Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
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Hegel talks of the
path of natural consciousness … the way of the soul which journeys through the series of its own configurations as though they were the stations appointed for it by its own nature, so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit.
The path laid out for the soul 'presses forward to true knowledge' or 'Science', and the point of the journey is to provide the soul with a 'completed experience of itself' in which it finally achieves 'awareness of what it really is in itself'.24 Kierkegaard's existing individual is denied any such awareness, and it is instead the full awareness of this fact that forms the goal of its journey along the path of consciousness. On the other hand, Kierkegaard's spirit is, like Hegel's, the realization of a potentiality specific to the human soul. And also like Hegel's, the special characteristic of this soul is its sense of a disproportion between natural and merely finite existence, on the one hand, and the requirements of its autonomy and fulfilment, on the other.25 But in the case of Kierkegaard's 'soul', the ideals of fulfilment and freedom are always a 'task', for instance the task of 'winning the sexual into the [eternal] category of spirit' (at vinde det ind i Aandens [evige]Bestemmelse).26 The instinctual life does not conform itself to 'the category of spirit', it has to be brought actively into conformity with it; the instinctual life poses a practical problem requiring the individual's active intervention.
How, then, are this practical task and its solution related to the overriding problem of reconciling the opposites, and to its solution? Indeed what kind of reconciliation is at all possible in the absence of a perfect vision of the kind providing it in Hegel? And even if there is one, what advantages, corresponding to the 'joy', 'blissful enjoyment' and 'self-assurance' afforded by the Hegelian vision, can the individual expect from such a reconciliation? Unless there is some sense of its being not only the right but also a satisfying thing to do, unless, at the very least, there is the prospect of some compensation for the losses involved in elevating the instinctual life to the level of spirit, the project will be as 'abstract' as Hegel's own and a matter of indifference to the concretely situated individual to whom Kierkegaard appeals. The answers, given here very briefly, provide introductions to our remaining topics.
First, that Kierkegaard does contemplate some form of reconciliation, and that what he calls 'transfiguring sensuousness into spirit'27 is a necessary part of it, can be understood, once again, in terms of the Hegelian programme which Kierkegaard's is intended (it is not always sufficiently stressed) to replace as well as to subvert. Hegel's is a monist system in which matter tends towards ideality and spirit in the end encompasses everything. The material world exists merely in order to give spirit embodiment; spirit has to 'externalize' itself as nature before 'returning to' itself as concrete spirit. For Kierkegaard, however, this monistic scheme leaves out the problematic and compound category of existence. In describing the human being as a compound (of infinitude and finitude, possibility and necessity, and eternity and temporality), he is, as we have seen, referring to the situation of the merely particular, concretely situated and unstabilized individual concerned with the possibility of reconciling these limitations with their opposites. Since conceptual mediation is an illusion from the point of view of
existence,28 the tendency in thought should rather be to stress the absolute distinction between these elements. Any tendency to conflate the two, to see the finite as a manifestation of the infinite, as if the terms of this contradiction were still within existence, and the reconciliation within the individual's power through ethical self-assertion or religious self-annihilation, must be regarded as a human weakness. The same applies if the tendency is to say that the infinite is totally different from the finite and yet to treat or conceive it as if it belonged to the familiar realm of the finite all the same.29 The two must be held absolutely apart. But there is still the possibility of a situation corresponding to that of the 'embodiment' of spirit in nature. It is for the acting individual to subordinate finite ends to an absolute end, at least to try to reach that 'maximum' which is to 'maintain simultaneously a relationship to the absolute telos and to relative ends, not by mediating them, but by making the relationship to the absolute telos absolute, and the relationship to the relative ends relative'.30 'If for any individual', says Kierkegaard, 'an eternal happiness is his highest good, this will mean that all finite considerations [Momenter] are once and for all actively [handlende] reduced to what has to be given up in relation to the eternal happiness.'31 By 'giving up' the finite (Kierkegaard also talks of 'resignation'32 and of 'renouncing everything',33 the latter as 'the first true expression of one's relationship to the absolute telos [there are later expressions, first suffering, the 'essential' expression, then guilt, the 'decisive' expression] ), Kierkegaard does not mean turning one's back on it. 'The individual does not cease to be a human being, nor does he divest himself of the manifold composite garment of the finite in order to clothe himself in the abstract attire of the cloister …'34 The point is rather that the individual consciously subjects the finite goals that confront him to an overordinate, non-finite end, genuinely conceived as non-finite. The result, in form, corresponds to the Hegelian subordination of matter to spirit – putting matter to spiritual use. The difference is that here the transformation of the material occurs not in the material world as such, in things and processes, but in the manner in, or nature of the intention by, which changes are brought about in that world by individuals, in their projects, aims and choices. The unification, which in Hegel's account of spirit is the result of matter striving (self-destructively, as Hegel says) after the realization of its idea, is for Kierkegaard introduced into the world by human agency. But it is not introduced in the sense that a change in the world due to human action of the kind in question is an objectively identifiable manifestation of the infinite. In this respect action is not a substitute for mediation. The unification has a purely 'subjective' location, in the individual will.
Secondly, why, when living in the category of spirit35 requires the individual to be a 'stranger in the world of the finite',36 should the individual nevertheless choose that life? Now although the reference to eternal happiness indicates that there is meant to be some form of ultimate satisfaction in it for the individual, it appears that the threshold of satisfaction to which Kierkegaard appeals is considerably lower than in Hegel. It is true that Kierkegaard speaks of a kind of certainty (Vished) paralleling Hegel's 'self-assurance', but otherwise, rather than 'joy' or
'blissful enjoyment', all that he offers his individual is the absence of despair. And even the certainty turns out to be the product of a consciously irrational decision, an 'act of daring' (Vovestykke) in which the individual 'risks everything', including his 'thought', which means that the capacity to determine logical possibility has to be renounced if an eternal happiness is to be even so much as an option.37 Whatever gravitational pull the prospect of an eternal happiness originally has is replaced, as the consequences of Kierkegaard's advanced position emerge, by the intellectually blind choice, in what he calls the 'passion of the infinite',38 of a goal about which all that can be said is that it is 'the manner of its acquisition'.39 However, we are not to take this to imply a corresponding decrease of interest in the goal of reconciliation itself. On the contrary, it is when, in the deepest despair, one faces the full impact of the absolute transcendence of the eternal that being rid of despair becomes the greatest thing one could wish (as water to someone parched with thirst) and differentially on a par with Hegel's joy and blissful enjoyment. The reason why, as Kierkegaard concedes, so few even attempt the life of spirit is not that it has no inherent attraction, it is, he says, because 'most people have still not gone particularly deep in their despair'.40
Despair is described as an incongruity or imbalance (Misforhold) 'in the relation comprising the synthesis'.41 The incongruity, it should be noted, is not the fact that the terms in the synthesis stand opposed to one another: that they do so is a given fact
of human existence; and in any case 'it is not up to the existing [individual] to make existence out of finitude and infinity [by putting them together], but being himself composed of [these] to become qua existing one of them [namely infinite] …'.42 Furthermore,
[if] the synthesis [itself] were itself the imbalance, there would be no despair, it would be something that lay in human nature itself, that is, it would not be despair; it would be something he suffered, like a sickness he succumbs to, or like death, which is the fate of everyone.43
It is essential to Kierkegaard's view that there is an alternative to despair, that despair is an option that the individual chooses, or at least remains in by default. So the incongruity is a feature not of the synthesis, but of the self. More accurately, it is that whereby this 'third' factor fails to establish itself, or be 'posited' as a self, fails to 'relate to itself' and thus to become the 'positive' third factor in the synthesis.
Yet this is not the whole story. Despair is said to have two main forms: one is the individual's reluctance to be a self, and the other is the 'posited' self's reluctance to accept that it is 'established by another'.44 In Hegel's language this latter reluctance would be the posited self's insistence that it has its 'essence' in itself. Hegel's ideal of spiritual freedom as the spirit's existing 'in and with itself' would therefore appear from Kierkegaard's position as a form of despair. The 'formula' for reconciliation, or the 'condition of the self when despair is completely eradicated [is]: by relating itself to its own self and by willing to be itself, the self is grounded transparently in the power which established it'.45 'The self is freedom',
or the achievement by the synthesis (or by the relationship which comprises it) of relating to itself.46 But if the self now freely refuses to consider itself a 'derived' (deriveret) relationship and presumes to exist (as Hegel would put it) 'in and with itself', it has still failed to be rid of its despair. The self is 'healthy' and 'free from despair' only when, 'having despaired', it is 'grounded transparently in God'.47
Both these answers imply the centrality of will: the first says that reconciliation is a kind of exercise of will, the second that it is an achievement of will. The latter is obviously logically prior: the existence of the achievement is presupposed by the claim that it takes the specified form. The combined view is that reconciliation is the result of the individual's own effort, something which, first of all, points to the truth in the Kierkegaardian share in the frequent claim that the problems Hegel treated as capable of conceptual solution Marx and Kierkegaard interpreted in their different ways as practical; and thereby, secondly, allows us to place Kierkegaard's views on the relation of body, soul and spirit in their proper philosophical context, which is that of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, not philosophy of mind in the modern, more specialized sense.
The pseudonymous author of The Concept of Anxiety says it is not necessary for his purpose to enter into any 'pompous philosophical discussion about the relation between soul and body' (though he adds enough to indicate that he could if he wanted); it suffices to say that 'the body is the organ of the soul and thus, in turn, of the spirit'.48 Transforming the soul/body synthesis into the organ of the spirit is the task that first appears, or the 'history' of which begins, with the 'positing' of the synthesis and culminates in the constituting of a 'self' properly so called: a free individual in the sense of one who, to adapt Marx, has brought the psychological conditions of life under conscious control – conditions which, in Marx's terms, if abandoned to chance acquire an independent existence over against the individual. The 'synthesis' is the framework in terms of which Kierkegaard describes fulfilment: the individual's decision to 'risk everything' is one by which he does, in a way, 'become infinite';49 it is a choice in which he accepts an identity apart from and superordinate to the finite, even though, in order to avoid the second main form of despair, this requires accepting that possession of the infinite must take the form of dependence upon God.
But it is also the framework within which the problems and failures of fulfilment are to be described. The synthesis provides, in its pairs of opposite terms, the basis of a typology of failures, that is, of forms of despair (in The Sickness unto Death), as well as a kind of hierarchy of growth-levels – first the psychophysical compound in which the body is the organ of soul, and in respect of which spirit is only an open 'possibility', and then this compound as the organ of spirit in the state Kierkegaard calls freedom – which allows him to describe (in The Concept of Anxiety) the states of anxiety attending the idea of a transition from a finitely based identity to an infinitely based one. To understand the role of the component terms in the synthesis it would be misleading to think of them, as in contemporary discussion of psychophysical connections, as logically independent coevals in some kind of hierarchically ordered relation to one another. The soul,
for instance, is not to be regarded, along with its characteristic bodily expression, as an independent though junior and more earthbound partner of an ascetic spirit. It is rather the state or stage to which the self may regress when under pressure, a state in which the body becomes the organ of the soul rather than of the spirit, although Kierkegaard claims that in thus shunning its spiritual possibility or freedom the self entering this state is divided and the state therefore is a morbid one. This attempted regression in fact comprises one important category in Kierkegaard's typology of anxiety, what he calls 'freedom lost psychosomatically' (Friheden tabt somatisk-psychisk). It is an anxiety which shuns the good, and among the 'countless multiplicity of [whose] nuances' will be found 'an exaggerated sensibility, nervous affections, hysteria, hypochondria, etc.'50 The circumstances of which these can be symptoms might be called conditions of life which have acquired an independent existence over against the individual.
2 One way of reading the two main works Kierkegaard devotes to psychological themes is as providing the conceptual tools necessary for the individual's conscious control of such conditions. What these works describe are the psychological attitudes of the individual in its relation to the presupposed and personally demanding ideal of freedom. In The Concept of Anxiety we have an account of the individual's growing anxiety in the face of the ideal, both before it takes clear shape in consciousness and after. In The Sickness unto Death we are given classified descriptions of the morbid and psychologically unstable conditions of those who shun the ideal and try, against their better judgement, but also – it is suggested – against the inherent tendency of human consciousness, to make do with something less demanding. Both accounts could be said to provide the conceptual background the individual needs to know his place within the psychological economy, thus enabling him to direct his own psychological affairs instead of being directed by them.
This interpretation strikes me as largely correct but in need of careful qualification, in two respects. First, there is the emphasis Kierkegaard places on the will. It isn't just understanding that the individual lacks, as if he already had the correct desire (selfhood, freedom) and needed only the knowledge of what actions will satisfy it; indeed Kierkegaard's assumption seems to be that the gist of the account is something with which the individual is already acquainted, and the details of which will be readily recognized as true. What someone who is a victim of his own psychological economy lacks is, partly, the will to put the knowledge into practice. But only partly, since a significant factor in the weakening of the will is the individual's own description of the attitude he adopts in failing to act so as to satisfy his desire for selfhood and freedom; thus he might say that the conditions really do have an independent existence and that he really is a victim and so not free to do otherwise, or that the attitude is freely adopted because it affords an alternative satisfaction that is the really preferred one. What Kierkegaard gives is an alternative description, a description of the attitude as an inferior option which the individual has chosen deliberately or by default; that is to say, as an accountable failure to act