Spirit and Society
Spirit and Society
If The Concept of Anxiety is the text in which Kierkegaard most clearly provides a picture of the ontological structure at the heart of his thought along with a theory of the relationship between this ontology and the structure of subjectivity, The Sickness Unto Death extends the ontology and development of the concept of spirit into a more fully realized anthropology. While in a certain sense these two texts can seem to speak about the same issue, we can think of CA as being equivalent to the construction of the foundation and frame of a building which lays out the underlying structure, while SUD is equivalent to the second phase of work in which this frame and foundation are filled out with wood, plaster and paint. This second work continues to build upwards and add further detail and complexity to the image of spirit and reality introduced in CA. In this sense then, it is crucial that we hold onto the assumptions and developments of the first text when reading the latter. This text assumes the ontology of the former, as well as the account of spirit that emerges in a break from innocence in that text. As we have previously seen, the ontological picture presented in CA allows Kierkegaard to develop a conception of spirit as freedom, and in SUD this bare conception of spirit as freedom is further developed. If spirit could be equated to a bare ontological subjectivity in CA, in SUD we see spirit developed in a properly anthropological manner as selfhood. In this way we can say that, while the former text is primarily ontological in its orientation, the latter is a psychological, or anthropological, investigation into the further development of spirit.
In this chapter I will accomplish a few different tasks. First of all, a reading of the text will be presented which outlines the development of spirit as presented in the work, with particular focus on the way in which Kierkegaard’s dialectic develops from a critique of immediacy to a theory of reflection. Next, focus will be placed on the theological aspects of this text and, following the method outlined in the previous chapter, will provide a materialist reading of this religious ontology. Finally, I will further develop the story of spirit provided in the text by moving from a discussion of the relational aspects of individual consciousness to an exemplification of how this relational structure operates at the social level. To accomplish this, reference will be made to a text Kierkegaard completed alongside SUD, Practice in Christianity.
3.1 Despair
The first thing to note when discussing the structure of the self as it is presented in SUD is that this text assumes the conclusions of CA. Thus, in SUD, spirit has already broken forth from immediacy after the encounter with the Afgrund of anxiety and faithfully accepted the contingency and possibility of its ontological freedom. While CA was concerned with the ontological grounds of subjectivity, Kierkegaard describes SUD as a work concerned with ‘genuine anthropological contemplation’ (SUD 11). Following this, the ontological account of the subject in CA creates the conditions for a systematic anthropology of the self in SUD. Considered in terms of the journey of spirit, while CA provided an account of spirit’s break with immediacy, SUD is the story of the development of reflection by spirit and the limits of the development of reflective consciousness. Put differently, if in CA the subject experiences anxiety through its break with immediacy and experience of radical freedom, in SUD we see how the possibility of reflection can lead the self to various forms of despair.
In the preface to the text, Kierkegaard criticizes the attempts of the Christian knowledge of his age for being overly concerned with scientific and scholarly forms of knowing at the cost of not being wholly concerned with the up-building of the individual. Kierkegaard points out that Christianity is related to life in a way that leaves it necessarily opposed to a scholarly distance from life. He wants Christian knowing to be concerned and goes on to state, ‘Concern constitutes the relation to life, to the actuality of the personality’ (SUD 5).
Following the distinction made in the previous chapter, we need to once again remember that when Kierkegaard uses the term actuality he is using this term in distinction from its conceptual usage by the philosophers of German idealism. While for the idealists actuality concerns logical structure, for Kierkegaard actuality signifies a relation to life and the particularity of lived existence. This is why Kierkegaard will go on to state that the anthropological tone of this text aims to focus not on ‘man in the abstract’ (SUD 5) but rather on the particular existence of particular individuals—or more precisely, a concern not with a universal structure of subjectivity but instead with the anthropological features of the single individual. This brief preface is crucial for my interpretation of this text, as it signifies the explicitly anthropological, and not conceptual, tone of Kierkegaard’s analysis. This follows the distinction highlighted in the previous chapter between the conceptual aims of German idealism and the existential aims of Kierkegaard’s project.
Section A of the text, ‘Despair Is the Sickness Unto Death’, opens with Kierkegaard’s formula for self-consciousness, a passage notorious among Kierkegaard scholars for being one of the most obscure of his authorship. While some scholars have indicated that this passage is meant as a parody of the obscure nature of Hegelian thought, I will contend against this that Kierkegaard is actively employing an explicitly Hegelian conceptual structure.[1] The passage in question states:
[A] Human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation; the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself. A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self. (SUD 13)
At this point in Kierkegaard’s analysis of the structure of the self, he defines human being as spirit and further states the spirit is precisely the self. Next, he defines this self as a relation, meaning that the very structure of the self, or spirit, is relational. While the standard English translation of this text states that the self ‘relates itself to itself’, it is more precise to think of the self as ‘relating to itself’, or as being ‘self-relating’. The reason that the structure of the self is primarily relational is that the self is composed of a series of dialectical opposites that spirit is constantly moving between. Thus, the self is made up of the tensions between: the infinite and finite, the temporal and the eternal, and freedom and necessity. At this point we can see a basically Fichtean structure to the self, as it exists as a tension between two oppositional elements (i.e., an ‘I’ and a ‘not-I’).
But as we see in the last line, if we take this passage to be indicative of the self’s structure as a whole, we necessarily fall short, as ‘in this way a human being is still not a self’ (SUD 13). Kierkegaard goes on to introduce the crucial distinction between what could be considered a broadly Fichtean anthropology and his own:
In the relation between the two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation: thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self. (SUD 13)
At this point Kierkegaard introduces a third element into the structure of the self, and this third element is precisely spirit as the positive third which both relates to the two previously discussed opposed elements while also relating to itself. This positive third is distinct from a negative relation, as in this case spirit relates negatively to both the infinite and the finite and not positively to itself. It knows that it is an oscillation between these two opposed elements, but it does not want to be just one or the other, and thus it is constantly attempting to get away from being just finite or just infinite. Thus, the negative relation is spirit attempting to differentiate itself from any category of absolute determinacy, that is, spirit does not want to be just one or the other of its two opposed elements. Spirit is thus the activity of constantly negating its being wholly associated with one of these two opposed elements. The positive third, which is the self, breaks from this constant oscillation of negatively relating to two opposed elements by also relating to itself, and this level of self relation is what opens up spirit to the process of reflection and thus truly entering the journey of becoming a self.
After explaining that the structure of the self contains two opposed elements dialectically related to by spirit the third that relates to each of these elements while also relating to itself, Kierkegaard introduces an idea that further differentiates his own approach to the self from the thought of Fichte and the idealist tradition. Kierkegaard states:
Such a relation that relates itself to itself, a self, must either have established itself or have been established by another. (SUD 13)
Kierkegaard is here arguing that this theory of the self can either be self-posited in its orientation (i.e., serve as its own grounds) or instead can have been established by something existing wholly outside the structure of the self. In the terms of German idealism, we can see Kierkegaard here following Schelling in his break from his own system of absolute idealism, which for the large part follows the Fichtean structure of self-consciousness, and the development of his ungrounded theory of freedom that emerges in Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom. Kierkegaard’s next move in the first page of section A opens up the possibility for despair (which signifies the opening of reflection) which will guide the analysis provided in the rest of the text. Kierkegaard adds:
If the relation that relates itself to itself has been established by another, then the relation is indeed the third, but this relation, the third, is yet again a relation and relates itself to that which established the entire relation. (SUD 13)
This adds another level of relationality to the structure Kierkegaard has already introduced. We have already seen that spirit is the relation contained within the self between two opposed elements. This addition adds another level of relationality between the self and the power that established the self. So while the self contains an internal relation between two opposing poles (i.e., possibility/necessity), spirit also functions as a relating between the self and the power that established the self. So in true idealist fashion, Kierkegaard identifies this fundamentally relational structure of the self and extrapolates this structure to a higher level. We will later see how this structure is repeated in the context of socio-political relations. Kierkegaard sums up the structure outlined in the opening of section A by stating:
The human self is such a derived, established relation, a relation that relates itself to itself and in relating itself to itself relates itself to another. (SUD 13–14)
This dual nature of the self, that it is both dialectically relational and established by another, is what allows Kierkegaard to argue that there are thus two forms of despair experienced by the self. The first form of despair is described as ‘not to will to be oneself’, the second is ‘in despair not to will to be oneself’ (SUD 14). While he outlines these two distinct forms of despair, he is quick to note that all forms of despair can be traced back to the second form of despair, as the root of despair is a failure to either a) recognize or b) accept that one’s self is not self-posited but has been established by another. Any attempt to deny or evade this reality leads to despair. One of the fundamental moves of this text is thus to analyse the various forms of despair and outline the cure for the problem of despair, which we will soon see is faith. Kierkegaard goes on to describe the cure for despair as such:
The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (SUD 14)
Thus, when the self is both a) willing to be itself and b) affirming itself while also willingly acknowledging the fact that it has not posited itself and is thus grounded in something outside itself, it is outside of despair. To reiterate, despair can be seen as the self’s infinitely failing process of trying to be wholly autonomous in itself and, along with this, the process of being caught in an infinite series of reflection.
In the story Kierkegaard is telling about the development of spirit; despair serves as both an excellence and a defect (SUD 14). This is because, while despair can lead to an inability to properly will to be oneself along with a refusal to recognize that one is not wholly autonomous, it also opens up the space for reflection, which is a positive development of spirit on its journey forward from immediacy and anxiety. According to Kierkegaard,
The possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over the animal . . . for it indicates infinite erectness or sublimity, that he is spirit. (SUD 15)
While the possibility of this sickness is man’s superiority over purely animal existence, ‘to be aware of this sickness is the Christian’s superiority over the natural man’ (SUD 15). For Kierkegaard, ‘to be able to despair is an infinite advantage’ precisely because it signifies a being able, a capacity for reflection and possibility. He goes to state that ‘not being able to be in despair must signify the destroyed possibility of being able to be in despair’ (SUD 15); thus, the lack of a capacity for despair signifies the lack of capacity for reflection and possibility in general. So while being in despair is in fact a defect of spirit, it continuously signifies the excellence of spirit in its reflective capacity. Or in other words, better to be in a failed form of reflection that signifies the qualification of spirit than to not be spirit at all.
So for the self to not be in despair, it must at every moment destroy possibility. This destruction of possibility simply signifies the risk of spirit being caught up in reflecting on an infinity of possibilities, a form of despair Kierkegaard will go on to explain, but for the time being it is worth noting that this destruction relates to actuality in that actuality itself is consummated, not annihilated, possibility. Thus, the point here is not that spirit simply annihilates possibility but that spirit moves from determinate reflection on one possibility to the actualization of that possibility, which serves as its consummation.
Section B of the first book of the text, ‘The Universality of the Sickness (Despair)’, goes on to argue that despair is a fundamental condition of humanity and a necessary aspect of the self. In a move which shows a clear point of continuity between this text and the previously discussed Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard argues that anxiety and despair are both fundamental to being human. Anxiety represents the fundamental disharmony at the heart of subjectivity and the inability of the self to be its own foundation. While anxiety remains an ontological category used to describe the foundational state of universal human subjectivity, despair (which is a category of the self) is a qualification of human spirit. While anxiety remains a category signifying the failure of immediacy, despair is a category of reflection.
Kierkegaard goes on to explain this by differentiating physical from psychical health. Physical health is an immediate category that leads to a thinking of the human as a clear synthesis of the physical and psychical; when considered in terms of spirit (the psychical) there can be no such thing as immediate health. Referring back to his analysis from CA, Kierkegaard notes, ‘all immediacy is anxiety and thus, quite consistently, is most anxious about nothing’ (SUD 25). This immediacy is made anxious when made aware of the indefinite nature of its own ontological grounds. Reflection, or despair, follows a similar structure and is never so much itself when it is precisely nothing, or put differently, becomes nothing through infinite reflection. The transition from anxiety to despair has to do with the progression of the dialectical nature of spirit. While anxiety is the relation between the subject and its grounds, in despair the subject takes on a dialectical structure, and thus there no longer exists a simple contradiction between the subject and its grounds, but this subject contains a contradiction within itself. Put differently, anxiety is the relation between something and nothing, while despair involves the contradictions of the self’s split nature (infinite/finite) relating to both possibility and necessity. As we will soon see, despair is, at its most basic, a lack of awareness that one is dialectically constituted as spirit. Kierkegaard states,
What wretchedness that they are lumped together and deceived instead of being split apart so that each individual may gain the highest, the only thing worth living for and enough to live in for an eternity. (SUD 27)
Despair is thus the necessary splitting apart of abstract humanity into the single individual and a further splitting apart of the individual’s own consciousness. This split, or fracture, is the sign of man’s true nature as spirit. While Kierkegaard notes that this qualification of man as spirit is thought to be rare, it is in fact the most universal trait of humanity. Most simply fail to realize they are spirit.
In section C (‘The Forms of This Sickness’), Kierkegaard further outlines the structure of the self in its relations to the twin poles of infinitude/finitude and possibility/necessity. He states that the self is composed of two parts, infinitude and finitude, and that the synthesis between infinitude and finitude is a relation, and further, this relation, which is the self, can be called freedom. This relational structure then takes on another aspect when Kierkegaard says, ‘Freedom is the dialectical aspect of the categories of possibility and necessity’(SUD 29). So the self (freedom) is the relational synthesis of infinitude and finitude, and this self is then further dialectically related to the categories of possibility and necessity.
This structure is the structure of consciousness (which is awareness of self by the self) for Kierkegaard, which is crucial as his aim is to consider despair entirely within the category of consciousness. This relates back to the distinction in section B between despair that is conscious of itself and despair that is not conscious of itself as being in despair.
He goes on to highlight the importance of consciousness for properly considering despair by connecting the category of consciousness with the categories of both self and will, stating,
The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness the more will; the more will, the more self. (SUD 29)
Thus, for Kierkegaard, the self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude, or more precisely, consciousness is the self’s awareness that it is a synthesis (or is composed) of infinitude and finitude. In this active relation between the poles of infinitude and finitude, it is the task of the self to more fully become itself by relating to its own internal synthesis of infinitude and finitude as well as relating itself to the poles of possibility and necessity. Along with this, and most importantly, the self can in the final instance become itself only through its relationship to God, as that which has established the whole relation. While his conception of faith is further elaborated in the second half of the book, for the time being we can simply note that relating to God primarily signifies the acknowledgement that one’s self has an origin that lies outside its own circle of reflective consciousness, an origin related to the Afgrund of absolute freedom discussed in the previous chapter.
Kierkegaard thinks that becoming a self is equivalent to becoming concrete and that this becoming concrete consists of fighting the temptation to become either wholly finite or infinite; rather, becoming concrete consists of existing within the very tension of this synthesis. Kierkegaard describes this process, of becoming concrete:
The process of becoming must be an infinite moving away from itself in the infinitizing of the self, and an infinite coming back to itself in the finitizing process. (SUD 30)
Thus, if the self is to properly become itself, it must let itself move away from itself in the act of infinite reflection, which is reflection about pure possibility, but only to then return back to its finite, or necessary aspect to refill the necessary with the possible, or the finite with the infinite. It is important to note that this is not a one-time process and, more importantly, we must note that this process of becoming is the self. The self, as spirit, is precisely this activity of movement between the infinite and the finite, the possible and the necessary. As Kierkegaard puts it, ‘every moment the self exists, it is in a process of becoming’ (SUD 30). Insomuch as the self does not become itself in the fashion outlined above, it is not itself and is thus in despair.
With this structure of the activity of the self now adequately outlined, Kierkegaard goes on to describe the two primary types of despair which both emerge as the product of two different forms of mis-relation in the structure of the self.
The first form of despair is the one that emerges when spirit ventures off into the realm of infinitude and fails to come back and touch the ground of finitude. In this sense, the despair of infinitude can only be defined directly by reflecting on its opposed concept: finitude (SUD 30). In this case of despair, infinitude represents ‘the fantastic, the unlimited’ (SUD 30). In this form of despair, spirit becomes paralyzed through reflecting on the fantastic possibilities contained in the infinite.
Kierkegaard uses this form of despair to introduce another important concept for his theory of consciousness: the imagination. He brings up this concept through its relation to the fantastic, one of the tendencies of infinitude’s despair, and goes on to state that the imagination is further related to ‘feeling, knowing, and willing’ (SUD 30). This is important so long as the imagination is a tendency of the self and is also related to feeling, knowing and willing, then there can also be imaginary feeling, knowing and willing.
He goes on to describe the imagination as infinitizing reflection, which simply means that imagination spurs reflection on an infinite trajectory with no finite limit. The self who is caught up in imagination is the self that is trapped in an endless cycle, or circle, of reflection. Imagination in general is not an inherently negative concept for Kierkegaard as ‘the self is reflection, and the imagination is reflection, is the rendition of the self as the self’s possibility’ (SUD 31). Imagination is negative, however, when through imagining the fantastic in an infinite manner, the self is led infinitely away from itself to the point that it is prevented from making a return to itself. Rather than the self relating to its two poles (infinitude-finitude) in a process of becoming, the self whose imagination is caught in fantastic reflection merely moves in one direction, with no return to itself.
Kierkegaard goes on to describe the way in which this form of despair affects feeling, knowing and willing. When feeling becomes fantastic, the self turns into an ‘abstract sentimentality’ (SUD 31) that combines sentimentality with some abstract fate. Rather than becoming herself more and more, this person loses herself more and more (SUD 31).
With knowing, it is normally the case that an increase of knowledge corresponds to an increase in self-knowledge (SUD 31); thus, the more the self knows, the more the self knows itself. But when knowledge fails to make this return to itself and become self-knowledge, this fantastic form of imaginary knowledge is merely abstract.
Finally, in terms of willing, when it becomes fantastic, there is no longer an even proportion between abstract and concrete willing, and the self once again loses itself through a pure willing of the fantastic, or abstract, with no reference to the concrete. In all three of these examples, these aspects of the self risk becoming wholly fantastic, or infinite, rather than being a dynamic relation between the infinite and the finite. When the self becomes swept away in this manner, it loses its dialectical nature and ends up existing purely in the fantasy of abstract and infinite possibility with no reference to the concrete or the actual. It is not difficult to see why this form of despair would have a dramatically a-social and a-political effect on the self and its existence.
The most unsettling aspect of this form of despair, however, is that, as Kierkegaard points out, this retreat into the fantastic does not preclude the possibility of one’s going on living a fairly normal life. As Kierkegaard sees it, this person can still, ‘marry, have children, be honored and esteemed’ (SUD 32), even though, in fact, he or she lacks a self. Kierkegaard believes this loss of self does ‘not create much of a stir’ precisely because a self is ‘the most dangerous thing of all for a person to show signs of having’ (SUD 32). This loss of self is so dangerous precisely because it so easily goes unnoticed.
The opposite pole of the fantastic despair of infinitude is finitude’s despair, that is, to lack infinitude, which Kierkegaard refers to as ‘despairing reductionism’ (SUD 33). In this type of despair the self avoids infinitude by staying completely within the bounds of the finite. When one is completely finitized in this manner, Kierkegaard states that man runs the risk of ‘becoming a number instead of a self’ (SUD 33). When someone loses the infinite aspect of the dialectical structure of their self, they cease to exist in a properly spiritual sense and thus out of this fear of becoming oneself they avoid the essential contingency which is characteristic of humanity and the relation between the human and reality.
Rather than the self that loses itself by a reckless plunge into the infinite, in this form of despair one is ‘tricked out of itself’ (SUD 33) by others or the crowd. In this instance, one finds it easier to become lost in the crowd or some sort of abstract collective rather than to truly believe in, and thus become, oneself. Kierkegaard describes the one who avoids an essential encounter with their own self through absorption in the crowd as ‘a copy, a number, a mass man’ (SUD 34).
Once again the most surprising aspect of this despair is that one can go on living a normal, and even successful, life. Kierkegaard says that this man will often have great success in business and social life. He goes on to describe this form of despair as the ‘secular mentality’, in which men ‘use their capacities, amass money, carry on secular enterprises . . . but themselves they are not; spiritually speaking they have no self’ (SUD 35). Thus when one lacks infinitude, one becomes totally absorbed in finite and spiritless matters. There is nothing dialectical, and thus spiritual, about this despair.
After defining despair in terms of the poles of infinitude and finitude, Kierkegaard deepens his analysis of despair by defining it in terms of possibility and necessity. He states:
Possibility and necessity are equally essential to becoming (and the self has the task of becoming itself in freedom). (SUD 35)
Following this, he first outlines possibility’s despair, which is to lack necessity. This type of despair runs more or less parallel to the despair that lacks finitude but is more developed in an even deeper sense. To help explain this despair, Kierkegaard offers an updated description of the structure of the self in these terms:
Insofar as it is itself, it is the necessary, and insofar as it has the task of becoming itself, it is a possibility. (SUD 35)
The risk inherent in this form of despair is that the self runs wildly away from itself in possibility, to the extent that it loses any necessity to which it might return. Kierkegaard describes this self as a purely ‘abstract possibility’ which
flounders in possibility until exhausted but neither moves from the place where it is nor arrives anywhere, for necessity is literally that place; to become oneself is literally a movement in that place. (SUD 36)
So in this case, possibility seems greater and greater to the self, as an infinity of possibilities lie before it at every moment, and none of these possibilities ever become actual. Kierkegaard goes on: ‘Eventually everything seems possible, but this is exactly the point at which the abyss swallows up the self’ (SUD 36). In this process, the self becomes pure possibility and the time between the appearance of one possibility and another grows so brief that eventually the self becomes a mirage. There is no longer time to consider the actualization of these possibilities. This form of life now lacks all actuality, and in light of this, the ‘individual has become unreal’ (SUD 36). This lack of actuality, however, is in Kierkegaard’s terms a lack of necessity. He is careful to distinguish his position from that of the Hegelians of his day on this point by noting:
The philosophers are mistaken when they explain necessity as a unity of possibility and actuality—no, actuality is the unity of possibility and necessity. (SUD 36)
This lack of necessity experienced by the one caught up in the unreal life of pure possibility is thus the lack of submission to the necessity contained in life. Because the self has a finite and necessary aspect, the attempt to become pure possibility requires an ignorance of this necessity. Kierkegaard says that this self has thus ‘fantastically reflected itself in possibility’ to the point that, when looking into a mirror, one does not necessarily recognize oneself. In practical terms, the one who despairs in this way would be so concerned with the infinite possibility of their desires and hopes that they would be paralyzed from taking these desires and hopes to bear on necessity and, subsequently, from ever making these possibilities actual. This could look like the young graduate with so many options for her future that she spends her days sketching out elaborate life plans while failing to ever put on her shoes and go out into the world to make any of these possibilities actual. On the other hand, this could also be the young man so anxious about losing his beloved that, instead of spending time actually experiencing this person he loves so deeply, he retreats further into his own self through anxiously relating to the possibility that this love could at any moment collapse.
When Kierkegaard moves on to a discussion of the opposite of possibility’s despair, which is necessity’s despair, he says,
The necessary is like pure consonants, but to express this there must be possibility. If this is lacking, if a human experience is brought to the point where is lacks possibility, then it is in despair and is in despair every moment it lacks possibility. (SUD 37)
In simple terms, if the one lost in the infinite abyss of possibility is in despair because the multitude of possibilities moves them so far from anything necessary that spirit never becomes actual, then the despair, of necessity, takes away all possibility and thus one’s ability to believe in anything not finite or necessary. If the one suffering from the despair of possibility never ventures out into the world because there are too many things to do, the one suffering from the despair, of necessity, stays home because there is nothing to do. It is similar to the difference between a fantastic transcendence in which what is truly the most real is infinitely ‘out-there’, and a stable immanence in which all that exists and might ever exist is contained in one stable totality.
After introducing this form of despair, Kierkegaard introduces an idea that Slavoj Žižek has referred to as Kierkegaard’s ‘key ontological formula’;[2] this is the idea that ‘what is decisive is that with God everything is possible’ (SUD 38).
This is the crucial ground upon which faith, which will soon be outlined as the corrective to despair, stands. The despair of necessity is thus firmly rooted to the understanding, and according to secular understanding, there is no possibility other than what is necessary or finite. For the one trapped in this form of despair, possibility is thus the only chance of salvation (SUD 38). This possibility is connected to breaking with the understanding through a movement of faith in which one becomes a believer by acknowledging, ‘that for God everything is possible’ (SUD 39). Even if one makes the decision of faith in an attempt to break the bounds of finite necessity, the human understanding will still maintain the tension that ‘his collapse is all together certain’ (SUD 39); this tension is what Kierkegaard describes as the dialectic of believing. He goes on to state that ‘the believer sees and understands his downfall, humanly speaking, but he believes. For this reason he does not collapse’ (SUD 39). Thus, even when the world seems to pose absolute obstacles to the development of the self, it is able to rest in the openness of the possibility of God and move forward. Here one could rightly think of the famous closing lines from Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable:
You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.
We could think of the ‘you must go on’ as the imperative to become oneself. ‘I can’t go on’ would be the response to this imperative by the one caught in the despair of necessity, and finally, ‘I’ll go on’ would represent the self resting in the fact that, while necessity may deem something impossible, with God everything is possible, so the self existing in faith can continue to develop.
This further development of the self in relation to the movement of faith and faith’s overcoming of the fatal determinism of necessity leads Kierkegaard to stating, ‘Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity’ (SUD 40). Existing as just one or the other leads to inevitable despair. For the fatalist, another name for the one caught in necessity’s despair, God thus becomes necessity. Kierkegaard corrects this by restating his key religious formula:
Since everything is possible for God, then God is this—that everything is possible. (SUD 40)
It is interesting to note that, rather than offering any sort of theological content to the concept of God, Kierkegaard gives it only the ontological-existential content of signifying pure possibility. This distinction will be highlighted later in the present chapter.
Kierkegaard goes on to relate his formula (God is Possibility) to the development of the self as spirit by stating,
Only he whose being has been so shaken that he has become spirit by understanding that everything is possible, only he has anything to do with God. (SUD 40)
Thus the encounter with the possibility of God serves the purpose of destabilizing the self by making the self aware that the seeming stability of necessity is fractured with possibility. This is what enables spirit to properly become itself. The being of God as possibility is thus the ontological condition for the free development of spirit (or freedom) in becoming itself.
Kierkegaard contrasts the believer with what he calls the ‘philistine-bourgeois mentality’. He describes this mentality as essentially lacking possibility and as fundamentally spiritless. Rather than existing in the dialectical tension between necessity and possibility,
the philistine-bourgeois mentality lacks every qualification of spirit and is completely wrapped up in probability. (SUD 41)
Thus, rather than spirit existing in the possibility that is signified by God, the philistine-bourgeois considers only what is probable in the finite-necessary nature of a situation. Novelty in any true sense would be impossible for the philistine-bourgeois, as only what is contained in the situation could be probabilistically possible. Kierkegaard goes on to state, ‘he lives within a certain trivial compendium of experiences as to how things go’ (SUD 41).
Kierkegaard states that this person is left unaware of both their self and God, and only the possibility of imagination can tear him out of the calculated nature of his probabilistic experience and teach him how to fear and hope. This happens by ‘rendering possible that which surpasses the sufficient amount of any experience’ (SUD 41). So without the capacity for imagination, the philistine-bourgeois mentality does not allow one to think anything beyond the limits of possible experience. He goes on to argue that the philistine-bourgeois mentality thinks ‘that it has tricked this prodigious elasticity into the trap or madhouse of probability’ (SUD 41), or in other words, has taken the previously mentioned ‘essential contingency’ (SUD 33) of human existence and attempted to reduce it to a system of necessity and probability.
Thus far we have seen Kierkegaard progress from analyzing despair in terms of infinitude-finitude and possibility-necessity; now we will look at his most thorough analysis of despair when he attempts to define it by consciousness. The first point which needs to be made regarding the relation between despair and consciousness is that ‘the greater the degree of consciousness, the more intensive the despair’ (SUD 42).
When considering despair in terms of consciousness, Kierkegaard breaks despair down into even more precise categories than he has with infinitude-finitude and possibility-necessity. The first type of despair in this categorization is despair that is ignorant of being in despair and ignorant of having a (eternal) self. In this form of despair, the human is ‘completely dominated by the sensate and the sensate-physical’ (SUD 43). This individual waves good-bye to spirit and subsequently misses out on being the absolute that a human can be. As Kierkegaard theorizes it, every human being is spirit insomuch as they are a synthesis of the psychical and the physical, and by leaving out the psychical element, there is no contradiction or opposition and thus no relational structure. Kierkegaard compares the person suffering from this form of despair to someone who builds a three-story house, with each story signifying a higher level of social distinction, and then choosing to live in the basement. In this example, the basement represents pure sensate existence, while the higher levels represent the progression of spirit’s self-becoming.
Kierkegaard equates this form of despair with the sort of thinker who erects a huge system to explain the whole of existence and history but fails to consider his own place in this grand system. The allusion here is once again to the Danish Hegelians who used Hegel’s logical categories to provide a comprehensive account of religion and existence. The thinker erects a huge home but lives in the doghouse out back, rather than occupying a place in the home he worked so hard to construct, as he forgot to build a room for himself.
Kierkegaard also relates the ignorance of being in despair with the ignorance of being in anxiety, discussed in the previous chapter. This anxiety, which is spiritlessness, is recognized by its spiritless sense of security, in a manner akin to the one who would rather live in the basement of the purely sensate rather than ascend the stairs of spirit.
For Kierkegaard, this individual is separated from the one who is conscious of being in despair by being ‘a negativity further away from the truth’ (SUD 44). This journey to the truth of spirit is thus a series of overcoming various negativities, as Kierkegaard says ‘to reach the truth, one must go through every negativity’ (SUD 44). This form of despair is merely the most basic and because of this, it is the most common form of despair in the world (SUD 45).
This form of despair, which is a lack of awareness of being spirit, leads the individual to seek their identity through merging with ‘some abstract universality’, such as a nation or state (SUD 46). By remaining ignorant of both their fundamental nature (spirit) and the source of this nature (God), the self continues to try and find these things in something wholly external to its self and its nature.
The next development of despair is the consciousness of being in despair and subsequently in despair not willing to be oneself, or, in despair willing to be oneself. While this represents a movement towards spirit, this is a more intensive form of despair than the form previously discussed as it is more conscious of being in despair and responds to this awareness with even more despairing attempts to get out of despair. Kierkegaard outlines these despairing attempts to get out of despair through contrasting them to faith, the only actual solution to despair, the formula of which is:
In relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it. (SUD 49)
Thus, the progression of forms of despair outlined in this analysis represents a variety of attempts to get out of despair which all fall short of the formula of faith.
He begins by outlining the transition from pure immediacy to reflection in regard to despair. This process begins when one existing in pure immediacy (which is spiritless) experiences some sort of suffering that is wholly external, ‘in no way does it come from within as an act’ (SUD 51). This individual is psychically qualified, but in a childlike fashion. Its dialectic is not one of infinitude-finitude or possibility-necessity but rather good luck–bad luck (SUD 51). Something then happens to this immediate self that comes from outside and leads to despair, but this despair is more like a basic form of unhappiness than it is a truly dialectical despair. As Kierkegaard puts it, each excess that requires reflection leads the man of immediacy into this form of despair, as a realization of the limits of immediacy.
This sort of despair is the lowest form of despairingly not willing to be oneself, as these external occasions that call for reflection call for an awareness that he is a self, as spirit, with the capacity for reflection. Thus, his despair is a refusal to become a self, or an attempt to be someone else (SUD 53). The man of immediacy thus remains devoid of self-knowledge and identifies himself only by externalities, such as ‘the clothes he wears’ (SUD 53). Kierkegaard refers to this as a ‘comic form of despair’ (SUD 53).
The next step of this progression from immediacy to reflection takes place when immediacy is assumed to have some reflection (SUD 54). This occurs when enough reflection is present to enable the man of immediacy to recognize himself as essentially different or separated from the externalities he previously sought to identify with. This opens up the space for self-activity and an awareness of responsibility for one’s self (SUD 54). Now that the man of immediacy has enough reflection to recognize the separation of his own self from externality, he then realizes that obstacles also exist within the structure of his own self. The necessary aspect of the self restricts the possible aspect and ‘this difficulty, whatever it is, makes him recoil’ (SUD 54). This emergence of the contradiction (or tension) within the very structure of the self signifies the first signs of the potential for a full break with immediacy, but this awareness itself does not lead to this break.
This reflection, which has made man aware that he is not simply the externalities he has previously identified with, makes him further aware that ‘there is much he can lose without losing the self’ (SUD 55). This then provides him with a dim idea that there may even be something eternal contained within himself. In spite of this, he still avoids taking full responsibility for himself and thus avoids a full break with immediacy. Thus, he still despairs not to will to be oneself. He has stepped past willing to be someone else but still remains in a higher form of despair. He became a self up until a point but refused to venture any further. At this point, we could say that this despair, immediacy with a quantitative reflection, is still despair over the earthly, which is the most common form of despair. Most people will remain here and never live within the qualification of spirit. This only happens at the point at which they are compelled to turn inward, which happens through an experience of the moment or instant. To reckon with this I will now move to a more critical discussion of Kierkegaard’s conception of faith and paradox and its place in the curing of despair.
3.2 Faith and Paradox
While SUD is without a doubt one of Kierkegaard’s most blatantly philosophical and systematic works in tone as well as style, it is worth using an example from one of his most literary works, Fear and Trembling and Repetition, to highlight the transition that takes place between Part I and Part II of SUD. In FTR we see a young man transitioning from attempting to overcome despair in the methods outlined in Part I of SUD, which inevitably lead to failure, to overcoming this despair through an encounter with something external which leads to faith. After this encounter the young man says, ‘I am myself again. . . . I am unified again’ (FTR 220).
This character goes on to state, ‘When the idea calls, I abandon everything, or, more correctly, I have nothing to abandon’ (FTR 221). This young man goes from attempting to understand his despair in totally logical (or immanent) terms and, through encountering something which signifies a transcendence outside of his circle of logical reflection, lets himself embrace the contingency at the heart of being. After this experience he says,
Three cheers for the dance in the vortex of the infinite . . . three cheers for the cresting waves that fling me above the stars! (FTR 222)
This embracing of contingency, or faith, is what Kierkegaard offers to the solution of despair that was outlined in detail in Book 1.
At this point (the conclusion of part I) Kierkegaard has worked through the dialectics of despair in relation to consciousness and outlined the various attempts that consciousness makes to break out of despair. While it seems that Kierkegaard has attempted to provide an account of how despair can be overcome, the endeavor ends in failure. It would not be absurd that say that in part I of SUD, Kierkegaard is in fact emphasizing the limits of a Fichtean account of consciousness and, in particular, the account offered by Fichte during his Jena Period (exemplified in the 1794 The Science of Knowledge). This account, as outlined in chapter 1 of this work, considers consciousness as internal to itself, consisting of the dialectical tension between an I and a not-I; and while this version of consciousness can be considered properly self-relating in the sense Kierkegaard outlines in the opening pages of SUD, it fails the test of resting transparently in the power which posited it. Thus, no matter how fully developed this version of consciousness is, it will always remain trapped in a cycle of despair as long as its activity and grounding are considered wholly immanent to its own activity.
With this in mind, we can see that if Part I of this book consists of an exercise in the inevitable failure of a Fichtean model of consciousness, Part II consists of Kierkegaard introducing the concept capable of accounting for consciousness’s way out of the despair of infinite reflection, which is faith. To arrive at this existential solution to the problem of despair, Kierkegaard first re-articulates the key conceptual terms of Part I in explicitly theological terms, and thus despair is now more precisely defined as sin (SUD 77). In relation to the analysis presented thus far, sin does not want to recognize that one is always already posited by something existing outside itself, which is God. Following this, despair/sin can be considered as not willing to be oneself before God. Thus, the faithful way out of despair involves not only a positive willing to be oneself but also the subsequent movement of willing to be oneself before God in faith. Following this, faith characterizes the self that rests transparently in God. Sin, which Kierkegaard refers to as a qualification of spirit, is the condition of spirit that leads to despair and faith, is the way for spirit to get out of the deadlock of despair caused by sin.
While terms such as sin and faith surely carry with them weighty theological connotations, I would like to continue to follow the strategy outlined in the previous chapter and instead consider the philosophical and ontological significance of these concepts. Sin in this text carries with it the same ontological significance as it did in CA, namely as signifying a fundamental split, or inconsistency, between the self and it-self (or the I and the not-I). This position, sin, could thus stand for the position of Jena-era Fichte. Faith, on the other hand, signifies the development of spirit past the wholly negative self-relation of sin. Rather than faith signifying a recuperative moment, or synthesis, by which the two poles of consciousness (possibility/necessity, infinitude/finitude) are united in a third term without any excess or remainder, faith instead signifies the affirmation of this essential gap (or contradiction) that characterizes spirit. Faith is not a fixing of the split articulated by sin but is rather the affirmation of this split as something fundamental. Faith does not fix, but rather affirms, the fracture at the heart of existence.
So if sin can be seen as representing a certain version of Fichte’s theory of consciousness in which self-relation is primarily the contradiction of an I and a not-I, then faith can be considered as operating in a manner similar to the ontology articulated in Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, which was explicated in the previous chapters. This means that faith is precisely the affirmation of the Afgrund of being, that is, faith in God does not equate to an absolute knowing grounded in an absolute being or substance; as Kierkegaard notes, ‘God is not some externality, like a policeman’ (SUD 80). But rather, faith is that spirit grounded in God as the un-pre-thinkable grounds of possibility and contingency which forever elides any sort of dialectical recuperation or a moment of finality.
Thus at the level of the purely ontological, the movement that takes place from CA through SUD consists of a critique of any immediate account of the grounds of consciousness and spirit in favor of an Afgrund which utilizes a Schelling-inspired ontology to argue that spirit itself is the activity of freedom. At the level of reflection this means that God signifies the un-pre-thinkable thing that haunts any attempt for reflection to maintain any sort of logical totality, as there remains something wholly outside the recuperative activity of reflection.
Moving forward in his religious solution to the problem of despair, Kierkegaard introduces another of his oft-used concepts: paradox. Paradox is crucial as it distinguishes Kierkegaard’s position from a more typically dialectical account of consciousness in which one stage is sublated in the next; that is, faith is not a result that is immanent to the self-development of consciousness. On a larger scale, we can see this distinction (between paradox and dialectic) in Kierkegaard’s theory of the stages: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious. As Slavoj Žižek has noted, this triad of stages does not involve, on the one hand, a choice between three equally rational life views, or on the other, a system in which each stage is the dialectical consequence of the other. According to Žižek:
The religious is by no means the mediating ‘synthesis’ of the two [the aesthetic and the ethical], but, on the contrary, the radical assertion of the parallax gap (the ‘paradox’, the lack of common measure, the insurmountable abyss between the Finite and the Infinite). That is to say: what makes the Aesthetic or the Ethical problematic is not their respective positive characteristics, but their very formal nature: the fact that, in both cases, the subject wants to live a consistent mode of existence, and thus disavows the radical antagonism of the human situation.[3]
Thus, it is not the case that the religious is the synthetic third moment that unites the contradiction between the aesthetic and the ethical. Rather, while there exists a dialectical moment in the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, there is no transition from the ethical to the religious, the relation of these two stages is not dialectical but paradoxical, and thus the subjective condition of faith is necessary to venture from the ethical into the religious; this is what Kierkegaard refers to as ‘the leap’.[4] In terms of the development of consciousness, paradox allows Kierkegaard to point out the limits of the logic of reflection. The ontological condition of paradox is a corollary to the subjective moment of decision. Kierkegaard says that the modern mind, which he associates with reflection, holds that ‘to think is to be’ (SUD 93). Thus, reflective thought is constitutive of being, or existence. Understanding the logical conditions of thought is thus equivalent with living, or existing, in the world. Kierkegaard opposes this modern mindset with the world of actuality, a concept outlined in the previous chapter. According to Kierkegaard, ‘in the world of Actuality, there is a transition from understanding to doing’ (SUD 93–94).
The crucial point here is, simply stated, that thought itself does not create action. Put differently, reflecting on reality in itself has no effect whatsoever on actually existing reality. Kierkegaard does not primarily think of the human as a purely reflective being but as spirit, and ‘in the life of spirit there is no standing still’ (SUD 94). Kierkegaard associates the equation between thought and existence with the modern mind and a largely Cartesian model of subjectivity in which thought implies existence. Kierkegaard instead associates the Greek mind with the connection between understanding and doing, and thus his goal here is in one sense to re-problematize the modern equation of thought with existence. This is why for spirit there is no standing still, as for spirit ‘everything is actuation’, or put differently, the act of spirit is the constant actualization of ideality (SUD 94).
The point here is to highlight the limits of reflection as it pertains to action and actuality, and this is primarily accomplished by arguing that decision serves as the moment at which human consciousness can break out of the circle of logical reflection and create the conditions for action. Thus, rather than ideality being equivalent to actuality, it is the work of the subject to will the ideal in the actual. This point is crucial as this helps us avoid a crass reading in which Kierkegaard’s ‘religious existentialism’ is put in absolute opposition to the systematicity of German idealism. The reason that paradox is so crucial to this break from reflection is that paradox, as opposed to dialectical transition, forces a choice, as one can no longer follow the logical unfolding of consciousness (or reality) but must make a determinate decision. While Kierkegaard prefers Christ as the example of paradox par excellence (as Christ is both divine and human, transcendence and immanence) we could just as well use the structure of romantic love as the example of a paradox. When someone falls in love, she is faced with a decision that no system of logic can help her make. She is well aware that billions of potential partners exist on this planet, and that most love relationships end in heartbreak and disaster anyway, and there is no guarantee that she will not also end up with a broken heart. Thus is the paradox of love, ‘this likely will not work, but I simply cannot do otherwise’. Faith is then the decisive action by which two lovers make a pledge to each other that is beyond the bounds of any logical certainty or epistemological proof. This paradox marks the disruptive split between ideality (logic) and actuality (existence). It is crucial to note that this paradoxical split between logic and existence is not some existential appropriation of Kant’s ontology in which subjective freedom is the product of our absolute inability to access absolute reality as it ‘really is’ in-itself. Kierkegaard is here not post-Kantian but post-Hegelian in his orientation, as this paradoxical gap does not imply a gap or deficiency in the subject’s ability to know the underlying purpose or structure of reality (i.e., an epistemological limit) but rather this gap is the product of a radical freedom which is ontological and not epistemological in nature (i.e. the abyssal grounds of freedom).
The implications of failing to grasp Kierkegaard’s fundamentally post-Hegelian (or idealist) orientation in this context has recently led to an extremely provocative reading in which Lee Braver labels Kierkegaard’s position as a ‘transgressive realism’ which occupies a crucial place between the Hegelian and Heideggerian strands of recent European philosophy.[5] In Braver’s reading, which is a key aspect of his larger project of tracing the history of what he calls ‘continental realism’,[6] the subject’s experience of reality as transgressing the limits of its previous understanding of the field of symbolic representation creates a realism in which we can know reality only insomuch as our systematic framework is constantly transgressed by experience. Thus, the paradox is between our conceptual understanding of reality and our subjective experience of actuality. This reading is opposed to the one presented in this work as it makes the conceptual move of too quickly disconnecting Kierkegaard from the ontological concerns of the post-Kantian idealist tradition which sought to think about the relation of subject and object rather than their radical disconnect and the effect this has on the subject’s epistemological faculties. Along with this, Braver remains committed to a reading of Hegel in which spirit (Geist) reaches a final synthesis within human history and thus enables us to have objective knowledge of reality. With this reading, he then sets up an opposition between Kant, for whom noumenal reality is forever outside our epistemological capacity, and Hegel, whom he thinks outlines a system in which logical thought makes it capable to have absolute knowledge of the whole.
Braver outlines the stakes of this transgressive realism, which occupies a space between the either/or offered by Kant and Hegel as such:
Not only is there an outside, as Hegel denies, but we can encounter it, as Kant denies; these encounters are in fact far more important than what we can come up with on our own. The most important ideas are those that genuinely surprise us, not in the superficial sense of discovering which one out of a determinate set of options is correct, as the Kantian model allows, but by violating our most fundamental beliefs and rupturing our basic categories.[7]
So Braver contends that ’transgressive realism’, a position he finds in the writings of Kierkegaard, allows us to acknowledge that there is in fact an outside to thought (something he finds absent in Hegel) and that while we can never have objective knowledge of this outside, we can still encounter aspects of this reality which forever elides our desire for epistemological certainty. In a simple sense, it seems that Braver is here wanting to argue that Kierkegaard’s theory of the instant represents these experiences in which we momentarily gain access to the outside of thought. Braver goes on to argue:
Thus, Kierkegaard’s view combines Kant’s admission of limitations on our (metaphysical) understanding with Hegel’s rejection of noumena, without thereby falling into the latter’s arrogant anti-realism.[8]
It should be clear at this point that the dichotomy set up by Braver is completely dependent on the idea that Hegel offered an ‘arrogant anti-realism’ in which there is no outside to subjective thought and that the world is completely contained in the structure of thought.
While this interpretation of Hegel is not unorthodox, I have already shown that a transcendental materialist reading of Hegel allows us to move past a reading in which Hegel is the philosopher of the totalized absolute and, rather, to a reading in which contradiction and tension are what characterize the structure of the concept, and absolute knowing is knowing absolutely that tension and contradiction will forever push thought forward past any moment of supposed finality. In this reading, Hegel does not avoid the Kantian split between the phenomenal and the noumenal by placing thought and reality wholly on the side of the phenomenal, but instead he takes the gap, or paradox, residing between the phenomenal and noumenal and places this gap within the phenomenal realm itself. Thus the absolute is not located in an external and infinite realm but is instead paradoxically located on the side of the finite. Žižek outlines Hegel’s thinking as such:
Hegel knows very well that every attempt at rational totalization ultimately fails, this failure is the very impetus of the ‘dialectical progress’; his ‘wager’ is located on another level—it concerns, so to speak, the ‘squared totalization’: the possibility of ‘making a system’ out of the very series of failed totalizations, to enchain them in a rational way, to discern the strange ‘logic’ that regulates the process by means of which the breakdown of a totalization itself begets another totalization. What is Phenomenology of Spirit ultimately if not the presentation of a series of aborted attempts by the subject to define the Absolute and thus arrive at the longed-for synchronism of subject and object? This is why its final outcome (‘absolute knowledge’) does not bring about a finally found harmony but rather entails a kind of reflective inversion: it confronts the subject which the fact that the true Absolute is nothing but the logical disposition of its previous failed attempts to conceive the Absolute—that is, with the vertiginous experience that Truth itself coincides with the path towards Truth.[9]
So if one is willing to grant this reading serious consideration, then it is possible that the dichotomy set up by Braver to utilize Kierkegaard as a sort of dialectical synthesis between Kant and Hegel is a moot point, as it is possible that Hegel himself already recognized that our attempts at logical finality are little more than failed attempts to finally grasp the truth and that the moment of absolute knowledge essentially involves recognizing, in an extremely Kierkegaardian fashion, that the truth is in fact the very journey towards the truth. If this is the case, then Braver’s comment that ‘Hegel remains Kierkegaard’s arch-enemy’[10] makes very little sense and seems to only perpetuate the worst tendencies of twentieth-century interpretations of Kierkegaard. This is particularly troubling, as the previously mentioned work of Jon Stewart has rendered the rhetorical force of speaking of Kierkegaard as the ultimate anti-Hegel historically indefensible. It is surprising that Braver completely ignores any mention of Stewart or similar work and offers a reading of Kierkegaard completely outside the context of contemporary interpretations of Kierkegaard. This is even more troubling as he is using Kierkegaard to represent a position he presents as a crucial and under-recognized moment in the development of continental philosophy, ‘transgressive realism’.
Along with this, Braver does not mention the texts in which Kierkegaard actually outlines the systematic and philosophical aspects of his project, texts such as CA and SUD. Once again, this lack of attention to the serious systematic project present in Kierkegaard’s own thought strips Braver’s argument of much of its force and leaves one wondering why he relies on a fairly commonsense understanding of Kierkegaard to mark what he sees as a crucial moment in the history of philosophy. It is interesting that Braver moves on to outline the post-Kierkegaardian history of ‘transgressive realism’ by looking at the way this perspective informs the projects of both Heidegger and Levinas, a reading which can be found in a whole host of secondary texts already existing on Kierkegaard.
Before moving on, I will briefly outline how the present transcendental materialist reading of Kierkegaard differs from Braver’s position of transgressive realism. In a certain sense, these positions seem similar, as both focus on a paradoxical split, or gap, that marks the being of subjectivity and its experience of reality. The crucial difference lies in the place given ontological priority in each position. For Braver, Kierkegaard’s ontology is fundamentally post-Kantian, in that it holds that there is a split between two distinct orders of being, with our subjective and finite experience on one side and the objective world of truth on the other. For Braver, the Kierkegaardian corrective to this Kantian framework is that the subject can experience paradoxical instants in which we have momentary access to the objective structure outside of our subjective experience. My reading, on the other hand, considers Kierkegaard in a post-Hegelian and, more accurately, a post-idealist, ontological framework. Rather than thinking of reality as possessing two distinct realms, this framework considers reality itself as inherently and incessantly fractured. So it is not the case that we exist in the realm of the finite and the necessary and that at special moments possibility breaks in to our world in a moment of divine transcendence. Rather, reality itself is pregnant with possibility and is itself the dynamic contradiction of the infinite and the finite, of possibility and necessity. Thus, it is not the case that we live in a finite and stable world in which God is a wholly other infinite source of transcendent truth that occasionally breaks in and provides moments of illumination but, rather, that in the ultimate paradoxical act God in fact became man. This is why Kierkegaard focuses so much on the paradoxical nature of Christ. It is not the case that God merely appeared to be human or that the divine momentarily possessed a particular human being; instead Christ was both fully human and fully divine, or fully infinite and fully finite. To once again quote Žižek’s own Hegelian reading of Kierkegaard on this point:
In Christianity, the gap that separates God from man is not directly ‘sublated’ in the figure of Christ as God-man; it is rather that, in the most tense moment of crucifixion, when Christ himself despairs, . . . the gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from God-Father; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God.[11]
Later in this chapter, I will work out the implications of this form of paradox in reconsidering the dichotomy between immanence and transcendence often used by Kierkegaard.
At this point it should be clear that Kierkegaard’s account of the development of consciousness provides both a critique of the limits of reflection as well as an account of the necessity of decision and action in the development of the self. In terms of the critique of reflection, we have seen that Kierkegaard orients the first half of SUD around an exploration of the various attempts of a largely Fichtean model of consciousness in overcoming despair, which is primarily a despairing to will to be oneself. In part I Kierkegaard shows that while consciousness is able to dialectically progress from a basic form of immediacy’s despair to a more advanced and self-reflective form of despair, the self (which is spirit) remains unable to break out of the deadlock which is reflection’s despair.
In part II, Kierkegaard provides the religious solution to the problem of despair: faith. Through facing the paradox between ideality and actuality, spirit wills a decision and is able to progress beyond despair through a decisive act. Once again, we must reiterate that faith is in no way a synthetic act that resolves a contradiction for spirit but rather a holding together of the contradiction in a willed act. Faith is possessed by the one who decides that, because of the contingency of being and the openness of the future, anything is possible and any immanent system of logic fails whenever it attempts to fence in logic and possibility. In this sense, we could think of those involved in the American civil rights movement as embodying the shift in consciousness outlined in Book II of SUD. While an immanent system of logic (race relations in 1960s America and the institutionalization of Jim Crow segregation laws) made it very clear that racial equality was something completely outside of the bounds of the political possibility of the state, the faith of those involved in the civil rights movement allowed them to recognize the possibility contained in the future and the contingency of any system of logic which claimed to be totalizing. This faith thus allowed those involved to move forward without any guarantee of success.
3.3 Reflection and Consciousness
Before moving forward, it is important to briefly outline the distinction between the concepts of reflection and consciousness in the work of Kierkegaard to avoid any confusion. The realization of the self as spirit is not a development of the faculty of reflection but, rather, the activity of becoming consciousness. Reflection consists of opposition without interest, or as previously stated, opposition without a moment of decision. In this sense, reflection is a negative relation between two opposed moments. Pure reflection operates wholly in the realm of possibility, and thus, in political terms, a politics of reflection would consist of reflecting on political reality and future possibilities for political projects but only in terms of pure possibility. Thus, reflection represents the pure possibility of a relation between ideality and actuality without a movement towards decision and subsequent activity. As Kierkegaard says in Johannes Climacus, or, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, ‘reflection is the possibility of the relation; consciousness is the relation, the first form of which is contradiction’ and ‘consciousness, therefore, presupposes reflection’ (PF/JC 169). He goes on to state, ‘reflection is disinterested. Consciousness, however, is the relation and thereby is interest’ (PF/JC 170).
Interest (or decision) serves as a key moment signifying the progression from reflection to consciousness, as it marks spirit as a third element embodying the dialectical relation between two elements of the self, in this case, ideality and actuality. We can here see once again that the development taking place from CA to SUD does not attempt to position reflection as the solution to the previously outlined problems of immediacy but rather that the move from immediacy to reflection is just a more deeply problematic account of the development of the self (spirit). While in reflection we have advancement from anxiety (ontological) to despair (anthropological), without decision (interest) reflection is little more than an infinite feedback loop of spirit’s inability to actually become a self.
This can also allow us to briefly mention another oft-used Kierkegaardian trope in our systematic analysis, repetition. In terms of the development of consciousness, repetition signifies the continued collision of ideality and actuality in the movement of spirit’s process of becoming a self. In this manner repetition signifies the non-totalizable nature of both spirit and reality, as the developing structure of both means that the dialectic of consciousness, or spirit, is never complete or, in other words, has no final moment of synthesis. Rather, even when spirit succeeds in decisively willing the ideal in the real, reality (which is marked by facticity) keeps developing, so spirit has to continually develop in its dialectical relation between factical necessity and possibility. Repetition is thus the constant and non-totalizable process of spirit’s dialectical becoming. In more typically Hegelian terms, repetition serves as a reminder that every dialectical overcoming is followed by another higher level of contradiction that follows the same structure. While it is often argued that the concept of repetition serves as Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegelian mediation, Jon Stewart has argued quite the opposite, noting:
What Kierkegaard calls ‘repetition,’ at least in this context, is what Hegel means by the relation of universality to particularity. The only way one can recognize a sensible particular as a repetition is by virtue of a universal concept that one already possesses. Without universals there would be no repetition since there would only be a plurality of dissimilar particulars. By the same token, without particulars there would be no repetition since there would be only eternal universals, which could never repeat. Thus, repetition can take place only in the relationship between the two. This can be regarded as the epistemological groundwork for the notion of repetition, a groundwork that Kierkegaard borrows from Hegel. This conclusion—that the notion of repetition arises from an analysis of Hegel’s discussion of consciousness—is striking since Kierkegaard seems ultimately to want to use the notion of repetition to criticize Hegel’s notion of mediation.[12]
Thus, every time spirit forces the collision of a contradiction (between ideality and actuality, finitude and infinitude, etc.) it repeats the process of positively working through the contradiction, but, once again, this movement is never final, and the contradiction simply reaches a higher level. To return to the previously used example of a love relationship in exemplifying the role of faith and decision, we can also see how this sort of relationship exemplifies repetition. While the initial declaration of love involves a faithful decision, the continuation of this process involves repetition. For example, after the initial decision between two lovers, they will be faced by a number of uncertainties and contradictions along the way. Is this really the person I should be in love with? Is our relationship really a good thing? In the face of these moments, the committed lovers will repeat their initial declaration and once again take a faithful leap into the contingent future of loving another individual. This repetition is thus not a simple and exact duplication of the initial decision but a faithful re-inscribing of this choice in a host of different circumstances as love progresses. This example shows how decision, faith, the leap and repetition all work together to give a picture of the process of the becoming of the self.
Faith is then the manner by which any sort of ethical or metaphysical totality is replaced by possibility as the absolute (which we could equally argue is an absolute contingency), as possibility for Kierkegaard corresponds precisely to the openness of the future.[13] As Elrod puts it, ‘the self’s necessity is its possibility’.[14] This also reinforces why Kierkegaard was so insistent on spirit being the activity of freedom. This is the case, as the possibility contained in the future creates an openness that places freedom at the heart of the becoming of consciousness. Finally, the concept of the instant, which was introduced in the previous chapter, also comes into play at this point, as this concept signifies that the present is pregnant with the possibility of the infinite, and this moment (the instant) occurs during the collision of/in consciousness previously described. So the instant serves as the event by which spirit is spurred on in its process of becoming by re-inscribing its field of possibilities in the realm of the necessary with the openness of the infinite. As Elrod argues, ‘This instant is the negation of time in the sense that its successiveness is momentarily negated.’[15] The instant is the moment of the negation of the present for the sake of the freedom of spirit that is made possible by the contingency of the future. Thus, the instant is not a moment in time but the interruption of time as a successive process of subsequent moments.
3.4 God and Transcendence
Before moving on to further consider the socio-political possibilities contained within this reading of Kierkegaard’s development of reflection and its accompanying despair, I would like to take a detour in the opposite direction and consider two overlapping concepts at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project: God and transcendence. While thus far I have provided a largely systematic, or ontological, reading of the thought of Kierkegaard, it could rightly be asked if his commitment to religion and, in particular, the Christian theological tradition, precludes the possibility of fully realizing the proposed aim of this study, to provide a properly ontological and political reading of Kierkegaard’s thought through a transcendental materialist framework. Through a reconsideration of the systematic function of the concepts of God and transcendence in the work of Kierkegaard, I will show that Kierkegaard remains much more indebted to the tradition of idealist philosophy than he is to the systematic framework of Christian theology. I will begin by extending the ontological reading already outlined in this work to include the concept of God as it appears in SUD in a manner that shows that this concept signifies absolute possibility more than it refers to any determinate theological or personal conception of the divine. Next, I will argue that the dichotomy between immanence and transcendence posited in Kierkegaard’s work is no longer relevant in the context of the current philosophical climate and that a transcendental materialist reading of Kierkegaard leaves open the space for Kierkegaard’s critique of idealist philosophy while allowing for the foundational idea that self rest transparently in another.
For a thinker so strongly associated with the Christian tradition, it is important to note that Kierkegaard has shockingly little to say about the actual theological content of this tradition. As Jon Stewart has recently noted, Kierkegaard’s Christianity is basically content-less and says little if anything about the actual theological structure underlying this system of belief. Stewart also notes that, when compared to the work of his historical ‘enemy’ Hegel, we see that Hegel provides a fully systematic account of Christian theology that far outweighs anything offered to us by Kierkegaard. This lack of a discussion of the theological content of Kierkegaard’s Christianity has made it all too easy for religious thinkers with a host of theological commitments to adopt Kierkegaard for their own personal usage and impose a variety of theological contents into Kierkegaard’s purely formal account of religion.
Stewart has outlined this issue through his critique of Kierkegaard’s account of appropriation and its distinction from the idealist concept of abstraction.[16] According to Stewart, Kierkegaard associates the idealist tradition with abstract thinking, which is a wholly objective form of thinking that often equates to a sort of reflection concerned with establishing the conditions for rational thought. Kierkegaard counters this form of abstract reflection with the idea of appropriation, which he sees as being a subjective rather than an objective concept. Rather than focusing on the universal conditions for thought (as in abstract thinking), appropriation is concerned with the movement from the universal to the particular, and this appropriation is capable of differing due to the character of the particular individual and is thus a subjective rather than an objective concept.
Following this, Kierkegaard sees appropriation as necessitating external action rather than as a merely inward belief in the rationality of an idea or concept. Thus, abstract thinking equates to a purely rational, and thus reflective, manner of thinking, while appropriation involves the decisive willing of an ideality into actuality by a particular individual. Abstraction is a category of thought, while appropriation is a category of activity, or put differently, abstraction is an internal category of thought, while appropriation is an external category of existence. This distinction helps us to further understand Kierkegaard’s critique of reflection, as when consciousness is thought wholly in reflective terms, thought will also remain primary over action, and there exists no necessity to stop the process of reflection for the sake of decisively willing an idea in the realm of actuality.
Kierkegaard clears the space for his theory of appropriation by drawing a sharp distinction between philosophy (an abstract mode of thinking) and religion (a subjective mode of existence). In minimal terms, philosophy is concerned with only the ideal conditions for thought, while religion is concerned with the way in which individuals appropriate ideas and subsequently actualize them in externality. The curious aspect of this distinction between philosophy and religion, as previously mentioned, is that Kierkegaard uses what Stewart terms a ‘minimal conception of Christianity’ to emphasize this necessary separation of the philosophical and religious spheres. Rather than providing a particular theological content for this religious form of subjective existence, Kierkegaard’s minimal Christianity provides a content-less form of religious practice in which it is not the what but the how that matters, or put differently, subjective appropriation matters more than objective theological abstraction. So Christianity, for Kierkegaard, operates as a structural theory of praxis more than it operates as a determinate theological content that is meant to foster belief. In this sense, Kierkegaard clearly follows the book of James which claims that believers ‘not be merely hearers of the word, but doers of the word’ (James 1:22).
We can see this theory of religion as praxis in another of Kierkegaard’s works, For Self Examination/Judge for Yourself, in which he quotes the previously mentioned verse by St. James (FSE 25). In this text, which is one of Kierkegaard’s up-building religious discourses, he describes the ‘rigorously religious individual’ as practicing a life that is ‘essentially action’ (FSE 11) Thus, the man of religion is not described in terms of his theological commitments or church participation but in his appropriation and activity. Highlighting the openness of the concept of faith as outlined in the present chapter, in this text Kierkegaard says that ‘faith is a restless thing’, once again emphasizing the manner in which the life of faith does not equate to a final synthesis of the dialectical contradictions contained within consciousness but, rather, that faith is an affirmation of the constant process of self-becoming inaugurated by the emergence of spirit through sin as a foundational and absolute negation (FSE 17). So we see that even in one of his more explicitly Christian texts, religion has more to do with the voluntary than it does with the theological or any moment of dialectical finality, and the properly religious mode of existence is one marked by appropriation and not merely rational agreement.
Christian appropriation thus serves as a way of highlighting the distinction between philosophy and religion as for Kierkegaard one is concerned with the what of abstract thinking and the conditions for thought, while the other is concerned with the how of decision and action. Following this, it seems hard to imagine Kierkegaard ever engaging in a serious theological debate regarding the merit of any particular systematic theology or philosophy of religion, as even though the content of these engagements would be religious, the form would still remain wholly abstract. Once again, we need to be clear that this critique of abstract thinking does not entail a full-scale critique of philosophy as such but simply of an abstract philosophical system which thinks itself capable of creating the conditions for activity and the actualization of ideals in reality. As Kierkegaard states in another text, if the Hegelian thinker would have finished the system of logic and said it was a grand intellectual exercise, everything would have been fine, but the system oversteps its bounds insomuch as it assumes itself capable of accounting for existential reality as well (CUP 34). Thus for Kierkegaard the religious is a step beyond abstract thinking insofar as it builds upon the conditions for thought arrived at through systematic thinking for the sake of outlining the conditions for activity and the actualization of ideals in reality. It is not as if Kierkegaard wants to abandon abstract philosophical thinking altogether, but simply that he wants to convince us that philosophy will take us only so far, and, at a certain point, it is up to the willed activity of engaged individuals to make an impact in actuality. At this point we can say that religion is a manner of engaged and willed appropriation. If philosophy thinks, religion acts.
Now that we have seen the basic distinction drawn by Kierkegaard between abstract thinking and appropriation and the distinction he subsequently draws between philosophy and religion, we can take a step further into even murkier theological territory and investigate both the religious and philosophical content of Kierkegaard’s conception of God. While many commentators on Kierkegaard have provided explicitly theological accounts of Kierkegaard’s conceptions of both God and religion, these accounts seem to usually have more to do with the commentators’ personal theological and religious commitments (usually of a fairly conservative variety) than they do with any determinate theological content outlined by Kierkegaard himself.[17] Thus it is commonly the case that a theologian or Christian philosopher will simply import their own theological content into Kierkegaard’s religious structure in a manner that makes it shockingly easy for Kierkegaard’s own thought to quickly become little more than an existential precursor to twenty-first-century protestant evangelicalism. I would like to avoid this sort of dogmatic misreading by attempting to interrogate the systematic content of the concept of God in Kierkegaard’s own writing.
It is in SUD that Kierkegaard gives one of the most straightforward descriptions of God to be found anywhere in his authorship, stating that ‘God is this—that everything is possible’ and ‘that everything is possible means the being of God’ (SUD 40). At this point, rather than providing any theological content describing a divine creator possessing anthropomorphic characteristics, he simply says that God signifies absolute possibility and that the existence of this possibility signifies the very being of God. One could rightly read this description of God and wonder whether or not Kierkegaard was not simply equating God with the previously described despair of possibility, in which one experiences despair from becoming wrapped up in possibility to the point at which one becomes paralyzed and loses all contact with the necessary. This is the same form of despair experienced by someone wholly wrapped up in the infinite by which they lose all contact with the finitude and facticity of existence. While this may seem like the case, it is important to note that in the first instance Kierkegaard introduces this definition of God in the section of the text concerned with the despair of necessity, in which what one lacks is precisely the sort of possibility contained in the existence of God. As Michael Theunissen notes in his study of this text, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, ‘The Leap into the abyss of the idea that everything is possible for God appears as the only way out of a situation in which nothing is possible for the person anymore.’[18] Thus this position, of God as possibility, is arrived at only through dialectically overcoming the despair of necessity in which nothing at all seems to be possible for the individual. Theunissen further differentiates the possibility arrived at through faith in God from the possibility of despair by arguing:
But the ‘everything is possible’ of belief is different from the ‘everything is possible’ of unlimiting despair because it has gone through the ‘nothing is possible’ of limiting despair. It leaves the despair of possibility behind by acknowledging the limitation established in the establishment of the self; and it sets itself apart from the despair of necessity by finding consolation in the idea of a God for whom everything is possible.[19]
Thus, the distinction has to do with the self recognizing the limits placed on it by its fundamental state of contradiction between possibility and necessity, infinity and finitude, subject and object; while at the same time acknowledging that for God everything is possible and, while the self always exists in the entangled freedom of its own contradictions, absolute possibility is that power which is absolutely outside the self and which has established it. To once again quote Theunissen, ‘A person who is entirely wrapped up in possibility does not submit to the necessity of the self, and a person who is drowned in necessity is not open to the possibility in God.’[20]
In chapter 2, I outlined the manner in which the Afgrund, or abyss, at the heart of existence, which creates the conditions for the experience of anxiety by the subject, is the ontological condition for the possibility of both good and evil. If we read these two texts (CA and SUD) as charting the continued development of spirit, we see that the Afgrund of CA serves the same systematic and ontological function of God in SUD, only in a more dialectically developed manner. Following this logic, we can see that rather than representing a divine personality or an absolute substance, the concept of God signifies the absolute possibility (or, contingency) that resides at the heart of reality.
Following the previously used quote about God being equivalent to possibility, Kierkegaard goes on to connect this seemingly ontological concept to the importance of lived actuality, stating, ‘only he whose being has been so shaken that he has become spirit by understanding that everything is possible, only he has anything to do with God’ (SUD 40). So the individual who has something to do with God is not the committed Christian believer with an allegiance to a dogmatic system of belief but, rather, is the one who has traumatically encountered the Afgrund at the heart of existence and has come out of this traumatic encounter with an understanding of the sheer possibility at the heart of reality. This is a far cry from a traditional theological conception of God and one that makes it possible to construct a systematic reading of Kierkegaard that is detached from any theological conception of the divine. In this reading, the human is qualified as spirit only insomuch as their being has been destabilized by a traumatic encounter with a power that is absolutely prior to their own existence.
One of the few commentators who has interpreted Kierkegaard’s definition of God in SUD in a fashion similar to the one outlined in this chapter is David Wood in his essay ‘Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard’.[21] One of the first things that Wood notes in his essay is that, in the opening pages of SUD where Kierkegaard says that the formula for not being in despair is that the self ‘rest transparently in the power that established it’, Kierkegaard says ‘the power that established’ (i.e., he says ‘power’ and not ‘God’). In Wood’s analysis, this is to make the structure of the argument formal, which then leaves the possibility open that it is a relation to something other than God that allows us to truly become ourselves.[22] The point of Wood’s argument here is that the point of the relation to God in the work of Kierkegaard may have more to do with the mode of relation than it does the thing that is related to. Thus for Wood, it may be the case that a political movement or a lover may be that which we relate to in order to more fully become ourselves.
As Wood notes, referring to a passage from CUP (199–200), ‘Here Kierkegaard makes it clear, first that God is a mode of relationship, and secondly, that God is a subject, not a thing’.[23] Following this, we see that God can be conceived as a mode of relation and, in particular, the God relation is itself a particular mode of subjectivity rather than an object. Reversing the commonplace understanding of divinity, our being is called into question by the very subjectivity of the divine. God is thus a mode of subjectivity marked by the instability characteristic of the infinite. Wood goes on to remark on the previously discussed passage from SUD, saying that, ‘similarly, Kierkegaard’s comment that “since everything is possible for God, then God is this—that all things are possible”, could be interpreted as a way of organizing one’s Being in the world. God is being glossed as hope’.[24] So if God is equivalent to the idea that everything is possible, then the being of God can equally be equated to the being, or possibility of, hope. This hope thus becomes a factor in orienting one’s subjectivity in the world. If someone’s subjectivity is characterized by this hope, then their field of possibility will not be limited by the facticity of objective scientific analysis, or as Kierkegaard thinks it, the epistemological claims of logical immanence. Logical immanence, as a supposed totality, is always ruptured by the field of contingent possibility lying forever outside its powers of logical totality. As Wood goes on to state, ‘to live in paradox is to be suspended in a space of contradiction’,[25] and following this, we see that to live in paradox is precisely to accept our situation as one of being constantly related to both possibility and necessity, infinity and finitude, subjectivity and objectivity, and rather than attempting to rest in either one or the other, the God-relation signifies the paradoxical possibility of existing precisely within this contradictory fracture. Freedom, as conceived by Kierkegaard, is when as spirit we cease any attempt to exist as either fully infinite or fully finite, but rather when we move in the gap between these two contradictory poles. Once again, Wood seems to highlight this when noting that for Kierkegaard, ‘the way we are constantly outstrips our knowledge of who we are. In that gap alone, there is dialectical ferment enough’.[26] Thus Wood, without naming it as such, seems to grasp the fractured dialectic at the heart of both Kierkegaard’s account of spirit and religious ontology. We never simply ‘are who we are’ in an immediate and stable sense because reality itself is never simply ‘what it is’ in a logically immanent sense. Our freedom in becoming spirit is entangled with the fracture contained within reality itself. In a manner akin to the upcoming political shift in the present study, Wood closes his essay by noting that the practical outcome of his speculative analysis of the concept of God in Kierkegaard is that ‘there is no other realm, but there are radically different ways of inhabiting this one’.[27] This reading, which disassociates God from any brand of divine transcendence, allows us to subsequently consider the God-relation as the possibility of creating a variety of different realities in our own world, in opposition to a transcendent conception of religion that is primarily concerned with offering another world that is wholly exterior to our own.
The crucial ideas offered in Wood’s essay are his reconsideration of the role of immanence and transcendence in Kierkegaard and his interpretation of the ‘God is possibility’ equation offered in SUD. By reading God as signifying radical possibility and not something wholly other existing outside of our own realm, Wood avoids the either/or of immanence or transcendence by considering the sort of transcendence that rests in the primacy of an immanent account of reality. Thus, the possibility signified by the being of God is not something that exists in a wholly other realm but is rather something contained in the very gaps and ruptures within our experience of reality itself. This allows Wood to stay close to Kierkegaard while still being able to state that ‘there is no other realm’; as for Kierkegaard, the point is not to prove the existence of another world, but to instead show how we can never have a totalized experience of this world.
What Wood, in his own Derridean inflected manner, opens up in his reading is a legitimate path to rethink the tension between immanence and transcendence in the work of Kierkegaard, particularly as it relates to the religious. This is crucial, as one of the ways in which Kierkegaard’s project is often distinguished from that of the German idealists is through the argument that Kierkegaard’s thought rests on the attempt to argue for a conception of freedom in transcendence, while for the idealist the project is precisely to develop a similar conception of freedom but in a wholly immanent and monist account. Wood’s reading deviates from this tendency as he grounds freedom in the gap occurring within the structure of reality itself and subsequently in the self, in a manner quite similar to the readings of Hegel outlined in chapter 1 of this work. While Wood’s reading represents one of the most provocative of thinkers operating in a largely post-phenomenological deconstructive framework, another provocative interpretation of the same concepts in Kierkegaard, this one offered by Hegelian-materialist Slavoj Žižek, takes things a step further by offering an interpretation that brings Kierkegaard surprisingly close to the dialectical materialist tradition. If with Wood we have seen the limits of a postmodern interpretation of Kierkegaard’s conception of God, Žižek takes the same passage and concepts and interprets them through the lens of a Hegelian influenced transcendental materialism.
In his work The Parallax View, he dedicates much of the crucial ontological chapter, titled ‘Building Blocks Towards a Materialist Theology’, to a discussion of Kierkegaard, carrying the subtitle ‘Kierkegaard as Hegelian’. Provocative titles aside, Žižek’s reading offers one of the first genuine attempts to provide a thoroughly materialist reading of Kierkegaard without doing so in a way that skirts concepts such as God and the religious. While discussing Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel, Žižek remarks on what he sees as the key formula of Kierkegaard’s religious ontology:
Kierkegaard’s God is strictly correlative to the ontological openness of reality, to our relating to reality as unfinished, ‘in becoming.’ ‘God’ is the name for the Absolute Other against which we can measure the thorough contingency of reality—as such, it cannot be conceived as any kind of Substance, as the Supreme thing.[28]
Thus, Žižek too highlights the manner in which God is equivalent to possibility in such a way that God signifies ontological openness and at the level of subjectivity our relating to reality as ‘unfinished’ or ‘in becoming’ shapes the way in which we understand the structure of our own subjectivity. One of the implications of this is that we can never conceive of either the absolute or our own individual subjectivity as any sort of stable and logically totalizable substance. While in some senses this seems similar to the reading previously offered by Wood, Žižek has very different philosophical intentions in mind, as he says in the same work, ‘A thin, almost imperceptible line separates Kierkegaard from dialectical materialism proper’.[29] While Wood seems to aim at placing Kierkegaard in a line of largely post-phenomenological ethical figures such as Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, Žižek is interested in Kierkegaard only insomuch as he sees him as occupying the intellectual space of a post-idealist philosophical framework. This means that Žižek is less concerned with what Kierkegaard’s work can tell us about our phenomenological experience of the world and the way in which this encounter affects our personal subjectivity and more concerned with the manner in which Kierkegaard outlines a structural account of both self and world and the manner in which freedom is at the heart of both this theory of subjectivity and ontology. It is telling that while Wood more or less argues that a ‘thin, almost imperceptible line’ keeps Kierkegaard apart from the deconstructive tradition proper, Žižek insists on the similarity between Kierkegaard and dialectical materialism, a tradition often at odds with deconstruction.
Dialectical materialism may sound like a far cry from the religious works of Kierkegaard, but Žižek’s provocation is not without merit, and he goes on to argue that the gap characteristic of the religious in Kierkegaard follows the same structure as the parallax gap at the heart of his own materialist conception of reality. For example, while a dialectical materialist would explain the movement of history through contradictions contained in the very materiality of reality, we have already seen that Kierkegaard explains the becoming of subjectivity as spirit through the contradictions at play in the core of the structure of the self.
Žižek, who reads Kierkegaard as still occupying an anti-Hegelian position, argues: ‘Does not the main thrust of Kierkegaard’s anti-Hegelianism reside precisely in his effort to break this Hegelian closed circle, and open up the space for contingent cuts, “jumps”, intrusions, which undermine the field of what appears to be possible?’[30] So while continuing the misreading that places Kierkegaard at absolute odds with Hegel’s idealism, Žižek correctly points out the fact that at the heart of Kierkegaard’s project is the affirmation of a contingent possibility that is constantly undermining our own field of possibility. This possibility, also called ‘God’, is what renders the project of constructing a field of logical totality impossible, as these cuts, jumps and intrusions will always haunt our desire for totality and completeness.
After providing his ontological interpretation of Kierkegaard’s key religious formula (God is possibility), Žižek goes on to extend this to its subjective implications in a manner once again parallel to Wood’s deconstructive reading. Žižek goes on to argue that ‘God is “beyond the order of being”, he is nothing but the mode of how we relate to him; that is to say, we do not relate to him, he is this relating’.[31] Once again we see an interpretation in which the key issue of the God relation in Kierkegaard is not the substance or nature of God but, rather, the sort of relation inaugurated through this concept. It is worth noting that while this may strike some as stripping the concept of all its theological significance, the apostle John himself wrote, ‘God is love’ (1 John 4:8, NIV). It is telling that the scripture says nothing of the nature of substance of God but simply that God is love, and love itself is a mode of relation, not any object or metaphysical substance. We here see what Kierkegaard meant in the passage from CUP quoted by Wood when he stated that God is subject, not object, as God exists as love that is a mode of relation. Following this, we can see how Wood and Žižek both open up the path for us to think about the manner in which a Kierkegaardian form of subjectivity can account for religious relations to things other than organized Christianity, as the key factor in determining the God relation is love and one could just as equally lovingly relate to a partner, a political movement, a work of art or a scientific innovation. This follows another of Kierkegaard’s comments in CUP in which he states, ‘The how of the truth is precisely the truth’ (CUP 323). So to relate to God is to do with how one relates to something rather than what it is one relates to.
What we see in this example is that even Kierkegaard himself is saying that it is not the formal content and institutions of Christianity that are important but, rather, the form of belief present, the how and not the what. Thus, it seems that one could reasonably conceive, in a manner following the reading previously laid out by Wood, of being able to religiously relate to activities other than the formal practice of Christianity. It is important to note, however, that because it follows the structure of the religious laid out by Kierkegaard, this mode of relation and form of commitment continue to operate in terms of paradox and not mediation, which means that there is still no guarantee that one’s pursuit will necessarily succeed even if one approaches their endeavor with all of the passion of infinity.
So even if one is passionately and religiously committed to a political cause, it could always fail; if one is religiously committed to a lover, they could always leave; and if one is committed in this way to a line of scientific innovation, it could always turn out to be a waste of time. Thus, as long as the contingent possibility of God haunts our field of logical possibility, things can always be otherwise. To once again quote Žižek:
We are never safely within the Religious, doubt forever remains, the same act can be seen as religious or aesthetic, in a parallax split which can never be abolished, since the ‘minimal difference’ which transubstantiates (what appears to be) an aesthetic act into a religious one can never be specified, located in a determinate property.[32]
Thus, we have seen that Žižek opens up the possibility of reading Kierkegaard’s formula ‘God=Possibility’ as signifying the fundamental ontological contingency of reality, and that for Wood, this allows the practical implication of there being religious modes of existence to a whole host of non-theological commitments. Put differently, because possibility and contingency are at the heart of reality, we can be religiously committed subjects to a whole host of life orienting projects (love, science, art, etc.) which may seem difficult or even impossible, but through a faithful and religious commitment one can still orient their subjectivity around these projects.
3.5 The Matter of Despair
Through this ontological encounter with the theological content present in this text (SUD), I am now able to more explicitly outline my own systematic reading of Kierkegaard’s project. While he obviously does not intend this, after the development of both dialectical materialism and discoveries in contemporary science, we can see that Kierkegaard offers an explicit account of the nature of human subjectivity, along with an implicit account of the nature of reality, which is in line with the project of transcendental materialism which was outlined in the opening discussion of the present work.
It is important to note that, if nothing else, consciousness, as dialectically developed subjectivity, is the product of contradiction for Kierkegaard. This contradiction, or gap, which characterizes the very nature of consciousness, is what puts the whole process into motion by inaugurating the process of becoming a self. There is a contradiction present in the very core of the self and the attempt to resolve this contradiction is what spurs forward the development of the self. However, as we have seen, any attempt of consciousness to resolve this contradiction in a manner wholly immanent to its own activity can only lead to various types of despair. These attempts occur when consciousness attempts to resolve its contradictory nature by attempting to be ‘just one’ of its dialectical elements. For example, consciousness will attempt to be wholly finite or wholly infinite—wholly marked by necessity, or floating wholly in possibility. Faith is then the movement out of despair through an acknowledgement that consciousness is always grounded in something that forever precedes its own existence and this primordial act is forever outside the reach of the activity of reflective consciousness. This is what Schelling refers to as ‘un-pre-thinkable being’, which as Markus Gabriel states, ‘is therefore merely that which, no matter how early we come on the scene, is already there’.[33] In the context of Kierkgaard’s own broken engagement, Vanessa Rumble describes this emergence of consciousness as such:
Kierkegaard saw the story of the broken engagement take on the dimensions of the singular event at the heart of every history—the genesis of human consciousness, the scene in which freedom emerges from nature, a turning point in relation to which the question of agency is ambiguous. Consciousness arises, then, in a ‘broken engagement’ with reality’s unbroken plenum—freedom is possible only at its outskirts. Yet human existence remains anchored in nature, its constant point of departure at the moving juncture of fate and freedom.[34]
So consciousness is characterized by its state of contradiction and is absolutely preceded by and grounded in something that is wholly other to its own existence as a ‘broken engagement’. At this point, it is crucial for my argument to note the similarity between the structural account just provided and the central structural features of transcendental materialism, an ontological position I outlined in the introduction. Transcendental materialism (hereafter TM) is primarily an ontology of subjective freedom, but one which aims to ground human subjectivity in the material rather than anything prior to the emergence of materiality. One of the primary features of TM is that it also characterizes subjectivity through a series of contradictions or gaps. On one level, there is a gap in the very structure of the subject itself, a blind spot that creates the space for spirit or freedom. On another, the subject is always irrevocably split from that which grounds it. We see the same two-level structure in Kierkegaard’s account of consciousness and its relation to externality. In the most minimal terms possible, there is a split at the core of subjectivity and a split between the subject and the objective foundation of this subject. In Kierkegaard’s terms, that from which the subject finds itself irrevocably split is God (or its Afgrund), while for the TM position, it is matter itself from which the subject and freedom as spirit emerges. It is important to note that the TM position does not rule out the possibility of the subject being spirit, as TM does not rule out the possibility of the existence of phenomenon that can only be accounted for as more-than-material. Unlike an immanent naturalism in which all phenomenon are explained in fully reductive and naturalist terms, TM aims to leave room for more-than-material subjectivity that is grounded in the material. In this sense we could say that TM is neither a wholly immanent or transcendent ontological account but, rather, one in which transcendental conditions are generated from immanent materiality and the contradiction in the core of matter leaves open the possibility that present material conditions can be transcended through future events and the emergence of novel conditions.
Adrian Johnston offers the clearest formulation of the ontology of TM in his work Žižek’s Ontology, where he states that:
The break induced by the more-than-material subject splitting off from its material origins is irreplaceable, opening up an impossible-to-close gap, a non-dialecticizable parallax split. The transcendental materialist theory of the subject is materialist insofar as it asserts that the Ideal of subjective thought arises from the Real of objective being, although it is also simultaneously transcendental insofar as it maintains that this thus-generated Ideal subjectivity thereafter achieves independence from the ground of its material sources and thereby starts to function as a set of possibility conditions for forms of reality irreducible to explanatory discourses allied to traditional versions of materialism.[35]
So for the TM position there are transcendental and ideal subjective conditions, but these conditions emerge through a fundamentally materialist basis. In this sense TM arrives at a position which can account for both materialism and idealism while avoiding a traditional account of naturalism which attempts to provide an explanatory apparatus which renders transcendental freedom an impossible category.
The point of this brief excursion into the ontology and theory of subjectivity of TM has been for the sake of going on to show that considering Kierkegaard’s as a systematic pre-cursor to TM allows us to use Kierkegaard’s structural account of subjectivity and ontology to critique some of the shortcomings of some of the prominent political theories which have emerged in recent materialist philosophies. To accomplish this, I will now transition to an explicitly political reading of Kierkegaard’s work and its implications for subjectivity.
3.6 From the Psychological to the Social
While the text that this chapter has been primarily in dialogue with, SUD, was concerned with providing a structural account of how the ontological structure of Kierkegaard’s work bears on the level of the anthropological, Practice in Christianity, the other text published under the name Anti-Climacus and conceived during 1848 was called, by Kierkegaard, ‘an attack upon the established order’ (PC xvii). Although this text’s concern with issues of society and the political diverge greatly from Kierkegaard’s inward and ethical texts, Kierkegaard himself wrote that Practice in Christianity was ‘without a doubt . . . the most perfect and truest thing I have written’ (PC xviii).
In one sense this text, which was meant to be the final section of Kierkegaard’s projected volume ‘Collected Works of Consummation’, serves as the work in which he most explicitly outlines what it means to be what he considers a properly existing religious individual. While in some senses being an overtly religious and even pastoral text, PC at the same time stands as Kierkegaard’s most overt social and political critique, and it provides a social, or outward, exemplification of the inward project of SUD. If SUD gave an account of how spirit dynamically develops the free self, PC provides an account of how the properly self-relational individual would relate to others at the social and religious level.
Kierkegaard’s stated intention for Practice is the re-introduction of Christianity into Christendom, and he finds this to be a necessary task because since all were considered to be Christian in his time, no one was actually expected to live as a Christian. So in a sense, Kierkegaard uses this text to re-present Christianity in a way that makes it seem new, or difficult, to his intended Danish audience. Rather than presenting Christianity as a set of facts or assertions that can be agreed or disagreed with in objective fashion, Kierkegaard here presents Christianity in what he refers to as indirect communication, the point of which is to make subjective decision absolutely necessary in the matter. In this way he is not only attempting to rethink the nature of religious existence but also the nature of belief. According to Kierkegaard, Christ cannot be known but only believed, and thus Kierkegaard confronts the objective and indecisive religion of his time with a religion that necessitates subjective belief and decision.
One of the key moves made by Kierkegaard in his re-presentation of Christianity is the illegitimate light he shines on the person of Christ, noting that Christ was, and is, ‘literally a nobody’ (PC 64), and that both during his age, as well as the present age, the existence of Christ is one considered illegitimate by those in power. Rather than attempting to gain honor and prestige in the eyes of the state, Kierkegaard emphasizes that Christ disdained all worldly prestige and thus the Church should be characterized by this same disdain for the prestige and recognition of the state. Kierkegaard goes on to argue that the motto by which Christ’s relationship to the established order can be characterized is that he is illegitimate and uses Christ’s saying that one not put a new piece of cloth on an old garment to imply a willingness to not recognize the established order but instead to do away with it to make room for the new. At this point Kierkegaard is clear that his conception of Christ and of religious existence in general is not one characterized by a willingness to reform, but rather one that conceives the new as emerging through a revolutionary change. It must be noted, however, that Kierkegaard does not find the revolutionary core of Christianity in what Christ does, but rather in the fact that in the eyes of the established order he does absolutely nothing and is literally nothing. This very nothingness, or negativity, which characterizes Christ is the very thing that Kierkegaard sees as bringing him into collision with the established order.
One of the prime concerns of PC is how one is to live in relation to the established order. According to Kierkegaard, one must avoid being consumed into the outwardly focused life that is the crowd, or mass, of the established order. For Kierkegaard, ‘to live in such an established order, particularly to be something in it, is a continuation of being tied to mother’s apron strings’ and as long as one continues to exist as part of this established order, one will be able to ‘calculate the probability and spinelessly exempt oneself from the least little decision’ (PC 90). Kierkegaard’s prime contention against the established order is its failure to force individuals to make decisions, and exist as the single individual. Here Kierkegaard sets the stage for a collision between two opposites, the single individual and established order. In a similar sense, he sets a religious existence against a secular existence, and whereas the present age has turned them into essentially the same thing, or at least has made them compatible, Kierkegaard wants for there to be a infinite contrast between the religious and the secular so that the properly religiously existing individual will be nothing but an offense to the secularity of the established order. It is worth mentioning at this point that this opposition of religious and secular should not be considered as simply the theological versus the non-theological. Instead, the religious signifies transcendence as a fundamental openness towards the possibility contained in the future. This is a primarily ontological rather than a dogmatic orientation, and being religious primarily has to do with the manner in which one relates to the essential contingency characteristic of reality. The secular in this sense then signifies the calculated, the reflective and the logical. This mindset is one in which reflective logic is capable of establishing what is right and wrong, what exists and what does not and what is deemed possible and impossible.
The most significant social critique present in PC is the distinction made by Kierkegaard between the triumphant Church and the militant Church. This distinction is explicated primarily in section V of the text, which Kierkegaard opens with a prayer containing the lines ‘keep us also from this, that we delude ourselves into thinking ourselves to be members of a Church already triumphant here in this world’ (PC 201). One of the primary differences Kierkegaard identifies between the triumphant Church and the militant Church is the role of truth in the life of each. For the triumphant Church, truth is something settled, and something that can be objectively (and most importantly non-relationally) known by the individual. In this sense, truth is a logical and totalized fact which one agrees with abstractly rather than believes in through appropriation. For the militant Church however, ‘Christ is the truth in the sense that to be the truth is the only true explanation of what truth is’(PC 205). For the individual who is a part of the militant Church, truth must be something which is related to and appropriated on an individual basis, and thus Kierkegaard notes, ‘The being of truth is the redoubling of truth within yourself . . . that your life, my life, his life expresses the truth approximately in the striving for it ’ (PC 205). According to Kierkegaard’s religious understanding, ‘truth is obviously not to know the truth but to be the truth’ (PC 205).
This emphasis on truth as something like a task, or infinite process, gives the militant Church a subjective and social aspect not necessary in the triumphant Church. To be a part of the militant Church, the individual must first be properly related to the truth through a redoubling of this truth within himself or herself. In line with the manner in which the self is theorized in SUD, one must first be properly related to themselves through a relation to something outside themselves before they can properly relate to anything else. Thus, the emphasis on inwardness found in SUD is not eradicated by a social participation in the militant Church but rather is consummated into the social relation around a common truth.
Along these same lines, Kierkegaard draws another distinction between the triumphant Church’s insistence on adoration and the militant Church’s insistence on imitation. While the triumphant Church upholds a vision of Christ as one to be admired and worshiped, the militant Church requires individuals to imitate the works of Christ in actuality. This distinction is grounded in the fact that for the triumphant Church, established Christendom is, it exists as such, rather than existing only as in the process of becoming. The militant Church cannot possibly exist in this way because to the established order the existence of a truly militant Church is a complete impossibility, and thus this Church never is but instead is constantly engaged in the infinite process of becoming. Because of this stark distinction Kierkegaard will go as far as to remark, ‘This Church triumphant . . . resembles the Church militant no more than a square resembles a circle’ (PC 212). This also makes it clear that attempts to co-opt Kierkegaard’s thought by dogmatic theologians are often misguided, as he makes clear that his version of religious practice bears little relation to established and dogmatic Christian practice.
Within his discussion of the two distinct churches, Kierkegaard makes an interesting statement in regard to representation. He notes that the majority of individuals in the triumphant Church are ‘content with perceiving themselves in the order that represented them’ (PC 214). Here Kierkegaard makes an important observation that a majority of individuals during his time consider themselves to be Christians because the dominant order, that of established Christendom, represented them as such. We can thus see that rather than existing as properly relational selves qualified by the development of spirit, individuals looking to the triumphant Church (or equally, the state) for their self-representation are attempting to be related to by the order in power without necessarily relating to themselves through this order. In opposition to this relation-less representation, Kierkegaard argues that in the Church militant, direct recognizability is impossible, and being a member of the militant Church is expressed in contrast to what the order in power represents as being a Christian (or a citizen). Kierkegaard makes this move to emphasize the error in equating being a citizen with being a Christian during his time. Because he finds it necessary that the militant Church be a suffering Church, Christianity needs to disassociate itself from the system in power and once again exist (or better, in-exist) on the margins of what is socially represented. Succinctly stated, Kierkegaard is arguing that as soon as all are considered to be Christians by the triumphant Church, then none are actually Christian as dynamic subjective activity is no longer necessary.
While on a cursory reading the continuity between SUD and PC may not seem glaringly obvious, a reading which considers these texts together makes it clear that the latter serves as an extremely valuable social exemplification of the former. Along with the manner in which PC continues to tell the story of SUD at the social level, it can also be seen that this text assumes the ontological structure outlined in CA. The openness to futurity and contingency, and the space for decision and faith present in the church militant are grounded in the Afgrund that is at the heart of the ontological picture present in Kierkegaard’s work. The connection between anxiety, ontology and the social can be seen when we consider the church militant and triumphant in their relations to anxiety about the good and anxiety about evil.
One can here see a clear connection between the notion of anxiety about good and evil in CA, and Kierkegaard’s notion of the militant and triumphant churches in PC. Because truth is always an infinite and open process without the possibility of a finite completion, Kierkegaard argues that the true church, the one properly related to the structure of properly religious truth, is the militant church. This church never makes a claim to absolute or objective understanding and is constantly aware of the contingency contained in the unknowable future. Because of this, those participating in this church must always be open to reform and change. Kierkegaard develops this in opposition to the church triumphant, for whom truth is already settled and objectively knowable, and there is no necessity to be open to the contingency of the future, because reality is already closed off into a finite set of possibilities. To this form of religious practice, decision and faith lose their crucial importance, as one can simply agree with the truth propositions inherent in a certain institutional dogma and be recognized as a member through their agreement with it.
This second example, of the church triumphant, exemplifies Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety about the good. This is the anxiety experienced by the one who was not able to make the final leap into the abyss of freedom and is still attempting to posit some finite means as their ground. According to Kierkegaard, the demonic is thus ‘unfreedom that wants to close itself off’ (CA 123). Rather than acknowledge the infinite openness of the future, the self who is anxious about the good (which is freedom) is avoiding the good at all cost, as ‘the good signifies the restoration of freedom’ (CA 119), and this restoration would bring with it the acknowledgement of the contingency of the future and the lack of any stable ground for the self. Because the good carries with it Kierkegaard’s notion of the instant, this opens up the possibility for radical interruption or novelty, and this sort of novelty would be the ultimate threat to the attempt of the self to close itself off from all otherness or interruption. We see this exemplified collectively in Kierkegaard’s notion of the church triumphant, as this is a social body that is attempting to ground itself in an immediate relation to a possession of an absolute truth and which is subsequently closed to any and all otherness or contingency. On this point we can see Kierkegaard’s fears about a philosophical system working in the service of totality, as a system that begins from a position of logical totality and then attempts to describe actuality in the same terms could have no way of thinking about the freedom and contingency contained in the future. Following Kierkegaard’s example of the church triumphant, we can glean a picture of what he fears the implications are of totalizing metaphysical projects at the level of the social and political. When the space for the emergence of spirit (as the gap existing between subject and object, possibility and necessity, infinitude and finitude) does not exist, then freedom as such does not exist. Without the possibility of the free and dynamic development of spirit (which is freedom), there is no longer any room for contingency, and thus no necessity for decision and faith. The triumphant church represents the effect this sort of totalized metaphysic has on the capacity for freedom at the social and political levels.
At this point it should be clear why Kierkegaard’s theorization of the internal relation of the self as spirit becomes consciousness and offers a structure that does not stop at the individual. Rather, through an analysis of a more social text we see that the same sort of fractured relation which makes possible the free activity of the individual self is what subsequently allows for free activity on the collective level. At the heart of both individual and collective freedom is the anxiety experienced through the realization that things could always be otherwise and that no necessary and absolute structure exists, whether it is the ontological or political. In the next chapter I will shift to an overtly political analysis of this fractured dialectic.
Notes
1.
For an example of a reading that takes this passage to be an ironic parody of Hegel, see Roger Poole, Kierkegaard: The Indirect Communication (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1993), 19–20. I instead follow Jon Stewart, who argues that ‘Although there is virtually no discussion of the content of Hegel’s philosophy in The Sickness Unto Death, as been demonstrated, the work shows a striking use of Hegel’s dialectical method’ (Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relation to Hegel Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 591.
2.
Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 79.
3.
Ibid., 105.
4.
It is interesting to note that, while often seen as a move away from a Hegelian system, Kierkegaard actually gleans this concept of ‘the leap’ from Hegel’s Science of Logic.
5.
Lee Braver, ‘A Brief History of Continental Realism’, Continental Philosophy Review, 45 (2): 261–189. Accessed online.
6.
See Lee Braver, A Thing of this World: A History of Continental Anti-Realism (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007).
7.
Braver, ‘A Brief History of Continental Realism’, 10.
8.
Ibid., 12.
9.
Slavoj Žižek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 99–100.
10.
Braver, ‘A Brief History of Continental Realism’, 9.
11.
Žižek, The Parallax View, 106.
12.
Stewart, Kierkegaard’s Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, 288.
13.
John Elrod, Being and Existence in Kierkegaard’s Pseudonymous Works (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 235.
14.
Ibid., 236.
15.
Ibid., 239.
16.
My discussion of Stewart relies largely on two lectures given at the Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota, during the summer of 2011. Work based on these lectures has been published in Stewart, Idealism and Existentialism: Hegel and Nineteenth and Twentieth Century European Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2010). In particular, see chapters 5 and 6.
17.
Examples of these theological interpretations include Christopher Ben Simpson, The Truth Is the Way: Kierkegaard’s Theologia Viatorum (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing, 2011), C. Stephen Evans, Faith Beyond Reason: A Kierkegaardian Account (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing, 1998), Kyle Roberts, Emerging Prophet: Kierkegaard and the Postmodern People of God (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishing, 2013).
18.
Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair trans. Barbara Harshav and Helmut Illbruck (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 86–87.
19.
Ibid., 87.
20.
Ibid.
21.
David Wood, ‘Thinking God in the Wake of Kierkegaard’, in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998).
22.
Ibid., 69.
23.
Ibid.
24.
Ibid.
25.
Ibid., 72.
26.
Ibid.
27.
Ibid.
28.
Žižek, The Parallax View, 79.
29.
Ibid., 75.
30.
Žižek, The Parallax View, 77.
31.
Ibid., 79.
32.
Ibid., 105.
33.
Markus Gabriel, Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (New York: Continuum, 2011), 65.
34.
Vanessa Rumble, ‘Eternity Lies Beneath: Autonomy and Finitude in Kierkegaard’s Early Writings’, in Journal of the History of Philosophy, Volume 35, Number 1, January 1997, 83–103, 92–93.
35.
Jonhston, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 275.