Chapter 8: Loving the Ones We See
8
Loving the Ones We See
Kierkegaard’s Neighbor-Love and the Politics of Pluralism
So then, let this work of love be done—and would that it might be well understood.
—Søren Kierkegaard350
The “work of love” which Søren Kierkegaard describes here is of course his own 1847 signed publication, Works of Love: Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses. Penned in his journals but not included in the published edition of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s words above are excerpted from a short reflection he entitled “A Self-Defense.”351 Until recently, Works of Love was perhaps not so “well understood,” in part because of a lack of scholarly attention to it in favor of Kierkegaard’s philosophical pseudonymous texts. Though he suggested that “whether the book acquires readers is not our affair,” increased attention to Works of Love in the last decades confirms that the book has indeed acquired a readership, one which has been engaged in an ongoing effort to see that it is indeed well understood. Perhaps the most comprehensive of these studies is Love’s Grateful Striving (2001), M. Jamie Ferreira’s insightful commentary on Works of Love. Other studies include collections of essays on Works of Love in the International Kierkegaard Commentary (1999) and the Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook (1998), and multiple scholars have examined the book in relation to specific themes (such as faith and hope) or to other works in Kierkegaard’s corpus (such as Fear and Trembling and Either/Or, for example).352
As recent commentators on Works of Love have noted, constructive engagement with the book (at least in the latter half of the twentieth century) has had to take into account a strand of negative critique, including Adorno’s well-known criticism of the book. Describing the deliberations as “sermons” which make for “tiresome and unpleasant reading,”353 Adorno’s central criticism is that Kierkegaard’s concept of love is too inwardly focused and has no real concrete object. “Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love remains totally abstract,”354 Adorno maintains, and later argues that “a doctrine of love which calls itself practical cannot be severed from social insight.”355 Yet that is, according to Adorno, just what Kierkegaard does. Danish theologian K. E. Løgstrup leveled similar criticism thirty years later, arguing that Kierkegaard’s conception of love does not require a concrete person and is thus empty of any real ethical content.356
In recent decades, however, scholars have countered these claims and argued for the social and political relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought in general and of Works of Love in particular. As theologian Stephen Backhouse writes, “Even amongst those who would not go as far as proclaiming a proto-socialist Kierkegaard, it is now widely accepted that however much Kierkegaard focuses on the individual, he is certainly not a misanthropic, apolitical individualist.”357 George B. Connell’s recent work, Kierkegaard and the Paradox of Religious Diversity, attests to Kierkegaard’s social relevance in its treatment of a theme clearly germane to the present chapter. “Can Kierkegaard, that great connoisseur of anxiety, offer insight into an anxiety that pervades the contemporary spiritual landscape—anxiety over religious diversity?”358 Connell carefully answers his own question in the affirmative, and as I will argue, an exploration of Works of Love supports this affirmation.
This chapter, then, seeks to contribute to the ongoing effort to situate Works of Love in the context of sociopolitical theological discourse. Specifically, it argues that Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor-love provides a framework for building and maintaining religiously and culturally pluralistic democratic societies. The model of neighbor-love presented in Works of Love, I maintain, is particularly applicable to twenty-first-century democracies on both sides of the Atlantic. While the United States has wrestled with cultural and religious diversity since its beginnings and some Western European nations have become more diverse only in recent decades, all are faced with the question of what it might mean to foster a healthy pluralism in the present age.359 As recent violent episodes such as the tragedy in Norway (2011), Copenhagen (2015), Paris (2015) and San Bernardino (2015) have shown, Europe and the United States have a great deal of work to do to shift from sheer diversity to engaged pluralism.
In this chapter, then, I point to three aspects of Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor-love as they are presented in Works of Love that can offer resources for considering the meaning of pluralism today: Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love is inherently active and action-oriented, involves seeing the neighbor in terms of similarity and equality, and also requires seeing the neighbor in terms of difference and distinctiveness. To probe more fully the meaning of pluralism, I then briefly examine relevant issues in regard to the relation between pluralism and multiculturalism before turning to an application of Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love for contemporary social and political life. I shall begin, however, by examining the meaning of “pluralism” as it is employed in this context.
Pluralism
The term “pluralism” has been utilized lately in a number of disciplines and in relationship to a variety of frameworks, including politics, culture, society, theology, religion, and beyond. As sociologist of religion Grace Davie notes, “Not only is the term ‘pluralism’ used to describe the very different situations found in modern Europe (and indeed beyond), it is also used to evoke the moral and political values associated with these shifting profiles.”360 There is, as she explains, uncertainty about whether pluralism refers to “what is” or “what ought to be.”361 For the purposes of this present chapter, I make a distinction between “diversity,” which refers to the presence of coexisting multiple religions and cultures (“what is”), and “pluralism,” which refers to the best moral and political response to that diversity (“what ought to be”) in the context of democracy. “Diversity, of course, is not pluralism,” explains Diana Eck, scholar of religion and director of the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. “Diversity is simply a fact, but what will we make of that fact, individually and as a culture?”362
Eck suggests four points about pluralism, which inform my analysis of Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love. First, pluralism is “not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity.” It involves not passive acceptance but actively seeking to understand the other and necessitates that “neighbors” interact with one another in honest and authentic ways, even if these encounters are difficult and uncomfortable. Second, pluralism is “not just tolerance, but the active seeking of understanding across lines of difference,” which suggests that traditional liberal ways of conceiving tolerance which actually serve hegemonic power structures, need to be deconstructed. Third, Eck corrects a popular notion that pluralism requires a relinquishment of truth and value claims by emphasizing that pluralism is “not relativism, but the encounter of commitments.” Finally, she underscores the value of active engagement by maintaining that pluralism is based on dialogue.363
Although Eck does not address the distinction at length in her work, I note that just as there is a difference between “diversity” and “pluralism,” as I am discussing it here, pluralism should also be distinguished from the related concept of multiculturalism. As will be addressed later in the chapter, both frameworks are informed by a number of the same public discourses (on tolerance, recognition and identity, for example), and both could be described as ways of responding to the fact of diversity. As with pluralism, the concept of multiculturalism is ambiguous. Similar to Grace Davie’s claim above regarding pluralism, multiculturalism has been interpreted in both a descriptive sense to note the diversity in a given society, and in a normative sense, as “a moral stance that cultural diversity is a desirable feature of a given society.”364
Additionally, the meaning of multiculturalism is context-dependent, so it takes different forms in the United States, Europe, Canada, South America, or elsewhere. Emphasizing that while there is no universal definition, political philosopher Will Kymlicka maintains that we can understand multiculturalism as a reaction to models of the nation-state which have traditionally emphasized homogeneity. As part of a larger human-rights revolution in the wake of World War II, multiculturalism provided an alternative to earlier models of the nation-state in three key ways: by maintaining that the nation belongs equally to all citizens, by replacing assimilation and exclusionary practices with recognition and accommodation, and by acknowledging historic injustice to particular minorities and making amends for those injustices.365
While multiculturalism as a moral stance and as a set of practices can be utilized by individual members of a community (or by dominant groups within a society) apart from official political institutions, it is usually associated with policies and practices institutionalized by the state to recognize and/or accommodate minority cultures. I would argue that while pluralism can (and perhaps should) address or include official state policies as multiculturalism does, it offers a broader framework for considering not simply how state actors, policies, and laws should relate to citizens but also how members of communities should regard one another and act accordingly in a diverse context. While it does not exclude state policies and laws from its concern, for example, the work of the Pluralism Project tends to focus on American religious diversity in public life more generally. Research projects sponsored by the Pluralism Project involve a variety of topics related to pluralism in the public square, including mapping religious diversity in major US cities, documenting interfaith initiatives of civic institutions considered to be “promising practices,” and exploring the practice and promise of dialogue in religious and civic institutions.366
Pluralism, furthermore, as I am conceiving it here, is both a civic and theological concept. In her work Diana Eck distinguishes the two senses, but also maintains “that our increasing engagement with one another in civil society may well provide the context for new and transformative theological thinking.”367 Neighbor-love, as understood by Kierkegaard, provides a theological vision and a civic practice for how we can best respond to diversity in our present age. His vision, as I maintain, provides a model for moving from diversity in a descriptive sense to pluralism in a normative sense. I turn now to elements of Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love which deeply resonate with the framework of pluralism which I have described above.
Neighbor-Love as Inherently Active
Action is crucial for Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor-love [Kjerlighed], which he distinguishes from preferential love for the friend or the beloved [Elskov]. Indeed, the very title of the book, Works of Love [Kjerlighedens Gjerninger] conveys the centrality of acts and action. The Danish gjerninger simply translates to “deeds” or “acts,” and as M. Jamie Ferreira points out, the word here doesn’t intend to suggest works as “merit” in the way that Luther would have conceived of “works righteousness.”368
What Kierkegaard is writing about then, are deeds and acts—the doing of love. In deliberation 3A in the first series of Works of Love, Kierkegaard offers reflections on Romans 13:10: “Love is the fulfillment of the law.” To clarify Paul’s understanding of fulfilling the Jewish Law, Kierkegaard distinguishes the way in which Paul (and Christ) answer the question, “What is love?” from the way in which Socrates responds. Socrates, “that simple wise man of old,”369 had an artful way of questioning, but was focused on knowledge, while Paul and Christ go beyond knowledge to action, Kierkegaard explains. “The essentially Christian, which is not related to knowing but to acting, has the singular characteristic of answering and by means of the answer imprisoning everyone in the task.”370 To further illustrate his point, Kierkegaard discusses the Pharisee’s famous question to Jesus: “Who is my neighbor?” Jesus responds by telling about the story of the Samaritan who became the neighbor through his actions.371 “Christ imprisoned the questioner in the answer that contained the task,” Kierkegaard writes.372 All of Christ’s answers contain the task; they all suggest not just ways of thinking or believing, but of doing. “Christian love is sheer action, and its every work is holy, because it is the fulfilling of the Law.”373
Earlier in the book, again with reference to the merciful Samaritan, Kierkegaard maintains that the question “Who is my neighbor?” can only be answered in regard to our dutiful response to the specific individual in need. In other words, to recognize the neighbor, one must become a neighbor to the neighbor: “The one to whom I have a duty is my neighbor, and when I fulfill my duty I show that I am a neighbor. Christ does not speak about knowing the neighbor but about becoming a neighbor oneself, about showing oneself to be a neighbor just as the Samaritan showed it by his mercy. By this he did not show that the assaulted man was his neighbor but that he was a neighbor of the one assaulted.”374 In her commentary on Works of Love, M. Jamie Ferreira suggests that “in one sense this is perhaps the most concrete moment in the whole of the book” and “should be considered a guiding principle for any interpretation of Works of Love.”375 Kierkegaard’s clear emphasis on the action-oriented nature of neighbor-love here provides an obvious challenge to those critics like Adorno and Løgstrup who argue that his neighbor-love is too abstract, ethereal and divorced from material concerns.
Neighbor-Love, Similarity, and Equality
As theologian Arne Grøn has discussed, Kierkegaard’s claim that love is action should be complicated and complemented by the question of “how” exactly this love should be enacted. As he points out, one can engage in works of love in ways that do not ultimately affirm the other as an equal and loved by God. As is characteristic of Kierkegaard’s thought in general, in Works of Love, “ethically, ‘how’ qualifies ‘what.’”376 Yet how is one able to recognize genuine neighbor-love? And perhaps even more challenging a question: How is one able to recognize the neighbor herself? For Kierkegaard, recognizing neighbor-love and the neighbor, as well as discerning how we should respond to both, relies upon sight. “The critical point is that love itself is a matter of seeing,” explains Grøn. The ethics of deciding how we are to act and the recognition of love as it is discovered in the other “re-situate us in a social world of seeing and being seen, as a field of vision already ethically imbued.”377
This “ethics of vision”378 is a theme throughout Works of Love, but is particularly elucidated in discussions of sight and seeing in the second and fourth deliberations of the first series. The focus of this section of this chapter is on the second set of deliberations (all on variations of “You Shall Love the Neighbor”), which emphasize that seeing the neighbor rightly means seeing her as an equal with a common human identity. In deliberation 2A (“You Shall Love”), Kierkegaard explains that the word neighbor [Næste] is derived from “nearest” [Nærmeste] and thus the neighbor is the one who is “nearer to you than anyone else, yet not in the sense of preferential love.”379 Because we usually choose our friends and romantic lovers, in a certain sense our love for them is simply self-love. In a twist, Kierkegaard suggests, however, that “the neighbor comes as close to self-love as possible,” but in such a way that tests the selfishness of self-love.380 Because the commandment is that “you shall love your neighbor as yourself,” it requires what Kierkegaard calls a “redoubling” of one’s self. To love the neighbor, one must see her in the same way that one should see oneself, as a spiritual being loved by God.381
Crucial to recognizing the neighbor as the one who is nearest to us is Kierkegaard’s adamant assertion that “the neighbor is the one who is equal.”382 She or he “is neither the beloved, for whom you have passion’s preference, nor your friend, for whom you have passion’s preference,” he writes. “Nor is your neighbor, if you are a cultured person, the cultured individual with whom you have a similarity of culture—since with your neighbor you have the equality of a human being before God.”383 Equality for Kierkegaard involves not making distinctions among people and not making partial and preferential judgments about them; the commandment is that we shall love the lowly and distinguished neighbor equally.
The question of how to recognize this radical equality with the neighbor returns us to the theme of vision and sight. In the second set of deliberations in the first series, Kierkegaard’s suggestion for seeing the other as the equal neighbor is ironically to close our eyes. “One sees the neighbor only with closed eyes, or by looking away from the dissimilarities,” he writes, for “the sensate eyes always see the dissimilarities and look at the dissimilarities.”384 Worldly differences of rank, culture, or other social distinctions make us blind to our innate and eternal commonality. “In being king, beggar, rich man, poor man, male, female, etc., we are not like each other—therein we are indeed different. But in being neighbor we are all unconditionally like each other. Dissimilarity is temporality’s method of confusing that marks every human being differently, but the neighbor is eternity’s mark—on every human being.”385 By closing our eyes, however, we can suspend this temporal state of distinctions, even to the point of seeing the enemy as an equal. To love the neighbor is to love blindly, so that even the enemy appears as one’s neighbor whom we are commanded to love as ourselves. “Love for the neighbor makes a person blind in the deepest and noblest and most blessed sense of the word, so that he blindly loves every human being as the lover loves the beloved.”386 Enacting this noble blindness means that we will love the one standing before us here and now; in this way, both friend and enemy are equally our neighbor.
Neighbor-Love, Difference, and Distinctiveness
If Kierkegaard’s understanding of the duty to love the neighbor involved only a blindness to distinctions, it would, as critics have noted, suggest a kind of other-worldly and even dangerous denial of human difference. As noted earlier, Adorno criticizes Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love for being too abstract and his understanding of equality as divorced from society. “Instead of any real criticism of inequality in society, he has a fictitious, merely inward doctrine of equality,” Adorno writes.387 But in the fourth deliberation of the first series, “Our Duty to Love the People We See,” Kierkegaard shifts his focus from a more abstract sense of duty to one that is more explicitly connected to what he calls “actuality.” As M. Jamie Ferreira notes, once we arrive at this section of Works of Love, “it looks like a new beginning,”388 as “attention to ethical concreteness begins in earnest precisely in this fourth deliberation.”389
Kierkegaard begins the deliberation by presenting the well-known words from 1 John 4:20: “If anyone says, ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar; for how can he who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, love God, whom he has not seen?” One should, Kierkegaard maintains, start by loving what is unseen—God—but the only way to know that one loves the unseen is through loving the brothers and sisters one actually sees. Here Kierkegaard’s framework indeed reveals itself more fully to be concerned with the actuality of this-worldly life. “One must become sober, gain actuality and truth by finding and remaining in the world of actuality as the task assigned to one,” Kierkegaard writes. “With regard to loving, the most dangerous of all escapes is wanting to love only the unseen or that which one has not seen.”390 Loving the one we see means that we love the one with imperfections—who it turns out, is everyone including oneself. If we only love or see the perfections in a person, we do not actually see them or truly love them.
This suggests an important aspect of Kierkegaard’s ethics of vision. There are right ways of seeing, which validate and respect an individual in their very humanness, but there are also wrong ways of seeing, which are ultimately a form of not seeing. To see the other only in terms of excellences and perfections is to make an error in terms of vision. A person who has a vision of love that seeks after only such perfections will search in vain. Such a person, Kierkegaard says, keeps searching and “has dizzily reeled out—into loving the unseen, a mirage, which one does not see. Does it not amount to the same thing: to see a mirage—and: not to see?”391 If we see the other only as we wish they were, it is as though we are living only through the power of our imagination. Furthermore, in this phenomenon of seeing but not seeing, we are failing to recognize the neighbor for who they are. Arne Grøn has described this as part of a “dialectics of recognition” in Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. “To recognize someone is not just to see, but to affirm what you see. It is to see in the emphatic sense of paying attention to or giving significance to. Recognition is seeing the other human being as an other self: affirming the other to be an other self.”392 And, we might add, it involves affirming them as an other with imperfections and concrete differences.
How are we to arrive at this truthful, honest, and loving way of seeing? Kierkegaard recommends the same mechanism as he did earlier when discussing the necessity of seeing the neighbor as one’s equal: we must close our eyes. Love is the “closed eye of forbearance and leniency that does not see defects and imperfections,” he writes.393 “This is the duty, to find actuality in this way with closed eyes.”394 M. Jamie Ferreira suggests that the blindness that Kierkegaard describes here differs from the earlier version, however. While closing one’s eyes in order to see the other as equal does allow for concrete seeing, it doesn’t necessarily get us to that vision. But in this deliberation, Kierkegaard situates the call to a kind of blindness in the context of actuality, which can foster concrete sight. “Our eyes are closed to what is not actual in order to see things just as they are,” Ferreira explains. “The closed eye of forbearance means that love is an honest, inclusive seeing, which is a concrete seeing.”395
This kind of concrete seeing allows us not only to see the commonality between ourselves and our neighbors, but also the very real differences between those neighbors and ourselves. Kierkegaard’s insistence that neighbor-love involves an appreciation for difference and diversity is reflected later in the book, particularly in the fourth deliberation of the second series, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own.” In this section, Kierkegaard extols the value of each individual’s distinctiveness. “The truly loving one does not love his own distinctiveness but, in contrast, loves every human being according to his distinctiveness; but ‘his distinctiveness’ is what for him is his own; that is, the loving one does not seek his own; quite the opposite, he loves what is the other’s own.”396 In contrast, Kierkegaard describes the “domineering person” as one who refuses to recognize the other’s distinctiveness, as well as the “small-minded person,” who refuses to recognize her own distinctiveness. Both are missing—or rejecting—the greatest beneficence, which is “in love to help someone toward that, to become himself, free, independent, his own master, to help him stand alone.”397 The greatest gift that we can give is to help a neighbor embrace their own unique individuality. In this way, then, Kierkegaard here is calling human beings to both appreciate and foster genuine difference and diversity.
Pluralism, Multiculturalism, and the Politics of Recognition
Thus far, I have highlighted three aspects of Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love as presented in Works of Love: it is inherently active, involves seeing similarity and equality, and involves seeing distinctiveness and difference. Before bringing Kierkegaard’s concept into contemporary social-political questions of how communities can better approach the challenge of diversity, I want to return to the concept of multiculturalism as it bears on issues related to pluralism.
I first turn to a theme within contemporary discourse about pluralism and multiculturalism—the “politics of recognition”—which is particularly relevant here. The question of what it means to “recognize” the other is deeply related to two characteristics of neighbor-love described in this chapter—that it simultaneously requires us to acknowledge similarity and equality on the one hand, and distinctiveness and difference on the other. To consider the relation between the politics of recognition and multiculturalism and pluralism, we can look to Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s influential essay on the topic. While recognition has always been a human need, Taylor explains that the modern articulation of the need for recognition came about with a historical shift from regarding identity in terms of honor (as defined by social hierarchies) to dignity (in terms of egalitarian human worth). The contemporary demand for recognition by individuals and subaltern groups is informed by the thesis that “our identity is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people 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.”398
The question of how to meaningfully recognize the other, however, is complicated by the related and sometimes-conflicting dynamics of what Taylor calls a “politics of equal dignity” and a “politics of difference.” Recognition requires that we acknowledge some universal and “difference-blind” principles which are foundational for liberal democracies, chief among them that all humans deserve dignity and are equally worthy of respect. Yet recognition also necessitates that differences between individuals and groups be respected and that the unique identities of each be acknowledged. The former, in turn, means that nondiscrimination will entail granting particular rights and protections to minorities that have traditionally been oppressed or excluded. “We give due acknowledgment only to what is universally present—everyone has an identity—through recognizing what is peculiar to each,” Taylor writes. “The universal demand powers an acknowledgment of specificity.”399
As noted, however, these two modes of politics can conflict in their call simultaneously to recognize what is the same among people and what is different. As Taylor points out, this conflict is made more complicated by the growing awareness that the ostensible “difference-blindness” of liberal Western democracies is actually a mode of seeing shaped by a culture without regard to the ways that power and particular values have formed these lenses. Thus, non-discrimination itself can be biased. Others have suggested that multiculturalist policies which seek to recognize group identities and rights actually have the effect of obscuring internal diversity within a given group. In a recent book entitled Multiculturalism and Its Discontents, for example, Kenan Malik argues that “multicultural policies . . . have not responded to the needs of communities but, to a large degree, have helped create those communities by imposing identities on people and by ignoring internal conflicts arising out of class, gender and intra-religious differences.”400
As Malik and others describe, however, in the 1970s to the mid-1990s, multiculturalism held much promise as states began to end practices of cultural and religious assimilation. Charles Taylor describes the eight most common policies associated with multiculturalism, including the constitutional, legislative or parliamentary affirmation of multiculturalism; the adoption of multiculturalism in school curricula; exemptions from dress code; allowing of dual citizenship; the funding of ethnic group organizations to support cultural activities; the funding of bilingual or mother-tongue language instruction; and affirmative action for immigrant groups.401 Since the mid-1990s (especially in Western Europe), however, there has been a general retreat from multiculturalism and the kinds of policies that Taylor describes. In 2010, German Chancellor Angela Merkel remarked, “Of course the tendency had been to say, ‘Let’s adopt the multicultural concept and live happily side by side, and be happy to be living with each other.’ But this concept has failed, and failed utterly.”402 At the conclusion of 2015, despite the fact that Germany accepted over one million refugees in that year, Merkel made similar comments, maintaining that “multiculturalism leads to parallel societies and therefore remains a ‘life lie.’”403 In 2011, then-British Prime Minister David Cameron declared that multiculturalism had failed, remarking that “under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we have encouraged different cultures to live separate lives, apart from each other and the mainstream,” leading to a weakening of collective identity and the growth of radicalization among Muslims.404
Issues related to these sets of politics have arisen in recent years as critiques of multiculturalism have grown louder, particularly in Europe. One strand of this critique claims that the multicultural ideology of the politics of difference has led to the erosion of national identities. Over the last several decades, anti-immigrant rhetoric has increased in a number of Western European countries as Muslim populations have risen. Far-right parties in countries such as France (National Front), Denmark (Danish People’s Party), and the Netherlands (Freedom Party), for example, have called for restrictions on immigration and have cultivated fears of an immanent “Eurabia.” These fears have been exacerbated by the terrorist attacks of the last decade, many of which were connected to fundamentalists claiming to speak for Islam.405
There is, of course, a long list of other recent issues and events which reflect the fears and tensions of societies that wish to reassert national identity, including (but not limited to) the headscarf debates in France in the 1990s–2000s, the banning of minarets in Switzerland in 2009, the Danish cartoon crisis in 2005–2006, and the 2016 Brexit vote, which was made possible by the anti-immigrant Independence party in the UK. The vote came in the wake of the refugee crisis, which peaked in 2015 and continues to ignite fierce debate on restricting immigration. Perhaps the most extreme example is the 2011 tragedy in Norway perpetrated by ethnic Norwegian Anders Breivik, whose rationale for murdering dozens of young Norwegian Labor Party leaders was that the party had supported the Islamization of Europe which would lead to the collapse of Christendom. “Multiculturalism . . . is the root cause of the ongoing Islamisation of Europe which has resulted in the ongoing Islamic colonization of Europe through demographic warfare,” Breivik wrote in his 1,500-page manifesto entitled 2083: A European Declaration of Independence.406
The context in the United States is much different for a number of reasons, including its internal indigenous Native American populations, a long tradition of immigration, and the absence of a historical link between church and state. Yet anti-immigrant and Islamophobic attitudes have recently ignited in the United States, particularly over fears that one of the perpetrators of the November 2015 terrorist attack in Paris may have been a Syrian refugee. Shortly after the attack, two dozen American governors expressed their fear that future refugees might threaten national security and announced plans to curtail or refuse future Syrian refugees.407 Donald J. Trump’s initial calls for a “total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States” (December 2015) and for a wall to be built along the US-Mexican border to prevent illegal immigration (October 2015) resembled the anti-multiculturalist attitudes of populist parties in Europe.408
Yet other critics of multiculturalism have issued concern not out of far-right nationalist or Islamophobic ideologies, but rather from the political left. Some feminists, for example, have criticized multiculturalist practices on the grounds that political support for the rights of minority cultures often means allowing or even promoting practices which oppress women. In the late 1990s, political scientist Susan Moller Okin raised the question of whether multiculturalism was “bad for women.”409 She answered in a resounding affirmative, noting examples of multiculturalist policies that she argued had harmed women, such as French legislation in the 1980s which permitted polygamy, as well as cultural practices of clitoridectomy and child marriages. Calling into question the defense of multiculturalism by theorists such as Will Kymlicka, Okin maintains that the liberal promotion of group rights can serve to discriminate and oppress women.410
Kierkegaard’s Neighbor-Love and the Politics of Pluralism
Some of the challenges (or “discontents”) of multiculturalism described above are encountered in attempts to cultivate pluralism in contemporary Western societies. The dynamics of a politics of recognition which Charles Taylor describes, for example, complicate the process of dialogue, a key aspect of pluralism. Engaging in authentic and constructive dialogue with the other, after all, necessitates the difficulty of simultaneously recognizing the equal dignity of the other and the unbridgeable differences between people. But because pluralism as it is understood here is a broader civic, political, and theological concept than multiculturalism, both its promises and challenges are different. In this final section, I raise two related questions: First, how can Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love, which reflects the three characteristics above, serve to foster pluralism in contemporary Western democracies? Second, does his concept of neighbor-love apply to individuals only, or might it have implications for official policies and practices of the democratic state itself?411
In addressing the first question, we can turn to one of Kierkegaard’s key paradoxes present not just in Works of Love, but throughout his corpus: that there is a persistent dialectical relationship between the particular and the universal. The first element—the individual and/or the particular—is undeniably central to Kierkegaard’s thought. He consistently addresses his works to Den Enkelte, that single existing individual whom he describes in his Upbuilding Discourses as the one “I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that single individual.”412 While reflecting on the absolute duty to God, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Johannes de Silentio famously says that “the paradox of faith, then, is this: that the single individual is higher than the universal, that the single individual . . . determines his relation to the universal by his relation to the absolute.”413 A human being on its way to becoming a self, Anti-Climacus explains in the first exasperating page of The Sickness Unto Death, “is a relation that relates itself to itself.”414 Not only does Kierkegaard—also through Anti-Climacus—stress the particularity of the individual, but he also insists in Practice in Christianity that it is the particularity of Jesus Christ which makes him the Paradox of faith: Christ, who issues his invitation to all, “is and wants to be the specific historical person he was eighteen hundred years ago.”415 The historical specificity of Christ’s individual life is key, for the fact that “God has lived here on earth as an individual human being is infinitely extraordinary.”416
At the same time, however, Kierkegaard’s paradoxical framework suggests that the universal is also necessary for the individual subject. While the Knight of Faith is called to teleologically suspend the “universal” ethical sphere, Kierkegaard’s pseudonym Judge William asserts that the three spheres—the esthetic, ethical and religious—are “the three great allies.”417 The healthy self, Anti-Climacus maintains, must always extend beyond its relation to itself to that universal “power that established it.”418 Jesus, furthermore, was an existing and particular human being, but the power of his love is universal, for he will “draw all” to himself.419 In his insightful discussion of these themes as they relate to the issue of religious diversity, George Connell notes that Kierkegaard “rejects any simple choice in favor of either the universal or the particular dimension of the human condition.”420 This both/and quality of Kierkegaard, he argues throughout his book, speaks to the challenge of contemporary religious diversity, which is “at its core, a matter of balancing the demands of our particular identities, especially our particular religious identities, with the demands of our shared humanity, especially our common need to find ways to coexist harmoniously and appreciatively with people different from us.”421
The concept of neighbor-love present in Works of Love brings together the universal and particular in Kierkegaard’s thought in a way that offers insight for thinking about the nature of pluralism. In its insistence upon seeing the similarities and equality between oneself and others, Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love stresses recognizing the universal worth and dignity of all people. Kierkegaard’s ethics of vision demands that we see the neighbor with the lens of equality, and thus to the extent that they are seen through the eyes of love, our enemy is our equal. With closed eyes, Kierkegaard calls us to see the neighbor—who is “every human being, unconditionally every human being”422—as one who shares in our common humanity and is worthy of love.
In a society which strives toward pluralism, this ethics of vision requires the majority to recognize minorities as their human equals even in the context of social and economic inequality, and despite differing cultures or religions. As political scientist Thomas Banchoff writes in his introduction to his excellent volume Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism, “There are majority religious traditions and majority political cultures—different on both sides of the Atlantic—within which diversity is articulated. Pluralism is about the responses of minorities to majorities and vice versa.”423 Kierkegaard would say that the uneven playing field that is human society creates false divisions and does not reflect our unconditional and eternal equality. “Love for the neighbor has the perfections of eternity,” Kierkegaard writes, and “this perhaps is why at times it seems to fit in so little with the relationships of earthly life and with the temporal dissimilarities of the worldly.”424 Despite these temporal distinctions, the Kierkegaardian society is one in which neighbors see one another’s commonality and are called to exercise tolerance and respect. This society would have little patience for the kind of anti-immigrant and Islamophobic attitudes expressed by far-right parties in Europe and the United States today. Members of society—both leaders and “lay” people—would strive to look away from the differences that divide people, such as race, ethnicity, religion, or gender.
Yet Kierkegaard’s ethics of vision also demands that, paradoxically, we must see the distinctiveness and the particularity of the neighbor even as we see her as an equal. As Arne Grøn, M. Jamie Ferreira, and others have noted, there are times when we see the neighbor but in such a way that we are not really seeing them. We may fail to see them as equals, as was the case above, but we can also fail to see them if we only recognize the ways in which they are similar to us. Honest and concrete seeing must be anchored in actuality rather than imagination, which can allow us to see the real and irreducible differences between one another. This necessary aspect of neighbor-love is reminiscent of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics of responsibility and helps us recall the similarities (as well as differences) between Kierkegaard and Levinas.425 For Levinas, seeing the other means recognizing her alterity—seeing her difference—which he explains in terms of the face of the other. “The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed,” Levinas writes in Totality and Infinity. “The Other remains infinitely transcendent, infinitely foreign.”426 This is, of course, not the language that Kierkegaard uses in Works of Love, but his insistence on honoring distinctiveness and individuality resonates with Levinas’s call to recognize the alterity of the other.
As noted earlier, Kierkegaard describes the “greatest beneficence” as lovingly helping someone to “become himself, free, independent, his own master.”427 To do so requires not just seeing the distinctiveness of the neighbor but actually helping to foster it. Here I highlight two commentators who offer insight into the political function of Kierkegaard’s insistence on singularity and individuality. Following Derrida rather than Levinas, philosopher Mark Dooley has argued that Kierkegaard offers an ethics of responsibility that relies on a “politics of exodus” or “politics of the émigré” who “places the needs of the singular over those of the universal, of one who takes up the cause of the outcast and the marginalized, the victims of injustice, the lepers and the lame, as a means of destabilizing the establishment.”428 Dooley argues that a politics of exodus helps to counter totalizing politics of the state that can tend toward exclusion, and is necessary for the emergence of authentic community.
Theologian Stephen Backhouse, in Kierkegaard’s Critique of Christian Nationalism, follows Dooley’s project of gleaning the social and political significance of Kierkegaard. Backhouse, however, specifically focuses on Kierkegaard’s challenge to nationalism and elements of patriotism, arguing that Kierkegaard’s political relevance is necessarily tied to his Christian identity. Reading Works of Love through a social-political lens, Backhouse maintains that “the neighbour provides a superior way to identifying persons than those suggested by national models driven by shared preferences.”429 Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor provides an alternative to the problematic categories of “compatriot” or “conational,” which unite citizens only in their devotion to the nation. Nationalism relies on preferential love [Elskov], which seeks to exclude diversity in favor of shared culture and custom. “By contrast, neighbour love thrives in situations of difference and it is able to include many people under its wing,” Backhouse maintains.430 “The Christian does not have an ethical duty only towards people whose national narratives dovetail with their own—the duty is to love the neighbor simply because he is the neighbor.”431
This requirement to love the neighbor not because she shares my nationality or my love for my nation, but simply because she is my neighbor, the one nearest to me, is part of cultivating a pluralistic society. Pluralism, as we have seen, challenges exclusivist positions and institutions which seek to define the identity of a community in narrow and prejudicial ways. But it also provides an alternative to inclusivist frameworks which seek to assimilate diversity into a melting pot in which the real differences between individuals are obscured or made invisible. As articulated in Two Ages and his public attack on Christendom in his late writings, Kierkegaard’s critique of mass entities including the nation and the public (including the press) is relevant here. Kierkegaard detested the way in which he believed the Danish nation had become equated with Christianity as well as the way that the “public” had served to curtail the existential religious commitment of individuals. Both of these entities were “imaginary magnitudes” which worked to homogenize individual particularities.432 As he writes in The Moment, “The number decides whether an opinion has physical power, and this is what they care about all the way through: the single individual in the nation—well, there is no individual, every individual is the public.”433
In the context of twenty-first-century life, a pluralistic society would support the development of individual identities, which would include recognizing and actively seeking to understand the specific religious and cultural elements of those identities. Two of Diana Eck’s characteristics of pluralism can be noted in particular here, including the requirements to go beyond tolerance to seek understanding across differences, and to foster the encounter of diverse commitments. In his effort to preserve the distinctiveness of every individual neighbor, Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love offers a framework for the possibility of fulfilling these requirements as societies work toward creating authentic pluralism. Rather than simply tolerating those who are different from us, this stance requires that we recognize their distinctiveness and work to understand them in a way that honors both their common humanity and their alterity.434 Since both pluralism and Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love are to be actively practiced rather than simply contemplated in theory, however, we must consider to whom these requirements apply and how. Here I raise the final question of this chapter: Does Kierkegaard’s concept of neighbor-love apply to individuals only, or might it have implications for official policies and practices of the democratic state itself?
As discussed earlier, Kierkegaard was wary of groups such as the state and public, which he believed had leveled out differences among individuals. As noted, critics of approaching Kierkegaard from a political perspective point out that while he did criticize the Danish government and state church, Kierkegaard was more concerned with religion than politics (especially in Works of Love, the subject of this discussion). This sentiment was ostensibly evident in the last year of his life, as he wrote in a journal that “political service and religious service relate to each other altogether inversely.”435 Should we understand, then, that Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love is most appropriate for fostering pluralism through individual relationships, attitudes and actions, rather than through institutions, policies or laws of the state?
In one sense, it seems that we should answer in the affirmative. Arguably, the kind of ethics of vision that allows us to recognize the neighbor as the nearest one to us, the one who is similar and equal to us yet simultaneously distinct, is an ethics suited for individual members of a community. From this perspective, enacting pluralistic neighbor-love would mean fostering interpersonal relationships with the “ones we see” who are right in front of us—even if we deeply disagree with them or appear to have nothing in common with them. Practically, therefore, it might mean that I strive every day not to see my neighbor only as a Muslim, a Christian, or a Hindu, but instead as a fellow human being who shares in similar existential struggles. Perhaps it could suggest that I actively participate in community events which bring my neighbors together to discuss common social concerns.
On this individual level, Kierkegaard’s paradoxical embrace of both the universal and the particular, similarity and difference, would also call me to recognize my neighbor exactly how she is. Even if I, as a Muslim, disagree with my Christian neighbor, for example, neighbor-love would demand that I encourage her to become her full potential as both a human being and as a Christian. As we have seen, after all, for Kierkegaard the loving person “loves every human being according to his distinctiveness,”436 and the greatest beneficence is to help someone “become himself.”437 Neighbor-love might call me to participate not only in public events that highlight common concerns, but also in those that provide a space for dialogue about differences. When enacted, Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love would reflect all four of Diana Eck’s characteristics of pluralism: that it is active; it is not just tolerance but is rather active seeking of understanding; it is not relativism but rather an encounter of commitments; and it is based upon dialogue.
As existential practices, these characteristics may seem to be more appropriate for actions, attitudes and frameworks of individuals in the public square and civil society than for nation-states. Yet it is possible that the call for a Kierkegaardian ethics of vision could at least inform official political bodies and policies. Kierkegaard’s dual emphasis on recognizing similarity and equality (the universal) and difference and distinction (the particular) could provide a needed corrective to both harmful assimilationist policies and the kind of multiculturalist programs that actually end up segregating minorities in an attempt to honor them. Perhaps then a French Muslim could more easily be recognized as having both identities, but in a way that is also particular to him as an existing individual. An American Buddhist with ties to China could equally be respected in her actuality as part of all of those communities. At its best, the politics of pluralism does not just tolerate, but rather encourages, these commitments. George Connell poses a version of these statements in the form of a question which he (and I) answer in the affirmative:
Does Kierkegaard’s dialectical sense of counterpoised particularity and university mean that, for Kierkegaard, fidelity to a specific faith should lead toward, not away from, mutual recognition of shared humanity, that delving more profoundly into the deepest sources of that faith should foster peaceful and appreciative coexistence rather than fomenting discord, that faithfulness invites us to attend with equal seriousness to the common convictions that unite as well as to the contrasting beliefs that distinguish one faith from another?438
Appreciating the concepts that Connell mentions—the paradox of particular and universal, mutual recognition of shared humanity and a commitment to one’s own distinct faith—are crucial aspects of Kierkegaard’s neighbor-love and are also at the heart of pluralism. They are also, I would say to Kierkegaard’s critics, as political as they are existential and theological. As recent events in Europe and the United States attest, however, these stances and practices are not easy to cultivate in a diverse society. Slavoj Žižek has aptly pointed out that the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself” should be jarring. Drawing from Freud and Lacan, Žižek has written about the Law as a violent imposition that calls for us to encounter—and love—the neighbor who is a “traumatic Thing” completely other to us. From this perspective, “the neighbor (Nebenmensch) as the Thing means that, beneath the neighbor as my semblant, my mirror image, there always lurks the unfathomable abyss of radical Otherness, of a monstrous Thing that cannot be ‘gentrified.’”439
As Kierkegaard and Levinas would agree—though for different reasons perhaps—the Otherness of the neighbor should not (and perhaps cannot) be gentrified or annulled, which is clear from Kierkegaard’s insistence on the preservation of individual distinctiveness. Yet neither should we forget that the neighbor is our equal and shares in our very humanity. Pluralism would call us to love these ones we see, to actively encounter and dialogue with these others who are all neighbors, the ones nearest to us. This is no small challenge, but it is a task and a goal that we must continue to strive for if we are to foster a working just peace in the twenty-first century and beyond. To use Kierkegaard’s language, we can think of pluralism as a possibility of the good for which we must continually hope, for “lovingly to hope all things signifies the relation of the loving one to other people, so in relation to them, hoping for them, he continually holds possibility open with infinite partiality for the possibility of the good.”440
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350. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 461.
351. Ibid., 455–61.
352. See, e.g., Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love (2004); Furtak, Wisdom in Love (2005); Hall, Kierkegaard and the Treachery of Love (2002); and Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love (2009).
353. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” 414.
354. Ibid., 418.
355. Ibid., 421.
356. See Søltoft, “Presence of the Absent Neighbor,” 113–15, for a helpful summary of Løgstrup’s criticism.
357. Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 169–70.
358. Connell, Kierkegaard, 1.
359. For helpful reflections on the historical context of pluralism in Europe and the United States, see Banchoff, Democracy.
360. Davie, “Managing Pluralism,” 613.
361. Ibid.
362. Eck, Encountering God, 43.
363. Eck, “What Is Pluralism?” See also Eck, Encountering God, 191–98, for an earlier version of these descriptions.
364. Triandafyllidou et al., “Diversity, Integration, Secularism and Multiculturalism,” 4.
365. Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys, 61–65, and Kymlicka, “Multiculturalism,” 5.
366. For the Pluralism Project’s mission and research on “Promising Practices,” see http://pluralism.org/about.
367. Eck, Encountering God, xi.
368. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 11.
369. Ibid., 96.
370. Ibid.
371. Luke 10:25–37.
372. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 97.
373. Ibid., 99.
374. Ibid., 22.
375. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 70.
376. Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” 66.
377. Ibid.
378. Both Arne Grøn and M. Jamie Ferreira describe Kierkegaard’s ethics in this way.
379. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 21.
380. Ibid., 21.
381. For a discussion of the meaning of redoubling, see Andic, “Love’s Redoubling and the Eternal Like for Like,” 16–17.
382. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 60.
383. Ibid.
384. Ibid., 68.
385. Ibid., 89.
386. Ibid., 69.
387. Adorno, “On Kierkegaard’s Doctrine of Love,” 421.
388. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 99.
389. Ibid., 100.
390. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 161.
391. Ibid., 162.
392. Grøn, “Dialectic of Recognition,” 148.
393. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 162.
394. Ibid., 163.
395. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, 110.
396. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 269.
397. Ibid., 274.
398. Taylor, “Politics of Recognition,” 25.
399. Ibid., 39.
400. Malik, Multiculturalism, 60.
401. Taylor, “Multiculturalism,” 7.
402. Noack, “Multiculturalism.”
403. Ibid.
404. Cameron, speech on radicalisation.
405. See, e.g., Augstein, “After European Strikes.”
406. See Funaro, “Norway Shooting.”
407. See Troyan, “After Attacks in Paris.”
408. See Imbert, “Donald Trump,” and Diamond, “Donald Trump.”
409. Okin first published her reflections in the Boston Review in 1997 under the title “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?” and in 1999, the piece was republished in a collection of essays under the same title.
410. Okin, “Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women?,” 20–22.
411. I owe thanks to this volume’s coeditor, Silas Morgan, for raising this important question.
412. Kierkegaard, Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses, 5.
413. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, 70.
414. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 13.
415. Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 23.
416. Ibid., 31. See Connell, Kierkegaard, 5, for commentary on this passage.
417. Kierkegaard, Either/Or, 2:147.
418. Kierkegaard, Sickness Unto Death, 14.
419. John 12:32: “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all to myself.” See Kierkegaard’s reflections on the verse in Kierkegaard, Practice in Christianity, 151–262.
420. Connell, Kierkegaard, 11.
421. Ibid., 8.
422. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 66.
423. Banchoff, Democracy, 6.
424. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 69.
425. For helpful discussions of the relationship between Levinas and Kierkegaard, see Westphal, Levinas and Kierkegaard in Dialogue, and Simmons and Wood, Kierkegaard and Levinas.
426. Levinas, Totality and Infinity, 194.
427. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 274.
428. Dooley, Politics of Exodus, xxi.
429. Backhouse, Kierkegaard’s Critique, 197.
430. Ibid., 210.
431. Ibid., 211.
432. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 37.
433. Ibid., 209.
434. For an insightful critique of tolerance as a liberal democratic virtue, see Brown, Regulating Aversion.
435. Kierkegaard, The Moment, 537.
436. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 269.
437. Ibid., 274.
438. Connell, Kierkegaard, 11.
439. Žižek, “Neighbors and Other Monsters,” 143.
440. Kierkegaard, Works of Love, 253.