be true.15 Of course, if the believer refuses to prefix the leftist account, he can simply keep repeating the account of 185

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nihilism that his belief commits him to, namely that it is a form of sin. But in that case he has simply given his beliefs the status of axioms and withdrawn them from rational debate. The other way is to go from right to left; and this is the way Anti-Climacus goes. That is, the rightist view embraces the leftist one and straightforwardly stigmatizes nihilism as untruth. This looks an unpromising approach, and perhaps in the end it is. But a brief rehearsal of the Hegelian background to Anti-Climacus’s concept of the human spirit may help to show just how far it can or cannot raise the level of the Christian believer’s beliefs above the philosophically barren level of axioms. In the famous Preface to his Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel describes spirit as the only ‘actuality’ (Wirkliche) and as self-relating’ (das sich Verhaltende).16 Hegel’s notion of ‘spirit’ is that of the Absolute in which subject and substance are one. In other words it is the notion of God, an ideal of completeness or perfection which, according to Hegel’s speculative idealism, is the inherent goal of all history. It is the realization, or actualization, of a possibility latent in all nature and life, and grasped in an ascendingly adequate fashion in the fields of art, religion and philosophy, respectively. In relating to itself, spirit is conscious of itself as being ‘the only actuality’, or if you like, it is actuality conscious of itself, self-conscious actuality. If one focuses on the self, or the individual, that has this latent possibility, the goal of spirit is reached by what might be described as the self’s ‘returning’ to itself.17 Hegel’s view is, in effect, that individual consciousnesses are programmed in the direction of the goal of absolute spirit. It is important to realize how much of this is retained in Kierkegaard. According to Anti-Climacus, ‘every human being is primitively organized as a self’ and is ‘the psychophysical synthesis planned as spirit’.18 The difference, of course, is that where for Hegel not just the ideal but also the movement towards its realization is programmed (in the subject’s progressive conceptualizations of its relation to, and ultimately identity with, the whole of reality), for Kierkegaard whether the subject moves in that direction or not depends on a choice. Kierkegaard talks of the ‘choice’ of oneself. By this he does not mean, as commentators eager to associate him with modern existentialism often assume, selecting a self-definition from a cafeteria of value-neutral alternatives. As Judge William remarks, ‘I do not create myself, I choose myself.’ In order to choose oneself in the sense Kierkegaard has in mind, one chooses not some identity other than the one already possessed but to be the person one already is in another way; one chooses to accord one’s present personality the ‘eternal validity’ it is already implicitly recognized as having. One chooses oneself ‘absolutely’. The choice, in other words, is to be the self one presently is but in a way that reflects the traditional philosophical goal of completeness or perfection. In one sense ‘[t]his self did not exist previously, for it came into existence through the choice’, but in another it did exist, ‘for it was indeed “he himself” ’.19 The crucial point is that for Kierkegaard one does not choose the goal. As with Hegel, there is an ideal of true selfhood, specified in terms of ‘spirit’, which one renounces in vain. Not because, owing to the unfolding of some inner dialectic, 186

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renouncing it will inevitably, or in the long run, be transformed into acceptance; but because to try to renounce the ideal is to try not to be the programme one inescapably is. In a way, the attempt to destroy the programme is a ‘useless passion’, though in a Sartrian light paradoxically so, in that it is an attempt to abandon rather than assume the absolute,20 and also, for Kierkegaard, despairing of the absolute is not at all passionate, but a frustration or inhibition of the passion with which the individual must choose himself. But is one inescapably this programme? Is there no possibility of this ideal’s being dislodged and replaced by another, for example by a Heideggerian wideawake freedom towards death or cool Stoic resignation? Can’t we simply bring these old pre-Copernican conceptions of the cosmic centrality of humankind into the open and set them aside, curing ourselves of Kierkegaardian despair not through faith but by divesting ourselves of an antiquated and hopelessly exaggerated standard of authenticity before which, if we do not have faith, we are all found wanting? Whatever the answer, the continuing challenge of Kierkegaard’s writings is undoubtedly the critical gaze they direct on the questions. Raising them, according to his position, is preparing to make do with second-best. It is a manifestation of despair. We may resist this diagnosis, but it is not one we can so easily dismiss; at least doing so too easily might be taken to confirm it. And there is more psychological, anthropological or philosophical territory to be uncovered by locating the nihilist option (or any other alternative to the Anti-Climacian ideal of the selfhood before God) within a framework which presupposes that it is a second-best, than by presenting it as the neutral starting-place from which any alternative requires rational justification, or is intelligible only in the sense that one ‘understands’ how people in a certain kind of extremity need a certain kind of help. From that point of view it will seem remiss of Kierkegaard not to have allowed for the nihilist option. We will have to resign ourselves to the fact that he was a religious author who therefore adopts the ‘inside’ view to the exclusion of the ‘outside’ one, which we then prefix to the authorship and diagnose the author as ensconced in the world of a solution to a problem he can no longer talk about in the way he would have before he adopted the solution. But there is this other way of construing the fact that the outside view is not represented in Kierkegaard’s ‘stages’. As Anti-Climacus presents it, the nihilist option arises when the background assumption people grow up with of their unity and continuity with their ‘worlds’ is brought to consciousness and pressed to the point where it becomes an ethically strenuous and intellectually paradoxical ideal. Nihilism arises, then, not as a refusal to be taken in by irrational presumptions of immortality or whatever, but as a refusal to maintain a goal that in one’s ‘innocence’ or ‘immediacy’ one virtually took to be attained, but which, when considered now in the light of the human situation, appears too demanding. The crux is that when the human situation stands revealed for what it is, the goal appears not less but more important. For in its relation to the human situation, unclouded by the distractions of everyday living, the goal is not one that human 187

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beings have it in their power to attain. In that sense they are abandoned. And they are solitary in the sense that the choice of accepting ‘infinite help’ is their own, not one that reason or any other authority can help them to make. The problem, as Climacus says, is one that requires ‘thought-passion’, not to want to understand it, but to understand what it means to break with the understanding in this way and with thinking and with immanence, in order to lose the last foothold of immanence – of eternity behind one – and to exist constantly at the extremity of existence on the strength of the absurd.21 When ‘all original immanence [is] annihilated and all connection cut off, the individual reduced to the extremity of existence’,22 the goal can be attained only if infinite help is extended through the paradox of the Incarnation. According to this way of construing the exclusion of the outside view from Kierkegaard’s writings, the goal that can be consciously retained only at the price of absurdity first appears as a native assumption. The fact that it is native can be said to lend it some kind of authority, though not of course a rational authority. It is simply a deeply embedded presumption, or even prepresumption, and not so easily dislodged. It is true, of course, of all belief that believing something is responding to the force of evidence. That is why the notion of believing at will is so ‘bizarre’.23 But evidence is not always in the form of clearcut data, gathered and processed to form rationally justifiable inferences. Or if it is, then belief can be a response to some less articulate, and less easily revisable, authority. Interspersed with Wittgenstein’s remarks on the Christian religion we find this: ‘Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can’t then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable.’24 From the context it is clear that Wittgenstein is thinking of religious faith. The authority might be God, but really you cannot submit to God unless you already accept in some way or other that there is a God you should be submitting to. In that case the authority is somehow presupposed. Assuming it not to be an external authority, but internal, though perhaps internalized through exposure to a culture which bears its imprint, submitting to it will be aligning oneself to what presents itself as being one’s ‘true’ selfhood. If this is the meaning of Wittgenstein’s remark, then it could equally have come from the Kierkegaard of The Sickness unto Death. Wittgenstein goes on to say that you cannot call the authority in question and then accept it anew without rebelling against the authority. The first part is exactly Anti-Climacus’s notion of sin, the calling in question of one’s divinely dimensioned ideal of selfhood. The second part, about accepting it again after doing that, is a departure. Anti-Climacus advocates faith as the only solution to the despair of (what amounts though in many different forms to) putting the authority in question – unless, of course, the believing Wittgenstein has in mind as occurring after the authority has been put in question is based on reasoning, 188

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or is simply a ‘creative’ choice on the part of the person and does not involve appealing for ‘infinite’ help in choosing the self one already is. Anti-Climacus (and no doubt Kierkegaard too) would certainly agree with that. But then perhaps Wittgenstein is saying that once the authority is questioned, you have rebelled against it for good, whatever you do to try to restore its hold. Or then again, perhaps he means that you can only restore its hold by accepting that your calling it in question is or was indeed a rebellion, a form of Kierkegaardian despair, a refusal to submit to the authority but because of that not a nihilistic denial of the authority as such. In that case we are again within Kierkegaard’s Anti-Climacian framework. What this suggests is that it is wrong to take belief in this context to be ‘believing at will’, that is, believing something only because you want it to be true. Here it is rather a question of ‘daring to believe’, against the evidence even, if by ‘evidence’ one means what in isolation from one’s native predispositional attitudes and assumptions would make it rational for one to accept, but in conformity with those attitudes and assumptions. The vehicle of AntiClimacus’s account of the progression from ‘immediacy’ to ‘self-consciousness’ in The Sickness unto Death is despair, that is, unwillingness to be one’s true self, an unwillingness that culminates in downright refusal. But if one could imagine a similar progression with faith as the vehicle, culminating in faith proper, that is, the solitary individual standing before God, the progression would be marked by an ascending series of occasions to renew one’s faith in increasingly difficult circumstances, both existential and intellectual. To retain one’s faith one would have increasingly to dare to believe in the face of those circumstances. It ends at the ‘extremity’ of existence where all that intellect, or ‘dialectic’, can do is, as Climacus puts it, ‘help find where the absolute object of faith and worship is’.25 That might be the place where Wittgenstein’s man finds he is a single soul in need of an infinite help. My proposal is that the help be seen as needed in order to retain an ideal when undiverted attention to both the facts and the epistemic possibilities of human life show it to be humanly unattainable.

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Introduction In ‘Kierkegaard and the Study of the Self’1 Ingmar Pörn applies an action-theoretical analysis to Kierkegaard’s concept of the self. Or rather, he calls on certain of Kierkegaard’s ideas to illustrate ‘a notion of the self that is articulated in action-theoretical terms’ (p. 199, Abstract). Almost half of Professor Pörn’s very concisely wrought article is devoted to clarifying these terms and the place they give to a notion of the self. The other half applies the terms in a brief reconstruction of Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, that is, despair over the self. Pörn’s aim is to show ‘one way in which … Kierkegaard can be seen as a contributor to … the study of the self’, and thereby to a significant ‘field in development’ (ibid.). Pörn’s penetrating analysis does throw light on the structure of Kierkegaard’s idea of the self as a self-relating relation. And Pörn certainly succeeds in making something psychologically recognizable out of Kierkegaardian despair. But because he fails to observe an important distinction on which Kierkegaard’s idea of selfhood is based, and which must be used if the ideas illustrating the action-theoretical notion of the self are to be Kierkegaard’s, the conclusion must be that the analysis fails to throw light on the idea itself. It isn’t that Pörn disregards the distinction, as might someone sifting through Kierkegaard for things of value to the developing study of selfhood. He assumes he has identified it and found the right place for it in the action-theoretical analysis. My remarks are directed at showing that this isn’t so. I also suggest what would be needed, in terms of that analysis, if Kierkegaard’s distinction were to be reconstructed in this way, though I am not altogether convinced that the terms are ultimately suitable for the analysis of selfhood at all. Whether Kierkegaard’s own ideas on selfhood, however reconstructed, really can contribute to the developing study of the self in general depends on what live issues can be seen to hang on his distinction, and on whether the study of the self so develops as to be able to do justice to them.

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The action-theoretical self The analytical apparatus Pörn employs is that of the negative information-feedback control loop. The state of a ‘system’ analysed in its terms can be specified at any given time in respect of four variables: (1) an actual state of affairs comprising the agent’s occurrent interest horizon (the ‘actual state of the inventory’); (2) (1) as it appears to the agent (the ‘apparent state of the inventory’); (3) the decision to correct a discrepancy between (2) and ‘some fixed ideal state of the inventory’; and (4) the influencing of (1) by action designed to eliminate the discrepancy. There is a corresponding four-phase diachronic specification: (i) an inquiry phase, (ii) a decision process, (iii) an implementation stage and (iv) ‘a phase in which the inventory is subject to change’ (p. 199, Abstract). Beyond these specifications of the system in respect of what is ‘generated within the loop’ , there are also three important factors governing the system’s performance ‘from outside’ (p. 200): (a) an ideal-state of the inventory (a ‘want’ or ‘volition’); (b) the repertoire of intrapersonal abilities to act; and (c) the ‘epistemic frame’ or set of models accessible to the agent from which the actual model for understanding (1) is drawn (ibid.). If this sounds formidable, the basic idea is quite simple. It is essentially that of a selfcorrecting device, of which there are numerous familiar examples, both mechanical (self-regulating cistern taps, thermostats, electronic homing devices, and so on) and biological (sweating and shivering), with the appraisive, optational, decisional and implementational additions needed to account for human goal-directed performance. The special merit of the model for articulating human behaviour is, as Pörn points out, that it can replicate the case where the goal of goal-directed performance is some aspect of the goal-directed performance itself. Applied to a simple example, the ingredients of the account can be illustrated as follows. I am driving (or being driven) to a lunch appointment; a tyre punctures, thereby forcing an evident discrepancy on my attention between an ideal state, the expeditious status quo, and the sudden fact of having one good tyre too few and the prospect of missing my appointment. Corrective action requires the wheel to be replaced by the spare, the decision is taken, and work with the jack and spanner changes the actual state in the direction of the ideal. Before going further with this example, let us note two questions it raises which Pörn’s very tight account doesn’t tell us how to answer. He describes the self as a ‘family of interconnected relational systems’ (p. 202). What he has in mind here, or at least the cases he directs our attention to, are systems interconnected by way of the factors influencing one system’s performance being states of inventories to be corrected by a system of a higher order. But the example indicates other kinds of interconnection that might create problems concerning the relation of systems to selves. For instance, we would have to say that the wheel-changing, like any other emergency repair, takes place within a system already in its implementation stage, even if that stage is temporarily interrupted. The fact that I am on the road at all is part of my attempt to ensure that the inventory-description ‘being about to be there at lunchtime’ remains true in face of the threat of the counterfinal ‘not being about to be there at lunchtime’. Thus I am a family of systems connected also in this way. Secondly, what if I can’t change wheels and my chauffeur does it for me? 191

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Can the factors of ‘ideal state of the inventory’ and ‘repertoire’ be distributed between two systems, or families of interconnected systems, that combine in one operation? Or is my ability to command the ability of others (one kind of secondorder ability) a proper component in my own repertoire, so that the family of systems comprising the chauffeur’s self doesn’t have to be included among the factors determining the performance in this case? Perhaps these are not problems but simply indications of the power and flexibility of the analytical model, showing how it can also be applied to the familiar ‘nesting’ phenomenon and to the wide variety of master–slave and other symbiotic interrelationships. In the present case, however, these are not of concern. We are to think of the interconnections purely in terms of the stratification of the factors governing the loops ‘from outside’. Punctured, chauffeurless and unable to change wheels, I miss my appointment and reflect that it would be an undoubted advantage to learn wheel-changing skills. That I can acquire the ability means I have this second-order ability, which is thus part of my ‘second-order repertoire’, that is, of one of the three factors influencing the system’s correctional activity in respect of its own set of firstorder abilities, or its ‘first-order repertoire’. (The other factors are the ideal state of the inventory, the agent’s ‘want’ or ‘volition’ – the set of these ‘operative at a given time’ Pörn labels the ‘agent’s will’ – and, secondly, the ‘epistemic frame’.) One could say quite generally that life, particularly in its early years, is a continual disclosure of significant deficiencies in one’s first-order repertoire. Reading, writing, riding bicycles, making white sauce, speaking to the Søren Kierkegaard Selskab in Danish are all things one can find oneself wanting but unable to do. Wanting to be able to do something one cannot presently do (intrapersonally, that is, because of lack of ability, not just because the opportunity happens to be withheld) is having an ideal for the state of the inventory of one’s repertoire, and learning to do it is changing the actual repertoire in the direction of the ideal. Pörn’s example is of making oneself understood in Russian – the inability to do so being ‘a feature of my first-order repertoire’ , the ability to acquire that ability ‘an item in my second-order repertoire’ (p. 201). Similarly I can have a ‘fixed ideal’ of the inventory of my goals. As Pörn says in a companion article, human beings respond with conation not only to items in their external environment but also to the fact that they exhibit or fail to exhibit such responses. The fact that a person is, or is not, the bearer of a desire or aversion may be among the circumstances with respect to which he exerts his will.2 I can appraise my present inventory of goals and find it wanting, though, as Pörn points out, this can just as well be a matter of wanting to ‘rid oneself of a will one already has’ as of wanting to ‘obtain possession of a will one has not already got’ (p. 201). In the companion article he mentions the want to be rid of a desire to change one’s profession, due to the impracticability of doing so and to the fact that wanting to change it interferes with a prudentially satisfactory identification with one’s 192

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present profession. Here ‘a first-order want … is the object of a second-order want declaring the first-order want invalid’. This second-order want may in turn become the object of a third-order want, as when one begins to reflect that too much identification with one’s present profession might be bad.3 A case of the alternative possibility, where one wants to add to the first-order set, would be wanting to like classical music in order to avoid the boredom otherwise involved in accompanying one’s disabled aunt to concerts. Allowing, though here without comment, that the same stratification applies to epistemic frames (the set of models from which the one used to appraise the actual inventory as deficient is drawn), we can now note that Pörn defines a first-order self (‘of an individual at a given time’) as ‘those control systems which constitute his activities in relation to his surroundings at that time’. Included in the first-order self are ‘the determinants of these systems and the relations which obtain between them, e.g. the inadequacy of the repertoire relative to the will’ (p. 200). Correspondingly, the second-order self is defined as ‘the union of all [the] secondorder control systems together with their determinants and the relations between them’ (p. 201).

The immediate and the spiritual self Of the first-order self, Pörn says that ‘[f]ollowing Kierkegaard we may also call the first-order self the immediate self’ (p. 200). And by the ‘spiritual self’ he says he understands ‘the open collection of interconnected selves beyond the immediate self – open because its highest level cannot be fixed once for all’. He continues: The spiritual self supplies a blueprint for the immediate self, a possibility for its repertoire, its will, and its epistemic frame. Let us call this blueprint the ideal self. In the spiritual self the immediate self, such as it is according to the information available to the individual, is compared with the ideal self. Any discrepancy between them requires decision, choice of corrective action. If it belongs to the repertoire, the corrective action chosen influences the immediate self in the direction of the ideal self; and if it does not belong to the repertoire, the individual concerned has a problem with respect to the will. (p. 201) This problem normally becomes, however, the subject of ‘another ideality, namely the will of a higher-order self’. And that in turn can be subjected to demands of a ‘self of still higher order’ . This leads Pörn to identify the spiritual self with what in The Sickness unto Death is called ‘the expanding factor’ (Sickness, p. 60),4 which we note, however, that the text identifies only as ‘the infinite’, in contrast to the finite, or limiting factor, which for Pörn is the immediate self (pp. 201–2). To test Pörn’s claim to be articulating Kierkegaard’s concepts here, consider first the implications of his distinction between the first- and the second-order self. One is that it fails to distinguish kinds of goal (want or volition). If I cannot speak 193

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Danish but have a second-order ability to acquire that capacity, and do acquire it, what I have achieved is simply a wider range of first-order capacities. In that case there is no reason to distinguish the old range, belonging to the ‘immediate’ self, from the new. For native Danes, who don’t have to make speaking Danish into an ideal in order to learn their language, the ability will belong to their immediate selves in any case. Similarly, a naturally talented and versatile person will have ‘immediately’ what others less fortunate will have to acquire qua (as Pörn sees it) spiritual selves. On this account a person’s spirituality will be measurable by such criteria as the number of evening classes he attends, though, having acquired the aptitudes and pocketed the diplomas, he will have then ceased to be spiritual in the respects in question. Related to this consequence is another. On Pörn’s account there is no sense in which the second-order (or any higher-order) self has the first- (or next-lower-) order self, as such, as its target. Even though he defines the agent’s ‘will’ as the ‘set of volitions’, the set is only that ‘operative at a given time’ (p. 200); the secondorder self’s concern is limited to what is relevant to a particular piece of agency, such as wanting to be rid of the desire to change one’s profession. In other words, the second-order self’s interest in the first-order self is purely situational. The demand its blueprint makes on the latter’s range of abilities and goals is only piecemeal. A third consequence is that the piecemeal changes it prescribes may be motivated by mere prudence. The kind of control exercised on first-order activity, in respect of goals, abilities or epistemic frames, is compatible with its being directed at straightforwardly improved first-order performance; in the terms Pörn provides there is no requirement, for instance, that the nature of the motivations in firstorder performance be changed. In fact an example of the kind of change the second-order self might seek, on Pörn’s account, is provided by the aesthete’s ‘rotation method’, which Pörn himself refers to in the companion article. As he describes its function there, the method is designed to keep ‘ideality … at bay’ and at the same time secure a certain ‘distance’ from immediacy, so as to avoid disappointed expectations. The technique is to avoid having expectations and to take pleasure only in accidental superficialities.5 This, too, would have to be a performance of the spiritual self, for no other reason than that it involves a modification of the first-order will. Kierkegaard might have wanted to call this a performance of the spiritual self, but then it would be for a quite different kind of reason, which we will touch on below. ‘Spirit’ , in the Hegelian context in which Kierkegaard wrote, was a familiar and fairly well-defined term.6 In Hegelian philosophy we have ‘absolute’ spirit representing an ideal of reconciliation between two at first apparently incongruent concepts, which can be conveniently termed ‘subjectivity’ and ‘substantiality’.7 For Hegel the reconciliation occurs in the inward and outward manifestations of human reason. Kierkegaard of course rejects this view, though not the ideal of reconciliation. What the subject lacks in substantiality, because the notions of subject and substance are obdurately incompatible in human existence, is ‘appro194

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priated’ in faith by the subject’s ‘willing to be itself’, that is, by accepting a ‘blueprint’ of itself as centred on God (‘reposing freely in God’),8 or, as Kierkegaard puts it, ‘grounded transparently in the power that established it’ (Sickness, p. 44). The spiritual self, for Kierkegaard, is the self that acknowledges an ideal of reconciliation between incongruent terms that in immediacy are not yet grasped as incongruent. Thus in The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard’s pseudonym says the immediate person’s self is ‘in immediate continuity with the Other … coheres immediately with this Other – desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet passively. … Its dialectic is: the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are: good fortune, misfortune, fate’ (ibid., pp. 81–2). For Kierkegaard this means that there is as yet no real self. The self emerges only with ‘an act of separation’ (ibid., p. 85) which brings (or is) an awareness of being ‘essentially different from the environment and the external world and their effect’. Kierkegaard clearly gives us to understand that the activity of the immediate (not yet real) self reveals itself to reflection as being inherently deficient because such activity can no longer be grasped as enclosing the individual in a substantial unity or completeness, as perhaps the child or immediate adult with (only) an illusion of something eternal in it unreflectingly assumes. The Sickness unto Death begins, ‘Man is spirit’, and it then straightaway identifies spirit with self. The implication is that the individual has to look for its fulfilment (ideal state, blueprint of selfhood) elsewhere than in the natural world, or in any kind of development that the second-order self might demand of the first-order self qua natural being. According to certain passages in Kierkegaard, one ‘gains’ the eternal in the experience of temporal loss. Losing what you have set your heart on, but being able to say the loss is ‘merely’ temporal, means you have ‘gained the eternal’ and placed yourself outside the range of temporal defeats, good and bad fortune, fate. The step he calls ‘resignation’ involves a transference of the wish one had for oneself in the world of time to a wish one has for the Eternal Being.9 One is thereby compensated for the loss, though really ‘more than compensated’, as Kierkegaard says, just because you have now ‘gained’ the eternal.10 Whatever constructions our own epistemic frame(s) may tempt us to propose for such alleged discovery of the eternal, there would be little objection to saying that, prior to the framework of faith in which Kierkegaard embeds his concept of the eternal, the eternal, merely negatively conceived, must offer itself as a devastatingly bleak habitat for the self cast out of the Eden of contingency and time. Here the self is mere subjectivity, bereft of all that was assumed substantial and incapable of conceiving of any substitute. The self thus placed is what Kierkegaard thinks it must become in order to qualify for Christianity as he understands it, as what offers reconciliation for the individual qua individual.

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Supplementing the analysis To capture this predicament of selfhood, the action-theoretical model would have to be refined. It would have to accommodate at least three amendments to the account given by Pörn. First, it would have to distinguish ‘spiritual’ from other idealities. The power to impose idealities on one’s given self shows only that there is a power of reflection and self-correction, which may be only a prudential capacity; but as Kierkegaard says, for the highest ideality the point of finding what is the most prudent thing to do is to ‘disdain to do it’.11 Secondly, spiritual idealities would have to be distinguished from others in terms of the kind of goal the agent should or shouldn’t have. This means that the target of its demands is, in Pörn’s terminology, the ‘will’ of the self as a whole, and not just in respect of a particular form of activity. And, thirdly, the discrepancy between the apparent state of the immediate inventory and the ideal state posited by the spiritual self must be statable in terms of the incongruent opposites with which Kierkegaard specifies spiritual ideality, roughly a space in which the expanding factors are given rein but without losing sight of the limiting. By relating itself to an ideal of ‘true’ selfhood, Kierkegaard does not mean that the (no longer immediate) self is actually ‘reposing in God’ (completion of this loop being the state of faith in which despair vanishes); he means only that the self now has this model of the inventory and is confronted by its demands. On this interpretation, the field of the spiritual self’s operations lies in the hiatus between the ‘fixing’ of the ideal state of the inventory, as a reconciliation in the terms stated, and actually conforming to that ideal. Thus the ideals set by the spiritual self will typically be those of higher-order selves than that self which first fixes the ideal state of its inventory in terms that make it proper to call the self spiritual. These selves will have such higher-order goals as wanting not to have the ideal thus fixed for the will, and wanting to have another ideal in which it is not centred on a transcendent God but on itself. These in fact correspond to the two main forms of despair discussed by Kierkegaard: not willing to be oneself, and willing to be oneself. The ‘oneself’ in the first case is the ‘self one truly is’ and thus ought to ‘will’ to become, and in the second case a ‘self which [one] is not’, that is, a self that is not the self one ought to will to become. Since despair in its first form is the inability to become one’s true self, and in its second the inability to become something other than one’s true self, the hiatus may also be understood, as Pörn says, in terms of inadequacy of the agent’s repertoire (p. 202). But we mustn’t let this simple formula obscure an important difference between the inabilities corresponding to these two forms. In the first it is an inability to endorse the ideal of true selfhood that is in some way ‘fixed’, an inadequacy of repertoire which can be made good by dint of higher-order willing and doing, that is, by adding to one’s set of wants whatever Kierkegaard would count as faith. In the second, it is an inability to dislodge the fixed ideal of true selfhood. On Kierkegaard’s view it cannot be dislodged, for this specific ideal forces itself on anyone who reflects clearly upon the nature of human existence. So the project of becoming something other than one’s true self fails not because one hasn’t got what it takes to become the kind of person one chooses to make of

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oneself, something that might be remedied, but because nothing, not even becoming such a person, will enable one to dispose of the ideal of true selfhood.

Despair Pörn’s account of Kierkegaardian despair is subtle and consistent within the framework of his analysis, but it gives a contextually anomalous interpretation of the two main forms of despair. This is due not to applying the action-theoretical model itself, or at least I see no reason in principle why that should be so, but to a failure to identify a main component in Kierkegaard’s concept of the self. In order to ‘fix the concept of despair’ (p. 202) Pörn begins with Kierkegaard’s example of the ambitious man who wants to be (a) Caesar. The man sees his subsequent inability to achieve this goal as a failing in his (in Pörn’s terminology) ‘immediate’ self. So he sets about making the necessary modification(s) in whatever ‘feature or constellation of features in his will, repertoire, or epistemic frame’ is at fault (which Pörn says is what Kierkegaard means by saying that the man ‘wants to be rid of himself’ [cf. ibid.] ). But he finds he cannot make the modifications, thereby revealing ‘a discrepancy between the immediate and the ideal self for the removal of which the higher-order repertoire is inadequate’ (ibid.) – the ‘formula’, as Pörn claims, for all ‘elementary despair over oneself’ (ibid.). This, so far, is Pörn’s version of the first of Kierkegaard’s two main forms of despair, not willing to be oneself – the despair of ‘weakness’ (Sickness, p. 80). The transition to the second form, willing to be oneself – the despair of ‘defiance’ – is presented as follows: in order to escape the obstacle posed by the fact that the immediate self cannot be suitably modified, the despairer chooses one among possible idealities that ‘do not take (full) cognizance of the immediate self in its concretion’ – the chosen ideality being what Pörn calls a ‘counterfeit’ self (p. 202; cf. Sickness, p. 99, on ‘refashioning’ the self’). So the second form of despair is being willing to be one’s counterfeit self, a self that ignores the necessities and limitations of the concrete self. The project is doomed from the outset, however, for there is nothing on which this (Kierkegaard calls it ‘hypothetical’ [ibid., p. 100] ) self can stand ‘eternally firm’ (ibid.). This self is no more a self than a king without a country is a king (ibid.). As an attempt to ‘fix’ Kierkegaard’s concept of despair, this seemingly plausible reconstruction suffers from a serious limitation: it fails to locate the principal parameter of the development, and in consequence fails to mark its beginning and end. It also fails, and for the same reason, to identify what it is the ‘weak’ despairer wants to do away with. Consider first what Pörn says is needed to bring the ‘constantly inward movement’ of despair (p. 204) to a stop. He says it can only be stopped by a return to the immediate self. That is because Kierkegaard says a person has to see his task in the self given him, that is to say, ‘at the beginning’ and not ‘in the beginning’ (Sickness, p. 99, emphasis added), not in a counterfeit self. But in order to see his task in this way, Kierkegaard’s individual must first undergo a transition to selfhood from immediacy. 197

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Pörn is right to associate having one’s task in the self that is given with the idea of the individual’s having an ‘eternal validity’ (p. 203) (though this expression is from Either/Or), but he is wrong to identify the notion of the individual’s eternal validity with that of being a concrete self in which ‘the determinants of the immediate self are formed and settled in a pattern’ (ibid.). The idea of an eternal validity is used in connection with that of the ‘choice’ of oneself in the sense of a revaluation of the concrete self from the point of view of there being a task connected with the self’s having ‘something eternal’ in it, and this involves something other than simple reversion to the pattern into which the determinants of the immediate self have been formed and settled. Indeed Kierkegaard says quite clearly that the choice of oneself in one’s eternal validity is not choice of oneself in one’s ‘immediacy … as this contingent individual’.12 The very idea of an eternal validity requires a ‘complete break with immediacy’, which leaves the self naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy, [and is] the first form of the infinite self and the progressive impulse in the entire process through which a self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages. (Sickness, p. 86, emphasis added) Taking possession of the actual self from this point of view is not a return to the immediate self, not therefore a choice of oneself in one’s immediacy. We saw that on Pörn’s account despair begins when the second-order self makes an impossible demand on the first-order self – for example, becoming a Caesar. But Kierkegaard makes it clear that, at the level he is interested in, the self that makes such demands is already in despair. Wanting to be Caesar is already an attempt to be rid of the self. Why should the second-order self want to do away with the first-order self (or modify it more or less radically) even before the second-order self has begun to give it such impossible demands? Because even though the destruction of immediacy through reflection (for example, on temporal loss, and so on) leaves the self incapable of fulfilment by way of its ‘settled’ modes of transaction with the environment, or any changes or developments in these, it is still unwilling to locate its fulfilment in the ‘eternal’, which is after all, in finite terms, nowhere at all and provides no ‘clothes’ to cover its nakedness. Becoming a Caesar is the goal of a higher-order self that has taken exception to the demand of ‘true’ selfhood posed by a lower-order self in terms of an ideal of the self’s being in some sense eternal. The higher-order self refuses to endorse this ideal, and becoming a Caesar is an attempt to impose a blueprint that keeps the repertoire and will confined safely to the temporal. As Kierkegaard says: ‘By becoming Caesar he would have despairingly been rid of himself’ (Sickness, p. 49). It is here, in the ambition itself, not with the failure to realize it, that despair is first to be found. And it is the true self, the self distinguished from immediacy, that one who despairs in the despair of weakness tries (inevitably in vain) to be rid of, not an immediate self that doesn’t have what it takes to be a Caesar. Indeed, on Kierkegaard’s account, it is not an immediate, and so on Pörn’s account not a first-order, self that the higher198

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order self wants to be rid of. It is the self that has already recognized, if only vaguely, that it is not immediate (though there is no reason why for purposes of analysis we shouldn’t refer to such a non-immediate self as a first-order self, in respect of secondorder attempts to subvert its acknowledgement of its spiritual ideality). This brings us back to Pörn’s correlation of the spiritual and immediate selves with, respectively, the ‘expanding’ and ‘limiting’ factors referred to earlier. As Pörn sees it, the expansion is to be understood in terms of increasing ‘orders’ in the stratification of selves (see pp. 201–2). But Kierkegaard seems clearly to be referring to degrees of discrepancy between the idealities imposed on a finite self and that self’s inescapably finite situation. Expansion is a matter of ‘infinitization’, whose ‘medium’ he identifies with imagination, that ‘faculty for all faculties’ which ‘in the last resort’ determines what ‘feelings, understanding and will a person has’ (Sickness, pp. 60–1). The will that is ‘furthest away from itself (when it is most infinitized in its purpose and decision)’ must at the same time be ‘as near as can be to itself in the carrying out of the infinitely small part of the task that can be accomplished this very day, this very hour, this very moment’ (ibid., p. 62, original emphases). Expansion extends the finite self’s possibilities, the limiting factor ‘finitizes’ – refers them back to the self’s actual situation in terms of what can and is to be done. If expansion were a matter of increments of orders of ideality, as Pörn assumes, then since a higher-order ideality can be invoked to try to dislodge an ideal that makes the finite self’s task alarmingly great, it would also serve as a limiting factor in respect of the finite self’s ability to confront and realize its infinite possibilities. Expansion connotes a progressive development in the stratification of idealities (to revert to action-theoretical terminology), provided two conditions are met. The first is that the possibilities are referred back to a finite self whose mode of ‘becoming’ is the realization of the possibilities. The second is that the finite self whose possibilities the idealities represent sees these as modes of an ideal of selfhood constituted or ‘posited’ by a ‘power’ other than it, that is, a transcendent God. If the former condition is not met, that is, if infinitizing is not complemented by finitizing, then the self lives in its idealities as if they were already realized, a form of despair that converges on insanity. If the latter condition is not met, the self exploits the expanding factor, its ‘consciousness of the infinite self’, as a resource for making itself whatever it wants to be. Thus, instead of beginning with the ‘concrete’ self as it is and seeing its ‘task’ in that, it sets about ‘refashion[ing] the whole thing, in order to get out of it a self such as [it] wants to be’ (Sickness, p. 99). Kierkegaard says that ‘to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis [of infinitizing and finitization]’ (ibid., p. 59).

Conclusion A conclusion to draw from the above might be that Kierkegaard’s concept of the self is rather special and belongs to a tradition that is unlikely to afford insights to students of selfhood used to a new and more secular climate of thought. For 199

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Kierkegaard the situation of pure subjectivity (or however one chooses to refer to it) is one to be sought since it is what qualifies you to grasp and seize Christianity’s offer of reconciliation, appropriation of the actual self. But the same situation is one that Hegel thinks you should avoid; reconciliation requires that you renounce your individuality and put on the clothes of ethical substance, of society and the State. Feuerbach thinks it inappropriate to link the category of eternity with that situation since it is only the species that is eternal, and whose advancement offers transient specimens their only chance of substantiating achievement. The Right Hegelians deny this and claim you are on the right track for ascending to that form of ‘eternal’ consciousness which unites you, qua individual, with God. Marx, of course, diagnoses the cult of individuality, on the other hand, as an undesirable product of liberal capitalist political economy, though some, Sartre for instance, have accused him of failing to do justice to the place of individuality in the human scheme of things. How far these controversies can contribute to our understanding of selfhood must depend partly on what questions we are able and willing to raise about the self, and that sounds very much as if debating selfhood could itself be material for action-theoretical analysis. But leaving these controversies aside, one can support Pörn’s claim that Kierkegaard can contribute to the study of the self. A close reading of The Sickness unto Death, especially those parts that trace the development from ‘despair over the earthly or over something earthly’, through ‘despair about the eternal or over oneself’, to ‘defiance’, affords a richness of compact psychological observation and a grasp of psychopathological structures that can throw light on any corresponding psychological context. Whether Pörn’s actiontheoretical model can still capture all the subtleties, I am not competent to judge.

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Georg Lukács, in his confrontation with Existenzphilosophie after World War II, poured scorn on what he called this ‘permanent carnival of fetishized inwardness’ which, he said, continued to ‘mesmerize and mislead bourgeois intellectuals’.1 Historically, he held Husserl and Heidegger accountable, but also Kierkegaard, and the latter together with Nietzsche he described as ‘anti-democratic’, holding both responsible, in his terms by the same token, for the destruction of reason. Yet Lukács’s pupil Lucien Goldmann regarded his teacher as Existenzphilosophie’s true father; not only did Lukács’s first book Soul and Form (1910) contain a decidedly appreciative though critical piece on Kierkegaard, entitled ‘The Foundering of Form on Life’,2 much of Lukács’s earlier work reads as an attempt to bring Kierkegaardian themes to bear on social problems in pre-World War I Europe. What happened in between to cause this change of mind or heart? It is worth noting that the later criticism is tempered. Kierkegaard (and Schopenhauer) still had some of that ‘good faith’ and ‘consistency’ which the existentialist philosophers were engaged in ‘casting off’ as they ‘increasingly became apologists of bourgeois decadence’.3 It seems in fact as if the later Lukács saw in these earlier writers some kind of heroic example that allowed them as writers to escape the charge of decadence that he levelled at their works. Or was there even something in Kierkegaard’s thinking itself that positively protects it and the writings too, even in Lukács’s eyes, from the charge of decadence? My main argument here is that there is, but that Lukács didn’t see it. If he had, he might have realized that the charges of decadence he levelled at Kierkegaard could just as well, mutatis mutandis, be levelled at himself. In the early essay, itself a fine example of poetic prose, Lukács accuses Kierkegaard of having made a poem out of his life. It all began with a ‘gesture’, the act both of renunciation and of deception by which Kierkegaard jilted Regine and tried, in furtherance of his love of her, to expunge all traces of his own life in her mind by presenting himself in the role of cynical reprobate. Lukács correctly sees this as a totally vain attempt on Kierkegaard’s part to free Regine for a future untrammelled by vestiges of their common past. Among the possibilities Kierkegaard is forced to leave her with is that of reflecting that he might well be deceiving her, a possibility which in turn spawns an endless sea of further reflections on possible motives with their implications for the present 201

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state of their (dis)relationship, which is of course just the situation graphically presented in Either/Or’s ‘Shadowgraphs’, a literary fact which suggests that the futility of the ‘gesture’ was early apparent to Kierkegaard himself and that his subsequent writings might be better understood as an attempted accommodation to that circumstance. But Lukács sees the early gesture as setting the pattern for the rest of Kierkegaard’s life. What Kierkegaard had really done was sacrifice ordinary life for a poet’s existence. Regine had to be sacrificed but still loved, as the knight of resignation loved his unattainable princess, with an idealized love vested in a transcendent being. Lukács suggests that Kierkegaard’s religiosity derives from his poet’s need for a transcendental locus of this idealized love, beyond the fluctuations and pettiness of ordinary human relationships, a fictive relationship in which the actual object of love no longer stands in the way of that love.4 The ordinary and everyday is sacrificed to creativity but with the love itself preserved in a purified and ‘unreal’ form. Looked at in this way, the religiosity in Kierkegaard’s works is not, as Kierkegaard presents it, a ‘second movement’ back to reality (as if the idealized love will still one day be real) for which resignation of one’s love to a higher being is the necessary preliminary. It is simply a requirement of resignation itself; to preserve the love in an unreal form there must be a transcendent God to preserve it. A line can thus be traced directly from Regine to the transcendental God of love ‘above’ and ‘beyond’ the everyday sometimes-you’re-right, sometimes-I’m-right world, a God for isolated human beings against whom they are always in the wrong. As Lukács sees it, Kierkegaard is trying to force an intractable infinity into a mould formed of personally significant but necessarily life-defying choices. Objective time with its plethora of possibilities is frozen heroically but falsely into moments which purport to disambiguate an inherently ambiguous reality. In the subsequent Theory of the Novel (1916) Lukács was to proclaim the ambiguity as a political and therefore contingent fact. The novelist fabricates forms embracing subject and world where the world itself offers no such visible unities.5 So the novelist’s passion is a useless one. How much more so then the passion with which one makes of one’s own life a novel! Kierkegaard’s ‘heroism’, says Lukács, was that he wanted to ‘create forms from life’; he lived ‘in such a way that every moment of his life became rounded into the grand gesture’.6 Kierkegaard’s ‘honesty’ was that he ‘saw a crossroads and walked to the end of the road he had chosen’; his ‘tragedy’ was that he wanted to live ‘what cannot be lived’,7 since although the whole of life is the poet’s raw material, by trying to give limit and significance to ‘the deliquescent mass of reality’, he simply spites that reality. The choice the poet makes is never a choice of an absolute and the choice never makes him absolute, never a ‘thing in itself and for itself’;8 we might say the poet as such swims in an aesthetic element and never touches bottom. Kierkegaard’s greatness lay in the special situation and talents that enabled him nevertheless to conduct an apparently successful campaign against life’s necessity. But really, says Lukács, by giving ‘every appearance of victory and success’, all that his character and gifts 202

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enabled him to do was lure himself ‘deeper and deeper’ into ‘the all-devouring desert’, ‘like Napoleon in Russia’.9 Lukács was later to be lured quite literally into Russia, in the belief that he was aligning himself constructively with an historical process of humanization, his ‘reality’. Since Lukács’s Russia proved to be very much a desert, and all-devouring at that, it is tempting to compare this early portrayal of Kierkegaard with the facts of Lukács’s own life, the better to clarify the differences in their views on soul, form, life, reality, necessity, and so on. Might it not be that the Marxist littérateur’s life, though politically engaged as Kierkegaard’s never was, scarcely touched bottom either? Soul and Form, as the title indicates, was greatly influenced by the neo-Kantian notion that human subjectivity impresses forms on an inchoate manifold, not in the limited ‘transcendental’ context within which Kant himself worked, but in the wider post-Hegelian context of historical forms of consciousness which include everything from anthropology through politics to culture and art. In a central chapter, among all the forms that consciousness can take, Lukács claims a privileged place for ‘tragedy’. It is privileged in something like the traditional epistemological sense, as was also the corresponding Marxist notion, derived from Hegel, of a sociopolitical group, the proletariat, best placed to see the lie of the land. Tragedy for Lukács, and it is an idea he would have recognized in Climacus’s Postscript if he did not actually find it there,10 is the self-conscious form of the soul in which reality is faced most fully and openly, with ‘death – the limit in itself’ as an ‘ever immanent reality’, a thought then quite soon to gain currency in Heidegger’s ‘being-unto-death’. There are various ways of interpreting and responding to the full acknowledgement of finitude. The Kierkegaardian way is to describe the form of consciousness in which it occurs as one of total isolation in which the self, conscious of finitude as a limit, interprets itself as poised before possibilities that transcend that limit. The Heideggerian way is to insist that the self qua Dasein has no such possibilities and that humankind’s range is circumscribed by its ongoing finite projects. Lukács represents a third response. It is customary, following Goldmann, to say that Lukács’s path-breaking History and Class Consciousness (1923) represents the overcoming of tragedy.11 But, if that is correct, it is a solution in a special sense. Lukács does not think that what he asserts in the later book are truths you can only have access to from the privileged position of tragic consciousness. On the contrary, genuinely overcoming tragedy means discovering that the tragic form of consciousness is neither essential nor privileged. So in the subsequent work Lukács has in effect revised his notion of the sense of finitude as affording privileged epistemic access to reality and now rejects the ‘narrow’ access to reality implied by the notion of an individual consciousness. History and Class Consciousness widens the epistemological base to embrace the shared, collective perspective of the proletariat. So the more mature Lukácsian view is that what is needed for establishing an authentic relationship to reality is not the individual soul’s tragic insight but insight into the actual disrelationships – provisional, contingent tragedies one might say – to be found in existing societies. Lukács thus came to deny that 203

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anxiety and despair afford a fundamental perspective on the human condition, seeing in them simply a psychopathological detour which can and should be avoided. It is not at all difficult to find in the Hegelian thought that inspired much of Lukács’s work a rationale for this step away from subjective forms of consciousness. An Hegelian would deem as totally ‘undialectical’ any attempt to provide a solution to the tragic consciousness that simply takes that form of consciousness for granted; it is as though the sense of tragedy could be conceived as in some way an eternally valid cognitive achievement to be chalked up to humanity and taken at face value. To do that, however, would be to assume that any ‘solution’ must regard it as an unsurpassable spiritual fact which itself lays down the conditions for human fulfilment. It is precisely an assumption of this kind that provokes cries of ‘decadence’ from Hegelians. Wolf Lepenies nicely expresses this in the thought that ‘the element of reflection in bourgeois melancholy was not a phenomenon of rational thought; rather, it represented a return of disempowered subjectivity to itself and the attempt to make a means of self-confirmation out of the inhibition of action’.12 Here then we have the conventional critique of decadentism. The philosophy that seeks subjective solutions to subjective problems and tries in this way to legitimate the condition of the problem itself, reinterpreting it as a necessary precondition of the solution, is nothing more than melancholy’s narcissistic reflection on itself. Since the solution reflects the problem, it does not constitute a genuine escape. Nor is it hard to appreciate how an Hegelian might read Kierkegaard too in this light, for we see once again how Kierkegaard’s concept of faith might easily be diagnosed as a de facto acceptance of despair, as simply an attempt to legitimate despair rather than ‘overcome’ it. To overcome despair in the style proper to Hegelians, one must locate and define the limited forms of consciousness out of which it emerges. Subjectivity and its travails can be pinpointed as bourgeois and in the long term as surpassable contingencies of the human condition. Thus idleness and ennui – along with the novel – arise in a certain phase in capitalist society. Inside the frame of that society’s own self-image these negative features are given positive interpretations. The subjectivity in which they arise secures its own legitimacy as the medium of authenticity, martyrdom, suffering for the truth, sin and personal redemption, or just plain decadence which now acquires metaphysical status. But, says this rationale, whatever the flavour of the positive philosophies erected on it, the solutions here are no less decadent than the problems. It would, however, be a serious mistake to think that Kierkegaardian subjectivity was undialectical in this way. The succeeding stages or ‘spheres’ of life do not form solutions to problems as defined in their predecessors. The ‘solution’ provided by the religious stages, for example, diagnoses melancholy and despair in religious terms and therefore as problems of a quite different kind and description. Thus there is a deep divide between the ersatz heroisms of authenticity, or ‘positive’ decadence, and the Kierkegaardian notion that the Good can only ever materialize in individual wills aligned to tasks done ‘consistently’ and in ‘good 204

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faith’. The latter amounts to an entirely new form of consciousness, as new and radical as the one that Lukács adopted when he chose a transindividual solution to tragic consciousness. It is this genuinely revolutionary feature that made other left-wing thinkers such as Adorno and Marcuse take Kierkegaard seriously as a genuinely edifying thinker, as when Marcuse concedes that Kierkegaard’s existentialism ‘embod[ies] many traits of a deep-rooted social theory’.13 It was just this revolutionary feature that was lacking in the post-World War II existentialism opposed by Lukács. Without the religious point of view and its heroic promise of a world socialized by individual conscience in a distributive (each one his or her own) relationship to God, there remained only ‘authenticity’, or the cult of subjectivity as an end in itself, what Lukács calls ‘bourgeois decadence’. So in a sense Lukács is right about the existentialists but much closer to Kierkegaard than he allows, also in the way he prosecutes his version of ‘reality’ against their common foe, the bourgeoisie. Indeed, Lukács and Kierkegaard are both of them martyrs to the cause of what they differently assume is the Good. Even the terms of their cultural criticism run parallel. Most of what Lukács says about decadent literature can be paraphrased in terms of Anti-Climacus’s typology of despair. The terminological difference is that what Kierkegaard calls despair Lukács calls irrationality. But since what Lukács calls irrationality is the failure to face the possibility of a humanized world in the way he believed that must be done, the real disagreement is about the method and content of humanization. Lukács systematically ignored the possibility of an unfetishized subjectivity. True to Marxist form, he assumed that the answer to all the travails of subjectivity can be given indiscriminately in terms of some transindividual realm of forces to be controlled and diverted so as to produce some special state of human being, a state in which tragedy and despair need no longer occur. As a self-appointed custodian of the ‘subjectivities’ of the great writers, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Mann, Tolstoy, whose works he interpreted as sources of insight into the course that the historical process should take, Lukács felt he was both saving communism from its anti-humanistic image and preserving a heritage that would one day be the property of the people – a noble and humanistic aim. If this was Lukács’s ‘heroism’, we could say that his ‘honesty’ lay in a proved commitment to the belief that literature is the irrational soul’s striving for expression with humankind as its topic, and that in order to be ‘really’ rather than fictitiously and decadently about humankind, literature must catch on to history. In this way Lukács, too, it can be said, walked to the end of the road he had chosen. What, then, was Lukács’s tragedy? To overcome tragedy, for Lukács, means overcoming the aesthetics of subjectivity. This too is something he shares with Kierkegaard, though with his quite different alternative in mind. It seems the alternative was forced on him more by his Hegelian instincts than by the requirements of left-wing philosophy. Adorno, for instance, saw the ‘aesthetic’ as a growth-point and not just a locus of sterility and decadence. The post-Nietzschean tradition, or at least one aspect of it, also offers its non-Kierkegaardian alternatives. It does

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indeed seem odd to talk of decadence and sterility in the same breath. Decadence, along with birth and growth, is an integral part of Aristotle’s sublunary world, the world in which decay is part of a cycle of life. Sterility is more like an unnatural intrusion of timelessness, or eternity, it being just this that allows Lukács to talk of the permanency of the carnival of fetishized inwardness. Making the eternal into a feature of the self is to lift the self out of reality and leave it in stasis, which is what sterility amounts to. According to Kierkegaard, the aesthetic is only boring or sterile when developed into a cult that refuses to seek any kind of continuity through life’s accidents, or, in other words, refuses to impose form on life. But the Kierkegaardian idea of the ‘eternal’ in one’s self is not that of fixing a path for oneself ahead of history and in defiance of reality, as Lukács’s extrapolation from Kierkegaard’s ‘gesture’ on behalf of Regine would have us believe; it is the idea of there being a constant readiness to solve whatever ethical tasks life puts in our way. It does so precisely by providing a dimension of inner time or continuity which allows human (and other) value originally to manifest itself. Form does not, for Kierkegaard, founder on life; on the contrary, it is that in which value first appears. Lukács wanted to live a life for humanism. When he found his bourgeois clothes ill-suited to the better self he thought he should be, instead of taking the Kierkegaardian route via the nakedness of a separated self back to reality from a position of radical choice and ethical resoluteness through faith, he reached resolutely into the wardrobe and grabbed a uniform. He chose the part of a militant ‘we’. Instead of embarking on an inner history, he chose to be directed by the ‘dialectic of the historical process’.14 Lukács saw better than Kierkegaard the tragedy of human exploitation, and his great contribution was to bring humanizing insights to bear on the prevailing Marxist interpretation of that tragedy. But it remained essentially an intellectual contribution, and in Kierkegaardian terms therefore also an aesthetic one. Lukács managed to live most of his revolutionary life in a world of literature, supposing that there lay humanity’s insight into its own humanization. He failed to see that by appointing himself guardian of the European heritage on behalf of a universal ‘we’, he was taking it hostage. This doubly vicarious participation in the life of poetic subjectivity was Lukács’s own way of making a poem of his life. His own tragedy was his failure to see through the myth of the universal ‘we’ and to detect its dehumanizing power.

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16 NIETZSCHE/KIERKEGAARD Prospects for dialogue?

Organizers of philosophy conferences have devised a new kind of show. Dialogues are staged between philosophers long since dead in the persons of their latter-day interpreters. The ‘dialogues’ are ostensibly designed to let the philosophers’ thoughts rub off on each other in ways that accidents of history have prevented. Well, why not? After all, their thoughts still linger on. But if we begin to ask what can realistically be expected of these vicarious conversations between philosophers who never met, difficulties proliferate. Are the thoughts that linger with us really theirs or are they just what we find congenial when we selectively skim the textual surface? Do we share a philosophical language with them, or they with each other? By not penetrating the surface, and by failing to take account of the specific cultural contexts in which the texts arose, are whatever similarities we find, or whatever ways in which the thought of one thinker may seem to support or interestingly modify that of the other, merely specious, not in fact obscuring real and significant differences that then go unobserved? There is the further complication with the two thinkers to be discussed here, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – though it makes them particularly interesting for us – that their works speak to the future. The thought is that only the future will understand them. Kierkegaard wrote: ‘Only when I am dead and gone will the time for my writings really come,’1 a common enough sentiment among creative artists and thinkers, one inviting future generations, such as ourselves, to claim that they are in a better position to interpret and judge them than were their contemporaries. In 1933 (soon approaching half-way between Kierkegaard and us) Karl Jaspers wrote that ‘[t]o their contemporaries these two philosophers seemed no more than freaks – prophets of a sensationalism which no one could take seriously … [but t]hey were, in truth, pioneers who discerned what already existed but had not as yet aroused general disquiet’. Jaspers then went on to say that ‘only in our own day have they been acclaimed as thinkers dealing with contemporary actualities’. We are perhaps that happy generation, the generation privileged to be the first to understand what they were saying, assisting, as it were, at their first real birth, or even, a thought given credence by the notion that they were ‘pioneers’ with work to be followed up and completed, assisting in that birth. Yet, even if that is plausible, it does not mean that we are better able than these writers themselves to understand their writings or their thought. The perspectives 207

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from which what Jaspers calls ‘contemporary actualities’ appear to us can easily lead us to exaggerate the extent of the similarities of perspective from which the writers in question spoke to them. When it comes to what apocalyptic possibilities Kierkegaard and Nietzsche discerned in their own cultures, Jaspers says only that while ‘Kierkegaard was the first to undertake a comprehensive critique of his time, one distinguished from all previous attempts by its earnestness … [and] first to be applicable to the age in which we are now living’, a critique which, as though written ‘but yesterday’, confronts man ‘with Nothingness’, Nietzsche, ‘who wrote a few decades later’ and was ‘unacquainted with the work of his predecessor’, noted the advent of European nihilism, diagnosing its symptoms pitilessly.2 Prophetic opposition to their culture might well be a common point of reference for these two thinkers. If we further imagine, as Jaspers seems to suggest, that ours is (or at least his was) the generation privileged to be the first to understand what these writers were saying, then surely we should be able to see clearly where, that is to say, on what, they agree and differ. Yet what critical project did they share? Indeed why should they share any? After all, they were separated by a generation.3 And while Kierkegaard’s reference group was a local intelligentsia with which he was closely and quite personally involved, Nietzsche, a far more pretentious thinker and with an audience Kierkegaard could never have dreamed of, was taking on the whole of Western culture. We might loop them together as (de/re)constructive misfits,4 a promising enough proposal because radical misfits run the danger of formulating ideals that are simply the mirror-image of the societies they cannot or are determined not to join.5 Or, understandably from our point of view but not profitably as far as the needed insights for the future are concerned, they may tend to nostalgic Golden Ageism. That would make them, by the same token, poor both as diagnosticians and as prophets. Misfits may even be unable to see any mischief that their own, inevitably constrained attempts at renewal might cause. We could also propose that what they had in common is that they put their ages (or if we take the chance of assuming they belong to a single epoch) to the test, even putting themselves to the test. Some think they tested if not their societies to destruction then at least themselves. That, too, is an interesting hypothesis; it leads us to wonder at what point, if any, we should stop taking them seriously. Yet another unifying theme might be whether – if I may coin a word – ‘racinators’, by posing root questions, are fated to become deracinators, both for themselves and, if they are good enough, for their societies. Our two writers can certainly serve as potentially revealing examples in such a debate. Thus Dan Conway talks appositely of Nietzsche’s ‘attempt to retrieve the founding question of politics’, and uses the metaphor of ‘excavation’, digging at ‘the site of politics’.6 As for Kierkegaard, his ‘dig’ – he himself called it ‘a domestic journey’, an indirect reference to the ‘international’ journey of his brother-in-law, a famous palaeontologist and natural scientist who lived and worked many years in Brazil – was in his ‘own consciousness’, where he aimed, as he said, to ‘uncover the preconditions of original sin’.7 208

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Here, however, I shall try to dig a little on my own account in order to uncover one difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that seems to me to colour all their works. The question I try to shed some light on is where they stand on naturalism, a topic neither of them explicitly discusses as such but one upon which, given some leads as to what the term means to us, it might have been interesting to hear them in dialogue. My point of departure in each case will be what I take to be both the traditional and the current ways of misunderstanding both thinkers, a gloss on Jaspers’ claim that only a later generation can see what it was that aroused their disquiet. In some respects we may grasp the point more clearly, but in others our better vision may be clouded more than we like to think by our own current concerns. Nietzsche was early castigated as an offence to modern liberal egalitarian society. Today his ‘perspectivism’ is embraced as the expression of a radically democratic freedom. Both views miss the point, which is to say that both are too little Nietzschean. The former response was still too blinded by the slave mentality Nietzsche was criticizing to see in the criticism any message of liberation, while through the oversimplifications of its glib categories of freedom the latter loses sight, of the savage realist and harsh judge not only of nations, morality and religions but also of democracy itself. Between the hated ‘enemy of laws’8 and the fêted darling of post-philosophical liberalism, Nietzsche still waits to be assessed in his own undeniably philosophical terms as a resource in the face of the cultural malaise he himself portrayed so vividly but kept on asking us to see beyond. Nietzschean nihilism is often thought of as a challenge. But what is this nihilism? Not the existentialist fad, or the abstract ‘axiological nihilism’ that finds no room for values in the scheme of things. Heidegger takes what Nietzsche means by nihilism to be the self-serving and merely habitual hold on us of norms we have not appropriated personally. That is part of it. It leaves values in place, those that would be there if we did appropriate them personally, and it implies there might be better ones that we would in fact appropriate once they came in sight. A more radical nihilism consequent upon the death of God is the belief in the sheer contingency of all things, our own things in particular and ourselves. Let us say that this is another part of Nietzschean nihilism. Do Nietzsche’s remarks about the need to experiment with truth provide a third? They may, but they may also include a resource out of which Nietzsche’s challenge, however we define it, could be given a Nietzschean answer. If it is also a recognizably philosophical answer, then we need look no further than to Nietzsche himself to find a possible way out. Some reject Nietzsche’s thought out of hand by the kind of knockdown selfreferential arguments that philosophers direct at all generalized negative theses, whether scepticism or perspectivism. But arguments that try to find something inherently wrong with a thinker’s thought at the outset tend to leave nearly all of its actual resources untapped. Any project of redeeming or falsifying Nietzschean thought in its own terms requires, first, that the thought and its terms be given 209

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their due and, secondly, that we find in these terms some standard that any Nietzschean can accept in judging the success or failure of Nietzsche’s critical enterprise. The term ‘critical’ here, as in most of its philosophical uses, has basically a positive connotation: it prepares the ground for some improvement. In Nietzsche’s case, the improvement is to be made and measured by something other than reason. But among upholders of the philosophical tradition it is commonly thought that there simply is no alternative to reason. Habermas, who follows the critique of reason a long way, avoids the dilemma by marking out for reason a hitherto unexploited area. He claims that Nietzsche failed to see this new possibility because his critique of reason is still caught up in the ‘philosophy of the subject’, so that he is misled into thinking that in order to ‘fill the abstract terms “Being” and “sovereignty” with life’, he must look to some ‘other of reason’. Hence the appeal to ‘archaic times’ and to Dionysus for what in its destructive course reason has ‘buried’ and ‘rationalized away’.9 Habermas’s own solution is to abandon the philosophy of the subject and to reconstitute reason in the structure of rational discourse, a discourse that, by keeping the filling of these terms on its agenda, is able to preserve the philosophy of reason. One might with justice say that here it was Habermas who was rationalizing away. In typical rationalist vein he is reducing the aesthetic to a series of moments, to psychological events, to an ‘other’ that could not possibly fill the old terms with life. In criticizing Nietzsche for ‘enthroning’ taste as the ‘organ of a knowledge beyond true and false, beyond good and evil’,10 Habermas refers slightingly to this other as the ‘yes and no of the palate’. But isn’t Habermas simply restating his own archaically Cartesian conception of what he refers to just as dismissively as the ‘philosophy of consciousness’, in which the ‘experiencing subject’ remains ‘the last court of appeal’?11 Doing justice to Nietzsche means at the very least revaluing the negative role ascribed to experience in Habermas as in much other current philosophy and, if possible, both revitalizing and transforming the philosophy of consciousness in a way that can balance Habermas’s enlarged concept of reason, to let aesthetic ability compete fairly in the job of reconstituting our concepts of ‘being’ and ‘sovereignty’. To see in what direction such a critique might start, we can look usefully to Kierkegaard, whose pseudonymous writings designedly address the sensibilities of their readers. In addressing the subject’s inner dispositions, Kierkegaard aims to enrich his reader’s sensibilities so that the narrow yes and no of the palate gives way to a sense for the kinds of considerations upon which choices and rejections of whole ways of life depend. There is in Kierkegaard also a significantly Nietzschean reason for directing the appeal to these sensibilities: in the communication of what counts here, there is nothing else to address. The attempt to appeal, for instance, to objective reason, argument, revelation or any authority at all is simply a strategy of flight – what Nietzsche calls servitude and reluctance to exercise the will to power but which for Kierkegaard is dispirited self-protection from the agonies, though also priceless opportunities, of 210

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personal choice. In both thinkers, the strategy is not simply personal, it is a feature of the human context, one that history in its creation of values has embodied in public morality and its institutions. Because one does not normally think of Kierkegaard as a naturalist, the comparison with Kierkegaard may seem importantly limited. But if there is a limit it is not here. For philosophical purposes, naturalism is the view (naturalists themselves will call it the realization) that reason is not independent of nature, that rationality does not confer autonomy upon the human being; in brief, that reason is no short-cut to satisfaction, truth, harmony and justice but just another human faculty with a history subject to a psychological and social dynamic. Nietzsche the naturalist offers a history of the traditional topics of rationalist philosophy; he gives us a history in which reason itself appears not as the guarantor of truth, goodness and freedom but as a condition of life, a factor in the fight for survival and self-assertion. Truth is not the route to cognitive salvation but ‘the kind of error without which a certain species could not live’.12 None of this is inconsistent with Kierkegaard’s own focus on the dynamics of despair in bourgeois society. Nor need Kierkegaard object to Nietzsche’s view that the source of value is history rather than philosophy, let alone the mental gyrations of late nineteenth-century German genius. Nietzsche’s history of the ways an inability to control their situation physically leads people to invent an ideal of fulfilment to which they then enslave themselves is fully complemented by Kierkegaard’s nosology of the ways people compress their spiritual possibilities into a manageable one-dimensionality. So when we finally do reach the limit, it is quite plausible to argue that the way Kierkegaard’s transcendentally based value expresses itself in the hidden will of the exceptional individual is directly mirrored in the way the value with which Nietzsche stems the nihilist drift of history reaches its conspicuous apotheosis immanently in the Overman (Übermensch). Nietzsche’s Overman is really Hegel’s Subjektivität writ large. No longer having to realize itself in das Allgemeine, subjectivity can now take on the weight of Substantialität all on its own. But that, contrary to what many suppose, does not mean that the universal is done away with. Nietzsche’s alleged farewell to philosophy is premised on the un-Nietzschean assumption that the universal belongs to reason. But for Nietzscheans the question is where now to look for the universal in reason’s so-called other. The clue lies in the fact that although dispensing with the universal in its Socratic form means dropping the idea of a Gattungswesen, we are still equipped with one very crucial speciesspecific ability: the ability to create our own exemplars. Compare the naturalization programme instigated by Quine, a pragmatist variant of Vienna positivism well illustrated in his expressed hopes for the successful theoretical reduction of Geist to physicalistic science.13 The naturalization of philosophy – of epistemology in particular – is presented as an apocalyptic vision based on assumed theoretical successes already achieved. It leaves no room for ‘first philosophy’ or for the deployment of concepts of human fulfilment. Though Nietzsche would be in total agreement with Quine’s view that philos211

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ophy has been unnecessarily hamstrung by its preoccupation with traditional problems in the theory of knowledge, Nietzsche’s own thought is normative through and through. The death of God is still part of philosophical business. The real threat to our concepts of human value (and disvalue) is not Nietzschean naturalism but the naturalizing tradition, which, having removed values from the discourse of science, confines itself and its values to the latter. But banishment of value from the discourse of truth and error is a radically ambiguous affair. To leave value judgements in the limbo of ‘mere’ subjective taste can of course be an effective way of simply striking them off the philosophical agenda. But it might equally be a way of freeing value from enslavement to science, including a pseudo-science of Geist. So, given the alternatives, in his dedication to ‘reactive’ forces out of which all that is active must emerge, the naturalizing positivist is merely replacing one slave culture with another.14 If, again from this viewpoint, there is still a theoretical task for philosophy, it is to return values to where they belong, to within the compass of human experience. Naturalized philosophy sides with science, mechanizes man, and then pitifully leaves us with a still impotent ‘Overman’ who has freed himself from the resentments of first philosophy only to settle for the unexamined values propelling the scientific project. Proponents proclaim this as the virtue of ‘living within our means’,15 but we may ask whether human experience might not provide additional means to which a naturalized philosophy that settles for scientific virtues is culpably blind. One way of dealing with this possibility is Habermas’s: grasp the world in which we are all parts as a world not of things, states of affairs and processes but, first and foremost, of potentially open discourse. In that way, values are still negotiable, and the unexamined values that propel science can be rationally examined. But this suggestion, as we saw, ignores the potential of experience, and the Nietzschean, who also proclaims the virtue of living within our means, is committed to seeing what hitherto suppressed means are still to be recovered from that quarter. Demotically and least ambitiously, Nietzsche’s Overman symbolizes freedom from enslavement to decontextualized reason and prejudice. As potential Overmen, we are left to make original attempts to shape life, in the first instance our own lives. The question is then whether, having overcome morality, the shape we give our lives can still be, in some extended sense, moral. Is Nietzsche’s aesthetically based naturalism any better placed in this respect than Quine’s? Whatever answer we give on Nietzsche’s behalf, we cannot expect it to be in terms of some predetermined paradigm of human being. All we have to start with is the species-specific ability to create images in some form or other, and oneself in those images. On the other hand, the form in question can be one that, from the perspective of a certain cultural time and place, appears as a paradigm of human excellence – as it were a local Gattungswesen, something more than the simple presentation of one of many forms of virtuoso-though not yet specifically virtuous performance. That more is the sense provided by this local exemplar that, here and now at least, this is how human excellence looks. And although it will not look like the paragons paraded before us in the religious and moral past, we should note 212

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that Nietzsche in effect requires of the wise judge of human form a depth born of a past love of religion.16 So the universal returns, one might say, in the guise of the wise judgement that this image, or this personality, is worth following – not in the dictator’s sense (where following requires the obedience of the sycophant) but in the sense of emulation, as in imitation of the example of Christ. Needless to say, there are questions. First, we face the apparent conundrum of how, in a contingent universe, to create value at all. Yet if we are just a little bit Hegelian on Nietzsche’s behalf, the sheer contingency of nature can serve as an unsurpassable ‘immediacy’ but against the background of which the essentially human thing, the creative thing, takes place. If we think this is meaningless and that there must be some criterion of objectivity corresponding to the goals of a Quinean account of what there is and how we know it, then the Nietzschean will say that that is because we have not yet learned the lesson that values have their origins in us and our histories and do not exist in some abstract state of suspended animation beyond our natural lives. Secondly, to the complaint that there is as yet no moral or political component laid down in this notion of natural human spirituality, Nietzsche could well say that this objection is born of the prejudice that essentially human ideals must always have an openly social face, where social and universal mean practically the same thing. But ‘moral excellence’ is as contextual as any other value, and in a world where social reality was expressed effortlessly, even spontaneously, the salient excellences could well be of the Greek kind: people would honour their athletes as their exemplars. Although this indeed invites the rejoinder that Nietzsche’s nostalgic classicism has blinded him to the evident fact that in the modern world society cannot take care of itself, that would be a feeble and patronizing and therefore totally un-Nietzschean defence, a mere excuse. There is a better defence. It is that Nietzsche considered the problem of society’s being taken care of beneath the level of the concerns whose value he was trying to promote. Commenting on the experimental nature of the task of re-creating values, he wrote: ‘We are conducting an experiment with truth. Perhaps mankind will perish because of it. Fine!’17 A monstrous utterance in the post-Holocaust age, but looked at more discerningly it effectively questions the high priority given so obsessively in our time to the very idea of human survival. Ears attuned to Nietzschean possibilities will find something suspiciously defensive, negative, indeed totally abject, in that. Kierkegaard remarked once that if all human suffering were remedied but without compassion, this ‘would be a greater misery than all temporal need’.18 In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche says that morality is ‘first of all a means of preserving the community and warding off its destruction’ and then ‘a means of preserving the community at a certain height and in a certain quality of existence’. Its ‘motive forces’ are, he says, ‘fear and hope’.19 Might we then not say for Nietzsche, following Kierkegaard, that although fear and hope may be what keep a society together, and perhaps nothing else can, unless a society thus held together contained individuals motivated by ideals higher than fear and hope, this would be a greater misery than were society not held together at all? 213

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The slogan ‘better nothing than nothing gained’ might well serve for both our thinkers, at least at their most provocative and in the guises that most readily invited contemporaries to see them as ‘freaks’. But contemporaries would hardly be predisposed to hear that they had bartered ideals the given world offers them the opportunity to fulfil for the weak-kneed aim of the survival of the means. But there is this common feature in Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. For both of them the satisfactions of selfhood are to be conceived as prior to those of the ‘universal’ conceived in this negative way. However differently they conceive the relation between selfhood and subjectivity, the satisfactions of subjectivity require, in both cases, that merely immediate and temporal fears and hopes be transcended and, on the way there, scorned. There are further parallels. They include, for instance, the rejection of other traditional but degenerative virtues such as pity.20 One can also say that for both Kierkegaard and Nietzsche pain and suffering become part of the struggle out of which alone true individuality and fulfilment can be sustained. There is also a shared opposition to prudentialism and to social programmes which presuppose in their beneficiaries, as Nietzsche puts it, fear, insecurity and self-interest. Yet the differences in conception of subjectivity are vast. If Nietzsche really does hold out the promise of a new morality, it is conceived in terms of the means we have, a naturalism. If we have the makings of a naturalist spirituality, transcending the everyday, in Nietzsche’s version it implies a confidence in the ideals of classical Greece. He looks back at what humanity lost through enslavement to reason and religion. Kierkegaard’s guiding pseudonym, Johannes Climacus, however, hypothesizes that the project the Greeks set in motion requires more than human means. Not the philosophical project, for philosophy, if not by definition then at least in practice and by implicit agreement, confines itself to what, from time to time, it conceives to be those means. The project in question is morality. Kierkegaard talks of it in terms of truth, human truth, what Socratic irony might open the way to. But the possibility of going beyond Socrates, in the full consciousness of what that implies, is just what Climacus urges us to contemplate. The whole Kierkegaardian corpus can indeed be seen as a continuation of Kierkegaard’s early concern to rescue religion from philosophy. Reason, for Kierkegaard, as for Nietzsche, is not the organ of divine or even human truth. As merely a human instrument, reason can be as efficient in the causes of self-deception and enslavement as in that of discerning truth. Nietzsche uses reason, embedded in a good deal of rhetoric – appropriately enough given its new-found freedom – to uncover and persuade us of this latter truth. Climacus uses it with less rhetoric to impress upon us what it means to exceed Socrates, while the other pseudonyms are designed to convey the truth-seeking reader beyond the bounds of sense to the locus of religion: the subject’s unmediated relationship to God. In short, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche are in such fundamental disagreement on the matter that interests them most that it is closer to the truth to describe any apparent similarities and parallels ultimately as differences. Let me conclude by trying to support this strong claim. 214

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In Kierkegaard there is a notion of human fulfilment which responds to a certain challenge which I have nowhere seen expressed in Nietzsche. It is the challenge of that experience of perfect singularity which is reserved for selfconscious beings, like us. It is part of what Kierkegaard considered his most important contribution, the notion of the category of the singular individual, or the particular individual. What being perfectly singular means is that what one essentially is, if anything, lies beyond and above, and is therefore no longer protected by, any finite role or character description. Human nature rebels, naturally, against this upsetting feature of human life; human society – at least as exemplified in early nineteenth-century Copenhagen – is a set of institutions in which human beings cower and protect themselves by playing out roles, including some called religious, Christian, and so on; and most people, perhaps all, and Kierkegaard included himself, fail to face their awful singularity and the only form of fulfilment possible from that position – absurd or paradoxical Christianity. From that point of view most of Nietzsche can probably be written off as a form of Kierkegaardian despair, and the will to power (and the will to will) as a form of spiritual weakness. Had Nietzsche, on the other hand, read The Sickness unto Death, especially the last few pages of Part One, he would probably have dismissed Kierkegaard’s apparent advocacy of self-annihilation there as a despairing surrender of humanity, the last gasp of a slave morality. The problem for us is that the forms of fulfilment that correspond to Kierkegaard’s Particular Individual and to Nietzsche’s Overman are mutually exclusive and therefore, if we take them along with the rest, confront us in the form of a stark choice. We may, of course, choose neither, perhaps regarding both ideals as symptoms of their authors’ straitened psychological circumstances; but then we should leave them both behind rather than do them the disservice of suggesting they are part of a conversation in which this choice is not on the agenda, and when what we are really proposing is then simply that a certain kind of conversation we are now having may be enriched by introducing into it some concepts or categories gleaned from these authors’ texts. A related form of disservice is to discuss fulfilment in very broad terms and assign Kierkegaard and Nietzsche to separate but not mutually exclusive departments: Nietzsche looks after politics and the externals while Kierkegaard takes care of inwardness. The tendency to do this is again encouraged by the many surface parallels, not least the notion of struggle. But the struggle Kierkegaard writes about is that of obtaining selfhood through the eye of the needle of singularity, while Nietzsche’s is about channelling Dionysian chaos into creative order, and converting mutually destructive forces into constructive activity.21 What we have here are not two sides of the same thing but alternative views of human fulfilment. There is the common notion, you might say, a metaphor – as usual, and as Nietzsche was so fond of pointing out – in this case one of energies which otherwise work divisively, and in the ends of power, being harnessed into socially creative ends. But Kierkegaard and Nietzsche give it quite different applications. These are such that Kierkegaard’s agon is – for us today, given the distinctions we 215

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make by using the word – still recognizably moral, its telos, or ‘excellence’, the formation of a genuinely social intention, while Nietzsche’s is not that. The two notions have different metaphysical structures. That the metaphysical frameworks differ means that most seeming parallels are at bottom illusory. Thus Nietzsche’s recommendation that one ‘avoid chance and outside stimuli, a kind of walling oneself in belongs among the foremost instinctive precautions of spiritual pregnancy’,22 although sounding rather like Religiousness A, is, where it counts, totally different. In Kierkegaard one does not guard oneself against chance and outside stimuli but rises to a position where they simply bounce off. Dialogue? Had Nietzsche read Kierkegaard he might certainly have included him in his list of ‘historical’ philosophers, that is to say, those who write themselves into their times, as against the ‘unhistorical’ philosophers, whose ‘thoughts do not constitute a passionate history of a soul’, or in whose work ‘there is nothing … that would make a novel, no crises, no catastrophes or death-scenes’, and whose thinking is therefore ‘not at the same time an involuntary biography of a soul’.23 In Kierkegaard, indeed, he might have found someone whose thinking was at the same time a voluntary biography of a soul. Kierkegaard, for his part, would surely have found quite a lot to agree with in Nietzsche. But then Kierkegaard, as he admitted, tended to read other authors only to get something out of them for himself. His readings were bent in his own direction, unless of course he was already disposed to disagree with them, in which case he would bend them the other way. Maybe that is what we all do, as also in the case of this essay. I feel sure Kierkegaard would have recognized in Nietzsche a genuinely moral thinker. Indeed Nietzsche has much more to say about morality than does Kierkegaard, just as Kierkegaard has much more to say about religiousness, and perhaps also the powers of deception, which later he seems clearer about than Nietzsche. But as I see it, there is no denying, and no amount of strategically selective ‘dialoguing’ should obscure the fact, that these are thinkers with fundamentally very different ideas about what the new world needs. Not one via positiva. Possibly two in parallel. But not so that you can have a foot in each. Kierkegaard was early criticized by conservative theologians for taking the heart out of religion, its cordiality, or warmth; he spoke not of comfort and consolation but only of suffering and sacrifice. Cultural radicals, the liberals of the time, on the other hand, seeing in the hard thoughts on religion a dramatic provocation of tradition, or even a reason to discount religion altogether, embraced him for possessing precisely those democratic virtues Nietzsche’s later critics thought the latter lacked. To them Kierkegaard’s whole performance seemed in tune with the new sense of the individual’s release from confining authority and tradition. However, just as with Nietzsche, we can say that here, too, both the early opponents and the late adherents miss the point. Kierkegaard’s point is that religion and morality cannot be of our own devising. If the world does harbour the resources needed for a positive revaluing of values, these values cannot be created by man. To accept that there is a moral and/or a religious aspect, these aspects have to be encountered, their challenges 216

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met. We cannot assume their purpose is to cater to our all too human needs. As Kierkegaard says in his dissertation, the world must then be confronted both as a gift and a task. Certainly, Nietzsche might well say the same. But the task for Nietzsche, apart from breaking the chains, would be to devise something with the means at our disposal, becoming a glorious exemplar whose exemplariness first begins with and depends on the appreciation of others. For Kierkegaard the tasks are already there all around us. Our all too human ethics already points them out to us. Revaluing these values consists in seeing them in a new light, less pretentiously, less sentimentally, from a point of view upon the world that transcends hope, fear and pity.

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17 DECISIVEL Y DISCONNECTED

What are texts but inscriptions on paper, on a tablet, a screen or whatever? As a way of attending to the scruples of another kind of readership, though at the risk of parody, let me expand on my reflections in the introduction to Part II on Either/Or as both epitaph and epigram. A little fancifully perhaps but only in order to put the matter in relief. I said that the distance between an epigram over despised contemporaries and an epigraph over a whole cultural era is already considerable. In the case of Either/Or it is the distance between what Kierkegaard at least said he expected and what MacIntyre at least says was what happened. But instead of ‘epigram’ read ‘telegram’. Yes, Either/Or was a telegram delivered in an envelope to ‘her’, for whose sake it was written. She was to be shocked out of her misery through being made to despise the author for publishing something so scandalous. But also, as indicated in Chapter 7, Regine was to be given to understand that there are conditions whereby some people specially prone to scruples of a spiritual kind are exempted from marrying. But what of the work as a whole? Is it not simply this message delivered in a massive envelope scribbled over with aphorisms, essays, a theatre review, letters and a sermon, things that have little if anything directly to do with the message itself and to be thrown away once the message is received, but perhaps picked up again by a by-passer who reads it with no idea of its origins or purpose? The by-passer reads it as recording the end of a cultural epoch. This is how some see it. What Kierkegaard himself intended with the text is one thing, and it is confined to his inner circle. What those outside the immediate circle do with the envelope, or even the telegram itself if they find it, is another. With regard to what the text really means, the author has nothing to say that any reader cannot also say. True meanings of texts are matters for infinite deferral. They are least of all matters of what the author had in mind when writing, or of what was avowedly intended with them at the time. Look only at the pseudonymity. Here is proof positive of Kierkegaard’s own allegiance to this principle. It is what makes him so topical today. That he has no privileged status in the task of interpretation is stressed by his constant dodging away from his texts, ducking responsibility for them, peering over our shoulders to look at them just as we do. In his diversity he is a near perfect example of the Lyotard node-constituted self that materializes only in some specific authorial guise and 218

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conjuncture (of pen, ink, paper and inspiration). What biographical events join the various conjunctures is of no moment; all we have and all we need is there in the text, a text which lies there awaiting whatever renoding occurs in its ephemeral meeting with a reader. That’s all there is to Kierkegaard too, for what interest have we in him other than as a writer? If we are fascinated by the biography, well and good, but don’t let that fascination interfere with the free marketing of the test. Yes, we may say that behind the text there was something else, another set of nodes, an aspiring writer node, a social outcast mode, a social-sniper mode, and finally a Church-bashing, self-proclaimed martyr node, and so on. But all of these are biographical facts from a time long past, a life of conflict if not resolved at least long forgotten. Yes, everything we need is there on the surface, and whatever we make of it is there. Everything? Well, it has to be admitted that some allusions will have eroded, making it harder to make sense of some of the text. Time takes its toll on background knowledge, and then there’s the terminology, the assumptions and beliefs – so some hermeneutic bridge-building of the kind attempted here in Chapter 7 may be needed. Not in order to reach back to Kierkegaard himself of course, to the lost nodes of selfhood that were his own attachment to his texts, but to be able to say that the texts are really before us. Some will deny the need even of this. If we anchor the text that securely in the past, don’t we begin to risk losing it altogether? If the text is occasionally obtuse, why not just allow ourselves a little latitude, a little drifting down the stream of cultural time? The background can be refurbished after, or, where beyond repair, replaced, the terminology freshened up, the insights updated, the whole thing salvaged and burnished for current use. The past after all is an island from which we have escaped. Let me propose another picture based on what Kierkegaard himself has said. In notes for a lecture series he never gave (though the plan to do so suggests a philosophical intention) on ‘Den ethiske og den Ethisk-Religieuse Meddelelses Dialektik’ (‘The Ethics and the Dialectic of Ethico-Religious Imparting’) Kierkegaard says that ‘on thinking of what it is to impart something, four things come immediately to mind: the object, the imparter, the receiver, and what is imparted [Gjenstanden, Meddeleren, Modtageren, Meddelelsen]’.1 We note that there is no provision made for a fifth component: the text. Where the object or, let us say, ‘topic’ is the existing subject’s way of grasping and coping with his or her own life, this being what a Meddelelse, an imparting, is paradigmatically concerned with, we have no common reference, no object in an ordinary sense. Being ‘existential’, such ‘communication’ differs from that on topics about which people can advise one another on this or that, discuss and agree on how to deal with an identifiable problem, or give each other general rules or prescriptions for doing so. To be imparted, an existential matter requires something like a personal boost on the part of the recipient (Modtageren), something more than the recognition and acceptance of some such rule. So the imparter (Meddeleren), someone who has something to impart, is in some degree a 219

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teacher but realizes that the lesson can only be learned by the recipient catching on, not by being instructed, corrected, re-instructed, and so on.2 The message itself, the teaching, will be something that the learner should be in a position to grasp provided only the obstacles to doing so are removed, or at least presented to the learner in a way that can lead to the learner seeing them for what they are, namely obstacles, wrong avenues, convenient defences, or whatever else makes them get in the way of the truth as it can be for the individual. For recipients, or even just readers, like us, there are also the obstacles of distance, lack of background, difference in vocabulary. What Climacus calls an indirect Meddelese, best translated ‘indirect imparting’ rather than ‘indirect communication’, occurs successfully only in the case where all obstacles are removed. An indirect imparting is not just the picking up of a text with no relation to what its author intended. If it were, there would be no relation at all to the teacher and consequently no reason then to describe the relation as indirect. Nor, then, is there any reason to suppose that imparting indirectly means letting the leaves fly loose to be gathered and read in just any way. We do not locate texts merely by finding sheets of paper on which words that we understand are written. Texts are found when, the obstacles to locating the teaching (including our own lack of preparation for receiving it) being removed, we are in a position to grasp the intended effect. The indirect imparter is someone who has some idea of where to look for the truth and of the ways in which, if found, it should manifest itself. It is in so far as we can say that this idea is embodied in the text, which is to say, it is an essential part of it, that there is no stage where Kierkegaard’s four components in the imparting of ethico-religious truth would permit the emergence of a fifth, the mere text.

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Part I: Introduction 1

2 3 4

5

Gordon Marino, Kierkegaard in the Present Age, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001, p. 96: ‘On the grand scale, it may be that Kierkegaard measures out as a relatively minor philosopher, but he was non pareil as a moral phenomenologist.’ Harvie Ferguson, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, London/New York: Routledge, 1995, p. xv. For instance, Hilary Putnam, Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, X 2 A 130. Ibid., A 150.

1 Climacus among the philosophers This is a revised version of a paper given to an invited symposium at the Pacific Division meeting of the American Philosophical Association on 27 March 1998. I would like especially to thank the official commentator, Frederick Neuhouser, for his excellently clarifying remarks, Henry Allison for his encouraging and helpful comments from the floor, Ed Mooney for constructive questions in correspondence, and Camilla Serck-Hanssen for valuable comments on the final draft. 1

2

James Conant, ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense’, in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam (eds), Pursuits of Reason, Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical University Press, 1993, pp. 207, 223’ n. 82. Conant has in several places drawn parallels between Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein in respect of themes raised in the present essay. See, for example, James Conant, ‘Must We Show What We Cannot Say?’, in Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989; ‘Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for their Work as Authors’, in Timothy Tessin and Marion von der Ruhr (eds), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief’, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1995; and ‘Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility’, in D. Z. Philipps (ed.), Morality and Religion, New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996. Henry E. Allison, ‘Christianity and Nonsense’, The Review of Metaphysics, 20, 3, 1967, reprinted in Josiah Thompson (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, NY, Anchor Books, 1972. References in the text are to the latter. Allison is briefly acknowledged by Conant in ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense’, p. 223, n. 82.

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3 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p.180. Allison quotes Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. Swenson/Lowrie translate this as ‘to realize the truth’ (p. 175) (page references to the translation henceforth in parentheses). 4 Stephen Mulhall, Faith and Reason, London, Duckworth, 1994, p. 50. 5 SKS 7, p. 516 (504). 6 Ibid., p. 516 (504). Swenson/Lowrie: ‘for precisely the understanding will discern that it is nonsense’. 7 Ibid., p. 516 (504). 8 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78,X 1 A 556. Søren Kierkegaard,Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 400. References to this translation will be given in parentheses. 9 SKS 7, p. 528 (515). 10 Ibid., p. 527 (514). Swenson/Lowrie overtranslate ‘Projekt’ as ‘thought-project’, which, although it is Climacus’s term (‘Tanke-Projekt’) in Fragments for the hypothesis that truth must be learned by paradoxical example, fails to convey the sense here that Christianity itself is a project, a ‘scheme’ of God’s, not ours. 11 Ibid., p. 528 (515). Swenson/Lowrie: ‘apparently well known’ and ‘absolutely strange’. 12 Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. (with intro. and notes) by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson 1934), New York: Harper and Brothers/Harper Torchbooks, 1960, p. 58 fn. 13 Ibid., p. 55. 14 SKS 7, p. 521 (508). 15 Ibid., p. 180 (176). Swenson/Lowrie has: ‘This unity is realized in the moment of passion.’ 16 Ibid. (emphasis added). 17 The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1989, p. 60. 18 Kierkegaard makes it clear in Papirer X, 6 B 79 (459) (1850) that Anti-Climacus inherits Climacus’s views though to lend them a new focus. 19 See Kant, Religion within the Limits, p. 54. 20 Conant, ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense’, p. 215. 21 Papirer X, 6 B 79 (459). The passage goes on to say that the absurdity of the Paradox is the negative side of the frame of mind properly characterized as ‘faith: ‘The absurd rounds off the sphere of faith, which is a sphere unto itself.’ It ‘throws light on faith negatively’. The entry was made in 1850 (four years after Postscript). Among the pronouncements Kierkegaard puts into the mouth of his later pseudonym, AntiClimacus, is the following: ‘The absurd is not simply the absurd or absurdities indiscriminately … the absurd is a category … the negative criterion of the divine … the absurd marks off the sphere of faith, a sphere unto itself, negatively. … it is the category of courage and enthusiasm … [there is] nothing at all daunting about it …’ 22 Papirer X 2 A 592 (482). 23 They need his dialectic to be consolidated, if faith is what they want, but ‘the most intelligent person is hindered from believing by his great understanding’. On the other hand: ‘he also has the advantage of knowing from experience what it is to believe against the understanding’ (SKS 7, p. 515 [502] ). As to what that advantage is, a comment in the journals may help. It says that ‘to be properly clear that the object of faith is the absurd abbreviates tremendously’. That might just mean that

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28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37

38 39 40 41

42

43

once you see the point you don’t have to go on and on, not about the elaborate dialectic, but about faith. That remark, too, seems aimed at the ‘intelligent’, but in the same entry Kierkegaard surmises that God may have made the object of faith absurd out of concern for people – ordinary people, that is to say, people of ordinary intelligence and not versed in dialectics (Papirer X 2 A 624 [490] [1850] ). God has even ‘let it be said in advance that it was, is, and must be absurd’. Papirer X 1 A 680 (420) (1849). Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbott, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946, p. 13. My thanks to an anonymous referee. Recall that for Allison, Postscript, owing to the patent inadequacy of its argument, must be considered a comic device; the ‘doctrinal content of the work must be regarded as an ironical jest, which essentially takes the form of a carefully constructed parody of the Phenomenology of Mind’ (p. 290). SKS 7, p. 465 (459). Ibid., p. 455 (448). Ibid., p. 408 (401). Ibid., p. 465 (459). Ibid. Ibid., p. 472 (463–4). Ibid., p. 474 (465). Translation altered. Ibid., pp. 466, 467–9 (459, 462–4). Ibid., pp. 561–2 (546–7). Postscript’s remarks about revocation and superfluousness are addressed to an ‘imagined’ reader. Climacus, saying he does not aim to ‘oblige any single real person to be the reader’, feels free to have an ideal one. The ideal, imagined reader is one who both reads the book and, once apprised of the real comedy as opposed to the humorous rhetoric, would know to put it aside. The ideal reader ‘can hold out as long as the author; he can understand that understanding is a revocation’ (ibid., p. 563 [548] ). Kierkegaard at least wanted us to believe that the function of his ‘dialectical’ pseudonyms (de Silentio, Haufniensis, Climacus, Anti-Climacus) was to bring people back to Christianity, not put them off it – in spite of the talk of the repulsion of the absurd, or rather to bring them back to it precisely by that somewhat drastic means. SKS 7, p. 506 (494). Ibid., p. 78 (71–2); cf. p. 84 (78). SKS 17, 2002, Journal DD 3, 6. Papirer X, 2 A 130 (436) (1849). In his very first publication, From the Papers of One Still Living, through Either/Or (see the title of Assessor Wilhelm’s second long letter in Part Two), to many comments in the journals. The idea itself is implicit in Postscript’s thought that one must exist in one’s thinking. In his journals Kierkegaard comments on a book on the topic by the younger Fichte (I. H. Fichte, Die Idee der Persönlichkeit und der individuellen Fortdauer, Elberfeld, 1834, see Papirer II, A 31 [1837] ), and again, later, on the curious usage that makes a ‘personal’ remark an impertinent one and the term ‘personality’ itself just another word for an insult. He thinks this strange when ‘the personal is the secret of all human existence’ (Papirer X, 1 A 18 [1849] ). Of the latter he writes: ‘The whole Idealist development e.g. in Fichte certainly found an “I”, an immortality, but without fullness [Fylde] … Fichte threw the empirical ballast overboard in despair and capsized.’ Papirer I, A 302 (59) (1836). But what Novalis hauled on-board again were only the ‘opiate fumes of soul-fullness Touse John Perry’s experession [Sjelsfylde]’.Papirer I, A 91 (39) (1835).

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2 Philosophy of mind 1 Louis Mackey, Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylania Press, 1971. 2 Gregor Malantschuk, Kierkegaard’s Thought, ed. and trans. by Howard Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. 3 John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. 4 Mackey, Kierkegaard, p. 268. 5 Charles. Taylor, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, p. 225. 6 Peter F. Strawson, Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen, 1967, Part One. 7 Mark. C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship. 8 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 4, 1997, pp. 272–84. Johannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments. Present author’s translation. 9 Jean Wahl, Études Kierkegaardiennes, Paris: Fernand Aubier, 1938, see, for example, p. 166. 10 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977 (pbk 1979), §§ 213 and 210. 11 Ibid., §§ 210 (emphases added) and 232, and G. W. F. Hegel, Faith and Knowledge, trans. by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977, p. 318. 12 SKS 7, 2002, p. 280. My translation. The Swenson/Lowrie translation (references added henceforth in parentheses) (Johannes Climacus, ed. S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941) renders ‘at toenke’ (lit. ‘to think’ here ‘thought’) as ‘philosophical reflection’ p. 273. 13 SKS 4, p. 306 (Climacus, ed. Kierkegaard, Fragments). 14 SKS 7, pp. 137–8 (184–5). 15 See Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship and especially Adi Shmuëli, Kierkegaard and Consciousness, trans. by Naomi Handelman. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. 16 SKS 7, p. 519 (507). 17 SKS 4, p. 353 (Vigilius Haufniensis, Begrebet Angest). The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte (Kierkegaard’s Writings, VIII), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, p. 49 (references in parentheses). Present author’s translation. 18 Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 (SV3), vol. 15, p. 73 (AntiClimacus, ed. Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til døden). The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 43. 19 G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990, p. 17. 20 SKS 4, pp. 347, 348 – cf. p. 401 – 354, 376, 384, 390–1 (41, 42 – cf. 98 – 48–9, 72, 81, 87–8). 21 SKS 7, pp. 519-20 (507). 22 SKS 4, p. 359 (44). 23 G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (System der Philosophie, Sämtliche Werke, vols VIII, IX and X, 1927–30), § 413). 24 Hegel, Phenomenology, § 77. 25 Cf. SKS 4, p. 359 (44).

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26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51

52

53 54 55

56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64

Ibid., p. 383 (80). Ibid. SKS 7, p. 363 (357). Ibid., pp. 356–7 (350–1). Ibid., p. 370 (364–5). Ibid., p. 356 (350) (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 364 (358). Ibid., p. 369 (363). Ibid., p. 373 (367). See SV3 15, p. 113. The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 88 (references henceforth in parentheses). SKS 7, p. 373 (367). Ibid., pp 385 and 390–1 (379 and 384). Ibid., p. 388 (381). Ibid., p. 388 (382). SV3 15, p. 112 (88, 112–13). Ibid., p. 74 (44). SKS 7, pp 381–2 (376); cf. SV3 15, p. 88 (p. 60). SV3 15, p. 75 (45–6). Ibid., p. 73 (43). SV3 14, p. 74 (44). Ibid., p. 87 (59). Ibid., p. 88 (60). SKS 4, p. 437 (136). SKS 7, p. 385 (379). SKS 4, p. 437 (136). For example, Donald Davidson, ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’, in Davidson, Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978; Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, ‘Belief and Self-deception’, Inquiry, 15, 1972, and ‘Akrasia and Conflict’, Inquiry, 23, 1980. See both the latter for further references. This point is made in Kresten Nordentoft’s Kierkegaard’s Psychology (trans. by Bruce Kirmmse, Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1978), the only major work in the period under review devoted to these aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought and their relation to post-Freudian psychology. L. A. Feuerbach, Ludwig Feuerbachs Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodls, 10 vols, Stuttgart, 1903–10, vol. 2, pp. 230 and 232. SKS 7, p. 147 (141). SKS 4, pp. 172–3 and 171. Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, pp. 110–11 and 107 (references henceforth in parentheses). Ibid., p. 201 (137). Ibid., for example p. 84 (149). Hegel, Phenomenology, § 96. SKS 4, pp. 153 and 201 (89 and.137). SKS 7, p. 185 (181). R.J. Bernstein, Praxis andAetun: Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. See SKS 4, p. 148 (82). See Paul Dietrichson, ‘An Introduction to a Reappraisal of Fear and Trembling’, Inquiry, 12, 1969. See Mark C. Taylor, Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship, especially the two last chapters.

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65 See ibid., pp. 337 ff. and the qualifying footnote on p. 337. 66 See Stuart Hampshire, ‘Feeling and Expression’, in Jonathan Glover (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind, London: Routledge, 1976, especially pp. 81ff. 67 John R. Searle, ‘What is an Intentional State’?, Mind, 88, 1979; and ‘The Intentionality of Intention and Action’, Inquiry, 22, 1979. 68 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. by P. Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980; rev. edn (text revised by Alois Pichler), 1998, p. 52e (original emphasis).see ch.13 in this volume, p 180 69 Ibid. (emphasis added). 70 Hampshire, ‘Feeling and Expression’, p. 81. 71 Stanley Cavell, ‘Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation’, in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, New York: Scribner’s, 1976. 72 Hampshire, ‘Feeling and Expression’, p. 82. 73 Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, pp. 52e and 52 (original emphasis). 74 Hampshire, ‘Feeling and Expression’, p. 82. 75 See, for example, Robert C. Roberts, ‘Kierkegaard on Becoming an “Individual” ’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 31, 1978; and ‘Thinking Subjectively,’ International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 11, 1980.

3 Faith and probability 1 Robert Merrihew Adams, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion’ (The Monist, 60, 1977, pp. 48–62), reprinted in N. Scott Arnold, Theodore M. Benditt and George Graham (eds), Philosophy Then and Now, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998, pp. 211–25. Here p. 214. 2 Ibid., p. 212. 3 See Peter Fonda, Don’t Tell Dad, New York: Hyperion, 1998, p. 496. Of course, it can be said that the desire in this case inclines the would-be believer to regard the paucity of evidence in favour of the belief as due to the parent’s inability to make visible what would otherwise have been overpowering evidence for it. The rationality of that move would depend on further evidence about the parent’s psychological make-up. 4 Adams, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments’, p. 214. A small ambiguity is removed by exchanging prepositions, the danger ‘in’ rather than ‘of’. 5 Ibid., pp. 214–15. 6 Ibid., p. 213. Adams’s references are to the Swenson/Lowrie translation of Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941), here p. 25 (emphasis removed). I give them here in parentheses following references to the corresponding passages in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, here p.30. I do not keep rigidly to the translation. 7 Adams, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments’, p. 214 (original emphasis). 8 SKS 7, p. 29 (23). 9 Ibid., p. 38 (32). 10 See SKS, Kommentarbind 6, 1999, p. 351. 11 Adams, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments’, p. 215. 12 SKS 7, p. 336 (331).

4 Having Lessing on one’s side 1 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard

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2 3 4 5

6 7

8

9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

19 20 21

Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p. 72. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 72. References to the translation are given in parentheses. Except for some brief phrases, translations of Concluding Unscientific Postscript are all modified. SKS 7, p. 69 (67–8). Ibid., pp. 66–7 (64–5). ‘Eine Duplik’, G. E. Lessings gesammelte Werke (hereafter GW) (neue rechtmässige Ausgabe), Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1857, 9, p. 98. What could Kierkegaard make of a thinker who at one time or another held (i) that individuals can get a head-start at birth by bringing their spiritual gains with them from a previous existence (and generation), (ii) that freedom was not such a good idea because it induced anxiety (Philosophische Aufsätze, 1776) – Lessing thanked his God that he was ‘under necessity, that the best must be’ – and who ended up believing (iii) that the resort to religion was in any case a sign of human immaturity (Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts [1780], GW, 9, pp. 399–425). But in mitigation and in the context of the fourth thesis attributable to Lessing, it would be perfectly in order to doubt that Lessing considered any of these to be ‘results’. SKS 7, p. 103 (106). Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, V B 1.3 and V B 1.2. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, vol. 3, 1975, pp. 2342, 2370, trans. altered. For Lessing’s use of the word Sprung, see GW, 9, pp. 84–5. For an informative account of this aspect of the period, as well as of the background to the present paper’s topic in general, see Frederick C. Beiser,The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. See among the early Journal entries from 10 September 1836 to 1837. See, for example, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte (Kierkegaard’s Writings VIII), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, p.162 fn. J. G. Hamann, Sämtliche Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. by J. Nadler, Vienna: Herder, 1949–57, II, p. 74. Moses Mendelssohn, Morgenstunden oder Vorelesungen über das Daseyn Gottes, Berlin, 1785, rev. edn 1876. See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, pp. 72, 78, 94. F. H. Jacobi, Werke, ed. by F. H. Jacobi and F. Köppen, Leipzig: Fleischer, 1812, IV/1, pp. 210–11, 223. SKS 7, p. 227 (250). Ibid., pp. 227–8 (250–1). Ibid., p. 94 (95). Ibid., p. 104 (107). Ibid, p. 92 (93). G. E. Lessing, ‘Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft’, Theologische Streitschriften, GW, 9, p. 82. The short piece (only eight pages) also includes the occurrence of the familiar Aristotelian expression, ‘metabasis eis allo genos’ (qualitative change) referred to by Climacus (SKS 7, p. 96 [98] ). SKS 7, p. 95 (96). Ibid., p. 94 (95). G. E. Lessing, Axiomata, GW, 9:210, 211. Cf. Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 58. Lessing’s remarks here are part of his dispute with H. M. Goeze (see Anti-Goeze, GW, 9, pp. 241–322), an orthodox Lutheran pastor in Hamburg, who had reacted against Lessing’s publication (with commentary) of an attack on positive religion by H. S. Reimarus (Apologie oder Schützschrift für die vernunftige Veregrer Gottes). Lessing had received the manuscript, withheld by its author during his lifetime

227

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22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

30 31 32 33 34 35 36

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

because he feared the effect of its publication, from Reimarus’s daughter, Elise (cf. SKS 7, p.101 [103], where Kierkegaard refers to her as Emilie). Lessing, ‘Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft’, 9, p. 85. SKS7, p. 97 (98). Ibid., p. 97 (98). Ibid., p. 97 (99). Ibid., p. 99 (99) (emphasis removed). Climacus also notes that, in referring to accidental historical truths, Lessing might be allowing there could also be historical truths that were not accidental, but assumes that ‘accidental’ is intended as a ‘genus predicate’ (ibid., p. 96 [98] ). SKS 4, 1997, p. 136. Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 70 (references henceforth in parentheses). I. Kant, ‘Gedanken bei dem frühzeitigen Ableben des Herrn Friedrich von Funk’,Werke, Akademie Text Ausgabe, ed. by W. Dilthey et al., Berlin: de Gruyter, 1979, II, pp. 37–44. See Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 333, n. 49. SKS 7, p. 97 (99). Ibid. Ibid., p.102 (105). Ibid., p. 100 (102). Ibid., p. 67 (65). Ibid., p. 69 (68). F. H. Jacobi, ‘Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn’ (LS), in Jacobis Spinoza Büchlein, ed. by Fritz Mauthner, Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1912, pp. 63–80. (SKS 7, p. 98 [100].) LS, p. 69. Ibid., p. 78. Ibid., p. 79, quoted in SKS 7, pp. 99–100 in German (102). LS, p. 80, quoted in SKS 7, p. 100 in German (102). LS, p. 80, quoted in SKS 7, p. 100 in German (102). SKS 7, p. 100 (103). Ibid., p. 100 (102). Ibid., p. 100 (103). Ibid., p. 101 (103). Ibid., p. 97 (99). SKS 4, p. 105 (44). Beiser, The Fate of Reason, p. 77. Cf. SKS 7, p. 192 (210). Ibid., p. 83 (83). LS, p. 80. SKS 7, p. 101 (104). Beiser, The Fate of Reason, 44. SKS 7, p. 72 (71). SKS 4, p. 171 (107).

5 ‘Spirit’ and the idea of the self as a reflexive relation 1 The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. References in parentheses are to The Sickness unto Death (Kierkegaard’s Writings XIX), trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. 2 Quotations from Hegel are from Sämtliche Werke, ed. by H. Glockner, Stuttgart: Fromann, 1927–30; Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977; Logic (pt. 1 of The Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences [1830] ), trans.

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3 4

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

17

by W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975 (abbreviated Enc.); and Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. See Martha C. Nussbaum, De motu animalium: Interpretive Essays, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, pp. 159–60. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, vol. 6, 1978, p. 6794. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 506. The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte (Kierkegaard’s Writings VIII), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980, pp. 83–4, 88–9. See, for example, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, XI 1 A 370, XI 2 A 88, XI 1 A 487. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2, 1970, 2065; vol. 3, 1975, 2986; vol 4, 1975, p. 4350. The Concept of Anxiety, p. 118. Ibid., p. 119. Fear and Trembling, trans. Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1985, p. 57. The Concept of Anxiety, p. 66. Ibid., p. 88; cf. p. 85. Papirer III A 5. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2, 2274. The Concept of Anxiety, p. 88. Ibid., p. 85. In ‘Refuge and Religion’, in George L. Stengren (ed.), Faith, Knowledge, Action: Essays to Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1984, pp. 43–53. See also Ch. 16 in the present volume. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 1, 1970, 844.

6 Basic despair 1 The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 43. The translation is as natural as the more traditional rendering: ‘not willing to be one’s self’, and ‘willing to be oneself’. 2 Ibid., pp. 72–3, 75. 3 Ibid., p. 56. 4 Ibid., p. 44. 5 Ibid., pp. 43, 44. 6 Michael Theunissen, ‘Die Existenzdialektische Grundvoraussetzung der Verzweiflungsanalyse Kierkegaards’, given at a conference on the later Kierkegaard in the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters in October 1992. The paper is now published, as the first of two ‘studies’, in Michael Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung: Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurt-am-Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. A modified version of my initial response (‘Notes on Kierkegaard’s Notion of Wanting in Despair to be Oneself’[unpublished] ) appeared as ‘Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death’, Kierkegaardiana, 17, 1994, a slightly revised version of which appeared under the same title in Kierkegaard Studies/Yearbook 1996, Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. A predecessor of the present essay appeared in the same volume under the title ‘Paradigmatic Despair and the Quest for a Kierkegaardian Anthropology’. 7 The Sickness unto Death, p. 44. 8 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. by Theodore Kiesel. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 317.

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28

The Sickness unto Death, p. 47 (emphasis added). Ibid., p. 80. Ibid., p. 49 (translation modified). Ibid., p. 50. Ibid.(translation modified). Ibid., pp. 50–1. Ibid., p. 49. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 516. The Sickness unto Death, pp. 99, 100, 103. Either/Or, p. 517. Ibid., pp. 517, 520. The Sickness unto Death, p. 49. A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, p. 97. The Sickness unto Death, p. 50. Ibid., p. 50. Either/Or, p. 516: ‘And by choosing God’, the Jews could not ‘choose God absolutely’ so that ‘it ceased to be the absolute and became sosmething finite’. SeeThe Sickness unto Death, p. 83: ‘When immediacy despairs, it has not even enough self to wish or dream that it had become what it has not become.’ Ibid., p. 44. St Thomas Aquinas, Truth, trans. (from the definitive Leonine text) by Robert W. Schmidt, S.J., vol. III, Questions XXI–XXIX, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954, p. 264. See Ch. 10 in the present volume The notions of selfhood in Either/Or and The Sickness unto Death differ in that the former focuses on ethical disclosure and the latter on a self in ‘a deeper sense’(The Sickness unto Death, p. 86) that contains an invisible link with God. See my ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998, pp. 335–6.

7 A question of continuity 1 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, X, 1 A 147. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1996, pp. 373–4. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols, ed and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, vol. 6, 1978, 6361. 2 Papirer XI 1 A 164, XI 1 A 231, XI 1 A 445, XI 1 A 141. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 586, 591–2, 606–7, 579–81. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4, 1975, 4999, 5000, vol. 6, 6902, vol. 4, 4998. 3 In his journals Kierkegaard writes that the ‘nerve’ in all his activity as a writer is to be found in the fact that he was ‘essentially religious’ and ‘religiously resolved’ when he wrote Either/Or. Papirer X 1 A 266, IX A 175. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 381–3, 319–20. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, p. 6388 (cf. 6209). 4 Papirer X 1 A 147. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 373–4. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6361. 5 Papirer X 1 A 302. Excerpt in Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 385–6. 6 Papirer X 1 A 74. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 358 and 359. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6325.

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7 See, for example, Papirer X 1 A 78, X 1 A 117 and X 1 A 508. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 359–61, 366 and 390. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6327. 8 Cf. Papirer X 1 A 510. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 391–3. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6431. 9 Papirer IV B 24, p. 192. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 167–8. 10 Kierkegaard, Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed: En ligefrem Meddelelse, Rapport til historien, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1859, p. 11. 11 Ibid., p. 31. 12 Ibid., p. 32. 13 Ibid., p. 31. 14 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. References in parentheses are to Either/Or, vols 1 and 2 (Kierkegaard’s Writings III and IV), trans. by Howard V.Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987. 15 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p. 233. Concluding Unscientific Postscript (Kierkegaard’s Writings XII 1 and 2), trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, vol. 1, p. 256. References to the latter are in parentheses. 16 Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 137. 17 SKS 7, p. 233 (1, 256). 18 Ibid., p. 248 (1, 273). 19 Ibid., p. 249 (1, 274). 20 Ibid., p 234 (1, 257–8). 21 SKS 6, 1999, p. 439. Stages on Life’s Way (Kierkegaard’s Writings XI), trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978, p. 477. 22 Papirer X 6 B 41. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6255. 23 Synspunktet, p. 12. 24 Papirer X 1 A 266. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 382. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, p. 6388. 25 Papirer IV A 234. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 165. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 5, 1978, 563. 26 Papirer XI 1 A 164. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 586. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4, 1975, 4999. 27 Papirer X 1 A 139. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 372. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, p. 6357. 28 Papirer X, 4 A 663. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 552. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6823 (translation altered). The Hongs translate ‘udviste’ in ‘Jeg udviste Ægteskabet som Eller’ as ‘eliminated’. But the secondary sense of ‘indicate’, ‘point out’ or ‘mark out’ is clearly appropriate. 29 Papirer XI 1 A 141. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 579–81. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4, 4998. 30 Fear and Trembling, p. 83. 31 Papirer XI 1 A 226. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 590–1. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 4, 5000. 32 Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. See Ch. 15 in this volume. 33 Papirer X 2 A 14. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 425. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 2, 1172.

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34 Papirer X 2 A 622. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 487. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 5, 6604. 35 Papirer X 4 A 596; cf. XI 1 A 28. Papers and Journals: A Selection, pp. 545 and 570–1. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 1, 707–11. 36 Papirer X 1 A 640. Papers and Journals: A Selection, p. 408. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, p. 6467. 37 Papirer X 2 A 61. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, vol. 6, 6500. 38 Papirer X 6, B 115.

8 The ‘what’ in the ‘how’ 1 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p. 185. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 181 (page references hereafter in parentheses). Original emphasis. 2 Gottlob Frege, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. and trans. by P. Geach and M. Black, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952, p. 59. 3 Ibid., footnote. 4 Ibid., p. 61. 5 Ibid., p. 79. 6 Ibid., p. 60. 7 Ibid., p. 59. 8 Gottlob Frege, ‘The Thought’, trans. A. M. and M. Quinton in P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967, p. 35. 9 SKS 7, p.185 (181). 10 Ibid., p. 221 (217). 11 Frege, Translations, p. 79. 12 Ibid. 13 J. R. Searle, ‘What is an Intentional State?’, Mind, 88, 1979. 14 J. R. Searle, ‘Intentionality and the Use of Language’, in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979, p. 181. 15 Cf. Alfred J. Ayer, The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan, 1940, Ch. 1, sec. 3, and R. M. Chisholm, ‘The Theory of Appearing’, in Max Black (ed.), Philosophical Analysis, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1950. 16 Cf. Alan R. White, ‘Seeing What is Not There’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1969–70, p. 62. 17 The example is from Alastair Hannay, Mental Images – A Defence, Muirhead Library of Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972 (reprinted London: Routledge, 2003), p. 226. 18 Cf. Virgil C. Aldrich, ‘Picture Space’, Philosophical Review, 67, 3, 1958, p. 349. 19 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958, p. 201. 20 Virgil C. Aldrich, ‘ Aesthetic Perception and Objectivity’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 18, 3, 1978, pp. 210, 213 and 214. 21 Ibid., pp. 214 and 215. 22 William Blake, ‘To the Evening Star’, in The College Survey of English Literature, rev. shortened edn, New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1942, p. 663. 23 Aldrich, ‘Aesthetic Perception and Objectivity’, p. 213. 24 Ibid., p.209. 25 Hermann. Hesse, ‘The Latin Scholar’, from Stories of Five Decades, New York: Panther, p. 113.

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26 Søren Kierkegaard,The Concept of Dread, trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 33. 27 Rudolf Steiner, Goethe the Scientist, trans. by O. D. Wannamaker, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950, p. 226, cf. p. 218. Goethe, in contradiction of Kant’s Third Critique, allowed the principles of organic nature to announce themselves to what he called anschauende Urteilskraft, p. 229, and Ch.16 passim. 28 For a discussion and references see Hans D. Sluga, ‘Frege’s Alleged Realism’, Inquiry, 20, 1977, esp. pp. 230–1.

Part II: Introduction 1 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, IV A 45. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols, ed and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, vol. 5, 1978, 5614. 2 Alasdair MacIntyre, Against Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, London: Duckworth, 1981, p. 38. 3 Papirer IV B 59, p. 218. 4 In an essay on Bloch in Theodor W. Adorno, Notes on Literature, vols 1–2, ed. by R. Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. 5 Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face, ed. and intro. by James Conant, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990, p. 20. 6 Étienne Gilson, The Unity of Philosophical Experience, William James Lectures 1936, New York: Scribners, 1965, pp. 305–6.

9 Commitment and paradox 1 In his journal Kierkegaard wrote that ‘the whole development of the world tends in the direction of the absolute significance of particularity’ (Søren Kierkegaards Papirer [Papirer], ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, VIII, 1, A 9), which he also regarded as the category proper of Christianity. See Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, pp. 254–5 (references, where available, henceforth in parentheses). 2 Joseph Agassi, ‘Rationality and the Tu Quoque Argument’, Inquiry,16, 1973, p. 405. 3 D. Z. Phillips, ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-games’, in Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 77–110. 4 Ibid., p. 78. 5 Ibid., p. 79. 6 Ibid., p. 101. 7 Ibid., p. 102. 8 Well, of course they might; they might say they were responding to certain situations in the way those situations demanded. But I think we could say they were then assuming that the situations were endemically religious and so the religious response was already called for, by the nature of the situation; whereas Phillips, if I understand him properly, is saying that religious responses are a specific kind of response elicited by properties of certain situations not themselves initially conceived as being inherently religious. 9 Papirer X 2 A 299 (449–50) (original emphasis). 10 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren

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11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29

Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p. 295. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 288 (references henceforth in parentheses). Ibid., p. 192 (187). Phillips, ‘Religious Beliefs’, p. 103. See Ch. 13 in the present volume. In that case we are on the slippery slope to the kind of religious attitude that Kierkegaard does not identify with faith but only as a preliminary to faith, namely resignation, and which is open wide to the kind of critique of religion given by Marx, that religious beliefs are invoked to make present suffering seem natural. Faith for Kierkegaard, as the example of Abraham and Isaac shows, means keeping what one cherishes, or receiving it back, but only on God’s terms. See my Kierkegaard, in The Arguments of the Philosophers series, ed. by Ted Honderich, London and New York: Routledge, 1982; rev. edn, 1991 (new edn, 1999), Ch. 3. See also below. SKS 7, p 517 (505). Papirer X 2, A 318 (450–1). SKS 7, p. 151 (145). Henry E. Allison, ‘Christianity and Nonsense’, Review of Metaphysics, 20, 3, 1967, reprinted in Josiah Thompson (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972, p. 315. Ibid., pp. 308 and 306.Allison’s argument is more fully discussed in Ch 1. In the present volume. See Papirer X 2 A 624. SKS 7, p. 25 (19). Ibid., p. 516 (504). Papirer X 6 B 78. cf. page 22 in 21 above. Ibid., B 79. SKS 7, p. 516(504). See Edna Ullmann-Margalit and Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘Picking and Choosing’, Social Research, 44, 1977, pp. 757ff. Agassi, ‘Rationality’, p. 395. Ibid., p. 405. Ibid., p. 401.

10 Humour and the irascible soul 1 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, p. 504. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Kierkegaard’s Writings XII 1 and 2), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992, p. 554 (page references henceforth in parentheses): ‘[A]ll despair is a kind of ill temper.’ 2 See the Republic 4:439. Cf. the physiological treatment of the theory of the tripartite soul (as a distinction between ‘divine’ reason, emotion and appetite (the latter both ‘mortal’) in the Timaeus 69–71. 3 St Thomas Aquinas, Truth, trans. (from the definitive Leonine text) by Robert W. Schmidt, S.J., vol. III, Questions XXI–XXIX, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954, p. 264. See Ch. 6 in the present volume. 4 The sadness, on Aquinas’s account, must be a form of pain, since none of the other five basic passions of the concupiscible are likely candidates. These are love and hate, desire and aversion, and pain’s opposite, pleasure. 5 Aquinas, Truth, p. 264.

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6 SKS, 4, 1997, p. 138. Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 72 (references henceforth in parentheses). 7 Ibid., p. 140 (74). 8 Aquinas, Truth, p. 272. 9 Summa Theologiæ, vol. 21, Fear and Anger, Latin text, English trans. (intro., notes, appendices and glossary) by John Patrick Reid O.P., London: Eyre & Spottiswoode/ New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, 1a2æ.40, 1, p. 5. 10 Ibid., 1a2æ.40, 4, p. 13. 11 Ibid., 1a2æ.40, 1, p. 5: ‘we do not speak of hoping for a trifle which lies easily within our grasp’. 12 Ibid., 1a2æ.40, 5, p. 13. Nicomachean Ethics III, 3. 1112b24. 13 Summa Theologiæ, 1a2æ.40, 5, p. 13. Nicomachean Ethics III, 3. 1112b24. 14 Summa Theologiæ,1a2æ.40, 1, p. 5. 15 Étienne Gilson, Le Thomisme: Introduction à la philosophie de Saint Thomas D’Aquin, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1947, p. 394. The quotation is from The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. by L. K. Shook, C.S.B., London: Gollancz, 1957, pp. 283–4; cf. The Summa Theologica, 22 vols, London, 1912–36, II–II, 67, 1 and 2. 16 Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 (SV3), vol. 15, p. 73 (AntiClimacus, ed. Kierkegaard, Sygdommen til døden), p. 79. The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1989, p. 50 (page references henceforth in parentheses): ‘To despair over oneself, in despair to want to be rid of oneself, is the formula for all despair.’ 17 Ibid., p. 118 (94–5). 18 Ibid. (94). 19 Ibid., p. 161 (143–4). 20 In sections CA(a) and CA(b) (ibid., pp. 87–98 [59–72] ), though we should observe Kierkegaard’s directions in the journals on this point and note that in this section he is making abstract distinctions, not yet applying them to actual people in terms of the levels to which they are conscious of ‘themselves’ and of their being their ‘something eternal’ in themselves. This comes in section CB. 21 Ibid., p. 78 (48). 22 See ibid., p. 88 (60): ‘No form of despair can be defined directly (that is, undialectically, but only by reflecting on to its opposite’ (translation altered). 23 The idea of a ‘dialectic’ can be traced to Aristotle. Using a term familiar to us in this discussion, Aristotle says that if the claim that ‘hatred follows anger’ is true, then hatred would be in the ‘spirited faculty’ (‘en to thumoeidei’) since ‘that is where anger is’. But if friendship, the opposite of hatred, were in the ‘faculty of desire’ (‘en to epithumetiko’), then hatred could not be in the spirited faculty and ‘could not follow anger’ (Topica, 113a35–113b3). 24 SKS 7, p. 504 (554). 25 SV3 15, p. 108 (82). 26 Le Thomisme, p. 394 (The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, p. 284). 27 Aquinas, Summa Theologiæ, 2a2æ. 17 art. 1, p. 7. 28 SV3 15, pp. 131 and 179 (109 and 164) (the first and the final page of Part Two). 29 Summa Theologiæ, vol. 33, ‘Despair’, 2a2æ, 20, 1, p. 89. 30 Ibid., p. 91. 31 SV3 15, p. 180 (165). 32 Ibid., p. 155 (137). 33 Ibid., p. 131 (109).

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34 Truth occurs in Aquinas also in a wider sense as that which being imparts of its nature on a suitably placed knower, something the reader of Philosophical Fragments may not find altogether unfamiliar. 35 See note 29 above. 36 Aquinas, Truth, p. 69. 37 SV3 15, pp. 88–9 (60). 38 Ibid., p. 164 (147). 39 SV3 11, p. 30. Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, trans. with introd. essay by Douglas V. Steere, New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Brothers, 2nd edn, 1958, p. 53. 40 SV3 15, p. 146 (127). 41 SV3 11, p. 30. Purity of Heart, p. 53. 42 SV3 15, p. 147 (127). 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., p. 91 (63). 45 Ibid., pp. 74 and 88 (44 and 60). 46 Ibid., p. 81 (52). 47 Ibid., p. 120 (96). 48 SKS 7, p. 455 (502). 49 Ibid., p. 458 (505). 50 Ibid., p. 466 (514). cf. ch.1, pp 18-19 in this volume. 51 Ibid., pp. 468–9 (516). 52 See note 23 above. 53 Ibid., pp. 25 and 560 (16 and 617). 54 I thank my colleague Ey;olfur Kjalar Emilsson for advice and guidance on the classical texts.

11 Proximity as apartness 1 For informative discussion of the Levinas–Kierkegaard connection in this and other respects, see Merold Westphal, ‘Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue’, in Merold Westphal and Martin J. Matustík (eds), Kierkegaard in Post Modernity, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995, pp. 265–81. 2 Matthew xxii. 37; cf. Luke x. 25 and 27. 3 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbott, London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 6th edn, 1954, p. 176. 4 Émile, Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols, Paris: Édn Pléiade, 1959–, iv, pp. 503–4; Émile, trans. Barbara Foxley, London: Dent, 1974, p. 182. 5 Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 (SV3), vol. 14, p. 78. A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, p. 75 (references henceforth in parentheses). 6 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, VII 1 B 135. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 251 (references henceforth in parentheses). 7 SV3 14, p. 78 (75). 8 Ibid., p. 80 (78). 9 SV3 15, 1963, p. 110. S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 85 (references henceforth in parentheses).

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10 Ibid., p. 111 (86). 11 Ibid. 12 Immanuel Kant, Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbott, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946, p. 24. 13 SV3 12, p. 26. Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger (Works of Love). The essentials of Kierkegaard’s account of love are anticipated in the Nicomachean Ethics VIII, iii. 2, where Aristotle observes that ‘in a friendship based on utility or on pleasure men love their friend for their own good or their own pleasure, and not as being the person loved, but as useful or agreeable’. Such friendships are ‘based on an accident, since the friend is not loved for being what he is, but as affording some benefit or pleasure as the case may be’ (Aristotle, XIX: The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by H. Rackham, London: W. Heinemann/Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968, p. 459). 14 Kant, Fundamental Principles, p. 18. 15 Just as Aristotle says that when the ‘motive of the friendship has passed away, the friendship itself is dissolved, having existed merely as a means to that end’. Nicomachean Ethics, VII, iii. 3. Cf. William Shakespeare’s ‘Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ (Sonnet CXVI). 16 There is a fuller discussion in my Kierkegaard, The Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. by Ted Honderich, London and New York: Routledge, 1982; rev. edn, 1991 (new edn, 1999), Ch. 7. 17 See M. Jamie Ferreira’s brief but timely, ‘Kierkegaardian Imagination and the Feminine’, Kierkegaardiana, 16, 1993, pp. 79–91. 18 See note 2 above. 19 Nicomachean Ethics, VIII, v. 5. His reason for this is that friendship, as a reciprocal form of liking, involves ‘deliberate choice’, and deliberate choice in his view must spring from a fixed disposition. I am grateful to Marianne McDonald for bringing this to my attention. 20 Ibid., VIII, iii. 6. 21 Ibid. 22 See Tracy Strong, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975, pp. 192–202, and Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche contra Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991, pp. 214–15. 23 Cf. Nietzsche’s claim in his unpublished essay on ‘Homer’s Weltkampf’ from 1872 that natural talent must develop through struggle. 24 Cf. Nietzsche’s unpublished essay from 1871 on ‘The Greek State’. 25 SV3 15, p. 110 (84).

12 Levelling and Einebnung 1 Samlede Værker ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 (SV3), vol. 14, p. 77. A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, pp. 74–5 (references henceforth in parentheses). 2 John Rawls’s ‘veil of ignorance’ is a notional device for bringing about a levelling of this kind. If you do not know what your own interests are, your choice of procedures for the distribution of insufficient goods will better express the interests of the reference group you profess to speak for than if your judgements are affected by your knowledge of your own prospects. 3 Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 1, 1997, p. 137. The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates (Kierkegaard’s Writings II), trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989, p. 79.

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4 Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 509. 5 Climacus says in the Postscript, that irony is ‘the making [Dannelse] of spirit’ (SKS 7, 2002, p. 457; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1941, p. 450 [references henceforth in parentheses] ). Roughly speaking, levelling the qualitative distinctions that confront a person in a state of what Kierkegaard calls immediacy leaves them in a position to grasp another set of qualitative distinctions, namely those that correspond, in the first instance, to the values embodied in an ethical way of life. For irony, as the Postscript also tells us, ‘is the boundary between the aesthetic and the ethical’ (SKS 7, p. 455 [448] ). 6 See Ch. 1 in the present volume. 7 SV3 14, pp. 88–9 (86–7). 8 This impression may simply be due to the fact that, as on the surface an intellectual work, the Postscript appeals to ‘thought’ and leaves all the hard work to be done after it has served its deconstructive purpose. 9 Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena (HCT), trans. by Theodore Kisiel, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1985, p. 247. 10 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, X 1 A 628. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, p. 407 (abbreviated) (references, where available, henceforth in parentheses). ‘Cause’ and ‘personality’ are opposed also in a later journal entry, already quoted (ch.1, p.23) where Kierkgaard says: The reason why Concluding Postscript is made to appear comical is precisely that it is serious – and people think they can better the cause by taking separate theses and translating them into pieces of dogma, the whole thing no doubt ending in a new confusion where I myself am treated as a cause, everything being translated into the objective, so that what is new is that here we have a new doctrine, and not that here we have personality. (Papirer X 2 A 130 [436] ) 11 12 13 14 15

16 17

18 19 20 21 22 23

HCT, p. 244 (my italic, original italic removed). Ibid., p. 426. Ibid., p. 291; cf. note 43 below. See Ch. 11 in the present volume. To eliminate any doubt on this score see HCT, p. 245 in which the Abstand in Abständigkeit is explicitly said to be the apartness we are concerned with in our concern with how we differ from one another. See SV3 14, pp. 58–9 (55). The term is also introduced in The Sickness unto Death but in a slightly different context (see SV3 15, p. 110 [The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, p. 85] [references hereafter in parentheses] ). SKS 7, pp. 330–1 (324). Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952, para. 36, p. 38. HCT, p. 248. SV3 14, p. 86 (84). Ibid., p. 92 (90). Ibid., p. 61 (58).

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24 Ibid. For Kierkgaard’s early views on life and form, see Alastair Hannay, Kierkgaard: A Biography, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, ch.1. 25 Ibid., p. 58 (55). 26 Ibid. 27 Papirer VII 1 B 135 (251). The passage was deleted from the final draft of the Review. Cf. the parallel comment from The Concept of Dread (trans. by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957, p. 89), that ‘fate’ is an ‘anticipation of providence’ (SKS 4, 1997, p. 402). 28 Jenaer Realphilosophie, II: Die Vorlesungen von 1805/6, ed. J. Hoffmeister, republished as Jenaer Realphilosophie, Hamburg, 1967, p. 270, cf. p. 267. I am not assuming that Kierkegaard had access to the text in question. 29 As I did in Ch. 8 of my Kierkegaard, The Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. by Ted Honderich, London and New York: Routledge, 1982; rev. edn, 1991 (new edn, 1999). 30 Papirer VII 1 B 43. 31 SV3 14, p. 77 (74). 32 See ibid., p. 87 (84). 33 Ibid., pp. 86–7 (84–5). 34 HCT, pp. 246–7. 35 Ibid., p. 246. 36 See SV3 14, p. 99 (97). 37 Ibid., p. 80 (77–8). 38 Papirer X 1 A 107 (365) (translation amended, original emphasis). 39 SV3 14, p. 73 (70). 40 SV3 15, p. 111 (86: ‘[T]his self, naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy, is the first form of the infinite self, and the progressive impulse in the entire process through which a self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages.’) 41 See HCT, p. 246. 42 SV3 14, p. 73 (70). 43 Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell, London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978, p. 197. 44 SV3 14, p. 79 (76). 45 Ibid., p. 78 (75). 46 SV3 15, pp. 122–3 (99: ‘[B]y means of the infinite form, the negative self, he wants to undertake to refashion the whole thing in order to get out of it a self such as he wants, produced by means of the infinite form of the negative self … he does not want to don his own self, does not want to see his task in his given self, he wants, by virtue of being the infinite form, to construct it himself’). 47 SV3 14, p. 98 (97: ‘de skulle enten fortabes i den abstrakte Uendelighedes Svimmel, eller frelses uendeligt i Religieusitetens Væsentlighed’). 48 Hubert L. Dreyfus and Jane Rubin, ‘Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age: The Case of Commitment as Addiction’, Synthese, 98, 1, January 1994, p. 7.

13 Solitary souls and infinite help 1 ‘Die christliche Religion ist nur für den, der unendliche Hilfe braucht, also nur für den, der unendliche Not fühlt … Der christliche Glaube – so meine ich – ist die Zuflucht in dieser höchsten Not.’ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, trans. by P. Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980; rev. edn (text revised by Alois Pichler), 1998, pp. 52e and 53e. 2 ‘Der ganze Erdball kann nicht in grösserer Not sein als eine Seele. …Grössere Not kann nicht empfunden werden, als von Einem Menschen. Den wenn sich ein Mensch

239

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3 4

5

6 7 8 9

10 11

12 13 14 15

16

verloren fühlt, so ist das die höchste Not.’ Ibid., pp. 52 and 53, Parrallel German English text. See, for example, ibid., pp. 35–8, 54 and 61. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, X2 A 459 (1850), p. 326. Søren Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996, p. 471. The quotation is from Opbyggelige Taler i forskjellig Aand (Samlede Værker ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 [SV3], vol. 11), p. 60 (Edifying Discourses in Various Spirits [more reliably translated ‘Edifying Discourses in a Different Tenor’] from ‘A Discourse for an Occasion’, translated as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, by Douglas Steere (with an introductory essay), New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Brothers, 2nd edn, 1958 [emphasis added], and as Purify Your Hearts, by A. S. Aldworth and W. S. Ferrie, London: The C. W. Daniel Co. Ltd, 1937, p. 78). SV3 12, p. 34. Ibid., p.37. SV3 15, p. 74. The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989, pp. 44–5 (references henceforth in parentheses). ‘Menschen sind in dem Masse religiös, als sie sich nicht so sehr unvollkommen, als krank glauben. … Jeder halbwegs anständige Mensche glaubt sich höchst unvollkommen, aber der religiöse glaubt sich elend.’ Culture and Value, p. 51. SV3 15, p. 168 (151). See ibid., p. 84 (55). ‘[G]ood fortune is not a specification of spirit’. Cf. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–, SKS 7, 2002, pp. 392ff. (Concluding Unscientific Postscript, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941, pp. 386ff. [references henceforth in parentheses] ). According to Postscript’s pseudonymous author, Johannes Climacus, the immediate individual sees misfortune and fortune as accidents. If he cannot be rid of misfortune, he despairs because he has no way of coming to terms with it. Climacus says that immediacy ‘expires’ (udaander) in misfortune, while in suffering the religious individual ‘begins to breathe’ (at aande) (SKS 7, p. 397 [390] ). The Danish for ‘spirit’ is Aand. SKS 7, pp. 392ff. and 396 (386ff. and 390). Ibid., pp. 508–9 (497). See my ‘Refuge and Religion’, in George L. Stengren (ed.), Faith, Knowledge, and Action, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1984, pp. 43–53. The oddity of the idea of ‘believing at will’ was first pointed out in Bernard Williams’s ‘Deciding to Believe’, in Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. See, for example, p. 149. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Philosophische Bibliothek Bd. 114, ed. by G. Lasson. Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1907, p. 17. A. V. Miller (Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Oxford: Clarendon, 1977, p. 14) translates ‘[Das Geistliche ist] das sich Verhaltende und Bestimmte, das Anderssein und Fürsichsein’ as ‘[The spiritual] is that which relates itself to itself and is determinate, it is other-being and being-for-self’. The reflexive form ‘relates itself to itself’, as in some current translation of The Sickness unto Death, can mislead, and the more straightforward forms ‘relates to itself’ and ‘is self-related’ are to be preferred. Hegel too describes the self as selfrelating, and indeed, literally translated, the passage would be rendered ‘[T]he

240

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17

18 19 20 21 22 23 24

25

spiritual is the self-relating-to-itself sameness and simplicity’ (p. 15); but the first ‘self’ has a merely a grammatical function due to the reflexive form taken by the German ‘beziehende’ (‘referring’). The self is ‘das in sich Zurückgekehrte’ (Phänomenologie, p. 15). In Miller’s translation: ‘And the self is like that immediacy and simplicity of the beginning because it is the result, that which has returned into itself …’ (p. 12). SV3 15, pp. 91 and 100 (44–5). SKS3, 1997, pp. 206–7. Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 517. See Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956, p. 615. SKS 7, p. 517 (505) (translation altered). Ibid., p. 520 (507) (translation altered). Williams, ‘Deciding to Believe’, p. 149. ‘Glauben heisst, sich einer Autorität unterwerfen. Hat man sich ihr unterworfen, so kann man sie nun nicht, ohne sich gegen sie aufzulehnen, wieder in Frage ziehen und auf’s neue glaubwürdig finden,’. Culture and Value, p. 52. SKS 7, p. 445 (438–9) (translation altered).

14 Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark revisited 1 Ingmar Pörn, ‘Kierkegaard and the Study of the Self’, Inquiry, 27, 2–3, 1984, pp. 199–205. Unprefixed references in the text are to this article. 2 Ingmar Pörn, ‘On the Dialectic of the Soul: An Essay on Kierkegaard’, in Ingmar Pörn (ed.), Essays in Philosophical Analysis Dedicated to Erik Stenius on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 32, 1981, pp. 198–210. 3 Ibid., pp. 199–200. 4 References (in the text here and henceforth to Sickness) are to Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. The translation is based on the text of Sygdommen til døden in Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962 (SV3), vol. 15. 5 Pörn, ‘On the Dialectic’, pp. 203 and 204. 6 Kierkegaard’s own familiarity with the concept and its background can be confirmed by the notes he made and borrowed on Hans Lassen Martensen’s lectures on ‘The History of Philosophy from Kant to Hegel’ (Søren Kierkegaards Papirer [Papirer], ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, 12, 1969, II C 25, pp. 280–331), and on ‘Speculative Dogmatics’ (Papirer 13, 1970, II C 26–8, pp. 3–116). 7 A useful source in English for variations on these Hegelian themes is Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 8 See Søren Kierkegaard, Guds Uforanderlighed: En Tale, SV3 19, pp. 249–66. Also Montréal: Inter Editions, 1981, Facsimile. 9 See Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985, p. 72. 10 Søren Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses, trans. (intro. and notes) by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940, p. 146. 11 Søren Kierkegaard, A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001, p. 99. 12 Søren Kierkegaard, Either/Or: A Fragment of Life, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992, p. 513.

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15 Two ways of coming back to reality: Kierkegaard and Lukács 1 Georg. Lukács, Existentialisme ou marxisme?, Paris: Nagel, 1948, p. 84. 2 Georg Lukács, Soul and Form, trans. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1974. 3 Georg Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, trans. by Peter Palmer, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981, p. 296. 4 Soul and Form, p. 24. 5 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. by Anna Bostock, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. 6 Soul and Form, p. 41. 7 Ibid., p. 40. 8 Ibid., p. 40. 9 Ibid., pp. 40–1. 10 See Ch. 1 above. 11 Georg Lukács, History and Class Consciousness, trans. by Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971. 12 Wolf Lepenies,Melancholy and Society, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992, p. 153. 13 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, Boston: Beacon Press, 1941; 1960 edn, p. 264. 14 Stephen Spender, ‘With Lukács in Budapest’, Encounter, December 1964, p. 55.

16 Nietzsche/Kierkegaard: prospects for dialogue? My thanks to Dan Conway and Ed Mooney, fellow participants in an American Philosophical Association symposium (Pacific Division, Berkeley, California, 28 March 1997) my contribution (‘Kierkegaard and Nietzsche in Dialogue: Who Gets What?’) to which formed the beginnings of this paper, for setting many of its thoughts in motion. 1 Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, VIII 2 B 104. 2 Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, trans. by Eden and Cedar Paul, London: Routledge, 1951, p. 17; cf. pp. 20–1, 141, 152–3, 160, 177 (emphasis added). 3 For the record, Kierkegaard was born the same year as Nietzsche’s father. 4 See Daniel W. Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, London and New York: Routledge, 1997, p. 50, which refers to the ‘experimental nature’ of Nietzsche’s own life and work. 5 In both Nietzsche and Kierkegaard there is a tendency to proclaim possibilities which are simply the diametrical opposite of those they are trying to write out of culture. In talking of a need for ‘a critique of moral values’, and of the need for this of ‘a knowledge of the conditions and circumstances in which they … evolved and changed’, Nietzsche writes: ‘One has hitherto never doubted … “the good man” to be of greater value than “the evil man”. … But what if the reverse were true? … So that … morality was the danger of dangers?’ Similarly in the case of what Kierkegaard attributes to ‘spirit’. In his case this may be due to comparative proximity to Hegel. The displacement in time, the ‘few decades’ Jaspers mentions, may have made Kierkegaard far more of an Hegelian, and in that sense (though not others) a conservative, than Nietzsche. 6 Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, pp. 6 and 2.

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7 Papirer V B 47:13, in connection with The Concept of Dread/Anxiety. 8 Ferdinand Brunetière, ‘Après le procès’, Revue des deux mondes, 15 March 1898. The procès was the Dreyfus trial and the article became famous through Durkheim’s response, ‘L’Individualisme et les intellectuels’. 9 Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by F. Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity, 1987, pp. 102–3. 10 Ibid., p. 96. 11 Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. by T. McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, New York: Vintage, 1968, p. 493. 13 Willard Van O. Quine, Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 132–3. 14 See Gilles Deleuze, ‘Active and Reactive’, in D. B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, New York: Delta, 1977, pp. 81–2. 15 Cf. Willard Van O. Quine’s appositely titled paper, ‘Naturalism or Living Within One’s Means’, given at the conference ‘Transcendentalism or Naturalism’, Universität Tobler, Bern, 14–16 November, 1993. 16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 135. Nietzsche says we should not underestimate ‘the value of having been religious’. 17 Friedrich Nietzsche, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke unde Briefe, ed. by W. Hoppe, K. Schlechta, H. J. Mette and C. Koch, Munich: Beck, 1933–42, vol. XII, p. 410. 18 Søren Kierkegaard, Samlede Værker, ed. by A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962, vol. 12. p. 312. 19 Human, All Too Human, p. 321. 20 See, with reference also to Rousseau, Ch. 11 in the present volume. 21 See Ch. 11 above in this volume. 22 Ecce Homo, trans. by W. Kaufmann, New York: Random House/Vintage Books, 1989, II:3. Quoted in Conway, Nietzsche and the Political, p. 60. 23 Nietzsche says: what we have in the case of Kant [is] the biography of a head, in the case of Schopenhauer the description and mirroring of a character (‘that which is unalterable’) and pleasure in the mirror itself, that is to say in an excellent intellect. When he does shine through his thoughts, Kant appears honest and honourable in the best sense, but insignificant: he lacks breadth and power, he has not experienced very much, and his manner of working deprives him of the time in which to experience things. Schopenhauer has one advantage over him: he at least possesses a certain vehement ugliness in hatred, desire, vanity, mistrust; his disposition is somewhat more ferocious and he had time and leisure for this ferocity. But he lacked ‘development’: just as development is lacking in the domain of his ideas; he had no ‘history’. (Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, trans. by R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, p. 198 [original emphasis] These two ‘unhistorical’ thinkers are contrasted with Plato, Spinoza, Pascal, Rousseau, Goethe (ibid.). Kierkegaard and Sartre would surely have earned a mention here.

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17 Decisively disconnected 1

2

Søren Kierkegaards Papirer (Papirer), ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78, VIII 2 B 83 and B 89. .In respect of Kunnens Meddelelse (imparting practical knowledge) Kierkegaard distinguishes between ethical knowledge, in imparting which the imparter as it were steps aside, and religious knowledge to impart, which implies authority and thus reintroduces an ‘object’ of ‘knowledge’. I owe this observation to Poul Lübcke.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kierkegaard’s works and writings in Danish Samlede Værker, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg and H. O. Lange, 5th rev. edn of 3rd edn, 20 vols, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, ed. by P. A. Heiberg, V. Kuhr and E. Torsting, 16 vols. in 25 tomes, 2nd edn, ed. by N. Thulstrup, with an Index by N. J. Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1968–78. Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. by N. J. Cappelørn, J. Garff, J. Kondrup, A. McKinnon and F. H. Mortensen, 4th edn, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag for the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre, 1997–. Synspunktet for min Forfatter-Virksomhed: En ligefrem Meddelelse, Rapport til historien, Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzels Forlag, 1859.

English translations Where possible or appropriate the following translations in the Penguin Classics series have been used: Either/Or: A Fragment of Life (lightly abridged), trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992. Fear and Trembling, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985. A Literary Review, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2001. Papers and Journals: A Selection, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996. The Sickness unto Death, trans. by Alastair Hannay, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989. Where appropriate the following translations have been used or cited: Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong, Edna H. Hong, Henrik Rosenmeier, Reidar Thomte, et al., Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978–. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, 7 vols., ed. and trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1967–78. Other translations used are:

245

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Christian Discourses, trans. (intro. and notes) by Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1940. The Concept of Dread, Vigilius Haufniensis, trans. by Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1957. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Johannes Climacus, trans. by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1941. Philosophical Fragments, Johannes Climacus, trans. by David F. Swenson and Howard V. Hong, with Intro. and Commentary by Niels Thulstrup (trans. by Hong), Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962. Purify Your Hearts: A Discourse for a Special Occasion, trans. by A. S. Aldworth and W. S. Ferrie, London: The C. W. Daniel Company Ltd, 1937; also translated as Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing: Spiritual Preparation for the Office of Confession, trans. with introd. essay by Douglas V. Steere, New York: Harper Torchbooks, Harper and Brothers, 2nd edn, 1958.

Selected books (not all cited) on or in connection with Kierkegaard Adorno, Theodor W., Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, ed. and trans. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. —— Notes on Literature, vols 1–2, ed. by R. Tiedemann, trans. by Shierry Weber, New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Agacinski, Sylviane, Aparte: Conceptions and Deaths of Søren Kierkegaard, trans. by Kevin Newmark, Tallahassee, FL: Florida State University Press, 1988. Ansell-Pearson, Keith, Nietzsche contra Rousseau, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Aquinas, St Thomas, Summa Theologiæ, vol. 21, Fear and Anger, Latin text, English trans. (intro., notes, appendices and glossary) by John Patrick Reid O.P., London: Eyre and Spottiswoode/New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965. —— Truth, trans. (from the definitive Leonine text) by Robert W. Schmidt, S.J., vol. III, Chicago: Henry Regnery Co., 1954. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, from A New Aristotle Reader, ed. by J. L. Ackrill. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987, and The Nicomachean Ethics, trans. by H. Rackham, London: W. Heinemann/Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968. Ayer, Alfred J., The Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, London: Macmillan, 1940. Beabout, Gregory R., Freedom and Its Misuses: Kierkegaard on Anxiety and Despair, Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1996. Beiser, Frederick C., The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1987. Bell, Richard H. (ed.), The Grammar of the Heart: Thinking with Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein. New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988. Bernstein, Richard J., Praxis and Action:Contemporary Philosophies of Human Activity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971. Collins, James, The Mind of Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983. Come, Arnold B., Trendelenberg’s Influence on Kierkegaard’s Modal Categories, Montreal: Inter Editions, 1991.

246

BIBBLIOGRAPHY

Conway, Daniel W., Nietzsche and the Political, London and New York: Routledge, 1997. —— Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, 4 vols, London: Routledge, 2002. Davenport, John J. and Anthony Rudd (eds), Kierkegaard after MacIntyre: Essays on Freedom, Narrative, and Virtue, Chicago and La Salle, IL: Open Court, 2001. Derrida, Jacques, The Gift of Death, trans. by David Wills, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995. Dunning, Stephen N., Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985. Elrod, John W., Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975. Evans, C. Stephen, Kierkegaard’s ‘Fragments’ and ‘Postscript’: The Religious Philosophy of Johannes Climacus, Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1983. —— Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1992. Fenger, Henning, Kierkegaard: The Myths and Their Origins, trans. by George C. Schoolfield, New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1980. Fenves, Peter, Chatter: Language and History in Kierkegaard, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993. Ferguson, Harvie, Melancholy and the Critique of Modernity: Søren Kierkegaard’s Religious Psychology, London and New York: Routledge, 1995. Ferreira, M. Jamie, Transforming Vision: Imagination and Will in Kierkegaardian Faith, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Feuerbach, L. A., Ludwig Feuerbachs Sämtliche Werke, ed. by Wilhelm Bolin and Friedrich Jodls, 10 vols, Stuttgart, 1903–10, vol. 2. Frege, Gottlob, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, ed. and trans. by P. Geach and M. Black, Oxford: Blackwell, 1952. Gardiner, Patrick, Kierkegaard, Oxford Past Masters, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Gilson, Étienne, Le Thomisme: Introduction à la philosophie de Saint Thomas D’Aquin, Paris: Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, 1947; The Christian Philosophy of St Thomas Aquinas, trans. by L. K. Shook, C.S.B., London: Gollancz, 1957. —— The Unity of Philosophical Experience, William James Lectures 1936, New York: Scribners, 1965. Gouwens, David J., Kierkegaard as a Religious Thinker, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Green, Ronald M., Kierkegaard and Kant: The Hidden Debt, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. by F. Lawrence, Cambridge: Polity, 1987. —— The Theory of Communicative Action, II: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason, trans. by T. McCarthy, Boston: Beacon Press, 1987. Hamann, Johann Georg, Sämtliche Werke, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. by J. Nadler, Vienna: Herder, 1949–57. Hannay, Alastair, Kierkegaard, The Arguments of the Philosophers, ed. by Ted Honderich, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982; rev. edn, 1991 (new edn, 1999).

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—— Kierkegaard: A Biography, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. —— Mental Images – A Defence, Muirhead Library of Philosophy, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972; reprinted Routledge, 2003. —— and Gordon D. Marino (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Hegel, G. W. F., Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (System der Philosophie), Sämtliche Werke, ed. by H. Glockner, Stuttgart: Fromann, vols VIII, IX and X, 1927–30. —— Faith and Knowledge, trans. by W. Cerf and H. S. Harris, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1977. —— Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952. —— Jenaer Realphilosophie, II: Die Vorlesungen von 1805/6, ed. by J. Hoffmeister, republished as Jenaer Realphilosophie, Hamburg, 1967. —— Logic (pt. 1 of The Encyclopædia of the Philosophical Sciences), trans. by W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975. —— Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. by A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977. —— The Philosophy of History, trans. by J. Sibree, Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1990. Heidegger, Martin, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. by T. Kiesel, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985. —— Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings, ed. by David Farrell Krell, London and Henle: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978. Holmer, Paul L., The Grammar of Faith, San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, Werke, ed by F. H. Jacobi and F. Köppen, Leipzig: Fleischer, 1812. Jaspers, Karl, Man in the Modern Age, trans. by Eden and Cedar Paul, London: Routledge, 1951. Kadarkay, Arpad, Georg Lukács: Life, Thought, and Politics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. —— (ed.) The Lukács Reader, Oxford: 1995. Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Practical Reason, in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbott, London, New York and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 6th edn, 1954. —— Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Ethics, trans. by T. K. Abbott, London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1946. —— Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, trans. (with intro. and notes) by T. M. Greene and H. H. Hudson, New York: Harper and Brothers/Harper Torchbooks, 1960. Kirmmse, Bruch, Encounters with Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. —— Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990. Law, David R., Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Lepenies, Wolf, Melancholy and Society, trans. by Jeremy Gaines and Doris Jones, foreword by Judith N. Shklar, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Anti-Goeze, in G. E. Lessings gesammelte Werke (neue rechtmässige Ausgabe), Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1857, vol. 9.

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—— ‘Poor Paris’: Kierkegaard’s Critique of the Spectacular City, Kierkegaard Studies: Monograph Series 2, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1999. Phillips, D .Z., r.o. p. 249 r. o. p.248Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Pojman, Louis, The Logic of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Religion, Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1984. Poole, Roger, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993. —— and Henrik Stangerup (eds), The Laughter Is on My Side: An Imaginative Introduction to Kierkegaard, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. Putnam, Hilary, Realism with a Human Face, ed. and intro. by James Conant, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990. —— Renewing Philosophy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992. Quine, Willard Van O., Quiddities: An Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Rée, Jonathan and Jane Chamberlain (eds), Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Roberts, Robert C., Faith, Reason and History: Rethinking Kierkegaard’s ‘Philosophical Fragments’, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Émile, Oeuvres complètes de Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ed. by Bernard Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond, 5 vols, Paris: Édn Pléiade, 1959–; Émile, trans. by Barbara Foxley, London: Dent, 1974. Rudd, Anthony, Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Sarkar, Husain, The Toils of Understanding: An Essay on ‘The Present Age’, Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2000. Sartre, Jean-Paul, Being and Nothingness, trans. by Hazel E. Barnes, New York: Philosophical Library, 1956. Shestov, Lev, Kierkegaard and the Existentialist Philosophy, trans. by E. Hewitt, Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1969. Shmuëli, Adi, Kierkegaard and Consciousness, trans. by Naomi Handelman, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1971. Steiner, Rudolf, Goethe the Scientist, trans. by O. D. Wannamaker, New York: Anthroposophic Press, 1950. Stepelevich, Lawrence S. (ed.), The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. Strawson, Peter F., Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics, London: Methuen, 1967. Strong, Tracy, Friedrich Nietzsche and the Politics of Transfiguration, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Tanner, John S., Anxiety in Eden: A Kierkegaardian Reading of ‘Paradise Lost’, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Taylor, Charles, Hegel, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Taylor, Mark C., Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980. —— Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.

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Theunissen, Michael, Der Begriff Verzweiflung: Korrekturen an Kierkegaard, Frankfurtam-Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. —— Das Selbst auf den Grund der Verzweiflung, Frankfurt-am-Main: Anton Hain, 1991. Thomas, J. Heywood, Subjectivity and Paradox, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957. Thompson, Josiah, Kierkegaard, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973. —— (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972. Thulstrup, Niels, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel, trans. by George L. Stengren, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980. Wahl, Jean, Études Kierkegaardiennes, Paris: Fernand Aubier, Éditions Montaigne, 1938; 2nd edn: Paris: J. J. Vrin, 1949. Walker, Jeremy D. B., To Will One Thing: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s ‘Purity of Heart’, Montreal and London: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1972. Weston, Michael, Kierkegaard and Modern Continental Philosophy: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 1994. Westphal, Merold, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s ‘Concluding Unscientific Postscript’, West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 1996. —— Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991. Williams, Bernard, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973. Wisdo, David, The Life of Irony and the Ethics of Belief, Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value, trans. by P. Winch, Oxford: Blackwell, 1980; rev. edn (text revised by Alois Pichler), 1998. —— Philosophical Investigations, trans. by G. E. M. Anscombe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1958.

Essays and articles cited Adams, Robert Merrihew, ‘Kierkegaard’s Arguments against Objective Reasoning in Religion’, The Monist, 60, 1977; reprinted in N. Scott Arnold, Theodore M. Benditt and George Graham (eds), Philosophy Then and Now, Oxford: Blackwell, 1998. Agassi, Joseph, ‘Rationality and the Tu Quoque Argument’, Inquiry,16, 1973. Aldrich, Virgil C., ‘Aesthetic Perception and Objectivity’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 18, 3, 1978. —— ‘Picture Space’, Philosophical Review, 67, 1958. Allison, Henry E., ‘Christianity and Nonsense’, The Review of Metaphysics, 20, 3, 1967; reprinted in Josiah Thompson (ed.), Kierkegaard: A Collection of Critical Essays, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1972., (Reprinted in Daniel W. Conway [ed.], Kierkegaard. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosphers, vol. 3, London and New York: Routledge, 2002) Brunetière, Ferdinand, ‘Après le procès’ Revue des deux mondes, 15 March 1898. Cavell, Stanley, ‘Kierkegaard’s On Authority and Revelation’, in Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, New York: Scribner’s, 1976. Chisholm, Roderick M., ‘The Theory of Appearing’, in Max Black (ed.), Philosophical Analysis, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1950. Conant, James, ‘Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein, and Nonsense’, in Ted Cohen, Paul Guyer and Hilary Putnam (eds), Pursuits of Reason, Lubbock, TX: Texas Technical University Press, 1993.

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—— ‘Must We Show What We Cannot Say?’, in Richard Fleming and Michael Payne (eds), The Senses of Stanley Cavell, Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1989. —— ‘Putting Two and Two Together: Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and the Point of View for their Work as Authors’, in Timothy Tessin and Marion von der Ruhr (eds), Philosophy and the Grammar of Religious Belief’, New York., St Martin’s Press, 1995. —— ‘Reply: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Anscombe on Moral Unintelligibility’, in D. Z. Phillips (ed.), Morality and Religion,New York: St Martin’s Press, 1996. Cross, Andrew. ‘Suspending the Ethical’, Inquiry, 46, 2003. Davidson, Donald, ‘How is Weakness of the Will Possible?’, in Davidson, Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978. Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Active and Reactive’, in D. B. Allison (ed.), The New Nietzsche: Contemporary Styles of Interpretation, New York: Delta, 1977. Dietrichson, Paul, ‘An Introduction to a Reappraisal of Fear and Trembling’, Inquiry, 12, 1969. Dreyfus, Hubert L., and Jane Rubin, ‘Kierkegaard on the Nihilism of the Present Age: The Case of Commitment as Addiction’, Synthese, 98, 1, January 1994. Ferreira, M. Jamie, ‘Kierkegaardian Imagination and the Feminine’, Kierkegaardiana,16, 1993. Frege, Gottlob, ‘The Thought’, trans. by A. M. and M. Quinton in P. F. Strawson (ed.), Philosophical Logic, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967. Hampshire, Stuart, ‘Feeling and Expression’, in Jonathan Glover (ed.), The Philosophy of Mind, London: Routledge, 1976. Hannay, Alastair, ‘Basic Despair in The Sickness unto Death’, Kierkegaardiana, 17, 1994; reprinted in Kierkegaard Studies/Yearbook 1996, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996, and in Daniel W. Conway (ed.), Kierkegaard. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 2, London: Routledge, 2002. —— ‘Equality and Association’, in Daniel W. Conway (ed.), Kierkegaard. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 4, London: Routledge, 2002. —— ‘Kierkegaard and the Variety of Despair’, in Alastair Hannay and Gordon D. Marino (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. —— ‘Paradigmatic Despair and the Quest for a Kierkegaardian Anthropology’, Kierkegaard Studies/Yearbook 1996, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. —— ‘Pathology of the Self’, in Daniel W. Conway (ed.), Kierkegaard. Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 2, London: Routledge, 2002. —— ‘Refuge and Religion’, in George L. Stengren (ed.), Faith, Knowledge, and Action: Essays to Niels Thulstrup, Copenhagen: Reitzel, 1984. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, ‘Über die Lehre des Spinoza in Briefen an den Herrn Moses Mendelssohn’, in Jacobis Spinoza Büchlein, ed. Fritz Mauthner, Munich: Georg Müller Verlag, 1912. Kant, Immanuel, ‘Gedanken bei dem frühzeitigen Ableben des Herrn Friedrich von Funk’, Werke, Akademie Text Ausgabe, ed. W. Dilthey et al., Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1979. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, ‘Eine Duplik’, in G. E. Lessings gesammelte Werke (neue rechtmässige Ausgabe), Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1857. —— ‘Über den Beweis des Geistes und der Kraft’, Theologische Streitschriften, in G. E. Lessings gesammelte Werke (neue rechtmässige Ausgabe), Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche Verlagshandlung, 1857.

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Phillips, D. Z., ‘Religious Beliefs and Language-games’, in Phillips, Faith and Philosophical Enquiry, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. Pörn, Ingmar, ‘Kierkegaard and the Study of the Self’, Inquiry, 27, 2–3, 1984. —— ‘On the Dialectic of the Soul: An Essay on Kierkegaard’, in Ingmar Pörn (ed.), Essays in Philosophical Analysis Dedicated to Erik Stenius on the Occasion of his 70th Birthday, Acta Philosophica Fennica, 32, 1981. Roberts, Robert C., ‘Kierkegaard on Becoming an “Individual” ’, Scottish Journal of Theology, 31, 1978. —— ‘Thinking Subjectively’, International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, 11, 1980. Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg, ‘Akrasia and Conflict’, Inquiry, 23, 1980. —— ‘Belief and Self=deception’, Inquiry, 15, 1972. ____ 2, 1977. Searle, John R., ‘Intentionality and the Use of Language’, in A. Margalit (ed.), Meaning and Use, Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1979. —— ‘The Intentionality of Intention and Action’, Inquiry, 22, 1979. —— ‘What is an Intentional State?’, Mind, 88, 1979. Sluga, Hans D., ‘Frege’s Alleged Realism’, Inquiry, 20, 1977. Spender, Stephen, ‘With Lukács in Budapest’, Encounter, December 1964. Ullmann-Margalit, Edna, and Sidney Morgenbesser, ‘Picking and Choosing’, Social Research, 44, 1977. Westphal, Merold, ‘Kierkegaard and Levinas in Dialogue’, in Merold Westphal and Martin J. Matustík (eds), Kierkegaard in Post/Modernity, Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995. White, Alan R., ‘Seeing What is Not There’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1969–70. Williams, Bernard, ‘Deciding to Believe’, in Williams, Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

253

INDEX

Abraham, and Isaac 37–8, 130, 233 Abständigkeit 166–8, 171, 174, 177, 237; see das Man absurdity 9, 10, 13, 15, 19–20, 126, 127, 130, 131, 133, 134, 136, 187, 221 n21 Adams, Robert Merrihew 42–8, passim Adorno, T.,125, 204 Agassi, Joseph 134–5, 232 akrasia 35 Aldrich, Virgil C. 110, 112, 114–15 Allison, Henry E 9–10, 13, 15, 131, 133, 220, 221 n3 Ansell-Pearson, Keith 236 Anthropology; philosophical 5, 6, 186 Anti-Climacus 14, 64–75, 76–88, 140–7, 181, 185, 186, 188, 204 anxiety 33–4, 40, 42, 43, 54, 72, 226 Aquinas, St. Thomas 4, 87, 124, 138–40, 143–6, 147, 149, 234, 235 Aristotle 25, 26, 139, 142, 149, 159, 205, 226, 234, 236 Assessor Wilhelm; see Judge William. Augustine, St 4 Ayer, Alfred J. 231 Beauvoir, Simone de 5 Beiser, Frederick C. 61 Bernstein, 39, 224 Blake, William, 114–15 Brunetière, Ferdinand 242 Cavell, Stanley, 40. Christianity; Christian; Christians 9–14, 18, 20–2, 24, 40, 42, 44–5, 48, 52, 56, 61, 73–75, 87, 92, 99,101, 102, 104, 120, 127, 128, 129, 132, 133,

143–5, 147, 151, 159, 160, 178–88, 195, 199 Climacus, Johannes 4, 9–23, 27, 49–52, 54–62, 91, 105, 119, 127, 127, 132, 137–49, 184, 187, 188, 202, 219, 226, 227, 237 Conant, James 9, 15 Conway, Daniel W. 207, 241, 242 corrective, 102 Davidson, Donald 224 das Man 85, 143, 167–8, 172–4 Deleuze, Gilles, 242 Derrida, Jacques, 4 Descartes, R.- Cartesian, 25–6, 209 despair 5, 16, 32, 33, 40, 66, 67–71, 76–88, 102, 118, 133, 137–48, 165, 179, 182, 186, 189, 195, 196–8, 199, 204, 214, 229, 234 Dietrichson, Paul 224 Dreyfus, Hubert L. 168, 176 Dualism; see Descartes

Einebnung; see Abständigkeit Elrod, John W. 24 Emilsson, Eyjolfur Kjalar 235 Enlightenment the 8, 51–4, 59–61, 123, 126 Ethics; suspension of the ethical 17, 18, 21, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 90, 92, 93, 99, 100, 131, 148, 151, 156, 157, 158, 161, 237 exceptionality 93–4, 97–8, 101, 103–4 existentialism 5, 52, 54, 62, 124, 200, 204 facticity 72 faith 5, 9, 13–15–17, 20, 23, 35, 39, 40,

254

INDEX

42–8, 51–2, 54–9, 69, 70, 73, 74, 77, 127, 128–30, 131, 132–4, 144, 145, 147, 178–80, 182–4, 186–8, 194, 196, 221 n21; Knight of 37–9, 62; Leap of 48, 50, 52,56–60, 6 Ferguson, Harvie 220 Ferreira, M. Jamie 236 Feuerbach, L. A. 36, 184, 199, 224 Fichte, J. G. 23, 165–6, 222 Fonda, Peter 225 Forster, G. 53 Foucault, Michel 4 Frege, G. 26, 106–8, 114, 116 Gilson, É, 125 139–40, 141, 143, 234 God; God-relationship 7, 12, 17, 18, 21, 23, 33, 37–8, 46–7, 60, 68–9, 78–80, 84, 87, 88, 93, 105, 129, 130–1, 143, 145, 148, 155, 160, 175, 182, 186, 187, 194, 195, 198, 199, 200, 233 Goethe, J. W. von 61, 243 Goldmann, Lucien 200, 202 Habermas, J. 160, 209, 211, 213 Hamann, J. G. 4 21, 52, 54, 55–6, 61 Hampshire Stuart, 40 Hannay, Alastair 231, 238 Haufniensis, Vigilius 71 Hegel, -ian(ism); G. W. F. 5, 6, 9–10, 12, 13, 18, 19, 22, 25–6, 28–31, 36–9, 49–53, 55, 61–2, 64–8, 71, 75, 120, 124, 132, 146, 150, 153, 165, 168–70, 171–2, 175–7, 184, 185, 193–4, 199, 202, 203, 204 Heiberg, J. L. 49, 176 Heidegger, Martin 5, 79, 85, 87, 143, 166–70, 173–5, 177, 200, 202 Herder, J. G. 61 Hesse, Hermann 117 history 44, 46, 47, 51, 56–7, 107, 156; inner, 5, 28, 33 Humboldt, K. W. von 53 Hume, David 5 humour, 5, 9–23, 40, 58, 137, 148–9 Husserl, E. 107, 200 imagination 13–14, 198 immediacy; immediate 18, 21, 29, 37, 70,72, 88, 95, 102, 170, 186, 188, 192–8, 212, 213, 229, 237, 238, 240 Incarnation 11, 12, 13, 48, 132, 134, 184, 187

intentionality 39, 108–9, 111, 113 inwardness 10, 11, 18–20, 39, 60, 124, 154; town-criers of, 20 irony; -ical 7, 10, 17, 19, 39, 50, 51, 52, 55, 56, 59, 61, 164–5, 175, 213, 237

Jacobi, F. H. 52, 53, 55–6, 59–62 Jaspers, Karl 5, 206, 208 Judge William 82, 83, 89, 91, 92, 93–95, 96, 97–98, 101–3, 131, 185, 222 Kant, Immanuel; Kantian(ism) 6, 12, 13–17, 19, 53, 119, 155, 156–7, 158–9, 242 Kierkegaard, Søren; passim; ; A Literary Review, 83, 163–4, 166, 169–75; Concluding Unscientific Postscript, vii, 5, 7, 8, 9–23, 27, 38, 42–48, 49–63, 92, 118, 126–7, 129, 131–2, 133–4, 137, 142, 148–9, 166, 168, 202, 221, 222; Either/Or, 8, 82, 88, 89–104, 123, 126–7, 161, 164, 197, 201, 217; Fear and Trembling, 37, 39, 61, 71, 92, 93, 95, 101, 102, 130, 139; Philosophical Fragments, 4, 11, 27, 50–52, 91, 127; Repetition, 92; Stages on Life’s Way, 92, 93, 102; The Lilies of the Field and the Birds of the Air, 90; The Concept of Anxiety, 33, 34, 35, 70, 71, 171; The Point of View for My Activity as an Author, 89, 90; The Sickness unto Death, 7-8, 33, 34, 64–75, 76–88, 102, 140–7, 155, 173, 182, 187, 192–4, 196–7, 199 language -game(s) 6, 127, 131–2, 134 Leibniz, G. W. 51 Lepenius, Wolf 203 Lessing, G. E. 49–63, 226, 227 189–99, 213, 214, 218, 229, 238, 239, levelling 154, 163–77, 236 Levinas, Emmanuel 4, 150 Lübcke, Poul 243 Lukács, G. 102, 124, 200–5 Lyotard, Jean-Francois 217 MacIntyre, Alasdair 123–4 Mackey, Louis 24, 25 Malantschuk, Gregor 24 Marcuse, Herbert 204 Marino, Gordon D. 220

255

INDEX

Marriage 89, 94–8, 99–100,102, 104 Martensen, Hans Lassen 11, 240 Marx, Karl, Marxist 33, 153, 199, 204, 205 McDonald, Marianne 236 Mendelssohn, Moses 55 Michelet, C. L. 55 Mind; philosophy of 5, 6, 24–40 misology 10, 15, 16, 17 Møller, Poul M. 8 Mooney Edward F. 220, 241 Moral psychology 35 Morgenbesser, Sidney 233 Mulhall, Stephen 11 naturalism 4, 208, 210–11 neighbour 150–1, 156, 157, 159, 162 Neuhouser, Frederick 220 Nielsen, Rasmus 45 Nietzsche, F. 86, 124, 160–1, 165, 175, 204, 206–16, 236, 241, 242 Nihilism; nihilistic 67, 69, 73–5, 175–7, 184, 186, 188, 207, 208, 210 nonsense; see absurdity Nordentoft, Kresten 224 Novalis, 23 165, 222 Nussbaum, Martha 228 Other; (foreign, foreignness) 7, 12, 14, 148, 210; the other(s), 150–1, 152, 156, 157, 167 pantheism 61 Paradox, the Absolute 19, 133, 221 Pascal, Blaise 243 Peirce, C. S. 108 personality 7–8, 23, 165, 166, 176 Pharisees 103 Phillips, D. Z. 127–9 pity 152–4, 213, 216 Plato; -nism 16, 119, 130, 137–8, 149, 233, 243 Pörn, Ingmar189–93, 195–9 Putnam, Hilary 125 Perry, John 222 n43 Prayer; praying 128, 130–1, 132 Quine, Willard Van O. 210–11 rationalism 53, 55, 60, 62, 126, 132, 134–6 rationality 126, 128, 134–5

Rawls, John 158, 236 Reason; -ing 7, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14, 15, 16, 26, 36, 53, 54, 56, 59, 137, 144, 145, 209 religion; religiosity; religiousness; religious point of view 6–7, 8, 9, 17, 40, 53, 90, 94, 126, 128, 130, 131, 148, 215, 232–3 Religiousness A 18, 19, 20, 92, 130, 132, 215 Religiousness B 19, 20, 28, 92, 132 resignation 31, 139, 141, 149, 186, 194, 201 Roberts, Robert C. 225 Romantic; the; Romanticism 8, 23, 54, 95, 126, 165 Rorty, Amelie Oksenberg 224 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 124, 152–3, 160, 165, 242, 243 Rubin, Jane 176 Ryle, Gilbert 39 Sartre, Jean-Paul 5 155, 186, 199 Schiller, J. C. F. von 53 Schleiermacher, F. D. E. 6 Schopenhauer, Arthur 4, 200, 242 Searle, John R. 108–9, 113, 231 Self; selfhood 5, 8, 14, 25, 28, 29, 31, 32–34, 64–75, 76–88, 140, 142, 145–7, 156–7, 173, 182, 185–7, 240; see Spirit Serck-Hanssen, Camilla 220 Shakespeare, William 4, 236 Silentio, Johannes de 57, 61, 71, 95, 102, 139 sin 35, 77, 81, 143–4, 145, 147, 178, 180, 182, 185, 203, 207 Sluga, Hans D. 232 Socrates; Socratic 5, 21, 27, 28, 39, 51, 52, 54, 58, 61, 81, 90–92, 93, 98, 138, 210, 213 Spender, Stephen 241 Spinoza; -ist 49, 59, 60, 61–62, 73, 243 spirit 27, 29–31, 32–4, 36, 37, 41, 64–75, Steiner, Rudolf 232 Stoic, the Stoics 163–4, 186 Strawson, Peter F. 26 Strong, Tracy 236 subjective thinking; (reflection) 4, 5, 10, 13, 21–22, 50–51, 56, 57, 58 superstition 129 synthesis 25, 28–9, 32–3, 64–75

256

INDEX

76, 77, 78, 87, 99, 101, 120, 129, 137, Taylor, Charles 26 Taylor, Mark C. 24, 26, 224 Theunissen, Michael 78–9, 81, 82, 87–88, 228 Tragedy; the tragic 18, 201, 202–3, 204, 205 truth 5, 10, 11, 16, 20, 21, 22, 28, 38, 42–48, 51, 55–6, 60, 65, 67, 69, 105, 120, 165, 235 Ullmann-Margalit, Edna 233 Unamuno y. Jugo, Miguel de 5

Unhappy Consciousness 26, 169 Universal; the 37–8, 91, 93, 99, 100–1, 103, 157, 210, 212, 213 Wahl, Jean 26 Weber, Max 128 Westphal, Merold 235 White, Alan R. 231 Wilhelm, Assessor; see Judge William Will 11, 12, 13, 31, 34–5, 43, 78, 139, 145–7, 148, 191–2, 193, 195, 196, 198 Williams, Bernard, 239, 240 Wittgenstein 6–7, 39, 40–1, 110, 126, 178-88

257