Conclusion
Conclusion
Kierkegaard and Twenty-First-Century Philosophy
While I have just utilized my account of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project to critique one of the major problems haunting Badiou’s materialist philosophy, the question remains, is it really worth attempting to provide a materialist account of Kierkegaard’s work? Along with this one could also ask: if the aim is to move beyond a phenomenological, theological or existential account, why not attempt to offer a naturalist reading? The project of developing a naturalist interpretation of Kierkegaard’s project has recently been developed by Alison Assiter, who in her work Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished Selves attempts to develop a naturalist reading of Kierkegaard’s conception of the self for the sake of responding to recent liberal political accounts of the self.[1] While I have obvious sympathies with this project, I am favoring a materialist account over a naturalist account, due to some of the latent issues with the concept of nature itself. This is important not only due to the problems inherent to theorizing nature, but also due to a recent tendency in Kierkegaard scholarship to attempt to argue that Kierkegaard himself is an essentially supernaturalist thinker.[2] In response to the tendencies to read Kierkegaard as either a naturalist or as a supernaturalist, I would like to play off the title of a recent article by Adrian Johnston by responding that if the only two options by which we can interpret Kierkegaard are as a naturalist or as a supernaturalist that, ‘no, thanks—both are worse!’[3]
In light of this, I think a contemporary account of materialism, in which materialism is precisely the assertion that matter is non-all and still in a contingent process of development, avoids some of the dangers of the attempt to say that a particular form of subjectivity, consciousness or activity is natural, or supernatural, as such. Along with this, I stand halfway between the perspective of Badiou and Catherine Malabou, for whom the natural sciences are a crucial resource for contemporary philosophical materialism.[4] With Malabou I agree that there is no longer any excuse for philosophy to not consider the recent developments in neurobiology in our considerations of the nature of the structure of subjectivity; while at the same time acknowledging with Badiou that often the natural sciences can carry their own dogmatic baggage into the systematic attempts of philosophy.
One of the first steps here is to simply analyse what Kierkegaard already has in common with contemporary materialist philosophy, or more precisely, the ways in which Kierkegaard seems to have already prefigured many of the crucial conceptual aspects of transcendental materialism. First, Kierkegaard’s project can be regarded as a critical response to post-Kantian idealism that at the same time relies on the systematic structure of idealist philosophy. As we have seen, two of his primary problems with idealism are both the lack of emphasis on willed subjectivity and its claims to systematic, and logical, completion. In response to this, Kierkegaard wants to place a renewed emphasis on the contingency of both reality and subjectivity itself, two of the shared critiques offered by contemporary transcendental materialism. This privileging of contingency (or events) over laws at the ontological level is what subsequently allows for an emphasis on human freedom at the level of actual subjective existence. Moving beyond Badiou’s formalist axiomatics, the recent work by Johnston and Malabou tries to account for this freedom at the neurobiological level.[5]
Kierkegaard attempts throughout his corpus to argue that the unique activity of subjectivity can never simply be reduced to objective or determinist forces, and this attempt to rigorously defend free human subjectivity is one of the orienting axioms behind transcendental materialism. For this particular brand of materialism, the aim is to provide an account of subjectivity that emerges from a wholly material basis but is characterized by a freedom that is irreducible to its material basis. Thus, freedom is the ‘except that’ which goes beyond bodies, languages and immanent material structures. In this case, I am claiming that my materialist re-articulation of Kierkegaard’s project makes possible a materialist theorization of human subjectivity that does not reduce this phenomenon to some necessary material substance or process, while also not grounding the activity of free subjectivity is some theological or quasi-mystical form of transcendent otherness.
What Is the Matter of God?
One final question that may still remain is, what about God? Is it really possible to develop an interpretation of an overtly religious thinker that attempts to build a systematic structure that is both materialist and immanent? The other question that could be posed at this point is: What is so unique about a materialist re-interpretation of the religious project of Kierkegaard, or put differently, how does this reading differ from the contemporary materialist philosophies I have been discussing thus far in this book?
I will start with the latter question. One of the babies that seems to have been thrown out with the conceptual bathwater is any positive notion of the particularly human in contemporary materialist philosophies. In the reaction against phenomenological and vitalist accounts of life, many formalist philosophies (such as the one developed by Badiou) have attempted to develop a system of philosophical materialism that aims at a rigorous anti-humanism, or at least a serious indifference to the particularly human. Much of this anti-humanism rightly comes from a desire to avoid any hierarchical (and often theological) account that places human thought as somehow above the rest of reality in a traditionally metaphysical fashion. I have already shown the way in which the lingering affects of this anti-humanist tendency have led to various contradictions in Badiou’s own philosophy and theory of subjectivity.
We can see another one of the dangerous tendencies of contemporary materialism in the work of Adrian Johnston.[6] While Johnston has developed a theory of transcendental materialism that builds directly upon the work of both Badiou and Slavoj Žižek, he differs from the former set of thinkers by being absolutely anti-religious in his philosophical orientation. This is not to say that Badiou or Žižek are religious in any theological sense of the term but simply that both acknowledge the structural significance of various forms of religious thought for their theories of subjectivity. As opposed to this, Johnston goes a step further than Badiou, who acknowledges his rigorous atheism while still acknowledging the structural and systematic importance of Christianity, by not only acknowledging a radical atheist axiom to his philosophical project but by also refusing to entertain the idea that religion (and Christianity in particular) can be useful in the development of any sort of materialist philosophy and theory of subjectivity. This can be seen in his repeated critiques of the use of religious and theological tropes in the work of Žižek, a thinker he otherwise endorses almost completely. On the other hand, and unlike Badiou, Johnston does argue for the significance of considering the role of the human in contemporary materialist philosophy and has gone to some length to attempt to articulate a theory of subjectivity that can account for both internal and emotional life and an external theory of political subjectivity.
This sets up an interesting dichotomy, as Badiou leaves room for something like a materialist philosophy of religion but leaves absolutely no room for a materialist theory of the human. On the other hand, Johnston is fine with claiming that contemporary materialism is at the point at which it can openly acknowledge the human (and even goes as far as to say that it is time for materialists and humanists to unite) but argues that anything resembling a philosophy of religion or theology is absolutely useless and even harmful to the project of developing a contemporary materialist theory of subjectivity.
In opposition to both Badiou and Johnston, a materialist re-articulation of the project of Kierkegaard allows us to hold onto a certain conception of humanism (which is not hierarchical in any sort of theological sense) while at the same time offering a manner by which to consider the religious in materialist terms that do not a priori invalidate the material significance of religious belief and practice. This reading not only enables us to consider Kierkegaard as a resource for thinking about the structure of human subjectivity in a materialist context but also allows us to see how the structure of the fractured dialectic serves as a crucial point of connection between nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy and twenty-first-century European materialist philosophy.
By considering Kierkegaard’s theorization of God in a materialist fashion, we end up with a way of avoiding the dichotomy of either a militantly atheist naturalism in which religion and the theological are wholly false and meaningless to rigorous philosophical discourse or, on the other hand, a mystical use of religion in which God stands for our inability to grasp any form of truth about metaphysical structure or human subjectivity. Put differently, this materialist rendering of God (and the religious) does not fall into the traps of the ‘god of the gaps’ argument in which the theological is inserted for the sake of accounting for explanatory gaps in our rational understanding of reality. Rather, this materialist interpretation makes God the very matter of these ontological gaps themselves. Put differently, rather than the religious signifying our response to explanatory gaps in human cognition and epistemological limitations, the possibility of the religious is a product of the ontological gaps that create the space for the emergence of free human subjectivity itself. In this sense, religious existence is not a reactionary response to epistemological limitation but is instead a product of a certain fractured ontological condition. Following this, we could say that this mode of religious thought is an existential response to the ontological structure outlined in transcendental materialism. This can bring us back to the discussion of Kierkegaard’s understanding of God in SUD, in which it is claimed that God is precisely that all things are possible. Because reality is non-all and marked by fracture and contingency, God signifies the possibility opened up by this non-all ontology, and subsequently the religious has to do with the form of human subjectivity established by the reality of this possibility. Following this, it makes sense to see the manner in which, for figures as diverse as Kierkegaard, Martin Luther King Jr. and Alain Badiou, ‘another world’ is always possible; this other world is never guaranteed but is always a possibility that can only be actualized through the work of willed human subjectivity. Along these same lines, a materialist reconsideration of God allows us to acknowledge that, rather than signifying ‘another world’ which exists beyond the bounds of our phenomenal experience, religion is concerned precisely with the human and the possibility contained in human activity.[7]
At this point of the book I have provided a contextual account of the theoretical moves of post-Kantian German idealism, outlined a systematic ontological and anthropological reading of Kierkegaard’s philosophical and religious project and used this reading to analyse Kierkegaard’s relation to some of the major figures of contemporary European materialist philosophy. Thus far I have shown the manner in which Kierkegaard offers a critique of immediacy (through sin as an absolute negation) and an account of the development and break from reflection that creates the conditions for willed human activity. I then moved on to show the social and political significance of this critique of reflection. To avoid leaving the lingering suspicion that I am merely providing a more rigorous ontological interpretation of traditional existentialism, I will close this work through briefly outlining the third, and final, moment of Kierkegaard’s ontological structure: love. If The Concept of Anxiety provides a critique of immediacy and The Sickness Unto Death outlines a theory, and critique of, reflection, Kierkegaard’s Works of Love provides a return to a higher immediacy through the activity of love. This final move is crucial as it not only allows us to reconsider Kierkegaard’s relation to Hegel, for whom love served as one of the motivating forces behind the development of a systematic philosophy, but equally to a figure such as Badiou, for whom love is one of the four ways by which the subject can be inaugurated into a process of truth. Put simply, I will conclude the present book by offering a brief outline the manner in which love is precisely the end of philosophy for Kierkegaard and the beginning of life.
Love’s Work
If Kierkegaard has anything that could be called a final moment in his system, we could say that this is it can be found in his concept of love, a concept at play throughout many of his works but primarily as outlined in his Works of Love. It is important to note that by final moment I do not mean a moment of final synthesis in which spirit finally returns to its grounds in a moment of absolute synthesis but, rather, the acceptance of the infinite tension of love’s activity. As Kierkegaard writes, ‘love’s element is infinitude, inexhaustibility, immeasurability’ (WL 180). Love thus has the character of an activity and never of a final moment or law which is characteristic of some sort of overarching structure. As Binetti puts it, when offering a reading of Kierkegaard’s conception of love in Hegelian logical terms:
Faith unites in this way what sin separates and maintains itself in the dialectical effort of its continuous overcoming. Its certainty affirms equality and Kierkegaard calls love this one and reconciled actuality. What faith believes and supports, that for which it struggles and on which it rests is thus, purely and simply, love.[8]
Thus, the initial fracture experienced by spirit in the moment of sin as absolute negation is reconciled only through the faithful activity of love, which is described by Binetti as an activity of ‘continuous overcoming’. She goes on to outline the meaning of this sort of love further, writing:
Love operates an identity, whose difference subsists, although reconciled; it restores a unity in which everything is made equal, but without mixture or confusion.[9]
So even though love can be seen as a moment of reconciliation between spirit and the absolute, in the midst of this moment of reconciliation, difference still subsists. Rather than love being that which finally synthesizes the fracture existing between spirit and the absolute, it is instead the affirmation of this fracture and the faithful acknowledgement that love is the activity capable of maintaining the tension difference in unity. Love is thus the third way through which spirit and the absolute possibility of God can be related. This only serves to re-affirm the dynamic nature of the absolute as previously outlined in chapter three of the present work.
To return to two examples used throughout this book, we could think of the way this form of love would operate in both political and romantic terms. Politically, this means that even if one is faithfully committed to a particular political project, there is never a moment of certainty in which the work is finished and a new, stable political reality is created. Rather, in a manner that we have seen outlined in the work of Badiou, a faithful political subject is constantly engaged in the process of reaffirming the consequences of a particular political commitment through acts of repetition. One never leaps once and for all but must continually affirm that which has shaped their subjectivity and existential project. In romantic terms, this means that, for example, a marriage ceremony is never a sort of dialectical synthesis in which two individuals are merged into one monistic romantic entity where difference and tension are abolished. Rather, they are only beginning a dynamic process of working out the consequences of love through affirming their identity through difference. The amorous affirmation that shaped their subjectivity must be re-affirmed through a lifetime of repetition. The fracture faced at the initial moment of negation still remains, but love is the activity capable of faithfully existing in the midst of this fractured abyss.
Kierkegaard emphasizes the active nature of love when he writes:
What love does, that it is; what it is, that it does—at one and the same moment. At the same moment it goes out of itself (the outward direction), it is in itself (the inward direction); and at the same moment it is in itself, it goes out of itself in such a way that this outward going and this returning, this returning and this outward going are simultaneously one and the same. (WL 280)
We here see that love is never a stable concept or identity but always an activity that affects the inward while acting outwardly and vice versa. Kierkegaard describes this process in more succinct terms when he states, ‘the one who loves is or becomes what he does’ (WL 281). Love is thus an activity that is intricately involved with the task of subjectivity or the task of properly becoming oneself.
Love is not an abandonment of the attempt at a systematic account, but rather love is both the foundation and the end goal of Kierkegaard’s philosophical and existential project. In Hegelian terms, love is both the immediate and the higher immediacy arrived at the through the journey of the self from the negation of objectivity in sin, to the despair of reflection, to the leap of faith which enables the self to participate in the process of the works of love. As Hegel himself states in his Fragment on Love, ‘In love the separate does still remain, but as something united and no longer as something separate; life [in the subject] senses life [in the object]’.[10] In another early essay, The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, Hegel notes that the community of Christian believers are related precisely through this sort of love as activity, as he states, ‘they make up not a collection but a communion, since they are unified not in a universal, a concept (e.g., as believers), but through life and through love’.[11] In this sense, the unity, or finality, of Christian community is not shared agreement on universal concepts but, rather, shared life and activity in love, as something that remains dynamic.
The fractured dialectic underlying Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity is thus not primarily concerned with providing a logical account of reality and the structure of the self but, rather, with showing that the fracture at the heart of reality, and the self, opens up the possibility for faith, hope and love. Not faith in a necessarily transcendent God, but a faith in our ability to become ourselves in the midst of fracture and contradiction. Hope not in a world to come, but hope in the ability of humanity to decisively change this world in the here and now. And love not as a sort of romantic unity and removal of tension and difference but precisely as the consistency of inconsistency and the holding together of two opposed elements in their productive tension. This fractured dialectic does not begin with the actual for the sake of arriving at a stable ideal but, rather, leads one from the immediacy of the actual to the possibility of activity. Kierkegaard does not provide us with a framework for doing systematic philosophy; rather, he provides us with a system which shows precisely where the task of speculative philosophy ends and the task of subjective activity begins.
At this point, the stakes of this book should be clear. Through a reading of Kierkegaard’s philosophical project which places his work against the backdrop of the major figures and themes of post-Kantian German idealism, a unique ontological position emerges which I have referred to as a ‘fractured dialectic’. This ontology of fracture differs from a traditionally conceived account of dialectics in that, rather than presupposing any primordially monistic unity, it instead posits that a primordial fracture, or gap, characterizes the very structure of reality and subjectivity. This enables us to conceive of what has been referred to in this book as a ‘meta-dialectics’, as the dialectical movement itself has the potential to dialectically oscillate between the dialectical and non-dialectical. This non-dialectical space of fracture serves as the basis for an account of freedom at both the ontological and subjective level.
I then moved on to outline the manner in which the ontology of fracture lays the groundwork for Kierkegaard’s account of the subject, in which this fractured structure is repeated at the level of consciousness. This provides an account of the self in which subjective freedom is made possible by the cracks and gaps in the ontological structure of reality itself. In this way, subjective freedom is not the outcome of any sort of epistemological gap between the phenomenal subject and noumenal reality; rather, the gaps and fractures in reality itself is what creates the empty space for the free activity of human subjectivity. If the previously discussed ontological break with any supposedly consistent immediacy is what leads to the experience of anxiety, the subject’s attempt to resolve the dialectical contradictions which haunt their own consciousness is what leads to Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair.
After outlining this fractured dialectical ontology and theory of subjectivity I moved on to argue for the political relevance of this theory, something that is rarely attributed to the religious authorship of Kierkegaard. Rather than outlining any sort of prescriptive political philosophy as such, I built upon this fractured dialectic to show the way in which this can allow us to theorize the ontological grounds of political possibility and the forms of political subjectivity made possible through these conditions. Rather than a political philosophy or theory, I argued that in Kierkegaard we have what can be properly considered a political ontology. This political ontology built a further link in the fractured dialectical chain by showing how the same meta-dialectical tension existing at the levels of the ontological and the subjective repeats at the level of social and political relations. In this way, individuals never simply collapse into political collectives but remain in a constant tension with themselves, other members of the collective, and the ideas that orient their political activity. In this way, the particularity of human freedom exists in a productive tension with a collective group oriented around a common political idea.
Finally, I showed the manner in which this new interpretation of Kierkegaard bears a direct relationship to many of the ontological and political concerns of contemporary European materialist philosophy. Along with seeming in many ways to prefigure the conceptual developments of recent materialist philosophies (and in particular those associated with transcendental materialism), this fractured dialectical account of Kierkegaard’s authorship provides crucial correctives to some of the problems plaguing recent materialist thought. In particular, I used the political ontology developed in chapter 4 to critique the lack of a proper account of the individual human subject in the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou. This materialist interpretation allowed me to use a nineteenth-century philosophical reading of Kierkegaard to argue for his continued relevance to twenty-first-century political and ontological debates.
The implications of this interpretation for Kierkegaard scholarship should be fairly clear. My reading offers good reason to reconsider his relationship to German idealist philosophy (and in particular figures such as Fichte and Schelling), his undervalued political potential and his relevance to contemporary debates in European materialist philosophy. While the task of contemporary speculative and materialist philosophy is absolutely indebted to those working through the serious task of the history of philosophy, if the task of philosophy is conceived only as history, then it fails to be philosophy as a living task which aims to critically theorize the world in such a way as to change it. Sadly, much of the work that takes place under the banner of ‘Kierkegaard scholarship’ falls into this trap and places so much rhetorical value on historical facts and anecdotes that speculative and creative accounts of his work are often left in the margins. Much of this dogmatic historicism takes place in the boys club of Kierkegaard scholarship that aims to safeguard the absolute importance of reading Kierkegaard as a thoroughly Christian thinker.[12] But as Michael Strawser has argued,
In general, there is no obvious connection between Kierkegaard’s real or feigned religiosity and his interpretation of his authorship. Whether Kierkegaard was a true Christian is certainly undecidable. . . . Consequently, it is misleading to speak of Kierkegaard the person as either a Christian or a non-Christian. This should not even be a question.[13]
Following this, I do not find it at all surprising that it is often this emphasis on the historical Christianity of Kierkegaard himself which prevents many scholars from taking seriously the economic, ecological and political questions which should be the orienting issues of twenty-first-century philosophical thought.[14] As Sartre emphasized in his Critique of Dialectical Reason, a philosophy incapable of offering any resources for critically thinking through issues of scarcity and destruction in our world and subsequently attempting to theorize the manner in which subjective activity can change this state is not of much use to contemporary thought. Thus, while a recent commentator has accused me of attempting to ‘water down his [Kierkegaard’s] religious commitments so that he is more palatable to contemporary social and political theorist’,[15] I am instead concerned that a contemporary social and political theorist does not miss the ontological and political insights of Kierkegaard’s philosophical authorship because of an emphasis on his own personal religious belief. I have no interest in keeping Kierkegaard chained to a conservative theological interpretation; I am interested in the vast resources Kierkegaard has to offer twenty-first-century philosophical and political thought. If this counts as a watering down of his religious commitments, I much prefer this to a drowning of his philosophical project in the holy waters of Christian theology.
Subsequently, this reading contributes to other recent scholarship that also argues for the necessity of a consideration of Kierkegaard’s authorship in the philosophical context of nineteenth-century European philosophy. My reading differs from these accounts, however, precisely insomuch as I am emphasizing not merely the historical but the ontological relationship between Kierkegaard and the German idealists and, along with this, am building upon this reading to argue for the direct relevance of Kierkegaard’s work to contemporary debates in ontology and the political. According to my reading, Kierkegaardian categories such as anxiety, despair, faith and love are not merely religious tropes that lay the groundwork for a religious anti-philosophy paving the way for twentieth-century European existentialism. Rather, these categories are significant conceptual repetitions of many of the key tropes of German idealist philosophy that carry serious ontological weight while also placing a unique emphasis on the activity of free human subjectivity. Following this reading, one would have to seriously question the tenability of any future work which attempted to consider Kierkegaard to be a merely religious, or existentialist, thinker who lacked any relevance to ontological and political debates. If the reading offered in this book is taken seriously, Kierkegaard must now be considered not only a properly nineteenth-century philosopher but, paradoxically, a properly twenty-first-century philosophical voice.
Notes
1.
Alison Assiter, Kierkegaard, Metaphysics and Political Theory: Unfinished Selves (London: Continuum, 2009).
2.
This view is concisely outlined in Jamie Turnbull’s essay ‘Why Kierkegaard Matters Not to Philosophy’ which is available online: http://www.academia.edu/1670192/_Why_Kierkegaard_Matters_Not_to_Philosophy_
3.
I am here playing off the title of Adrian Johnston’s paper ‘Naturalism or Anti-Naturalism? No, thanks—Both Are Worse!’ in La Revue International de Philosoophie, special issue: ‘On Slavoj Žižek,’ 321–46.
4.
See in particular, Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).
5.
See Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
6.
See ‘Adrian Johnston’s Reply to Clayton Crockett’s Review of His Book’, Political Theology 11.1 (2010), 158–60.
7.
Though it must be stated that this is in no way an attempt to slide theology, and any attempt to defend the existence of the divine, into the backdoor of philosophical discourse. Following Badiou, I wholly affirm that religion presents a set of fables, but of course these are fables that emerge from particular material conditions and ones that often represent the desire for the oppressed to work towards their own liberation. In particular, the traditions of liberation theology and radical theology represent this attempt to take seriously the social, political and philosophical implications of this sort of liberatory religious practice.
8.
Binetti, ‘Kierkegaard—Hegel: The Religious Stage in Speculative Terms’ in Acta Kierkegaardiana: Volume II, Kierkegaard and the Great Philosophers, 112.
9.
Ibid., 116.
10.
Hegel, Love, in Early Theological Writings trans. T. M. Knox (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1971), 305.
11.
Ibid., 278.
12.
While ‘boys club’ may seem like an unfair description, I do not find it a coincidence that many of the most creative and interesting voices in Kierkegaard scholarship (Alison Assiter, Maria J. Binetti, Clare Carlisle, Claudine Davidshofer, Michelle Kosch, Vanessa Rumble, Elisabete M. De Sousa) are female while more often than not it is male scholars carrying forth conservative theological interpretations. At a recent conference one of these male voices even went so far as to say that only a true Christian believer has the ability to really understand Kierkegaard.
13.
Strawser, Both/And: Reading Kierkegaard from Irony to Edification (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), xxvii.
14.
During a panel on Kierkegaard’s apocalyptic thought at a recent conference, one of the speakers was asked what this religious account of apocalypse could offer to the task of critically thinking about the potential economic and ecological collapse which haunts the contemporary world. Without missing a beat, this speaker responded that Kierkegaard’s thought reminds us that we need to get our souls right with God before the world collapses.
15.
J. Michael Tilley, ‘Kierkegaard’s Social Theory’, in The Heythrop Journal, 55: 944–59, September 2014, 944.