Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays
Page 31
There are two ways of qualifying this judgement. One, which I have discussed elsewhere,14 involves prefixing to Kierkegaard's view from the right a leftist account of the function of a religious life-view. This means starting from the left and ending at the right, but leaves the problem of justifying acceptance of a life-view that is inherently irrational. This is indeed a problem for someone who prefixes his rightist view with a leftist one, presumably in the attempt to justify the belief that infinite help is available; for there has to be some justification for preferring that belief to the nihilist alternative, and so long as the Christian religion is presented as a refuge from utmost distress it will be exposed to the objection that wanting to believe something cannot be the only, or even the decisive, reason for taking it to be true.15 Of course, if the believer refuses to prefix the leftist account, he can simply keep repeating the account of
nihilism that his belief commits him to, namely that it is a form of sin. But in that case he has simply given his beliefs the status of axioms and withdrawn them from rational debate.
The other way is to go from right to left; and this is the way Anti-Climacus goes. That is, the rightist view embraces the leftist one and straightforwardly stigmatizes nihilism as untruth. This looks an unpromising approach, and perhaps in the end it is. But a brief rehearsal of the Hegelian background to Anti-Climacus's concept of the human spirit may help to show just how far it can or cannot raise the level of the Christian believer's beliefs above the philosophically barren level of axioms.
In the famous Preface to his Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hegel describes spirit as the only 'actuality' (Wirkliche) and as self-relating' (das sich Verhaltende).16 Hegel's notion of 'spirit' is that of the Absolute in which subject and substance are one. In other words it is the notion of God, an ideal of completeness or perfection which, according to Hegel's speculative idealism, is the inherent goal of all history. It is the realization, or actualization, of a possibility latent in all nature and life, and grasped in an ascendingly adequate fashion in the fields of art, religion and philosophy, respectively. In relating to itself, spirit is conscious of itself as being 'the only actuality', or if you like, it is actuality conscious of itself, self-conscious actuality. If one focuses on the self, or the individual, that has this latent possibility, the goal of spirit is reached by what might be described as the self's 'returning' to itself.17 Hegel's view is, in effect, that individual consciousnesses are programmed in the direction of the goal of absolute spirit. It is important to realize how much of this is retained in Kierkegaard. According to Anti-Climacus, 'every human being is primitively organized as a self' and is 'the psychophysical synthesis planned as spirit'.18 The difference, of course, is that where for Hegel not just the ideal but also the movement towards its realization is programmed (in the subject's progressive conceptualizations of its relation to, and ultimately identity with, the whole of reality), for Kierkegaard whether the subject moves in that direction or not depends on a choice. Kierkegaard talks of the 'choice' of oneself. By this he does not mean, as commentators eager to associate him with modern existentialism often assume, selecting a self-definition from a cafeteria of value-neutral alternatives. As Judge William remarks, 'I do not create myself, I choose myself.' In order to choose oneself in the sense Kierkegaard has in mind, one chooses not some identity other than the one already possessed but to be the person one already is in another way; one chooses to accord one's present personality the 'eternal validity' it is already implicitly recognized as having. One chooses oneself 'absolutely'. The choice, in other words, is to be the self one presently is but in a way that reflects the traditional philosophical goal of completeness or perfection. In one sense '[t]his self did not exist previously, for it came into existence through the choice', but in another it did exist, 'for it was indeed "he himself" '.19
The crucial point is that for Kierkegaard one does not choose the goal. As with Hegel, there is an ideal of true selfhood, specified in terms of 'spirit', which one renounces in vain. Not because, owing to the unfolding of some inner dialectic,
renouncing it will inevitably, or in the long run, be transformed into acceptance; but because to try to renounce the ideal is to try not to be the programme one inescapably is. In a way, the attempt to destroy the programme is a 'useless passion', though in a Sartrian light paradoxically so, in that it is an attempt to abandon rather than assume the absolute,20 and also, for Kierkegaard, despairing of the absolute is not at all passionate, but a frustration or inhibition of the passion with which the individual must choose himself.
But is one inescapably this programme? Is there no possibility of this ideal's being dislodged and replaced by another, for example by a Heideggerian wide-awake freedom towards death or cool Stoic resignation? Can't we simply bring these old pre-Copernican conceptions of the cosmic centrality of humankind into the open and set them aside, curing ourselves of Kierkegaardian despair not through faith but by divesting ourselves of an antiquated and hopelessly exaggerated standard of authenticity before which, if we do not have faith, we are all found wanting?
Whatever the answer, the continuing challenge of Kierkegaard's writings is undoubtedly the critical gaze they direct on the questions. Raising them, according to his position, is preparing to make do with second-best. It is a manifestation of despair. We may resist this diagnosis, but it is not one we can so easily dismiss; at least doing so too easily might be taken to confirm it. And there is more psychological, anthropological or philosophical territory to be uncovered by locating the nihilist option (or any other alternative to the Anti-Climacian ideal of the selfhood before God) within a framework which presupposes that it is a second-best, than by presenting it as the neutral starting-place from which any alternative requires rational justification, or is intelligible only in the sense that one 'understands' how people in a certain kind of extremity need a certain kind of help. From that point of view it will seem remiss of Kierkegaard not to have allowed for the nihilist option. We will have to resign ourselves to the fact that he was a religious author who therefore adopts the 'inside' view to the exclusion of the 'outside' one, which we then prefix to the authorship and diagnose the author as ensconced in the world of a solution to a problem he can no longer talk about in the way he would have before he adopted the solution.
But there is this other way of construing the fact that the outside view is not represented in Kierkegaard's 'stages'. As Anti-Climacus presents it, the nihilist option arises when the background assumption people grow up with of their unity and continuity with their 'worlds' is brought to consciousness and pressed to the point where it becomes an ethically strenuous and intellectually paradoxical ideal. Nihilism arises, then, not as a refusal to be taken in by irrational presumptions of immortality or whatever, but as a refusal to maintain a goal that in one's 'innocence' or 'immediacy' one virtually took to be attained, but which, when considered now in the light of the human situation, appears too demanding. The crux is that when the human situation stands revealed for what it is, the goal appears not less but more important. For in its relation to the human situation, unclouded by the distractions of everyday living, the goal is not one that human
beings have it in their power to attain. In that sense they are abandoned. And they are solitary in the sense that the choice of accepting 'infinite help' is their own, not one that reason or any other authority can help them to make. The problem, as Climacus says, is one that requires 'thought-passion',
not to want to understand it, but to understand what it means to break with the understanding in this way and with thinking and with immanence, in order to lose the last foothold of immanence – of eternity behind one – and to exist constantly at the extremity of existence on the strength of the absurd.21
When 'all original immanence [is] annihilated and all connection cut off, the individual reduced to the extremity of existence',22 the goal can be attained only if infinite help is extended through the paradox of the Incarnation.
&n
bsp; According to this way of construing the exclusion of the outside view from Kierkegaard's writings, the goal that can be consciously retained only at the price of absurdity first appears as a native assumption. The fact that it is native can be said to lend it some kind of authority, though not of course a rational authority. It is simply a deeply embedded presumption, or even prepresumption, and not so easily dislodged. It is true, of course, of all belief that believing something is responding to the force of evidence. That is why the notion of believing at will is so 'bizarre'.23 But evidence is not always in the form of clearcut data, gathered and processed to form rationally justifiable inferences. Or if it is, then belief can be a response to some less articulate, and less easily revisable, authority. Interspersed with Wittgenstein's remarks on the Christian religion we find this: 'Believing means submitting to an authority. Having once submitted, you can't then, without rebelling against it, first call it in question and then once again find it acceptable.'24 From the context it is clear that Wittgenstein is thinking of religious faith. The authority might be God, but really you cannot submit to God unless you already accept in some way or other that there is a God you should be submitting to. In that case the authority is somehow presupposed. Assuming it not to be an external authority, but internal, though perhaps internalized through exposure to a culture which bears its imprint, submitting to it will be aligning oneself to what presents itself as being one's 'true' selfhood. If this is the meaning of Wittgenstein's remark, then it could equally have come from the Kierkegaard of The Sickness unto Death. Wittgenstein goes on to say that you cannot call the authority in question and then accept it anew without rebelling against the authority. The first part is exactly Anti-Climacus's notion of sin, the calling in question of one's divinely dimensioned ideal of selfhood. The second part, about accepting it again after doing that, is a departure. Anti-Climacus advocates faith as the only solution to the despair of (what amounts though in many different forms to) putting the authority in question – unless, of course, the believing Wittgenstein has in mind as occurring after the authority has been put in question is based on reasoning,
or is simply a 'creative' choice on the part of the person and does not involve appealing for 'infinite' help in choosing the self one already is. Anti-Climacus (and no doubt Kierkegaard too) would certainly agree with that. But then perhaps Wittgenstein is saying that once the authority is questioned, you have rebelled against it for good, whatever you do to try to restore its hold. Or then again, perhaps he means that you can only restore its hold by accepting that your calling it in question is or was indeed a rebellion, a form of Kierkegaardian despair, a refusal to submit to the authority but because of that not a nihilistic denial of the authority as such. In that case we are again within Kierkegaard's Anti-Climacian framework.
What this suggests is that it is wrong to take belief in this context to be 'believing at will', that is, believing something only because you want it to be true. Here it is rather a question of 'daring to believe', against the evidence even, if by 'evidence' one means what in isolation from one's native predispositional attitudes and assumptions would make it rational for one to accept, but in conformity with those attitudes and assumptions. The vehicle of Anti-Climacus's account of the progression from 'immediacy' to 'self-consciousness' in The Sickness unto Death is despair, that is, unwillingness to be one's true self, an unwillingness that culminates in downright refusal. But if one could imagine a similar progression with faith as the vehicle, culminating in faith proper, that is, the solitary individual standing before God, the progression would be marked by an ascending series of occasions to renew one's faith in increasingly difficult circumstances, both existential and intellectual. To retain one's faith one would have increasingly to dare to believe in the face of those circumstances. It ends at the 'extremity' of existence where all that intellect, or 'dialectic', can do is, as Climacus puts it, 'help find where the absolute object of faith and worship is'.25 That might be the place where Wittgenstein's man finds he is a single soul in need of an infinite help. My proposal is that the help be seen as needed in order to retain an ideal when undiverted attention to both the facts and the epistemic possibilities of human life show it to be humanly unattainable.
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14
HAMLET WITHOUT THE PRINCE OF DENMARK REVISITED
Introduction
In 'Kierkegaard and the Study of the Self'1 Ingmar Pörn applies an action-theoretical analysis to Kierkegaard's concept of the self. Or rather, he calls on certain of Kierkegaard's ideas to illustrate 'a notion of the self that is articulated in action-theoretical terms' (p. 199, Abstract). Almost half of Professor Pörn's very concisely wrought article is devoted to clarifying these terms and the place they give to a notion of the self. The other half applies the terms in a brief reconstruction of Kierkegaard's concept of despair, that is, despair over the self. Pörn's aim is to show 'one way in which … Kierkegaard can be seen as a contributor to … the study of the self', and thereby to a significant 'field in development' (ibid.).
Pörn's penetrating analysis does throw light on the structure of Kierkegaard's idea of the self as a self-relating relation. And Pörn certainly succeeds in making something psychologically recognizable out of Kierkegaardian despair. But because he fails to observe an important distinction on which Kierkegaard's idea of selfhood is based, and which must be used if the ideas illustrating the action-theoretical notion of the self are to be Kierkegaard's, the conclusion must be that the analysis fails to throw light on the idea itself.
It isn't that Pörn disregards the distinction, as might someone sifting through Kierkegaard for things of value to the developing study of selfhood. He assumes he has identified it and found the right place for it in the action-theoretical analysis. My remarks are directed at showing that this isn't so. I also suggest what would be needed, in terms of that analysis, if Kierkegaard's distinction were to be reconstructed in this way, though I am not altogether convinced that the terms are ultimately suitable for the analysis of selfhood at all. Whether Kierkegaard's own ideas on selfhood, however reconstructed, really can contribute to the developing study of the self in general depends on what live issues can be seen to hang on his distinction, and on whether the study of the self so develops as to be able to do justice to them.
The action-theoretical self
The analytical apparatus Pörn employs is that of the negative information-feedback control loop. The state of a 'system' analysed in its terms can be specified at any given time in respect of four variables: (1) an actual state of affairs comprising the agent's occurrent interest horizon (the 'actual state of the inventory'); (2) (1) as it appears to the agent (the 'apparent state of the inventory'); (3) the decision to correct a discrepancy between (2) and 'some fixed ideal state of the inventory'; and (4) the influencing of (1) by action designed to eliminate the discrepancy. There is a corresponding four-phase diachronic specification: (i) an inquiry phase, (ii) a decision process, (iii) an implementation stage and (iv) 'a phase in which the inventory is subject to change' (p. 199, Abstract). Beyond these specifications of the system in respect of what is 'generated within the loop' , there are also three important factors governing the system's performance 'from outside' (p. 200): (a) an ideal-state of the inventory (a 'want' or 'volition'); (b) the repertoire of intrapersonal abilities to act; and (c) the 'epistemic frame' or set of models accessible to the agent from which the actual model for understanding (1) is drawn (ibid.).
If this sounds formidable, the basic idea is quite simple. It is essentially that of a self-correcting device, of which there are numerous familiar examples, both mechanical (self-regulating cistern taps, thermostats, electronic homing devices, and so on) and biological (sweating and shivering), with the appraisive, optational, decisional and implementational additions needed to account for human goal-directed performance. The special merit of the model for articulating human behaviour is, as Pörn points out, that it can replicate the case where the goa
l of goal-directed performance is some aspect of the goal-directed performance itself. Applied to a simple example, the ingredients of the account can be illustrated as follows. I am driving (or being driven) to a lunch appointment; a tyre punctures, thereby forcing an evident discrepancy on my attention between an ideal state, the expeditious status quo, and the sudden fact of having one good tyre too few and the prospect of missing my appointment. Corrective action requires the wheel to be replaced by the spare, the decision is taken, and work with the jack and spanner changes the actual state in the direction of the ideal.
Before going further with this example, let us note two questions it raises which Pörn's very tight account doesn't tell us how to answer. He describes the self as a 'family of interconnected relational systems' (p. 202). What he has in mind here, or at least the cases he directs our attention to, are systems interconnected by way of the factors influencing one system's performance being states of inventories to be corrected by a system of a higher order. But the example indicates other kinds of interconnection that might create problems concerning the relation of systems to selves. For instance, we would have to say that the wheel-changing, like any other emergency repair, takes place within a system already in its implementation stage, even if that stage is temporarily interrupted. The fact that I am on the road at all is part of my attempt to ensure that the inventory-description 'being about to be there at lunchtime' remains true in face of the threat of the counterfinal 'not being about to be there at lunchtime'. Thus I am a family of systems connected also in this way. Secondly, what if I can't change wheels and my chauffeur does it for me?