Chapter 18: How (Not) to Write a Kierkegaardian Political Theology
18
How (Not) to Write a Kierkegaardian Political Theology
Between Niebuhr and Levinas on Anxiety, Faith, and Love
Best known for his tireless commentary on the “single individual,” Søren Kierkegaard (who once confessed: “No, politics is not for me”) seems an unlikely resource for political theology.847 Critics have long disparaged Kierkegaard’s apolitical, antisocial thought.848 According to Emmanuel Levinas, Kierkegaardian anxiety, in particular, endorses a solitary, unethical “egotism.”849 The concept’s afterlife within the pages of Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) all but confirms the concept’s inadequacy to our ethico-political relations with others; it is hardly a coincidence, Levinas insinuates, that anxiety (an insular self-relation) enjoys pride of place in the work of a former Nazi.850
Nevertheless, anxiety’s other afterlives include its foundational role in a classic of American political theology, Reinhold Niebuhr’s The Nature and Destiny of Man (1943). Niebuhr’s praise for Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety borders on the hyperbolic, if not the idolatrous: “Kierkegaard’s analysis of the relation of anxiety to sin is the profoundest in Christian thought.”851 Regarding Kierkegaard’s view of the “self, anxious for its life,” Niebuhr concludes, “In this, as in other instances, Kierkegaard has interpreted the true meaning of human selfhood more accurately than any modern, and possibly than any previous, Christian theologian.”852 Insofar as it informs the influential ideas of the twentieth century’s most influential political theologian, Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety (1844) undergirds Niebuhrian studies and modern political theology alike. Levinas’s complaints notwithstanding, then, Kierkegaardian anxiety can, perhaps must, figure centrally in political theology.
Rereading Kierkegaard—first and foremost, The Concept of Anxiety (1844)—in light of Niebuhr’s thought steers a course away from Heidegger’s atheistic, apolitical anxiety toward a thoroughly theological, interpersonal anxiety Kierkegaard and Niebuhr share. In pseudonymous and signed works alike, Kierkegaard anticipates (better, formulates) a Niebuhrian train of thought, which advances from (1) anxiety with oneself through (2) faith in God to (3) love of the other. Contrary to Heidegger’s case and Levinas’s concerns, Kierkegaardian anxiety has always already been relational, another side of love for the (divine and human) other.
Love, however, seems insufficient for politics—and political theology, for that matter. Certainly, love for an individual neighbor is insufficient for the complex demands of life in community. As Niebuhr and Levinas remind us, living in the world involves, not just the other, but other others—minimally, the “one next to the other” or the “third,” who interrupts self and neighbor to introduce the demands of justice and politics.853 Yet, what that “other other” demands (what justice requires) is what any neighbor needs—namely, love. Thus, it is not just living, but loving in the world (of countless others) that requires the deliberations and institutions of justice. Rereading Kierkegaard in light of Niebuhr and Levinas’s thought (their shared dialectic of love and justice, in particular) draws out the final element in a Kierkegaardian political theology: (4) political agapism, i.e., the realization that love requires institutional negotiation of the (often) competing demands of multiple neighbors.
Anxiety
So influential has Kierkegaard’s account of anxiety become that one can hardly believe pseudonymous author Vigilius Haufniensis’s claim that the “concept of anxiety is almost never treated in psychology.”854 Somewhere between psychology and philosophical anthropology, Haufniensis’s Concept of Anxiety has as much to do with a mode of human being as it does with a mood. At the core of this “psychologically orienting deliberation” stands human freedom. Famously, Haufniensis announces, “Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”; anxiety subjectively reveals (from the inside, as it were) our complicated relationship with our own liberty.855 We may be free, but we are not entirely free (i.e., at home) with that freedom. Facing countless possibilities posed by my freedom, I feel dizzy, vacillating between one possibility and another. Furthermore, facing countless limitations to my freedom, I feel dizzier still. The involuntary response of anxiety (the “dizziness” I never freely willed) attests to my unfreedom, even while attesting to my freedom, which stimulated the dizzy feeling. “Dizziness” suits the human subject, who teeters on the fault line, between possibility and actuality, finitude and freedom, “the temporal and the eternal.”856 In short, anxiety discloses the complex, even conflicted, character of the human, “a synthesis of the psychical and the physical . . . united in . . . spirit.”857
In addition to that synthesis, anxiety also announces the nothingness underlying the self. Unlike fear of “something definite,” anxiety highlights a paradoxical relation to “something that is nothing.”858 If “dizziness” evokes the self’s multiplicity, “nothingness” evokes its indeterminacy. “The object of anxiety is a nothing”—a nothing yet, or no-thing.859 What anxiety concerns is one’s possible future self. Hence, nothingness is another aspect of the (free) human, who “is a nothing—the anxious possibility of being able.”860 The distinction between fear of something and anxiety over nothing lives on in the writings of twentieth-century existentialists Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre.861 Both Haufniensis and Heidegger agree that in anxiety one relates to nothing (other than oneself). In Heidegger’s words, “Anxiety makes manifest the nothing.”862 Further, “anxiety individualizes”; in other words, my anxiety, alongside my authenticity (another Kierkegaardian-Hedieggerian notion), picks me out from the crowd.863
However, the individualistic quality of anxiety disturbs Heidegger’s former student Emmanuel Levinas. Having lost most of his family in the Shoah, Levinas sees in Heidegger’s picture of the self (free and isolated in its anxiety) evidence of his former teacher’s indifference to others and (in retrospect) a premonition of Heidegger’s later affiliation with the Nazis.864 Levinas condemns the isolated self-relation made manifest in the “double intentionality” of anxiety, by which the one “of” whom one has anxiety is the same as the one “for” whom that anxiety is had, namely oneself.865 Unlike fear, in which I have fear of the gunman for me or my neighbor, anxiety denotes a state in which I have anxiety of myself, for myself. Like Heideggerian “authenticity,” anxiety (a navel-gazing self-obsession, in Levinas’s view) entails the “dissolution of all relations with the other.”866 Because it distracts us from responsibility, “anxiety of the I for itself” is, as Levinas concludes, an unethical “egoism.”867
Preferable to anxiety’s self-involvement is an ethical relation with the other. In opposition to Heidegger’s being-towards-(my-)death, Levinas emphasizes being-towards-the-other’s-death: “The excellence of love and sociality, of ‘fear for the others’ and responsibility for the others . . . is not my anxiety for my death, mine.”868 If any anxiety belongs in our lives, it is the un-Heideggerian “anxiety of responsibility,” one that is “incumbent on everyone in the death or suffering of the other.”869 In being there for the other, I am not only more ethical; I am—i.e., I am individuated as the unique, responsible subject I am called to be.870 By Levinas’s account, Heidegger is, not merely unethical, but also inaccurate in his emphasis on individuating anxiety.
Objections notwithstanding, Kierkegaardian anxiety figures prominently, not only in Heidegger’s philosophy, but also in Reinhold Niebuhr’s theological anthropology. Like Haufniensis and Heidegger, Niebuhr reads anxiety as revelatory of freedom and the structure of human being. Echoing Haufniensis, Niebuhr defines anxiety as the “dizziness of freedom.”871 Overwhelmed by our freedom—with possibilities good and bad, creative and destructive—we experience anxiety. Furthermore, we try to flee anxiety through self-deception that denies one side or another of the synthetic self. In “sensuality,” we pretend to be nothing more than things, lacking freedom and responsibility; in “pride,” nothing less than gods, lacking limits and histories.872 As both Haufniensis and Niebuhr concede, anxiety incites inauthenticity, whether sensuous evasion of the better angels of our nature or proud denial of our kinship with the beasts.873
Torn between anxiety’s conflicting legacies—between Levinas’s rejection and Niebuhr’s endorsement—one wonders: Can Niebuhr navigate around, even through, the narcissistic tendencies of anxiety to steer a course away from Heideggerian egoism and atheism toward a political theology that combines anxiety, responsibility, and faith? Furthermore, is that course (which unites the best insights of Niebuhr and Levinas) foreshadowed by a Kierkegaardian political theology, in which anxiety coexists with faith, love, and community?
Faith
Although both Niebuhr and Heidegger use Kierkegaardian sources to fashion their anthropologies, anxiety plays a markedly different role in each. Most decisively, Niebuhr subordinates the self-relation of anxiety to a relation with the other—principally, God. The human predicament (the anxiety of our freedom-unfreedom) is “insoluble from the standpoint of man’s [sic] own resources and can be solved only from the standpoint of God’s resources” and “Providence.”874 Though never fully actualized (due to our inevitable sinfulness), the “ideal possibility is that faith in the ultimate security of God’s love would overcome all immediate insecurities of nature and history.”875 Faith overcomes the overwhelming subjective feeling, if not the ontological condition, of anxiety.876
A similar relationship between anxiety and faith appears in Kierkegaard’s work. Anxiety is “an adventure everyone must go through”; however, one can and should learn “to be anxious in the right way”—specifically, by being “honest about possibility and [having] faith.”877 Thanks to faith, one remains in (ontological) anxiety, though no longer (emotionally) anxious: “Whoever has truly learned how to be anxious will dance when the anxieties of finitude strike up the music.”878 Paradoxically, whoever has “learned how to be anxious” (i.e., in the right way) seems anything but anxious; faith in God’s grace brings, as it were, the dancer’s grace. Anxiety remains, but now in a form we can admire or, at least, use; for the person of faith, “anxiety becomes a serving spirit that . . . leads him where he wishes to go.”879
What’s more, while anxiety depends on faith for its fulfillment, faith also depends on anxiety: “With the help of faith, anxiety brings up the individuality to rest in providence.”880 As that line indicates, faith improves, rather than removes, anxiety. However, as the line also indicates, anxiety gives rise to faith. Insofar as it “brings up” (or educates) “the individuality” to “rest in [God’s] providence,” anxiety somehow cultivates the very faith that corrects it. By highlighting our liberties and limitations, anxiety leads one to faith. By exposing how little a person can do and how much he must do, anxiety “hand[s] him over to faith,” Haufniensis says.881 The idea that anxiety educates one to rest in God’s providence anticipates Niebuhr’s own remarks.882 Thrown back on humanity’s limited resources, the anxious, sinful person has no way forward, in Niebuhr’s view, except by putting her faith in “God’s resources”—i.e., God’s atoning redemption.883 Likewise, the one “educated by anxiety will rest,” Haufiensis explains, “only in the Atonement.”884 Given their interdependence, Haufniensis speaks, not of either anxiety or faith, but of “Anxiety as Saving through Faith.”885 For both Kierkegaard and Niebuhr, then, anxiety is the first, but not the final, element in an analysis of the human condition.
For Niebuhr, faith and anxiety are closely bound to one another; for Kierkegaard, the two are virtually synonymous. Both anxiety and faith entail a defining relation to possibility. Anxiety is an inner confrontation with possibility, while “faith is essentially this—to hold fast to possibility.”886 At his most provocative moments, Kierkegaard insinuates that being anxious (in the right way) relates one, not simply to the infinite possibilities that anxiety presents, but also to the Infinite (full-stop), the God in whom and for whom “all things are possible” (Matt 19:26). After all, one who has learned how to be anxious in the right way “has learned the ultimate”887—more suggestively, “the Ultimate” (God). In the words of Kierkegaard’s other great analyst of anxiety, Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of The Sickness Unto Death (1849): “[Since] everything is possible for God, then God is this—that everything is possible.”888 Suffice it to say that, from both Kierkegaardian and Niebuhrian standpoints, anxiety is (pace Heidegger) thoroughly theological.889 It walks hand and hand with faith.
Love
Yet, faith is not the final word in political theology. Just as anxiety leads to faith, faith leads to love—and love, to justice. By Niebuhr’s account, faith not only leads to love; it is love. As he says, “Love of God is identical with the two terms in the Pauline triad, ‘faith’ and ‘hope.’”890 What’s more, the love of God we call “faith” also promotes love of the neighbor: “The love of the neighbor . . . is . . . a derivative of perfect faith and trust in God.”891 By turning the self outwards, faith creates the possibility of love. “Faith in the wisdom of God is,” as Niebuhr observes, “a prerequisite of love because it is the condition without which man is . . . driven by his anxiety into vicious circles of self-sufficiency and pride.”892 In Niebuhr’s view, faith in God directs one toward the face of the other: “Without freedom from anxiety man is so enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity, so concerned about himself, that he cannot release himself for the adventure of love.”893 Because anxiety leads to faith, and through faith to neighbor-love, anxiety is doubly relational, connecting us with divine and human other alike.
Admittedly, anxiety’s movement through faith to love can be hard to spot in Haufniensis’s deliberations. Those looking for a Kierkegaardian understanding of love (and its parallels to Niebuhr’s thought) may, therefore, turn (initially, at least) to another of Kierkegaard’s writings: not The Concept of Anxiety, but Works of Love (1847). There, Kierkegaard insists that the “work of love in recollecting one who is dead [i.e., one who cannot reciprocate] is a work of the most unselfish love.”894 Niebuhr makes similar comments about a “sacrificial” love “which seeketh not its own”: “But a self which seeks to measure the possible reciprocity which its love towards another may elicit is obviously not sufficiently free of preoccupation with self to lose itself in the life of the other.”895 Notably, this opposition to reciprocity also prefigures what Levinas has to say about “my responsibility for the other, without concern for reciprocity.”896 Following Kierkegaard and Niebuhr (the so-called “modern-day agapists”),897 Levinas also equates this nonreciprocal responsibility with “love”—what he calls the “grave view of Agape [‘love’] in terms of responsibility for the other.”898
Works of Love also shares Niebuhr’s view of the close connection between faith and love.899 Like other Christian theologians, Kierkegaard recognizes that faith (in God’s love) leads to the love of others; we love, because God first loved us (1 John 4:10). Works of Love’s opening prayer emphasizes the fact that the God in whom one has faith is the source of all love (1 John 4:7).900 Kierkegaard also knows that faith is nothing less than faithful, trusting love in God. More than that, faith is nothing less than love for the God who both commands love (Matt 22:39) and is love (1 John 4:8). Faithful obedience to the divine command (“You Shall Love”) is, Kierkegaard thinks, needed to purify all works of love.901 Without faithful adherence to the divine directive, our good works only appear loving; they are, instead, works of self-interest and personal preference.
Faith is active, in Kierkegaard’s view. In words from Kierkegaard’s journals, “faith should make striving possible”—including striving to love neighbors.902 Anything less than effortful striving would make of our faith no faith (no trusting love) at all, but merely “cheap grace” (in the words of another well-known Lutheran theologian).903 Faith bears fruit; more to the point, it bears loving fruit (Luke 6:44).904 Consequently, if The Concept of Anxiety affirms faith (and it does), then it must also affirm love. Seen in the right light, faith and love are inextricably bound together.
More to the point here, seen in the right light (which Haufniensis provides), faith and love are inextricably bound to anxiety. The three denote different dimensions (better, different relationships) within the same moment. In anxiety, the human being faces, not only possibility, but also responsibility. In anxiety, I stand simultaneously before self, God, and neighbors. Confronted by my own future possibilities, I face a dizzying set of choices: between becoming or denying my true self; between trusting or rejecting the divine will for my life; between addressing or ignoring the needs of neighbors. Too often, I run (whether in pride or sensuousness) from all three relationships: from my anxiety, my vocation, and my responsibility to and for others. Anxiety invites me, however, not only to faith, but also (through faith) to love.
While its closing pages look beyond anxiety toward faith in God, Haufniensis’s opening pages look beyond anxiety toward a fundamental responsibility for the other. There, Haufniensis discards what he calls “first ethics,” which strives toward the virtuous perfection of the self-sufficient moral individual. In lieu of that “pagan” philosophy, “shipwrecked on the sinfulness of the single individual,” Haufniensis endorses a “new” or “second ethics,” an anxious, yet faithful ethical outlook that acknowledges our composite position: fallen yet responsible.905 Like Niebuhr, Haufniensis acknowledges that, through faith in the redemptive work of God, the sinner (partially) overcomes anxiety and self-centeredness to turn outward toward the other.906
In contrast, the introverted self (“enmeshed in the vicious circle of egocentricity”) is a very different figure, one Haufniensis labels “demonic.”907 The “demonic” self—who succumbs to “anxiety about the good”—“closes itself up within itself” in a state known as the “inclosing reserve.”908 By “inclosing himself”—by closing himself off from God and neighbor alike—the sinner refuses both the “adventure that every human being must go through—to learn to be anxious . . . in the right way,”909 and also Niebuhr’s “adventure of love.”910 Charges of atomistic individualism aside, Kierkegaard (Haufniensis) condemns isolated egoism in preference for a relationship with God (in faith) and neighbors (in love). What’s more, by rejecting “inclosing reserve,” Haufniensis rejects a satisfied self-relation not unlike Heidegger’s anxious, authentic Dasein.
Like Heidegger, Niebuhr and Haufniensis see anxiety as a fruitful starting point for an analysis of human being. Like Levinas, however, they admit that that analysis is grossly misleading unless anxiety gives way to love. Perhaps, then, it is not so much anxiety, as overcoming anxiety, that takes center stage in a Kierkegaardian-Niebuhrian anthropology. After all, Jesus’ injunction to “be not anxious” (Matt 6:25) is what, to Niebuhr’s ears, “contains the whole genius of the Biblical view of the relation of finiteness to sin in man.”911 In short, one ought to have faith, loving God and others, rather than having anxiety about oneself, a view Kierkegaard anticipates in his many meditations on the carefree “lilies of the field” and “birds of the air” (Matt 6:26–28).912 Nevertheless, anxiety remains central—and not altogether negative—for both thinkers. Because it is our unavoidable ontological condition—the way God created us—anxiety ought to be, not so much removed, as redeemed, by and for love. “Be not anxious for your life” is, as Niebuhr explains, the other side to the commandment to “love thy neighbor as thyself.”913 It is, in Haufniensian terms, an injunction to “be anxious in the right way”—in Levinasian terms, to be anxious for the other’s life, rather than my own.914
Conclusion: Political Agape
If anxiety leads (through faith) to love, then anxiety also leads to the political in the broad sense (i.e., prosocial behavior within the polis). What remains less clear is whether anxiety can also lead to the political in a narrower sense (i.e., support for state institutions). To be sure, Kierkegaard has his issues with justice, in most cases pitting it against love. According to Works of Love, “The one who truly loves . . . knows nothing about the claims of strict law or of justice, not even the claims of equity.”915 Instead, the one who loves undergoes the “revolution of love,” which purges one of the self-interest that lurks behind calls for reciprocity and justice’s distinction between mine and yours: “The more profound the revolution, the more completely the distinction ‘mine and yours’ disappears, the more perfect is the love . . . the more justice shudders.”916 So thoroughgoing is Kierkegaard’s animosity toward justice that the final lines of Works of Love take one last swing at the human infatuation with a just social order. There, Kierkegaard warns that advocating the principle of justice (i.e., to each her due) threatens to damn us all. Someone interested in salvation, by contrast, “will surely also avoid speaking to God about the wrongs of others against him . . . because such a person will prefer to speak to God only about grace, lest this fateful word ‘justice’ lose everything for him through what he himself evoked, the rigorous like for like.”917
Reread through a Niebuhrian lens, however, Kierkegaard’s commitment to active works of love (his agapism) allows, perhaps requires, a turn toward justice (his political agapism). As already indicated, Niebuhr shares Kierkegaard’s ideal preference for (self-sacrificial) love over (reciprocal) justice. However, if Niebuhr is right, that ideal love is never fully realizable in a world of sinners. Because of humanity’s fallenness, loving-in-the-world requires (institutions of) justice; justice and love are, in effect, two sides of the same coin. In Niebuhr’s words, although “without the ‘grace’ of love, justice always degenerates into something less than justice,” without justice, love fails to promote the well-being of actual neighbors.918 In lieu of a simplistic nonreciprocal agape, Niebuhr adopts what some call “political agapism”: the view that the achievement of love’s goals in a world of sinners necessitates institutions that strive for justice.919 In brief, love requires just institutions to promote the well-being of the neighbors we love and also to arbitrate among the competing claims of those neighbors.
Despite a well-known emphasis on nonreciprocal love, Levinas also endorses political agapism. Like Niebuhr, Levinas admits that justice is not an abandonment, but an approximation, of love; in fact, it is derived from love—“born of charity,” as he says.920 Though an infinite, nonreciprocal responsibility for the other (even to the point of becoming “hostage” to that other)921 is Levinas’s better-known theme, self-sacrificial responsibility for the other ultimately gives way to calculating, institutional justice and politics as soon as another other enters the scene. The “fact of the multiplicity of men and the presence of someone else next to the Other . . . condition the laws and establish justice.”922 Furthermore, because there is always “another other” (a “third”) on the scene, we always already inhabit the domain of justice and the political.923 In effect, Levinas seconds Niebuhr, agreeing that what love needs is the realism of justice, and what justice needs is the idealism of love. In words reminiscent of Niebuhr’s own, Levinas declares, “Love must always watch over justice.”924 Yet, so politically realistic is Levinas (former prisoner of war) that he, like Niebuhr, agrees that justice must also watch over love. Contrary to a common caricature, Levinas defends self-concern and political coercion; a “certain measure of violence is necessary in justice,” he says—at least, to stop the violent treatment of the other by another other.925 For that reason, and once again echoing Niebuhr, Levinas rejects the idealist’s pacifism: “[I] separate myself from the idea of nonresistance to evil.”926
In essence, I am arguing, not only that Levinas and Niebuhr are political agapists, but that Kierkegaard is (or ought to be) one, too. Although underdeveloped in Kierkegaard’s writings, justice is the logical extension of love within a Kierkegaardian worldview. If anxiety leads through faith to love, then anxiety also leads through love to justice and the political. Put differently, if God commands us to love all our neighbors, then God also commands us to navigate the complex dialectic between love and justice. Like both Niebuhr and Levinas, Kierkegaard concedes that we always face multiple (often competing) neighbors: “If there are only two people [i.e., self and other], the other person is the neighbor; if there are millions, everyone of these is the neighbor.”927 Yet, if Niebuhr and Levinas are right, fulfilling the duty to love those millions will require, not only the calculations of justice, but also the efficient institutions of justice (courts, police, armed forces, etc.).928
Justice (as a dialectical accompaniment to love) seems especially necessary given Haufniensis’s own recognition of the inevitability of sin, a recognition that informed Niebuhr’s own. Like Niebuhr, Haufniensis (the student of the “Doctrine of Hereditary Sin,” the purveyor of a “second ethics” for a sinful world) should agree that perfectionist, nonreciprocal love is insufficient for life in our world. Despite his more vocal reservations about justice, Kierkegaard sometimes agrees. Some of us must be “the servant[s] of justice,” who “work at discovering guilt and crime.”929 However, from Kierkegaard’s perspective, the “the rest of us are called to be neither judges nor servants of justice, but on the contrary, are called by God to love.”930 Justice is not ruled out entirely; Kierkegaard is, after all, neither idealist nor anarchist. However, justice is not his theme; it remains subordinated to the love to which God calls us (e.g., “love your neighbor as yourself”). As Kierkegaard indicates elsewhere, justice is, in the final analysis, God’s job; love is ours. Although, by imitating Christ, we “maintain a little justice in Christendom,” justice is, first and foremost, not the calculated efforts of human institutions, but the “divine justice” of God.931
Despite their overlapping views of anxiety and faith, then, Kierkegaard and Niebuhr ultimately part ways (at least, emphases) at the intersection between love and justice. In the end, Kierkegaard steers a course closer to Levinas than Niebuhr. Like Levinas and unlike Niebuhr, Kierkegaard has greater fear of the evil we do by loving too little (i.e., by relying on impersonal, calculating institutions of justice) than by loving too much (i.e., by relying on idealistic, interpersonal interactions). In short, the Kierkegaardian accent falls squarely on agape before the political. Consequently, anyone interested in writing a Kierkegaardian political theology should remember that anxiety makes room for faith, justice, and love—but the greatest of these is love.
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847. “To me . . . this matter of the single individual is the most decisive.” Kierkegaard, Point of View, 114–15. The disdain for politics appears in a letter from August 1848. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents, 253.
848. Martensen, Om Tro og Viden, et Lejlighedsskrift, 133–34; Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” 415; Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, 262.
849. Levinas, Proper Names, 68.
850. Levinas, Entre Nous, 214.
851. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:182.
852. Ibid., 171.
853. The need for justice prompted by the “third” person appears in Levinas and Niebuhr. Levinas, Entre Nous, 202. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:248.
854. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 313.
855. Ibid., 331.
856. Ibid., 355.
857. Ibid., 315.
858. Ibid., 313–14.
859. Ibid., 332, 345.
860. Ibid., 315.
861. Heidegger, Being and Time, 91; Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 65.
862. Heidegger, “What Is Metaphysics?,” 88.
863. Heidegger, Being and Time, 91.
864. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, v.
865. Levinas, Entre Nous, 112.
866. Ibid., 185. To Haufniensis, philosophers of being (Hegelian or Heideggerian) resemble the omphalopsychoi (“bellybutton-minds”), detached mystics (hesychasts) who value aesthetic reflection over ethical engagement. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 350–51; 242n2.
867. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 51; Levinas, Proper Names, 68.
868. Levinas, Basic Philosophical Writings, 158.
869. Ibid., 164.
870. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 112.
871. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:252.
872. Ibid., 185. The challenges of that synthesis inspired Niebuhr’s Serenity Prayer (1943): “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed, courage to change the things that should be changed, and the wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.” Niebuhr, Justice and Mercy, v. The anxious person must avoid overestimating human freedom (in pride) and underestimating it (in sensuousness).
873. Cf. Haufniensis: “The phenomenon [of anxiety] may appear in connection with the sensuous in man (addiction to drink, to opium, or to debauchery, etc.) as well as in connection with the higher (pride, vanity, wrath, hatred, defiance, cunning, envy, etc.)” Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 384.
874. Ibid., 288–89.
875. Ibid., 183.
876. Ibid., 182. Because it is a “concomitant of the paradox of freedom and finiteness in which man is involved” from creation, anxiety is a non-culpable condition of human existence. Even perfect faith is, therefore, faith-with-anxiety.
877. Ibid., 421, 423.
878. Ibid., 427.
879. Ibid., 424.
880. Ibid., 426.
881. Ibid., 424.
882. Ibid., 426.
883. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:288.
884. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 428.
885. Ibid., 421.
886. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2:1126.
887. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 421.
888. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 153.
889. For the linguistic and conceptual challenges posed by Anti-Climacus’s line, see Walsh, Kierkegaard, 74–76.
890. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:289.
891. Ibid., 293.
892. Ibid., 289.
893. Ibid., 272. Inasmuch as it overcomes anxiety, faith principally overcomes the anxious person’s irresponsible tendencies (i.e., pride’s will-to-power and sensuality’s irresponsibility). Ibid., 178, 186.
894. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 330.
895. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 2:72, 82.
896. Levinas, Entre Nous, 87. It is this responsibility, Levinas says, that he has “tried to analyze the phenomenon of.”
897. According to Nicholas Wolterstorff, Kierkegaard is the initiator of a modern resurgence in agapism. Wolterstorff, Justice in Love, 21, 71.
898. Levinas, Entre Nous, 113, emphasis added. So important is love to him that Levinas defines philosophy as “the wisdom of love” and “the love of wisdom at the service of love.” Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 162; cf. ibid., 188n5.
899. Levinas’s complicated views on faith (or God) lie outside the scope of this paper. For the similarities between Kierkegaard and Levinas’s views of love, see Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 127.
900. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 8.
901. Ibid., 21.
902. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2:1139.
903. Bonhoeffer, Discipleship, 43.
904. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 9.
905. Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 293–94.
906. Arguably, the second ethics is worked out (albeit not in name) in Works of Love. Grøn, Concept of Anxiety, 135.
907. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:272; Kierkegaard, Concept of Anxiety, 386.
908. Ibid., 391.
909. Ibid., 421.
910. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:272.
911. Niebuhr, Nature and Destiny, 1:168, emphasis added.
912. Niebuhr’s “be not anxious” is also taken from Jesus’ discussion of the lilies and the birds. See Pattison and Møller, Kierkegaard’s Pastoral Dialogues, 91.
913. Reinhold Niebuhr, Essential Niebuhr, 108–9.
914. “Be not anxious” is part of Jesus’ “Sermon on the Mount” and precedes the charge to seek first the kingdom of God and its justice.
915. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 256.
916. Ibid., 254.
917. Ibid., 365.
918. Niebuhr, Love and Justice, 28.
919. “Political agapism” means to remind us that Niebuhr’s “political realism” is motivated by what Nicholas Wolterstorff labels Niebuhr’s “non-classical agapism.” Wolterstorff, Justice in Love, 65.
920. Levinas, Entre Nous, 91. For a discussion of Niebuhr’s and Levinas’s overlapping views of love and justice, see Flescher, “Love and Justice,” 71, 77.
921. Levinas, Otherwise than Being, 112.
922. Levinas, Ethics and Infinity, 89.
923. Levinas, Entre Nous, 229.
924. Ibid., 92.
925. Ibid., 90; Levinas, Of God Who Comes to Mind, 83.
926. Levinas, Entre Nous, 90.
927. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 25.
928. Kierkegaard’s emphasis on non-preferential, nonreciprocal love need not rule out special relations (e.g., to spouses or children). Likewise, it need not rule out the calculated considerations of justice. We love neighbors by considering their particularities (their relationships with us, their needs in relation to others). See Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 91–92.
929. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 279. The distinction between those who further justice (through coercive institutions) and those who uphold love is rarely so clear (especially for those living in a democracy).
930. Ibid., 279.
931. Kierkegaard, Journals and Papers, 2:1902; Kierkegaard, The Moment, 315.