Presented to the Saint John’s University
Specters of the Demonic
In Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky:
From Doubt and Despair
To the Trinity of
Love, Freedom and Faith
Henry B. Piper
I feel that absolute atheism is more worthy of respect than worldly indifference.... Whatever you say, the complete atheist still stands at the next-to-the-top rung of the ladder of perfect faith. He may take that last step, and he may not—who knows? But the indifferent, they certainly have no faith, only an ugly fear—and only the more sensitive of them have that.
—Father Tikhon to Stavrogin, Dostoevsky Demons[1]
Introduction
I shall be speaking of what Kierkegaard refers to, as Vigilius Haufniensis in The Concept of Anxiety[2] and as Anti-Climacus in The Sickness Unto Death,[3] as “the demonic consciousness,” the ultimate intensification of defiant despair. The demoniac yearns to be a “closed system,” in perfect if tenuous isolation, which she identifies with “freedom” and for which she counts herself solely responsible. Like a craven, unrepentant alcoholic, the demoniac pretends to eternity by denying and defying it and so is a slave to herself, trapped like Narcissus in unwitting worship of her own image.
Kierkegaard variously describes the demonic consciousness as “inclosing reserve” [det Indesluttede: indeslutte to enclose; inde indoors, inside; slutte to finish, end], as “the unfreely disclosed” or “involuntary disclosure” and as “anxiety about the good.” I shall be looking at two specific instantiations of the demonic consciousness which illustrate these descriptions. The first I shall refer to as "the metaphysical demonic," exemplified by Johannes Climacus in Kierkegaard's early, discontinued work, Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est.[4] Johannes, by reducing his existence to pure cognition, evades despair by effectively denying his power of ethical decision and thus denying existence itself. The specter of ethical decision does manifest itself, however, in the second instantiation of the demonic consciousness―the underground man in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, [5] which I shall refer to as “the existential demonic.” In him we shall confront freedom's decisive requirement of self-disclosure, and we shall see how it is the will of the self utterly and ignominiously to surrender itself in faith to love that is the condition for such disclosure and for escape from the narcissistic bondage of self.
The demonic consciousness is the opposite of freedom just as, for Anti-Climacus, despair is the opposite of faith. Thus, as The Sickness Unto Death offers an indirect approach to faith through its analysis of despair, my analysis of the demonic is an indirect means of grasping the meaning of freedom. If we understand freedom as physical unconstraint, per Hobbes, or as the realization of the “I” in the “We,” per Hegel, we have a dialectical structure of social contract, whether material or ideal, for which freedom is the mediation of the conflict between individual autonomy and interpersonal concord. I mean to oppose that view by showing that freedom, and human personality more generally, are non-dialectical, implying that the implicit views of freedom espoused by Hobbes and Hegel are too limited and simply wrong: free personality is not merely mediated, rather it is most truly itself in the immediate and irremediable paradox of love, freedom and faith.[6]
In the final section of the paper, I shall describe the nature of this paradox by recounting Kierkegaard’s argument, from his Journals and Papers, that human freedom is paradoxically dependent upon the omnipotence and love of God. I shall explain this dependence by reference to the relationship between parent and child. Then, reverting again to an indirect approach, I shall indicate this paradox of freedom and love in inverted form in the abusive relationship, wherein love is perverted to become the instrument not of freedom and salvation but of possession, control and servitude. Love, the rejection of which is the underground man’s undoing and which would be the undoing of the demonic itself, demands the faith to surrender one’s narcissistic willfulness. Such willfulness is like our shadow, to which we might turn for an illusory sense of control as we turn from the light, which represents the existential truth of the unknown future, a light which blinds us with an anxiety that willfulness seeks vainly to overcome.
In brief, the demonic will lead us in a downward spiral into the shadows of doubt and despair, but the paradox of freedom and love would illuminate and redeem this obscure isolation on the condition of faith.
The Metaphysical Demonic
Johannes Climacus’s De omnibus dubitandum est opens with an autobiographical account of his childhood relationship with his father, undoubtedly a demonically idealized version of Kierkegaard's own childhood. Johannes recounts his father's “glowing imagination”—the power of his pure thought to conjure a complete, self-inclosed world; “his father was capable of everything” (120), says Johannes. Together he and his father took walks back and forth across the living room, his father describing in minute detail the sights, smells and sounds of the woods or marketplace through which they strode, Johannes adding crucial details, asking questions and looking out always, lest loom an untoward leap, for the slightest inconsistencies or omissions. Thus Johannes grew up with an acute appreciation of the all-consuming power of disinterested thinking, untainted by contingency and accident—an ideal world more real than reality itself. Intellectually, Johannes was in awe of the dialectical power of his father's mind—his capacity to make things turn into their opposites, before his eyes, with the immediacy of the sudden. But in this Johannes also felt an inscrutable emptiness which defied cognition and which Kierkegaard himself referred to as his father's “quiet despair.”
Johannes set his heart, ironically, on becoming a philosopher, and in this he was confronted with the considered wisdom of the local philosophizers, summed up in three distinct theses— (1) “philosophy begins with doubt,” (2) “in order to philosophize one must have doubted,” and (3) “modern philosophy begins with doubt.” Johannes begins with the third, which looks like an historical pronouncement, thus not one worthy of philosophy’s proper quest for the eternal—unless the eternal is understood, as in Christianity, to enter time in “the moment.” This Johannes rejects out of hand, for Christianity would put the eternal beyond the grasp of cognition, and he wants to be a philosopher and has no use for grace. But if this third thesis is not historical, it seems identical to the first—that “philosophy begins with doubt”—and the gratuity of such restatement unsettles him. Moreover he is stymied at the outset by the problem of beginning, which again seems to imply historicity. Finally, doubt itself clearly presupposes an object to be doubted—the preceding tradition.
It is suddenly clear that objective reflection (or dialectical thinking), which is dichotomous, is incapable of producing or explaining doubt, which must itself be a third that stands between—interesse—the two, logically-opposed poles of reflection. Doubt must be the trichotomous and interested activity of relating the opposed poles to one another: it must be a subjective undertaking. He thus progresses to the middle thesis, “in order to philosophize one must have doubted”: one must begin with one’s own doubt. To begin with doubt, however, is to begin with a negative principle; such a beginning suffers the same problem that Anti-Climacus raises in The Sickness Unto Death concerning sin—to consider sin as a negation rather than as a position is to abstract from the irreducible value of individual personality. Sin as negation makes repentance into a negation of negation instead of requiring the assumption of the position of one's own self (Cf. “Sin is not a Negation but a Position” SUD 96-100). To begin with doubt rather than with despair, as Anti-Climacus puts it in Practice in Christianity,[7] is “to speculate oneself into pure appearance [Skin]” and “out of our own skins [Skind]” (PIC fn 81). In short, “in actuality the whole interest of subjectivity steps forth and metaphysics runs aground” (CA fn 18). Johannes recounts that the philosophizers had told him that the first thesis, “philosophy begins with doubt,” “does not belong to any philosophy; it is a thesis from the eternal philosophy, which anyone who wishes to give himself to philosophy must embrace.” Johannes “thought the words so beautiful that he could not stop listening to them, just as one sadly gazes after the wild geese flying in the sky. Anyone who wants to belong to that world must join them, but no one has ever been seen flying with them” (Dode 148).
Two conclusions emerge from Johannes’s beginning. First, however one formulate Descartes’ shibboleth, the task of doubting entails a radical discontinuity because it demands a decisive break with all previous tradition—it is non-relational and self-inclosed; Descartes himself speaks of this in Discourse on the Method where he refers to his own mastery of the tradition and concludes that it has nothing to teach him. Johannes says that it is as if the master gives to his pupil the sword that must become the instrument of the master's own demise. Second, the method of doubt, taken as an existential demand, not only closes one off from the wisdom of the preceding tradition, but also it consumes the individual who invokes it: the sword, having slain the master, turns on her pupil. In short, once one assumes the mantle of radical doubt, one vanishes, in “inclosing reserve,” not only from the world but from oneself. Johannes's philosophizing is an enactment of the Hegelian effort to comprehend existence: Johannes becomes metaphysics, but there is no “metaphysical existence”—metaphysics and existence are non-dialectically incommensurable. To reduce existence to cognizable terms is to abstract oneself out of it.
Of Kierkegaard it is said that he prescribes a radical isolationism, that faith demands withdrawal from the world; thus Mark C. Taylor claims that Kierkegaardian faith is comprehended by Hegel as “the unhappy consciousness.”[8] As Ronald L. Hall suggests, however, this criticism is more properly directed rather to the demonic consciousness, which precisely denies faith. [9] Thus in Johannes’s dialectical peregrinations we witness an existence that defies existence itself: mesmerized by his own narcissistic reflection, he is like a hamster in a wheel, trapped in doubt with nowhere to go, unable to begin.
By contrast, for Dostoevsky’s underground man love offers an opening: this demoniac “stands at the next-to-the-top rung of the ladder of perfect faith.” Unlike Johannes, who is but an aesthetic abstraction for whom existence isn’t even possible, the underground man could exist if he would surrender, in faith, to love.
The Existential Demonic
In Part I of Notes from Underground we encounter existence in all its inclosingly reserved decrepitude: reflects the underground man, "I would gnaw at myself… secretly, inwardly… there is no way out" (8). The underground man gazes at the world across his own demonic abyss with disdain, and the only response to it that he can muster is a drive for arbitrariness and caprice. Much of his criticism of the hubristic enlightenment faith in the boundless progress of reason is well-founded: there is a narrow virtue in the underground man's “heightened consciousness,” which Anti-Climacus would refer to as his “deeper nature.” (Cf. SUD 64, 111). But in asserting his own universal perspicacity, he shifts accountability for himself to the world. His overweening morbidity is a defiance of existence, but as a disclaimer of membership in the human community it is also weakness: he poses as the defiant and suffering master of the sinfulness of the world (hereditary sin), but he will not accept himself as the author of his own sin.
In Part II of the novel we see how the underground man might have accepted the risk of becoming wicked that he might have been vulnerable to the good. There are three critical episodes. In the first, he seeks to conquer himself by avenging the offense inflicted upon him by the officer, who is altogether unaware of the underground man’s existence and thus incapable of inflicting offense on him, which is the futile point of the underground man’s tragicomic fastidiousness in dressing himself “to undress” the officer. In the second episode the underground man insinuates himself into a circle of former schoolmates at a dinner party and strives to conquer the determinate other by the offensiveness of his mere presence, which manifests his rebellion “against all existence,” in the words of Anti-Climacus: the underground man feels that he “has obtained evidence against it, against its goodness [and] that he himself is the evidence, and that is what he wants to be... in order to protest against all existence with his torment” (SUD 73-4). But as his companions leave him for the brothel, he is reduced to begging for money so that he can follow.
His defiant cleavage to his own, self-contrived torment is implicitly a rebellion against God, a defiance of eternity wherein one posits oneself as God, but its immediate victim is the young prostitute Liza. The third episode finds the underground man determined to master this innocent unfortunate by turning his own torment upon her with his prescient vision of her inevitable descent to the oblivion of a decrepit den and a nameless, muddy grave; by so revealing her fate he fancies himself her savior and lord. But his demonic consistency slips as he gives her the address to his shabby room, and his torment turns inwardly upon himself. He had gone to her for his own aggrandizement, but his indiscretion exposes him. His existence is desperate for her but his inclosing reserve despairs of her: “how I hated her and how I was drawn to her at that moment. One feeling intensified the other” (124). He had gone to the brothel for “power, that's what I wanted then, the game was what I wanted” (121), but she comes offering love—offering herself—and he realizes “that the roles were now finally reversed, that she was now the heroine, and I was the same crushed and humiliated creature as she had been before me that night” (124). Anti-Climacus offers a description of this condition:
Hope is the possibility of help, especially by virtue of the absurd, that for God everything is possible—no, that he does not want. And to seek help from someone else—no, not for all the world does he want that. Rather than to seek help he prefers, if necessary, to be himself with all the agonies of hell. (SUD 71)
As Liza turns to leave, the underground man makes a last grasp at mastery, pressing a five-ruble note into her hand; but when she is gone he finds the money on the floor and runs madly after her through the snowy street.
In this final episode, we see the underground man succumb utterly to the demonic consciousness understood as "anxiety about the good": “The bondage of sin is an unfree relation to evil, but the demonic is an unfree relation to the good. The demonic therefore manifests itself clearly only when it is in contact with the good, which comes to its boundary from the outside” (CA 119). Liza represents the eminence of the good, the imminence of which threatens to breach the demonic security of the underground man's self-inclosed, non-disclosive domain. Anti-Climacus describes the nature of this threat:
Precisely because the demonic person has no internal consistency and is consistent in the consistency of evil he also has a totality to lose.... In other words, in despair he has abandoned the good: it cannot help him anyway but it certainly could disturb him, could make it impossible for him ever to achieve the momentum of consistency, could make him weak. Only in the continuance of sin is he himself.... But what does this mean? It means that the state of sin is what holds him together. (SUD 108)
In Part I the underground man reflects, “I was never able to become wicked. I was conscious every moment of so many elements in my life most opposite to that. I knew that they had been swarming in me all my life,... but I purposely would not let them out. They tormented me to the point of shame” (5).
When Liza throws herself at his feet, the underground man is compelled to a decision: Liza’s unconditional love demands the “involuntary disclosure” characteristic of “inclosing reserve.” His “anxiety about the good” is manifested by the demonic obstinacy with which he clings to a self of his own, defiant projection, which he hurls against a world to which he will not belong. He represses the “elements of the good” which have been “swarming” in him because these cannot be part of his own projection but come “to its boundary from the outside”; they are indicative of the eternal that constitutes him and thus point inexorably to his ultimate dependence on a source that transcends him, and the demoniac, turning again to Anti-Climacus,
is afraid of eternity, afraid that it will separate him from his, demonically understood, infinite superiority over other men, his justification, demonically understood, for being what he is.... What demonic madness—the thought that most infuriates him is that eternity should get the notion to deprive him of his misery. (SUD 72)
Speaking across the depths of self-denial, the underground man utters his equivocal lament: “Oh,” he says,
if I were only doing nothing out of laziness. Lord, how I'd respect myself then. Respect myself because... there would be in me at least one, as it were, positive quality, which I could myself be sure of... It means I'm positively defined, it means there's something to say about me. “Lazybones!”—now that is a title and a mission, it's a career, sirs. (19)
The underground man clings to himself in inclosing reserve to gird himself against the surrender of self-disclosure, which the good demands; he defies self-disclosure in his denial of love, cleaving to his feckless quest for offensiveness, and succumbs to the self-inclosed enslavement of narcissism.
Demonic Undoing
“The greatest good, after all, which can be done for a being... is to make it free.” Thus opens Kierkegaard’s journal entry in which he argues, paradoxically, “In order to do just that, omnipotence is required.”[10]
The argument may be stated by analogy to human parenting.[11] An infant is totally dependent on the parent, who expresses his love, one-sidedly, in this dependency, by nurturing and directing the child’s every move. As she matures, the child asserts her freedom and the parent at times withdraws control to permit the child to stumble and so learn... to be free: to raise a child is indeed to prepare her “to stand on her own two feet.” Thus, for example, Mother puts training wheels on the child’s first bicycle to prevent him from falling, and she removes them with trepidation for she knows the child will fall. Mother does not remove the wheels to cause the fall, no more than God gives us free will to make us sin: in both cases the purpose is to make us free, out of love. Only without the training wheels can the child be free to ride on her own, though this freedom, unlike the negative, Hobbesian liberty of non-restraint, imposes significant restrictions, for genuine, positive freedom demands the acceptance and mastery of the exigencies of gravity and balance. Freedom is power, the effectiveness of which demands the acknowledgement and mastery of its own limits: to think freely, to master the power of thought, for example, is to bind oneself to rationality and truth. To bicycle freely is not to zigzag with unconstrained and arbitrary abandon but to master the straight and the true.
As the child ultimately flies the nest, however, no parent can entirely let go, as he must with the bicycle lesson, and the parent faces this paradox of love, the drive to protect by possession and control being incommensurable with the simple admiration of the child’s free flight: no human parent can manage it. Thus, says Kierkegaard, “This is why one human being cannot make another wholly free, because the one who has power is himself captive in having it and therefore continually has a wrong relation to the one whom he wants to make free.” So the parent cannot restrain himself from back-seat driving, unwelcome advice and importunate phone calls. Only omnipotent God can both love without condition and let go without qualification. Kierkegaard says,
Only omnipotence can withdraw itself at the same time it gives itself away, and this relationship is the very independence of the receiver. God’s omnipotence is therefore his goodness. For goodness is to give oneself away completely, but in such a way that by omnipotently taking oneself back one makes the other independent.
The loving parent also gives himself completely, but he does not have the power equally to withdraw, thus a parent is categorically incapable of the perfect love that makes free. Kierkegaard says, “All finite power makes dependent; only omnipotence can make independent, can form from nothing something which has its continuity in itself through the continual withdrawing of omnipotence.” Thus it is not surprising that, humanly, we can turn the thing on its head to think of power in terms of control, which is why the human will to power erupts so readily into violence, crushing all possibility of love. Kierkegaard concludes, “Only a wretched and mundane conception of the dialectic of power holds that it is greater and greater in proportion to its ability to compel and to make dependent.”
Let’s now turn to the adult love relationship. Whereas the parent loves from the moment of the child’s total dependency and is powerless to make the leap to making free, the adult lover loves the beloved precisely by virtue of the beloved’s independence, precisely because the lover has not “formed” the beloved. Whereas the parent can never altogether escape the possibility that he is really loving himself in the child, the adult lover, in truth, loves the other as other. Yet in this reciprocal relationship, the insoluble paradox of love persists, for the transition from dependence to freedom, which the parent fails to make, is, between adults, simply reversed in direction. This love begins with freedom, but in the very quest for unity, which love is, the lover inevitably sullies the purity of love by the very effort to connect: the lover cannot avoid seeing an image of himself in the beloved, indeed his attraction may, narcissistically, commence precisely with this, and to project himself onto and into the beloved is to defeat her independence—the inevitable effect of the effort to bond is to bind. In even the most ideal of human relationships it cannot be otherwise. Love, in other words, ideally demands total separation of lover and beloved in order that each be free, because only as free is each a proper object of love; but such separation of lover and beloved is precisely what human lovers seek to overcome. The paradox of love is that the lover seek to defeat the very possibility of love.
We observe this most graphically, if negatively, in the demonic perversion of love—the abusive relationship. The abuser expresses his “love” by demanding and enforcing possession and control. He effectively strives to reduce the beloved to infantile dependency. He won’t let her go “because he loves her.” Moreover, human love’s requirement of reciprocity requires, as the essential condition for the beloved to be able to return her love to the lover, that the beloved be free to love the lover, which entails equally that she be free not to; but it is precisely this that the abuser must deny his “beloved.” Thus he claims, sincerely if delusionally, that “he beats her out of love.” He is enraged by the attention of another to his beloved because it reminds him of her independence, yet it is this only that can make her a genuine recipient of his love as well as one who is free to return it. The abuser, like Narcissus, sees his reflection in the victim but is numb to the fact that it is he.[12] In truth, the abuser is possessed by a self-loathing, reflected in the victim, that seeks to assert the possession that he lacks of himself. He fixates upon his own shadow, turning his back to love. Moreover, the “beloved’s” victimization consists essentially not in physical servitude but in her seeing herself through the abuser’s eyes and thus internalizing the self-loathing that his shadow casts: her submission is the shadow of his control.
In his refusal of freedom, the abuser is forsaken of the faith that love demands, which is manifest when the victim succeeds at last in separating herself decisively to sever the relationship: it is here that the “beloved,” suddenly and irrevocably free, in truth faces her greatest peril, for this is when most abuse homicides occur. An abusive relationship is at all times hovering perilously over this catastrophic abyss, and avoids it only by a tenuous balance grounded in the submission of the victim, as the abuser sustains himself in the face of self-loathing by his control of the other in whom he narcissistically sees himself. When the victim’s decisive break sunders finally the relationship, the abuser’s delusion that she “loves” him reveals itself as mere shadow and the abuser himself as a mere shadow of it, and, suddenly alone over the abyss, vertigo overwhelms him and he acts to conclude a love that never existed, to control love itself by concluding its unrealized possibility. Here abuse no longer escalates gradually and quantitatively but takes a qualitative leap into demoniacal perdition, to murder.
Characteristic of the abuser, the underground man shuts himself off to love’s demand of self-surrender. He wants not love, but worship, which, as Anti-Climacus argues, is in human terms a blasphemous perversion of love: “no one has the right to make himself into an object of faith for another person” (PIC 143). To presume to demand what amounts to worship rather than love, to claim the eternal standpoint, is to confuse oneself with God. Liza, however, refuses to submit to the underground man’s command, and her appearance at his room is a genuine offer of love, which would be the underground man’s salvation and his demonic undoing; but he is demonically self-inclosed against love’s demand and he self-implodes and self-immolates, refusing the hand of love for his own deification. The love of God is the very illumination of freedom, but in that light the underground man casts his forsaken shadow upon all who touch him, even as Liza, loving much, weeps at his feet.
The underground man is a slave of his own willfulness, entranced by his own shadow. What power one’s shadow promises! Whereas a dog may be perplexed and fooled by his shadow, and a horse may start, the child stands, back to the light of the sun, facing the shapes and motions of her own casting, which are utterly in thrall to the child’s every whim. As child dictates “shadow lift your arm,” with perfect obedience it rises, with an elegance and aplomb surprising and delightful even to the great dictator herself. So compliant is the shadow that the child is enraptured by it; but, following Augustine, what is this shadow really but the absence of the light, a void and nothing in itself, utterly dependent upon the sun, which we obscure by our backwards orientation. As the sun goes lower, the shadow grows longer, to the point however of a scary distortion and perversity, and then… is gone.
Kierkegaard somewhere reminds us of the child, barely able to walk, pushing the stroller with father stealthily guiding and pushing from above. Child insists of course on going it alone and father must take care not to trample on the illusion since the child is indignant if father intrudes. Thus appears the willfulness of will, which we see too in the shadow command, the “command” of the underground man. The rapture such command affords reminds us of the power of its temptation. I love my shadow because it is I, the I of my dreams, the I who is what I want it to be. But recall: it is nothing in itself, its being utterly and only the absence of what enables it, without which it vanishes leaving no trace, and the narcotic attention I pay it leads me to ignore and deny the truth of that enabling power, the light of the sun. For therein is the truth and the power, in the light, which, unlike the shadows, truly is. It is only in the shadows and by the shadows that the shadows seem real; in truth they obstruct and conceal the real. It is in the obstruction and concealment of shadow that the willfulness of will resides, the tempting illusion of self-command.
As I turn toward the truth and reality of the sun, however, I am painfully blinded and I spontaneously and instinctually recoil and turn away in favor of the cool control of the shadows, especially my own! Even to acknowledge the truth of the sun is a supreme difficulty, but to face it deprives me not only of total control, which my shadow promises, but also of my very vision. I am plunged into anxiety since I cannot see the step ahead, a step into the future’s unrealized possibility. And now to walk toward that light, step by step into an invisible future—this is the monumental demand of faith, compared to which the descent into the shadows seems reassuring indeed. But this demand of faith is just where truth and freedom lie, for I do not see the future except as the anxiety that consists of its illimitable possibility, and this is my truth and the very truth of human existence as such. The narcissistic temptation of my shadow follows me doggedly, with every step, ever ready to catch my eye if I falter ever so slightly to turn away from the light and so be recaptured by the narcotic rapture of its first discovery. Freedom of the will, therefore, is not about that trap of self-command any more than it is about the unconstraint of haphazard bicycling; it is, rather, about our faith in the future’s indeterminate possibility and the straightness and assuredness of its promise, which the underground man, in defiance of love, rejects.
So the underground man’s despair “is really a despair through the aid of the eternal, the despairing misuse of the eternal within the self to will in despair to be oneself. But just because it is despair through the aid of the eternal, in a certain sense it is very close to the truth; and just because it lies very close to the truth, it is infinitely far away” (SUD 67). The freedom of self-hood is “at hand,” but to grasp it requires a decisive and passionate conversion of the self (a repetition), a turning from shadow to light.
Conclusion
The underground man’s passion is self-torment, possible only because he knows he is a self; Johannes's passion is dispassionateness, a contrived ethical indifference, which prevents him from acknowledging that he is a self. The underground man is aware of the possibility of freedom's ethical demand that he disclose himself in the choice between good and evil, whereas Johannes barricades himself ideally against the reality of the distinction. The underground man encounters the specter of salvation in the possibility of love, whereas Johannes, by beginning with the negative, can never begin to exist at all. The underground man, too, lacks positivity, but the difference is that he is aware that he has relinquished it.
We realize freedom only in love, but, abandoned to our own devices, we can encounter this only in our own mirror’s reverse image, in the dark shadow of our selves. The abuser’s narcissistic lust for possession and control alerts us to the irremediably paradoxical tension in which love and freedom abide. The demoniac worships her own shadow in narcissistic defiance of the eternal, refusing the leap beyond herself into love, reminding us that we achieve love, and freedom from the bondage of self, only by faith. In short, only lost am I found, only blind may I see.
[2]Vigilius Haufniensis, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomte and Albert B. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); hereafter “CA.”
[3]Anti-Climacus, The Sickness Unto Death, trans. Howard V. and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); hereafter “SUD.”
[4]Johannes Climacus, Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus or De omnibus dubitandum est, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); hereafter “Dode.” I refer to the work as “discontinued” to indicate my speculation that, rather than simply not finishing it, Kierkegaard realized that Johannes was trapped in Cartesian doubt and thus that the work had no end.
[5] Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes From Underground, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (New York: Vintage Books, 1993).
[6] For more on non-dialectical difference and the irremediable paradox to which I refer here, see my article “Kierkegaard’s Non-Dialectical Dialectic, or That Kierkegaard is not Hegelian,” International Philosophical Quarterly 44: 4 (December 2004), 497-517.
[7]Anti-Climacus, Practice in Christianity, trans. Hong and Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991); hereafter “PIC.”
[8] Journeys of Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Theodor Adorno’s interpretation of Kierkegaard is analogous and equally mistaken. According to Adorno, in Kierkegaard’s dialectic “Hegel is inverted, interiorized” whereas Hegel’s dialectic expresses itself outwardly and so comes back to itself in reflection. “For Kierkegaard,” says Adorno, “the external world becomes real only in its depravity.” Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), pp. 32, 39. Thus Adorno takes faith to be an isolated condition of interiority, which describes the demonic consciousness and thus utterly misses faith.
[9] Ronald L. Hall, "Language and Freedom: Kierkegaard's Analysis of the Demonic," The Concept of Anxiety, ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1985). Hall addresses himself to Taylor
[10] Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, trans. Hong and Hong (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1967-1978), Vol. II #1251, pp. 62-3, written 1846; hereafter “JP II 1251, 62-3, 1846.”
[11] The concepts I develop in this section derive primarily from Kierkegaard, while the illustrations―of training wheels, shadows and abuse―are my own.
[12]Marshall McLuhan makes this point in the context of the relation of human beings to their (media) “extensions”: “The Greek myth of Narcissus is directly concerned with a fact of human experience, as the word Narcissus indicates. It is from the Greek word narcosis, or numbness. The youth Narcissus mistook his own reflection in the water for another person. This extension of himself by mirror numbed his perception until he became the servomechanism of his own extended or repeated image. The nymph Echo tried to win his love with fragments of his own speech, but in vain. He was numb. He had adapted to his extension of himself and had become a closed system.
“Now the point of this myth is the fact that men at once become fascinated with themselves in any material other than themselves. There have been cynics who have insisted that men fall deepest in love with women who give them back their own image. Be that as it may, the wisdom of the Narcissus myth does not convey any idea that Narcissus fell in love with anything he regarded as himself. Obviously he would have had very different feelings about the image had he known it was an extension or repetition of himself. It is, perhaps, the bias of our intensely technological and, therefore, narcotic culture that we have long interpreted the Narcissus story to mean that he fell in love with himself, that he imagined the reflection to be Narcissus!” Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964), pp. 41-42.
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