Anxious Politics
Anxious Politics
In the previous two chapters I have outlined a systematic and ontological account of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project through a consideration of the development of the underlying ontological structure presented in The Concept of Anxiety and the further development of an anthropological account of consciousness in The Sickness Unto Death. Through this analysis I have shown that the ontological core of Kierkegaard’s authorship emerges through his critical appropriation of the project of German idealism and that rather than being most accurately considered to be a precursor to twentieth-century existentialism or phenomenology, Kierkegaard’s thought can best be seen as a continuation of the critical project of thinkers such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. This method has allowed me to outline a reading of Kierkegaard’s project that provides a non-theological account of the main motifs and developments of his thought without leaving any of the religious aspects behind. Crucial to this non-theological reading has been providing a purely ontological reading of the concept of God and a praxis-based concept of the religious. This has left us with a clear picture of both Kierkegaard’s ontology and anthropology and the way in which the account of reality that emerges in his work paves the way for a particular picture of subjectivity or, in other words, the development of spirit. Now that I have outlined this ontology and anthropology, I would like to take a step further towards the development of a political interpretation that builds upon the ontological and anthropological reading I have already developed.
The first step of this political interpretation will consist of differentiating between the reading I am providing and previous attempts to draw a political theory out of Kierkegaard’s authorship. It is my contention that while structurally sound, a majority of these previous attempts ultimately fail insofar as they draw no connection between the ontological and political aspects of Kierkegaard’s authorship. Further, it is my contention that this disconnect between the ontological and the political in previous attempts is a symptom of the misguided tendency to read Kierkegaard’s work as a wholly critical attack levelled against the metaphysical project of German idealism and thus as sharing no ontological relation to the thinkers of that tradition. I will briefly outline two of the more notable previous attempts to read Kierkegaard politically and point out the insufficiencies of each of these attempts while affirming the accurate aspects of each.
After a critical assessment of these previous attempts, I will outline my own political reading of Kierkegaard, which I will refer to as a ‘political ontology’, as it rests wholly on the previously outlined ontological interpretation of his authorship. It is crucial to note that I am not claiming to simply be uncovering some robust political theory that was there all along simply waiting to be decoded by one with some sort of special intuition; rather, I am attempting to build upon Kierkegaard’s ontology and anthropology, along with his varied comments on society and the political, to develop what could be called a Kierkegaardian political ontology. My concern here has less to do with the historical context of Kierkegaard’s social critique in Golden Age Denmark and more to do with considering what Kierkegaard’s thought has to offer political debates in a twenty-first-century philosophical context. In simple terms, I will extrapolate the relational structure of Kierkegaard’s ontology and anthropology to bear on the way in which we can conceive of social and political relations. Along with this, Kierkegaard’s critique of reflection will be used to bear on the contemporary age, which seems to exemplify his critique of the social and political outcomes of reflective thought in a way that bears an eerie resemblance to our contemporary age of constant media culture and digital chatter.
It is also worth noting why I am using the term political ontology to describe my political interpretation rather than a more traditional term such as political philosophy. This is due to the fact that, rather than provide any real descriptive or prescriptive political philosophy, the ontological structure at the heart of Kierkegaard’s authorship gives us a picture of the potentials of political possibility which we can then read alongside his account of the development of human subjectivity. Rather than providing an account of how politics and society should be, Kierkegaard’s work can offer us a novel manner of considering the underlying ontological conditions to political possibility in general, along with an account of how human subjectivity can function at the level of the political.
At the conclusion of this chapter it should be clear that Kierkegaard, when read through a properly materialist perspective, is surprisingly at home in the philosophical debates surrounding twenty-first-century transcendental materialism. In particular, it will be seen that Kierkegaard connects an ontology grounded in contingency and possibility with an anthropology that develops a relational account of the human as constantly developing and becoming, which coalesce in an ultimately relational political theory which considers political institutions and movements in the openness of a reality grounded in the contingency of an Afgrund. While I have been utilizing the theoretical standpoint of transcendental materialism throughout this book, this chapter and the next will make this perspective more explicit as I relate my systematic account of Kierkegaard’s thought to the primary thinkers and tendencies of contemporary materialist philosophy.
4.1 Previous Political Readings
While there have been various recent attempts to reckon with the social and political implications of Kierkegaard’s thought, in the current context, I will briefly discuss two works which share a similar theoretical outlook to my own interpretation. My aim is simply to give context to my own discussion and show the manner in which my reading differs from previous attempts to develop a political interpretation of Kierkegaard. The first of these texts, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society by Merold Westphal presents a reading that places Kierkegaard in a tradition of post-Marxist ideology critique. The second, The Politics of Exodus by Mark Dooley, places Kierkegaard in the context of postmodern philosophy to push the ethical and political implications of his thought. I will show why I find both works to move in the right direction while ultimately falling short of an ontologically grounded political interpretation of Kierkegaard.[1]
In his Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society, Merold Westphal argues that Kierkegaard is the precursor to Marx in regard to the development of an ideology and sociology of knowledge. According to Westphal, this critique of the reason and society of his age in no way qualifies as irrationalist but instead serves as a critique of a historically specific form of reason. Thus, Kierkegaard is not against the idea of a systematic form of reason as such but against the idea that a historically constructed and particular form of reason is regarded as universal in its scope. For Westphal, this critique of reason and advocacy of a certain form of individualism is not a-political or a-social but rather presents a radical form of politics and social relation that begins from a critique of the socialization of the individual.
While it is easy to interpret much of Kierkegaard’s critical language as particularly religious or other-worldly in orientation, Westphal sees this manner of speech as inherently political in nature, arguing that ‘prophetic speech is conspicuously out of step with the spirit of its times. . . . It is always the speech of the minority’.[2] In this way Kierkegaard’s political critique can be seen to operate from the perspective of the minority, where those on the outside of the system in power provide a prophetic call for a new world to come. Westphal goes on to state, ‘The prophets deny the continuing validity of the old institutions, sacred and the secular, of the nation’.[3]
Following this discussion of the role of the prophetic in Kierkegaard’s writing, Westphal notes, ‘By interpreting the present in terms of the future instead of the past, it becomes possible to see the present in bold new ways’.[4] Here Westphal is reading Kierkegaard as advocating a politics in which the possibility of future events illuminates the possibilities contained within the present situation. This reading seems to point to an element of subjective forcing in Kierkegaard, in which the openness of the future allows those in the present age to attempt to create political and social realities that currently seem to be impossible, or at least improbable. This would also account for the social and political role of faith, as faith would be the subjective attitude of the one affirming that what is currently seen as impossible can be possible in the future through the willed activities of subjects.
Westphal continues:
Kierkegaard knows that social groups make themselves legitimate through the propagation of the belief systems in which the established order is justified. He recognizes the degree to which this process determines what is to count as reason in any given context.[5]
Here we once again see Westphal pointing out the fact that Kierkegaard is not against reason as such but instead against the way in which established orders utilize reason to determine what is ‘new’ or ‘true’ according to their own immanent terms. In language used previously in this book, this further exemplifies that for Kierkegaard truth is always something transcendent that is capable of breaking with the immanent logic of a particular situation. In this sense, the religious is belief in the seemingly absurd that the order in power deems illegitimate and the activity of faith is the process of subjectively attempting to actualize these beliefs.
Westphal notes, ‘We should not be surprised if Kierkegaard’s politics is more like Marx’s than Plato’s in its form’,[6] but that this parallel with Marx is purely formal. Kierkegaard’s political diagnosis centers on a lack of subjectivity and the failure of people to be passionately committed religious individuals, while for Marx a critique of more-than-individual social structures is necessary. In this way Westphal thinks that Kierkegaard locates the flaw of Hegelian philosophy and the logic of the present age in their shared tendency towards a self-deification of the ‘we’. Kierkegaard’s criticism, according to Westphal, is that ‘we are not saved by socialization, but by subjectivity’. Thus Kierkegaard seeks to ‘un-socialize the individual in order to un-deify society’.[7]
In a manner which is in line with my own argument, Westphal does claim that one of the biggest issues with the previous attempts to read Kierkegaard politically is that these ‘readings suffer largely through a failure to notice how deeply Hegelian Kierkegaard is on two points’.[8] He goes on to outline these two Hegelian aspects of Kierkegaard’s thought:
The first step to understanding Kierkegaard’s politics is to recognize that he shares with Hegel this conception of spirit and the dialectical individualism contained therein. Being dialectical, this individualism is a social theory of human experience, inherently political in a broad sense.[9]
And:
The second important Hegelian element in Kierkegaard’s politics is the dialectical manner in which he defends dialectical individualism.[10]
So Westphal, in a manner I wholly agree with, argues that the failure to recognize the fundamentally Hegelian, and thus dialectical, conception of the spiritual self often ends up precluding a reading which locates the political aspects inherent to this version of subjectivity. While I agree with this, I hope I have previously outlined why he still fails to go far enough. By focusing only on the Hegelian elements of Kierkegaard’s theory of the self, he once again avoids the underlying ontological conditions that allow this dialectical account of spirit in the first place. So while Westphal takes the constructive step of acknowledging the underlying dialectical structure of the self, he fails to venture a step further towards a consideration of the underlying ontological conditions that make this form of self possible. If Westphal is correct in arguing that we must take more seriously the Hegelian conception of the dialectical self at play in Kierkegaard’s authorship, he falls short in not arguing that previous political readings have failed to begin from the idealist origins of Kierkegaard’s conception of philosophy as such.
Mark Dooley’s The Politics of Exodus is one of the few works that can be considered a full-scale political treatment of Kierkegaard’s authorship. In this work he offers an ethical and political reading that pushes the limits of how we can read the religious in Kierkegaard in the wake of Jacques Derrida and other postmodern thinkers. For Dooley, Derridean deconstruction has made it impossible for us to think in terms of metaphysical totality in any classical Hegelian sense.
Along with this emphasis on thinking through Kierkegaard in the wake of deconstruction, Dooley also aims to problematize readings that focus on the absolute inwardness of the Kierkegaardian self, thus leaving little serious room for a political interpretation. Dooley states:
My fundamental objective is to dispute these claims by arguing that Kierkegaard’s notion of the self does not result in isolated subjective interiority divorced from all social interaction, but rather one that seeks to engender a notion of community existence, and which therefore has much to offer the contemporary reader.[11]
Dooley goes on to describe the aims of his study as such:
So this book has, in effect, two central aims: first, to make a case for Kierkegaard as a committed thinker who had an ethico-political sensitivity; and second, to show how far in advance of their time were the ethical and political ideals he espoused.[12]
Much of Dooley’s reading is dependent on a consideration of the manner in which outward forces and other individuals are necessarily involved in the formation of the inward Kierkegaardian self, as he argues:
In short, the self for Kierkegaard is not acontextual, but rather the product of multifarious contextual forces that precede it. . . . The whole point of Kierkegaard’s work, I contend, is to demonstrate how the self can and must challenge the modus operandi of the prevailing political order so as to render it more sensitive to those for whom it is responsible.[13]
Dooley also takes note to not ignore the necessarily theological nature of Kierkegaard’s writing, and this leads him to considering the manner in which the religious and the political can be seen as related. In a manner that is reminiscent of the reconsideration of the theological which was presented in chapter 3 of the present work, Dooley argues:
For Kierkegaard, therefore, God is not a what, or the subject of disinterested objective analysis; God is, rather, a how, or a practical and active engagement with others in the world.[14]
Here Dooley is describing Kierkegaard’s conceptualization of God as something that signifies an active and subjective engagement with the external world, rather than as a transcendent deity outside of the bounds of the subject that simply necessitates solitary worship. Thus Dooley connects the possibility contained by this active understanding of God with the possibility of external political activity.
While he does not go into the relationship between Kierkegaard and German idealism in a systematic or ontological sense, he does take time to distinguish what Kierkegaard is attempting to do from any sort of totalizing Hegelian project. He states:
Hegel opened a new dawn for philosophy. However, in formulating a teleological dynamic, he cheated the forces of time and change. The future in this model is not an open-ended horizon of possibility, but another phase in Geist’s evolution toward absolute fulfillment.[15]
We see here that Dooley is staying firmly within the bounds of a traditional reading of Hegelian idealism in which spirit is on a necessary and one-way progression towards a final moment of synthetic unity in absolute knowing. For Dooley, the political stakes of Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel involve a prioritizing of contingency over and against the necessity he identifies is at the heart of Hegelian logic and metaphysics. Dooley outlines the political stakes of this dichotomy between Hegelian dialectical necessity and Kierkegaardian paradoxical possibility when he states:
To be truly responsible, for Kierkegaard, is to affirm the possibility of imagining otherwise, of calling into question what has been traditionally celebrated as truth, reason, ethics, and community with a view to making each of these structures own up to its contingent configuration.[16]
While I agree with Dooley’s assertion that for Kierkegaard one of the key social and political issues relates to recognizing the contingent configuration of forms of reason, ethics and community, it is interesting that for him this is a product of an absolutely non-metaphysical reading of Kierkegaard. As I have been outlining in this book, I claim that it is instead the case that it is precisely through an ontological consideration of the works of Kierkegaard that we arrive at a point at which contingency is a necessary category not due to our inability to ever grasp the structure of reality but because reality itself is riddled with fracture and contingency.
As is one of the primary contentions of this book, the shortcomings and lack of ontological consideration in Dooley’s reading seems to come from a continued insistence that there can be no such thing as a metaphysical or ontological interpretation of the works of Kierkegaard and that our best bet for developing a political interpretation involves breaking with the metaphysical to consider the absolute abyss which separates us from any sort of understanding of the absolute. Something both Westphal and Dooley have in common is a lack of insistence on the ontological structure at the heart of Kierkegaard’s work, and it is clear that much of this lack comes from a neglect of a serious consideration of the manner in which German idealist philosophy set the stakes for Kierkegaard’s own project. As will be shown, my interpretation differs insomuch as the real political potential of Kierkegaard’s authorship emerges precisely through a serious ontological consideration.
4.2 The Present Age
While Kierkegaard never presented any comprehensive system of political philosophy (or theology), the text that most clearly exemplifies the social and political consequences of the ontological and anthropological structure is the essay ‘The Present Age’, which was published alongside his ‘A Literary Review’ in the collection Two Ages. In particular, it is my contention that this brief text gives us just enough of an idea of Kierkegaard’s views on socio-political critique to allow us to tie together the ontological and political aspects of his work into a larger political ontology which accounts for the connection between ontological structure and political possibilities.
Before moving forward, however, it is necessary to make a few remarks on the connection, or more precisely the lack of any necessary connection, between the ontological and the political. In recent years there has been an increasing debate as to the precise connection between the ontological and the political, with some arguing that particular ontological structures imply a certain form of political practice and structure, while others holding that this conflation between the ontological and the political is a mistake to be avoided at all costs. Rather than fully endorse one of these approaches, I will instead argue that, following Kierkegaard, we can say that the consideration of ontological conditions is absolutely necessary when attempting to rigorously think about the political. This is not the case because a particular ontological structure implies a necessary socio-political structure and form of praxis but is rather the case because a careful ontological consideration opens up the space for a proper consideration of political possibilities. There is no such thing as an ontology in which the structure of a radical communist alternative to contemporary capitalism is somehow built into the structure of matter itself. To use the stage as an example, it is not the case that ontology writes the script for political activity, but merely that it builds the stage upon which the actors can perform in a variety of ways. The ontological creates the space and conditions for political action, but it does not dictate any particular sort of politics that is in any way ingrained into the structure of being. In the same manner in which logic does not lead to any necessary action on the part of individual human activity, ontological structure does not necessarily lead to any sort of collective political activity. The political is thus always the outcome of willed, contingent activity carried out against the backdrop of the pure possibility-of-possibility inherent to the structure of reality.
This seems to follow directly from the ontological and anthropological analysis carried out in the previous two chapters, where it was made clear that for Kierkegaard, reflective thinking does not equate to actual existence or activity and just because a concept is rational does not somehow place it into actual existence. Thus, it is not the case that, just because we develop a highly rational political theory, there is any necessary reason for this theory to be actualized. A space of contingent fracture always remains between the positing of an ideal and its actualization and this space is precisely the possibility of decisive and willed subjectivity. Following this, it becomes clear that if we are to claim that there is a connection between the ontological and the political in the thought of Kierkegaard, then there is equally a connection between both of these concepts and subjectivity. In a sense, we could say that subjectivity is the contingent third term that relates to the opposed poles of ontology and the political. Without the willed activity of subjectivity, there would be no way in which ontological structure would ever play any part in the formation of political actuality, but subjectivity operates precisely as a relation that relates to itself through its relations to both the ideal conditions of the ontological and the actual conditions of political reality. Following this, we can say that for Kierkegaard subjectivity is precisely the manner in which the ontological comes to bear on the actual and, in particular, that politics is precisely the name for the collective activity of subjects attempting to actualize a political ideal after a decisive break from the activity of reflection. I will return to a systematic outline of this political ontology but, for the time being, would like to offer a brief analysis of ‘The Present Age’ to provide a basis for my attempt to draw a political philosophy out of the seemingly non-political and anti-systematic writings of Kierkegaard.
‘The Present Age’ is essentially a critique of the mode of socio-political subjectivity and relationality implicit to speculative, or reflective, thought. Kierkegaard calls the social and political conditions created by speculative thought ‘the present age,’ which is contrasted with the age of passion (or revolution), which is the social and political structure which more clearly reflects Kierkegaard’s own views on the contingency of both ontology and the structure of subjectivity.
Kierkegaard identifies the present age as one of ‘understanding and reflection, momentarily bursting into enthusiasm, and shrewdly relapsing into repose’ (PA 33). He goes on to note, ‘A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity’ (PA 35). Because this age is grounded in an account of reality which believes itself capable of totalizing the field of possibility through logical reflection and the equation of logic with actuality, individuals in this age are thus little more than professional observers, losing themselves in the crowd and simply waiting for history to unfold on its own before their reflective gazes. They wait for something to happen, but sadly, it is often the case that nothing ever does. Since all are caught in a motionless sort of reflection, there is no longer any emphasis on the necessity of action or decision at the level of the individual subject (PA 36).
During his critique of the age of reflection, Kierkegaard comes as close as he ever does to an implicit critique of the logic of capitalism when remarking, ‘in the end, therefore, money will be the one thing people will desire, which is moreover only representative, an abstraction’(PA 40). He goes on to note that in the age of reflection, where all things become mere abstraction and there is no longer room for the contingent possibility of truth, men will say, ‘give me money . . . and I am saved’ (PA 41). Rather than the sort of self-relating subjectivity outlined to various extents in the previous chapters, Kierkegaard is here describing a sort of subjectivity in which one simply relates to the financial abstraction of money to gain a sense of self and existence. In a very simple sense, he seems to point out that under the logic of reflection and abstraction, the more one relates to money (i.e., the more money that one has), the more one truly exists. Here Kierkegaard shows the danger of the marriage between abstract thought and the necessarily abstracting effect of the capitalist economy.
As we have previously seen, Kierkegaard associates abstraction with the attempt to render thought, and life, a completely objective discourse, and abstract thinking is a manner of speculation which is completely opposed to religion, which is concerned with life and activity rather than thought and reflection. In this way, we see that he associates the desire for money as a means of satisfaction with abstraction. This means that this desire for money, which believes itself to be a clear representation of objective reality, serves the purpose of pulling one further and further away from a concern with life and actuality, which are properly religious (and thus subjective) categories.
Without the form of relationality which comes from the properly religious form of existence (i.e., the relation to possibility as the absolute relation) individuals will desire the false hope of objective certainty offered to them by money. Prefiguring the yet-to-occur full-scale development of the global capitalist economy in its contemporary model, Kierkegaard notes that this desire for money will serve the role of binding individuals together, and thus all will belong to capital as a unifying abstraction, and in this abstract unity there exists no fractures or gaps for the free activity of spirit. Thus, the individual is destroyed as she is bound to others in the herd, or crowd, of the present age.
This destruction of individuality is referred to as leveling by Kierkegaard, and he defines this process as a ‘silent, mathematical, and abstract occupation which shuns upheavals . . . at its maximum the leveling [sic] process is a deathly silence in which one can hear one’s heart beat, a silence which nothing can pierce, in which everything is engulfed, powerless to resist’ (PA 54). This process of levelling acts as the negative unity of individuals, in which one exists only as an abstract part of a useless crowd. As Kierkegaard later states, ‘Leveling is eo ipso the destruction of the individual’ (PA 54).
We can see that the upheaval Kierkegaard speaks of here is shunned precisely because an upheaval at the social-political level would equate to a new structure at the logical level that would invalidate the previously made claims to objective certainty by the age of reflection. Along with this, we see that this negative relationality present between these subjects is a mirror of the sort of negative relation previously discussed in SUD. Thus, there is no third term capable of turning this into a positive relation, as there are only two terms: the crowd and the individual.
In opposition to this destruction of the individual carried out by the levelling process of the present age, the age of passion (or revolution) necessitates that the individual be unbound from the abstract unity offered by the crowd and exist as a self-relational individual. In this age of passion, which exemplifies the relational account of consciousness (subjectivity) developed in CA and SUD, reality is posited as radically open and contingent, and the individual is open to the possibility of the emergence of the radically new. In this age of passion, the individual is responsible for decision and commitment, and rather than attempting to know through reflection, one must strive to believe through the actualization of the possible. Whereas the one existing in the present age can infinitely delay decision through continual calls for further reflection, the individuals of the present age must make a decisive leap for themselves and cannot rely on the supposed belief of the crowd. As Kierkegaard states, ‘they must make the leap themselves, for God’s love is not a second hand gift’ (PA 82).
We can thus see how the age of passion provides a socio-political exemplification of the inherently fractured account of reality offered in the previous explication of Kierkegaard’s ontological structure. Because thought and being are held apart by existence (CUP 123), actual existence necessitates that the freely acting subject make decisive leaps into/over these gaps and fissures in objective reality and continue to work out reality through this infinite subjective process. The socio-political affect Kierkegaard uses to describe this process of subjective existence is enthusiasm (PA 34, 54, 58, 84), and he claims that all truly subjective actions begin with a ‘leap of enthusiasm’ which removes the individual from the ‘snare of reflection’ and brings one into relation with the infinite, or eternal (PA 58). As we have seen in a previous chapter, the infinite, or eternal, is possibility as the absolute.
As we can see, in the present age, thought is being and thus reflection is regarded as existence/actuality. In this social ontology, there exists no room from which the subject could emerge, as there remain no ‘cracks’ in this levelled form of immanence that would necessitate that the individual make a decisive leap of enthusiasm. In this conception of reality, one can simply remain in bed and wait for God to finish its cosmic game of chess. In the age of passion, there is no chess game, and if one remains in bed, hoping to be moved, nothing will happen. In the age of passion a person must get up, put on their coat, and leap from their doorstep into the contingency of reality. For the one existing with infinite pathos (CUP 431) the transformation of reality will come only through this subjective and decisive action.
4.3 The Age of Revolution
While ‘The Present Age’ provides a fairly straightforward critical picture of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the social and political situation of his day, in particular the manner in which this age of reflection has engendered a certain form of subjectivity in which passion, action and decision are no longer the terms characterizing the process of self-actualization, we can get a glimpse of a more constructive positive program in ‘The Age of Revolution’, which immediately precedes ‘The Present Age’ in the volume Two Ages: A Literary Review. Of particular interest to the present study is the manner in which Kierkegaard places emphasis on the age of revolution possessing a particular form (or formal structure), as he states:
The Age of revolution is essentially passionate, and therefore it essentially has form. (TA 61)[17]
This emphasis on form is crucial for the present study, as Kierkegaard’s particular focus on form over content allows us to conceive of how this particular form of political subjectivity and relationality could be utilized in a contemporary context removed from the religious debates of nineteenth-century Danish society. Kierkegaard goes on:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore essentially has culture. In other words, the tension and resilience of the inner being are the measure of essential culture. (TA 61)
It is interesting to note that the precondition for culture, which is a necessarily social and inter-subjective phenomenon, is the ‘tension and resilience’ of the inner being. Put differently, the fracture which characterizes the structure of consciousness, which is enabled through a fracture in reality itself, is what creates the internal tension capable of leading to a form of subjectivity in which passion, and subsequently culture, is possible. He goes on:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate; therefore it must be able to be violent, riotous, wild, ruthless toward everything but its idea, but precisely because it still has one motivation, it is less open to the charge of crudeness. (TA 62)
His continued insistence on the essentially passionate nature of the age of revolution is important as this emphasis on passion signifies a continued emphasis on the inwardness of subjectivity. In the previous passage, Kierkegaard is clear to distinguish the age of revolution from either a completely inward form of subjectivity in which there is no necessity for action and, on the other hand, a crass form of herd-like activity in which individuals are merely caught up in a movement or group without inward relation. Kierkegaard avoids this ‘either/or’ through an emphasis on the place of the idea (or ideal) in the formation of subjectivity and subsequent activity. Through relating passionately to an orienting idea, one does not only develop one’s own individual subjectivity but is subsequently able to passionately work out the implications of the idea in externality (or actuality). Once again, we see that Kierkegaard places emphasis on ideality insomuch as it provides an aim for external and actual activity. Kierkegaard notes the absolute necessity of passion by stating:
If the essential passion is taken away, the one motivation, and everything becomes meaningless externality, devoid of character, then the spring of ideality stops flowing and life together becomes stagnant water—this is crudeness. (TA 62)
This paves the way for one of the most crucial, and in my opinion most overlooked, aspects of Kierkegaard’s social thought and one which allows us to once and for all dispense with the critique that Kierkegaard is some sort of acosmic thinker or that he has no ability to theorize relations to others.[18] In a passage that uses this emphasis on orienting ideas and passion to pave the way for thinking about inter-subjectivity Kierkegaard states:
When individuals (each one individually) are essentially and passionately related to an idea and together are essentially related to the same idea, the relation is optimal and normative. Individually the relation separates them (each one has himself for himself), and ideally it unites them. (TA 62)
It is worth explicating precisely what Kierkegaard is saying here. He begins by noting that the individual must first be essentially and passionately related to an idea. This is similar to what we have seen Kierkegaard argue in various forms throughout his authorship. To fully develop one’s own consciousness, one needs to relate (religiously) to an idea outside of their own reflective capacity that enables them to make the movement of faith and further actualize the becoming of their own subjectivity. In this passage he adds a social dimension to his theorization of the development of subjectivity and notes that, through being passionately related to an idea, individuals become related to others who are also passionately related to the same idea. Rather than Kierkegaard alluding to some sort of synthesis between the self and the other, or the individual and the collective, he makes sure to note the tension that necessarily remains in this relation. He does this through arguing that, on the individual level, the relation separates individuals, insomuch as each individual needs to passionately relate to an idea on their own, while at the same time, it ideally unites them. This means that tension (a product of a fractured dialectic) remains present at multiple levels.
At the level of the individual, or subjective, the age of revolution means that one must be passionately related to an idea. This passionate relation means that one does not simply agree or disagree with a movement or idea, but rather, a truly passionate commitment to an idea necessitates a re-orientation in the development of an individuals’ subjectivity through the process of attempting to actualize the ideal. Following this, a tension (or in terms we have used previously, the experience of anxiety) remains that reminds the individual of the contingency haunting their project and the necessity of faith in the light of the possibility of things always being otherwise.
This tension is repeated at the level of the social or the inter-subjective. Rather than individuals affirming the same idea or cause leading to the collapsing of the distinction between individuals and the development of a consistent group, or herd, this collective affirmation creates a tension within the relations of these individuals to each other through the previously mentioned tension of the individual’s relation to the idea. For example, if I am a part of a political collective oriented around the idea of equality, this means at one level that I am always aware of the infinite task of actualizing the idea of equality in my own activity. I know that at times I will miss the mark, and the temptation to either turn my back on the idea of equality, or the temptation to believe that ‘the work is done’ and equality has been completely realized, will always haunt my activity. At the level of the collective, I will relate to others in the tension that our own individual relations to the ideas are themselves contingent and in a process of becoming. Thus, it can never be assumed that being a part of the collective means that either my work as a self is finished or that the work of the collective and its members is finished. One can always turn her back on the idea that orients collective activity and the risk of completion, or the arrival at some ultimate finality or moment of synthesis, will also tempt the collective. As we have already seen in the discussion of Practice in Christianity, the idea that a collective subjective process could ever be complete would lead back to something like the Church Triumphant, something we will soon see Sartre refer to as the institution when he describes a collective founded on free praxis collapsing back into an objective and necessary body without freedom.
Kierkegaard highlights this in a passage worth quoting at length:
Thus the individuals never come too close to each other in the herd sense, simply because they are united on the basis of an ideal distance. The unanimity of separation is indeed fully orchestrated music. On the other hand, if individuals relate to an idea merely en masse (consequently without the individual separation of inwardness), we get violence, anarchy, riotousness; but if there is no idea for the individuals en masse and no individually separating inwardness, either, then we have crudeness. The Harmony of the spheres is the unity of each planet relating to itself and to the whole. . . . Remove the relation to one-self, and we have the tumultuous self relating of the mass to an idea; but remove this as well, and we have crudeness. (TA 63)[19]
This ideal distance is thus crucial to avoid what Kierkegaard is calling ‘crudeness’. This separation is necessary to avoid the ‘violence, anarchy and riotousness’ of individuals who are simply relating to an idea en masse. At the same time, if there is no idea capable of uniting individuals, we arrive at crudeness. At this point we see the problematic identified by Kierkegaard when an individual attempts to immediately relate to her own self and, at the social level, when an individual attempts to immediately relate to an idea. If the relation is immediate, there is no space from which a tension can emerge that would engender the space for the free becoming of the self and the collective. Put differently, if there is no fracture there is no space for the free dialectical becoming of spirit, or subjectivity.
Simply put, an external idea is necessary to properly relate to oneself, and after this self-relation, a common idea is equally necessary to relate to others. The mistake is made when individuals attempt to skip the first step and simply join the herd through an immediate relation to an idea. Passion is necessary for me to both become myself and to become a part of a collective set of relations bigger than myself.
We can connect this discussion with the claims made in the previous chapter regarding the meaning of the religious. As I have previously argued, an ontological interpretation of the works of Kierkegaard allows us the possibility of a non-theological interpretation of the religious, in which God signifies the possibility of a religious form of relation. Following this line of logic, Kierkegaard goes on to state, ‘fundamentally, essential passion is its own guarantee that there is something sacred ’ (TA 64). This quote seems to follow a similar and well-known passage in CUP in which he states that passion is of primary importance in terms of religious worship:
If someone who lives in the midst of Christianity enters, with knowledge of the true idea of God, the house of God, and prays, but prays in untruth, and if someone lives in an idolatrous land but prays with all the passion of infinity, although his eyes are resting upon the image of an idol-where, then, is there more truth? The one prays in truth to God although he is worshipping an idol; the other prays in untruth to the true God and is therefore in truth worshipping an idol. (CUP 201)
He goes on to once again emphasize the important of passion in particular reference to the age of revolution, stating:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate and therefore has immediacy. Its immediacy, however, is not the first immediacy, and in the highest sense it is not the final immediacy, either; it is an immediacy of reaction and to that extent is provisional. (TA 65)
And:
The age of revolution is essentially passionate; therefore it has not nullified the principle of contradiction and can become either good or evil, and whichever way is chosen, the impetus of passion is such that the trace of an action marking its progress or its taking a wrong direction must be perceptible. It is obliged to make a decision, but this again is the saving factor, for decision is the little magic word that existence respects. (TA 66)
At this point Kierkegaard re-articulates the emphasis on passion in a way even more in line with the argument of the present work. He notes that the essential passion of the age of revolution means precisely that it has not ‘nullified the principle of contradiction’, or in other words, this essential passion has not attempted to synthesize any apparent contradiction for the sake of reaching a higher level of truth or unity. In a manner which relates to the argument made in chapter 2 of this work, he notes that the age of revolution can ‘become either good or evil’ as this age has not attempted to move past the contingency at the heart of our experience of reality which leaves good and evil as equally realizable possibilities. He then notes that ‘decision is the little magic word that existence respects’, which once again emphasizes the manner in which the dynamic process of subjectivity (whether individual or collective) never moves past the absolute necessity of decision in which one must constantly recommit to a particular trajectory. One thus never decides ‘once and for all’, as if a simple ‘yes’ or ‘no’ will guarantee any particular mode of existence. The mode of existence characterizing the age of revolution is one in which the tension at the level of the individual and the collective opens up the realm of abyssal possibility in which the temptation for failure, inactivity and betrayal will always remain.
While it seems as if Kierkegaard may be placing unequivocal emphasis on an age of action, as over and against a powerless age of pure reflection, he is careful to note that the age characterized by an emphasis on reflective thought is instead very powerful; it simply fails to decisively actualize this power. He goes on to state:
Thus an age that is very reflective cannot for that reason be summarily accused of being powerless, for it perhaps has great power, but it goes to waste in the fruitlessness of reflection. (TA 66)
Thus it is not the case that reflection is the antithesis of activity; rather, it seems that Kierkegaard here acknowledges that reflection can be the precise precondition for activity, with the moment of decision being that ‘magic word’ which is able to bridge the abyss between reflection and activity, or thought and existence. He goes on to emphasize how the age of reflection is in a sense ‘so close yet so far’ from the life of radical activity when he states that:
Instead of bringing forth the child of a god, the silent, taciturn decision, the generation gives birth to a changeling of the understanding that has things at its fingertips. (TA 68)
Thus the generation wrapped up in the process of speculation and reflection ‘has things at its fingertips’, but its inability to break the cycle of endless reflection with an act of decision leads the generation to be a mere ‘changeling’ which simply transitions from one mode of thought to another without ever radically changing its fundamental orientation or character.
4.4 Political Ontology
Now that I have outlined the elements of political critique to be gleaned from Kierkegaard’s ‘The Present Age’ and ‘The Age of Revolution’, I will consider these elements of a Kierkegaardian political critique and analysis against the background of the systematic ontological and anthropological reading offered in the previous chapters. By considering the minimal, but extremely telling, comments Kierkegaard made of an explicitly political nature in the context of this systematic reading, I aim to arrive at what could be called a ‘systematic political ontology’ which allows us to locate a clear line of connectivity between an ontology, theory of subjectivity and model of political praxis. While at this point my discussion clearly leaves the realm of critical reading or systematic interpretation, I will still contend that even if Kierkegaard himself never aimed at developing anything like a systematic political ontology, the approach developed here is still thoroughly Kierkegaardian and the theory of political subjectivity which follows is a clear outcome of the systematic and ontological approach developed thus far in this book.
To begin, we must once again take as our starting point the ontological structure present in Kierkegaard’s authorship that I have referred to as the ‘fractured dialectic’. While this dialectic unfolds in a manner Kierkegaard clearly gleaned from the movements of Hegel’s logic as its movement is fueled by an attempt to overcome contradiction, it is clear that at its point of origin this ontological structure is grounded, or properly ungrounded, in a point of fracture which makes impossible any claim to a consistent, or immediate, beginning. Just as crucial as the fracture that characterizes the impossibility of a pure beginning is the fact that this fractured dialectic makes an eventual synthetic conclusion, or point of consistent finality, equally impossible. It is thus the case that the structure of both reality and subjectivity are characterized by this fundamental fracture, which leaves both characterized by their movements of becoming. In a traditional idealist sense, this ontology makes impossible any moment of finality, or ‘absolute knowing’ as it is traditionally conceived.
If there is such a thing as absolute knowing in a systematic reading of Kierkegaard, it is a form of faith in which one sacrifices any claim to finality and completion and instead recognizes that God, or the absolute, is the constant possibility of absolute contingency and possibility itself. Thus, the logical desire for absolute knowing turns into the lived perspective of absolute possibility. This relates back to the previously discussed distinction between the philosophical emphasis on abstraction and a more properly religious emphasis on appropriation and the actuality of existence. Absolute knowing, as traditionally conceived, is little more than a logical attempt to abstract thought from the movement characterizing actuality for the sake of arriving at a stable point where thought is no longer haunted by the anxiety of contingency. Following Kierkegaard’s emphasis on appropriation over abstraction, the logic of absolute knowing instead becomes the activity of faith and, in particular, the work of love. As I will briefly outline in the concluding section of this work, love serves as Kierkegaard’s response to the logic of final synthesis, as love is an activity that relates two opposed entities while not conflating both into one singular synthetic substance, (i.e., love is pure identity in difference).
To move closer to a political reading, it is important to note how this ontological structure creates the grounds upon which we can concisely outline the systematic contours of Kierkegaard’s own theory of subjectivity. Rather than an anthropological view in which the individual can only ever simply be one thing or another as a wholly stable and consistent entity, the individual human being is always engaged in the dynamic process of becoming. All attempts to exist as a sort of stable and consistent totality will forever be haunted by the fundamental inconsistency (or fracture) at the heart of the subject or spirit. As I have previously outlined at length, spirit (or the self) is the dynamic relation operating between two opposed elements. Thus, the self is never simply just a finite or infinite thing and never operates in terms of pure necessity or absolute possibility; rather, the self is the dynamic element that relates between two opposed terms. The self is itself fractured at its core, and this space of fracture creates the conditions for the dynamic freedom of subjectivity. The acceptance of this fracture, at both the ontological and anthropological level, is what characterizes the movement of faith.
We can now clearly see that the same structure that characterizes the ontology of the fractured dialectic repeats itself at the level of the anthropological or subjective. While at the level of the ontological this fracture creates the conditions for possibility and anxiety, at the level of the individual this fracture creates the conditions for the free activity of spirit and the risk of despair. It is important to once again note that this freedom (at the level of both ontology and subjectivity) is never a pure and limitless freedom but instead always operates within the tension of opposed elements. In this picture, the dialectic is always already fractured, and freedom is always already entangled.
The next step towards an explicitly political interpretation of Kierkegaard is to take this same systematic structure to the level of the social to analyse the manner in which the fractured dialectic creates the conditions for a political ontology and theory of political subjectivity. To do this, we must first extrapolate the structure of spirit at the level of the individual to the level of the relation between multiple individuals. This amounts to taking the relational structure at the heart of each individual and repeating the structure at the level of the relations between individuals. We have already seen that at the level of the individual, I am characterized by the freedom of spirit insomuch as my actual self is the dynamic element which relates to itself through the constant process of negotiating contradictory elements, such as the finite and the infinite, or possibility and necessity. It has already been shown that when someone accepts this condition of existing as spirit, through the act of faith, they can avoid the despair of not being able to accept existing in this spiritual manner. To begin to venture towards the social, we can first imagine what this relational structure would look like when conceived as the relation between two individuals. We already know that in the structure of my own consciousness I never merely ‘am precisely who I am’ as I am constantly developing as the internal relation of opposed elements. Thus, I can never simply be ‘just this one thing’ to another person. At the same time, I am attempting to relate to someone who is also dynamically developing in this same spiritual sense. To think about despair at this level, we can imagine what one feels if they attempt to truly know exactly who someone is at a fundamental level. This could be the desire to completely know a family member, friend or lover. As is the common experience of anyone who has ever momentarily thought that they truly knew someone in a totalized fashion, this moment of ‘absolute knowledge’ is usually just that, a chimerical moment during which someone seems to be fully present, followed by a moment at which the individual acts in such a way as to be inconsistent with the concept of them we have arrived at. Attempting to truly know the conceptual core of someone usually only leads to the despair of realizing the impossibility of this project.
The way to move past the despair of this sort of relation would thus be the faithful acceptance that a relationship with another person is equally characterized by the possibility at the bottom of human subjectivity, meaning that one only is this process of becoming. The relationship with another thus inaugurates another level of relation in which two opposed elements (in this case two distinct individuals) attempt the impossible project of relating to each other, and this dynamic tension properly is the relationship with another. It is clear that at the individual level, I never am exactly who I am at a particular moment and never know exactly what I feel or believe in a stable and final matter. In the case of a relationship with another, they are also inconsistent with themselves in this same fashion. We thus always only relate to each other as two dynamic processes engaged in dual processes of becoming which coalesce into the secondary level of becoming characterizing our relationship. Thus I do not simply cease the process of becoming myself when I engage in the process of relating to another; rather, the two processes work together.
This same process repeats again at the level of the social. We can imagine multiple individuals who are religiously related to a similar idea, whether it is a religious orientation, a political ideal or an artistic movement. As we have already seen in Kierkegaard’s critique of the age of reflection, there is no such thing as an immediate relation between myself and a collective, and when this happens, I simply attempt to collapse my own dynamic subjectivity into a collective through the activity of levelling which leads to the creation of a herd. By doing this, I act as if movement and activity are finished, and the group which I align myself with is firmly in the truth. To use an example from PC, at this point I would be following the structure of the church triumphant, in which I merge myself with an institution I believe has direct access to some sort of objective truth.
If instead of this I wanted to follow the example set by Kierkegaard’s discussion of the age of revolution and the church militant, I would have to acknowledge that any set of relationships is always fractured with the anxiety of possibility. I can never simply relate to an individual in a direct and final way, and in the same sense, I can never relate to a group or collective in a direct and final way. To give one example, I can never simply love someone in a direct and complete manner. When I pledge my love for another individual, I am simply inaugurating a process with no end in sight, as it is only through the continued renegotiation of the activity of loving the other person that I continue to be engaged in the process of loving. Anxiety is at the heart of this example, as I will be aware that at any moment it is possible that I could fail to love this person adequately and, at the same time, that at any moment they could betray my love. Thus a certain sort of subjectivity fidelity, or faith, is necessary to continue this process.
To move to the social level we can think about a group of individuals engaged in a political project. The ramifications of this fractured dialectic are that reality and any project we attempt to actualize in reality can never be completely realized. Thus, to be a part of a political project means to exist within the anxiety and tension of failure, betrayal and renegotiation. My relation to a political aim must be mediated by the ever-present possibility of contingency or change so I can thus never believe myself or the collective that I am participating in to be in possession of any sort of final truth. This means that the work of the political, just like the work of becoming a self, of participating in a relationship, can never be completed and instead requires that I am constantly reaffirming a commitment to a particular project as I/we aim at actualizing an ideal into reality.
To merge the examples of an individual relation and a relation to a collective, it is worth considering what sort of relation I can have to the other individuals who are also members of the collective political subject. While some figures, as I will show in the next chapter, theorize the collective subject as signifying the loss of individual subjectivity when one joins the collective, Kierkegaard gives us a way to theorize properly relational subjects who are capable of participating in what we could call a ‘group subject’ while at the same time remaining in the state of tension characteristic of the freedom and anxiety fundamental to these sorts of relations.
Notes
1.
While other political readings of Kierkegaard exist, I am focusing on these two as they contain the most conceptual overlap with my own reading.
2.
Westphal, Kierkegaard’s Critique of Reason and Society (Macon: Mercer University Press, 1987), 14.
3.
Ibid., 17.
4.
Ibid., 18.
5.
Ibid., 22–23.
6.
Ibid., 33.
7.
Ibid., 34.
8.
Ibid., 30.
9.
Ibid., 32.
10.
Ibid.
11.
Mark Dooley, The Politics of Exodus: Søren Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Responsibility (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), i.
12.
Ibid., xxii.
13.
Ibid., 10,11.
14.
Ibid., 18.
15.
Ibid., 95.
16.
Ibid., 107.
17.
This is particularly interesting as he equates passion and form, two aspects of thought normally considered separate in the contemporary philosophical landscape in which formalism and vitalism are considered to be at odds.
18.
Emmanuel Levinas makes this critique in his article ‘Existence and Ethics’ in Kierkegaard: A Critical Reader, eds. Jonathan Rée and Jane Chamberlain (Oxford: Blackwell), 1998.
19.
This passage is crucial for the consideration of Kierkegaard’s relation to the work of Alain Badiou that takes place in the subsequent chapter.