Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  We have looked at two paradigms of levelling that can be distinguished from Kierkegaard's in the Review, and also at Heidegger's near-Kierkegaardian notion. But although we devoted some space to the levelling of irony which in itself is purely negative, we still have no clear picture of Kierkegaard's position with regard to the first paradigm, the levelling that belongs to a deliberately cultivated moral attutude. A clue can be found in the role assigned towards the end of the Review to 'the unrecognizables' (de Ukjendelige).36 Where das Man levelling is the order of the day, no visible authority, either individual or corporate, can stem its progress:

  no single man – the eminent person in terms of superiority and the dialectic of fate – will be able to halt levelling's abstraction, for the single man's is a negative elevation and the age of heroes is over. No

  congregation [a reference to the Grundtvigian movement] will be in a position to halt levelling's abstraction, because in the context of reflection the congregation is itself in the service of levelling. Not even the individualities of nations will be able to halt it, for the abstraction of levelling reflects on a higher negativity, namely that of pure humanity.37

  The only hope is that certain individuals by their example, or other forms of indirect influence, succeed in awakening in others a sense of what is positive, namely the weight of moral and social responsibility that lies on each individual. Exerting an influence in this hidden way requires sacrifice and suffering. Summarizing, in a journal entry, not only his experience in the Corsair affair and its aftermath but also his later position in Copenhagen in general, Kierkegaard says:

  I posed … the problem the whole generation understands: equality between man and man. I posed it executively in Copenhagen. That's more than writing a few words about it; I expressed it approximately in my life. I have levelled in a Christian sense, but not in the rebellious sense against power and worth which with all my might I have upheld.38

  What Kierkegaard means by a Christian way of levelling may be interpreted in the light of a passage in the Review in which he observes that 'more and more have to renounce the modest yet so copious and God-pleasing tasks of the quieter life in order to realize something higher …'.39 The Christian as such has no special tasks beyond those that confront the ethically concerned individual locally; even in a Christian context, Dasein as such has no possibilities that exceed the range of das Man – I take it that Kierkegaard would agree here with Heidegger. Certainly, there is a clear parallel with Heidegger's insistence that Dasein is unable, however much it may try or even in imagination succeed, 'really [to] extricate' itself from its original das Man mode. But there is also a clear difference. For Kierkegaard, in a properly Christian world no outer distinction would count for your true worth. Living as though that were true would be what it means to answer as well as pose the problem of equality between man and man in practice, the problem Kierkegaard says he expressed 'approximately' in his life.

  Heidegger offers no basis for any worth to be gained beyond that of facing the fact of the finitude of one's own portable perspective on things. For Kierkegaard, the initially empty portable perspective, what in The Sickness unto Death is called the 'naked and abstract self',40 is where truth begins, the point of view from which one tries to resurrect or reconstitute immediacy, a second immediacy, a happily conscious reabsorption in the world. In Heideggerian terms, the reabsorption might even be described

  in terms of a regained but this time self-conscious anonymity – a kind of unrecognizability. Pursuing the anachronism of das Man still further, we can say that just as levelling down in Heidegger's sense is a 'levelling of all differences',41 so in Kierkegaard's re-entry project the goal is to take no account of differences as such – not to eliminate them but to allow for them but make them of no consequence. The point in terms of Abständigkeit would be to defy Abständigkeit, in short to cultivate an indifference to difference. In this we see the germ of what Kierkegaard takes true equality to be. It is to be 'committed' to bearing the differences one sustains with regard to others but not having them count either for or against one. And if in other people's eyes they do count, then that too is an insignificant fact. It doesn't matter who one is or what one does, as long as one gets on with the 'the modest tasks of the quieter life', the tasks which he says people 'more and more renounce … in order to realize something higher'. What in this reflective age they think is higher, he says, is

  to think over the relationships of life in a higher relationship [until] in the end the whole generation becomes a representation – representing … well, there's no saying who; a representation that thinks over the relations … well, it's hard to say for whose sake.42

  This would be a negatively levelled world, a common world that is no one's.

  As a final addendum to this list of parallels, it could also be said, and against what might seem the obvious objection, namely that Heidegger's 'originary' das Man mode is pre-reflective while Kierkegaard talks of the levelling of a reflective age, that what Kierkegaard means here is nevertheless still very close to Heidegger. What characterizes his age, as he sees it, is not that individuals reflect on their own account but that reflection is the general background mode of the shared life that is anyone's and correspondingly no one's. The reflection of a reflective age has none of the intensity of reflective irony, for it has lost its foothold in the individual, or 'subjectivity'. True, we must observe Heidegger's remark in the Letter on Humanism that the 'public realm' is currently typified by the 'dominance of subjectivity'.43 But even here the congruence may hold. In one sense to call an age reflective is by the same token just to say that the background mode of the shared life that is anyone's has a general form best described in terms of the subject–object relation. And the reflective stance is exactly one that freezes the things one unreflectively 'goes about' into objects of attention, but precisely for that reason for a 'subject' of the kind that was the focus of Heidegger's criticism, a subject abstracted from its living commerce with things. We can even see an accentuation of this idea in Kierkegaard's use of mathematical metaphors to convey the character of the underlying and controlling force he calls levelling. A society in which subjects actually become abstract in this way is one in which they themselves become

  governed by truly abstract laws, laws no longer associated with nature or psychology.

  Levelling is not an individual's action but an activity of reflection in the hands of an abstract power. Just as one calculates the diagonal in a parallelogram of forces, so too can one calculate the law of levelling. For the individual who himself levels a few is carried along too, and so it goes on.44

  Of course, superficially, one might suspect Heidegger of taking Kierkegaard actually to be preaching the dominance of subjectivity. But even if that suspicion were true, or even if the charge could in some sense be justified from a Heideggerian stance, in Kierkegaard's mind the subject–world relation is properly and primarily a relation between 'real' (that is, unified) subjects and their shared world, a world in which it would, moreover, be quite inappropriate to say that subjectivity was dominant, since ideally the relation is one of equilibrium.

  To measure one's worth in a way in which nothing external counts leaves you with no distinguishing marks at all. This is the merciless logic of levelling as Kierkegaard presents it in the Review. In essence it is the 'ascendancy of the category of the generation over that of individuality',45 and carried to the limit its ascendancy leads to the idea of that 'higher negativity': pure humanity. It is what you are left with after the elimination of external measures of distinction and a totally empty way of defining selfhood and the self. The self that defines itself in that way becomes a mere atom or a particle, on the one hand unrelated to any external structure (just as Hegel feared) and, on the other, lacking any internal structure of its own (just as Kierkegaard diagnosed when he talked later of the 'negative' self waiting either to redesign its external structure from scratch or to re-relate itself to the external structur
e it had ironized, or 'reflected', itself out of but now actively, that is, with a selfformed inner structure, took upon itself again in terms of an ethico-religious task).46

  At its extreme, therefore, levelling leaves you with a clear choice: either you really are nothing in worldly terms, and you are left to make your own self, or you are what you are in those terms, but these are to be grasped as given to you by God, as the 'equipment' you have been provided with to do, to the best of your ability, God's work. So, in extension of the original thought of irony's potentially edifying levelling being in the service of spirit by making room for it, the levelling that has arisen from the cult of reflection and is now being driven by its own momentum has one benefit in prospect. Though initially motivated by a fear of individuality, the very process through which people prone to reflection efface their individuality by seeking identity through group membership will, if carried to the limit

  (forcing them to identify themselves only as members of that group of all groups, pure humanity), force them to face the very thing they are trying to escape. They will see that they must either 'be lost' in the 'dizziness of abstract infinity' or be 'infinitely saved' in the 'essentiality of religiousness'.47

  I offer in conclusion some tentative remarks on nihilism. I do not think, partly because of what I have already noted, that Kierkegaard takes the main problem of his time to be what today we may be inclined to call nihilism, though that does of course depend on what we do refer to by the term.

  There are two senses in which Kierkegaard could be seen to regard his time as nihilistic. One is the sense of nihilism already hinted at earlier and which Heidegger finds so important in Nietzsche, namely that the values to which people still pay lip-service mean nothing to them in practice. Reflection had dissolved the assumptions that sustained the old hierarchical order, but the titles and even the positions remained, though no longer able to keep people harmlessly in their place. It was a society in which people clung desperately to their manners and ways of speech just to keep the rootlessness of their society out of sight.

  Another sense is whatever it means to say that the time was one of reflection, an age gripped by no idea. Ideas, as we saw, are what inspire people to the kind of activity that gives one a sense of one's life itself having meaning, a sense one can express in the Hegelian formula of 'personality claiming the world as its own'. The old hierarchical structure had seemed to provide those activities on a plate, but the world of the 1840s was one of disruption if not chaos. 'Having the world as one's own' is a formula for individuals able to feel that the part they play in life, however 'modest' and 'quiet', fulfils a universal human function none the less. This was the thought Hegel intended his System to legitimize, and perhaps Heiberg was the last person in Kierkegaard's culture to believe or at least hope that philosophy provided that grasp of the unity of all quiet and modest as well as grander tasks. Kierkegaard wants us to believe something else, namely that what life's increasing diversification and loss of unity shows is that the time for true religiosity has finally arrived. Whether you get back to religion in the ways expressed in the pseudonymous writings, rising through irony out of the aesthetic to the ethical and the religious, or get there by being forced into an ultimate choice by being levelled unto non-entity, you will have the opportunity to grasp life as a life of meaning even if the meaning it can have is no longer written on the face of the world itself. If nihilism is the thought that there is no such option to choose, then of course the Review is not concerned with that.

  This is not to say that Kierkegaard himself never entertained nihilistic thoughts, either directly or, as a writer, vicariously. We have only to look at 'Diapsalmata' and the later, reflective stages of the

  aesthetic life-view to see how well versed he was in nihilism. But nihilism is a consequence of the aesthetic life-view, which, when worked out to its limits, leaves the aesthete desperately devising ways of making life liveable (as the emperor looks desperately for ever more sources of amusement). It is also worth noting that, at least according to his own account, Kierkegaard early on decided that what would give his own life meaning was to restore to religion its primitivity, against all comers, whether rationalistic theologians, Hegelians or Grundtvigians. What gave Kierkegaard a sense of the meaningfulness of his own life may have been his approximation to Christian levelling, his martyrdom in the cause, or, on a more enduring scale, it could have been his exceptional ability to promote the point of view, in his own writing as well as his person, that this is what was needed.

  We should be careful, however, in expressing Kierkegaard's relation to nihilism in the way that Bert Dreyfus and Jane Rubin do when they say that 'Kierkegaard's interest, and ours in an increasingly nihilistic age, is in how we can recover the sense that our lives are meaningful'.48 In a general way, drawn from remarks I have already made and interpreted in their light, that may be true. But if the remark is taken to represent the problem Kierkegaard saw his society facing, as Dreyfus and Rubin intend, it is misleading. Certainly, levelling would make it increasingly difficult for individuals to engage in society in a way that would make their lives appear to be individually meaningful. But this was a period of the early flowering of liberal idealism, in which people held in prospect all those improvements that only in our own time have formed the basis of a new kind of aesthetic boredom. I do not think it would be true to say of Kierkegaard's time, as against certain individuals who were more or less self-conscious 'outsiders', including perhaps he himself, that people then were by and large conscious of living in a nihilistic culture. If they were, then his analysis of his age is wrong. If it is right, then most people had few or no problems with their culture or themselves. That was precisely what Kierkegaard thought was wrong with it and them; rather than busily performing the well-programmed functions of a reflective age in a flattened Being-with-one-another, as Heidegger would come to say, they should have felt, as he saw, that they were simply reinforcing a tendency to leave no headroom for what they should really be trying to do, namely become themselves.

  This required Udsondring. We have to see that Kierkegaard's Udsondring in no way implies having 'a world of one's own', and is very far from the post-modern self-design aesthetic. As in Hegel, though with the individual rather than the generation as the medium through which the external world can be appropriated and the self become 'actual', Udsondring is the way to claim the world as one's own, not to claim a world of one's own. The emphasis Kierkegaard puts on it is in terms of

  having a part in the world, and thus some sense, in spite of the massive disunities, of the world being one, and of getting the world back from the 'contradictory' null-point Hegel mentions in the passage I quoted, the point at which the subject thinks of itself as a 'nothing' facing not no world but a world that is alien.

  Returning finally to our three paradigms of levelling: there is no basis for describing Kierkegaard's work as proposing a design-yourself solution to a levelled culture. That would be the kind of formalistic solution he opposed from the very beginning. There is a much better basis for seeing in the Review what we might have called, had we not known what Heidegger owed to that work, anticipations of Heidegger. Kierkegaardian levelling is a special case of Abständigkeit. But that basis must be seen in the light of the very different focus Kierkegaard's work brings to bear on the Abständigkeit 'phenomenon', and which is to be understood within the edifying terms of the first of our paradigms, as a Christian 'overcoming' of Abständigkeit.

  * * *

  13

  SOLITARY SOULS AND INFINITE HELP

  In a collection of his reflections on 'culture and value' (assembled under that title), Wittgenstein says:

  The Christian religion is only for the man who needs infinite help, solely, that is, for the man who experiences infinite distress. … The Christian faith – so I believe – is a man's refuge in this ultimate distress.1

  What this utmost distress consists in may seem to have a distinctively Kierkegaardian flavo
ur. It has to do with the 'single' individual and its sense of abandonment.

  The whole Earth cannot be in greater distress than one soul. … [n]o greater distress can be greater than what a single person can suffer. … There is no greater distress to be felt than that of One human being. For if someone feels himself lost, that is the ultimate distress.2

  This might tempt us to add the above remarks to others in Culture and Value, and elsewhere, which confirm the influence of Kierkegaard on Wittgenstein's thoughts on religion.3 But there are difficulties in calling these, and some other connected remarks, Kierkegaardian in the sense that one might reasonably expect to find parallel expressions of closely similar views in Kierkegaard's own writings.

  These stem from the fact that Wittgenstein's remarks express the point of view of a person who understands a problem to which Christian faith is a (or even the) solution, while Kierkegaard's point of view is of one who (at least writes as if he) is totally committed to the solution. There is indeed a crucial disparity regarding what can or is to be said about Christianity as between a person who sees the need it satisfies and one who 'uses' it to satisfy that need. (The quotes here already signal that disparity.) I shall return to this below. But there is also a crucial disparity regarding what is or can be said about Christianity as between a person who does not and one who does see the need which it satisfies, whether or not in the latter case it is used to satisfy that need. Kierkegaard wrote that the 'suffering, sins, and fearful introversion' that made his need for Christianity so great also made him