Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
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authorship exposed to assessments like that of the early Lukács, who saw Kierkegaard's work and career as a tragic vengeance wrought by a protean and intractable reality on one who dared by existential choice single-handedly to impose eternal forms upon it.32
In his concluding polemical period Kierkegaard's topic and target became for the first time actual institutions. When he looked at the facts of marriage what he saw beneath the 'holy gloss' was 'faint-heartedness and worldliness'.33 What struck him was how, although professing faith in the Christian God, his own society had failed to make even the first of the two movements of faith expounded in Fear and Trembling by Johannes de silentio. Prior to belief one must resign and repent. But, germane to our own purpose, the same idea is prefigured in Either/Or in the notion of choosing despair, a necessary prolegomenon to choosing oneself in one's 'eternal validity'. Despair in this sense, which is not that of The Sickness unto Death (where it is exactly a way of protecting oneself from choice of oneself), reappears later in Religiousness A as what is called 'dying from immediacy', or dying to the world. In a journal entry from 1850, under the heading 'The World's Turning-point', Kierkegaard writes that the 'time of immediacy is past', not in the sense that the world has gone beyond it, but rather because there is now no going back, and 'everyone has to learn in earnest to be himself the master, to guide himself without the intercession of guides and leaders'. Just as Quidam, the test case in the psychological experiment in Stages on Life's Way, 'sees that the matter is comic and yet tragically clings to it on the strength of something else',34 so too is social life a manifestation of the fear of taking the next step and a desperate clinging to the forms that protect individuals from entering upon the life of spirit.
6 In conclusion, then, let me suggest a more relaxed interpretation of the continuity. The operative word here is 'corrective'. The term 'corrective' is Kierkegaard's own.35 It suggests a dialectical relationship between the established and what is needed to bring it further. Thus a corrective must be understood not on its own but in terms of what has to be rectified. A corrective is one-sided, but, as Kierkegaard points out, necessarily so. To anyone who complains about that, you can only say it is easy enough to 'add the other side' again, but then the corrective 'ceases to be the corrective' and you become the establishment once more.36 What is the most pressing need for a society whose pernicious ethos is that the individual's fulfilment comes to expression only in the form of political association and religious community? Surely, it is to establish a foothold for the single individual from which the world can be reappropriated in authentically Christian terms. For that purpose the determinedly spiritless institutions of a petit-bourgeois society must be comprehensively vacated before alternatives based on true selfhood, or spirit, can be formed to replace them. The corrective reading says that the polemic is a political version of William's injunction to A to choose despair: only after society has 'despaired' can it choose itself in its 'eternal validity'. That in itself might be thought enough to establish the continuity we
have been looking for. But one may go further. There is no reason why, once resurrected, human society could not conform with William's ideals, even if its conforming with them will consist in a 'repetition'– that is to say, the same but from a higher point of view – of William's own manner of doing so.
As noted at the beginning, Kierkegaard's purpose in including the second edition of Either/Or in the 1849 package may simply have been to set the record straight, to make it clear that the authorship in all its diversity and multipseudonymity had been the single-minded effort of one person with a religious purpose. This is indeed the kind of reason he himself gives. Here, however, we have been exploring various ways in which that 'pre-religious' work can be related thematically to those openly religious works which came later. The search seemed necessary because Kierkegaard's claim that he had a religious purpose from the start does not entail that the works written with that purpose disclose to the reader a unity of theme or content, and, moreover, his own utterances even tend to undermine any claim to such unity.
In seeking thematic unity we have placed ourselves, as is only proper, somewhere between Kierkegaard's pen and his page. Taking up a position behind the pen would give us a different and in the end an unlimited set of hermeneutic possibilities. One such is exceptionality, which from this perspective might well present itself as the definitive theme of the pseudonymous works. It is clear from the texts, however, that exceptionality is not so much the topic as the motivating circumstance. The texts present various horizons in which exceptionality impinges on a moral world and in its disrelationship with the latter seeks a new equilibrium. From even further behind Kierkegaard's pen his thorn in the flesh comes into view, a topic for all sorts of speculation.
The Pharisees had their thorns too; indeed it was these eponymous separatists who first came up with the idea. But the pain induced by their thorn-ringed garments was merely an excuse to affect a superior sanctity which allowed them to refuse dealings with others, in other words to enjoy being exceptions. Whatever the nature of Kierkegaard's own thorn, to which he constantly recurs, it never played that role, nor does anything in Kierkegaard suggest that exceptionality is praiseworthy, least of all enjoyable. On his deathbed he insisted that despite the thorn and his exceptionality he was no different from anyone else, echoing perhaps William's claim that the truly extraordinary man and the truly ordinary man are the same, and William's startling pronouncement that 'in a sense' everyone is 'the universally human and at the same time an exception' (p. 589 [2, 332] ). This, together with the thought that 'emancipation' from the universal on 'one point' (pp. 587–8 [2, 330] ) does not bring you beyond the universal on all points, might tempt one with the wisdom of hindsight to read the final pages of William's second letter as an anticipation of Kierkegaard's own destiny and a frame for the authorship as a whole, in which the universal is a 'severe master' to those who 'have it outside' (p. 588 [2, 331] ). That Kierkegaard himself never lost sight of the goal of realizing the universal is testified to in such entries in the journals as the
one where he affirms that he would gladly have married his fiancée had not his 'wretchedness' got in the way, though that had indeed enabled him to grasp the deep meaning of Christianity's recommendation of the unmarried state;37 and another in which he opines that, though unmarried, he had written 'one of the most gifted defences of marriage', and had done everything to explain that his solitary state, far from being 'higher' than marriage, was 'something much lower'.38
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8
THE 'WHAT' IN THE 'HOW'
Kierkegaard's pseudonym Climacus remarks unexceptionably that 'the objective accent falls on what is said, the subjective accent on how it is said'.1 But then notoriously he goes on to identify truth not with what one believes but with how one believes it. Nothing in Kierkegaard seems to offend philosophical sensibility more than the assertion that truth is subjectivity.
Some associations might temper our horror. A result of the familiar realism/anti-realism and externalism/internalism debates has been precisely to draw attention away from the all-too-elusive 'what' of truth and towards how-like considerations of the conditions under which 'what'-claims can be asserted. The residual demon of scepticism pushes us in the same direction: let's leave the truth to God and get on with better believing.
But Kierkegaard won't let go of God's truth. At the same time he seems to tell us that if believing occurs in the prescribed way, it doesn't matter that the 'what' of truth has been correctly identified. Some uncritically take this to imply with regard to what is taken to be true that any 'what' may count, an absurd relativism that finds no other support in Kierkegaard. Others would say that Kierkegaard means only that if you fail to adopt the right relationship to what is in fact true, you will be further from that truth than you would be if you adopted the right relationship to what is an over-simplification or even a quite serious distortion of the truth.
I am not con
cerned here to argue the rights and wrongs of such interpretations. I focus instead on something that the wider context of Climacus's remarks on the subjective accent presupposes and towards which it transpires they are directed, namely an account of moral experience as the medium in which truth is disclosed. For this we need to take both a broader and a closer look at the distinction between what is said and how one says it. Part of this requires questioning a tendency to identify the 'what' of a thought with a reality that is mind-independent and therefore thought-independent, and a corresponding tendency to assume that any specification of a thought's content for which there is no counterpart in the thought's strictly public reference must be relegated to what is commonly regarded as the lowly status of a subjective 'how'.
1 I begin with Frege, whose name comes both naturally and usefully to mind here. Naturally, because although I think it would be misleading to attribute the assumption to Frege himself, the prevalence of the tendency just mentioned is in large measure due to the influence of his work in mathematical logic. But usefully also, because Frege too insists that the sense of a thought must be carefully distinguished from contingent psychological factors involved in the thought's occurrence, and which he too calls 'subjective' factors in opposition to the objective nature of the sense or content of the thought as such. So let us look briefly at Frege's own brief remarks.
At first glance Frege's examples might indicate that the point he is making is a fairly trivial one. He mentions, for instance, the different images hearers or readers may 'connect' with a word even when they all grasp the same sense: for example, the different horse-descriptions or horse-aspects people may have in mind when thinking uniformly of Bucephalus.2 What may seem more interesting here is Frege's willingness to treat sense-impressions on a par with mental images.3 For according to this the way objects actually appear may be included among the subjective factors to be excluded from the sense or content, and by extension even the distinguishing traits of objects themselves, for example the wide variety of ways in which particular horses can display their horsehood. Even Frege's other example, namely the 'colouring and shading which poetic eloquence seeks to give to the sense', and which is 'not objective' because it must be 'evoked by each hearer or reader according to the hints of the poet or the speaker',4 could be accepted as separating out some aspect of meaning that lies outside what might be called the 'cognitive core', this latter being Frege's main topic. However, the general reason Frege gives for distinguishing these factors from the sense, and so, on his definition, also from the thought, indicates something far less trivial. For according to Frege, what distinguishes the thought's sense from its 'connected' idea is that the same sense – or thought – can be 'grasped by many', and that one person can 'convey' it – the self-same thought – to another;5 while on the other hand, the idea is, so to speak, a mere biographical particular, in referring to which 'one must, strictly speaking, add to whom it belongs and at what time'.6 Frege calls the idea a mere 'mode of the individual mind',7 and it will be of some relevance for what follows to connect this formulation with another of Frege's, where he describes the task of logic and mathematics, that is, his own task, as being the investigation not of 'minds and the contents of consciousness whose bearer is the individual person', but of 'Mind'.8
We should note here that Frege's criterion would include on the side of 'mere' ideas potentially more interesting kinds of 'how', for example Kierkegaard's 'the relationship sustained by the existing individual, in his own existence, to the content of his utterance'.9 That is a notion to which it is by no means implausible to attach philosophical significance. And although Kierkegaard too, as we noted, would distinguish this 'how' from the 'what', and therefore, also on this definition, from the content of the thought, his claim that it is the more important of the two – together with his explicit insistence
that it can only be conveyed indirectly ('the truth not being a circular with signatures attached'10) and, like poetic colouring and shading, has to be evoked in the hearer or reader – all this indicates that to dismiss the 'how' in general as mere biographical incident at least requires some general justification. It may even suggest that in defining the scope of the topic of his logical and mathematical investigations, namely Mind, Frege is being unduly selective.
Let us pursue this and Frege just a little further. In his review of Husserl's Philosophie der Arithmetik, Frege gives as a reason for saying that 'the constituents of thought, and a fortiori things themselves, must be distinguished from the images that accompany in some mind the act of grasping the thought', the fact that one never has somebody else's image, and therefore can never know 'how far [one's] image (say) of red agrees with someone else's'.11 Now that might sound as though it was the privacy of the image that was what prevented it from being, or being part of, the sense. 'In order to be able to compare one man's mental images with another's,' he goes on, 'we should have to have united them into one and the same state of consciousness, and to be sure that they had not altered in the process of transference.' The suggestion seems to be that if only the comparison could be carried out, it would be possible for one person to 'convey' his mental image (or his sense-impression) to another so that, like a thought, it too could be 'grasped by many'.12 But against this, Frege's willingness to talk of perception in terms of sense-impressions seems to imply that comparison of the contents of different persons' consciousnesses is impossible in any case, even where the 'ideas' are referred to presently appearing public objects. So the fact that images are 'mental' in the ordinary sense doesn't seem to be the feature that prevents their conveyability. Nor, correspondingly, does the simple publicity of common objects of reference seem sufficient to provide the kind of conveyability that Frege attributes to sense. What Frege apparently means is that when a person thinks (or 'judges'), this involves two distinct items: on the one hand, the sense or thought-proper, which, by virtue of its publicizable linguistic form, can be conveyed to and grasped by others; and, on the other, the experience or total psychological context in which the sense is embedded but which plays no part in the sense. Indeed what Frege seems really to be saying is that the image cannot function as a meaning because it is a particular and not a universal – a private particular certainly, like a twinge of pain or an itch, but precisely a particular, a piece of (in this case) psychological bric-à-brac which vanishes into history just like every other timeable event.
In the special context of Frege's critique of psychologism, this, if true, would be an important point. Psychologism treats philosophical problems, in particular those traditionally assigned to logic conceived as an investigation of the a priori, as if they could be answered by a posteriori empirical investigations. It is because the image is a mere particular that no investigation into it can provide information into the nature of meaning. The same would apply to an investigation into any particular, even a public one like last night's sunset. Psychologism fastens on private particulars like mental images simply because their privacy
seems to betoken their mentality. But meanings are essentially different. As universals it makes no sense to pin them down to particular biographical events.
And yet we can and do give names and times to thoughts, for thoughts are people's thinkings and as such comprise one very important kind (or perhaps several more or less important kinds) of event in those people's lives. What is it, then, that makes it possible to say of two thinkings that they are thinkings of the same thought? An answer, possibly even the right one if properly construed, is, first, that thinkings are 'intentional' in the sense of being 'about' things (events, states of affairs) other than themselves, and, secondly, that they are thinkings of the same thought when (a) they are about the same thing and (b ) 'say the same' about that thing. Some might be tempted to add the condition (c) that the thing be a public reference. But since we can talk and think about our own and others' mental states, to say nothing of abstract things like numbers, that condition would clearly be too strong. It mig
ht yet still be a condition of there being two thinkings of the same thought if construed as saying that even our abstract and private references have to be tied, perhaps epistemically or maybe only semantically, to public ones. Strictly speaking, though, since a thought is by definition repeatable, the condition would really be one of thought in general, that is, of anything's being a thought. Be that as it may, let us at any rate agree that a thought is a universal. But then, again strictly speaking, it is indeed the thought's repeatability, not its shareability, that is its basic characteristic. The shareability is simply the special and in some ways more complex case of repeatability where the thought's recurrence is not confined to the experience (using this term here as a mass noun) of one person.
Assuming, then, the thought's essential repeatability in principle, let us now exploit Peirce's well-known distinction between types (listable words) and tokens (their occurrences) and say that a thinking is always a token of a type that can be tokenized in another thinking. My questions are now: (1) Can the notion of thought-content ever be reasonably expanded to embrace elements drawn from the 'how' of the thought for the thinker, that is, from something peculiar to the tokenizing of the type? If that question can be answered affirmatively, I want then to ask: (2) Can those elements ever reasonably be promoted to the status of the thought's 'what', that is, to what most would regard as objective status? More briefly: Can token-specific aspects of the thought provide specifications of things in the world? In Fregean this would go something like this: Can a mode of the individual mind enter into the sense by virtue of which a definite description refers to something?