Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
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The reason why Concluding Postscript is made to appear comical is precisely that it is serious – and people think they can better the cause by taking separate theses and translating them into pieces of dogma, the whole thing no doubt ending in a new confusion where I myself am treated as a cause, everything being translated into the objective, so that what is new is that here we have a new doctrine, and not that here we have personality.41
For Kierkegaard, rescuing this category meant catching it somewhere between the frying pan of Romantic disintegration and the fire of Hegelian abstraction. Dismissive of Romantics like Novalis as he was of Fichte,42 Kierkegaard proposed a non-philosophical notion of the unified personality in which the unifying factor is faith in the inherent (though God-given) value of what we are and have. For us, placed quite otherwise as we are, the project would be different; in fact we would have to rebuild it from scratch. But even if this were not possible within the bounds of philosophy alone, that fact alone should invite a certain modesty among philosophers. And if philosophy is not sufficient to this task, might not philosophers themselves ascend to a perspective that reveals the unconscious comedy in the cartoon cut-outs that they have used as stand-ins for human beings in their scholastic attempts to fit human mentality into antecedent physicalisms?43
But why complain that philosophy has lost sight of the person when in all likelihood it cannot help doing that? Its disability may be its strength, and when philosophy claimed to speak to the person there could still be comedy. There is no reason to take Climacus's position to be that all philosophical questions are existential. Certainly that wasn't Kierkegaard's view: the footnotes and Nachlass address many philosophical positions in a learned and conventionally philosophical spirit. Philosophers may not be inherently figures of fun, but when they assume the solutions they offer are as good as, better than, even are answers to existential questions, then they come close to the kind of comedy Climacus was invented to help us see.
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2
PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
The influence of Søren Kierkegaard's writings on the course of philosophical debate in the 1960s and 1970s was predictably less than the burgeoning literature on this profound and complex thinker would ordinarily suggest. Those acquainted with Kierkegaard's writings could appreciate the reasons – not least the complexity of the thought, the difficulty of reducing it to a systematic or at any rate consistent locutionary series, or even to a string of clearly defined and independently contestable claims. There is also the apparently insoluble problem of the illocutionary force to be attributed to the various works themselves, individually or in their appointed categories (aesthetic, dialectical, religious) – the difficulty, among others, that the works in the two former categories may not be intended to express Kierkegaard's own claims, or even to claim assent at all, but, as Louis Mackey's Kierkegaard: A Kind of Poet1 proposes, to address the reader's intelligence in some less direct way. On top of that is (to what is for the most part a studiously agnostic professional public) the apparent parochialism of the announced principal theme of the work taken to be most philosophical, 'how to become a Christian' – or even more narrowly, 'how to become a Christian in Christendom'. Not necessarily finally, but surely most decisively, there is the absence of any clear connection between the highly interesting claims Kierkegaard or his pseudonyms seem to make and the problems occupying the centre of the wider philosophical stage in the 1960s and 1970s.
In view of the difficulties of interpretation (the first and second reasons), it is not surprising that a large proportion of the work on Kierkegaard, indeed a significant part of almost every work on him in the period in question, is concerned with offering one theory of how to read him and with rebutting rival theories. There is obviously a genuine need to solve such difficulties, and the depth and detail of some publications, whether they aim to provide a systematic interpretation of the entire corpus (as in the very different cases of Mackey's A Kind of Poet and Gregor Malantschuk's Dialektik og Eksistens hos Søren Kierkegaard, translated as Kierkegaard's Thought2), or a part (as, for instance, in John W. Elrod's Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works and Mark C. Taylor's Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Authorship: A Study of Time and the Self3), have helped in large measure towards doing so. But readers can hardly be expected to
judge the merits of the new proposals without a comprehensive acquaintance with the original texts; and even where, as in the latter two works, the discussion is of quite specific and central Kierkegaardian concepts and theses which could well prove interesting and constructive in a larger forum, the exegetical burden tends to inhibit the further analyses and comparisons needed to make them available there. The general effect, it might be said, is to preserve whatever is excellent in the renaissance of Kierkegaard scholarship (and there is very much) for an already established, even if expanding, circle of Kierkegaard scholars.
Some Kierkegaardians may not be troubled by this. They may say that the so-called centre of the philosophical stage is only that part of it which happens, for essentially trivial reasons and only for the time being, to be best lit. Time will show that the framework and manner in which Kierkegaard presents his thought is the enduring one, and that, as Mackey claims, 'in parting company with [the then] modern philosophy', Kierkegaard, although 'perhaps the most extreme antiphilosopher of modern times', was actually 'rejoin[ing] the philosophia perennis'.4 It would, however, be presumptuous as well as complacent to assume that the issues which occupy present modern philosophy, as well as the methods with which it deals with them, were entirely foreign to the philosophia perennis; and if participation in the philosophia perennis really matters, it would be safer to assume that the more lasting results would be obtained by a joint exertion that allows concessions from both sides. In the remainder of this chronicle I draw attention to a few topics where I suggest it might be profitable to search for links between the interesting things Kierkegaard seems to be saying, though not always with the greatest precision and clarity, and certain familiar problems and points of view in current philosophy of mind, broadly conceived. The point of the exercise is to chart the extent to which Kierkegaardian issues have their counterparts in (let us tendentiously call them) less sectarian discussions, to gain some idea of the degree of mutual interest and relevance.
1 Kierkegaard describes the person or self in terms which to the casual eye suggest the now widely discredited Cartesian polarity of res cogitans and res extensa. Since most contemporary discussion in current philosophy of mind is concerned with the elaboration of acceptable alternatives to Cartesian dualism, this could be one place where the connection can be made quite straightforwardly. But that is not so. Or at least it is not a connection that can be made straightforwardly with the contemporary critique and attempted replacement of Cartesian dualism. The terms which Kierkegaard uses to describe the person or self as a synthesis of two elements (infinitude/finitude, possibility/necessity, eternity/temporality) are drawn not from Descartes but from Hegel (and through him Aristotle). There are two very important differences between the Hegelian and the Cartesian polarity. In the first place, in the tradition stemming from Descartes, philosophy of mind focuses attention on the relation between mind, or consciousness, and its physical vehicle, the body; the debate is one in fundamental ontology as to whether the human mind is sui generis or can be explained in principle as a complex natural (that is, physical)
phenomenon. But the relation upon which the Hegelian tradition focuses is that between mind, or consciousness, and its object, the world. Secondly, for contemporary philosophy of mind, as for Descartes himself, the notion of the mind's object is that of an 'outside' (that is, extra-mental) reality which true judgements 'represent' in consciousness. In the Hegelian tradition it would be more apt to say that the mind's object is contained in rather than that it was represented by our true thoughts; or, as one commentator puts it, that 'thought and the determinations through which it operates (the Denkbestimmungen,
or categories) are not the apanage of a subject over against the world, but lie at the very root of things'.5 The Hegelian idea of an objective world is linked to that of shareable meaning rather than to that of common reference. Roughly, the commonness of the common world lies in the Fregean idea that a thought must be something people can have in common rather than in the Strawsonian idea of a unique system of publicly observable and enduring spatiotemporal entities.6
These aspects of the Hegelian polarities determine the nature of the philosophical problems posed by the oppositions in question. The overriding problem is that of reconciling them. Why is that a problem? Because the latter element in each opposition represents a limitation of the subject's fundamental nature. Traditionally finitude or finiteness is the limitation of distinctness and is a logical consequence of being something of a certain sort; necessity is the logical property of something's being as it has to be by power of reason; while temporality implies successiveness and so exposure to change. As Mark Taylor points out in his discussion of the oppositions, Kierkegaard not only departs from the traditional use of these terms but also tends to regard them as interrelated aspects of the same limitation.7 Broadly, and in the corresponding order, the aspects are being merely particular, being constrained by accidents of environment and endowment, and lacking a stable centre, or essence. The most crucial departure from the tradition is the use of the term 'necessity' in connection with situational rather than rational or logical constraint; Kierkegaard denies8 that anything actually occurs with necessity and, in the absence of its previous function of determining choices, applies the term by association to factors limiting them. Again broadly, and the parallel here was as far as I know first pointed out by Jean Wahl,9 the problem facing the subject is the one described by Hegel in his account of the Unhappy Consciousness as the subject's separation from the source of its own nature. What the 'particular individual' needs is (in Hegel's terms) its 'oneness …with the Unchangeable', or 'the reconciliation … of [its] individuality with the universal'.10
One difference between today's philosophy and the philosophy Kierkegaard so violently opposed is that for the former this is not a genuine problem at all. The Aristotelian framework of essences and unchangeable truths in which Hegel's philosophy is embedded has gone the way of all metaphysics. But then Kierkegaard's reason for opposing his philosophical contemporaries was that neither did he believe it was a philosophical problem. So how do Kierkegaard and our (post-positivist, linguistically turned) contemporaries differ? And if
Kierkegaard's point is that the problem is genuine but not philosophical, how can this be reconciled with the claim that in opposing his own philosophical contemporaries he was rejoining the philosophia perennis?
First, Kierkegaard's opposition to speculative idealism is that it claims the problem can be solved conceptually. The oneness and reconciliation are to be unifications in thought, brought about by advancing to a higher point of view. According to Hegel, consciousness 'becomes Spirit by finding itself therein', in an 'aware[ness] of the reconciliation of its individuality with the universal'. Its 'joy' is then found in the 'peace' of 'self-assurance', and its 'blissful enjoyment' is that of perfect 'vision'.11 In these quotations we see the tendency in Hegelian philosophy to personify abstract ideas, and Kierkegaard's argument is in effect that once the problem is, as it should be, really posed by actual persons of themselves, it becomes clear (for reasons given in Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript) both that the conceptual solution is abstract, irrelevant and self-defeating, and that it involves misconceptions simultaneously of the nature of personal existence and of the role of philosophy in helping to solve the problem as it does indeed arise there. If it is true that post-positivist philosophy would in general reject whatever metaphysical assumptions must be made for the problem to be able to arise there, this would not put it in a position significantly different from that of speculative idealism in Kierkegaard's eyes. Speculative idealism thinks it is addressing the issue but isn't. Post-positivist philosophy isn't addressing it either; the difference is simply that it doesn't aim to do so. Kierkegaard's criticism of the philosophical style of his contemporaries is one he would no doubt find good reason to repeat today:
If thought in our time had not become something queer, something one learns parrot-fashion [noget Tillært], thinkers would make a quite different impression upon people, as was the case in Greece, where a thinker was also someone whose thinking inspired him to a passionate interest in his own existence; and as was also once the case in Christendom, where a thinker was someone whose faith inspired him to try to understand himself in the existence of faith.12
The answer to the second question, then, as the reference indicates, is that Kierkegaard saw himself as returning to the Greek tradition. More specifically, he saw himself as returning to and continuing from where Socrates had left off. Kierkegaard describes himself (in the shape of his philosophical or 'dialectical' persona, Johannes Climacus) as 'going further than Socrates'.13 The respect in which Socrates was going in the right direction was that he was an existential thinker; while the respect in which he did not go far enough in that direction was that (in Plato's version; see the important footnote in Postscript on Socrates14) he continued to assume that essential truth lay within the scope of human cognitive capacity. Kierkegaard's proposed (or, as he presents it, hypothetical) 'advance' on Socrates is to reject this assumption; while it was the philosophical tradition's
acceptance of it which made the culmination of that tradition in Hegel's 'System' a colossal diversion. Ideally, Kierkegaard's own philosophical project should have been that of showing the path out of Greek philosophy (paganism), via Socrates (existential thought and irony), to the anti-philosophical, non-humanist position where the only saving truths have to be conceived as based on paradox (religiousness B). But there were obstacles: the philosophical tradition itself and its offshoot, organized religion. Kierkegaard had to contend with an ideology which offered easy ways out of the hard epistemological truths of his advanced position, which encouraged people to believe that they could be saved by being incorporated into the essential truth simply as effective members of existing Danish society, or even that they were already saved because they had been baptized into the Danish State Church. In respect of the ideology, Kierkegaard saw himself as a Socrates15 demolishing the protective fabric of illusions that prevented people from posing the problem of reconciliation as a personal one, as a problem their reflection on which could inspire them to a passionate interest in their own existence.
If we now return to the schema of oppositions which we said formed the basis of Kierkegaard's account of the person or self, we find two things which distinguish the account from the kinds with which we are most familiar in contemporary philosophy. In the first place, the oppositions apply differently according to the subject's understanding of its own relation to essential truth. Thus in paganism, or in what Kierkegaard calls 'immanent' positions generally, the subject as it were straddles the opposition; the assumption is that it can establish its relationship to the essential truth (to the eternal) by some form of action or style of life within the subject's own power of performance – in the ethical but not yet religious sphere by asserting a social self, and in the as yet only paganly religious sphere by a form of self-annihilation involving withdrawal from existence. In either case existence, the individual's existence, whether in self-assertion or in self-annihilation, is thought to be in some way encompassed by the eternal; while in Kierkegaard's advanced position, instead of the opposition occurring within existence, it is placed 'absolutely between existence and eternity'.16
The second distinctive feature is Kierkegaard's use of the term 'self'. It is introduced into the schema as a 'third term' which 'mediates' the opposites, establishing them as elements in a 'synthesis'. Against the Hegelian background with its method of conciliation one might expect the synthesis to be the solution of the problem, the reconciling of the opposite
s in a higher unity; but it appears rather to be the first grasp of the problem itself. In a discussion of sin and sensuality we are told that 'the synthesis is first posited in the sexual as a contradiction … and, like every contradiction, as a task the history of which begins at that very moment'.17 In an often-quoted passage, often assumed to be a parody of the Hegelian style but proving on explication to be a neat though spare definition of the self's place in the synthesis, we read:
The human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In short a synthesis. A
synthesis is a relation between two. Looked at in this way a human being is not yet a self. … In a relation between two things the relation is the third term in the form of a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation, and in the relation to that relation; this is what it is from the point of view of soul for soul and body to be in relation. If, on the other hand, the relation relates to itself, then this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.18
In plainer language, the self is not to be identified simply with a relation which allows us to classify human beings as a species of psychophysical entity; for then the self would be a merely dependent factor, mirroring the interactions of the other two. Kierkegaard's self is a controlling rather than a controlled factor, this being the respect in which it is said to belong properly to the category of 'spirit'. In Hegelian terms 'spirit' is synonymous with 'freedom', and the freedom of spirit is that spirit exists 'in and with itself'.19 Kierkegaard need not deny that psychophysical organisms lacking a self are nevertheless controlled, in the sense that they have an organized repertoire of advantageous responses to their immediate environments. But beings whose mental life is correctly located in the category of spirit are not confined in this way to the instinctual closure of immediacy. Kierkegaard refers (in The Concept of Anxiety) to spirit as a kind of function or force 'present' in man, and which 'constitutes' the psychophysical synthesis, whose components, soul and body, are variously said to be 'united', 'bound', 'sustained' by, or to 'rest' in it. Spirit also 'posits' the synthesis, though only when it, that is to say, spirit, ceases to be merely 'dreaming' in man, or present only 'as immediate'.20 The presence of spirit implies not merely an ability to envisage other environments than the immediate one; it implies a kind of distancing of the mind from the finite world of particular environments altogether. If we allow that animals are exclusively finite beings in the terms of this discussion, their minds (souls) do not have this distance, they live 'immediate' lives, and the synthesis in their case contains no 'opposition', 'contradiction' or 'task', while even if a human being who lives the life of immediacy (as in the 'aesthetic sphere') finds no contradiction in his existence, it is still there 'outside'.21 The contradiction is not between soul and body, but between spirit and the soul in its instinctual role. What Kierkegaard means by saying that man is 'determined as spirit'22 is that man is always, even if at first only implicitly, conscious of being essentially underdetermined as a merely finite being. An interesting parallel can be drawn between Kierkegaard's 'spirit' and Hegel's 'consciousness'. In Hegel this term, distinguished in a corresponding way from 'soul' (Seele), refers specifically to the kind of awareness, allegedly specific to man, in which he is set apart from the immediate, instinctual side of his existence, an idea with which Hegel, also with Kierkegaard, associates the notion of spiritual freedom and self-contained existence.23