Anxiety and Ontology
Anxiety and Ontology
In the previous chapter, I provided a brief outline of the major currents and theoretical themes of the key figures of German idealist philosophy. The pinnacle of the development of idealism is often referred to as absolute idealism, which is an attempt to give a complete account of the relation between subject and object that reconciles the gap left in the wake of Kantian idealism. In particular, Hegel and Schelling each offer a systematic philosophy that explains the dynamic relation of subject and object. Hegel outlines his absolute idealism through the idea of concept, or notion, which accounts for the dynamic unfolding of spirit in its process of constantly overcoming the contradictions occurring through reflection. With Schelling, the place of the idea (or ideal structure) shifts from the subjective to the objective, and nature provides the structural account which shows how subjectivity, or mind, emerges from the activity of nature. It is crucial to note that when we speak of idealism in a properly ontological fashion, any reading that attempts to posit idealism as the absolute antithesis of either realism or materialism risks missing the point. None of the German idealists (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel) were anti-realist in the crass sense and in different ways each of their mature philosophies offered an account of the facticity of the objective world and the manner in which this facticity crucially shapes the development of subjectivity, or spirit. The point of idealism is not that reality exists only insomuch as it is experientially created through the activity of the thinking subject but rather that there exists an ideal structure shared by both subject and object, or put even more simply, ideas are real. Rather than an epistemology that is concerned only with the manner in which human consciousness is able to construct a coherent world out of its perceptions, absolute idealism aims at a properly ontological understanding of the structure underlying both consciousness and reality. Thus when we say that idealism is not in opposition to realism or materialism, we mean that idealism is not the negation of the reality of self and world, but rather an attempt to provide a systematic account of the logical structure that accounts for the relation and development of both subject and object as they attempt to overcome their fractured relationship.
This understanding of absolute idealism is necessary as it helps make sense of why I can claim to offer a reading of Kierkegaard which considers his philosophical and religious project in such a way as to develop an ontological account of his project, which is largely indebted to the structure of idealist philosophy. While it has been said that ‘however else Kierkegaard may be classified in the history of thought, he stands in direct opposition to the philosophical idealism of his day’,[1] this reading holds weight only when the term idealism stands for a system in which the activity of human subjectivity literally creates reality. As we have seen, this is not what idealism meant for the German idealist, and thus it would seem a basic mistake of understanding to read Kierkegaard’s intellectual project as absolutely contra the project of philosophical idealism.
In order to properly situate Kierkegaard’s relationship to idealism before I move on to a discussion of The Concept of Anxiety, I will briefly consider one of his most explicit critiques of idealist philosophy, his critique of Fichte in The Concept of Irony.
2.1 The Concept of Irony
While there are few direct references to the work of Fichte in Kierkegaard’s authorship, the penultimate chapter of his book The Concept of Irony is titled ‘Irony After Fichte’ and serves as a useful tool in establishing Kierkegaard’s relation to the work of Fichte as well as to a certain brand of idealism as a whole. While much of the work is concerned with Hegel’s reading of Socrates and its implications for the place of irony in modern philosophy, it becomes obvious in the aforementioned chapter that Kierkegaard’s discussion throughout the work considers Fichte as providing the theoretical underpinnings for the philosophical version of irony during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Kierkegaard begins this chapter by contextualizing Fichte’s theory of consciousness in terms of Kant’s critical project. Describing the fate of the ‘I’ in post-Kantian philosophy, Kierkegaard states:
The more the I in criticism became absorbed in contemplation of the I, the leaner and leaner the I became, until it ended up becoming a ghost. (CI 272)
He goes on a few lines later:
Because reflection was continually reflecting about reflection, thinking went astray, and every step it advanced led further and further, of course, from any content. (CI 272)
Kierkegaard here points out that the primary question of post-Kantian philosophy, and in particular subjective idealism, pertained to the status of the thing-in-itself, and to whether the ‘I itself is not a Ding-an-Sich’ (CI 273), a question he says was ‘raised and answered’ by Fichte. Kierkegaard goes on to note that Fichte ‘removed the difficulty with this an-sich [in-itself] by placing it within thought’, and that for Fichte, ‘The producing I is the same as the produced I’ (CI 273).
Quite uncontroversial in his assessment at this point, Kierkegaard is simply pointing out the way in which Fichte’s basic position entails a repositioning of the thing-in-itself from the noumenal realm to the center of the ‘I’ itself. It is important to now point out the grounds for Kierkegaard’s criticism of Fichte, and why he would associate this position with the ironic.
While Kierkegaard notes that Fichte’s account of the I=I ‘infinitely liberated thought’ (CI 273), he goes on to argue that Fichte’s infinite ‘I’ is always an absolute negative infinity, which is lacking both finitude and content. This negative infinity is worthy of criticism for Kierkegaard as it is an infinity that is for nothing, an infinite striving for the sake of striving itself, completely internal to itself, devoid of an external content which would give purpose or bring it into touch with the finitude of lived actuality. According to Kierkegaard, Fichte
advanced an idealism beside which any actuality turned pale, an acosmism in which his idealism became actuality even though it was Docetism. In Fichte, thought was infinitized, subjectivity became the infinite, absolute negativity, the infinite tension and urge. (CI 273)
Because Kierkegaard’s concern, as we have already seen, was that thought begins with the particularity of existential actuality and subsequently moves to a consideration of the ideal only as secondary to the experience of actuality, he saw Fichte’s negative infinity prioritizing the ideal at the cost of the actual, even though Fichte himself was unaware of this loss. As Kierkegaard notes, Fichte ‘achieved the absolute beginning’ in which ‘the I became the constituting entity’ in the creation of the world. This position falls into the ‘bad’ brand of idealism for Kierkegaard, because it is a completely subjective idealism in which the subjective is the constituting entity of reality, whereas for Kierkegaard the subject always remains constituted by something absolutely prior to its own logical reflection. The difference between subjective and absolute idealism has much to do with the notion of grounds; as for (the early) Fichte, the subject constitutes its own grounds, while for Kierkegaard (and later idealisms) the subject is grounded in something that absolutely precedes it.
What Kierkegaard’s critique of Fichte in The Concept of Irony shows us is precisely that his problem with idealist philosophy is a critique only of subjective idealism and not absolute idealism as such. Subjective idealism, which is a position that neither Fichte, Schelling or Hegel held by the time each reached their mature philosophical system, is a position wherein the subject constructs reality through their own activity of perception, and thus the subject (or the I) serves as the grounds of its own activity. Put differently, in this view the subject, or I, always serves as its own grounds. Kierkegaard finds this position problematic precisely because it fails to account for anything outside of the activity of the subject, and thus subjective consciousness seems to have given birth to its own activity. As should be clear by now, this brand of idealism was not advocated by the mature philosophies of any of the German idealist. It is worth noting, however, that when read only in the context of Fichte’s early philosophy (mainly the 1794 The Science of Knowledge) Kierkegaard’s critique holds fairly accurate. That said, we cannot extrapolate Kierkegaard’s critical analysis to the whole of Fichte’s project as soon after this (beginning with the 1804 The Science of Knowing) Fichte realized the limits of subjective idealism and gave a whole new level of ontological importance to the not-I as representing not just the objective aspect of the I but rather as representing the facticity of that which exists wholly prior to and external to the I. While Kierkegaard never had the chance to respond to Fichte’s later position,[2] I think it is clear that he would have had much less to critique in Fichte’s shift away from subjective idealism.
Now that we have seen why the assertion that Kierkegaard is absolutely opposed to idealist philosophy holds only if one takes early subjective idealism to be representative of the development of idealism as a whole, I find it completely reasonable to affirm the recent assertion that Kierkegaard, ‘whether consciously or unconsciously’, follows the metaphysical structure of absolute idealism.[3] While Kierkegaard’s ethical and religious authorship often operates in literary tropes and pseudonymous voices which can discourage any attempt at a systematic reading, at its core, this authorship follows the same conceptual path as absolute idealism. Thus, as one commentator has noted, ‘The irony is that Kierkegaard is unable to avoid those very systematic structures that he so constantly disparages in Hegel’s writings.’[4] Kierkegaard’s philosophical project, which I am arguing is most clearly developed over three of his works,[5] provides an account of spirit’s break with immediacy, its development into reflection and its return to a higher form of immediacy. In other words, Kierkegaard provides an account of freedom as the process by which spirit negates the necessary facticity of the actual. Immediacy is negated through the activity of reflection, and reflection is negated in the moment of decision that leads to resolution and action.
It is also worth noting that, while I am arguing that Kierkegaard’s authorship contains a philosophical core which basically follows the structure of absolute idealism, I am not simply arguing that Kierkegaard’s unique place as a thinker can be reduced to little more than a ‘religious reading of Idealism by a quirky Dane’. On the contrary, while I will argue that the core ontological structure of his project follows idealism, Kierkegaard pushes his thought a step further than the idealists were willing to go, by emphasizing that if reflection is not negated by decision and action, philosophy remains little more than an intellectual exercise that is incapable of changing the world, or the self, in any useful way.[6] This is why the present work is considering the ontological and political as inextricably linked in the work of Kierkegaard, as his slight modification of idealism opens up a set of political possibilities which prefigure much of what has emerged in twenty-first-century post-idealist philosophy.
2.2 Actuality
One of the crucial ways in which we can begin to draw this slight, but meaningful, distinction between Kierkegaard’s project and that of the German idealist is through considering the differences in their respective understanding and use of key philosophical concepts. In particular, the most obvious way that we can distinguish Kierkegaard’s position from that of the idealists is through considering their different uses of the concept of actuality. This difference is so crucial as Kierkegaard begins The Concept of Anxiety with an analysis of how contemporary philosophy makes a crucial error when actuality is considered as a part of logic because for Kierkegaard contingency, which has no place in logic, is an essential part of actuality.[7] As Jon Stewart has shown in his work Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Kierkegaard’s critique of the conflation of actuality and logic has little to do with the work of Hegel and more to do with the Hegelian system of logic offered by Danish philosopher and theologian Adolph Peter Adler, who ends his work on logic with a section titled ‘Actuality.’[8] Kierkegaard’s issue is that thinkers like Adler believe that the categories of logic are capable of accurately describing existential reality, or in other words, that logic can give us an account of the actuality of human existence. As Stewart shows, however, the problem is not that Adler and others misuse the concept of actuality in the way outlined by Kierkegaard, but, instead, Kierkegaard and Adler mean completely different things when they use the term actuality.
For Kierkegaard, the term actuality signifies existential actuality, meaning the world of human experience and existence rather than a logical or metaphysical category. Following this, Kierkegaard’s critique is that Adler’s work attempts to account for actuality (which is always dynamically developing) in the language of logic (which is objective and stable). This also relates to Kierkegaard’s usage of the terms immanence and transcendence in relation to this critique of the conflation of logic and actuality. It is reasonable to interpret these terms in the light of their contemporary ontological usage, but for Kierkegaard they do not bear the same ontological consequences. Put simply, immanence for Kierkegaard signifies a closed and stable concept, akin to the sort of logic he is speaking of in The Concept of Anxiety. Transcendence, on the other hand, is a dynamic and developing concept that is related to the freedom and possibility of developing reality.
While actuality is an existential category for Kierkegaard, for Adler (and the German idealists) it is a purely conceptual category. Following Hegel, Adler associates the actual with the rational, meaning that the actual is that which corresponds to rational concepts. In this sense, actuality is not concerned with the dynamic freedom of the becoming of existential actuality but is rather only concerned with the rationality of concepts. This is why Adler can conclude his Logic with a section titled ‘Actuality’, as he is merely pointing out that when a concept is fully rational, it can then be considered actual. Following this, it is clear that Kierkegaard’s critique is merely the product of his having a different understanding of actuality, as a Hegelian logician would likely agree with Kierkegaard in affirming that logic as a mode of conceptual understanding has little to offer our understanding of existential reality.
While Stewart’s analysis is crucial in allowing us to disassociate Kierkegaard’s critique of the conflation of actuality and logic in The Concept of Anxiety from a substantial critique of idealist philosophy, it also runs the risk of allowing a reading in which this misunderstanding removes any philosophical significance from Kierkegaard’s emphasis on actuality as an existential category. While Kierkegaard does critique Adler over a conceptual misunderstanding, his emphasis on philosophical thought beginning from existential actuality helps us to understand the unique position developed through his critique of idealism. For Kierkegaard, thought should not attempt to begin from any position of stability existing outside of the dynamic nature of actuality, but rather the philosopher’s thought is always already fully immersed in this process of becoming. This is crucial as Kierkegaard believes that those who begin within thought will only ever remain in an infinite circle of logical reflection; on the other hand, by beginning with the acknowledgement that there is always something forever outside the circle of logical reflection, the culmination of thought necessarily leads out of reflection and back into actuality.
The biggest risk of Stewart’s historical account of Kierkegaard’s misunderstanding of the idealist conception of actuality is that this misunderstanding renders moot the uniqueness of Kierkegaard’s critique of a logical notion of actuality. Even if, as is the case, Kierkegaard was operating with a misunderstanding as to the nature of actuality in idealist thought, his emphasis on the contingency of lived (existential) actuality offers a modification of the idealist position that prefigures much post-Hegelian and contemporary continental thought. As I will outline later in the current chapter, this critique is what subsequently enables Kierkegaard to be read as inaugurating his own form of post-Hegelian ontology.
This discussion of the meaning of the term actuality in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety opens the path to discuss another concept that plays a crucial role in this text and the first moments of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project, the notion of grounds. One of the primary philosophical motives behind The Concept of Anxiety is a critique of the grounds of philosophical speculation and, in particular, any sort of speculation which believes itself capable of beginning immediately, without presupposition or reference to anything outside itself. As I outlined in the previous chapter, the successive attempts to develop a complete system of absolute idealism entailed a series of re-beginnings. Fichte began with a subjective idealism in which the being of the subject was dependent on its own activity, Schelling moved past this brand of Fichtean idealism to develop a theory in which mind and nature were related in a process of becoming, and Hegel offered an absolute idealism in which the development of thought and being could be accounted for by the process of spirit overcoming its negative relations to substance. Kierkegaard’s critique of immediacy entails a critique of many of these idealist attempts to ground the activity of philosophical speculation, in particular as he sees many of these attempts failing to account for the facticity of the existing individual who is carrying out the activity of philosophical reflection.
Terry Pinkard has noted that, according to Kierkegaard, Hegel could not show how his logical system had anything to say about the actual world as his presupposition-less beginning allows him to avoid considering the place of the particular thinker in the world.[9] In this sense, Kierkegaard sees the Hegelian position as positing that thought serves as the grounds for its own process of reflection. As I outlined in the previous chapter, Schelling’s position is able to respond to Hegel’s presupposition-less thought through positing that there is an aspect of un-pre-thinkable being, or an urgrund, which forever precedes the activity of the thinking subject and creates the conditions for both subjective and ontological freedom.
The distinction between the positions of Hegel and Schelling, and the consequences of this distinction, have been clearly outlined in the previously mentioned recent work of Markus Gabriel and Slavoj Žižek in which they argue that for Hegel, being is always an aspect of the activity of reflection, but for Schelling reflection always depends on un-pre-thinkable being.[10] This means that for Schelling reflection indicates the brute facticity of existence that always bears a mythological remainder of being that the activity of reflection can never fully account for. Following Schelling, Gabriel and Žižek argue that reflection is always based on an experience of the ‘trauma of God’, or put differently, that reflection is the product of the fact that something absolute exists forever outside of the recuperative activity of reflection. In this sense, reflection is never able to properly account for, or presuppose, its own existence, and this leaves its existence as ‘whyless’ and grounded in contingency. We can here see how Kierkegaard would seem to be on the side of Schelling regarding the question of the grounds of reflection; as I have previously noted, in the early pages of The Concept of Anxiety Kierkegaard critiques philosophies attempting to ground their understanding of actuality in logic for the fact that logic has no place for contingency, which is an essential part of the actual. Kierkegaard, like Schelling, believes that this ‘trauma of God’ (which we will later see is called ‘anxiety’) leaves us without immediate grounds and, as such, ungrounded in the facticity of contingency.[11] It makes sense then that Pinkard refers to Kierkegaard as a ‘Post-Schellingian Hegelian’,[12] as Kierkegaard takes Schelling’s critique of any immediate grounds of reflection to bear on the absolute idealism of Hegel. That is to say, in many senses Kierkegaard replaces Hegel’s ’presupposition-less beginning’ with a Schellingian urgrund and then continues from there in a largely Hegelian fashion.
2.3 An Introduction to Anxiety
Now that the stakes of the present discussion have been adequately outlined, this chapter will proceed as follows: I will begin by offering my own systematic reading of The Concept of Anxiety. I am explicitly using the term systematic to describe this reading, as my aim is to draw out an account of ontological structure in this work that will set the stage to further extend my interpretation to the realms of the anthropological and the socio-political. Thus my focus will primarily reside on a systematic interpretation of anxiety and the ontological conditions that lead to anxiety as conceived by Kierkegaard. After this I will move on to a specifically ontological account of the stakes of this text, in which I will use the term fractured dialectic to characterize the systematic core of Kierkegaard’s philosophical and religious project. I will conclude this chapter with a brief discussion of the social and political implications of this ontological structure. Through this analysis of anxiety I will show why freedom is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project, and why this freedom is ontologically grounded and not just an illusion of subjective experience.
Now that the philosophical stakes of my argument are clear, it is worth briefly introducing the text, The Concept of Anxiety, and its place in Kierkegaard’s authorship as a whole and in particular its place in my ontological reading of Kierkegaard’s project. The subtitle to this work is ‘A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin’, which is a misleading description on a variety of levels. Anyone familiar with the text will immediately note the irony contained in considering this work to be in any way simple, as this work could easily be regarded as one of Kierkegaard’s most conceptually difficult. Along with this, the remainder of the title gives the impression that the book is concerned with considering the psychological effects of the theological concept of hereditary sin. It is worth immediately noting that Kierkegaard does not mean psychological in the contemporary sense, but rather this term signifies the doctrine of both absolute and subjective spirit in a properly Hegelian sense. As we will see more clearly, spirit is the name given to the development of freedom, so the psychological is concerned with providing a systematic account of the dynamic development of spirit (CA 23–24).
Along with this proper understanding of the meaning of the psychological in the context of this text, it is worth considering what Kierkegaard means by ‘Hereditary Sin’, and in particular, the place of the theological concept of sin in this investigation. While it is easy for one reading with a purely philosophical intention to ‘tune out’ when Kierkegaard begins a discussion of hereditary sin, which seems to imply little more than the guilty feeling experienced by the Christian believer when transgressing against God’s law, on further analysis it becomes clear that Kierkegaard’s usage of the concept of sin is just as much ontological as it is theological, as it remains outside the realm of any particular theological dogma. In this text, and in Kierkegaard’s systematic project as a whole, we can consider sin as the negation of the absolute, or put differently, sin is absolute negation. As John Elrod has phrased it, for Kierkegaard, ‘sin is the abandonment of immanent self-reflection in the consciousness of one’s self as an impossibility’.[13] This negation is the individual subject absolutely negating its own grounds in an attempt to assert its autonomy in the face of an absolute that exists absolutely independently of it. This space opened up by absolute negation is thus the space of freedom. This absolute negation is the creation of the gap between subject and object in which spirit is able to operate freely, and in more ontological terms, spirit emerges through the cracks in being, in which subject and object (or thought and being) are severed. It is worth noting that it is not the operation of the subject that creates this gap, but rather absolute negation is the act by which the subject is trying to distance itself from this gap and from any sorts of dependency on objectivity. This negation is the bitter recognition by the subject that it is not the absolute and is not completely responsible for the conditions of its own existence.
The clearest way to consider this text is to begin at the beginning, which is itself a reflection on the problems of beginnings in speculative philosophy. In this reading, I will argue that, rather than holding any serious structural (or systematic) disagreement with the idealists, Kierkegaard’s constructive critique is largely to do with systems of idealism that attempt to begin from thought alone in a presupposition-less manner. Particularly as it pertains to CA, Kierkegaard is concerned with drawing a distinction between the realms of logic and actuality (or thought and being); arguing that subjective idealism fails insomuch as it conflates the two and posits that the structure of logic is adequate to describe the lived experience of actuality. In particular, Kierkegaard is here concerned with problematizing any notion that actuality can have an immediate beginning in a manner akin to the operations of logic, and equally that logic provides the conceptual tools necessary to adequately theorize freedom and contingency. For Kierkegaard, any absolute beginning absolutely precedes our reflective activity and any claim that reflection can grasp this beginning is necessarily misguided.
Through this critique, Kierkegaard develops a theory of the self which is properly ‘grounded’ only insomuch as it is ungrounded in a manner akin to the urgrund posited as the un-pre-thinkable grounds of being by Schelling in his Freedom essay. Thus, through his deliberations on the nature of sin, Kierkegaard develops a critique of the tendency to make an absolutely immediate beginning the grounds of the self and the act of philosophy as such and instead develops a theory of ungrounded subjectivity which splits off from any form of immediacy through a radical encounter with the instant of its own abyssal freedom.
This encounter with the radical freedom signified by the gap separating the subject from immediate access to its own grounds produces the experience of anxiety by the subject. This anxiety is not an anxiety about a set of possible outcomes, or a determinate content, but is rather an anxiety about the absolute nothingness which interrupts any claim of the subject to autonomy. It is an anxiety that is precisely about nothing. In this sense we could say that the ontological content of the experience of anxiety is similar to the thematic content of the sitcom Seinfeld; it is literally about nothing. It is not a matter of being without epistemological access to some underlying structure or reason but, rather, the experience of realizing that there is no underlying structure or meaning that we could ever access, thus there simply is only nothing. In other terms, we could say that anxiety is the experience of realizing that there is no higher order necessity existing outside of, or before, our experience of actuality.
Kierkegaard begins the introduction to CA with an explanation of the place of (philosophical) science in modern thought as that which commits the ‘man of science’ to ‘the service of totality’. Here, parodying a certain brand of Hegelian thought (in particular the work of Adler), Kierkegaard aims to problematize speculative science, or philosophy, not because of a bad employment of logic but rather for what he sees as the problematic conflation of logic with actuality in this sort of thought. Kierkegaard explains this:
Thus when an author entitles the last section of the logic ‘Actuality’, he thereby gains the advantage of making it appear that in logic the highest has already been achieved, or if one prefers, the lowest, for neither logic nor actuality is served by placing actuality in the Logic. (CA 4)
Kierkegaard is here beginning to point out the irony inherent in the notion that logic, a completely ideal mode of speculative thought, could adequately grasp the lived particularity of actuality. He goes on:
Actuality is not served thereby, for contingency, which is an essential part of the actual, cannot be admitted within the realm of logic. (CA 10)
And:
Logic is not served thereby, for if logic has thought actuality, it has included something that it cannot assimilate, it has appropriated at the beginning what it should only [presuppose]. (CA 10)
The crucial aspect of this passage for my reading is Kierkegaard’s claim that logic oversteps its bounds precisely at the moment at which it includes that which it cannot assimilate or, in other words, takes as its starting point that which it cannot adequately account for in its own terms. This is why he says that it has appropriated that which it should only presuppose. This point is as logical as it is ontological for Kierkegaard, as he is accusing (speculative) logic of claiming to be in possession of its own foundational moment (or grounds) rather than acknowledging the necessity of presupposing a primary ontological event that remains forever beyond the recuperative activity of logical reflection.
At this point it is crucial to note that the critique of actuality Kierkegaard offers here falls short in the manner explained earlier in this chapter; namely, he is confusing the idealist notion of actuality as a logical (or rational) category with his own notion of actuality as an existential category concerned with the particularity of lived experience. So while the idealists are merely attempting to use logic as a science to provide a grounds for actuality in which something being actual merely equates to its also being rational, Kierkegaard accuses these speculative thinkers of attempting to use logic to provide an account of the pre-rational grounds of existential actuality. This conceptual misunderstanding does not render Kierkegaard’s critique without merit, however, as he still makes two strong criticisms against various forms of idealism. The first is to do with subjective idealism, which attempts to posit an absolute beginning from within the activity of reflection itself. Kierkegaard’s critique would hold here as subjective idealism attempts to ground philosophical speculation in the logical activity of reflection, rather than recognizing that the activity of actuality operates independently of this reflection. The second manner in which this critique helps us understand Kierkegaard’s position is through his argument that logic fails insomuch as it cannot include an account of contingency, which is an essential part of the actual. This critique helps give us a clue as to what form of logic Kierkegaard is against. It seems here that Kierkegaard is opposed to any form of logic that considers itself to be capable of both totality and consistency.[14] Kierkegaard’s problem with a system of logic claiming to be capable of describing reality as a totalized structure is that it would provide nothing more than the sort of logical immanence discussed earlier. Thus, this form of logic attempts to provide a detailed account of not only what currently is but also of what could ever possibly be. This form of logic would thus rule out any ability to include contingency, as the possibility of contingency signifies the potential existence of possibilities that are not currently accounted for by the operation of a system of logic. This brings us back to the distinction Kierkegaard wants to draw between immanence and transcendence. Because reality is itself engaged in a process of becoming, Kierkegaard is critical of any conceptual framework that attempts to explain reality in a consistent and totalizing framework, as reality as a dynamic process is always capable of transcending our own conceptual frameworks. We will soon see how this critique is necessary to the ontological picture Kierkegaard presents in this text.
As with many of Kierkegaard’s philosophical discussions, however, his critique is not levelled primarily at the level of the purely ontological, but rather with the properly lived ethico-religious experience of the ontological or, as it is referred to in this text, ‘dogmatics’. This concern with dogmatics leads Kierkegaard to explore the ethical implications of the logical conception of immediacy, or ‘the immediate’. This misplaced notion of beginning seeps into dogmatics by affecting its understanding of faith. According to Kierkegaard,
Faith loses by being regarded as the immediate, since it has been deprived of what lawfully belongs to it, namely, its historical presupposition. Dogmatics loses thereby, because it does not begin where it properly should begin, namely, within the scope of an earlier beginning. (CA 10)
Whereas Kierkegaard previously critiqued speculative logic for assuming itself capable of accounting for its own beginning within its own circle of logical reflection, he now exemplifies what this looks like in the context of ethico-religious existence. In regard to faith, this conception of immediacy leads to the assumption that faith can adequately account for its own starting point or, in other words, that the starting point of faith is immanent to the activity of faith itself. In opposition to this, Kierkegaard wants to argue that dogmatics and faith can be grounded within the scope of an earlier beginning that lies outside the bounds of reflection. This means that faith when properly considered should reflect the sort of ungrounded ontological starting point previously discussed, as rather than being capable of accounting for its own beginning, faith is the acknowledgement of being grounded in something that is infinitely prior to its own beginning, and forever outside of faith’s own circle of understanding.
My discussion of the introduction to CA is important because without it, this text could be read as simply being concerned with the psychological and theological aspects of the self and its experience of anxiety. In this sense it is telling that Kierkegaard begins the text with this introduction, as it is almost explicitly philosophical in its critical considerations of idealist conceptions of logic and immediacy. This is crucial because the five main sections of the work switch to a predominately mythological tone and structure.[15] My contention will remain, however, that when reading this work in the context of the critique of idealism outlined in the introduction, the mythological examples and discussions can be seen as exemplifications of the problems that emerge when the logical claims of idealism are placed in the service of actuality or ethico-religious existence. Along with this, I aim to flesh out my claim that the critique levelled in the introduction has just as much to do with the ontological as it does the logical and that one of the primary stakes of this work is whether or not philosophy can claim to ever grasp any immediate notion of beginning at the heart of its ontological claims. I will contend throughout this chapter that this ontological critique places Kierkegaard clearly in line with the notions of urgrund and un-pre-thinkable being as they are developed in the middle and late works of Schelling. While at the level of ontology this work corresponds most obviously to the work of Schelling, at the level of the development of a theory of subjectivity, or consciousness, the problematics Kierkegaard seems to be responding to in this work are more closely related to the opposing theory of subjectivity as developed by Fichte.
2.4 The Instant
As I have just argued, one of the key philosophical questions reckoned with by Kierkegaard in CA is the question of the logical beginnings of philosophical reflection and, in particular, the lack of an adequate account of beginning in the thought of many of the subjective idealists. In his recent study, Kierkegaard’s Instant, David Kangas frames the project of CA in relation to Kant and Fichte, for whom ‘the originary conditions of knowledge . . . lie in an irreducible unity of self-consciousness, its presence to itself’.[16] In light of this, Kangas sees Kierkegaard as taking a step further back than either Kant or Fichte willed themselves to venture by asking how self-consciousness comes to posit itself in the first place. When Kierkegaard takes this step beneath any principle of subjective self-positing, which we can consider a subjective form of idealism, he discovers anxiety, which is the non-dialectical relation of the self to nothing, or non-being, which opens up the very possibility for the self to attempt to serve as its own grounds. The primary critique here is that any theory which begins from the assumption of the original unity of self-consciousness as a consistent substance leaves out any sort of un-pre-thinkable being which resides outside the bounds of the reflective activity of consciousness. This lack of anything outside the unity of self-consciousness leaves little room for the freedom and pure possibility-of-possibility which are so important to Kierkegaard’s ontological and existential project.
In response to this consistent model of self-consciousness (in which there is no gap between the objective and subjective aspects of the self), Kierkegaard outlines his own ontology of the self in response to the Fichtean account of the self in which ‘I=I’. This account is one that is made possible by the non-ground of anxiety which allows for the original act of self-positing, or negation, which he refers to as sin, and the subsequent freedom which comes through the self’s awareness that it has no corresponding object, or more precisely, the self experiences this anxiety in the awareness that the something it corresponds to is precisely nothing. The originary act of self takes place in what Kierkegaard refers to as the moment or instant [Øieblikket]. According to Kierkegaard, ‘in the individual life, anxiety is the instant [moment]’ (CA 81). This originary anxiety is thus the event through which the self breaks with the supposed innocence of immediacy and finds itself ungrounded in its experience of radical freedom and possibility. Through this process, the self becomes aware of the abyssal freedom at the heart of its own existence and of the very structure of reality in general.
Understanding this critique of the position of innocence, which equates to immediacy at the philosophical level, requires that we further explicate the manner in which Kierkegaard uses the concept of sin in this text. In particular, I will attempt to disassociate this concept from its traditional theological and moral implications. When Kierkegaard discusses sin in CA, he is not intending to initiate a pious discourse on Christian morality. Instead, sin is a psychological category, meaning it is concerned with spirit, and one that carries an ontological significance as well, as Kierkegaard states:
The subject of which psychology treats must be something in repose that remains in a restless repose, not something restless that always either produces itself or is repressed. But this abiding something out of which sin constantly arises, not by necessity (for a becoming by necessity is a state, as, for example the whole history of the plant is a state) but by freedom—this abiding something, this predisposing presupposition, sin’s real possibility, is a subject of interest for psychology. (CA 21)
Now, the first thing to note about this passage is, once again, that by psychology Kierkegaard is referring to the study of subjective spirit, which is the study of freedom. He notes here that this abiding something, out of which sin constantly arises, is not something that comes to be out of necessity but wholly by freedom. He refers to this abiding something as this ‘predisposing presupposition’, and says that this is ‘sin’s real possibility’. Here he is distinguishing a ‘restless repose’ from something restless that produces itself; put otherwise, between a freedom that makes no claim to any sort of historical necessity and the sin of presupposing that one is grounded in their own activity outside of the restlessness of freedom.
This is why Kierkegaard will move on to note that, while psychology has been called the ‘doctrine of subjective spirit’, when pursued in regard of sin, it will pass over into the doctrine of absolute spirit. What we can gather from this is that through a psychological investigation into the nature and origin of sin in the individual, we end up in the realm of absolute spirit. Put more succinctly, by investigating the nature of subjective freedom, we move into an exploration of the ontological grounds of this subjective freedom. This is a crucial notion for the aims of the present work, as one of my fundamental claims will be that Kierkegaard’s explicit theory of subjective consciousness and spirit contains an implicit ontological structure that accounts for this freedom.
It is also important to note what Kierkegaard means when he writes that ‘the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race’ (CA 28). He makes this comment in a discussion of Adam’s sin in which he outlines what it means to say that his sin is hereditary. Theological connotations aside, here Kierkegaard points out that no human is brought into existence divorced from a particular historical situation. While we are free on a subjective level, this freedom does not allow us to exist outside of the historical conditions of the human race. Kierkegaard goes on to state that ‘at every moment, the individual is both himself and the race’ (CA 28), so our freedom is always held in tension with the historical conditions created by humanity in general. Kierkegaard goes on to note:
This is man’s perfection viewed as a state. It is also a contradiction, but a contradiction is always the expression of a task, and a task is movement, but a movement that as a task is the same as that to which the task is directed is an historical movement. (CA 28–29)
As we have already seen, at least in part, Kierkegaard considers the relationship within consciousness itself to be a contradiction, and this internal contradiction is what produces the movement of freedom within the individual. The individual is subsequently held in contradiction with the history of the whole human race and, once again, this contradiction leads to a task, which is a movement. In this sense we see a move from the responsibility to be oneself present in Kierkegaard’s theory of consciousness to the task of participating in the whole of history inaugurated in the contradiction between the individual and the historical human race. This emphasis on the manner in which the individual is historically situated should serve as a sign that Kierkegaard does not simply believe in the ‘absolute freedom’ of the individual in a crass existentialist sense but is keenly aware of the historical facticity that each individual human is a part of. As he states, ‘perfection in oneself is therefore perfect participation in the whole’ (CA 29). Adam is thus significant, as he, as the first human being, ‘is at once himself and the race’ (CA 29). At the same time, Kierkegaard notes that Adam is not ‘outside of the race’ and that subsequent humanity is historically linked to this first individual and his first sin.
To begin to further understand the place of sin for Kierkegaard, we must first consider the concept of innocence. Kierkegaard’s use of innocence is as his ethical match for the idealist notion of immediacy, which for Kierkegaard can belong only to the operations of logic (CA 35). According to Kierkegaard, ‘in innocence, man is not qualified a spirit but is psychically qualified in immediate unity with his natural condition’ (CA 41). This picture of man is prior to both sin and the instant of self-positing. Kangas describes this innocence as ‘a state that hovers between being and non-being—a pre-differentiated, virtual, or dreamlike state.’[17] Kierkegaard goes on to state ‘dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself’ (CA 41). This state of innocence is, according to Kierkegaard, ignorance, but not ignorance of something, rather an ignorance of the self as such and an ignorance of the actual possibility and necessity located outside of this dreamlike state. Kierkegaard’s aim here is to articulate the state of the self prior to its moment of self-positing, which is innocence. In this state, there is no awareness of freedom or possibility, and the model of the innocent self could rightly be called ‘non-dialectical’, as the self has yet to be awoken from its existential slumber and has yet to begin the process of becoming which qualifies the self as spirit.
Kierkegaard next reveals the ‘profound secret of innocence’, that it is at the same time anxiety. But if innocence is not yet the fully realized self, what sort of anxiety is experienced in innocence? According to Kierkegaard:
The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasps for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety. (CA 42)
Kierkegaard notes that in innocence, spirit relates to itself as the pure possibility-of-possibility, and as Kangas points out, this ‘innocence is groundless and whyless’.[18] Kierkegaard then goes on to note the importance of this initial appearance of anxiety in innocence:
That anxiety makes its appearance is the pivot upon which everything turns. Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit. (CA 43)
This is a crucial moment, not only for Kierkegaard’s development of anxiety but also for the underlying ontology of the self that emerges in this work. As Kierkegaard develops this account of the structure of subjectivity, man is made up of both a physical and psychical aspect that are able to relate to each other only in relation to spirit. This third, spirit, is what allows the absolutely opposed elements of the psychical (the subjective) and the physical (the objective) to relate. In innocence, spirit is not fully actualized, or put in motion, but present as ‘immediate’ or ‘dreaming’ (CA 43). In this state, innocence is anxiety, because it is ignorance about nothing. Kierkegaard goes on to state, ‘innocence still is, but only a word is required and then ignorance is concentrated’ (CA 44). To understand what Kierkegaard means here by saying that ‘only a word is required’, it is necessary that we follow Kierkegaard and recall the biblical account of the first sin of Adam.
In his original state, before his encounter with Eve and the serpent in the garden, Adam was in a state of innocence. He existed in a dreamlike state wherein the only possibility he was aware of was a sheer possibility-of-possibility itself. He was ignorant about nothing, ignorant about his own possibility as a self. But then came the word, meaning the word of prohibition, ‘the enigmatic word’, according to Kierkegaard (CA 44). This is the word of God, which said that Adam could eat from any tree in the garden, except from the tree of knowledge of good and evil. This word, the word of prohibition, is the word that awoke ignorance. Whereas before the emergence of this word, innocence was ignorant of itself, now it is aware that it can do something, because it was prohibited from doing this very thing. Prohibition had thus awoken desire, as language here creates the space for possibility. According to Kierkegaard, ‘the prohibition induces in him anxiety, for the prohibition awakes in him freedom’s possibility’ (CA 44). At this point innocence is reaching its limit, as Kierkegaard says:
The infinite possibility of being able that was awakened by the prohibition now draws closer, because this possibility points to a possibility as its sequence. (CA 45)
This awoken possibility thus leads to the act of Adam’s original sin. We know that, according to the biblical narrative, Adam and Eve (after being persuaded by the serpent) eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; immediately after this act they cover their naked flesh in shame, and this is said to be the first sin. But beyond the religious and mythical meaning behind this act, Kierkegaard seems to have a clear philosophical motive in utilizing this notion of sin. By sin Kierkegaard is describing the act by which the self initially posits itself as its own ground through the original act of negation. This is clearly articulated by Kangas:
At the outermost point, facing the Afgrund of whylessness—of not having any determinate reason to be, or ground—the self posits itself by making itself into its own ground. . . . In this instant it wills its sovereignty over the Afgrund by reducing the possibility of possibility to possibility-for-x, some calculable possibility.[19]
In this act, the self posits itself as its own ground. This self-positing is similar to the previously discussed account of the Fichtean ego, but for Kierkegaard this act of self-positing is not the consummate act of self-realization. At this stage, the self encounters the terrifying abyss of freedom and experiences anxiety at this encounter but subsequently retreats further into itself and attempts to become its own ground. Kierkegaard describes this feeling of anxiety in a passage worth quoting at length:
Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for supposed he had not looked down. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. (CA 61)
At this point the self acts in one of two ways. In the first, which we have previously discussed, the self retreats from the abyss and attempts to posit itself as its own ground. The second option, and the one Kierkegaard associates with a true freedom and positive anxiety, is the refusal of self-positing and an affirmation of the abyssal nature of freedom. Kierkegaard describes this process as an ‘absolute sinking’:
He sank absolutely, but then in turn he emerged from the depth of the abyss lighter than all the troublesome and terrible things in life. (CA 158)
In this absolute sinking, the self affirms its inability to remain identical to itself, and in this instant an irrevocable parting of the self from itself takes place. Kierkegaard exemplifies this in the text:
Thus when Ingeborg looks out over the sea after Frithiof, this is a picture of what is expressed in the figurative word. An outburst of her emotion, a sigh or a word, already has as a sound more of the determination of time and is more present as something that is vanishing and does not have in it so much of the presence of the eternal. For this reason a sigh, a word, etc. have power to relieve the soul of the burdensome weight, precisely because the burden, when merely expressed, already begins to become something of the past. (CA 87)
Kangas offers an explanation of the significance of this passage:
This refers to the moment in Frithiof’s Saga where Ingeborg watches her lover disappear over the horizon—a parting that turns out to be irrevocable. Vigilius could hardly have selected a better image to capture the ambiguity of the instant: time and eternity part, like two lovers, whose only connection then becomes that of desire. The desire, inseparable from a ‘burdensome weight’, arises in the parting—desire as a relation without relation, a synthesis that does not syn-thesize. . . . Frithof’s glance becomes commensurate with the eternal only in the irreparable loss of its object: irreparability is the eternal cut into the present, the fateful conflict.[20]
This passage is crucial as it highlights the manner in which the affirmation of freedom signifies an irreparable cut with not only the present structure of temporal representation but also a break between the self and its foundation that can never be repaired. Rather than rely on itself for a sense of ground, Kierkegaard wants to affirm the absolute loss of ground that comes through an affirmation of freedom’s anxiety.
Following this, it is worth briefly remarking on the place of Kierkegaard’s notion of the instant (or moment), specifically as it functions within The Concept of Anxiety. The concept has both ontological and historical-temporal importance throughout this work and much of Kierkegaard’s corpus. Kangas gets at the heart of the ontological meaning of the instant when he says:
The instant, in other words, is not allowed to be reduced to mere evanescence or illusion; rather, it is precisely the real. The event is not a passage to reality, but reality itself. . . . This essential gap, the excessive futurity of the eternal, awakens precisely anxiety. And anxiety imposes the most strenuous demand upon the subject.[21]
It is important to note, first of all, that this notion of the instant as event is one of the crucial moments in which any philosophical reading of Kierkegaard breaks from traditional idealism, as for Kierkegaard the instant always falls outside of all dialectical recuperation in its ‘excessive futurity’. Not only is the self originally given to itself in the instant, but all future possibility and novelty are made possible through the recurrence of the instant as well. In this moment, the gap between the finite and infinite, the possible and the necessary and the subjective and the objective is momentarily bridged and reality itself is made present. This instantaneous experience of the real takes on the character of a traumatic encounter that subsequently re-orients the subject’s relation to an uncertain future.
One of the crucial aspects of this concept, which Kangas rightfully points out, is that the instant is not a moment in which one escapes reality or gets a glimpse of some transcendent plane of otherness but is rather the real itself. This is why Kierkegaard associates both terror and anxiety with the instant. This also relates to the opening problem of the book, the problem of the origin, or beginning, of self-consciousness. Rather than attempt to provide a logical, or scientific, account for the emergence of self-consciousness, Kierkegaard uses this notion of the instant to point out this primordial event of self which comes before all other finite beginnings.
This notion of the instant is so crucial to a philosophical and systematic understanding of Kierkegaard’s authorship because it provides a manner in which to think of the possibility of novelty as well as the subjective hope in future possibility while still allowing the overall dialectical structure of the self and reality that is emerging in our reading thus far. The structure of subjectivity and the development of consciousness provided by Kierkegaard are clearly dialectical, but there is always a remainder lying outside the field of what is dialectically recuperable, and this remainder is the space from which the instant can emerge.
The instant also expands our understanding of Kierkegaard’s relationship to idealism. Kierkegaard says both that ‘ethics proposes to bring ideality into actuality’ and that ‘ethics points to ideality as a task’ (CA 16). Following this, we could say that in the instant one encounters the ideal and subsequent to this encounter can take on the task of attempting to actualize ideality. This happens in the wake of an encounter between two lovers in which there is an instantaneous experience of love, and after this encounter both lovers faithfully attempt to actualize the ideal moment of love they both experienced. The instant takes place in that gap between the ideal and the actual, and just as it offers a glimpse of the ideal with the swiftness of ‘a blink of the eye’ (CA 87), this instant ‘also points toward that which follows’ (CA 81). This momentary experience of ideality that takes place in the instant thus opens up the possibility of a future in which a sequence of actualizing the ideality contained in that instant is made possible. Thus for Kierkegaard, it is not the case that we can never speak about the ideal, but for him idealism signifies only that which we can encounter which then inaugurates a subjective trajectory for us. This means that, while there may be the possibility of an ideal structure, it is up to us to bring that ideal into actuality through our own activity. We could say that the instant does not merely provide a momentary glimpse of the absolute as some sort of divine ontological vision to be adored or admired, but rather in this instant reality presents itself as a task which opens up a new trajectory for the life of the subject.
2.5 Freedom
This discussion of the instant leads us into one of the other crucial aspects at play in this text, which is Kierkegaard’s emphasis on freedom. While Kierkegaard’s theorization of freedom is often interpreted in a certain existentialist manner in which freedom simply signifies the lack of any sort of structure or necessary purpose behind existence, I will here show how this is never a merely abstract freedom in which the individual is not constrained by anything other than his or her own subjective desire, but instead, this freedom is always the entanglement of meaninglessness and possibility as they clash in the structure of the spiritual subject.
We must first note that for Kierkegaard spirit itself is freedom, so rather than considering spirit to be a stand-in term for human subjectivity in general, or the collective spirit of any society or group of individuals, spirit itself is the activity of freedom when it operates at the level of consciousness. This awareness, of the fundamental qualification of humanity as spirit, or freedom, is experienced by individuals in the moment of anxiety in which they are made aware that their own being is forever split from its original grounds and that they can never possess the sort of absolute self-autonomy they desire. It is thus in its desire to be wholly immanent and consistent with itself, the sort of subjectivity in which I=I, that the subject desperately attempts to avoid the actual conditions of freedom. When the subject is shaken out of its own feeble attempt to exist as its own absolute, it is made fully aware of the abyss of un-pre-thinkable being which forever elides the recuperative activity of its own consciousness. This sort of freedom is not something that is socially produced or learned but is rather an effect of the ontological structure of the self and reality as such. In a sort of structural repetition, the self is both forever disconnected from its objective ontological grounds and from its own objective being. As we will see in the next section of this chapter, these gaps characterize the fundamental ontological structure of Kierkegaard’s thought.
This means that there is no determinate value or consistent system at the ontological level which determines that things will be one way and not another, or which will determine what is and is not possible for the individual. Freedom is, rather, the realization that it is possibility as such which sits outside of the activity of the subject and forever haunts its attempts to completely wrap its own existence up with some form of consistent and necessary grounds. As Kierkegaard states, ‘Anxiety is freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility’ (CA 42). So it is the fact that possibility itself is possible that produces the experience of anxiety in the subject, and this anxiety is the actuality of freedom, because if this freedom were not actual, then the subject would have nothing to be anxious about.
So the anxiety experienced by the subject as he or she gazes into the utter whylessness of his or her own existence is the realization that freedom itself is primary and that this freedom is the pure possibility-of-possibility, meaning the lack of any determinate ground or reason at the heart of existence or experience. This freedom is subsequently characterized by no inherent value or necessary content, and one cannot say that this ontological freedom leads to anything necessarily good nor anything necessarily evil; both are possible. Kierkegaard goes on to describe the entanglement that characterizes this sort of freedom:
Anxiety is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom, where freedom is not free in itself but entangled, not by necessity, but in itself. If sin has come into the world by necessity (which is a contradiction) there can be no anxiety. (CA 49)
This concept, ‘entangled freedom’, is crucial to our understanding of the structure of subjectivity and freedom for Kierkegaard, as it notes the manner in which anxiety signifies a restriction of freedom in itself; put differently, freedom is never just a pure freedom detached from any necessity. Freedom is thus always entangled insomuch as our own activity is always entangled with the abyss of freedom lying outside of our own existence. We can never simply be free in an abstract sense, as our lives will always involve some sort of activity or project in which we aim at a sort of consistency, but the anxiety of freedom will always accompany us on this journey towards consistency. As Kierkegaard goes on to note, ‘in the moment actuality is posited, possibility walks by its side as a nothing that entices every thoughtless man’ (CA 49). Thus, freedom is not just a pure possibility but a possibility haunted by a nothing that reminds us that things could always be otherwise. This nothing is, in a sense, the constant reminder of a fundamental tension, or instability, at the heart of reality. So when an individual actualizes a possibility in a particular project, this nothing is a reminder of the possibility for failure or disaster in their attempt at actualization. The only consistent aspect for the subject’s existence is thus this experience of anxiety as the tension between the actualization of a possibility and the nothingness, or pure possibility-of-possibility, which forever disturbs the subject’s aspirations towards consistency and autonomy.
Following this, we see that the experience of anxiety further indicates that freedom is ontologically primary, not something that is merely the product of the subject’s mis-relation to a consistent and necessary structure of being, but rather something indicated by the fact that the only sort of relation one can have to reality is a mis-relation in which there can never be a consistency, or synthetic relation, between self and world, or even self and self. Freedom thus operates both at the level of the ontological and in the realm of consciousness for Kierkegaard. Ontologically, freedom is evident in our inability to ever escape the absolute possibility at the heart of being and subsequently in the impossibility of our attempts to absolutely negate ontological being in the hopes of being wholly self-autonomous. While the next chapter will be primarily concerned with the effects of this ontological freedom on the development of human consciousness, we can for the time being see that the same mis-relation, or inconsistency, which functions between the subject and reality is equally present within the internal operations of individual consciousness. The subject never simply ‘is what it is’, as the gaps in its own structure make possibility ever present. In this sense we can say that freedom is the terrifying experience of realizing that one is responsible for one’s own existence, while at the same time realizing that one lacks any sort of access to a consistent ontological structure which could provide a stable and explanatory system in which to ground one’s actual existence and activity.
This freedom is the underlying cause of anxiety, and Kierkegaard acknowledges that the effects of anxiety are not constrained to the experience of individual subjects but instead that anxiety is so pervasive that it has both objective and subjective effects. I will now briefly give an overview of the distinction drawn between these different forms, or effects, of anxiety.
While, thus far, anxiety has been discussed in a wholly subjective manner as that which is experienced by the individuals when facing the utter possibility and whylessness at the heart of their own existence, Kierkegaard briefly notes that there is also an objective form of anxiety. By this term, objective anxiety, Kierkegaard means ‘the reflection of sinfulness of the generation in the whole world’ (CA 57). Thus, the anxiety of individuals has left its trace on the world as a whole. Stephen Dunning refers to this as such: ‘Objective anxiety, [is] a for-itself moment in which the self projects its anxiety onto creation, which is the nonhuman other.’[22] For example, if anxiety has led some individuals in history to want to exist as their own foundation outside of their contingent historical conditions, they may have developed ways of existing, both personally and politically, which bear the mark of this anxiety. For example, any sort of nationalism, racism or sexism in which a group wants to make its particular existence foundational would bear the mark of an anxiety obsessed with a desire to build a wall around what, or who, ‘counts’ and what does not. In philosophical terms, this often leads to the denial of the possibility-of-possibility and an insistence on strict logical necessity. In historical terms, this means that we are never disconnected from the historical sequences and events that precede our coming to exist. Kierkegaard goes on to point out that objective anxiety is not just the reflection of sin in the (human) generation but is also ‘the effect of sin in nonhuman existence’ (CA 57), so sin not only leaves a trace on the whole of human history but equally on non-human creation. While he says little else about what could be called ‘nature’ in his authorship, here Kierkegaard is pointing out that the structure of nature itself contains a sense of ‘longing’ and ‘anxiety’ akin to what is experienced at the anthropological level by the human. After noting that some members of ‘Schelling’s School’ (CA 59) also think that sin has altered nature, he quickly ends the discussion, stating, ‘However, at this point I break off the digression, which for a moment I permitted to go beyond the boundary of this investigation’ (CA 60).
If objective anxiety is the effect of sin on the human race as a whole as well as on nonhuman creation, subjective anxiety is exactly what it sounds like, the effect of sin on individual subjectivity. Kierkegaard compares anxiety with dizziness and, in particular, equates this subjective experience of dizziness with the awareness of freedom. This occurs when the individual gazes for a moment into the abyss of freedom and subsequently attempts to ‘lay hold of finiteness to support itself’ (CA 61). He notes that in this instant ‘everything is changed’ (CA 61) and that between these two moments (the moment of gazing into the yawning abyss and of self-positing in response to this) there is the leap. The anxiety and guilt produced in this moment are the products of the self momentarily gazing into the abyss of absolute groundless possibility and subsequently attempting to hold onto something finite to re-ground itself. It is important to note that that which produces this anxiety is precisely nothing but because of the anxious subjective response, this nothing becomes ‘more and more a something’ (CA 61). Kierkegaard spends a bit of effort in outlining what exactly this nothing that becomes a something is. Nothing produces something through anxiety about the possibility of anxiety that produces sin as a furthering of the initial act of negation by which the self attempts to exist independently from anything outside of itself. This is why the initially anxious response to the experience of a nothing existing outside of the recuperative activity of the subject is capable of becoming ‘more and more a something’, as through the repetition of negation sin continues to grow as the anxiety over sin produces sin itself. Thus, reflecting on sin produces sin, so there must be some sort of break in this cycle if one is to ever break from the wholly negative activity of sin. Freedom, and in particular the free activity of faith, allows one to break free from this cycle of sin. This emphasis on the negative and positive elements of anxiety and freedom lead Kierkegaard to a crucial emphasis on the foundations of good and evil.
2.6 Good and Evil
The previous discussion of freedom is crucial and it lays the groundwork for the important distinction between good and evil Kierkegaard lays out in this text, as freedom operates in response to the possibility-of-possibility which makes neither good nor evil absolute or necessary. This is thus a further mark of the contingency at the heart of Kierkegaard’s ontology, and only under conditions of absolute freedom are good and evil equally possible.
To say that reality in inherently contingent (or inconsistent) means to equally say that there is no absolute good, or evil, at the core of being. Thus, we could not say in a religious fashion that God is the absolute and that, subsequently, the absolute is in itself Good. Instead, we could say that the core of being is characterized by contingency, or put otherwise, absolute indifference. This is a shift between necessity and contingency being ontologically primary, as to say that Good is ontologically primary, or necessary, would be to place an absolute necessity at the core of existence, and thus good would be primary and evil would only be defined by a lack of the Good that is ontologically primary, which would be an Augustinian view on evil. To say that contingency, or indifference, is ontologically primary is to instead say that both good and evil are secondary to an absolute contingency at the heart of being. This is also to say that both good and evil are equally possible and equally contingent, as neither is necessary while both are possible. Each has to be actualized in freedom, through the decisive activity of the individual. In more explicitly theological terms, Marcus Pound has remarked, ‘Kierkegaard’s God is not invoked as a neurotic defense of difference, but is instead the very principle of difference.’[23] Thus, placing God at the heart of being does not imply that the goodness of the divine is ontologically primary and that evil is subsequently a deprivation of this good, but rather that God represents the very principle of difference at the heart of being.
This connects back to the primacy of anxiety in the human experience of this freedom. While Kierkegaard’s example of ‘gazing into the abyss’ may seem more esoteric than any experience the average person is familiar with, most can relate to the experience of driving a car down a highway. While at first this may not strike one as the sort of experience that would lead to the experience of a terrifying ontology of freedom and subsequent anxiety, one only needs to think about the real freedom involved in this experience. When I drive down a highway in my car, there is nothing about my existence that means I will necessarily drive safely and stay in my own lane. At the same moment I am doing all that I can to ensure the safety of myself and other drivers on the road, I become aware that in a split second I could simply move the steering wheel violently to the left while increasing pressure on the gas pedal to initiate an accident that would likely kill me and a multiple of others in an act of senseless evil. While this may sound extreme, this terrifying freedom is at the core of many of the activities we carry out on a regular basis. This is why, in a certain sense, we find certain acts, such as the senseless shooting of innocent movie goers or school children by a lone gunman, so terrifying—not because of the sheer and unimaginable horror of the violence itself, but rather because of the fact that these senseless events could happen at any moment. All it takes is one individual making one decision to initiate terrible acts such as these. This is the true and anxiety-inducing nature of human freedom. We often act as if we live in a well-ordered world in which the simple following of natural necessity will keep us out of harm’s way, while in reality we are engaged in a contingent and whyless experiment in which one meaningless act can throw the whole thing off balance.
This example, of the anxiety experienced when we realize that our own freedom carries with it the possibility for evil acts, is what Kierkegaard refers to as ‘anxiety about evil’ (CA 131). This is the anxiety experienced by the awareness that I am capable of senseless and meaningless evil and that I must, on my own volition, avoid this temptation. While this may sound like a negative thing, Kierkegaard says that this is the sort of anxiety experienced by one who is ‘in the good’, as their desire to avoid falling into evil leads to an anxiety over evil acts. A recovering alcoholic can help exemplify this sort of anxiety. If someone recovering from the evil of alcoholism is attending a wedding with an open bar, they will likely experience an overwhelming anxiety when they look around and see everyone enjoying cocktails and toasting with glasses of champagne. This experience will make them aware of the possibility of having a drink, and this possibility of transgression will lead to an intense experience of anxiety, but this anxiety is aimed at maintaining the good they have accomplished through their recovery from alcoholism. Thus, even when one is aiming towards the good, evil and transgression remain possibilities, and anxiety serves as the means by which one is always open to the contingent possibilities of both good and evil. This anxiety is what emerges when one is aware that the continued presence of an infinite freedom which ‘arises out of nothing’ means that even where good is present, evil is always possible. As Kierkegaard states, ‘anxiety is at this point always present as the possibility of a new state’ (CA 115). This activity of constantly choosing the good in the face of the temptation for evil is what Kierkegaard refers to as the ‘act of faith’:
The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith, courage to believe that the state itself is a new sin, courage to renounce anxiety without anxiety, which only faith can do; faith does not thereby annihilate anxiety, but, itself eternally young, it extricates itself from anxiety’s moment of death. Only faith is able to do this, for only in faith is the synthesis eternal and at every moment possible. (CA 117)
On the other hand, Kierkegaard discusses another sort of anxiety, which is ‘anxiety about the Good’, which he also refers to as ‘the demonic’. This is the sort of anxiety experienced by one who is living ‘in evil’, which means that they have attempted to close off existence from all possibility and contingency and have attempted to live a consistent mode of existence in which things ‘just are’ a certain way. In this case, the demonic signifies the inclosing of freedom, the building of barriers around a certain sort of existence and subjectivity. In opposition to this is the good, which, ‘of course, signifies the restoration of freedom, redemption, salvation, or whatever one would call it’ (CA 119). This desire to close existence off from possibility and freedom is what Kierkegaard means by the demonic, as ‘the demonic is un-freedom that wants to close itself off’ (CA 123). This attempt to build a barrier around possibility is in complete opposition to an ontology of freedom, as ‘freedom is precisely the expansive’ (CA 123). In terms that help to prefigure the political reading of this distinction which I will briefly discuss at the end of this chapter, Kierkegaard goes on to state that ‘as long as freedom does not defect to the party of the rebels, the anxiety of revolution will still be present, not as anxiety about the good, but an anxiety about evil’ (CA 136).
To place this distinction (between anxiety about evil and anxiety about the good) in the clearest terms possible, anxiety has to do with the relation of the subject to the possibility-of-possibility, which signifies an absolute freedom, contained in reality. Anxiety about evil is the basic awareness that things could always be otherwise and that one has to work and strive to continue one’s existential trajectory, while anxiety about the good is an attempt to negate the possibility of things being otherwise by attempting to close off possibility in a set of determinate coordinates. In ontological terms, anxiety about evil functions against the backdrop of a reality that is engaged in the process of becoming, while anxiety about the good assumes a reality in which everything is settled and finished.
This discussion of good and evil in CA not only serves the purpose of showing the psychological effects of various conceptions of the ontological possibility of freedom but will also lay the groundwork for my political reading of Kierkegaard, as well as allowing a clear link between Kierkegaard and Schelling’s conceptions of the ontological and the grounds of human freedom. As I outlined in chapter 1, in Schelling’s Freedom essay, he argues that for good and evil to be equally possible there must be an absolute indifference, or urgrund, at the heart of being which makes contingency (rather than necessity) absolutely primary. Schelling pushes freedom a step further than ‘God’ or ‘the Absolute’ and instead claims that there is an un-pre-thinkable ground of being, which is a point of absolute indifference or contingency, which precedes the supposed conceptual and ontological stability offered by conceptions of the absolute. Through a brief consideration of Schelling’s and Kierkegaard’s conceptions of freedom, I will show that the primary difference comes down to their conceptions of the divine.
In a manner similar to Kierkegaard’s argument in this text, Schelling argues in the Freedom essay that rather than some positive concept of the divine residing at the core of being, there is instead an absolute indifference which pre-exists a positive conception of the divine, or the good. This absolute indifference (or urgrund) is what creates the space and conditions for the sort of ontological freedom that enables good and evil to exist as equally possible activities.
As Vasiliki Tsakiri argues, ‘the concept of freedom in Schelling functions in the same way as the concept of anxiety does in Kierkegaard, eluding definition and acquiring a primordial meaning. Anxiety and freedom are thus interwoven in both Kierkegaard’s and Schelling’s philosophies.’[24] Following this, it is worth further analyzing the ontological and systematic similarity between Kierkegaard and Schelling’s conceptions of the grounds of freedom and anxiety, as this provides a historical link between Kierkegaard and German idealism, as well as a conceptual link between Kierkegaard and contemporary materialist re-articulations of the idealist project.
One of the crucial differences still remaining between the thought of Schelling and Kierkegaard in regard to freedom is the manner in which Schelling takes the step of placing a sort of primordial naturalism underneath any concept of the divine, so that nature is still primary. By this I mean that before the emergence of any positive notion of the divine, there exists an absolutely indifferent void at the core of being, nothing but a set of contracting and expanding drives which serve as the preconditions for the emergence of the divine. In a certain sense, it is as if Schelling provides a primordially naturalist account of the emergence of God. On this point, it would be fair to say that Kierkegaard would be critical of this naturalist theology, due to his own lingering supernaturalism. By using the term supernatural in this sense, I mean that Kierkegaard would not be content with any attempt to explain the divine in terms that could be reduced to any sort of naturalist or scientific phenomenon or logic. The divine signifies precisely that which lies outside the realm of the scientific and logical for Kierkegaard, and this sort of naturalist account of the grounds of the divine wanders into the dangerous territory where logical operations attempt to fully comprehend the landscape of existential actuality.
Slavoj Žižek’s analysis of Schelling’s concept of freedom is useful here as, whether he intends it or not, he cast Schelling’s project in a materialist fashion in terms that bring it into close proximity to that of Kierkegaard. In the opening lines of his The Indivisible Remainder Žižek states:
How, then, should one begin an essay on Schelling? Perhaps the most appropriate way is by focusing on the problem of beginning itself, the crucial problem of German idealism. [25]
He goes on to argue:
Schelling’s ‘materialist’ contribution is best epitomized by his fundamental book according to which, to put it bluntly, the true Beginning is not at the beginning: there is something that precedes the Beginning itself—a rotary motion whose vicious cycle is broken, in a gesture analogous to the cutting of the Gordian knot, by the Beginning proper, that is, the primordial act of decision.[26]
At this point we can note two things. First, that the problem of absolute beginning, which Žižek characterizes as the crucial problem of German idealism, is the core ontological issue which characterizes Schelling’s ontology of freedom and Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Second, we can see that according to Žižek the true beginning is comparable to an irreparable ‘cut’ or primordial act of decision. In this sense it seems as if Schelling takes the importance of decision a level deeper than Kierkegaard as, rather than making decision the primordial moment of the development of subjectivity or consciousness, it is an act of decision itself that opens up the ontological space for the development of human freedom. Following this, we could say that the capacity for human decision is made possible only by a primordial divine act in which an absolute cut or break opens up the space for freedom in human history. Žižek goes on to cast this primordial act in more theological terms when he states that ‘the beginning thus occurs when one “finds the word” which breaks the deadlock, the vicious cycle, of empty and confused ruminations.’[27] This is reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s discussion of spirit’s break from innocence when he states:
Innocence still is, but only a word is required and then ignorance is concentrated. Innocence naturally cannot understand this word, but at that moment anxiety has, as it were, caught its first prey. Instead of nothing, it now has an enigmatic word. (CA 44)
For Kierkegaard this word is the initial prohibition given to Adam by God that awoke desire in Adam at the moment he was made aware of freedom’s possibility through an experience of anxiety. This word signifies the externalization of the divine in language and opens up the irreparable split between the absolute and the particular (or, the ideal and the actual), a space in which freedom and the becoming of consciousness take place. It thus seems that both Schelling and Kierkegaard ground freedom, and the subsequent experience of anxiety, in the externalization of the divine in the original word. As Pound argues, ‘it is precisely because language negates empirical reality that Kierkegaard accounts for doubt and its integrity to consciousness’, and further, ‘it is this very contradiction between language and empirical reality that gives rise to consciousness’.[28] To more clearly articulate the stakes of this externalization of the divine, or ideal, Pound argues that, ‘language cancels the immediacy of raw sensation because language is an “ideality”. That is to say, language uses universal or ideal terms to talk about the particular.’[29] In this sense, language can never be identical with the actuality of immediate experience and thus always operates as a negation of ideality.
This irrevocable break with immediacy, which we have already analysed in terms of Kierkegaard’s CA, is also accounted for by Schelling’s ontology of freedom, as Žižek points out:
For Schelling, then, the primordial, radically contingent fact, a fact which can in no way be accounted for, is freedom itself, a freedom bound by nothing, a freedom which, in a sense, is Nothing; and the problem is, rather, how this Nothing of the abyss of primordial freedom becomes entangled in the causal chains of Reason.[30]
It is once again striking how close this analysis of the role of freedom in Schelling mirrors the previously discussed account of freedom and its grounds for Kierkegaard. It is particularly striking that Žižek refers to the manner in which primordial freedom ‘becomes entangled’ with the causal chains of reason, as this is almost precisely what Kierkegaard describes with his own conception of ‘entangled freedom’ in CA. As if he intended to make the comparison with Kierkegaard even more apparent, Žižek then goes on to discuss the manner in which the experience of freedom, as conceived by Schelling, involves the constant tension between good and evil, along with the experience of an anxiety produced by this tension:
Rather, it concerns the most concrete experience of the tension within a living, acting and suffering person between Good and Evil—there is no actual freedom without an unbearable anxiety.[31]
He then goes on to explain the relation between freedom and emergence of spirit in Schelling. Of particular importance to this study is the manner in which Žižek refers to Schelling’s conception of freedom as ‘the moment of eternity’, the same language Kierkegaard uses to refer to the instant (or, moment), a concept previously outlined in this chapter. As Žižek describes it:
The emergence of Freedom means that Spirit has posited itself as such in opposition to its impenetrable-inert Ground. . . . That is to say, Spirit is no longer determined by the network of causality. Freedom is thus stricto sensu the moment of eternity.[32]
Finally, in a manner which immediately brings to mind Kierkegaard’s conception of the instant, in which the infinite and finite are instantaneously, and paradoxically, reunited in the ‘blink of an eye’, Žižek describes the manner in which an act of freedom for Schelling consist of a similar reunion with the absolute:
In the experience of freedom . . . we ‘rejoin the Absolute’—that is, we re-establish contact—our identity, even—with the primordial origin outside temporal reality, with the abyss of eternity prior to the fall into the world of creatures.[33]
While Žižek’s materialist reading of Schelling’s theory of freedom provides many avenues of clear comparison with Kierkegaard, a clear point of distinction between Schelling and Kierkegaard in their respective understandings of freedom has to do with the precise place of the grounds of freedom. We have seen that, for Schelling, the non-grounds for freedom and the possibility of good and evil absolutely precede the emergence of the divine. For Kierkegaard, as we will see ever more clearly in the next chapter, the divine itself serves as the non-ground which opens up the possibility of possibility itself. This is why Kierkegaard would not see the purpose of placing a non-ground of indifference before the emergence of the divine, as the divine itself is this non-ground of indifference. As I will argue in the next chapter, God is not a separate entity from the contingent and dynamic structure of being that underlies Kierkegaard’s thought, but instead, God is this ontological openness.
2.7 A Fractured Dialectic
Now that I have outlined my systematic reading of Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety and have shown the manner in which this text serves as the first moment in Kierkegaard’s critical reworking of the philosophy of idealism, I would like to focus on the ontological implications of this reading. In particular, I would like to highlight the underlying ontological conditions which create the space for what I would like to call a fractured dialectic, meaning a non-totalizable account of dialectical structure that does not emerge from, or arrive at, a synthetic unity of opposites. To put it differently, this text serves as the primary ontological moment in the development of Kierkegaard’s underlying philosophical system, whereas The Sickness Unto Death builds upon this ontology by drawing out the anthropological implications, and Works of Love unifies the ontological, the anthropological and the ethical through Kierkegaard’s unique version of absolute knowing.
I will use the term fractured dialectic to describe Kierkegaard’s ontological position as it describes a structure that is dialectical in nature, while holding to the position that fracture, not unity, is ontologically primary. Paul Ricoeur initially coined this term[34] in an essay in which he makes the claim that:
At any rate a fresh interpretation of Kierkegaard must certainly entail a reconsideration of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel himself.[35]
And
A new approach to Kierkegaard must also be a new approach to German idealism.[36]
For Ricoeur, Kierkegaard’s position does not represent an anti-philosophical reaction against the tenets of German idealism but rather should be approached as a unique reworking of the developments made by the idealists, which gives a full consideration to the actuality of human freedom within systematic philosophy. Much of the present work could be seen as an attempt to provide a full-scale treatment of the interpretation outlined by Ricoeur in his brief essay.
By fractured dialectic I am aiming to differentiate my reading from the standard version of idealist dialectics in which the point of departure is the absolute immanent monism of substance, which is then split into subject and substance and in which subject finally reconciles back into substance in a moment of higher unity and absolute knowing. Rather than making unity the absolute moment that both begins and completes the dialectical process, Kierkegaard’s fractured dialectic places fracture at the beginning of the dialectical process. Thus, fracture is not a deficiency of our own understanding that can only be overcome through a higher order metaphysical knowledge, it is instead the primary characteristic of the real in-itself. As Kierkegaard states in The Concept of Anxiety:
Every science lies either in a logical immanence or in an immanence within a transcendence that it is unable to explain. Now sin is precisely that transcendence, that [crisis] in which sin enters into the single individual as the single individual. (CA 50)
The ontological dichotomy Kierkegaard sets up here is one between a ‘logical immanence’, by which he means a system of absolute knowing in which the rational faculty can comprehensively grasp the whole of actuality, and an ‘immanence within transcendence’, by which he means an immanent account of actuality and subjectivity which is absolutely preceded by an event outside of the recuperative activity of its own rational faculties. This ‘immanence within transcendence’ is thus open to the unknowable possibility of the future, as it makes no claim to being able to rationally account for that which precedes its own emergence. This is very similar to what Schelling refers to as un-pre-thinkable being, as this immanence similarly posits an absolute which is forever preceding the circle of logical reflection and its recuperative capacities.
It is thus my contention that one of the primary stakes of this ontological dichotomy is to do with Kierkegaard’s emphasis on the concept of contingency (or the actuality of contingency). As I have already shown, one of Kierkegaard’s primary criticisms of any sort of idealism that equates the operations of logic with the experience of lived actuality is that it contains a category (contingency) that cannot be contained, or assimilated, within logic. Contingency signifies a lack of unifying reason behind the development of both actuality and subjectivity along with the possibility that things could always be otherwise. Acknowledging the contingency at the heart of actuality is equally acknowledging the lack of a unifying force of reason capable of providing logical science with a totalizing explanatory framework.
Contingency thus signifies that our immanent and immediate conditions are always capable of being transcended by something wholly novel and external that disrupts established conditions of possibility and logic. This is why Kierkegaard often equates contingency with the religious, as in the example of Christ; a particular event (the incarnation) must either be outright rejected as untrue or must instead force one to re-orient their own field of logical and ontological possibility. Either Christ is not truly both God and Man, or Christ is both God and Man and we must now reconsider what is and is not truly possible. A less theologically contentious example would be the French Revolution. In the time preceding this event, it seemed logically impossible to the average French farmer or peasant that anything other than a monarchical rule was possible, but through the contingent uprising of the Jacobin party and the subsequent revolution, the field of logical possibilities was altered so that now a republic founded on justice and equality was able to overcome an age-old monarchy. While many more examples could be made, the important point is that this ontological emphasis on contingency and possibility leaves open the possibility that another world is always possible and, along with this, another way of orienting one’s subjective position within the world.
It is important to note, however, that this contingency is not conflated with any sort of religious mysticism which simply holds that some divine power exists outside of the limits of our own knowing which makes the miraculous possible. Instead, contingency is grounded in the abyss (Afgrund), which resides at the very core of the structure of being. We can again think about Kierkegaard’s concept of the instant (or moment). This concept signifies the subjective appropriation of contingency and the manner in which the acceptance of the non-ground, which creates the conditions for both good and evil, is what opens up the space in which anything is possible, and present conditions can always change. Rather than consider what Kierkegaard is doing as a metaphysics of religion, I would like to consider this project an ontology of contingency, meaning that the point is not that there is some consistent and reasonable structure which forever transcends our knowing (a more or less Kantian metaphysic) but rather that there is no consistent and absolute structure to be known in the first place. To repeat a quote used in the introduction, this leads one commentator to state that for Kierkegaard:
No abyss sunders us, the knowing subjects, from reality, but rather reality itself is incessantly fractured between the actual and the possible, and within this rift ‘subjectivity’ comes to be/becomes possible.[37]
Thus, it is not the case that there is a fracture between our subjectivity and the ‘true’ structure of reality as it exists in itself, or between the absolute immanence of our experience and the transcendence of the absolute. Rather, there is a fracture at the core of reality itself, and this creates the fractured dialectic in which the conditions for subjective freedom, or spirit, are opened up. It is important to note that this fractured dialectic differs from the standard view of dialectics insomuch as fracture, and not absolute unity, is the primary term at play. For Kierkegaard, it is not the case that there is a dialectical gap that can thus be metaphysically overcome in a moment of sublation or synthesis. Instead, this fracture is a feature of reality itself and not just a lack to be overcome by our own logical faculties. The reason this is so important for Kierkegaard is that if this fracture is not primary, then we lack the conditions for a truly free account of human subjectivity, as any account of a unifying spirit, reason or divinity behind our activity takes away the space for decision and free activity. This fracture is the condition for the emergence of spirit and the possibility of willed subjective activity. As the same commentator goes on to state, ‘this new bridge thrown across the abyss is not the work of the abyss, but of willed, contingent subjectivity’.[38] This space of fracture, or abyss, is the very feature of reality which necessitates the existence of free and willed subjective activity, and this primordial space of fracture, or lack, is what creates the conditions for the rest of Kierkegaard’s systematic project, including his accounts of freedom, reflection, ethics and love. Now that I have outlined the ontological importance of the argument of The Concept of Anxiety and have explained why I am using the term fractured dialectic to describe this ontological structure, I would like to even more explicitly outline the core features of the foundations of Kierkegaard’s ontology.
We begin with the non-ground (Afgrund), or abyss, at the core of being which signifies the un-pre-thinkable being that we can never logically account for. This non-ground and its lack of unifying totality thus creates the rift at the heart of reality which produces the dialectical contradictions of subject and object, possibility and necessity and infinity and finitude. It is important to once again note that this series of dichotomies is not akin to a consistent totalizing substance splitting apart from itself in a Hegelian manner but, rather, signifies the chaotic abyss at the heart of both subject and object. Put differently, the starting point of Kierkegaard’s ontology is thoroughly Schellingian, and not Hegelian, even though his subsequent account of the development of spirit is Hegelian in nature.
The primordial fracture creates a struggle between subject and object and, as we have seen in the discussion of CA, leads to a struggle between the freedom of subjectivity against the facticity and necessity of the objective world. This creates the conditions for sin, which is the activity by which the subject attempts to negate the object after realizing that objectivity will always be there. Sin is an absolute negation, or negation of the absolute, in which the subject says ‘I am not that’ to the realm of objectivity. This act of sin is a separation in which subject absolutely negates object and attempts to be grounded wholly in itself.
Anxiety then emerges when the subject, who has previously committed the act of sin (absolute negation), gazes into the abyss grounding his or her own being and realizes that their own existence is whyless and marked by a freedom which provides no guarantee of consistency or autonomy. This realization that things could always be otherwise is what creates the experience of anxiety for the subject. Thus, absolute negation (sin) is an attempt of the subject to posit its own existence, but this negation runs into anxiety once the subject realizes there is always an abyss lying outside of their own attempts to be self-positing. Anxiety can then lead to either an acceptance of the abyssal ground of possibility preceding his or her own particular existence (which would be the good) or a struggle to posit themselves over and against the abyss of possibility (which would be evil).
Freedom is then the acceptance of this abyssal possibility at the heart of being and the sacrifice of any desire of the subject to be its own grounds, or put differently, to move past the irony of thinking that the subject can be self-positing. By accepting this freedom, subject is qualified as spirit, as spirit is freedom as the free becoming of subjectivity in its dialectical interactions with objectivity. If sin is the name of the activity by which subjectivity places itself in absolute opposition to objectivity through attempting to serve as its own grounds, faith is then the name marking the activity by which subjectivity accepts the freedom at the core of its own being. Faith is thus the process by which the abyss between subjectivity and objectivity can be crossed. However, this crossing of the abyss is not a logically built structure, like a sort of ontological bridge, but is rather the faithful leap of the subject across this abyss.
While this ontology begins with a clearly Schellingian moment and progresses with a Hegelian structure, it is important to note that Kierkegaard is not just providing a religious synthesis of the projects of two of the most prominent figures in German idealism but, rather, is adding something wholly novel to the trajectory of idealism.
Lived experience is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project and, while the structure behind this experience is idealist, it simply serves in the role of creating the space for free subjective intervention in the world of (existential) actuality, and the actuality of the activity of subjectivity can never be systematized in any sort of logically immanent fashion. Thus, Kierkegaard is not opposed to the idealist tendency to systematize the grounds of existence and the structure of dialectical becoming but is instead opposed to any instance in which this same systematic logic attempts to account for the willed and contingent activity of individual human beings in actuality. Logic is capable of describing structure; it is not capable of producing the movement of free subjective activity. Along with this, logic can explain the structure inherent to reality but cannot make anything happen. Logic does not produce movement, decisive subjective activity does. The journey towards religious existence is something individuals must attain for themselves; the logical structure of reality does not accomplish this on its own.
This also shows the error in the tendency to read Kierkegaard’s existentialism as placing him firmly against any attempt at a systematic or idealist philosophy. Rather than this serving as some absolute either/or placing Kierkegaard clearly outside the lineage of idealist and systematic philosophy, he represents a both/and. Kierkegaard offers a thoroughly systematic account of the grounds of reality and subjectivity and uses this systematic account to clear the space for a rigorously existential account of the lived experience of actuality. To use a metaphor, while music possesses a systematic structure, simply knowing advanced musical theory will not lead an individual to instantaneously produce beautiful melodies. Instead, the individual subjectively appropriates the systematic structure of music, and in the space between the ideality of this structure and the reality of their contingent and free subjectivity, something new emerges. Structure does not produce actuality, but it creates the conditions for its becoming.
2.8 Early Political Considerations
Before drawing out some of the social and political implications that emerge through this reading of The Concept of Anxiety, I must say something about the method I am employing in this book for developing my political interpretation of Kierkegaard. Rather than saving my comprehensive political reading for the end of my study, I will offer political reflections on each text discussed. In simple terms, I will be starting with a very minimal account of the political relevance of Kierkegaard’s thought that will develop alongside the conceptual development of his thought presented in this study. At this point, I hope to only outline what could be called a ‘very skeletal account’ of my political interpretation of Kierkegaard, one which is primarily ontological, and in the coming sections, this skeleton will be fleshed out in both anthropological and social terms.
While chapter 4 will consist of a more systematic attempt to develop a political philosophy grounded in Kierkegaard’s fractured dialectical ontology, I would like to briefly note some of the political implications of this ontology that can be seen in Kierkegaard’s own work. In particular, we can glean a clear picture of the implications of Kierkegaard’s discussion of good and evil by drawing out the ontological implications of each of these positions and the correlation between this ontological analysis and the practical examples given of different sorts of collective religious practice as outlined in Kierkegaard’s Practice in Christianity, a text which will feature at various points throughout this book to show Kierkegaard’s own social usage of this structure. In particular, it is worth noting the social and political implications of Kierkegaard’s conception of anxiety.
We have already seen that on the ontological level anxiety serves as a reminder for the individual subject that the possibility-of-possibility remains behind any determinate activity as the reminder that things could always be otherwise and that there can be no such thing as a final and consummative end to the activity of spirit’s process of actualization. On the level of the individual subject, this means that I can never be finished with the project of becoming myself. No matter how much I progress, how many contradictions I overcome and how I reconcile my own activity with the facticity of materiality, the future will always remain infinitely ahead of me as the possibility of things being otherwise. We have already seen how this ontological situation leads the subject to experiencing anxiety about evil which can only be overcome through the movement of faith, as my own capacity for reflection will never be able to provide assurance that evil is no longer possible.
The opposite account of this was anxiety about the good in which one attempts to build an inclosing reserve around truth and a certain manner of existence, with the goal of ruling out the possibility of contingency. If the earlier account is an affirmation of freedom, anxiety about the good is an attempt to deny freedom and build a sort of consistent and totalized account of reality.
If we extrapolate this analysis to the level of the social, we can see that the same anxiety that characterizes the individual in their process of subjective becoming can also characterize a political or social institution or group in its own process of actualization. The implication would be, to put it simply, that another world is always possible, or, as Kierkegaard puts it ‘in possibility all things are equally possible’ (CA 156). If there always exists a pure possibility lying outside the realm of what seems to be necessary, then there could never be a wholly necessary sort of subjectivity or society, and any group would have to remain faithfully open to the continued actualization of their particular ideal. Following this, it seems that Kierkegaard would not deny that we can speak in rational terms of the existence of something akin to the ‘ideal state’ or ‘ideal society’, but the risk would be in believing we could ever actualize this ideal to the point of completion. The ethical is an infinite activity of actualization, and the moment at which we think ourselves privy to the consummative moment of truth is the risk of inclosing the truth and positing evil.
One of the potential risks with this reading may be that it seems as if this account turns the political and social into a game of politicized existentialism in which the fact that nothing is absolutely necessary robs any particular mode of social or political existence of any claim to value or priority. While I will flesh out this reading in subsequent chapters, at this point I can still offer some initial claims to argue against this reading. First of all, Kierkegaard’s distinction between good and evil already provides us with an idea of the types of political and social institutions that we can say are evil at the structural level. As we have seen, any individual who attempts to ground their own activity in wholly objective and immanent terms in such a way that they deny the abyss of possibility at the bottom of their own existence is anxious about the good, which Kierkegaard also calls the demonic. So following this, we could say that any social or political institution which attempted to defend its own existence and principles in wholly rational terms which built a wall around a particular definition of truth, while attempting to deny the continued possibility of possibility, could be called demonic due to its anxiety about the good. For example, any political organization that wanted to claim that only a certain type of individual counted (i.e., only a certain gender, race or religion was actually privy to the truth and afforded ontological priority) would be building an inclosing reserve around a particular type of person while leaving the possibility of others outside the bounds of what they deem possible. In a sense, this is equivalent to denying the abyss at the heart of reality and instead claiming to have special access to underlying structure and meaning, to the extent that one can show why they ‘exist’ more fully than others.
The social and political implications for this should be fairly obvious, in the same manner in which my project of becoming myself can never be considered as complete or final; any social or political project which consists of the activity of a number of individuals can also never reach a point of finality in which freedom and possibility no longer call this activity into question. This can be seen through an example presented in Practice in Christianity in which Kierkegaard differentiates between two different forms of collective religious practice, the church triumphant and the church militant. The church triumphant is the form of religious practice in which a group believes themselves to be wholly privy to absolute theological truth, and thus their knowledge of God takes on an objective form. In this church, simply being born into a Christian nation qualifies one as a part of the collective, and religious knowledge is something that can be known and agreed with in a wholly objective and rational manner. Because they already possess the truth, the infinite actualization of the truth in freedom is no longer necessary, and one need not develop their own subjectivity through a relation to this truth. In Kierkegaard’s terms, inwardness is not present in the church triumphant, as the qualification of spirit is not an issue. You are in or out based on where you are born and your agreement with a set of objective claims, and thus faith is of little importance.
In opposition to this, Kierkegaard uses the example of the church militant. If the church triumphant required a wholly objective relationship to its foundational truth, the militant church necessitates a subjective and inward relation to truth. This church is militant insomuch as it is actively engaged in the process of seeking out and actualizing truth in a free act of collective becoming. Here one does not rationally agree with a set of doctrinal statements that ‘are’ the truth; instead one subjectively relates to truth in one’s own act of becoming. Because of their anxious awareness that anything is possible in the realm of possibility, the church militant would be unlikely to make pronouncements about who is in or out but would instead remain open to the outside and hesitant to enclose their own truth.
While in the next chapter we will return to Practice in Christianity in a more in depth and systematic manner, at the moment it is important that we simply note the way in which the example of these two forms of collective religious practice embody the ontological structure seen in CA. The church triumphant would be characterized as anxious about the good, as their primary concern is to be in possession of a static and absolute form of truth that is removed from any sense of possibility or becoming. The militant church instead represents anxiety about evil as in this church truth is considered in terms of subjective appropriation, and possibility is always haunting any claim to absolute structure. Each of these forms of religious practice is grounded in a particular ontology that implies a different form of political praxis.
To put this in blunt terms, Kierkegaard’s ontology leads directly a socio-political theory in which the ontological openness of reality creates a situation in which it is up to subjectivity to navigate reality in the freedom of this contingency. Because there is no such thing as the possibility of accessing some absolute metaphysical totality, or in other terms, because this dialectic never reaches a point of absolute mediation, a new state is always possible.
Notes
1.
Reidar Thomte, editor’s introduction to Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, trans. Reidar Thomate and Albert A. Anderson (Princeton University Press, 1980), xi.
2.
Fichte’s Berlin lectures were unpublished during Kierkegaard’s lifetime.
3.
This claim was made by Maria J. Binnetti during a seminar at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center in Copenhagen in September 2011. Thank you to Dr. Binetti for providing notes from her presentation.
4.
Stephen N. Dunning, ‘Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety ed. Robert L. Perkins (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1985), 9.
5.
These works are: The Concept of Anxiety, The Sickness Unto Death and Works of Love.
6.
In this sense I find it rather uncontroversial to state that Kierkegaard’s attitude towards the practice of philosophy can be considered pretty similar to Marx’s ‘and the left Hegelians’. If we were to imagine Kierkegaard’s response to Marx’s eleventhth thesis on Feuerbach, he would likely re-phrase it to add that philosophy should aim to provide the conditions for you to ‘first change yourself, and then change the world’.
7.
Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 9–10.
8.
Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 378–80.
9.
Pinkard, German Philosophy1760–1860: The Legacy of Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 327.
10.
Gabriel and Žižek, Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism (London: Continuum), 2009, 20.
11.
While Schelling uses the term urgrund to describe this groundless ground of reflection, Kierkegaard uses the equivalent Danish term, Afgrund, which translates to abyss in English.
12.
Pinkard, German Philosophy, 345.
13.
John W. Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 217.
14.
By totality, I am here referring to a system that thinks itself capable of theorizing the whole, without remainder, and by consistency, I mean a form of logic that is wholly consistent with itself and leaves no room for chance, contingency or becoming. Put otherwise, this consistency would be a consistency between thought and being, or logic and actuality.
15.
By mythical I am thinking in particular of Schelling’s lectures on philosophy and mythology, in which he makes the argument that because we do not have logical access to ontological grounds, mythology is our manner of attempting to explain the ontological without a recourse to logic.
16.
Kangas, Kierkegaard’s Instant (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 163.
17.
Ibid., 165.
18.
Ibid., 166.
19.
Ibid., 167.
20.
Ibid., 185–86.
21.
Ibid., 189.
22.
Dunning, ‘Kierkegaard’s Systematic Analysis of Anxiety’, 18.
23.
Marcus Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma (London: SCM Press, 2007), 85.
24.
Vasiliki Tsakiri, Kierkegaard: Anxiety, Repetition and Contemporaneity (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 87.
25.
Žižek, The Indivisble Remainder (London: Verso, 2007), 13.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid., 14.
28.
Pound, Theology, Psychoanalysis and Trauma, 80.
29.
Ibid., 79.
30.
Žižek, The Indivisble Remainder, 16.
31.
Ibid., 17.
32.
Ibid., 20.
33.
Ibid.
34.
Ricoeur, ‘Philosophy after Kierkegaard’ in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
35.
Ibid., 11.
36.
Ibid., 15.
37.
John Milbank, ‘The Sublime in Kierkegaard’ The Heythrop Journal 37 (3), (1996): 303.
38.
Ibid., 305. It is particularly telling that a Christian theologian (with a commitment to an extremely dogmatic theological metaphysics) makes this comment. Even with that set of presuppositions, he still finds that reality itself is characterized by a state of fracture in the work of Kierkegaard.