Idealism Before Kierkegaard
Idealism Before Kierkegaard
The relationship between Søren Kierkegaard and the main figures of German idealism (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) has been historically cast in an extremely one-sided fashion. For example, Fichte, the figure most responsible for charting the idealist trajectory that would come to define the projects of both Schelling and Hegel, and who serves as a critical point of reference in the second half of Kierkegaard’s dissertation, warrants very little mention in the secondary literature on Kierkegaard.[1] Schelling has been largely dismissed as a serious influence on the work of Kierkegaard due to the negative comments Kierkegaard left in his journals after attending Schelling’s inaugural Berlin lectures in 1841–1842.[2] While the previously mentioned figures, Fichte and Schelling, have more or less been brushed aside as figures playing a substantial role in the development of Kierkegaard’s thought, the literature on Hegel and Kierkegaard has grown consistently throughout the second half of the twentieth century. The problem with this literature is that it is largely concerned with perpetuating a reading in which an irrevocable gap exists between the totalizing project of Hegel’s dialectical system and the ethico-religious project of Kierkegaard, which emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual human subject which stands in opposition to the system. Equally problematic has been the tendency of Kierkegaard scholars to take his reading of Hegel far too literally and use this as the hermeneutic guide for their own interpretations of Hegel. The important question lingering in the wake of the literature on the Hegel-Kierkegaard relationship is inevitably one of ‘whose Hegel?’ and ‘which Kierkegaard?’[3]
While for the most part the crucial relationship between German idealism and Søren Kierkegaard has tended to evade the majority of those working under the general rubric of Kierkegaard scholarship, many figures not generally associated with the work of Kierkegaard have made brief, but crucial, comments on the necessity of rethinking this relationship. In his important volume of lectures Between Kant and Hegel, German philosopher Dieter Henrich notes that it is ‘impossible to understand any basic doctrine of Kierkegaard without knowing both Hegel and Fichte’.[4] Paul Ricoeur, in an essay titled ‘Philosophy After Kierkegaard’, comments that ‘at any rate a fresh interpretation of Kierkegaard must certainly entail a reconsideration of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel himself’.[5] While Ricoeur’s article provides a programmatic overview more than it does a step-by-step argument, he makes it clear that any future philosophical engagement with Kierkegaard must necessarily entail his being read within the philosophical context of German idealism and that this reading can equally enrich our understanding of the idealists. More recently, Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab have echoed Henrich and Ricoeur by stating:
There is no doubt that, philosophically, German Idealism constitutes the background and point of departure for Kierkegaard’s thinking. Essential concepts, ideas, and moves in Kierkegaard’s oeuvre are indebted to impulses from Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel and are, in the first instance, to be understood by reference back to classical German philosophy.[6]
In a sense then, my current intention is to consider Henrich’s and Ricoeur’s comments as dual aspects of a method of reconsidering the relationship between the writings of Kierkegaard and the philosophical project of German idealism. With Henrich, I think it is absolutely crucial to note the manner in which a rigorous philosophical understanding of the work of Kierkegaard necessitates that one takes seriously the projects of Fichte and Hegel, as well as of Schelling. This is not for the sake of undermining the uniqueness of Kierkegaard’s own project but rather so that one can see the manner in which Kierkegaard was deeply intertwined with many of the dominant philosophical debates of his age. In the second sense, following Ricoeur, it is crucial to note that this reconsideration of Kierkegaard does not simply imply that we evaluate his project in terms of the established canon of German idealism but, rather, that we equally reconsider the traditional readings of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Thus, the aim of the present chapter should be seen as an attempt to briefly chart out this sort of reading to set up the rest of the argument of the book.[7]
A final and unexpected voice in the rallying cry to reconsider the philosophical relevance of Søren Kierkegaard through a consideration of his engagement with German idealism is Slavoj Žižek. Žižek, whose own work can best be summarized as a Lacanian and Marxist re-interpretation of the ontology of German idealism, makes the surprising move of dedicating almost an entire chapter of his ‘magnum opus’, The Parallax View, to his own Hegelian rereading of Kierkegaard. In this chapter Žižek focuses on what he sees to be the ‘unexpected continuity between German Idealism and Kierkegaard’.[8] Žižek goes on in this chapter to reconsider Kierkegaard’s relationship to Hegel in light of Žižek’s own interpretation of Hegel, one in which the flight of the owl of Minerva does not signify the closure of the system but rather reads contingency back into the seemingly necessary events of the past.[9]
While the primary philosophical aim of this book is to develop an ontological and political reading of the works of Søren Kierkegaard, it is my claim that unless one reads Kierkegaard’s works as critically responding to the figures and shared problems of the German idealist tradition, a rigorous ontological and political reading of his work is destined to fall short. In light of this, I will begin with an overview of the figures and issues of German idealism that I identify to be primary in producing a critical response from Kierkegaard. It is worth noting that in the discussion of each of these figures attention will be given specifically to the aspects of their work that Kierkegaard seems to be responding to at various junctures and, in particular, providing an account of their work that is in line with Kierkegaard’s own interpretation. Because much of Kierkegaard’s knowledge of idealism was transmitted to him through his teachers at the University of Copenhagen and the various texts that were made available to him during his studies, his depiction of the issues framing early-nineteenth-century German philosophy is in no way comprehensive, and in many ways his reading lacks the interpretive subtlety that one would desire. Nevertheless, the slower pace of cultural and intellectual dissemination in the nineteenth century meant that during his studies at the University of Copenhagen, both theologians and philosophers were deeply engaged in the issues of early-nineteenth-century German Idealism, and thus both the systematic framework and lingering problems of this tradition would have been deeply influential in Kierkegaard’s own philosophical development.[10]
In this book I will be reading Kierkegaard’s own thought in terms of his critical reaction to the theories of immediacy, reflection and practical philosophy present in the work of the idealists. In this reading Kierkegaard’s authorship can be read as an account of the subject’s journey from a break with immediacy (which brings with it the emergence of freedom and the experience of anxiety), to the opening of reflection (leading to despair), to the necessity of action or practical philosophy (which is the overcoming of reflection’s despair) and finally returning to a higher immediacy in the work of love. Throughout this interpretation, I will be referring to the idealist figures as representing both the problems to which Kierkegaard is critically responding, as well as providing the concepts which serve as the inspiration to Kierkegaard’s creative attempt to move past idealism. The aim of the present chapter will be to provide a point of reference for the conceptual interaction with idealism that will take place in the subsequent chapters.
This chapter will proceed as follows. First, I will begin with a discussion of J. G. Fichte, the earliest representative of the post-Kantian idealist position. Of primary importance in my discussion of Fichte will be presenting his account of the immediacy of the self-positing subject as it is presented in the 1794 version of the Wissenschaftslehre (The Science of Knowledge), focusing particularly on the absolute immediacy of this self-positing subject which Kierkegaard would go on to identify as his critical point of departure in both the second half of The Concept of Irony and in the early sections of The Concept of Anxiety. After outlining both Fichte’s early theory of subjectivity and his notion of the absolute immediacy of the grounds of reflection, I will move on to briefly discussing The Vocation of Man, a text intended for a popular audience, which was written after the atheism controversy caused a considerable amount of damage to Fichte’s academic reputation. Finally, I will consider recent interpretations that argue that when considering the whole of his authorship Fichte is not, in fact, the absolute subjective idealist that Kierkegaard and others accuse him of being.
After discussing Fichte, I will move on to a consideration of Schelling. The starting point of this discussion will be an account of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism (hereafter STI), in which he presents a theory of subjectivity which begins from the same absolute immediacy with which Fichte grounds his early Wissenschaftslehre. I will then outline the break made between the System of Transcendental Idealism, and Schelling’s 1809 essay Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Paying attention to this shift in Schelling’s philosophy will serve our interpretation of Kierkegaard in two respects; first, it will show how Schelling’s break with Fichte follows a similar line of critique as that of Kierkegaard, and second, Schelling’s grounding of both human freedom and the capacity for good and evil in the urgrund of an absolute indifference further paves the way for the account of freedom and evil in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, and subsequently leads into the development of reflection in The Sickness Unto Death.
Finally, this chapter will briefly outline what I will refer to as an open interpretation of the work of G. W. F. Hegel which has been developed in recent scholarship. The point of this discussion will be to show the way in which much of Hegel’s work can be seen as a systematization of the idealist systems that came before (i.e., Fichte and Schelling) more so than as a unique system in its own right. Along with this, I will consider the manner in which this open reading of Hegel has already been used to reconsider the traditional systematic reading of the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard and emphasize systematic elements of Kierkegaard’s thought along with existential elements of Hegel’s.
While one may at this point wonder why a book purporting to present an ontological and political reading of Kierkegaard through considering his work as a response to German idealism has yet to mention socio-political aspects of German idealism itself, this question will not garner much importance in the subsequent chapters. In the ontological and political reading I develop hereafter, the socio-political aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought emerge precisely through the ontological response and critique of idealism, rather than through his direct critique of the practical and political philosophies offered by idealism. Put otherwise, it is not a critique of the political philosophy of German idealism that leads to Kierkegaard’s socio-political importance but rather his critiques of the theorization of both immediacy and reflection among the German idealists that leads to an emphasis on action and a break with reflection that enables me to develop a socio-political interpretation of Kierkegaard. Thus, while the first half of the book will continue to build on largely ontological and speculative questions, this will be for the sake of underpinning the social and political discussions that will make up a majority of the second half of this book.
1.1 J. G. Fichte
It could rightly be argued that Fichte was the first philosopher to develop a systematic post-Kantian Idealism. While some, such as Reinhold, had published attempts at their own Kantian systems, Fichte was the first to move firmly beyond the Kantian paradigm by providing both a systematic account for the primary unity of both theoretical and practical philosophy (the lack of which he thought to be one of the primary shortcomings of Kant), as well as an account of the self-positing absolute subject which did away with the Kantian thing-in-itself. At issue for Fichte was the establishment of a primary principle by which philosophical speculation could properly begin and a principle that would provide the grounds for both the theoretical and practical aspects of critical philosophy. He opens Part I of the 1794 The Science of Knowledge by stating, ‘Our task is to discover the primordial, absolutely unconditioned first principle of all human knowledge. This can be neither proved nor defined, if it is to be an absolutely primary principle.’[11] As we will later see, this desire to discover an absolute and immediate beginning for human knowledge is what Kierkegaard will come to critique so fervently in both The Concept of Irony and in the opening pages of The Concept of Anxiety.
Before providing a summary of the conceptual developments made by Fichte in The Science of Knowledge (hereafter the SK) there are some structural and methodological aspects of this work worth considering. The first of these involves the structure of the 1794 SK, which is set into three parts: ‘Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge’, ‘Foundation of Theoretical Knowledge’, and ‘Foundation of Knowledge of the Practical’. In the first section, Fichte provides an account of the principles that will be at the heart of both the theoretical and practical aspects of his philosophy, the main principle being the self-positing I, or, the self identical I=I. Once he establishes this primary principle, he moves on to outline how this principle operates in the speculative activities of theoretical knowledge. After this, once theoretical knowledge can go no further, Fichte concludes the work with an account of how this primary principle functions in its practical role as the striving activity that is the self.
While much time could be spent charting the argument of this text, the important aspect for the argument of this book is ‘Part I: Fundamental Principles of the Entire Science of Knowledge’, as this is the point in the text where Fichte provides the most straightforward account of the primary principle of his entire system, which is the activity of the self-positing ‘I’. This is crucial for the present argument as the idea of the self-positing ‘I’ as the foundation, or beginning, of knowledge is the aspect of Fichte’s early system that Kierkegaard takes serious issue with.
In the first introduction to SK, Fichte makes clear that his intention is to discover the absolute starting point of philosophy through a radical turn inward, opening this introduction by stating:
Attend to yourself: turn your attention away from everything that surrounds you and towards your inner life; this is the first demand that philosophy makes of its disciple. Our concern is not with anything that lies outside of you, but only with yourself.[12]
It is clear from the outset that Fichte’s idealism searches for its practical and theoretical unity with a turn inward, rather than an appeal to a thing-in-itself that is indefinitely ‘out there’, forever removed from the access of the subject. Fichte goes on to note, ‘This idealism proceeds from a single fundamental principle of reason, which it demonstrates directly in consciousness’.[13] This principle which Fichte’s idealism proceeds from must be one that is immediate to consciousness, rather than being the product of some prior state of reflection. While in this introduction Fichte proclaims this single, fundamental principle upon which reason is founded, he does not elaborate on what this principle actually is until Part I of the main text.
In this section Fichte sets out to explain what this absolutely posited foundation is; in short, it is the I=I, as absolute, immediate, self-identity.[14] This ‘I’ is in itself the absolute activity of self-positing, which rests on no ground outside itself. Thus, it is absolutely posited, and founded only on itself, and is nothing but a pure activity. This self posits itself absolutely.[15] He goes on to complicate this picture of the immediacy of the self-positing subject by showing how this subject is not merely a unified, or consistent, entity. Rather, the ‘I’ contains within itself both ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ (or ‘I’ and ‘−I’). This seems, at first glance, to pose quite a problem, as the goal of Fichte’s project is a single unified principle from which philosophy can begin. He goes on to show how ‘self’ can be equated with reality, or being, and the ‘not-self’ with non-being, or negation. Their relationship thus becomes one of mutual limitation, where ‘self’ represents pure infinity, and ‘not-self’ represents finitude.[16]
Fichte goes on to point out that ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ are immediately unified in the ‘I’ and thus distinguished from each other only through the act of reflection.[17] This seeming contradiction between ‘self’ and ‘not-self’ is thus grounded in the priority of self-positing consciousness, as both are aspects of this unified and self-positing consciousness. Only in reflection are these two aspects of the ‘I’ differentiated: ‘self’ as reality, ‘not-self’ as the negation of this reality. He later goes on to associate ‘self’ with pure activity and the ‘not-self’ with the pure passivity, and thus all activity is a negation of passivity, while passivity is a negation of pure activity.
It is useful to consider this the position of absolute immediacy associated with Fichte, in which there is nothing prior to the ‘I’, but instead the whole of thought rests on this primary activity. We will later see why Kierkegaard found Fichte’s account of immediate self-consciousness as its own grounding inadequate on both theological and philosophical grounds, as well as Fichte’s own repositioning of the ‘I’ in his later system, in which it could be argued that Fichte finally accounts for something ‘other’ than the absolute ‘I’ which both precedes its emergence and continues to exist as a negative remainder within the activity of the ‘I’.
Fichte’s philosophical project went through a number of changes and modifications between the 1794 presentation of SK and the 1800 publication of The Vocation of Man. Many of these modifications were a result of the atheism controversy that led to Fichte’s losing his position at Jena and being forced to essentially rebuild his professional and intellectual reputation. One of the ways he went about this was through publishing a work of public (or popular) philosophy, intended to appeal to a wide audience, rather than being written for the practitioners of the new critical, or speculative, philosophy. While much more could be said about the six-year period between the early presentation of SK and The Vocation of Man, the reason for jumping ahead in this investigation is the fact that we know for certain that Kierkegaard himself read, and was influenced by, this text.[18] Along with the historical relevance of Kierkegaard’s own relation to and reading of this text, it is important insomuch as its tone and intended audience place it in close proximity to Kierkegaard’s own ethico-religious style, in both his pseudonymous works and the Christian discourses he published under his own name. For the sake of the forthcoming discussion of Kierkegaard, it is worth considering how a brief discussion of this text shows a side of Fichte that seems remarkably similar to Kierkegaard’s own insistence on the necessity of action and striving in the religious existence of the individual subject. While there will not be any substantial discussion of this similarity here, this summary of Fichte’s ethico-practical writing will allow us to move on to a more thorough comparative discussion in later chapters of this book in which I will discuss the practical and socio-political elements of Kierkegaard’s own thought.
Fichte structures this work into three books: Book 1 is concerned with ‘Doubt’, Book 2 with ‘Knowledge’, and Book 3 with ‘Faith’.[19] Each book is a practical, or ethical, reading of a theoretical philosophical position. Book 1 presents the practical outcomes of the brand of determinist naturalism Fichte associates with Spinoza. Book 2 is meant to represent the idealism, and potential skepticism, associated with the Kantian position. Book 3, ‘Faith’, ends the work with a practical presentation of Fichte’s own philosophical position. At each juncture, Fichte is attempting to show how a particular philosophical outlook that was prominent during his era leads to a particular lived outcome and practical philosophy. In the preface to this work, Fichte clearly differentiates the intention of this work from his previous attempts at SK when he states:
I still need to remind a few readers that the ‘I’ who speaks in the book is by no means the author. Rather, the author wishes that the reader may come to see himself in this ‘I’; that the reader may not simply relate to what is said here as he would to history, but rather that while reading he will actually converse with himself, deliberate back and forth, deduce conclusions, make decisions like his representative in the book, and through his own work and reflection, purely out of his own resources, develop and build within himself the philosophical disposition that is presented to him in this book merely as a picture.[20]
Fichte is here inviting the reader to see himself in the work and thus realize how his own philosophical tendencies lead to a particular way to life. This seems to link with Fichte’s earlier insistence that ‘what sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is’.[21] In this text he is arguing even more explicitly for the link between philosophical systems and practical outcomes, but rather than the somewhat murky confusion between the primacy of the theoretical or practical which is present in SK, in the Vocation of Man Fichte is clear that ‘practical reason is the root of all reason’.[22] At this point, one can see a strong similarity between Kierkegaard’s method of attempting to elicit a subjective response from those reading his texts through the method of ‘indirect communication’ and the aims of Fichte’s text.
As I previously noted, Book 1 is titled ‘Doubt’ and explores the practical outcomes of Spinoza’s naturalism in the life of the individual. Fichte begins this book by posing the fundamental question of existence, which for him is, ‘what am I myself, and what is my vocation?’[23] According to Fichte, Spinozist naturalism places one in a situation of absolute determinism, in which all things are placed in a line of strict necessity, and by the shifting of even one grain of sand, a change is effected in all parts of the whole.[24] Fichte connects a certain form of despair and a feeling of helplessness to the one existing in a state of doubt, stating that ‘I myself, along with everything I call mine, are a link in this chain of strict necessity[25] and ‘whatever I am and become I am and become necessarily, and it is impossible for me to be anything else’.[26] Fichte is here attempting to show how this lack of freedom and realization of a strict and natural necessity leaves the individual in a state of despair, unable to do anything to change their situation, and painfully aware of their lack of freedom. Before ending this book Fichte states that ‘the system of freedom satisfies my heart; the opposite system kills and annihilates it’.[27] Thus, this system of strict naturalism has the outcome in existence of annihilating the heart of the one who derives their practical philosophy from this theoretical position.
Book 2, ‘Knowledge’, lays out the practical implications of Fichte’s interpretation of the Kantian project. Fichte structures this book as a dialogue between the ‘I’ and spirit, in which spirit attempts to convince the ‘I’ that idealism is a way out of the ‘depression and dread’ caused by the previous system of naturalism.[28] In the subsequent dialogue, spirit, which represents the problematic skepticism Fichte sees as being the necessary outcome of the Kantian thing-in-itself, Fichte takes the ‘I’ through a journey which amounts to a process of reflection that turns out to be infinite. Unlike the system presented in the first book in which the ‘I’ becomes convinced that it is merely a link in a necessary and natural chain of events, the system presented through this dialogue leaves the ‘I’ trapped in the reflecting despair of absolute skepticism, in which it realizes it cannot actually know anything, and knowledge is thus forever outside its grasp. By the end of this book the ‘I’ is left with a new form of despair, but rather than being the despair of absolute determinism, it is the despair of an absolute skepticism, in which one is forever trapped in a circle of reflection.
The final section of the book, ‘Faith’, presents Fichte’s own version of practical philosophy, one that he sees as grounded in the project of SK that I have previously outlined. Early in this section Fichte states, ‘your vocation is not merely to know, but to act according to your knowledge’.[29] He here seems to set out the program for his ethico-religious ideal, mainly that proper human existence is not to be a merely speculative endeavor into the nature of knowledge, or knowledge about reality as it exists in itself, but rather a practical endeavor grounded in an initial theoretical knowledge. While in the opening section of SK we have seen that for Fichte the ‘I’ is essentially its own activity, in this text Fichte argues that not only are we activity but that we exist for activity.[30] Existence for Fichte is thus not something static, or immediate, but rather the process by which one becomes something for and through his or her own activity.[31]
Fichte’s idea of an ethical existence involves the positing of an ethical ideal by the ‘I’, the forming of a project by which one hopes to bring about this ideal, and a subsequent process by which this ideal is worked for. Thus, the self is faced with the objectivity of the world (or the non-self) and the ethical drive for a better world provides the active project of overcoming this objectivity in a subjective project aimed at attaining the ideal.[32] Fichte argues in the book on faith that life itself ‘flows towards this better state of things’,[33] and that the life of faith is able to transform the paralyzing despair exemplified in the previous two books (‘Doubt’ and ‘Knowledge’) into a positive motivation, as that which is capable of driving the oppressed to strive towards the creation of a better world.[34] He goes on to argue that will is the first link in a spiritual chain given through faith, and that subsequently act, or activity, is the first link in the material chain which is the will’s activity on matter. Or the self’s activity towards the not-self. Fichte then uses this concept of will to develop a theory of unity among all individuals, as ‘this will unites me with itself; it unites me with all finite beings like me and is the general mediator between all of us’.[35]
Fichte continues to develop this notion of will into a universal concept which serves as the ‘common spiritual source’ of humanity which ‘builds the world’ in and through individual minds.[36] This form of will is thus the common spiritual source of humanity and the power that allows mediated relations between individuals to emerge. According to Fichte, “all our life is its life.’[37] In what seems like an extremely unexpected move when considered in light of the previously considered SK, Fichte is here developing a sort of speculative theology, in which faith allows access to a transcendental life which works through humanity to achieve its own ends. Rather than being a self, this conception of life seems to be the absolute self that utilizes individual selves for projects that seek to transform the finitude of the absolute non-self. At this point we see a shift in Fichte’s overall project which is acutely observed in the translator’s introduction to this work in which it is argued that ‘no, the task is not to replace one theoretical philosophy with another one, but to get out of philosophy altogether’.[38] In this sense, faith seems to be the necessary middle term Fichte places between theory and action.
While one could read this shift in Fichte’s work as a collapse of philosophy back into theology, Slavoj Žižek has recently offered a reading of this work that accounts for this split as something immanent to the act of philosophy itself. According to Žižek, ‘the discord between our knowledge and our ethico-practical engagement is irreducible, one cannot bring them together in a complete “world view”’.[39] In Žižek’s reading, this irreducible split between theoretical knowledge and practical engagement is a direct consequence of the absolutization of the split between self and non-self that Fichte introduced in SK. To again quote Žižek:
When I (finite subject) ‘posit’ an ideal/unattainable practical goal, the finite reality outside me appears as ‘not-self’, as an obstacle to my goal to be overcome, transformed. In the wake of Kant this is Fichte’s ‘primacy of practical reason’: the way I perceive reality depends on my practical project . . . the obstacle is not an obstacle to me as an entity, but to me as engaged in realizing a project.[40]
Let me briefly provide an example of how this would look in practical terms. Let us say, for example, that one decided to train for a cross-country race. As soon as the self commits to this project (completing the race) it immediately begins to perceive reality in a different light. Whereas before this project was posited, things such as hills, rocks, creeks and other rugged terrain were little more than natural elements in a generally pleasing landscape, they now become the specific obstacles that stand between the individual and his projected goal. To take this one step further, this project alters the way that the self perceives even himself, as his own fatigue, lack of proper form and the effects of previous injuries on present physical performance all become goals to be overcome. Thus, practical reason is primary for Fichte because our practical projects affect the way we not only perceive external reality but also shape the way in which we perceive ourselves. In the previous example, ‘self’ is the individual attempting to complete the cross-country race, while ‘not-self’ is the objectivity contained in not only the difficult elements of the natural landscape but equally the aspects of the individual’s own body which pose a threat to the completion of this goal.
This development prefigures a change that will take place in Fichte’s post-Jena system, in which the ‘not-self’ does not simply represent the passivity or negation contained with the ‘self’ in the unity of the self-posited ‘I’, but rather it represents the remainder of something that has come before the positing of the ‘I’ and which will forever serve as the objectivity the ‘self’ must struggle to overcome.[41] This aspect of Fichte’s project is what Žižek has referred to as the possibility of ‘Fichte’s materialism’. Along with this, one could reasonably deduce that if there is always some ‘not-self’ which comes absolutely before the positing of the absolute ‘I’, then Fichte can no longer be accused of the absolute ego-logy that often serves to represent the worst tendencies within idealism.
Thus his ethico-practical project (as outlined in The Vocation of Man) serves as the practical system corresponding to the developments taking place in his theoretical philosophy. Because there is always something ‘other’ that is prior to the immediacy of the ‘I’, the ‘I’ must always be an activity striving towards a goal that necessitates the projected overcoming of objective ‘checks’.
While the topic will be covered in more detail in the next chapter, we can see that much of Kierkegaard’s critical stance on Fichte depends on a reading that takes the 1794 presentation of The Science of Knowing to be exemplary of his overall position. This explains Kierkegaard’s critical stance towards the theoretical presentation of Fichte’s self-positing ‘I’. The crucial point, however, is that Kierkegaard’s seeming agreement with the ethico-practical project developed by Fichte in The Vocation of Man comes right as Fichte is beginning to modify his theoretical position, and in particular the notion of immediacy, which Kierkegaard took as his critical starting point. Kierkegaard’s critique of Fichte thus makes perfect sense when read in light of his Jena-period writings, but if we read Kierkegaard’s critiques in light of Fichte’s later presentation of his system, we notice that Fichte’s system seems to move beyond many of the problems identified by Kierkegaard. In essence, much of the position Kierkegaard develops by way of his critique of Fichte ends up making some of the same points Fichte develops himself in his post-Jena period. Before moving on, it is worth once again considering the different interpretations of Fichte’s philosophy at play in the contemporary literature to further note the way in which we could easily conceive of Kierkegaard as both for and against his project.
As we have seen, the shifts in Fichte’s philosophical system led to some difficulty in pinning down something that could simply be described as ‘Fichte’s philosophy’. Instead, interpretations vary from readings in which Fichte is offering an absolutely idealist and non-realist system which grounds reality in the internal operations of a self-positing consciousness (a reading Kierkegaard seemed to subscribe to) and, on the other hand, a reading in which the not-I comes to signify something absolutely external to the operations of consciousness. We can further glean the stakes of the two opposed interpretations of Fichte’s project by looking at two different analyses of his project, one by Dieter Henrich and the other by Daniel Braezelle.
In one sense Henrich places emphasis on the practical nature of Fichte’s project, stating that ‘Fichte wants the Science of Knowledge to bridge the gap between philosophy and life’[42] in a way that is akin to Kierkegaard’s critique that idealist philosophy fails to provide an adequate account of existential actuality. But while Henrich places emphasis on what could be called the existentialist interpretation of Fichte, he still considers the overall conceptual focus of his work to reside wholly within the structure of immediate human consciousness.[43] As he states, ‘opposition is the basic structure of the human mind for Fichte’.[44] Thus for Henrich, it is not the case that the oppositional structure of the human mind is a product of anything external (or material) which affects the seemingly immediate structure of consciousness; rather, any opposition is wholly internal to the structure of the self. According to Henrich’s interpretation, the self and the not-self are both opposed and united within consciousness, as there is no external relation that gives birth to any sort of opposition.[45] Henrich, then, returning to an existentialist tone, remarks that this constant process of opposition and reunification within consciousness is what leads to an experience of despair as reflection is longing for a moment of unity.[46] So while in one sense Henrich places emphasis on the manner in which the immediate unity of self-consciousness still contains a form of opposition and contradiction that leads to an experience of despair as the self desires unity, this entire process is still immanently contained within the structure of the self, and thus there is no point of reference to an outside or external world. It seems that, according to Henrich’s interpretation, there is little room for the movement of faith previously discussed in The Vocation of Man, as opposition and its subsequent despair are constituent of the very structure of consciousness.
Another commentator, Daniel Breazeale, offers a reading that follows the oppositional structure emphasized by Henrich, but instead he uses this reading to emphasize the necessity of an external facticity that necessarily affects and disrupts any immanent or wholly internal account of self-consciousness. This argument is outlined in his extremely important essay, ‘Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self’.[47] As he states early on in this piece, ‘the true “Fichtean self”, [I will argue], is always involved with finitude’.[48]
One of the primary stakes of Breazeale’s reading is the externalization of the Anstoss, or check. While a commentator such as Henrich places this check inside the structure of self-consciousness, Breazeale considers this to be something that does not simply serve as an obstacle but rather as something which ‘impels or provokes the “I” to further actions of self-determination’.[49] Thus for Breazeale the ‘I’ exists precisely insomuch as it is engaged in a constant contradiction produced by its being both infinite and finite, but this is not a state of opposition that is wholly internal to the structure of consciousness. Outside the ‘I’, which is this opposition of the finite and the infinite, is the Anstoss, which exists externally and adds a higher order level of contradiction to the internal opposition within the ‘I’. So, according to Breazeale’s interpretation, while the ‘I’ contains both an infinite and a finite element, there exists a not-I which is wholly external and which haunts any experience of immediacy.
Breazeale goes a step further to discuss the manner in which the existence of the Anstoss is a necessary condition for the activity of the ‘I’, stating:
the Anstoss provides the essential occasion or ‘spark’, without which neither the theoretical nor the practical activity of the I could be engaged and thus without which there could be no I at all.[50]
Thus the Anstoss serves to provide an occasion, or instant, which serves as a precondition for both the possibility of the practical activity of the self and of the internal structure which makes the ‘I’ possible in the first place. Following this interpretation, it would be the case that there is something necessarily external that can never be contained by, or produced within, any immediate activity of consciousness.
One of the final, and most crucial, points made in this essay is when Breazeale places emphasis on the manner by which
the self that becomes possible in this way is a self that remains radically open to and constrained by a realm beyond its own devising—a realm both of material things and of other rational individuals.[51]
In this reading, the Fichtean self is both made possible through the existence of external forces and subsequently held open to the possibility contained in the contingent facticity of both material things and the existence of other rational beings. Following this, we could say that the Fichtean self is grounded in materiality and held open by the possibility of varying configurations of the material and the social. Following this, Breazeale notes ‘the unavoidable element of contingency—“facticity”—if you will, at the heart of the Fichtean self.’[52] And in a manner that problematizes the interpretation that claims that Fichte is primarily concerned with absolute self-positing, he goes on to note:
struggle as we may—and must—this original conflict within the self can never be eliminated, for the simple reason that the conflict itself is the condition for the very possibility of the self.[53]
Following this, we see that in opposition to Henrich, Breazeale offers an interpretation of Fichte which not only breaks from the supposedly wholly self-positing and internal ‘I’ previously outlined by Henrich, but one which offers a way of thinking through the material and social aspects of the Fichtean self. According to Breazeale’s reading, the internal conflict within the self (which is driven by its encounter with a not-I) is not something to be overcome but is rather the very condition for the possibility of the self in the first place.
1.2 F. W. J. Schelling
F. W. J. Schelling is the German idealist who follows on from Fichte most immediately. While I will once again avoid attempting to provide a summary of his philosophical project as a whole, which is a nearly impossible task in itself,[54] I aim to present his work in a way that will allow me to set up his importance in our reconsideration of both the philosophy of Kierkegaard and the relevance of idealism for twenty-first-century philosophy. I will begin by outlining Schelling’s project as it appears in his System of Transcendental Idealism, a text that continues to work within the framework of Fichtean intellectual intuition as its starting point. From there I will show how Schelling breaks from this Fichtean brand of idealism in the 1809 Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, which would be his last text published during his lifetime. At this juncture I only hope to introduce the basic contours of Schelling’s thought, as a further comparative analysis with Kierkegaard will take place in coming chapters. A discussion of contemporary interpretations of Schelling, in which I will compare the stakes of twenty-first-century interpretations of Hegel and Schelling as outlined by Markus Gabriel, will be saved until later in this chapter.
It must be noted that like Fichte, Schelling has often been left out of much of the scholarly debate regarding Kierkegaard’s philosophical influences.[55] Unlike Fichte, however, Schelling seems to be left out precisely because Kierkegaard made notable mention of him, particularly in the journal entries and lecture notes written by Kierkegaard while in attendance of Schelling’s 1841 Berlin lectures. Kierkegaard travelled to Berlin to hear Schelling’s inaugural set of lectures shortly after completing his doctoral thesis (The Concept of Irony) with the hope that his lectures on positive philosophy would develop an account of actuality that would provide what Kierkegaard felt Hegel’s system was lacking. Initially Kierkegaard was extremely enthusiastic about the lectures, due to Schelling’s mention of actuality, writing in his lecture notes:
The embryonic child of thought leapt for joy within me, as in Elizabeth, when he mentioned the word ‘actuality’ in connection with the relation of philosophy to actuality. I remember almost every word he said after that. The pure science of reason is, then, only negative, has nothing to do with existence. But existence can also be the object of science. For example, a revelation that always presupposes a God who is, would also belong to this. This science of reason is complete only when it is made to the point of knowing itself as negative, but this is impossible without having the positive outside itself at least as possibility. But if the positive does not come quickly, the negative easily becomes obscured, and the logical is taken away for the actual. (CI 344)
This excitement was short-lived, however, and soon after Kierkegaard wrote this in a letter to his brother about the lectures:
Schelling talks endless nonsense both in an extensive and an intensive sense. I am leaving Berlin and hastening to Copenhagen, but not, you understand, to be bound by a new tie, oh no, for now I feel more strongly than ever that I need my freedom. I do owe Schelling something. For I have learned that I enjoy traveling. (CI 239)
While the standard maneuver in much Kierkegaard scholarship has been to utilize these examples to argue that Kierkegaard was influenced by Schelling for only a very short period before his pseudonymous authorship even began and that Schelling subsequently played little role, if any, in the formation of Kierkegaard’s later thought, I would like to argue that this position fails on at least two levels. First, the Schelling text that Kierkegaard references most frequently in his published work is Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, which was written over thirty years before his Berlin lectures took place; so whether or not Kierkegaard was left unconvinced by the presentation of positive philosophy, it would be unfair to argue that this would retroactively erase the influence Schelling’s earlier work played on Kierkegaard’s philosophical formation. Second, it is worth noting that Kierkegaard left Berlin before Schelling gave the lectures that would present his philosophy of mythology and revelation, a form of Christian metaphysics that has much in common with Kierkegaard’s later work. Thus, to hold the position that Kierkegaard rejected wholesale the philosophy of the late Schelling would involve ignoring the fact that Kierkegaard was in attendance for only the first portion of these lectures and would die before they would have been available to him in published form. It will be my contention that the clearest way in which one can establish the relation between Schelling and Kierkegaard will be through a philosophical evaluation of the similarity between Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and The Concept of Anxiety.[56]
Having outlined some problematic aspects of the scholarly reception of Kierkegaard’s relationship to Schelling, I will now move on to outlining the aspects of Schelling’s philosophy that are important for the present book. First and foremost, it is crucial to note that the System of Transcendental Idealism, published in 1800, can be said to follow the foundational principle of Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge, that principle being the absolute self-positing ‘I’ (or intellectual intuition). The key divergence between Schelling’s STI and Fichte’s SK is that Schelling wants to move beyond the purely subjective account of idealism provided by Fichte and argue that this foundational principle is present not only in the self, or intelligence, but also in nature, or the objective realm. Or, in other words, Schelling is concerned with the compatibility of subjectivity and objectivity. Schelling’s point is that, rather than objectivity being something that is simply created by the activity of subjectivity in the Fichtean sense, as something that limits or ‘checks’ the activity of the self, objectivity is the self, and subjective activity is an attempt of the objective (or nature) to come to full consciousness of itself. As Schelling states,
Nature’s highest goal, to become wholly an object to herself, is achieved only through the last and highest order of reflection, which is none other than man; or, more generally, it is what we call reason, whereby nature first completely returns into herself, and by which it becomes apparent that nature is identical from the first with what we recognize in ourselves as the intelligent and the conscious.[57]
In a manner that obviously prefigures Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Schelling attempts to develop a transcendental system in which the seeming division of intelligence and nature can in fact be accounted for as different aspects of one process of nature, or the absolute, attempting to come to a realized knowledge of itself. In this sense, when the objective aspect of philosophy is primary, it is a nature-philosophy, and when philosophy proceeds from the subjective, it is transcendental philosophy.[58] So while Schelling remains largely Fichtean in terms of the structure of his primary principle, he uses this principle to develop a theory of the unity of the subjective and objective, or self and nature, something that was of little concern to Fichte’s early purely transcendental idealism. Another crucial difference between Schelling and the early Fichte is that, rather than placing an absolute unity at the beginning of philosophy, Schelling thinks that the absolute unity of objective and subjective comes at the end of philosophy.
Up until a certain point, Schelling’s position still remains largely influenced and critically indebted to the work of Fichte, but this indebtedness ends with the publication of the Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. While the present discussion of Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom may seem brief, this is because my primary aim is to show the thematic overlaps between this text and Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety, which will be discussed later in the book. In this work Schelling breaks with any sort of identity philosophy (i.e., the identity between the objectivity and subjectivity outlined in STI) and instead considers the groundless ground of all being which is necessary for there to be such thing as genuine human freedom and the accompanying capacity for humans to decide to act in ways both good and evil. When discussing the necessity of this re-investigation into the grounds of freedom Schelling states:
There must be being before all ground and before all that exists, thus generally before any duality—how can we call it anything other than the original ground or the non-ground [ungrund]? Since it precedes all opposites, these cannot be distinguishable in it nor can they be present in any way. Therefore, it cannot be described as the identity of opposites; it can only be described as the absolute indifference of both.[59]
Thus, rather than there being any sort of immediate point from which consciousness (and philosophy) can begin, Schelling wants to locate an absolute non-ground of indifference at the bottom of any sort of determinant ground. This position draws a clear break with any sort of Fichtean intellectual intuition, as there is always something ‘other’ that absolutely precedes the activity of consciousness. This also signifies a break from Schelling’s position in STI that reason was that activity by which nature could become an object of itself, as in the Freedom essay where Schelling states,
For, no matter how high we place reason, we do not believe, for example, that anyone may be virtuous or a hero or generally a great human being on the basis of pure reason, indeed, not even, according to the familiar phrase, that the human race can be propagated by it. Only in personality is there life, and all personality rests on a dark ground that indeed must therefore be the ground of cognition as well.[60]
The crucial distinction here is that, rather than signifying a progression towards unity, reason is instead the acknowledgement of a primordial separation, or indifference. As Schelling states,
Reason is not activity, like spirit, nor is it the absolute identity of both principles of cognition, but rather indifference; the measure and, so to speak, the general place of truth, the peaceful site in which primordial wisdom is perceived. [61]
Thus, rather than developing a typical idealist conception of reason as the process by which spirit, or mind, eliminates a seeming division by coming to an absolute knowledge of itself, Schelling here develops a conception of reason that is precisely the recognition of an absolute indifference at the heart of all being, and an indifference that is absolutely necessary for an adequate theory of human freedom and the capacity for good and evil. This emphasis on indifference also marks a break from the idea that intellectual intuition can serve as an absolute beginning for thought, as that which posits itself, and behind or before which there is nothing. Unlike the sort of absolute beginning which can be seen in both Fichte’s SK and Schelling’s STI, Schelling is here emphasizing the notion of a non-ground which precedes any sort of unity or supposed absolute beginning. In other words, while Schelling’s STI can rightly be considered a philosophy of immediacy, the Freedom essay provides a strong argument for the shortcomings of immediacy for the development of a philosophy of freedom. I will return to this distinction in chapter 2.
As I will show in both the later sections of the current chapter and in subsequent chapters, this aspect of Schelling’s thought not only provides the clearest link to considering his influence on the work of Kierkegaard but it is also one of the crucial points at which contemporary interpreters have been able to identify a sort of materialist moment at the heart of Schelling’s thought. This non-ground of absolute indifference will thus bear serious resemblance to both the fractured dialectic at play in Kierkegaard’s ontology as well as the fundamental break at the heart of a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity.
1.3 G. W. F. Hegel
I will close this chapter with a discussion of Hegel, as his system is one that incorporates many of the insights previously attributed to Fichte and Schelling. As Frederick Beiser has noted, Hegel’s philosophical originality has less to do with the development of a completely original system of philosophy than it does with the sophisticated systematization of much of the work that came before him, primarily that of Fichte and Schelling.[62]
While it is beyond the aim of the present chapter to provide any systematic reconstruction of Hegel’s position, it is worth noting that there is a particular version of Hegel that seems to be consistent throughout a majority of the scholarship considering his relation to the work of Kierkegaard. In the simplest terms possible, this version is the Hegel of the absolute system, for whom pure speculative thought was able to dialectically climb its way to the perspective of absolute knowledge, and for whom this logic provided a way past religion, ethics and existence to a unitary and consistent structure in which history, religion, and politics were complete. It is Hegel as totalizing philosopher of the system who is often put in opposition to the existential anti-philosophy of Kierkegaard.
One of the underlying stakes of the present book will be a re-consideration of the traditional reading of the relationship between Kierkegaard and Hegel.[63] By attempting to bring them closer together, my intention is not to make the gap between their positions easier to cross; on the contrary, by establishing how similar their overall philosophical structures are, I hope to show that the few differences become all the more crucial.[64] Thus, rather than reading Kierkegaard as the absolute anti-Hegelian existential-theologian, I hope to paint a picture in which Kierkegaard can be read as a post-Idealist figure who used his own sort of anti-philosophy to note some of the crucial shortcomings of Hegel’s philosophy when applied to the actual existence of individuals.
Hegel’s position follows what we have previously seen in Fichte’s The Science of Knowledge and Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism in so much as it is a progression of dialectical oppositions and reunifications (akin to the structure of Fichte’s SK) but equally follows Schelling’s critical addition of a philosophy of nature to Fichte’s purely subjective idealism. One of the crucial distinctions between Hegel’s position and that of the Fichte of SK and the Schelling of STI is a critique of the self-positing and immediate ‘I’ which lies at the foundation of each of these systems. For Hegel, pure immediacy is impossible because any attempt at pure and immediate reflection always presupposes an object of reflection which is external to consciousness and thus, from the beginning reflection, is aware of an inconsistency between being and its own reflective activity. As is well-known, the majority of the Phenomenology of Spirit is the story of consciousness (or spirit) coming of age and reaching a state of absolute knowledge.
However, my concern in this section is to merely show Hegel’s place in the development of German idealism, and along with that, to briefly introduce an alternative reading of the Hegelian story that has gained particular momentum in the past decade. This reading of Hegel is marked by an insistence on themes such as tragedy, contingency, plasticity and contradiction, but I will simply refer to this as the open reading of Hegel. I choose the term open, as what all of these readings hold in common is the idea of the dialectical process as something that is fundamentally open and without the absolute closure often attributed to it. This interpretation is useful for the aim of this book, as the previously mentioned anti-Hegelian reading of Kierkegaard is absolutely dependent on a totalized or closed reading of Hegel’s dialectic. While a textual explication of this interpretation of Hegel falls out of the scope of the present study, I will briefly offer some examples of what this reading of Hegel looks like in contemporary scholarship.
An example of this open reading of Hegel, in which the dialectic itself has a dialectical structure (or in which there is never a consummate moment in which all contradiction is reconciled in a final synthesis), can be seen in Jean-Luc Nancy’s short work, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative. In this work Nancy presents a reading of Hegel that focuses on the restlessness of the dialectical movement and utilizes this emphasis on the internal restlessness of the dialectic to rethink political readings of Hegel which consider him the thinker of the absolute state. As Nancy argues early in this work:
Hegelian thought does not begin with the assurance of a principle. It is simply identical to the restless, preoccupied, and non-presupposed return into itself of philosophy that exposes itself to what it already is: the movement of consciousness of this world that knows itself as world, and that no representation . . . can saturate or reassure, because, to the contrary, the world bears them all away into its history.[65]
This notion of beginning, or the precise lack of a proper beginning, is one of the crucial ways in which this open reading of Hegel can bring his thought into much closer philosophical proximity with that of Kierkegaard. As we have already intimated, one of the primary points of distinction between Kierkegaard and the German idealists is the critique of the idealist account of beginnings, which Kierkegaard sees as an untenable reliance on an account of immediacy, or intellectual intuition.[66] Keeping Kierkegaard’s critique in mind while reading Nancy’s account of Hegel helps bring these two thinkers much closer together. Nancy goes on to argue:
The restlessness of thought first means that everything has already begun: that there will therefore be no foundation, that the course of the world will not be stopped in order to be recommenced. It means that one is no longer in Descartes’ element, nor in Kant’s, and that, if the thread of history is broken, this happens of itself, because its very continuity is only division and distension.[67]
Nancy goes on:
In these two ways—absence of beginning and absence of end, absence of foundation and absence of completion—Hegel is the opposition of a ‘totalitarian’ thinker.[68]
If one takes Nancy to be providing a philosophically tenable reading of Hegel, then one is forced to rethink the caricature of Hegel as the thinker of absolute totality and closure, the philosopher unable to account for the inevitability of contingency. If this is the case, then we see that the version of Hegel commonly set in such stark opposition to the work of Kierkegaard may not in fact be Hegel at all.[69] If, as Nancy argues, the form of ‘circular’ logic favored by Hegel is in fact a ‘circle of circles’, then one cannot consider Hegel’s dialectic as a forward-moving process with a consistent and final teleology.[70]
So, if one at least considers possible a reading of Hegel in which there is no absolute beginning or end, in which the only absolute is restlessness and negativity, and in which the dialectic is itself dialectical,[71] then one must seriously reconsider the claim that Kierkegaard is a fundamentally anti-Hegelian thinker (and at this point, it may be better to utilize the recent remark by Alain Badiou that Kierkegaard is the ultimate philosopher for/against Hegel).[72]
Following this, it seems to be the case that there is no such thing as the final moment of the system in Hegel and, rather, that any seeming moment of closure is just that, a moment, and one which quickly opens up a new space of movement and contradiction. In this regard Catherine Malabou has argued, ‘dialectical sublation proceeds through a movement whereby, at one and the same time, it contracts and alienates the material on which it acts’.[73] Thus, at the moment at which one expects a dialectical sublation, a new dialectical tension emerges which is immanent to the sublation itself, and the various forces of the dialectic never dissolve into a final moment. According to this reading of Hegel, negativity is always immanent to the dialectical process itself. Following this, it is at worth nothing that Hegel concludes his most Kierkegaardian text, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, by arguing, ‘it is its fate that church and state, worship and life, piety and virtue, spiritual and worldly action, can never dissolve into one’.[74]
While there has yet to be a serious overlap between this open reading of Hegel and recent Kierkegaard scholarship, there is one notable exception in the work of Maria J. Binetti. According to Binetti:
During decades, the history of philosophy has kept Kierkegaard and Hegel apart. I believe this has been sadly detrimental to both of them, as their longstanding opposition has swept through the speculative greatness of Kierkegaard’s thought and the existential power of Hegel’s.[75]
She outlines her reading by focusing on the underlying speculative (and Hegelian) form of logic at play in Kierkegaard’s seemingly existential philosophy and, at the same time, explores the manner by which the most conceptual aspects of Hegel’s logic are still grounded in the existential and religious uses of love in his early work. She describes this as such: ‘I have tried to show how the internal logic of Kierkegaard’s thought coincides with the fundamental dialectical dynamism of Hegel’s philosophy’.[76]
Thus for Binetti we are not faced with an absolute choice between a Hegel wholly concerned with systematic unity in a totalizing system of logic and an irrational Kierkegaard whose insistence on paradox and subjectivity leaves him with no systematic structure. Instead, Binetti argues that it is the case that:
[The] Kierkegaardian repetition is nothing but this powerful idea, mediating the flux of finite differences in the eternal journey of subject.[77]
She puts this in even more systematic terms in another piece in which she argues,
Thus it is not possible to speak either of an insuperable dualism that alienates the spirit, as in Kierkegaard’s case, or of an abstract monism that absorbs the singular, as in Hegel. On the contrary, we must speak of an identity that is not pure identity and of a difference that is not pure difference. And this is the crucial point of reconciliation, that its identity only subsists in the other and that the other does not exist but in its identity.[78]
Binetti is here advocating a reading in which we no longer view the Kierkegaardian subject as one absolutely alienated from any structure or grounds, and a reading of Hegel in which the subject is ultimately sublated back into a primary monistic substance. Instead, for both Kierkegaard and Hegel, identity is identity only in difference, and reconciliation is not the collapse of the two back into the one but the maintaining of difference of love which serves as a dynamic third. As she goes on to argue:
If identity is possible, it is the work of love. . . . Love operates an identity, whose difference subsists, although reconciled; it restores a unity in which everything is made equal, but without mixture or confusion.[79]
At this point, I hope that it can at least be seen that the traditional reading which has created absolute enemies of Hegel and Kierkegaard may not be the whole story and that, through a consideration of this open reading of Hegel, we can begin to reconsider the systematic nature of Kierkegaard’s existential and religious thought.
1.4 Contemporary Readings of Idealism
This tension between Kierkegaard’s relationship to the work of both Schelling and Hegel is one that will appear throughout this book, as at various junctures it is easy to read Kierkegaard as either a post-Hegelian or post-Schellingian thinker. This tension is evident in the subtitle to a section on Kierkegaard in Terry Pinkard’s German Philosophy 1760–1860 which is posed as a question; ‘Kierkegaard: Post-Schellingian Hegelianism?’ For Pinkard, this title alludes to the way in which Kierkegaard can be seen as abandoning any lingering Hegelian tendencies for the hope of the ‘positive philosophy’ Schelling was meant to outline at the Berlin lectures Kierkegaard attended. According to Pinkard’s analysis, Schelling’s late philosophy was fuelled by the conviction that Hegel had no way of showing that his logical system entailed anything about the actual world, or existence. This could equally be said about Kierkegaard’s attitude towards Hegel, or better put, Hegelianism, and thus why Kierkegaard was so disappointed when Schelling did not offer just that, a philosophy of actuality which moved beyond what he saw as the dead end of Hegelian logic.
Markus Gabriel articulates the difference between Hegel and Schelling in a way that will prove useful in the explication of Kierkegaard to come in subsequent chapters.[80] Gabriel develops his distinction between the projects of Hegel and Schelling in terms of the relationship each draws between being and reflection. According to this reading, Hegel is not willing to admit the failure of reflection in fully comprehending being, as this would entail a concession to the romantic insistence on incompleteness.[81] For Hegel, being is thus an aspect of reflection and is completely contained within the movement of reflection as the attempt of reflection to comprehend itself. Schelling, on the other hand, thinks this to be a useless (and impossible) task and instead thinks that the failure of reflection to fully comprehend itself indicates the brute fact of an existence wholly other to reflection, an un-pre-thinkable being, which Schelling refers to in the Freedom essay as the non-ground. This non-ground, or un-pre-thinkable being, will thus forever haunt reflection as the remainder that it can never assimilate. This signifies the brute fact of existence and the absolute inconsistency between subject and object, and this encounter is what leads Schelling to describe the anxiety experienced by consciousness when encountering this fundamental instability as being ‘seized by dizziness on a high and steep summit’.[82]
As Gabriel goes on to argue for the contemporary relevance of idealism, he notes:
This is why philosophy deep down in its essence qua groundless creative activity always amounts to an encounter with ourselves, to an existential project. . . . In other words, the decision to grasp the constitutive elusiveness of the conditions of possibility of determinacy and to refer to it in terms of the mythology of a domain of all domains is ethical.
In short, Gabriel argues that this un-pre-thinkable being which forever haunts reflection is what drives Schelling (and philosophy in general, whether it is aware of this or not) to develop a non-philosophical mythical structure that provides the very grounds by which philosophical speculation is possible at all. Gabriel utilizes a quote from Stanley Cavell that eloquently sums up this need of a non-philosophical foundation for philosophy:
We begin to feel, or ought to, terrified that maybe language (and understanding, and knowledge) rests upon very shaky foundations—a thin net over an abyss.[83]
This recognition of the need for a non-philosophical mythological structure is what Gabriel sees as putting an irrevocable gap between the idealisms of Hegel and Schelling, and subsequently why he sees Schelling as having more to critically offer twenty-first-century philosophy. While I do not intend to fully endorse Gabriel’s critique of Hegelian reflection, I have highlighted his discussion of the relationship between Hegel and Schelling for the sake of alluding to the philosophical importance of considering Kierkegaard as a post-idealist philosopher, or as Pinkard describes him, ‘a post-Hegelian philosopher in the German tradition’.[84] This is crucial, as the critique of the necessary failure of reflection that Gabriel attributes to Schelling is one of the driving forces of Kierkegaard’s critique of idealism, and as will later be my contention, Kierkegaard goes further than the later Schelling in his articulation of a genuinely positive philosophy which is concerned with a traumatic encounter with oneself and the subsequent ethical project of existence which comes in the wake of this encounter. One could rightly read Kierkegaard as pushing a Hegelian-inspired model of subjectivity and logic into the actualized and unstable account of reality offered by Schelling. On this point, I am thus willing to rephrase the previously mentioned question-begging title of Pinkard’s discussion of Kierkegaard and affirm that Kierkegaard can be fundamentally read as a post-Schellingian Hegelian.
1.5 Conclusion
The aim of this chapter has been to outline some of the general features of the philosophical projects of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel for the purpose of subsequently developing a philosophical reading of the work of Kierkegaard against the background of the major figures and conceptual concerns of German idealism. Particular emphasis has been placed on the manner in which each thinker offers an account, and in some cases a subsequent critique of, immediacy. This critique of immediacy, or of an absolute philosophical beginning, is what then puts reflection in motion for consciousness and opens up the pathway for speculative philosophy. If much of later idealism, and in particular the projects of Schelling and Hegel, can be cast as the critique of Fichtean idealism (which itself is a critique of Kantian idealism), then it will be my contention that we can read Kierkegaard as offering a critique of the philosophies created by this critique, or in more literal terms, Kierkegaard offers a critique of the critique (of the critique).
The secondary aim of this chapter has been to outline a method of rereading the German idealist tradition that will shape the coming interpretation of Kierkegaard. As I have shown, one of the primary stakes of a contemporary rereading of the idealist tradition is the question of materialism and the extent to which much of nineteenth-century idealism seems to contain the philosophical kernel of twenty-first-century materialism. Following the interpretation of thinkers ranging from Daniel Breazeale to Slavoj Žižek to Jean-Luc Nancy, I have aimed to show how a reading of the idealists which focuses in particular on a critique of immediacy offers a structure for thinking about the material remainder, which signifies that which comes absolutely before the emergence of consciousness and subsequently provides the drive for the activity of consciousness.
In Fichte we saw how the concept of the Anstoss, which can be translated as both ‘check’ and ‘impulse’, complicates any reading which wants to interpret Fichte as the absolute idealist for whom the self-positing ‘I’ is its own beginning and subsequently constitutes all objectivity. Following Breazeale and Žižek, I attempted to show why it is far from paradoxical to speak of the possibility of a Fichtean materialism, in which the Anstoss signifies the absolute objectivity which precedes the positing of the ‘I’ as well as being that which both drives and ‘checks’ its subjective activity.
In the discussion of Schelling’s System of Transcendental Idealism, it was shown how this text follows the principles of Fichte’s early Science of Knowledge but builds on Fichte’s early system of idealism by developing an objective nature-philosophy with a parallel structure in which mind emerges from nature. Schelling later backs away from this idealist position in his Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, in which a critique of intellectual intuition leads him to develop a theory of a non-ground, or urgrund, which precedes any experience of subjective immediacy and provides the possibility of freedom in both its good and evil forms. This account of the non-ground has been taken up by contemporary thinkers such as Slavoj Žižek and Iain Hamilton Grant[85] to describe the relevance of Schelling to thinking contemporary philosophical issues such as dialectical materialism and the ontogenetic capacity of matter.
Finally, I provided a brief discussion of Hegel, the idealist who is most notable for his systemization of aspects of both Fichte and Schelling. Of primary importance in this discussion of Hegel has been the attempt to argue for the validity of a reading of Hegel as an open thinker and for the dialectic itself being considered in dialectical terms. In this reading, Hegel’s absolute knowledge does not signify the reunification of spirit with itself in a sort of finalized consistency, but as it has recently been stated by Clayton Crocket and Creston Davis, Hegelian absolute knowledge is instead a subjective position which finally accepts contradiction as an internal condition of every identity.[86] This idea of absolute knowledge as signifying an internal contradiction may be the biggest stake of the open reading of Hegel for contemporary philosophical thought.
While this chapter has offered only a brief philosophical outline of the major figures of German Idealism, the following chapters of the book will continue to build on this foundation as I consider particular instances of Kierkegaard’s engagement with German idealism and use these instances to develop a reading of Kierkegaard’s post-idealist philosophy and the manner in which Kierkegaard’s socio-political thought emerges through this response to idealism.
Notes
1.
At present, the secondary literature in English linking the projects of Kierkegaard and Fichte is extremely limited. Michelle Kosch has published one article on this issue, ‘Kierkegaard’s Ethicist: Fichte’s Role in Kierkegaard’s Construction of the Ethical Standpoint,’ Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie (2006); and David Kangas has discussed the relationship with Fichte in his book Kierkegaard’s Instant as well as in his article ‘Kierkegaard and Fichte’ which appeared in a volume on the German influence on Kierkegaard’s thought.
2.
Exceptions to this lack of scholarship include Michelle Kosch’s Freedom and Reason in Kant, Kierkegaard, and Schelling as well as the volume Kierkegaard und Schelling, ed., Henningfeld and Stewart (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2003) which contains essays in both German and English.
3.
The most important study to break from this tradition is Jon Stewart’s Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) in which Stewart forcefully argues that much of what seem to be direct attacks against Hegel in Kierkegaard’s writing are actually aimed at many of Kierkegaard’s teachers, pastors and colleagues in the Danish intellectual scene of his time. Another crucial voice in the careful reconsideration of this relationship is Argentinean philosopher Maria J. Binnetti, whose recent articles in English put forth the bold claim that Kierkegaard actually practices a thoroughly Hegelian form of metaphysics, with the crucial difference being that he begins with the perspective of particular existence rather than universal logic.
4.
Dieter Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel: Lectures on German Idealism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). Henrich comments on the similarities between Fichte and Kierkegaard on page 19, and Hegel on page 20.
5.
Paul Ricoeur, ‘Philosophy After Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), 11.
6.
Lore Hühn and Philipp Schwab, ‘Kierkegaard and German Idealism’, in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard eds. George Pattison and John Lippitt, 62.
7.
It is worth noting that the present discussion of the relationship between Kierkegaard and the German idealist is cursory, as a full reckoning of the systematic relationship between Kierkegaard and each of these figures is worthy of a full study in its own right. At present the aim is to at least allow the reader to see the manner in which many of Kierkegaard’s key concepts can be seen as responses to the key conceptual movements of German idealism.
8.
Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 75.
9.
This interpretation of Hegel, in which there is no final consistent consummative moment of the dialectic, is also represented to varying degrees by the work of Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic trans. Lisabeth During (London: Routledge, 2005); Gillian Rose, Hegel Contra Sociology (London: Verso, 2009); Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2010); Jean-Luc Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative trans. Jason E. Smith (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Fredric Jameson, The Hegel Variations: On the Phenomenology of Spirit (London: Verso, 2010); Adrian Johnston, Zizek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008); and David Gray Carlson, A Commentary on Hegel’s Science of Logic (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007)
10.
This can be seen in Kierkegaard’s doctoral thesis, The Concept of Irony, which follows a largely Hegelian structure in the first half, and the second half is dedicated to a discussion of ‘Irony after Fichte’.
11.
J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge trans. Peter Heath and John Lachs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 93.
12.
Ibid., 6.
13.
Ibid., 25.
14.
Ibid., 96.
15.
Ibid., 97.
16.
Ibid., 108.
17.
Ibid., 108, 112.
18.
For more on this see David Kangas, ‘J.G. Fichte: From Transcendental Ego to
Existence’ in Kierkegaard and His German Contemporaries, ed. Jon Stewart (Surrey: Ashgate, 2009).
19.
The outline of the work and section titles in themselves seem an obvious parallel to the structure of much of Kierkegaard’s own work.
20.
J. G. Fichte, The Vocation of Man trans. Peter Preuss (Cambridge: Hackett, 1987), 2.
21.
Fichte, The Science of Knowledge, 16.
22.
Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 79.
23.
Ibid., 3.
24.
Ibid., 10.
25.
Ibid., 11.
26.
Ibid., 14.
27.
Ibid., 24.
28.
Ibid., 27.
29.
Ibid., 67.
30.
Ibid., 68.
31.
Ibid.
32.
While this seems to be merely an aspect of Fichte’s practical philosophy, in his study, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), Fredrick Beiser argues that this drive to transform the objective world into an ethical ideal is the main goal of Fichte’s overall project.
33.
Fichte, The Vocation of Man, 81.
34.
Ibid., 87.
35.
Ibid., 107.
36.
Ibid., 109–11.
37.
Ibid.
38.
Ibid., ix–xi.
39.
Žižek, ‘Fichte’s Laughter’ in Gabriel and Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2009), 140.
40.
Ibid., 155.
41.
While it has not come up in our explication thus far, a further elaboration of Fichte’s notion of the Anstoss, or ‘check’, will become crucial for a reading of the self in Fichte as not absolutely immediate.
42.
Henrich, Between Kant and Hegel, 16.
43.
Ibid., 223.
44.
Ibid., 116.
45.
Ibid., 186.
46.
Ibid., 223.
47.
Breazeale, ‘Check or Checkmate? On the Finitude of the Fichtean Self’, in The Modern Subject: Conceptions of the Self in Classical German Philosophy eds. Karl Ameriks and Dieter Sturma (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995).
48.
Ibid., 88.
49.
Ibid., 91.
50.
Ibid., 99.
51.
Ibid., 102.
52.
Ibid., 98.
53.
Ibid., 101.
54.
For the only introduction to Schelling’s work available in English, see Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction (London: Routledge, 1994). For a more in-depth reading that focuses specifically on Schelling’s nature-philosophy, while at the same time arguing that Schelling’s many stages can be read as part of a larger and consistent project, see Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling (London: Continuum, 2008).
55.
Notable exceptions to this trend include Michelle Kosch’s Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard and David Kangas’s Kierkegaard’s Instant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). While Kosch’s work is the most comprehensive in contrasting the positions of Schelling and Kierkegaard and noting the former’s influence on the later, her reading takes a more pragmatic approach which steers clear of any metaphysical discussion. Kangas, on the other hand, contrasts the theological-ontological projects of both Schelling and Kierkegaard in a manner more in line with the present book.
56.
This will be the topic of chapter 2.
57.
Schelling, System of Transcendental Idealism trans. Peter Heath (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1978), 6.
58.
Ibid., 7.
59.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 68.
60.
Ibid., 75.
61.
Ibid., 76.
62.
In Frederick Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism.
63.
It is worth noting that on this point I follow Maria J. Binetti’s work on the relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard almost completely, and readers interested in this relationship should consult her work as the standard for future research on the systematic relationship between Hegel and Kierkegaard.
64.
On this point I will follow, to an extent, Maria J. Binetti’s insistence that the difference between Kierkegaard and Hegel is more to do with their differing perspectives than with a difference of metaphysical structure.
65.
Nancy, Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, 8.
66.
On this point, see Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant.
67.
Ibid., 8.
68.
Ibid.
69.
On this point the work of Jon Stewart is important, as he has argued that in Kierkegaard’s work it is often the case that the signifier ‘Hegel’ or ‘Hegelian’ stands for the work of various Danish Hegelian theologians that Kierkegaard encountered during his studies in Copenhagen. If this is the case, it seems that, if anything, the Kierkegaard of the pseudonymous authorship had more indifference towards Hegel than he did radical opposition.
70.
Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant, 7.
71.
This is an observation made by Frederic Jameson in his Valences of the Dialectic (London: Verso Press, 2010), 4.
72.
Alain Badiou, Logics of Worlds trans. Alberto Toscano (London: Continuum, 2009), 425.
73.
Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 146
74.
G. W. F. Hegel, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, in Early Theological Writings trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 301. Emphasis mine.
75.
Maria J. Binetti, ‘Kierkegaard’s Ethical Stage in Hegel’s Logical Categories: Actual Possibility, Reality, Necessity’, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy Vol. 3, No. 2–3 (2007), 183.
76.
Ibid.
77.
Ibid., 183–84.
78.
Binetti, ‘Kierkegaard—Hegel: The Religious Stage in Speculative Terms’, in Acta Kierkegaardiana: Volume II, Kierkegaard and the Great Philosophers, 118.
79.
Ibid., 114, 116.
80.
Markus Gabriel, ‘The Mythological Being of Reflection—An Essay on Hegel, Schelling, and the Contingency of Necessity’, in Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum, 2009).
81.
Ibid., 19.
82.
Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, 47.
83.
Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 178.
84.
Terry Pinkard, German Philosophy 1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 345.
85.
Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature After Schelling
86.
Clayton Crocket and Creston Davis, ‘Editors Introduction’ in Hegel and the Infinite ed. Crocket, Davis, and Žižek (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 6.