Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

One might therefore feel justified in suspecting that the isolated remark in Postscript about despair being peevishness has a secret Thomist origin, or that Aquinas's desperatio and Kierkegaard's Fortvivlelse share a common origin.

  On the other hand you might not suspect that at all. Indeed you might suspect something altogether different, namely that this whole examination has been misdirected from the start. Anyone at all familiar with Postscript may think that. I said at the beginning that Climacus's remark that all despair is a kind of bad temper comes 'out of the blue'. But the remark about peevish despair comes at the end of a long discussion of humour and so not really out of the blue at all. A word we could have been using all along is 'ill-humour'. Surely all that is intended is some sort of contrast between a sense of the comic and despair as two distinct and opposed attitudes to 'it all'.

  But I said I had a reason for not mentioning this. I would like to turn the tables on those who would respond in this way. Where they will point out, as is correct, that 'Arrigskab' can be translated as 'ill-humour', and that the term has no other origin than the need to mark humour's 'other', I propose that it was worth considering that Kierkegaard's 'humour' is introduced as the irascible's other.

  The point can be made quite briefly. What Climacus says is that 'despair is always the infinite, the eternal, the total', though in its case, and as against humour, in 'the instant of impatience'. Impatience is obviously enough within the irascible; but humour is not, for in humour, just as in sadness, delight, and so on, there is no sense of a difficulty to be overcome. Yet humour can certainly be appropriate to the appreciation of difficulty, especially someone else's difficulty, or – to get to the point – of a difficulty an sich without special reference to anyone's being in or having it, in particular without any reference to the very person who sees the comedy in the situation.

  What is the situation? As Climacus describes it, it is the 'contradiction' between the subjective inwardness of religious concern and the externality of our everyday concerns, but included in the latter our ethical concerns as these are conventionally understood. Humour is 'the confinium between the ethical and the religious'.48 Religiousness (Climacus's remarks on humour come at the end of his discussion of Religiousness A's 'decisive' expression) requires, and in part necessarily is, what Kierkegaard calls inwardness. But to develop a relationship of inwardness to God is to isolate oneself from the surrounding world to the point where one's subjective relation to God and the view one still has on the world as the place for ethical concern appear mutually 'incommensurable'. The humorist sees the 'contradictions' arising here and, because he is an observer and not a true believer ('he does not relate himself to God'49), is able to see the comic in the contrast. But also, it is only because he has humour that he can see them. The humorist occupies a 'jesting and yet profound transition area' where an adequate conception of God brings everyday life as a whole into comic relief. Using the

  contrast between comedy and tragedy to make the point, Climacus says 'the comic is a painless contradiction', while the tragic is a 'suffering contradiction'.50 Humour and tragedy both 'see' the contradiction, but humour escapes the pain by looking at the 'way out' in an uninvolved manner, intellectually, while tragedy looks at it full in the face as an impossibility and 'despairs'.51

  Humour is therefore an essential addition to Thomas's account. It is not an irascible passion, but it is concerned with the difficulties that irascible passions respond to. Humour is a non-irascible attitude to those difficulties. Like resignation it has no part in the pull and push with which what Aristotle, following Plato, calls the 'spirited faculty' occupies itself,52 but it understands the difficulties from above, or perhaps below.

  Clearly, as a meta-irascible passion, humour is not in the concupiscible. There is room therefore for more than Aquinas's scheme allows. In confrontation with difficulties in respect of a salient good, besides hope and despair there is also humour. But just because it is a meta-position, or transitional as Johannes Climacus says, like despair, humour sees only totality. Despair, seeing the contradiction but no way out, shrinks from entering the ethico-religious sphere. Despair's way of being 'always the infinite, the eternal, the total', is the 'impatient' way. This contrasts with humour, which knows the way out but is not irascibly engaged in testing itself against the difficulty to see if it can actually take that way.

  But then should we not bend the rules to allow that the humorist is in despair all the same? Isn't intellectual insouciance in the presence of such matters just another case of flight? Placing it apart from the irascible in the way proposed might be thought itself to be an irascible move on the part of a philosopher, an attempt to avoid the stigma of despair.

  One answer, satisfactory or not, would be to point to Climacus, who actually insists he is a humorist and admits to being an 'outsider'.53 Like any philosopher, or at least thinker (he is not a system-builder but a clarifier of concepts, a philosopher in a sense we are better able to recognize than were Kierkegaard's own contemporaries), he is in the business of clarification. In this case, unlike many thinkers, what concern him are vital matters. They need clarification too, but so also does the individual's relationship to them, the dynamics of hope and despair. The flight of the humorist is in their service but need not be prolonged beyond what is necessary. The humorist's position is that of anyone who merely lays out the conceptual facts of some personally important matter, but to do so must take leave of the irascible life which the concepts he uses articulate.

  Kierkegaard is one step ahead of Aquinas. He takes account of the individual's relation to the truth. One must suppose that Aquinas would see comedy in the very idea that the contradictions and incommensurabilities Climacus humorously points to are structures of human being made visible to humour. But humour only comes into its own in philosophy when the traditional claims for thought can no longer be upheld.54

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  11

  PROXIMITY AS APARTNESS

  How can we be concerned with one another without sharing values and interests, without being relevantly similar or even the same? The answers seem too obvious for the questions themselves to be more than rhetorical. Yet there are other questions, just as rhetorical, whose obvious answers seem directly to conflict with these. How can I be concerned with you unless I regard you as the independent source of your own interests, as relevantly 'other'. And how can I regard you in that way without releasing myself from the hold upon me of the web of my own personal interests in which my concern with you is interwoven? How, in other words, can you come within the scope of my authentically moral concerns without standing before me as someone totally alien?

  One might pose these questions under the once fashionable rubric 'dialectic'. But the dialectic of proximity and apartness here is not Hegelian. If it were, then the conflict would be merely apparent; it would be the result of seeing the terms – you and I – too abstractly and in isolation, of failing to appreciate that in properly ethical contexts closeness and apartness are related to each other internally. On the contrary, I shall suggest that the closeness required of the true ethical relationship presupposes genuine apartness. The philosophical affiliation here is not with Hegel but with Levinas, though it is in Kierkegaard that we find its first as well as clearest expression.1 A mind-catching but potentially misleading way of putting it would be to say that true sharing is the prerogative of mutual aliens. I am suggesting a sense of apartness in which the object of our moral concern eludes conceptualization. What is shared simply gets in the way, and only by removing it does the object become visible. Only then does the 'other' come within moral reach.

  1 That the object of moral concern should be nearby is a well-entrenched principle of European moral thinking. It finds its historical expression in the New Testament injunction to love one's neighbour as oneself.2 Of course, 'neighbour' need not refer to someone living next door; the word (plesios) as it occurs in the commandment (ton plesion) means 'the one close by', and in the everyday
marketplace that could be anyone. Yet it is clear that the settled contiguity implicit in the idea of one's neighbour had special moral significance in the history of the time. To be asked to love the one next door to you is to be asked

  to show, even feel, love just at that boundary where equitable relations with your fellow humans are exposed to their severest test, at the wall or fence where the distinction between what is yours and what the other's is most evident. The significance of neighbour-relations for a society split between local and Roman allegiances is not hard to see; in the face of oppression from above there is clearly room for an alternative way of cementing social relations from below. That might be the origin of the ideal of neighbour love, but it is not how it has come down to us. For us it has the form of a universal principle; we are to love the neighbour as ourself be he friend or foe, at home, in the marketplace, and in the field of conflict. The question is whether the notion contains any ethically viable core that survives this radical de-contextualization.

  For the modern world, the literal interpretation of the commandment to love one's neighbour as oneself has clear limitations. First, it is exactly that, a commandment, and Kant's question immediately arises, whether it is possible to obey it even in the case of those to whom one is not inclined by nature, or social habit, to extend one's loving concern.3 Second, in the modern world the test of ethicality presented by next-door neighbour relations is more than outweighed by an even greater test, namely the challenge of distance: the physical and psychological distances which, because they remove the immediate perception of others as sharing in our lives, so easily cause moral concern for these others (or any others) to dissipate. Modern technological society, besides pressing individuals out of those community and other consolidating contexts in which moral intuitions were once traditionally fostered and reinforced, allows an enormous expansion of the possibilities of acting in contexts which are morally relevant but where one's acts of commission and omission have an impact on persons one never has to face at all, let alone across the garden fence. In our own day, moral indifference and callousness present a (to put it mildly) serious and special challenge, not least to our powers of moral imagination. Moreover, the causes of indifference and callousness are not confined to demographic distance; they extend, owing to dissolutional factors of the kind just mentioned, to various forms of psychological distance manifested in an inability or refusal to consider others as sharing in our life. An important inadequacy of the garden-fence analogy is that, besides assuming actual demographic contiguity, by presenting the parties as physical neighbours from the outset it prescinds from all those ethically relevant factors (racism, élitism and other self-serving forms of partiality) which prevent such actual, social contiguity from occurring in the first place.

  This is clearly a valid objection to any proposal to present the literal interpretation of the injunction to love one's neighbour as a viable vehicle for serious ethical reflection in our own age. The question then is whether we can find in the New Testament commandment some more far-reaching, perhaps universal, ethical message, not its historical intention perhaps, but some insight to which an original locally good idea has nevertheless given rise and, owing to the spread of Christianity, allowed to become an integral part of a moral culture to which large parts of the world pay at least lip-service. Clearly, a version of the

  homely metaphor which abstracts from its homeliness need not inherit objections which apply to it because of its homeliness. There may be something of general significance there after all. And indeed, at least one morally sensitive thinker in our time has fastened on the dialectic of proximity and apartness pinpointed by the next-door neighbour metaphor to construct the makings of a deep-rooted ethics which is advertised also as an ethics of love.

  That thinker is Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard's special perspective, from the point of view of the individual, brings certain aspects of the ethical relationship into sharp focus. Whether that perspective is sufficient, or the case for the commandment acceptable, is hard to decide, and there will be no attempt to resolve the matter here. But a preliminary examination of Kierkegaard's views does help to throw light on questions fundamental to morality.

  Granting that ethical concern is the active acknowledgement of the interests of persons, Kierkegaard's claim is in effect that it is not until a person whose concern it is has achieved a state of autonomous selfhood that that address becomes available. There are familiar, not least communitarian, objections to such a view. Let us first see what the view is and then what the objections amount to.

  2 First, in order to lay bare the structure and implications of Kierkegaard's view, it is useful to contrast its apparently fundamental atomism with an opposed view which seeks to establish social ethics on the basis of a supposedly innate communality. Kierkegaard's 'I'-based position can be compared with (or contrasted to) Rousseau's 'we'-based position. The comparison with Rousseau is especially revealing since Kierkegaard and Rousseau both agree that group identities and distinctions impede advancement to the ethical situation, though in opposite directions.

  For Rousseau, the non-divisive standpoint of ethics is that of what he calls commonality. It is the notion of a concretely abstract 'we', such that, in respect of myself, the other with whom I acknowledge my oneness in the first-person plural is seen in terms of a sameness, a shared generality. From the latter there grows a natural respect for beings capable of referring to themselves individually, that is, able to relate to themselves in the first-person singular. What we share at the level of greatest generality, and what distinguishes us from mere animals, is precisely this self-referential capacity. It is this capacity, therefore, that forms the basis of our commonality. The moral psychological basis for this claim is that the ability to refer to ourselves enables us by the same token to direct a sense of pity at others. A pity directed at others as such is a pity unmediated by the social, political and economic differences which separate us from them. Thus Rousseau's 'pity' is a spontaneous feeling of compassion; it is not a feeling evoked by comparison with others, as would be a pity directed from one or another position of superiority, which then slides so easily into contempt, just as easily as its counterpart, envy, stemming from a position of inferiority slides into resentment. That there is such an uncorrupted pity, based upon the use of the self-referential 'I', is due to the alleged fact that self-identities are themselves 'mediated', not of course by any social categories, but

  by other self-identities, or rather by the sense of interacting directly with others at a level transcending that of social mediation. Why the operative sensation should be pity in particular is explained by Rousseau, in Émile, as follows:

  We are drawn towards our fellow-creatures less by our feeling for their joys than for their sorrows; for in them we discern more plainly a nature like our own, and a pledge of their affection for us. If our common needs create a bond of interest our common sufferings create a bond of affection. … Imagination puts us more readily in the place of the miserable man than of the happy man. … Pity is sweet because, when we put ourselves in the place of the one who suffers, we are aware, nevertheless, of the pleasure of not suffering like him.4

  Any view which can posit a 'species-ability' as the basis of human unity has a considerable initial appeal. It provides a focus of ethical attention even where humanity is divided, so that it is possible, by appealing to something all humans have in common, to address one's fellows across present barriers and work together to eliminate them. There is a sense, then, in which even if universal respect could only reign unhindered in a society where that goal was achieved, it may also reign in the form of a good will in a world where actual distinctions still obstruct social, political and economic unity.

  There are nevertheless severe defects in any such view. In the first place, the unity posited is merely abstract: a species-function is selected, in this case that human beings are particulars in a special, self-reflective way. The ability of every human bein
g to ascribe that same function to other human beings is made the basis of an innate or primordial sense of 'we'. But what is the ethical content of this notion? Indeed what content does it have at all beyond providing one means of differentiating the human species from others? In order to have ethical content, the notion would have to address the relations in which human beings stand to one another, yet all the notion can provide is a metaphor which represents humanity in all its plurality and division suspended as though from a single peg. Finally, even if that metaphor could be translated into a position with relevance for either politics or ethics, the implications of that position would not speak at all convincingly for it. Politically, it is exposed to the objection that society is of necessity differentiated (Hegel's objection to the abstract 'citizenship' of the French Revolutionaries). It is also exposed to the same objection that can be levelled at Marxism, namely that it is uncritical, not to say naïve, to assume an innate but repressed first-person-plural unity whose spontaneous flowering waits only upon the removal of the institutions that divide people externally. Ethically, it is exposed to the objection that even were non-divisive political unity possible, ethics is directed in the first instance at fellow beings in their present divisions and differences.

  Here Rousseau's pity, an ability vicariously to feel the other's sorrow, may seem to do service. But remember, this is no ordinary pity; it is a pity uncontaminated

  by relative positions in social space. The pitier is to conceive him- or herself and the pitied as sharers in a common humanity by virtue of a general characteristic beyond social differentiation. But what is it in that characteristic which counts as something actually being shared? The question is analogous to that posed of membership in Kant's kingdom of ends, and the only answer we seem able to give is an abstract defining characteristic of human being. No doubt pity and concern for human suffering and sorrow are an essential part of moral psychology, but regrettably they are not a universally defining characteristic of human being, and if the claim is that pity would not even be possible but for the special manner of human particularity, then the answer is that the very same is true of failure to show pity or concern, of callousness and every form of inhumanity. Indeed, if we look more closely at this special manner of human particularity, the way in which human being becomes an object for itself, it may appear that what comes first to light in this capacity for self-reflection is not the notion of human being at all, a general concept, but particularity, the self and its own interests. And not the general concept of particularity either, but particularity itself.