Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  Aren't there problems, however, with this mongrel and its space? Take the mongrel first. How can a continuing space-occupier possess, even in turn, properties belonging to mutually exclusive categories? In particular, how, if an object-term can genuinely take predicates which, in Frege's terminology, specify modes of individual minds, can one avoid classifying those predicates which apply to any physical-object guise that the material thing might assume as also being merely specifications of modes of individual minds? In short, how can the self-same thing function alternately as a physical object in a determinate physical space21 and as an aesthetic object in some other space? Isn't this stretching both the thing and its visual versatility too far?

  To this one may say that there is no mystery in general (as against the specifically visual case) about how the same thing can be referred to under different descriptions. We already know that 'the Morning Star' and 'the Evening Star' can pick out the same physical object at two different stages of its career. But the fact that the two stages correspond to different senses or thought-contents directed at what is in fact the same thing is not, unless actually specified, part of either thought-content. It will nevertheless be part of the sense of each that some such identity statement is true. In general, therefore, it is not at all necessary for a specification of the content of a thought about some physical object to include a specification of its physical identity; there need only be the implication that some such specification could be added. Thus even Blake's personally phrased request to the Evening Star to 'speak silence with [her] glimmering eyes' and to 'wash the dusk with silver'22 can be, as indeed it was presumably intended to be, 'about' the physical object in space, even if no merely physical body could possibly comply with this or indeed with any other request. Why then should we not treat the visual case as just another instance of sense or thought-content in general where, as in aesthetic vision, a specification of the sense need not include a specification of the object of the experience in its physical state? In that case we could understand Aldrich's mongrel as a material thing whose material, or, rather, merely physical, aspects can be more or less shut out in favour of aesthetic and other aspects. The 'sense' of the aesthetic experience will nevertheless always contain the idea that the physical aspect can be brought back into view.

  I am not sure that I follow Aldrich's account of this material thing. He wants it to function as something that is 'simply' seen because 'not yet bifurcated by the categorial physical–mental dichotomy'.23 But as instances of this 'neutral starting-point for perception'24 he wants to include the ordinary references of daily discourse, for example persons (aspectable mentalistically, as when you see in someone their intention or point of view – perhaps the purpose in her eyes – or physicalistically, as mere occupants of physical space – the eye perhaps now a mere organ of sight or a lens) and pictures (aspectable as aesthetic or physical objects but not both). This seems to me to exaggerate the simplicity of our ordinary acts of reference. Persons and pictures (to limit ourselves to these examples) are already bifurcated, usually in favour of their non-physicalistic senses. A person in ordinary unreflective experience is a 'who', with all that this implies, and not a 'what'. A picture generally confronts us as a representational or an aesthetic object or both. In both cases it requires a conscious effort to switch to the purely physicalistic experience. Therefore it seems to me that a better candidate for a neutral starting-point would be something more abstract than the things of everyday experience. If what is common to the visual experiences is that they are acknowledged to be ways in which one and the same object, or set of objects, can appear, then the idea of the object that can appear in these ways is, I suggest, not that of a further object that could appear in yet another, neutral way. It is of something in the world as yet unaffected by mental modes presenting some coloured spatiotemporal configuration (or configuration of configurations) that can be experienced in different ways. One might say that the idea of the neutral thing should be linked more to that of the stimulus of the experience rather than to its conscious target; or, if not that, to the as yet uncorrupted response to the stimulus, something like the traditional sense-presentation as the notion of how the physical environment first impinges on a mind, though it may never or seldom in fact impinge on a mind as blank (as unaffected by its own or its community's modes) as the notion implies.

  Now a sense-presentation is not the kind of thing we usually talk about. Nor is it what we see – at least not 'simply', in Aldrich's sense. But it is at least the kind of thing we could mean when we talk theoretically about a common

  reference in the strictest sense, that is, of something other than the mind which may be grasped by individual minds in various ways. However, it is quite clear that our normal visual experience of 'common' things departs very widely from this bleak ideal. We see most physical things as more than simply physical items; we see them as tools, valuables, currency, symbols, and so on. And we see (yes, actually see) people as related to one another and to ourselves in certain roles and functions and bearers of certain intentions. Our perceptions of the 'common' world is 'coloured' by, and may be said therefore to reflect, our culturally or personally 'local' beliefs, expectations and environments, as well as our understanding of other environments and the beliefs and expectations special to these. In so far as this is the case, and because, as is admitted, a perceptual description 'refers' to its object in virtue of its 'sense', the 'common' world we see is a function of whatever cultural, social or personal factors enter into that sense. The bearers of these factors are individual minds, and the factors themselves are modes of individual minds, but not quite as Frege meant it. As we saw, Frege apparently assumed that a mode of the individual mind can only be a psychological event, a private reference; he doesn't seem to have thought that it might be the (more or less idiosyncratic) sense by which a mind picks out its reference.

  What now of the mental space? If we think of that as somehow analogous to a mode of individual minds in Frege's sense, the fact that 'common' things appear there will be very puzzling. Indeed it will be difficult to understand how they could be common at all, as for each person everything will appear in his or her individual space, and the spaces of others in which the 'same' things are said to appear will be 'transcendent' and therefore invisible. I know of no satisfactory solution to this problem. It does seem to be a necessary first step to its solution, however, that we get rid of the idea of mental space as in any way analogous to modes of the individual mind. And one might do that in a suitably Fregean spirit by insisting that mental space is a universal and not a particular – a property or form of sense rather than a private reference. We might say in this same spirit that the mentality of this space consists in its being a feature of Mind, not of minds. But this no doubt raises its own problems. Just what these may be and how mystifying they really are we must leave aside.

  5 We began by asking two questions: first, whether the notion of thought-content could ever reasonably be expanded to include elements drawn from the 'how' of the thought for the thinker; and, secondly, whether, if that was the case, the elements thus included could be such as to provide specifications of the thought's reference. In effect we have already given affirmative answers to both questions: to the first by simply expanding the concept of a thought-content to include its psychological mode, and to the second by allowing the mode (and other rather more elusive features) to 'corrupt' the referential core. In conclusion I would like to try to give added point to these answers by asking a third question, namely: Must this corruption of the referential core

  really be regarded in this negative light? Aren't there contexts in which what the mind adds to the core has some kind of importance in the scheme of things? There may also be 'cognitive' contexts, but the ones I am interested in are practical.

  To gain access to such a context let us recall our earlier example of the changing of situational properties. It involved a kind of changing of aspects, but there was no suggesti
on there that one of the aspects might be better, perhaps more 'adequate', than the other. But now let us try to introduce this element of grading. To give the change of aspects a practical import we must enlarge the scope of the situation to embrace also the field of opportunities, wants, needs, rights, and so on, which provide the targets and goals of ordinary purposive action. We can enlarge it sufficiently to accommodate also a practical concern with conspicuously absent as well as perceptually present objects, persons and situations. (They are nearly always both and interconnectedly involved.) If we enlarge it this far, we have a practical or moral and not just epistemological or aesthetic context. It is important that there be persons as well as objects and situations – other persons, that is. For morality, as opposed to mere practice, involves more than active engagement on the part of the perceiving subject in his or her perceptual environment, more than the supplementation of beliefs by wants. The beliefs will have to include appraisals of the motives, opportunities, rights and duties of others, and an evaluation of their comparative importance and worth, both in themselves and in relation to the subject's wants.

  Having widened the screen sufficiently, let us put a human story on it. The theme is the forlorn love of a young scholar (once more a scholar, a Latin scholar – the example is from Hermann Hesse) for a girl who has shown him intermittent, mainly merely friendly, but still disturbing interest. During a period in which he has not seen her for a while he learns of her engagement to another. This becomes a personal tragedy through which he nevertheless lives, eventually regaining some equanimity. Then one day he meets her in the street. She is distraught, an accident has crippled her betrothed. She asks Karl, our Latin scholar, to accompany her to the hospital while she visits the patient. Karl goes with her and waits outside the ward. Eventually she comes out, says things are a little better, that he is expected to regain consciousness soon. She thanks Karl and bids him goodbye. The narrative continues:

  She [Tina] slipped into the room and closed the door on which Karl for the hundredth time unthinkingly read the number 17. His only recently recaptured happiness had left him, but what he felt now was no longer the ache of lost love, it was embedded in a much wider and larger feeling. He saw his own despair reduced to absurdity by this disaster that had so unexpectedly crossed his path. And all at once it came to him that his own little sorrow did not amount to much, that it was not a cruel exception, and that those whom he had regarded as fortunate were also subject to inexorable fate.25

  The tale is clearly a moral one. It is moral because it doesn't just describe a transition from one interpersonal perspective to another; it suggests that the transition is to a less narrow point of view. Karl acquires a situational understanding from which the points of view of others are also taken, or are taken more realistically, into account. He appears to have attained a perspective from which the relevant world is seen as a domain in which other persons are understood to be selves with their own solicitudes and sufferings. There is the hint also of a psychological accompaniment, the awakening of a moral sentiment, a feeling 'larger' than self-pity, and, it seems also, a new awareness of himself as one whose own despair is 'reduced to absurdity'.

  We have become used to being told that persons are nothing but systems of beliefs and wants. Whether systems can also be free agents in the sense that they can deliberately choose other wants than those they presently have, can choose to become characterologically different persons, is a contested issue. But regardless of whether the changes are free in this sense or not, or of whether, if so, persons cannot be nothing but systems, the change could not occur unless the options were presented as 'modes of the individual's mind'. (The change to the possessive is significant here.) And to be presented as that, they must be either experienced or imagined. One cannot undergo a moral change unless comparison between the two perspectives is available. Mere criticism, whether the objection is moral or rational, is not enough, either as an objection to what one does as a way of achieving an admitted goal, or as an objection to the goal itself. The view that moral intentions, or even acts in general designed to promote good, are the result of the computation of context-independent consequences against weighted norms is just another expression of scholarly narrowness.

  Suppose that changes of moral character are made, freely or not, in response not to instruction or criticism from others, even from respected superiors, but to events (actual or represented) that reveal the inadequacy of one's current stock of goals and concerns and at the same time possibilities of growth. A view of this kind underlies Kierkegaard's pseudonymous authorship and the account of 'stages' or 'spheres' of life outlined in Postscript. The works presuppose that there is this kind of appeal. The view implies that morality is not subservience to the will ('ethical rigorism', as Kierkegaard says26) or to the authority of convention or of reason; it is a form of personal growth in which a better self is revealed, a self that can be shunned as well as appropriated, and a prospect that exposes whatever may count here as a will to strategies of self-deception and to what Kierkegaard calls 'despair'. From an author's point of view, to get people to modify their desires in the direction of courses of action which afford longerterm or more widely distributed benefits, to 'edify' them, one has to get them to see their personal and interpersonal situations from another perspective, one from which goals previously aimed at and appraisals previously made can be seen to be inadequate. The 'how' here is the medium of moral change; it is only by acquiring a new and more embracing situational understanding that a person can transcend a narrow or egocentric, less moral, point of view. A person's

  moral character can be said to consist in the kinds of beliefs and wants he or she has, these forming that person's relationship to the common world (though recall that we have allowed that the descriptions a person gives of this world can be affected by the attitudes).

  6 First I indicated ways in which the 'how' of a thought can be incorporated into the thought itself once the latter is conceived sufficiently widely and also, I would claim, realistically. I then suggested a way in which the burden of responsibility for conveying what is true can be borne by the 'how'. The idea that it can do so is by no means new, though that fact is partly due to a certain flexibility in the way that the 'what'how' distinction can be applied. Kant's sensory manifold is a notional 'what' that when structured by the 'how' of the categories becomes the 'what' of human perceptual experience. Carried in one direction, the Kantian case can even lead to an inversion of the relation of 'what' to 'how' as understood hitherto: the 'how' is nothing but the mere datum of experience and has nothing to contribute to truth. Why? Because

  [o]nly through the conceptual comprehension of an entity given in the sense-world, does the what of that which is given to perception attain to manifestation. … The content of that which is perceived cannot be expressed for the reason that this content is limited entirely to its how – that is, to the form of its coming to appearance.27

  This is Platonism. What is publicly shareable hence objective is the Eidos, or Idea with a capital 'I', while 'ideas' (with a small 'i'), what contemporary cognitive psychology takes to be our first contact with public reality in the form of a response to a distal stimulus, are just the individual mind's manner of access and therefore subjective.

  But with this inversion we appear to have returned, full circle, with Frege, for whom objectivity is the world of thought or Mind into which minds in their individual ways enter,28 while the accidents of these individual manners of entry are irrelevant psychological details to be separated from the content of the thought itself, that which any thinker can share. For Frege, however, the Eidos is not yet said to be something requiring the cultivation by Mind of a particular way of grasping things. All it amounts to is a meaning available to the public world in the form of a sentence, or in what Johannes Climacus would call a certain sort of circular to which signatures may be attached. I have argued here that this is far too narrow a notion to grasp what there is in a thought qu
ite generally, and more particularly for a notion of content capable of capturing moral experience.

  I said I was interested on Kierkegaard's behalf in an account of moral experience as the medium in which truth is disclosed. But we must be careful here. In stressing the 'subjective accent', Kierkegaard is not referring to some special truth-giving occurrence or feature in a subjective domain. In fact he has to be particularly careful not to say that. In his time the subjective domain was much to

  the fore as the locus of everything from divine revelation to the key to understanding nature. There was a strong tendency, it was even a fashion at the time, for philosophers to believe that the subjective was the domain of cognitive intuition where the truth could manifest itself. For Hegelians, after all, the subjective domain was that of self-conscious spirit, in which the world was first able to present itself in the form of thought. As one would expect, Kierkegaard's polemic is directed against such views. In affirming that truth is something on which the subjective accent falls, he is not saying that what makes something in that area true is some guarantee of intuition.

  Whatever truth is conveyed in the 'what' of moral experience is not the truth, either God's or that of morality. Climacus's negative epistemology, not far from positivism, leaves the truth out of our grasp. His unthinkable hypothesis is that in Christianity the eternal has taken on the form of time, and the example of Christ is revelatory only on the vanishing chance that against all reason it is so. Whether one takes the chance or not is up to the individual. Yet Kierkegaard's other pseudonyms, the 'aesthetic' as opposed to the 'dialectical', try with consummate literary skill and powers of psychological observation, and a talent for irony, to bring the inadequacies of aesthetic views of human fulfilment to the reader's attention. No doubt it takes a reader in tune with the project to see his or her own life, in its supposedly fulfilling moments, in the ways the pseudonyms present their narratives. But for those who can see it, the inadequacy will stand there, 'revealed' let us say, as a truth about having taken a step in the right direction, a truth, if you like, about the person in question in respect of what kind of foothold he or she has in the moral universe.