Kierkegaard and Philosophy: Selected Essays

by Alastair Hannay

  It is not at all difficult to find in the Hegelian thought that inspired much of Lukács's work a rationale for this step away from subjective forms of consciousness. An Hegelian would deem as totally 'undialectical' any attempt to provide a solution to the tragic consciousness that simply takes that form of consciousness for granted; it is as though the sense of tragedy could be conceived as in some way an eternally valid cognitive achievement to be chalked up to humanity and taken at face value. To do that, however, would be to assume that any 'solution' must regard it as an unsurpassable spiritual fact which itself lays down the conditions for human fulfilment. It is precisely an assumption of this kind that provokes cries of 'decadence' from Hegelians. Wolf Lepenies nicely expresses this in the thought that 'the element of reflection in bourgeois melancholy was not a phenomenon of rational thought; rather, it represented a return of disempowered subjectivity to itself and the attempt to make a means of self-confirmation out of the inhibition of action'.12 Here then we have the conventional critique of decadentism. The philosophy that seeks subjective solutions to subjective problems and tries in this way to legitimate the condition of the problem itself, reinterpreting it as a necessary precondition of the solution, is nothing more than melancholy's narcissistic reflection on itself. Since the solution reflects the problem, it does not constitute a genuine escape. Nor is it hard to appreciate how an Hegelian might read Kierkegaard too in this light, for we see once again how Kierkegaard's concept of faith might easily be diagnosed as a de facto acceptance of despair, as simply an attempt to legitimate despair rather than 'overcome' it. To overcome despair in the style proper to Hegelians, one must locate and define the limited forms of consciousness out of which it emerges. Subjectivity and its travails can be pinpointed as bourgeois and in the long term as surpassable contingencies of the human condition. Thus idleness and ennui – along with the novel – arise in a certain phase in capitalist society. Inside the frame of that society's own self-image these negative features are given positive interpretations. The subjectivity in which they arise secures its own legitimacy as the medium of authenticity, martyrdom, suffering for the truth, sin and personal redemption, or just plain decadence which now acquires metaphysical status. But, says this rationale, whatever the flavour of the positive philosophies erected on it, the solutions here are no less decadent than the problems.

  It would, however, be a serious mistake to think that Kierkegaardian subjectivity was undialectical in this way. The succeeding stages or 'spheres' of life do not form solutions to problems as defined in their predecessors. The 'solution' provided by the religious stages, for example, diagnoses melancholy and despair in religious terms and therefore as problems of a quite different kind and description. Thus there is a deep divide between the ersatz heroisms of authenticity, or 'positive' decadence, and the Kierkegaardian notion that the Good can only ever materialize in individual wills aligned to tasks done 'consistently' and in 'good

  faith'. The latter amounts to an entirely new form of consciousness, as new and radical as the one that Lukács adopted when he chose a transindividual solution to tragic consciousness. It is this genuinely revolutionary feature that made other left-wing thinkers such as Adorno and Marcuse take Kierkegaard seriously as a genuinely edifying thinker, as when Marcuse concedes that Kierkegaard's existentialism 'embod[ies] many traits of a deep-rooted social theory'.13 It was just this revolutionary feature that was lacking in the post-World War II existentialism opposed by Lukács. Without the religious point of view and its heroic promise of a world socialized by individual conscience in a distributive (each one his or her own) relationship to God, there remained only 'authenticity', or the cult of subjectivity as an end in itself, what Lukács calls 'bourgeois decadence'. So in a sense Lukács is right about the existentialists but much closer to Kierkegaard than he allows, also in the way he prosecutes his version of 'reality' against their common foe, the bourgeoisie. Indeed, Lukács and Kierkegaard are both of them martyrs to the cause of what they differently assume is the Good. Even the terms of their cultural criticism run parallel. Most of what Lukács says about decadent literature can be paraphrased in terms of Anti-Climacus's typology of despair. The terminological difference is that what Kierkegaard calls despair Lukács calls irrationality. But since what Lukács calls irrationality is the failure to face the possibility of a humanized world in the way he believed that must be done, the real disagreement is about the method and content of humanization.

  Lukács systematically ignored the possibility of an unfetishized subjectivity. True to Marxist form, he assumed that the answer to all the travails of subjectivity can be given indiscriminately in terms of some transindividual realm of forces to be controlled and diverted so as to produce some special state of human being, a state in which tragedy and despair need no longer occur. As a self-appointed custodian of the 'subjectivities' of the great writers, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Mann, Tolstoy, whose works he interpreted as sources of insight into the course that the historical process should take, Lukács felt he was both saving communism from its anti-humanistic image and preserving a heritage that would one day be the property of the people – a noble and humanistic aim. If this was Lukács's 'heroism', we could say that his 'honesty' lay in a proved commitment to the belief that literature is the irrational soul's striving for expression with humankind as its topic, and that in order to be 'really' rather than fictitiously and decadently about humankind, literature must catch on to history. In this way Lukács, too, it can be said, walked to the end of the road he had chosen.

  What, then, was Lukács's tragedy? To overcome tragedy, for Lukács, means overcoming the aesthetics of subjectivity. This too is something he shares with Kierkegaard, though with his quite different alternative in mind. It seems the alternative was forced on him more by his Hegelian instincts than by the requirements of left-wing philosophy. Adorno, for instance, saw the 'aesthetic' as a growth-point and not just a locus of sterility and decadence. The post-Nietzschean tradition, or at least one aspect of it, also offers its non-Kierkegaardian alternatives. It does

  indeed seem odd to talk of decadence and sterility in the same breath. Decadence, along with birth and growth, is an integral part of Aristotle's sublunary world, the world in which decay is part of a cycle of life. Sterility is more like an unnatural intrusion of timelessness, or eternity, it being just this that allows Lukács to talk of the permanency of the carnival of fetishized inwardness. Making the eternal into a feature of the self is to lift the self out of reality and leave it in stasis, which is what sterility amounts to. According to Kierkegaard, the aesthetic is only boring or sterile when developed into a cult that refuses to seek any kind of continuity through life's accidents, or, in other words, refuses to impose form on life. But the Kierkegaardian idea of the 'eternal' in one's self is not that of fixing a path for oneself ahead of history and in defiance of reality, as Lukács's extrapolation from Kierkegaard's 'gesture' on behalf of Regine would have us believe; it is the idea of there being a constant readiness to solve whatever ethical tasks life puts in our way. It does so precisely by providing a dimension of inner time or continuity which allows human (and other) value originally to manifest itself. Form does not, for Kierkegaard, founder on life; on the contrary, it is that in which value first appears.

  Lukács wanted to live a life for humanism. When he found his bourgeois clothes ill-suited to the better self he thought he should be, instead of taking the Kierkegaardian route via the nakedness of a separated self back to reality from a position of radical choice and ethical resoluteness through faith, he reached resolutely into the wardrobe and grabbed a uniform. He chose the part of a militant 'we'. Instead of embarking on an inner history, he chose to be directed by the 'dialectic of the historical process'.14 Lukács saw better than Kierkegaard the tragedy of human exploitation, and his great contribution was to bring humanizing insights to bear on the prevailing Marxist interpretation of that tragedy. But it remained essentially an intellectual contrib
ution, and in Kierkegaardian terms therefore also an aesthetic one. Lukács managed to live most of his revolutionary life in a world of literature, supposing that there lay humanity's insight into its own humanization. He failed to see that by appointing himself guardian of the European heritage on behalf of a universal 'we', he was taking it hostage. This doubly vicarious participation in the life of poetic subjectivity was Lukács's own way of making a poem of his life. His own tragedy was his failure to see through the myth of the universal 'we' and to detect its dehumanizing power.

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  16

  NIETZSCHE/KIERKEGAARD

  Prospects for dialogue?

  Organizers of philosophy conferences have devised a new kind of show. Dialogues are staged between philosophers long since dead in the persons of their latter-day interpreters. The 'dialogues' are ostensibly designed to let the philosophers' thoughts rub off on each other in ways that accidents of history have prevented. Well, why not? After all, their thoughts still linger on. But if we begin to ask what can realistically be expected of these vicarious conversations between philosophers who never met, difficulties proliferate. Are the thoughts that linger with us really theirs or are they just what we find congenial when we selectively skim the textual surface? Do we share a philosophical language with them, or they with each other? By not penetrating the surface, and by failing to take account of the specific cultural contexts in which the texts arose, are whatever similarities we find, or whatever ways in which the thought of one thinker may seem to support or interestingly modify that of the other, merely specious, not in fact obscuring real and significant differences that then go unobserved?

  There is the further complication with the two thinkers to be discussed here, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche – though it makes them particularly interesting for us – that their works speak to the future. The thought is that only the future will understand them. Kierkegaard wrote: 'Only when I am dead and gone will the time for my writings really come,'1 a common enough sentiment among creative artists and thinkers, one inviting future generations, such as ourselves, to claim that they are in a better position to interpret and judge them than were their contemporaries. In 1933 (soon approaching half-way between Kierkegaard and us) Karl Jaspers wrote that '[t]o their contemporaries these two philosophers seemed no more than freaks – prophets of a sensationalism which no one could take seriously … [but t]hey were, in truth, pioneers who discerned what already existed but had not as yet aroused general disquiet'. Jaspers then went on to say that 'only in our own day have they been acclaimed as thinkers dealing with contemporary actualities'. We are perhaps that happy generation, the generation privileged to be the first to understand what they were saying, assisting, as it were, at their first real birth, or even, a thought given credence by the notion that they were 'pioneers' with work to be followed up and completed, assisting in that birth.

  Yet, even if that is plausible, it does not mean that we are better able than these writers themselves to understand their writings or their thought. The perspectives

  from which what Jaspers calls 'contemporary actualities' appear to us can easily lead us to exaggerate the extent of the similarities of perspective from which the writers in question spoke to them. When it comes to what apocalyptic possibilities Kierkegaard and Nietzsche discerned in their own cultures, Jaspers says only that while 'Kierkegaard was the first to undertake a comprehensive critique of his time, one distinguished from all previous attempts by its earnestness … [and] first to be applicable to the age in which we are now living', a critique which, as though written 'but yesterday', confronts man 'with Nothingness', Nietzsche, 'who wrote a few decades later' and was 'unacquainted with the work of his predecessor', noted the advent of European nihilism, diagnosing its symptoms pitilessly.2

  Prophetic opposition to their culture might well be a common point of reference for these two thinkers. If we further imagine, as Jaspers seems to suggest, that ours is (or at least his was) the generation privileged to be the first to understand what these writers were saying, then surely we should be able to see clearly where, that is to say, on what, they agree and differ.

  Yet what critical project did they share? Indeed why should they share any? After all, they were separated by a generation.3 And while Kierkegaard's reference group was a local intelligentsia with which he was closely and quite personally involved, Nietzsche, a far more pretentious thinker and with an audience Kierkegaard could never have dreamed of, was taking on the whole of Western culture. We might loop them together as (de/re)constructive misfits,4 a promising enough proposal because radical misfits run the danger of formulating ideals that are simply the mirror-image of the societies they cannot or are determined not to join.5 Or, understandably from our point of view but not profitably as far as the needed insights for the future are concerned, they may tend to nostalgic Golden Ageism. That would make them, by the same token, poor both as diagnosticians and as prophets. Misfits may even be unable to see any mischief that their own, inevitably constrained attempts at renewal might cause. We could also propose that what they had in common is that they put their ages (or if we take the chance of assuming they belong to a single epoch) to the test, even putting themselves to the test. Some think they tested if not their societies to destruction then at least themselves. That, too, is an interesting hypothesis; it leads us to wonder at what point, if any, we should stop taking them seriously. Yet another unifying theme might be whether – if I may coin a word – 'racinators', by posing root questions, are fated to become deracinators, both for themselves and, if they are good enough, for their societies. Our two writers can certainly serve as potentially revealing examples in such a debate. Thus Dan Conway talks appositely of Nietzsche's 'attempt to retrieve the founding question of politics', and uses the metaphor of 'excavation', digging at 'the site of politics'.6 As for Kierkegaard, his 'dig' – he himself called it 'a domestic journey', an indirect reference to the 'international' journey of his brother-in-law, a famous palaeontologist and natural scientist who lived and worked many years in Brazil – was in his 'own consciousness', where he aimed, as he said, to 'uncover the preconditions of original sin'.7

  Here, however, I shall try to dig a little on my own account in order to uncover one difference between Kierkegaard and Nietzsche that seems to me to colour all their works. The question I try to shed some light on is where they stand on naturalism, a topic neither of them explicitly discusses as such but one upon which, given some leads as to what the term means to us, it might have been interesting to hear them in dialogue. My point of departure in each case will be what I take to be both the traditional and the current ways of misunderstanding both thinkers, a gloss on Jaspers' claim that only a later generation can see what it was that aroused their disquiet. In some respects we may grasp the point more clearly, but in others our better vision may be clouded more than we like to think by our own current concerns.

  Nietzsche was early castigated as an offence to modern liberal egalitarian society. Today his 'perspectivism' is embraced as the expression of a radically democratic freedom. Both views miss the point, which is to say that both are too little Nietzschean. The former response was still too blinded by the slave mentality Nietzsche was criticizing to see in the criticism any message of liberation, while through the oversimplifications of its glib categories of freedom the latter loses sight, of the savage realist and harsh judge not only of nations, morality and religions but also of democracy itself. Between the hated 'enemy of laws'8 and the fêted darling of post-philosophical liberalism, Nietzsche still waits to be assessed in his own undeniably philosophical terms as a resource in the face of the cultural malaise he himself portrayed so vividly but kept on asking us to see beyond.

  Nietzschean nihilism is often thought of as a challenge. But what is this nihilism? Not the existentialist fad, or the abstract 'axiological nihilism' that finds no room for values in the scheme of things. Heidegger takes what Nietzsche means by nihilism to be the self-serving an
d merely habitual hold on us of norms we have not appropriated personally. That is part of it. It leaves values in place, those that would be there if we did appropriate them personally, and it implies there might be better ones that we would in fact appropriate once they came in sight. A more radical nihilism consequent upon the death of God is the belief in the sheer contingency of all things, our own things in particular and ourselves. Let us say that this is another part of Nietzschean nihilism. Do Nietzsche's remarks about the need to experiment with truth provide a third?

  They may, but they may also include a resource out of which Nietzsche's challenge, however we define it, could be given a Nietzschean answer. If it is also a recognizably philosophical answer, then we need look no further than to Nietzsche himself to find a possible way out.

  Some reject Nietzsche's thought out of hand by the kind of knockdown self-referential arguments that philosophers direct at all generalized negative theses, whether scepticism or perspectivism. But arguments that try to find something inherently wrong with a thinker's thought at the outset tend to leave nearly all of its actual resources untapped. Any project of redeeming or falsifying Nietzschean thought in its own terms requires, first, that the thought and its terms be given

  their due and, secondly, that we find in these terms some standard that any Nietzschean can accept in judging the success or failure of Nietzsche's critical enterprise.

  The term 'critical' here, as in most of its philosophical uses, has basically a positive connotation: it prepares the ground for some improvement. In Nietzsche's case, the improvement is to be made and measured by something other than reason. But among upholders of the philosophical tradition it is commonly thought that there simply is no alternative to reason. Habermas, who follows the critique of reason a long way, avoids the dilemma by marking out for reason a hitherto unexploited area. He claims that Nietzsche failed to see this new possibility because his critique of reason is still caught up in the 'philosophy of the subject', so that he is misled into thinking that in order to 'fill the abstract terms "Being" and "sovereignty" with life', he must look to some 'other of reason'. Hence the appeal to 'archaic times' and to Dionysus for what in its destructive course reason has 'buried' and 'rationalized away'.9 Habermas's own solution is to abandon the philosophy of the subject and to reconstitute reason in the structure of rational discourse, a discourse that, by keeping the filling of these terms on its agenda, is able to preserve the philosophy of reason.