Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
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3 It is just this that underlies Kierkegaard's contrasting view. For Kierkegaard, generalities are not merely modes of human differentiation and possible division; more fundamentally, they are protective devices shielding the individual from a desolate sense of its sheer particularity. Or, more to our point, they are psychological strategies shielding the individual from the unwanted insight into a fact which the ability to refer to oneself in the first-person singular brings with it, namely that the differentiating social and political categories in terms of which we fashion our self-images are pure contingencies and not the clothes of any lastingly true selfhood. Let us, in outline, note the main strands of Kierkegaard's thought here: first his criticism of the belief that one must always act as a member of a group or association on behalf of group aims, and the corresponding belief that human freedom and fulfilment are to be found in the idea of a universal affiliation.
This associational idea is by no means foreign to political rhetoric; it has formed the ideological underpinning for many a political movement. Kierkegaard refers to it as 'levelling'. This is not so much a refusal to accept exceptionality per se, getting everyone to step in line, as a refusal to see the ethical agent except under some socio-political category, so that one never acts on one's own beliefs and behalf. At bottom, then, levelling is an evasion, a refusal to accept the challenges and claims of individuality. It is a flight into abstraction, and levelling itself is, as a motivating factor, 'an abstract power' and its influence 'abstraction's victory over individuals'.5 In levelling, Kierkegaard writes, 'the dialectic turns away from inwardness and wants to render equality in the negative; so that those who are not essentially individuals constitute an equality in external association …'.6 The unity of association is a 'negative unity' involving a 'negative mutuality'.7 It is negative because, in Kierkegaard's categories, it places sociality in the external and temporal instead of in the subjective and eternal. Similarly, negative mutuality is the mutuality of an overriding commitment to common rules of association, of shared duties and
rights, under an associative umbrella which covers associates indiscriminately and protectively. The most inclusive umbrella of all is the 'higher negativity' of 'pure humanity',8 the association of all associations, which Kierkegaard considers the typical fabrication of an age of reflection. It enables people to suppose quite spuriously that they have a personal identity simply by being human.
What precisely are the claims and challenges of individuality? The Sickness unto Death, Kierkegaard's main text on selfhood, talks of 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 on it'.9 There are several ways of reading this notion of separation, but it is clear that what Kierkegaard refers to is not simply the ability to refer to oneself in the first-person singular. The separation comes as a development within what is normally called self-consciousness. In general terms one might say it was a sense of an essential distinction, even an incongruity, between the 'I' as possessor of all and whatever predicates make up its sense of a continuing identity and these predicates themselves. The incongruity could even be said to stem from the general capacity to refer to oneself in the first-person singular, simply because this capacity of the 'I' is the continual possibility of reviewing, looking upon, the characteristics with which it is identified, but from a position which transcends not only them but also the 'I' itself. The 'I' is always one jump ahead of the characteristics with which it would identify itself and systematically eludes its own glance. This is a Sartrean manner of expression but captures the general point. However, in Kierkegaard's case, the predicates in question are special by being those which define some respect or respects in which the project of personal fulfilment has been essayed. We may think of them in particular as being those predicates specifying social roles whereby, in sharing these predicates with others, we aspire to some form of human universality, or perhaps just respect and honour – as though that was what counted for fulfilment. The act of separation is, then, one in which it is acknowledged that personal fulfilment cannot be provided by any such predicate. The first consequence of the act of separation is the acknowledgement that the 'I' is essentially bare. But then, since the appropriateness of ascribing a predicate to the self is the only way in which the 'I' can be said to share any characteristic or property at all with other 'I's, in finding itself bare or naked ('naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy'10), the 'I' also finds itself radically alone, in the face not only of its peers but also of transcendent reality and, if He exists, God.
Here, then, we have one term in the dialectic of proximity and apartness. Aloneness is apartness. But what ethical implication has this? As the quotation above asserts, the difference in kind implied by the act of separation also means that the naked self sees that its nature, if it is to have one, is not the 'effect' of the environment and the external world. Here we can detect a Kantianism in Kierkegaard's thought: the naked self deprived of the fulfilments which seemed available in the state of its 'immediate' consciousness through common, roletaking attribution, recognizes that in order to be itself, whatever that may be, it must at least prevent such attributions from motivating whatever activities are to
be its fulfilling ones. So, the naked and alone 'I' is also in a sense autonomous, but only in a negative sense. For according to Kierkegaard, this is only the 'first form of the infinite self'; it is the 'progressive impulse' which sets in motion the process of fulfilment, 'the entire process through which the self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages'.11
4 The kernel of Kierkegaardian ethics (not, be it noted, that of the quasiHegelian ethical life-view depicted in Part Two of Either/Or, in which the implications of the religious aspect have not been drawn out as they are in the works that followed) lies in this notion of taking possession of the 'actual' self. But what does that mean? A comparison with Kant can help. Kant's categorical imperative is designed to guarantee motivation by the idea of membership of the association of all human associations. In acting morally you take the side of humanity in general and focus upon an ideal of impartial considerateness, and you do that by removing yourself in the moral moment from the push-and-pull of inclination. The categorical imperative is, as Kant says, a compass which the moral agent carries around so as to be able to chart the moral course in any event or situation.12 There is no provision for the possibility that pushes and pulls of inclination can themselves be transformed in a way that would make the compass redundant. That, by contrast, is exactly what becoming, or taking possession of, the actual self is intended to amount to. Instead of the notion of a natural self, with its affections and partialities in the situation, being set aside in favour of an impartial but abstract ideal of agency, we have the notion of an actual self primed to respond impartially to its immediate environment.
At a pinch, the ideal of impartiality might be called love, love of one's neighbour, or loving one's neighbour as oneself. If we ignore the emotive overtones of the term 'love' for a moment, we can see that the notion of love and of an ethical relationship coincide. Or at least we can see this if we allow that ethics is primordially an interest in the interests of others. Further, and still retaining something of the form of love, if not yet admitting any clear foothold for its content, an ethical concern for the other is a concern that is not hedged about with conditions. Of course there are forms of love which are so hedged about. You love the other because you are attracted to the other, so that if the other or your own susceptibilities changed significantly, then the love would cease. Preference, clearly, is an expression of such a condition, the condition under which you prefer, or are attracted by, one person in preference to another. Preferential love, then, is self-regarding at least in the sense that it does not address itself fully to the other. Kierkegaard claims that 'to love the one who is preferentially nearer one than all others is self-love'.13
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What would it be fully to address the other? What or who is the other? Any individual is a continuous, finite subject of experiences, with a sense of identity through experiences, and with a focus of its own interests for the future. How do you address such a person? What is it to love them? Surely it is to consider the whole history as it has been and how it may be, subject to whatever changes may
occur. Suppose the one you love preferentially suffers a transformation, disfiguration perhaps, plus some significant personality change, as in Alzheimer's disease, possibly acquiring characteristics by which, in Kant's words, you are no longer attracted but 'repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion'.14 Love will require that none of this makes any difference; for if it did, your love would be shown to be conditional. It would by the same token be preferential, because, given the same susceptibilities, you would prefer another with the preferred characteristics to the one who once had them but, having now lost them, has lost also the ability to attract you.15
5 The ideal of adequately addressed love of the concrete other is in effect a transformation of the abstract 'we'. Both it and the 'we' of membership of the association of associations are specifications of the notion of 'anyone'. The difference is that by bringing the notion of anyone to earth in the shape of the other, the 'we' is now specified under the category of the particular and not of the universal. Instead of 'we' being innately, primordially, even politically derivable from human nature, we see it now as having to be constituted in and by the particular itself, the individual, in the relation it establishes to the other. 'We' now embraces particulars not by virtue of accidents of affection or affiliation which abstract from the 'I's in the relation, but by virtue of being a relation between genuinely concrete 'I's. Your 'neighbour' – the one hard by, on any morally relevant occasion – is such an 'I', another 'I' accessible or 'visible' for the first time as such only when the veil of preference has been lifted.
The essence of the view is that the ethical sense of the universal is one of a commonality that must be established by human beings, and is not inherent in any given property whereby the beings that are human are picked out as such, or whereby those animals that are human are picked out as human animals. Establishing this sense of commonality is itself a task for the individual, the task of becoming ethical. Indeed, for Kierkegaard this is what selfhood means. Selfhood, becoming an 'I', is for Kierkegaard therefore a rigorous concept. But until we have this 'I', we cannot have a 'we' either. For 'we' does not express some characteristic innate to humankind, and if 'we' has any ethical reference, it is not to any feature of our social forms but to the individual will, which may or may not be expressed in social forms. The primordial sense of 'we' is the will to society, and that will has to be cultivated and maintained. Before that intention can be acquired in its adequate form, the 'I' must be wrested from immediacy in the face of the blandishments, subterfuges and protective devices of association. One has to become an individual apart from other individuals before one can establish a relation with those other individuals, who in terms of their 'actual' selves are also individuals apart and faced with the same task of realizing those selves so as to be able to will society.
6 As one would expect, there are several objections to be raised. At this stage, however, I shall be mentioning just two, because these are based partly on
misunderstandings and should be ignored. The first of these objections is that the conception of ethical relationships here is excessively, even maximally, atomistic; and the second is that the whole idea is based on an illegitimate extension of the notion of love, so that even if a relation of the form described were feasible, 'love' could never be the right word to describe its content. Limitations of space preclude my entering into detailed discussion of these questions,16 but I shall offer some comments directed at the misunderstandings. The objections, and replies, fit quite neatly into a distinction between 'affiliation' and 'affection'.
(a) The first objection (today it would be called communitarian) is that affiliative 'we'-relations are of the essence of ethics or social morality, and therefore the claim that an 'I'–'I' relation forms the basis of ethics is misconceived. In respect of Kierkegaard, however, the objection would itself be misconceived, because it ignores the way in which his notion of taking possession of the actual self involves accepting the self as it is in its situation, in all its affiliative relations, but now addressing both itself and its relationships from an ethical point of view which focuses on the individuals in these relationships. Of course, from Kierkegaard's point of view, the objection would be misconceived in any case if it stemmed from the idea that ethical relations are to be understood on the model of affiliation. But in denying that, Kierkegaard is not making the Kantian (or Rawlsian) mistake which communitarians point to, namely that the categorical imperative (or the veil of ignorance) is a compass designed to determine the ethical (or equitable political) course in defiance or ignorance of personal ties and reciprocal sympathies based on shared interests.17
This form of reply may not appease every communitarian scruple, for it may still be objected that by making the unconditionality of one's address to the other itself so unconditional, even such ordinary yet ethically significant relationships as maternal and paternal love will fail the test. And Kierkegaard does indeed say things which might suggest that. Thus because even the requirement that I might be the one to bestow love on the other is a condition on the love, this again means that the love fails to be addressed to the other.
But if love has the form of an interest in the interests of the other (ignoring here how these interests are to be determined), there are surely cases where the interest of the other is exactly that I or perhaps you should be the one to bestow that love. Having the interest in question, that is, in the interests of the other, is subject to an appreciation of what the interests of the other are, and these may well be expressed in the expectations aroused in the other by the mores which would lead to a sense of desolation and abandonment if the love were not directed from the accepted source but came, for instance, in the form of a welfare cheque. Of course, in another society that might be the expectation, and if the legitimate interests of the other include not having such expectations disappointed, that would have to be known by the person intent on doing the loving thing. But, at a guess, in most societies the child's interests would include having its interests catered to by a parent or the human functional equivalent.
(b) Kant concluded, when faced with the Christian commandment of universal love, that whatever the form of a moral intention, its content cannot be what we call 'love', for what we mean by that is by its very nature instinctual. Consequently acts of will are superfluous where love already exists, and ineffectual where it does not. He recommended, therefore, that, in interpreting the commandment, we replace the impossible duty to love one's neighbour with that of trying to like practising one's duties towards one's neighbour.18
One reply would be to say that it is tendentious of Kant to adopt as his model of love something which tends in the direction of infatuation. He might have done better to consider the 'cooler' Aristotelian notion of friendship (philia), which Aristotle distinguishes from the 'emotion' of liking (philesis), because unlike the latter it is based on a 'fixed disposition'.19 We note that Aristotle's description of friendship conforms with our own proposal concerning at least the form of love; he says that it is 'those who wish the good of their friends for their friends' sake who are friends in the fullest sense'.20 Since dispositions can be trained, why not propose that one's friendship can be trained to cover the 'anyone' who fills the role of 'neighbour'?
A difficulty with this is pinpointed by Aristotle's own remarks about what motivates true friendship. It has to be something that elicits the affection, and even though Aristotle allows there to be some absolute quality of goodness in a person that attracts the affection of friendship, it is still a quality of the person, whereas, as we saw, the ideal of universal love has to overcome,
as Kant rightly says, the case where you are 'repelled by a natural and unconquerable aversion'. Also, it seems, as Aristotle also points out, that the affection of friendship has to be 'prompted by similarity',21 and since the similarity here is not universal, in terms of universal love that would be just another manifestation of preference and therefore conditionality.
A promising solution might be to say that universal love, and the feature that warrants the use of that word as an extension at least of the Aristotelian friendship model (but perhaps even more), is based not on any recognizable feature, not, that is, on any actually perceived goodness or whatever, but on the decision to ascribe some notion of autonomous value to every human being. The Kantian notion of 'end in itself' comes to mind. But Kant believed the attribution to be backed by objective reason, which is just another form of cognitive realism, in this case a characteristically rationalistic form. The point, initially, is that the values people (and animals and things) have are not functions of the pleasure others derive from them, or their power to attract in others friendly relations of concern. Why? One reason is that pleasure and utility provide a poor perspective from which to discern inherent value. That would also be an objection to Aristotelian friendship based on what mutual friends took to be the instrinsic good that they both shared; the particular quality they find likeable in each other may not be the good that really resides in them. But according to the assumptions of the present proposal there would be no such value to be found residing there anyway. What the solution says is that the value is attributed on the basis of the idea that all