Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  Can the factors of 'ideal state of the inventory' and 'repertoire' be distributed between two systems, or families of interconnected systems, that combine in one operation? Or is my ability to command the ability of others (one kind of second-order ability) a proper component in my own repertoire, so that the family of systems comprising the chauffeur's self doesn't have to be included among the factors determining the performance in this case? Perhaps these are not problems but simply indications of the power and flexibility of the analytical model, showing how it can also be applied to the familiar 'nesting' phenomenon and to the wide variety of master–slave and other symbiotic interrelationships.

  In the present case, however, these are not of concern. We are to think of the interconnections purely in terms of the stratification of the factors governing the loops 'from outside'. Punctured, chauffeurless and unable to change wheels, I miss my appointment and reflect that it would be an undoubted advantage to learn wheel-changing skills. That I can acquire the ability means I have this second-order ability, which is thus part of my 'second-order repertoire', that is, of one of the three factors influencing the system's correctional activity in respect of its own set of first-order abilities, or its 'first-order repertoire'. (The other factors are the ideal state of the inventory, the agent's 'want' or 'volition' – the set of these 'operative at a given time' Pörn labels the 'agent's will' – and, secondly, the 'epistemic frame'.) One could say quite generally that life, particularly in its early years, is a continual disclosure of significant deficiencies in one's first-order repertoire. Reading, writing, riding bicycles, making white sauce, speaking to the Søren Kierkegaard Selskab in Danish are all things one can find oneself wanting but unable to do. Wanting to be able to do something one cannot presently do (intrapersonally, that is, because of lack of ability, not just because the opportunity happens to be withheld) is having an ideal for the state of the inventory of one's repertoire, and learning to do it is changing the actual repertoire in the direction of the ideal. Pörn's example is of making oneself understood in Russian – the inability to do so being 'a feature of my first-order repertoire' , the ability to acquire that ability 'an item in my second-order repertoire' (p. 201).

  Similarly I can have a 'fixed ideal' of the inventory of my goals. As Pörn says in a companion article,

  human beings respond with conation not only to items in their external environment but also to the fact that they exhibit or fail to exhibit such responses. The fact that a person is, or is not, the bearer of a desire or aversion may be among the circumstances with respect to which he exerts his will.2

  I can appraise my present inventory of goals and find it wanting, though, as Pörn points out, this can just as well be a matter of wanting to 'rid oneself of a will one already has' as of wanting to 'obtain possession of a will one has not already got' (p. 201). In the companion article he mentions the want to be rid of a desire to change one's profession, due to the impracticability of doing so and to the fact that wanting to change it interferes with a prudentially satisfactory identification with one's

  present profession. Here 'a first-order want … is the object of a second-order want declaring the first-order want invalid'. This second-order want may in turn become the object of a third-order want, as when one begins to reflect that too much identification with one's present profession might be bad.3 A case of the alternative possibility, where one wants to add to the first-order set, would be wanting to like classical music in order to avoid the boredom otherwise involved in accompanying one's disabled aunt to concerts.

  Allowing, though here without comment, that the same stratification applies to epistemic frames (the set of models from which the one used to appraise the actual inventory as deficient is drawn), we can now note that Pörn defines a first-order self ('of an individual at a given time') as 'those control systems which constitute his activities in relation to his surroundings at that time'. Included in the first-order self are 'the determinants of these systems and the relations which obtain between them, e.g. the inadequacy of the repertoire relative to the will' (p. 200). Correspondingly, the second-order self is defined as 'the union of all [the] second-order control systems together with their determinants and the relations between them' (p. 201).

  The immediate and the spiritual self

  Of the first-order self, Pörn says that '[f]ollowing Kierkegaard we may also call the first-order self the immediate self' (p. 200). And by the 'spiritual self' he says he understands 'the open collection of interconnected selves beyond the immediate self – open because its highest level cannot be fixed once for all'. He continues:

  The spiritual self supplies a blueprint for the immediate self, a possibility for its repertoire, its will, and its epistemic frame. Let us call this blueprint the ideal self. In the spiritual self the immediate self, such as it is according to the information available to the individual, is compared with the ideal self. Any discrepancy between them requires decision, choice of corrective action. If it belongs to the repertoire, the corrective action chosen influences the immediate self in the direction of the ideal self; and if it does not belong to the repertoire, the individual concerned has a problem with respect to the will.

  (p. 201)

  This problem normally becomes, however, the subject of 'another ideality, namely the will of a higher-order self'. And that in turn can be subjected to demands of a 'self of still higher order' . This leads Pörn to identify the spiritual self with what in The Sickness unto Death is called 'the expanding factor' (Sickness, p. 60),4 which we note, however, that the text identifies only as 'the infinite', in contrast to the finite, or limiting factor, which for Pörn is the immediate self (pp. 201–2).

  To test Pörn's claim to be articulating Kierkegaard's concepts here, consider first the implications of his distinction between the first- and the second-order self. One is that it fails to distinguish kinds of goal (want or volition). If I cannot speak

  Danish but have a second-order ability to acquire that capacity, and do acquire it, what I have achieved is simply a wider range of first-order capacities. In that case there is no reason to distinguish the old range, belonging to the 'immediate' self, from the new. For native Danes, who don't have to make speaking Danish into an ideal in order to learn their language, the ability will belong to their immediate selves in any case. Similarly, a naturally talented and versatile person will have 'immediately' what others less fortunate will have to acquire qua (as Pörn sees it) spiritual selves. On this account a person's spirituality will be measurable by such criteria as the number of evening classes he attends, though, having acquired the aptitudes and pocketed the diplomas, he will have then ceased to be spiritual in the respects in question.

  Related to this consequence is another. On Pörn's account there is no sense in which the second-order (or any higher-order) self has the first- (or next-lower-) order self, as such, as its target. Even though he defines the agent's 'will' as the 'set of volitions', the set is only that 'operative at a given time' (p. 200); the second-order self's concern is limited to what is relevant to a particular piece of agency, such as wanting to be rid of the desire to change one's profession. In other words, the second-order self's interest in the first-order self is purely situational. The demand its blueprint makes on the latter's range of abilities and goals is only piecemeal.

  A third consequence is that the piecemeal changes it prescribes may be motivated by mere prudence. The kind of control exercised on first-order activity, in respect of goals, abilities or epistemic frames, is compatible with its being directed at straightforwardly improved first-order performance; in the terms Pörn provides there is no requirement, for instance, that the nature of the motivations in first-order performance be changed. In fact an example of the kind of change the second-order self might seek, on Pörn's account, is provided by the aesthete's 'rotation method', which Pörn himself refers to in the companion article. As he describes its function there, the method is designed to keep 'ideality �
�� at bay' and at the same time secure a certain 'distance' from immediacy, so as to avoid disappointed expectations. The technique is to avoid having expectations and to take pleasure only in accidental superficialities.5 This, too, would have to be a performance of the spiritual self, for no other reason than that it involves a modification of the first-order will. Kierkegaard might have wanted to call this a performance of the spiritual self, but then it would be for a quite different kind of reason, which we will touch on below.

  'Spirit' , in the Hegelian context in which Kierkegaard wrote, was a familiar and fairly well-defined term.6 In Hegelian philosophy we have 'absolute' spirit representing an ideal of reconciliation between two at first apparently incongruent concepts, which can be conveniently termed 'subjectivity' and 'substantiality'.7 For Hegel the reconciliation occurs in the inward and outward manifestations of human reason. Kierkegaard of course rejects this view, though not the ideal of reconciliation. What the subject lacks in substantiality, because the notions of subject and substance are obdurately incompatible in human existence, is 'appro

  priated' in faith by the subject's 'willing to be itself', that is, by accepting a 'blueprint' of itself as centred on God ('reposing freely in God'),8 or, as Kierkegaard puts it, 'grounded transparently in the power that established it' (Sickness, p. 44). The spiritual self, for Kierkegaard, is the self that acknowledges an ideal of reconciliation between incongruent terms that in immediacy are not yet grasped as incongruent.

  Thus in The Sickness unto Death Kierkegaard's pseudonym says the immediate person's self is 'in immediate continuity with the Other … coheres immediately with this Other – desiring, craving, enjoying, etc., yet passively. … Its dialectic is: the pleasant and the unpleasant; its concepts are: good fortune, misfortune, fate' (ibid., pp. 81–2). For Kierkegaard this means that there is as yet no real self. The self emerges only with 'an act of separation' (ibid., p. 85) which brings (or is) an awareness of being 'essentially different from the environment and the external world and their effect'. Kierkegaard clearly gives us to understand that the activity of the immediate (not yet real) self reveals itself to reflection as being inherently deficient because such activity can no longer be grasped as enclosing the individual in a substantial unity or completeness, as perhaps the child or immediate adult with (only) an illusion of something eternal in it unreflectingly assumes. The Sickness unto Death begins, 'Man is spirit', and it then straightaway identifies spirit with self. The implication is that the individual has to look for its fulfilment (ideal state, blueprint of selfhood) elsewhere than in the natural world, or in any kind of development that the second-order self might demand of the first-order self qua natural being.

  According to certain passages in Kierkegaard, one 'gains' the eternal in the experience of temporal loss. Losing what you have set your heart on, but being able to say the loss is 'merely' temporal, means you have 'gained the eternal' and placed yourself outside the range of temporal defeats, good and bad fortune, fate. The step he calls 'resignation' involves a transference of the wish one had for oneself in the world of time to a wish one has for the Eternal Being.9 One is thereby compensated for the loss, though really 'more than compensated', as Kierkegaard says, just because you have now 'gained' the eternal.10 Whatever constructions our own epistemic frame(s) may tempt us to propose for such alleged discovery of the eternal, there would be little objection to saying that, prior to the framework of faith in which Kierkegaard embeds his concept of the eternal, the eternal, merely negatively conceived, must offer itself as a devastatingly bleak habitat for the self cast out of the Eden of contingency and time. Here the self is mere subjectivity, bereft of all that was assumed substantial and incapable of conceiving of any substitute. The self thus placed is what Kierkegaard thinks it must become in order to qualify for Christianity as he understands it, as what offers reconciliation for the individual qua individual.

  Supplementing the analysis

  To capture this predicament of selfhood, the action-theoretical model would have to be refined. It would have to accommodate at least three amendments to the account given by Pörn. First, it would have to distinguish 'spiritual' from other idealities. The power to impose idealities on one's given self shows only that there is a power of reflection and self-correction, which may be only a prudential capacity; but as Kierkegaard says, for the highest ideality the point of finding what is the most prudent thing to do is to 'disdain to do it'.11 Secondly, spiritual idealities would have to be distinguished from others in terms of the kind of goal the agent should or shouldn't have. This means that the target of its demands is, in Pörn's terminology, the 'will' of the self as a whole, and not just in respect of a particular form of activity. And, thirdly, the discrepancy between the apparent state of the immediate inventory and the ideal state posited by the spiritual self must be statable in terms of the incongruent opposites with which Kierkegaard specifies spiritual ideality, roughly a space in which the expanding factors are given rein but without losing sight of the limiting. By relating itself to an ideal of 'true' selfhood, Kierkegaard does not mean that the (no longer immediate) self is actually 'reposing in God' (completion of this loop being the state of faith in which despair vanishes); he means only that the self now has this model of the inventory and is confronted by its demands. On this interpretation, the field of the spiritual self's operations lies in the hiatus between the 'fixing' of the ideal state of the inventory, as a reconciliation in the terms stated, and actually conforming to that ideal. Thus the ideals set by the spiritual self will typically be those of higher-order selves than that self which first fixes the ideal state of its inventory in terms that make it proper to call the self spiritual. These selves will have such higher-order goals as wanting not to have the ideal thus fixed for the will, and wanting to have another ideal in which it is not centred on a transcendent God but on itself. These in fact correspond to the two main forms of despair discussed by Kierkegaard: not willing to be oneself, and willing to be oneself. The 'oneself' in the first case is the 'self one truly is' and thus ought to 'will' to become, and in the second case a 'self which [one] is not', that is, a self that is not the self one ought to will to become. Since despair in its first form is the inability to become one's true self, and in its second the inability to become something other than one's true self, the hiatus may also be understood, as Pörn says, in terms of inadequacy of the agent's repertoire (p. 202). But we mustn't let this simple formula obscure an important difference between the inabilities corresponding to these two forms. In the first it is an inability to endorse the ideal of true selfhood that is in some way 'fixed', an inadequacy of repertoire which can be made good by dint of higher-order willing and doing, that is, by adding to one's set of wants whatever Kierkegaard would count as faith. In the second, it is an inability to dislodge the fixed ideal of true selfhood. On Kierkegaard's view it cannot be dislodged, for this specific ideal forces itself on anyone who reflects clearly upon the nature of human existence. So the project of becoming something other than one's true self fails not because one hasn't got what it takes to become the kind of person one chooses to make of

  oneself, something that might be remedied, but because nothing, not even becoming such a person, will enable one to dispose of the ideal of true selfhood.

  Despair

  Pörn's account of Kierkegaardian despair is subtle and consistent within the framework of his analysis, but it gives a contextually anomalous interpretation of the two main forms of despair. This is due not to applying the action-theoretical model itself, or at least I see no reason in principle why that should be so, but to a failure to identify a main component in Kierkegaard's concept of the self. In order to 'fix the concept of despair' (p. 202) Pörn begins with Kierkegaard's example of the ambitious man who wants to be (a) Caesar. The man sees his subsequent inability to achieve this goal as a failing in his (in Pörn's terminology) 'immediate' self. So he sets about making the necessary modification(s) in whatever 'feature or constellatio
n of features in his will, repertoire, or epistemic frame' is at fault (which Pörn says is what Kierkegaard means by saying that the man 'wants to be rid of himself' [cf. ibid.] ). But he finds he cannot make the modifications, thereby revealing 'a discrepancy between the immediate and the ideal self for the removal of which the higher-order repertoire is inadequate' (ibid.) – the 'formula', as Pörn claims, for all 'elementary despair over oneself' (ibid.).

  This, so far, is Pörn's version of the first of Kierkegaard's two main forms of despair, not willing to be oneself – the despair of 'weakness' (Sickness, p. 80). The transition to the second form, willing to be oneself – the despair of 'defiance' – is presented as follows: in order to escape the obstacle posed by the fact that the immediate self cannot be suitably modified, the despairer chooses one among possible idealities that 'do not take (full) cognizance of the immediate self in its concretion' – the chosen ideality being what Pörn calls a 'counterfeit' self (p. 202; cf. Sickness, p. 99, on 'refashioning' the self'). So the second form of despair is being willing to be one's counterfeit self, a self that ignores the necessities and limitations of the concrete self. The project is doomed from the outset, however, for there is nothing on which this (Kierkegaard calls it 'hypothetical' [ibid., p. 100] ) self can stand 'eternally firm' (ibid.). This self is no more a self than a king without a country is a king (ibid.).

  As an attempt to 'fix' Kierkegaard's concept of despair, this seemingly plausible reconstruction suffers from a serious limitation: it fails to locate the principal parameter of the development, and in consequence fails to mark its beginning and end. It also fails, and for the same reason, to identify what it is the 'weak' despairer wants to do away with.