Climacus's rendition of part of the famous conversation between Jacobi and Lessing, a report of which Jacobi published after Lessing's death.36 Here, says Climacus, we have Lessing's 'last word' on the leap. This last word follows Lessing's famous confession to Jacobi that he is a Spinozist. The original goes as follows:
Lessing: So we won't be parting company over your credo?
Jacobi: We don't want that by any means. But it isn't in Spinoza that my credo lies.
Lessing: I would hope it doesn't lie in any book.
Jacobi: Not just that. I believe in an intelligent and personal cause of the world.
Lessing: Ah, so much the better! Now I must be about to hear something quite new.
Jacobi: Don't get too excited on that account. My way out is with a salto mortale; but you aren't one to take much pleasure in standing on your head?
Lessing: Don't say that, just as long as I don't have to follow suit. And you're going to end up on your feet anyway, aren't you? So, if there's no mystery, I want to see what's in it.37
Then following a fairly lengthy discussion of fatalism, the conversation resumes as follows:
Jacobi: As I see it, the researcher's first task is to reveal and to disclose existence [Dasein zu enthüllen]. … Explanation is only a means, a way to this goal: it is the first goal but never the last. The last goal is what cannot be explained: the irresolvable, immediate and simple … .38
To this Hamannian proposal Lessing ironically responds:
Lessing: Good, very good, I too can use all that; but I can't do it in the same way. On the whole, your salto mortale does not displease me; and I can see how a man with a head of that kind will want to stand on his head to get somewhere. Take me with you if it works.39
Jacobi: Just step on the elastic spot which catapulted me out and it will go of its own accord.40
Lessing: That already requires a leap that I can no longer ask of my old legs and heavy head.41
By publishing his account of this conversation in 1785, Jacobi hoped to bring the Enlightenment's faith in reason into disrepute. If Spinozism is where reason takes you, so much the worse for reason. Climacus's account does justice to this part of Jacobi's intention by taking Lessing's ironic reply to be a recommendation
to lighter heads and younger legs to accept the invitation which Lessing declines. But in Climacus's hands the remark that 'anyone with young legs and a light head can very well leap'42 is aimed ironically at Jacobi himself. For Jacobi has not understood the full dimensions of the leap. He has failed to see that the leap is an 'isolating act' and so cannot be taught or conveyed, or done in company. The Lessing to whom the 'possible' thesis on the dialectic of inwardness and communication has already been attributed sees the folly in Jacobi's asking him to leap with him, and in declining, Lessing makes it sound as though the leap spanned a ditch so that once again it is its width that is too much for his heavy head and old legs. Really, however, it was Jacobi who made the absurd suggestion that there can be a 'transition' to a decision,43 hence the possibility of a run-up and failure to gather sufficient impetus. Lessing is simply humouring Jacobi, 'realiz[ing] very well that the leap, or the crux, is qualitatively dialectical and allows no approximating transition'. Lessing's answer is therefore 'a jest'.44 Climacus concludes his account of the Jacobi–Lessing exchange by summarizing the psychological difference between the two: 'Lessing rests in himself, feels no need of fellowship; so he parries ironically and slips away from Jacobi on his old legs.'45
Lessing may of course have slipped away on his old legs simply to avoid further pestering by the persistent Jacobi. However, Jacobi exploits Lessing's last word for his own ends. And Climacus does the same. He wants to point out that faith for Jacobi is a cheap surrender of his human gift of understanding. No doubt it is also an uncritical faith, a faith in 'truths' already identified and aimed at under the aegis of reason, and with the slack now seen to be left by an ineffectual reason conveniently made up by faith. But faith, as Kierkegaard's pseudonyms present it, requires you to open yourself to practical uncertainties and to the realization that Enlightenment goals can only be secured by a relationship to God – in other words through a radical break with Enlightenment. Furthermore, if your interest in continuing beyond the bounds of human possibility is in any genuine sense religious, the leap you envision will disqualify you if you fail to evince a grasp of the fact that religious belief engages the whole person and not just the intellect. In short, Jacobi's anti-Enlightenment stance is confined to the criticism of reason. What Jacobi egregiously lacked, in Climacus's language, is that 'passionate dialectical abhorrence [Avsky] for a leap' which makes the ditch 'so infinitely wide'.46
But that abhorrence is just what, in Climacus's portrayal, we are prodded into thinking Lessing did possess – which now provides us with another possible explanation of why the ditch appeared so 'repugnant'. Here it is not because leaping from finite to infinite, or vice versa, is intellectually disreputable; nor is the repugnancy the frustration typically felt by a rationalist who would have so liked his reason to convey him across. It is the abhorrence one feels at the brink when one acquires enough negative dialectic to realize what is risked when the gap between finite and infinite is itself infinite.
Whatever Lessing meant by the phrase, it is undeniable that the commitment to reason and the acceptance of Spinozistic conclusions – and for Jacobi it was these which were repugnant – brings Lessing within reach of the existential dialectic
expounded in the two chapters we have been exploring. The moral, then, surely, is that precisely because it involves a clear break with the Enlightenment, the latter is a better background against which to grasp Kierkegaard's thought than the various moves made to save it in the so-called counter-Enlightenment.. The crux is that Climacus's leap is reserved for those whose commitment to reason is strong enough for them to feel the full force of Johannes de silentio's 'shudder of thought' (Tankens Gysen) in Fear and Trembling.47
According to Frederick Beiser's rewarding account, Jacobi's publishing the record of the conversation was calculated to bring the weight of Lessing's reputation behind the counter-Enlightenment, making it clear, as he puts it, that it was Lessing and not Mendelssohn who was the 'true Socrates of his time'.48 The Enlightenment Socrates was the tireless seeker of truth. But, as we noted, the tireless search was proving fruitless. Beiser describes Jacobi as preparing the hemlock that would solve the tragic Socratic dilemma confronting mainstream Enlightenment thinkers once it became obvious that the programme was not achieving its expected goals. Lessing was to be portrayed as someone willing to see the vanity of philosophy – a determinist who saw that rational speculation, consistently carried out, leads in the end to atheism and to fatalism. The solution was to leap out of philosophy. Hamann, as we saw, and as Kierkegaard noted, had gone even further and turned Socrates, the persistent confessor of ignorance, into a counter-Enlightenment symbol. Climacus's two chapters on Lessing are in the same tradition. Like Jacobi, Climacus sees Lessing as a Socrates whose jest betrays a sense of the objective uncertainty of all that is important.49 Like Socrates, Lessing with his wit and evasiveness can be someone who 'conceives infinity in the form of ignorance' which must then be expressed in the form of irony, in speech which to the uninitiated must sound like that of a 'madman'.50
But what does Climacus make of Lessing's alleged Spinozism? In referring to it he neither approves nor indeed comments. He does, however, say on the strength of a remark of Lessing's reported by Jacobi51 that it is 'no wonder' that Lessing was declared a pantheist.52 But there need be nothing wrong with pantheism from Kierkegaard's point of view, so long as it does not take a form that prevents it developing into true Christianity. In Postscript, however, pantheism is clearly associated in a bad sense with Hegel, who offers no future in that direction and, according to Climacus, even blocks it. The publication of Jacobi's Briefe led to the famous Pantheism Controversy, which, as Beiser says, 'threw the Aufklärung back on the defensive'
, in the end 'completely [changing] the intellectual map of eighteenth-century Germany'.53 The way in which Spinoza was received was part and parcel of that change, and by Kierkegaard's time Spinoza was in the custody of the likes of Herder and Goethe. His pantheism had come to be associated, in a way that Jacobi had not calculated, with Hamannian 'lived life', and Spinoza's texts were now treated as a mould into which to pour whatever existential ballast one needed to flesh out their 'geometry'. Kierkegaard would hardly be attracted to that Spinoza, and we gather from the distribution of entries on Spinoza in the journals that, although he had read the Tractatus as a student, it was not until
1846 that he looked seriously at the Ethics. Yet there is nothing in principle that would have prevented him appreciating Lessing's Spinozism, at least as Jacobi understood it – as the best that reason can do.
Climacus's consistency might still be questioned. In the very chapter which crucially denies the possibility of an existential system, he praises someone who he acknowledges is a confessed Spinozist. One might defend this by saying that Spinoza's system is not existential and therefore does not make the mistake of Hegel, whose System did have such pretensions. But a failure even to raise existential issues can hardly be a virtue in a work whose clear aim is to move those issues to centre-stage. Again, however, in terms of the dialectic which Climacus is concerned to elucidate in Postscript, and if we grant Lessing his own reading of Spinoza, the portrayal of Lessing as a rationalist and committed to staying within the bounds of reason is essential to the portrayal of Lessing as the thinker who understands what is and what is not meant by the 'leap'. Only someone who knows that he stands at the brink can grasp what is involved in going beyond it.
Finally, there is that question again of how Kierkegaard can 'attach himself' to Lessing on the subject of the leap in a work whose clearest message is that in this matter appeals to authority have no place. We noted at the beginning that Climacus denies that he is invoking Lessing as an authority. Yet in a subtle twist of counterfactual reasoning he contrives to have it both ways. Lessing is appealed to as someone who would agree that, if he could be appealed to, then the project that calls for his support would not be the right one. There can be no acknowledgement, but at least you know that, if there was, then someone has certainly got it wrong. Attachment on that point should be beyond reproach.
You see, that's how hard it is to approach Lessing in religious matters. If I were to present the individual ideas, ascribing them to him directly and in parrot fashion, if I were to enfold him politely, obligingly in my admiring embrace, as the one to whom I owed all, then he might smilingly avoid my embrace and leave me in the lurch, an object of ridicule. If I were to keep his name quiet, come out bawling joyously over this matchless discovery of mine, which no one before me had made, then that polumetis Odysseus [wily Odysseus], if I imagined him there, would no doubt put his hand on my shoulder and, with an ambivalently admiring look on his face, say: 'You you are right in this, if only I'd known.' And then I, if no one else, would understand that he had the better of me.54
In the same way that true knights of faith can never be teachers but only witnesses,55 truly religious writers can never cite each other as authorities. For Kierkegaard there is something in the nature of the relation of religious discourse to religious experience that makes it clear to one who understands that discourse (and therefore its relation to experience) that if another writer were to embrace him as a colleague, the right thing to do would be to look at one's watch and plead another appointment. A religious thinker seeing someone do that might suspect he had found an ally.
* * *
5
'SPIRIT' AND THE IDEA OF THE SELF AS A REFLEXIVE RELATION
The Sickness unto Death opens forthrightly enough by declaring that a human being is 'spirit', and amplifies this by saying that spirit is 'the seIf'. This latter notion is then elaborated as 'a relation that relates to itself', an intriguing suggestion but hardly forthright, and the reader awaits some clarification. But is it forthcoming? The notorious passage that follows has seemed to many an attempt on Kierkegaard's part not to help the reader understand this idea of a self-relating self, but to parody the impenetrability of Hegelian prose. Anti-Climacus continues:
The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself. 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 terms. 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.
(p. 43 [13] )1
If this were no more than a dig at Hegelian obscurity, one might conclude that the idea of a self-relating self is not in need of clarification, but only obscure when clothed in pretentious philosophical jargon. Perhaps, whatever difficulties attend an analysis of the notion, the notion itself is nothing more exotic than that of the self-evident ability of human beings to reflect upon what they do and think, and to form their own self-images.
But Anti-Climacus's definition of the self as a relation that 'relates to itself' is neither empty parody nor a pretentiously decked-out truism. It states elegantly, and I believe accurately, a crucial principle of Kierkegaard's thought – only, however, to the appropriately programmed reader. By this I mean a reader familiar with the tradition from which Kierkegaard's terms derive their connotations: the Hegelian tradition. It is now of course something of a formality
among Kierkegaard scholars to warn against letting Kierkegaard's unrelenting onslaught on Hegel blind one to the extent of the shared assumptions on which that onslaught is based. Yet often it is quite general, methodological assumptions that are referred to (notions of 'negativity' and 'dialectic', for example), or mere points of terminology where Kierkegaard uses Hegel's terms to deny what Hegel asserts (the identity of thought and being, and so forth). But there are several points of agreement in basic framework too, and an important one of these is the concept of self-consciousness.
Hegel makes two sets of distinctions. One, within the general category of 'subjective spirit', distinguishes 'consciousness', 'immediate self-consciousness' and 'universal self-consciousness' (see Sämtliche Werke 6, §§ 307–44).2 These, in outline, are phases in a development from simple awareness of a distinction between inner and outer (see Phenomenology, § 143), through a sense of the inner as the centre of things but with these things themselves quite independent, to a grasp of the inner and outer as combined in the unity of consciousness and reality (Sämtliche Werke 6, § 400; Phenomenology, § 394).
The latter phase – though each phase itself contains a development – provides the terms for defining 'spirit', or reason as full awareness of itself as being all of reality (Phenomenology, § 438). The second distinction is between 'natural' consciousness, or soul, and spirit. In the Phenomenology 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.
This path 'presses forward to true knowledge', or 'Science', and the goal of the journey is to give the soul a 'completed experience of itself', in which it finally achieves 'awareness of what it really is in itself' (Phenomenology, § 77).
These passages contain all three of the terms used by Anti-Climacus in the opening passage of The Sickness unto Death to define the self as a self-relating relation. We have 'self', 'soul' and 'spirit'. My suggestion is that what Kierkegaard wants us to understand by his idea of a self as a self-relating relation is something that coincides to a considerable extent with what Hegel says
about soul, consciousness and spirit, yet departs from Hegel radically at a point to be determined; and my discussion here is an attempt to determine that point.
1 Let us begin with Hegel' s metaphor of a path that the soul goes along to purify itself for the life of the spirit. For Hegel, 'soul' (Seele) denotes a set of possibilities ranging from those limited to (as with Aristotle) organic life as such (see Phenomenology, § 265), through those inherent in animal life, to those specific to human life. The 'paths' of these possibilities are of different length; that of human life (or consciousness) is one on which the soul progresses through its 'appointed stations' to 'purify itself for the life of the Spirit'. One
could read this as saying that the soul can itself acquire the characteristics of spirit, as if spirit was a qualification of the specifically human soul, something it can become and still remain soul.
But Hegel would want us to read it the other way around. Spiritual life is already contained in posse in the initial soul, which in its most general characterization is the 'animating principle of the body' (Enc., § 34). Spirit is what, in the human case, this animating principle is destined to become. It is the human end-state, the human soul's 'completed experience of itself' and 'awareness of what it really is in itself'. As noted, for Hegel this means not just a grasp of human consciousness as an actually existing subject-pole in relation to its 'negative', the 'other' (see Phenomenology, §§ 347–59), but awareness of a unity between thought and being themselves. A full philosophical account of self-consciousness is one that gives a total grasp of the relation of mind, or consciousness as reason, to its objective environment, and sees this goal of comprehension as a potentiality not just of 'natural consciousness' but (having escaped the limitations of a merely natural consciousness) of the natural and social world itself.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 11
