Published in International Philosophical Quarterly 44:4 December 2004
Kierkegaard's Non-Dialectical Dialectic
or
That Kierkegaard is not Hegelian
Henry B. Piper
A dialectic that mediates is a miscarried genius.
-- Johannes Climacus, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments[i]
I. Introduction
Speculations on Kierkegaard's dialectic have been numerous and spirited. They typically begin, and too frequently end,[ii] with Hegel, and if one begins with Hegel one cannot but end there. Doubtless Kierkegaard owes Hegel a great debt, but the debt is a negative one, as Hegel serves Kierkegaard not as mentor but as foil. But the shadow of Hegel is long, and many of Kierkegaard’s commentators seem unable to escape it.
In a recent article, Jack Mulder, Jr. offered a response to various efforts, most notably that of Merold Westphal, to temporize and Hegelianize Kierkegaard's dialectic.[iii] In response to Westphal's suggestion that the complete (Hegelian) expression of Kierkegaard's dialectic demands the Aufheben of Religiousness A and Religiousness B by Westphal's proposed “Religiousness C,” Mulder undertakes to "re-radicalize" Kierkegaard. Westphal claims that Religiousness B is characterized by "hidden inwardness" and corresponds to the “Church Triumphant," whereas we must await the Religiousness C of Kierkegaard's "second authorship" to achieve the stance of outward offense to the established order and the “Church Militant," wherein alone occurs the "teleological suspension of the ethical."[iv] Mulder's thesis, in response, is that Kierkegaard's "teleological suspension of the ethical," in its uncompromising denunciation of a universalist ethics, is already present in and essential to Fear and Trembling; further we needn't await Kierkegaard's so called "second authorship" to see Kierkegaard demand of the religious individual that she openly “offend” contemporary Christendom at the risk of worldly perquisites.
In this paper, I shall implicitly enter the debate on the side of Mulder by considering several of Kierkegaard's upbuilding discourses, published from December 1843 to April 1845, in order to illuminate the nature of his “non-dialectical dialectic” and to distinguish it from the logical dialectic of Hegel. I shall be arguing, in effect, that Kierkegaard is not and never was Hegelian. By demonstrating that Kierkegaard’s dialectic is non-Hegelian even in these early works, I shall be offering indirect support to Mulder's claim that we needn't await Kierkegaard's "second authorship" for a "radical" Kierkegaard. I turn to the discourses, first, because they have received remarkably little attention, which is surprising, particularly in light of the opinion of no less than Heidegger that most of what is philosophically interesting in Kierkegaard is to be found there.[v] But the real reason for confronting the discourses is that here Kierkegaard speaks in his own voice, albeit with his disclaimer of "authority"; and it is here that he unequivocally and undeniably seeks to fulfill the supreme, if not sole, goal of his authorship, namely Opbygellige-- “upbuilding.”
I shall begin with the discourse entitled, "To Need God is a Human Being's Highest Perfection," first published in August 1844, from Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses.[vi] This discourse depicts the distinction in the human self between its outer and inner dimensions, "the first self" as distinct from "the deeper self." The struggle of these “two selves,” with themselves and with each other, manifests the dialectical struggle of the self as synthesis, which ultimately becomes a struggle with God, the inevitable defeat in which constitutes the possibility of victory over oneself and the “corresponding to God.” This is the subject of the last of the EUD, published with the former, entitled, “One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and is Victorious-- In That God is Victorious." This victory constitutes the self that is "capable of nothing at all," the self that "loses itself in order to win itself," the task for which Kierkegaard uses the term “resolution.” In considering the account of "the two selves," we shall always be approaching the point where resignation meets faith, where "to need God is a human being's highest perfection." This account will lead to a consideration of the temporality of human existence and the subject of death, which Kierkegaard personifies as "the schoolmaster of earnestness," who instructs us in the certainty of the uncertainty of death.[vii] This is the subject of the discourse entitled “At a Graveside” from Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, published April 1845.[viii] The appropriation of this uncertainty enables autonomous self-hood, whereby “one loses oneself in order to gain oneself.”
As I proceed, I shall also refer to several other of the EUD-- “The Thorn in the Flesh,” (1844), “To Gain One’s Soul in Patience” (1843), “Against Cowardliness” (1844) and “The Expectancy of Faith” (1843). I shall be arguing that these discourses, considered together, reveal a dialectical play of non-dialectical difference and tension rather than mediated resolution and progress. We shall see that Kierkegaard's “non-dialectical” dialectic is not a logical dialectic of mediation but an existential dialectic of difference-- of irremediable paradox. The divisions that separate human beings are artificial but real; we are responsible for them but they nonetheless are. These divisions are rooted in the dividedness of the human self, which vainly seeks its own resolution, and this dividedness Kierkegaard traces to our absolute separation from God which we posit in sin-- the ultimate non-dialectical difference, which we are powerless to overcome. It is in the inevitable tension of actual difference that we exist, and “progress,” if it mean anything, is merely an incident of temporality and not indicative of a telos that determines us. Kierkegaard’s is a “one-way” dialectic which cannot resolve itself since its only conceivable resolution is incommensurable with it—indeed the conception of its conception is inconceivable; and its continuation consists in the maintenance of the tension of difference itself. Further, the divisions of existential dividedness do not resolve themselves because they cannot resolve at all; existential difference, as distinct from logical contradiction, is non-dialectical. Thus, because eternity is not temporally before us as final cause but is rather within us and among us, the simplicity of Kierkegaard’s one-way dialectic gives way, in the actuality of existence, to the desperate complexity of “redoubling repetition,” whereby the self comes to itself only in the halt of the lesson of death.
Let us enter upon the upbuilding.
II. "To Need God is a Human Being's Highest Perfection"
The discourse opens with a "high-minded proverb": "A person needs only a little in order to live and needs that little only a little while" (EUD 297). Through hardship and deprivation one can learn to live with progressively fewer worldly goods and endure even the deprivation of basic necessities, and by such sufferance one will learn to be content with little, to be content in the deprivation of what formerly seemed to be life's only pleasures, and so to be changed; contentment becomes no longer a function of wealth and external security, but comes now from within-- "few possessions with contentment is already a great gain," and further, "to know that a person needs only a little without knowing for sure at any moment that he can obtain the little he needs-- anyone who can bear this needs only a little; he does not even need to know this little is secure" (EUD 299). At the uttermost extremity of physical want, when one has nothing, one frequently hears the naive platitude, "Then be contented with the grace of God" (EUD 300); but this conceals a total reversal of the conception of "contentment," for "what brashness to be contented with the most! What one must be contented with must be the little" (EUD 301). Objectively, the grace of God appears something to which one must, in the absence of plenty, merely resign oneself, but this risks confusion of the human and the divine, for here, "Right in the middle of the earthly and worldly difference... the God-difference is thoughtlessly mixed" (EUD 301). To be "contented" with the grace of God is to impose human categories upon God, to judge God's will by the standard of one's own worldly aspirations and expectations rather than the other way around, so that "as soon as the grace of God gives a person what he desires and requests, he not only is contented with grace but is happy over what he receives, and in his way of thinking understands that God is gracious to him" (EUD 302). But "this is a misunderstanding," because it acknowledges the grace of God on the basis of worldly "desires and requests." The fact that "for God all things are possible" thus becomes a slight to God when one counts oneself deprived of something that God would provide. This indicates that the first self alone is engaged in one's life, one-sidedly determined by immediate gratification, and one remains thus "impatient"[ix] until one, "in the quiet incorruptibility of the inner being" (EUD 302), acknowledges that "the grace of God is in itself worth being contented with-- indeed, is alone worth being desired.” When this occurs, everything is inverted. "Then the human heart will gradually... become more and more discontented-- that is it will desire more and more ardently... to be assured of grace” (EUD 303). With this, “everything has become new,” for the inversion is not in externality, rather what is new is the self; in a worldly sense everything is identical.
Contentment, as previously understood, constituted a repression of the struggle of the self; it was a purely external condition of the individual who thus implicitly judged God according to his own arbitrary and multifarious criteria and not himself by God's, a denial of autonomy and not its affirmation because it denies the existential incommensurability of the self and its ground—that the ground is the ground of the self. "To need little" in a worldly sense there signified that one was sufficient to oneself, and thus could be content with but few worldly supports. But with respect to the individual "in his inner being," "to need little" leaves the external to itself, recognizes that there is no security there; and what was contentment with respect to one's first self is discontent with respect to one's deeper self. Thus "with respect to the earthly, one needs little," but "In a human being's relationship with God, it is inverted: the more he needs God... the more perfect he is" (EUD 303). With this acknowledgment, "to be contented with the grace of God" no longer settles the individual to the lassitude of resignation, but rather calls him to struggle. This is the prototype of the Kierkegaardian inversion-- that a human being's fulfillment is a function of dependency, which we learn when we understand that it is better to receive than to give; the non-dialectical inversion here consists in the fact that freedom is dependency, but not vice versa, where that dependency is solely and completely on God.
* * *
Before proceeding we must pause at this beginning, because if we are to distinguish the dialectic of existence from the logical, the beginning is everything.[x] The first thing to notice about this Kierkegaardian "inversion" is that it is not something that one can "observe," for it is essentially experiential. Hegel's dialectic would also call itself "experiential," but for Hegel the experience that counts occurs from the point of view of the "phenomenological observer," for this is the condition of science; experience otherwise can only be one-sided. In the case of the Kierkegaardian inversion, however, the experience of inversion is the experience of the inversion of myself, not of inversion itself; it is not the beginning of logical reflection but its end, because motion is not immanent but transcendent, and without this beginning there is no beginning, and this is Hegel's problem from the beginning.[xi] Of Hegel's Logic one must ask, whence the "Being" with which we begin and why rather not "Nothing"? We assume, without “presupposing,” that "I am," which is, as Descartes rightly acknowledges, to say nothing as to what I am, and it is with reflection upon this with which Hegel's Logic begins: immediate Being is observed already to imply Nothing, and vice versa, and the reciprocity of their otherness is the engine of their dialectic, as each from itself expresses its other and so "passes over" into it. The immediate in-itself of each cannot withstand its own reflective scrutiny-- Being in-itself cannot escape the gaze of Nothing-- which shows it not to be sufficient to itself, thus not to be in-itself, and thus it surpasses itself or is observed to be surpassed by its other. This dialectic is clearly by nature a two-sided affair: if Being were Nothing but not Nothing Being, the dialectic would stop at Nothing (and come to nothing). Hegel’s is a negative dialectic because it is the reciprocal negation of otherness that prolongs indefinitely the reflection of subject and object and thus renders plausible the Aufheben of both. On these (Hegelian) terms, Kierkegaard's dialectic, due to the radical imbalance entailed by its transcendent telos, is one-sided: at its ground, creation implies creator but not vice versa, since the love of God creates gratuitously and not necessarily; the being of God does not imply the nihil whence creation, because the nihil is an actual nothing-- the nothing whence nothing comes, the abyss the young Augustine glimpses as he throws inferior pears at pigs (Confessions Bk. II), an abyss of which even God knows nothing because it actually is nothing. Thus Kierkegaard’s dialectic is not reciprocal because it is positive, for creation is not the negation of God but is good in itself and stands positively by itself-- this is the condition of freedom. (Paradoxically, we should note, for Kierkegaard the positivity of freedom is possible only in the position of sin -- “sin is not a negation but a position”[xii]; for Hegel, by contrast, evil corresponds to cognition’s faculty of division.[xiii]) Difference for Kierkegaard is positive, because self and other do not negate each other, rather each affirms itself and so affirms the other in distinguishing itself as a self. The only commandment is to love God, a one-way demand which confirms the radical incommensurability of the human and the divine; but to satisfy this commandment is to love one’s neighbor, the requirement of which is, coincidentally, to love oneself.
The Kierkegaardian inversion knows nothing of Being and Nothing; it entails not mediation but conversion, a move from nihil to Being, to be sure, but a one-way move since it is only by grace that Being even is and not vice versa. The self cannot derive being from nothing but can only actualize the being that already is; a self does not merely assume its being, rather it creates it yet within the rigorous confines of the given. The inversion of the self is a denial of the mere assumption of the given; it is a reorientation from itself as itself to God, not in opposition to the world but through it. Kierkegaard speaks of an inversion of this sort, in “The Thorn in the Flesh,” in the case of the decisive transition of Saul to Paul, where the latter must repent of the worldly zealotry of the former: “to have to repent of the best that one has done, indeed, what one even regarded as pleasing to God…, and then as reward for his zeal to have to harvest not only the ingratitude of man but the bitterness of repentance because he had raved!” (EUD 342). The inversion Paul suffers is a radical reorientation from idolatry to God. His “thorn in the flesh,” paradoxically, is a suffering not of flesh but of spirit, a suffering in time that is yet not temporal for it is a suffering of eternity, which thus signals the presence of the eternal in him. His inversion is thus a repetition of the being he already is, which does not negate but positively denies the nothingness of being simply to be that being, which must be a repetition because temporal being cannot be but must become; by contrast, the simple “to be” of Hegel’s “pure Being” explains why, logically, this Being, in the simple indeterminateness of its immediacy, is at the same time Nothing.
Hegel's two-sided dialectic of progressive mediation can be diagrammed crudely on a two dimensional surface; by contrast, we might equally crudely envision an analogous diagram of Kierkegaard’s dialectic of existence as leaping from the two-dimensional surface of the page directly toward the reader. Its first dimension is the linear narrative of (physical) time, but this broadens into two dimensions with the advent of conscious, artificial distinction, which divides us from ourselves and from each other causing personal despair and interpersonal discord. The leap from the page into the self opens a third dimension, which gives motion to the first two; of Kierkegaardian religious discourse "the task is not to move from the individual to the race but from the individual through the race (the universal) to reach the individual" (CUP 428). Finally, there is a fourth dimension of eternity, whose existential trace is temporality; that we “are capable of nothing at all” is temporality’s reminder that eternity is within us and among us. Whereas one might abstractly conceive time without eternity, one cannot so conceive temporality: there is no temporality without eternity, it is the “breath of God” which vivifies, validates and spiritualizes the rude clay.
Before returning to the two selves, let me note that I shall be speaking, in the pages to come, in a progressive, linear mode; this is after all an essay. But this is not the mode of existence of the two selves. Though consciousness will appear to “progress” from the first self to the deeper self, there is throughout only one self, and “two selves” refers to the dividedness of this self-- from itself and from God. While I, for convenience, refer to “two selves,” Kierkegaard himself never so refers to the first self and the deeper self; he invariably maintains their difference, naming each separately while yet emphasizing that they pertain eternally to the one, divided self. Thus consciousness is not capable of “progressive” representation from one “self” or one “stage” to another, because existence is a matter not of progression but of repetition. The inversion we have just experienced constitutes an intimation of repetition in the freedom of dependency. Now, “to be contented with the grace of God” is to get the world back, to gain the self in losing it. In this repetition consists the distinction between the movements of resignation and faith. The self one gets back at once represents the objective continuity of the self and a qualitatively transformed self-- thus the transformed Isaac now recognized for the first time as the gift of God. This new Isaac, which actually is the old Isaac who was not before, is an objective example; but in the case of the self, within itself, this does not represent linear progression in time, because the first self can return to or turn back upon itself at any time-- to the morbidity of recollection or, what is existentially the same, to the “death wish” which consists in the impatience of determinate expectation. Existential repetition is thus a double-movement of immediate resolution and earnest continuity; it exists in the immediate decision of actual self-inversion-- the choice to become the self that one is, sustained by the reflective fortitude to persist in the uncertainty, indeed the absurdity, of becoming itself.
* * *
Returning now to our discourse, we acutely experience the inversion of the self (our “third dimension”) with respect to worldly power; thus it is a common practice "in the churches of the various countries," says Kierkegaard, to offer an "intercessory prayer" for "the King and the royal house." Externally understood, such a prayer is offered to the King "because he has the earthly power and holds the fate of many in his hands" (EUD 304), and by offering such prayer on behalf of the king, one offers it generally and vicariously for the benefit of all. But it is rather the case that the church "makes this intercession presumably because it is convinced that the higher a person stands, the more he needs God" (EUD 304-5). The king might himself understand it in the external sense, for a king is more likely than most to become entangled in the great affairs of the world, perhaps, indeed, to the extent of confusing himself with God, thus being diverted from his own inner being, for "the higher one ascends in earthly power and dominion, the closer one comes only to intercessory prayer" (emphasis added); thus "it is all too easy for the mighty to take it in vain; it is all too easy for the one praying to pray it in vain" (EUD 305), that is, without regard to the inner being of the one for whose sake it is offered. The words of prayer that surround the congregation are a mere "jest" unless they penetrate to one's inner being with the reminder that even a King "is capable of nothing at all." Further, just as the words of exhortation to the mighty are misunderstood if heard merely as reminder and confirmation of one's earthly power, so are words of consolation to the oppressed if taken to assure immediate relief to one's external condition. Indeed, "what is offered as comfort in life starts out by making life more difficult in order-- yes, in order-- to make it truly easier," because "before this comfort can come, you must understand that you yourself are simply nothing" (EUD 306). Eternally speaking, in the inner being, there is no distinction between the king and the disconsolate one: the power of both is equal, and this is "the highest,... that a person is fully convinced that he himself is capable of nothing, nothing at all. What rare dominion-- not rare in the sense that only one individual is born to be king, since everyone is born to it.... What wonderful rarity that is not depreciated by being offered to all, by being accessible to all!” (EUD 307-8). But the price of this dominion, this "rarity," is struggle. The "rarity" of this "dominion" is self-contradictory at its root, for this rarity consists in the universality of its accessibility. But so to conceive it is equivalent to turning Being into a being, for if it were a being, then it would not be possessed by all. The rarity consists in the nature of that which is to be possessed-- one's own soul: it is one’s own soul that is rare, but each individual human being is able to gain possession of this.
The struggle by which one grasps one's own powerless dependency begins not as a struggle of the first self with an other but with itself. One who undertakes this struggle resolves that the external struggles by which one is entangled in the world of the everyday, while they may lead to earthly power and glory, only divert one's attention from the knowledge of oneself; these struggles can only leave the self dubious to itself. The struggle we are speaking of here is not a struggle against the world-- a simple-minded asceticism; indeed this is a frequent target of Kierkegaard’s throughout his writings, because not only can asceticism conceal the profoundest vanity but also it serves the deepest conceivable self-delusion by bringing the world into the realm of the self such that one mistakes oneself as responsible for it, such that one substitutes the repudiation of the world for the struggle with oneself and thus self-deceivingly avoids precisely struggle itself. In this vain delusion consists the “demonic consciousness,” which mistakes oneself for the world and so loses the self in defiance of the desperation of struggle, in which the self, which is capable of nothing at all, exists. Thus, says Kierkegaard, “you must retreat into yourself, not as into a fortress that still defies the world while the self-inclosed person nevertheless has with him in the fortress his most dangerous enemy... but into yourself, sinking down into your own nothingness and surrendering yourself to grace and disgrace” (EUD 307).
It is the self-inclosed, self-consuming despair of demonic consciousness that Kierkegaard calls the self to struggle against, though many Hegelian commentators apparently mistake the demonic consciousness for Kierkegaard himself. [xiv] The individual who engages in the struggle with himself, however, "is unwilling to be an instrument of war in the service of inexplicable drives,... he does not want to be like a mirror in which he intercepts the world or, rather, the world reflects itself" (EUD 308). This individual seeks himself; he refuses to be a mere instrument or reflection of that world, by which he would reduce himself to "nothing at all," refuses merely to reflect it in its mutability, for he wants to reflect himself in himself. But the price for this, in an external sense, is high: "if he himself... wants to capture the eye so that it may belong to him and not he to the eye; if he grasps the hand before it grasps the external, so that it belongs to him and not he to the hand...-- well, then everything is changed; the power is taken away from him, and the glory. He struggles, not with the world but with himself" (EUD 308). Such a struggle is a lesson in struggle itself, the lesson of powerlessness, because the first self and itself "hold each other so firmly interlocked and are so equally matched... that the wrestling cannot even begin, because in that moment the other figure would overwhelm him-- but that other figure is himself. Thus he is capable of nothing; even the weakest person who is not tried in this struggle is capable of more than he" (EUD 309). The most powerless person is always capable of doing something in the world; but the struggle of the self with itself "knows no delusion, permits no evasion, occasions no self-deception... since when he struggles with himself, circumstances cannot determine the result," and "this is the annihilation of a person, and the annihilation is his truth" (EUD 309). By this struggle of the first self with itself, one learns that "man is a helpless creature, because all other understanding that makes him understand that he can help himself is but a misunderstanding, even though in the eyes of the world he is regarded as courageous-- by having the courage to remain in a misunderstanding, that is, by not having the courage to understand the truth" (EUD 309-10). Worldly courage is thus the non-dialectical opposite of true, spiritual courage, the courage of the self which only the self knows, a courage that manifests itself only in coming to know oneself by struggling with oneself.
* * *
Let’s pause again, for a moment, to consider this “knowledge” of the self. Kierkegaard seeks here a "knowledge" of the self that is certain, an existential certitude, but of a self that is nothing because it is temporal and thus always merely becoming. In logical “certainty” there lurks a delusion: it can’t really be certainty because it is incapable of uncertainty—it is rather the necessary that is logic’s terrain. In existence, the “certainty” one hears spoken of is in fact probability, where circumstances are favorable; but this “certainty” is the most deceptive of all: it isn’t even logical certainty, much less certainty itself. The only criterion by which a human being can know himself with existential certitude is the unchangeable-- God; thus to know oneself is "to correspond to God": "there is only the question of... whether you prefer to be such a one who does not correspond to God at all, such a one who is capable of something himself and consequently does not correspond completely to God, for indeed you cannot change God, and indeed you do not want to change God so that he would not be capable of all things" (EUD 310). The sole and irreducible condition for one's relation to God, for whom all things are possible, is the acknowledgment that for oneself nothing is possible, and it is only as nothing that one corresponds to God. "Thus a human being is great and at his highest when he corresponds to God by being nothing at all himself" (EUD 311).
In “Against Cowardliness” the theme is decisive resolution, whose condition is that one commit all of oneself—that one “lose oneself in order to win oneself”—for only in resolution so defined is there existential decision, which is the self. Resolution “demands everything” (EUD 363), and to resolve is to give everything and so to be capable of nothing and so to correspond to God. Evidently, however, correspondence to God is a species not of (mediated) resolution but of (existential) tension—we here find ourselves in the irremediable difference that distinguishes the human and the divine, which Hegel would have us mediate. I have previously emphasized the one-way character of Kierkegaard’s dialectic, grounded as it is in the radical incommensurability of the human and the divine and reflected in the unidirectionality of the existential reality of time; from here on, however, as we consider the dividedness of the self in the interaction of the “two selves,” we shall begin to encounter the desperate complexity of Kierkegaard’s existential dialectic in the back-and-forth motion suffered by each self and the “two” with each other, a foreshadowing of the “redoubling” (Fordoblelse) which is the explicit subject of The Sickness Unto Death. In that book, Kierkegaard will strive to articulate the tension of irremediable difference present both to the outer and inner dimensions of the self and the tension that consists in “the third” of their interaction, as he points to “the fourth”: “The human self is such a derived, established relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another” (SUD 13-14).
As he does frequently throughout his writings, Kierkegaard at this point in our discourse offers an analogy to human love as a suggestive illustration of the irremediable difference the self encounters even within itself:
If misfortune taught two human beings that they corresponded to each other in friendship or in love, how negligible the distress caused by the misfortune would seem compared with the joy the misfortune also brought-- that these two corresponded to each other! And if two human beings did not understand until the day of death that they corresponded to each other for all eternity-- oh, how brief, though bitter, that moment of separation that is death would be compared with an eternal understanding! (EUD 310).
With an echo of Pascal’s wager, we encounter here a glimpse of repetition’s “moment” (Ojeblik); and we shall see shortly that this “eternal understanding” is the moment of the existential certainty of victory in prayerful struggle with God, the struggle of resolution, as summed up in the title of the last of the EUD – “One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and is Victorious—in that God is Victorious.”
* * *
Returning again to our discourse, we are at that point in the struggle where the individual "turns and faces himself in order to understand himself, he steps, as it were, in the way of that first self, halts that which was turned outward... and summons it back from the external" (EUD 314)-- the first move in the back-and-forth of dialectical inversion. Thus does the first self encounter the deeper self, which, in order to continue the engagement of the first self with itself, which is the condition for the actuality of existence of the deeper self, "lets the surrounding world remain what it is-- remain dubious" (EUD 314). Now the first self faces an irreducible, exclusive disjunction: either it must continue the struggle with itself which brings to actuality the claim of the deeper self-- that the self is spirit-- or it must repress that deeper self and so end the struggle with itself to surrender to the inconstancy of the world and the delusion of its own, self-subsistent capacity, and so trade the possibility of certitude for mere probability, the circumstantiality of circumstance. The first self "must either admit that the deeper self is right, because to want to predicate constancy of something that continually changes is indeed a contradiction," or it must "silence the deeper self by letting the roar of inconstancy drown it out" (EUD 314), surrendering itself to external diversion.
Thus the struggle becomes one between the first self and the deeper self, a struggle between the dubiousness of externality and the unchangeableness of eternal spirit. It is clear that this struggle is one of the self with itself and not with an other, because here the self faces a decision: the condition of the world offers "the beckoning fruits" of apparently favorable circumstances, and the first self is accordingly tempted to abandon the struggle with itself, which would in fact be to choose "the beckoning fruits" over itself. "But the deeper self does not give ground, does not haggle, does not give its consent, does not compromise; it merely says: Even in this moment everything can be changed" (EUD 315). The deeper self is there to remind the individual that he is capable of nothing at all, but the world's favorable conditions belie this reminder, and "people come to the aid of the first self with the explanation... that there are some people who are fortunate and are supposed to enjoy life and that he is one of them" (EUD 315). Such people trade in fortuitous circumstance and pass it off as true coin, and it is to the easy acceptance of such circumstance that the deeper self will not consent, because such circumstance is irrelevant to the assertion of the self: "even though he knew how to invest himself ever so advantageously and with interest, do you suppose he would therefore know himself?" (EUD 313). To know oneself according to one's external being is to suffer a delusion because the external is ever changeable, ever dubious, and thus one who posits something external to oneself as his criterion will himself remain dubious. "What would this sagacious self-knowledge be other than this-- that he knew himself in relation to something else but did not know himself in relation to himself?" For, "This something else could be changed... and this self could be changed," and the greatest delusion would be that this externally-derived self and its externally-derived criteria not change, since "there is no delusion if something that can deceive does so, but instead it is a delusion when it does not" (EUD 313). This would be the actuality of delusion, where nothing changes, and this nothing is delusion. Thus does the first self, in struggle with the deeper self, tempt itself with respect to the promise of the world-- that the world seems to offer the possibility of the self's own, autonomous success and victory. But as long as it remains in struggle with the deeper self, “The first self is halted” (EUD 314), "The first self cannot move from the spot" (EUD 315), and if it remains in place, in the place of its own self, in submission to its own (deeper) self, it thus remains the self that it is, as spirit. Thus are the first and deeper selves reconciled such that the self, momentarily, is reconciled to itself. Momentarily the first self is merely resigned to the reconciliation, which consists in the abandonment of worldly care and hope for success; but the deeper self explains,
Have you lost anything by not caring about it in that way? Consider the other side. Suppose... that the surrounding world had deceived you-- and you do realize that it could have done that. More I did not say; I merely said that it is possible, and by that I also said that what you regarded as certainty was actually only a possibility. What then? Then you would have despaired and you would not have had me to rely on” (EUD 316-7).
Now the first self understands “that with regard to the external a person is capable of nothing at all,” so that now he can reenter the external “with the consciousness that it could also be changed, and he is not deceived even though it is changed, because he has the deeper self’s consent” (EUD 317).
This “reconciliation” of the two selves, however, “is only the condition for coming to know himself" (EUD 317), because the world still beckons, so that this first self still knows that it can succeed in the world, even if it is not deluded into thinking that this self-won "success" could assume the certitude of unchangeableness. The self still does not know itself, which is a self that needs God; it is resigned to its own powerlessness only in a negative sense, that is, without having come to itself in the positive sense of its dependence upon God. This is the decisive moment where resignation might embrace the world again, but now in the faith that as long as the self is capable of nothing at all, for God all things are possible, and that what comes to be is not now to be received merely with resignation but with joy. This brings the self to its own ultimate struggle-- though spiritually it is only the penultimate-- of the deeper self with itself, a struggle without external reference. "In the external world, he was capable of nothing; but in the internal world, is he not capable of anything there, either?" (EUD 318). The self's resignation to the inconstancy of the external world, the outcome of the struggle between his first and deeper selves, still attributed to the deeper self the capacity to resist the temptation that the self itself maintained with respect to the promise of the external; the deeper self, in its own inner being, had not confronted God's own demand that it submit to absolute reliance upon Him. Thus now the question becomes whether that deeper self has in fact the capacity the first self attributed to it. In order now for the self as its own deeper self to test its own capacity "it must have opposition," and as there is no opposition to the deeper self to come from the external world, "the opposition can come only from himself" (EUD 318). Now "he struggles with himself in the internal world, not as previously, where the deeper self struggles with the first self to prevent it from being occupied with the external" (EUD 318). In this struggle of the deeper self with itself, the deeper self cannot overcome itself, for "How can I be stronger than myself?" (EUD 319). The deeper self, in its struggle with itself, is now, unlike the first self in its struggle with itself, altogether on its own with itself, and now it might truly discover that it is capable of nothing at all "because this he can discover only by himself" (EUD 319) and this discovery is the condition for being able "to know God": "When we speak of overcoming oneself by oneself, by this expression we really mean something external, so that the struggle is unequal. When, for example, someone who has been tempted by worldly prestige conquers himself-- so that he no longer reaches out for it...-- then we shall not deprecate him but praise him instead" (EUD 319-20). The struggle of the first self is "unequal" because it is merely the external that tries him, thus the self in such a case is very far from overcoming himself; "he struggles with a fortuitous degree of temptation, and the victory proves nothing with regard to what he would be able to do in a greater temptation" (EUD 320). This is the temptation to overcome himself by himself, thus the struggle is now against this self; this is the struggle of the deeper self with itself, and only here does it become evident that the struggle can have only one result, that the self cannot overcome itself by itself and thus that, in one's own inner being, one is not capable of anything without God; "the person who himself is capable of nothing at all cannot undertake the least thing without God's help, consequently without becoming conscious that there is a God" (EUD 322). This is a struggle entirely of the self, stripped of the fortuitous circumstance of the external. It is a struggle from which the self cannot emerge victorious because the self has left circumstance behind and cannot loose itself from itself; and it cannot emerge victorious because it cannot overcome itself because no self is stronger than itself. It is thus that only in this struggle can the self "correspond to God," for only in this struggle does the self become aware "that he, although he himself is capable of nothing at all, with God is capable of ever more and more-- that is, he is capable of overcoming himself, since with the help of God he is indeed capable of this!" (EUD 325).
What distinguishes the deeper self’s struggle with itself is the self-evident certainty of its failure, unless the self resolves to acknowledge its own incapacity and so surrender to God. Thus the self might here choose instead to struggle with God, the subject of the last of the EUD. This brings us to the moment of repetition: here one might choose oneself in struggle, because here alone is struggle itself even possible: thus Job’s righteousness consists not in the argument he takes to God but in the fact that he takes his argument to God. In the struggle with God, the self can only achieve the actual realization of certain defeat-- that the self cannot overcome God: to assume otherwise is not to struggle with God, as, analogously, to think that that than which nothing greater can be thought is not is not to think.[xv] This is the certainty that consists in the acknowledgment that I am "capable of nothing at all," which entails the attendant joy that "for God all things are possible." The struggle of the deeper self with itself, as we have seen, is a struggle from which the self cannot emerge victorious; it is a simple and endless standoff, for the self is not stronger than and thus cannot overcome itself. In this, the struggle with God, it is still the case that "The battleground is in the inner being," for "the nature of the struggle" is "praying," and the "nature of the victory" the "realization that one has lost" (EUD 378); but in this last struggle God is here posited by the self in its struggle with Him, and in this consists the victory. “When the ocean is exerting all its power, that is precisely the time when it cannot reflect the image of heaven, and even the slightest motion blurs the image; but when it becomes still and deep, then the image of heaven sinks into its nothingness” (EUD 399).
So the struggle of the “two selves” must abide as the condition of existence of the single individual; it is the essential condition of freedom. In considering the first and deeper selves, we have been emphasizing the importance of the latter in its relation to the former, but this rhetorical emphasis should not obscure the fact that it is the self in its dividedness that is the self in struggle. The reconciliation of the first and deeper selves enables the reconciliation of the self, in correspondence to God, to itself. One cannot here escape the echo of the two wills in Augustine's Confessions Bk. VIII: only as divided against itself in struggle for the "completeness" of its "single nature" can the (free) will be said to exist. Compare Augustine’s anguished query—“Whence comes this monstrous state? Why should it be?” (Unde hoc monstrum? et quare istuc?)—to Kierkegaard’s—“What kind of unnatural condition is this? What does it all mean?” (Hvad er dog dette for en unaturlig Tilstand; hvad skal det Hele betyde?).[xvi] So for Kierkegaard, the “two selves” are unnaturally divided (thus sin): the self is, against its nature, divided against itself, and it seeks the synthesis which consists in the reconciliation of itself with itself, that is, with God.
The real struggle consists in maintaining the struggle, and this brings us to consider the self's matchless foe-- the certainty of death. This certainty, however, is not merely the dialectical contradictory to the uncertainty of temporal change; rather, as we shall see, death, as "the schoolmaster of earnestness," is a function not of a temporal certainty-- the contradiction of worldly contingency-- but rather of uncertainty: the truth of death, existentially, is not certainty but uncertainty. And here we shall gain a different perspective on Kierkegaard's non-dialectical dialectic.
III. The Dialectic of Death
Evidently there is but one certainty for the individual in his mortal being, and that is death, which Kierkegaard takes up in the discourse entitled "At a Graveside," the third of Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions. Time passes, and one is swept toward death whether or not one asserts one's self. The assertion of self that death compels Kierkegaard designates "earnestness," which must not be confused with the earnestness that one displays in one's everyday affairs, the earnestness of worldly "entanglement” which distances the self from itself-- one loses oneself in the world, one is "wrapped up" in daily affairs, one "forgets oneself." Such forgetting of oneself is efficacious in the accomplishment of worldly obligations, but so "to throw oneself into one's work" requires that one keep one's self "out of the way." The earnestness of self-hood, by contrast, demands that one maintain an existential distance from the everyday, of the deeper self from the first self; yet, paradoxically, this is precisely the condition for reentering the world as a self.
This earnestness is not an obsession over death, which would distance oneself from one's own death; rather, the earnest thought of death accomplishes precisely the opposite. The personal appropriation of the certainty of one's own death, which the earnestness of existence demands, directs the self not to the future inevitability of death; rather, by such appropriation the self captures its own present by "conquering the future." As Kierkegaard puts it in the first of the EUD, “The Expectancy of Faith” (1843), "how much do we dare to be occupied with the future? The answer is not difficult: only when we have conquered it, only then are we able to return to the present, only then do our lives find meaning in it" (EUD 17). It is thus that the self exists in the only place in which it might find itself, in the moment that is "this very day":
Indeed, time [Tid] is also a good. If a person were able to produce a scarcity [Dyrtid] in the external world, yes, then he would be busy.... A person is perhaps not able to do this in the external world, but in the world of spirit everyone is able to do it. Death itself produces a scarcity of time [Dyrtid paa Tid] for the dying. Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, was jacked up in price when the dying one was bargaining with death? Who has not heard how one day, sometimes one hour, gained infinite worth, because death made time dear! Death is able to do this, but with the thought of death the earnest person is able to create a scarcity so that the year and the day receive infinite worth.... (TDIO 83-4)
To conquer the future is to conquer time itself and thus to win the present for one's self. This is the lesson of death, which prohibits the investment of oneself in "calculating" according to the probabilities of worldly affairs. Absent this lesson, one is doomed to the mere endurance of passing time, in which one impatiently suffers existence in the impotence of wishful attendance upon external good fortune or indeed upon the comfort of death itself. Says Kierkegaard in “The Thorn in the Flesh,” where Paul struggles against the temptation of temporal beatitude: “as long as one is running in time, one does not run past time” (EUD 343). Time, the primordial medium of human existence, must, for the existing individual, rather be turned to the benefit of that existence. The crucial distinction here is between the outward life of the first self and that of the inner being, between external entanglement and the life of the self as spirit.
The unique capacity and task of death, "the schoolmaster of earnestness" (TDIO 75), is to guide the self back to itself, which must be understood with reference to the inexorable, unidirectional thrust of time toward the future, where it is the past, and not the present, that becomes the in-itself of the self, and the future, and not the present, in which one passes one's time. Death is the guide neither from the present to the past, which would signify the morbidity of recollection, nor from the present toward the future, which would signify the impatience of expectation; death rather is an instructor in repetition, guiding the self from itself-- its own death-- to itself. Death is uniquely able to do this, first because it is decisive and thus demands the earnest resolution of one's self, one’s infinite "concern" for oneself:
There is many another decision in life, but only one is decisive the way death's decision is. All the forces of life are incapable of resisting time; it sweeps them along with itself-- even recollection is in the present. One who is living does not have it in his power to stop time, to find rest outside time in the perfect conclusion.... Death, however, has this power;... it does not chase after the decision as the living person does-- it carries it out in earnest. (TDIO 78)
Death is not the consolation of eternal rest, for to think of death in this way “is a mood, and to think of death in this way is not earnestness,” but “a jest,” which distances oneself from death, like thinking abstractly about death as a universal condition of human existence; the death in question is the death that is already one's own and not merely "depression's escape from life" (TDIO 81). The term "jest" denotes the misrelation between the self and itself:
A pagan has already declared that one ought not to fear death, because "when it is, I am not, and when I am, it is not." This is the jest by which the cunning contemplator of death places himself on the outside; but even if the contemplation of death uses pictures of horror to describe death and terrifies a sick imagination, it is still only a jest if he merely contemplates death and not himself in death, if he thinks of it as a human condition but not as his own. (TDIO 73)
Such jesting separates oneself from death by positing this idea or representation of death as a universal concept, whereas the earnestness of existence demands the personal appropriation of one's own death, one's own and sole certainty: "Earnestness is that you think death, and that you are thinking it as your lot, and that you are then doing what death is indeed unable to do-- namely, that you are and death also is" (TDIO 75). The earnest thought of death compels one to exist: "Death in earnest gives life force as nothing else does; it makes one alert as nothing else does" (TDIO 83). The earnest thought of death guides one to the present, that one exist "this very day."
By considering this irremediable contradiction of certainty and uncertainty, in which death educates us, we shall again distinguish Kierkegaardian from Hegelian dialectic. “The certainty of death is the earnestness; its uncertainty is the instruction, the practice of earnestness. The earnest person is the one who through uncertainty is brought up to earnestness by virtue of certainty” (TDIO 94). This certainty of which earnestness consists is utterly incommensurable with the logical certainty of death, which signals not only the negation of life but also of existence, because the existential position of the self is the certainty of the uncertainty of death, which is the only certainty for the self. Existentially speaking, the logical certainty of death is a jest, for it abstracts from subjective concern, as indeed it must; but there is no certainty of death where such disinterestedness prevails, unless one refers to the deathly stillness of logic itself. Existentially, this certainty is nothing at all, and least of all is it the uncertainty of death in which death itself instructs us; logical certainty is existential limbo. But the certainty of the uncertainty opens the way for the acknowledgment of infinite, existential possibility:
This is the way it is with death. The certainty is the unchanging, and the uncertainty is the brief statement: It is possible. Every condition that wants to make the certainty of death into a conditional certainty... runs aground on this statement.... If certainty is allowed to leave open the question of what it can be, like a universal caption over life, instead of being like the endorsement of the particular and the daily by usage, as happens with the help of uncertainty-- then earnestness is not learned. Uncertainty... says to the learner, “Pay close attention to the certainty”-- then earnestness comes into existence. (TDIO 95)
Thus earnestness consists in making one's own the certainty of this uncertainty. Death’s is a “retroactive power” which consists in the uncertainty of possibility to bring death to life in “the particular and the daily”: only through uncertainty does the certainty of death become certain for oneself. This existential position might be described as the certitude in which the certainty of uncertainty resides. The relation between certainty and uncertainty signals a radical separation, an existential tension and the annihilation of logical progress; there is no uncertainty about the certainty of death, but what is certain about death is the uncertainty.
One might yet, however, expect (logical) “resolution” in the equality of death, since the metaphysical certainty of death resolves worldly inequality and injustice; but to pin one’s hopes on such equality would be an illusion because such equality is “indefinable”: "Death does indeed make all equal, but if the equality is in nothing, in annihilation, then the equality is itself indefinable" (TDIO 85). There is no consolation in the equality of death for one who is "weary of dissimilarity" (TDIO 86), one who resents the misfortune of not being who one wishes to be, who seeks comfort in the thought of death as the ultimate resolution of all worldly dissimilarity in the equality of the grave. Such a view of death is again "a mood; and actually it is cowardice" (TDIO 87), for though death does annihilate all dissimilarity, it is the absolute annihilation and, in such relief as this deceptive consciousness of death offers, "the living person's conception of death roams around in fantasy in the silent kingdom of the dead, itself playing that it is death.... But all this is not earnestness," which "does not scowl but is reconciled with life and knows how to fear death" (TDIO 88). Nor is it the case, however, that one can define death by inequality, for it indeed remains true "that death makes no distinctions, that it recognizes neither status nor age" (TDIO 91). The indefinable decision of death is "the only certainty, and the only thing about which nothing is certain" (TDIO 91). Further, there is no explanation for death, and death offers none of its own, because it owes no explanation: "death's decision... is inexplicable. That is,... death itself explains nothing.... Whether it comes as the greatest benefaction or the greatest misfortune" (TDIO 96), death knows nothing of "circumstances." To seek an explanation for death according to circumstances is to fall victim to a mere "mood" whereby it is not death itself of which one seeks explanation, whereby one is concerned about death and not about oneself. The "explanation" of death thus "does not explain death but discloses the state of the explainer's own innermost being" (TDIO 97)-- herein lies the “third dimension” of double-reflection.
With the earnestness that consists in the renunciation of the demand for an explanation of death, the self arrives at the limit of reason, which would explain death, which is inexplicable. “The inexplicability is the boundary, and the importance of the statement is simply to give the thought of death retroactive power and make it impelling in life, because with the decision of death all is over, and because the uncertainty of death inspects every moment” (TDIO 100). Death does not guide one to the certain outcome of a process of reason, but to the annihilation of oneself and of one's quest for explanations; death is the end of explanation as such. Here reason must halt, or rather, with the utmost expenditure of itself in its quest for the explanation of the inexplicable, it hurls itself upon its own sword; here reason halts upon the annihilation of itself. Here the self finds itself, having been led back to itself by the certitude that consists in the instruction in the uncertainty of death, "the practice of earnestness." Here the self arrives at the place where time no longer merely passes by, carrying the self inexorably toward the certainty of death, because the certainty of the uncertainty of death halts time's passing to bring death, and therefore life, to the self that now is. Thus does the self conquer the future and time itself, since the future is time-- "the future is the whole of which the past is a part".[xvii] Only with “the halt” of the inexorable passing of time can the self arrive at its own place, which is the self itself. Thus does the present gain its own space, in which the motion is no longer the external passing of time, but the movement of the self within itself. As Kierkegaard will put it years later in Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, "Halting is not indolent resting; halting is also movement. It is the heart's inward movement, it is self-deepening in inwardness; but merely to proceed further is the course straight ahead on the surface. On this road one does not arrive at willing one thing".[xviii] The "one thing" which the self can alone will if it is "to will one thing in truth" is its own self: "a person may very well... treat various things earnestly, but the question is whether he first becomes aware about the object of earnestness. This object every human being has, because it is himself..." (CA 150).
IV. Conclusion
In the struggle of the two selves, one discovers the contingency of the external world and the consequent powerlessness of the self; the self recognizes itself in negative relation to the world. This opens the way for the self's discovery of the changeless certitude of the deeper self in its correspondence to its ground, which is the acknowledgment that it is a self. Such certitude is the lesson of death. To embrace the certainty of the uncertainty of death is to realize one's temporality, and in this consists the positive relation of the self to the world, the contingency of which yields to the motion of the self in the place of the self, which is the self.
In these early discourses, Kierkegaard’s self-proclaimed focus is “upbuilding”: his subject and goal are the “inward deepening” of “his reader.” Thematically we remain far removed from the radical, outward religiosity of Practice in Christianity, For Self-Examination and Judge for Yourself! But the early upbuilding works furnish a decisive basis for the political requirement of the Church Militant, since the vision of the self that emerges is positive, a function not of an Hegelian dialectic of negation which privileges totality over personality but of an existential dialectic of position. We have noted Anti-Climacus’s assertion in The Sickness Unto Death that sin, which, Christianly, is definitive of individual self-hood, “is not a negation but a position” (SUD 96-100). The self as sinner finds itself not to be the opposite of itself but in opposition to itself, and it is precisely this opposition that we encounter in the struggle of the two selves and the dialectic of death; but what matters is that in this opposition we discover the self, which is the (political) condition of possibility for loving one’s neighbor as oneself.
These early, upbuilding works, in contrast to the pseudonymous, contain no overt, anti-Hegelian polemics, but we would not expect them here because these works are not anti-Hegelian but non-Hegelian. The discourses are not merely about individual self-hood, rather they speak directly to the self of the reader, while Hegel subverts individual selfhood in favor of the universal; thus Hegel’s dialectic cannot find a place here, it cannot even be thought within these pages, because “an individual human being cannot be thought”.[xix] Kierkegaard’s dialectic is utterly incommensurable with Hegel’s: it is a non-dialectical dialectic.
In my consideration of the struggle of self-hood, I have attempted to elucidate two related senses in which this is so. First, Kierkegaard’s dialectic is grounded throughout not in mediated contradiction but in irremediable paradox: “difference” in Kierkegaard is thus “non-dialectical.” This is evident, second, in the “unidirectionality” of Kierkegaard’s “movement”; ultimately, the only “direction” is that of grace, which is evidently a one-way affair, but we see an image of this unidirectionality in the inversion of the self and in the certainty of the uncertainty of death. In short there are two “movements”-- "redoubling" and "repetition." Ontologically, the self is a redoubling, whereby the first self and the deeper self each and together struggle with the incommensurable dimensions of time and eternity of which the self is constituted. The “synthesis” of the self consists in the reconciliation of the self with itself, a “corresponding to God,” which is the condition for repetition, the moment where eternity touches time, whereby “one loses oneself in order to gain oneself.” This is the victory in struggle which is the victory of God in and for oneself, and here one assumes the imago Christi, the image of repetition itself-- the death and resurrection of Christ-- which is the condition of political life and the Christian vocation.
[i] Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992) p. 491; hereafter CUP.
[ii] See for example Mark C. Taylor’s “Prefatory Conclusion” in Journeys to Self-hood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980) p. 264: “Our sojourn through the labyrinthine works of these two formidable figures has disclosed remarkable identity in the midst of significant difference. We have seen that, throughout their writings, Hegel and Kierkegaard develop alternative phenomenologies of spirit....” Clearly this conclusion Kierkegaard himself would emphatically reject, and I hope to justify that rejection.
[iii] “Re-radicalizing Kierkegaard: An Alternative to Religiousness C in light of an investigation into the teleological suspension of the ethical,” Continental Philosophy Review 35 (2002): 303-324.
[iv] The article by Westphal to which Mulder primarily responds is entitled “Kierkegaard’s Teleological Suspension of Religiousness B” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Community: Religion, Politics and Ethics in Kierkegaard, George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans, eds. (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992) pp. 110-129. Regarding “teleological suspension,” Westphal claims that “each transition in Kierkegaard’s dialectic has this shape,” thus “one can just as fruitfully speak of the teleological suspension of the aesthetic in relation to the ethical” (p. 112). Thus it is not clear, as Mulder himself suggests in footnote 27 to his own article, what Westphal’s precise position on “teleological suspension” is; however, by emphasizing “the existence spheres” of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authorship, by further characterizing them as “shapes” of similar quality and finally by pointing himself to the Aufheben of Religiousnesses A and B, Westphal is unapologetically reading Kierkegaard from an Hegelian perspective. My paper is an effort to question this approach of Westphal and others. A good example, to whom Westphal also refers, is Stephen N. Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985).
[v]Heidegger mentions Kierkegaard in three footnotes to Being and Time. Not surprisingly, he faults Kierkegaard for failing to penetrate the existentiell for the existential; but I take seriously, though not on his word, his reserved recommendation of the discourses, in lieu of Kierkegaard's “theoretical work”: “In the nineteenth century S. Kierkegaard explicitly grasped and thought through the problem of existence as existentiell in a penetrating way. But the existential* problematic is so foreign to him that in an ontological regard he is completely under the influence of Hegel and his view of ancient philosophy. Thus more is to be learned philosophically from his ‘edifying’ writings than from his theoretical work-- with the exception of his treatise on the concept of Angst. [*and, to be sure, the fundamental ontological one, i.e. aiming at the question of being as such in general.]” (trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996) fn. 6 p. 407). Three things come to mind. First, one can imagine Kierkegaard’s comic rejoinder to the criticism of not “aiming at the question of being as such in general.” Second, Heidegger’s assertion of the degree of Hegel’s influence may betray the focus of Heidegger’s interpretation of Kierkegaard. Third, the mention of Kierkegaard’s contribution to the subject of anxiety obscures, perhaps, a far greater debt than Heidegger is willing to acknowledge.
[vi] Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); hereafter EUD.
[vii] In a recent article, Merold Westphal suggests, correctly I think, that the temporality of human existence prevents the collapse of the human and divine, which Hegel is constrained to effect in pursuit of the absolute standpoint: “In existence, subject and object , thought and being are held apart by time…. That the system must be presuppositionless and that it must be final are two sides of the same coin. In both cases the speculative philosopher needs to occupy a standpoint outside of time, and whether the eternity that must be achieved is represented before or after time is not very important. In either case it involves the claim to have a God’s eye view of the world.” “Kierkegaard and Hegel” in The Cambridge
[viii] Søren Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); hereafter TDIO.
[ix] Kierkegaard has already devoted several other of the EUD to the important subject of “patience.” See e.g. “To Gain One's Soul in Patience” (1843) whose words, says Kierkegaard, contain
a redoubling repetition. They admonish one to gain one's soul “in patience,” and they admonish one to “gain” it. This word alone contains an admonition to patience. It does not say “Seize your soul,” as if it were a matter of a moment.... Nor does it say “Save your soul”.... The emphasis that is already given by the phrase "to gain" is inculcated even more penetratingly by the added phrase "in patience"; indeed, the words in their entirety are a kind of picture of the whole process of gaining, that it takes place much as the words proceed with their communication-- that is, it is all a repetition. It is a question not of making a conquest, of hunting and seizing something, but of becoming more and more quiet, because that which is to be gained is there within a person, and the trouble is that one is outside oneself, because that which is to be gained is in the patience... so that it is patience itself in which the soul in patience inclosingly spins and thereby gains patience and itself…. In patience, the soul comes to terms... with God in that it sufferingly accepts itself from him.... The soul can obtain nothing through its own power; it is in the hands of an alien power. If the soul were free in some other way, it would not be the self-contradiction in the contradiction between the external and the internal, the temporal and the eternal. The self-contradiction is again expressed in the soul's being stronger than the world through its weakness, in its being weaker than God through its strength, in its inability to gain anything but itself unless it wants to be deceived, in its being able to gain itself only by losing itself (EUD 169-172).
The "weakness" that makes it "stronger than the world" is itself in relation to God-- the self that is "capable of nothing at all." It is "weaker than God" only if it has the strength to choose to struggle with itself rather than succumb to the world's "beckoning fruits"; but this makes the self "weaker than God." The only thing it can gain, of itself, is itself-- it is deceptive to think otherwise; and it can make this gain only by losing itself and so corresponding to God, thus gaining itself.
[x]See Carl G. Vaught, “Subject, Object, and Representation: A Critique of Hegel’s Dialectic of Perception,” International Philosophical Quarterly XXVI, 2 (1986) 117-129. In this article, the author directly confronts the possibility of dialectical progress at the beginning of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, arguing that the countervailing “vector directionalities” of Hegel’s subject and object render impossible the mutual recognition necessary to Aufheben; in short, Hegel’s dialectic never gets off the ground. I recall Professor Vaught saying that if you let a great thinker get started, there’s no stopping him, and I am reminded of the penultimate scene in The Wizard of Oz: the Wizard’s balloon releases prematurely and Dorothy shouts “Come back, come back” to which the Wizard replies, “I can’t come back, I don’t know how it works!” Had Hegel supplied such a “retraction,” Kierkegaard suggests, he would have been “the greatest thinker in history.” But unlike the humbled and human Wizard, Hegel slips away in glory hoping that no one notices the “problem” at lift-off.
[xi]This problem of beginning begins with Descartes, who does not justify the move from "I think" to "thinking.” In Johannes Climacus, or de omnibus dubitandum est, Kierkegaard offers what Hannah Arendt describes in The Human Condition as “perhaps still the deepest interpretation of Cartesian doubt” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958) fn. p. 275. In this autobiographical account of Johannes Climacus’s commitment to the existential stance of doubt, Climacus finds himself trapped: he doubts his self out of existence by assuming the position of the cogito. Descartes’ move from “I think” to “I am” works as long as it remains metaphysical and timeless, but the move from this “I am” to a determinate I am, from “I think” to thinking, requires “a leap,” and Descartes obscures the decisiveness of this leap.
[xii]See The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 96-100; hereafter SUD.
[xiii]See Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, J. M. Stewart assisted by H. S. Harris, Peter C. Hodgson, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988) p. 443: “humanity has elevated itself to the knowledge of good and evil; and this cognition, this distinction, is the source of evil, is evil itself.... For cognition or consciousness means in general a judging or dividing, a self-distinguishing within oneself.... The cleavage, however, is what is evil; it is the contradiction. It contains the two sides: good and evil.”
[xiv] Ronald L. Hall makes this suggestion specifically with respect to Mark C. Taylor’s characterization, in Journeys to Self-Hood, of Kierkegaard as comprehended by Hegel’s “unhappy consciousness.” See “Language and Freedom: Kierkegaard’s Analysis of the Demonic in The Concept of Anxiety” in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety, Robert L. Perkins, ed. (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985) pp. 153-166. Similarly, for Theodor Adorno, Kierkegaard is an “inverted, interiorized” version of Hegel for whom “the external world becomes real only in its depravity.” Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989) p. 32. Both, I suggest, by reading Kierkegaard from within Hegel’s shadow, are really attacking the demonic consciousness and thus do not reach the heart of Kierkegaard himself.
[xv] This analogy fails, however, by conflating the existential and the speculative. Thus Kierkegaard, in his Journals, remarks of Anselm that his “proof” is not in the proof but in Anselm’s personal surrender to grace: “Anselm prays in all inwardness that he might succeed in proving God’s existence. He thinks he has succeeded, and he flings himself down in adoration to thank God. Amazing. He does not notice that the prayer and this expression of thanksgiving are infinitely more proof of God’s existence than—the proof.” Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, tr. Hong and Hong (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978) Vol. I, 20, p.11, 1853. Then again, perhaps the analogy is saved by our recognition of how little in fact we have “proven” merely by proving the existence of God; for that, after all, as Anselm himself clearly recognized, is to prove nothing about God. And this recalls how infinitely less Descartes has accomplished with the mere existence of the “I am,” and how infinitely far he has to go—thus the leap—before he gets “beyond” it.
[xvi] Confessions, trans. John K. Ryan (New York: Doubleday, 1960) p. 196; Søren Kierkegaard’s samlede Værker, ed. A. B. Drachmann, J. L. Heiberg, and H. O. Lange (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1962) Bd. 4 p. 281. It is not my present purpose to pursue the “natural” affinities between Augustine and Kierkegaard, both of whom are imbued also with Paul; but the “unnaturalness” of which both speak is striking and is evidently bound up for both, as for Paul, with sin. See Romans 7: 19-25: “For the good that I would I do not: but the evil which I would not, that I do. Now if I do that I would not, it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me. I find then a law, that, when I would do good, evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man: But I see another law in my members, warring against the law of my mind, and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death? I thank God through Jesus Christ our Lord. So then with the mind I myself serve the law of God; but with the flesh the law of sin.”
[xvii] The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980) p. 89; hereafter CA.
[xviii] Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993) p. 153.
[xix]“The category of sin is the category of individuality. Sin cannot be thought speculatively at all. The individual human being lies beneath the concept; an individual human being cannot be thought, but only the concept ‘man.’… But just as one individual person cannot be thought, neither can one individual sinner; sin can be thought (then it becomes negation), but not one individual sinner. That is precisely why there is no earnestness about sin if it is only thought, for earnestness is simply this: that you and I are sinners. Earnestness is not sin in general; rather, the accent of earnestness rests on the sinner, who is the single individual” (SUD 119).
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