Sample Chapter: The Dialectical Self
In these times of quarantine boredom, I thought I’d share a sample chapter from my recent book, The Dialectical Self: Kierkegaard, Marx, and the Making of the Modern Subject (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Penn Press is currently having a 40% off Spring sale with promo code SPRING20-FM.
PART II: EMANCIPATION
When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a shape of life has grown old, and it cannot be rejuvenated, but only recognized, by the grey in grey of philosophy; the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.
—G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right
I rebel—therefore we exist.
—Albert Camus, The Rebel
It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom.
—Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Now I’m beginning to understand everything.
—Nora Helmer, in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House
CHAPTER 3: COMMUNICATION
Recovering Abraham
Of all Søren Kierkegaard’s many works, Fear and Trembling is the most problematic, yet it is also essential for understanding Kierkegaard’s thoughts on emancipation. As a meditation on the biblical Abraham, one that explicitly focuses on his attempted sacrifice of Isaac, Kierkegaard’s apparent praise for this horrific act seems irreconcilable with any sense of human decency. In fact, the image of Abraham obeying God’s command, hand poised atop Mt. Moriah, has become one and the same with that which many have of Kierkegaard himself.1 Abraham’s story, after all, is the central concern of Fear and Trembling, and it is used by Kierkegaard to make the claim that God’s demands are higher than those of reason (i.e., that faith, of which Abraham is the father, is higher than reason).2 However, while Kierkegaard himself could not have foreseen the degree to which his legacy would be tarnished, in a more modest way, he actually counted on such misinterpretations. As Fear and Trembling argues, the “religious” movement of faith is an existential movement of self-appropriation, but there is an interpretive dimension to this movement—one that the Abraham narrative helps reveal—whereby it is easily (almost necessarily) misunderstood. As a result, self-appropriation often appears as the very worst of transgressions, so that learning to properly interpret Abraham is intimately related to learning to understand the emancipatory act of overcoming despair.
To the attentive reader, the first words of Fear and Trembling reveal that Kierkegaard is interested in questions of communication and interpretation. It begins with an epigram borrowed from Johann Georg Hamann, which reads as follows: “What Tarquinius Superbus said in the garden by means of the poppies, the son understood but the messenger did not.”3 This epigram refers to a story in which Sextus, the son of the last king of Rome, having just conquered the city of Gabii, sent a messenger to solicit further orders from his father. His father Tarquinius, not trusting the messenger, gave him no verbal message and instead took the messenger on a stroll through the garden, where he casually lopped off the tops of the tallest poppies. In this way, he sent word to his son to execute the city’s leading men, doing so by way of the messenger, but without informing the messenger as to the content of the message (or even that he was carrying one). As C. Stephen Evans notes, it is this story that is meant to orient us to Abraham’s story—and to all of Fear and Trembling.4
Throughout Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard’s praise of Abraham seems endless, while he offers little by way of an explanation of Abraham’s faith—a faith that does, in fact, appear horrific. However, this absence of a positive doctrine of faith is a further clue that any demonization of Kierkegaard might be unfair. Specifically, Kierkegaard wrote Fear and Trembling by way of the pseudonym Johannes de Silentio, or Johannes of Silence, and Johannes makes it clear that he does not know what faith is. “Abraham I cannot understand; in a certain sense I can learn nothing from him except to be amazed.”5 Like the epigram’s messenger, Johannes does not know the content of the message he carries, as he does not have the faith of which he attempts to speak. Therefore, in an essential sense, he is silent. Johannes cannot even be sure he carries a message at all, making the readers’ interpretive work all the more difficult. All that Johannes does know is how it appears to him, an individual lacking faith, and who therefore lacks access to the essential content of the story. And to him, it does, in fact, appear like murder.6
Ironically, insofar as the story appears like that of an attempted filicide and insofar as Kierkegaard has made it clear that its truth is other than its appearance, the one thing that this story cannot mean is precisely what so many have taken it to mean (i.e., it cannot mean that we should be willing to sacrifice our children if God commands it). However, thus far, the only thing hinting at an alternative reading is that Johannes is “amazed”—a specific type of amazement that seems to testify to a vague recognition that Abraham cannot possibly be a murderer (and note, Johannes does not extend this charity to other filicides but only to Abraham).7 Or perhaps it simply indicates a hope that Abraham is not one, with Johannes having nothing to offer but his hope. Regardless, a tension now exists between the apparent content of the story—content that beckons revulsion—and Johannes’s belief that the story must be otherwise, but all Johannes offers is his willingness to extend a benefit of the doubt. However, this tension is intentionally orchestrated by Kierkegaard and helps explain a central pillar of Fear and Trembling.
In order to reveal the hidden message that Abraham’s story contains, to the extent that this revelation is possible, Kierkegaard first needs to make us aware of the interpretive role that we play in understanding the world. And by shocking us with such a horrific story, while simultaneously praising it, he is attempting to do just that. Whereas the apparent obviousness of the narrative makes it seem as if we are passive recipients of the story’s unquestioned meaning, by insisting that we entertain the possibility that the meaning might be otherwise, Kierkegaard is attempting to provoke the awareness that there is a difference between how a story appears and what it essentially means.
In this, we can see a way in which Kierkegaard represents a sort of post-Hegelian Kantianism. Clearly adopting a model of freedom and subjectivity from Hegel, Kierkegaard is also adopting a Kantian position by arguing that there is a division between appearance and reality, contrary to Hegel’s attempt to overcome this divide. However, in Kierkegaard’s case, his concern is not purely an epistemological or metaphysical one but rather a pedagogical and ethical one. He does not want us to comprehend the difference between the noumenal and phenomenal realm as it might pertain to the natural world;8 instead, Kierkegaard wants us to acknowledge that this division holds true within the world of ethics. While Abraham appears willing to complete a horrific act, by suggesting that this appearance might not reflect the truth, Kierkegaard is expressly asking his readers to acknowledge that there is a gap between the truth of an action and how it appears. Perhaps, Kierkegaard argues, Abraham is not sacrificing Isaac at all,9 and perhaps, he further argues, it only appears that way to us.10
Fear and Trembling is a work that is often quite conscious of its immediate readers, and these readers were members of Copenhagen’s bourgeois elite.11 As we have seen, a few years later, Kierkegaard would diagnose this same class as despairing in their social conformity.12 For now, however, insofar as Christianity was the Danish state religion, Kierkegaard was attacking Danish social conformity by way of the substance of that conformity. That is, the bourgeoisie had adopted Christianity as a cultural identity, outwardly conforming to it but not earnestly struggling with its difficult ethical maxims. In other words, the Danish bourgeoisie were cosmetically Christian but not truly so, and they had thereby come to mistake appearance for reality.
Therefore, speaking to a class for whom ethical life had become too easy—a matter of conformity rather than earnestness—Kierkegaard realized that a prerequisite for rekindling ethical seriousness was to move beyond appearances and toward underlying realities. And by suggesting that there might be something ethical to Abraham’s story, despite appearances to the contrary, Kierkegaard was advancing an ethical possibility that was irreconcilable with any conception of ethics that saw ethics in purely phenomenal, or apparent, terms.13 Therefore, to the extent that his claim about Abraham could be demonstrated as true, Kierkegaard had found a way not only to attack his bourgeois contemporaries, but also to undermine (or move beyond) Hegel’s advance over Kant, by finding an example that, if redeemed, helped demonstrate that the truth of an action does not reside in how it appears. That is, he had found a way to demonstrate the undemonstrable—the non-identity of the self.
Silence and Speaking
In Henrik Ibsen’s 1879 drama, A Doll’s House, the protagonist Nora Helmer rebels against the paternalism that had long defined her bourgeois life. Discovering a sense of self-worth that was irreconcilable with her marriage—and with her society—the play climaxes as Nora leaves behind both her husband and her family, realizing that before any duties to them, she has a “sacred” duty to herself.14 The play ends in ambiguity, as she sets out to discover and develop her new sense of self, doing so in a world inhospitable to the freedom of women.15 Nora’s rebellion—a rebellion predicated on a discovery of self-worth that impels her to explore her own authentic individuality—also helps us imagine how Kierkegaard’s negative use of the Abraham story (i.e., as a suggestion that appearance and reality might not always cohere) is not purely negative. Specifically, as Nora begins developing her own unique self, rather than merely conforming to the social norms expected of her by her husband and society, she increasingly faces a problem. Unless she wishes to live forever alone, she has to learn to express her newfound self. That is, she has to speak.
Insofar as Nora has overcome her despair and is beginning to explore and develop her authentic individuality, she will continue to communicate by way of the same language she used beforehand. Now, however, she will simply use it in a creative and expressive way rather than a despairing way, because she is using language to express her authentic individuality rather than her obedience to social norms.16 The difficulty emerges when we realize that if Nora wishes to share her newfound authenticity, she is ultimately attempting to draw attention to the very way she is using language rather than to any of its particular contents. Put differently, Nora will still be able to say all of the particular things about herself that she could say before, but the essential thing she now wishes to convey—that she somehow remains wholly the same, yet entirely transformed—will be incommunicable. Or, as Kierkegaard writes of Abraham, “He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say this—that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it—then he is not speaking.”17 As Kierkegaard understands it, there is a way in which the movement of self-appropriation—the leap of faith—puts us beyond communication.
The nature of this problem becomes clearer if we return to Ibsen’s play, as it ends with precisely this dilemma. Nora, having found freedom, individuality, and the desire for a truly loving marriage (rather than a bourgeois façade of one), looks back at her husband and realizes that he is now incapable of understanding her.18 That is, unless he is likewise transformed.19 Without his own transformation, he is incapable of seeing in Nora what she finally sees in herself, because, by way of his own despair, he fails to see this same thing in himself too. Therefore, despite Nora’s access to a language she shares with her husband—a language in which words such as alienation, authenticity, despair, and faith do exist—language is incapable of explaining her transformation to him, at least not “in such a way that the other understands it.”20 Here, we begin to see Kierkegaard’s positive point in the Abraham narrative; to the despairing individual, authenticity might come to look quite other than it actually is. In other words, just as the expression of Nora’s newfound freedom appears to her husband as a transgression of everything he holds dear, Abraham might be saving Isaac, just as he appears to be sacrificing him.
In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard argues that language births sin, using Adam’s fall as an example of the way in which the development of self-consciousness ushers us into a moral universe.21 However, while this example reveals the ontological nature of despair, it is divorced from any social content. Unlike Adam, we do not invent our own language but inherit it from the world in which we are born. Therefore, born into a preexisting moral universe, we have no choice but to make use of the symbols and meanings at hand, which we experience with the pressure of social conformity behind them. So, from our first moment of self-consciousness, the pressure to despair is present (i.e., the pressure “to will to be rid of oneself”).22 Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre would later note, we are each born into our parents’ home.23 It is there that we learn language, and it is there that we learn to conform to the social meaning that it carries—just as Nora was first a “doll” in her father’s house before being one in her husband’s house too.24
Out of our desire to be understood and to fit in (or, as Marx would add, out of our very desire to survive), we learn to translate ourselves into preexisting social categories in an ongoing process of social reproduction. If this process occurs with our very development of consciousness in childhood, as Kierkegaard believes it does, these pressures begin with the most vulnerable members of our communities, children. Instead of language serving as a means of authentically objectifying our subjectivity, objectified meanings become internalized, acting as the boundaries in which we are then allowed to live. For example, this is Nora prior to her rebellion; having internalized the social mores of her age, she shapes her subjectivity into the confines of what is allowed, acting as a “doll” for her masters.25 In her case, her subjectivity was forced into the specific contours of “daughter,” followed by “wife” and “mother,” as these roles were then defined.26 However, in this way, she is also understood by her community, accepting, as she did, the role or roles assigned to her. In fact, for Nora, transgression itself is iterated into a socially acceptable form, as she is allowed the excitement of the occasional acceptable transgression, just as she is aware of and avoids the truly transgressive ones.27
In this, it should be easy to see a Hegelian subtext. As we have seen, Hegel imagines a similar process of socialization as essential to his conception of ethics and world history.28 For Hegel, the process through which an existing subject reconciles themselves with the objective ethical substance of the world lies at the heart of subjectivity itself. For instance, “Subjectivity is itself the absolute form and existent actuality of the substantial order, and the distinction between subject on the one hand and substance on the other, as the object, end, and controlling power of the subject, is the same as, and has vanished directly along with, the distinction between them in form.”29 In other words, it is through the synthesizing process endemic to subjectivity that we overcome the opposition between our individuality and our historical context, thereby creating a unity of the two, so that what was once a mediated relationship now assumes the status of immediacy.
However, this is not merely an intellectual task in which we adopt the ethical beliefs of our society, but these beliefs become a matter of custom or habit, so that they then shape our actions. As Alastair Hannay notes, for Hegel, “it is in forms of the self’s action that ‘consciousness’ is afforded the satisfying experience of being at one with all reality.”30 We thereby replace our “natural will” (i.e., the type of will that Adam in the Garden of Eden would have) with a social will that becomes “second nature.”31 For Hegel, therefore, “if it [the existing order] is simply identical with the actuality of individuals, the ethical [das Sittliche], as their general mode of behavior, appears as custom [Sitte]; and the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence [Dasein].”32 More simply, in acting according to the ethics of our age, we adopt a “second nature” and find ourselves at home in the world.
Recalling Kierkegaard’s critique of the ethical superficiality of his fellow bourgeois Danes, we can see how this superficiality can be explained by the view of ethics that Hegel advances.33 Rather than an ethics in which individuals take a critical distance toward the beliefs by which they interpret and judge, Hegel is clearly speaking of ethics as constituting the dominant ethical ideas that pervade a society. Granted, within the context of Hegel’s own thought, Kierkegaard’s argument does not necessarily pose a problem, insofar as Hegel is interested in the progressive development of ethical ideas over time. However, for Kierkegaard, ethics does not reside in the substantive content of our ethical ideas, but in the sense of individual responsibility that we cultivate.34 And this sense of ethical responsibility requires that we overcome the process of socialization that, for Hegel, lies at the heart of ethical life.
In her radical critique of Norwegian doxa, in her decision to find out for herself “who’s right—the world or me,”35 the prototype for Nora’s radical questioning is found twenty-five hundred years earlier, in the figure of Socrates. Less methodical than Socrates, Nora is nonetheless radically critical of the society whose beliefs she has inherited. In The Concept of Irony, Kierkegaard’s master’s thesis written two years prior to Fear and Trembling, he engages in an extensive discussion of Hegel’s understanding of Socrates, ultimately disagreeing with him on grounds that will now seem familiar.36 Whereas Hegel argues that Socrates not only criticizes Greek values but also subsequently counsels adherence to them (i.e., a true synthesis with them), Kierkegaard agrees with Hegel on the first point but disagrees about the second one.37 For Kierkegaard, Socrates’s virtue lies in his perpetual ability to undermine objective values while simultaneously helping others do so too.38 In his refusal to validate Greek doxa, Socrates retains the authority for his own ethical judgments, because assenting to the veracity of an objective ethical schema would entail the abdication of his own responsibility, in favor of the authority of those beliefs.
Returning to Fear and Trembling, its opening section repeats this same theme, as Kierkegaard argues that Socrates’s importance lies in his doubting attitude rather than in any objective doctrine he left behind.39 Moreover, Kierkegaard argues that this is similarly true of Descartes, whose doubt was likewise authentic, and not merely a speculative premise of his philosophy.40 As a result, rather than viewing Descartes’s philosophy—or at least the Discourse on Method to which Kierkegaard refers—as an objective philosophy to which we should conform our thinking, we should instead see it as the unique expression (or objectification) of his subjectivity, much as Descartes himself suggests.41 For both Socrates and Descartes, doubt was not a premise of speculative philosophy, but a hard-fought subjective attitude toward the world; it is “a task for a whole lifetime.”42 It is through authentic Socratic and Cartesian doubt that we develop a critical distance from the social mores into which we are born, so that we might begin accepting responsibility for our own judgments and actions.
For Kierkegaard, authentic doubt offers an avenue through which we can begin to understand Abraham, because it becomes possible to imagine that Abraham’s story is told from the perspective of the type of social world from which individuals like Socrates and Nora are excluded. To further make this point, Kierkegaard juxtaposes Abraham’s attempted filicide with the actual one of Agamemnon. While he admiringly calls Abraham a “knight of faith,” Agamemnon only receives the lower moniker of “tragic hero.”43 For Kierkegaard, what makes Agamemnon a tragic hero as opposed to a knight of faith is that Agamemnon’s dilemma is actually a social dilemma; it exists between his conflicting commitments to his daughter and to his nation, even though this latter duty is veiled in religious language. That is, while the Trojan War depends on Agamemnon’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to the goddess Artemis, his competing commitments are actually both social: he has to choose between being a good father and being a good king, as these roles were then understood. Agamemnon’s conflicting commitments were therefore to the objective social norms of his society, and not to something that might transgress (or transcend) them.
As Kierkegaard argues, this dilemma does not place Agamemnon beyond the confines of the social world and its language, in the way of Nora or Abraham, as Agamemnon’s conflict lies between two of the roles that help constitute our shared social universe. As a result, in choosing one role or the other, Agamemnon is “disclosed” to us; he is or can be understood. Moreover, Agamemnon’s act is not only a choice between two conflicting social roles—father or king—but his very act also upholds the social universe itself. As horrific as are his crimes, Agamemnon consummates himself in the perceived necessity of his act, and he thereby gives his own life, metaphorically speaking, as a sacrifice that upholds the selfsame world—“the universal”—that presents him this dilemma. In other words, through his sacrifice of Iphigenia, Agamemnon establishes the validity of the social universe for which she is sacrificed. Reciprocally, Agamemnon experiences “relief,” because he avoids responsibility for his actions by ascribing it to the very social world that his actions legitimized.44 That is, rather than feeling responsible for his actions himself, they instead seem to flow as an unavoidable consequence of his social role. Therefore, for Kierkegaard, “The authentic tragic hero sacrifices himself and everything that is his for the universal; his act and every emotion in him belong to the universal; he is open, and in this disclosure he is the beloved son of ethics.”45 In this, Kierkegaard clearly prefigures a host of twentieth-century thought, most notably René Girard, who argues that sacrifice is a means of upholding social differentiation.46
However, whereas Agamemnon is disclosed, Abraham remains hidden, because there is something within Abraham that is incommensurate with such a social reality. Unlike Agamemnon’s “divine” command, Abraham’s faith is irreconcilable with any social role, such as “father,” by which we might understand him. Therefore, “Abraham remains silent—but he cannot speak. . . . Even though I go on talking night and day without interruption, if I cannot make myself understood when I speak, then I am not speaking. This is the case with Abraham. He can say everything, but one thing he cannot say, and if he cannot say this—that is, say it in such a way that the other understands it—then he is not speaking.”47 The problem is not that Abraham is unable to physically vocalize himself or even that he is necessarily beyond self-expression; rather, it is that he cannot make himself understood through language.
The communicative problem at the heart of Fear and Trembling is not an innate problem with language, as The Concept of Anxiety seems to suggest, so much as it is a problem with how language is used. Language can be used to express a particular subject’s subjectivity, or it can be used to cloak a subjectivity behind the guise of representational objects. Reciprocally, in listening to language, we can either hear a unique subject’s attempt to reveal themselves or hear nothing but the appearance they present to us. However, in order to authentically use language as a means of expressing our own unique subjectivity, while simultaneously being able to hear the unique subject behind the language spoken to us, we have to become the unique subject that we are, so that we might see others as such subjects too. It is only in this way that we might come to realize that the truth of language does not reside in its apparent truth but in the subject that resides beneath it. And this, as Fear and Trembling suggests, requires faith.48
Returning to Abraham’s story, as the Bible recounts, there is no mention of Abraham telling his wife, Sarah, about God’s command to sacrifice Isaac.49 This problem preoccupies the latter portion of Fear and Trembling, as Kierkegaard wrestles with the nature of Abraham’s silence in regards to Sarah.50 As we have seen, “Abraham cannot be mediated; in other words, he cannot speak. As soon as I speak, I express the universal, and if I do not do so, no one can understand me.”51 Posed in the context of his marriage, as Kierkegaard does, the question of Abraham’s silence becomes easy to answer. After all, the Bible recounts Sarah’s lack of faith, captured by her laughter at God’s promise that she would bear a child in her old age.52 Given this absence, Sarah is immersed in the very world from which Abraham’s faith is excluded (i.e., she exists in the social universe). And so, within their very marriage there is a communicative gap, as they each use language differently. Directly framed by Kierkegaard in the context of the intimacy of marriage, we once again find Nora an apt parallel for Abraham. Just as Abraham’s act might appear to Sarah as the destruction of everything she holds dear, Nora is likewise accused of destroying everything her husband holds dear.53
Through an ordeal that lasted three long days, the Bible records very little by way of Abraham’s words. As Kierkegaard notes, “Just one word from him has been preserved, his only reply to Isaac, ample evidence that he had not said anything before. Isaac asks Abraham where the lamb is for the burnt offering. ‘And Abraham said: God himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering, my son.’ ”54 If we take Abraham’s statement to Isaac as truth, rather than imputing to him a lie, the nature of his faith is precisely that God will not take Isaac from him—God will provide a lamb. To the outside reader, Abraham’s act might continue to appear horrific, but in his reassuring words to Isaac, we can begin to see that their relationship is actually constituted by a deep trust. Ultimately, for Kierkegaard, the story’s true meaning is not about how we lose—or sacrifice—one another, but about how we receive them. As he writes, “By faith Abraham did not renounce Isaac, but by faith Abraham received Isaac.”55
Philosophy and Faith
For Kierkegaard, from within the context a Hegelian social world, authentic individuality comes to appear as the most heinous of crimes. Rather than conforming to the authority of social norms—an act of conformity through which those very norms are validated—the existence of the authentic individual proves incommensurate with such a world. In this light, we can begin to understand the question that preoccupies the central section of Fear and Trembling, where Kierkegaard asks, “Is there a Teleological Suspension of the Ethical?”56 While many see this question as an invitation to fanaticism, with Abraham serving as a preeminent example, it should now be clear that Kierkegaard has something more complex in mind. Rather than undermining ethics, Kierkegaard has in mind an ethical critique of “the ethical.”
To begin, “the ethical” that Kierkegaard has in mind are clearly the Sittlichkeit, or social, ethics that we find in Hegel.57 When he speaks of a teleological suspension of the ethical, he is not speaking about a suspension of ethical life in favor of a zealous adherence to the perceived commands of a God who might require us to contravene such ethics; instead, he clearly argues that such social ethics remain intact, if they are suspended (and preserved) in a higher telos.58 For example, if “the ethical is of the same nature as a person’s eternal salvation, which is his τέλος . . . it would be a contradiction for this to be capable of being surrendered (that is, teleologically suspended), because as soon as this is suspended it is relinquished, whereas that which is suspended is not relinquished but is preserved in the higher, which is its τέλος.”59 In other words, if social ethics truly represented our highest end in life, they would be incapable of being suspended, because suspension would mean that we have merely abandoned that end. Instead, Kierkegaard is suggesting that if we imagine social ethics as our highest telos—as providing our “eternal salvation”—we are living a spiritually impoverished life, because human beings have a higher end than mere obedience to social norms. Consequently, they (i.e., social ethics) are not enough to sustain us. Moreover, in arguing that social ethics are suspended but also preserved in a higher telos, Kierkegaard is implying that the justification for social ethics might not exist internally to them, but within this higher end. That is, the very justification for social ethics might reside in something for which they themselves cannot account.
As the example of Agamemnon has demonstrated, in understanding ethical life in terms of the social universe, the very individual responsibility upon which Kierkegaard wants to ground ethical life is abdicated in favor of that of an external authority. So, as both C. Stephen Evans and Edward Mooney note, Kierkegaard does not attack such social ethics for their content, because he often agrees with its substance; rather, he attacks these ethics for the status they hold in relationship to our subjectivity.60 For Kierkegaard, it is only by overcoming the apparent world of such ethics that we might come to see ourselves and others for the subjects that we are rather than for the social roles that we play. In seeing ourselves clearly, we might accept responsibility for our actions, and in seeing others clearly, we might find the “higher” end that offers our “eternal salvation.” Only this “higher end” constitutes the true justification for an ethics of individual responsibility, and for Kierkegaard, this discovery takes place in faith.
To better understand Kierkegaard’s point, it is useful to return to Hegel. Whereas the Philosophy of Right traces a narrative detailing the progressive development of ethical and political life over time, the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion does the same but for religion. In religion, however, Hegel sees the progressive evolution of humanity’s self-conception, which ultimately culminates in the “truest” religion—“the consummate religion”—which, for Hegel, is Christianity. As he writes, “The Christian religion is the religion of truth. . . . Its content [is] the truth itself in and for itself, and it consists in the being of truth for consciousness.”61 More specifically, in Christianity’s Trinitarian nature, Hegel sees a religion that has managed to capture the truth of the dialectical nature of self-consciousness.62 Moreover, insofar as freedom emerges from self-consciousness, Christianity constitutes “the religion of truth and the religion of freedom.”63 Christianity therefore offers a truthful self-conception to its adherents, albeit in the symbolic guise of religion rather than the clearer conceptual form found within philosophy.
As both Hegel and Kierkegaard realize, freedom emerges through our self-consciousness, which means that it is also circumscribed by the self-image that we have and by the possibilities that this image then affords.64 In other words, the way we see ourselves can limit our freedom, just in the way that Nora’s identity (daughter, wife, mother) circumscribes the possibilities for action that she perceives. For Hegel, Christianity corrects this problem by providing a truthful self-conception of our dialectical and free nature. In this light, we can see the deeper parallel between his religious and ethical thought, insofar as religion proffers us with a self-understanding, whereas ethics then extends this understanding out into the world of action. In other words, religion helps us see ourselves as free, whereas ethical life embodies this freedom in the world. Therefore, insofar as religion and ethical life both express the truth of freedom, for Hegel, “the institutions of ethical life are divine institutions” because “it is in the ethical realm that the reconciliation of religion with worldliness and actuality comes about and is accomplished.”65
Problematically, the effect of Hegel’s understanding of religion is that faith is seen as synonymous with a belief in objective dogma, in much the way that faith is conventionally understood, rather than seeing it as requiring a transcendence of such dogma, as Kierkegaard suggests. So, whereas Kierkegaard argues that his contemporary Danes are not truly Christian, it is possible to make a Hegelian argument that they are. Following this, Hegel then comes to understand the relationship between religion and philosophy as one in which philosophy replaces the mythological truths of religion with clearer conceptual truths.66 For instance, for Hegel, faith entails a relationship to the sensible data that constitutes religious doctrine, such as the historical facts about the life of Jesus Christ or, as he writes, “faith begins from the sensible mode.”67 Following from this, individuals might then discover the underlying truth, such as when they recognize that the figure of Jesus Christ “was the Son of God.”68 The process by which this happens is essentially deliberative, whereby conceptual thinking replaces thought pertaining more directly to sensibility, as we come to recognize the conceptual truth lying within the sensible world.69 The objective dogma of religion is thereby replaced with philosophical truth, so that “sensible content as such . . . [is] replaced by spirit.”70 We therefore discover “the concept, and sensible existence is reduced to the level of dream image, above which there is a higher region with its own enduring content.”71 In other words, in place of the “dream image” of religious doctrine, we discover the underlying conceptual truth of philosophy.
For all of Kierkegaard’s reputation as an “irrationalist,” his critique of philosophy relates solely to the role that reason and faith play in the acquisition of truth. As he writes, the philosophy with which he has a problem is that same one tied to the social ethics of which he is critical. For instance, “if the ethical—that is, social morality—is the highest . . . then no categories are needed other than what Greek philosophy had or what can be deduced from them by consistent thought. Hegel should not have concealed this, for, after all, he had studied Greek philosophy.”72 In other words, if life can be understood from within the confines of a social universe, the tradition of Western philosophy, as well as its attendant categories, would be adequate for understanding it. However, Kierkegaard believes that reason cannot bring us to the truth and that only faith can.
In his critique of reason, Kierkegaard specifically has in mind the Socratic doctrine of anamnesis (i.e., recollection), as elucidated in the Meno.73 As Socrates explains, conceptual understanding occurs by way of a process of recollection; when we come to understand a geometrical truth, for instance, such as the fact that dissecting a square by its diagonal severs the square precisely in half, we have recollected a truth that precedes us.74 In other words, we did not create this truth; we only came to realize a truth that already exists, for it lies in the very nature of a square. In the Meno, this is demonstrated by the example of an uneducated slave who is helped to recognize the truth of a square’s diagonal, with nothing more than his own mind. For Plato, this doctrine proves essential, as it allows for a theory of education in which truth is not imparted in a student, along the lines of a vessel being filled, but in which students are taught how to conduct their own reason, so that they can find truth for themselves. Yet, for all the democratic leanings of this doctrine, it harbors a problematic conservative core.
The doctrine of anamnesis, itself a doctrine of innate truth, transforms the discovery of truth into the very type of deliberative process we have seen with Hegel, insofar as philosophy reveals the underlying truths of the religious doctrines into which we are born. And it is easy to see how this process applies to fields such as geometry, insofar as we are discovering truths that are latent in the objects that comprise them, just as a square’s diagonal exists within the idea of a square, whether or not we realize it. In other words, insofar as we are already thinking about a square—insofar as we have presupposed a square as existing—then truths about that square are there to be discovered. In fact, insofar as we always possess our freedom as an ontological fact, its intellectual apprehension is always a possibility. After all, both Marx and Kierkegaard fundamentally agree with Hegel’s conceptual understanding of this freedom, as they both appropriate a Hegelian model of subjectivity. Therefore, presumably, any individual can, at any time, come to understand that he or she possesses freedom as a consequence of self-consciousness, in much the way that Hegel hoped his philosophy would help us achieve. However, for Kierkegaard, faith is not the conceptual apprehension of something that we have always had, but the acquisition of something that we do not have. In other words, while we might always possess freedom in an ontological sense, the moment of emancipation is not the conceptual apprehension of this freedom, but the birth of something fundamentally new. Or, as Kierkegaard argues in one of his next works, Philosophical Fragments, in faith, we are born anew.75
Ontologically speaking, for both Kierkegaard and Marx, freedom is an essential component of the self. However, despair and alienation—their respective conceptions of unfreedom—are not phenomena pertaining to the elimination of this ontological freedom, but rather to its misuse. In other words, for both, we use our freedom to try and will it away, in an attempt to lose ourselves in social categories, as Kierkegaard explains in his formula for despair (i.e., “to will to be rid of oneself”).76 While Marx adds material pressures to this process—pressures essential for understanding our sociopolitical reality—it is clear that neither despair nor alienation could exist without our free complicity. Both phenomena therefore speak to how we use our freedom, or, in Kierkegaard’s vernacular, they speak to how we relate to ourselves.
Herein lies the doctrine of anamnesis’s conservatism: it not only confines truth to that which already exists, but what follows is that it likewise understands the acquisition of truth as an inherently deliberative process. Transposed to the human world, this doctrine comes to understand emancipation (i.e., the discovery of the truth that we are free) as a similarly deliberative process. After all, the ontological structure of our subjectivity is always there to be understood, much as is the truth of a square’s diagonal, so that the discovery of our inalienable freedom is understood as an essentially intellectual task. However, Kierkegaard’s point is that this truthful relationship with ourselves is not an intellectual relationship, whereby we simply need to discover the proper concept that explains our underlying nature, to which we might then will what Hegel calls an “obedience in freedom.”77 Instead, in the moment in which faith is acquired, something fundamentally new is born, and it is through this that we find the truth. And insofar as this is accurate and insofar as thinking thinks about that which already exists, we cannot think ourselves into freedom.
Rebirth
While Nora Helmer remains a useful example for demonstrating this problem, another example adds further clarity, that of Frederick Douglass. Suffering under a particularly vicious attack by a violent slave master, Frederick Douglass’s autobiography recounts the moment in which, for the first time ever, he fights back. Paralleling Nora’s own moment of revolt, for Douglass, this moment is the moment in which he truly becomes a man, “the turning-point” in his “career as a slave,” a “rekindling” of his last “few expiring embers of freedom,” and a revival of his own “sense” of “manhood.”78 Douglass further writes, “I felt as I never felt before. It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact.”79 Just as Nora was a “doll” in her father’s house and then in her husband’s house before rebelling against the constrictions of social conformity, Douglass’s story prior to his revolt is the story of how “a man was made a slave,” just as afterward, it is the story of a how “a slave was made a man.”80
Now, thinking of Nora Helmer, Frederick Douglass, or any other example of revolt, including even Hegel’s own bondsman, it is hard to reconcile the nature of these emancipatory experiences with a doctrine of innate truth and the deliberative process that leads to it. Specifically, such a doctrine presumes that the freedom each discovers has always existed in a latent, unrecognized form, and that this form only later comes to consciousness. In other words, Douglass always has the “heaven of freedom” inside of him, just as Nora always has the “sacred” within her. Yet, post-revolt, neither Nora, nor Douglass, nor even Hegel’s rebellious bondsman, necessarily has a truthful conceptual understanding of themselves, as such an understanding might take years of reflection and philosophizing to develop. Instead, as the dramatic nature of their narratives helps reveal, the appropriation of freedom is a more deeply felt existential experience, with its rational comprehension following afterward, if it ever does.
This same insight lies at the heart of Albert Camus’s magnum opus, The Rebel, insofar as he understands that “the rebel” revolts not out of a new idea he or she possesses, but out of a felt experience of freedom.81 It is this feeling of freedom, rather than an idea of it, that proves irreconcilable with a life of servitude, as Nora, Douglass, and the bondsman, do not revolt following a process of deliberation but following a visceral experience of freedom. In fact, as Camus understands, the experience of freedom can be easily transformed into an ideology of freedom that can be used to justify oppression, if we leave behind the subjective experience of freedom in favor of an objective theorization of it. This, for Camus, is precisely the problem that has defined the past two centuries of artistic, literary, intellectual, and political history, as Western civilization has struggled with the paradox that objective doctrines of freedom can become the justification for untold inhumanity.82 In Marx’s language, we continue to struggle with delineating the reality of freedom from its objectifications.
We can get a better sense of this if we focus on what a truthful concept of freedom might look like to Nora or to Douglass. If we think of freedom as a lived experience, such as the experience that leads both Nora and Douglass to revolt, then informing them that they are free is tantamount to insisting that they feel a way that they do not. In other words, they both revolt because they finally experience their freedom as a reality and not because they finally think about it, and it is the sense of dignity and autonomy that this confers on them that proves to be irreconcilable with their lives of servitude. In this light, confronting them with an idea of freedom appears as little more than an attempt to socialize them into a new—albeit better—sense of self, but that would likewise serve to reinforce their general subservience to the world of objective truth. Put differently, if their experience of freedom is simultaneously an experience of the inalienable dignity that goes with it, then confronting them with an idea of their freedom is tantamount to insisting that they possess a sense of self-worth that they do not yet feel. However, a sense of self-worth that is not felt is not a sense of self-worth at all. Clearly, then, if individuals do not feel free, there is a way in which they are not. Yet, given that we always possess our ontological freedom, what we do not yet possess is the proper appropriative relationship to it, whereby we might truly come to experience and thereby live our freedom. As Kierkegaard argues, freedom is not a matter of being, but of how we relate to that being. And this relationship is not rational.
In fact, we can see how the project of emancipation presents a basic contradiction, insofar as the project of aiding individuals overcome their oppressive relationship with the universe of social meaning has to occur by way of the very same meanings they find oppressive. That is, helping someone find freedom entails communicating with this person; however, from an alienated or despairing individual’s point of view, these messages are received as yet more objective meanings to which he or she should conform. This is why a paradoxical expression of freedom—such as found in the possibility that Abraham does not sacrifice Isaac but receives him—proves so useful, because it provokes Kierkegaard’s readers into changing their very relationship with the world of meaning. Specifically, it helps them overcome subservience to it by destabilizing its apparent hegemony, much in the way of Socrates before him, because conforming ourselves to the apparent truth of the story is so obviously (or hopefully) horrific.
Ultimately, therefore, the transition of emancipation speaks to the birth of something new (i.e., the birth of a new relationship with oneself), in which the self learns to express itself free from its subservience to the objective world. In Kierkegaard’s Christian vernacular, emancipation is not a discovery but a rebirth. “But the person who already is cannot be born, and yet he is born. Let us call this transition rebirth, by which he enters the world a second time just as at birth.”83 And where does this rebirth occur? “In the moment, [that is where] he becomes aware of the rebirth.”84 That is, in the moment in which Nora and Douglass revolt, the moment in which they overcome their own internalization of oppressive social roles, they also come to accept that rather than being a determined subject, they are, in fact, transcendently free. This acceptance is radically new—it is a faith in themselves that is a new and positive self-relationship.
In a leap beyond the confines of the world of social determination, they overcome the appearances behind which their society tells them to hide, and they instead come to embrace their free self. And this truly is a leap of faith, because authentic individuality is the one thing that is excluded from their despairing position within the world of social morality. In this way, Kierkegaard’s pronouncement about the nature of faith is clearer, for “faith is namely this paradox that the single individual is higher than the universal.”85 This is precisely Kierkegaard’s critique of philosophy—you cannot think yourself or socialize yourself into such faith. Therefore, “even if someone were able to transpose the whole content of faith into conceptual form, it does not follow that he has comprehended faith, comprehended how he entered into it or how it entered into him.”86 After all, insofar as we are not identical with any of our objectifications, we can never demonstrate that we have a free self.87 Instead, we truly must take our selves and those of others on faith. However, insofar as Abraham possesses faith prior to the start of the narrative, the story of his attempted sacrifice of Isaac is not actually about Abraham’s leap of faith. Instead, it is about how Abraham’s faith helps Isaac find his own. But this discussion will have to wait until Chapter 5.
NOTES
Chapter 3
1. For instance, Brand Blanshard is often referred to as a primary exponent of this position, but it is a pervasive subtext for many readings of Kierkegaard. See Brand Blanshard, “Kierkegaard on Faith,” The Personalist 49 (Winter 1968): 5–23.
2. Søren Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, in Fear and Trembling/Repetition, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 18.
3. Ibid., 3.
4. C. Stephen Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality: A Reading of Fear and Trembling,” in Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2006), 210–11.
5. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 37.
6. “The reality of his act is that by which he belongs to the universal, and there he is and remains a murderer.” Ibid., 74.
7. Ibid., 58–59, 78–79, 86–87.
8. Kierkegaard does, in fact, maintain his Kantian critique of Hegel in regards to the natural world, but he discusses this in one of his next works, Philosophical Fragments. Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, in Philosophical Fragments/Johannes Climacus, ed. And trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987). For more, see Chapter 6.
9. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 49.
10. Ibid., 112–16.
11. See, for instance, Bruce H. Kirmmse, Kierkegaard in Golden Age Denmark, The Indiana Series in the Philosophy of Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 49–52, 77–85.
12. For more, see Chapter 2.
13. Kierkegaard even makes a joke about this, suggesting that the pastor who extols the virtues of Abraham on Sunday is horrified if a parishioner emulates him on Monday. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 28–29.
14. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll House, in Ibsen’s Selected Plays, ed. Brian Johnston, trans. Rick Davis and Brian Johnston (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), 203.
15. Ibid., 202–6.
16. For more, see Chapter 2.
17. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 113.
18. Ibsen, A Doll House, 201.
19. Ibid., 205–6.
20. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 113.
21. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, ed. Reidar Thomte, trans. Albert B. Anderson and Reidar Thomte (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 25–51.
22. Søren Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 20.
23. Jean-Paul Sartre, Search for a Method, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Vintage, 1968), 62. Sartre’s point will be explored in Chapter 7.
24. Ibsen, A Doll House, 202.
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. In Nora’s case, her delight in eating macaroons, despite her husband’s prohibition, is certainly heightened by the secrecy surrounding it. In an interesting contrast, she also enjoys the transgression of flirting with a man who is not her husband (Dr. Rank), but once he professes his true love for her, and a socially acceptable transgression is replaced with the threat of a transgression that is actually transgressive, Nora quickly retreats. See ibid., 160, 179–81.
28. For more, see Chapter 2.
29. G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 109.
30. Alastair Hannay, Kierkegaard, The Arguments of the Philosophers (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd., 1982), 54.
31. G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 195.
32. Ibid.
33. For more, including a discussion of the unique applicability of Hegel’s conception of ethical life to the bourgeois commercial world, see Jamie Aroosi, “The Causes of Bourgeois Culture: Kierkegaard’s Relation to Marx Considered,” Philosophy and Social Criticism 42, no. 1 (2016): 71–92.
34. For reasons like this, Jon Stewart argues that Hegel and Kierkegaard have projects of a fundamentally different nature: “while Hegel is primarily interested in providing a philosophical explanation of the world in terms of concepts, Kierkegaard is primarily interested in the religious life of the individual.” Jon Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Modern European Philosophy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 633.
35. Ibsen, A Doll House, 203.
36. Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony: With Continual Reference to Socrates, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 219–37.
37. Ibid., 228–36.
38. Ibid., 236.
39. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 6–7.
40. Ibid., 5–7.
41. Kierkegaard is referring to passages like the following: “Thus my intention is not to teach here the method which everyone must follow in order to direct his reason correctly, but only to show the manner in which I have tried to direct mine. . . . I am . . . proposing this work as, so to speak, a history—or if you prefer, a fable.” René Descartes, Discourse on the Method for Rightly Directing One’s Reason and Searching for Truth in the Sciences, in Discourse on Method, Optics, Geometry, and Meteorology, trans. Paul J. Olscamp (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 2001), 5.
42. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 6.
43. Ibid., 74–81.
44. Ibid., 78–79.
45. Ibid., 113.
46. René Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), 49–52.
47. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 113.
48. For more, see Chapter 6.
49. The Holy Bible Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal/Deuterocanonical Books, New Revised Standard Version (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), Genesis 22:1–19.
50. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 82–120.
51. Ibid., 60.
52. The Holy Bible, Genesis 18:10–15.
53. Ibsen, A Doll House, 198–200.
54. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 115–16.
55. Ibid., 49.
56. Ibid., 54.
57. See also Hannay, Kierkegaard; Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality”; Merold Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991).
58. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 54.
59. Ibid.
60. Evans, “Faith as the Telos of Morality,” 214; Edward Mooney, “Getting Isaac Back: Ordeals and Reconciliations in Fear and Trembling,” in Foundations of Kierkegaard’s Vision of Community: Religion, Ethics, and Politics in Kierkegaard, ed. George B. Connell and C. Stephen Evans (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1992), 78.
61. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, vol. 3, The Consummate Religion, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 64.
62. Ibid., 331–32.
63. Ibid., 171.
64. For more, see Chapter 6.
65. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 483–84.
66. This relationship is essentially identical to the relationship he imagines between political life and philosophy, metaphorically captured by his famous pronouncement that “the owl of Minerva begins its flight only with the onset of dusk.” Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 23. For Kierkegaard, the ex post facto nature of philosophy is precisely why it cannot deliver us to the truth.
67. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, 3: 226.
68. Ibid., 226–27.
69. Ibid., 228.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid., 229.
72. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55.
73. Plato, Meno, trans. G. M. A. Grube, in Complete Works, ed. John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1997). Kierkegaard explicitly makes the connection to the Meno and its doctrine of anamnesis in his 1844 work, Philosophical Fragments. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 9.
74. Plato, Meno, 84d–85c.
75. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 20.
76. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, 20.
77. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition, 483–84.
78. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, in Autobiographies, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Library of America, 1994), 60, 65.
79. Ibid., 65.
80. Ibid., 60.
81. Albert Camus, The Rebel: An Essay on Man in Revolt, trans. Anthony Bower (New York: Vintage International, 1984), 13–22.
82. Ibid., 23–252.
83. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 19.
84. Ibid., 21.
85. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 55.
86. Ibid., 7.
87. For more, see Chapter 6.