Chapter 23: Kierkegaard and the Politics of Time
23
Kierkegaard and the Politics of Time
At this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. . . . What we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the conditions of mere nature, and which had to be presented here only as on the threshold of the World’s History.
—G. W. F. Hegel1211
Too bad that Hegel lacked time; but if one is to dispose of all of world history, how does one get time for the little test as to whether the absolute method, which explains everything, is also able to explain the life of a single human being. In ancient times, one would have smiled at a method that can explain all of world history absolutely but cannot explain a single person even mediocrely.
—Søren Kierkegaard1212
The nameless boy’s face smiles up from the page. Dressed in overalls, he sits at a rough-hewn kitchen table, eating vegetables and cornbread with a wide-mouthed grin. When I first saw this image from a postwar issue of National Geographic in Amy Laura Hall’s Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction, two thoughts came immediately to mind. The first thought was that it strongly evoked family photos from my father’s childhood on a Mississippi farm during the Great Depression. The second was that my grandmother would have never allowed her son to be photographed in such an undignified manner. Unlike those family pictures of my father in overalls, this image was constructed to convey the idea that this boy is clearly other. He is construed as qualitatively different than the image’s intended or implied viewers, and as such he can safely be understood as little more than a figure of comic relief. The caption that appeared with it in National Geographic reinforced the point: “This Tennessee hill boy’s traveling days will come later. Now, with food shortages world-wide, he is better off at home. Most ration tickets went unused among hill folk, for they grew nearly all their own food.”1213
The feature article in which this photo appeared was entitled “America on the Move,” and its ostensible subject was the opportunity for travel and domestic convenience afforded by postwar technological and economic progress. The image of the hill boy, placed suggestively alongside a clearly racist photo of a black “Deep South Farm Urchin” eating watermelon, was contrasted with pictures of smiling families boarding passenger aircraft, boxcars carrying consumer goods to market, and children vacationing on the Lake Michigan shore. As Hall writes,
In the middle of the photographic feature, a two-page spread signals the difference between families who are “on the move” and those who are not. . . . In the commerce of limitless horizons, this boy is out of luck. His community, the “hill folk,” was outside the realm of ration tickets, and now is outside the realm of an “America on the move.” . . . The Americans “on the move” were “on the move” precisely inasmuch as they were able to distinguish and distance themselves and their own progressing children from children like these.1214
I became keenly aware that my own story, as the daughter of rural parents who rode the tide of New South prosperity from Depression-era uncertainty to postwar optimism and professional careers, was also enmeshed in this narrative of backwardness and progress.
Such was my introduction to the politics of time, specifically to the notion that the rhetoric of progress and backwardness is a political maneuver rather than a description of the natural order of things. At the heart of this political tactic is a tendency to arrange oneself and one’s neighbors on a temporal trajectory, distinguishing one’s own contemporaneity from the ostensible primitivity of particular neighbors. This brief chapter is an exploration of that theme, as well as of the role that the work of Kierkegaard can play in reorienting not just our thought but our selves toward contemporaneity with Christ and with our neighbors.
This is not merely a matter of theoretical or of historical interest. The politics of temporal separation and distancing that marked the postwar National Geographic feature persist into our present day, in venues that range from well-funded projects in scientific anthropology to the language of popular political discourse. Using the theoretical insights of anthropologist Johannes Fabian among others, I hope to show how the politics of time are, at a fundamental level, a problem of soteriology. The question that lies underneath the impulse to arrange one’s neighbors along a temporal continuum is the question: “Who saves, and by what means?” A reading of Kierkegaard, specifically of Either/Or II and Philosophical Fragments, may be helpful in elucidating these matters of time and salvation. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, it reminds us that underlying all politics is the inconvenient and persistent question of the neighbor who calls into question our own works of love.
Running Out of Time at the End of History
Far from being an unfortunate artifact of history, the tendency to arrange human beings on a temporal trajectory of progress and atavism persists into the present day. An example from the world of biological anthropology may be helpful in understanding the pervasive presence of this intellectual maneuver. In 1991, an article in the journal Genomics heralded the beginnings of what would later be called the Human Genome Diversity Project. The original paper, by Anne Bowcock and Luca Cavalli-Sforza, was entitled “The Study of Variation in the Human Genome” and promised that through the genetic study of “isolated” indigenous populations would reveal “our evolutionary history” as human beings.
A number of populations of considerable interest are rapidly disappearing. Large geographic areas are being exploited and developed, changing rapidly and irreversibly the aboriginal populations that still survive in every continent. The loss of traditional lifestyles destroys established communities, and their diaspora makes it practically impossible to sample them. It is only from the knowledge of the gene pools of these populations that we can hope to reconstruct the history of the human past. Humans are an endangered species from the point of view of genetic history.1215
Much to the surprise of Cavalli-Sforza and other leaders of the HGDP, the indigenous subjects of this genetic research objected to being treated as a biological repository of human history. As Jenny Reardon describes in her history of the racial politics of the project, indigenous activists first voiced these concerns in an online forum:
The Project’s focus on preservation, and its use of terms like “Isolates of Historical Interest,” demonstrated a preoccupation with the past rather than the future. This focus represented indigenous groups as objects of historical interest that were about to go extinct as opposed to “fully human communities with full human rights”—a stance they described as particularly egregious in 1993, the U.N.-decreed year of indigenous peoples. In short, by redescribing indigenous groups as “vanishing,” the Project threatened to once again reduce them to objects of mere scientific interest.1216
Here, the politics of time function to reduce or eliminate the political agency of those who are marked as variously behind the trajectory of human development. The extent to which such communities are marked as belonging to the past rather than the present is also the extent to which their status as “fully human” is called into question.
This project, and the sense of urgency that accompanied it, can perhaps be best understood as at least in part a product of its own location, both in the geographical and the historical sense. The HGDP emerged in the heady days of the early 1990s, two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At that time, Francis Fukuyama had declared that the “End of History” foreseen by Hegel had been achieved in the demise of the USSR and the apparent universal triumph of Western liberal democracy. For Fukuyama, the “triumph of the West, of the Western idea” had been proven by the “total exhaustion of viable systematic alternatives to Western liberalism.”1217 As he explains,
What we may be witnessing is not just the end of the Cold War, or the passing of a particular period of postwar history, but the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government. This is not to say that there will no longer be events to fill the pages of Foreign Affairs’ yearly summaries of international relations, for the victory of liberalism has occurred primarily in the realm of ideas or consciousness and is as yet incomplete in the real or material world. But there are powerful reasons for believing that it is the ideal that will govern the material world in the long run.1218
The task of completing the evolutionary history of human biology can perhaps best be understood as a product of the peculiar cultural moment of the post-Cold War period. The HGDP scientists’ sense of urgency was intensified by the sense that Western democratic cosmopolitanism would soon engulf even the most isolated of communities and lead to genetic intermingling. If the end of history was indeed upon us, then the story of that history needed to be filled in before it was too late. And this self-assigned task would be carried out in a way that treated indigenous people not as political contemporaries but as biological raw material, ultimately intended for intellectual consumption.
The History of Man and the History of Salvation
How did this intellectual and political maneuver become so prevalent? One particularly helpful guide to the temporal characteristics of modernity is Johannes Fabian’s Time and the Other. In this text, which deals primarily with the problem of time within anthropology, Fabian describes a modern shift that entails both temporal and geographic processes that are deeply tied to secularization. Previously, he argues, time was negotiated in terms of a sacred history, and the determinative temporal framework was the history of salvation based in the specificity and particularity of the incarnation. Modernity, for Fabian, enacts a continual process of secularizing time by not just linearizing, but also by generalizing and universalizing it. He also notes the connection of time and space, as time becomes related to travel in a new way:
In the Christian tradition, the Savior’s and the saints’ passages on earth had been perceived as constituent events of a sacred history. To be sure, this had occasioned much travel to foreign parts in the form of pilgrimages, crusades, and missions. But for the established bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century, travel was to become (at least potentially) every man’s source of philosophical, secular knowledge. Religious travel had been to the centers of religion, or to the souls to be saved; now, secular travel was from the centers of learning and power to the places where man was to find nothing but himself.1219
In this form of travel, new people were encountered as a way to write the history of “man.” As a result, the temporal was tied to the geographical, and in particular to narratives of exploration and discovery. In the words of the eighteenth-century French explorer the Comte de Lapérouse, “The modern navigators only have one objective when they describe the customs of new peoples: to complete the history of man.”1220 This “new science of travel” was inextricably intertwined with “natural-historical projects of observation, collection, and classification.”1221
By linking the temporal and the geographical through these secular, scientific voyages of exploration, the stage would be set for the next shift in anthropological thought. Fabian notes that in the nineteenth century, time became “immanent to,” and “coextensive with,” the material world or with the idea of “nature.”1222 At the same time, relationships between parts of the world were understood as temporal relationships, such that “dispersal in space” indicates “sequence in Time.”1223 At the same time as these relationships were presented as objective and universal, however, they reintroduced a covert form of specificity. The histories completed through these scientific voyages, and strikingly repeated in the Human Genome Diversity Project, were part of a particular story of salvation through travel, discovery, and progress that posits some human beings as temporally atavistic or primitive, while others are destined to bring salvation to them:
The natural histories of evolutionism reintroduced a kind of specificity of time and place—in fact a history of retroactive salvation—that has its closest counterpart in the Christian-medieval vision contested by the Enlightenment. This was politically all the more reactionary because it pretended to rest on strictly scientific hence universally valued principles. In fact little more had been done than to replace faith in salvation by faith in progress and industry, and the Mediterranean as the hub of history by Victorian England.1224
Living societies and past cultures were arranged on a continuous temporal slope, in which some were located upstream and others downstream, separated by the temporal rhetoric of “then” and the geographies of “there.”1225
The political tactic of temporal distancing described by Fabian is rooted in what he calls the “denial of coevalness.” This is defined as “a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse.”1226 In the context of exploration and colonialism, this distancing results in what Fabian calls “a kind of political physics,” in which “it is impossible for two bodies to occupy the same space at the same time.”1227 As the history of colonialism and relations with indigenous peoples tragically reveals, it then becomes logical to either (1) “move or remove the other body,” or (2) assign the other body to a different time.1228 In this way, the separation between Western man and the Other as the object of anthropological inquiry as well as political subjugation is maintained.
Foreign and Domestic
The theological politics of our existence in time are not only a matter of dislocating ourselves or our neighbors in time or in space. They are also a matter of looking to the wrong agent of salvation to give us our time, and ourselves, back again. And, it is here that Kierkegaard will enter the conversation. Before turning to his texts, however, one further word of theoretical clarification is in order. By focusing on the interactions of temporality with colonial expansion and exploration, it might be assumed that the politics of time are only a matter of the global, or of the foreign, perspective. The question of saving others by forcibly incorporating them into the Western civilizing project would seem to have little or nothing to do with the intimate politics of middle-class homes within the Western metropole. And yet as we consider how Kierkegaard may be a useful interlocutor as we think about these matters of temporal politics, we need to bear in mind there is no clean line of demarcation between the “foreign” and the “domestic,” in both senses of the latter word.
Indeed, as Amy Kaplan has noted in her seminal essay “Manifest Domesticity,” these two spheres are intimately tied to each other. In fact, the notion of the foreign as the stage upon which politics of grand strategy are enacted is dependent on, and produced by, the concept of the domestic. As Kaplan explains,
This deconstruction of separate spheres, however, leaves another structural opposition intact: the domestic in intimate opposition to the foreign. In this context domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home. The earliest meaning of foreign, according to the OED, is “out of doors” or “at a distance from home.” Contemporary English speakers refer to national concerns as domestic in explicit or implicit contrast with the foreign. The notion of domestic policy makes sense only in opposition to foreign policy, and uncoupled from the foreign, national issues are never labeled domestic. The idea of foreign policy depends on the sense of the nation as a domestic space imbued with a sense of at-homeness, in contrast to an external world perceived as alien and threatening. Reciprocally, a sense of the foreign is necessary to erect the boundaries that enclose the nation as a home.1229
Specifically, travel into the geographical spaces marked as foreign depends on a sense of the domestic. A well-ordered home and a well-ordered colonial geography depend upon each other, and, indeed, are produced by each other:
The border between the domestic and the foreign . . . deconstructs when we think of domesticity not as a static condition but as the process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild, the natural, and the alien. Domestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery. Through the process of domestication, the home contains within itself those wild or foreign elements that must be tamed: domesticity not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself.1230
It can be tempting to assume that political theology is only concerned with events on the large scale, whether the global arena of the machinations of nation-states or the common life of cities. But it is a mistake to draw a boundary around the home as an apolitical zone that does not also participate in the interactions between the political, the soteriological, and the temporal.
It is here that we turn to Kierkegaard, and in particular to his unmasking of the pathologies that lurk within the image of domestic bliss put forward in Either/Or II, where Judge William gives his account of “The Esthetic Validity of Marriage.” There, the self-satisfied middle-class husband describes himself as having produced his own salvation and grounded his own existence in time through his “struggles with time”—struggles in which he emerges victorious through his consuming grasp of the domestic tranquility ensured by his wife.1231 As Judge William puts it, only through marriage can one find the unity between time and eternity and the resolution of recollection and hope:
[The married man] has not fought with lions and trolls but with the most dangerous enemy, which is time. But now eternity does not come forward, as for the knight, but he has eternity in time, has preserved eternity in time. Therefore only he has been victorious over time, for it may be said of the knight that he has killed time, just as one to whom time has no reality always wishes to kill time, but this is never the right victory. Like a true victor, the married man has not killed time but has rescued and preserved it in all eternity.1232
Marital love, which he describes as the only form of “true love,” has “an utterly different value.” It “does its work in time” and in fact has “a completely different idea of time and of repetition.”1233
The judge’s married life is for him the means of his salvation, and his God is conveniently reduced to “an eyewitness who does not cramp one’s style.”1234 In particular, he looks to his wife as the mediator who grounds his existence in time, giving it meaning and coherence:
If, when I am sitting in my study and time is dragging for me, I slip into the living room, I sit down in a corner, I say not a word for fear of disturbing her in her task, for even though it looks like a game, it is done with a dignity and decorum that inspires respect, and she is far from being what you say Mrs. Hansen is, a top that hums and buzzes around and by its humming and buzzing makes matrimonial music in the living room.1235
For Judge William, then, “the woman” is the key to the existence of “the man” in time. As he explains with an almost ecstatic fervor:
Is it a perfection in a woman, this secret rapport she has with time; is it an imperfection? Is it because she has a more earthly creature than the man, or because she has more eternity within her? Please do answer; after all, you have a philosophic mind. When I am sitting this way, desolate and lost, and then I watch my wife moving lightly and youthfully around the room, always busy—she always has something to take care of—my eyes involuntarily follow her movements. I participate in everything she is doing, and in the end, I find myself within time again, time has meaning for me again, and the moment hurries along again.1236
Heretically, Judge William also contends that married life has brought him to a state of self-knowledge, such that “through the individual’s intercourse with himself the individual is made pregnant by himself and gives birth to himself.”1237 In marriage, Judge William escapes the paradox of time in and through himself, but by means of an assimilative and acquisitive consumption of his wife as the salvific “woman.” As what may at first seem to be a detour through Either/Or reminds us, colonizing voyages of discovery may not save, but neither does what happens within the contours of self-satisfied married life. The problem of misplaced salvation on the global political stage cannot be solved by turning within the boundaries of the home.
In and Out of Time
While Kierkegaard can tell us much about looking to the wrong place and the wrong people to ground our existence in time, he can also reorient us in the right direction. Writing in Philosophical Fragments, he playfully turns and returns to the question of time and of contemporaneity with Christ and, in turn, with the neighbors we are given to see and love through Christ. In Fragments, Kierkegaard contrasts Christian existence with what he calls “the Socratic,” wherein truth lies within the individual and may be extracted through a process of self-knowledge. Again and again, he returns to the refrain, “if the moment is to have decisive significance,” arguing that such a moment is not Socratically self-generated but received as sheer, gratuitous gift.1238
This moment, which occasions the unity between God and humanity, time and eternity, teacher and learner, occurs not by means of a human ascent (even a divinely-assisted ascent) to a pinnacle of exaltation. Rather, it takes place “by means of a descent,” in which God takes on “the form of a servant,” not just as a divine means of disguise and concealment, but truly and completely. As he writes,
For this is the boundlessness of love, that in earnestness and truth and not in jest it wills to be the equal of the beloved, and it is the omnipotence of resolving love to be capable of that of which neither the king nor Socrates was capable, which is why their assumed characters were still a kind of deceit.1239
As he continues, Kierkegaard shows Judge William’s tactic of do-it-yourself salvation and maritally grounded temporality for the lie that it is:
The god’s love—if he wants to be a teacher—must not only be an assisting love but a procreative love by which he gives birth to the learner, or, as we have called him, one born again, meaning the transition from “not to be” to “to be.” The truth, then, is that the learner owes him everything. But that which makes understanding so difficult is precisely this: that he becomes nothing and yet is not annihilated; that he owes him everything and yet becomes boldly confident; that he understands the truth, but the truth makes him free; that he grasps the guilt of untruth, and then again bold confidence triumphs in the truth. Between one human being and another, to be of assistance is supreme, but to beget is reserved for the god, whose love is procreative, but not that procreative love of which Socrates knew how to speak so beautifully on a festive occasion.1240
To exist in time, in that decisive moment, is to simultaneously exist in debt to the one who has given us everything, and also with the neighbor whom that one commands us with duty’s imperative: “You shall love.”1241
And what of those who, as noted earlier in this chapter, would place themselves in what Denise Ferreira da Silva calls the position of transparency, standing outside of time in order to arrange their neighbors on a temporal trajectory?1242 As Amy Laura Hall and I have noted elsewhere, and as Julia Watkin wrote in her commentary on Concluding Unscientific Postscript, the one who steps outside of time, away from the “decisive significance” of the “moment” risks losing her neighbor, herself, and indeed the conditions of possibility of ethical thought and action.1243 Watkin explains:
Loss of contact with ethics occurs firstly through the thinker’s make-believe standpoint in which he or she takes some fantastical God’s-eye position outside the universe, that is, outside existence. Since objective thinking, in that it concerns description of the world, has no relation to the individual thinker’s personal life, daily life becomes an inconvenient appendage to the great work of System-building (CUP, 1:119, 122–23). Secondly, there is a loss of ethics in the Hegelian-style System because it contains ethics and morality as a necessary process. Yet in a necessary process there can be no freedom and hence no ethics.1244
The rhetorical tactics of temporal distancing and of the denial of coevalness are not merely an unfortunate artifact of scientific hubris or limited to the histories of colonial domination. Rather, they are a symptom of a profound political and moral problem, rooted in the past but all too pervasive in the present.
While a reading of Kierkegaard provides a sharp word otherwise to those who would distance themselves in time from their neighbors, its political implications extend far beyond the anthropological or the philosophical realms. The problem that Kierkegaard diagnoses is not only a problem of thought or scholarship, but also of political speech on the most mundane of levels. Indeed, the aforementioned temporal maneuvers can also be found in the popular rhetoric that surrounds political debate, especially in some of the lazier pronouncements that emerge from within Western liberalism itself.
One example of this rhetoric could be seen recently in my own home state of North Carolina. Reacting to a nondiscrimination ordinance in the city of Charlotte, in 2106, the state legislature passed House Bill 2, which mandated that “public agencies shall require every multiple occupancy bathroom or changing facility to be designated for and only used by persons based on their biological sex.”1245 Ostensibly concerned with the growing visibility of the transgender community both in North Carolina and nationally, HB2 was in reality a law with broad consequences for labor—both in terms of minimum wage laws and protections against many forms of discrimination.
However, much of the opposition to HB2 took on a predictable temporal character. As one popular Internet meme put it, “Welcome to North Carolina. Please set your clocks back 50 years.” Rather than argue against HB2 on its merits (or the lack thereof), many political activists focused instead on the perceived temporal reversion that it represented, painting it as a step backward into the past and away from contemporaneity. In this form of liberal rhetoric, the backwardness of a political position in and of itself functions as self-evident proof of its wrongness. The same habits of speech can be seen in debates on topics ranging from drug policy to energy regulation to religious freedom. One political position is posited as representing contemporaneity (or the future), while the other is cast as a temporally retrograde attempt to pull the social body back down the temporal slope toward the position that its proponents are assumed to occupy. And yet as this chapter has suggested, such temporal distancing makes political discernment and debate difficult, if not impossible to achieve. As a way to describe the contours of human life together, political conversation depends on the relationships that only contemporaneity makes possible. And that contemporaneity, in turn, depends on a recognition that no human project is salvific. Thankfully, that job has already been taken.
Bibliography
Bowcock, Anne, and Luca Cavalli-Sforza. “The Study of Variation in the Human Genome.” Genomics 11 (1991) 491–98.
Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002.
Ferreira da Silva, Denise. Towards a Global Idea of Race. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Fukuyama, Francis. “The End of History?” National Interest, summer 1989, 3–18.
General Assembly of North Carolina. Second Extra Session of 2016. House Bill 2. http://www.ncleg.net/Sessions/2015E2/Bills/House/PDF/H2v1.pdf.
Hall, Amy Laura. Conceiving Parenthood: American Protestantism and the Spirit of Reproduction. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2008.
Hall, Amy Laura, and Kara Slade. “The Single Individual in Ordinary Time: Theological Engagements with Sociobiology.” Studies in Christian Ethics 26 (2013) 66–82.
Hegel, G. W. F. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. New York: Wiley, 1906.
Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” American Literature 70 (1998) 581–606.
Kierkegaard, Søren. Either/Or II. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987.
———. Philosophical Fragments. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.
———. Works of Love. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998.
Reardon, Jenny. Race to the Finish: Identity and Governance in an Age of Genomics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.
Watkin, Julia. “Boom! The Earth Is Round! On the Impossibility of an Existential System.” In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, edited by Robert L. Perkins, 95–113. International Kierkegaard Commentary 12. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1997.
1211. Hegel, Philosophy of History, 99.
1212. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 206 (Revision of Pap. V B 14).
1213. Hall, Conceiving Parenthood, 317.
1214. Ibid., 315.
1215. Ibid., 495.
1216. Reardon, Race to the Finish, 105.
1217. Fukuyama, “End of History?,” 3–18.
1218. Ibid.
1219. Fabian, Time and the Other, 6.
1220. Ibid., 8.
1221. Ibid.
1222. Ibid., 11.
1223. Ibid., 12.
1224. Ibid., 17.
1225. Ibid., 27.
1226. Ibid., 31.
1227. Ibid., 29.
1228. Ibid.
1229. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 581–82.
1230. Ibid., 582.
1231. Kierkegaard, Either/Or II, 134.
1232. Ibid., 138.
1233. Ibid., 141.
1234. Ibid., 56.
1235. Ibid., 308.
1236. Ibid., 307.
1237. Ibid., 259.
1238. Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, 28.
1239. Ibid., 32.
1240. Ibid., 31.
1241. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 24.
1242. Silva, Towards a Global Idea of Race, 20.
1243. Hall and Slade, “Single Individual,” 66–82.
1244. Watkin, “Boom! The Earth Is Round!,” 101.
1245. General Assembly of North Carolina, Second Extra Session of 2016, House Bill 2.