Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  Compare this with our other two notions of levelling. Unlike the levelling that is sustained in the service of a cultivation of personality or a moral point of view, this requires absolutely no effort; one levels simply by falling in with the ways of others, or finding oneself already having done that. As for what we described as Karamazovian levelling, there the subject still felt a need to become itself by choosing itself and its world. Indeed the sense of alienation only accentuated the need and with it the sense of the almost overpowering importance and difficulty of the choice. Here, however, it is precisely choice that becomes eclipsed, and with it the need to 'be oneself'.

  Readers of Being and Time and the lectures preceding that work will recognize here a model for what Heidegger calls Einebnung, a culture in which Dasein is 'deprive[d] … of its choice, its formation of judgments, and its

  estimation of value', and which 'relieves Dasein of the task … to be itself by way of itself'.9 Heidegger's remarks, so close to Kierkegaard's that we can all but see the well-thumbed copy of the Review's German translation lying there zuhanden, provide a notion of levelling which invites careful comparison with Kierkegaard's. It is tempting to assume that Heidegger drew also on Kierkegaard's journals. Kierkegaard says in one entry,

  I know of no man whom it is in the strictest sense true that his life has reached actuality. … No one says 'I.' One person talks in the name of the century, another in the name of the public, another in the name of science, another by virtue of his office, and their lives are everywhere guaranteed by tradition, that 'others,' 'the others' are doing the same thing.10

  Still, it becomes clear that the accounts have significantly different foci. Heidegger's Einebnung is one element in an account of the way in which Dasein can be dominated by its das Man mode. Heidegger pinpoints a 'phenomenon' which he labels Abständigkeit. There are various relationships that might call for this metaphor of distance (or distantiality or apartness, as the English translations have it), and the reader may be excused for not seeing immediately which of these Heidegger has in mind. But Abständigkeit turns out to be a deeply embedded concern with difference, so deeply embedded that even the concern to get rid of difference is evidence of it: 'this concern constantly lives in the concern [Sorge] over being different …even if only to equalize that difference'.11 The difference Heidegger refers to is the way we not only measure ourselves against one another but also identify ourselves by our proximity or apartness (better or worse than) in these respects. So Abständigkeit is not the presence or measure of any specific distance between oneself and others, or 'the' others; it is concern with difference überhaupt, whether with measuring up to or even seeing oneself as superior to others, or else the concern to be just like them, whether they are higher or lower, even the concern that everyone should be like everyone else. Abständigkeit is, in short, a way or mode we have of being with others, a structural feature of Dasein as such. But the nature of this concern with difference is to draw Dasein in the direction of the 'average and everyday', and the result an absorption in das Man in which there is a 'levelling of all differences'.12

  This is so like Kierkegaard that anyone who has already read him might be inclined to think that what Heidegger means by the 'distantiality' involved in measuring oneself in terms of others (and particularly a tendency in doing so to discount or eliminate the differences) is the way in which this concern holds one at arm's length, so to speak, from one's own possibilities. The fewer the differences, the greater the absorption, and the less contact with the indexical self or what Heidegger, again echoing Kierkegaard, calls 'naked being-in-the-world'.13 In other words, Abständigkeit might be the distance such concern with difference creates between Dasein in its das Man mode

  and Dasein in some authentic mode. In that case the significance of this distantiality would be that it prevented Dasein from becoming a place, locus or location for the disclosure of truth (about what it is to be with others and to share a world). The thought here would be that in order to become close to others as others, one must be in relation to them at the level of selves, of disclosed selves; whereas the absorption in das Man, although from a certain point of view it may seem an excellent way of getting or acting together, working cooperatively, a self-less way of being about things, in actual fact distances us from each other just as, and because, it distances us from ourselves.14

  We have just seen, however, that this is not what Heidegger means by Abständigkeit.15 The phenomenon he points to under that label is concern with difference, not with the distance such concern creates between sharing practices, on the one hand, and being ourselves as particular selves, on the other. This is not to say that Heidegger has no sense of the distance that being part of the anonymous public makes between it and you, and of the implications of being more and more anonymous. Indeed, on some readings of Heidegger, these are matters that concerned him a great deal. It remains true, however, not only that this is not what Abständigkeit is about, but that Heidegger's remarks on this other dimension, authenticity, remain both sketchy and abstract. The point is that the view here that it would be a mistake to attribute to Heidegger on the strength of his remarks on Einebnung is exactly what Kierkegaard says in the Review.

  The key word is Udsondring (Udsondring or den individuelle inadvendte Udsondring, but sometimes just indre Sondring).16 Udsondring means a separating or singling out.17 To grasp the notion, we have to see its connection in the text with 'Idea', sometimes 'the Idea'. To many this Hegelianism may sound no more than a piece of empty jargon, a useless relic of the very philosophy Kierkegaard so successfully demolished. It is interesting therefore to see how insistently the terminology persists even in this (just) post-Postscriptian work. Unlike Heidegger, in whom no such Hegelian residue would be expected, Kierkegaard seems to have seen his own task as in some sense a conversion and not just a subversion of the Hegelian enterprise. While Heidegger sets himself up as a steadfast dismantler of traditions, doing his best to dispense with the traditional terminology he thinks connotatively tied to them, Kierkegaard takes hold of the terminology 'appropriated by speculative thought'18 in order to direct it back upon its proper tasks.

  In his observations on distantiality, averageness and levelling, Heidegger is opposing a particular tradition. It is, however, one whose links with Hegel are in fact quite tenuous. As many have pointed out, especially Hubert Dreyfus, Heidegger is opposing a way of thinking that takes the subject of experiences to be preconstituted before it can itself constitute a world. He is also, naturally, by the same token opposing the philosophical project that takes its task to be the explanation of how the subject does that. According to Heidegger's Daseinanalyse, there is not and cannot be such an entity as a subject without its world.

  It is important to stress, however, that the notion of a worldless subject is entirely antithetic to Hegel's philosophy. Nor does it occur in Kierkegaard, for all

  the accutions of subjectivity heaped on him by latter-day Hegelians. But there is another problem which both Hegel and Kierkegaard do address while Heidegger does not. What it is and how it differs from the allegedly specious question of a worldless subject can be put in the terms of a useful quotation from Hegel's Philosophy of Law, which goes as follows:

  For personality, however, as inherently infinite and universal, the restriction of being only subjective is a contradiction and a nullity. Personality is that which struggles to lift itself above this restriction and to give itself reality, or in other words to claim that external world as its own.19

  The problem Hegel is expressing here in terms, we note, of personality is one he thinks can be solved or overcome; it is the problem of the subject that experiences itself as no more than subjective and as unable to claim the external world as its own. This is not a version of the problem of the external world as traditionally conceived in post-Cartesian epistemology. There is no question in Hegel of there being a worldless subject, but only of the world there is not being a world in which the subject see
s anything of itself. It would be inappropriate therefore to think of Heidegger as beginning where Hegel wrongly thought his long journey down the path of despair could take us. Hegel's project, though rightly called a unifying one, was of quite another kind; and if Heidegger ever claimed to have put that speculative project in the museum, the reason would have to be not that his Daseinanalyse showed the project to be redundant, but that it showed how Hegel exaggerated the role of philosophy.

  As to the precise relation of Heidegger's project to one like Hegel's, some, and not only Hegelians, may see Heidegger's Daseinanalyse as a view fixated in the stance of the Hegelian Unhappy Consciousness (think of the notion of 'naked being-in-the-world') but with a bargain-basement solution. The answer it gives to the problem of claiming the external world as 'one's own' is that the world is in any case 'ours' in the sense of presenting itself in the form of equipment, but also, secondly, in the possibility of the equipmental world of human projects being appropriated individually. Others may see this instead as Heidegger's virtuous conformity with the philosophical (but also Lutheran) principle that one should live within one's means.

  What is in any case clear is that Heidegger's structural interests lead him to look at authenticity from a perspective diametrically opposed to Kierkegaard's. Heidegger's problem is for Dasein to resist its tendency to be absorbed from below; to be 'still itself'20 in spite of the pressures that drag it into anonymity. In his pseudonymous works, the problem for Kierkegaard is the reverse. These works are directed at enlarging the self's sense of its possibilities though without losing sight of the limitations of existence. Indeed the 'dialectic' depends on these two straining against each other, the possibility that the finite is not only finite being the theological requisite of the unity of person-

  ality. When he came to write the Review, however, it looks as if Kierkegaard is seeing the danger from the same point of view as Heidegger. Levelling is an impediment to the grasp of the individual's own possibilities tout court, with or without the possibility for which there is a theological requisite.

  I have suggested that the key to the difference lies in Kierkegaard's retention of the Idea. Outside its specifically Hegelian ramifications, 'Idea' signifies a goal of unified understanding of the kind most philosophy up to and including Hegel has been concerned with. It isn't even an exclusively philosophical notion, belonging also as it does to theology and cosmology as well as politics. When, in the Review, Kierkegaard complains that 'no big event or idea gripped' his time,21 he is saying that there is no sustained enthusiasm for such goals. In a reflective age, ideals that had once seized people and inspired them to passionate activity were now just headings for discussion, and there was as much interest, even more, in the principles for undertaking such discussions as in the topics themselves.

  Some might call this nihilism, but if so it is not of the Karamazov variety. It would be nihilism in the culture-critical sense that values still professed had lost their living content. Not having that content, they are no longer values in the true sense; they do in their spirit as well as letter guide and energize lives. Kierkegaard seems clearly to think that unifying goals should seize people 'personally', and that their doing so is the necessary beginning of anything that can be achieved in the general terms of reference within which Hegelian philosophy operates. Ideals that once fuelled the French Revolution were now fashionable expressions of principle on party political agendas. And as for principles and the current call to act on them, Kierkegaard says that a 'principle' in its 'proper sense' is the Idea taking shape in (and taking the shape of) feeling's 'unopened form'.22 Looking back now, at the revolutionary times which the author of Two Ages had contrasted with the present, Kierkegaard saw these as having been a time of revelation too.23 The Idea had indeed unfolded and opened, yet not fully. Unlike the more recent post-1830 political movements he had earlier criticized for trying to impose forms on life, the revolutionary age had at least been seized passionately by the Idea, so that its inspiration among the 'inspired' still had 'truth' in it, for at that time 'inwardness [was] not abolished'.24 But the Age of Revolution was nevertheless still an expression of human immaturity, a lapse back into immediacy.

  According to a typology of concerted activity sketched in the Review, at the lowest end of the scale is the raw and formless behaviour of the crowd, in short mob behaviour. Here the crowd is not even informed collectively by an Idea; it lacks a centre of gravity, indeed it lacks any internal structure at all; the crowd is at the mercy of suggestion and governed by primitively holistic psychological reactions. Revolutionary contexts differ. Here a crowd is related en masse to an Idea. But the members are still not separated or singled out as enthusing individually for the ideals inspiring the

  revolution; there is passion, certainly, as against a cold formalism, but it is due to the mutual encouragement of numbers and results in violence. If they are so singled out, and the numbers are sufficient, so that effectively concerted action, which of course need not be revolutionary, is on the cards, then the revolution or change will be carried out in the 'unanimity of the singled-out'.25

  In his own time, however, instead of the individual's relation to the Idea being 'perfect and normal' because it 'singles out individually … and unites ideally',26 the proper flowering of the Idea in the individual had been brought to a stop by an externalizing of its goals. Politicians, whose close links with the press were a marked feature of the times, aimed to introduce equality in such a way that, as Kierkegaard says, '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'. Levelling, he adds, is 'the faked anticipation of eternal life, which people have done away with as a "beyond" and now want to realize here in abstracto'.27

  The remark calls to mind one of Hegel's that it is a basic mistake of religion to 'introduce the eternal, the Kingdom of Heaven, on earth'.28 Rather than contradicting Hegel on this point, Kierkegaard can be read as saying that politicians had expropriated the religious goals along with the basic mistake, thinking they could introduce the Kingdom of Heaven on earth. Kierkegaard would insist that religious goals are personal, and that means individual, which in turn means 'individually appropriated'. There is still some conflict: Hegel would have disagreed about this location for the Idea. But they would agree about it being a mistake to introduce the ideals in question in any institutionalized form, be it political or religious.

  We can readily see now that what is entirely negative about levelling in the Review is that it abstracts from and ideally eradicates the unique locus of human fulfilment, the only place where the ideal can arise in the way it must, that is, in the form of sustained concern on the part of the individual. In a reflective age, enthusiasm is marginalized and manifests itself in brief eruptions, last-ditch protests at the gradual disappearance of 'personality'. These outbursts are just futile attempts to revert to spontaneous immediacy; they can only last so long and are followed by indolence.

  Levelling in the Review turns out to be a special case of Abständigkeit: it is that special concern with difference that is the concern to eliminate difference. In Kierkegaard's analysis the process is not claimed, as in Heidegger, to be structural, although if we put what Kierkegaard says here in conjunction with The Concept of Anxiety, something like a structural claim might well emerge. As it is, Kierkegaard's eye is trained on the cultural manifestations of what appeared to him to be an unstoppable process. Levelling, for all its inevitability, had its 'reasons'. One might think, not inappropriately in the light of this typically Hegelian thought, that the reasons were to be found in

  the grip of Hegel's thought (the idea of the Idea) on the times. In the Hegelian System, after all, 'reduction' to the rank and file can be the way to spiritual ascent. But by the time the Review was written the Hegel craze was over and there are few grounds for reading it as a criticism of Hegelian politics.29 If the Review addresses politics at
all, it speaks to the exaggerated concern shown by liberal politicians towards what Kierkegaard considers mere externals – not so much symbolic externals such as palings and hedges, but the institutional conditions that give priority to formal rights over experience and responsibility.

  However, the criticism goes much wider than that; indeed it embraces the whole of culture, ways in which people interrelate at all levels. The target is one that Kierkegaard encapsulates in the notion of envy: 'one wants to drag down the great'.30 So deep is it in the collective consciousness, or so far in the background, that nobody sees it for what it is: it is 'self-establishing'.31 It is one that wants to drag down; it is Dasein in its das Man mode that does it, not envious individuals, at least not singled-out individuals. In fact, if you were to look for someone responsible for levelling, worse than there being no one at home when you knocked on the door, there would be no door to knock on. What has levelled (in the transitive sense) in such a case is 'the public'.32

  The Review contains a little allegory which in outline captures Kierkegaard's own fate at the hand of the Corsair. The public is personified by a bored Roman Emperor who has a dog (identified as 'literary vilification') let loose on someone just for amusement, knowing he can then blame the dog (by common consent a mere cur) for whatever harm was done.33 Kierkegaard's colleagues were to 'go public' in just this negative sense when they refrained from defending him when he was exposed to scurrilous attacks in a journal they could well pretend they wouldn't stoop to reading. It is as Heidegger says: 'The public is involved in everything but in such a way that it has already always absolved itself of it all.'34 Exceptions are quietly suppressed by, as Heidegger also says, 'the polished averageness of the everyday interpretation of Dasein', which 'watches over every exception that thrusts itself to the fore'.35