Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  Consider first what Pörn says is needed to bring the 'constantly inward movement' of despair (p. 204) to a stop. He says it can only be stopped by a return to the immediate self. That is because Kierkegaard says a person has to see his task in the self given him, that is to say, 'at the beginning' and not 'in the beginning' (Sickness, p. 99, emphasis added), not in a counterfeit self. But in order to see his task in this way, Kierkegaard's individual must first undergo a transition to selfhood from immediacy.

  Pörn is right to associate having one's task in the self that is given with the idea of the individual's having an 'eternal validity' (p. 203) (though this expression is from Either/Or), but he is wrong to identify the notion of the individual's eternal validity with that of being a concrete self in which 'the determinants of the immediate self are formed and settled in a pattern' (ibid.). The idea of an eternal validity is used in connection with that of the 'choice' of oneself in the sense of a revaluation of the concrete self from the point of view of there being a task connected with the self's having 'something eternal' in it, and this involves something other than simple reversion to the pattern into which the determinants of the immediate self have been formed and settled. Indeed Kierkegaard says quite clearly that the choice of oneself in one's eternal validity is not choice of oneself in one's 'immediacy … as this contingent individual'.12 The very idea of an eternal validity requires a 'complete break with immediacy', which leaves the self

  naked and abstract, in contrast to the fully clothed self of immediacy, [and is] the first form of the infinite self and the progressive impulse in the entire process through which a self infinitely takes possession of its actual self along with its difficulties and advantages.

  (Sickness, p. 86, emphasis added)

  Taking possession of the actual self from this point of view is not a return to the immediate self, not therefore a choice of oneself in one's immediacy.

  We saw that on Pörn's account despair begins when the second-order self makes an impossible demand on the first-order self – for example, becoming a Caesar. But Kierkegaard makes it clear that, at the level he is interested in, the self that makes such demands is already in despair. Wanting to be Caesar is already an attempt to be rid of the self. Why should the second-order self want to do away with the first-order self (or modify it more or less radically) even before the second-order self has begun to give it such impossible demands? Because even though the destruction of immediacy through reflection (for example, on temporal loss, and so on) leaves the self incapable of fulfilment by way of its 'settled' modes of transaction with the environment, or any changes or developments in these, it is still unwilling to locate its fulfilment in the 'eternal', which is after all, in finite terms, nowhere at all and provides no 'clothes' to cover its nakedness. Becoming a Caesar is the goal of a higher-order self that has taken exception to the demand of 'true' selfhood posed by a lower-order self in terms of an ideal of the self's being in some sense eternal. The higher-order self refuses to endorse this ideal, and becoming a Caesar is an attempt to impose a blueprint that keeps the repertoire and will confined safely to the temporal. As Kierkegaard says: 'By becoming Caesar he would have despairingly been rid of himself' (Sickness, p. 49). It is here, in the ambition itself, not with the failure to realize it, that despair is first to be found. And it is the true self, the self distinguished from immediacy, that one who despairs in the despair of weakness tries (inevitably in vain) to be rid of, not an immediate self that doesn't have what it takes to be a Caesar. Indeed, on Kierkegaard's account, it is not an immediate, and so on Pörn's account not a first-order, self that the higher-

  order self wants to be rid of. It is the self that has already recognized, if only vaguely, that it is not immediate (though there is no reason why for purposes of analysis we shouldn't refer to such a non-immediate self as a first-order self, in respect of second-order attempts to subvert its acknowledgement of its spiritual ideality).

  This brings us back to Pörn's correlation of the spiritual and immediate selves with, respectively, the 'expanding' and 'limiting' factors referred to earlier. As Pörn sees it, the expansion is to be understood in terms of increasing 'orders' in the stratification of selves (see pp. 201–2). But Kierkegaard seems clearly to be referring to degrees of discrepancy between the idealities imposed on a finite self and that self's inescapably finite situation. Expansion is a matter of 'infinitization', whose 'medium' he identifies with imagination, that 'faculty for all faculties' which 'in the last resort' determines what 'feelings, understanding and will a person has' (Sickness, pp. 60–1). The will that is 'furthest away from itself (when it is most infinitized in its purpose and decision)' must at the same time be 'as near as can be to itself in the carrying out of the infinitely small part of the task that can be accomplished this very day, this very hour, this very moment' (ibid., p. 62, original emphases). Expansion extends the finite self's possibilities, the limiting factor 'finitizes' – refers them back to the self's actual situation in terms of what can and is to be done. If expansion were a matter of increments of orders of ideality, as Pörn assumes, then since a higher-order ideality can be invoked to try to dislodge an ideal that makes the finite self's task alarmingly great, it would also serve as a limiting factor in respect of the finite self's ability to confront and realize its infinite possibilities. Expansion connotes a progressive development in the stratification of idealities (to revert to action-theoretical terminology), provided two conditions are met. The first is that the possibilities are referred back to a finite self whose mode of 'becoming' is the realization of the possibilities. The second is that the finite self whose possibilities the idealities represent sees these as modes of an ideal of selfhood constituted or 'posited' by a 'power' other than it, that is, a transcendent God. If the former condition is not met, that is, if infinitizing is not complemented by finitizing, then the self lives in its idealities as if they were already realized, a form of despair that converges on insanity. If the latter condition is not met, the self exploits the expanding factor, its 'consciousness of the infinite self', as a resource for making itself whatever it wants to be. Thus, instead of beginning with the 'concrete' self as it is and seeing its 'task' in that, it sets about 'refashion[ing] the whole thing, in order to get out of it a self such as [it] wants to be' (Sickness, p. 99). Kierkegaard says that 'to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis [of infinitizing and finitization]' (ibid., p. 59).

  Conclusion

  A conclusion to draw from the above might be that Kierkegaard's concept of the self is rather special and belongs to a tradition that is unlikely to afford insights to students of selfhood used to a new and more secular climate of thought. For Kierkegaard the situation of pure subjectivity (or however one chooses to refer to it) is one to be sought since it is what qualifies you to grasp and seize Christianity's offer of reconciliation, appropriation of the actual self. But the same situation is one that Hegel thinks you should avoid; reconciliation requires that you renounce your individuality and put on the clothes of ethical substance, of society and the State. Feuerbach thinks it inappropriate to link the category of eternity with that situation since it is only the species that is eternal, and whose advancement offers transient specimens their only chance of substantiating achievement. The Right Hegelians deny this and claim you are on the right track for ascending to that form of 'eternal' consciousness which unites you, qua individual, with God. Marx, of course, diagnoses the cult of individuality, on the other hand, as an undesirable product of liberal capitalist political economy, though some, Sartre for instance, have accused him of failing to do justice to the place of individuality in the human scheme of things.

  How far these controversies can contribute to our understanding of selfhood must depend partly on what questions we are able and willing to raise about the self, and that sounds very much as if debating selfhood could itself be material for action-theoretical an
alysis. But leaving these controversies aside, one can support Pörn's claim that Kierkegaard can contribute to the study of the self. A close reading of The Sickness unto Death, especially those parts that trace the development from 'despair over the earthly or over something earthly', through 'despair about the eternal or over oneself', to 'defiance', affords a richness of compact psychological observation and a grasp of psychopathological structures that can throw light on any corresponding psychological context. Whether Pörn's action-theoretical model can still capture all the subtleties, I am not competent to judge.

  * * *

  15

  TWO WAYS OF COMING BACK TO REALITY

  Kierkegaard and Lukács

  Georg Lukács, in his confrontation with Existenzphilosophie after World War II, poured scorn on what he called this 'permanent carnival of fetishized inwardness' which, he said, continued to 'mesmerize and mislead bourgeois intellectuals'.1 Historically, he held Husserl and Heidegger accountable, but also Kierkegaard, and the latter together with Nietzsche he described as 'anti-democratic', holding both responsible, in his terms by the same token, for the destruction of reason. Yet Lukács's pupil Lucien Goldmann regarded his teacher as Existenzphilosophie's true father; not only did Lukács's first book Soul and Form (1910) contain a decidedly appreciative though critical piece on Kierkegaard, entitled 'The Foundering of Form on Life',2 much of Lukács's earlier work reads as an attempt to bring Kierkegaardian themes to bear on social problems in pre-World War I Europe. What happened in between to cause this change of mind or heart?

  It is worth noting that the later criticism is tempered. Kierkegaard (and Schopenhauer) still had some of that 'good faith' and 'consistency' which the existentialist philosophers were engaged in 'casting off' as they 'increasingly became apologists of bourgeois decadence'.3 It seems in fact as if the later Lukács saw in these earlier writers some kind of heroic example that allowed them as writers to escape the charge of decadence that he levelled at their works. Or was there even something in Kierkegaard's thinking itself that positively protects it and the writings too, even in Lukács's eyes, from the charge of decadence? My main argument here is that there is, but that Lukács didn't see it. If he had, he might have realized that the charges of decadence he levelled at Kierkegaard could just as well, mutatis mutandis, be levelled at himself.

  In the early essay, itself a fine example of poetic prose, Lukács accuses Kierkegaard of having made a poem out of his life. It all began with a 'gesture', the act both of renunciation and of deception by which Kierkegaard jilted Regine and tried, in furtherance of his love of her, to expunge all traces of his own life in her mind by presenting himself in the role of cynical reprobate. Lukács correctly sees this as a totally vain attempt on Kierkegaard's part to free Regine for a future untrammelled by vestiges of their common past. Among the possibilities Kierkegaard is forced to leave her with is that of reflecting that he might well be deceiving her, a possibility which in turn spawns an endless sea of further reflections on possible motives with their implications for the present

  state of their (dis)relationship, which is of course just the situation graphically presented in Either/Or's 'Shadowgraphs', a literary fact which suggests that the futility of the 'gesture' was early apparent to Kierkegaard himself and that his subsequent writings might be better understood as an attempted accommodation to that circumstance. But Lukács sees the early gesture as setting the pattern for the rest of Kierkegaard's life. What Kierkegaard had really done was sacrifice ordinary life for a poet's existence. Regine had to be sacrificed but still loved, as the knight of resignation loved his unattainable princess, with an idealized love vested in a transcendent being. Lukács suggests that Kierkegaard's religiosity derives from his poet's need for a transcendental locus of this idealized love, beyond the fluctuations and pettiness of ordinary human relationships, a fictive relationship in which the actual object of love no longer stands in the way of that love.4 The ordinary and everyday is sacrificed to creativity but with the love itself preserved in a purified and 'unreal' form. Looked at in this way, the religiosity in Kierkegaard's works is not, as Kierkegaard presents it, a 'second movement' back to reality (as if the idealized love will still one day be real) for which resignation of one's love to a higher being is the necessary preliminary. It is simply a requirement of resignation itself; to preserve the love in an unreal form there must be a transcendent God to preserve it. A line can thus be traced directly from Regine to the transcendental God of love 'above' and 'beyond' the everyday sometimes-you're-right, sometimes-I'm-right world, a God for isolated human beings against whom they are always in the wrong.

  As Lukács sees it, Kierkegaard is trying to force an intractable infinity into a mould formed of personally significant but necessarily life-defying choices. Objective time with its plethora of possibilities is frozen heroically but falsely into moments which purport to disambiguate an inherently ambiguous reality. In the subsequent Theory of the Novel (1916) Lukács was to proclaim the ambiguity as a political and therefore contingent fact. The novelist fabricates forms embracing subject and world where the world itself offers no such visible unities.5 So the novelist's passion is a useless one. How much more so then the passion with which one makes of one's own life a novel! Kierkegaard's 'heroism', says Lukács, was that he wanted to 'create forms from life'; he lived 'in such a way that every moment of his life became rounded into the grand gesture'.6 Kierkegaard's 'honesty' was that he 'saw a crossroads and walked to the end of the road he had chosen'; his 'tragedy' was that he wanted to live 'what cannot be lived',7 since although the whole of life is the poet's raw material, by trying to give limit and significance to 'the deliquescent mass of reality', he simply spites that reality. The choice the poet makes is never a choice of an absolute and the choice never makes him absolute, never a 'thing in itself and for itself';8 we might say the poet as such swims in an aesthetic element and never touches bottom. Kierkegaard's greatness lay in the special situation and talents that enabled him nevertheless to conduct an apparently successful campaign against life's necessity. But really, says Lukács, by giving 'every appearance of victory and success', all that his character and gifts

  enabled him to do was lure himself 'deeper and deeper' into 'the all-devouring desert', 'like Napoleon in Russia'.9

  Lukács was later to be lured quite literally into Russia, in the belief that he was aligning himself constructively with an historical process of humanization, his 'reality'. Since Lukács's Russia proved to be very much a desert, and all-devouring at that, it is tempting to compare this early portrayal of Kierkegaard with the facts of Lukács's own life, the better to clarify the differences in their views on soul, form, life, reality, necessity, and so on. Might it not be that the Marxist littérateur's life, though politically engaged as Kierkegaard's never was, scarcely touched bottom either? Soul and Form, as the title indicates, was greatly influenced by the neo-Kantian notion that human subjectivity impresses forms on an inchoate manifold, not in the limited 'transcendental' context within which Kant himself worked, but in the wider post-Hegelian context of historical forms of consciousness which include everything from anthropology through politics to culture and art. In a central chapter, among all the forms that consciousness can take, Lukács claims a privileged place for 'tragedy'. It is privileged in something like the traditional epistemological sense, as was also the corresponding Marxist notion, derived from Hegel, of a sociopolitical group, the proletariat, best placed to see the lie of the land. Tragedy for Lukács, and it is an idea he would have recognized in Climacus's Postscript if he did not actually find it there,10 is the self-conscious form of the soul in which reality is faced most fully and openly, with 'death – the limit in itself' as an 'ever immanent reality', a thought then quite soon to gain currency in Heidegger's 'being-unto-death'.

  There are various ways of interpreting and responding to the full acknowledgement of finitude. The Kierkegaardian way is to describe the form of consciousness in which it occur
s as one of total isolation in which the self, conscious of finitude as a limit, interprets itself as poised before possibilities that transcend that limit. The Heideggerian way is to insist that the self qua Dasein has no such possibilities and that humankind's range is circumscribed by its ongoing finite projects. Lukács represents a third response. It is customary, following Goldmann, to say that Lukács's path-breaking History and Class Consciousness (1923) represents the overcoming of tragedy.11 But, if that is correct, it is a solution in a special sense. Lukács does not think that what he asserts in the later book are truths you can only have access to from the privileged position of tragic consciousness. On the contrary, genuinely overcoming tragedy means discovering that the tragic form of consciousness is neither essential nor privileged. So in the subsequent work Lukács has in effect revised his notion of the sense of finitude as affording privileged epistemic access to reality and now rejects the 'narrow' access to reality implied by the notion of an individual consciousness. History and Class Consciousness widens the epistemological base to embrace the shared, collective perspective of the proletariat. So the more mature Lukácsian view is that what is needed for establishing an authentic relationship to reality is not the individual soul's tragic insight but insight into the actual disrelationships – provisional, contingent tragedies one might say – to be found in existing societies. Lukács thus came to deny that

  anxiety and despair afford a fundamental perspective on the human condition, seeing in them simply a psychopathological detour which can and should be avoided.