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’.2