on an actually preferred judgement. Here, then, we should be able to find a link with contemporary discussions of akrasia, or weakness of will, and self-deception.51 But there are obvious differences. These discussions are often formal, with examples, usually fairly trivial and nearly always artificial, concocted to make particular logical points. Kierkegaard focuses on one example and seems to claim it is universal. His discussion really belongs to moral psychology, not conceptual analysis; in addition to which it takes for granted an ethico-religious framework that even moral psychologists would consider old-fashioned – a framework which to many will seem simply to have been imposed upon the psychological phenomena from above, though this would be to go too far: Kierkegaard's moral psychology is in the first instance phenomenological; its descriptions of psychological states appeal, if not to common experience, at least to what Kierkegaard might plausibly claim are generally available insights. It might be more fruitful to regard the ethical framework not as being arbitrarily superimposed but as an attempted reconstruction of more or less familiar phenomena in terms of a particular theory of human development, a theory which gives a central place to individual responsibility and choice. A better indication of the kind of relation Kierkegaard's moral framework has to his psychological descriptions is to be found in the objection that the framework is arbitrary in another sense: namely that it is simply an ideological solution to admittedly real but not universal psychological problems, problems revealed to Kierkegaard in his own neurosis and by his exceptional powers of self-observation. In other words, that the framework of sin, faith and redemption is a piece of wishful thinking. For even if the criticism is misguided (and perhaps it is not altogether), its functional interpretation of the relationship between the ethical superstructure and psychological base does at least express recognition of a way in which it would be correct to say that the two are not logically independent of one another.
The second qualification to the claim that the psychological works provide the knowledge the individual needs to be able to control his own psychological economy concerns the role often assigned to knowledge in such a case. Scientific descriptions are parts of scientific explanations, and we usually think of these as causal. Discounting mere curiosity or wonder, the rationale for such descriptions is that, if true, they contribute to our ability to predict and, in principle, by manipulation of the causal antecedents, to prevent, compensate for or contrive the occurrence of the phenomenon in question. Although it is perhaps physical phenomena we think of first here, there seems no reason in principle why at least some psychological phenomena should not be open to similar manipulation. Nevertheless, Kierkegaard's descriptions of psychological phenomena are not intended to enable us to avoid problems. His account of the conditions of the 'real' possibility of sin (The Concept of Anxiety, Ch. I), for example, is not intended to enable us to avoid the problem of sin by control of these conditions. Certainly there is a sense in which he intends it to enable us to solve the problem of sin. However, the solution requires us not to avoid the problem but to face it head-on.52 The descriptions are in fact best understood
as reconstructions of certain psychological phenomena in a non-scientific terminology which interprets them from the point of view of that problem. The aim is to make us aware both of the kind of practical solution needed and of the destructive consequences of not giving it that kind of solution. The descriptions are thus in a sense diagnostic and cautionary. But unlike scientific psychologists, whose cautions consist in predictions of undesirable consequences (pain, death, insanity) of present psychological conditions, predictions which only then disclose to those affected that they are confronted with a (prudential or ethical) choice, Kierkegaard interprets the conditions as themselves outcomes of choice in conscious defiance of what the choosers already know to be right.
Establishing causal connections between (it is usually insisted) logically independent events is only one way of enlarging the scope of our understanding. The connections can also be, and perhaps must always necessarily be in part, conceptual. According to Hegel's conception of science (philosophical science), they are exclusively conceptual. Phenomena which appear to be only contingently related, or which our currently best descriptions even force us to regard as conceptually irreconcilable, are grasped – that is to say, a conceptual solution of the theoretical problem they confront us with is provided – only if they can be logically united or reconciled under the cover of a new, embracing concept. The ability to come by such concepts, Hegel's speculative reason, has in principle no limits. Hegelian science is therefore all-embracing. Hegel classified psychology, along with (in his senses of these terms) phenomenology and anthropology, as a science of Subjective Spirit, a topic comprising, roughly, the attitudes and dynamics of spiritual emergence from the point of view of consciousness – in contrast to 'objective spirit', by which Hegel meant the public manifestations and historical forms of this emergence, including legal institutions and social morality (Sittlichkeit), but also the socially significant aspects of individual conscience (Moralität). In intending his science of spirit to be all-embracing, Hegel meant that no aspect of human life, not even the concepts and principles of individual and social morality, lay beyond its grasp. It is this view which Kierkegaard attacks: the belief that ethical concepts, principles and problems can be understood by incorporating them within a systematic understanding of the world in general. This, on Kierkegaard's view, is precisely to misunderstand the nature of ethical problems. It is to interpret them not as practical dilemmas facing individual persons and their lives, practical problems, that is, which require specifically ethical, not technical, solutions, but as in the end theoretical problems to be solved by advances in comprehension, as if the solutions were to be found rather than made.
3 Making a solution, in Kierkegaard, means creatively embodying the unity of the infinite. Feuerbach said that speculative philosophy's mistake was to conceive the path of philosophy as 'from the abstract to the concrete, from the ideal to the real'. This was to put things upside-down: the starting-point should be the finite, without which 'the infinite cannot be conceived'. Feuerbach observes that '[t]he transition from the ideal to the real takes place only in practical philosophy'.53
Whatever he meant by that, it is clear that Kierkegaard, too, holds that the proper direction is the reverse of Hegel's and that the problem is a practical one. However, in regard to this practical problem Kierkegaard prescribes a path that not only reverses Hegel's by having the finite (individual) as its beginning and the unity of the infinite as its goal, but is its reverse in another respect too. Hegel's path of natural consciousness goes from private to public, from inner to outer, from individuality to a consummation of the individual in a publicity offering fulfilment in ready-made social roles. The progress is outward from 'immediacy' to the public domain in which spirit finds its own home, and in relation to which any pockets of privacy in the public fabric are wrinkles to be flattened out in further extensions of the common vision of objective truth. Kierkegaard's journey is inwards, as greater insight reveals the inability of the public world to provide for the individual's consummation, and as the role of will (or 'heart') and personal choice are revealed as the resources with which the finite agent must secure any consummation that may be in store for it. In this respect the force of Kierkegaard's injunction to 'become subjective', and of his claim that this is the 'highest task' confronting every individual,54 is that, apart from having to be stood on his head, Hegel also has to be turned outside-in.
4 We said earlier that the Hegelian idea of an objective world was linked to that of shareable meaning rather than common frame of reference. By, at this level of analysis, an admittedly crude and facile inference one might suppose that from the Hegelian point of view the degree to which a person succeeds in becoming subjective correlates inversely with the amount of meaning that person has to share, and perhaps that at the extreme of subjectivity a person has no meaning at all to share. Now,
as it notoriously happens, this thesis, or rather a thesis answering to this general formulation, is the one presented in Fear and Trembling and exemplified in the extreme moral individualism of the knight of faith. The knight of faith, portrayed in a version of the Genesis story of Abraham's willingness, on God's command, to sacrifice his son, Isaac, as proof of his faith, is one who acts in 'concealment' and 'cosmic isolation'.55 His isolation is that of one who cannot make himself understood, who, whatever he might say in explanation of his action, will not be able to convey its moral point to others. He is a radically recalcitrant wrinkle in the public fabric. The question is whether his 'privacy' has any actual connection with the notion that objectivity is essentially linked to that of shared meaning – or of common conceptual vision – and if so, with what implications for the wider philosophical debate; or whether the 'teleological suspension of the ethical', as Kierkegaard calls the situation exemplified by Abraham, is a breach not of some alleged principle of meaning, but, less radically, of a preferred theory of morality.
The latter interpretation is suggested by Kierkegaard's explanation of Abraham's 'concealment' as being due to his '[doing] nothing for the universal'.56 That is to say, there is no overriding communal goal that his action serves and which in the eyes of common morality would justify what to those
eyes must otherwise appear to be an incomprehensible repudiation of parental love and responsibility. One might think that Abraham's own reason for his action (that it is a test of his faith – not, of course, in God's existence, since even disobeying God's command demonstrates that, but in God's justice) is one that he, Abraham, understands. So that if there were enough knights of faith to form a community, it might be said of them that they shared a common vision of morality, one for which doing something for the universal was not an absolute norm. If the knight of faith's isolation is 'absolute', however, we would expect knights of faith to be just as isolated, in the relevant respect, from one another as from those with whom they do not share this vision. It seems that the clue to what this respect is and to what makes the isolation absolute is to be found in Kierkegaard's (or his pseudonym's) saying that the basis of the knight of faith's actions is a principle which defies thought and 'remains in all eternity a paradox'. The principle is that 'the individual is higher than the universal'.57
Hegel says in the Phenomenology that there is something which, if you try to convey it in language, you will always misrepresent: namely the particular 'sensuous' content of your experience. Language can only express generality. So what you might mean to say in this case will be 'refuted' by what you actually succeed in saying. Hegel's view is that it is what you say that is 'the more truthful',58 as we would expect if objective truth is the content of a perfect vision whose content is conceptual, that is, a system of relationships, and not some particular or particulars to which you stand in a definite relation. Kierkegaard apparently accepts this view of what language can and cannot express ('As soon as I speak I express the universal' and 'the relief of speech is that it translates [one] into the universal.'59) But his view as to where there is more truth is the opposite of Hegel's – at least with regard to 'eternal' truth, an essential component in which is the definite relation of the individual to the content (the 'how' of the utterer's relationship to the objective 'what' of his utterance), as the distinction is made in Postscript,60 and therefore also, in the present case, with regard to the transcendent source of eternal value. What is primary in this respect is the 'absolute relationship' in which the individual stands to this 'Absolute'. The relationship itself is absolute because it is unconditional upon any finite consideration on the part of the individual. Apart from this, however, and the fact that the absolute, being transcendent, could not be identified by any general description applicable within the space-time order in any case, the relationship to this transcendent source is parallel to that to the immediate content of experience, or perhaps to any particular thing we try to consider in itself, without the 'mediation' of the universal. What is paradoxical is the idea that the individual, in regard to what he essentially is and ought to do, should be prior to the universal, that is, to what can be thought and said about the individual. It is paradoxical in so far as in order to 'understand' the utterances and actions of the individual who adopts this idea, we would have to describe them in terms that constitute a breach of a principle of describability. That the idea defies thought would then simply be a consequence of the (not at all self-evident) principle that whatever can be thought can be said.
Most discussion of Fear and Trembling in the period covered by these chronicles has focused on the figure of Abraham and the question of the morality and/or general defensibility of his intended action. Although little of this debate comes more than marginally within the philosophy of mind, it is perhaps worth remarking that a fuller appreciation of the general Hegelian background – of the logical background as well as the practical background presented by Bernstein61 – would have obviated the need for a good deal of it and perhaps directed attention more fruitfully upon the general issues. It is clear, for example, that Kierkegaard does envisage a teleological suspension of the ethical, at least in the sense of an Hegelian Sittlichkeit ethics, but that he does not mean this to imply a relativization of morality as such to a supramoral authority;62 and also that we are to take Abraham as an illustration not of the total irrelevance to morality of our moral intuitions but of the unintelligibility of faith.63 So there should be advantages both in the present context and in general in a fuller and closer investigation of the principles of meaning and reference underlying Kierkegaard's potentially important accounts not only of the unintelligibility and enforced silence of the knight of faith, but of course also of subjectivity and 'inwardness' (Inderlighed) in connection with the concepts of truth and communication.
A more useful point of departure for such an investigation would be what Kierkegaard says about the distinction between inner and outer.64 The potential relevance of this distinction for contemporary philosophy of mind should be clear. Kierkegaard's insistence on the distinction itself and more particularly on the centrality of the inner goes against the grain of most recent philosophy of mind, as also (even more so) his claim that faith, the category in which the inner has to be understood if it is to have that centrality Kierkegaard claimed for it, is an aspect of the inner life which has no specific outward manifestation.65 In view of Kierkegaard's conception of his own role as that of Socratic gadfly, encouraging people, as it might be said, to prise the mystical shell of absolute idealism away from whatever existential kernel is to be found in Hegel's dialectic, it would be an interesting test of the durability of his thought to place it in contexts where, if true, it should prove fruitfully corrosive. One such context might be the general area of post-Rylean and post-Wittgensteinian philosophy of mind with its questions of 'other minds', the logic of mental concepts, the question of outward criteria for their application, and of the relationship of the inner life to the outer as well as of the implications of this for the learning of the vocabulary of the inner life.66 Another might be that of the analysis of 'intentionality' or propositional attitudes. Kierkegaard's distinction between the thought's 'how' and its 'what' comes close enough to a current distinction between the 'psychological mode' of a person's concern about some objectively identifiable segment of (past, present or future) reality and the 'representative content'67 of the corresponding thought to prompt the possibility of extending the modest range of rather simple modes usually mentioned in such analyses to include Kierkegaard's more sophisticated modes (irony,
humour, faith, anxiety, despair), as well as the more philosophically interesting 'life-views' corresponding to the well-known stages or spheres of existence, since these after all are said to be ways of experiencing reality.
5 Finally, there is an underlying issue affecting the question of the contemporary philosophical relevance of Kierkegaard's thought quite generally, namely the status of the ethico-religious framewo
rk in which it is embedded. For many the 'superimposition' of this framework will weaken the ties of relevance and interest, while for others its being 'presupposed' will strengthen them. Superficially this difference looks non-philosophical, at least in the sense that philosophical differences are held to be ones which can be – and perhaps also actually tend to be – discussed philosophically. However, as was suggested earlier, the connection between the ethical superstructure and psychological base is closer than the notions of superimposition and presupposition imply. A better idea of the connection is conveyed by Wittgenstein's remark that, as he sees it, 'the Christian faith … is refuge in [an] ultimate distress'.68 Wittgenstein's comments on religion are clearly coloured by his reading of Kierkegaard. Nevertheless, 'refuge' (Zuflucht), with its connotation of 'shelter', suggests flight from reality, and one may wonder how that notion can be part of the framework within which reality itself is what one is attempting to describe. The answer must of course be that it is a description of human reality that the framework is designed to provide. But then a similar question arises in that context too: Why should a framework which selects this refuge be the one that accounts most satisfactorily for human reality? If, as Wittgenstein also says, '[t]he Christian religion is only for the one who needs infinite help, that is only for the one who suffers infinite distress',69 why should the special needs of this one be thought to have universal significance? Now although at first glance it would seem self-defeating to answer this latter question by saying, 'Well at least it can seem so to one who has these needs', there is an important point here none the less. It comes to light if we read the claim that the Christian religion is only for the one who needs infinite help as saying not that it has nothing to say to others, but that if you are to understand what it does say you must have or acquire the kind of inner life in which the Christian concepts of sin, faith and redemption apply. Hampshire has argued that '[e]ntry into a certain "form of life" is a necessary background to using and attaching sense to [the] concepts … [which correspond] to the more refined distinctions within the vocabulary of sentiment and emotion'.70 The form of life Hampshire refers to is the 'adult human form of life' with its habits of controlled expression in word and deed. But if, following Cavell's lead,71 we regard Kierkegaard's religious stage as a Wittgensteinian form of life, Hampshire's arguments – to the effect that the 'concept of feeling and sentiment' is derived from that of inhibited behaviour, in such a way that 'the order in which a person learns the use of two classes of expression' is also that in which he 'acquires the faculties of mind to which the expressions refer'72 – might be extended or adapted to the feelings and sentiments (needs and hopes) of the person about whose form of expression Wittgenstein says, 'A cry of distress cannot be greater than that of
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