Chapter 7: Equality
7
Equality
A Proposal Rooted in Kierkegaard’s Theological Anthropology and Theology of Love
Intersecting the desideratum of equality in modern democracies with the reality of human difference is treacherous both at the level of thought and practice. Theologically speaking, equal regard for all human beings is rooted in God’s universal love for all people. Human beings are creatures whose very presence in the world results from an act of divine love. God’s fecund love is the source of God’s desire to create all that is not God, including humanity, and to orient human beings teleologically to be the kinds of beings who find their well-being in relations of love, both by loving God and by loving fellow humans. Throughout his corpus, Søren Kierkegaard shows that there is a deep coherence between God’s action in the world and God’s being: God is not only loving, God is actually love itself. Since human beings are also called to be creatures of love in human ways, God gives them the tools to become so. God teaches us how to love because God wants us to flourish.329
However, while human beings are in a rapport of equality with one another through God’s own love relation to them, we are at the same time creatures of difference: God loves us with equality and similar regard, but our love for one another is marked by particularities and dissimilarities. The wide-ranging differences that characterize our identities have powerful consequences in both our individual lives and in the social structures that envelop our existence. In his recognition of difference as a destructive seed of inequality in social relations, Kierkegaard anticipates realities that have been amply analyzed and theorized much later.
Kierkegaard conceptualizes human differences as not only utterly real but also as interwoven with another dimension of human identity: an irreducible, equal universality of simply being human, on account of which we are called to love and regard others as equals, mirroring God’s own way of love in human ways. In this essay I argue for a framework of equality rooted in Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology, which holds promise in light of contemporary concerns for recognizing and valuing human differences, which Kierkegaard also upholds. Specifically, I show that Kierkegaard assumes a bi-stratified human subjectivity consisting of a base layer of universal humanness and an additional stratum of particularity or difference, which needs to be recognized without distortion. I subsequently show how Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology parallels his theological focus on love relations, as he envisions universal love for all human neighbors as a baseline ground from which preferential loves extend as another layer. I conclude by proposing an account of possible equality on the basis of this relational bi-stratification.
Kierkegaard’s theology as a whole is ultimately a theology of love, aiming to transform those who encounter it into agents of love in the world. He builds his understanding of love on a corresponding double-layered image of the human self. On top of a basic layer of identity shared by all human beings, there is another layer of particularities and differences. Neither difference nor the universal dimension is optional or reducible to the other in the structure of our subjectivity. While one might object to Kierkegaard that invoking universality is too easily self-evident and needs no proof, Kierkegaard pushes this base layer of the human self precisely because we tend to only see particularities and differences and little else. Because of this tendency, we neither love nor treat each other with equal, universal regard: at best, we become enslaved to preferential relations that distance us from those who have not made the cut, while at the same time distancing ourselves from the source of sustainable love and relationality—God.
The significance of basic universal humanity notwithstanding, we don’t encounter fellow human beings at such a level of generic, “pure humanity.”330 This is not how embodied human existence unfolds. Kierkegaard is acutely aware of the enormously numerous and complex dissimilarities, distinctions, and differences that make each one of us singularly unique. Our lives are characterized by complicated identity markers that make each of us irreducibly particular, which is how we encounter any person, including ourselves.331 Contemporary analysis of gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, ability and other identity differences matches well with Kierkegaard’s prescient observations. Much harm results from failing to recognize particularity in human subjectivity.
Charles Taylor speaks of recognition as an externally generated yet inwardly validating dialogical exchange with other people that confers solidity to one’s sense of self in terms of one’s concrete particularity and difference. Recognition bears deep significance for a person’s subjectivity and well-being. The opposite is also true. Human beings “can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves. It can be a form of oppression, imprisoning someone in a false, distorted or reduced mode being.”332 Structural misrecognition is even more deeply injurious. People of color, those of nonconformist sexualities or queer gender, undocumented migrants, persons of low economic class, or those with disability often encounter such pervasive malrecognition from the dominant groups that it becomes an internalized part of their self-understanding and therefore a powerful source of oppression, both inwardly and socially. When distorted images of people’s particularities spread through society, the oppression and injustice becomes systemic, making equality impossible. Misrecognition of human difference invalidates human identities and forms social supremacies that damage the social space; white supremacy, heteronormative patriarchy, or the oligarchy of the economic elite are prominent examples. While much more than recognition is necessary for social transformation and for undoing such structural harms, empowering people regardless of their different particularities to flourish, and engendering democratic equality, recognition nonetheless plays a significant role. To acknowledge human difference is “not just a courtesy we owe people. It is a vital human need.”333 Political recognition requires the interpersonal and social acknowledgment of particularities and differences that characterize people and groups. Paradoxically, what is needed is the universal recognition of what is not universal but unique, particular, and distinctive. Even beyond the political goal of recognizing difference and particularity, which is a sine qua non condition for democratic equality, recognition is needed for the human self to be properly shaped, actualized, and fulfilled, which is an integral part of partaking well in love relations.
Yet Kierkegaard warns that our dissimilarities and differences are the reason why we develop desires and preferences for some people at the expense of others. On one hand, particularity is part and parcel of our existence as we experience it and gives us our unique identity and unique beauty, yet on the other hand, our differences are the most fertile ground for inequality, exclusion, and oppression. To be sure, “there is dissimilarity everywhere in temporality,” since the very nature of time-infused history is “the different, the multifarious.”334 Kierkegaard adds that our differences are not simply on a par with each other: some are kings, while some are beggars; some are rich, while some are poor; some are male, while some are female—and all of these differences create unjust hierarchies. Thus, particularity is not just a neutral descriptor of human life, let alone an unqualified marker of beauty, but it is also the dangerous territory of rejection. We are powerfully tempted to associate ourselves with people most like us. The problem grows larger when the markers of our identity are those of unacknowledged privilege and we associate ourselves with others who share the privilege, unquestioningly, blind to the rejection, nonrecognition, and resulting oppression of those who do not share our privilege. In Kierkegaard’s estimation, the relationships with people like ourselves are not relations of love but of selfishness. When the other person is like me, she is in a certain sense another “I” and not a genuine other human being to be recognized and loved as other.335
The manifold differences that permeate our lives carry with them unequal privileges, powers, wealth, and social capital. Kierkegaard emphasizes this by invoking differences in social class and material wealth. Glossing on Jesus’ parable of the wedding banquet,336 Kierkegaard imagines a lavish party with luxurious decorations, exotic food, and satisfying beverages. Yet the host does not invite his privileged friends to partake in such fine wining and dining. The host instead invites a dubious crowd of homeless, poor, and destitute people. In the story told by Jesus the host initially invites friends and relatives who share the host’s social status, but these over-entertained people refuse to come. Only then the host calls the beggars and the lame, the poor and the homeless, and all variety of the nobodies of the day, who are delighted to come. Kierkegaard makes the denouement even more poignant and envisions the nobodies as the only invitees. Subsequently, a host’s friend hears about the party and is outraged for not receiving an invitation. But when he learns who the invitees were, his hurt feelings instantly evaporate. He would have never come to such a gathering, nor would he have ever seen it as a true banquet or desirable party. It seems to him that this is more like an eccentric soup kitchen; the poor and the homeless would never be equal either to him or to the host. In Kierkegaard’s thought, differences such as the social-economic ones in this story work against imagining the equal humanity of dissimilar neighbors. “The one who feeds the poor—but still has not been victorious over his mind in such a way that he calls this meal a banquet—sees the poor and the lowly only as the poor and the lowly.”337 Kierkegaard is troubled that the differences in social location threaten the possibility of equal relations and equal regard. Indeed, relational equality is unreachable when difference is hierarchical and generates rejection, exclusion, and oppression. In other words, left on its own, the particularity of difference renders equality elusive. On the other hand, human universality theorized on its own would be incompatible with embodied historical human existence as we know it.
Kierkegaard acknowledges the difficulties of understanding human identity either in universal terms or in terms of particular differences if either category is taken alone. His solution is to construct a picture of human identity in which the human self is a synthesis of these two layers which coexist without collapsing into each other at any given time and without any conflict between them. The self is therefore marked by a stratum of universality which makes each of us recognizable as human beings. In that sense, we are similar to one another, and are each other’s human neighbors. Yet, we are also marked by multiple differences and unique features without which our individual identity would not be conceivable. These differences make us recognizable as the singular, particular people that we are. The proper way to understand the Kierkegaardian relation between the universal and the particular within human subjectivity is a rapport of continuity. There is no contrast between universality and particularity in the constitution of the human self but rather, the particular grows out of and perfects the universal.
Universal similarity and particular uniqueness are both irreducible features of the self, yet in Kierkegaard’s thought, these two ingredients of human identity are not on the same plane. Again, they form two different strata of human subjectivity. Kierkegaard envisions the self as a construction in which our universal humanity operates as a base layer, with particularity extending onto another level. Both these layers constitute the self, in different ways. The universal marks us qua human; particularity is a second gift which perfects the universal without obliterating it, opposing it, or diminishing it. Kierkegaard illustrates the relation between universality and particularity within the human self by imagining paper sheets that share a common watermark.338 Each individual sheet of paper has something written on it: a story, a drawing, or an inscription. This writing gives each sheet its own particular, unique, character, while the watermark impressed on all sheets makes them similar. The unique drawing, scribbling or other writing is the most visible feature of each sheet; the watermark infused in the fabric of the paper is much less discernable. Although the watermark is part of the body of the paper, ingrained in it, we need to hold it up to the light and look carefully to notice it. Kierkegaard thinks that human beings are somewhat analogous to these sheets of paper. We are characterized by the common watermark of our universal humanity, yet we also have a unique story and set of particularities that make up our different identities. As the sheets of paper have different inscriptions on each of them, so are we singularly unique and different from one another. As the sheets share a common watermark that is discernable if one holds the paper against the light, and as the unique inscriptions on each page do not erase it, so is our common, universal humanity discernable if one looks attentively. Our universal humanity is not obviated by our equally powerful particularities. This watermark of common human identity is the base layer on which particularity is built and grows. To be sure, it is less visible than the dissimilarities that readily catch the eye in the same way that the inscriptions on the sheets of paper draw our attention first.
The common watermark stands not just for our universal humanity, but also for the human neighbor whom we are called to love and care for. This is a call for equal regard, regardless of the particular identity markers or story the neighbor carries within herself. Kierkegaard reads the story of the good Samaritan to illustrate the universal human neighbor, and not the Samaritan identity of the main character. The wounded traveler could be anyone. The helper could and ought to be anyone as well, even though the helper’s identity was most discernable as a citizen of Samaria in the gospel story. This person proved to be the neighbor of the injured voyager on account of his humanity, in spite of his Samaritan ethnicity or the prejudices that such an ethnicity carried with it at that time. Kierkegaard concludes that we can only see the common, universal humanity in our neighbor when we look beyond the more easily discernable particularities of time and history and see the other person’s universal humanity in the light of eternity. However, we cannot bypass human differences and dissimilarities. Eternity’s light illuminates our common humanity only through the differences inscribed in our existence because our eyes see these differences first.
The categories of the eternal and historical-temporal complicate Kierkegaard’s discussion of the universal and the particular. What makes us similar, as well as equal, is that our identities are permeated by our relation to the eternal God, who has marked each one of us with eternity’s own presence in us, and who is both the source of our being and our destiny. Conversely, dissimilarity, difference, and particularity are marks of temporality in our existence. We cannot avoid being creatures of difference or being unique selves any more than we can avoid existing. Our lives are both located in eternity, by virtue of being God’s creatures, and in history and temporality, by virtue of living in the world. The double marks of eternity and temporality correspond with the two layers of our common universal humanity and particular differences. The rest of my essay shows how both of these dyadic descriptions of our subjectivity contribute to a synthesis that makes the democratic desideratum of equality realistic.
I have argued thus far that Kierkegaard’s theological anthropology is a bi-layered construction: the particular is in continuity with and a perfection of the universal. Kierkegaard’s theology of love builds on this bi-stratification of subjectivity. I propose that there is a correspondence between, on one hand, the non-oppositional relation of universal humanness to particular difference and on the other hand, the relation of neighbor love to preferential loves. Neighbor love is a universal duty to love all human beings, while preferential loves expand and perfect this duty, since we grow close to particular people whom we know in more depth and nuance. This is a constructive proposal based on Kierkegaard’s more direct assertions; I resist the trend of interpretation that reads him as the enemy of preferential, special relations. Although his claims regarding universal neighbor love and preferential loves may seem to oppose each other at times, a more nuanced reading of his texts allows for a parallel between the non-oppositional strata in human subjectivity and a non-conflicting relation between universal love for all and particular loves of preference which give life meaning and joy.
When Kierkegaard invokes neighbor love, he literally means every single person possible. The circle is pan-human and maximally large. This extensive inclusion foreshadows recent feminist and womanist theological anthropologies that conceptualize all human beings as part of a web of relationality and interconnectivity.339 While Kierkegaard is not a feminist avant la lettre, his strong injunction that we ought to love our neighbors even as the neighbor is indeed every human being qua human, shows at least a thought bridge between his concerns for equality and contemporary feminist and womanist arguments for universal interconnectivity.
Such an emphasis on universal neighbor love might appear to support an oppositional rapport between this universal duty and loves of preference, especially since Kierkegaard does indeed say that “Christianity has thrust erotic love and friendship from the throne” and replaced it with the love of neighbor. Yet he also passionately advocates that “erotic love and earthly love are the joy of life,” adding that “erotic love is undeniably life’s most beautiful happiness and friendship the greatest temporal good.”340 However, I suggest that such statements are not contradictory. Non-preferential and preferential loves are continuous with each other, and this continuity corresponds to Kierkegaard’s bi-layered theological anthropology. My proposal is that preferential loves are not just a different category from neighbor love. They perfect neighbor love in the same way that particularity perfects universality in the identity of the self, with differences extending and growing out of the base layer of common humanity shared by all. Neighbor love is, however, distinct from preferential loves in the sense that it focuses on similarity between people or what might be called universally human, transcending particular differences which are not however denied.341 Kierkegaard recognizes that the dissimilarities inherent in creation and in human life are utterly irreducible. They are unequivocal features of temporality and history. As they augment our universal common humanity, so do preferential special loves add a new profound dimension to neighbor love. Again, they are not simply another type of love, but rather, an expansion and perfection of neighbor love that does not take away from or contradict anything about the neighbor love as such.
Preferential loves are bi-layered relationships in the same way that we are bi-layered subjectivities. Our desires, inclinations, and the whole magnetism of attraction constitute one of the layers. The other layer is the neighbor love relation, which ought to be in place between all human beings, even though all relationships need not be (and we can easily recognize that they are in fact not) limited to this base layer of relating. We form bonds with particular human beings and certainly not with all whom we come across, let alone the entire global community of human beings. We are too finite for that. We become attached to a mere subset of people, even though all people on the planet will remain our neighbors in Kierkegaard’s understanding. This view is at least partially consistent with the relational claims of feminist theological anthropologies such as Catherine Keller’s proposal: all human life is engaged in a weblike connectivity that permeates the whole universe. In Kierkegaard’s thought this would be a universal neighbor connectivity which nonetheless allows for the formation of attachments and preferential loves with a small subset of people. In Keller’s thought there is also room for particular relations through which we enter the web of all-life-connectedness. Particular relations allow us to “glimpse [into] the unseen relatedness of all things—and always back again into the particular.”342 She emphasizes the inescapability of particularity, since particular relations are the gateway toward the universal web of connectedness of the whole human community. For Kierkegaard, however, particular relations of preference are well lived when the strand of universal neighbor love is integrated within them. Preferential loves are sources of well-being for us, but people with whom we engage in such meaningful relations ought to never cease to be the universal neighbor, even as they are much more than that.
Kierkegaard’s injunction that we ought to love all people as our universal neighbors is not what people typically encounter in their daily lives. Much more common is the experience of preferential love based on similar particularities between partners without neighbor love permeating it. Love relations, friendships, or other partnerships across human differences are much less frequent especially when differences are steep. It is unlikely that a global bank’s CEO would become a close friend to a homeless adolescent sleeping on the marble steps of the bank’s headquarters, or that a highly affluent person would bond with a Walmart worker who earns less in a month than what this rich individual may pay for an outfit to wear to the gym.
What we encounter most often is love rooted in preferences, which in turn is rooted in sameness, not in universal neighbor love which would transcend dissimilarities regardless of their depth and amplitude. Kierkegaard keenly observes that this reality is a fact, but it is precisely what he would never call good. He suggests instead that we need to make neighbor love a universal feature of life and to never let our preferential loves be devoid of it. Paradoxically, the very kind of love for which we yearn most deeply and which we intuit to be the source of our joy and well-being includes at its core the non-preferential element of neighbor love which solidifies preferential loves with a no-matter-what quality.
Kierkegaard only rejects preferential alliances and special loves insofar as they are problematic when they are mono-layered relationships devoid of the element of neighbor love. In such a case, they would appear to stand in opposition to the non-preferential care for the neighbor, who is any human being. Kierkegaard is adamant about the need for neighbor love to form an integral part of preferential relationships. Kierkegaard’s ideal is that two human partners would not be engaged in just a dyad of mutual relating, but that a third element would also be present between them: what he calls “the middle term ‘neighbor.’”343
On one hand, this middle term is a universal duty of love owed to all people, which ensures equality between partners and, by extension, among members of a society. We are not to take advantage of, or be abused by those who are close to us—either lovers, or friends, or relations of kinship, or any other partners. While such people are more than the universal neighbor to whom we owe equal regard (while the same is owed to us), people with whom we are in preferential, special relationships are never less than what a neighbor is. Hence the middle term of neighbor love must be part of any preferential relation. On the other hand, Kierkegaard uses the concept of the middle term to indicate a space between human lovers and partners that is a dwelling place for God. The middle term refers, in Kierkegaard’s universe, to both the neighbor and to God. This is an intentional parallelism, as the universality of God’s love equally given to all of us and the universality of neighbor love, which implies treating each other with equal regard, are analogous. This logic allows him to construct what I read to be a bi-layered image of human love and relating, with the universal thread of equality as part of all properly and justly lived preferential loves and partnerships. The equivalence between the middle term understood as neighbor love and the middle term understood as God shows not only the equality envisioned in all human relating but also the sanctifying function of such a transcendental element within all preferential loves. God’s presence within human preferential loves is the source of their transformation, so as to become permeated by the equality that neighbor love entails.
Kierkegaard is realistic about our need for preferential, special relations and unions, as well as about the fulfillment and pleasure that such relationships bring. He, therefore, is being unfairly accused of opposing eros, passionate attachment, or friendships in human life. He does not ask for a disintegration of passionate loves and preferential alliances between people, but rather introduces the element of neighbor love and divine presence as a foundation of equality and justice within every particular love and relational preference.344 Kierkegaard accepts the fact that human attraction and desires create eros-based relationships which are distinct from relating to all people with universal neighbor love. His vision is not to eliminate preferential close bonds from the human spectrum of relating, but to place them in the right rapport with the non-preferential equality-inducing kind of love which ought to permeate any preferential love. His concern is to create a framework which allows for relational equality both in preferential and non-preferential loves, as well as responsibility toward all human neighbors, not just the preferred ones. “Christianity does not want to make changes in externals; neither does it want to abolish drives or inclination—it only wants to make infinity’s change in the inner being.”345
The change Kierkegaard is talking about involves becoming permeated by the eternal, above and beyond temporality and history. This is equivalent with a transformation whereby universal neighbor love as well as divine presence become an integral part of preferential loves as an equalizer between the partners. Kierkegaard’s vision of social equality is a description of relationships that have become infused with the transcendent. In theological terms this means that God’s love and the human analogue of neighbor love saturates as well as sanctifies preferential loves. “In loving the beloved we are first to love the neighbor . . . your [partner] must first and foremost be to you the neighbor; that she is your [partner] is then a more precise specification of your particular relationship to each other. But what is the eternal foundation must also be the foundation of every expression of the particular.”346 Kierkegaard’s claims regarding the “eternal” as a foundation for every particular, preferential relationship are coherent with his logic of equivalence between God and neighbor love as the middle term that sanctifies human relationships. Read in political terms, this sanctification is a transformation that is conducive to equality across the whole spectrum of human relationality, therefore throughout the societal spectrum.
Thus preferential relationships of partnership, alliance, or love of any kind are in Kierkegaardian terms a “further . . . expression” of the non-preferential relationality that characterizes universal neighbor love. Neighbor love ought to percolate through them, but neighbor love alone is an insufficient description of how we human beings operate relationally, as well as an insufficient condition for our well-being. We thrive when we experience the close bonds of preferential loves, in the variegated forms of erotic loves, kinship relations, friendships, mentorships, and many more. Since it includes the whole of humanity, the neighbor circle is too large and too diffuse to see anyone’s face closely. As Levinas points out, seeing the other’s face both physically and metaphorically is the true mark of human relating.347
Special loves and preferential partnerships are also insufficient for achieving relational (and implicitly social) justice and equality. Neighbor love ought to become the bedrock out of which they grow in order to ensure equality between the partners, and by extension, equality across all social relations. Since neighbor love is an analogue in Kierkegaard’s work to the presence of God as a middle term within human relationships, Kierkegaard in effect imagines human loves to be re-circuited through God. This provides an ultimate context in which human relationships unfold alongside the more proximate context348 which typically characterizes the very nature of preferential loves and partnerships. Yet the ultimate context of divine presence within preferential loves allows for the possibility of the sanctifying transformation of such loves making them conducive to social equality. The relation between neighbor love and preferential loves is therefore one of expansion and continuity. Neighbor love is a ground which holds firm the root of preferential loves, which are extensions that grow from this fertile soil. Kierkegaard’s worry is that when preferential loves are not rooted in neighbor love, they would single out just one or very few people from the whole human community as recipients of attraction and devotion,349 risking pervasive inequality since all others are rejected. Kierkegaard’s solution is to acknowledge that particular attachments are part and parcel of human existence in an indelible way, yet neighbor love as a mode of loving needs to permeate them in order for equality to permeate the human society.
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Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism, and the Self. Boston: Beacon, 1986.
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Kierkegaard, Søren. Works of Love. Translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995.
Levinas, Emmanuel. “Ethics as First Philosophy.” In The Levinas Reader, edited by Sean Hand, 76–87. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005.
———. Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969.
Taylor, Charles. “Politics of Recognition.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutman, 25–73. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
329. Kierkegaard’s Works of Love is in its entirety a passionate pedagogy of love.
330. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 73.
331. Ibid., 70.
332. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25.
333. Ibid., 26.
334. Ibid., 81.
335. Cf. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1825–39 (8.1.1154b1–8.14.1164a1).
336. Matt 22:1–14, or the parallel parable of the banquet (without the wedding implication, at least explicitly) in Luke 14:12–24.
337. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 83.
338. Ibid., 89.
339. Relationality-centered feminist theological anthropologies have been put forth by, among others, Catherine Keller, Elizabeth Johnson, and Mary Grey; however, there are variegated other contexts for such thought, from the African evele conceptuality of the human being, which entails an inherent communion with others, to the claims of communion in the Eastern Orthodox tradition as evinced by John Zizioulas.
340. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 267.
341. Ibid., 68.
342. Keller, From a Broken Web, 158.
343. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 142.
344. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 92.
345. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 139.
346. Ibid., 141.
347. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194–219; see also Levinas, “Ethics as First Philosophy.”
348. Kelsey, Eccentric Existence, develops extensively the distinction between the proximate context of human existence as our embodied, historical life unfolds in particular environments, communities, and relationships and the ultimate context which grounds the former one and which is defined by our relation to God.
349. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 49.