This conveniently, but I think not altogether accidentally, picks out for us the target of Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel's philosophy. If the term 'science', as in Hegel, is taken to embrace knowledge not only of the environment but also of a harmony between it and thought – a harmony so total as to give self-consciousness, among other things, the status of 'the principle of right, morality, and all ethical life' (Philosophy of Right, § 21) – then, says the criticism, science is not at all the end-state of natural consciousness. What end-state would Kierkegaard propose instead? And what would be the corresponding Kierkegaardian life of the spirit? One plausible suggestion regarding the end-state would be 'awareness of the fact that there is no such completed experience of itself'. As for Kierkegaard's life of the spirit, the apt answer would be to say that for both Hegel and Kierkegaard the life of the spirit is the life of clear-sightedness. In Hegel's case the clarity is that of the 'standpoint of Science' (Phenomenology, § 8), taking this to include all ethical life, while in Kierkegaard's it is that of scepticism. This would allow us to see Kierkegaard's 'journey' along the path of natural consciousness as merely a truncated version of Hegel's. For, according to Hegel, natural consciousness proves only to have the idea, or notion, of itself as knowing, and not – as it itself believes – the reality of that; and for it the path to spirit proves to be one of loss of its status of real knower:
what is in fact the realization of the Notion [that is, rational knowledge] counts for it rather as a loss of its own self … [t]he road can therefore be regarded as the pathway of doubt, or more precisely as the way of despair … [f]or this path is conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge.
(Phenomenology, § 78, original emphasis)
Hegel is saying that natural consciousness has to give way to spirit, which is for him the standpoint of science, from which knowledge of appearance has given way to 'true' knowledge (cf. Phenomenology, § 76). The nature/spirit distinction used here is a development of the traditional one going back as far as Aristotle's pneuma, for him a kind of divine stuff (compared by Aristotle in one place to the aither) that preserves the unity of the organism, which would dissolve into its constituent elements if these were allowed to obey their natural laws of motion.3 In Hegel's use of the distinction, nature is what appears to consciousness as external, which appearance is replaced in the standpoint of science – of spirit – by true knowledge. If the spiritual development is inhibited, one receives only the 'doubt', 'despair' and 'loss of self' of the awareness that phenomenal knowledge is not real. This sounds remarkably like Anti-Climacus's account of the individual's path to despair, in light of the failure of people even to 'make so much as the attempt at this life' (p. 88 [57]). In the journals Kierkegaard draws the distinction in exactly Hegel's terms by talking of a 'world of spirit' lying '[b]ehind this world of actuality, phenomena'.4 Might we not simply say, then, that spirit for Kierkegaard is the life of one who realizes, on the one hand and like Hegel, that the natural world is only phenomenal, but, on the other, contrary to Hegel, that there is no standpoint of science from which true knowledge (including knowledge of right, morality and ethics) can be attained, and squarely faces the consequent uncertainty about human nature's standing and also the prospect of nihilism?
It is clear, however, that this is not what Anti-Climacus would have us call the life of the spirit. Such a life would in Kierkegaard's as well as in Hegel's terms be purely negative; it would involve no more than the realization of loss – loss of presumptive knowledge and of self. Spirit, again for Kierkegaard as well as for Hegel, has a positive content; it involves the realization that human existence is grounded in an eternal telos.
Every human existence not conscious of itself as spirit, or not personally conscious of itself before God as spirit, every human existence which is not grounded transparently in God, but opaquely rests or merges in some abstract universal (state, nation, etc.), or in the dark about itself simply takes its capacities to be natural powers, unconscious in a deeper sense of where it has them from, takes its self to be an unaccountable something, should there be any question of accounting for its inner being - every such existence, however astounding its accomplishment, however able to account even for the whole of existence, however intense its aesthetic enjoyment: every such life is none the less despair.
(p. 76, translation modified [46] )
The passage says that a life not grounded transparently in God is a life of despair; yet it appears also to say that the life of spirit has to be one that is grounded transparently in God, but then, surely, it is not a life of despair. However, since for
Anti-Climacus the opposite of despair is faith, it looks as though the end-state he envisages, faith, and the life of spirit are one and the same. Of course the humanly existing subject cannot know that it has God as the source of its powers to produce; at most its 'becoming aware' of where it has them from is precisely a matter of faith. But then that, on this interpretation, would be the Kierkegaardian alternative to the Hegelian spirit's self-knowledge. To buttress the interpretation we could turn to Anti-Climacus's remark that pagans 'lacked the spirit's definition of a self' because they 'lacked the God-relationship and the self' (p. 77 [46] ). They lacked the God-relationship because pagan belief finds God in nature, and the God-relationship Anti-Climacus refers to presupposes his predecessor Climacus's account of the 'break with immanence';5 and they lacked the self because they had no sense of an identity other than in terms of what they could blame one another for (theft and fornication, for example), while adopting a lenient attitude to suicide (p. 77 [46] ).
Should we say then that what we have here is Anti-Climacus's version of the life of the spirit in its properly positive guise? Much of The Sickness unto Death might be read in this light, for example passages like that in which Anti-Climacus says that the only one whose life is truly wasted is he who has so
lived it, deceived by life's pleasures or its sorrows, that he never became decisively, eternally, conscious of himself as spirit, as self, or, what is the same, he never became aware – and gained in the deepest sense the impression – that there is a God there and that 'he', he himself, his self, exists before this God, which infinite gain is never come by except through despair.
(p. 57 [26–7], emphasis added)
Much also gainsays the proposal. For instance we have the starkly unambiguous assertion that 'the devil is pure spirit' (p. 72 [42] ). Clearly the devil (in Greek diabolos, or defamer) stands in no God-relationship of the kind Anti-Climacus is talking about. So it looks as if the latter here employs a more neutral concept of spirit. And since it is the devil's 'absolute consciousness and transparency', and the fact that in him there is therefore 'no obscurity which might serve as a mitigating excuse', that earns him the description 'pure spirit', it might look rather as though we were forced back upon our original and merely 'negative' notion.
Yet that is not so. Although (like Hegel's natural consciousness) the devil despairs, he does not doubt, nor does he suffer any loss of self – at least not as far as we are directly told. Indeed Anti-Climacus says '[t]he more consciousness, the more self [and will]' (p. 59 [29] ), though also 'the greater the conception of God, the more self' (pp. 111 and 146 [80 and 113] ); but it is easy to imagine someone having a strong conception of God without yet having faith. In fact the devil's despair is not analogous to that of Hegel's natural consciousness, for his despair is that not of uncertainty but of 'the most absolute
defiance' (p. 72 [42] ), and that presupposes not only a conception of God but also something like a standing assumption that God exists and exerts power.
The devil could not be a defamer if there were no one for him to defame. (According to early ecclesiastical writers, the devil was created by God as an angel, Lucifer, who, for his rebellion against God, was punished by being thrown into the abyss, where he became the prince of darkness.) And this seems generally true of what Anti-Climacus classifies as despair. The despairer of The Sickness unto
Death, the one who lacks faith, is one who will not affirm what is recognizably the standing assumption that God exists and that one ought to stand before God. True, at the very end of The Sickness unto Death we are told of a form of despair, the culminating despair, that denies Christ, 'declares Christianity to be untruth and a lie' and makes of Christ 'an invention of the devil' (pp. 164–5 [131] ). Yet calling Christianity an invention of the devil still acknowledges the God that created the devil. Moreover, that Anti-Climacus says this denial of 'everything Christian: sin, the forgiveness of sins, etc.' is itself a 'sin against the Holy Ghost' (ibid.), indeed sin's 'highest intensification', shows quite clearly that for him the framework of the standing assumption, and the assumption itself, remain sacrosanct. In other words, if Anti-Climacus were to claim further, from within this framework, that nihilism too was an invention of the devil, he would not be taken seriously by the nihilist; for nihilism denies the framework and so cannot be grasped by one who must consider it to be defiance in Anti-Climacus's sense. Anyone who asserts that nihilism is the invention of the devil must assert it diagnostically from a point of view not shared by the one whose beliefs are diagnosed. I strongly suspect that Kierkegaard intends Anti-Climacus's diagnoses to be ones that those in the conditions he describes are predisposed, however unwillingly, to acknowledge.
It appears then that Anti-Climacus's 'spirit' embraces not only faith but also that form of its absence which is despair. There is much to support this interpretation. '[R]egarded as spirit (and if there is to be any question of despair, man has to be regarded under the aspect of spirit), the human condition is always critical' (p. 55 [25] ). Unlike a normal illness where the issue of health or sickness is topical only for so long as the illness lasts, within the category of spirit the issue is always alive: 'spirit' connotes a perpetual tension between faith and despair. Apart from in The Sickness unto Death itself, the reading is supported by most of what Kierkegaard says about spirit elsewhere, in the pseudonymous works and the journals. He consistently links the idea of spirit with such partly 'negative' attitudes as irony and indifference (to the worldly) as well as resignation – all preliminaries to fundamental choice. In Anxiety, although spirit (like truth and freedom) is said to be 'eternal', spiritual consciousness seems to require no more than the possession of the concept of time or temporality as such sub specie aeternitatis, that is, from a position as it were outside time, if only in that intersection of time and eternity that is the 'instant'.6 Finally, scattered throughout the journals are numerous remarks on spirit as transcendence of nature. Spirit is also linked with individuality as such, and with the individual's task of fulfilment itself.7
2 Let us then return to where we began, with the question of how to interpret the idea of a self as a reflexive relation. The passage (with the translation slightly modified) reads as follows:
The human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation which relates to itself, or that in the relation which is its relating to itself. The self is not the relation but the relation's relating to itself. 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.
(p. 43 [13] )
The passage might be read in one of two ways: (1) as a description of 'health' (faith), (2) as a description of 'crisis'.
According to (1), the identity of spirit and the self is that of spirit and the true self. (Anti-Climacus does say that the 'opposite' of despair, that is, faith, is 'to will to be the self he truly is' [p. 50 (20) ].) The idea of a self as a self-relation can then be identified as that of the (to use a neutral term) subject's conforming itself to what we have called the standing assumption – that there is a God and a need to stand before that God.
The distinction between a 'synthesis' in which soul is the determining category and one where, on the contrary, the self (and thus spirit) is 'positive' will then be read as follows: when the self fails to relate to itself, which is to say when it is in despair, then the fact that the true self is not related to is a matter of letting the soul be the determining category. This suggests a gloss on remarks in Anxiety on the 'bondage of sin'.8 In sin a person is willing to be 'determined' by temporal goals and is in 'an unfree relation to the good'.9 The claim that, as spirit, man's condition is 'always critical' could then be understood as asserting that, even when the subject does relate to his true self, the situation still remains critical because the possibility of a reversion to soul-determining despair is always present (cf. p. 146 [114] ). In fact Anti-Climacus says that when the human being is regarded spiritually it isn't just sickness that is critical, but health too (p. 55 [25] ).
According to (2), spirit is not to be equated with the true self but with the self aware of the options of health and sickness from the standpoint of either, though initially from that of sickness, that is, the standpoint from which conforming to the true self is a task.
Here the point of distinguishing spirit (and self) from the soul, where the relation forms a 'negative unity', could be that human beings live initially 'immediate'
lives, in the sense that (and in a way corresponding to Hegel's 'natural consciousness') their goals are located outside them as external sources of satisfaction, and in such a way that they do not yet conceive of the finite world (their 'environment') as a whole as something in relation to which they are not properly at home. Here they are not yet selves because they have so far no consciousness of something 'eternal' in them (p. 93 [62] ), and since despair proper (that is, as a 'characteristic of the spirit' [p. 54 (24) ] ) is always 'despair of the eternal or over oneself' (p. 91 [60] ), they have yet to reach the threshold of crisis. But immediacy inevitably gives way to a sense of selfhood as transcending the world of temporal goals. There is an 'act of separation in which the self becomes aware of itself as essentially different from the environment and the external world and their effect upon it' (p. 85 [54] ). The scene is thus set for the 'positive' third factor's travails in the realm of spirit: the subject enters upon the critical condition that embraces both the health and the sickness of spirit. Most importantly, even in sickness (that is, despair) it is not true that the bondage of sin is a condition in which the soul takes over from spirit as though from outside, for 'despair … is not merely a suffering but an action' (p. 93 [62] ). However hedged around by 'mitigating excuses', despair is itself an action of the spiritual subject unwilling to conform to its true self, the mark in varying degree of the open defiance of the devil's 'sheer spirit'.
One might propose a third reading in which 'spirit' denotes the realm of task and travail while the idea of the self as a reflexive relation is that of the goal, the true self, the self being truly itself; and there is even a fourth possibility that inverts these two, the reflexive self being the self of travail and spirit the self being itself truly. But both seem unduly complicated and the latter is in any case inconsistent with what the above makes it most plausible to identify with spirit, a spirit shared with the devil, namely the area of acceptance or defiance.
Of the two main readings the second is overwhelmingly to be preferred. It is not only more consistent than the first with respect to what Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms say elsewhere of spirit and the self, it also preserves the identity of spirit and self. As far as external consistency is concerned, we have Johannes de silentio's assertion that the world of spirit is the one in which one must work to 'get bread'.10 Haufniensis, for whom 'spirit' and 'freedom' are interchangeable, says in Anxiety that the 'secret of spirit' i
s that it 'has a history',11 and he talks of two 'syntheses': one the initial fusion or unity of soul and body in which spirit is not yet 'posited'; the other the positing itself, which is the same as spirit's positing the 'second' synthesis, that of time and eternity, as an 'expression' of the first.12 The point seems to be this: prior to positing the second synthesis, the two terms, soul and body, are understood from the point of view of immediacy as forming a synthesis on their own, or rather (since 'synthesis' in at least a popularized Hegelian context implies the union of apparently incongruent terms under the auspices of a third) a unity with these two aspects, as though naturally unified as in the case of psychophysical organisms lacking a spiritual possibility. This is the case in natural human consciousness before spiritual consciousness emerges; but the
emergence of spiritual consciousness is itself the idea that what appears initially to be a unity is really a juxtaposition of opposites. This realization is evidently what Kierkegaard means by the emergence of spiritual consciousness; for spiritual consciousness, or positing spirit, is recognizing an identity apart from, and superordinate to, the finite mentality of the first synthesis. The emergence of spirit is that of a problem. Since both The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death have as their topic the obstacles to its solution, it seems likely that, in having his author describe the human being in the first sentence of the main text of The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard is drawing the reader's attention to a feature of consciousness which, once it emerges, presents a set of specific problems. The set itself is indeed specified in the triad of opposites, that is (in their consistent order), infinity and finitude, eternity and temporality, freedom and necessity, mentioned in the opening passage. The latter element in each pair represents a limitation for a subject, now a self, that has emerged from immediacy into eternal consciousness. Traditionally, finitude is the limitation of distinctness or determinacy, necessity that of rational constraint, and temporality that of exposure to change. In Anti-Climacus these become something like the limitations of mere particularity, genetic and environmental determination ('facticity' in Heidegger's or Sartre's sense), and lack of a stable centre in which to reside or 'repose'. (The most obvious departure from the tradition is the use of 'necessity' in connection with contingent rather than logical constraint.) A human being subject to the limitations but not conscious of them as such lives the life of immediacy, though such a life is also attempted (actively), by those who do feel them as limitations yet due to anxiety will not venture beyond the closure of immediacy. According to our preferred reading, the category of spirit applies as soon as the limitations are felt as such, and therefore applies even to those who try to revert to immediacy.
Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays Page 12
