The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

by Michael N Forster

  109 This is made clear in Bahnsen, Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, p. 6: in Objektivdialektik ‘it is a matter not just of the conflict of the laws of thought with one another, but of a conflict of the laws of reality on the one hand with one another and on the other with the laws of thought’; the dialectical character of the relation between elements in reality (gedachten Realen)—not insofar as they are contained in subjective thought but insofar as they stand in objectivity—is the same as that which can obtain between thoughts, ‘namely one of contradiction’. It is on this basis that Bahnsen differentiates his Realdialektik from Hegel’s merely subjective, ‘verbal’, ‘pseudo’ dialectic.

  110 Which is not to say that Bahnsen fails to engage with epistemology: in the first part of Volume I of Der Widerspruch im Wissen und Wesen der Welt, ‘Das antilogische Princip: Einleitung in die Realdialektik’, Bahnsen tries to show that his system avoids self-refutation.

  111 MRCD, 310; WWR I, 418; WWR II, 582.

  112 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music [1872], trans. Shaun Whiteside, ed. Michael Tanner (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), §9, 47.

  113 WWR I, 384. Or, again, as an ‘Abspiegelung der Welt, in abstrakten Begriffen’, VgP, 571.

  114 WWR I, 252.

  CHAPTER 7

  KIERKEGAARD (1813–1855)

  MICHELLE KOSCH

  SØREN Aabye Kierkegaard (5 May 1813–11 November 1855) is the most important Danish philosopher of the nineteenth century. His contributions in ethics, moral psychology, and philosophy of religion took some time to spread beyond Denmark, but his influence on early twentieth-century German and French philosophy was substantial,1 and by mid-century his work had been translated into nearly 20 languages. The larger context of Kierkegaard’s thought was the German philosophy and theology of the early nineteenth century,2 but his approach to the issues that context presented was novel both in its content and in its mode of presentation. Although he published a series of works under his own name—including upbuilding and Christian discourses and a large monograph on Christian ethics—his most important philosophical works were published under a set of pseudonyms. The broader aim in these works is to present a set of comprehensive aesthetic, ethical, and religious life-views. The device of pseudonymity allowed him to argue for and against these life-views (and their components) from different perspectives. As a result we see them both as they look from the inside, to those trying to understand and direct their lives in the terms they provide, and as they look from the outside, to those with opposed commitments. Some views are portrayed as more adequate than others, in various ways, to the situation of existing subjectivity, and Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous corpus as a whole can be approached as a many-sided portrayal of that situation.

  The aesthetic view of life is a major focus in Either/Or (1843) and Stages on Life’s Way (1845), and a topic in Fear and Trembling (1843), Repetition (1843), The Concept of Anxiety (1844), and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846). It is characterized from two directions: positively, by characters who embrace it (in Either/Or, for instance, by A, the author of the papers in the first volume), and critically, by characters who do not (in Either/Or, by Judge Wilhelm, the author of the papers in the second volume).

  A number of configurations of the aesthetic approach to life are described in Either/Or I, ranging from the unstructured pursuit of one hedonistic pleasure after another (in the essay on the musical erotic) through a series of approaches organized around more reflective pursuit of more sophisticated goals that still revolve around aesthetic satisfaction, and culminating in the highly structured production of opportunities for pleasure that is never actually enjoyed (in the diary of the seducer). In all of these configurations the organizing aim is the production of some subjective state—of sensual pleasure, or of reflective pleasure in works of art, in one’s own self, or in other people rendered interesting by one’s own manipulation of them. Notably, the end points (purest immediacy and the aesthetic in its most reflective form) are ideal types: Don Juan is pure sensuality untouched by reflection, and is an operatic character; Johannes the seducer has a conception of seduction so intellectualized as to be in the end sexless, and is probably a fictional character of A’s creation. The portions of Either/Or I meant to reflect A’s actual state of mind convey neither extreme, but instead his sophisticated reflections on the pursuit of the beautiful and the interesting, interspersed with expressions of his own frustration, melancholy, and despair.

  Despair is the defining feature of the aesthetic view of life according to Judge Wilhelm’s negative characterization in Either/Or II. What he means by “despair” (Fortvivlesen) is not in the first instance a psychological state, but rather the aesthete’s denial that he is responsible for his actions and that his ends must ultimately be self-given. The Judge argues that A’s attempt to see himself as a spectator in life rather than a participant in it is a futile endeavor,3 and that the despair (in the psychological sense) that A complains of in some of the diapsalmata is a symptom of despair in this deeper sense.4 The message of this part of Either/Or is that the aesthetic view of life is self-defeating: it is a nominally normative stance (one that purports to be action-guiding) that at the same time denies some presuppositions of any such stance (e.g. the agent’s responsibility for his own decisions).5

  Like the aesthetic standpoint, the ethical standpoint is characterized both positively and negatively—positively primarily by Judge Wilhelm in Either/Or II (and his counterpart in Stages on Life’s Way), and critically in The Concept of Anxiety, parts of Concluding Unscientific Postscript, and in The Sickness unto Death (1849).

  Wilhelm defines the ethical view of life by contrast with the aesthetic: its central feature is the acceptance of personal responsibility. This emphasis on responsibility is a feature of the religious standpoints as well, and for this reason it makes sense to say that the most basic division between life-views in the pseudonyms has the aesthetic on one side and the ethico-religious on the other.6 What distinguishes the ethical stage from the religious is its commitment to an account of normativity based on the autonomy of the will. The Judge believes, with Kant and Fichte, that the negative concept of freedom as absence of determination by alien causes gives rise to a positive concept of freedom as self-determination, which in turn gives rise to a law or an end which gives content to the moral life.7 In enjoining A to choose the ethical, the Judge advises him to choose with utmost energy, arguing that the demands of the ethical become apparent as soon as one takes choice seriously.8

  The criticisms of the ethical standpoint in the other pseudonyms target this basic premise; the claim is that it entails that morally wrong actions can never be fully imputable.9 This criticism is most fully spelled out in the second part of The Sickness unto Death, where the premise of the ethics of autonomy is linked with the Socratic–Platonic thesis that intentional action always aims at the good;10 a similar worry is voiced in The Concept of Anxiety.11 The message of these works is that, like the aesthetic view of life, the Judge’s ethical view is internally incoherent: the “either/or” that defines it (the emphasis on freedom and responsibility) is at the same time undermined by the account of the source of norms it presupposes, since on that account the agent never in the end confronts a true either/or.12 The ethical standpoint is thus, like the aesthetic, a form of despair (in Kierkegaard’s deep sense) and the typology of despair in the first half of The Sickness unto Death includes a form that corresponds to it: the “despair of wanting to be oneself.”13

  The religious standpoint has two main configurations: philosophical and revealed religion. In Philosophical Fragments (1844), Johannes Climacus presents the first as the “Socratic” account of ethico-religious knowledge, the second as an alternative to it. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript they are religiousness “A” and “B”. It is with the second, and with Christianity in particular, that Kierkegaard is most concerned; but he believed that its pec
uliar characteristics are best brought out by comparing it with the first. He approaches both—as with the other stages—as comprehensive views of life, examining how they function as normative frameworks (how they guide action), what they presuppose about the nature of human agency (and whether the presuppositions are plausible), and what it is like to take each of them as one’s perspective on life. These standpoints are again characterized from different perspectives in the different pseudonymous works. Johannes Climacus (in Fragments and Postscript) describes the epistemology and psychology of both from the perspective of someone who does not presuppose the truth of either. Anti-Climacus (in The Sickness unto Death and Training in Christianity (1850)) offers an account of the self, of normativity, and of the relation between these two, from within the Christian perspective. Vigilius Haufniensis explains the moral psychology of sin (on the Christian conception) in The Concept of Anxiety. (Christianity is the highest stage of existence in Kierkegaard’s scheme, and so there is no point of view higher than it from which it is subjected to criticism. That said, the difficulty of occupying it is vividly portrayed in all of these works, as well as in Fear and Trembling.)

  A great variety of religious views fall more or less under the “A” rubric as Kierkegaard describes it, and undoubtedly he meant for this to be the case. Although Socrates is the named source, surely Spinoza (especially Jacobi’s Spinoza) and Plotinus (whose influence on the German idealists and the larger philosophical culture of the time was substantial) figured among the historical models. These figures shaped the approach to religion shared by the German idealists, and the religion of idealism must sort under “A” if anything does. Fichte’s later religious writings may be particularly significant here.14

  Like the ethical standpoint, religiousness A is characterized as an answer to the normative question that has its source in human reason; this is what Kierkegaard means when he describes A as “immanent” religiousness.15 The divine is conceived as a place mapped out within a philosophical system; everything about it is knowable by reason alone. The criterion of the good is union with God, and the task religiousness A sets for the individual is to overcome those aspects of her being in which finitude consists—not only finite desires and attachment to the world (“dying to immediacy”), but also the will itself insofar as it is the particular will of a particular individual. This is an ideal that it is possible to approach, but not to attain (since no human individual can entirely overcome his finitude).16 Moreover, it cannot be approached directly through individual effort (since individual agency is among those characteristics of finite existence that one is supposed to attempt to overcome); instead, the suffering that characterizes existence under the imperative of fulfilling an unfulfillable task is what brings about a transformation in the individual. The trial of existence is seen as having a reward, but because the trial cannot in any genuine sense be passed-or-failed, the reward is not contingent on the individual’s action.17

  The ethical standpoint and religiousness A are therefore similar, in that in neither does the individual’s ethico-religious fate rest on his own actions.18 From the perspective of the agent, one decisive difference between the immanent views and religiousness B is that in the latter the individual is responsible for her own guilt or innocence.19

  Another decisive difference lies in the epistemology of religiousness B, the primary topic of Philosophical Fragments. On the account given there, a normative criterion is given to human beings through revelation by a transcendent and otherwise unknowable God. The revelation is a contingent historical event; epistemic access to it requires the right sort of causal contact (either first-hand or through testimony). This event is at the same time the establishment of that criterion as normative for the recipient. Religious belief is justified, on this account, just in case it has the correct aetiology. But the possession of such justification is unverifiable in principle by any human being (including the believer). This is because, on the one hand, the revealed criterion is not one to which human beings have alternative access (e.g. through reason), and so it is unverifiable by reference to any alternative.20 But, on the other hand, there can also be no adequate empirical evidence that some set of events is a revelation. Kierkegaard agreed with Kant that there can be no immediate, sensibly apprehensible marks of divinity or divine manifestation,21 and he agreed with Hume that the sort of mysterious or improbable events that might seem to constitute indirect evidence should be regarded with skepticism in direct proportion to their mysteriousness or improbability (that is, in direct proportion to their suitability as evidence for divine revelation).22 Having a religious justification for one’s actions is in practice indistinguishable from having no justification at all: although there is a distinction, it is one only God is in a position to draw. Kierkegaard follows Hamann, who in turn follows Hume, in concluding that the Christian must therefore view his own belief as itself a miracle.23 What Hume calls a miracle, Kierkegaard calls “the condition”: the subjective condition, imparted by God, for apprehending a set of events as a revelation.24

  Fear and Trembling is in part a meditation on the normative situation of someone with this religious orientation. Abraham is of course not a Christian, but the justification of his actions in the binding of Isaac has a similar structure. Johannes de Silentio emphasizes the impossibility of knowing oneself to be justified in religious terms, and the moral anxiety suffered by the person committed to acting on a divine imperative.25 This is part of the larger project in that text of portraying the religious life as more challenging than it is typically taken to be—driving up the price of faith, in the terms Johannes employs in preface and the epilogue.26 (This fact makes it all the more puzzling that Fear and Trembling is so often taken to contain an argument in favor of a religious view of life over a non-religious ethical one.27)

  Nor is Fear and Trembling the only pseudonymous text that portrays the difficulty of occupying this standpoint. Much of the Postscript is dedicated to an exploration of what Climacus calls the “existential pathos” of the A and B forms of the religious life, and he argues that the latter is “sharpened” in comparison with the former by the two features already mentioned: its account of the god-relation as a relation to a historically contingent apparition; and its emphasis on individual responsibility. The believer at the standpoint of religiousness A is certain of the object of his belief; and although the believer’s certainty is at the same time a consciousness of his necessary inadequacy (qua finite being), this necessity is itself reassuring. By contrast the combination of epistemic groundlessness on the one hand, and emphasis on individual responsibility on the other, renders the prospect of salvation extremely insecure, and the situation of the believer correspondingly psychologically strenuous, in religiousness B. In Postscript the language of “market price” appears again in the discussion of existential pathos, and the clear message is that salvation (in the terms proposed by religiousness B) is a reward so dearly purchased that it is, from a human perspective, lunacy to go in for it.28

  Far from offering any sort of apology for Christian faith, any justification (epistemic or prudential) of the religious standpoint or any attempt to make it more appealing to anyone not already occupying it, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works do just the opposite: they are dedicated to displaying the true extent of its difficulty. In Postscript, Climacus describes his particular authorial vocation as “making difficulties everywhere” in an age in which life in general—and Christianity in particular—has been made too easy.29 This is an important part of Kierkegaard’s own authorial vocation, persisting from early journal entries to the late writings attacking the Danish state church. For Kierkegaard, the only way open to human beings to help one another toward faith is a negative one: helping them to work their way free of the various attitudes that they might mistake for it. Thus Johannes de Silentio, while nominally praising Abraham, in fact demonstrates the impossibility of taking him (or anyone else) as a model of faith; and Johannes Climacus scoffs at the id
ea of wanting to reassure people about their salvation, claiming that in this area “the most one person can do for another is unsettle him.”30

  Kierkegaard devoted much of his authorship to an extensive typology of moral character. The theory of agency on which that typology is based is presented most systematically in The Sickness unto Death. There, in terms that draw on Fichte and Schelling, Anti-Climacus describes the self as a synthesis that is self-relating and that, in relating to itself, relates to a power that posited it.31

  To say that the self is a synthesis is to say that its activity involves bringing together and unifying disparate cognitive and conative states into a single consciousness. Anti-Climacus claims that the self is a synthesis “of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom[/possibility] and necessity.”32 The pairs of terms emphasize Kierkegaard’s view of human agency as an interplay of constraint and transcendence (a theme that appears in The Concept of Anxiety as well). The agent must integrate the givenness of herself with the set of goals or view of life she has taken up, forming her concrete embodiment into some ideal shape, but also tailoring the ideal to the unchangeables of personal history, social situation, and physical and psychological nature.33 Human freedom is both opposed to the constraints upon it and dependent on them—opposed because they place limits on possible actions, dependent because they provide the context in which actions make sense and so contribute to determining what actions they are. It is not and cannot be entirely clear where the freedom begins and the constraint leaves off; the agent continually faces the question of what is really possible given the constraints, a question that never finds a final answer.34

  To say that the self is a synthesis that relates to itself is to say that its activity is the object of immediate awareness and the possible object of reflective consideration.35 Self-relation encompasses a range of degrees of self-consciousness, from immediate awareness of what one is doing as one is doing it to the highest degree of reflectiveness upon one’s life as a whole. It subsumes any number of ways of conceptualizing, and stances taken toward, one’s activity (including refusal to consciously reflect on it). Self-awareness of any sort becomes part of any new synthesis (as when a negative evaluative attitude toward some intention causes one to abandon it).