Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  things, including persons, have their own value, and in the case of persons, that this value belongs to what can be achieved from the position of particularity.

  7 This may sound no better than the abstract feature which we criticized Rousseau for positing. Indeed, we may seem merely to have come full circle, the only change being – and it may not seem a gain – that now we have the ethical agent arbitrarily positing the feature in order to justify ethical performance, instead of deriving it, as Rousseau himself did, from some agreed aspect of human existence.

  And yet, by positing this feature, we place the other – any other with whom we enter into a morally relevant relation, and however lacking in the properties that would normally elicit concern in us – in a context of mutual moral development. We add to his or her recognizable features a dimension our attribution of which to them is already, on our part, an expression of good will or love. In addition, this feature is still nevertheless one that 'attracts' us to them in terms of what can be done to bring them, too, to the point of moral self-insight, from which they in their turn can posit this feature in others. This may not seem sufficient to attract us to them; but if not we can still add what in Kierkegaard's thought is clearly the real source of the attraction. In seeing the other in this light we are partaking in God's (distributive) love of humankind.

  Whatever further objections arise at this point, and it is not hard to anticipate their tenor, there is at least something to be said in terms of the autonomy of moral discourse itself for a solution which posits, as a principle of ethical relationship, some property the very positing of which is itself a moral act. A further fact in favour of the view is that to decide to treat others as autonomous centres of moral development is the exercise of a specifically human ability, just as much a feature of human being as the ability to refer to oneself in the first-person singular. And when it comes to deciding, in terms of ethical relations, which of these two deserves to be called foundational, there is something to be said for preferring the former. After all, in the light of the view as we have outlined it, exercising this particular ability is the only way in which the world can actually manifest itself to human beings in genuinely moral terms, the only way in which there can be a world of which a disinterested regard for the other is a universally defining feature.

  8 But is that not an exaggerated and unnecessary demand? Perhaps morality should be seen instead as a Manichaean conflict in which basically good (or other-regarding) and basically evil (or self-regarding) people struggle for supremacy or survival. Many will object on post-Nietzschean grounds to a morality based on Christian compassion and might be willing to dispense with the notion of morality in any case, or at least under that loaded name. Others would not be seriously disturbed philosophically if the world betrayed no moral dimension but morality had to be worked out by humans contractually, or perhaps, as Habermas would have it, simply by living up to the ideals implicit in the very nature of their discourse.

  Still, it would be wrong to dismiss the Kierkegaardian perspective too quickly, either on Nietzschean grounds or more generally. In the first place, Kierkegaard's insistence on the particularity of the individual brings several easily obscured aspects of the ethical relation into focus. One of these is the reality of the other as a separate subject of experiences, a fact easily lost sight of in traditional theories of ethics, which, by marginalizing the individual's own sense of moral integrity, tend to denature rather than elicit the moral personality. Secondly, systems of law, political institutions and social habits are usually assumed to be ethically effective, and necessary, extensions of private morality. They extend the scope of natural concern to morally relevant reference groups and serve as guarantees of the exercise of such concern where moral feeling is no longer present, or, if present, no longer works. From a Kierkegaardian perspective, however, they appear in the guise of surrogate moral agents which, by relieving actual agents of their own responsibilities, allow those very dispositions to atrophy which motivated the laws, practices and institutions in the first place, thus leaving political institutions to be steered by more sinister forces.

  9 It is here, finally, that Kierkegaard's thought provides an interestingly particularistic, though undeveloped, parallel with Nietzsche. What they have in common is the idea that excellence is the outcome of struggle. The agon in Nietzsche is one in which Dionysian chaos is channelled into creative order; conflicting and mutually destructive forces are converted into constructive activity, and energies which otherwise work divisively, and in the ends of power, are harnessed into socially creative ends.22 In Kierkegaard this motif appears in the ontogenesis of the ethical agent, first in Either/Or where the destructive aesthetic forces which 'poetize' the other out of reality are brought under the stabilizing influence of selfhood,23 and later where motivations that split the self are brought together under the unifying ideal of the eternal. Just as in Nietzsche the power play of politics is favoured because the social politics of pity serves merely to conceal lack of the strength and dignity to stand alone, so in the struggle out of which Kierkegaard's individual emerges there is a hardening against the pity one is disposed to feel for human suffering, and the emergence of an ethics in which suffering is accepted as an inescapable challenge. Pain and suffering then become part of the struggle out of which alone true individuality and ethical excellence can be sustained. Accordingly, as with Nietzsche, Kierkegaard too opposes prudentialism and social programmes which presuppose in their beneficiaries fear, insecurity and self-interest.24

  Unlike Nietzsche's, Kierkegaard's agon is decidedly moral. Its telos, or 'excellence', is the formation of a genuinely social intention. His idea is that the latter implies treating others as autonomous generators of value, and this requires the would-be moral agent to struggle free of attachments to the other, since these reduce the metaphysically incontrovertible otherness of the other to a feature of the would-be moral agent's own world. Similarly, morality is not the immersion of individuality in common projects, but a devotion to being the kind of being a human being is, a being capable of individual and autonomous ethical reflection.25

  This devotion is expressed in situ, in daily dealings with one's fellows, the neighbour or the one close by. 'Neighbour' means anyone with whom one stands in relations of responsibility. 'Close by' means anything from visibly across the garden fence to invisibly at the receiving end of a ballistic missile.

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  12

  LEVELLING AND EINEBNUNG

  A main motif in the subsection of A Literary Review entitled 'The Present Age' (Nutiden) is something Kierkegaard calls 'levelling' (Nivellering). The metaphor of levelling has many applications. Most historical examples are literally down to earth. The Irish levellers were agrarian agitators who tore down hedges enclosing common ground. They were preceded, in English history, by a group of levellers so-called for removing park palings as well as hedges, in this case from crown lands. But both had an underlying political motive which in a more abstract sense is what really gave them their name. That sense became quite explicit with certain radicals in the time of Charles I and the Commonwealth; they were 'levellers' because they insisted that everyone should have equal eligibility to public office. What Kierkegaard means by levelling is something more ethereal even than politics. In his first reference to levelling in the Review he describes it as a 'quiet, mathematically abstract affair … [that] avoids all fuss [Ophævelse]'.1

  That it cannot be political is obvious, at least not in the way usually associated with egalitarian ideals being framed and fought for by removing physical and other kinds of barriers to free association and opportunity, forcibly if need be. The levelling Kierkegaard speaks of is at odds with any kind of passion or the forceful pursuit of ideals. A rather curious observation in the same passage says that the process called 'levelling' blocks the channels for passionate action, with the result that enthusiasm can only occur in the stunted form of fads and crazes and, as here, even the longing for
something calamitous to happen if only to gain some sense of life itself: 'While the eruptive short-term enthusiasm might look despondently for some misfortune, just to taste the strength of existence, nothing can help the apathy that succeeds it, any more than it helps the levelling engineer.'

  To pinpoint this notion of levelling I shall compare it with two others, both of which, besides being distinguishable from it, are relevant in our Kierkegaardian context.

  One kind of levelling, also abstract, is that of the Stoics in their strategic withdrawal from the vicissitudes of the world. But it is strategic and thus not abstract in the sense of Kierkegaard's levelling. The aim of the Stoics was to cultivate a kind of self-immunization from what they considered to be irrational responses that embraced all forms of guilt and regret. Their aim was the edifying one of impassivity in the face of the ups

  and downs of direct personal engagement. You could indeed call the result of this form of levelling a kind of apathy, but unlike the apathy Kierkegaard mentions in the above quotation, the cultivated 'apathy' of the Stoic is not an indolence, such as Kierkegaard says people in his time are prone to. Apathy with the Stoics is due to strenuous efforts of self-cultivation on the part of individual levellers.

  This idea of cultivating personality, or as one might say in the case of the Stoics a kind of impersonality, is at the roots of the traditional notion of the moral point of view. Stoic levelling thus points to a paradigm according to which levelling takes the form of an ideal elimination of the subject, or agent, as a locus of purely personal interests, and its replacement by a point of view beyond and 'above' such interests. The notion here of levelling-up, or levelling as elevation, may suggest the opposite of levelling considered on the analogy of the levelling engineer, who usually levels down. But this elevation can just as well be described by a metaphor of descent, a levelling with the wider reference group that climbs down from the obtrusions of private interests.2

  If we ask whether Kierkegaard represents this tradition in his writings, we will have to say that he does, even though, as the above remarks indicate, it is not this that concerns him in the Review. That is not to say, however, that the latter is not to be understood on the background of that tradition.

  In Kierkegaard's published works the verb 'to level' (at nivellere) occurs first in the dissertation on the concept of irony. He says there that what 'typifies irony is the abstract measure through which it levels everything'.3 Here again we note the reference to abstraction. To grasp Kierkegaard's meaning we need to consider two sides to the levelling engineer's purposes. He first creates an even surface upon which then to build something new. It is an interesting feature of Kierkegaard's work on irony, both in the dissertation and subsequently, that it moves from a focus on the negative aspects of irony to irony's edifying possibilities, or the cultivation of what Kierkegaard, in compliance with his tradition, calls 'personality'. If we follow the story up to the end of the first part of Either/Or, we will see how, having going through the various infra-stages of the aesthetic point of view, the increasingly self-conscious aesthete is left with the problem of perpetually creating and trying to re-create his own aesthetically satisfying world. It is at this point that the ethicist confronts the aesthete with the proposition that his life is one of despair4 and that what he is despairing of is being a self, something that the ethicist then claims requires a life in conformity with our first paradigm.

  Without the edifying possibilities drawn from the idea that the levelling engineer is preparing the ground for something new, we are left with what might be called Dostoevskian or Karamazovian levelling: the levelling that occurs when God is pronounced dead and anything or everything is possible or permitted. This provides our second paradigm of levelling. It can be called nihilism. Out of the unlimited freedom of choices with which such levelling leaves you, you are free also to choose your own moral point of view, a position outlined in Sartre, which could be called an ethicist's version of Karamazovian levelling. But there is also a post-modern or Nietzschean version, aesthetic rather than ethical: Karamazovian

  levelling gives one a chance to demonstrate the quintessentially post-modern virtue of being a self-with-its-world that one has designed from scratch. The ultra-liberal, cosmopolitan, non-exclusionary culture whose negative aspect earns it the title of 'modern nihilism' is a culture in which we are left with the aweinspiring but sub specie aeternitatis ludicrous challenge of designing or defining our own worlds.

  In the progression through the infra-stages of the aesthetic mode of existence marked out in the first part of Either/Or and culminating in the melancholy, boredom and despair of the later, reflective stages, the world as it appears to the aesthetic mode of existence becomes drained of significance. It levels. Note that the aesthetic mode in the long run actually finds the world in this way. It is not a way in which the aesthete actively 'defines' the world. The designer-world of Karamazovian aestheticism is not itself designed; it is more like a condition of things brought about unwittingly through some inner logic of the prior position or attitude. According to Either/Or, it is only in the reflective stage of the aesthetic mode of life, and in its defiant attempts to exploit its self-consciousness in favour of the position, that the definition of the aesthetic point of view as deficient takes shape.

  This then marks the point at which the positive aspect appears. The sense in which irony levels is one in which it discloses the (ethical) space in which a self can appear, if only the subject will move into that space instead of fleeing it, as the reflective aesthete more or less deliberately does, or instead of refusing to enter into it in spite of a latent acknowledgement that it is the place to go. This flight is part of what Kierkegaard calls despair, a shunning of the next step, turning one's back upon it, giving up of hope. Irony's levelling then, in spite of the Romantic features of melancholy, and so on, associated with it, which make subjectivity a problem, indeed which largely eradicate it, has a positive part to play.5

  In order now to place Kierkegaard in relation to our first paradigm of levelling I would like briefly to locate the notion of personality and its cultivation in the context of what Kierkegaard inherits from the Romantics. The concept of personality in a philosophic context stems in the first instance, or so I believe, from Novalis. It was a means of conveying a broadened conception of the self in which imagination and the power of poetic feeling and expression play their part. The Romantics retained the title of 'philosophers' because, for them, the unity of finite and infinite, reality and ideality, was still a goal. The tradition felt it had grounds for claiming a superior, because more 'real' or 'actual', understanding of that goal. It required, in a way that parallels Kierkegaard's criticism of Hegel, a fuller engagement of the person than was the case in what was considered to be Fichtean 'intellectualism'. Truth could be expressed in forms of experience available to a well-tuned personality. Truth, or awareness of it, became a matter of degree tied to the extent of a human being's participation in it. An epistemic value came in this way to be conferred on the idea of a unified personality. Hegel, who, as we shall later note, also adopts the notion of personality, offers

  a traditionally philosophical account of the unified personality. In contrast, one can say that Kierkegaard's notion of unity is non-philosophical. But, and this marks a limitation of the parallel with the Romantics' criticism of Fichtean intellectualism, it is still properly called dialectical, like Hegel's, and so in another sense might also claim to be philosophical. The Postscript, written just before the Review, says in effect that human beings lack the resources required for unifying themselves, but that personal unification can be brought off if the individual is 'dialectically consolidated' in faith.6

  The theme of personal unification surfaces in the Review, where Kierkegaard writes of the individual being brought 'into the closure of agreement with himself' ('i den sluttede Enighed med sig selv') by the 'creative omnipotence implicit in the passion of the absolute disjunction', a strength that has now been '
transformed into the extensity of common sense and reflection'.7 His own age was one that was dispiritedly removing the dialectical tension required of unified (and unifying) personalities.

  The remark about extensity and reflection gives us some purchase on what to expect in regard to the levelling that is a main topic of the Review. Levelling here is no part of a spiritual ascent; on the contrary it impedes spiritual growth, although Kierkegaard says that carried to its conclusion it will leave people with a hard choice, the same choice to which Climacus seems to lead the reader more gently.8 Far from being itself part of a spiritual advance, the levelling Kierkegaard talks of in the Review is a process of spiritual stultification, and were it not for the fact, according to him, that it had come to the point where nothing could stop it, it might even look like a deliberate attempt to flee the thought that personality needs to be cultivated at all. But the levelling is not deliberate in any literal sense, since no one actually chooses this stultifying path, and everyone is in any case to some extent on it, as though on an escalator: it is a 'quiet, mathematically abstract affair' which 'avoids all fuss'. One could, however, say it was deliberate in the weaker sense in which people go along with the pressures that impede spiritual progress, rather than regretting them, or trying to delay the inevitable, attempting to go back along the escalator.