Kierkegaard: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions Book 58)

by Patrick L. Gardiner

His aim was not, in other words, to add to the sum of their propositional knowledge in the manner of a schoolmaster or an academic teacher, nor did he purport to ‘compel a person to accept an opinion, a conviction, a belief’ in the autocratic style of some privileged authority. On the contrary, the idea was to approach people ‘from behind’, manoeuvring them into a position from which they themselves, as a result of interior reflection, could step back and make a radical choice between remaining where they were and opting for a fundamental change. Their freedom and autonomy as individuals must at all costs be respected; it was ultimately for them to decide what to do, what course to follow, once they had arrived at a deep and unclouded comprehension of the implications of contrasting life-views. But it was an essential precondition of this that they should be clear about the nature and limits of their own positions.

Kierkegaard distinguishes three basic modes or ‘spheres’ of existence: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.

In each case the attitudes comprised show considerable variations, reflecting not only his perception of contemporary cultural trends but also the complex patterns of his own history and development; indeed, some of the material was drawn directly from his journals. Thus traces of the psychological difficulties and dilemmas of his student years, including those connected with his ambivalent relationship with his father, are frequently discernible; so, too, are the traumatic repercussions of his broken engagement to Regine Olsen, Kierkegaard making oblique references to it which she was intended to read and understand. This lends to parts of the writing a rather contrived air which has evoked a sympathetic response from some of his modern votaries but which has produced a cooler reaction amongst more critically inclined commentators.

In the first place, it is indicated that the man who lives aesthetically is not really in control, either of himself or his situation. He typically exists ins Blaue hinein; he tends to live ‘for the moment’, for whatever the passing instant will bring in the way of entertainment, excitement, interest. Committed to nothing permanent or definite, dispersed in sensuous ‘immediacy’, he may do or think one thing at a given time, the exact opposite at some other; his life is therefore without ‘continuity’, lacks stability or focus, changes course according to mood or circumstance, is ‘like a witch’s letter from which one sense can be got now and then another, depending on how one turns it’.

As he puts it, the aestheticist ‘expects everything from without’; his approach to the world is basically a passive one, in that his satisfaction is finally subject to conditions whose presence or fulfilment is independent of his will.

The point is that, in all instances of this kind, the person is placed at the mercy of circumstances, of ‘what may be or may not be’; his mode of life is tied to things that are necessarily uncertain or perishable, and no volition on his part can ever guarantee their attainment or preservation, or even his continued enjoyment of them if he has them. If they fail him – and that will in the end be a matter of chance – it may seem to him that the point of his existence has gone; he will feel, temporarily at least, that he has been deprived of what makes life worth living.

For it is now claimed that such self-awareness may be repressed or ignored, or that at any rate its true implications may be subtly evaded. Despair about his life and its foundation is, in fact, a necessity if the aesthetic individual is to recognize that a ‘higher’ form of existence is an absolute requirement; yet it is precisely this crucial step in the direction of the ethical that he is unwilling to take. He remains too deeply rooted in his own mode of life and thought to attempt to liberate himself and seeks instead, by a variety of stratagems, to keep the truth from impinging upon him. This sometimes happens through a person’s trying to overcome or obliterate his inner dissatisfaction by various kinds of activity: it may take a ‘demonic’ form, as in the Faustian case; but it can equally well find expression in the life of a ‘respectable’ man of affairs, going pertinaciously about his business. There is, however, a more insidious shape which it is apt to assume. For there exists what Kierkegaard once called a ‘dialectical interplay of knowledge and will’ which can make it hard to tell whether a person is consciously trying to distract himself from a predicament which he realizes (however obscurely) to be his or whether, on the other hand, he has so interpreted his condition as to make it appear to preclude the whole notion of fundamental choice and change. And the second of these possibilities may be actualized.

Hence, by a strange modification of the aesthetic position, a man may come to treat sorrow, not pleasure, as ‘the meaning of his life’, taking a perverse satisfaction in the thought that this at least is something of which he cannot be deprived.

Alternatively, it can be that he portrays himself under grandiloquent labels that somehow determine his place and destiny in the world: for example, the ‘unfortunate individual’, the ‘tragic hero’. Again, and more generally, he may take refuge in a Romantic Weltschmerz, using a tone of disillusioned pessimism and treating questions of practical decision as if they could be of no final significance; whatever a man does he will end up regretting. In all such ideas it is possible to find a spurious tranquillity; one can even take a quiet pride in them. For their eventual issue is ‘an out and out fatalism, which always has something seductive about it’ (EO ii, 241); by accepting a fatalistic or necessitarian viewpoint, the individual tacitly absolves himself from accountability for his condition as well as from an obligation to do anything about it. It is implied, however, that this is never more than a pretence, a cover, behind which he conceals his unavowed determination to remain at a stage from which he could, if he chose, release himself.

This man is similar to the Notes from underground.

At one point, for instance, it is explicitly stated that ‘aesthetic melancholy’, the failure ‘to will deeply and sincerely’, is a sickness under which ‘all young Germany and France now sighs’ (EO ii 193).

the book was partly conceived as a protest against the Hegelian notion that distinct forms of consciousness follow one another in a dialectically necessary sequence, mutually opposed standpoints being successively reconciled at higher stages in the progressive unfolding of universal mind or spirit. In Kierkegaard’s eyes, the transition from one mode of existence to another conformed to a wholly different pattern. It could only be achieved through an unconstrained and irreducibly personal choice between alternatives; moreover, the alternatives themselves must be seen as being finally incompatible and not such that they could be ultimately harmonized or ‘mediated’ in the light of some over-arching theoretical insight. Yet, notwithstanding these considerations, the fact remains that the picture of the ethical sphere which actually emerges from ‘Equilibrium’ is not altogether free from Hegelian overtones.

The ethical subject is portrayed as one who regards himself as a ‘goal’, a ‘task set’. Unlike the aestheticist, who is continually preoccupied with externals, his attention is directed towards his own nature, his substantial reality as a human being with such and such talents, inclinations, and passions, this being something which it constantly lies within his power to order, control, and cultivate. There is thus a sense in which he can be said, consciously and deliberately, to take responsibility for himself; he does not, as the aestheticist is prone to do, treat his personal traits and dispositions as an unalterable fact of nature to which he must tamely submit, but regards them rather as a challenge – his self-knowledge is not ‘a mere contemplation’ but a ‘reflection upon himself which itself is an action’ (EO ii 263).

Moreover, by such inward understanding and critical self-exploration a man comes to recognize, not only what he empirically is, but what he truly aspires to become; thus the judge refers to an ‘ideal self’ which is the ‘picture in likeness to which he has to form himself’. In other words, the ethical individual’s life and behaviour must be thought of as infused and directed by a determinate conception of himself which is securely founded upon a realistic grasp of his own potentialities and which is immune to the vicissitudes of accident and fortune. He is not, as the aestheticist was shown to be, the prey of what happens or befalls, for he has not surrendered himself to the arbitrary governance of outside circumstances and incalculable contingencies.

Nor, from the standpoint he adopts, can success or failure be measured by whether or not his projects in fact find fulfilment in the world. What finally matters is his total identification of himself with these projects; it is the spirit in which things are done, the energy and sincerity with which they are undertaken and pursued, that are relevant here – not the observable consequences of the actions performed.

For it is arguable that a person who lives such a life must also be understood to acknowledge specific norms and values which he regards as holding for others as well as for himself and which justifiably command general agreement and acceptance. And

The fundamental categories of the ethical are ‘good and evil’ and ‘duty’, and they are referred to as if they had a meaning necessarily shared by all who used them; with this in mind, it can legitimately be affirmed that the ethical individual ‘expresses the universal in his life’.

Hegel had criticized the Kantian criterion of morality for being too abstract to offer determinate guidance and for appearing to justify any principle, even the most immoral, provided only that no contradiction was involved in willing its universal adoption. Instead, it should be recognized that moral duties were ‘rooted in the soil of civil life’.

There need be no conflict here between individual aspirations and the demands of communal existence; as an integral part of the society to which he belonged, the individual experienced the duties and responsibilities it imposed, not in the shape of alien constraints, but rather as giving objective form to values and interests that he inwardly acknowledged to be his own.

None the less, many of the judge’s remarks imply that the ethical as he understood it accorded with the Hegelian notion of Sittlichkeit just outlined. He says, for instance, that the self which it is the task of the ethical individual to develop must not be thought of as existing ‘in isolation’, in the manner envisaged by certain ‘mystical’ doctrines; he stands in ‘reciprocal relations’ with his public surroundings and conditions of life, the self he seeks to realize being ‘a social, a civic self’, not an abstract one that ‘fits everywhere and hence nowhere’.

Troublesome suspicions about the self-sufficiency of the ethical outlook and its basic categories emerge towards the end of the judge’s disquisitions in Either/Or and the Stages alike: in both cases, and particularly in the latter, he acknowledges the extreme difficulties certain ‘exceptional’ individuals may meet when trying to realize the ethical universal in their lives. There, though, the problems raised are only touched upon in a guarded fashion, with careful reservations and with a noticeable reluctance to arrive at a positive resolution.

In Fear and Trembling, by contrast, faith is represented as possessing a wholly independent status: it lies beyond the province of ethical thinking and it resists elucidation in universal or rational terms.

He could only fulfil God’s command by acting, not merely against his natural inclinations as a loving father, but in defiance of the deeply grounded moral principle that forbids the killing of an innocent person; furthermore, the moral enormity of the action was compounded by the fact that the person in question was his own son. Thus what he was required to do must have appeared to him, as it does to us, abhorrent on both human and ethical grounds.

He does, however, believe that he can lay bare the conditions that make it possible to speak of faith in such a context; he believes, too, that he can thereby illuminate (if only indirectly) the true relationship between the ethical and religious standpoints – a relationship which, in the intellectual climate of his time, has been persistently misconstrued.

Abraham’s predicament with that of the moral or ‘tragic’ hero.

‘the tragic hero gives up the certain for the even more certain, and the observer’s eye views him with confidence’ (FT 60). He is at least able to ‘rejoice in the security of the universal’, knowing that what he does can be defended in terms that all, including even its victims, are in a position to recognize and understand.

He stands isolated and alone, without the possibility of justifying to others an action which, at the level of rational thought and conduct, must necessarily appear outrageous, indeed absurd.

In the discussion that follows this passage, Kierkegaard reverts to the point on which much of his essay can be said to turn. It was one thing to accord supremacy to the ethical; it was quite another to maintain that the religious could be reduced to this, its essential content being expressible in terms wholly acceptable to finite reason.

God, where the latter is conceived to be an infinite or absolute ‘other’ that transcends human reason and understanding: ‘the single individual … determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute, not his relation to the absolute by his relation to the universal’ (FT 70).

As we have noticed, intimations of these appeared at certain moments in the judge’s presentation of the ethical position in Either/Or and Stages on Life’s Way. There it was suggested that an individual may believe himself to be subject to the demands of a unique calling which cannot be accommodated within the framework of socially determined duties or universally accepted principles of conduct; yet the status of such an awareness must inevitably be problematic, and the judge shows no inclination to play down the consequences incurred by trying to follow it:

At the level of religious faith, which is the theme of Fear and Trembling, the significance of these intimations becomes at last fully manifest. While the importance of moral requirements is not as such denied, the absolute sovereignty of the ethical can no longer be assumed; rather, it is transcended by a perspective in which the self-sufficiency of morality, regarded as a socially established and universally acknowledged institution, is explicitly challenged. The notion that a person might be conscious of an ‘exceptional’ mission, to be fulfilled at whatever cost and in the face of ostensibly overwhelming objections, was not something that could be simply passed over or shrugged off, nor could it be relegated to ‘the rather commonplace company of feelings, moods, idiosyncrasies, vapeurs, etc.’ (FT 69).