Kierkegaard on Faith and Love

KIERKEGAARD ON FAITH AND LOVE Kierkegaard’s writings are interspersed with remarkable stories of love, commonly understood as a literary device that illustrates the problematic nature of aesthetic and ethical forms of life, and the contrasting desirability of the life of faith. Sharon Krishek argues that for Kierkegaard the connection between love and faith is far from being merely illustrative. Rather, love and faith have a common structure, and are involved with one another in a way that makes it impossible to love well without faith. Remarkably, this applies to romantic love no less than to neighbourly love. Krishek’s original and compelling interpretation of the Works of Love in the light of Kierkegaard’s famous analysis of the paradoxicality of faith in Fear and Trembling shows that preferential love, and in particular romantic love, plays a much more important and positive role in his thinking than has usually been assumed. is a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Department at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

SHARON KRISHEK

M O D E R N E U R O P E A N P H I L O SO P H Y General Editor R O B E R T B . P I P P I N , University of Chicago Advisory Board GAR Y GU TTI NG , University of Notre Dame R O L F - P E T E R H O R S T M A N N , Humboldt University, Berlin M A R K S A C K S , University of Essex

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KIERKEGAARD ON FAITH AND LOVE

SHARON KRISHEK The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sa˜o Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 8RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521519410 Sharon Krishek 2009 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2009 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library ISBN

978-0-521-51941-0 hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

In memory of Isaac Krishek, my father 1950–2006

CONTENTS

page x xii

Acknowledgements List of abbreviations Introduction: stages on love’s way

1

1 Lost loves 2 The sorrowful lover 3 The knight of love 4 Neighbourly love versus romantic love 5 The double movement of love 6 Faith-full romantic love

17 46 75 109 138 166

Bibliography Index

190 195

ix

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I was truly fortunate to be surrounded by the good will and extensive help of so many people, and I would like to try and express here my sincere gratitude. First, I would like to thank the two anonymous readers for Cambridge University Press for their extremely helpful comments. In particular I’d like to express my gratitude to Reader B, whose detailed reviews, suggestions, and insistence on clarifications have immensely improved my manuscript. I would also like to thank Hilary Gaskin, the philosophy editor at Cambridge University Press, who has helped me throughout this long process with her patience and kind attention. I would like to express my gratitude to the philosophy department at Tel Aviv University, and to the faculty of humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, for awarding me postdoctoral fellowships in the academic years 2006–7 and 2007–8, respectively, and so providing me with the time and peace of mind needed for writing this book. The beginning of this book is rooted in ideas developed in the context of a Ph.D. thesis which I wrote at the University of Essex. I would like to thank Simon Critchley, my supervisor, for his enlightening philosophical guidance, and for his vital encouragement both in easier and more difficult times. The late Mark Sacks was the head of the department during the years of my study at Essex, but his involvement in my work went far beyond his official duties. The perceptive interest and trust he expressed regarding my ideas helped me greatly, and the memory of our long conversations is dear and meaningful to me. x

acknowledgements

xi

In the summer of 2005 I spent a most productive month at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St Olaf College, where I was first introduced to the welcoming and lively community of Kierkegaard scholars. I wish to thank the people I was privileged to meet there, and in particular those who have accompanied my work since then: John Lippitt, for acquainting me with the Library and its denizens, and for sharing the clarity of his thought and the breadth of his understanding; Gordon Marino, the curator of the Library, who reminded me to think in ways that are closely connected with life, and whose invaluable feedback and warm friendliness I deeply appreciate; George Pattison, whose work on Kierkegaard had influenced me long before I met him in person, for the serious attention he gave to my thoughts, which was significantly motivating for me; and finally, Ed Mooney, whose approach to philosophy in general and to Kierkegaard in particular has been crucial to my own outlook, and whose intellectual enthusiasm and unlimited generosity have set an admired example and greatly cheered me on many occasions. My engagement with the study of philosophy is much indebted to the people who first initiated me into this field. I wish to thank my former teachers at Tel Aviv University, and in particular Marcelo Dascal and Zvi Tauber, who have helped me to develop vital intellectual tools, and kindly offered their experienced advice; and Ran Sigad and Hagi Kenaan, who have, each in his special manner, formatively influenced the way I think about philosophy. To Hagi I also wish to express thanks for his constant support throughout these years and for his enduring friendship. Other friends significantly helped me in many ways, and I deeply thank them for this: Ido Geiger, for his right-to-the-point tips and calming words; Vered Lev-Kenaan, for her strength, her heartening optimism, and her inspiring trust; Dorit Peleg, whom I first knew only as an author but was lucky enough to get to know as a wise friend; and Maya Michaeli, whose close friendship I deeply cherish, for making everything easier with her love and care. I would like to thank my very dear family, and in particular my sister and mother, Einav and Tamara Krishek, and my mother-in-law Rachel Meirav, for their endless patience, their selfless efforts on my behalf, and above all for their love, which continually expresses itself in so many irreplaceable ways. And most of all, I would like to thank Ariel Meirav, my greatest critic and teacher, my greatest love, who spared no intellectual, emotional, and practical effort to help to make this enterprise possible; without him, both this book and its author would have undoubtedly been in a less desirable place.

ABBREVIATIONS

CA

CUP

EO

EUD

FT

JN JP

The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard’s Writings 8, trans. Reidar Thomte, in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 2 vols., Kierkegaard’s Writings 12, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997. Either/Or, 2 vols., Kierkegaard’s Writings 3–4, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, Kierkegaard’s Writings 5, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings 6, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, general ed. Bruce H. Kirmmse, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, assisted by Gregor Malantschuk, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, (Vol. I) 1967, (Vol. II) 1970, (Vols. III–IV) 1975, (Vols. V–VII) 1978. xii

list of abbreviations PF

PV

R

SLW

SUD

WL

xiii

Philosophical Fragments, in Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, Kierkegaard’s Writings 7, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. The Point of View for My Work as an Author, Kierkegaard’s Writings 22, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Repetition, in Fear and Trembling and Repetition, Kierkegaard’s Writings 6, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Stages on Life’s Way, Kierkegaard’s Writings 11, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988. The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard’s Writings 19, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s Writings 16, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.

INTRODUCTION: STAGES ON LOVE’S WAY

1 Kierkegaard, love, and romantic love And yet it must be wonderful to get the princess, and the knight of faith is the only happy man … to live happily with her day after day … this is wonderful. (FT, 50) … erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness. (WL, 267)

Romantic love, in contrast with neighbourly love or love for God, is rarely viewed as an important issue for Kierkegaard.1 Despite the textual evidence regarding the centrality of this kind of love in his works, scholars in this field often seem reluctant to take the matter seriously. When required to address Kierkegaard’s repeated references to love stories, the secondary literature tends either to interpret this as a literary device or, more frequently, to relate this to his unhappy personal relationship with Regine Olsen, his forsaken fiance´e.2 This ‘biographical’ approach is common among interpreters of Kierkegaard who believe that a complete understanding of his 1

2

I use the expression ‘romantic love’ in its loose familiar sense of a love between two individuals that involves erotic aspects, without intending to connote any more specific notion such as the conception of love associated with the romantic tradition in literature. Søren Kierkegaard and Regine Olsen became engaged in 1840. Søren met Regine, a young and beautiful woman from an affluent family, years before the engagement, but proposed to her only in 1840, when she was 18 years old. A year later he broke off the engagement, without giving a convincing explanation. The broken engagement caused a great scandal in Copenhagen and much pain to everyone involved.

1

2

kierkegaard on faith and love

work requires a thorough understanding of his life, and vice versa. Such an interpretative method was dominant among earlier scholars (P. A. Heiberg and Walter Lowrie, for example), but it still has its ardent followers today (as demonstrated by Gene Fendt’s book on Works of Love and especially by the comprehensive biography of Kierkegaard by Joakim Garff).3 However, intriguing as this approach to interpreting Kierkegaard may be, it is evident that it does not take his preoccupation with romantic love to be philosophically enlightening. And this is true also with regard to scholars who do not entertain the ‘biographical’ approach: they are equally inclined to overlook the possibility of discovering philosophical insight in Kierkegaard’s discussions of romantic love. There appear to be two main reasons for this. The first reason concerns the context in which these discussions are usually found. The aesthetic writings which most conspicuously elaborate on this subject are written under pseudonyms and conveyed in the form of ‘indirect communication’.4 There is a vast discussion in the secondary literature regarding Kierkegaard’s use of such indirectness, and the reasons offered for his decision to adopt this method are not uncontroversial. However, most of the commentators agree that the relationship between Kierkegaard’s own views and those that he attributes to his pseudonyms is, at the very least, complicated. This complication not only challenges any attempt to give a coherent interpretation of his philosophy, but often leads to a sceptical assessment of the views expressed in the voices of his pseudonyms.5 The centrality of romantic love in the lives of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms is thus disregarded because it is taken to represent their incomplete, or even mistaken, understanding of existence – Kierkegaard’s apparent obsession with romantic love is understood not as a reflection of the importance of the matter to him, but rather as a reflection of the interests of his unhappy pseudonyms, and their problematic points of view. The second major reason for not taking Kierkegaard’s discussions of romantic love seriously has to do with his reputation as a philosopher who is interested exclusively in ‘the single individual’.6 Kierkegaard is seen as an anti-social philosopher, who has nothing to contribute to a moral understanding of the relationships between human beings. He is notoriously portrayed as a philosopher who focuses his attention on the individual’s relationship with himself and with divinity, and is thus allegedly 3 4 5 6

See Fendt 1989; Garff 2005. The designation of a group of Kierkegaard’s writings as ‘aesthetic’ is explained in note 16 below. I refer to this complication in chapters 2 and 5. For Kierkegaard’s use of this expression see, for example, PV, 101–26.

introduction: stages on love’s way

3

indifferent (or even hostile) to social, inter-human relationships. The life of faith offered by Kierkegaard, it is often claimed, is very lonely, leaving no room for relationships with human others, including of course relationships of romantic love. Martin Buber, in works such as The Question to the Single One and What is Man?, has probably contributed the most to shaping Kierkegaard’s problematic image as estranged from morally significant relationships, but others have followed.7 With a reputation like this, then, it is perhaps not surprising that one is hard pressed to find philosophers and scholars who seek in Kierkegaard’s words enlightenment with regard to romantic love. Moreover, Kierkegaard himself has directly contributed to this problematic reputation, by formulating quite explicit claims against romantic love in his important book Works of Love. On the face of it, Works of Love should have presented a challenge both to those who disregard Kierkegaard’s views on love due to the indirectness of his writing and, in particular, to those who disregard them due to his reputation as an anti-social philosopher alienated from morality. First of all, Works of Love is a direct work, published under Kierkegaard’s name. Secondly, it is devoted entirely to exploring the relationships of love that one ought to have with one’s neighbours in general, and with particular neighbours more specifically (including, of course, our romantic beloveds). It seems, then, that this book provides a source for both a moral theory and a theory of romantic love, and thus should constitute at least the beginning of a reply to all those who refuse to see in Kierkegaard a philosopher who is interested in the subject of romantic love. However, this does not turn out to be the case: it is precisely Kierkegaard’s extensive treatment of human relationships in this book which has drawn some of the severest criticism of his understanding of ethics and love. In a harsh essay entitled ‘On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love’ Theodor Adorno claims that Kierkegaardian love is so abstract that it ultimately amounts to ‘misanthropy’, ‘paradoxical callousness’, and even a ‘demonic hatred’; Knud Ejler Løgstrup, in the ‘polemical epilogue’ to his influential book, The Ethical Demand, wishes to ‘[settle] accounts with Kierkegaard’s Works of Love’; and Irving Singer, in his wide-ranging study of love, declares that the doctrine of love presented in Works of Love is ‘too remote from human experience to be convincing’.8 These views of Works of Love, needless to say, have only strengthened the image of Kierkegaard as a philosopher 7 8

See Buber 2004. For some more recent examples see MacIntyre 1984: 39–56, and also Mackey 1986. Adorno 1940: 423; Løgstrup 1997: 218; Singer 1987: 48.

4

kierkegaard on faith and love

who cannot contribute anything positive or valuable to the understanding of love in general, and to that of romantic love in particular. In recent years, however, a new interest in Works of Love has emerged. Leading scholars of Kierkegaard such as George Pattison and C. Stephen Evans have published studies in which Works of Love plays a central role, and varied essays on this work have been gathered into an interesting collection.9 An especially noteworthy contribution in this context is M. Jamie Ferreira’s Love’s Grateful Striving which constitutes the most comprehensive commentary on Works of Love to be published thus far.10 These new readings of Works of Love have tried to establish its importance as an ethical work, and to correct earlier critical views of its philosophical position. Nevertheless, even these sympathetic studies seem to neglect the special place of romantic love in the context of Kierkegaard’s more general understanding of love. This is admittedly in accordance with the ambivalent spirit of Works of Love, as far as romantic love is concerned. After all, in this book, Kierkegaard draws a sharp distinction between neighbourly love and preferential love, and goes out of his way to demonstrate that the latter should be purified and transfigured by the former. Romantic love is a form of preferential love and, as such, is unequivocally denounced. At the same time, Works of Love praises love in all its possible forms, including the romantic. This inconsistent account of romantic love seems to have had the tendency to lead interpreters to assume that for Kierkegaard romantic love is a relatively marginal special case of neighbourly love. It is not surprising then that studies of Works of Love have usually been concerned with the meaning of love as directed at one’s neighbour, any neighbour, rather than more specifically at one’s romantic beloved. Indeed, the only recent study which focuses on Kierkegaard’s understanding of romantic love, completely disregards the distinction between neighbourly love and preferential love.11 However, to consider romantic love merely as a manifestation of neighbourly love is to diminish the importance of the former and to neglect its distinctive and unique nature.12 The interpretations of Works of Love, therefore, appear to leave us with the need to choose between two options. If we take the distinction 9 10 11

12

See Evans 2004; Pattison 2002a; Perkins 1999. See also Andic 1998 and Walsh 1988, 1994. See Ferreira 2001. A detailed discussion of this book is presented in chapter 4. See Hall 2002. As its title suggests, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love offers a pessimistic account of romantic love, which derives from Hall’s view of our failure to follow Christ’s example of neighbourly love. I discuss Hall’s book in chapter 4. Such conflation is especially problematic with respect to the issue of preferentiality. I discuss this problem at length in chapters 4 and 5.

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between neighbourly love and romantic love seriously, then we have to follow the critical interpretations of this book and end up with a strange conception of romantic love which is negative at worst and, at best, simply inconsistent. But if we follow the more recent readings of Works of Love and ultimately disregard this distinction (or render it inessential), then it seems that we will have to conclude that Kierkegaard has nothing special to say about romantic love in particular. We seem to be faced, therefore, with two unhappy options as far as the relevance of Works of Love to a theory of romantic love is concerned. Either, as the critics argue, the book fails to provide any convincing account of love, romantic or otherwise or, as the sympathizers imply, it provides a valuable account of love, but ultimately one that blurs the unique character of romantic love, failing to distinguish it from other forms of love. Should this, then, be our conclusion regarding Kierkegaard’s view of romantic love? Does he indeed have nothing illuminating to contribute to our understanding of this specific form of love? In the present study I wish to argue quite to the contrary. I claim not only that the subject of romantic love is important for Kierkegaard, but that he offers a unique understanding of its nature and significance. To see this, however, we must broaden our investigation and, in contrast with the customary interpretative tendency in this connection, focus not only on Works of Love but also on the aesthetic writings, and, in particular, on Fear and Trembling. In this central text Kierkegaard presents, side by side with stories of romantic love, an account of the double structure of faith, which includes two seemingly contradicting movements: the movement of resignation and the movement of faith. There is an important connection, I claim, between these two movements and a possible understanding, and fulfilment, of love. Not only does the account of the double movement of faith in Fear and Trembling interestingly parallel the stories of love that it relates, this account also helps to address the inconsistent view of romantic love that we find in Works of Love. Exploring love in the light of faith, then, opens a new way to the understanding of love, and romantic love in particular. It is widely agreed that at the core of Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a concern with the life of faith. In the present study, however, I wish to point to the intriguing connection that Kierkegaard draws between faith and love, and more specifically between faith and romantic love; this profound connection, I argue, may serve to illuminate the nature of the latter. This study therefore attempts to develop a Kierkegaardian account of love on the basis of a detailed examination of Kierkegaard’s account of faith, and

6

kierkegaard on faith and love

in the context of this exploration to offer a theory of romantic love. As we shall see, the central themes of resignation coupled with repetition, of self-denial coupled with affirmation, of the need to give away coupled with the ability to receive back, are crucial for understanding the life of love no less than for understanding the life of faith. 2 The joyful security of the insecure13 The struggle of love … love and life together first take something away from a person before they give. (WL, 154)

Years before writing these words in Works of Love, the young Kierkegaard articulated the following reflections in his journal: Often, as I stood here on a quiet evening, the sea intoning its song with deep but calm solemnity … then the few dear departed ones rose from the grave before me, or rather, it seemed as though they were not dead. I felt so much at ease in their midst, I rested in their embrace, and I felt as though I were outside my body and floated about with them in a higher ether – until the seagull’s harsh screech reminded me that I stood alone and it all vanished before my eyes … I have often stood there and pondered my past life and the different surroundings that have exerted power over me. And before my contemplative gaze, vanished the pettiness that so often causes offence in life, the many misunderstandings that so often separate persons of different temperament, who, if they understood one another properly, would be tied together with indissoluble bonds. (JN, 9)

Kierkegaard is standing at one of his favourite points in Gilleleje, the sound of the sea and the breadth of the sky envelop him, and in the midst of this grandeur he has a twofold vision. It begins with a deep longing for those beloved ones who are gone. He encounters them in some inbetween zone: they seem to be leaving the world of the dead, coming to him; he seems to be stepping beyond the concreteness of his body, the concreteness of the finite world, into their welcoming embrace. He feels so comfortable in their other-worldly arms, as if he has found home. But then the cry of the seagull brings him back, reminds him of the impossibility of this love: they are there, lost to him, he is here, alone in the world. 13

The title alludes to the following statement of Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym Constantin Constantius): ‘Repetition’s love is in truth the only happy love … it has the blissful security of the moment’ (R, 131–2).

introduction: stages on love’s way

7

But then a second vision takes shape before his contemplative mind, and in this vision he clearly sees a possibility of love. The ‘pettiness’ and ‘misunderstandings’ that usually keep people apart dissolve, and instead there emerges the option of being together; the joyful possibility of firm bonds between self and other. And the vision continues: as I stood there alone and forsaken and the power of the sea and the battle of the elements reminded me of my nothingness, while the sure flight of the birds reminded me on the other hand of Christ’s words, ‘Not a sparrow will fall to the earth without your heavenly Father’s will,’ I felt at one and the same time how great and how insignificant I am. (Ibid., 10)

There are two forces in conflict here. One reminds Kierkegaard of his powerlessness, his nothingness, the other reminds him of God’s love for him; a powerful and encompassing love by virtue of which everything is possible. One force is that of resignation: he is reconciled to his nothingness, he dies to the world; the other is that of affirmation: he nevertheless has his place in this world; his abode is not only among the dead, but also among the living. Kierkegaard deeply wishes that these two forces could always be ‘amicably combined’. ‘Fortunate the man’, he says, for whom this is possible every moment of his life, in whose breast these two factors have not merely reached an agreement but stretched out their hands to each other and celebrated a wedding … a marriage … that will not be barren but will have blessed fruits visible also in the world to the eyes of the experienced observer. (Ibid., emphasis in the text)

We may read these words as expressing not only a wish, but also a question – a question regarding the way to achieve this desirable harmony, which drives one to creative and productive action that would bear fruit in the world. Remembering his earlier reflection on the bonds between people, and given the metaphor he chooses (‘a wedding … a marriage’), we may suppose that the fruits he has in mind are the fruits of love.14 In a way, then, Kierkegaard is asking how he should live – so as to love; how he should form his life, so that love would become possible. After all, his vision begins with painfully feeling the impossibility of love: he yearns for those beloved ones that are forever gone, those who were irrevocably taken away, those whose death uncompromisingly separated them from him. But simultaneously he also envisions the possibility of love: he can feel the blissfulness that human bonds entail, and the providence of God that 14

See the first deliberation in Works of Love.

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kierkegaard on faith and love

makes such bliss possible. Kierkegaard has a profound insight regarding an existential position that wholeheartedly accepts one’s nothingness while at the same time passionately affirms and rejoices in life and, more specifically, in love. This powerful insight reveals the possibility of love in the face of finitude and limitedness: that is, in the existential context of the ephemerality, loss, separation, and death that seem to posit an impassable obstacle on the way of fulfilling love. We may therefore say that by depicting this poetic vision, Kierkegaard is actually asking about the desirable way to love, about the right way to love. Given the conditions of our existence (that seem to work against the possibility of joyful love), what form should love take so as to become possible nevertheless? Further, it is important to note that the kind of love that inspires this vision is a special, particular love for concrete persons (‘the few dear departed’). At the heart of the problem that stimulates Kierkegaard’s insight regarding the paradoxical harmony between two contradicting powers (an insight which is in many ways central to his entire philosophy) is therefore not merely a general, neighbourly love to any person whatsoever. Rather, it is the kind of love that later in his philosophy Kierkegaard refers to as preferential love. It is a concern with this kind of love that infuses his early existential reflections, and drives him to ponder the possibility of satisfying relationships of love, thus implicitly raising the following question. How, given the essential obstacles along love’s way (temporality, ephemerality, limitedness) should we love; what is the right way to love? Indeed, Kierkegaard’s writings seem almost haunted by this question, especially as it concerns preferential love, and more specifically romantic love.15 The latter kind of love will also be the focus of the present study. Together with Kierkegaard (although not always in agreement with him), and by using his implicit and explicit discussions of love, I shall ask: what does genuine romantic love look like; what is the right way to love romantically? Even though he himself does not explicitly formulate this as a question, Kierkegaard’s fascination with romantic love cannot be missed. His writings are pervaded by the spirits of unhappy lovers, and their yearning for lost relationships of love. This is particularly conspicuous in the early group of his writings – the group that includes the eminent Either/Or, Repetition, Fear and Trembling, and Stages on Life’s Way, which are known

15

The term ‘preferential love’ covers relations of friendship and filial love, as well as relationships of romantic love.

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as his ‘aesthetic’ writings.16 In the first part of Either/Or we meet various lovers, the most famous of whom is the notorious Seducer whose diary is brought before us in its full sinister glory. In Repetition we meet a somewhat more reserved lover, but no less elusive and unhappy, the Poet who cannot find in his beloved the mysterious thing that he is really after. In the second part of Either/Or we meet a married Judge who presents himself as a happy lover: in two long letters he praises the beauty and truth to be found in marriage. But beneath the apparently perfect surface there are hints of conflicting and darker attitudes, making the reader wonder whether the Judge is as happy a lover as he thinks he is. And indeed in Stages on Life’s Way we meet the frustrated version of the Judge, the demonic lover, Quidam (i.e. ‘Someone’), who desperately wants to love but miserably fails to achieve this. It is only in Fear and Trembling, a work which seems to be told in the voice of yet another unhappy lover, that the real possibility of a happy love relationship emerges.17 The group of the aesthetic writings which concerns us is distinguished not only by its prominent preoccupation with stories of love but also by its delineation and presentation of the Kierkegaardian ‘theory of stages’. According to this theory, there are several paradigmatic ways in which one can live one’s life. These are usually divided into three, and are known respectively as the ‘aesthetic’, the ‘ethical’, and the ‘religious’. The word ‘stages’ implies that a person’s life may change from one of these ways to another, and it suggests a hierarchical order – one stage will be either ‘lower’ (less developed) or ‘higher’ (more developed) than another. The development in question, however, is applicable not only to the views of life, but also to the views of love that these writings present. In this study, therefore, I propose to explore the Kierkegaardian stages of love. My claim is that in correlation with the various ways available to the existing individual to live his life, so there are various ways open before him to fulfil his 16

17

Hannay divides Kierkegaard’s authorship into four main categories: the aesthetic works, the dialectical works, the psychological works, and ‘the non-pseudonymous and moralizing discourses’ (see Hannay 1982: 16–17). I think that this categorization is more illuminating than the more general one that follows Kierkegaard in dividing the authorship simply into ‘the aesthetic’ (the pseudonymous authorship) and ‘the religious’ (the non-pseudonymous authorship) because it expresses the diversity existing in the group of the pseudonymous works. Of this vast group I shall therefore focus on the ‘aesthetic’ works, which include the four pivotal works mentioned above. The pseudonymous author of Fear and Trembling is Johannes de Silentio, who is often identified with the unhappy young man whom he describes as being in love with the princess. De Silentio speaks as one who has not achieved a happy love, but does consider it to be a real possibility.

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relationships of love. And in a way similar to that in which one’s existence can be developed – beginning with the aesthetic stage and culminating with the religious one – so can one’s love be developed as well.18 Now, in order to assess the development of love, we need a criterion that will enable us to examine the extent to which a form of love is more or less satisfying or good or correct. Returning to Kierkegaard’s journal reflections, I suggest that the key to understanding the stages of love lies in their different responses to the essential loss threatening love. What do I mean by ‘loss’, and how does it pose a threat to love? Actual, potential, and essential loss Being finite and subject to the passage of time, our existence is pervaded by constant loss. Time goes by and seems to take with it everything that gives meaning to our life. Most often this loss is quiet and inconspicuous, but at the same time it is unstoppable. From this point of view, becoming involved in relationships of love – that is, becoming deeply attached to the essentially evanescent – cannot but lead to misery and pain: My heart grew sombre with grief, and wherever I looked I saw only death … My eyes searched everywhere for him, but he was not there to be seen … I lived in misery, like every man whose soul is tethered by the love of things that cannot last and then is agonized to lose them. Only then does he realize the sorry state he is in, and was in even before his loss.19

Augustine, who laments the death of his closest friend, believes that it was madness and folly of him to love ‘a man who was mortal as though he were never to die’.20 Loving a finite being who is ultimately doomed to decay and death seems to be in essence a state of sorrow: it is to cling in one’s soul to something that cannot last forever. Therefore, to become involved in a 18

19 20

There are debates in the secondary literature as to how the theory of stages should be formulated and understood. On the one hand there are scholars who argue that there are four, and even five, stages of development (see, for example, Evans 1999; Westphal 1996) and, on the other hand, there are readings that refuse to see such a progressive or hierarchical connection between the stages at all (see, for example, Jegstrup 2004 and Poole 1993 and 1998). The focus of this study, however, is love and its development: the less or more satisfying ways to fulfil it, the less or more genuine ways to experience it. Accordingly, the theory of the stages serves here only as a framework – as a background against which the development of love can be clearly manifested. The interpretative questions mentioned above, as well as other questions regarding the theory of the stages, will therefore not be my concern here. Augustine 1961: 76, 77. Ibid., 79.

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relationship of love with a finite being is to put oneself in a profoundly vulnerable position. It means that even before an actual loss takes place, the beloved and the relationship are potentially lost, and that the lover, accordingly, is always potentially on the verge of great suffering. We need to distinguish, then, between two kinds of loss, actual and potential. When we speak of loss we usually refer to the former kind. The death of ‘the few dear departed’ that the young Kierkegaard writes about, the death of Augustine’s beloved friend – the most blatant expression of actual loss is, of course, death. However, a love relationship which ends also amounts to an actual loss, as do periods of time that are gone forever (childhood, youth, last year, yesterday). The latter expression of loss, the quiet loss involved in the passage of time, is less striking. It is a mundane, non-dramatic sort of loss, almost unnoticeable – and yet it is a form of actual loss nevertheless. Potential loss, on the other hand, is a loss that threatens to become actualized, that hints at a future possibility of actual loss. The inevitable future death of every human being, for example, amounts to a potential loss at present, and it hangs over our lives as a gloomy promise which we know must be fulfilled. The possible termination of a love relationship is another example of potential loss – however, unlike death, this gloomy possibility can be averted (until death, that is). Potential loss, then, might either be actualized or not, but its threatening presence enfolds our existence all the same. It lurks beneath the surface of everything in time, and shapes our life accordingly. Our finite, temporal existence, therefore, is characterized by constant loss, which is either actual (in those cases in which it has already occurred) or potential (when it has not). Everything in time is either actually lost or potentially lost. Everything finite, if it has not yet been taken away from us, is doomed to be taken away from us eventually, or is at least under the threat that it might, eventually, be taken away from us. Thus loss, whether actual or potential, indicates that our hold on things is always profoundly insecure: nothing is really at our disposal. Everything is in essence (namely, either in an actual way or only potentially) lost for us. To describe the status of something that is either actually or potentially lost, then, I shall use the term ‘essential loss’. My claim is that everything that we have, everything that we take to be ours, is in truth essentially lost for us. Now, relationships of love are characterized by an intense desire to have a secure hold on the beloved. Accordingly, loss (in its various forms) poses a deep threat to love. This threat may express itself in many ways, but all are essentially connected to the passage of time. Like many waters

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flowing over a rock, the passage of time must affect the shape of even the strongest of loves – and the lover is terrified by the unknowability of this future.21 The shadows of death and sickness, the possible changes in the character of the lover or the beloved, the possible changes in interests and wishes, the weariness of old desires and the temptations of new ones – all of these belong under the category of essential loss (always potentially present and sometimes actually fulfilled). All of these are a consequence of our finitude and limitedness, and all render our relationships of love essentially insecure. The question that we need to ask, therefore, is a variation on Augustine’s solemn conclusion. When facing the threat involved in its essential insecurity, how is love possible at all? How can we find joy in our loves, and strive to fulfil them, under the shadow of their essential loss? If we agree with Kierkegaard that ‘erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness’ (WL, 267), and assuming that loving the temporal good is meaningful and central to our humane existence, we face an uneasy task. Can we overcome the obstacle of essential loss? Can we reconcile with the insecurity of love? Or, to put it as succinctly as possible, can we fulfil love even when we clearly see its potential (and sometimes actual) ruins? As I have suggested above, the way to assess the different stages of love is precisely by exploring their different responses to this unsettling question. In other words, the various ways of responding to the loss that threatens love constitute the different stages of Kierkegaardian love. My claim is that we are presented in Kierkegaard’s philosophy with three basic ways in which a lover can respond to loss: the way of recollection, the way of resignation, and the way of faith. But only one of these constitutes the correct form of love. 3 ‘The only happy love’22 The claim of this study is that the correct way to love is in a manner analogous to faith. Of the various stages of romantic love, of the various possible ways open to the lover to fulfil his love, the right way is that structured in the form of faith. My claim, then, is that to reach its highest, most satisfying fulfilment, romantic love should be modelled in the shape 21

22

At the same time, however, ‘Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it’ (Song of Solomon 8:7, the King James version). In a way, one of the tasks of the present study is to inquire into – and justify – this biblical assertion against the background of the existential fact just stated above. R, 131. See note 13 above.

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of Kierkegaardian faith – namely, in that of the paradoxical double movement of resignation and repetition. What does this mean? There are several possible stages in the way of love and, as I explained above, I suggest that we delineate the differences between them by examining their different responses to loss. I therefore begin by exploring the ‘natural’, pre-religious responses to loss, which constitute the love of recollection. This is a love that fails to sustain real contact with its object and collapses into the inner sphere of the lover’s mind (wherein the lover engages with his memories, his poetic imagination, or his aspiration to universal ideals). In chapter 1, then, we will meet three types of lovers – the aesthetic, the ethical, and the demonic – who despite the noticeable differences between them share a form of love that is fundamentally miserable.23 Those who love by way of recollection try to avoid the loss inherent in love – they try to secure their love. And indeed they all manage to hold on safely and securely to something – but not to what they had originally intended. They all end up without genuinely relating to the actual object of their love. Instead, they all relate to some substitute for it, some representation of it, some recollection of it – which exists in the ‘inner sphere’ of their mind and is therefore unthreatened by external contingencies. This substitute may amount to a memory of the beloved girl (replacing an actual contact with her), or to a poetic recreation of the love relationship (replacing an actual fulfilment of the relationship), or to a self-righteous adherence to some ethical ideal regarding the perfect love (replacing a real effort to overcome the imperfections of the actual love relationship). In all of these cases, the lovers’ opting for an indirect relation to the object, instead of a direct one, explains their falling under the same title of ‘recollection’. After all, in ‘recollection’ we attain an indirect, representational, inner connection to the thing – and leave the thing itself behind. Now, of the three types of lovers at the stage of recollection, it is only the demonic who recognizes the limits of this state. However, he cannot move beyond it: to leave the sphere of recollection, the lover needs to undertake a painful movement that carries him into the religious sphere. This is the movement of resignation, and the lover who undertakes it is the subject of chapter 2. 23

Since Kierkegaard’s protagonists are usually male, for the sake of simplicity and uniformity of style I will generally use the masculine pronoun, even when not discussing a Kierkegaardian protagonist/story. Needless to say, this does not mean that the variety of lovers presented throughout this study cannot be females: all that I say about ‘him’ holds true for and is applicable to ‘her’.

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In that chapter (chapter 2) we will explore the meaning of resignation as a wholehearted acceptance of loss. While the lovers in the sphere of recollection try to avoid loss in various ways, the knight of resignation acknowledges the essential impossibility of sustaining a secure hold on his love, and he willingly releases any such hold. In spite of desiring the beloved above all other things, he renounces the relationship with her. He does not try to secure a false hold on the beloved, but at the same time he continues to love her. His attachment to her is therefore structured in an intriguing way. He cannot but see her as infinitely lost – and his love is therefore filled with pain and agony – but at the same time, and while connecting himself to her in a bond of sorrow, he initiates himself into a profound relationship with God. Undertaking the movement of resignation amounts to a religious submission of oneself – that is, of one’s will, of one’s worldly desires and possessions – to God. Accordingly, the love of the knight of resignation is twofold, involving a new relationship both with the original beloved and with God. But this new relationship is far from being complete and satisfying. Despite the joy and richness involved in his relationship with God, this knight is ‘a stranger and an alien’ in the world (FT, 50) – as far as his romantic love for his finite beloved is concerned, he cannot but be deeply unhappy. Another step, another movement, therefore, needs to be taken: the movement of faith. Closely examining Kierkegaard’s knight of faith, in chapter 3 we will present the portrait of the knight of love. This religious knight is a lover whose wholehearted acceptance of loss (through resignation) is paradoxically coupled with the affirmation of a possible renewal, or repetition, of the thing lost (through faith). He who loves by way of faith, then, initiates a renewed relationship with his essentially lost romantic beloved. This relationship amounts to a unique attachment to the beloved – a full, concrete, and joyful attachment – which becomes possible through the relationship that the lover sustains with God. The knight of faith-like love, then, is the only lover who gains the harmony discussed above – namely, between acknowledging one’s nothingness (resignation) and rejoicing in God’s providence (affirmation) – that allows him to conduct a life of love, in the context of which romantic love becomes a real (and happy) possibility.24 In this chapter we will therefore see how among the different stages along love’s uneasy way, faith-like love – a romantic love which is construed in accordance with the model of faith – is the highest form of love. 24

See again our discussion of Kierkegaard’s Journal’s reflections on pp. 6–8 above.

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In arriving at this conclusion, however, we have accomplished only a part of our task. We now face the challenge of validating the model of faith-like romantic love against Kierkegaard’s own attack on romantic love in his monumental Works of Love. It might be thought that Works of Love provides the central reference in our exploration of Kierkegaard’s view of love. This, as mentioned above, is the only work which he devotes specifically and directly to a consideration of the nature of true love and of the way in which it might be achieved; it is signed by Kierkegaard and, arguably, written from the point of view of the religious life. However, my claim is that despite its conspicuous advantages in this regard, Works of Love presents a confused and inconsistent view of romantic love. On the one hand it contains some of Kierkegaard’s fiercest denunciations of romantic love (due to its preferentiality which, he claims, contradicts the nature of true, neighbourly love). On the other, it presents a powerful affirmation of the need (and even the duty) to maintain a love of this kind. In chapter 4 I therefore discuss the problematic view of Works of Love, and in chapter 5 I argue for the following (possibly surprising) claim. Not only is the implicit account of faith-like love in Fear and Trembling more accurate and enlightening than the explicit account of love in Works of Love but, more importantly, we need the former in order to account for the problematic position of the latter. In chapter 5 I therefore suggest that we ‘amend’ Works of Love’s model of love in the light of Fear and Trembling’s model of faith. My claim is that we cannot understand Kierkegaard’s conception of love (neighbourly and romantic alike) without understanding his conception of faith. Therefore, only when we read these two pivotal texts together can a complete understanding of Kierkegaardian love emerge. And only against this background can we articulate an understanding of romantic love. In chapter 6 I explore this new understanding of romantic love as modelled on faith, by looking closely at a Kierkegaardian protagonist who may be the nearest to representing a striving human lover: the Merman. Against the background of the pre-religious option of recollection and the religious options of resignation and faith, we will be able to examine the story of the demonic, sinful Merman in Fear and Trembling, and the various ways open to him when he tries to fulfil his love for Agnes. We will then be in a position to fathom Kierkegaard’s claim that ‘repetition’s love’ (that is, love modelled on faith) is ‘the only happy love’, and to understand why it is the only love that achieves ‘the blissful security of the moment’. Understanding romantic love in the light of faith, then, helps to address several pressing issues regarding love. It supplies us with the tools to

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distinguish between better and worse forms of love; it helps to solve the problem regarding the tension between romantic love and neighbourly love (as presented in Works of Love); and it offers a cautiously positive prospect regarding romantic love: despite our finitude, despite our limitedness, despite our almost hopeless struggle with the demons within us (namely, with our sinful nature) – a happy fulfilment of romantic love is confirmed as a valid possibility. Romantic love undoubtedly plays a significant and profound role in human existence, but at the same time it has often been treated in philosophical and religious contexts as merely an expression of our physical, sensuous nature, and therefore lacking in positive interest as far as our moral and spiritual lives are concerned. By contrast, to account for romantic love in terms which demonstrate its essential coherence with, and even similarity to, faith, serves to validate and acknowledge the centrality of this phenomenon, and to throw light on its moral, spiritual, and existential significance. And so, even though at first glance the connection I wish to draw between faith and romantic love might seem strange, I hope to show how we can be inspired and edified by faith with regard to the way in which we can, and should, love (romantically and otherwise). And it is Kierkegaard, I claim, who effectively paves the way for us to see this. In this study I shall make use of his distinctive vocabulary (and especially of pivotal concepts such as recollection, resignation, repetition, the double movement of faith, the demonic) for a detailed portrayal of love and, specifically, of romantic love. I hope that such a portrayal can help to correct the prevailing, unjustified conception (not to say stereotype) of Kierkegaard as a philosopher who has nothing (except perhaps negatively) to contribute to our understanding of romantic love. By showing that Kierkegaard can be eminently helpful in an exploration of various relationships of love, I shall try to reveal a less familiar aspect of his philosophy. I therefore hope that by the end of this study it will be evident why Kierkegaard may justly be considered not only as a passionate explorer of faith, but also as a thinker who opens before us a unique and fascinating way to understand love in general, and romantic love in particular.

1 LOST LOVES

1 Recollection’s love and its three types of lovers Recollection’s love, an author has said, is the only happy love … Recollection has the great advantage that it begins with the loss; the reason it is safe and secure is that it has nothing to lose. (R, 131, 136)

Recollection’s love is the kind of romantic love which consists in recollection (something which flourishes in the inner sphere of the lover’s mind) rather than in a genuine encounter with the beloved other. As we shall see, the three protagonists of this type of love – the aesthetic Poet (or Seducer), the ethical Judge, and the demonic ‘Someone’ – share a fundamental failure to reconcile themselves with the loss that every relationship of love entails.1 The loss concerned is that involved in the passage of time and manifested in the effects that time has on love. Most conspicuous, naturally, is the loss of the initial stages of love: these stages are strongly characterized by an enchanting excitement that the passage of time seems to weaken. However, the loss that threatens love, to which each of the lovers responds in his own manner, is deeper than that. It is the essential loss of everything that time may – and sometimes must – eventually take away with it. 1

Quidam, the name of the young lover from Stages on Life’s Way, who represents the demonic kind of lover, is the Latin for ‘someone’. Since of the various Kierkegaardian protagonists the demonic (as I shall explain later in this chapter and in chapter 6) is in many ways the closest to us, I think it is significant that Kierkegaard, rather than distinguishing the demonic as a ‘Poet’, a ‘Seducer’, or a ‘Judge’, characterizes him as ‘Someone’, perhaps in the sense of ‘any person’.

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Essential loss, as specified in the Introduction, is the condition common to all those circumstances in which the object of love is potentially lost, and those in which it is actually lost. It consists in the lover being deprived of a firm, dependable hold on the object of love. It is expressed in the variety of difficulties and obstacles involved in being finite and especially in loving a finite human being.2 It is the kind of loss which always underlies love and afflicts those who wish to fulfil a relationship of love. Now, the common denominator unifying the aesthete, the ethical, and the demonic is that ultimately they all seek immunity from loss. They therefore turn their love into a recollection, into an inner representation of the beloved and of the relationship. As we shall see, each of these lovers tries to achieve a ‘safe and secure’ love that has ‘nothing to lose’ (that is, a love not threatened by loss), and therefore substitutes the insecure contact with the beloved with a secure mental representation of it. Rather than encountering the real otherness of the beloved (with all the difficulties and insecurities involved), they distance themselves from her and instead indulge in their memories of the relationship, or in a poetic recreation of it, or in the sublime universal ideals of a perfect relationship. In this way they manage to hold securely on to something, but not to the real relationship (or to the real beloved). By recollecting the relationship they turn their love into something that fundamentally belongs to the past, and which is rooted not so much in actuality as in the immanent sphere of their mind. They turn their love into something dead – they kill their loves. The following portrayal of recollection’s love (and of its lover) clearly depicts this: The sun is shining brilliantly and beautifully into my room; the window in the next room is open. Everything is quiet out on the street. It is Sunday afternoon. I distinctly hear a lark warbling outside a window in one of the neighboring courtyards, outside the window where the pretty girl lives. Far away in a distant street, I hear a man crying ‘Shrimps for sale.’ The air is so warm, and yet the whole city is as if deserted. – Then I call to mind my youth and my first love – when I was filled with longing; now I long only for my first longing. What is youth? A dream. What is love? The content of the dream. (EO1, 42) 2

Namely, the shadow of the inevitability of death (that threatens to take our beloved away from us); the changes that love must undergo (as well as the changes that the lover and the beloved both undergo); the weariness and fading away of old desires (as well as the awakening of new, potentially conflicting, desires that may eventually drive ourselves, or the beloved, away); not to mention the faults in the way we regard our beloved (when time and its repetitions make us forget that the beloved must not be taken for granted), and the weaknesses of our will (that the passage of time usually strengthens).

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The world surrounding the lover is colourful and beautiful, the air is warm and all around there are singing birds and pretty girls and human voices – the passionate warbling of life is heard in the distance. But the lover, who can love only by way of recollection, is alone in his secluded room, incapable of making any living contact with anyone and thus, for him, the lively city feels deserted. Love is only a distant, faded, recollection. Once upon a time he was filled with longing for a beloved, now the only longing is for the longing: he is entirely defeated by recollection. This kind of lover, recollection’s lover, who deeply fears the loss which every love entails, responds by eventually turning the potential loss into an actual one. Whether he literally terminates the relationship (as the aesthete and the demonic lovers tend to do), or only ‘deadens’ it by maintaining an unsatisfying, solo-voiced rather than dialogical, relationship with the other with whom he shares his life (as the ethical, and sometimes the demonic, do) – his love is fundamentally, essentially, lost.3 In what follows we shall therefore inquire into the loves of the aesthete, the ethical Judge, and the demonic ‘Someone’ and see how, despite their different responses to loss, all of them ultimately belong in the sphere of recollection’s love. We will see that they all attempt to find a secure replacement for their concrete, insecure relationships of love. The aesthete who chases after ‘the first’ (a term given to the first stages of love by the Judge) tries to capture love in its immediacy, but (inevitably) the moment evades him. Thus, the stable replacement that he creates is the ‘frozen’ memory of the beloved and of the relationship. The ethical Judge tries to solve the problem of loss by turning ‘the first’ (the moment) into an ‘eternity in time’. His way of stabilizing the essentially evanescent is to focus on the universal, unchanging ideals (and ideas) of love, thus desiring ‘the ideal marriage’ (rather than his concrete, imperfect, wife), turning this into the real object of his love. The artificiality of his solution cannot but push his love relationship into the deathly territory of recollection (so 3

It is important to note that using the notion of recollection for an analysis of the aesthetic and the ethical – as well as of the relations between them – is rather unusual. This analysis emphasizes the common ground that these two stages of life share and, in particular, it focuses on the failure, essential for both, to fulfil a satisfying relationship of love. Naturally, emphasizing this aspect comes at the expense of a more elaborate examination of the differences between the two stages and the complexity of the relations between them. Accordingly, I have also put aside the complex interpretative debate concerning the proper understanding of the figure of Judge William (and of the view of life he represents). For a more extensive discussion of the Judge, and of the relations between the aesthetic and the ethical, see Carlisle 2005; Davenport 2008; Davenport and Rudd 2001; Furtak 2005; Pattison 2005; Perkins 1995, 2000; Rudd 1993; Taylor 1975.

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to speak). And indeed, the demonic – who in effect embodies the combination and the struggle between the aesthetic and the ethical elements in every human soul – is sensitive enough to see the shortcomings of the ethical solution. However, while acknowledging the loss he fails to become reconciled with it, thus despairing and becoming obsessed with it. The demonic understands that the way to address the essential loss involved in loving – namely, the actual and potential loss that any relationship of love must suffer – is to be found beyond the sphere of recollection. Being a demonic, however, he can only look to this horizon from afar, while his feet are still implanted deep in the soil of recollection. 2 Recollection and the aesthetic lover A portrait of immediacy When two people fall in love with each other and sense that they are destined for one another, it is a question of having the courage to break it off, for by continuing there is only everything to lose, nothing to gain. (EO1, 298)

The aesthete advocates a life of immediacy,4 a life devoid of any commitment or continuation that might pose a threat to the thrill and interest of the moment. After all, duration (the continuation of something beyond its momentary peak) has a structure of repetition: it consists in continuing the ‘new’ (be it a job, a friendship, or a love affair) into a committing, repetitive pattern. To continue a moment into the future – where the limits of the ‘moment’ are determined by the extent to which its contents are experienced as novel, fresh, unprecedented – necessarily entails a repetition of the moment. But repetition, from the point of view of the aesthete, is boring. It is the ‘same old thing’ rather than the ‘new and exciting’. The aesthetic life, then, is a life of immediacy, and to experience time in its immediacy means to adopt (and nurture) an attitude of full responsiveness to that which is momentarily desired. An attitude whereby one 4

The following analysis of the aesthetic focuses on one possible aspect of the aesthetic life, which is manifested by the more reflective and sophisticated type of aesthete. There are other aesthetic types (such as a frivolous youth, a decadent cynic, or a Don Juan, to name only a few) that manifest other possible aspects of the aesthetic life (such as responsiveness to novelty and excitement, seeking satisfaction, and admiration of the sensual). However, from the perspective of the present study, it is the reflective type of aesthete (who is more conscious of the threats of loss than the other types) that is of interest for me. I therefore focus on this type alone and develop only one particular (and quite dominant) aspect of aestheticism: namely, recollection.

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fully responds to any desire at any moment, without being able or willing to choose between the different desires (or between the courses of action involved in fulfilling them). Choosing is about saying ‘yes’ to one thing and ‘no’ to the other; it is about turning a possibility into an actuality. And turning a possibility into an actuality means adherence and dedication to the thing chosen.5 It is about being willing to continue one’s commitment despite conflicting desires that tempt one to abandon the thing chosen in favour of submitting oneself to another thing; it is about continuing one’s commitment despite the difficulties and obstacles involved, despite the threat of loss. But the aesthete prefers to shape his life in the sphere of (promising) possibilities (rather than in the sphere of a fulfilled actuality) – he enjoys the variety, not the actualization. He wants to keep everything open, to be receptive of everything, and let life offer him as much as possible. He wishes to enjoy only the offerings of life, and refuses to suffer over that which life might take away. The aesthete, therefore, is a passive recipient of whatever comes his way. He acts according to his momentary passions and inclinations, enjoys what he fancies at any particular moment, and is never bothered about the next moment. To him, it matters not if in the next moment he fancies something that is not compatible with, or might even contradict, what he fancies at the present moment. This is the meaning of not making a commitment to anything whatsoever, and of limiting oneself only to the moment – a moment that has no continuation and therefore does not commit one, or oblige one, to whatever it is that happens next. Today I want to be a painter, yesterday I wanted to be a doctor, tomorrow I might want to be a world explorer – so be it. Today I want this lover, yesterday I wanted the other one, tomorrow I might want a different one. So be it. Now, on the face of it, the aesthetic life may seem very tempting: one creates oneself every moment anew, one acts spontaneously, faithful to what one really wants. The problem is that this life is necessarily very fragmented, composed of a series of episodes that ultimately belong only in the past. If one does not want to choose, because choice entails a continuation of the moment in the form of a commitment that means 5

Such adherence is one of the main characteristics of the ethical life (see the discussion of the ethical below). This might be the time to emphasize that sharing the fundamental problematic attitude of recollection does not mean an abolition of the essential differences between the aesthetic and ethical forms of life. There are some crucial distinctions between them, and these distinctions make the ethical life – despite failing where the aesthetic life fails (namely, in addressing loss properly) – more advanced and desirable in many senses. (See also note 15 below.)

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saying ‘no’ to all the other possibilities, then one also confines oneself to a life of constant ‘endings’. And to be constantly ending things (in order to be receptive to something new) means to be living mostly in the past – the content of this life is composed of a long series of recollections. The aesthete might be a hedonist who enjoys the moment without any worries or commitments with regard to what happens next; but his life is always tinged with constant death. In order to submit himself to the new, he has to kill, as it were, the old. Accordingly, the love of the aesthete must also be the unsatisfying love of recollection. This love is focused on the first phase of love, on the first moment of love. The joy of the aesthetic love is always brief and its peak (in which the aesthete is interested) is confined to a very limited period of time, beyond which there is nothing: There are, as is known, insects that die in the moment of fertilization. So it is with all joy: life’s highest, most splendid moment of enjoyment is accompanied by death. (EO1, 20)

The death referred to here is the death of the desired moment of enjoyment. Once fulfilled, this moment is lost, dead. Continuation of the moment beyond this peak of enjoyment (and interest) has only the void and darkness of death to offer. It is no wonder, then, that the aesthete declares that My misfortune is this: an angel of death always walks at my side, and it is not the doors of the chosen ones that I sprinkle with blood as a sign that he is to pass by – no, it is precisely their doors that he enters – for only recollection’s love is happy. (EO1, 41)

And why is ‘only recollection’s love’ happy? ‘To live in recollection is the most perfect life imaginable; recollection is more richly satisfying than all actuality, and it has security that no actuality possesses’ (EO1, 32). In actuality, indeed, there is no security. Time is characterized by bringing along with it change and loss and (boring) repetition. Therefore, in order to secure the pleasure of the passing moment – the intensity of the newly felt love – one has to end it before it gets spoiled. One has to freeze the first moment of love, as it were, and to turn it from a living, continuing present into a recollection; one has ‘to kill’ the ‘chosen ones’ (that is, the relationships one has had with them, the moments one has spent with them) – in order to recollect them. There, in recollection, they can be cherished as beautiful and happy, as intact, as one wishes them to be. The aesthetic love contains an inner contradiction. The aesthetic moment defeats itself, as it were: its fulfilment is necessarily also its destruction. It is not something one can hold on to, something whose

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possession can be extended into the future (because, again, when thus extended, it turns into something else, something ‘boring’). Therefore the aesthetic love can be maintained only as a lost love; as a part of the past – it can be maintained only in the form of recollection. To put it differently, in his fear of losing the intensity and thrill of love, the aesthete refuses to continue the relationship, and thus turns it into a recollection. Thereby he dooms his love to loss: For me nothing is more dangerous than to recollect. As soon as I have recollected a life relationship, that relationship has ceased to exist … A recollected life relationship has already passed into eternity and has no temporal interest anymore. (EO1, 32)

In a way, the aesthetic lover wants to turn the first moment of love into an eternity. He wants to ‘freeze’ the moment of interest and create for himself a sphere devoid of the threatening passage of time (that for him is the cause of everything he is afraid of: the loss of the interesting, the loss of immediate pleasure, the loss of the thrill of the moment, the encounter with the committing and potentially painful). However, this eternity is, of course, a false one. The moment is over and the ‘eternity’ the aesthete is left with is only the memory of the moment, its recollection, its existence in the past. It is not surprising, then, that the aesthetic lover is characterized as ‘the unhappiest one’ – he is ‘the envoy from the kingdom of sighs, the chosen favorite of suffering, the apostle of grief, the silent friend of pain, the unhappy lover of recollection’ (EO1, 229, emphasis mine).6 From the perspective that asks about love’s possible responses to the problem of loss (that essentially pervades and threatens it), we may say that the aesthetic lover offers quite a miserable solution. He cannot handle the passage of time and the loss it entails, and his reaction consists of his futile attempt to freeze the love and transform it into a recollection. Recollection is indeed protected from the passage of time; it constitutes the little inner kingdom of the one who recollects. The aesthetic lover closes himself within himself, as it were, and creates an alternative world to the one outside of him – an immanent world of a false eternity, ‘safe and secure’ against the ruins of time. 6

The strong criticism expressed here against aesthetic love does not mean that what is usually associated with aesthetics – the senses, appreciation of the beautiful, etc. – is without importance for the philosophy of Kierkegaard in general, and for his understanding of the life of faith, and of love, in particular. On the contrary: as I shall demonstrate in later chapters, the body and the sensuous (as well as sensitivity to beauty – the concrete beauty of the beloved, the beauty of the world) have a central role in the Kierkegaardian understanding of both faith and love.

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Now, the solution of the aesthetic lover may be a false and diverted solution, but the problem is a real one. At the basis of recollection’s love lies a deep longing for time past. After all, time always seems to take along with it something valuable belonging to our love (a feeling, a passion, something about the way we were, something about the way our beloved used to be). This longing and its ‘twin brother’ – namely, the wish to get the lost thing back – characterize the poetic love of the protagonist of Repetition. The Poet’s love of recollection Repetition – which presents a melancholic Poet as another type of the lovers belonging to the sphere of recollection’s love – is a book that tells a story within a story. One story is that of Constantin Constantius, the narrator, that revolves around an experiment he undertook when he tried to reconstruct – to repeat – a successful trip to Berlin (the experiment has failed); another story is the one that Constantius tells us about an unhappy love affair of a young friend of his; and another significant story is the biblical story of Job, which the young man considers as a source of inspiration for him. The book Repetition, then, echoes the desire to receive something back, to gain a ‘repetition’ of something lost (an enjoyable trip, desirable love, a beloved now dead). But while the title of the book implies an event of repetition, the book itself demonstrates a failure of repetition. Constantius fails to get back (that is, to relive) his desired trip to Berlin, the young man fails to get back his love relationship, and only the story of Job is about a real repetition, but this only emphasizes the mistake committed by the protagonists of Repetition with regard to their own understanding (and performing) of repetition.7 Constantius is a reflection of Either/Or’s aesthetic prototype. The Berlin experiment demonstrates his aesthetic focus on the past and his immanent, self-contained, approach to reality – Constantius, after all, uses the materials of reality to relive his memory. He wants a ‘repetition’ of his trip to Berlin but, instead of being open to what the world has to offer, he tries to control it by a futile attempt to externalize his inner recollections and give them an ‘outer’ validity (see R, 150–76). However, a more interesting character in the book, from the point of view of our inquiry, is the young friend of Constantius, the Poet. 7

Repetition becomes a valid possibility only in the context of the religious life of faith. I shall therefore return to this concept when discussing Fear and Trembling’s model of faith (see chapter 3 below).

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The Poet is presented as a melancholic youth who chose Constantius as his confidant. But the very close affinity between them – expressed in the fact that Constantius seems to understand too well the motives for the young man’s strange behaviour, i.e. he knows exactly how the young man feels and predicts, quite accurately, what he is about to do – gives us good reason to suspect that the Poet is in fact a younger version of Constantius:8 namely, a young double of his whom Constantius, in a poetic enterprise, brings to life. Looking at the love story of the young Poet, we can trace back the reasons leading Constantius to his present position: an unhappy, lonely man, enclosed in his room and in his recollections, just like the lover from Either/Or who cannot contact the passionate city (that is, the world) outside his room, outside his inner frozen world of recollection.9 Let us examine, then, the love story of the young Poet. He was deeply and fervently in love, that was clear, and yet a few days later he was able to recollect his love. He was essentially through with the entire relationship. In beginning it, he took such a tremendous step that he leaped over life. If the girl dies tomorrow, it will make no essential difference. (R, 136)

This love is sufficient unto itself, regardless of the existence of its object. It is a love which exists as recollection. The young man is not interested in continuing, developing, and living the actual love for the girl. The beginning of this love was so intense that for him it exhausted the whole relationship. It fulfilled and devoured (as it were) his entire expectations from love – no wonder, therefore, that he did not need the girl any longer. All he needed was a recollection of her. Moreover, the girl was only a trigger to something else, something that had nothing to do with her, the beloved, but rather with him, the lover. Strangely enough, the young man was nourished by the absence of the girl rather than by her presence. Constantius contrasts specifically between ‘loving’ and ‘longing’ – the latter, of course, indicating an absence. The young man, he says, truly loved the girl and will never love any other – but he does not still love her: the adored young girl was already almost a vexation to him. And yet she was the one he had loved, the only one he would ever love. Nevertheless,

8 9

I thank Dr Ran Sigad for the suggestion to look upon the two protagonists as reflecting the older and the younger versions of the same person. See again the quotation on p. 18 above.

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kierkegaard on faith and love he did not still love her, because he only longed for her … The young girl was not his beloved: she was the occasion that awakened the poetic in him and made him a poet. (R, 138)

The love was an event, an ‘occasion’, forever to be carved into his soul – and entirely belonging to the past (it had happened, once, and is now over). What is now being loved, therefore, is not the actual girl; it is rather the girl in recollection. The unhappiness and frustration of recollection’s love, we may say, is a result of the painful demand that defines it. Recollection’s love requires the (actual) loss of the concrete other, rather than the other’s actual presence. In order for this form of love to exist, the love of the concrete person in her actuality has to stop: ‘[s]he had made him a poet – and precisely thereby had signed her own death sentence’ (R, 138). The loss of the girl was the constitutive event that made him into a poet. But even before her actual loss, the young man had felt that he had lost her (after all, he had lost her long before actually leaving her). What kind of loss was it, then? The loss that made him leave the girl (and become a poet) was the loss of the aesthetic ‘first love’: the initial stage of any love when everything is new and exciting. The theme of the ‘first love’ will reappear in the ethical theory of Judge William, but we have already encountered the desire for it in the figure of Either/Or’s aesthetic person: he who craves only the immediate moment of pleasure, after which there is nothing but death. What the young man longed for, and what he wanted to get back, was not the actual girl, but rather the way he had felt for her at the beginning of the relationship. It is quite consistent of him, then, to find his solution in poetry and recollection. By becoming a poet he creates a world of recollection, a world of (his own) creation, in which he loves her just as he had at the beginning. In this context he loves her just as one does in eternity – time becomes irrelevant, and so does the threat of loss and change, which might damage his pure feelings. The Poet demonstrates very clearly the essence of ‘recollection-hood’ and he no doubt forms a notable manifestation of the kind of lover belonging in the sphere of recollection. One who prefers to indulge in the pain of the loss, to praise the ‘what has been’ and to stay ‘there’; there in the past, deep within recollection (of the love and the beloved). Painful as it is, it is tempting to love in this way for the simple reason that one will indeed no longer have anything to lose (see again R, 136). This kind of lover sacrifices the future but knows that nothing can ruin his past – no new experiences would overshadow the sweet past, no disappointments.

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When one relives what has already happened, the events one is concerned with are under one’s control; when one chooses to live in one’s imagination, one takes no risks. We can characterize this kind of love in the same words that Constantius uses to explain, at a later stage, the Poet’s behaviour. When someone is loving – and living – in his own world of recollection, he ‘limits himself to a cozy domestic diversion, together with mental activity and pastimes of the imagination, which are the most perfect substitute for all erotic love’, and at the same time ‘are not at all accompanied by the inconveniences and disasters of erotic love’ (R, 183). The Poet’s detachment from reality is also expressed in his understanding of himself. He is inspired by the story of Job, and sees in himself a kind of modern manifestation of this biblical figure. For him, Job is the epitome of one who has undergone great misery in losing everything; he therefore finds consolation in Job’s story because in his (false) understanding, he, the Poet, has undergone a similar ordeal. Accordingly, in one of his letters to Constantius, he declares that just like Job, he has gained a repetition: I am myself again … Is there not, then, a repetition? Did I not get everything double? Did I not get myself again and precisely in such a way that I might have a double sense of meaning? (R, 220–1)

The Poet feels that he has won a repetition. But he did not get the girl back – rather he got himself back. Moreover, it was precisely the girl’s marriage to someone else (i.e. her conclusive, actual loss) that allowed the Poet to experience a repetition. Is this a real repetition? It is true that, in a way, receiving oneself back is a repetition. It is clear that losing an object dear to us, let alone a beloved person, can be viewed as involving a loss also of ourselves. Receiving ourselves back in the sense of regaining meaning and coherency in our lives may justly be considered as a true repetition.10 However, this is only one aspect of repetition and, important as it is, it is still only a part of what constitutes full repetition. The Poet did not receive anything back except himself, and even when he received himself back, he gained no new understanding of himself or of the world. In a sharp difference with Job – who confronted the ultimate otherness of God that made him realize the profundity of the truth that ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’ – the Poet never confronted anything beyond himself and beyond

10

I am indebted to Professor George Pattison for suggesting this idea to me in conversation.

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the powers of his own will and imagination.11 And now that the girl is married, and he need not feel responsible for her pain anymore, he can sink back peacefully into his lonely world, a world in which there is no real room for anyone but himself. The love story of the Poet, therefore, could not be more remote from the story of the loss and suffering of Job. Rather than exemplifying a modern version of the biblical story of repetition (as the Poet would have liked to think), he is deeply absorbed in recollection. Ultimately, recollection’s love uses the other as material for building a house in which one lives alone. This love nourishes a rich and productive inner world, and can be very sensitive and poetic (it can even drive one to poetry, as we have just seen), but it is not strong enough to break through and plunge into the concrete world – it is not strong enough to actually encounter the other and create a genuine relationship with that other.12 It is a kind of narcissistic love in which one is sufficient unto oneself, and in the context of which the focus is on the self, not on the other. A strong manifestation of how little the concrete other takes part in recollection’s love is exemplified in the love of the Seducer.13 The Seducer’s love of recollection I am an esthete, an eroticist, who has grasped the nature and the point of love, who believes in love and knows it from the ground up, and I reserve for myself only the private opinion that no love affair should last more than a half year at most and that any relationship is over as soon as one has enjoyed the ultimate. (EO1, 368)

11 12

13

Job 1:21, the King James version. In chapter 4 we will see how critical Kierkegaard is with regard to the love of the poets, which he condemns as selfish. It is reasonable to assume that the kind of poet he has in mind is that which belongs in the category of recollection’s lovers. Kierkegaard’s use of a Platonic vocabulary in relating to the Poet’s story of miserable love, and in particular his use of the Platonic term ‘recollection’, is hard to miss. Kierkegaard presents the young Poet as someone who substitutes the concrete object of his love with an Idea (of both the girl and the love), and creates an inner ‘eternal’ world which abides in the secure sphere of his imagination, thus detaching himself from the real world of temporality. This presentation may be understood as an implicit criticism of the metaphysical project that, in Kierkegaard’s understanding, began with Plato. A philosophy of this sort, Kierkegaard claims, is preoccupied with reflecting upon existence, rather than with existing: ‘What philosophers say about actuality is often just as disappointing as it is when one reads on a sign in a secondhand shop: Pressing Done Here. If a person were to bring his clothes to be pressed, he would be duped, for the sign is merely for sale’ (EO1, 32). However, it is beyond the scope of the present study to elaborate on the complex and intriguing relationship between Kierkegaard’s thought and Plato’s philosophy.

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The aesthetic lover, we said, is interested in the first moment (or phase) of love, but since this moment is transient the aesthete can never really take hold of it. His life, therefore, moves between future-oriented plans towards the desired moment and past-oriented recollections of the fulfilled – and thereby lost – love. The aesthete is interested in the moment only as long as it contains within it some new and unfamiliar experience, and thereby he can never continue the moment beyond its peak (of pleasure or interest). He is afraid of boredom and therefore constantly seeks the new, ‘the first’. Anything experienced more than once – that is, anything advancing beyond its ‘first’ manifestation – is doomed to ‘be killed’ by him. He wants nothing to do with it again, he wants to keep it as beautiful and exciting as it was the first time. He is afraid of the signs that the passage of time may engrave on his love. He therefore refuses to continue his love relationship: rather, he recollects it. The epitome for such an aesthetic recollection’s love is embodied in the love of the seducer. The seducer is someone entirely receptive to the sensual beauty surrounding him in the form of various women. ‘The art is to be as receptive as possible to impressions’ (EO1, 361) he says. From this point of view focusing one’s attention only on one woman seems, of course, senseless: one can be in love with many girls at the same time, because one is in love in a different way with each one. To love one girl is too little; to love all is superficiality; to know oneself and to love as many as possible, to let one’s soul conceal all the powers of love inside itself so that each receives its specific nourishment while the consciousness nevertheless embraces the whole – that is enjoyment, that is living. (Ibid.)

This love-theory discloses that for him love is like a tour through the bounteous beauty that the world has to offer. The seducer is the wandering world-explorer who refuses to settle in one place. He is willing to pay the price of being rootless, even detached, the price of being involved only to a certain degree (not too little but not too much). He is a collector of images, a collector of experiences.14 Like the Poet of Repetition, he is interested in the other only as a means for creating his secluded, selfsufficient, world: My Cordelia, You know that I very much like to talk with myself. I have found in myself the most interesting person among my acquaintances. At times, I have feared that I would come to lack material for these conversations; now 14

See EO1, 390.

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kierkegaard on faith and love I have no fear, for now I have you. I shall talk with myself about you now and for all eternity, about the most interesting subject with the most interesting person – ah, I am only an interesting person, you the most interesting subject. (EO1, 401)

And yet, there is a sad emptiness in his life. His love is structured in such a way that its fulfilment is also its extinction: ‘now it is finished, and I never want to see her again’ he says having his desire for Cordelia fulfilled. And despite his cruelty we can also sense the desolation he is left with – a sad and lonely man who is defeated by his own victory: ‘[h]ow much I have gathered into this one moment … Why cannot such a night last longer?’ (EO1, 445). 3 Recollection and the ethical lover15 The ethical lover, unlike the aesthete, lets the night of desire and rapture continue into a day of commitment. This kind of lover is embodied in the austere figure of Judge William, who presents his unequivocal opinions both in the second part of Either/Or (in two letters addressed, presumably, to the aesthete from the first part) and in Stages on Life’s Way.16 The Judge takes upon himself the task of defending the ethical against the aesthetic way of life, and in particular against the aesthetic way of love. Both in Either/Or and in Stages on Life’s Way he speaks ardently about marriage (for marriage is the social manifestation of love, a point that will turn out to be very significant), and praises the sort of life that transfigures itself from 15

16

An important note of clarification is needed before beginning the following analysis. The discussion of the ethical presented here is focused on the failure common to the aesthetic and ethical stages of life (namely, their ‘recollection-hood’). However, this should not mislead one into thinking that there are no essential differences between these two attitudes to life and love. While the aesthete is guided by adherence to his momentary desires, the ethical person is guided by the attempt to adhere to moral ideals; the ethical person, unlike the aesthete, tries to reach the kind of goodness that transcends his momentary satisfactions. Accordingly, the ethical person tries to understand what his overarching wishes are, and he is thus more dedicated and committed to his will. Such differences between the stages qualify the ethical stage as more advanced (or ‘correct’) than the aesthetic one. It is therefore important to emphasize that the following presentation of ethical love – although focused on the conclusion that such love, just as the aesthetic love, ultimately fails to fulfil a satisfying love relationship – does not claim that these loves are equally problematic in all their aspects. In the present study, though, I will discuss only the position presented in Either/Or. There are subtle nuances distinguishing between the Judge’s positions presented in the two works, but fundamentally they represent the same view. For my purposes, therefore, it will suffice to focus on Either/Or’s observations alone.

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immediacy into ‘the universal’. What does this mean and does the love of the Judge succeed in being more satisfying than that of the aesthete? ‘The esthetic validity of marriage’ Marital love, then, has its enemy in time, its victory in time and its eternity in time. (EO2, 139)

The first letter of Judge William aims at establishing ‘the esthetic validity of marriage’.17 The Judge wishes ‘to show that romantic love can be united with and exist in marriage – indeed, that marriage is its true transfiguration’ (EO2, 31), as against the position of the aesthete, who considers that which goes beyond the immediate moment(s) of pleasure and excitement to be dull and un-erotic. We have seen above how deeply Either/Or’s aesthete objects to anything that requires a continuation beyond the climax of pleasure; here the Judge identifies this approach to love and existence as a longing for ‘the first’. ‘The first’ is ‘the first time’: the first time in which I did x, the first time in which I experienced y. Attributing an unparalleled significance to ‘the first’ (the first time that we kissed, for example) necessarily means considering ‘repetition’ as undesirable and problematic. If one bestows upon ‘the first’ the special meaning of having a unique position above any other rank on the scale of experience, as it were (there is only one ‘first’, after all), this means that ‘the first’ cannot repeat itself (because if it does, it is no longer ‘the first’): ‘the more meaningful that is which in its “first” manifests itself for the first time, the less the probability is that it can be repeated’ (EO2, 40). But do we really need to approach ‘the first’ in such a manner, to bestow upon it so heavy a meaning? The aesthete certainly does so – especially when it comes to love. What the Judge calls ‘the first love’ can be understood as the equivalent of the phase of ‘falling in love’ (or ‘infatuation’). This is the first period in the development of love before it is shaped into a stable relationship (i.e. before it is continued in time into a certain pattern and under a certain commitment). Now, since marriage is clearly a continuation of the first love in time, it is evident why the aesthete is so unenthusiastic about it. However, in his reluctance to continue the first love he dooms it, as the Judge claims, to be only momentary: ‘[y]ou must therefore hate all love that wants to be an eternal love. You must therefore stop with the first love 17

EO2, 3.

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as a moment’ (EO2, 126). Indeed, as we explained above, this is the paradox of the aesthetic experience (that defeats itself). The aesthete’s worship of ‘the first’ means that one focuses all of one’s attention on a certain event which must be momentary (since it is confined within the very narrow limits of the phase defined as ‘the first’). To carry this phase beyond the moment is indeed to turn it into something else. The kisses, the gaze, the touch are not ‘the first’ anymore, and thus – from the aesthete’s point of view – not as exciting and desirable as they used to be. To keep something as ‘the first’, therefore, means to do it only once, or, in the case of a ‘phase’, to do the things included in this phase only as long as they feel like a ‘first’ – which of course turns this phase into a very short-lived one, because sooner or later everything becomes a repetition (of x and y) rather than ‘the first’ (x and y). Hence, if one does not want to continue ‘the first’ (because one wants to retain the uniqueness of the event, a uniqueness which depends on its not being repeated), one has no choice but to abandon it when the moment is over, keeping it as a cherished memory rather than as a living present. And if we think of ‘the first’ as ‘the first phase of love’, the paradox becomes even clearer. If ‘the first’ cannot be continued in time, then the only way to continue to have ‘first-ness’ is by entering a new situation which has a ‘first’ of its own. But when it comes to love, entering a new situation in which ‘the first’ will indeed be the first (as the aesthete demands) means to find, each time anew, a different object of love. Accordingly, to give ‘the first’ its aesthetic significance necessarily means that the object of one’s love cannot remain the same and that, ultimately, means that the desired thing is not so much the beloved but rather the (excitement of the) situation. As the Judge puts it: ‘[w]hen you say that the first kiss is the sweetest, the most beautiful, you are insulting the beloved, for then it is time and its qualification that give the kiss absolute worth’ (EO2, 126). How can this paradox be solved? Can we both retain the beauty and the value of ‘the first’ – preventing the inevitable loss of ‘first-ness’ – and yet love in a way which is not confined to fragmented, scattered, dispersed experiences of love? Or, to put it differently: what is the ethical response to the loss – the loss of ‘the first’ in particular, but also the essential loss inherent to love in general – that threatens one’s love? The Judge believes that the ethical is the answer to the paradox of ‘the first’. The ethical, according to the Judge, entails taking part in the universal (i.e. social) realm, where one chooses to engage in a task that gives continuity and meaning to one’s life. Thus, the secret is to turn the momentary ‘first’ – that as such cannot become something more than an ideal (as this kind of love vanishes

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upon being realized) – into an actuality. And in turn, says the Judge, the ‘first’, the moment, becomes an eternity: ‘[i]t is an eternity in which the temporal has not disappeared as an ideal element, but in which it is continually present as real element’ (EO2, 137–8). While the aesthetic ‘first’ is more dramatic in the sense that it can easily receive an external, artistic expression (a longing glance or a passionate kiss can be more easily captured in a moment and depicted aesthetically), marital love lives its drama in the continuation of time. The married man, says the Judge, ‘has not fought with lions and trolls but with the most dangerous enemy, which is time’ (EO2, 138). However, his marital love, to repeat the point quoted above, has not only ‘its enemy in time’, but also – and most importantly – ‘its victory in time and its eternity in time’ (EO2, 139). It seems, then, that the Judge believes that the ethical response to the aesthetic paradox of ‘the first’ is a transfiguration of ‘the first’ into an ‘eternity in time’. In order to understand better what this might mean, we need to turn our attention to the ethical theory expressed in the Judge’s second letter. Resisting loss rationally18 The life of the aesthete – as expressed, for example, in his attitude to love and to ‘the first’ – is fragmented, dominated by spontaneous responses to desires and momentary fancies and inclinations. This life lacks continuity or any unifying principle to give it harmony and meaning, since the aesthete is reluctant to engage in any committing activity. In Kierkegaard and the Limits of the Ethical, Anthony Rudd delineates this inconsistency in the aesthete’s life-narrative as leading to despair. The aesthetic despair is rooted in a lack of personal identity (involving persistency and actively maintaining roles commitment), which is vital for a sense of stability and meaning in one’s life: For one’s life to acquire this continuity, for one to develop a personal identity, it is necessary to commit oneself to projects. To embark on a significant project, from which one does not ‘sheer off’ when the whim takes one, is to give one’s life at least some aspect of secure narrative structure.19 18

19

The ethical man, as will be demonstrated here, is paradigmatic of someone who maintains a Hegelian world view. However, in essence he actually represents a more general philosophical-rational state of mind. In his views he exemplifies a belief (typical of the philosophy of the Enlightenment) in the ability of human understanding, and a will to possess an all-encompassing grasp of the world and to solve existential problems completely with the power of human rationality alone. Rudd 1993: 93.

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And he continues: ‘It seems that most – if not all – projects that are significant enough to give one’s life a purpose and meaning will involve at least some degree of social interaction, and will therefore have some kind of social definition.’20 Giving one’s life meaning, then, entails getting involved in projects, becoming engaged in tasks that posit a purpose and goal for one’s actions and manner of living. And indeed, projects and tasks are not maintained in a vacuum – they gain their meaning in a social context. There is a clear mutual relationship between acquiring a personal identity and becoming a part of society. Now, becoming a part of society as a means to fulfilling oneself is the hallmark of Hegelian morality. In Hegel’s philosophy, as Rudd explains, ‘[m]an finds his true fulfilment not in the abstraction of Kantian morality, but in conformity to the laws and customs of society – but a society that has learnt to understand the value of the individual’.21 The locus of value in an individual, which needs to be ‘learnt to be understood’, is his freedom – and freedom is precisely the subject of the Judge’s second letter. The central issue of this letter is the meaning of either-or; the meaning of choosing. Making a choice is a crucial ingredient in the development of one’s character, of one’s personality. It is important to understand that the determining factor from the Judge’s point of view is not the content of one’s choice (which is a question that can only subsequently be addressed), but rather the act of choosing, whereby one constitutes oneself as a free agent: But what is it then that I choose – is it this or that? No, for I choose absolutely, and I choose absolutely precisely by having chosen not to choose this or that. I choose the absolute, and what is the absolute? It is myself in my eternal validity … But what is this self of mine? … It is the most abstract of all, and yet in itself it is also the most concrete of all – it is freedom. (EO2, 214)

The point regarding either-or, then, ‘is not so much a matter of choosing between willing good or willing evil as of choosing to will’ (EO2, 169).22 Choosing to will, choosing to choose, constitutes me as an ethical person because I thereby take responsibility for and control over my life (I am not 20 21 22

Ibid., 94. Ibid., 16. That is, choosing in a serious way that defines one’s identity and forms one as a responsible, self-committing agent. For an illuminating discussion of the Kierkegaardian ethical choice see John Davenport’s ‘The Meaning of Kierkegaard’s Choice between the Aesthetic and the Ethical: A Response to MacIntyre’, in Davenport and Rudd 2001.

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a passive recipient of external forces) – I discover myself as a free person who has the capability of shaping his life and bestowing meaning upon it. Therefore, this absolute freedom discovered in the act of choosing is not an abstract factor in my life, a rational conclusion arrived at after deep contemplation. The meaning of being absolutely free takes shape through acting. And acting (in this focused, will-committed way) amounts to becoming involved in projects and tasks, becoming a part of society.23 The insistence of the Judge on actualizing the individual’s absolute freedom in the form of the ready-made models offered by society (such as marriage) indicates his commitment to Hegelianism.24 To use Merold Westphal’s eloquent assertion: ‘Nothing could be more Hegelian than the move by which Judge William makes the meaning of marriage the key to the ethical sphere.’25 We may therefore say that the connection drawn by the Judge between choosing, eternal validity, and freedom articulates his Hegelian understanding as to the way in which eternal truth is embodied in society.26 Accordingly, an initial answer to the question regarding the meaning of ‘gaining eternity in time’ (and therefore defeating temporality) seems to emerge: eternity is gained by the temporal individual by his taking part in the truth embodied in society.

23

24

25 26

This is also, from the point of view of this position, what secures the ethical choice from ‘willing evil’. Society is taken to be the realization of truth, of the human spirit that has arrived at the highest stage of fulfilling itself as free and virtuous (see note 26 below). Choosing to become a part of such a society is thereby to will good. This view is not uncontroversial. There is an interpretative debate regarding the extent of the Judge’s Hegelianism on the one hand and his affinity to the Kierkegaardian religious believer on the other. (See, for example, Carlisle 2005; Davenport 2008; Davenport and Rudd 2001.) Westphal 1998: 106. The Hegelian connection between society, ethical truth, and freedom can be briefly explained as follows. Hegel believed that the historical process in which consciousness has become self-consciousness (thus understanding that it is absolutely free: everything is part of it, nothing limits it from the ‘outside’) – has reached its culmination, i.e. its end. Spirit (the human mind and understanding) is free: it understands that it is actually identical with the world. Human spirit has arrived at the point of having a total possession of ‘absolute knowledge’ since it understands that ‘truth’ consists in Spirit’s self-understanding. Accordingly, since Spirit is now free and total, its realization of itself in the present society is the ultimate realization. The morality maintained and required by a society established by free Spirit is truth itself, and therefore the free individual who is a part of the society knows that there is a correspondence between his self-realization and his becoming a member of that society. In other words, the individual knows that the way to realize himself – to fulfil himself – is to become a part of society, to become assimilated into society. After all, this (namely, society’s structure, duties, and roles) is the ‘site’ in which truth itself (namely, free Spirit that knows itself) is embodied.

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Now, as Michael Weston explains, the metaphysical project (that in Kierkegaard’s view began with Plato’s philosophy and culminated in that of Hegel) has four main features: aiming at finality and totality, considering itself as prior to and necessary for any other intellectual (spiritual or scientific) activity, seeing itself as autonomous, and operating in the mode of self-reflection – ‘thus [having] the character of “recollection”’.27 The Judge – who believes in self-fulfilment through assimilation into society, who has confidence in his absolute autonomy and adopts an optimistic view which does away with every element of pain, fear, or uncertainty – fits very well the profile of the philosopher. Indeed, the Judge criticizes the philosophers, saying that ‘[p]hilosophy turns toward the past … it mediates and mediates. It seems to me, however, that it does not answer the question I am asking, for I am asking about the future’ (EO2, 170). However, as we have just seen, the ‘future’ in which the Judge is interested amounts to becoming a part of the already-established society. The ‘future’, therefore, is a ‘closed’, known future – already achieved in the past (at the point of history at which it was established), and manifested in the status quo of the present. The understanding of this future-present, therefore, requires a recollection of the past. After all, society as a genuine expression of ‘absolute freedom’ (i.e. of the eternal Spirit, of truth) may be fully understood as such only when one knows – when one recollects – world-history (i.e. the process of the Spirit’s development). This world-history is of course the past, which leads dialectically to the ideal future-present. The Judge does not criticize the philosophical aspiration to achieve absolute freedom, totality, and autonomy – he criticizes only the method by which this aspiration is taken up. In this the Judge is revealed as having fallen into the same mistake which he attributes to the philosopher. By directing oneself at a ‘truth’ already known and achieved (i.e. the eternity of Spirit as embodied in social institutions such as marriage), one is actually preoccupied with the act of recollection. The struggle is over and truth is arrived at in the manner of the established society; the threat of time, loss, and death is only a memory for the Spirit which has accomplished the movement of selfrealization, and now reposes in an eternal tranquillity of self-knowledge. When truth is thus defined, and when arriving at this truth is the goal, life becomes a movement directed at the past (due to its aspiration to reconstruct this once-and-for-all, historical truth), and the individual becomes someone who focuses more on rational, perfect ideals than on mundane, imperfect concreteness. Life, then, turns into one of recollection. 27

See Weston 1994: 6

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From a phenomenological point of view, the picture emerging from the Judge’s didactic speech lacks the ability to provide a satisfactory account of human existence. Although he identifies the problems associated with the aesthetic way of life quite impressively, the answers he gives ignore the complexity of human existence in time and, in particular, the pressing problem of loss. In his view, truth – absolute freedom, the good life, the perfect love – is here at hand: ready to use and simple to reach. Becoming a part of the universal, a part of society, is the key to a full and satisfying life, regardless of the non-individual nature of this ‘solution’ and its (necessarily correlative) ignorance of any personal, private experience of loss, fear, and death (actual or potential). Indeed, the ethical account of life and love is different from the aesthetic account, and it offers a more developed and desirable understanding of genuine relationship, in which the lover makes an honest effort to recognize an ideal of goodness regarding his relationship, and to adhere and commit his will to this ideal.28 However, the failure involved in fulfilling such a relationship, in as much as this failure amounts to mistreating the passage of time by resorting to recollection, is ultimately the same as the aesthetic one. From the point of view of the problem that concerns us here – namely, the loss (essentially inherent in our existence as temporal creatures) that posits an imminent threat to our loves – both the aesthetic and the ethical solutions are eventually unsatisfying. The aesthetic ‘solution’ is to attach oneself to immediacy, creating a false eternity that collapses into itself, becoming – instead of a transcendent eternity – an extended recollection. In his fear of the future (because it is the loss of the immediate, of the present), the aesthete turns his life into a huge gallery of recollections. Since the cherished, immediate moment is not allowed to have a future (so to speak), the only way to keep one’s hold on it is through recollection – a movement directed at the past. And the ethical ‘solution’ (as far as the problem of loss is concerned) is no better. The ethical Judge reduces the open future into a ‘closed’ present (by finding one’s fulfilment, one’s task, in pursuing an anticipated path that has already been paved for him by society), thus preventing an individual search which might lead to a yet-unknown conclusion. And so while the aesthete tries to avoid the loss associated with his temporality by holding to immediacy, and thus actually falling into recollection – the ethical man holds fast to himself. In his submission to the rational understanding of eternal ideals, and in believing himself to have fulfilled these ideals by 28

See again note 15 above.

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becoming a part of society, the ethical man holds fast to the delusion that he has conquered loss and temporality, while in fact he has been preoccupied with recollection. His eternity is as false as the aesthetic one. It exists only in his rational, contemplative accounts; it never faces his private, phenomenological experience of living, and loving, in time. The Judge, then, no less than his aesthetic friend, is deeply immersed in recollection. And recollection, ultimately, amounts to the attempt to deny the loss essential to one’s life and in particular to one’s love, and distract one away from it. Denying the loss is manifested in the aesthetic attempt to create a world independent of the passage and ruling of time – a world of fantasy, for example, or a world of artistic creation such as poetry. And in the ethical life this denial is manifested in the rational confidence that one has conquered loss and gained a secure ‘eternity in time’. Now, we saw how recollection shapes the aesthetic love. How does it shape the ethical love? The Judge’s love of recollection The great nineteenth-century novel Middlemarch tells the story of Dorothea Brooke, who tried honestly to maintain a perfect marriage with the pompous, unloving Mr Casaubon, whom she had willingly (and even ardently) chosen as her husband. The conclusion she arrives at, however, is quite grim: Marriage is so unlike everything else. There is something even awful in the nearness it brings. Even if we loved some one else better than – than those we were married to, it would be no use … I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love. I know it may be very dear – but it murders our marriage – and then our marriage stays with us like a murder – and everything else is gone.29

In his letters to his aesthete friend, the Judge expresses the confidence that he has found the secret recipe for the happiest, most fulfilling love. He believes that by the determination of his will, and by choosing right, he has conquered all the possible difficulties of love. This is how he describes the ideal lover (i.e. himself): He has perceived that it was an insult and consequently ugly to want to love a person according to vague forces in his being but not according to a clear 29

Eliot 2000: 797. Dorothea says these words upon acknowledging that despite her earnest efforts she had actually fallen in love with someone else.

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consciousness, to want to love in such a way that he could imagine it possible that this love could cease … He has perceived that it was an insult to want to be attached to another person in the way one is attached to finite and accidental things, conditionally, so that if there should prove to be problems later one could undo it. He does not believe it possible that the one he loves can change, except for the better, and if it should happen he believes in the power of the relationship to make everything good again. (EO2, 301, emphasis mine)

According to this utopian vision there are no problems, no possible changes in the love or in the beloved, and no obstacles that a determined (and rational) relationship cannot overcome. It seems that the Judge ignores the possibility that a marriage, in spite of being willed and decided upon by the two parties involved, can fail. But if marriage, once decided upon, cannot fail, can one really affirm it (as the Judge claims to be doing)? How can sustaining a relationship of love be truly valued, if one does not accept the possibility of not always being able to hold on to this relationship? How can the complacent self-assurance of the Judge not lead him to the kind of marriage in which the partners – who are so sure that the marriage is safe and secure – take their love, and each other, for granted? [T]he way that marriage becomes legitimate is by its being chosen, but this can happen only if one acknowledges the dialectical possibility of divorce. The possibility that the bonds of marriage are ever subject to being broken tells us that their bonding effect is something we are called on to decide, and to decide continually. A legitimate marriage is a continuous remarriage, a continuous commitment of ourselves to what is ours to refuse.30

Basing his model of ‘legitimate marriage’ on the principle guiding him in forming ‘an existential faith’ – namely, that the affirmation of something has meaning only against the background of rejecting it (a ‘yes’ is a ‘yes’ only if we know what ‘no’ means) – Ronald L. Hall justly claims that for a marriage to be valid, the partners should acknowledge the real option of divorce.31 ‘What makes the security of such a marriage different from the judge’s’, he says, ‘is that it is a security established within the full awareness of the possibility of divorce. As I see it, divorce is, for the judge, not even a remote possibility, not to mention a real and wrenching existential threat.’32 30 31 32

Hall 2000: 143. I elaborate on Hall’s interpretation of faith in chapter 3. Hall 2000: 82–3.

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I agree with Hall that it seems that for the Judge a divorce, or any other break in the love, is not a possibility. And indeed, if one knows a priori the answer to the question one asks – in what sense is the question a real one? In the same manner, if the marital freedom is the freedom to choose only one path – where is the freedom? Therefore, when the Judge declares that the ethical view of marriage ‘sees the relationship as the absolute and therefore looks upon love according to its true beauty – that is, according to its freedom’ (EO2, 305), we cannot but wonder whether he is being honest with himself. Maybe he ignores the fact that the picture of marriage is more complicated than the one that he wishes to acknowledge?33 There is something immodest and lacking in humility in the Judge’s confidence. He seems proudly to disregard human limitations and the human susceptibility to acting wrongly, stumbling, and sinning.34 In their essay ‘Erotic Love in the Religious Existence-Sphere’ Green and Ellis point out this problem. Judge William, they say, ‘does not typically bring sin, guilt or repentance into relation to the ethical reality of marriage. Marriage’s challenge resides for him primarily in the ethical decision to commit to another person.’35 Accordingly, the Judge does not take into account ‘the real stresses that threaten marital continuity’.36 These are stresses such as ‘infidelity on the part of either partner … the sense that the beloved has become hostile or alienated … changes in the beloved (or the self) that are extensive enough to raise the question of whether either is any longer really the same person to whom one has pledged eternal devotion’.37 Stresses of this kind indeed pose a real threat, which is completely ignored by the Judge. The latter does not have even the slightest doubt that his ‘feelings about love or [his] beloved’ – despite his choice – ‘may change’.38 33

34

35 36 37 38

It is true that choosing honestly x (choosing to marry, for example) amounts to focusing on x and investing emotions and energy and goodwill in this choice in a way that makes turning back to not-x harder. In that sense the Judge is right when he focuses his attention on the one path that has been chosen. However, even if once choosing x the path leading to its annulment becomes narrower, this does not justify ignoring the possibility of this path coming true nevertheless. Here I completely agree with Hall that for truly validating (and valuing) choice x, one must continually take into account the possibility that this choice will be annulled (either by one’s own will or by the will of someone – or something – else). In chapter 6 below I will discuss Kubrick’s film Eyes Wide Shut (and Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story which inspired it) as a vivid example of ethical naı¨vety and the unavoidability of its failure. Green and Ellis 1999: 352. Ibid., 357. Ibid., 356. Ibid., 366.

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Another effective criticism of the Judge is brought by Amy Laura Hall who emphasizes the invisibility of the Judge’s (unnamed) wife. We never hear her opinions, we know hardly anything about her and, indeed, one has to admit that for someone in love the Judge speaks very little about her. Whenever he does speak about her, it is in relation to himself – he mostly speaks of the benefits that her existence as his wife bestows upon him. Hall makes a good point when she claims that the hubristic, self-centred perspective of the Judge does not allow him to see his wife as a real other, separated and independent of him. Rather, Hall claims, the Judge sees her only as far as she revolves around his needs and desires. Not only does he take for granted that she is preoccupied from morning to evening with domestic tasks that concern his well-being, he sees in her his ‘saviour’: ‘William lauds his wife as his “salvation” – as the means by which he is able to “centralize” and “acquire” himself.’39 In a manner similar to that of Green and Ellis, Hall warns against the confidence of the Judge that his love relationship will remain intact, and she foresees the day in which he will be forced to face his delusional love and the otherness of his wife: Currently he may know that he is ‘everything to his wife’ and may think his ‘consciousness’ resolutely ‘integrated’, but William’s treatise assumes that this will continue to be the case … if his wife eventually refuses carefully to contort her form to fit his mood, William’s esteem for her and his hope of ‘salvation’ through her may collapse.40

Having said that, however, we should not dismiss the Judge’s world view as entirely wrong and unfounded.41 As opposed to Hall’s reading, I think that the portrait he presents is not an entirely distorted one – rather, it is incomplete.42 The Judge needs to go through a painful process of edification – but his love is not hopeless, it is only naı¨ve. At the same time, there is indeed something vital that is missing in his love, and the various criticisms presented above clearly indicate this. The main problem with 39 40

41

42

See Hall 2002: 113, 117. See ibid., 130. Despite my agreement with Hall on this point, I think that her overall understanding of Kierkegaardian love is quite problematic. See my discussion of her view in chapter 4. As already emphasized above, I acknowledge that despite failing in committing the same mistake of ‘recollection-hood’ as the aesthete, the Judge’s failure might be easier to correct because he holds a view of life, and of love, which is more advanced than that of the aesthete. Thus, he might well be more prepared for advancing to the next, and required, stage of resignation. This reading is similar to Hannay’s: see Hannay 1982: 80–2.

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the Judge’s position is that it encourages a state of mind which is oblivious to the need to carry out the movement of resignation. In the next chapters we will see what resignation (and its counterpart, self-denial) actually means and how it is connected to loss, but we can already observe that the Judge’s self-deluded view blinds him to the possibility of loss. His depiction of love is too perfect, too brightly clear – but love is not like that. Love involves pain, and sacrifices, and anxieties. Love can be dark and complicated, and it definitely does not amount to only sheer joy: it hurts to love. Those aspects of love (not to mention its demons) are completely absent in the Judge’s account of love. Being absent from the account of love, however, does not mean that they are defeated and removed from (the experience of) love itself. And this is the point at which the demonic raises its head. 4 Rebellion against the ethical: the demonic lover [I]f a marriage could be built despite my inclosing reserve, then this union is indeed my wish … and yet I cannot renounce my inclosing reserve for that reason. (SLW, 369, 373)

In Stages on Life’s Way we are introduced to the diary of someone – a Quidam – whose story depicts a demonic love. While the Judge believes that determination of the will and choosing to marry are enough to secure a satisfying love, Quidam the demonic and his tortured diary thoroughly complicate the optimistic love-view of ethical rationality. Quidam is not an aesthete – he wants to marry and he chooses to marry. Unlike the aesthete, he would have liked to adhere to the ethical ideal of love. He sees the beauty and attractiveness of a secure and committed love that someone such as the Judge advances, and he seeks the ethical continuity of love. He deeply wants to take a part in the utopia offered by the Judge and to succeed in living peacefully with himself, with his beloved, and with the threats of loss (as the Judge claims to be doing). But he fails. He cannot fulfil the love relationship he desires, he cannot proceed with the engagement and marry the Quadam whom he loves. This failure stems from the demonic in him, which rebels against the ethical solution to the problem of loss. Being demonic, Quidam objects to the ethical hubristic position; to its presumption to overcome loss. Being demonic, he is too sensitive to the unyielding nature of loss, and is well aware of the threats overshadowing love. He understands that love is insecure, that there are many powers – external and internal alike – that work against love. In other words, he sees

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all too vividly the obstacles standing in the way of love, and is defeated by them. Moreover, the distinctive characteristic of the demonic lover is that he becomes obsessed with the various obstacles in the way of loving. He becomes obsessed with the essential loss that threatens love, and with his failure to reconcile himself with this loss, to learn how to love in spite of it. The demonic lover surrenders to failure, thus actualizing the essential loss (by, for example, breaking off the relationship, sinning against the beloved, driving the beloved away). Failing to overcome the obstacles, he demonically rejoices, or at least indulges, in them. He sets all his demons free, as it were – he lets his fears, weaknesses, conflicting desires (and other demonic powers) condemn his love to loss. Quidam’s diary is a reflection of the demonic failure to fulfil the ethical ideal, and it demonstrates how his defeat in the confrontation with essential loss (namely, his demonic inability to accept the essential loss which threatens love; his demonic refusal to reconcile himself to this loss) turns the loss from potentiality to actuality. Quidam breaks off his engagement to Quadam, and the diary is a documentation of his haunted mind. It presents the self-torturing attempt of Quidam to justify his act, by asking himself over and over again ‘Am I guilty or not guilty (in behaving in this way, which has caused her – and myself – misery and pain)?’ Quidam thinks that he might not be guilty after all: his reason for breaking the engagement was not a whimsical fancy in the aesthetic manner, but rather a secret that he cannot disclose to her. However, despite the centrality of that mysterious secret to the broken engagement (it is this secret that allegedly stands between him and his girl; between his will to marry her and the possibility of doing so) – the diary never spells out what the secret actually is. And it does not do so because, ultimately, the particular secret of Quidam is not what really matters. It does not matter what the secret is, it matters what it indicates. The specific secret is but a manifestation of the more fundamental inability of the demonic to accept the essential loss (in the form of various obstacles and difficulties) which threatens his love.43 43

The meaning of the beloved being essentially lost to Quidam is that his hold on her is tentative: her presence and her love are not something that he can absolutely secure. In order to share his secret with the beloved, then, Quidam would need to accept her as tentatively held – as vital to him and yet not truly ‘his’. For example, her knowledge of his secret might change her attitude towards him, causing her to lose respect and love for him, and even to leave him. It is this tension, of loving without truly having a secure hold of the beloved, that Quidam is unable to sustain. The essence of his demonic love concerns this inability, rather than the presence of some particular dark secret or other.

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Quidam, we saw in the quotation above, refers to his secret (that is, to what he understands as the obstacle preventing him from marrying Quadam) as an ‘inclosing reserve’.44 This term testifies that the demonic lover, despite seeing the shortcomings of recollection’s love (whether in its aesthetic or ethical form), cannot break through this kind of love. His focus on himself in the manner of ‘inclosing reserve’ renders him a member of the club of lovers who love by way of recollection. Like his fellow recollection-lovers he is incapable of transcending himself and initiating a genuine relationship with another. He is closed within himself (this, after all, is what it means to be inclosed) and so precludes the possibility of being in a relationship; he is closed within himself and cannot open himself to any other. In The Concept of Anxiety an explicit connection is specified between the two notions: ‘[t]he demonic’, it says, ‘is inclosing reserve’ (CA, 123, emphasis in the text).45 Now, the content of ‘inclosing reserve’ can be ‘the most terrible, the most insignificant, the horrible, whose presence in life few probably even dream about, but also the trifles to which no one pays attention’ (CA, 126–7). The ‘inclosing reserve’ – that is, the demonic failure to love – is therefore not so much about a particular secret (or even a particular deed). Rather, it amounts to an inner obstacle, a limit that imprisons the self and does not let one fulfil one’s love (and thus it can be either a ‘most terrible’ obstacle or just a ‘trifle’).46 To be inclosed is to attend to the demonic powers within one: the powers which refuse to follow the ethical solution and rationally ignore the loss, but at the same time also object to a resigned acceptance of the loss. Therefore, in order to overcome the ‘inclosing reserve’, a leap beyond recollection is needed – a leap into the religious sphere: his inclosing reserve contains nothing at all but is there as the frontier, and it holds him, and at present he is depressed in his reserve … inclosing reserve can scarcely be taken from the reserved person and there is no real healing for him except religiously within himself. (SLW, 428, emphasis mine) 44

45 46

It is important to emphasize that ultimately, it is not the secret that ruins the love but rather Quidam’s inability to disclose this secret in resignation and repentance. The connection between the demonic, resignation, and repentance will be explained in chapter 6. On the link between the demonic in The Concept of Anxiety and Quidam see Gonza´lez 2000. However, submitting oneself to the demonic (rather than trying to overcome it) indeed leads to one acting in a problematic way (that may terminate love, for example), and amounts to being in a state of sin. The connection between the demonic and sin will be considered in chapter 6.

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However, the demonic fails to carry out the religious requirement and move forward into a different sphere of existence. Surrendering himself to the demonic powers in him, then, the demonic lover is immersed in recollection. He can therefore only look yonder, at the horizon beyond recollection, but as long as he chooses the demonic he is inclosed within himself and cannot break through. Breaking through beyond the demonic, beyond recollection, requires a profound change of heart and mind and a submission to the demanding requirement of the movement of resignation. Of the various lovers of the sphere of recollection, the demonic comes closest to representing the essential condition of a human lover. Baffled by the struggle between the aesthetic and the ethical powers in him, coming up against his limitations, failing to fulfil his love completely and sometimes failing to fulfil his love even in part – of the three lovers he reflects most convincingly the struggle of love.47 The demonic lover seeks a way out of his present condition and, in this sense, he is a borderline figure as it were – he is deeply immersed in recollection (in the prereligious sphere) but he sees its shortcomings. He is therefore looking further. He aspires to transcend recollection, but to do this he needs to undertake the demanding, painful movement of resignation, and such an undertaking, as we shall see in the next chapter, is far from easy. The demonic lover, then, stands on the verge of the religious sphere. If, indeed, he manages to leap beyond recollection (by making the movement of resignation), he will be facing new possibilities for love: these possibilities will be presented and explored in the next four chapters. Having inquired into the different forms of love in the religious sphere, in the sixth and last chapter of this study we shall return to the demonic lover, this time in the form of the intriguing figure of the Merman in Fear and Trembling.

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The demonic, in his attempt to address the loss threatening love, is well aware of the tension between aesthetic sensitivity (to the moment and its passing desires), and ethical higher aspirations (to continuity and universal ideals). Now, as the common lover is usually neither a pure aesthete nor a sheer ethicist but rather someone who wavers between the attitudes represented by these two protagonists, it is reasonable to suggest that the demonic comes closest to representing such a lover. At the same time, the demonic is, by contrast with the common lover, highly conscious of the struggle within himself, and of his frustrated and unhappy condition. In this the demonic may be standing in a higher position than such a common lover: he knows and acknowledges that something is wrong; he is painfully aware of the misery infusing his unsatisfying state.

2 THE SORROWFUL LOVER

1 Fear and Trembling and the concept of resignation Introduction [The knight of resignation] infinitely renounces the love that is the substance of his life, he is reconciled in pain. (FT, 46)

, The concept of resignation is presented in Fear and Trembling as an essential part of Kierkegaard’s analysis of faith. Fear and Trembling, which was published in 1843 and is probably the best known of Kierkegaard’s works, tells the story of the Binding in a strikingly unusual way. It discusses the structure of Abraham’s faith, and characterizes it as a paradoxical double movement. The two movements, of resignation and of faith, and the paradoxical relation between them, are the core of Fear and Trembling: this is the basis on which Kierkegaard construes his famous polemical discussion regarding the ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ (‘Problema I’) and its implications (‘Problema II’ and ‘Problema III’). However, most of the readings and interpretations of Fear and Trembling tend to overlook the significance of this fundamental analysis of faith (which constitutes almost half of the book), and rush to address the problem of the three ‘Problemas’.1 It is not surprising then, that along with the movement of 1

The notable exceptions are Mooney, Hall and Lippitt, whose readings will be discussed in the next chapter.

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resignation, the knight of resignation is also pushed aside – and so is his painful love for a princess. But before doing justice to this love story (as well as to the concept of resignation which is crucial for a correct understanding of faith), there is a need to say a few words on the supposed author of Fear and Trembling, that is, the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio.2 Johannes the obscure: the loud voice of the silent one Johannes de Silentio (whom I shall refer to simply as Johannes) – the name, or rather the persona, under which Kierkegaard chose to present Fear and Trembling – is someone associated with silence. As his name indicates, he is someone who in some sense cannot, or does not, speak. Johannes, of course, does speak (otherwise there would be no book to be discussed); his declared silence, therefore, refers to his inability to understand Abraham. He claims, most persistently, that he cannot understand Abraham, cannot understand the knight of faith, cannot, therefore, understand faith. But should we take his word at face value? Maybe Johannes understands more than he wishes to admit? After all, he claims not to understand but, surprisingly, he has a lot to say about faith – a whole book, to be precise (and indeed a very rich and condensed one!). To begin with, Johannes can recognize a knight of faith: he knows that Abraham is a knight and he is very fluent when it comes to defining his knighthood. Johannes knows how to tell the difference between resignation and faith, and he even has something very interesting to say about the nature of the relationship between these two movements. So why does Johannes present himself as someone who does not understand, when his book provides written evidence against this claim? A plausible suggestion may be that the failure that Johannes is preoccupied with is not one of understanding faith, or of giving an accurate account of it. It is rather a failure in performing it. Johannes does not understand how Abraham was capable of performing the wondrous movement of faith. However, the fact that Johannes himself is not someone who has faith does not make his understanding of faith – or rather the understanding of faith that emerges from his text without his willing to 2

This is a pressing matter because the pseudonymity of the work is too often taken to indicate the alleged problematic status of Fear and Trembling as an unreliable source for assessing Kierkegaard’s understanding of faith. I will discuss briefly the issue of the pseudonymous writings in chapter 5 below, but since the weight I give to Fear and Trembling’s account of resignation, faith, and love is evident already at this stage, it is important to clarify the reasons for regarding Johannes de Silentio as someone whose views deserve serious attention.

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admit it – inadequate or deficient. We can learn a lot about faith from Johannes’ account, even if he himself is not someone who lives up to his model (and in a Kierkegaardian fashion we can say that this is the same as in the case of love: we can learn a lot about love from the account of a heartbroken lover who attempts to love but fails). Now, there are commentators who do take Johannes’ word and believe him that he does not, and cannot, understand faith.3 What Johannes has to say about faith, according to these readings, is therefore necessarily lacking. Johannes is an outsider who is lacking something important about faith; something such as an understanding of sin: To really understand the positive character of the religious life, including of course faith, one must understand sin, but Climacus says that no pseudonymous book prior to The Concept of Anxiety manifested such an understanding … From this it follows that it is a mistake to take Fear and Trembling as giving us a positive account of faith.4

Evans, of course, does not dismiss altogether the importance of the text. The significance that he finds in the story of Abraham (and especially in Johannes’ account of it) is that of showing us that ‘a person of faith is a person who has a direct and personal relationship with God’ and that ‘it is at least possible for God to encounter a person directly, not simply through social ideals, and that such an encounter can provide a new self, a new identity, and a new understanding of the purpose of human existence’.5 However, the text as a whole is only ‘a poetic anticipation of the situation of the Christian believer’ and ‘[s]ince it is poetry, one should not look to the story for detailed information about the character of Christian existence’.6 In other words, Evans suggests that for an adequate, positive model of faith we should look elsewhere, not in Fear and Trembling. A similar direction is manifested in the reading of Stephen Mulhall, who thinks that the absence of sin, from Johannes’ account as well as from Abraham’s life, renders Fear and Trembling – and the model embodied in the figure of Abraham – insufficient for a valid understanding of faith: ‘Whereas Abraham, according to de Silentio, did not become the single individual by way of sin, Christianity teaches that the only way to God is

3 4 5 6

See, for example, Jackson’s criticism of Johannes de Silentio, whom he takes to be distant in his opinions and understanding from Kierkegaard himself (Jackson 1999: 192–200). Evans 1993: 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid.

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through sin – through recognizing our sinfulness and our inability to overcome it through our own resources.’7 This kind of interpretation – which indicates an essential failing both in Johannes’ understanding of faith and in the faith he tries to understand – points to other texts (delivered by another Johannes), for the purpose of understanding and edification: At one point in Fear and Trembling, where Johannes de silentio says he doesn’t understand Abraham, he also says that to understand him we need a new category. This is almost certainly the Christian concept of faith (not Abraham’s) defined and elaborated at great length in Philosophical Fragments and particularly Concluding Unscientific Postscript.8

Indeed, in the texts of Johannes Climacus (the Fragments and their Postscript) a different model of faith is presented: a model that specifically includes the distinctively Christian features of sin, God in time, the issue of eternal happiness and so on. It is also true that these texts present Religiousness B (the distinctively Christian faith) as the highest, and that may lead to the conclusion that the faith of Abraham belongs more in the category of Religiousness A.9 If such a conclusion is adopted then on the face of it Fear and Trembling may seem like a problematic source to rely on for an adequate model of faith. My answer to such a possible objection is twofold. First, one can ask about the extent and cruciality of the difference between these two models. Perhaps, after all, the difference between them is not so profound or essential. For example, one of the more decisive differences between Religiousness A and Religiousness B is that the former is characterized as ‘immanent’ (a religious consciousness that takes into consideration only that which is in the realm of human will and powers alone) while the latter is defined as ‘transcendent’ (a religious consciousness that manages to put its trust in that which is beyond the realm of human abilities, that is, divine intervention).10 However, as Pattison points out, this distinction is not entirely accurate because we can find, already in those writings that are ‘supposedly representative of the merely “immanent” form of religiousness’, ‘transcendent’ elements 7 8 9

10

Mulhall 2001: 386. Hannay 2003a: 32. For the relationship between Johannes de Silentio’s book and those of Johannes Climacus in terms of the different stages of life they occupy, see, for example, Westphal 1996 and Evans 1999. ‘In Religiousness B, the upbuilding is something outside the individual; the individual does not find the upbuilding by finding the relationship with God within himself but relates himself to something outside himself in order to find the upbuilding’. CUP, 561.

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such as ‘the human need for repentance, for Grace’.11 Although Pattison refers here to the Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, I think that his observation holds true with regard to other supposedly ‘religiously immanent’ writings as well, among them Fear and Trembling. Also, another ‘charge’ against the latter is its alleged ignorance regarding the issue of sin. It seems that the crucial topic of sin and repentance, while central to the model of Religiousness B, is quite marginal to the model of Fear and Trembling. However, this quite common interpretative view is based on the failure to recognize the pivotal role of the Merman in the story (and model) of faith that Johannes tells us. The Merman and his story – a story of romantic love – is the topic of the last chapter of the present study, and it is in that chapter that I shall try to justify my understanding of the importance of sin already for the faith presented in Fear and Trembling. In the meantime, however, we may say that at the very least, and despite their differences, there is no evident reason to think that there is something in the Postscript’s model that invalidates the one of Fear and Trembling and, moreover, there are reasons to consider the former as a specific manifestation of the latter.12 However, it is not my task here to compare the two models. At any event – and this is my second answer to the possible objection to my taking Fear and Trembling to be the main text from which to learn of faith – even if the model of the Postscript goes beyond that of Fear and Trembling, and even if it does indeed add new features that qualify it as a more accurate model than that of the faith praised by Johannes, the latter is rich enough to show us something very interesting about our lives, and in particular about the loves that give them a significant content. The faith of Abraham, then, is definitely a topic worth discussing, and Johannes is definitely someone who does so. Which brings us back to our original question: if Johannes has so much to say, why does he claim to be silent? One way to settle the dissonance between Johannes’ (alleged) silence and confusion and the fluency and insightfulness of the text is to see in Johannes the messenger from the motto, who does not understand the message that he carries.13 In the light of such a reading Johannes is taken 11 12

13

Pattison 1991: 156. For an interesting discussion of the essence of Kierkegaard religiousness as not being confined to (dogmatic) Christianity (hence, also, exceeding the Postscript’s Religiousness B) see Mooney’s On Søren Kierkegaard: Dialogue, Polemics, Lost Intimacy, and Time, in particular the first part ‘Kierkegaard: A Socrates in Christendom’. The motto reads: ‘What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not’, quoting from Hamann. See, for example, Lippitt 2003: 177.

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to represent the understanding of Kierkegaard’s contemporaries, who held a Hegelian conception with regard to faith – a limited conception that indeed makes it impossible to understand Abraham. As Alastair Hannay explains: Johannes’s platform is still that of his (contemporary) readers … Really what he uncovers is the extent of the inability of those who accept the Hegelian principle to understand Abraham. But that is because the readers Kierkegaard has designed him for are wedded to that principle. Kierkegaard’s overriding aim is to divorce them from it, but he believes that has to be done with their own consent and therefore with due regard to their own conceptual and attitudinal presuppositions.14

This reading may also explain why Kierkegaard chose to attribute his interesting ideas about faith, expressed in one of his most intense works, to Johannes the silent. Presumably, by doing so, he indicates that it is Johannes – as a Hegelian or simply as someone who is not a believer – who does not (and cannot) understand Abraham (and faith). But Kierkegaard does – and so potentially can we. I think that this reading is plausible and even compelling but, as I suggested above, maybe we can think of Johannes as someone who does understand after all, someone who chooses to present himself as silent even though he can (and does) speak, someone who is closer to Kierkegaard than we might at first be tempted to think. Maybe his nonsilent silence, his refusal to spell out a less enigmatic account of faith, and what Mulhall calls his ‘confusion’ are rather intended, as Mulhall points out, ‘as a signal, all but unmissable, that he expects his readers to work a little harder to earn their bread’.15 Keeping in mind who were the readers of Kierkegaard – the bourgeois society of believers who took themselves to understand what faith involves and to have progressed far beyond it (to the realm of reason) – we can see the point of narrating the account of faith in the voice of someone who insists on faith’s unintelligibility. Kierkegaard wanted his readers to understand, to take a minute to think, and to realize, how profoundly difficult it is really to have faith. Kierkegaard wanted his contemporaries to face and acknowledge the fact that faith is not the triviality that they believed they acquired simply by 14 15

Hannay 2003a: 31. Mulhall 2001: 368. The confusion Mulhall is referring to is Johannes’ position regarding the literal: on the one hand, Johannes insists on a literal reading of the biblical text, on the other, he himself fails to do so and provides an inaccurate reading of the words that Abraham uttered (see pp. 359–70).

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virtue of being born Christians. And what can be more effective for the purpose of demonstrating this than to create a protagonist who struggles to understand faith? 2 Resignation: the relationship with the beloved16 Desire and loss17 Conceptually speaking, to describe an attitude as ‘resignation’ is eo ipso to say something about the meaning and importance of the thing being renounced. Resignation truly counts as resignation only when we are requested to give up something of importance to us. To renounce something means that we have an interest in it – we do not renounce something that we do not want. When we renounce something it has to be, by definition, something we want and have an interest in, it has to be something that we desire. Resignation, therefore, is necessarily a difficult and painful act. There is something that we want – a romantic relationship with a desired person, for example – and we have to ‘let it go’, to give it up, to not have it. The more strongly we are attached, the more intense our will and the greater our interest – the more painful and difficult the resignation. Such a story is told in Fear and Trembling: A young lad falls in love with a princess, and this love is the entire substance of his life, and yet the relationship is such that it cannot possibly be realized, cannot possibly be translated from ideality into reality. (FT, 41)

This young man, despite the advice of ‘the slaves of the finite, the frogs in the swamp of life’ to take him ‘the rich brewer’s widow’ instead (see FT, 41–2), does not want any substitute for the princess – he cannot love any other woman. However, on the way to resignation, and before actually undertaking the movement, the lad honestly enquires into the status of his love. He wants to be sure that this love is indeed ‘the entire substance of his life’ (i.e. a true, enduring love and not merely a fleeting infatuation); and that this love is indeed lost for him, a real impossibility: 16

17

I am deeply indebted to Ariel Meirav for his invaluable input regarding the understanding of resignation that I present in the rest of this chapter. His own work on the concept of resignation, as well as his challenging comments on my work, have significantly contributed to developing the ideas I present here. It should be emphasized that in what follows I use the word ‘desire’ to indicate a strong and passionate wanting of some particular thing. Thus, in its being focused and overriding will, it is different from the aesthetic desire, which is momentary and transient (and accordingly also unstable and quite feeble).

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He examines the conditions of his life, he convenes the swift thoughts that obey his every hint, like well-trained doves, he flourishes his staff, and they scatter in all directions. But now when they all come back, all of them like messengers of grief, and explain that it is an impossibility, he becomes very quiet, he dismisses them, he becomes solitary, and then he undertakes the movement. (FT, 42)

In the previous chapter we characterized recollection’s love by means of its distinguished response to loss (the essential loss involved in the passage of time, consisting both of actual and potential losses). Resignation’s love also emerges as a unique response to a loss, but here the loss is emphatically actual; the loss concerned is the actual loss of a princess.18 Now, the experience of losing something exposes the way in which our will is restricted by reality. When we lose something (especially something of importance to us), we feel the resistance that the world applies against us. There is something that we want which is taken away from us, and it is taken away from us despite our will and regardless of our efforts. Loss, then, is something external to us, something that is imposed on us, something beyond our control. We may therefore say that loss is an external event to which we respond, first and foremost, in an inner manner (by pain, anger, or denial, for instance). This inner response to the loss, the inner attitude taken to it, is akin to what Kierkegaard regards as a ‘movement’. Resignation, then, is an inner movement – a movement of the spirit, of the will – which can either be carried out as a response to the loss, or not. But what kind of a response is it? The knight, then, makes the movement, but which one? Will he forget it all … ? No, for the knight does not contradict himself, and it is a contradiction to forget the whole substance of his life and yet remain the same … The knight, then, will recollect everything, but this recollection is precisely the pain, and yet in infinite resignation he is reconciled with existence. (FT, 43)

First of all, resignation does not amount to forgetfulness: the knight renounces the princess but does not, by any means, forget her. This implies that the knight continues to desire the princess, continues to love her. He does not abjure his strong desire and does not deny his love for her. Accordingly, his love is sorrowful: strongly desiring that which is lost for him cannot but result in intense pain and sorrow. The pain that 18

However, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean that resignation is relevant only when actual loss occurs. As we shall see in the next chapter, resignation is highly relevant also when the loss concerned is only a potential one.

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characterizes resignation, then, indicates not only that the knight keeps his desire conscious and alive (‘this recollection is precisely the pain’), but also that he fully accepts the loss of the princess, is fully reconciled to it. He is ‘reconciled with existence’, Johannes says, and to be reconciled with existence means precisely to accede to those aspects of existence that resist one’s will; those aspects that disagree (as it were) with what one wishes, and hurt one. It means, in other words, to comply with the profound imperfection of existence, an imperfection that expresses itself in various forms of loss. Fully accepting this loss means that one does not try to deny the loss or render it insignificant (by forgetting the lost thing or finding a substitute for it). And at the same time it also means to be at peace with this painful existence – not to rebel against it or become bitter and angry with regard to it. Resignation, then, is a unique response to the different losses that our existence essentially entails. In resignation we entirely accept the loss (say, of a princess), but at the same time we entirely continue to desire the lost thing and to suffer over its loss. We may say that in resignation we sustain a ‘relationship’ of painful desire with the lost thing, the latter always belonging to the realm of actuality and finitude: Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the finite world there is much that is not possible … The desire that would lead [the knight] out into actuality but has been stranded on impossibility, is now turned inward, but it is not therefore lost, nor is it forgotten … He keeps this love young, and it grows along with him in years and in beauty. But he needs no finite occasion for its growth. From the moment he has made the movement, the princess is lost. (FT, 44)

Johannes draws a clear distinction between the ‘external’ loss of the princess and the ‘inner’ response to this loss, which is expressed in the movement of resignation. The latter does not consist in the loss of the desire and love for the lost thing (it is not a loss of the spiritual, ‘inner’ relationship with the princess), but it definitely amounts to accepting the loss of the thing desired and loved (in other words, it is a loss of the concrete interactive, ‘outer’ relationship with the princess). In resignation, although his love for the princess is not lost, the princess herself (and the realization of a relationship with her) is wholeheartedly regarded as lost for him. However, something further happens in resignation. Not only is the knight’s relationship with the finite deeply changed (from an actual hold on the princess into an inner connection of painful desire), but another relationship, a relationship with the infinite, is created:

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His love for that princess would become for him the expression of an eternal love, would assume a religious character, would be transfigured into a love of the eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment but nevertheless did reconcile him once more in the eternal consciousness of its validity in an eternal form that no actuality can take away from him. (FT, 43–4)

What does this transfiguration mean? First it is crucial to keep in mind what it does not mean. As we have just seen, renouncing the princess does not mean that the knight stops loving and desiring her. Therefore, this transfiguration does not amount to a simple replacement of one object of love (the princess) with a different one (God). Resignation does not mean that the knight loves God instead of loving the princess. To do so would be to act aesthetically, not religiously.19 The aesthetic person, who fails to accept the loss of his ‘princess’, changes the object of his love in a way that helps him to evade the loss and the pain over it – he exchanges one desire for a new, different one. The seducer in Either/Or loses girl A and immediately falls in love with girl B. The young poet in Repetition first wants the girl and then wants to be a poet. The latter’s story of unhappy love may seem similar to the story of the young lad in Fear and Trembling, but this is only a superficial resemblance. While the young lad, in the context of his knighthood of resignation, continues to want the renounced princess and is therefore deeply suffering, the young man of Repetition is not in the same situation because he has found a substitute for the girl. Having lost the girl it is not her that he wants: he wants to be a poet. His initial desire (for a concrete relationship with the girl) was not kept alive but was rather replaced by a new desire – the desire for writing and reflecting on the idea of love (i.e. becoming a poet). In resignation, on the other hand, rather than substituting one desire (or an object of desire) with a different one, there is a paradoxical sustaining of two contradictory desires, two contradictory wills. The knight of resignation desires the princess and continues to will a relationship with her but, in his resignation, he willingly submits himself to the will of God. It is said specifically that the knight of resignation recognizes the eternal being as that which denies the fulfilment of his love for the princess (i.e. the eternal being is recognized as ‘responsible’ for the 19

Indeed, it is easy to confuse the movement of resignation with the aesthetic position, and as we will see in the next chapter, this confusion is found even in the context of careful interpretations of faith.

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loss).20 However, despite recognizing God as the source of this denial, the knight is not angry with him, he does not rebel against him, and does not feel bitterness towards him – he loves him. Can there be a deeper expression for a wholehearted acceptance of loss than this? He recognizes God as the one who takes away from him what he wants (the realized relationship with the princess) – and he willingly gives this to him, he willingly renounces it, he willingly accepts the loss. We may therefore describe the movement of resignation as a submission to the will of God. Submission, by contrast with change of will, has a peculiarly dual character. In resignation the knight continues to will and desire what he lost, while willingly accepting that loss. What constitutes resignation as resignation, then, is precisely this quality of submission of the will rather than a mere change in the will or a replacement of its object. Resignation is a paradoxical position of deeply desiring a lost thing, while deeply accepting its loss. Unfolding the two-sided value of the beloved Understood as a submission to the will of God, resignation amounts to the recognition that everything finite (that is, everything in time which, in other words, is everything that we have) is not really ours but rather God’s. We understand that, fundamentally, we do not ‘have’ anything, not even the things that we consider to be our most cherished things. After all, it is not for us to decide (or even to understand) when and how the dearest, most important things in our lives are given to us – and when they are to be taken away. To recognize our limited control over what constitutes the heart of our existence (so to speak) is to acknowledge our nothingness before a greater power that far transcends our frail hold of everything. We do not, actually, have anything. Our loves, our achievements, our life – everything, ultimately, belongs to that infinite power. In resignation, then, we understand our nothingness, and thereby we understand that the real value of the things in our life is independent of our hold of them, independent of our relation to them. We are not the value-givers – things have value in themselves, in their belonging to their real source of existence. In the introduction to his translation of Fear and Trembling, Alastair Hannay makes a similar point. Explaining the paradox of faith, he suggests 20

Note again the quotation above: ‘His love for that princess … would be transfigured into a love for an eternal being, which true enough denied the fulfillment …’ (FT, 43–4, emphasis mine).

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that we understand Abraham’s complex story of resignation and faith as symbolizing a particular attitude to the things given to us in the world, the precious things we consider as ours and wish to attain. On Hannay’s reading the story of faith is a story in which we learn that it is not we who endow valuable things with whatever value they have. Their value is bestowed on them by the source of existence itself, i.e. God: Johannes de silentio’s ‘lyrical’ account of resignation … could be read as symbolizing the way a person must look upon everything that he values, whether or not it is unattainable. It could symbolize the attitude that says that nothing in the world has value simply because one values it … Faith would be, correspondently, the attitudinal appendix to this, that things have their value nonetheless, but they have them on their own account or from God. It would be plausible to attribute this compound attitude … to Abraham and his belief that what he is giving to God will be returned, as it was but with its status clarified.21

In resignation, then, there is a crucial shift in our understanding of the status of those things which we consider as ours. Resignation exposes them as independently valuable – thanks to their belonging to God, regardless of what we feel about them. We may call this new understanding the unfolding of the ‘objective’ value of everything finite: namely, the value pertaining to them regardless of our attachment to them (and despite their fleeting, ephemeral nature). At the same time, resignation also unfolds the ‘subjective’ value of everything in time, the value of the thing for us. The loss of something dear to us – and the full acknowledgement and acceptance of this loss in resignation – exposes the thing in its fullness and focuses everything we found valuable in it. A non-resigning way of life constitutes a state of forgetfulness with regard to our fragile relation to everything we hold dear and important in our lives. We take it for granted that we have family and friends, freedom (and abilities to carry out various activities), love, and life – and we forget (or are too distracted to notice) how important and valuable those things are for us. In the context of a non-resigning way of existence (that takes everything for granted and forgets to appreciate it) we quite ironically see the thing – see it clearly and fully – only when it is gone. (Think of how we feel when we lose and have to renounce something: all too often, it is only at such moments that we understand how valuable the thing is for us.) To make the movement of resignation – to sustain the 21

Hannay 2003a: 24 (emphasis mine).

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resigning gaze, so to speak – is to be focused constantly on the frailty of everything that we have. And it is precisely thereby that we remember that what we have is something that we have been given; given – because it is not ours: in a profound sense everything in time is lost for us, everything in time eludes the absolute hold we wish in vain to have over it. What we have, therefore, is ours only as a gift – a gift from God.22 The importance of resignation, therefore, is twofold. By shedding on our existence the light of infinitude, as it were, resignation edifies us to appreciate the value of things both in their relation to God (their independent value as belonging to God) and in their relation to us (their value for us). Resignation, I claim, is the unfolding of the two-sided value of everything finite. In contrast with a common (or even intuitive) understanding of this concept, we therefore see how resignation deepens and strengthens our relation to finitude.23 A relationship of pain with the finite beloved I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain. (FT, 49)

Focusing on resignation from the point of view of the relationship with the finite in general and the beloved in particular, we may sum up the following points. Resignation is a movement (a movement of the spirit) – it is a response to a state of affairs, a state of loss, in the external world. This loss can be manifested in various ways (in the impossibility of sustaining an important relationship, for example), but the crucial thing to remember is that while the occurrence of loss is something beyond one’s control, something that happens to one, the movement of resignation is a spiritual response undertaken by the individual who faces the loss. Resignation, then, is the inner submission to some external will, the latter being manifested and experienced as loss. However, resignation can be justly defined as resignation only if two essential features are present: acceptance (of the loss) and desire (towards 22 23

I return to this idea in chapter 3. In the next chapter we will see readings of Fear and Trembling that tend to overlook the importance of resignation or even belittle it. A different understanding of resignation is presented in the readings (to be discussed in the next chapter as well) of both Kellenberger and Adams. Both emphasize the importance of resignation as a crucial religious movement in the context of which not only do we understand our relation to God but also maintain our care and pain with regard to that which we renounce.

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the lost thing). Thus the young lad, for example, renounces his beloved (acknowledges and accepts her loss) but being in a state of true resignation, he still wills to have her. Indeed, he is convinced (and reconciled to the fact) that he will never get her back – but he still wants her back. Resignation, then, can be described as a unique response to loss. It is a genuine, non-bitter, even loving acceptance of not having what one, very passionately, still in a sense wants to have. And against this background we may say that resignation edifies us to appreciate the value of finitude. Through the pain of resignation we clearly see and understand what many a time we fail to notice – how important and valuable finitude is. Accordingly, acknowledging both the ultimate loss and the ultimate value of the thing we renounce, while continuing to desire this lost thing – the connection of the person resigning to the thing renounced is one of ultimate pain and sorrow. However, as we have already said above, resignation goes further than this. The movement of resignation is not only a creation of a bond that ties us to the finite beloved in a relationship of sorrowful love; it is also, and crucially so, a creation of a bond that ties us – in a relationship of love, a relationship of ‘joy and peace and rest’ – to God. 3 Resignation: the relationship with God Johannes’ enigmatic statement Johannes emphasizes the significance of resignation more than once. ‘[O]nly in infinite resignation’, he says, ‘do I become conscious of my eternal validity’ (FT, 46), and a little later he declares what seems to be a variation of this: ‘what I gain in resignation is my eternal consciousness’ (FT, 48). But what does gaining one’s ‘eternal consciousness’ mean? ‘[M]y eternal consciousness’, Johannes says quite enigmatically, ‘is my love for God’ (FT, 48).24 In the spirit of Johannes, who is deeply bewildered by the mystery of faith, we may say that the connection he indicates here between resignation and love for God is a puzzling mystery in itself. Although Johannes says these powerful words casually and almost as if they represent a trivial fact, they seem to be a key to some pivotal truth. And we cannot but wonder: why is it that resignation – a painful movement that as we have seen 24

And remember that earlier in the text he also specifically claimed that in resignation his love for the princess becomes ‘the expression of an eternal love’ and is ‘transfigured into a love of the eternal being’ (FT, 43).

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demands of the believer that he renounces what he loves the most – is so intimately connected to the possibility of loving God? Johannes does not even formulate this question (let alone answer it), and therefore I suggest that as a clue to a possible answer we turn to a different Kierkegaardian text, to the Sermon of Either/Or’s Ultimatum. In this Sermon Kierkegaard makes a connection between the notion of ‘being in the wrong’ and love for God; my claim is that ‘being in the wrong’ (or more accurately, as we shall see, accepting oneself as ‘being in the wrong’), is a form of resignation. Understanding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love, then, may help us shed some light on the connection between resignation and love for God. But first let us ask: what does ‘being in the wrong’ actually mean, and how is it related to resignation?

Resignation and the thought that ‘In relation to God we are always in the wrong’ The Sermon in the Ultimatum is the very last part of Either/Or. Judge William says that it was composed by an old friend of his, a pastor in a small parish in Jutland. The Sermon is called ‘The Upbuilding That Lies in the Thought That in Relation to God We Are Always in the Wrong’ and it opens with the following prayer: Father in heaven! Teach us to pray rightly so that our hearts may open up to you in prayer and supplications and hide no furtive desire that we know is not acceptable to you, nor any secret fear that you will deny us anything that will truly be for our good, so that the laboring thoughts, the restless mind, the fearful heart may find rest in and through that alone in which and through which it can be found – by always joyfully thanking you as we gladly confess that in relation to you we are always in the wrong. Amen. (EO2, 341)

What does the pastor mean when he speaks of ‘being in the wrong’? On the face of it, it seems most reasonable to interpret ‘being in the wrong’ as simply ‘sinning’ or ‘having sinned’. When the pastor claims that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’, it is natural to think that what he means is that in relation to God we are always in a state of sin. However, his central move in the Sermon renders this interpretation questionable because he speaks specifically about wishing to be in the wrong. When the pastor explains the reason for considering the thought that ‘one is in the wrong’ as upbuilding, he turns to love and declares that when we love someone we wish to be in the wrong in relation to him:

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Why did you wish to be in the wrong in relation to a person? Because you loved. Why did you find it upbuilding? Because you loved. The more you loved, the less time you had to deliberate upon whether or not you were in the right; your love had only one desire, that you might continually be in the wrong. (EO2, 349)

Now, if we understand ‘being in the wrong’ as sinning, this is a very strange claim: why would we wish to be in a state of sin in relation to someone we love? I therefore suggest that we understand ‘being in the wrong’ in a slightly different manner, using two textual ‘hints’ for this. The first is the prayer, which expresses the wish of the believer to be given the strength to trust that God will never deny us ‘anything that will truly be for our good’. This kind of trust is put to the test when we suffer a loss or injury that seems unjust, undeserved. And indeed, such a situation is described in the text that follows the prayer – a retelling of a scene from the Gospel according to St Luke, in which Christ foresees the destruction of Jerusalem. This dreadful event – when ‘heaven remained closed, and no angel was dispatched, except the angel of death, which waved its sword over the city’ (EO2, 342) – ‘fell on the innocent’, as the pastor says, ‘just as hard as on the guilty’ (343). This disaster serves as a paradigm for cases in which we might tend to fear that God has not acted for our good, that God has unjustly caused us suffering and loss, that God has been ‘in the wrong’ in relation to us. The risk which the pastor speaks of in this connection is evidently that of thinking it appropriate to blame God, to think that one is in the right in accusing God of injustice. The pastor also reminds us that according to the scriptures, ‘you are not to argue with God’ (344), paraphrasing a point expressed in the Book of Job, which offers the most dramatic presentation of the gap between the fact that a person suffers loss and pain apparently undeservedly, and that person’s being in the right. Job was a righteous man who suffered an overwhelming sequence of losses and injuries. His response was not to blame God or to rebel against him – rather, he tore his clothes and said: ‘the Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord’.25 And the biblical author says: ‘In all this Job sinned not, nor charged God foolishly.’26 That is to say, Job’s righteousness was demonstrated precisely by his refusal to accuse God of wrongdoing. Had Job blamed God for his terrible losses, then he would have been in the wrong. 25 26

Job 1:21, the King James version. 1:22.

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The prayer and the examples that follow it, then, indicate the kind of wrongness that the pastor is concerned about. There are two aspects, or levels, to this wrongness. It begins with our sense of being hurt, or of suffering injustice – we feel that a wrong has been done to us. However, when we thus feel, we often tend to blame someone else for this ‘wrongness’ that we suffer. We feel strongly motivated to affirm that someone is in the wrong in relation to us, and that we are in the right in blaming him for this. Here it is crucial to pay attention to the second hint that the text provides regarding the meaning of ‘being in the wrong’: namely, the pastor’s claim that we wish to be in the wrong in relation to someone we love. When we feel that a wrong has been done to us by someone we love, we are not motivated to find our beloved guilty in causing us this injury; we are not motivated to be in the right when seeing him as being in the wrong. Instead, we wish to find that the appearance of the beloved’s guilt was mistaken, that in fact the beloved is not in the wrong, and that we have been in the wrong in blaming him. What the pastor is actually saying, then, is that when we love someone we wish to be always in the wrong when it comes to blaming him for causing or having caused us suffering. The second level or aspect of being in the wrong, therefore, may be understood as referring to the wrongness (on some occasions) of a position that we are disposed or commonly tempted to find ourselves in; that is, the human tendency to blame someone else for a wrong that we suffer. In this sense, to be ‘in the wrong’ in relation to God is to blame God wrongly for having wronged us; to accuse God unjustly of injustice in causing or allowing us to suffer pain and loss. Accordingly, the upbuilding thought of the Sermon – that is, that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’ – is the thought that we are wrong whenever we blame or even tend to blame God for causing us loss or suffering. Now, to acknowledge that we are in the wrong in relation to God – that is, to accept this thought and recognize the wrongness in blaming God – ultimately expresses resignation. Resignation, as we have seen, has to do with a submission to the will of God. The knight of resignation renounces his will before God’s will, and despite the fact that he still wishes to sustain a relationship with finitude (with the beloved princess, for example) he releases all hold of it. He accepts that everything belongs to God, and that he has no claim to, or right over, anything. By contrast to this resigned attitude, thinking that one is in the right in blaming God for the loss of something valuable involves the emphatic affirmation that the valuable thing belongs to one and has been unjustly taken from one. The thought that one is in the right, therefore, is clearly opposed to resignation, and

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accordingly, the thought that one is in the wrong is equivalent to resignation. In thinking that I am (or would be) in the wrong to blame God for any loss, I express a resigned attitude towards all the finite things which I am susceptible to lose. (Just as Job, in his refusal to argue with God regarding the terrible losses that he has suffered, expresses the highest degree of resignation.) Love and the thought that ‘In relation to God we are always in the wrong’ We already noted that in order to explain the upbuilding in the thought that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’, the pastor turns to love: [If] a person who is the object of your love were to do you a wrong, is it not true that it would pain you, that you would scrupulously examine everything but that you then would say: I know for sure that I am in the right; this thought will calm me? Ah, if you loved him, then it would not calm you; you would investigate everything. You would be unable to perceive anything else except that he is in the wrong, and yet this certainty would trouble you. You would wish that you might be in the wrong; you would try to find something that could speak in his defense, and if you did not find it, you would find rest only in the thought that you were in the wrong. (EO2, 347–8)

Now, we said that more specifically the claim here is that when we love someone we wish to be in the wrong in our tendency to blame him for an injury or loss that we have suffered. But why is this so? Why do we want to be in the wrong in this way when we love? The pastor says that finding that the beloved has wronged you is in conflict with the possibility of finding ‘rest and peace and happiness’ in your love (EO2, 350). Clare Carlisle, in her book Kierkegaard’s Philosophy of Becoming, presents two points in explaining this conflict: When one loves another … one is not made happy by finding fault with him. One wishes to admire, not to blame him – for one’s own love suffers as a result of this blame. Wanting to be in the right is an assertion of the ego that makes love more difficult and painful.27

First of all, love involves admiration for the beloved, and to blame the beloved for wronging you is to view him as less admirable. Secondly, love involves a compassionate concern for the beloved, and to feel that one is in the right in blaming the beloved is to focus in an incompatible way on 27

Carlisle 2005: 64.

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oneself, on one’s ego. It is to justify (and intensify) feelings of anger and bitterness that are in conflict with loving. After all, when we love we do not want to feel anger, bitterness, or defensiveness – feeling like this stains love and limits it rather than allowing it to ‘[flow] out unhindered’.28 There is another reason, however, for our wish to be ‘in the wrong’ (when we blame, or tend to blame, someone we love). When we love, not only do we not want to find fault with the beloved, or to hinder the love for the beloved (by marking it with anger and self-righteousness) – we also do not want to find a fault with the love of the beloved. If we are in the right in blaming the beloved for doing us wrong, that means that the love the beloved gives us, or has for us, is limited and faulty. And when we love, this is the last thing we want to think of our beloved (that he or she loves us only partly, or even, painfully, does not love us at all).29 Taking ‘being in the wrong’ to mean ‘being in the wrong when blaming someone for having wronged us’, then, makes it quite intuitively clear why it is that someone who loves will wish to be in the wrong in relation to one’s beloved. However, as far as the connection between love and being in the wrong is concerned, I think that we can go further than the pastor suggests here. Thinking that one is in the wrong in relation to a person (in blaming him for injury or loss) is not only a typical consequence of loving the person – it can also be an attitude that makes love possible, an attitude that leads to love. By adopting the attitude of thinking that one is in the wrong in relation to the other person, or God, one can change from not loving (or from loving only in an incomplete way, in a distracted and hindered way), to loving that person or God (in a focused, unlimited way). To demonstrate this point, I propose to look closely at a recently published Israeli novel, On the Way Home, that presents a love that evolves as a consequence of recognizing that one has been in the wrong.30 This novel presents the somewhat surreal story of Dina, who one night meets God – in the figure of a man in his thirties – on a late bus on her way home. After their first meeting, when Dina realizes it was God and thinks that she was never going to see him again, she reflects:

28 29

30

Ibid. ‘You loved a person, you wished that you might always be in the wrong in relation to him – but, alas, he was faithless to you, and however reluctant that it should be so, however much it pained you, you proved to be in the right in relation to him, and wrong in loving him so deeply’ (EO2, 350). On the Way Home, Dorit Peleg, Zmora-Bitan Press, Or Yehuda 2006. All the quotations from the novel are translated by Sharon Krishek, in collaboration with Dorit Peleg.

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I felt quite sorry at the beginning. After all one does not meet God everyday, and if one does then there are so many questions that one could have asked him, for instance why is it so lousy down here and why did he arrange everything so badly and why is it that whatever you do, you always come out wrong.31

As one can already understand at this early stage of the book, Dina is not very happy with her life. She is a single mother of a young boy, divorced from Yoni, who failed her (or so she thinks), works as a software engineer in a demanding job that she does not really like and, more profoundly and movingly, feels that she has no home, a real home, to go back to. ‘Dear father’, she writes in her notebook to her beloved, long-dead father, ‘Dear father, where have you taken our home, and did it ever really exist?’32 In actual fact, Dina does have a home, and even quite a nice one: it is located in the heart of Tel Aviv, surrounded by ruggedly charming streets that offer all the good things that Tel Aviv has to offer. But Dina cannot see this – what she mostly sees is the disarray in her life. However, after God becomes a part of her daily existence, she grows extremely sensitive to the sorrow and pain and injustice in the lives of others, especially the literally homeless people in her vicinity. God’s coming into her life starts an interesting process. It is a very quiet, almost imperceptible, process, and yet one which changes her fundamentally. What happens to Dina, then, on her long way home? Soon after the encounter on the bus, God does meet her again, and indeed moves in to live with her. At first Dina finds it very difficult to accept his decision to limit himself to the form and powers of a regular human being. She does not understand why he cannot at least give himself the advantage of getting a decent job (he works as a garbagecollector). And when a friend of hers becomes a father to a child with Down’s syndrome, she demands of God that he perform a miracle, and is very angry when he refuses to do so: she clearly accuses him of doing wrong.33 Generally speaking, Dina is a cool-tempered person who does not expect much from anybody, but in relation to God she finds herself in the position of believing that she is in the right. She blames God for what happened to her friend’s child, she blames him for the injustice and misery of the world, she blames him for the misery and difficulty in her

31 32 33

Ibid., 10. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 28–9.

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own life. Looking at an old photo of Yoni, her divorced husband, she even blames God for the loss of the love that she once had: And suddenly I rebelled against this loss, which was for me, all at once, the loss of everything: how can it be that I have lost him, how can it be that these eyes, these hoping-fearing eyes, are no more, where has this fine, quivering vulnerability, gone, where has it all gone. And I raised my eyes to the bedroom door with a real enmity. You, who will never die, for whom nothing will ever be lost, give me back this look, the hope and the fear in it, the place over which it hovered, so fleeting and evanescent.34

In spite of Dina’s feelings of bitterness and anger towards him, however, God soon becomes an anchor of stability in the midst of her turbulent life. And her life is turbulent indeed. Strangely, she begins to lose everything. First she loses her job. Then she loses her motivation to find an alternative job. And then, along with her willingness to work, she also loses her daily routine. Occasionally she goes to a job interview, but mostly she just wanders around on the streets of Tel Aviv. Day and night she walks about, seeing familiar things in a new way. She encounters the wretchedness of Tel Aviv: its neglected buildings, its sad inhabitants, its worried and painful existence. She notices more and more homelessness around her. People literally live and die in the streets – forsaken, invisible, begging for money, for a home, for love. All of this is suddenly very painful to her. And the process of losing things continues. Her friends disappear, her photo albums, her money, even her bank disappears. She loses hold of everything. It is only God who remains, who can be relied upon to wait for her at home while she walks aimlessly in the streets. Almost a year passes by before the most meaningful event in her relationship with God takes place. Dina, who at this point of the novel is completely penniless, thought she could earn some money by letting the flat she owns, renting a cheaper one instead. She finds such a flat in a poorer neighbourhood but changes her mind at the last moment, and the night that follows is filled with despair. Her home does not feel like a home; her belongings are still in boxes; her child is at his grandparents’ place. God lies next to her, but she is resentful. ‘The despair’, she says, ‘clenched into a kind of ball inside me, and the ball hurt.’35 And in the morning it gets even worse:

34 35

Ibid., 399. Ibid., 435–6.

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The room was awash with sun and it was hot … The ball tightened again inside me, one oppressive layer after another. All at once the sun dimmed and the light went grey, and I knew it was going to be one of those days I hate the most … a grey heat-wave day … I turned over and then I felt God’s hand touch me and I looked at him. His face was raised towards me, pleading, quite grey. Hug me, he asked.36

But she is incapable of doing this. She cannot reach out to him, even though she knows how deeply he wants her to. And then everything turns even greyer and he walks away from her and leaves the house. At this moment she is suddenly overcome by a painful recollection. She understands that she has already been there before, in a situation of the very same kind. She remembers the face of her father, reaching his hand out to her, when she was a child. She remembers his words back then: ‘It’s true,’ he said, ‘isn’t it, that nothing really matters, the only important thing is that we love each other.’ And she lay in her bed, unable to respond to his sorrow, to his unspoken need, and looked at his arm extended towards her and was not able to take hold of it and to do what she knew was the only right thing to do, which was ‘to throw myself at him, to hug him with all my strength and tell him, “Yes, that’s right, father, we do love each other so very much.”’ But she did not do this, and now the poignant recollection has merged with the present moment, making her leap out of bed and rush outside, because the need to feel him was so agonizing, his large body where, so I suddenly understood, I had one more chance, perhaps the last chance, to hug. But his steps had already seeped away from the stairwell, and as always all there was left was to throw myself on the bed and cry, with the grief of one who cannot hold others nor let them hold him, of one who is left outside the circle of holding, forever.37

And after a while she goes out again to the familiar streets, but now with a definite aim. She wants to find him, she needs to find him. But he is nowhere to be found. And she walks round and round and then it comes – the insight that was slowly rising, or rather building up, within her throughout the novel but only now could break through: only then was this understanding born in me, very lucidly, not like the lump of pain I had felt before but like a pattern of light that was now falling into place, the knowledge that I could no longer live without him. 36 37

Ibid., 436. Ibid., 438.

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kierkegaard on faith and love I saw the living room with the sofa and the two armchairs standing empty … without him sitting in my mother’s brown armchair and solving the weekly newspaper quiz … and the kitchen without the heap of apples that he piles up on the counter every Thursday, and an emptiness rose in me and took hold of this image as when you set a burning match to a piece of paper and the fire eats into it more and more, slowly at first and then faster and faster till all at once the paper collapses and if you don’t let go it burns your fingers, and I understood I could no longer live in a house that did not have God in it.38

And then, completely exhausted and empty, she sees him. He is collecting garbage – this, after all, is his job – and he is sweaty and dirty and smelly. But she does not care. She simply throws herself upon him and embraces him ‘for him, for my father, for Yoni. For myself’.39 The next morning she wakes up and knows that God is no longer in the house. It is empty, as if he had never been there. And so begins a very strange day, with which the book ends. A chain of mysterious events makes this day look as though it is the end of the world. First of all it snows – it never snows in Tel Aviv, particularly in the hot days of September, but on this day it snows. And then there is an earthquake, and then a big fire, and then she sees God and knows it is for the last time. Dina is sitting alone on a bench on Dizengoff Street; he looks at her, smiles apologetically, and leaves. But the reader knows that she is no longer alone, because somehow, she no longer needs God to be there physically, in order for her to feel God’s love. Thus, in an important sense God has not really left her and now, finally, she has found her home. Now, from the point of view of the question we are asking here (that is, the question regarding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love), what is interesting in Dina’s story is that the turning point, the crucial point at which her spiritual transformation reaches its highest stage, is when she acknowledges that she is in the wrong in relation to God. Let us think again about the relevant scene (see the quote from p. 436 above). She is despairing, in a house that does not feel like home. And she is resentful, secretly blaming God for the unhappy state she is in. But then God asks for her love, begs for it, actually, and she cannot respond. She cannot give him what he asks for and, as a result, he leaves the house. His going away brings back a dreadful recollection, and makes her realize, for the first time in the novel, that she is in the wrong in her accusations of God. She is the one to 38 39

Ibid., 439–40. Ibid., 440.

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blame, not him. This recognition has a great transformative power over her. It is as if a barrier has been broken, and now she can finally love; acknowledging that she is in the wrong in relation to God leads her to loving him. She is literally pulled out of her reserved inactive position, and is driven outside by the desire to give him her love. What exactly is it that happens to her at this critical moment of transformation? What happens is that against the background of the possibility of losing him, Dina suddenly discovers God’s love for her. This love is clearly expressed in his appeal: ‘Hug me’, he asks, imploringly. She sees that he needs her, and this makes her see also that she is very important for him, that he cares about her, that he loves her. And seeing this, she can no longer accuse him of any injustice towards her. Whatever loss and pain she has suffered, it was not through God’s not taking her suffering into account. To treat her unjustly, to wrong her, would have been to act in a way that does not take her interest sufficiently into consideration. But now that she is convinced of the greatness of his love, it is clear that no suffering and no loss has ever come about through any such injustice. God has not wronged her. She has been in the wrong in holding him to blame. And so, realizing God’s love, she comes to think of herself as being in the wrong, and this acknowledgement opens her, and drives her, to loving him. The novel convinces us of this, by prompting us to imagine the situation in which Dina, who may represent in this context each and every one of us, becomes completely confident that God (both as an omnipotent being and as a human lover) loves her, and that all that he has done derives from his great love for her. Imagining such a situation, it seems necessary to agree that she could no longer accuse him of having wronged her. It seems clear that she would feel, upon discovering his love, that she has been in the wrong. After all, when we are confident in the love of someone for us, we are not easily disposed to see this person as being in the wrong; accordingly, we should be more disposed to see ourselves as being in the wrong when the temptation to accuse this person of wronging us arises. The deeper our confidence in the love is, the deeper is the trust that we have in this person’s intentions, and the less we are inclined to see ourselves in the right in relation to him or her (when we suffer injury or loss that seems to be caused by our lover). We trust that there is a good reason for the lover’s seemingly offensive behaviour, and that this reason by no means contradicts his (or her) love for us, or his (or her) concern for our well-being.40 40

Here it is of course important to remember the difference between love by God and love by humans in this respect: only in relation to God are we always in the wrong. When the lover is

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And back to Dina, now that she acknowledges that she has been in the wrong, she realizes that she loves God – she gains her love for him (to use Johannes’ expression in Fear and Trembling, see p. 59 above). Because blaming another for having wronged us sets up a screen of anger and bitterness that blocks our ability to love the other. Once we acknowledge that we are in the wrong in blaming him, this screen is set aside, and the obstacle to loving is removed; the foundations for loving are thereby set. When we felt angry and bitter and self-righteous we were enclosed within ourselves in a way that did not allow us properly to see the other, let alone love him. But now we are led to love. The other, whose love is now clear to us, appears as an eminent source of goodness, and our love emerges unreservedly as a response to him, to his benevolent presence in our life. We are now capable of seeing him, of recognizing his value and appreciating his goodness. And we thereby find ourselves loving him. 4 The upbuilding that lies in resignation It takes the acknowledgement that we are in the wrong, then, to gain the ability to love those that we had previously blamed for doing us wrong. This acknowledgement is akin to resignation – it is to release our hold of things, it is to stop blaming the other, or God, for taking away from us something we think we deserve to have, something that in some basic sense we consider as ours. And I hope that now we are in the position to understand better Johannes’ claim that in resignation he gains his love for God. The knight of resignation loved a princess, but she was taken away from him. As this was the most important thing in his life, we can imagine that the knight was disposed to feel angry with God and to blame him for doing him wrong (namely, taking the princess away from him by denying the fulfilment of the relationship). However, resigning is precisely rejecting this tendency. It is to see himself as being in the wrong in his disposition to blame God. This happens when (in quite a counterintuitive way) he discovers God’s love for him through the event of loss. Resignation, we have said, is a unique response to a loss. Losing the princess, the knight (being a knight) realizes that the princess does not really belong to him – he discovers her radical apartness, her radical alterity, and understands that she ‘belongs’ to a greater power that transcends his will and intentions. Thus, he now understands that her a human being, however, we may sometimes be in the wrong but sometimes, unfortunately, we can find ourselves in the right. Humans are not perfect; nor, regrettably, is their love.

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presence in his life was from the very beginning something that he was given, something that he has to be thankful for. Kierkegaard depicts this latter point rather emphatically in his Discourse of Job: The moment the Lord took everything away, [Job] did not first say, ‘The Lord took away,’ but first of all he said, ‘The Lord gave.’ The statement is brief, but in its brevity it effectually points out what it is supposed to point out, that Job’s soul was not squeezed into silent subjection to the sorrow, but that his heart first expanded in thankfulness, that the first thing the loss of everything did was to make him thankful to the Lord that he had given him all the blessings that he now took away from him. (EUD, 115–16)

To make the movement of resignation, then, is to be in the position of Job. It is first of all to realize that ‘the Lord gave’, and thus to see and recognize God’s love for us (the bestowal of a good thing is one of the more central aspects of love as we usually understand and experience it). Seeing this love, then, the knight of resignation has no reason to be angry, no reason to blame God for doing him wrong. Seeing this love, he acknowledges that he was in the wrong in blaming God, and is and will be in the wrong in his tendency to blame God. And acknowledging this, he gains his love for God, his love for God is built up. In the Sermon the pastor explains this upbuilding (i.e. the upbuilding that lies in resignation; meaning, in the thought that ‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’) in the following terms: [T]his thought … manifests its upbuilding power in a twofold way, partly by putting an end to doubt and calming the cares of doubt, partly by animating to action. (EO2, 351)

The action that this thought is the platform for (as it were) belongs already to the realm of faith. The knight of faith, as well as the one who loves in faith, is someone who incorporates the movement of resignation in the slightest of his actions, and this movement (as we will see in the next chapter) is in a paradoxical way a necessary condition for faith. The pastor therefore speaks in his sermon on the state of faith, but he focuses on one component of faith – namely, on the movement of resignation, here discussed in terms of acknowledging one’s wrongness before God. This resignative thought (‘in relation to God we are always in the wrong’), then, generates the conditions for a correct action in the world (that is, for faith), and it does so by ‘putting an end to doubt and calming the cares of doubt’ (ibid.). But what does this doubt amount to? To put it differently, which doubt does resignation calm and put an end to?

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Being humans, we are fundamentally vulnerable and essentially susceptible to loss and suffering. Sometimes we are the ones to blame (we are the cause of the loss and pain in our lives, we are doing wrong to ourselves), and sometimes we are not (someone or something else, external to us, is the cause of our pain). But whichever is the case, our all-toohuman tendency is to blame someone else for the pain that we suffer, and to channel the pain into anger. This unsettling state of mind is shaped by doubt and accompanied by it – we are constantly searching for the one to blame, constantly asking who is in the wrong. This tendency is typical of our relationships with the people surrounding us, but its severest expression is in the context of our relationship with God. To be in doubt here means to accept the possibility that we are right in relation to God, we are right in blaming him for doing us wrong. But such a thought is ultimately a rejection of the idea of a loving divinity altogether (to consider God as unjust is in effect to doubt the idea of an omnipotent goodness that cares about us; that is, to doubt the basic understanding of God), and this, Kierkegaard claims, cannot but lead to a chaotic existence of despair: If a human being did not have an eternal consciousness, if underlying everything there were only a wild, fermenting power that writhing in dark passions produced everything, be it significant or insignificant, if a vast, never appeased emptiness hid beneath everything, what would life be then but despair? (FT, 15)

On the other hand, to be genuinely in the position of always being in the wrong in relation to God is never to doubt his goodness and his care for us. It is to be able to see God as an eternal source of loving benevolence, even when we suffer terrible and unexplainable losses and injuries. It is to have a complete confidence in God’s love and goodness while renouncing the human presumption to fully understand this love and goodness in natural (logical, juridical) terms. It is, again, to be in the position of Job, having gone through the dramatic encounter with the Whirlwind. As Stephen Mulhall puts it: The new terms that the Voice proposes do not ask us … to become indifferent to actuality; they ask us to revel in its glories, to acknowledge that the wealth of God’s creation exceeds anything we might have thought or imagined, and in particular to acknowledge that its bounty is not expressible or containable in terms of either natural or moral law … The point is to shatter Job’s reliance upon juridical terminology altogether – to stop him picturing the realm of experience and existence as answering to human moral worth, to take a step beyond the idea of God as exercising his

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Will through the natural order, as if nature was simply and solely responsive to human good and evil.41

Our natural stance in the world is that of being distant from God. We are immersed in finitude, in a state of oblivion or anger, indifferent to God or blaming him for the sufferings that are inherent to our human condition, and doubting thereby his care and love for us. To put an end to this doubt, to make the movement of resignation and to acknowledge that in relation to God we are always in the wrong (in our anger towards him, in blaming him for doing us wrong, in mistrusting his goodness), is to be reconciled with existence, to find rest and peace in the pain. The knight of resignation trusts God’s love for him, and responds to this with love: Therefore this, that in relation to God you are always in the wrong, is not a truth you must acknowledge, not a consolation to alleviate your pain, not a compensation for something better, but it is a joy in which you win a victory over yourself and over the world, your delight, your song of praise, your adoration, a demonstration that your love is happy, as only that love can be with which one loves God. (EO2, 351)

Winning a victory over ourselves and over the world is in a way overcoming our finite condition by gaining our ‘eternal consciousness’. The meaning of this ‘overcoming’ is the peaceful reconciliation we now attain – the reconciliation with our finite condition and with the constant loss it entails. Experiencing loss, after all, is to find ourselves opposed to existence: actuality seems to be working against us, against our will. We desire something or someone, but actuality does not allow us to fulfil our desire. The thing is taken away from us, we are deprived of it – it is lost for us. But in resignation we accept this loss with love, we are reconciled to this loss, and find ‘peace and rest’. We find a new happiness, which is now based, rather than on our relationship with finitude, on our relationship with God: If your one and only wish was denied to you, you are still happy … if you lost not only your joy but even your honor, you are still happy … If you knocked but it was not opened, if you searched but did not find, if you worked but received nothing, if you planted and watered but saw no blessing, if heaven was shut and the testimony failed to come, you are still happy in your work … you are still happy – because in relation to God you are always in the wrong. (EO2, 353)

41

Mulhall 2001: 408.

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However, this happiness has a deeply painful side to it. If we think of the knight of resignation as reaching one hand to God, but another hand to the finite, it is only the first bond that gives him happiness. The knight of resignation does not disconnect himself from the finite – he is, as we have said above, tied to it with pain. In this chapter we have inquired into the concept of resignation, and its intriguing connection with love (both for the finite and the infinite), by referring to three different texts. One Kierkegaardian text, Fear and Trembling, indicates this connection specifically while another, the Ultimatum, discusses the connection between being in the wrong and love. We have also used a different text, the novel On the Way Home, in order to explore the Sermon’s insight regarding the connection between ‘being in the wrong’ and love. This novel presents the upbuilding in the thought that one is ‘in the wrong’ by vividly showing the way in which this recognition leads one to love, paving the path that is one’s way home. Having taken these steps, we may conclude by saying that resignation is undoubtedly a fundamental brick in the building of love that the philosophy of Kierkegaard construes. However, resignation is not enough. A truly happy love, which incorporates harmoniously our love both for God and the finite (in an interdependent relation), is possible only in the context of a different realm: that of faith.

3 THE KNIGHT OF LOVE

1 ‘By Faith You Will Get Her by Virtue of the Absurd’ 1 The paradox of faith To exist in such a way that my contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it – this I cannot do. (FT, 50)

By undertaking the movement of resignation, as we saw in the last chapter, the young lover comes to participate in a twofold relationship. On the one hand, this movement ‘binds’ him to his renounced princess in knots of pain; on the other, it gains him a relationship of love with God. And despite the profound nature of the first, it is the latter relationship – the relationship with God – that constitutes the core of resignation. This is the focus of the young man’s interest, this is the new content of his resigned life. But important and meaningful as it is, resignation does not amount to faith. ‘The act of resignation does not require faith’, says Johannes, ‘but to get the least little bit more than my eternal consciousness requires faith, for this is the paradox’ (FT, 48). Indeed, renouncing finitude is an extremely difficult act, but nothing more than the human power of will

1

FT, 50.

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and determination is required for performing it.2 There is a correspondence between the act of resignation and the reality it generates (a reality of being apart from the princess, of not sharing a life with her) – the consequences of this act correlate with the knight’s expectations, with his beliefs regarding the way the world operates. In the context of faith, on the other hand, there is a contradiction between the way the knight acts and his expectations and beliefs regarding the world (i.e. the realm of finitude): By my own strength I cannot get the least little thing that belongs to finitude, for I continually use my strength in resigning everything. By my own strength I can give up the princess, and I will not sulk about it but find joy and peace and rest in my pain, but by my own strength I cannot get her back again, for I use all my strength in resigning. On the other hand, by faith, says that marvelous knight, by faith you will get her by virtue of the absurd. (FT, 50)

Faith, it is important to remember, is defined by Johannes as a double movement – in spite of being very different from resignation, it necessarily includes resignation as an essential part of it. Resignation is a permanent component within faith. Accordingly, the knight of faith also makes the movement of resignation – but in contrast with the other knight he believes in receiving back his renounced princess. This is the paradox of faith: the knight of faith undertakes the movement of resignation and another, simultaneous movement, that seems to contradict it. Having renounced everything, by virtue of his faith he receives everything: Through resignation I renounce everything … This movement I make all by myself, and what I gain thereby is my eternal consciousness in blessed harmony with my love for the eternal being. By faith I do not renounce anything; by faith I receive everything. (FT, 48–9)

It is quite evident that faith amounts to an interesting attitude to finitude. While resignation is concerned with the infinite, faith concerns the finite: ‘Temporality, finitude – that is what it is all about’ (FT, 49).3 However, 2 3

‘I make this movement all by myself, and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft and devoid of enthusiasm … ’ (FT, 48). It is worth emphasizing this point because one of the more common dogmatic stereotypes regarding faith is that it is focused on eternal happiness and is indifferent (or even hostile) to the affairs of this world. Johannes himself mentions the related confusion between resignation and faith: ‘It is said that faith is needed in order to renounce everything. Indeed, one hears what is even more curious: a person laments that he has lost his faith, and when a check is made to see where he is on the scale, curiously enough, he has only reached the point where he is to make the infinite movement of resignation’ (FT, 48).

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faith is very different from the aesthetic interest in finitude – its concern with worldly happiness is constituted by a simultaneous renunciation of it. And this is, strictly speaking, the paradox of the double movement of faith. How are we to make sense of it? This question is sharpened when we consider the paradox of faith against the background of the story of the father of faith, who serves as the prototype of the life of faith – the story of Abraham. And so, before attempting to understand how faith allows the young lover to get back his princess, let us turn to the story that fascinates Johannes: the story of the Binding of Isaac. The paradoxical faith of Abraham And they came to the place which God had told him of; and Abraham built an altar there, and laid the wood in order, and bound Isaac his son, and laid him on the altar upon the wood. And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son.4 Yet Abraham had faith, and had faith for this life … Abraham had faith specifically for this life – faith that he would grow old in this country, be honored among the people, blessed by posterity, and unforgettable in Isaac, the most precious thing in his life, whom he embraced with … love. (FT, 20)

The difficulty in understanding Abraham is twofold – we are baffled by his faith, and amazed by his resignation. Indeed, Abraham’s resignation puzzles us in a different way from that in which his faith does, but it puzzles us nevertheless. To begin with, we cannot understand, we cannot even begin to imagine, how Abraham was capable of drawing the knife: ‘Who strengthened Abraham’s arm, who braced up his right arm so it did not sink down powerless! … Who strengthened Abraham’s soul lest everything go black for him and he see neither Isaac nor the ram!’ (FT, 22). Because after all, we are convinced that Abraham did not want to kill his son. We know that he loved Isaac dearly, we remember that Isaac was his only, long-awaited son, and we understand that Isaac meant everything for him.5 That it was Abraham’s most passionate wish that his son would live, is therefore an essential part of Abraham’s resignation. 4 5

Genesis 22:9–10, King James version. His love was the greatest fatherly love possible, as Johannes emphasizes: ‘Next I would describe how Abraham loved Isaac. For that purpose I would call upon all the good spirits to stand by me so that what I said would have the glow of fatherly love. I hope to describe it in such a way that there would not be many a father in the realms and lands of the king who would dare to maintain that he loved in this way’ (FT, 31).

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Abraham’s act, then, cannot but be admired as the most extreme manifestation of resignation possible. Not only did Abraham renounce the greatest of his desires (to keep hold of his son who is also the fulfilment of the divine promise given to him), his undertaking of the Binding makes it clear that Abraham indeed resigns: Many a father has lost his child, but then it was God, the unchangeable, inscrutable will of the Almighty, it was his hand that took it. Not so with Abraham! A harder test was reserved for him, and Isaac’s fate was placed, along with the knife, in Abraham’s hand. (FT, 21–2)

In his willingness to bring about – by his own bare hands – the loss of what he undoubtedly loves the most, Abraham cannot but be expressing a wholehearted, genuine resignation. It is against this background that Abraham’s faith appears to be so perplexing. Abraham, Johannes insists, believed that Isaac would continue to be his living son, and he strongly held this belief while renouncing him, while drawing the knife: He [Abraham] climbed the mountain, and even in the moment when the knife gleamed he had faith … Let us go further. We let Isaac actually be sacrificed. Abraham had faith. He did not have faith that he would be blessed in a future life but that he would be blessed here in the world. God could give him a new Isaac, could restore to life the one sacrificed. He had faith by virtue of the absurd, for all human calculation ceased long ago. (FT, 35–6)

It seems that while resignation involves a paradox of wills (willingly renouncing the son while still wanting to keep hold of him), faith involves a paradox of beliefs.6 The movement of resignation, let us not forget, is associated with Abraham’s being on the verge of acting in a way which would inevitably result – as he fully realizes – in Isaac’s death. The movement of faith, on the other hand, is associated with the belief he maintains that Isaac, in accordance with God’s promise, will live. To put the issue here as uncompromisingly as possible we can ask, as does a recent 6

Note again our discussion in chapter 2: it is already resignation (and not only faith) that manifests a self-contradictory attitude. Resignation cannot be considered as resignation unless it is directed at something of importance, something that is highly desired. In resignation we willingly let go of something that in a profound sense we do not want to let go of; something that we are deeply attached to, care about, and strongly desire. Here we see it as sharply as possible: it is clear that Abraham does not want to sacrifice his son – but in resigning he submits his will to the will of God, and with a total acceptance of God’s demand he is prepared to sacrifice his son willingly. And yet, while doing this willingly, he still very passionately wants to keep hold of his son.

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interpreter, what does Abraham’s belief amount to? Does he believe that Isaac will die, or that Isaac will live?7 This is a good question but at the same time a little misleading since it may prompt us to mistakenly imagine Abraham’s resignation as an act that begins and ends with the trial. But Abraham’s resignation was in place before – and after – holding the knife that threatened to kill his son. As far as there is a connection between Abraham’s resignation and the loss of his son, this is an ongoing connection – Abraham is continuously in a state of resignation, and thus continuously renounces Isaac and sees him as lost. Adams expresses this point succinctly: For if one first gives up something and then later takes it back, there is no paradox in this sequence of ‘movements’ … if Abraham stopped making the movement of resignation in order to make the movement of faith, he would nullify his sacrifice … The contradiction in belief … can hardly be more than an expression of what is fundamentally ‘the absurd.’ It cannot be the essence of it. For after they have sacrificed the ram and descended the mountain, Abraham can hardly have continued to believe that he would be deprived of Isaac; but Kierkegaard surely does not conceive of him as ceasing at that point to make the movement of infinite resignation. That would spoil everything.8

Abraham’s trial does not constitute his faith – Abraham’s faith is what allows him to go through the trial. As such, the dramatic moment of drawing the knife is only a manifestation – indeed, the most extreme and horrifying manifestation possible – of the movement that Abraham makes before the trial and continues to make after it. For us, of course, there is a crucial difference between resignation when there is no threat involved, and resignation when one’s beloved is about to perish. But this only demonstrates that we are not Abraham. For Abraham the trial was only an expression of something he performed all of the time.9 Abraham is a knight of faith precisely because he was capable of going through a trial which indicates the genuineness and profundity of his resignation and faith. 7

8 9

John Lippitt, in his commentary on Fear and Trembling, tries to capture the difficulty of understanding Abraham’s faith in terms of this question: ‘What does Abraham believe at the point of drawing the knife?’ (See Lippitt 2003: 66.) Adams 1990: 386. This does not mean, of course, that Abraham feels the same at each and every moment of his life: no doubt the moment of the trial, although sharing the same structure of resignation and faith with every other moment, was characterized (so we can imagine) by a different feeling than, for example, the moment following the trial.

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Having said that, let us return to the above question, which is an important one since it emphasizes the paradoxical nature of faith by freezing the most dramatic moment in Abraham’s life, and thus allows us to examine its profound complexity. What does Abraham believe in when he is drawing the knife? What is the content of his faith? He seems to be holding a paradoxical combination of beliefs according to which Isaac will both die and live – how can we make sense of this? First it is important to note that the paradox here does not amount to a logical impossibility. Abraham does not believe that Isaac will be both dead and alive at the same time. Rather, he believes that Isaac will live in accordance with God’s promise to him, despite being unable to understand (or predict) the way in which this will happen. In other words, Abraham believes in the fulfilment of God’s promise even while acting in a way that contradicts this promise. As far as his human understanding is concerned, Abraham is well aware that he is about to kill Isaac; nevertheless he continues to believe in the fulfilment of God’s word to him. His faith is therefore paradoxical in the sense that there is an irresolvable tension between the different aspects of his faith. There is an acute tension between his belief in the fulfilment of God’s promise, and his belief, his understanding, regarding the irrevocable result of the deed he is about to perform.10 This tension between the different beliefs that constitute his faith also explains why Abraham can hold his faith only ‘by virtue of the absurd’ (as Johannes keeps saying). Abraham cannot hold his faith by virtue of his human understanding – he cannot hold it by virtue of reason or experience. His hold on it is therefore by virtue of the absurd. When ‘all human calculation cease[s]’ (FT, 36), and when human powers (reasoning, experience, understanding) fail to supply a justification, then faith can be sustained only by virtue of the absurd.11 We therefore see that the paradox of faith, the paradox of the double movement, is manifested in several aspects. This is a paradox concerning the will (the knight renounces willingly that which he wants the most), and it is also a paradox concerning belief (there is a conflict between the knight’s understanding of reality and his expectation regarding reality). And it is also a paradox of emotions. Faith involves the paradoxical combination of being in a state of infinite pain (the pain of resignation) and an indescribable joy: ‘I can bear to live in my own fashion’, Johannes tells us, 10 11

And this therefore makes his faith humanly, rather than logically, impossible. See Hannay 2003a: 17–18. Kierkegaard returns to these notions (the paradox and the absurd) in later pseudonymous texts, but I limit my interpretation to his use of them in Fear and Trembling alone.

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‘I am happy and satisfied, but my joy is not the joy of faith, and by comparison with that, it is unhappy’ (FT, 34). The knight of faith, then, leads an intriguing existence. He may look ‘just like a tax collector’ (FT, 39), but his life is a profound drama of holding harmoniously contradicting powers (of will, belief, and emotion). To return to the quote that opens this chapter, we can now understand what Johannes has in mind when he declares that to be a knight of faith means ‘[t]o exist in such a way that my contrast to existence constantly expresses itself as the most beautiful and secure harmony with it’ (FT, 50). However, we may understand why he is saying this – but what is he actually saying? In other words, having formulated the paradox of faith (in terms of the paradoxical combination between what resignation involves on the one hand, and faith on the other) – how can we fathom it? 2 Mooney and Hall on the paradox of faith Faith as ‘selfless care’ Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice Isaac shows in the most dramatic way imaginable his severing of the possessive tie. To Johannes, and perhaps even to Abraham, it will seem dangerously close to losing Isaac outright. Yet Abraham has faith that Isaac will not be lost. In severing the tie, a selfless care is renewed and released … The story depicts, at least in embryo, a father’s ordeal of liberation and fulfillment … how to grant fathers and sons the separateness-in-love each will need and deserve.12

Edward F. Mooney’s influential interpretation of the relationship between resignation and faith puts the emphasis on the issue of freedom and care. Faith ultimately amounts to the understanding acquired by the individual that it is freedom – freedom in the sense of not claiming any ownership rights – that shapes (or rather, ought to shape) his attachments to the world and to the other. Mooney interestingly reads the four cryptic proverbs regarding the weaning of a child, at the very beginning of Fear and Trembling (see Exordium, FT, 9–14), as reflecting the central theme of the book: ‘resignation of something of utmost value (in this case the child to be weaned), coupled with the assurance that it will be returned, is Johannes de Silentio’s basic characterization of faith’.13 Accordingly, ‘[i]f the child weaned is Isaac, then the issue is how to make Isaac free’.14 12 13 14

Mooney 1991: 58–9. Ibid., 31. Ibid., 30.

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For Mooney, then, Abraham’s ordeal is about the need ‘to undergo a complex shift in his relationship to Isaac and to his world generally’.15 Abraham is depicted as a knight of faith in his ability to care about Isaac without claiming any proprietary rights over him. What does having a proprietary claim over something amount to? Mooney gives an example of a fine old watch that is suddenly stolen. In such a case ‘we may feel not only sorrow but anger … It gets entwined with possessiveness and capacity for hurt, should possession-related rights be violated.’16 To cease feeling this way about x or y is to renounce our proprietary claim over x or y, and this, in Mooney’s view, constitutes the movement of resignation. However, this comes at a price: according to this interpretation, being a knight of resignation means also ceasing to care about the object of one’s love (over which one renounces a proprietary claim). Mooney refers to the young lad’s love for the princess and claims that, in his resignation, the young lad ‘saves himself from hurt should she marry another and from hurt coming from the finite generally’. However – ‘the price he has paid for diminished hurt is diminished care’.17 The process that the knight of resignation is going through, according to Mooney, is therefore a renunciation of proprietary claims that results in immunizing oneself to the pain of the loss – which, in turn, results in indifference to the thing lost. The deal, as it were, is diminishing one’s hurt by diminishing one’s care. However, ‘not all cases of love or care are tied up with proprietary claim’, says Mooney, while referring, of course, to faith.18 As an example, he mentions the approach that one is inclined to adopt towards a sparrow in one’s feeder. It is delightful when the sparrow chooses to visit, and one ‘enjoy[s] and warmly anticipate[s]’ those visits, but one can claim no rights over the sparrow: The matter of its life and death is something over which I have no claim. Of course, I would feel indignant were someone maliciously to injure it. But in the course of things, the sparrow will go its way. Meanwhile, I will adjust myself to its goings and comings.19

Mooney calls this approach a ‘selfless care’ and this, in his view, is what faith is about – namely, renouncing one’s claims (over the beloved) without renouncing one’s care. While the knight of resignation cannot 15 16 17 18 19

Ibid. Ibid., 53. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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maintain his (or her) care for the beloved after renouncing the claim over him (or her), the knight of faith is a knight of faith precisely due to the ability to care for the beloved (without claiming any proprietary rights over him/her). Accordingly, in case of a wondrous return, the knight of faith is capable of warmly welcoming the beloved back, warmly receiving this marvellous gift: The knight of faith works to get the princess back, then, only in the sense that he guarantees that the ultimate obstacle to her return – lack of receptivity – will be absent. He does not by his own strength effect her return, but provides the required condition: He is ready in welcome.20

In other words, it seems that Mooney suggests that we understand faith in terms of a renewed relationship with finitude. Faith is a new, desirable form of relationship that one sustains with one’s son, one’s princess, or one’s world in general. In my view, as I shall soon elaborate, this is an extremely significant point that provides the key to a profound understanding of faith. However, as much as I accept this direction and agree with Mooney’s fundamental insight regarding the meaning of faith as a renewed relationship with finitude, I find several problems with the way in which he develops this pivotal idea. To begin with, it is not clear why Mooney considers the severing of ‘proprietary claim’ to be such a painful ordeal, one that might serve to explain the ordeal Abraham went through. Indeed, it is true that in relationships with people – and in particular in relationships of love – we dangerously tend to develop feelings of possessiveness regarding the other. At the same time, however, this is a rather weak way of describing the process that the knight of resignation goes through. Should the ungraspable sacrifice that Abraham is about to perform, in his willingness to renounce Isaac, be addressed as connected (only) to the severing of the proprietary claim he has over him? Mooney is careful enough to offer this interpretation in the context of the young man’s love story, and it is true that he admits that this story is an imperfect and limited analogy to the story of Abraham (see p. 44). But he does use it to construe a structure of faith, that as such should be at least adequate, or applicable, to the story of Abraham (even if it does not capture it completely). In my view, understanding resignation in terms of renouncing proprietary claims alone is not strong enough to describe the pain and difficulty that resignation is connected with in the story of Abraham, and indeed even in the love 20

Ibid., 54–5.

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story. The first movement of faith, then, cannot be understood only in these terms. While Mooney correctly identifies this movement as the severing of an immediate tie (with Isaac, the princess, ‘the world’), it is not enough to regard this tie as based on proprietary claims alone. Now, in accordance with the incomplete account of the tie which is severed in resignation, there follows an incomplete account of the tie which is renewed in faith. Can the characterization of the desired relationship in terms of ‘selfless care’ sufficiently capture Abraham’s love for his son or the romantic relations between a lover and his princess? A criticism in this spirit is expressed by Ronald L. Hall (to whose interpretation we shall shortly turn), who refers to this picture of faith as ineffectual when it comes to the relationship which exists in marriage.21 Hall sees in marriage a case of what he calls an existential faith and he claims that the picture of ‘selfless care’ is quite inapplicable here: What kind of marriage would it be for one spouse to say to the other that he or she does not make any claims on the other, but will simply adjust to the other’s comings and goings? And what would we think if both mutually acknowledged that in the course of things the other will go his or her own way? What does such a disavowing of all proprietary claims on the other have to do with the covenant of marriage?22

I agree with Hall that the attitude of ‘selfless care’ that Mooney attributes to the knight of faith does not give a full account of the way we are related to those we love. I think that something crucial is indeed missing in Mooney’s picture of the desirable tie (i.e. relationship) that faith constitutes, and I will explore below the nature of this tie as I understand it. However, I think that the core of the problem in Mooney’s interpretation does not lie in the way he characterizes the nature of the tie that faith constitutes, but rather in the way he understands the nature of resignation. Mooney regards resignation as a psychological shelter (so to speak) from the world, a detachment in the sense of indifference and carelessness, a way of becoming immune to our fragility (to use a term frequently employed by Hall who, with regard to understanding resignation, as we will see, seems to be in agreement with Mooney). Resignation is depicted as a hardening of the heart, as a detachment from the world – which results in less pain and less care. Now it is true that the knight of 21

22

Hall’s criticism of Mooney is presented also by Lippitt in the context of his reservations concerning Mooney’s position, and this is where we share the same view both with regard to Mooney and to Hall (see Lippitt 2003: 60–2). Hall 2000: 31.

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resignation transfigures his focused love for the concrete princess into a focused love for transcendence and God, but this is the only sense in which he takes leave from the world.23 The knight of resignation does not use his resignation as an ‘escape’ – if there is any detachment involved in his position at all, it is only in the sense that the focus of his attention is now somewhere else (and not in the sense of losing interest in finitude and becoming indifferent to the pain and misery that existence entails). Moreover, the knight of resignation does not ‘kill’ his love (as Mooney’s reading implies, putting an emphasis on ‘less pain, less care’); what he kills – metaphorically, though in Abraham’s case (almost) literally, speaking – is the object of his love. From the point of view of pain, the latter is of course infinitely more difficult (than killing the love), but this is precisely what constitutes the knight of resignation as a knight. He performs the most difficult thing for him (and this indeed makes the story of the Binding the ultimate manifestation of resignation), and lives in pain: And yet, I repeatedly say, it must be wonderful to get the princess. The knight of resignation who does not say this is a deceiver; he has not had one single desire, and he has not kept his desire young in his pain. There may be someone who found it quite convenient that the desire was no longer alive and that the arrow of pain had grown dull, but such a person is no knight. (FT, 50)

The knight of resignation lives in pain because he continues to love the object of his renunciation – while fully accepting its loss, he continues to desire it and to care for it.24 Mooney’s (psychological) formula of ‘diminished hurt [at the price of] diminished care’, therefore, does not fit the portrait of the knight who both suffers and cares. While Mooney distinguishes resignation from faith by attributing an attitude of care to faith only, I claim that caring is already a crucial part of resignation. Because, again, if one is no longer attached, and no longer cares, there is no longer anything for one to be resigning from. ‘Solving’ the absurdity of faith by defining it ‘as a complex test of care’ does not fully capture the complexity and difficulty of faith as a double movement that maintains resignation along with what seems to be its contradiction.25 Can we think of a different way to understand the double movement of faith? 23 24 25

This, please note, does not mean that he stops loving the princess, but rather that his love for her becomes incomplete and unfulfilled. (See again chapter 2.) See again chapter 2. Mooney 1991: 56.

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kierkegaard on faith and love Faith as a ‘no’ to resignation My claim is that the existential import of Abraham’s embrace of Isaac, or more generally the full import of the faithful embrace of the world, comes in the concrete, existential recognition of the fact that we have the power to do otherwise; it is this power to do otherwise that is a permanent possibility within faith, a possibility faith must continually annul.26

For Ronald L. Hall Kierkegaardian faith is emphatically about being human (‘the existential embrace of the human’).27 When Hall speaks about ‘being human’ he refers to the acceptance and affirmation of our fragile existence in an uncertain world, against the background of our freedom not to accept this.28 Resignation, in Hall’s view, embodies precisely the negative possibility of rejecting, not accepting, our humanness. It expresses an escape from our human position in the world either by descending to brutality or by ascending – aspiring – to transcendence, ignoring the temporal and contingent conditions of our existence. However, the possibility of rejecting our humanness paradoxically affirms its ‘embrace’: ‘as a human being I must choose either to embrace or to reject my humanness. The constant temptation to search for a way of transcending the world has the paradoxical effect of occasioning my decision to live it and to embrace it, every inch.’29 Under the category of ‘resignation’ Hall includes all the modes of existence which differ from faith (i.e. the different variations of the aesthetic and ethical modes of life along with the various philosophical and religious forms of resignation). For him, ‘the truth of resignation and refusal’ (and so of faith) is that we can own or truly possess only what it is possible for us to disown, to dispossess, to refuse … refusal is not faith, but faith must include this negation within itself as an ever-present possibility. Indeed, it is just this refusal of the human that the knight of faith must be prepared continually to encounter in fear and trembling and continually to annul in faith.30

Hall’s understanding of the ‘dialectical logic of paradox’ that constitutes the Kierkegaardian conception of faith is therefore based on the idea of oppositions that depend on and validate each other.31 There is no 26 27 28 29 30 31

Hall 2000: 37. Ibid., 10. See ibid., 1. Ibid., 38. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 2.

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meaning to the ‘yes’ (the acceptance and embrace of our humanness), he says, without the ‘no’ (the freedom to reject and refuse our humanness); and therefore the ‘yes’ (affirmation) actually includes within itself the ‘no’ (negation) as an annulled possibility – The knight of faith says ‘no’ to this possibility of saying ‘no’; and therefore his ‘no’ dialectically annuls the concretely realized possibility of refusal. In the paradoxical logic of Kierkegaardian worldly faith, the ‘yes-to-the-world’ is a refusal of refusal; it is an affirmation via dialectical double negation.32

Hall bases this reading on Kierkegaard’s treatment of the relation between despair and faith in The Sickness Unto Death. Hall’s suggestion is to understand despair as a possibility – without which there would be no meaning to faith – where the latter is the state of rejecting and annulling the possibility of despair: ‘to the extent that despair is not possible, neither is faith’.33 Therefore, faith includes within it despair as an annulled possibility, and it also does so with regard to resignation: ‘despair, like resignation and refusal, is present within faith, but dialectically present as absent’.34 Closely resembling Mooney’s reading of resignation (but with more emphasis), Hall considers resignation to be a negative tendency that one needs to overcome. Resignation stands for a non-human detachment, a way of escaping the pain and misery of this world – an almost detestable ‘technique to cope with the fragility of human existence’.35 ‘[T]he knight of resignation’, Hall concludes, ‘fails not because he does not go far enough but because he goes in the wrong direction completely.’36 It is not surprising, then, that on Hall’s reading God’s call to sacrifice Isaac was not a test of faith but rather a temptation against finitude – a temptation to withdraw from finitude. To live in faith is to acknowledge the possibility of resignation, which in the story is embodied in God’s call, and this means ‘to become conscious of the fact that such a transcendence, such refusal of our own personal presence in the world is possible’.37 I disagree with such an understanding of resignation, and of its relation to faith. First, from a textual point of view, Hall’s reading of resignation as such a negative, undesirable, and even contemptible option is unfaithful to the pronounced appreciation expressed in the text for the knight of 32 33 34 35 36 37

Ibid., 39. Ibid., 36. Ibid. See ibid., 29. Ibid., 35. Ibid., 34.

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resignation. True, this knight is not as admirable as the knight of faith (maybe even not nearly as admirable), but he is a knight nonetheless. Johannes certainly respects him and presents him as someone who deserves our sympathetic attention. But even more crucially, I think that Hall’s way of annulling resignation (that is, of maintaining it in the structure of faith only as a negative option that one rejects) expresses a misunderstanding of the profundity and complexity of resignation. While Hall bestows on resignation the status of an ‘annulled possibility’, I think that resignation should be kept as an affirmed possibility in order to maintain the intensity and the penetrating meaning that Fear and Trembling imparts to faith. If resignation is to be kept in faith only as a ‘no’, it is not clear at all why Johannes – even as an ‘outsider’ to faith – should consider faith to be a paradox and an offence to human understanding, for rejecting the renunciation of Isaac and believing that Isaac will live do not conflict with one another. It seems that resignation has a more dominant role in the structure of faith. It expresses something more valuable to our existence. Resignation, in other words, seems to be present in our lives (and in particular in the mode of faith) in a way that is more substantial than being just an option to which we say (or should say) ‘no’. To use one of Hall’s images, I think our humanness depends also on our ability to embrace resignation. And this is because our humanness must not only be embraced (as he keeps emphasizing) – it must also be given a particular shape. And in my view resignation (as we shall see more clearly in the chapters on Works of Love below) has a crucial role in this ‘shaping’. Not as an ‘annulled possibility’ but rather as an active ‘ingredient’ in our relation to and understanding of ourselves, the world, and the other.38 My claim is that there is something in the structure of our encounter with the world that becomes (desirably) manifested only through resignation. To put it succinctly: a ‘yes’ to resignation is essential to faith, to the good life, to our humanness. When we read Fear and Trembling in a way that tries to throw light on and interpret this sometimes enigmatic text, a tension inevitably arises between the attempt to render the text intelligible (and so to address the intuition that this text speaks to us even if most of us are far from being an Abraham), and the respect that one should pay to the fact that it is, after 38

After all, it is the movement of resignation that initiates the relationship of the believer with God (see again chapter 2). Note that Hall’s negative understanding of resignation is also consistent with the minor role that God plays in his account of faith.

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all, an unusual story. In other words, without abandoning the important task of disclosing the relevance of the text, one should be very careful not to dismiss the difficulty and the rarity of faith. I think that readings of the kind presented above give more weight to the need to decode the text and make it clearer than to the other need, to be faithful to the text’s careful choice of the distinctive story of Abraham, in depicting its model of faith. I think that an accurate reading of the text should aim to address these two tendencies and find the balance between the need to present the relevance of faith to our mundane existence and the difficulty that the text raises when it insists on using Abraham’s story of non-mundane existence as its model. To return to our question, then, how are we to fathom the meaning of faith? 3 Joy and trust: a proposed alternative interpretation Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling.39

A renewed relationship We saw that Mooney’s interpretation paves the way to considering faith as a renewed relationship with finitude. Hall criticizes Mooney for offering an unsatisfactory account of the nature of this relationship, but basically he seems to accept the idea of faith as constituting a desirable relationship with the world. What, however, is the reason for considering faith as a relationship to begin with? Johannes (and his interpreters) talks repeatedly about ‘renouncing Isaac’ (or ‘renouncing the princess’) – but when I renounce Isaac (or the princess, or anything else), what is it precisely that I renounce? To renounce something, it seems to me, means first and foremost to renounce the relationship (the actual, worldly relationship)40 that one sustains with that something. To renounce Isaac is in effect to renounce the relationship with Isaac; to renounce the princess is to renounce the relationship with the princess.41 Accordingly faith, as the ability to ‘receive 39 40 41

Psalm 2:11, the King James version. As opposed to an inner, spiritual bond which one sustains in resignation. See again chapter 2. Here, of course, Abraham’s story again shines as an awe-inspiring exception, since Abraham’s renunciation of the relationship with his son has the further horrifying implication of renouncing Isaac’s life. However, I suggest that we see in this further implication another way to emphasize the point regarding Abraham’s highest exemplification of resignation. Not only did Abraham renounce the present relationship with Isaac, he expressed in his resignation an acceptance of the impossibility of any future relationship with him.

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Isaac (or the princess) back’, is a renewal of the relationship with Isaac or the princess. Having clarified this, the interesting question to ask is, of course, what is the nature of this relationship and why does it ‘deserve’ the title ‘faith’ – what turns this relationship any different from a simply right, ethical relationship? What does having a relationship mean, what constitutes a relationship? Mooney seems to understand the nature of a relationship (a relationship with some x) in terms of two factors: (1) considering x as ‘mine’, and (2) caring for x. Also, it seems that for Mooney considering x to be ‘mine’ amounts to seeing myself as ‘owning’ x (that is, as having the right to demand proprietary claims over x) – a reprehensible tendency that one undoubtedly needs to be rid of. Accordingly, in his account of the desirable relationship, Mooney purges the first factor and leaves only the second. The correct form of a relationship is one of selfless caring: I care for x without in any way considering x as ‘mine’. However, is the consideration of x as mine something merely negative? As Hall’s criticism of Mooney suggests, for a relationship to be a relationship, some self – with some demands and expectations – needs to be involved. And indeed, when we think of the context of a proper relationship with x, it seems reasonable to assume that one will be justified in having certain requirements from x, requirements that are connected to one’s own well-being. In other words, considering x to be ‘mine’ – namely, affirming a specific connection of x to oneself – has not only the negative meaning of claiming proprietary rights over x. Rather, it has also the positive meaning of wishing and expecting x – my x (who is my husband, my wife, my beloved) – to be present and involved in my life, as well as committed to me in this way or another, while bestowing on me the joy I seek in the context of this specific encounter.42 We can therefore say that being in a relationship with x actually amounts, in its immediate sense, to three factors: (1) considering x as ‘mine’ in a negative way (claiming proprietary rights over x), (2) considering x as ‘mine’ in a positive way (expecting x to be involved in a committed way in my life, wishing for its presence and finding joy and satisfaction in this presence), and (3) my caring for x. Like Mooney I claim that in resignation Factor (1) is indeed eliminated. However, unlike him I claim that Factor (2) (which Mooney does not take into consideration) is also eliminated in resignation, and in contrast with him I claim that Factor (3), the care for x, 42

This, of course, resonates with wider questions as regards the status of the self in the context of the desirable form of love (as well as the theological concern regarding the difference between eros and agape). I shall refer to these questions in chapters 4 and 5 below.

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is not eliminated in resignation. Care for x is sustained – and even becomes clearer – in resignation, and accordingly there is something else that, having resigned, is gained in faith. That something, I claim, is what I have just defined as Factor (2) in a relationship – the joy in the presence of x and a positive ‘hold’ on him. So what is it that allows us to conduct a renewed relationship with x that includes also Factor (2)? Before answering this question, another clarification – of faith being a renewed relationship – is needed. Renewal is connected to repetition: something is returned, received back, gained anew. This associated group of concepts (renewal, repetition, receiving or gaining back) is commonly used to explain the Kierkegaardian faith, but often without properly clarifying the metaphorical picture that the use of these terms depicts. What do we ‘receive back’? How does it happen? What does it presuppose? These questions are particularly pressing when we remember that it is not only Abraham that Johannes portrays with admiration and wonder; there is another knight of faith whose profile is presented in Fear and Trembling. Nothing about his appearance indicates that this man knows how to live in relation to infinity – he is completely immersed in the finite and does not seem to be losing (and therefore renouncing and receiving back) a thing. What then does this knight, to whom I shall refer as ‘the mundane knight’, receive back in faith? The mundane knight Thinking of faith as ‘receiving something back’ may lead us to imagine mistakenly the knight as someone who suffers a loss of some x, which at present (in resignation) is absent, but which at some point in the future (in faith) will be present again, regained. This understanding of faith is mistaken because it blurs the simultaneity of resignation and faith – it leads us to think that if x is received back then the state of resignation is over (because we assume that resignation implies the absence of x). However, resignation does not end when faith begins: it continues within faith. Therefore, in an interesting sense (that we will soon explore) in the context of faith x is both renounced and gained, both ‘absent’ and present. Moreover, the terminology of ‘receiving back’ presupposes that a concrete, actual loss must have taken place (a loss of a child or of a beloved, for example), but is this necessarily so? The portrait of the mundane knight indicates that the movement of resignation is performed even when there is no actual loss apparent:

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kierkegaard on faith and love Here he is … The instant I first lay eyes on him, I set him apart at once; I jump back, clap my hands, and say half aloud, ‘Good Lord, is this the man, is this really the one – he looks just like a tax collector!’ But this is indeed the one. I move a little closer to him, watch his slightest movement to see if it reveals a bit of heterogeneous optical telegraphy from the infinite, a glance, a facial expression, a gesture, a sadness, a smile that would betray the infinite in its heterogeneity with the finite. No! I examine his figure from top to toe to see if there may not be a crack through which the infinite would peek. No! He is solid all the way through. His stance? It is vigorous, belongs entirely to finitude. (FT, 38–9)

The mundane knight, then, seems to be living quite a peaceful life. He is not required to sacrifice anything whatsoever, and no dramatic loss – of a son or of a princess – threatens him. And yet this mundane person is nevertheless a knight. Johannes emphasizes that this simple man, seemingly indelicate or even coarse, is a knight no less than Abraham – at every moment he performs the movement of faith, and thus also that of resignation: With the freedom from care of a reckless good-for-nothing, he lets things take care of themselves, and yet every moment of his life he buys the opportune time at the highest price, for he does not do even the slightest thing except by virtue of the absurd … and yet this man has made and at every moment is making the movement of infinity. He drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation, he knows the blessedness of infinity, he has felt the pain of renouncing everything, the most precious thing in the world, and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher. (FT, 40)

The mundane knight of faith, we are told here, has renounced everything. To renounce ‘everything’ means to renounce everything in time, everything in this world. The mundane knight of faith renounces his worldly happiness, he renounces all the possible finite goods that the world in time has to offer him. But what does it mean, in effect, to renounce ‘everything’ (or, to be more precise, the relationship with ‘everything’)? After all, we have said that the movement of resignation is performed in response to loss, it is an acceptance of loss – what kind of loss then does the mundane knight have to face? Here it would be helpful to return to an earlier distinction that we have drawn between actual, potential, and essential loss (see again the Introduction). If Isaac had died in the Binding, his death would have been an actual loss. The loss of the princess who cannot return the young

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man’s love (or may even marry a different man, a prince) is another instance of actual loss. In the story of the mundane knight there is also an actual loss but this is a non-dramatic, quiet loss: it is the continual loss of time. Time goes by and everything within it is fleeting and passes away; and we, finite creatures as we are, cannot have an absolute hold on it. Everything in time is either already actually lost (already taken away from us), or potentially lost (under the threat of being eventually taken away from us). We called loss in this sense (that is, either actual or potential) essential loss. Now, the loss that the mundane knight is facing is the actual loss of time and the potential loss of everything in time. We may therefore say that the loss the mundane knight is facing is the essential loss of everything that he has. However, it is important to note that despite suffering an actual, relentless, loss of time, the mundane knight is not asked to suffer an actual loss of a concrete thing persisting in time (a son, a beloved) – the latter is only potentially lost for him. And of course, the potential death of a beloved, or the potential termination of a love relationship differs from the actual loss of Isaac (had the sacrifice gone ahead to its conclusion) or from the actual loss of the princess. The mundane knight, therefore, faces the essential loss of ‘everything’, while Abraham is under a more concrete threat of facing the actual loss of his son, and the young man is facing the actual loss of his princess. In accordance with this distinction, it is important to note also the distinction between the different kinds of resignation (resignation being, after all, a response to loss). The kind of resignation that the mundane knight performs is an essential resignation. He essentially renounces everything; in his resignation he responds to the potential loss of everything that he has, and he makes this movement before any actual loss (of a concrete something in time) takes place. On the other hand, an actual resignation is, for example, the kind of resignation that the young man performs – it is a movement he makes after the actual loss of the princess has taken place (and in response to it). And what about Abraham’s resignation? Even though the loss of his son is closer to becoming actualized than any of the potential losses that the mundane knight faces, it is important to remember that the loss of Isaac was eventually prevented – Abraham renounced Isaac before his son was actually taken away from him. His resignation, therefore, was also an essential one. Now, an essential resignation is obviously the condition for an actual resignation. Abraham stood the test and by drawing the knife he expressed his willingness (and his ability) to ‘transform’ his essential resignation into

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an actual one. The mundane knight essentially renounces everything, but were he to lose his love relationship or his son, his resignation would have become an actual one as well (assuming that as a genuine knight he would also have withstood the test). In this connection it is worth noting Johannes’ words (referring to himself maybe) regarding a failure of resignation as it shows itself when the mirror of an actual loss is put in front of one’s face (so to speak): There was one who also believed that he had made the movement [of resignation]; but look, time passed, the princess did something else – she married, for example, a prince – and his soul lost the resilience of resignation. He thereby demonstrated that he had not made the movement properly. (FT, 44)

The acceptance of the essential loss of ‘everything’, that the mundane knight exemplifies by performing the movement of resignation, means that he does not try to evade the loss or deny it (as the aesthetic and ethical ‘knights’ of recollection respectively do, see again chapter 1). Accepting this loss in resignation amounts to the ability of the mundane knight to acknowledge that everything he cares for is under the threat of being taken away from him. The knight fully acknowledges this loss – he realizes that everything he cares for is not really his – and lives in accordance with this acknowledgement. To demonstrate this point let us imagine the mundane knight as a knight of resignation alone (i.e. as someone who had not undertaken the further movement of faith). Such a knight looks at everything which he has as something which he does not really have, something which he cannot really have. For the thing is fleeting – everything in time is essentially tainted by the quality of slipping away, passing by, being changed and lost. For him, all things temporal are as good as lost: they are absent from that domain of things that are fully rooted in being, the domain that is not touched by change and loss. Thus, renouncing everything finite, the knight of resignation directs his hopes at the infinite, at his relationship with God – this is where he finds the meaning and the joy in his life. However, the knight of resignation, as we have emphasized, is not indifferent to finitude. On the contrary: resignation is a movement which discloses the value of finite things and our strong attachment to them.43 Thus, the knight of resignation lives in pain, not in indifference. What he fails to sustain with regard to finite things is not his 43

For the analysis of resignation as constituting both our happy relationship with God and our sorrowful relationship with the finite, see again chapter 2.

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ability to care for them, but rather his ability to feel joy in them.44 Having made the movement of resignation the knight cannot consider anything as belonging to him. Rather he is constantly aware of the impending absence of everything that he has, of the imminent threat of becoming deprived of each and every thing he loves. He thus cannot let himself be fully attached to anything he cares for in the realm of finitude. However, this is only half of the journey. After all, the story of faith, as well as the story of Fear and Trembling, does not end with resignation. Both Abraham and the mundane knight (along with, at least potentially, the Merman whom we will meet later) are knights of faith. And faith, we have said, is a renewal of relationship with a ‘lost’ thing (i.e. something that is lost, either actually or potentially – Isaac, the princess, ‘everything’); and is also understood in terms of ‘receiving back’. And now that we understand what kind of loss stands at the basis of the different stories of faith, and are in the position to understand that what we ‘receive back’ in faith is the relationship with the lost thing, we can finally turn to the question formulated above. What is the nature of this renewed relationship and what are the conditions for sustaining it, which earn it the name of ‘faith’? Faith as trust The crucial distinction between the knight of faith and a mere knight of resignation consists in the ability of the former, while performing the movement of resignation, to find hope and joy in the finite again. The mundane knight, to quote again, ‘drains the deep sadness of life in infinite resignation … knows the blessedness of infinity … has felt the pain of renouncing everything … and yet the finite tastes just as good to him as to one who never knew anything higher’ (FT, 40). The faith of this knight amounts to his ability to sustain an adequate (full, satisfying) relationship with everything in his life. He has a very unique hold on finitude, a very special way of being attached to it. He sustains a relationship with everything finite by way of both renouncing and affirming it, by both releasing and holding it. On the one hand, he acknowledges that nothing belongs to him, he has no right over anything, and he cannot demand any proprietary claim on anything in his life. But at the same time the knight is joyful as one who entirely belongs to the world – as one to whom the world ‘belongs’. This latter ‘belongingness’ is of a new kind, of course. He is fully attached – by way of hope, 44

See Kellenberger 1997 for a discussion of joy as the hallmark of the knight of faith.

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expectations, and joyfulness – to everything as if it were ‘his’, while fully acknowledging – by way of resignation – that nothing is really ‘his’. A helpful way of thinking about this new hold on finitude is to picture it in terms of receiving a gift. To think of our hold on everything in time, which is everything that we have, as a hold on a gift, demonstrates the subtlety of the relationship (between us and everything finite) which faith constitutes. A gift has a special status. When something is given to us, it both does and does not belong to us. Having received it, we now have it, but at the same time we are not the origin, so to speak, of the gift – the giver is. We ‘own’ the gift, after not having owned it before, only thanks to the giver who is the real owner of the gift. We should remember that, being a gift, it was absent from our life prior to being given to us by the giver, and that, as the ‘origin’ of the gift, he still has the right over it. Our hold on a gift is always, in a way, only tentative.45 To think of faith in this way captures the profound meaning of considering something as ‘not mine’ but nevertheless ‘mine’; it helps to understand the uniqueness of the relationship that faith constitutes with finite goods. It addresses our intuition that there is a positive connection between having joy in something and considering it as ‘ours’ in some sense. We may now understand what this ‘ours’ means – it is ‘ours’not in the negative sense of claiming possession rights over it (Factor (1)), but rather it is ‘ours’ in a new, ‘purged’ sense of being involved in a mutual relationship with it, and of being deeply attached to it (Factor (2)). From the point of view of faith, if something is ‘mine’, it is ‘mine’ only in the way that a desirable gift is mine. When receiving it, I do not (and cannot) see myself as its ‘natural’ possessor (after all I have been given it), but at the same time I am joyful – joyful to receive it and to have it. And thinking of the relationship of faith thus, we make genuine place for the presence of the giver of the gift: the presence of God. It emphasizes that the right form of a relationship includes not only two participants (myself and the other party involved), but rather three; there is another party involved in the relationship of faith, the party that gives shape and validity to the relationship.46 45

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The analogy of a gift is not devoid of problems: for example, one may claim that once one receives a gift one owns it as if it were one’s own from the beginning. However, I think this analogy manages to capture the complexity of the desirable type of hold that faith provides, one that both renounces the thing as ‘mine’ and affirms it as ‘mine’. Because even if, say, legally speaking I ‘own’ the gift once given to me, still, at least emotionally, I feel that I have fewer rights over it than, suppose, over something I bought with my hard-earned money. In this connection, it is interesting to note Kierkegaard’s idea of a genuine relationship as effectively a relationship between three, with God as ‘the middle term’: ‘Christianity teaches

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However, considering everything in time as a gift, as well as acknowledging the decisive presence of God in any finite relationship, is not as yet enough for constituting a relationship of faith. After all, the knight of resignation also understands the status of everything in time as a gift, and obviously he also sustains a loving relationship with God – but still he is only a knight of resignation. What he lacks, then, is the power to trust the bestowal of the gift in the context of his finite life. The right relation between ourselves and everything that we have (which is, as we have said, a relationship between two that includes the presence of a third, the giver) involves the ability to trust. What does it mean to trust? Being a believer, Alastair Hannay explains, expresses a deep trust in God, when ‘trusting’ means precisely that there is a gap between the individual’s understanding of some situation (his understanding, or rather lack of understanding, of the demand to ‘suspend the ethical’, for example), and his belief in its being ultimately a good thing. If we understand something as good and blissful, there is no need for us to ‘trust’ that it is this way. Trusting something implies that we have good reason to be suspicious or doubtful; it means that from the point of view of what we see and understand, something – a reason, an answer, an explanation – is missing or hidden from us. To be a believer, then, is to be capable of enduring this confusion. It is to be capable of enduring such an insult to reason and understanding, and of believing genuinely, and trustfully, that even when reality seems strange, painful, and confusing – it will, eventually, be ‘all right’. As Hannay puts it: but to be a knight of faith Abraham had to be willing to accept that the outcome would be ‘all right’ even if God had not relented by producing a result which satisfied his moral intuition and personal preferences; that is, even if the way in which the outcome was ‘all right’ remained utterly obscure … faith requires that he believe that it would be ‘all right’ no matter what.47

In his book, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: Faith and Eternal Acceptance, J. Kellenberger also explains the religious consciousness of the knight of faith in terms of an absolute trust in God, manifested in the belief that ‘all will be well’. Kellenberger rightly emphasizes the difference between ‘the contemporary knight of faith’ (whom we called a mundane knight) and

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that love is a relationship between: a person – God – a person, that is, that God is the middle term’ (WL, 107, emphasis in the original). Hannay 1982: 78.

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Abraham. The latter had God’s promise that through Isaac he would be the father of nations, and therefore had good reason to believe that Isaac would live (even if he was about to die). The contemporary knight of faith, on the other hand, is neither put to a trial nor does he have God’s concrete promise. So what does his faith amount to? It amounts to the belief and trust in God that everything will be well: Like Abraham, the contemporary knight of faith must have absolute trust in God, but his absolute trust is unlike Abraham’s in that it does not rest upon God’s special promise … This means that the direct object of the faith of the contemporary knight of faith, what he knows and does not doubt, must be different from the direct object of Abraham’s faith. Going beyond Fear and Trembling, we can identify it as the belief that all will be well. The direct object of Abraham’s faith … was, we may say, that all will be well with Isaac. The direct object of the faith of the contemporary knight of faith is the more general belief that all will be well – all will be well with ‘everything’.48

Robert M. Adams is another commentator who posits the concept of trust as central to the idea of faith. Analysing Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith, he wonders why the additional element in faith, which distinguishes it from resignation – namely, the acceptance of the finite back – is so important.49 And this is his answer: In faith, we may suppose, one trusts in God, and that implies that one consciously, believingly, willingly, depends on God for something. In infinite resignation, however, one does not in this way depend on God. For one has resolved to live solely for one’s relationship of love to God. And I take it the knight of infinite resignation sees this relationship as constituted sufficiently by his own voluntary resignation. In relation to what he lives for, therefore, he does not depend on anything outside the control of his own will. Hence the knight of infinite resignation has no occasion for trusting God; and faith, in the sense of trust, plays no essential part in his religion. The knight of faith, on the other hand, does willingly depend on God for something outside the control of his own will. But if he depends thus on God for it, he must surely accept it when given, and must be prepared to accept it.50

In other words, faith is trusting God that what is impossible for me (‘outside the control of [the] will’) will be possible nevertheless. This trust amounts 48 49 50

Kellenberger 1997: 48–9. See Adams 1990: 392. Ibid., 392–3.

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to an acknowledgement of my deep dependency on God for achieving a hold on anything beyond my control. While in resignation the knight does not need to rely on anything but himself and his own powers of will and determination, in faith the knight relies entirely on God. ‘[H]e who loves God without faith reflects upon himself’, says Johannes, while ‘he who loves God in faith reflects upon God’ (FT, 37). Being a knight of faith, then, means to have the trust that what I accept in resignation as completely lost for me – everything in time, and the relationship with everything in time – will nevertheless be returned to me. I cannot tell how this is to happen, and what form it is to take, but trusting God means that I believe in the ultimate realization of the good. In a recent essay ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’, John J. Davenport emphasizes precisely this latter point. According to his interpretation, Kierkegaardian faith is trusting that the desirable good – he speaks of this good in terms of the perfect realization of the ideals of ethics – although beyond my limited reach, is nevertheless – ‘eschatologically’, ultimately, in the last account – to be fulfilled. I shall elaborate on Davenport’s suggestion below, but first let us try to imagine a concrete example of trust, when it is understood in terms of a belief in an ultimate realization of the good. As Kellenberger indicates, in the story of the Binding it is relatively easy to understand what Abraham’s trust in God amounts to. Abraham trusts the realization of God’s promise to him, and he therefore believes that come what may, Isaac will continue to be his living son. However, when it comes to the mundane knight, it is more difficult to imagine what his trust (as a knight of faith) looks like. Earlier we distinguished between an ‘essential loss’ and a concrete, ‘actual’ one, and said that the loss in the story of the mundane knight is of the essential kind. But what happens in a story of a mundane knight who suffers an actual loss? What does his trust (which consists in the belief that ‘all will be well no matter what’, see again Hannay and Kellenberger above) amount to? After all, he does not have God’s special promise regarding, say, the life of his son. In the case of a tragic loss, then, what form does his trust take? This is a very difficult question, emotionally no less than conceptually, but I wish to offer at least an initial direction to a possible answer. I will do so by examining the form that faith (as trust in an ultimate realization of the good) can take in the context of a life of someone who suffers an actual, tragic loss. The story I use is the one presented in Almodovar’s film, All About My Mother. In this film Manuela, the heroine, loses her only and beloved son, Esteban, in a car accident. In memory of her son – who on the day of his tragic death expressed his wish to know who his father was (a transvestite

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who had changed his name from Esteban to Lola, and never knew he had become the father of Manuela’s son) – she takes upon herself the task of travelling to Barcelona to find Esteban’s father. Out of respect for her son’s last wish she wants to find the father, and tell him that he had a son who wanted so much to meet him. The journey to Barcelona is a journey to her past: there lives her son’s father whom she used to love so much; there she conceived her dearly beloved son; there live all her past friends; there, on virtually every street corner, exist meaningful memories. Manuela, during the first part of the film, is a knight of recollection. She is willing to live only in the past – both in the more distant and in the more immediate past. She does not even tell her best friend from the past, Agrado, whom she meets again in Barcelona, about the reason for her search after Lola. She does not want to create a new present in which her son’s death takes part. She shares with Agrado the distant past, and within herself she keeps the pain of the more immediate one. She is indifferent to the present and from this perspective it is indeed pointless to tell Agrado about her (and Lola’s) dead son. Manuela’s knighthood of recollection is most clearly expressed in her refusal to open herself – her love, her life – to the new people she meets. The most significant encounter takes place with Sister Rosa, a young nun who also fell under the spell of Lola, became pregnant and also contracted AIDS (in both cases from Lola). Rosa, rejected by her own family, sees in Manuela her truest friend and a substitute mother. But Manuela refuses to take on herself this new possibility. In an emotional scene she firmly demands of Rosa to leave her alone: ‘You have no right to ask me to become your mother!’ she painfully cries at her. But her refusal does not last long. And the turning point at which she opens herself to the needy woman standing before her is the moment of her transformation from the state of recollection to that of resignation. She accepts the death of her son, she accepts the loss, and she lets the past become the past. She lets go of her hold on the past (in its being the focus and centre of her life) and is now open to that which transcends her own past: the life, and death, of Rosa.51 She adopts Rosa’s newborn child, naming him (after both the father and the dead son) Esteban. At the end of the film we see Manuela travelling with the new Esteban, who has miraculously recovered from AIDS, to Barcelona again. But this 51

Indeed, her resignation is not before God but rather for the sake of a human other. In that sense it does not take the form of infinite resignation but rather the form of self-denial. She moves herself – her pain, her recollections – aside (so to speak) and finds the place for her neighbour, Rosa. The meaning of self-denial and its essential connection to infinite resignation will be discussed in the next two chapters.

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time, she says, she is not on the run – she travels joyfully, full of love, emotion, and hope, with the new beloved son to a conference on AIDS. It is clear that the dead son (as well as the now dead father) is there with her. The infinite pain over her son’s death has not become any lighter. But there is also a genuine joy in this scene: she, who has renounced being a mother (i.e. renounced the relationship with a son), is a mother again to a new son. She refers to the child as ‘my Esteban’, and this scene is the first one, since her son’s death, in which it is clear that she is really happy (she also indicates this about herself). Manuela is able to receive back the joyfulness of motherhood due to making the double movement of resignation and faith. Only by being willing to renounce her hold on her dead son (a hold which was expressed in her refusal to see anything else as important), and by trusting the possibility of realizing the good of motherhood nevertheless, was she able to sustain a new relationship, a relationship of faith, with a new son. We can easily see the centrality of trust to Manuela’s (renewed relationship under the aegis of) faith, when we imagine a parallel version of her story in which she halts in resignation. Being a knight of resignation (and not of faith) would have been manifested in Manuela’s dedication to nursing the dying Rosa and then, maybe, in dedicating her life to caring for other people afflicted with AIDS. But she would have refused to become a mother again; she would have refused to care for the baby as if he had been her own. If she had remained a knight of resignation alone, she would not have been capable of loving, in a motherly, concrete way, ever again. Trust, then, is the crucial element in faith that allows the renewal of any relationship; it is the condition for ‘receiving back’ – namely, fully renewing – a relationship with a returned lost thing (be it Isaac, a beloved, a son, or any other finite good). Trust, we may say, is the ground on which the distinctiveness of faith is construed, while this distinctiveness amounts to the ability to fully renew a relationship with a lost thing that has returned; to find joy in it again. ‘[F]or if I had gotten Isaac again’, says Johannes in the voice of a knight of resignation, ‘I would have been in an awkward position. What was the easiest for Abraham would have been difficult for me – once again to be happy in Isaac! – for he who with all the infinity of his soul … has made the infinite movement and cannot do more, he keeps Isaac only with pain’ (FT, 35). 4 Faith and the ethical According to the analysis of faith that we are developing here, I suggest that we understand faith as a unique existential stance which is best described in

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terms of a renewed relationship with the finite in general, and with the finite other (a son, a beloved) in particular. However, this characterization – making use as it does of an ethical vocabulary (‘relationship’, ‘otherness’) – may bring to mind two questions. The first regards the difference between a relationship structured by faith and a mere ethical relationship. Simply put, the question (as we have already phrased it above) is why does this relationship deserve to be called ‘faith’? What makes this kind of relationship any different from a mere desirable ethical relationship? The second question regards the ethical status of Fear and Trembling, and has a long interpretative history. As a matter of fact, Johannes’ insistence on reading the Binding as an act which is in principle unintelligible from an ethical point of view (as each of the three Problemata concludes), and in particular his provocative suggestion regarding the possibility of suspending the ethical, have usually been the focus of scholarly interest in the text. In the context of the present study, with its slightly different interpretative interests, it is of course impossible to exhaust the debate regarding the relations between the ethical and the religious in Fear and Trembling. However, since the model of faith and love which I am advancing here is essentially ethical (namely, it concerns ethical issues), a few clarifications regarding this matter are needed. I shall therefore begin by referring to the second question, and against this background will conclude by answering the first. The suspension of Hegelian ethics When we refer to ‘the ethical’, it is important to distinguish between two related but distinct issues. The first concerns the specific understanding of ‘the ethical’ in the context of Fear and Trembling, and is related to the question ‘What kind of ethical understanding does Johannes present?’ The second concerns a more general understanding of Abraham as an ethical agent, and is related to the question ‘Can Abraham’s willingness to kill his son be regarded as anything but unethical; can there be any ethical point of view that would affirm his act?’ These two issues are of course tightly connected, and many interpreters address the second concern by focusing on the first. According to such readings, Johannes’ analysis of Abraham as basically standing outside the ethical realm is rooted in the first’s incomplete perspective expressed in his understanding of the ethical in Hegelian terms. When Johannes speaks of ‘the ethical’, it is suggested, he does not speak on morality in general but rather has a specific understanding of it in mind:

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The ‘ethical’ with which faith is contrasted seems to be a stance that is quite Hegelian, seeing ethical obligations largely as embodied in the historically relative institutions and practices of societies.52

Everything that Johannes says about the relations between faith and the ethical, then, should be understood in the context of his Hegelian conception of ethics. His conclusions regarding the alienation of faith to ethics, therefore, indicate not only his explicit rejection of the Hegelian understanding of faith, but also his implicit acceptance of the Hegelian understanding of the ethical. Thus, as Stephen Mulhall suggests, maybe the problem begins precisely with Johannes’ uncritical presupposition according to which Hegel’s theory of the ethical is indeed the ultimate one? [A]s his claim to have immersed himself in Hegel’s philosophy might lead us to expect (FT, 33), de Silentio’s supposedly anti-Hegelian account of the religious realm remains implicitly indebted to Hegel’s understanding of the ethical realm ... He never stops to consider that Hegel’s illicit equation of the ethical and the religious realms might be as much a consequence of his misinterpretation of the ethical realm as it is of the religious realm – that the equation depends upon a misunderstanding of both relata.53

According to such an interpretative direction, we should decode a hidden message in the text. Rather than considering it as a call for a suspension of the ethical (as its overt import implies), we should discern in it the call for a higher, post-Hegelian ethics. We should therefore read the suspension of the ethical not as intended to abolish the ethical ideals altogether, but as a means to paving a different approach to them (in the framework of higher ethics).54 Some interpreters emphasize the Christian nature of such higher ethics. Ronald Green, for example, claims that the problem Fear and Trembling deals with lies in the realm of Christian soteriology – it is focused not on human behaviour but rather on God’s grace and redeeming power. Fear and Trembling, he says, is about the religious idea of salvation and justification through faith alone.55 One possible answer to the question regarding the meaning of ‘the ethical’ in Fear and Trembling, then, is that it amounts to the Hegelian ethical ideals, and that accordingly the notorious call to suspend the ethical is, in effect, a profound moral call for a higher, more correct, ethics. The ethics 52 53 54 55

Evans 2004: 74. Mulhall 2001: 382. See Hannay’s Introduction to his translation of Fear and Trembling (Hannay 2003a). See Green 1993. See also Mulhall 2001: 382–8, and Evans 2004: 82–4.

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that needs to be ‘suspended’ is therefore the Hegelian Sittlichkeit which (wrongly) equates between social norms (duties and institutions) and a genuine morality. However, is the ethics that Fear and Trembling refers to only the Hegelian Sittlichkeit? After all, the ‘suspended’ duties not to kill and to love one’s son seem to be valid from any ethical point of view (i.e. not only the Hegelian). This brings us to the second concern regarding ‘the ethical’: can Abraham’s distressing behaviour be affirmed in the framework of any ethical understanding? An interesting answer to this question is implied in the context of a recent discussion regarding the relations between the ethical and the religious in Fear and Trembling. This study rejects those readings that understand the ethical in Fear and Trembling as merely representing a Hegelian ethics, and offers a new interpretation of the ethical (in this text) and its relation to faith. ‘Is only Hegelian ethics “suspended”?’ 56 [A]gapic norms are integral to the ethics that is ‘suspended’ in Abraham’s faith, and not only to the faith that does the suspending. In raising the knife, or starting to sacrifice Isaac, Abraham appears to violate not only Hegelian Sittlichkeit but also the duties he would have under the religious ethic of neighbor-love.57

John J. Davenport, in his essay ‘Faith as Eschatological Trust in Fear and Trembling’, claims that Kierkegaardian faith does not wish to replace one set of ethical ideals by another. The highest ideals of ethics (such as loving one’s neighbour, let alone one’s son) are the same before and after the ‘suspension’. The crucial change consists in the relation of the ethical agent to those ideals – it consists in the way one succeeds in holding fast to them, against the background of various obstacles in realizing them. Faith is the position that allows one to trust that those highest ideals of ethics, which are ultimately beyond the reach of one’s limited powers, will nevertheless be fulfilled. Davenport calls this trust ‘eschatological’, and explains its structure as follows: (a) The future state, ultimate outcome, or final end is a victory of the good, an actualization in finite/temporal existence of the infinite/eternal ideal; the created order of existence converges with what ethically ought to be … (b) (1) Given various kinds of obstacles in their way, the relevant human agents can see no way of bringing about this victory by their own powers. 56 57

See Davenport 2008: 208. Ibid., 211.

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(2) Nevertheless, it is possible in an incalculable way by divine power, by ‘miracle’ transcending any rational prediction.58

God’s command to Abraham was therefore not the telos for the sake of which the ethical was suspended, but rather the obstacle in the way of fulfilling the ethical. God, according to Davenport’s suggestion, plays three distinct roles here: he is ‘the ground of universal ethical norms; in faith, he is also the singular source of eschatological possibilities; and in this special case, he is even the origin of the mysterious obstacle’.59 The crucial point, then, is that faith, when understood as an eschatological trust, allows us and motivates us to act morally in accordance with the important hope that even when the attainment of ethical ideals seems impossible (due to the countless obstacles that reality puts up in our way), their fulfilment is nevertheless a valid possibility. This hope, strong enough to entirely transform the way we value our existence, is rooted in the trust we have in God’s promise: ‘… “teleological suspension of the ethical” means: it is a trusting response to a divine promise concerning actual realization of ethical possibilities in this world (or in its end and remaking).’60 The suspension, then, is by no means a suspension of particular ethical ideals. Rather, it is a suspension of the human confidence regarding our powers to fulfil those ideals independently of divine transcendent help.61 This is indeed an important clarification, but at the same time Davenport’s discussion leaves questions regarding the form (and content) that both the divine promise and its eschatological fulfilment take a little obscure. As mentioned above, there is an essential difference between Abraham and someone such 58 59 60 61

Ibid., 201–2 (emphasis in the text). Ibid., 212. Ibid., 231–2 (emphasis in the text). For a discussion on the transformative power of hope, see Meirav 2009. In a way, the readings presented in the previous section also lead to this important conclusion. The Hegelian aspect that the ‘new (post-Hegelian) ethics’ aims to transcend is ultimately human confidence regarding its autonomy and its ethical independent abilities. The ‘new ethics’ that those readings advance can be also understood as focusing on ‘recovering a capacity to aim for ethical ideals by means of grace’ (Mulhall 2001: 386, and see also Green 1993). However, the strength of Davenport’s reading is, in my view, twofold. First, it clarifies the crucial – and usually blurred – idea that at no point in Fear and Trembling is there a rejection of fundamental ethical ideals (regardless of their Hegelian or nonHegelian context). Second, by clarifying the meaning of the ‘new’ ethics in terms of trusting the fulfilment of the ‘suspended’ ethics, Davenport shows, significantly, that Abraham’s faith shares the same meaning, in terms both of structure and content, with the later Christian model of faith. He thereby avoids the problematic conclusion of the other readings that call not only for post-Hegelian ethics but also for a ‘post-Abrahamic’ faith.

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as the mundane knight. While the former received a specific and direct promise from God, the latter did not; accordingly, while Abraham had strong reason to believe that Isaac would continue to be his living son, this is of course not applicable in the case of ‘mundane’ fathers. It is true that the relationship of trust between man and divinity must be based on some kind of promise, but surely this promise takes a different form from that of the specific one given to Abraham. The eschatological faith of a mundane father that loses his son, accordingly, amounts to something different from the eschatological faith of Abraham; the fulfilment of ethical ideals is expressed differently in each of these cases. I therefore suppose that when Davenport speaks of trusting the realization of ethical ideals in time, he means that the knight of faith trusts that ultimately goodness (the ideal of the good) will be fulfilled, even if the knight cannot predict or even understand the form that this goodness is about to take (note again our discussion of the film All About My Mother).62 Returning to our question regarding the ethical status of Fear and Trembling, we may conclude by saying that not only does Abraham’s faith not violate any ethical ideal, it presents the highest way of fulfilling it.63 The ideals remain the same, but our appropriation of them in the context of faith is changed completely: ‘A gestalt-shift occurs in the meaning of universal ethical ideals … although their formal content is unchanged, their ultimate significance for human life has changed.’64 Thus, the essential element that distinguishes between a merely rational approach 62

63

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At the same time, Davenport seems to emphasize (by contrast to my claim) that divine promise must be specifically given also to ‘mundane knights’. I suppose that this is rooted in his wish to underline the decisive transcendental factor in the account of ‘eschatological trust’: the foundation on which such trust is based cannot be the individual himself. Emphasizing that the basis for genuine eschatological trust cannot be immanent safeguards this kind of trust from falling into self-delusion or bad faith. Here I am, of course, in agreement with him: trusting in a way relevant to genuine faith must involve an appeal to a greater power that transcends the powers of the individual. However, as explained above, I think that the very idea of trusting already presupposes such an appeal. ‘Trusting that x will be fulfilled’ implies that the person who trusts acknowledges his limited control over the fulfilment of x. I therefore think that the issue in question here is a slightly different one. To define trust as being based on a divine promise refers to a question regarding the justification for having such a trust to begin with: what is it that justifies one’s trust of a power greater than oneself? Is it justified by some kind of revelation; or maybe by dogmatically accepting the contents of scripture as true? This is, of course, an extremely important question; but it requires a separate discussion which goes far beyond the scope of the present study. Accordingly, we can now also clarify that the test that Abraham withstands does not consist in his willingness to kill his son, but rather in his trust in God’s promise. (See again our discussion of ‘faith as trust’ above, and in particular of Adam’s interpretation on p. 98.) Davenport 2008: 218–19.

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to ethics and a religious approach (the approach of faith) is trust. An ethics that remains within the limits of human understanding and capacities alone finds itself bankrupt when facing an unfathomable obstacle on the way to fulfilling its ideals. We need the trust that is involved in faith to be capable of holding fast to the possibility of this fulfilment.65 We may now be in the position to understand why the desirable renewed relationship with the finite deserves the title ‘faith’. To use Davenport’s terminology, the ethical ideal that concerns us here is that of maintaining a relationship of love (the love of the young man for his finite princess, for example). The obstacle in the way of fulfilling this ideal is loss (in its various forms and manifestations). And finally, the way to fulfil the ideal notwithstanding the obstacle of loss is faith. Namely, the way of resignation and affirmation, the way of holding fast to the finite while completely releasing any claim on it, the way of trusting the fulfilment of even the most unattainable of our ethical wishes. Taking Fear and Trembling’s understanding of faith as our model opens a new horizon of meanings in the context of which an interesting understanding of love, and in particular romantic love, can emerge. We live in a complex reality of bestowal and deprival, and it requires much effort and sensitivity to communicate in a proper way with such a confusing reality; a reality that offers us splendid goods but sometimes also takes them away, leaving us in pain and sorrow. We therefore need the unique language of faith – profoundly attentive to our twofold bond with God and finitude – with which we can talk and listen to the world. This dialogue contains the infinite pain involved in releasing everything, but also the intense joy of getting a firm hold on everything back again. Thus, it is only faith that manages to give a real place for the existential, and ultimately religious, intuition regarding the world’s receptivity to us. This intuition is the basis for the desirable relationship – the faith-full (faith-pervaded) relationship – we should aim to sustain with everything given to us, and with the beloved other in particular. It seems then that in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard emphatically (even though indirectly) paves the way to a new understanding of romantic 65

‘The esthetic sphere is the sphere of immediacy, the ethical the sphere of requirement (and this requirement is so infinite that the individual always goes bankrupt), the religious the sphere of fulfillment, but, please note, not a fulfillment such as when one fills an alms box or a sack with gold, for repentance has specifically created a boundless space, and as a consequence the religious contradiction: simultaneously to be out on 70,000 fathoms of water and yet be joyful’ (SLW, 476–7).

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love – the double structure of faith, we saw, proves to supply a productive framework for a profound depiction and exploration of this phenomenon. Hence, we may say that in Fear and Trembling Kierkegaard offers quite a surprising angle: a religious and affirmative approach to a phenomenon which usually finds itself on the outskirts of the religious discourse (if not completely banished from it). However, four years after writing Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard published his only book that specifically and directly explores the subject of love, and his tone there seems to be completely altered. Works of Love, signed under Kierkegaard’s name (i.e. not pseudonymously), expresses a reserved, sometimes even hostile, approach to romantic love. We are therefore facing a non-simple task – can these two Kierkegaardian voices, that of Fear and Trembling and that of Works of Love, be heard together? And does their mutual composition ultimately produce a song of praise to, or of condemnation of, romantic love? We cannot elaborate on the implications of Fear and Trembling’s model of faith-like love before answering these questions, and to this the next two chapters will be devoted.

4 NEIGHBOURLY LOVE VERSUS ROMANTIC LOVE

1 Love and the works of love In the second paragraph of the Preface to Works of Love Kierkegaard states the following: these ‘are Christian deliberations’, he says, ‘therefore not about love, but about works of love’ (WL, 3, emphasis in the text). This brief but emphatic declaration delineates the scope of the long discussion in the book before us: first, it is Christian in character and second (in accordance with the first point), it is about works of love and not about love. However, this should make us wonder: what is the difference between love and its works and why does Kierkegaard wish to emphasize that the latter is the business of Christianity? One of the prominent tasks that Works of Love takes upon itself is to clarify the confusion regarding the nature of true love, as against the way the poets understand it. Kierkegaard believes that the common understanding of love – rooted in and advanced by the poets’ praises of it – is a confused and misleading understanding, and that only a Christian point of view can overcome this confusion. At the same time, Kierkegaard is not interested in conducting a conceptual (or metaphysical) analysis that will fathom the mysterious essence of love, examine it from every possible angle, and conclude with a clear-cut definition of it. Rather, he is interested in the way love expresses itself in our life, in the way it shapes our existence and drives us to action: he is interested in the acts of love, in its works. Therefore, the objective of Kierkegaard’s inquiry is an exploration of the works of love 109

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(rather than a conceptual examination or a metaphysical understanding of love), and he believes that this goal is the task of Christianity (and not of poetry or of conventional, i.e. Hegelian, philosophy). Moreover, given Kierkegaard’s point of departure – he begins his discussion by presenting love as a deeply impenetrable phenomenon – we may infer that the works of love (i.e. the various ways in which love expresses itself in the life of one who loves) are our only access to love. How else can we inquire into something which is ‘essentially indescribable’ (ibid., emphasis in the text), and about which Kierkegaard says the following: Where does love come from, where does it have its origin and its source, where is the place it has its abode from which it flows? Yes, this place is hidden or is secret. There is a place in a person’s innermost being; from this place flows the life of love … But you cannot see this place; however deeply you penetrate, the origin eludes you in remoteness and hiddenness. (WL, 8–9)

We can say that Kierkegaard implicitly portrays love as a mysterious power with two facets: one is hidden, the other manifested in our works. Love itself is invisible; hence the only way to discern love is in the works infused by it. We can ‘see’ love only by means of the way in which it makes us work.1 The one thing that Kierkegaard is willing to say about this mysterious power is that it originates in God: Just as the quiet lake originates deep down in hidden springs no eye has seen, so also does a person’s love originate even more deeply in God’s love … Just as the quiet lake originates darkly in the deep spring, so a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love. Just as the quiet lake invites you to contemplate it but by the reflected image of darkness prevents you from seeing through it, so also the mysterious origin of love in God’s love prevents you from seeing its ground. (WL, 9–10)

We can cautiously depict the following picture. Love is a driving power implanted in us by God, but it is hidden.2 It is the basis for all the possible manifestations of love; but in itself, this fundamental power is unfathomable. Being thus hidden and unfathomable, we can inquire only into its various manifestations: that is, only into the way that this fundamental 1

2

However, this does not mean that the work of love always bears recognizable fruit. Sometimes it does, sometimes it does not, and sometimes there are beautiful fruits – but no love. There is not a simple and necessary connection between the work of love and its results. See the First Deliberation: Love’s Hidden Life and Its Recognizability by Its Fruits. ‘God … has placed love in the human being’ (WL, 126; see Ferreira 2008: 107).

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love expresses itself in our works (our works of love).3 These works may sometimes bear recognizable fruit, but not necessarily. Hence, the focus of our investigation should be the works of love (rather than the hidden power of love or its recognizable fruits). In the picture that I suggest here, then, there are four elements to be distinguished (we can also think of them in terms of four levels). First, there is the source of love: that is, God. Second, there is the love that God places within us, the mysterious power that operates in us, the hidden ground of our works: that is, love itself. Third, there are the manifestations of love, the expressions of that mysterious power: that is, the works of love. And finally (but not necessarily), there are the results of the works: that is, the fruits of love. However, despite drawing this essential (and quite illuminating) distinction between love and its works, Kierkegaard does not seem to elaborate on this idea or make much use of it in his exploration of the subject matter of love. He uses the Danish word for love – ‘Kjerlighed’ – whenever he speaks of true love (love as it should be), but he does not clarify whether it denotes the source of love (that is, God as love), or the hidden power of love (that is, love itself), or the manifestation of love (that is, the works of love). As a matter of fact, it seems that he uses the word ‘Kjerlighed’ for indicating all the three: It is noteworthy that Kjerlighed is the immediate love by which we are loved by God and which enables us to love others – that is, Kierkegaard uses the same Danish word (Kjerlighed) to refer to (1) God as love, (2) the love placed in us by God, as well as (3) the neighbor-love we are commanded to express. The love that Kierkegaard says is commanded by God is described by the same word as the love that is God (Kjerlighed) prior to any specification into erotic love and non erotic love.4

Now, for reasons that will become explicit later, I claim that the distinction between love and its works should be kept as clear as possible. I therefore suggest that we use the word ‘Kjerlighed’ in a narrower, more focused, way. In what follows I will use the word ‘Kjerlighed’ to indicate only one of its (three) meanings; I will use it to indicate the hidden power of love, ‘the love placed in us by God’, the fundamental love: that is, love itself (rather than its manifestations/works). Kjerlighed, then, is the hidden ground of every possible manifestation of love, and as such cannot be the subject of our 3

4

Roughly put, we may suggest that Kierkegaard is actually saying that love, being a mysterious or even divine power, cannot be the subject of our discussion. We cannot talk about love, we can only talk about the works of love: namely, about the various ways in which this power is present in our life, shaping our essential relationships with ourselves and with the others surrounding us. Ferreira 2008: 107 (emphasis in the original).

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inquiry: only its manifestations can. What are the manifestations of Kjerlighed like, then? What are the works of love? When we think of the possible human manifestations of love, two major types are noticeable: the neighbourly (non-preferential) kind of love on the one hand, and the preferential kind (for example, romantic love), on the other.5 As we will soon see, Works of Love presents quite a confused and inconsistent account of the latter: Kierkegaard sharply contrasts between neighbourly and preferential love, but at the same time tries to incorporate the latter (preferential love) into the former (neighbourly love). While ultimately wishing to affirm the legitimacy of the preferential kind of love, Kierkegaard insists that there is only one true manifestation, only one genuine love: the Christian, neighbourly, non-preferential kind of love. ‘Christianly’, he says, ‘the entire distinction between the different kinds of love is essentially abolished … Christianity … knows only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, but this can lie at the base of and be present in every other expression of love’ (WL, 143, 146). We can see that Kierkegaard actually identifies the neighbourly manifestation of love (i.e. one of the works of Kjerlighed) with the fundamental power of love that ‘lie[s] at the base of … every other expression of love’ (i.e. Kjerlighed itself).6 In Works of Love, I claim, Kierkegaard conflates between Kjerlighed and neighbourly love, thereby sowing the seeds that soon develop into the inconsistency typifying this important work. But let us not jump ahead of ourselves and point at the direction of the solution before presenting the problem. Let us then put aside for the time being the distinction between love and its various manifestations (i.e. between Kjerlighed and its different works), and focus on Kierkegaard’s account of neighbourly, non-preferential love as the one true love. Our question, accordingly, will be how does Kierkegaard, in the context of this account, understand the status of romantic, preferential love?7 5

6 7

The list of deeds that Kierkegaard sometimes seems to consider as works of love (for example, ‘giving to charity, visiting the widow, and clothing the naked’, WL, 13), or examines as a work of love (for example, hope, mercifulness, or praising love – see respectively deliberations III, VII, X of the second series) should be considered as falling under these two categories. When love is manifested in a neighbourly way, the works of love may be expressed in giving to charity or in being merciful; when love is manifested in, say, a romantic (i.e. preferential) way, the works of love may be expressed in hope or in praising love. To put it differently, he does not seem to clarify whether from his point of view neighbourly love is the origin of love (love itself: Kjerlighed), or a work of love. The following two sections form a part of my essay ‘Two Forms of Love: The Problem of Preferential Love in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love’ (Krishek 2008). Minor changes have been made in the present version.

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2 Kierkegaard’s ambivalent position Non-preferential love versus preferential love Erotic love is based on a drive that, transfigured into an inclination, has its … expression in this – there is but one and only one beloved in the whole world … Christian love teaches us to love all people, unconditionally all. (WL, 49) Erotic love and friendship are preferential love and the passion of preferential love; Christian love is self-denial’s love. (WL, 52, emphasis in the text)

Kierkegaard draws a clear division here between preferential love and Christian love. The division is defined as follows: erotic love and friendship belong to the category of preferential love, which is characterized by exclusivity (‘there is but one and only one beloved’) and is based on preference, while the other category – that of Christian love – is characterized by equality (‘teaches us to love all people’) and is based on selfdenial. Christian love is the love expressed in the commandment ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself’ (Matthew 22:39) and this ‘shall’, this duty, is ‘the very mark of Christian love’ (WL, 24). Christian love is therefore the duty to love the neighbour, any neighbour, as one loves oneself, while preferential love is the love directed at one special neighbour who, by virtue of preference, has a different status from that of all the other neighbours. For the sake of simplicity, and to keep the division as clear as possible, in what follows I shall refer to Christian love as neighbourly love and to preferential love, occasionally, as special love. Also, I will refer frequently to ‘romantic love’ as a typical representative of this category (since of all the various kinds of preferential love, romantic love is the specific subject of our inquiry). Why does Kierkegaard consider these two kinds of love – the neighbourly and the preferential – to be so distinctively different? Kierkegaard continually restricts his reservation towards preferential loves to the way ‘the poet understands them’ (WL, 50). That is to say (at least on the face of it) that preferential love is excluded from the category of neighbourly love only as far as it is understood in the way the poet understands it. We can therefore read between the lines that erotic love and friendship are not dismissed altogether but only as long as they are understood in the non-Christian (or ‘pagan’ as Kierkegaard calls it) manner of the poet. This, of course, paves the way for the affirmation of a different – that is, Christian, neighbourly – understanding of preferential love, but it raises two questions. First, what is wrong with the poet’s

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pagan understanding of preferential love? Second, what is the alternative, that is, what does the new, neighbourly manifestation of preferential love look like? My claim is that although Kierkegaard answers the first question, he does not – and, if he wants to be consistent, cannot – give a satisfactory answer to the second. However, let us begin with the first question: what is wrong with the poet’s pagan understanding of preferential love? ‘[W]hat paganism called love, as distinguished from self-love, was preference. But … passionate preference is essentially another form of self-love’ (WL, 53). Paganism, Kierkegaard explains, distinguished between self-love and true love by recognizing the latter in the passionate preference of erotic love and friendship: to love one’s beloved or friend passionately is to love another person (rather than oneself) and therefore it is (true) love (and not self-love). However, in sharp contrast with paganism, Christianity considers preferential love – the passionate love for one’s beloved or friend – to be ‘another form of self-love’. Christianity ‘has misgivings about erotic love and friendship’, then, because Christianity rejects self-love (ibid., 53). It is the element of selfishness in preferential love that neighbourly love – which is, after all, self-denial’s love – wishes ‘to root out’: ‘only when one loves the neighbor, only then is the selfishness in preferential love rooted out’, Kierkegaard says at the very beginning of the deliberation (ibid., 44, emphasis in the text). But what constitutes the element of selfishness in preferential love? In an earlier stage of the book Kierkegaard declares: What a difference there is between the play of feelings, drives, inclinations, and passions, in short, that play of the powers of immediacy, that celebrated glory of poetry in smiles or in tears, in desire or in want – what a difference between this and the earnestness of eternity, the earnestness of the commandment in spirit and truth, in honesty and self-denial! (WL, 25)

It seems reasonable to assume that Kierkegaard considers those elements (‘feelings, drives, inclinations, and passions … the powers of immediacy’) to constitute the selfishness that distinguishes between preferential love and neighbourly love, because they are indeed concerned exclusively with the self and its gratification. Moreover, this fits in well with the logic that differentiates between preferential love and neighbourly love: we saw above that Kierkegaard defines neighbourly love as self-denial’s love (‘Christian love is self-denial’s love’, ibid., 52) and this, quite reasonably, must oppose the kind of love that is focused on the self. Are we to conclude, then, that inclinations and desires and everything connected

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to the well-being of the self are to be eliminated when one is to love properly (that is, in the neighbourly way)? Is the self simply to be denied? The picture is more complicated than that. After all, the self plays a crucial part in the commandment that reads ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself ’. There is a need, then, to distinguish between at least two different ways of relating to the self, between two kinds of self-love: the kind of self-love referred to in the commandment, and the kind of self-love Kierkegaard considers as selfish. Different kinds of self-love What does it mean to love somebody as one loves oneself? What does it mean to love oneself in a way (the proper way) that can and should be applied in our relationship to the neighbour? I follow M. Jamie Ferreira’s suggestion to understand this kind of self-love in terms of respect and of wishing the good for ourselves, and I accept her emphasis on the importance of noting the distinction that Kierkegaard makes between ‘selfish self-love’ and ‘proper self-love’.8 Ferreira explains the difference between these two self-loves as follows: ‘Kierkegaard distinguishes between two forms of self-love: a “selfish,” exclusive love of self, which is at odds with the good of the other, and a “proper,” inclusive love of self, which both encompasses the good of the other and is the measure of the good of the other’ (Ferreira 2001: 35). However, is this a satisfactory characterization? Is the criterion expressed here – that is, not to be ‘at odds with the good of the other’ – accurate enough to distinguish unselfish (that is, proper) self-love from selfish self-love? Taking this as our guiding rule does not explain, for example, why passionate romantic love (being ‘the play of feelings, drives, inclinations, and passions’) should be considered by Kierkegaard to be selfish (and it seems that it is, given the contrast he outlines between passions and the ‘earnestness’ of neighbourly love – see again the quotation above). After all, from the point of view of one’s neighbour there is nothing offensive (in terms of respect and wishing his well-being) in loving one’s beloved passionately. It seems that Kierkegaard’s objection to preferential love goes beyond a strictly blatant violation of the good of the neighbour. In order to understand what might be the problematic element in preferential love we therefore need to qualify the differences 8

See Ferreira 2001: 31–4. I refer in detail to Ferreira’s interpretation below.

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between selfish self-love and proper self-love more carefully, and distinguish between three kinds of self-love: (a) Selfish self-love. Self-love which is indeed ‘at odds with the good of the other’: using the other as a means for one’s selfish satisfactions or acting towards achieving one’s own good regardless of the effect it has on the other. (b) Proper qualified self-love. A restricted form of self-love, which is the selflove referred to in the commandment. This kind of self-love is understood in terms of respect and wishing one’s well-being, in a narrow sense of ‘well-being’ (that is, a well-being stripped of most of its ‘embodied’ aspects, such as responsiveness and sensitivity to inclinations, desires, and preferences). (c) Proper unqualified self-love. Acting to fulfil one’s well-being, in a broader sense of ‘well-being’ (which includes sensitivity to the self’s inclinations, desires, and preferences), with a constant consideration of the good of the other. That is, fulfilling one’s own ‘self-focused’ concerns as long as they are not ‘at odds with the good of the other’. On the face of it, self-love (b) and self-love (c) seem to be very close to each other: after all, there is no contradiction between the elements constituting the broader kind of self-love (elements concerned with satisfying one’s inclinations and desires: the basis for preferential love), and those constituting the narrower one (elements concerned with respect for the self and for the other). Indeed, this seemingly reasonable combination between the two kinds of self-love provides the grounds for the justification of preferential love, to be found later in the text. However, as I aim to show, from Kierkegaard’s point of view the two cannot really be in harmony. Neighbourly love, which in his understanding is self-denial’s love, can work well with self-love only when self-love is understood in the manner of (b). Of course, this does not mean that self-love in the manner of (c) should be ruled out; but as long as self-denial is the dominant structure of the love which Kierkegaard advocates here, self-love in the manner of (c) – that is, self-love which is concerned also with the gratification of one’s self-focused wishes (even if it does not come explicitly at the expense of the other) – should at least be set aside as marginal or secondary. In other words, even if self-love in the manner of (c) is not explicitly condemned by Kierkegaard, he implicitly expresses ambivalence towards it. We get the impression that, from Kierkegaard’s point of view, desires and feelings and inclinations are something that he needs to tolerate: he has no choice but to accept them (because he definitely does not wish to ignore or

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deny our corporeal, worldly existence; see for example WL, 52) – but it is hard to say that he does this enthusiastically. In Works of Love, I claim, Kierkegaard is reluctant to endorse what I shall later call a ‘full concreteness’ of the self: a concreteness which is manifested in the embodiment of the self, whose spirituality is expressed also in a worldly, natural (bodily and self-related) manner. This ambivalence towards the self is at the root of Kierkegaard’s ambivalence towards preferential love. The crux of the matter, then, is the contrast (or at least the tension) between a denial of the self (arguably the basis for neighbourly love), and an affirmation – a full affirmation – of it (arguably the basis for preferential love). Does Kierkegaard allow for an affirmation that unapologetically takes into consideration self-concerned, natural, and spontaneous desires, or does he, ultimately, consider this aspect of the self to be ‘selfish’?9 To love the neighbor, however, is self-denial’s love, and self-denial simply drives out all preferential love just as it drives out all self-love … Even if passionate preference had no other selfishness in it, it would still have this, that consciously or unconsciously there is self-willfulness in it. (WL, 55) [I]n preferential love there is a natural determinant (drive, inclination) and self-love … The spirit’s love, in contrast, takes away from myself all natural determinants and all self-love. (WL, 56)

It seems that for Kierkegaard any form of preference, by virtue of the ‘natural determinants’ that characterize it, amounts to selfishness (even if only in the form of ‘self-willfulness’, he says, without justifying this problematic statement).10 Accordingly, Kierkegaard seems to posit ‘spirit’s love’ against ‘all self-love’ and by doing this to rule out the possibility of unqualified self-love (self-love (c)): self-love that includes attention to ‘natural determinants’ such as desires, feelings, and inclinations. Works of Love is rich in critical denunciations of preferential love. At the same time, it is clear that Kierkegaard wishes to affirm the special relationships we all have in our lives (with members of our families, with lovers and with friends). He says: 9

10

To avoid confusion, whenever referring to the self-love related to the fully affirmed self (i.e. the kind of self-love about which Kierkegaard is ambivalent), I will use the qualification ‘self-love (c)’. It is true that preference is related to identification and manifestation of one’s will – but does this necessarily amount to ‘self-willfulness’? Sensitivity to one’s wishes and desires, sensitivity to ‘what one wants’, is not essentially connected to a blatant, non-humble, and selfish assertion of the will, as Kierkegaard’s use of ‘self-willfulness’ here implies. I return to the problematic identification between self-willfulness and selfishness in the next chapter.

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[L]ove the beloved faithfully and tenderly, but let love for the neighbor be the sanctifying element in your union’s covenant with God. Love your friend honestly and devotedly, but let love for the neighbor be what you learn from each other in your friendship’s confidential relationship with God! (WL, 62)

Kierkegaard’s welcoming of preferential love is quite evident here: he explicitly posits it on the side of neighbourly love and declares the possibility of their coexistence. However, his earlier (and insistent) opposition between preferential and neighbourly loves indicates his ambivalence towards ‘unqualified’ self-love (self-love (c)) – and towards preferential love (to which self-love (c) is the basis) thereby. Although Kierkegaard accepts the kind of self-love that allows for attending to one’s – bodily and emotional – good, his heart, so to speak, is in the self-love of the commandment (that is, the kind of self-love that allows only for a partial self; a self whose principal relation to himself is that of denial, and whose love for himself basically amounts to a ‘feeling’ of respect). This ambivalence results in a series of assertions regarding preferential love that are undoubtedly in tension with each other. How are we to address this ambivalence? Is the ambivalence in Kierkegaard’s position resolvable? Kierkegaard’s harsh attitude towards preferential love in the context of Works of Love has earned him more than once the severe charge of presenting a non-human and undesirable model of love.11 In recent years, on the other hand, several impressive attempts have been made to amend Works of Love’s notorious reputation and to bring to light its edifying nature and its important insights regarding human love. However, despite this growing interest in Works of Love, the problem of Kierkegaard’s understanding of preferential love has not received the attention it deserves. Researchers either focus their attention on the moral and religious nature of neighbourly love alone or, on the relatively rare occasions where romantic (that is, preferential) love is the focus of the research, the tension in Kierkegaard’s position with regard to this kind of love is quite disregarded.12 An example of a study which, though acknowledging the tension in Kierkegaard’s understanding of preferential love, refrains from giving it 11 12

See, for example, Adorno 1940; Løgstrup 1997; Singer 1987. See Green and Ellis 1999 and Hall 2002 as an example of the latter. These studies take neighbourly love to be the essential model for romantic love, and do not pay enough attention to the inconsistency in Kierkegaard’s position with regard to the relations between these two manifestations of love. I elaborate on Hall’s reading below.

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the thorough consideration it requires, is Sylvia Walsh’s ‘Forming the Heart: The Role of Love in Kierkegaard’s Thought’. In this essay Walsh emphasizes that Kierkegaard does not object to preferential loves as such but only to the element of selfishness in them. This selfishness, according to Walsh’s understanding, does not consist in our ‘natural inclinations, needs, and desires’, and therefore a purified preferential love is the form that neighbourly love takes in the context of our special, ‘natural’ loves.13 At the same time, however, Walsh admits that this model is not entirely affirmed by Kierkegaard, and she acknowledges that there appears to be a certain ambivalence toward natural love in Kierkegaard’s thought. He says that Christianity is not opposed to natural inclination as such, only to the selfishness in it, yet he does not seem to recognize any ability on the part of natural love to love unselfishly.14

Moreover, Walsh asks the important question of whether preferential loves, by virtue of their preference, do not ‘remain fundamentally selfish in nature’ (ibid., 240) (I suppose that she means selfishness in the sense of what I have termed self-love (c)), and her answer reflects her own ambivalence with regard to the significance and value of preferential loves. After all, it is the element of preference in our special loves that establishes the uniqueness, the different nature, of those loves directed at their ‘preferred’ objects (such as the beloved and the friend). But Walsh, despite conceding to the essentiality of preference in these loves, presents the difference created by preference as inessential. ‘[W]hile we certainly love persons in our special relations differently from the way we love others’, she says, ‘this difference is not essential, since we love them fundamentally as we love others, that is, as a neighbor.’15 In other words, Walsh considers preferential loves to be only an inessential expression of neighbourly love, which means not only a marginalizing of preferential loves but also a disregarding of the fundamental clash between equality (the demand of neighbourly love) and preference (the demand of special love). Accordingly, she can state the following: ‘This [i.e. neighbourly love] seems to be for Kierkegaard the decisive factor in the transformation of erotic love that rids it of selfish exclusivity and establishes equality in love while preserving special relations.’16 13 14 15 16

Walsh 1988: 239. Ibid., 248. Ibid., 241. Ibid.

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However, this leaves us with two related problems. First, can we really rid ourselves of what Kierkegaard tends to understand as ‘selfishness’, without this resulting in the elimination of the special, preferential loves that we want to keep (since, as we saw above, it seems that Kierkegaard is reluctant to unequivocally affirm as unselfish one’s desires and inclinations and preferences – that is, everything that constitutes special loves as such)? And second, how can the same love (neighbourly love) be at the same time equal and special? If neighbourly love should be directed equally at everybody, what does this love look like when it is directed at those special people in our lives? Is this love still the same? What then makes this special love special? To put it as succinctly as possible: can we really keep our special (that is, preferential and supposedly ‘selfish’) loves – say, our romantic loves – in the framework of being allowed to love only in a neighbourly (that is, equal and self-denying) manner? In my view, this twofold problem – that is, Kierkegaard’s implicit reluctance to affirm as unselfish the essential self-relating aspects of our embodied, finite existence; and his explicit insistence on seeing selfdenying neighbourly love as the overarching model for all human loves, including special, preferential loves – forms the basis of his conflicting understanding of preferential love and explains the ambivalence in his position. Is this ambivalence resolvable? An in-depth treatment of this problem was made by M. Jamie Ferreira in her commentary on Works of Love. Love’s Grateful Striving is an extensive, detailed, and the most comprehensive study of Works of Love to date, including an all-embracing response to the variety of former readings of this book. Accordingly, in the argument I put forward here against Kierkegaard, Ferreira will be my most important opponent. 3 M. Jamie Ferreira’s resolution Equality and preferentiality What is at stake for Kierkegaard is not that preferential love should be excluded but that it should not be the determinant of responsibility for the other. The discussion of preference is meant to show that love that is restricted to preference will not apprehend people as equals.17

According to Ferreira, Kierkegaard’s assertions against preferential love should be interpreted as attesting to his concern with equality and not as a 17

Ferreira 2001: 46.

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manifestation of his rejection of preferential love. Indeed, Ferreira has a solid textual ground for declaring that ‘Kierkegaard is offering neither an attack on all self-love nor a denial of the legitimate role of preference and inclination in erotic love and friendship’ – but can she reconcile the latter (textual indications as to the legitimacy of preferential love) with the former (assertions against preferential love)?18 Ferreira’s claim is that ‘[l]ove of neighbor is distinguished from preferential love precisely because neighbor is the category of equality before God and preferential love does not do justice to equality’.19 Therefore, the emphasis in the text should be understood as an emphasis against loving only by way of preferential love. The danger that Kierkegaard is pointing out here, Ferreira says, is the danger of restricting ourselves to loving only those we are inclined to love, only those we love naturally and easily – that is, only those we love preferentially.20 The warnings against preferential love, then, are warnings against exclusion. Since ‘[t]he radical commitment to human equality’ is the crucial thing for Kierkegaard (‘at the heart of Kierkegaard’s ethic’), his negative position against preferential love should not be understood as an unequivocal rejection of preferential love but rather as an indication of ‘the obligation to care for all without exclusion’.21 Ferreira, then, takes the antagonism in Kierkegaard’s discussion of preferential love and reads it as an affirmation of the importance of equality in his ethics. In a sense she turns the ‘no’ (to preferential love) into a ‘yes’ (to equality) and thus finds a way to reconcile Kierkegaard’s initial rejection of preferential love with his later affirmation of the same thing. Preferential love is not rejected for being preferential but only for the danger it posits to our duty to love everybody with no exception. Therefore, as long as we are guided by this duty there is nothing wrong with preferential love. We are allowed to love ‘preferentially’, as long as we (first and foremost) love dutifully. On the face of it, this seems to be a reasonable demand. It sounds perfectly plausible to affirm preferential love as long as we have neighbourly love as the basis on which we construct, as it were, our preferential loves. But what does this really mean? Can it really work – can preferential love be subsumed under neighbourly love without compromising either the meaning of preferential love (as preferential) or the rigorousness of the ‘commitment to human equality’? 18 19 20 21

Ibid., 44. Ibid. Ibid., 46, 52. Ibid., 47, 44.

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If we expect neighbourly love – which is presented by Kierkegaard as essentially non-preferential – to present the general structure of love (that is, to constitute the essential model for love) – what does this imply with regard to the essential element of preferentiality in special loves? To say that love is essentially non-preferential, and yet that one of its manifestations is preferential, is to contradict oneself. Neither Kierkegaard nor Ferreira refers to this contradiction that seems to be implied by their suggestion. Therefore, although I agree with Ferreira that Kierkegaard indeed affirms preferential love, I do not agree with her that this affirmation is consistent with his basic position. If taken seriously, I claim, the ‘radical commitment to equality’, that Works of Love posits as the ground for any form of love, implies the exclusion of preferential love. Does Works of Love allow for equality and preference to coincide? 22 Kierkegaard is very specific about the meaning of neighbourly love with regard to equality and preference: Love for the neighbor is therefore the eternal equality in loving, but the eternal equality is the opposite of preference … Equality is simply not to make distinctions, and eternal equality is unconditionally not to make the slightest distinction, unqualifiedly not to make the slightest distinction. Preference, on the other hand, is to make distinctions; passionate preference is unqualifiedly to make distinctions. (WL, 58, emphasis in the text)

With Ferreira’s defence of Kierkegaard in mind, as well as Kierkegaard’s own words in favour of preferential love, how are we to understand the above uncompromising demand for equality that presents preferential love as being at odds with neighbourly love? Moreover, Kierkegaard makes it clear, and reasonably so, that loving preferentially means to posit one person above all the rest. Erotic love and friendship, he says, are based on preference: to love this one person above all others, to love him in contrast to all others … The Christian doctrine, on the contrary, is to love the neighbor, to love the whole human race, all people, even the enemy, and not to make exceptions, neither of preference nor of aversion. (WL, 19)

Thus, if loving equally means ‘not to make exceptions’ and this means precisely that one must not accept any hierarchy in the way in which one 22

See ibid., 45.

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loves, how can preferential love be affirmed in the framework of neighbourly love? To address this same matter from a slightly different angle, let us remind ourselves of Ferreira’s explanation. As we saw in the previous section she says that preferential love is acceptable as long as it does not abuse my general duty towards the neighbour. In other words, to love preferentially is adequate on the condition that it does not ‘blind’ me to the neighbour’s needs.23 However, according to this criterion, it is not clear why Kierkegaard should be worried about the possibility of loving one person above everyone else. On the face of it, loving one’s beloved more than (that is, above) one’s neighbour does not mean – at least not necessarily – that one is blind towards one’s neighbour. One can love one’s beloved ‘above all others’ and yet be sensitive and responsible and caring for one’s neighbour and help him in his need. There is no contradiction here. Kierkegaard, however, insists that there is. Note that he couples ‘above all others’ with ‘in contrast to all others’: in his view, to love someone ‘more’ necessarily entails blindness towards the rest. What does he mean by that? I think that we can see the problem he is referring to by imagining a simple situation, familiar from our daily experience. The duty to love my annoying neighbour who lives upstairs means that despite his being rude and noisy and unpleasant, despite the fact that I do not really like him, I have a duty to care about him, to see him as an equal human being, to feel compassion towards him and to help him if he is in need. But now suppose that I have not only been afflicted with a disagreeable neighbour, but also blessed with a good friend that I love dearly. Loving my friend preferentially does not mean that I am blind to my upstairs neighbour and that if he needed help I would not give him this help. However, loving my friend preferentially does mean that the well-being of my friend is of a more focused concern to me, and sadly – since we are limited creatures (in time and abilities) who cannot dedicate our maximal efforts to everyone – it also means that I choose my friend (by virtue of my preference which gives my friend his special status)above my neighbour. Now, if Kierkegaard is unwilling to accept the appropriateness of treating the friend and the neighbour in such a different manner (and it seems that he is indeed unwilling), but still insists on maintaining that preferential love is legitimate, he has to explain what makes this legitimate (that is, unselfish, neighbourly) form of preferential love ‘preferential’. Since he does not explain this (that is, he does not provide an alternative account of a legitimate preferential love), and yet attacks preferential love 23

See Ferreira’s discussion of ‘The Blindness of Preference’ (ibid., 50).

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in the way he does and then affirms it in the way he does – we are justified in accusing him of inconsistency. Ferreira’s interpretation fails to address this inconsistency because the answer she gives (preferential love is acceptable as long as it does not result in blindness towards the neighbour) does not tackle the problem that the situation described above posits with regard to the demand for equality. That is, the problem that in spite of not being blind to my neighbour, loving preferentially means necessarily that I look differently at my friend and love him in a different way (an ‘unequal’ way) from that in which I love my neighbour. The result of the demand to love in the same way (in the neighbourly, non-preferential, equal way) all the different objects of love in our lives, then, is that we leave no real room for the (existing) differences between preferential and non-preferential loves. Therefore, as long as neighbourly love is expected to be the ruling, decisive model for love – any love – it is impossible to present those special loves that we call ‘preferential’ as legitimate forms of love: that is, as anything other than a failure to love correctly, or a distortion of correct love. Accordingly, Kierkegaard’s – and Ferreira’s – attempt to present those loves as legitimate, while insisting on taking neighbourly love as the model for any love, is precisely the cause of the inconsistency in their position. Ultimately, given their insistence on one and the same equal love for all, it is not very clear what their suggestion – to love by way of both duty and preference – amounts to. After all, how can I love my romantic beloved (assuming that this is a love that is by definition preferential) by virtue of a love which is essentially and decisively non-preferential? In answer to the question that I posited in the title of this section I would therefore say that no, Works of Love does not allow equality and preference to coincide. However, this does not mean that they cannot coincide in principle. Works of Love does not allow them to coincide because it insists on structuring the model of love (that is, the one true love of which all the other loves are various manifestations) in terms of self-denial and nonpreferentiality. But perhaps this is misleading: perhaps we should think of love as being structured differently, in the shape of the double movement of faith? I shall return to this suggestion in the next chapter, but first let us see how Ferreira might have responded to my criticism. A possible response to my criticism and an answer Although Ferreira herself uses the term ‘preference’ when approving special loves (under the condition of not violating equality), it now

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seems that she objects to preference after all: ‘the descriptions of the fulfillment of love that begin here support the idea of an impartiality (or equal regard) that includes loving the differences (even while it excludes preference)’.24 Ferreira wants to include in Works of Love’s model of love a special attention to concreteness and differences – but at the same time she wants, in compliance with Works of Love, to exclude preference. She therefore limits the meaning of preference to the phenomenological fact that there are people who are closer to us than others, people ‘who constitute our arena for moral action’.25 She insists that the fact that proximity indeed influences the way we act (in terms of who we give our help and attention to – and remember the example of the neighbour and the friend that I mentioned above) does not imply preference. She asks: ‘Does Kierkegaard’s acknowledgment of the fact that we are situated in a particular historical and spatial context amount to a disguised expression of preference that is inconsistent with equality?’26 And she answers: In the second deliberation, as we saw, Kierkegaard claims that preference is self-loving because even if it is not selfish, it remains an expression of ‘self-willfulness’ and ‘arbitrariness’ … In the fourth deliberation, on the contrary, the phrase ‘those once given or chosen,’ which he repeats (pp. 159, 166), explicitly excludes the dimensions of willfulness or arbitrariness that constitute the preference to be avoided.27

‘Once given or chosen’, then, is the logic behind the ‘new’, justified preference (it explains what constitutes our ‘arena for moral action’), and this new condition for close, ‘preferred’ relationships substitutes the ‘preference to be avoided’. However, is ‘once given or chosen’ strong enough to explain the different, unique commitment and love that we feel towards the people who constitute our close circle (that is, ‘our arena for moral action’)? What explains the ‘choice’ (in the ‘once chosen’), for example? Can the ‘forbidden’ preference (which we are instructed ‘to avoid’) be taken out of the picture when we try to explain the phenomenological fact of being closer to some people than to others (and of choosing some and not others)? Moreover, Ferreira emphasizes that the love discussed here (i.e. in Works of Love) is sensitive to differences. From this perspective the 24 25 26 27

Ibid., 106, emphasis mine. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 106–7.

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different loves are explained in terms of different responses to distinct objects of love: We can assume that seeing a person as she is, if she is our daughter or wife, will mean seeing her as our daughter or wife. The particularities of the relation must make some difference in the character of our response, both in terms of what is seen to be needed by those to whom we stand in special relations and what I can more easily do for them because of proximity or greater knowledge of their situation.28

It seems, then, that Ferreira’s answer to my criticism – a criticism that emphasizes the importance of preference for explaining the phenomenological reality in which, for example, one’s love for one’s wife is different from one’s love for one’s neighbour – could be that dismissing preferences does not entail dismissing the uniqueness and distinctiveness of different forms of love. Even though one loves without making preferences, one loves different persons distinctively and distinguishably. She refers in this context to Kierkegaard’s effective example with respect to our love of nature: ‘Just recollect what you yourself have so often delighted in looking at, recollect the beauty of the meadows! There is no difference in the love, no, none – yet what a difference in the flowers!’ (WL, 269–70).29 However, in my view, these beautiful words capture precisely the problem I am trying to indicate: I do not claim that neighbourly love is not sensitive to the differences between the distinctive objects at which it is directed; I do not claim that this love unifies all the concrete persons into one abstract object. The problem with this model of love is not that it implies sameness in the object of love (or, in Ferreira’s terms, blindness to differences and concreteness) – but rather that it implies the sameness of the love itself. Eventually, the only explanation Ferreira offers as regards the nature of the difference in the love itself (that is, the difference, for example, between love for one’s spouse or friend and love for one’s neighbour) is in terms of a ‘responsiveness to different needs’. But is this strong enough to explain the difference between the love I feel for my romantic beloved and the love I feel for my neighbour? I think not. Ferreira’s resolution, to conclude, is therefore unsatisfactory for several reasons. To begin with, her account does not explain why the difference in roles (which, from her point of view, serves to explain the 28 29

Ibid., 112. Ferreira’s reference to this quote is on p. 112.

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difference between love for neighbour and love for friend or for spouse, for example) is formed in the first place; she does not explain why some people become my friends or my spouse. After all, the needs of the friend or the spouse are presumably generated, to a large extent, by the friendship itself; the friend needs my advice or empathy because I am his friend, and not the other way round (it is not because he needs my advice that I become his friend). Ferreira’s account presupposes that a choice has been made, by me and by the other people involved (determining that this will be my friend, this my spouse), but her account cannot explain why this choice is made. Now, the lack of explanation here is of course consistent with her reluctance to affirm preference. For choice is essentially connected with preference: with the inclinations, emotions, and personal needs of the one who chooses, the one who loves. However, Ferreira’s account is entirely in terms of the other’s (i.e. the object of my love) needs, and my ability to answer those needs. It leaves no room for the role of my needs in forming preferential relationships of love. Finally, Ferreira’s account assimilates the difference between my relations to a mere neighbour and to a friend or spouse, to the difference between my relations to different neighbours (such as the king, the poor man, the sick man). In the latter case it is perhaps plausible to describe the differences as different expressions of the same, equal attitude of love (that changes according to the neighbour’s needs). However, it seems to miss something crucial to say that my love for the beloved is the same attitude (directed towards persons with different needs) as the attitude towards the neighbour. For in the case of my beloved, I not only give something different, I also, crucially, want something different (independently of my beloved’s needs) from what I want in the case of the neighbour. This different wanting, this different quality and intensity of wanting, is precisely what constitutes my love for my beloved as preferential. Let us think of romantic love. It is true that neighbourly love may be described as a way of attending to the intrinsic value of another person (the infinite value that all human beings share equally), and of responding to the needs of the other person in accordance with this recognition of his value. However, to see the love for my romantic beloved as simply a version of this equal response to the value of persons seems to ignore the unique nature of such love. My love for the romantic beloved is not merely a response to the intrinsic value of the other (though, of course, it should not conflict with recognizing this intrinsic value): it involves something further. And this can be addressed only when we acknowledge the

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role of preference – the attention given to my need of companionship or to my seeking after a total encounter of mind and body with this particular person (and nobody else) – in the reality of the special loves that we have in our lives. If one wants to give an adequate account of the nature of the special loves that are so central to our lives (romantic love, friendship, parental love), one needs to acknowledge the role of preferentiality in our existence.30 Part of this acknowledgement is an unqualified affirmation of selfconcerned sensitivities and desires. Self-concern or self-love, to recall our discussion above, does not necessarily mean something bad (I am referring to self-love (c)). Accordingly, it is not rejected (at least not explicitly) either by Kierkegaard or Ferreira. However, as we have just seen, there is a strong reluctance here to accept it fully. In the previous section we saw that Kierkegaard is very unenthusiastic, to say the least, about preference, and in this section we have seen that Ferreira goes out of her way to remove the element of preference from the model of true love. There is a deep ambivalence – in the text itself and in Ferreira’s interpretation of it – with regard to the status of what I call ‘full concreteness’ (or ‘a full return to the world’). Full concreteness is the concreteness of ourselves as one entity, essentially containing both our spiritual elements and our finite, bodily elements. To accept this concreteness fully is to rejoice not only in our spiritual connection with God (and with the neighbour), but also in our finite embodiment (intended by God, after all) in the world. In Works of Love there is an acceptance of our finitude, of our bodily existence (which necessarily entails self-focused elements such as feelings, inclinations, and desires) – but this is an unhappy acceptance (it is more like a grudging acceptance; something we have no choice but to accept). Although it never explicitly states so, Works of Love grants our finite existence – in its full expression as including our bodily, self-interested needs and desires – a secondary place. Needs are solemnly respected – but never joyfully celebrated. Accordingly, the account of the meaning of our 30

See, for example, C. Stephen Evans’ study of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love. Evans, in contrast to Ferreira, acknowledges the decisive role of preferentiality in our lives and strongly contends that ‘Kierkegaard does not hold the absurd belief that I ought to have the same feelings and do precisely the same things for every human being … it is clear that institutions such as the family could not exist without treating some people differently than others’ (Evans 2004: 199). However, despite his sensitivity to preferentiality, Evans, ultimately (and by his own admission), offers a solution close to that of Ferreira’s (see ibid., 205). I therefore do not elaborate further on his reading here.

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existence given here is necessarily incomplete.31 The difficulty to affirm preferential love – which constitutes an important aspect of our lives – is symptomatic. At the same time, however, this problem must not mislead us into overlooking the deep significance of Works of Love. We should therefore distinguish between Kierkegaard’s important insights regarding neighbourly love and his confused judgement regarding preferential love. To do so, we should begin by trying to discern the fault in Kierkegaard’s perspective: maybe if we can find a way to clarify this fault and, accordingly, suggest an amendment to his perspective, we will also be able to offer a more consistent and satisfying vision of love (neighbourly and romantic alike)? 4 Resignation is not enough: the problematic perspective of Works of Love In her book on Works of Love, Ferreira does justice to Kierkegaard and to the richness of his text. Many critical readings of Works of Love tend to be selective and by focusing only on the problematic assertions made in the text present a one-sided, often fanatic, Kierkegaard who does not give a straw for human needs or human existence in this world. This is an unjust reading and I think that Ferreira – who takes it as her task to present a more balanced picture of Works of Love – proves to be very convincing in establishing the great extent to which this book has so often been treated inadequately. However, to be fully faithful to the text, one need not disregard the harshness of the assertions that provoked so deeply bitter a criticism. Ferreira does not ignore this, of course. She admits that there are different emphases in the text and tries to find an encompassing reading that takes them all into consideration. However, I think that in her efforts to defend Kierkegaard she goes a step too far and tends to overlook the problematic side of Kierkegaard’s complex, ambivalent, position. In my view, a balanced reading of the text should indeed not focus only on the harsh side of Kierkegaard’s position (as his critics tend to do), but also it should not colour this same position mostly in the soft colours of his ‘humanness’ (as Ferreira tends to do). Rather, a truly balanced reading should acknowledge that there are two sides to Kierkegaard’s position and that there is a tension between them. There is a tension between 31

I return to this point in chapter 5.

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Kierkegaard’s insistence on positing the ‘movement’ of self-denial as the (only) ground for any human relationship (of one to oneself, to one’s neighbour, to one’s beloved), and his commitment to an unqualified – that is, unreservedly rich and passionate – human existence (the kind of existence which I have characterized above as ‘fully concrete’; the kind of existence that unapologetically allows one to love preferentially). I suggest that we think about this tension in terms of a disharmony between Fear and Trembling’s two movements of faith: that is, between the movement of resignation and the movement of faith, or affirmation.32 While in Fear and Trembling a paradoxical balance between these two movements has been achieved, in Works of Love Kierkegaard seems to be quite oblivious to the second movement – the movement of affirmation – and to focus on the movement of resignation (here discussed in terms of self-denial) alone. In the next chapter I shall elaborate on the connection between resignation and self-denial and on how using the insights of Fear and Trembling can help resolve the tension in Works of Love’s vision of love. However, it is important to remember that despite its problematic perspective (which results in its inconsistent view of preferential love), Works of Love does play an important role in shedding light on the model of love that we are forming here. After all, resignation is an essential component of the model of faith, and if we wish to use this model for a new understanding of love (as we indeed suggest doing in this study), then the focus of Works of Love on this movement cannot but be highly significant for us. The importance of resignation Our natural (initial, spontaneous) existential position is that of recollection (i.e. not of resignation: recollection is the life-stage inhabited, as it were, by those who have not yet become resigned or are refusing to do so). We are naturally inclined to place ourselves in the centre of our world and to believe that everything – and in particular the beloved other – revolves around us. We nourish an inner world in which the beloved is an extension of ourselves: a reflection of our desires, wishes, and self-esteem (or self-contempt). In the vast gallery of the Kierkegaardian characters, one may be a sensitive poet, a mischievous seducer, or a respected married 32

See again the discussion in chapter 3.

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judge – but in their ‘recollection-hood’ they are all characterized by a problematic attitude to those they love.33 It requires the painful movement of resignation to free us from the self-delusion that we are the absolute masters of our world, and this transforming realization also discloses the other (including the beloved other) as truly distinct, independent, and indeed other than us. We have already emphasized, in our analysis of the movement of resignation, the way in which this movement discloses the value of the beloved other on the one hand, and initiates our relationship with God on the other.34 In Works of Love Kierkegaard strengthens and widens this view: by discussing the movement of resignation in terms of self-denial, and by presenting the connection between self-denial, the relationship with God, and equality, he demonstrates the essentially moral implications of the movement of resignation. To sustain a relationship with God is to acknowledge that all humans are created equal (equal in value, equal in being the subject of his love). This acknowledgement, best expressed in self-denial, consists in the understanding that no matter how different we are from one another, in a profound sense we are all the same: If, then, in the life of actuality you should see the ruler, cheerfully and respectfully bring him your homage, but you would still see in the ruler the inner glory, the equality of the glory that his magnificence merely conceals. If, then, you should see the beggar – perhaps in your sorrow over him suffering more than he – you would still see in him the inner glory, the equality of the glory, that his wretched outer garment conceals. Yes, then you would see, wherever you turned your eye, the neighbour … In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other – therein we are indeed different. But in being the neighbor we are all unconditionally like each other … Take many sheets of paper, write something different on each one; then no one will be like another. But then again take each single sheet; do not let yourself be confused by the diverse inscriptions, hold it up to the light, and you will see a common watermark on all of them. In the same way the neighbor is the common watermark, but you see it only by means of eternity’s light when it shines through the dissimilarity. (WL, 88–9)

The movement of self-denial gives shape to our duty to discern the equality beneath the differences and to act in accordance with this realization.

33 34

See again chapter 1. See again chapter 2.

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Realizing that the neighbour is our equal has the power to generate empathy: understanding that the neighbour is like ourselves, we are more inclined to act for and towards him with care and love. Through the act of self-denial we see that the neighbour deserves our respect, our acknowledgement of his independent value, and our compassion. (Acting with compassion ensures that our duty will be fulfilled with warmth and kindness which, in principle, can be directed at every neighbour.)35 And indeed, to see the neighbour as equal means genuinely to see him. It means that when he is there before you – the stranger asking for change in the street, or your colleague who might have done you wrong in the past but now seeks your help, or your friend with whom you are having a heated quarrel – you see him, out of self-denial, as your neighbour, as your equal, as a human being like yourself. Not as a stranger who has nothing to do with you, not as a bad-tempered colleague who has done you wrong, not as a friend who is hurting your feelings at the moment – but rather as a neighbour. To see the neighbour (in all of these instances and in many others) is an act of self-denial because it forces you to set your self (not to mention your ego) aside, to renounce your own personal opinions and inclinations, your personal preoccupations, your thoughts and plans that are focused on your self – and in this vacuum to put, as it were, the neighbour. But at the same time, and without this coming in any way at the expense of one’s duty to see the neighbour as equal, one should also be ‘allowed’ to love preferentially, to sustain unique relationships with ‘special’ neighbours. However, it is very difficult to affirm this kind of love when one’s perspective is based solely on resignation (or self-denial): this difficulty, as we have seen, is clearly manifested in Works of Love’s ambivalent position with regard to preferential love. Another example of the inadequacy of this perspective is demonstrated in a recent reading of Works of Love: Amy Laura Hall’s Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love emphatically offers to consider the perspective of Works of Love as the ideal one for a genuine understanding of romantic love. What shape, then, does romantic love take on her view?

35

See Ferreira’s discussion of the use of the word ‘love’ (Ferreira 2001: 49). Compassion safeguards the moral obligation against becoming an act fulfilled ‘grudgingly, hatefully’ – which is a danger that Ferreira connects with the limitation of our duty to responsibility alone.

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The unbearable dreariness of romantic love: a critique of Amy Laura Hall’s interpretation Kierkegaard brings his charge against human love continually back to each of us, rhetorically prompting us to recognize our inability to reach or grasp the faithful state that we think ourselves already to have achieved.36

Hall’s commentary on Works of Love presents a position quite opposite to the one that I am concerned to develop here. While I claim that it is in Fear and Trembling that we should look for an adequate account of (or at least some guidance towards) the desirable model of romantic love, her claim is that Kierkegaard’s central pseudonymous texts (and Fear and Trembling in particular) present us with various ways of loving in a distorted or partial way – and that it is in Works of Love that the true way to love is explored. However, Hall fails to acknowledge the tension that arises in the context of Works of Love between neighbourly love and preferential love. She identifies loving one’s (romantic) beloved properly with an absolute and uncompromising fulfilment of the commandment to love one’s neighbour. Her claim is that the latter is almost (if not always) impossible; accordingly, she maintains, loving (romantically) is usually a treacherous enterprise. In the light of the commandment – in the light of the way Christ lived and loved – our romantic loves are deplorable failures of our duty to love: Kierkegaard interjects into the domestic sphere Christ’s startling life and his parables, in order to remind us that Christ’s love and our own supposedly apt love consistently and drastically collide.37

By delineating the stories presented in Works of Love, Hall says, ‘Kierkegaard makes graphic the distance between our own love for those with whom we are engaged and Christ’s love for even those who hated him.’38 The conclusion is clear: when it comes to our daily loves, there is an ‘“unbridgeable abyss gaping” between what we think to be love and what love truly is’.39 Or, as she picturesquely puts it, ‘even those who most earnestly seek to receive God’s grace merely glimpse true love as it glimmers between the fragmented slivers of our broken attempts’.40 36 37 38 39 40

Hall 2002: 14. Ibid., 41. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 1. Ibid., 105–6.

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For Hall, this sombre verdict on (human, romantic) love – a verdict she bases on the various love stories presented in the pseudonymous texts, and in which she sees a sound reflection of the way we usually fail to love – is the clearest demonstration of our need to repent. The pivotal message around which her book (and her reading of Kierkegaard’s texts) revolves is the need to deepen our humility and the importance of repentance: What Kierkegaard intimates in these pseudonymous texts, indirectly and variously, is that the reader must repent. Each story involves a different false start along a wrong route, and the reader must seek instead a relationship with that one who occasions our repentance and our redemption. The common factor uniting all of the irreligious texts is the void that brings them into being. Running underneath and between the disorder of the characters’ lives is an absence, the correction for which Kierkegaard commends in Works of Love.41

Although in principle I agree with Hall about the importance of humility and our need to repent (on my reading this is basically what the movement of resignation expresses), and despite accepting some of her analyses of the love stories (see, for example, her reading of the Judge’s love which I presented in chapter 1), I think that by demonstrating this point in the way she does, she epitomizes the same problem which was explained above: that is, ignoring the unique (and preferential) nature of romantic love by subsuming it under, and thereby identifying it with, neighbourly love. Hall even takes this confusion a step further: while Kierkegaard’s Works of Love distinguishes between neighbourly and preferential loves, and Ferreira’s commentary tries to settle the tension between them, Hall’s thesis disregards this tension (and the distinction constituting it) altogether. She considers the love of the commandment to be the ultimate model (which we fail to fulfil) for our intimate loves, and in that demonstrates that she sees no problem, or tension, in modelling the latter in the shape of the former. Indeed, Hall’s thesis is that there is a ‘radical discontinuity between our love and the love commanded’, though not because of some difficulty regarding preferentiality, but rather because our love is a defective, pale, and depressingly remote version of the love that is commanded.42 Our task is, then, to acknowledge this ‘unbridgeable’ gap (that indicates our sinful state) and, accordingly, repent: ‘[w]e may interpret Works of Love as Kierkegaard’s attempt again to precipitate the awareness of sin 41 42

Ibid., 3. Ibid., 13.

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indispensable for our repentance and to evoke the confession necessary for our reception of grace’.43 In the light of this, Hall presents humility as the key to loving faithfully: It is through such humility that we are able to approximate Christ’s command to love the neighbor with whom we live daily. Knowing the treachery of our intimacy and our infinite need for grace, we are better able to distinguish self from other, to forgive the beloved whose faults most tempt us to despair, and to perceive generously the one whose transgressions we have most frequent occasion to note.44

Now, it is true that our intimate beloved is first and foremost a neighbour, and that as such he should be the subject of our duty to love. It is also true that because of his closeness to us, our intimate beloved is the one most susceptible to our various transgressions (such as anger, betrayal, pride, impatience towards faults, refusal to forgive). However, as we have shown in detail above, the love directed at our intimate beloved cannot be modelled on the kind of love which is based on resignation/self-denial alone. Thus, although I completely agree with Hall that Works of Love presents us with a doctrine that exemplifies some crucial elements in self–other (as well as self–God) relationships, without which romantic love is indeed impossible, I disagree that this is enough for a model of romantic love. But Hall does take Works of Love as her model, and her account, accordingly, is indeed one of resignation. She disregards the bodily and preferential aspects of romantic love and ends up with a gloomy, pessimistic account that forgets that love can be not only a source of pain, treachery, and frustration, but also a source of joy, faithfulness, and revelation. Developing this kind of view, Hall insists that Works of Love is the only text (belonging to the group of the Kierkegaardian texts she reads) which presents a genuine model of love, and dismisses the possibility that the relevant pseudonymous texts provide us with any ‘access into the precarious realm of faithful love’.45 This, for example, is how she regards Fear and Trembling: To read Fear and Trembling with Works of Love heightens Kierkegaard’s call in Works of Love for us to acknowledge the resilience, complexity, and ambiguity of illicit aims and, ultimately, the treachery of our love.46 43 44 45 46

Ibid. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 174. Ibid., 52.

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Except for Abraham, Hall does not recognize any other knights of faith in Fear and Trembling. On her reading, the other characters presented there are either various versions of the knight of resignation (the lad who loves the princess, Johannes himself, the Merman), or caricatures of the faithful knight (the ‘tax collector’ figure).47 Moreover, she understands ‘resignation’ in a deprecatory sense similar to that which we found in the interpretations of Edward F. Mooney and Ronald L. Hall (see chapter 3 above): she takes it to be no more than an undignified escape from love (and existence).48 However, such a reading is bound to ignore the complexity of the text in question. First, in her reading of resignation as an aesthetic option, Hall disregards the affinity between resignation (which she rejects) and selfdenial (which she affirms). Indeed, Fear and Trembling does not discuss neighbourly love and, accordingly, is not specifically concerned with the commandment’s prescribed movement of self-denial; but in its depiction of resignation as a painful renouncement for the sake of submitting oneself to God, it is at the very least faithful to the spirit of the commandment.49 Secondly, Hall asserts that ‘[f]or de Silentio, the movements toward faithful love ascend from the prosaic girl and her impossibility, “upward” to the idea of loving her, on to the love itself, to love for “the eternal being,” and then back to the idea of loving, without a corresponding return “below” to the girl in her actuality’.50 In emphasizing this, Hall quite blatantly turns a blind eye to those passages in Fear and Trembling in which a return to the ‘girl in her actuality’ occurs or is reflected upon as the desirable alternative (beyond de Silentio’s reach but nevertheless an object of his amazement and envy): ‘it must be wonderful to get the 47

48

49

50

‘… the most significant object of love for which this knight is hopeful is a “roast lamb’s head with vegetables”’ she says (ibid., 65), revealing thereby her (somewhat condescending) conception of who deserves to be considered as a knight of faith. Focusing on his anticipation of the enjoyment of a good meal in such a sarcastic tone indicates quite clearly that Hall misses the point altogether. She misses the point that the knight of faith may well be this unrecognizable, almost invisible, person whose outstanding ability is precisely to hold faith (and love) in the midst of the most banal, sometimes unimpressive, mundane reality. To mention only one example, she puts in the same basket of fleeing from reality (so to speak) both the dreamy young man of Repetition and Fear and Trembling’s knight of resignation, denouncing them both as committing the same mistake: ‘Rather than turning vulnerably toward God in repentance, we may, like Constantin’s young man or de Silentio’s knight of resignation, seek to elevate ourselves above existence and grasp the infinite’ (ibid., 173). For a detailed discussion of the similarities and dissimilarities between resignation in Fear and Trembling and resignation (in the form of self-denial) in Works of Love, see the next chapter. Hall 2002: 67.

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princess … to live happily with her day after day … to live happily every moment this way by virtue of the absurd … this is wonderful’ (FT, 50, emphasis mine). Also, when discussing the story of the Merman, she concludes that ‘[a]t de Silentio’s prompting, we leave the merman in the sea, alone, reveling demonically in his own guilt. Incapable of repentance and disclosure, the merman’s errors are formed in the context of unfaith.’51 However, this is a misleading presentation of the Merman’s story because it disregards the fact that Johannes leaves open the question which of several options the Merman will end up choosing. And it disregards in particular the third, the most important and hopeful option which Johannes mentions with unmistakable amazement and envy – that the Merman will disclose himself to Agnes and live with her (see FT, 99).52 The task of the present study is to inquire into the possibility of construing a Kierkegaardian model of love which, on the one hand, adheres to that which is central to Works of Love (resignation/self-denial, a loving relationship with God and the neighbour, equality and humility), and yet, on the other, genuinely makes room for the factor that crucially constitutes love as romantic: that is, preference. Such a desirable model, I claim, is not to be found between the lines of Works of Love but rather between those of Fear and Trembling. 51 52

Ibid., 77–8. I discuss the Merman’s story, and the real possibility of religious love which is open to him, in the last chapter of this study.

5 THE DOUBLE MOVEMENT OF LOVE

1 Kierkegaard versus Kierkegaard Can Johannes’ perspective amend Kierkegaard’s? At the end of the previous chapter I suggested that the attempt to resolve the tension in Works of Love should lead us back to Fear and Trembling. But before explaining how Fear and Trembling can help in addressing the problem of Works of Love, a methodological explanation is needed. After all, while Fear and Trembling was published pseudonymously, Works of Love was published under Kierkegaard’s name, and thus may seem to more adequately represent his understanding of love (and faith). What is the justification, then, for using an earlier, pseudonymous work (which allegedly can be seen as further and more differentiated from his own views) to amend Kierkegaard’s signed words? My answer in the following section will be twofold. First, I claim that Kierkegaard’s use of pseudonyms should not necessarily be interpreted as indicative of a less valid (or reliable) point of view. Second, even if it is thus interpreted, the interesting question is not so much the relationship between the biographical man Kierkegaard and his ideas, but rather the relationship between his expressed ideas themselves. To put it differently, from the perspective of this study, the relevant question is less ‘What did Kierkegaard himself really say?’ – given his complex strategy of writing this question may never be adequately answered – and more ‘What should 138

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Kierkegaard have said had he been consistent and faithful to the inner harmony of his own ideas?’ Kierkegaard and his different voices Kierkegaard the writer exists for the reader solely in the diaspora of his works and is not to be approached as a historical personality whom we have to excavate from beneath the rubble of words he has left behind him.1

Kierkegaard’s authorship is vast and manifold. On the one hand, we find the signed works – among which are published religious texts as well as his unpublished journals and papers – and on the other, we find the pseudonymous works, signed by imaginary authors invented by Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard himself famously expressed his wish to attribute these texts to their pseudonymous authors, and in his posthumous The Point of View for my Work as an Author, explained his use of pseudonyms in terms of ‘indirect communication’.2 Given the versatility of the authorship and its diversity of ideas and voices, a division of it into several categories is often set forth. Apart from the major categories of the pseudonymous writings (the ‘indirect communication’) and the religious writings (the ‘direct communication’), there is the category of the unpublished journals and papers, and that of the very late polemical essays attacking the Danish church.3 Each of the groups is distinguished by its style and objectives, and often a similar richness is found in writings that belong in the same group (for example, the group of the pseudonymous writings contains many strikingly distinct voices, and the group of the religious writings may be divided into the early upbuilding discourses and the later Christian discourses). This seemingly extreme lack of unity turns the task of interpreting Kierkegaard into a particularly complicated one. When we want to undertake an interpretation of Kierkegaard, which of the many voices of Kierkegaard should we interpret? Here we need to distinguish between two different questions. One concerns the relation between Kierkegaard’s ideas (as expressed in his published writings) and his life (as expressed in his journals and papers). The other concerns the relation between the 1 2

3

Pattison 1990: 81. ‘… if it should occur to anyone to want to quote a particular passage from the books, it is my wish, my prayer, that he will do me the kindness of citing the respective pseudonymous author’s name, not mine’ (CUP, 627). See Taylor 1975: 11–14. For a different division of the authorship see Hannay 1982: 16–17.

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ideas Kierkegaard presents in the context of his direct communication (that is, the religious writings) and those he presents in the context of his indirect communication (that is, the pseudonymous writings). Now, regarding the first question, although there is a long and interesting tradition of scholarship that focuses on the interrelation between Kierkegaard’s thought and his life, in the present study I leave this question outside the range of my discussion. My interest here concerns the philosophical and religious implications of Kierkegaard’s words, and the relevance they may have for us. From this point of view it is of no interest that Søren loved but left Regine, that he had a complicated relationship with his father and that he led a bitter quarrel with a popular newspaper, and a far more bitter struggle with the Danish church. These fascinating facts may shed light on Kierkegaard’s thought from a psychological perspective, but are of little relevance to a philosophical understanding of his thought. The second question raises a large and controversial issue, on which I would like to comment briefly.4 The principal difficulty here is to decide to what extent Kierkegaard’s own retrospective view of his authorship in The Point of View can be used as a guide to interpreting his works. If we take what he says there at face value, then we should regard him as a religious author who used the method of indirectness in order to attract sympathetically the attention of those who do not share his religious views and ‘tempt’ them to reflect on their lives from their own perspective (the nonChristian, aesthetic, or merely ethical perspective which the pseudonymous books attempt to adopt or imitate). His aim, as he explains, was to lead his readers in this way to realize the shortcomings of their nonreligious way of existence; to make them see that despite their understanding of themselves as Christians they do not live religiously.5 This sounds like a reasonable motive for using the indirect method, but the problem with this account is that it may lead (and often has led) to the 4

5

Various approaches to the relations between direct and indirect communication in Kierkegaard may be found in Evans 1992; Fenger 1980; Lippitt 2000; Mooney 1996; Pattison 1992; Poole 1993; Walsh 1994. ‘…one does not begin directly with what one wishes to communicate but begins by taking the other’s delusion at face value. Thus one does not begin … in this way: I am Christian, you are not a Christian – but this way: You are a Christian, I am not Christian. Or one does not begin in this way: It is Christianity that I am proclaiming, and you are living in purely esthetic categories. No, one begins this way: Let us talk about the esthetic. The deception consists in one’s speaking this way precisely in order to arrive at the religious. But according to the assumption the other person is in fact under the delusion that the esthetic is the essentially Christian, since he thinks he is Christian and yet is living in esthetic categories’ (PV, 54).

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conclusion that Kierkegaard’s ‘real’, or ‘valid’, opinions were expressed only, or principally, in the context of his works of direct communication. This is a problematic conclusion, especially in its implication that these works are more reliable indicators of Kierkegaard’s thought than his indirect works. It is problematic not only because the religious writings themselves present a variety of views (that are not always entirely consistent with each other), and not only because the extent to which we should take Kierkegaard’s retrospective pronouncement at face value is in itself debatable.6 Rather, it is problematic mainly because the core of some of Kierkegaard’s most important ideas can be traced back to his pseudonymous writings, and in some cases their expression in these writings is particularly lucid and illuminating. As far as interpreting Kierkegaard is concerned, then, I consider his authorship as a whole, and judge the relations between its different parts first and foremost according to inter-textual criteria such as consistency in developing ideas and philosophical coherence. Although I do not disregard external, authorial intentions (such as those expressed in his Point of View), I give them, for the reasons mentioned above, less weight in the overall assessment of Kierkegaard’s view of faith and romantic love.7 I take the different voices of Kierkegaard to be interesting and valid in their own right, regardless of how close they may or may not be to his ‘real’ opinions.8 As Kierkegaard worked so hard to make them heard, our task as his readers is to listen carefully, and with equal attention, to all of them. In the following chapter I therefore aim at showing how two of Kierkegaard’s most noticeable voices, when joined together, create a clear and interesting ensemble.

6 7

8

See, for example, Fenger 1980; Garff 2005. In other words, I acknowledge that Kierkegaard may have regarded Works of Love as a more adequate source for his views of faith and romantic love, but I claim that there are good reasons for looking in Fear and Trembling for insightful views regarding these issues. That is, from an internal textual point of view Fear and Trembling, as will be demonstrated shortly, proves to offer a consistent account of faith that manages to resolve the fundamental tension at the crux of Works of Love. Opinions that towards the end of Kierkegaard’s life seemed to change their tone even more dramatically. Judging by his late writings, it seems that at this point Kierkegaard chose to turn to the ‘doctrine of the cross’, preferring it over his initial doctrine of ‘incarnation and creation’ (see Pattison 1997: 130). However, in this study I have chosen to inquire into two of his works that focus (more and less explicitly) on the subject matter of love, namely, Works of Love and Fear and Trembling. I shall not attempt to evaluate the change in Kierkegaard’s thought in his late writings.

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kierkegaard on faith and love 2 In the light of Fear and Trembling The threefold problem in Works of Love

In the previous chapter we saw that a close reading of Works of Love discloses a deep ambivalence with regard to romantic (that is, preferential) love. On the one hand, Kierkegaard acknowledges its importance for a full and satisfying life, and wishes to affirm the possibility of loving in this special way. On the other hand, his strong reservations concerning this kind of love are undeniable. Romantic love, we said, essentially involves elements of selflove, which Kierkegaard is reluctant to affirm as unselfish (even when there is nothing selfish about those elements). Thus, considering his evident insistence on understanding love in terms of self-denial (and non-preferentiality) alone, perhaps it is not surprising that Kierkegaard fails to affirm fully the significance of romantic love. Let me explain. As I understand it, there are three principal difficulties in connection with the view that Kierkegaard presents in Works of Love. The first difficulty concerns his understanding of the relationship between preference and resignation. In Works of Love Kierkegaard seems to consider preferentiality and resignation as categorically incompatible: in his view, any stance that involves resignation, necessarily excludes preference. Accordingly, he persists in equating, problematically, preferentiality and selfishness (selfishness being the opposite of resignation). The second difficulty concerns Kierkegaard’s identification between the one and only true love – that is, Kjerlighed (see again chapter 4 above), and one of its manifestations – that is, neighbourly love. ‘Christianity’, he emphasizes more than once, ‘recognizes really only one kind of love, the spirit’s love, and does not concern itself much with working out in detail the different ways in which this fundamental universal love can manifest itself’ (WL, 143; ‘the spirit’s love’ and ‘neighbourly love’ are clearly interchangeable in Kierkegaard’s usage). However, by identifying neighbourly love and Kjerlighed, Kierkegaard in effect changes the status of non-preferentiality. Non-preferentiality is indeed an essential feature of neighbourly love, but if neighbourly love is now taken to be the basis and image of any possible love, then non-preferentiality becomes an essential feature not only of neighbourly love but of any kind of love (including romantic love). And the third difficulty concerns Kierkegaard’s identification of neighbourly love and self-denial (‘Christian love is self-denial’s love’, WL, 52), that is, of neighbourly love and the movement of resignation.9 9

On the essential connection between resignation and self-denial see pp. 148–9 below.

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Now, the characterization of neighbourly love in terms of resignation alone (the third problem), when coupled with Kierkegaard’s identification of Kjerlighed and neighbourly love (the second problem), leads to an understanding of Kjerlighed, the one fundamental love, in terms of resignation and non-preferentiality alone. And when this is coupled with Kierkegaard’s understanding of resignation and preferentiality as incompatible (the first problem), we are led to the conclusion that not only is Kjerlighed essentially non-preferential (as is neighbourly love), it excludes preferentiality (that is, it cannot coexist with preferential love). And if Kjerlighed, the one fundamental love, is incompatible with preferentiality, how can romantic love, which is essentially preferential, not be rejected? Hence, we find ourselves with the strange and inconsistent position that wishes to affirm romantic love as a manifestation of neighbourly love, but rejects one of romantic love’s essential features, namely preferentiality. Moreover, this threefold problem (according to which Kjerlighed equals neighbourly love, equals non-preferentiality, equals self-denial) does injustice not only to romantic love, but also to neighbourly love. A crucial component is missing in the structure of love thus presented; and it is missing in its romantic and neighbourly manifestations alike. This essential component consists in Fear and Trembling’s second movement of faith: namely, the ability to affirm finitude joyfully again. Looking at Works of Love’s problematic picture, then, let us ask: do we need a modified picture that construes differently the relationship between resignation and preference, between Kjerlighed and neighbourly love, between neighbourly love and resignation and, ultimately, between neighbourly love and romantic love? I agree with Kierkegaard that resignation is a necessary condition for genuine love, any love (romantic love no less than a neighbourly one). In this respect, as I have already emphasized, Works of Love plays an important role in enlightening one of the essential features of love. However, in contrast with Kierkegaard, I claim that resignation and preference are compatible with one another (and hence preference is not opposed to selfdenial, and accordingly should not be equated with selfishness). In response to Kierkegaard’s rejection of preferentiality, I claim that the structure that allows one to hold both resignation and preference is the structure of the double movement of faith: that is, the movement of resignation coupled with the movement of faith. The latter movement (hereafter: the movement of repetition) consists of our full acceptance and affirmation of finitude, and so of everything that plays an essential

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part of it.10 Namely, our physical and emotional embodiment, our needs and desires, our boundaries, and also our existentially necessitated preferences.11 Understanding the movement of repetition as an equally important element in the structure of faith (that is, as having the same worth and significance as resignation) allows an affirmation of preference – while simultaneously holding to the movement of resignation.12 Now, if we understand the basic structure of love in terms of the double movement of faith, we can think of neighbourly love and romantic love as two distinct kinds of love: that is, two distinct manifestations of the one fundamental love, of Kjerlighed. We said that Kjerlighed may be understood in terms of a mysterious power, implanted in us by God, which manifests itself in the various acts of love that we perform (and experience).13 But while Kierkegaard characterizes this fundamental love in 10

11

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On the reasons for understanding the second movement of faith in terms of ‘repetition’ – that is, on the connection between faith, affirmation, and receiving back/repetition – see again chapter 3. Making preferences not only reflects the complexity and uniqueness of the combination between our bodily, mental, and spiritual inclinations (which makes each of us choose, connect with, and prefer different neighbours). It also reflects our boundaries as creatures confined in space and time. There are many intersections in our lives – even in the context of neighbourly love alone – at which we are constrained to choose to whom we give our attention and help. We need to make choices all the time. It is a trivial truth that we have limited resources that do not allow us to respond in the same way to everybody, and to give the same help to whoever is in need of it. An interesting angle from which to look at the human need to make preferences as an inevitable part of our existence is presented – though not under this title – by Derrida’s reading of Fear and Trembling, entitled Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know). The sacrifice of Isaac, Derrida says, is actually a reflection of the daily sacrifice we undertake when we respond to the call of a close other: ‘I cannot respond to the call, the request, the obligation, or even the love of another without sacrificing the other other, the other others’, he says (Derrida 1995: 68). Even though I would not like to go as far as Derrida does and ‘bind’ together preference and sacrifice, I agree with him that we cannot offer our spiritual, mental, and material resources – in the same manner and at the same time – to everybody. One may claim that the danger in such affirmative return to the finite – and accordingly also to our worldly needs and desires – is that it implies an affirmation of unethical aspects of our finitude as well (after all, our finite existence may include problematic needs and unwelcome desires). However, here it is important to remember the crucial role of resignation in the double movement of faith: resignation is maintained in faith, thus safeguarding our return to finitude. That is to say, the needs and desires affirmed in the context of faith are only those that work well with resignation: those which are not, in any way, offensive or harmful to the other. We suggested that Kjerlighed should be thought of as a hidden ‘inner’ power that can be discerned and accessed only through the different forms – or works – of love: self-love, neighbourly love, preferential love (see chapter 4). In a way, we may say that faith – the existential attitude of performing resignation and affirmation together – enacts love. Faith enables the primordial power of love to take shape and express itself in the world. I return to this idea at the end of the present chapter.

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terms of the single movement of resignation (self-denial), I suggest that we think of it in terms of the double movement of resignation and faith, which basically means that the structure of the double movement is essential to, and shared by, all the various manifestations of Kjerlighed. According to this suggestion, then, neighbourly love and romantic love are two distinct manifestations of Kjerlighed that share the same structure of faith: each includes both the movement of resignation and the movement of repetition. However, while the former manifestation essentially excludes preference, the latter essentially includes it. Romantic love requires the movements of faith no less than does neighbourly love, but it also includes preference. Preference posits no threat to faith (because, by virtue of the double structure of resignation and repetition, preference can be paradoxically affirmed in the context of repetition, in spite of and through resignation), and therefore romantic love can obey, as it were, the central demand of Works of Love (that is, resignation/self-denial) and still be preferential. Different returns to the world Kierkegaard’s uneasiness with regard to preferentiality is rooted in his confused judgement with regard to self-love. The kind of affirmation of the self in the context of preferential love seems to him to contradict selfdenial. His failure to see that self-denial (resignation) and preference do not necessarily exclude each other leads him therefore to assess preferentiality as a form of selfishness (that is, as the opposite of self-denial). This mistaken judgement of preferentiality and self-love results in Works of Love’s unwillingness to allow what in the previous chapter I termed ‘a concrete (or full) return to the world’. This kind of concreteness consists of a more coherent understanding of the self as being a finite creature no less than he is a spiritual one (we can think about such finite creatureliness in terms of an ‘embodied spirituality’, or a ‘spiritualized body’).14 Accordingly, such concreteness can be attained only in the context of the second movement that renews our hold on the finite (see again chapter 3). To demonstrate the significance of this movement – and of the ‘full return to the world’ – for love (romantic and neighbourly alike), in what follows I shall examine the worldly existence of two imaginary knights: the knight of self-denial (the protagonist of Works of Love, let us call him Knight S) and the knight of repetition (the 14

See chapter 6.

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protagonist of an amended construction of Works of Love, let us call him Knight R). The former is a version of Fear and Trembling’s knight of resignation, with an additional important aspect that will be specified soon; the latter is a version of Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith. What is the nature of these two knights, and what are their respective forms of return to the world? As we demonstrated at length in chapter 3, the existential state of faith involves a unique combination between the movement of resignation and that of repetition (or faith). The latter, however, should be distinguished from the event of repetition: while the movement of repetition is performed by the believer, repetition itself, when it occurs, is the gift of God. Let us recall, then, the story of Fear and Trembling’s father of faith. It was not in Abraham’s power to bring Isaac back: this is something that only God could do. But Abraham was a knight of faith precisely because he believed and trusted – against all reason, against the laws of nature and experience, and while holding fast to resignation – that he would receive Isaac back. This (i.e. the movement of repetition) is the main source of wonder in Abraham’s story: although his willingness to sacrifice his son (i.e. the movement of resignation) is also astonishing, the way in which he performed his resignation is what really amazes Johannes (and us). He did so while simultaneously performing the movement of repetition: that is, with a complete confidence that he would receive his son back.15 Hence, the picture of faith presented in Fear and Trembling actually contains three different components (rather than two): the movement of resignation (Abraham’s consent to sacrifice Isaac), the movement of repetition (Abraham’s trust in receiving Isaac back), and repetition itself (Isaac’s life being spared or, had the sacrifice actually taken place, Isaac being restored to life). Let us call the last element ‘grace’. Grace belongs entirely to a realm beyond our understanding, control, and reasoning. It belongs to the realm of the divine. This is God’s gift, while we are only its recipients: it is not for us to explain why, under which circumstances, and in which form God 15

Here I am clearly at odds with Agacinski’s claim that ‘Fear and Trembling is all about the question of trembling in the face of sacrifice’ (Agacinski 1998: 131). On her reading, Abraham is beyond our understanding (us, who ‘are not the sublime’) due to his resignation: she does not distinguish the movement of repetition (Abraham’s belief that he will receive Isaac back) from the movement of resignation (his consent to sacrifice his son). Her incomplete understanding of Abraham’s faith allows her to raise questions and speculations regarding Abraham’s willingness to carry out the sacrifice (see ibid., 132–4), while on my reading there is no room for doubting Abraham’s lack of doubt. For faith amounts precisely to the way in which resignation is carried out: out of the paradoxical belief in receiving back that which one is renouncing.

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sends us his grace. However, we do have a responsibility as regards the way we respond to and act upon God’s grace. We can abuse it or ignore it altogether, but we can also work in a co-operative response to it. According to the view that I am suggesting here, then, ‘grace’ (or the event of ‘repetition’) stands for a divine action beyond human inquiry. The movements, however – be it the movement of resignation/self-denial or the movement of repetition – stand for our way of responding to grace. The religious assumption (accepted by the believer upon abandoning the circle of recollection and becoming initiated into the religious sphere) is that there is grace and that it is our task to decide how we shall act in response to it; how we shall approach it. Should it be by way of self-denial or by way of faith, by making the movement of resignation/self-denial alone or by making also the movement of repetition? What, then, are the differences between these two ways of responding to grace? Fear and Trembling’s knight of resignation – the earlier and less complete (or developed) version of Works of Love’s knight of self-denial – renounces the world. The meaning of this is that although he still cares dearly about finitude (which he renounces), and although he might even be acting in the world (rather than isolating himself in a cloister, for example), the relationship he can sustain with finitude is necessarily incomplete. He lacks hope and cannot find joy in the finite. Indeed, the knight of resignation is a sorrowful person, but his sorrow, his pain, is a peaceful one. He renounces the thing he wants the most – this, of course, is extremely painful – but he finds peace in dedicating his life, and his love, to God. The way in which this knight lives his life in the face of grace, therefore, is by submitting and dedicating himself to it, recognizing it to be a part of his eternal (i.e. future) happiness. For him, the realm of the infinite is completely separate from the realm of the finite, and he does not have the strength to trust divine intervention in the realm of finitude. His position is an immanent one: he cannot act in a way that relies on something transcendent, something which is beyond his access and control – something like grace. Thus, even if this knight does not retire from the world (as it were), even if he leads a ‘normal’ life (having a family and keeping a job), he is a stranger in the world.16 The ‘advanced’ version of this knight – namely, the believer of Works of Love who performs the movement of self-denial (Knight S) – resembles the knight of resignation in making the same movement (he also renounces everything finite, everything that gives meaning to his worldly life). 16

FT, 50.

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However, the movement that Knight S undertakes consists not only in infinite resignation before, and for the sake of, God; but also in selfrenunciation before, and for the sake of, the neighbour. Now, the close connection between the movement of resignation and that of self-denial is an important point worth emphasizing, because the essential affinity between infinite resignation and self-denial is often disregarded or misconstrued. Most interpreters ignore this crucial link between Fear and Trembling and Works of Love, and those who do not, tend to understand the movement of resignation as a less mature version of self-denial. It is claimed, for example, that ‘a transition’ is needed ‘from an understanding of God as demanding the sacrifice of what is ours to the understanding of God as demanding the sacrifice of the self’.17 However, does sacrificing one’s son (assuming, of course, that one is a loving and devoted father like Abraham) not amount to a sacrifice of the self? Is sacrificing one’s son not the most extreme instance of self-denial possible? The knight of infinite resignation – and of course also Abraham in as much as infinite resignation is a vital component of his faith – renounces the centre of his existence, renounces that which means to him the most, renounces entirely his worldly happiness. He denies his will, he denies himself. Infinite resignation and self-denial are the two sides of the same deeply religious coin of self-submission before God.18 The difference between them is not grounded in the supposedly higher or lower degree of religious maturity which they exemplify: from the point of view of renunciation, I claim, both express the same degree of religious maturity. Rather, while infinite resignation is inclusive of self-denial and is undertaken only for the sake of God, self-denial is the specific manifestation of infinite resignation and is undertaken also for the sake of the neighbour. God is the only authority for, and before which, one is allowed (and obliged) to renounce infinitely, that is, to renounce everything. But for, and before, the neighbour one can (and must) renounce only oneself.19 At the same time, I agree that the knight of resignation (who halts in resignation and fails in performing the further movement of faith) is less religiously mature than the believer of Works of Love. However, his immaturity in comparison with the latter is not to be found in the extent or degree of his sacrifice, but rather in his inability to trust divine intervention 17 18 19

Mulhall 2001: 380. That is, self-denial is one essential facet of resignation. The other essential facet of resignation – namely, repentance – will be considered in the next chapter. Remember the Sermon that concludes Either/Or: it is upbuilding to be in the wrong in relation to someone one loves, but only in relation to God is one always in the wrong.

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(as regards the world of finitude). Accordingly, by contrast with the knight of resignation, Works of Love’s Knight S exemplifies a position which is not an immanent one. The believer of Works of Love trusts a divine intervention: he holds on to (and acts upon) the belief (and trust) in grace manifesting itself already in the context of his finite existence.20 Knight S, therefore, returns to the world (by way of his trust in divine intervention), and he does so more emphatically and consciously than does the knight of resignation (who might also be ‘in’ the world but as a stranger whose focused gaze is directed at infinitude). However, this is still a strange, partial, return. Knight S does not make the movement of repetition: he faces grace by acting in the world, but he does so by way of self-renunciation alone. Everything that Knight S does, then, he does out of self-denial, which means that while he gains the (interest in the) other back, he cannot gain himself back. His action in the world is considered by him to be the manifestation of God’s power, which can dwell in him (so to speak) only if he empties himself by denying his self entirely. His self is denied and he becomes a mere instrument that enacts the powers of God: The person who thinks only one thought must learn this, must experience that there comes a halt in which everything seems to be taken away from him … In a spiritual sense it holds true that just when a person strains his spiritual powers as such he then, and only then, becomes an instrument. From that moment on, if he honestly and faithfully perseveres, he will gain the best powers, but they are not his own; he has them in self-denial. (WL, 362)21 20

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In this sense, Knight S is not part of what Johannes Climacus calls in the Postscript ‘Religiousness A’ (which expresses an immanent position that takes into consideration human capabilities alone). Rather, of the three positions that I’m presenting here, the one which is closest to the Postscript’s ‘Religiousness A’ is the position of the first knight, namely, that of Fear and Trembling’s knight of resignation. However, the resemblance between them is not unquestionable and an in-depth justification of this claim would require an investigation into the Postscript, which I cannot conduct here. I will therefore only mention four reasons for assuming a resemblance between the two positions: 1. Despite not talking specifically on ‘Eternal happiness’ (as Johannes Climacus does when discussing ‘Religiousness A’), I think it is reasonable to interpret the content of the peace that Fear and Trembling’s knight of resignation finds in his relationship with God in similar terms. 2. It is true that there is something more prominently sorrowful about the demeanour of the knight of resignation, but ultimately he is someone who may lead the most regular kind of life, just like his fellow believer in the Postscript. 3. The two positions represent immanent understanding of existence. 4. The two positions are important milestones on the way to true religiousness, but are not sufficient in themselves for bestowing upon their believers a satisfying way of life. See, for example, also: ‘God is not seen, and therefore, as God uses this instrument into which a human being has made himself in self-denial, it seems as if it were the instrument that is able to do everything, and this tempts the instrument itself to understand it in that way – until he again is able to do nothing’ (WL, 363, emphasis mine).

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Knight S is by definition selfless (this is, after all, the meaning of ‘selfdenial’), but since there must be some kind of self involved (recall the commandment to love others as one loves oneself), it seems that the self of the selfless believer must be an incomplete self, a self who is indifferent to an important aspect of concrete living in the world. This denied aspect is that of the finite, and corporeal, embodiment of the self, including the physical and emotional needs and desires connected with being thus embodied. Accordingly, the existential position of Knight S is inconsistent. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the ambivalence inherent in such a manner of living in the world is clearly expressed in the attitude of Works of Love’s believer to preferential love. The return to the world of Knight S must therefore be lacking and incomplete (and is not even considered by him as a return, i.e. as an active movement, distinctive from the movement of self-denial).22 His action is focused on the well-being of the other but he is not allowed to ‘gain’ anything out of it – not even joy or satisfaction – lest his motive be regarded as ‘selfish’.23 Even though Knight S is interested in the world – interested in the finite, interested in the otherness of his neighbour – his involvement cannot but be partial. A focus on self-denial alone does not allow a full and unreserved relationship with the finite: something crucial in the tie that bonds one to the world is denied from the self (even when he wishes to return to the world, as does Knight S). To live fully – that is, to fully return to finitude and concreteness, while unreservedly acknowledging and affirming all the aspects of living an embodied life – means that another movement needs to be taken: the movement of repetition. And so we now turn to Knight R. This knight, who performs both the movement of resignation (and self-denial) and the movement of repetition, gains the world back, and this world includes unreservedly (and unqualifiedly) not only the other but also himself. And this is an

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To quote Amy Laura Hall (who presumably would have considered the manner of existence of Knight S to be the highest manifestation of religiosity): ‘It is only as we exist at the perilous intersection of our nothingness and Christ’s grace that we may love’ (Hall 2002: 190). It is also worth noting that when speaking of Fear and Trembling’s knight of faith Hall strongly objects to the idea of regarding the movement of faith as a movement, i.e. as something of the knight’s ‘own making’ (see ibid., 64). An encompassing understanding of correct self-love is a weighty and controversial theological issue that obviously exceeds the narrow and focused treatment I am able to give it here. For a recent extensive discussion of self-love (and a defence of it) see Darlene Weaver’s Self Love and Christian Ethics.

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embodied self: a spiritual self with a body, who constantly (and paradoxically) denies himself, and gains himself back. Knight R performs the movement of resignation, he renounces the world and he renounces himself, but he also performs the movement of repetition. He is capable of renewing his relationship with everything in a way that affirms not only the well-being of the other, but also the fully concrete well-being of himself. The movement of repetition incorporates resignation (through which one, in self-denial, gains a new understanding of his relationship both with God and with the finite), coupled with the paradoxical return to the world, to finitude, and to the self. By not reducing our human action in the world to the sole movement of self-denial, we allow our existence to be full, embodied, and passionate. And only thus can we sustain an adequate relationship with the other, with the neighbour (be it our annoying neighbour from upstairs, the stranger on the street, or our romantically beloved). In terms of self–other relationships, then, we can say that the difference between the knights is that while the knight of resignation ‘denies’ both himself and the other (by virtue of his infinite renunciation), and Knight S affirms the other but denies himself, only Knight R maintains an attitude that allows him genuinely to affirm the other, himself, and the relationship between them. This is the reason why only Knight R can initiate a satisfactory relationship of love. While the knight of resignation cannot give a concrete expression to his love for the princess, and Knight S is commanded to love everyone equally (namely, without preferring the princess), only Knight R can find the way to make room for the special love for his one and only princess. However, as I keep emphasizing, the importance of the second movement (that is, of the full return to the world) regards not only our preferred, romantic, relationships: it also regards our love for our neighbours. Thus, it is important also to stress that my criticism of Knight S does not in any way concern the fact that he is focused only on loving in a neighbourly way. Rather, it concerns his manner of loving, which is by way of self-denial alone. In other words, there is nothing wrong in loving only in a neighbourly way – the highest existence of faith and love can be manifested in the life of a monk or of someone who holds no particularistic relationships – as long as one loves one’s neighbours correctly: namely, by way of the double movement of faith (rather than by way of self-denial alone). How, then, does the double structure of faith shape each of the two manifestations of love, the neighbourly and the romantic?

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kierkegaard on faith and love 3 The faith-like structure of love The double structure of each of the two loves

A desirable relationship with the neighbour, any neighbour, must involve joy and compassionate tenderness. These are the elements that connect the one who loves to the other, the elements that constitute a relationship (even when this amounts to no more than a brief encounter on the street). The loving attitude of the self to the other cannot, I claim, be nourished by duty alone: it cannot flourish when its ground is a self that is lacking. When I love the neighbour I act – that is, I am moved and motivated – in a twofold way. On the one hand, I indeed deny myself by focusing my entire attention on the neighbour. I thus see him as an equal and discern the infinite value pervading him by virtue of his being a human being with a whole world of his own: a world full of emotions and dreams and sorrows and hopes. To be capable of seeing this is not easy. Too often we are so preoccupied with ourselves, with our world (our emotions, our dreams, our sorrows, our hopes) that we do not, cannot, genuinely see the neighbour, let alone care about him. The first movement is therefore necessarily the one of self-renunciation, self-denial. We are obliged to deny ourselves, to empty ourselves, to clear our sight and widen our horizon so that we can truly see the neighbour: see him as an equal, as a human being just like ourselves, as infinitely valuable. However, a relationship of love cannot amount to only this (self) emptiness: something further is needed. This is the second movement, the fully concrete return to finitude that makes room for a self who can genuinely love, a self who is allowed to feel and to be emotionally involved; allowed to find joy and satisfaction in his interaction (albeit of the minimal kind) with the neighbour. Because even if my involvement were limited (as it usually is with a stranger), I would still feel pain and responsibility when witnessing a neighbour’s suffering, and I would feel genuine joy and satisfaction if I managed to contribute to his well-being.24 The self here is involved in a way that exceeds the bounds of self-denial: it is involved in a self-regarding kind of way. Hence, strictly speaking, this kind of attachment may seem, from a point of view such as that of Works of Love, even to contradict the duty to deny the self. However, the double structure 24

It is important to note that this kind of attitude towards the neighbour holds true, in principle, also with regard to those neighbours whom I do not, and will never, actually meet (but only hear of, think of, or read about in the news). The double-structured attitude to the neighbour is not conditioned by a physical encounter with him or her.

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of faith, here applied to love, allows this combination: the self who loves both renounces himself and affirms himself. Accordingly, his renewed relationship – not only with his ‘preferred’ neighbours but with every single neighbour – has a more coherent quality of completeness. Now, the affirmation of the self (gained under the aegis of the second movement) is of course more evident – and more evidently needed – when it comes to preferential, romantic love. The involvement of the self in the context of this kind of love is emphasized by virtue of the self’s preferences. Making preferences expresses the attention given to the wishes of the self, to his needs and desires, to his self-concerned inclinations and aspirations. Nevertheless, it is crucial to remember that this focus on the self does not come at the expense of the denial of the self (provided, of course, that it is in the context of the double movement). This is what we ‘gain’ when we think of the structure of love in terms of the double movement of faith. When we understand that a paradoxical combination between denial and affirmation is not only possible but desirable – namely, that it is an existential attitude that we should aspire to attain – then we can also see the legitimacy of preferential love, and unequivocally allow room for its significant role in our lives. The coexistence of the two loves Having demonstrated the way in which the double structure forms each of the two loves – the neighbourly and the romantic – we still have to consider the possibility of their coexistence. My claim is that the two loves share the same structure, and that it is this structure that allows their coexistence. This coexistence basically means two things. First, it means that non-preferential neighbourly love for x and preferential romantic love for y can be maintained and performed together (without the latter love excluding the former, as Kierkegaard seems to be worried about in Works of Love). Second, it means that both neighbourly and romantic love can be directed at the same time at the same person: my neighbourly love for x can be accompanied by a romantic love for him. Therefore, when we love our romantic beloveds correctly, we always love them in a neighbourly way as well (but not vice versa, of course).25 25

However, it is important to emphasize that this does not mean that neighbourly love is more important or more meaningfully fundamental than romantic love (or any other particularistic kind of love). It is true that neighbourly love can exist without romantic love and not the other way round (the correct form of romantic love cannot exist without being accompanied by

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Now this claim, needless to say, is not uncontroversial. As against this claim, one may assert that neighbourly love and romantic love are too distinct, and too essentially different, to work well together (or to work together at all). Kierkegaard’s ambivalent position in Works of Love indicates that he himself is intuitively inclined to assert this kind of judgement (while, at the same time, he is no less intuitively inclined to insist on the significance of romantic love and on the possibility of it coexisting with neighbourly love: hence the ambivalence). To put it differently, given the long tradition of distinguishing between eros and agape – a tradition that takes these two loves to be structurally different and mutually exclusive – how can we defend our claim that romantic love (presumably a form of eros) and neighbourly love (a form of agape) can coexist? A strong opponent to the possibility of their coexistence is the theologian Anders Nygren who, in his book Agape and Eros, aims to present the ‘fundamental opposition between two whole attitudes to life’.26 While agape is ‘spontaneous and unmotivated’ (75), ‘indifferent to value’ (77), and ‘creative’ (it creates value: the lover bestows value on the beloved by virtue of loving him), eros conflicts with agape in each of these respects. Eros, according to Nygren, is basically ‘the consciousness of a present need and the effort to find satisfaction for it in a higher and happier state’ (176). This means that eros is driven by lack of something valuable (that is, it is not spontaneous, and is definitely motivated), and responds to the value that it finds in its object (that is, it is not indifferent to value and is acquisitive rather than creative). Eros, then, is the kind of love that – unlike agape – seeks for value: only that which is considered valuable (with regard to the lover’s happiness) can become the object of erosic love. Accordingly, says Nygren, eros is egocentric love: it is concerned with the good and happiness of the self who loves, and is motivated by the desire to fulfil this happiness. ‘The very fact that Eros is acquisitive love’, he says, ‘is sufficient to show its egocentric character: for all desire, or appetite, and longing is more or less egocentric. But the clearest proof of the egocentric nature of Eros is its intimate connection with eudaemonia.’27

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neighbourly love), but this is simply because while every romantic beloved is also a neighbour, not every neighbour is also a romantic beloved. The picture of love is therefore as follows: there are two distinct kinds of love, neighbourly and romantic, while one love is directed at everybody and the other love is directed only at a few. Accordingly, when it comes to my romantic beloved, the two loves are directed at him, merging together into a compound – complex and yet coherent – feeling of love. Nygren 1982: 208. Ironically enough, Nygren is drawing on Kierkegaard (as he interpreted him) in developing this theory. Ibid., 180, emphasis in the text.

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According to a view such as Nygren’s, then, the fundamental contrast between agape and eros can be formulated as follows. While agape is a spontaneous love, which for Nygren equals its being unmotivated by anything valuable in its object, eros is a non-spontaneous love but rather one that responds to the value it finds in its object, which for Nygren equals its being motivated by the desire to fulfil its own good. Therefore, while agape is a bestowing love, which purely gives itself to the other, eros is a ‘needy’ love which seeks something from the other, thus focusing on the self and being, ultimately, ‘selfish’. Nygren actually expresses the Kierkegaardian concern that ‘[e]ven if passionate preference had no other selfishness in it, it would still have this, that consciously or unconsciously there is selfwillfulness in it’ (WL, 55). Every love which is attentive to the needs (and wishes, and interests) of the self who loves (an attentiveness which is of course very noticeable in the context of romantic, preferential love) is tainted with selfishness. Nygren takes this problematic Kierkegaardian intuition a step further, and unequivocally rejects any love which, in its attentiveness to a need in the subject, is elicited as a response to the value of its object. Consciously or unconsciously, explicitly or implicitly, in a bodily manner or in a spiritual one – if love involves sensitivity to a need (and is somehow driven by it) it is, according to Nygren, selfish. And it is selfish, he believes, because it is wrongly grounded in the value of its object: the lover loves because he recognizes attractive traits in his beloved, from which he ‘selfishly’ hopes to benefit. However, is the picture that Nygren presents adequate? It seems that Nygren, in his condemnation of erosic love as ‘selfish’ (and thus non-genuine), conflates between two distinct matters. He supposes that responsiveness to value (the non-spontaneity of love) goes hand-in-hand together with the ‘neediness’ of love (that is, with its being motivated by some lack and the need to fulfil it). But is it necessarily so? Is responsiveness to value necessarily motivated by a need (the need of the lover who lacks something, seeks it, and finds it in his beloved)? Cannot one respond to values without benefiting from this and regardless of one’s needs? In his critique of Nygren’s view, John Davenport expresses precisely this point. Nygren errs, he says, by concluding that: ‘if any objective value in object X explains or grounds love of X, then … this value in X must cause that love by attracting the lover’; however ‘… values can inform the will in ways other than appetite attraction or prepurposive motivation of any kind’.28 28

Davenport 2007: 504.

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Thus, when asking about the nature of genuine, unselfish love, we should distinguish between two different questions. First, should a genuine love be spontaneous (that is, grounded only in itself) or does it arise as a response to the value of the beloved (that is, grounded in its object)? Second, is attentiveness to one’s own needs necessarily pernicious? That is, should a genuine love be purified of any motivation to fulfil the needs of the one who loves, or maybe such a satisfaction does not pose any threat to the purity, genuineness, and unselfishness of love? In response to the first question, it is helpful to look at Alan Soble’s The Structure of Love, where he defends what he calls the ‘property-based’ view, namely, the view according to which love arises as a response to the value of the beloved. ‘When x loves y’, he says, ‘this can be explained as the result of y’s having, or x’s perceiving that y has, some set S of attractive, admirable, or valuable properties.’29 This structure, claims Soble in contrast to Nygren, holds true also with regard to neighbourly love: neighbor-love is interpretable not as agape but as an erosic love. For example, if humans are not worthless precisely because God has bestowed objective value on them, then neighbor-love could be construed as a property-based response to this value. Or perhaps neighbor-love is a response to the piece or spark of God that exists in all humans.30

I agree with Soble that recognition of value is crucial to neighbourly love no less than it is for preferential love. Responsiveness to the nature of the beloved (in this case the neighbour’s infinite value as created by God) is therefore essential to neighbourly love as well. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the significance of equality for love, which he expresses in terms of seeing the ‘inner glory’ (WL, 88) in each and every person, indicates that his understanding of neighbourly love is also sensitive to the role of valuing when loving one’s neighbour, any neighbour. Thus, regarding the first question about the nature of love, my claim is that Nygren is mistaken in his demand that love should be grounded only in itself, regardless of its object. To think of love as independent of its object (as Nygren does) works not only against our experience of love but also against our understanding of love as crucially sensitive to the individuality and uniqueness of the other. This sensitivity necessarily involves the valuation of the other: that is, discerning his or her value, and appreciating it.

29 30

Soble 1990: 4. Ibid., 13.

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The second question, which concerns the connection between love and need, is more difficult to answer. On the face of it, to think of love as driven by some need may seem to contradict our view of love as focused on the other rather than on the gratification of the self. However, maybe the need in question is deeper and more essential to our nature than the kind of need that Nygren has in mind? An interesting conception of such a need, which is essentially and desirably involved in loving, is presented in Stephen G. Post’s analysis of agape. Post focuses on God’s love for us as the highest ideal of agape, and he claims that it is mistaken to understand this love as being free of any need: Divine love, so often understood as the perfect example to which human love must conform, is mistakenly interpreted as containing no element of self-concern; this view is based on the false assumption that the divine neither needs nor seeks the mutual good of fellowship with humanity.31

The desire for mutuality, for acknowledgement and connection, is the basic need that motivates any love, even that of God. To be driven by a need when loving, then, is not necessarily an indication for a nongenuine, self-seeking love. According to an understanding such as that presented by Post, needing is part of the structure of love. The need to be acknowledged and loved in return by those we love, the need for fellowship and mutuality, the need for the basic connection of being looked at by the one at which one looks (as it were) – this kind of need is not a motivation that taints love: it explains love.32 Moreover, Kierkegaard himself seems to connect love and need. ‘How deeply the need of love is rooted in human nature!’, he says, and continues: ‘[s]o deeply is this need rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it 31 32

Post 1995: 151–2. It is important to emphasize here the difference between (love) being motivated by a need and (love) being conditioned by the demand to have one’s need satisfied. When I define needing as being part of the structure of love, I mean that love is motivated and driven by a need, not conditioned by its fulfilment. This is of course particularly crucial in the case of neighbourly love: to understand the need for mutuality as motivating love does not mean that love for one’s neighbour is conditioned by the satisfaction of this need. Rather, it means that the hope that one’s need will be satisfied functions as a regulative ideal that explains, emotionally speaking, the drive to fulfil the duty to love. Namely, one is obliged to love one’s neighbour regardless of the satisfaction of one’s need to be loved in return, but this need continues to play a part in loving nevertheless. And remembering the double structure of faith, we may say that the hope and trust that this need will be ultimately fulfilled is part of the second movement in the structure of neighbourly love. That is, the movement of repetition, of receiving back, amounts (among other things) to the trust that ultimately, even when it seems impossible (as in the case of loving the enemy), one’s love for one’s neighbour will be returned, and the need for acknowledgement and mutuality will be satisfied.

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belong to being human, that even he who was one with the Father and in communion of love with the Father and the Spirit, he who loved the whole human race, our Lord Jesus Christ, even he humanly felt this need to love and be loved by an individual human being’ (WL, 154, 155, emphasis in the text). Humans need love: they need to love others and to be loved in return. This is what Kierkegaard is saying here very specifically, which means that he accepts the view according to which love is essentially connected to a need. But what kind of a need is it? In my understanding, to speak of ‘the need to love and be loved’ is to say, first and foremost, something about our nature as creatures that are not sufficient to themselves. We may therefore think of a need not in the demeaning way that Nygren seems to think of it (namely, as referring to being selfishly interested in gratifying oneself), but rather as reflecting our human nature that in its incompleteness drives us to transcend ourselves and seek meaningful values beyond ourselves. And this kind of ‘search’ is satisfied through our relationship with the other (human or divine). In a way, we may say that needing is our window to the other: it drives us to look beyond ourselves, to seek something that transcends ourselves.33 Thus, if we agree that there is nothing problematic in considering genuine love as involving this kind of need, we may conclude that there is nothing wrong in principle with taking sensitivity to the lover’s needs to be a part of the structure of genuine love. The real question is not whether genuine love should exclude sensitivity to the lover’s needs, but rather what kind of need poses a threat to love? The answer to this question has already been given in our analysis of the relationship between resignation and faith (namely, the relationship between resignation and affirmation): resignation is maintained (and not annulled) in the context of faith and accordingly it safeguards our affirmative return to the world, so that the needs being affirmed are not selfish or harmful to the other.34 To return to the question regarding the coexistence of the two loves, we can now reply that from the point of view of the traditional contradiction between agape and eros, the claim that romantic love and neighbourly love 33

34

I wish to clarify that despite the analogy to divine love in the context of needing (presented by both Post and Kierkegaard), I do not mean to imply that the motivation in each case – the human and the divine – is the same. Namely, to claim, as I do here, that humans need love because they are not sufficient to themselves, does not reflect in any way on the nature of divine love or on the reasons for it. All that I wish to establish here is that the connection between needing and loving can be found also in those loves where there is no doubt regarding their genuineness and unselfishness. See again note 12 above.

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are mutually exclusive (due to their allegedly essential distinction) proves to be refutable (or at least questionable). It seems that these two loves are not opposed to each other but rather share the same elements: both respond to the beloved’s value, and both address the lover’s needs. Indeed, the appreciation is different in the context of each love (responding to the value of the neighbour is different in character from responding to the value of one’s romantic beloved), and so are the needs that are being addressed. But in essence the two loves share the same fundamental structure of faith and under this aegis – namely, that of the double movement of resignation and affirmation – they also share the same fundamental elements (valuation of the other, attentiveness to needs of the self) that constitute each of the two loves. We can therefore see once again the importance of the model of faith for a coherent understanding of love. The double structure of faith resolves the tension that might seem to be inherent in the relations between the two kinds of love. Indeed, the two loves have different emphases: neighbourly love emphasizes self-denial, while romantic love emphasizes self-affirmation. But at the same time, the two loves share the same fundamental structure, the double structure of faith, whereby in both cases there is a paradoxical twofold relation to the self – denial and affirmation – which opens the way to a genuine relationship with the other. Each of the loves performs self-denial (a renunciation of one’s desires and needs) and self-affirmation (a renewed attention to one’s desires and needs); each manifests resignation (a renunciation of finite, worldly goods) and repetition (a full return to the world). To be more specific, we can picture how the paradoxical structure allows the coexistence of the two different loves: it does so in the following manner. Resignation, as we said in chapter 2, discloses the value of everything finite in two important ways. On the one hand, resignation discloses the independent value of x (in his belonging to God, regardless of what I think of him and regardless of the effect x has on me or on my life). On the other hand, it discloses the value of x for me (let us call this the personal value of x): resignation also discloses (in relevant cases) how strongly I am attached to x, how important x is for me, how greatly x is involved in my life and how profoundly x affects me. Now, neighbourly love focuses on the independent value of the neighbour (every neighbour) and regards as irrelevant the personal value of those of my neighbours to whom I am attached in closer relationships. But romantic love, while being bound and committed to acknowledging the independent value of the beloved no less than is neighbourly love (due to the first aspect of resignation which is

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valid in romantic love as well), is also focused on the personal value of the romantically beloved neighbour. From this perspective there is nothing contradictory in loving in a neighbourly way every human being, and loving romantically, preferentially, and in a special way, only one person. While neighbourly love and romantic love are indeed two distinct kinds of love (different in their emotional content, intentions, and needs), there is nothing contradictory in performing them together. When it is the double movement of faith that provides the basic structure of love, and when we remember that non-preferentiality is not essential to this basic structure (but only to one of its manifestations, namely, to neighbourly love), then we can see how neighbourly love and preferential love can coexist. We can therefore think about the neighbourly kind of love in terms of a caring compassion which is based on (a) discerning the neighbour’s value in resignation and self-denial, and (b) with sympathy and kindness responding to him in affirmation (as well as self-affirmation). This kind of feeling, this kind of doubly-structured love, can and should be directed equally at everybody. However, at the same time, and while equally loving all my neighbours, I can also love in a preferential way only a few of them. My preferential love for my special beloved (say, my romantic beloved) does not blind me with regard to my neighbour’s independent value, and it does not contradict or exclude my love for him (or her). Preferential love for my beloved need not conflict with having neighbourly love either for him (or her) or for a complete stranger. It is compatible both with fulfilling my duty towards either of them in self-denial, and with finding joy (of a sort associated with non-romantic relations) in either of them in self-affirmation. It is therefore the paradoxical structure of faith which makes it possible both to describe and to fulfil a profound (and complex) vision of the coexistence of the two loves, which compromises neither on the equality demanded by neighbourly love, nor on the inequality demanded by romantic love. According to this vision one can wholeheartedly fulfil one’s fundamental duty to love the neighbour: to love any human being by virtue of discerning and responding to his humanness (taking on board the profound difficulty and responsibility involved in doing this correctly). And at the same time, one can also make real, unqualified, and non-apologetic room for loving in a special way: one can respond to a special neighbour in a way which is undoubtedly central to our human existence.

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4 Summary: towards a model of romantic love Therefore if you want to be perfect in love, strive to fulfill this duty, in loving to love the person one sees, to love him just as you see him, with all his imperfections and weaknesses, to love him as you see him when he has changed completely, when he no longer loves you but perhaps turns away indifferent or turns away to love another, to love him as you see him when he betrays and denies you. (WL, 174)

Having inquired into the problematic perspective of Works of Love, we are now in the position to understand that when Kierkegaard utters words such as those quoted above, he is actually confusing the two kinds of love. His words sound as though they were directed towards a romantic lover (who loves one specific beloved), but the love that he speaks about is exclusively neighbourly.35 These two loves share the common feature of resignation (since they both have the structure of faith), and from this point of view Works of Love is indeed most insightful for a model of romantic love (because it illuminates one of romantic love’s essential features, that of resignation). At the same time, while romantic love is necessarily preferential, neighbourly love is necessarily not. Therefore, to shape romantic love in the form of neighbourly love is to take away a crucial feature from the former, and thereby to change it into something else. Alas, this is precisely what Kierkegaard seems to be doing. The quotation above, in its blatant disregard of the essential demands of preferentiality, is an accurate example of this. Kierkegaard’s confusion in Works of Love, we claimed, is rooted in his ‘forgetfulness’ of the movement of repetition: a movement that affirms the self, and the self’s preferential tendencies, while incorporating the movement of resignation and self-denial. Thus, his failure to see the possible compatibility of resignation and preference (in the context of the double structure of faith, which comprises resignation and repetition), results in his depiction of an incomplete self (a self-denied self), whose preferential loves are condemned as a form of selfishness. In Works of Love Kierkegaard seems to recognize two possibilities alone: one either denies oneself (and only denies oneself), or one is selfish; one either loves in a 35

Kierkegaard says these words against the background of his discussion on the biblical story that describes Peter’s denial of Christ, but it is reasonable to assume that he intends his reader to understand his conclusion in a more general way, one which is applicable to all kinds of preferential relationships (including the romantic), and relevant for any sort of betrayal.

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neighbourly way (and only in a neighbourly way), or one loves selfishly. Kierkegaard fails to see that one can affirm oneself and at the same time deny oneself; that one can deny oneself and at the same time love preferentially. Now, the forgetfulness of the movement of repetition poses a problem for neighbourly love no less than it does for romantic love (neighbourly love, being shaped in the light of faith, should include the movement of repetition as much as romantic love should) – but this problem is less conspicuous in the context of neighbourly love. After all, neighbourly love is essentially non-preferential, and non-preferentiality is achieved in the context of resignation (therefore the ‘need’ in a further movement is less noticeable). But resignation (or self-denial) is not enough – not for neighbourly love and not for romantic love. A return to the world is needed in both: a return to finitude, to concreteness, to our body; a return to our unique embodiment in time and space. However, Works of Love focuses only on self-denial and, as a result, the model of love that it presents is incomplete. It is a model of resignation’s love (rather than of the double movement, of a faith-like love) that allows for only a partial and incomplete return to finitude. Resignation’s love looks suspiciously at finitude and cannot fully affirm it. Finitude is ephemeral and transient and, from the point of view of resignation, cannot but be marginal to eternity. The resigned believer’s relationship with finitude is therefore qualified and ambivalent: he cares about finitude but can neither immerse himself in it nor joyfully accept it; he acknowledges the importance of finitude, but is very cautious not to let it play a more central role in his life. The body, being the finite aspect of our existence, is therefore pushed to the margins as well. A self-regarding kind of love (which is frequently also more noticeably bodily than neighbourly love), though not harmful in any way, is nevertheless dismissed, or at least overlooked, because it is connected to the finite, demanding body. Such a connection gives a more emphatic expression to self-concerned needs and desires, and is thus considered by Kierkegaard to be ‘selfish’. However, while this kind of dismissal of the body presents no problem for neighbourly love, it definitely presents a problem for preferential love, and in particular for romantic love. In the context of neighbourly love it is easier to forget that we have a body and it is quite in place to look at it as merely functional, a secondary fact about our existence. But in the context of romantic love the body becomes central and it shows itself and demands our attention. It reminds us that it has special needs and idiosyncratic ways of expressing itself as an

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essential part of who we are. And the resigning believer is baffled by this. He does not know how to make room for something he considers as marginal in a context in which it demands to be central. Resignation’s love cannot be viewed as adequate. The broken harmony between finitude and infinitude – the regression (after the achievement of Fear and Trembling) to the more traditional hierarchy where infinitude is placed above finitude – cannot allow for the possibility of joyful love. For a satisfactory model of love, a harmony between the movements (of resignation and repetition) is needed. A renewed relationship with finitude (see again chapter 3) is required for achieving a desirable relationship of love. In the context of such a relationship we can attain a balance between the spiritual connection of the lovers and its bodily expression, between self-denial and an embodied self-love; a harmony between me (as an embodied spiritual being) and you (as no less spiritual and no less embodied). Having said that, and especially in the context of romantic love, it is important to emphasize again the significance of resignation. When my neighbour is also my romantic beloved, the need to deny myself is of particular importance. We have said that self-denial is the other, more specific, side of resignation: we renounce our beloved before God (in the same manner as the young lover renounces his princess), and we specifically renounce ourselves before our beloved. Resignation is necessary for crystallizing our view of the beloved: it reveals the beloved as belonging to God and it brings to light our deep attachment to him. Hence, if we want to be honest with ourselves and act in a manner consistent with the realization gained through resignation, we need strenuously to deny ourselves. Because it is only through this prism that we can truly see the beloved: see him as separate from us in his autonomy and freedom, see him as someone for whose sake we sometimes need to sacrifice our selfcentred gratifications and habits, see how valuable he is and, accordingly, realize how deep our duty and obligation is to him. Denying ourselves, however, is not an easy task: there are, indeed, selfish elements in us that are powerfully awakened particularly in the context of an intimate relationship. In such a context it is harder to be patient and forgiving, harder to see the other clearly, harder to be on guard about one’s own faults and weaknesses. In such a context it is easier to become tired and oblivious, easier to take the beloved for granted, easier to sin against him.36 The movement of resignation edifies us to be 36

See the discussion of the demonic in the next chapter.

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alert and attentive to these selfish tendencies, and it upbuilds us to overcome them, to deny ourselves in spite of ourselves. But then again, this is not enough. Having denied ourselves, we also need to be able to return to ourselves. Such a return needs to be a full return, including a return to our body, to our needs, and to our idiosyncratic preferences – the preferences pertaining both to our bodies and to our souls. Resignation alone does not allow this. Our model of love should therefore be shaped in the structure of the double movement of faith: a model of faith-like love. In this chapter I have used Kierkegaard’s view of faith (as presented in Fear and Trembling) to amend his view of love (as presented in Works of Love). The amendment that I have offered here has three aspects (in accordance with the three main problems that I identified in Works of Love). First, I suggested that we should regard as separate neighbourly love and the love that Kierkegaard calls ‘Kjerlighed’. Neighbourly love should not be considered as identical to Kjerlighed, but rather as a particular manifestation of it. While Kierkegaard conflates neighbourly love with Kjerlighed, I suggested that we regard the former as a particular type of work of love that gives the fundamental, mysterious Kjerlighed within us a particular expression in action, feeling, and thought.37 Second, I suggested that we understand the basic structure of each work of love – namely, the structure shared by all the various manifestations of Kjerlighed, neighbourly and preferential alike – in terms of the double movement of faith. That is, instead of understanding our acts of love as involving the movement of resignation (self-denial) alone, I suggested that we understand them as involving both resignation and repetition. This paradoxical structure entails the compatibility of resignation and preferentiality (or of self-denial and an unqualified self-love), which Kierkegaard fails to take into consideration in Works of Love. Finally, the first and the second suggestions pave the way for the third: preferential, romantic love is not a manifestation of neighbourly love (as Kierkegaard and many of his interpreters inconsistently suggest) but is rather a distinct manifestation of Kjerlighed. Thus, neighbourly love and romantic love are two kinds of love – two manifestations of Kjerlighed – that share the same faith-like structure, a structure that allows for their coexistence. At the beginning of our discussion of Works of Love I suggested that Kierkegaard’s focus on the works of love indicates, among other things, 37

See chapter 4.

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that he is not interested in conducting an inquiry that aims at fathoming the metaphysical nature of love.38 Rather, Kierkegaard is interested in the existential aspect of love – in the way that love manifests itself in our life, in the way in which it affects and guides our existence. At the same time, we saw, Kierkegaard does provide a few hints regarding his metaphysical understanding of love: he speaks of it as originating in God (‘a human being’s love originates mysteriously in God’s love’, WL, 10), he pictures the need to love as deeply and essentially rooted in our nature (‘[s]o deeply is this need rooted in human nature, and so essentially does it belong to being human’, WL, 155), and he declares that God implanted love in us (‘[G]od … has placed love in the human being’, WL, 126). In the inquiry of love presented here I have followed Kierkegaard in focusing on the ‘how’ (how does love shape our existence into a meaningful one?), rather than on the ‘what’ (what love is). However, I have tried cautiously to delineate a connection between the initial Kierkegaardian metaphysical characterization of love and the Kierkegaardian focus on the works of love. My suggestion is that while love itself is a divine, mysterious power (implanted in humans by God, defining human nature, but evading any definite human grasp), the works of love are a particular human way to encounter love, to access it, to enact it. This particular way is the way of faith. Faith enacts love, and the structure of faith (the double movement of resignation coupled with repetition) is the ‘outline’, the distinctive figure, of the work of love. Namely, love is enacted by faith – it is shaped and structured by it – into the various works of love around which our existence is centred. Now, these works are many and various, and one of them is the work of romantic love. In the next and last chapter of this study I shall focus on this kind of work of love by presenting more specifically the faith-like model of romantic love. In the light of this model I will closely examine the story of one of Kierkegaard’s more intriguing protagonists, who is perhaps the nearest to representing a striving human lover: the Merman of Fear and Trembling. 38

See the first section of chapter 4.

6 FAITH-FULL ROMANTIC LOVE

1 The significance of faith-full love The infinite love of the finite 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. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self. (SUD, 13)

What does a human being need to become a self? He needs, says Kierkegaard (under the pseudonym of Anti-Climacus), something beyond the synthesis (which is the relation between the finite and the infinite, the temporal and the eternal), something other which stands in relation to this synthesis. Hence he says (at the beginning of the paragraph just quoted): ‘The self is a relation that relates itself to itself … the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself’ (ibid.). To be a self, then, it is not enough to be a synthesis, namely, a mere relation between finitude and infinitude. Being a self is relating to this relation, knowing how to relate to ourselves in our being both finite and infinite. Being a self means knowing how to posit ourselves in the right relation to both infinitude and finitude; it is ‘the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that relates itself to itself’ (SUD, 29). This self is spirit, Anti-Climacus says, and this interestingly resonates with an important definition formed by Kierkegaard (under yet another pseudonym, this time Vigilius Haufniensis) in The Concept of 166

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Anxiety. ‘Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical’, he says, ‘however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit’ (CA, 43). In notable disagreement with an influential philosophical tradition that contrasted spirit with the finite aspect of our existence (i.e. the body), and considered the true nature of human beings as ultimately consisting in an unembodied spirit, here the body is understood as a necessary, and equally important part of a true self. A true self is one consisting of both a soul and a body; a true self is complexly composed of both a part aspiring to infinitude, to God, and a part immersed in finitude. Being a spirit, being a true self, is to know how to live in accordance with this complex nature, how to harmonize the synthesis between the two different ‘parts’, how to ‘marry’ the different needs, demands, wishes, and duties they involve. It is the claim of this study that among the possible Kierkegaardian attitudes to existence it is only the mode of faith that allows this desirable harmony, and hence the unique existence of the self as a spirit. And being a spirit, in Kierkegaard’s specific use, means the ability to exist as a finite creature infused with infinitude. The self is understood as flesh invaded by a soul; as an embodied soul. In chapter 3, against the background of the religious meaning of renouncing the finite (see chapter 2), we analysed the special significance of faith as a renewed (and ‘spiritualized’) relationship with the finite. In chapter 5, against the background of Kierkegaard’s ambivalence with regard to self-love and preferential love in Works of Love (see chapter 4), we demonstrated how crucial the double movement of faith is for a coherent understanding of love as a true relationship between self and other (and God, as the ‘middle term’).1 Having come this long way, we can now tie together all the threads and present a faith-like model of romantic love. When romantic love is fulfilled in faith it is performed along the lines of faith, in the shape and structure of faith. And when it is thus performed, it reaches its highest stage of fulfilment. This love is pervaded with faith, it is full of faith. Let us call this form of love ‘faith-full’ love. Now, romantic love is a state of existence in the context of which both finitude and infinitude are strongly present. Being emphatically bodily, the finite 1

We said that faith, being the double movement of resignation and repetition, is a renewed relationship with finitude, which is constituted on the basis of a relationship with God (see chapters 2 and 3). Thinking of faith in terms of such a spiritual bond that connects people through their relationship with God accords with the idea that Kierkegaard expresses in Works of Love regarding God as a ‘middle term’. See WL, 107, and note 46 in chapter 3 above.

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aspect of our existence demands our attention more than it does in the context of other kinds of love. At the same time, however, when romantic love is fulfilled in faith, it is no less a matter of the soul than it is bodily. Hence, in the context of romantic love we are fully exposed as both finite and infinite. It is there, in such a close relationship with the other, that we intensely feel our body and the limitation of our finitude on the one hand, and our aspiration, and opening up, to the infinite (expressed in resignation as well as in our joyful feelings of gratitude for being given the gift of love) on the other. And since it is both finitude and infinitude that are so strongly present in romantic love, it is crucial in connection with this form of love to achieve a balance between finitude and infinitude; but at the same time (and for the same reason) it is here that achieving such a balance is the hardest. It is in romantic love, then, that the challenge to value the finite through one’s relationship with the infinite is at its greatest. Indeed (as emphasized above), the model of faith – by edifying us towards a full valuation of the finite – is obviously not restricted to romantic love alone. Any love – be it for friends, family, neighbours – should therefore be formed in the light of faith. However, we may now be in a position to understand why it is important to discuss the faith-fullness of romantic love in particular. First, as we have just stated, in its being emphatically both finite and infinite, romantic love may be the kind of love that poses the highest challenge to faith: the challenge of finding the right balance between its finite and infinite aspects. Second, looking at romantic love through the prism of faith safeguards our understanding of its significance. As we saw in chapters 4 and 5, it is easy to dismiss romantic love as only bodily, selfish, or less important than ‘spiritual’ matters; it is easy even to dismiss romantic love as immoral. Kierkegaard’s severe judgement of it in Works of Love only emphasizes how important it is to discuss the faith-full nature of romantic love. Disclosing the faith-full nature, or the faith-like structure, of romantic love is, in a way, more crucial than disclosing faith-fullness in the context of, say, neighbourly love. Evidently, in the case of neighbourly love not applying the structure of faith does not threaten one’s judgements regarding neighbourly love so severely. Even without seeing the double structure of faith one can consider neighbourly love to be important, coherent, and desirable. This approval is connected, first and foremost, to our understanding of resignation in the context of such love. In neighbourly love there is not so much need to emphasize the importance of

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resignation. Resignation does not even seem to conflict with such love; on the contrary. In the case of romantic love, on the other hand, if we do not apply the structure of faith we end with a picture that seems problematic ethically and spiritually. Since a position that involves resignation (the ethical and spiritual demand), and a position that involves preference (the romantic demand) seem to exclude each other, romantic love may easily seem to conflict with our ethical, spiritual, and religious aspirations. Clarification with regard to the faith-fullness of romantic love – with regard to the way in which the structure of faith is applicable to it – is therefore particularly important here.2 What, then, is faith-full romantic love like? The first stage of romantic love is its fulfilment in an aesthetic manner. This kind of fulfilment puts the emphasis on the temporal and finite aspects of the love. The seducer, for example, is focused on the sensuous and the immediate, on achieving satisfaction that cannot progress beyond its momentary fulfilment. Once the desired object of love is seduced (that is, surrenders to the will of the seducer, accepts his love and returns it, and becomes, from the seducer’s point of view, his ‘own’ possession), he loses interest and the love is over: it becomes a recollection (see again chapter 1). Accordingly, aesthetic love, as momentarily oriented (that is, as a love directed at its momentary fulfilment), tends to be short-lived. For aesthetic love to progress towards becoming faith-full love a deliberate (and difficult) step needs to be taken. This step is the performance of the movement of resignation, which is a step forward not only beyond aesthetic love but also beyond marital love, which is represented by the Judge (as we have seen in chapter 1). Because resignation means not only renouncing desires (present or future) towards other people (a step that one already fulfils in marriage by choosing a beloved to whom one promises to commit one’s love), it rather means acknowledging that nothing – not the lovers’ present desire for one another, not their good will, and not the vows they take in the context of marriage – can secure their love from a loss. Becoming involved in a relationship of genuine, life-committing love means to put oneself in the vulnerable position of becoming strongly 2

I should emphasize again, though, that even in the case of neighbourly love the structure of faith presents an improved picture. It allows us to see how neighbourly love can be realized in a way which does not fall into various forms of self-deception, coldness and indifference, or thanklessness. Moreover, in chapter 5 we demonstrated the need in applying this model on neighbourly love for a coherent understanding of the coexistence of the two different kinds of love, neighbourly and romantic.

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attached to someone who may eventually be lost to you (by going away or by being taken away; as a result of one’s free choice, or through the imposition of death). It means to become attached to something (someone) over which one has only limited control. Therefore, becoming involved in such a relationship confronts one, very vividly, with one’s own limitations. It does so by giving rise to fears and anxieties (of losing oneself in the love, of losing the beloved, of spoiling the love, of being ruined by it), and by making the lover understand how demanding, and painful, it is to love. The lover understands the depth of the required sacrifice – a sacrifice of the natural inclination to have everything one wants as one wants it, a surrender of the natural tendency to put oneself in the centre, a renunciation of the natural tendency, and desire, to be in control – and the depth of the required selfdenial. Indeed, there are many ways to spoil love (by fear, by selfishness, by weariness, by lack of trust), but I am not interested in analysing all of these here.3 It is more interesting, from my point of view, to acknowledge that, at many junctures, maintaining a relationship of love depends on resignation: on renouncing the beloved and on renouncing ourselves. We need the movement of resignation for a genuine appreciation of our beloved, and we need to deny ourselves as an appropriate response to his revealed value. However, romantic love in its highest form does not halt in resignation (just as faith does not stop here). To halt in resignation means that the relationship we maintain with our beloved (if we manage to maintain such a relationship at all) is necessarily shaped by the consciousness of loss and is, accordingly, dominated by pain and sorrow. Such a relationship cannot but be incomplete – it is barred from taking joy either in the love or in the beloved. To make the second movement of faith in the context of love means to be capable of relating to the finite unreservedly, to love the finite not in a relative, restricted way but rather absolutely. In other words, we may say that faith-full love means to love the finite in an infinite way: it is the infinite love of the finite, for the finite.4 3

4

In a way, Amy Laura Hall’s book takes on itself the task of doing precisely this: showing how we humans – because of our sinfulness and failure of faith – cannot but ruin love. My own conclusion, however, is more positive and optimistic than hers (see my discussion of her book in chapter 4 above). A possible objection to this claim would assert that, according to Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, such a love should be ruled out as paganism and idolatry (after all, the wisdom of the religious life is defined as knowing how to relate oneself relatively to the relative and absolutely to the absolute. See CUP, 407). However, my answer to a charge of this sort (i.e. that the love that I offer here is a regression to paganism) would be that what secures this love from becoming idolatry is the movement of resignation. The love I present here is

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Love’s aura of faith If … we become capable of hearing the cry of the lover from whose arms the beloved has been torn away, we shall discern in the emptiness of his arms the space that awaits a second voice; a space left open for the joyful possibility of a consummating embrace in which both voices are reunited and separation conquered … never, of course, to be won without passion and never to be possessed without the risk of pain.5

The origin of love, we said, is a mystery (it is a power ‘implanted’ by God and hidden in us), but at the same time this mysterious power can be manifested in our work of romantic love.6 Accordingly, we can think of romantic love as a complex combination of human acts (performed both inwardly and outwardly, consciously and subconsciously) and a divine mystery. Because even if a relationship of love can be explained in terms of sociological, psychological, and even biological reasons – it can never be reduced to these explanations. Sometimes love may seem banal, sometimes it appears to be banally explainable, but these appearances and explanations are never (and can never tell) the whole story. No matter how hard we work to sustain our love, no matter how many stories we tell about it, something crucial escapes our control. To begin with, romantic love is something that happens to us, not something that we can plan or bring upon ourselves (we cannot force ourselves to fall in love with a person, no matter how hard we try). Of course, we are responsible for noticing the opportunity for such love, for wanting it, for working towards it – but we cannot ignore the wonder of its occurrence: a meeting with this particular person, under these particular circumstances, at this particular time, that turns out to be love. However, and especially in the long term, it is easy for us to surrender to the routine of love, to get used to it, and to forget about the wonder of it. And so the value of our love and of our beloved comes to be concealed behind the thick screen of the banality and tiredness of our blurred and unappreciative everydayness. And this is where our work becomes crucially significant.

5 6

not a naı¨ve love that simply sees the finite as absolute. Rather it is a paradoxical love that fully dedicates itself to the finite while acknowledging how deeply it fails to have a hold on it, how deeply it is removed from the finite. Moreover, the full dedication to the finite is sustained by, and becomes possible through, the full dedication to the infinite, that is, God. I do not see the dedication and love for God and the dedication and love for the finite as being in conflict with each other. I rather see the former as allowing the latter, as a necessary condition for it. Pattison 2002b: 189. See again chapters 4 and 5.

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The importance of resignation (the first movement of faith) for a clear and focused view of finitude has been emphasized several times in this study. Here the finite in question is our human beloved; and resignation serves as the edification for seeing the beloved in all his glory. This addresses the need, so essential for romantic love, not to take the beloved for granted – not to forget his infinite value as being God’s gift to us. The second movement of faith (the movement of affirmation, or repetition), being the acceptance of this gift and the full appreciation of it, expresses the ability to see the wonder of love. To see the grace, to see the gift and joyfully accept it, despite the human (and sinful) temptation to disregard it. Faith, we said, is a renewed relationship with the finite. Faith-full love is the renewal of love, the occurrence of moments in which the light of infinitude reveals our love to us in its full value. Loving faith-fully, by applying faith’s double structure to our relationship of love, is therefore important for positing ourselves in the right relation to the object of love, and for disclosing the value of both the beloved and the relationship. And to love faith-fully is no less desirable – and no less difficult and rare – than to live faith-fully (that is, to live like the knight of faith). Being a knight of faith-full love is at each and every moment to be fully attuned to, and appreciative of, the presence of one’s beloved (even in his absence). When loving faith-fully, the beloved is passionately seen within the full aura of his value. And when this happens, there are no distractions that can threaten the complete attention given to the beloved: no weakened wills or treacherous thoughts that might cast a shadow over the love. However, this fullness emerges from, and is accompanied by, an infinite nothingness: the nothingness invading our existence which is acknowledged in resignation. The beloved’s presence is infinitely intense, but this intensity is genuinely seen and experienced only against the background of his profound absence (that consists in his being essentially lost, by virtue of his finitude). Faith-full love, then, begins in resignation and culminates in the movement of repetition. In the context of such love we are edified to accept our position of being-in-relation with regard to both God and the human other.7 After all, resignation, in its acknowledgement of our boundaries 7

In Kierkegaard’s Upbuilding Discourses Pattison argues for the importance and centrality of the upbuilding discourses in the philosophy of Kierkegaard, and in their dialogical nature he sees an indication of the presence of the ‘Thou’ – the human ‘Thou’ – in Kierkegaard’s authorship. Like Pattison I claim that there is a real place, an essential place, for the ‘other’ in the life that Kierkegaard depicts as a life worth living. Moreover, this place is created only through the relationship with the ultimate other, the ultimate ‘Thou’: God.

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and dependence on God, posits us not as autonomous creatures but rather as creatures the structure of whose existence is that of being in relation. This acknowledgement with regard to God upbuilds us with regard to the human other as well. We are edified to see ourselves as facing someone, someone independent of us, and entirely different from us. Through resignation then, we learn how to respect this independence, and it is resignation that makes us see not only the profound otherness of the other (in his belonging to God) but also the importance of this otherness for us. But it is only the movement of repetition that gives full expression to our appreciation of the importance and the value that we see in the other who is given to us. The ability to carry out this movement is the height of faith-full love. Only then do we truly see love, value love, and live love; only then do we show our appreciation to God, our gratefulness to him; only then can we genuinely fulfil our relationship with him and, through this, our relationship of human, faith-full, love. To conclude, faith is important for an understanding and fulfilment of romantic love because it enlightens this kind of love and gives it shape. Faith discloses the value and the desirability of romantic love, as well as its significance, for our existence. The prism of faith is essential because if one does not understand the resignation–repetition structure of romantic love, one may either reduce this love to its finite aspects (focusing on its bodily pleasures and functions alone), or come to the conclusion that bodily love should be left behind. My suggestion to see romantic love as illuminated by the aura of faith allows us to think differently about ideal love; about what it implies and what it demands, what it offers and what it takes away, about its pain and its joy. And now that we understand the significance of faith-full romantic love, let us examine more concretely how this form of love may be relevant to one’s life and to the way one loves. We will do so by looking closely at the story of the somewhat neglected Merman of Fear and Trembling, and see how from among the various options open to him, it is only faith-full love that fully does justice to the difficulties, demands, and joys of romantic love. 2 A faith-full lover: the Story of the Merman The seduction of Agnes Without a doubt, it is the most difficult mystery, just as it is also supposed to be the most profound wisdom, to arrange one’s life as if today were the last day one lives and also the first in a sequence of years. (SLW, 384, emphasis mine)

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In the first chapter we characterized the pre-religious lovers of recollection as failing to acknowledge and accept the loss inherent to any relationship of love. It is precisely these lovers who are far from arranging their lives – let alone their loves – in the wise manner described above; namely, that in which one sees and values every single day (of one’s life and of one’s love) as both lost and regained. And of the three types of lovers, I wish to return now to the demonic, who is the most complex (and interesting) one. The demonic is a borderline figure, someone who wavers between different options. He is too sensitive with regard to his temporality to accept the aesthetic and ethical solutions, but too powerfully inclosed within himself to leap beyond their sphere. He therefore stands at the threshold of the religious: reaching out for it, but too deeply rooted in recollection to arrive at it. Such a demonic lover is embodied in the figure of a merman, whose love story – which has several possible endings – is told by Johannes de Silentio in Fear and Trembling. Several commentators have paid attention to the tale of the Merman, finding it highly significant.8 However, usually the Merman’s love for Agnes is overshadowed by Fear and Trembling’s account of the biblical story of Abraham and, therefore, it is easy to miss the richness and significance of this tale. The story of Abraham presents us with the paradigm of faith: this is the ideal, the highest peak one can aspire to, the highest state of existence to which we look with admiration as our regulative ideal. And like Johannes, most of us find it hard not only to have a faith like Abraham’s, but even to imagine ourselves in his situation at the Binding. The Merman, however, is much closer to us. In as much as we are imperfect beings – sinful and possessed by our demons, that at each and every moment of our lives face the same possibilities that are open to the Merman – we are like him. And, like him, we are also free to decide between these possibilities: this is the striving for love, if only we choose to carry it out. We can therefore say that while the story of Abraham stands for the desired goal, the Merman’s story stands for the striving, for the way leading 8

Green and Mulhall see in this story a crucial turning-point in Fear and Trembling that imparts the less conspicuous and yet more significant of the text’s messages: the centrality of sin and repentance in the structure of faith. (See Mulhall 2001: 385–6; Green 1993: 201–2.) Hannay sees in this story a reflection of ‘the “logic” of Kierkegaard’s own special situation with regard to the universal, as he saw it, in respect of his relationship with Regine’, and a demonstration of the close relations between faith and fulfilment of the ethical/universal: ‘Being “revealed” means here disclosing social nature, making and fulfilling social and personal commitments, in short participating actively in the private and public affairs of life’ (see Hannay 1982: 79–81).

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to the goal. While Abraham’s life embodies a continual fulfilment and affirmation of the life of faith, ours is at best an attempt to approach this life. Unlike Abraham, and indeed more like the Merman, we are susceptible to weaknesses, distractions, and sins. If Abraham’s story is the embodiment of the ideal of faith, then, the Merman’s story is the embodiment of a life lived towards the ideal of faith – the embodiment of the striving and the attempt to accomplish this ideal. Hence the Merman, who may potentially be the reflection of any person, definitely deserves our attention – not only as a possible embodiment of every human being but, in particular, as a possible embodiment of every human lover.9 Despite the mythological setting of the story, the Merman’s way of love is, in essence, the way open to every human lover who struggles to fulfil love. Who is the Merman, then? What is he like and what is his story? The Merman is a seducer ‘who rises up from his hidden chasm and in wild lust seizes and breaks the innocent flower standing on the seashore’ (FT, 94). And indeed, his love story, which has two important phases, begins with a seduction: He has called to Agnes and by his wheedling words has elicited what was hidden in her. In the merman she found what she was seeking, what she was searching for as she stared down to the bottom of the sea. (FT, 94)

The story begins with the depiction of the Merman as an aesthetic seducer who enjoys the thrill of seduction, which ends once he has dragged his love-object to the depths of the sea (rising up again alone to seduce another girl). But then one day he meets Agnes; and Agnes is different. She is someone who is not terrified of the tempest before her – the turmoil of the sea does not frighten her. She seems to be even drawn to it. Not blinded by the beauty of the storming waves, she is looking beneath them, searching for something deeper at the bottom of the sea. Against the background of Kierkegaard’s image of love as a power that almost hypnotizes us (drawing us to itself just as the mysterious darkness of the water invites us to look more and more deeply into the lake), we may 9

One may claim that most lovers prefer to lead their lives in ‘happy ignorance’, and refuse to confront the reasons for being unsatisfied in their relationships (reasons such as the struggle between the aesthetic and ethical powers in their soul, their demons, their weaknesses, their conflicting desires, their sins – all of which are rooted in their frustrated responses to loss). From this point of view, most lovers are indeed not like the Merman, who is conscious of his misery and honestly tries to address it. It is therefore important to emphasize that the common lover is in essence like the Merman, but in actuality there are maybe only a few who dare to strive for their loves in the way that he does (or, at least, hints at).

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suggest that what Agnes manages to detect in the bottom of the roaring sea is the love in the innermost being of the Merman.10 Seeing the love in the midst of his dark, tempting wildness, she can trustfully submit herself to him: He is already standing on the beach, crouching to dive out into the sea and plunge down with his booty – and then Agnes looks at him once more, not fearfully, not despairingly, not proud of her good luck, not intoxicated with desire, but in absolute faith and in absolute humility … and with this look she entrusts her whole destiny to him in absolute confidence. (Ibid.)

And the Merman is overwhelmed by this look. Something stronger than his natural powers of seduction overcomes him, and he ‘breaks down’: He cannot withstand the power of innocence … he cannot seduce Agnes. He takes her home again, he explains that he only wanted to show her how beautiful the sea is when it is calm, and Agnes believes him. Then he returns alone, and the sea is wild, but not as wild as the merman’s despair. He can seduce Agnes, he can seduce a hundred Agneses, he can make any girl infatuated – but Agnes has won, and the merman has lost her. Only as booty can she be his; he cannot give himself faithfully to any girl, because he is indeed only a merman. (Ibid., 94–5)

What happened to the Merman? What is the essence of his surprising transformation? In his Journals Kierkegaard comments as follows: The merman is a seducer, but when he has won Agnes’s love he is so moved by it that he wants to belong to her entirely. – But this, you see, he cannot do, since he must initiate her into his whole tragic existence, that he is a monster at certain times, etc., that the church cannot give its blessing to them. He despairs and in his despair plunges to the bottom of the sea and remains there. (JP 5, 5668)

The Merman has fallen in love with Agnes (it might be suggested that it was her ability to see the loving power in him – to see through his ‘monstrous’ nature and accept him as he is, trusting the ‘humanity’ in him and thus reflecting to him the possibility of enacting this humanity – that touched him so deeply), and now he wishes to make the ethical choice and ‘belong to her entirely’. However, taking such a step requires of him to acknowledge his problematic past, and to foresee the possible difficulties that threaten their joint future. Therefore, even though ‘the seducer is crushed’ 10

See WL, 8–10. See also chapter 4 above.

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and ‘he can never seduce again’ (FT, 96), the Merman is now facing a new phase: the second phase of his convoluted story. To have repented of his seductiveness is only the beginning, and the Merman ‘stands at a dialectical apex’ (FT, 98), facing three different options which are open to him: demonic hiddenness, religious resignation, or faith. And if he decides to surrender to his present condition – that is, to surrender to the demonic in him – then what he chooses is, in actuality, the state of sin. The dark night of the demonic I am now taking this kinswoman of mine, not because of lust, but with sincerity. Grant that she and I may find mercy and that we may grow old together. (Book of Tobit, 8:7, New Revised Standard Version)

We said that the different responses to the essential loss threatening love constitute the different stages of love. And of the three possible pre-religious responses to loss – of the three possible loves of recollection – demonic love is the darkest, and also the most intriguing. It brings together the lover’s aesthetic and ethical tendencies, and pushes the struggle between them to a final defeat. The aesthetic desires and the ethical demands clash and collapse into the demonic failure to address the loss involved in the passage of time.11 And this failure, I claim, takes the shape of sin (or a temptation to sin). Namely, the demonic response to loss amounts to sinning or, at the very least, to being in a sinful state of mind (that is, being inclined and susceptible to sin, being attracted to the kingdom of sin).12 11

12

In chapter 1 we examined the different responses to loss as shown by the aesthetic and the ethical lovers and saw that each has its distinctive way of loving, which is in conflict with that of the other. The passionate debate between the ‘either’ (namely, the aesthetic) and the ‘or’ (the ethical) can be understood as an inner struggle between two dominant inclinations of the human soul. The aesthetic element demands receptivity to the sensual and the immediate; the ethical element demands choosing and adherence to continuity and higher ideals. These two elements are essentially in conflict but the resolution of their struggle lies beyond the limits of the struggle itself: it has to come from ‘the outside’, from a different point of view. And because this struggle cannot thus be resolved, the inevitable failure gives birth to the demonic. Of course, this does not mean that the aesthetic and ethical lovers are righteous men who never sin. Rather, it means that the demonic lover is the only one in the pre-religious sphere whose sinful state plays a role in the way he loves (and lives). The aesthetic and ethical lovers are indifferent to the existence of sin in their lives, they do not take their sinfulness into account, it does not play any role in their lives. Moreover, if we think of the ethical and the aesthetic as representing two dominant aspects of the soul (rather than actual types of human beings), it is easier to see why the reality of sin is not as yet a part of their story. (See note 11.)

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Now, in The Concept of Anxiety the demonic is defined as ‘anxiety about the good’ (CA, 118), and in The Sickness unto Death it is said that ‘sin is not a matter of a person’s not having understood what is right but of his being unwilling to understand it, of his not willing what is right’ (SUD, 95, emphasis mine). By using the term ‘sin’, then, I basically refer to the broadest meaning of it being a distancing of oneself from the good, of feeling anxious and hopeless about the good, of despairing of it (that is, despairing of achieving the good, of getting hold of it). The demonic powers in us, according to this understanding, are therefore those powers that take us away from goodness, that weaken our hold on it. They are the powers that weaken our will to achieve the good and to do what is right.13 And we all have our demons – those dark, shapeless powers within us that tempt us to do what we know we should not do, or distract us from doing what (we know) we should do. Such demonic factors in our will and motivation are all somehow connected to our limitedness. They are evoked by our coming up against our limitations, by our being confronted with them: our will is hindered by reality, and we rebel against it. Reality makes a variety of things incompatible with one another or unachievable (seducing a hundred Agneses and at the same time devoting oneself completely to one Agnes alone; maintaining the novelty of love over time; never to suffer changes, never to confront death), and the demonic refuses to reconcile himself to it. The demonic, in other words, refuses to reconcile himself to essential loss – namely, to the actual and potential losses that threaten love – which he cannot prevent or control. 13

The concept of sin constitutes an important part of the philosophical-religious language of Kierkegaard and is in particular central to the Christian emphases of this language. In the present study, however, I want to look at a general existential meaning that this concept might have in the context of Kierkegaard’s philosophy (and not necessarily at its more decisively theological meaning). It is therefore not my purpose here to give a complete account of Kierkegaard’s understanding of the concept of sin or to attempt to explain its role within a larger Christian theological picture. In a way, what George Pattison says of his project of reading Kierkegaard’s Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses philosophically can be applied to my own approach to the authorship of Kierkegaard in this context: ‘Now it has certainly not been my intention in developing a “philosophical” interpretation of the discourses to mask the fact that in one sense they do presuppose a set of distinctively Christian theological assumptions. It would almost be absurd to claim otherwise. The question is what does this mean for our reading of them? Does it mean that they are incomprehensible except to those who share these assumptions, who share Kierkegaard’s faith (in this case his faith in the Christian doctrine of the atonement)? Or, despite their Christian vocabulary and concepts, can we say of them that … they essentially seek to make the meaning of that faith accessible, attractive and understandable to the good-willed reader?’ (Pattison 2002b: 209).

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The demonic is terrified by loss. After all, loss is connected to those desirable things that one cannot have, to those beloved things that are taken away from one, to everything that one wants – but cannot have. Loss, therefore, can be understood as an obstacle before one’s will, an obstacle that hinders one from fulfilling the good that one desires. And while the aesthetic and ethical forms of recollection are characterized by their inability to cope with loss and by their attempt to ignore it in various ways, the demonic reminds one that those attempts have failed. The demonic is a manner of making the inevitability of loss powerfully present: it is to become obsessed with the loss, obsessed with the obstacle, obsessed with forfeiting the good.14 Hence, while the ethical man maintains a naı¨ve belief regarding his direct approach and access to the good and the right (as remembered, the ethical lover is characterized by trusting the human ability to fulfil the ethical ideals by way of one’s rationality and will alone) – the demonic rebels against this complacent delusion and, as a result, distances himself from the good. Not because he does not desire it, but rather because he despairs of achieving it. One who becomes thus estranged from the ideals of goodness (by focusing on the obstacles preventing one from fulfilling them) will quite naturally end by choosing the bad over the good or, in other words, end by sinning. To put it differently, while the ethical man tries to repress the fact of his limitedness (his finitude, his illicit desires, his failure to adhere to the ideals he holds), the demonic person is demonic precisely because he rebels against the ethical refusal to acknowledge his limitedness, and ultimately against the ethical ideals themselves. Hence, the ethical blindness and self-deception lead to a ‘demonic rage’.15 The demonic powers (which are rooted in our intimate, inescapable knowledge of our own limitations) cannot be subdued: they eventually burst their way out in the form of sin or a temptation to sin. A recent example of the demonic rebellion against ethical complacency – and the dark, tempting road it paves directly to the kingdom of sin – can be found in Stanley Kubrick’s interpretation of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Dream Story. In order to illustrate more concretely the complex 14

15

Note that the demonic, being a response to loss, can take the form of a sin that emerges in confrontation with the different obstacles connected to the passage of time (infidelity, for example, is a sin that may be committed in response to the loss which consists in the weariness of desires) but, as such, it becomes in itself an obstacle (being unfaithful is obviously an obstacle in the way of love, distancing love from its happy fulfilment). See SUD, 72.

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connection between loss (in the form of our limitedness), the demonic, and sin, then, I suggest the following interpretation of the film Eyes Wide Shut.16 The protagonist of this film, Dr Bill Harford, is in many ways the perfect realization of the ethical attitude represented by Kierkegaard’s Judge William. He is happily married to Alice, his beautiful and loving wife, he has a sweet child, and he works in a satisfying and respectable job to which he feels committed. In short, he is an honourable member of society. In the eyes of everyone around him, and in particular in his own eyes, he is someone who has everything: nothing is lacking in his life, nothing is missing or lost. Bill is certain of the purity of his love for Alice and of the purity and flawlessness of her love for him; when it comes to their relationship, his eyes are wide shut. He refuses to see himself as anything but a good and faithful husband, and cannot imagine that his wife might have a hidden aspect, distinct from her domestic identity as a loving wife and a devoted mother. It is therefore easy to understand how great his shock is when he learns that his faithful wife had an erotic fantasy which almost led her to betray him (or at least to seriously consider the possibility of doing so). This is how Albertine, the wife in Schnitzler’s novella, describes her infatuation with the stranger she met during a holiday she spent with her husband: He had glanced at me as we passed, but a few steps further up he stopped, turned round towards me and our eyes could not help meeting … I felt moved as never before. The whole day I lay on the beach lost in dreams. Were he to summon me – or so I believed – I would not be able to resist. I believed myself capable of doing anything; I felt I had as good as resolved to relinquish you, the child, my future.17

The husband is outraged, but a phone call from a patient forces him to leave the matter unaddressed. He goes out into the cold street, and so begins his longest and darkest night, during which more and more demons are released, threatening to take over him. He is facing one moral challenge after another, and each pushes him closer to sin. His fidelity to his wife – as well as to himself, and to the life he has believed himself to 16

17

I will refer simultaneously to both the film and the novella, but rely more on the way the film portrays its male protagonist. In my view, Kubrick’s interpretation presents the protagonist as more naı¨ve, and more complacently blind to his forbidden desires, than does the novella. Accordingly, the gap between the protagonist’s image of himself as ethical and the darkness of his repressed demons is more sharply emphasised in the film. Schnitzler 1999: 178.

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be leading – is put to different tests. And if at the beginning of this journey he tries to resist the temptations, at the end of it he is defeated by a decadent, sexual fantasy, and finds himself obsessed with the desire for a masked – nameless and faceless – woman. The rapidity and the ease with which the husband’s supposedly solid ethical identity (as a devoted and faithful spouse) cracks and falls apart is quite overwhelming – and yet disturbingly consistent (thus indicating how weak and helpless the ethical is when confronted by one’s limitedness). It begins with a confession of love imposed upon the husband by the daughter of his dead patient; this temptation, at this point, he strongly rejects. It continues with an offer from a prostitute whom he at first tries to reject but then accepts – he is about to sleep with her and the only thing that stops him is his wife, who calls him on his mobile telephone and brings him back to himself (as it were). It then continues with a bewildering encounter with a Lolita-figure, to whom he is almost involuntarily attracted. She is the daughter of a man from whom he rents a costume for a mysterious orgiastic ball to which, at this late stage of the night, he is determined to go (despite not being invited). And it culminates at this sensual party: there, behind a mask, surrounded by the strikingly beautiful bodies of naked and masked women, he completely forgets himself. Driven by a deep resentment for his wife on the one hand, and by an intense desire to fulfil the sexual fantasy that has so easily become available to him on the other, the husband is now devoured by his demons. He does not care about his wife (from whom, following the discovery of her fantasy, he so quickly became estranged), he cares nothing about the home he left behind, he cares nothing about his former identity. He therefore refuses to leave that dream-like house, with all those seductive women around him, even when he clearly realizes that he has entered a forbidden zone. And there is one particular woman there, with whom he feels he has fallen in love. She urges him to leave the house, but he, intoxicated with desire, is not willing to leave without her. Until he is forced to: a nightmarish ‘trial’ is enforced on him (he is, after all, an intruder), and he is ‘released’ only thanks to that mystery-woman who volunteers to ‘redeem’ him. And this is how Fridolin, the husband in the novella, is warned: ‘You are free,’ said the courtier to Fridolin, ‘leave the house at once, and beware of delving more deeply into secrets you have merely sneaked across the threshold of. Should you attempt to put anyone on our tracks, whether successfully or not – you will be lost.’18 18

Ibid., 229.

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Delving deeply into one’s demons, especially when one does not have the strength to address them, can indeed bring loss upon oneself. Therefore the husband, in a profound sense, is already lost. He returns home, where he is confronted with a horrible dream that his wife has just been having about him. While her fantasy exposed him to her secret desires, her dream reveals her repressed anger and resentment towards him. In the novella we are specifically told that, following this long night with its dark discoveries both of his wife’s demons and his own, the husband feels that he hates his wife. At the same time he feels that he is in love with the other, mysterious woman. He actually contemplates divorcing his wife, feeling that his bright and neat former life was nothing but a lie. ‘We will have to part’, he thinks to himself, ‘[t]hings can never be the same again between us’; he strongly feels that ‘all this order, balance and security in his life were really an illusion and a lie’.19 It takes a chilling encounter with death – with the dead body of a woman that may well be the mysterywoman from the party – to nullify his demonic desire and dissolve it into something completely different: ‘Was it her body? – that wonderful, blooming body that yesterday had tortured him with longing?’ … Even if the woman he was looking for, had desired and for an hour perhaps loved were still alive, and regardless of how she continued to conduct her life, what lay behind him in that vaulted room – in the gloom of the flickering gas-lamps, a shadow among shades, as dark, meaningless and devoid of mystery as they – could now mean nothing to him but the pale corpse of the previous night, destined irrevocably for decay.20

Demonic powers have an interesting nature: they are elusive and unstable, and there is nothing but a thin line separating their dark, attracting spell from their cold, repulsive ugliness. They can take over you, lead you into doing that which seems the most important and meaningful and desirable – so strong is their influence that you can easily lose yourself, forget who you are. And then the spell is abruptly gone, leaving you with emptiness and contempt for yourself, with the cold, meaningless dead body of the wrong deed, the sin, that the demons have led you into doing. It seems, however, that of the two protagonists, it is only the wife – the less self-righteous of the two – who truly understands the danger not only of giving oneself up to the demonic powers, but also of pronouncing a victory over them. She understands that these powers are an essential part 19 20

Ibid., 254, 259. Ibid., 276, 278–9.

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of her, lurking beneath her honest and deep love for her husband. She understands that the real danger is to refuse to acknowledge the demons and to believe, complacently, that the eyes of the lovers will be forever wide open against the demons’ tempting allure. In the closing monologue of the novella the wife is therefore reluctant to declare that their love is from now on forever secure: She smiled, and after hesitating briefly answered: ‘I think we should be grateful to fate that we have safely emerged from these adventures – both from the real ones and from those we dreamed about.’ ‘Are you quite sure of that?’ he asked. ‘As sure as I am of my sense that neither the reality of a single night, nor even of a person’s entire life can be equated with the full truth about his innermost being.’ ‘And no dream,’ he sighed quietly, ‘is altogether a dream.’ She took his head in both her hands and pillowed it tenderly against her breast. ‘Now we are truly awake,’ she said, ‘at least for a good while.’ He wanted to add: forever, but before he had a chance to speak, she laid a finger on his lips and whispered as though to herself: ‘Never enquire into the future.’21

The demonic indicates the need to approach (and strive for) the ethical ideals that one values in a way more demanding than the ethical way of human will and rationality. Those demons against which the ethical is helpless need to be acknowledged and addressed differently: namely, by resignation, self-denial, and, ultimately, by faith. And since the ethical ideal with which our inquiry is concerned is the ideal of love – of fulfilling love despite the many obstacles in its way – it is now time to return to the Merman. The sensual, tormented Merman who, having despaired of the ethical solution (we can imagine the Judge ordering him: ‘Just marry her and everything will be all right!’), now faces the choice between three different paths: the demonic path, the path of resignation, and the path of faith. A joyful insecurity: the Merman’s love Before he met Agnes, the Merman had been an aesthetic lover – his life was driven by desire and he chased the immediate. But then he meets Agnes, falls in love with her, and wants to make the ethical choice. He wants to commit himself to her, to marry her. However, in a profound sense Agnes is already lost for him: the Merman, we are told, ‘has lost 21

Ibid., 281.

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her … because he is indeed only a merman’ (FT, 95). The Merman, then, understands that Agnes is essentially lost for him; he feels ashamed and guilty, he feels that he cannot tell her about his past and about his merman-like nature that pulls him into the dark depths of the sea. He fears that initiating her into ‘his whole tragic existence’, having to tell her ‘that he is a monster at certain times’ (JP 5, 5668), will result not only in her walking away from him but also in the loss of the respect and love she has for him. And even if Agnes had decided to stay with him despite his past, the Merman is too anxious about the future and about the potential losses that this future entails. Therefore, although he cannot seduce her (after all, ‘the seducer is crushed’, FT, 96), being guilty as he is (in having wanted to seduce her, in seducing other girls before her, in being susceptible to the future possibility of regressing to his former, seductive nature) – he feels that he cannot marry her either. And this is precisely the point at which the second and more significant phase of the Merman’s love story begins. Having repented of his desire to seduce Agnes, he can now act in one of three different ways in response to her (essential) loss. He can stay in his present position (recollection), he can repent without Agnes (resignation), and he can repent with Agnes (faith/ repetition): If he remains hidden and is initiated into all the anguish of repentance, he becomes a demoniac and as such is destroyed. If he remains hidden but does not sagaciously think that by his being tormented in the bondage of repentance he can work Agnes free, then he no doubt finds peace but is lost to this world. If he becomes disclosed, if he lets himself be saved by Agnes, then he is the greatest human being I can imagine. (FT, 99)

If the Merman surrenders to his anguish (the fears, anxieties, and despair he feels at the prospect of the essential loss of Agnes), then he becomes demonic, a borderline creature who can never find peace and happiness in his state of being. The demonic is constantly in an ‘in-between’ position: between the sea and the shore, between the desire to sink down into the depths of the sea and the wish to ascend and disclose himself, between the desire to remain hidden and protected in the familiar watery territory of the sea, and the wish to take the risk and move into the unknown territory beyond the sea: that is, make the leap that ‘perhaps could transform him into a human being’ (JP 5, 5668). As a demoniac, the Merman has chosen the state of sin. He bears the guilt of his past and the guilt of offending Agnes in the present, he chooses to distance himself from her and from doing what is right

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(which is at the very least confessing to her), and he chooses to lead an existence dominated by his demons. He is therefore left alone, immersed in the depths of the sea, demonstrating thereby the self-focused state of recollection.22 The Merman is a sinner who refuses to repent. Despite specifically repenting of his acts of seduction, his overall frame of mind is still that of a sinner: he remains at the bottom of the sea, in a state of anguish and guilt. He does not disclose himself, does not make the movement of resignation. However, [i]f he is rescued from the demonic in repentance, there are two possibilities. He can hold himself back, remain in hiding … Or he can be saved by Agnes. (FT, 98)

The Merman may decide to make a leap beyond the sphere of recollection and undertake the movement of resignation. He then acknowledges and accepts his guilt, accepts his limited, sinful nature (namely, that he is a merman who selfishly offended many girls, who cravenly offended the girl he loves, and who in the future may regress in his weakness to his past habits), and submits himself to God. In his infinite resignation he empties himself, as it were, becoming transparent before God. He renounces his worldly desires, his worldly plans, and ‘finds peace of mind in the counterparadox that the divine will save Agnes’ (FT, 98). He renounces Agnes: being in a state of resignation means to accept fully that Agnes is lost for him. He loves her, he cares about her, he suffers from her absence in his life – but, having submitted himself to God, he releases his hold on everything and does not know how to grasp it all again; he does not know how to hold what he has wholeheartedly and willingly released. So he is disclosed before God, but still hidden before Agnes. His resignation releases him from his worldly ‘sagacity’ according to which ‘by his being tormented in the bondage of repentance he can work Agnes free’ (FT, 99). He knows that only God can free Agnes, only God can save her and, in that sense, he submits not only himself but also her to God. From this standpoint he does not know how – he cannot find the powers – to sustain a full, concrete, contact with her. Thus, he ‘no doubt finds peace but is lost to this world’ (FT, 99). The Merman, then, is now focused on his relationship with God and finds meaning in his life through this relationship. He continues to love Agnes but cannot sustain a relationship with her – he cannot ‘return’ to finitude, cannot find any joy and hope in it. 22

For the connection between the demonic and recollection see again chapter 1.

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And yet, this is not the end of the Merman’s story. Life and love are not exhausted by these two possibilities (recollection and resignation) alone. There is a further option open before him although, needless to say, this is the most difficult and demanding of all. ‘If he becomes disclosed, if he lets himself be saved by Agnes, then he is the greatest human being I can imagine’ (ibid.). But what does ‘letting himself be saved by Agnes’ actually mean? This must not be interpreted to mean that by Agnes’s love he would be saved from becoming a seducer in the future (this is an esthetic rescue attempt that always evades the main point, the continuity in the merman’s life), for in that respect he is saved – he is saved insofar as he becomes disclosed. Then he marries Agnes. He must, however, take refuge in the paradox. In other words, when the single individual by his guilt has come outside the universal, he can return only by virtue of having come as the single individual into an absolute relation to the absolute. (FT, 98)

The Merman has a past, a problematic, sinful past. This past is an integral element of his existence – it constitutes an important part of his present as well as of his yet-unknown future. After all, there is ‘continuity in the merman’s life’ and no human love can either erase the past or secure the future against taking the wrong path into a state of sinfulness again. At the same time, however, ‘love hides a multitude of sins’ and this gives a true relationship of love the strength to be forgiven with regard to the past and trustful with regard to the future.23 It is therefore by this that Agnes’s love saves the Merman – by her ability and willingness to accept him (including his demons); by her power to become reconciled with her hurt pride and her fears about the future (in infinite resignation and selfdenial); by being faith-full enough to have trust and hope, and to find joy in him and in their relationship of love. In other words, Agnes saves the Merman by being a loving knight of faith. However, this of course can save the Merman only to a certain extent. For the Merman to be really saved, and for their faith-full love to abide, he, too, needs to be a knight of faith. And being a knight of faith means to ‘take refuge in the paradox’. It is to resign and through resignation – by virtue of his ‘absolute relation to the absolute’ (namely, his relationship with the infinite, with God) – to return to finitude, to return to Agnes: The merman … cannot belong to Agnes without, after having made the infinite movement of repentance, making one movement more: the movement by virtue of the absurd. (FT, 99) 23

See WL, Second Series, Deliberation V.

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The Merman can choose the way of faith – the path of faith-full love. He can choose to repent and from the perspective of resignation (and selfdenial) to make the second movement, that of repetition. This movement means a reinitiating of his relationship with finitude; a full return to concreteness, which would be expressed in his ability to find joy (including bodily, erotic joy) in Agnes. As a knight of faith, and a faith-full lover, the Merman will find the strength to be hopeful and trustful that despite being essentially lost to each other, they will nevertheless, by the power of graceful infinitude, be capable of enjoying the gift of finitude bestowed on them from above.24 Against the background of the various pre-religious and religious options to fulfil love, then, the Merman’s story demonstrates the possibility of faith-full, romantic love. This kind of love, modelled in the form of faith, is a real possibility (even if perhaps not yet an actuality) for the Merman. Only by virtue of faith-full love can the Merman hope to achieve the ‘blissful security’ of his moments with Agnes. Nothing secures his love except for his faith, which is made of the spiritual materials of resignation, self-denial, hope, and trust, and allows the concrete, finite, bodily relationship with Agnes to become a real possibility. And therefore, although the moment is indeed essentially insecure – it passes and may leave in its wake pain, destruction, and the darkness of unleashed demons – the Merman’s love can still become in its own, faith-full way, secure; it can become truly joyful. It would be appropriate to describe his love, then, as a state of joyful insecurity. We have said that the Merman, who struggles with his demons and with the different ways to address them, is in essence the protagonist nearest to us.25 He is more realistically complex than the aesthetic and ethical protagonists on the one hand and, on the other, more humanly flawed than the mundane knight and, needless to say, Abraham. We can therefore conclude, by way of our reading of the Merman’s love story, that although the striving for faith-full love is a difficult lifelong enterprise which requires tremendous and constant efforts, we may hope to look up to this model of romantic love as a possibility that is in principle open to us.26

24 25 26

See ‘Every Good Gift and Every Perfect Gift is from Above’ (EUD, 125). See again note 9 above. Here, of course, I present a position opposed to that of Amy Laura Hall who seems to advance in Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love the view that we, humans, can only mess up love, and therefore need to concentrate our entire efforts in resignation (that is, repentance and self-denial). ‘As we become involved in the misguided lives of Kierkegaard’s characters

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And yet it must be wonderful to get the princess, and the knight of faith is the only happy man, the heir to the finite, while the knight of resignation is a stranger and an alien. To get the princess this way, to live happily with her day after day (for it is also conceivable that the knight of resignation could get the princess, but his soul had full insight into the impossibility of their future happiness), to live happily every moment this way by virtue of the absurd, every moment to see the sword hanging over the beloved’s head, and yet not to find rest in the pain of resignation but to find joy by virtue of the absurd – this is wonderful. (FT, 50)

The basic features of the Kierkegaardian view of love that the present study has attempted to depict are all gathered together in this concise paragraph: the attitude of the lover to the passage of time and hence to the loss hovering above any relationship of love (‘the heir to the finite’, ‘day after day’, ‘future happiness’, ‘every moment to see the sword hanging over the beloved’s head’); a differentiation between right and wrong forms of love (‘the pain of resignation’, the ‘joy by virtue of the absurd’); and above all the marvel of faith-full romantic love (‘the knight of faith is the only happy man’, ‘this is wonderful’). The only happy man is the happy lover who ‘get[s] the princess’ and finds joy in their relationship ‘by virtue of the absurd’. Unlike the knight of resignation who is ‘a stranger and an alien’, the knight of faith-full love feels at home in the world. This ‘feeling at home’, however, is not gained by virtue of an aesthetic frivolousness or ethical complacency. Like the knight of resignation, the faith-full lover knows intimately how deep is the pain of love: ‘every moment’ he sees ‘the sword hanging over the beloved’s head’, every moment he sees and understands that she is essentially lost for him. The loss of the beloved is always there, even if only potentially. In a profound sense the beloved is already absent, even when she is present: the passage of time threatens to transform every potential loss into an actual one and obstructs any secure hold on the beloved and the relationship.

and are pulled into his allegations against human love, we are to surmise that the possibility of true love depends on a factor beyond our own present capacities’, she says (Hall 2002: 9). Her gloomy conclusion, which is based on her choice of Works of Love as the Kierkegaardian locus from which to learn about romantic love, is therefore consistent with my interpretation of Works of Love as presenting only a partial view, and of the need to complete its vision by listening attentively to what Kierkegaard says in Fear and Trembling.

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And here indeed we clearly see the difference between the sorrowful resigned lover and the faith-full knight of love. ‘[I]t is also conceivable that the knight of resignation could get the princess’, Johannes says; however, the knight of resignation is not ‘heir to the finite’ and, having resigned, he cannot return to finitude. He may ‘get the princess’, but he cannot find joy and hope in the relationship with her. Having resigned he has ‘full insight into the impossibility of their future happiness’ and he lacks the ability to trust the givenness and renewal of that which is constantly (and essentially) being taken away from him. The knight of faith-full love, on the other hand, who has resigned, who lives with the hanging sword, who accepts the loss just as the knight of resignation does – he, unlike his fellow knight, does not ‘find rest in the pain of resignation’. Rather, he finds joy in the princess and in the relationship with her – he finds joy ‘by virtue of the absurd’. He finds joy not by virtue of immediacy, nor by virtue of his will, nor by virtue of his merits, nor by virtue of his reasoning – after all, it is not in his power to bring the princess back and to hold to her securely. However, it is his choice, the choice of faith, to be willing to receive her back. Despite the pain, despite the difficulties, despite his demons and despite the essential insecurity of their relationship – if he chooses the way of faith, he chooses the way of love. If he can receive her back every moment anew, and affirm their relationship while at the same time renouncing her and denying himself – then he is the knight of faith-full love. Thus, these moments of being, where infinitude sheds its light on finitude, exposing its perfection and its fullness of beauty and value in the midst of loss and pain, are the moments of faith-full love. And the lover who lives these moments may not even be discernible – he can live his life quietly, looking just like a tax collector, or being no more than a simple merman. The passionate storm of his love cannot be observed through the quietness of his demeanour, as the drama of faith-full love is not a matter of some colourful display of suffering: it is a matter of the intimate dialogue maintained between the two lovers, and through God. In this study I have looked at Kierkegaard’s thought from a somewhat unfamiliar perspective. Although treatments of his philosophy usually emphasize the centrality of faith to the individual’s life, I hope that I have succeeded in showing that there is a strong case for claiming that love – and in particular romantic love – is of similar centrality, not least because of the intimate connections between faith and love in all its forms. For it takes faith to love.

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INDEX

Abraham as ethical agent 102, 104, 106 faith 105, 106 in face of Binding of Isaac 46, 77--81 and resignation 57, 77--81, 83, 85 Johannes de Silentio’s understanding of 47--51 as a knight of faith 79, 82, 146 as model of faith 89 as paradigm of faith 174 resignation 89, 93 and faith 57, 77--81, 83, 85 self-denial 148 trust in God as belief 95--9 the absurd, involvement in faith 80 actuality 22, 28 Adams, Robert M. 58, 79, 98 Adorno, Theodor 3, 118 aesthetes lives’ limitations 33 and recollection’s love 19, 20, 23, 29 the aesthetic, and the religious, Kierkegaard’s view 140 aesthetic desire and desire 52 and resignation 55 aesthetic life, and ethical life 21

aesthetic love distinguished from ethical love 30, 31, 37--8 Judge William’s defence against 30 and romantic love 169 aesthetic lovers 13 responses to loss 20--4, 177, 179 aesthetic poets and recollection’s love 24--8 see also seducers affirmation, movement of, in romantic love 172 Agacinski, Sylviane 146 agape coexistence with eros 154--5, 157, 158 Agnes (Fear and Trembling), seduction by the Merman 175--7, 183 Albertine (Schnitzler, Dream Story) 180 Alice (Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut) 180--3 Almadovar, All About My Mother, as study of faith 99--101 Augustine of Hippo, St 10 ‘being in the wrong’ 60--3, 148 and love 63--4, 68--70 and love for God 64--70, 71 belief, as trust in God 95--9 beliefs, paradox 78, 80 the body, importance for love 162

195

196

index

body as part of the true self 167 role in faith and love 23, 162--4 Brooke,Dorothea(Middlemarch),onmarriage38 Buber, Martin 3 caring, as part of resignation 85 Carlisle, Clare 19, 35, 63 children, weaning, as indicative of faith 81 choice connection with preference 127 importance for formation of character 34 Christian love see neighbourly love Christianity concern with neighbourly love 142 on relationships 96 views preferential love as self-love 114 and works of love 109--12 compassion 132 creation and incarnation, doctrine 141 cross, doctrine 141 Davenport, John 19, 34, 35, 99, 104, 155 the demonic, approaches to the ethical 183 demonic lovers 13, 42--5, 173--7 and sin 177--83 Derrida, Jacques 144 desire, and aesthetic desire 52 desire, and resignation 52--5 despair, and faith 87 Dina (Peleg, On the Way Home), ‘being in the wrong’ with God 64--70, 74 ‘direct communication’ 139, 140 Eliot, George, Middlemarch 38 Ellis, Theresa M. 40, 118 emotions, paradox 80 enjoyment, death 22 equality denied by preferential love 120--2, 123, 124 humanity’s situation before God 131--2 in neighbourly love 122, 126 significance for love 156 eros, coexistence with agape 154--5, 158 essential loss 11, 12 Merman’s responses to 184 ‘eternal consciousness’ 59 eternity, gaining of 35 the ethical and faith 101--7 teleological suspension 46

ethical life, and aesthetic life 21, 33--8 ethical love distinguished from aesthetic love 30, 31, 37--8 Judge William’s views 38 ethical lover, the 13, 17, 19, 38--42 responses to loss 177, 179 and recollection’s love 38 ethical men 33 Evans, C. Stephen 4, 10, 48, 49, 103, 128, 140 faith Abraham’s faith and resignation 77--81, 83, 85 and communication with the world 107 double structure 5, 108, 145, 151, 152, 152n.24, 153, 157n.32, 159, 161, 168, 172 shaping of love 150--3, 166--73 existential state of 146 Johannes de Silentio’s understanding of 47--52 knight of 14, 71, 76, 79, 81, 82, 83, 87, 91, 92, 95, 99, 146 and love 12, 14--15 enactment of love 144, 145, 165 importance for love 159, 160, 164--5 in marriage 84 Merman’s response to essential loss 184, 187 in neighbourly love 168, 169 as relationship 89, 91, 95 resignation 46, 75--7, 81--9, 95--9 within faith 91 and romantic love 5, 12, 14, 15--16, 167--73 Kierkegaard’s views 141 second movement 143 sin and repentance in 174 trust within 97--101 way of 12 see also the finite; finitude Fendt, Gene 2 Ferreira, M. Jamie 4, 110, 111, 115, 120--9, 132 the finite reluctantly accepted, in Works of Love 128 value revealed by resignation 94 finitude affirmation as faith’s second movement 143 and faith 76 as renewed relationship with 83, 89 Merman’s relationship with 187 need for return to 162 relationships with 147

index

197

renunciation 75 in romantic love 168, 170 value recognized by resignation 59, 172 ‘the first’ 19 longing for 31--3 freedom 81 Fridolin (Schnitzler, Dream Story) 181 friendship 113, 122 full concreteness 128, 130, 145, 152, 187 need for return to 162

‘indirect communication’ 139, 140 infinitude, in romantic love 168, 170 Isaac Binding of 46, 77--81, 85 Abraham’s resignation in relation to 93 Abraham’s trust in God 99 Agacinski’s views 146 Derrida’s interpretation 144 ethics 102, 104, 105 as model for faith 89

Garff, Joakim 2 gifts, reception, as analogy for attitudes to the finite 96, 97 God believer’s relationship with affected by resignation 88 grace, responses to 146--51 love need in 157 love for, through resignation 70, 75 love’s origins in 165 Merman’s relationship with 185 as origin of love 110, 111 ownership of the finite 56--8 relationship with 167, 171, 172 ‘being in the wrong’ 61--3, 64--70, 71 through resignation 59--60 in relationships 96, 97 submission to 55, 78 trust in, as belief 97, 98 grace, responses to 146--51 Green, Ronald M. 40, 103, 105, 118, 174

Jackson, Timothy P. 48 Jesus Christ foretelling of the destruction of Jerusalem 61 love 133 need for love 158 Peter’s denial of 161 Job resignation of 61, 63, 71, 72 story of 24, 27 Johannes de Silentio 9, 47--52 Fear and Trembling faith 146 faith’s second movement 143 love in 137 the Merman as demonic lover 45, 173, 174--7, 183--7 on loss and resignation 54, 57 on resignation as relationship with God 59--60 understanding of faith 47--52 Judge William (Either/Or; Stages on Life’s Way) 60, 180 defence of marriage 30--3, 35, 39--42 on ethical love 38 as ethical lover 30, 38--42 wife 41 marital love 169

Hall, Amy Laura 4, 41, 118, 132--7, 150, 170, 187--8 Hall, Ronald L. 39, 46, 84, 86--8, 89, 90 on relationships 90 Hannay, Alastair 9, 41, 49, 51, 56--7, 80, 97, 103, 139, 174 Harford, Bill, Dr (Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut) 180--3 Haufniensis, Vigilius, The Concept of Anxiety, on selfhood in human beings 166 Hegel, G. W. F. 34, 35, 51, 102--5 human beings, selfhood 166--7 human relationships, self-denial as the ground for 130 immanence 49 incarnation and creation, doctrine 141 ‘inclosing reserve’, and the demonic 44--5

Kellenberger, J. 58, 95, 97--8, 99 Kierkegaard, Søren aesthetic writings 2 treatment of love 9--10 Anti-Climacus, The Sickness unto Death, on selfhood in human beings 166 authorship 9 authorship and interpretation 138--41 The Concept of Anxiety 166--7 the demonic 178 on the demonic and ‘inclosing reserve’ 44 understanding of sin 48

198

index

Kierkegaard, Søren (cont.) Concluding Unscientific Postscript 49--50, 170 on faith 49, 50 love of the finite and the infinite 170 Constantin Constantius (narrator, Repetition) 6, 24--5 Discourse of Job 71 Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses 50 Either/Or 8, 9, 20--4, 28--30, 38--42, 60--3 Judge William as ethical lover 30 recollection’s love in 25, 26 treatment of love 8 Ultimatum, ‘being in the wrong’ 60--3, 74 engagement to Regine Olsen 1 Fear and Trembling ethical status 102, 103, 106 Merman as demonic lover 45 movements of faith 130 pseudonymity 9, 47 readings of 88 resignation in 46, 52--6, 74, 136 and romantic love 5, 15, 107 treatment of love 8 understanding of sin 50 Johannes Climacus 48, 49 Philosophical Fragments 49 The Point of View for my Work as an Author 139, 140 religiousness 50 Repetition recollection’s love in 24 treatment of love 8 The Sickness unto Death on despair and faith 87 sin (concept) 178 Stages on Life’s Way on demonic love 42 tension between pseudonymous and acknowledged works 138 Works of Love 3--5, 108 ambiguity about romantic love 142--5 ambiguity towards preferential love 132 Christian nature of works of love 109--12 critical views of 129 existential aspects of love 165 love in 137 model of romantic love 161, 162 on preferential love 117--20, 124 reluctance to accept finiteness and preferential love 128

and romantic love 15 tension with Fear and Trembling 138 Kjerlighed 111, 144 equated with neighbourly love 142 manifestation 164 separation from neighbourly love 164 see also neighbourly love knight of faith 71, 146 Abraham as 79, 82 compared to the knight of resignation 88 faith of 83 relationship with the finite 95 resignation 76, 81 trust in God 97--9 Knight R (knight of repetition) 146 response to grace 150 knight of resignation 53, 146 alienation 188--9 commentators’ neglect of 46 compared to the knight of faith 87 as expression of Religiousness A 149 pain 94 relationship with the finite 95, 97 relationship with God 62, 70, 71, 73, 74, 98 and renunciation 84 renunciation of proprietary claims 82, 83 resignation and loss 55 response to grace 147, 151 Knight S (knight of self-denial) 145 response to grace 147, 149--50, 151 self-denial 149--50 Kubrick, Stanley, Eyes Wide Shut 40, 179--83 life gaining meaning within 34 and love 6--10 Lippitt, John 46, 50, 79, 84, 140 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 3 loss 10, 92--5 actual loss 11, 93, 188 demonic lovers’ responses to 177--83 essential loss 18--19, 20, 93 through demonic love 43 experiences of 73 and love 10--12, 13, 17--19, 23 as obstacle to the ethical ideal 107 potential loss 11, 19, 93, 188 in recollection’s love 26 relationship with in love 188 and resignation 53--6, 58

index love aesthetic love 20--30 and ‘being in the wrong’ 63--4, 68--70 common love, and the demonic 45 demonic love 42--5 erotic love 113, 119, 122 eternal love and resignation 59, 74 ethical love 30--42 and faith 12, 14--15, 144, 145, 159, 160, 161--5, 171--3 ‘first love’ 26, 29 Kierkegaard’s confusion about 161 and life 6--10 and loss 10--12, 13, 17--19, 23 maintenance of the ethical ideal 107 model of 137 need in 157--8 ‘property-based’ view of 156 ‘repetition’s love’ 15 as shaped by faith’s double structure 151 stages 9, 10, 12 true love 109--12 works of love, Christian nature 109--12 see also aesthetic love; ethical love; neighbourly love; preferential love; recollection’s love; romantic love; self-love lovers 13 comparison with the Merman 175 demonic lovers, the Merman (Fear and Trembling) 173, 174--7, 183--7 Merman as embodiment of 175 of recollection 17--45, 174 unhappy lovers 1, 2, 8, 9, 9n.17, 14, 23, 24, 25, 55 Manuela (All About My Mother), faith and trust 99--101 marriage and demonic love 42--5 faith in 84 Judge William’s defence of 30--3, 35, 39--42 love and resignation in 169 in Middlemarch 38 Meirav, Ariel 52, 105 Merman (Fear and Trembling) 15, 165 as demonic lover 45, 50, 173, 174--7, 183--7 faith 50 Mooney, Edward F. 46, 50, 81--5, 87, 89, 90, 140

199

movement of repetition, in neighbourly love 157 Mulhall, Stephen 48, 49, 51, 72, 103, 105, 148, 174 mundane knight 91--5 faith 105 relationship with the finite 95 trust 99 need, connection with love 157--8 neighbourly love 151 coexistence with preferential love 118 coexistence with romantic love 153--60, 164 cooperation with self-love 116 distinguished from preferential love 113--15, 123 equality in 122, 126 equated with Kjerlighed 142 equated with resignation 142, 143 as expression of Christian love 113 faith and resignation’s role 168, 169 manifests Kjerlighed 144 and need 157 not preferential 161, 162 and preferential love 4, 112 and the body 162 in relation to romantic love 127 and romantic love 5, 16 as self-denial 117 separation from Kjerlighed 164 as shaped by faith’s double structure 151--3 see also Kjerlighed; self-denial non-preferentiality 142 Nygren, Anders 154--5, 156, 158 Olsen, Regine, Kierkegaard’s engagement 1 the other relationship with 172 value 156 Pattison, George 4, 19, 27, 49--50, 139, 140, 141, 171, 172, 178 Peleg, Dorit, On the Way Home 64--70 Peter, St (apostle), denial of Jesus 161 philosophy, Judge William’s criticisms 36 the Poet (Repetition) and recollection’s love 25--8 poets, pagan understanding of preferential love 113, 114

200

index

Post, Stephen G. 157, 158 potential loss 11, 19, 93, 188 preferences making of 144 relationship with resignation 142, 143 role in romantic love 169 preferential love 8 allowance for 132 denial of equality 120--2, 123, 124 distinguished from neighbourly love 113--15 Kierkegaard’s ambivalence towards 118--20, 123, 129 and neighbourly love 4, 112 and the body 162 selfish nature 115, 116--17, 119, 120 preferentiality compatibility with resignation 164 seen as selfishness 145 proprietary claims 82, 83 pseudonymity, Kierkegaard’s use 6, 9, 138, 139 Quidam (Stages on Life’s Way) demonic 17, 19, 20 as demonic lover 42--5 recollection 130, 169 lovers of 174 and the Merman 184, 185 way of 12, 13 recollection’s love 17--20 and the aesthete 19, 20, 23, 29 and the aesthetic poet to 24--8 and the demonic 44 and the ethical lover 42 and loss 53 and the seducer 28--30 relationships 90--1, 96 the religious and the aesthetic, Kierkegaard’s views 140 Religiousness A 49, 149 Religiousness B 49 renunciation, and faith 89, 92 repentance 134--5 in faith 174 in the Merman’s story 184--6 repetition 24, 27--8, 91 distinguished from the movement of repetition 146 and duration 20

involvement in love 159, 164 in the Merman’s story 184--6 movement of 143 response to grace 147, 150 in romantic love 172, 173 regarded as undesirable 31, 32 resignation 42, 52--6, 158, 162 Abraham’s resignation and faith 77--81, 83, 85 believer’s relationship with God 88 common to both neighbourly and romantic love 161 equated with neighbourly love 142, 143 and eternal love 59, 74 and faith 46, 75--7, 81--5 Johannes de Silentio’s understanding of 47 and finitude 59, 172 involvement in love 164 knight of 46, 53, 55, 62, 70, 71, 73, 74, 82, 83, 84, 87, 94, 95, 97, 98, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 188--9 in love 159 and love for God 70 maintained in faith 144 Merman’s choice 185 in the Merman’s story 184--6 movement of Abraham’s Binding of Isaac 146 as repentance 134 response to grace 147 role in romantic love 169, 172 readings of 58 as recognition of God’s ownership of the finite 56--8 as recognition of our valuation of the finite 57 relationship with faith 130 as relationship with God 59--60 relationship with preference 142, 143 as response to loss 58, 93 role in neighbourly and romantic love 168 significance 163 submission to 45 twofold relationship resulting from 75 and the value of the finite 58 way of 12, 14 within faith 91 resignation’s love, inadequacy 163 revelation 174

index romantic love 8, 107--8 coexistence with neighbourly love 153--60, 164 and faith 12, 14, 15--16 Kierkegaard’s views 141 faith-full romantic love 188 as reflected in the Merman’s story 187 faith-like model 165, 167--73 Kierkegaard’s ambiguity about 142--5 Kierkegaard’s treatment of 1--3, 4--6, 8 manifests Kjerlighed 144 models of 161--4 as preferential love 113 regarded as selfish 115 in relation to neighbourly love 127, 153--60 as shaped by faith’s double structure 151, 153 and the body 162 Rudd, Anthony 19, 33--5 Schnitzler, Arthur, Dream Story 40, 179--83 seducers aesthetic loves 169 aesthetic Poet 17, 19 loss 55 Merman as 175--7 and recollection’s love 28--30 self-affirmation, in love 159 self-denial affinity with resignation 136, 148 basis of Christian love 113 as the ground for human relationships 130 Kierkegaard’s insistence on 142 in love 159 and neighbourly love 117 and resignation 148, 163 see also neighbourly love

201

self-love 114--15, 128 Kierkegaard’s confused judgement about 145 kinds 115--18 and preferential love 114 self-willfulness 117, 125 selfishness and preferential love 115, 116--17, 119, 120 relationship with preference 142 selfless care, as faith 82, 84 sin 178 and the demonic 44 response to loss 177--83 Merman’s demonic choice of 184 Singer, Irving 3, 118 ‘single individual’ 2 Soble, Alan 156 Song of Solomon 8:7 12 special love see preferential love ‘the spirit’s love’ see neighbourly love stages, theory of 9, 10 time effects on love 17, 22, 23 loss within 93, 94 see also ‘the first’ transcendence 49 trust eschatological trust 104 within faith 97--101 Walsh, Sylvia 4, 119, 140 Weston, Michael 36 Westphal, Merold 10, 35, 49 wills, paradox 78, 80 world, communication with through faith 107