Philosophers of Consciousness
by Eugene Webb
(Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1988)
Chapter 6. Søren Kierkegaard: Consciousness as Incarnate Subjectivity
Of the thinkers this book studies, Kierkegaard is both the best known--in the sense that he is widely read--and the most difficult to know. It is not just that the problems he took up are inherently difficult and that he strove to make us aware of that (one of his narrators, Johannes Climacus, once said that his special mission in an age of systematic solutions was to make thinking difficult again).1 It is also that Kierkegaard pursued this end by driving his reader to reach beyond ideas and arguments toward an existential self-discovery. He drives us, that is, to realize our active involvement in a struggle for subjective existence. This is a struggle, moreover, that we are led to realize we share with the author--or, to be more precise, with one or more of the author's personae, the masks or pseudonymous authors through whose voices Kierkegaard addresses us and in whom he images for us not only his own subjective presence but ours as well.
In one respect the difficulty of Kierkegaard's thought should be reduced somewhat by the chapters that have preceded, since, as has been discussed, several of the figures we have been studying--especially Voegelin and Ricoeur--were themselves influenced by Kierkegaard's questions and his approach to philosophy. This should have the effect of rendering his issues already familiar to some degree. A more direct consideration of Kierkegaard's own treament of the same issues should make still clearer the nature of the problems his successors have been wrestling with. Kierkegaard himself was not concerned with offering definite answers to the problems he addressed. Rather he insistently called attention to them precisely as problems, and much of the line of inquiry we have been concerned with--especially that which has to do with the relation between the subjective and objective aspects or poles of consciousness--has been a prolonged response to the questions he raised regarding the earlier treatment of this theme in the tradition of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel.
This focus in Kierkegaard on problems rather than on answers explains his characteristic tendency to speak to us through personae rather than in his own voice. He tried to make us aware of the complexity of the problems that interested him by getting us to look at them from a variety of angles. His writings considered collectively, therefore, tend to take on the character of an extended philosophical dialogue between different points of view rather than the more familiar one of a systematic exposition of one particular point of view.
This is not to deny, of course, that there are many specific philosophical claims that Kierkegaard advanced in his writings and that his various personae agree upon sufficiently that they may be said to represent a Kierkegaardian framework of thought. These, however, do not resolve the ultimate problems Kierkegaard sought to open up to us; rather they constitute essential points in the approach to those problems. An example that will be discussed shortly is Kierkegaard's conception of the nature of subjectivity and its relation to objectivity. Another is the distinction he makes between subjective and objective existence. These are matters he did not consider seriously controversial, even if he disagreed on them with the more fashionable thinkers of his time. With regard to the ultimate issues, on the other hand, such as the relation between man and God or between the believer and the savior--questions that reach toward the ultimate "who" at the core of subjective existence--his concern was not to persuade us of the truth of some solution but to elicit genuine philosophical wonder and active thinking. This means that the difficulty of Kierkegaard's thought is the difficulty of following him in his wonder, not the difficulty of figuring out how he might have brought that wonder to an end with an answer.
Even if this is acknowledged, however, it may be difficult for many readers to shake free from a desire to know "Kierkegaard's view," and some may find the present chapter rather frustrating because it does not seek to develop and prove a particular interpretation of "what Kierkegaard meant" regarding the most searching questions he raised. Since we have just finished considering the thought of a thinker, Ren
Girard emphasized the power of the instinctual drive that moves us to imitate others, and he spoke of the resulting need we feel for what he calls a "mediator." The mediator is a model we try to imitate in the hope that through mimesis not only of his gestures but also of his intentions we may put on the power we feel him to have and may thereby acquire "real being." Without such a figure to imitate we feel vulnerable, and we hope that a successful imitation will deliver us into a state of invulnerability. This insight can be applied to our relation to an author like Kierkegaard: whenever we approach a figure who has been accorded prestige and authority by widespread recognition, we tend to feel his power as a mediator. Sometimes we approach him admiringly and seek to share in his glory through understanding and adopting his ideas, in which case he becomes for us what Girard calls an "external mediator." Or we may approach him with distrust or hostility, seeking to master his thought only to dismiss it. In this case he becomes for us a rival or obstacle, an example of what we saw Girard call an "internal mediator." There are better ways to approach an author than either of these, but it would be a rare reader who is fully immune to the attractive power of a figure who, like Kierkegaard, has come to be so widely quoted and admired in our world. It should hardly be surprising, therefore, if one finds oneself recurrently drawn to wonder "what Kierkegaard really intended" and even to feel existential anxiety over how one can be certain one really knows that intention.
The latter problem, of how one can know with certainty the mind of a past historical personage, is analogous to the one Kierkegaard addressed (or rather Johannes Climacus addressed) in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript when he took up the question whether historical knowledge of the life of Jesus could attain certainty--and whether this mattered. The simple answer to the first question is that all knowledge of historical fact is only probable, so that certainty in history is an ever-receding goal that one can approach only by an infinite process of approximation. What interested Kierkegaard more was why we feel that this matters, why such certainty fascinates us. In this, as we shall see, he seems to have anticipated Girard's critique of mediations as well as his critique of the conventional notion of a "subject." That discussion will have to wait, however, until we have considered a theme that Kierkegaard himself presents as an essential preliminary: that of human fallibility and fault, or, in his own more theological language, sin.
This is a theme as central to Kierkegaard's thought as to that of Ricoeur or Girard. In The Sickness Unto Death, which Kierkegaard published in 1849, his persona, Anti-Climacus, said, "I steadfastly hold to the Christian teaching that sin is a position [i.e., a positive reality, not a mere deficiency, or aspect of our finitude]--yet not as if it could be comprehended, but as a paradox that must be believed."2 As an advocate of dogmatic belief, Anti-Climacus is the explicitly Christian counterpart to Johannes Climacus, the pseudonymous author of the Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript, who had approached Kierkegaard's topics, including the paradox of sin, from the point of view of the type of philosophy current in German universities in that period.
The two voices are not to be interpreted as antithetical, however, but complementary. As the Hongs wrote in their introduction to The Sickness Unto Death, "The prefix `Anti' may be misleading. . . . It does not mean `against.' It is an old form of `ante' (before), as in `anticipate,' and `before' also denotes a relation of rank, as in `before me' in the First Commandment" (p. xxii). Kierkegaard himself, in his Journals, described the relation in terms of degrees of ascent on a scale of understanding and spiritual development: "Johannes Climacus and Anti-Climacus have several things in common; but the difference is that whereas Johannes Climacus places himself so low that he even says himself that he is not a Christian, one seems to be able to detect in Anti-Climacus that he regards himself to be a Christian on an extraordinarily high level. . . . I would place myself higher than Johannes Climacus, lower than Anti-Climacus" (quoted in Sickness, p. xxii).
Another way to state the relation between these personae can be taken from the meaning of the name Climacus, which comes from the Greek klimakis, meaning a staircase or ladder.3 If Anti-Climacus stands above Johannes in the sense of having mounted higher, then for Kierkegaard it is because faith in the proper sense is not blind assent or dogmatism, but something that properly develops only on the basis of the fullest possible clarification of issues. Anti-Climacus represents in religion a position one can arrive at only after ascending the ladder of intelligent inquiry. There is a religiosity that favors incomprehensibility as an easy way of avoiding the demands of inquiry, but Kierkegaard considered this a sham; any earnest seeker of what Kierkegaard called "existential truth," which cannot itself be an object of intellection, must also be in earnest about understanding what can be understood. "Faith," as Johannes Climacus puts it, "must not rest content with unintelligibility; for precisely the relation to or the repulsion from the unintelligible, the absurd, is the expression for the passion of faith."4
The claim of Anti-Climacus that sin is a paradox that must be believed even if it cannot be comprehended is therefore not at all an expression of irrationalism. Rather he gives voice to a position arrived at by a thorough investigation of the possibilities of understanding, and he speaks in opposition to other, more common voices in the religious tradition that have assumed too easily that sin can be intellectually comprehended as though it were an idea. When Anti-Climacus says, "If all attempts to comprehend can just be shown to be self-contradictory, then the matter will fall into proper perspective" (Sickness, p. 98), behind this statement lies the work of an earlier persona, Vigilius Haufnensis of The Concept of Anxiety, who demonstrated at length that very self-contradictoriness.
Ironically, the latter work, which is subtitled "A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin," as though it were to be an exposition of the familiar Augustinian doctrine, presents a more thoroughgoing demolition of that speculative doctrine than even Ricoeur does in his essay "Original Sin: A Study in Meaning," referred to above in the chapter on Ricoeur.5 In fact, the first part of The Concept of Anxiety takes up every explanation of sin that has been offered in the Christian traditions of both West and East and shows that all of them (and by implication any others that might be advanced) are necessarily self-contradictory--in that any explanation of sin must presuppose some cause for it, and the presupposition of a cause must negate the one thing that is absolutely essential if it is to be considered sin: that it has no objective that is, as questions about something objectively explainable.()7 Rather the question about sin is a question about oneself: "Every science lies either in a logical immanence or in an immanence within a transcendence that it is unable to explain. Now sin is precisely that transcendence, that discrimen rerum [crisis] in which sin enters into the single individual as the single individual. Sin never enters into the world differently and has never entered differently. So when the single individual is stupid enough to inquire about sin as if it were something foreign to him, he only asks as a fool, for either he does not know at all what the question is about, and thus cannot come to know it, or he knows it and understands it, and also knows that no science can explain it to him" (p. 50).
If one does "understand" sin, one does so not by way of a comprehension of ideas but by way of an earnest inward struggle. As Vigilius stated it in his introduction, "according to its true concept, sin is to be overcome" (p. 15). To understand sin one must not approach it in an attitude of objective curiosity; "the proper mood is earnestness expressed in courageous resistance" (p. 15).
In Kierkegaard's writings, sin is not an intentional object of any sort. Rather, to speak of sin is to speak indirectly and in a quasi-objectifying way about repentance. And repentance is subjective: it is an act one performs. The importance of repentance is that it is essential to the process in which, to use Kierkegaard's language, one comes to exist as a subject. As he put the matter in the religious language of Vigilius, "In turning toward himself, he eo ipso turns toward God, and there is a ceremonial rule that says that when the finite spirit would see God, it must begin as guilty" (p. 107). Or as he put it in the complementary philosophical language of Johannes Climacus, "the essential consciousness of guilt is the first deep plunge into existence, and at the same time it is the expression for the fact that an exister is related to an eternal happiness" (Postscript, p. 473).
That consciousness of guilt is an essential feature of the process of coming to exist, and that this involves a relation to an eternal happiness, is the heart of the matter. To understand what this means, however, we will first have to work out an understanding of a number of key notions in Kierkegaard's thought--among them existence, eternity, subjectivity, objectivity, and belief or faith.
It will be helpful to begin with a consideration of Kierkegaard's conception of objectivity--both because it is the simplest to grasp and because addressing it should help to correct the common misunderstanding of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist. That he should be thought so is probably due to the great emphasis he placed on the importance of subjectivity, as in his famous dictum, from the Postscript, that "truth is subjectivity."8 Many who have heard this phrase but have not carefully read Kierkegaard himself assume that it implies a glorification of irrational arbitrariness. That this is not the case, however, Kierkegaard himself made quite clear.
The conception of subjectivity advanced in both the Philosophical Fragments and the Postscript is that of a process of conscious operations carefully carried out by a person genuinely concerned with truth. True subjectivity, therefore, is exactly the opposite of arbitrariness, which consists in deciding questions of truth and value without careful thought and serious intent. "It is commonly assumed," says Johannes Climacus, "that no art or skill is required in order to be subjective" ( Postscript, p. 116). The truth, he goes on to explain, is just the opposite, and the misunderstanding derives from the common failure to distinguish between being a subject in the proper sense and being "a bit of a subject" or a subject "so called" or "in the immediate sense," which is to say being just conscious enough to receive impressions, mouth conventional phrases, and leap on impulse to conclusions or outward actions without serious reflection: "When one overlooks this little distinction, humoristic from the Socratic standpoint and infinitely anxious from the Christian, between being something like a subject so called, and being a subject, or becoming one . . . then it becomes wisdom, the admired wisdom of our own age, that it is the task of the subject increasingly to divest himself of his subjectivity in order to become more and more objective. It is easy to see what this guidance understands by being a subject of a sort. It understands by it quite rightly the accidental, the angular, the selfish, the eccentric, and so forth, all of which every human being can have enough of. Nor does Christianity deny that such things should be gotten rid of; it has never been a friend of loutishness. But the difference is, that philosophy teaches that the way is to become objective, while Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, i.e. to become a subject in truth" (p. 117).
Far from wanting to suggest that true subjectivity is whimsicalness and heedlessness of objective truth, Kierkegaard maintained consistently that it is only a subject in the proper sense who can know truth at all, either objective or subjective. When Climacus speaks of "philosophy" as teaching that the way is to become objective, he is referring to the Enlightenment and idealist belief that knowing is a fundamentally passive process in which the empirically observable impresses itself on the observer or in which the logically necessary unfolds according to its laws before the gaze of disinterested reason. Kierkegaard's own claim is that only a concerned, interested inquirer can reason, deliberate, and decide and that when he does so, that is subjective existence. Far from being opposed to the objectivity that can be attained through actual subjective operations, Kierkegaard looks upon respect for objective truth in that sense as one of the marks of genuine subjectivity. The objectivity he especially objects to is the phantom objectivity of the rationalistic idealist, the mistaken belief that the supreme goal of thought is not the existential, but a panorama of logically necessary ideas.
Kierkegaard would agree in essence with Lonergan that true objectivity is, as we earlier saw Lonergan put it, "the consequence of authentic subjectivity, of genuine attention, genuine intelligence, genuine reasonableness, genuine responsibility" (Method in Theology, p. 265). He was not especially interested in natural science and its methodology, but there is no reason to think that he would have had any objection to the idea of its objective validity. His objection was to a different conception of "science" favored by the German Idealists of his time, whose ambition it was to render philosophy a science of that sort. This conception of "science" was "systematic" in the deductivist sense. It included, as Walter Kaufmann has explained, in Discovering the Mind, three central cognitive ideals: certainty, completeness, and necessity.9 Its fountainhead for Kierkegaard's historical epoch was Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, where in his preface to the first edition Kant said, "Regarding certainty I have pronounced this sentence on myself: in this kind of consideration it is in no way permissible to opine and everything that as much as resembles a hypothesis is forbidden goods," and went on to say, "The perfect unity of knowledge of this kind that consists of nothing but pure concepts so that no element of experience . . . can have any influence on it and expand or augment it makes this unconditional completenesss not only feasible but also necessary" (quoted by Kaufmann). "To be sure, the dream of absolute certainty is older than Kant," says Kaufmann, "and can be traced back to Descartes, to Plato, and even to Parmenides, but it was Kant who impressed this trinity of certainty, completeness, and necessity on his successors, especially in Germany" (p. 186).
Whenever Kierkegaard spoke slightingly of objectivity or science, it was systematic objectivity according to this ideal of knowledge that he had in mind--for this is what the words meant in the language of his milieu. Far from objecting to the conception of experientially based objectivity Lonergan speaks for, Kierkegaard advocated it himself in opposition to deductivism. He may have used somewhat different language to speak of it, but it is clear that he believed, like Lonergan, that the contingent reality of the objective world is known not through logical deduction but through a combination of experience, interpretation, and judgment.
Kierkegaard's most concise treatment of the theme of objective knowledge is to be found in the Philosophical Fragments, a work which, despite its title, is perhaps the most systematic of his writings. The book's speaker, as in its sequel, the Postscript, is Johannes Climacus.10 The question of the nature and importance of objective knowledge not in the idealist but in a critical realist sense is implicit in the questions that appear on the title page of the book: "Is an historical point of departure possible for an eternal consciousness; how can such a point of departure have any other than a merely historical interest; is it possible to base an eternal happiness upon historical knowledge?" To phrase the issues involved in another way, one might ask the question, "Is there some essential link between contingent existence in time and the goal of our deepest longing (i.e., to enjoy eternal happiness) or is our involvement with the temporal dimension of life simply a distraction from our true life, which would be the contemplation of eternal ideas and their necessary connections?"
Still another way to put it is the question with which Climacus begins the first chapter: "How far does the Truth admit of being learned?" The meaning of the question must depend on whether truth is to be interpreted in strictly objective terms or also in terms of subjective life. If the only truth is objective truth, then all truth can be formulated, taught, and learned because all truth is commensurate with its objectifications. If there is also another, subjective sense of the word truth (here indicated by the capitalization of "Truth" in the above quotation from the Swenson-Hong translation), there is a limit to the extent to which truth can be objectified.11
Implicit here is a debate between the idealist position mentioned above and Kierkegaard's Christian belief that man's eternal happiness is to be found not in the contemplation of a system of ideas but in active sharing of the contingent life God takes on in his incarnation. In this volume, however, Climacus shifts the scene of the confrontation from the nineteenth century to a sort of temporally unspecific classical present. In place of the Hegelians of Kierkegaard's own century, Climacus casts as his opponent the Socrates of Plato's Meno, and although what he opposes to it is belief in divine incarnation, the allusion to Christianity is veiled by references to "the God," and to an unnamed "Teacher" (implicitly Jesus).12
In the Meno, as was mentioned in the Lonergan chapter above, Socrates argued that all genuine knowledge is recollection and that the movement from ignorance to knowledge through inquiry is rather from apparent ignorance to a remembering of truths known in a former, supratemporal life. "Thus the Truth" according to the Socratic view, summarizes Climacus, "is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him," and this implies, he goes on to say, a doctrine of the soul's "preexistence" (Fragments, pp. 11-12). The latter point is important, because the central issue, as far as Kierkegaard is concerned, is less how we can come to know cognitive objects than whether in coming to know ourselves as human beings we are rediscovering an existence we already have but have only lost sight of.
This is the deeper significance for Kierkegaard of the Platonic theme of "recollection" or "anamnesis": do we have already an existence fundamentally our own which we need only trace our way back to along a trail of mythic symbols, or is our discovery of subjective existence something genuinely new--an awareness that is new of an existence that is new? The conception Climacus is sketching out--and here we are approaching one of Kierkegaard's ultimate issues--is the quite radical one that human beings have no existence of their own but only come to exist in the proper sense to the degree that they are "begotten" of God, living in God's incarnation.
The full exploration of that theme, however, has to wait until the ground for it is prepared. The approach Climacus takes is by way of asking how one can truly "know" the Teacher. This in turn leads to a distinction between objective and subjective knowledge. The ultimate problem is that of subjective knowledge of the Teacher. The initial focus, however, is the problem of the powers and limits of objective cognition.
In the Fragments this theme comes up as a question of the manner in which we can know the historical past. Whatever is factual, or contingent, is historical; because it is not necessary but something that simply has happened, the contingent is situated within the scheme of time, and it is known through a temporal process involving experience, interpretation, and judgment. Regarding abstract ideas, Climacus readily admits the claims of the idealists; it is possible to understand ideas and their necessary connections by logical reasoning alone. But in this case reasoning is an inquiry not into the factual but into the merely possible. It is what was referred to in the chapter on Lonergan as a "level two" operation, a purely formal analysis or explication of the contents of ideas.
Kierkegaard is as insistent as Lonergan or any other critical realist that the factual is known not through "pure reasoning" of this sort but by way of the act of judgment following upon critical reflection. Abstract reasoning knows the necessary, but the historical is what "has come into existence" and is therefore not necessary but contingent and uncertain. The inquirer's awareness of this uncertainty gives rise to what Climacus calls "the passionate sense for coming into existence: wonder" (p. 99). Wonder is the tension in subjectivity that moves one to reach from uncertainty toward factual knowledge. This is a movement beyond the immediacy of sensation and perception toward the historically contingent as known by a judgment of factual truth. When one knows the historical in this way, one does not have certainty in the formal sense, the certainty with which one knows the logically necessary, but rather one has "certitude," as Newman termed it, regarding what happens to be the case. It is such certitude Climacus refers to when he says, "Immediate sensation and immediate cognition have no suspicion of the uncertainty with which belief approaches its object, but neither do they suspect the certainty which emerges from this uncertainty" (p. 101).
The word "belief" in this passage, which is also translated in other passages as "faith," requires some explanation. Climacus uses the term in two ways: in the "direct and ordinary sense" and in the "eminent sense."13 In this passage it is used in the "ordinary" sense (i.e., to refer to a judgment of contingent fact). Climacus says that "the organ for the historical must have a structure analogous with the historical itself; it must comprise a corresponding somewhat by which it may repeatedly negate in its certainty the uncertainty that corresponds to the uncertainty of coming into existence" (pp. 100-101). Despite the differences of language, this is exactly what Lonergan spoke of as "the isomorphism that obtains between the structure of knowing and the structure of the known" (Insight, p. 399). What both mean is that the objective reality of contingent fact is precisely that which can be reasonably affirmed through attentive inquiry and critical judgment.
Climacus goes on to give the "organ" of critical judgment the name "faith" (in "the ordinary sense"): "Now faith has precisely the required character; for in the certainty of belief [Danish: Tro, faith or belief ] there is always present a negated uncertainty, in every way corresponding to the uncertainty of coming into existence. Faith believes what it does not see; it does not believe that the star is there, for that it sees, but it believes that the star has come into existence. The same holds true of an event. The `what' of a happening may be known immediately, but by no means can it be known immediately that it has happened. Nor can it be known immediately that it happens, not even if it happens as we say in front of our very noses" (Fragments, p. 101).
"Faith" in this usage does not have a theological meaning (which would be what Climacus calls the "eminent" sense of the word), but refers simply to rational judgment on the basis of interpretation and evidence. What Climacus means is that the contingent world is not known through sensation or perception or through consideration of ideas alone, but through the particular act by which contingent factuality is always known, namely the act of critical judgment. That he says "belief is not a form of knowledge, but a free act, an expression of will" (p. 103) does not mean that belief is arbitrary, it only means that judgment is a consciously intended (hence "voluntary") operation distinct from the contemplation of ideas as such and their logical relations (which is what "knowledge" refers to in the passage just quoted). As was mentioned earlier, much of the common misinterpretation of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist is the result of not reading him carefully. To read him carefully on this point, one must be attentive both to how he uses his particular language and to how he relates it to the language in use in his philosophical milieu. To Kierkegaard's idealist opponents as he delineated them "knowledge," even of historical fact, meant logical certainty through a grasp of systematic necessity. To this way of thinking he opposed his insistence on the contingency of the factual and its apprehension through the conscious operations by which contingent events can be reasonably affirmed to have happened.
Thus far Kierkegaard is perfectly in accord with Lonergan regarding our knowledge of the objective world, except that he uses rather different terminology. If this were the whole of the matter, however, he would have little to contribute to the dialogue among the philosophers we have been examining. His real contribution emerges precisely at the point at which his accord with the critical realist position regarding objectivity reaches its limit. This is the point at which Kierkegaard insists on the absolute difference between subject and object. Lonergan, as we saw, claimed that the subject can be adequately objectified and known in the same way as any other real object. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, like his philosophical descendants, Voegelin and Ricoeur, maintains that no matter what sorts of analogy may be drawn between an actual subject and a hypothetical object of knowledge, subjectivity itself is unique and incommensurable with any objectification.
Not only does Kierkegaard deny that the subject as such is objectively knowable, but he emphasizes the contradiction and clash between the actuality of the subject as subject and our desire to know it in some objective manner. It is on this contradiction, moreover, that he believes human subjectivity is founded. This is why he places so much emphasis on the category of paradox. "[O]ne should not think slightingly of the paradoxical," says Climacus in the Fragments, "for the paradox is the source of the thinker's passion, and the thinker without a paradox is like a lover without feeling: a paltry mediocrity" (p. 46).
This, too, could be interpreted as evidence of irrationalism on Kierkegaard's part, but only if one does not attend carefully to his meaning. There are two reasons for the prominence of the theme of paradox in Kierkegaard. One is that in trying to find a way to speak of subjectivity in a milieu in which philosophical language was oriented almost exclusively toward the description of objects of perception or of intellection, he was driven to use the currently available language of philosophical discourse in ways it was not suited to. In this respect, Kierkegaardian paradox is a function of the breakdown of a language pushed beyond its capacity. This might be termed "accidental" paradox.
There is also another type of paradox in Kierkegaard's thought, however, and it is this that Climacus refers to as "the source of the thinker's passion." This we might term "essential" paradox--essential in that it stems from the structure of human consciousness itself, so that there is no way it could be resolved by reformulation in another language. The paradox that is the source of the thinker's passion, as Climacus goes on to explain, is the desire to attain what is truly other than thought: "The supreme paradox of all thought is the attempt to discover something that thought cannot think. This passion is at bottom present in all thinking . . . " (p. 46).
One way to explain this is to say that all thinking, moved as it is by the desire to know, seeks after the unknown. Now there is that which is unknown in an accidental sense: it is not yet known but can be known. It is not inherently a mystery, only a problem. But there is also that which is essentially unknown because it is unknowable: it cannot be rendered an object of understanding and a fortiori cannot be affirmed as an objective reality--and yet it is actual in the most proper sense of the word. This is subjective actuality itself, the presence and life of what Climacus calls "the God": "But what is this unknown something with which the Reason [new translation: "the understanding"] collides when inspired by its paradoxical passion, with the result of unsettling even man's knowledge of himself? It is the Unknown. It is not a human being, insofar as we know what man is; nor is it any other known thing. So let us call this unknown something: the God" (p. 49).14
What this means becomes clearer when we consider what Climacus says about God in the Postscript: "The existing individual who chooses to pursue the objective way enters upon the entire approximation-process by which it is proposed to bring God to light objectively. But this is in all eternity impossible, because God is a subject, and therefore exists only for subjectivity in inwardness" (p. 178). It is here that we discover mystery in the proper sense of the term.
The contrast with Lonergan on this point is sharp, and a consideration of the difference between them may help to correct any misleading implications that might seem to be contained in the reference to God as "a subject," as though he were an individual entity conceived according to what Girard would characterize as the false subjectivity of romantic individualism. What Climacus actually seems to mean is something much closer to Girard's own conception of transcendent subjectivity as the source of the life we are called to share with Christ: not that God is a superhuman individual, but rather that God is absolutely subjective and that his subjective presence is the objectively inscrutable, radically inward source of all true human subjectivity. God, that is, is not to be discovered in the objective pole of consciousness, but in the subjective pole; the existing individual's immediate experience of subjective actuality is his experience of the presence of God.
Lonergan, in connection with his own effort to prove the existence of God, says that "it is one and the same thing to say that God is real, that he is an object of reasonable affirmation, and that he exists" (Insight, p. 669). The line of thinking Kierkegaard explores through his personae leads in exactly the opposite direction: that God is not an object of any kind whatsoever, neither an object of sense, nor of intellection, nor of reasonable affirmation. This is why Climacus argues that the existence of God cannot be proven: "Whoever therefore attempts to demonstrate the existence of God . . . ," he says, "proves in lieu thereof something else . . . " (Fragments, p. 54); any proof would, by the very nature of proof, have to be proof of something objective, which is exactly what God is not.
In his own linguistic usage Kierkegaard does not ordinarily even say that God "exists," since he more commonly confines this term to human being, as when he has Climacus say in the Postscript, "God does not think, he creates; God does not exist, He is eternal. Man thinks and exists, and existence separates thought and being, holding them apart from one another in succession" (p. 296). What this would seem to mean is simply that the properly divine mode of being is that of subjectivity as such--God in his eternity is entirely active, the performer of the eternal operation that is his being, not passive or static. God does not respond, as a human being does, to experiential data that come to him as to a passive recipient; what God experiences, immediately and in its fullness, is the subjective act that is his eternal life.
As in Voegelin's image of man in the Metaxy, human existence, for Kierkegaard, is constituted as a tension between being and thought, the subjective pole and the objective. This is the basis of Kierkegaard's deepest objection to what he calls "the System," the Idealism he associated with Hegel and Hegelians. "The systematic Idea," says Climacus, "is the identity of subject and object, the unity of thought and being. Existence, on the other hand, is their separation" (Postscript, p. 112).
To exist humanly, in this conception, is to be concernfully and hence in an actively conscious way (i.e., "subjectively") engaged in an incessant striving toward the act of existence. Human existence is a passion to exist. This is incessant because existence as such in the full sense of the word, the eternal being of God, is inherently subjective, whereas to be human is to be structured as a relation between the subjective pole of consciousness (our experience of dynamic actuality) and the objective pole that is the necessary second factor in incarnation. If we were not oriented by the structure of incarnate subjectivity toward an objective pole of consciousness, we would not exist subjectively as human beings at all. The goal of our "existential pathos," as Climacus calls it, our deep longing for conscious existence, is one that we can pursue only through commitment to the demands of incarnation; our conscious existence is our active engagement in intentional operations, and these can take place only as relations between subjective and objective poles of consciousness. For us, the experience of existential presence is to be found only in, and as our intentional engagement with, time and the world--the life of incarnate subjectivity.
At the foundation of Kierkegaard's thought, therefore, is a distinction between two radically different meanings of the word "exist." At the end of the chapter on Lonergan, I suggested that a reader of Insight could easily get from that work the impression that existence is a property specifically of objects and of them only inasmuch as they can be judged actual by a critical knower, and this impression is only reinforced by Lonergan's later statement in Method in Theology that esse ["to be" or existence] is reality affirmed in the world mediated by meaning" (p. 264). Kierkegaard makes a clear and absolute distinction between this sense of the term "existence," which I will call "objective existence," and another that I will call "subjective existence." The distinction was touched upon in earlier chapters with reference to Voegelin's emphasis on "existence as known from within" (i.e., subjectively) in comparison with Lonergan's emphasis on "existence as known from without" (i.e., objectively). Voegelin was concerned with knowledge "from within" of what he called "existential tension" and Kierkegaard called "passion."
The distinction between subjective and objective existence is treated in numerous places in Kierkegaard. An example is Climacus's discussion in the Postscript of the difference between what he considers existence in the proper and full sense, and existence in a loose sense of the word:
Here, of course, Kierkegaard is alluding to what, as mentioned in his chapter, was also one of Voegelin's favorite texts, the episode in Plato's Phaedrus (246a-248c) where Socrates, after discoursing on the role of eros in the life of the soul, says that although it is impossible for a man to know psyche by direct vision, one may perhaps speak truly of it in a philosophical myth. Then he makes up the myth of the soul as a chariot driven by a horseman who has to try to guide the energies of two steeds, one of noble stock and the other of base, so that the noble steed's upward motion, countering the tendency of the other to seek solid ground, will carry the chariot toward the region where "true being dwells, without color or shape, that cannot be touched."()16 The appositeness of the myth to Kierkegaard's meaning is quite clear. "True being," which is without color, shape, or tangibility (i.e., without objectivity), and which can be reached only through the upward moving energy of eros (passion or existential tension), corresponds to what Kierkegaard considers existence in the proper sense of the word--that is, subjectivity. The tangible ground to which the base steed retreats is the objectivity upon which the thinker deficient in existential pathos tends to fall back.
If we consider Kierkegaard's adaptation of this imagery, his carter has two possible modes of existence. When he consciously drives the horses toward a goal, he is existing subjectively. When he does not, but is only drawn along as he lies unconscious, he exists objectively; he can be perceived and judged objectively real by an observer, but in his drunken stupor he lacks any subjective presence. He is present as an object to others, but as subject he does not exist. To state Kierkegaard's concept of objective existence in language like that of Lonergan's cognitional theory, objective existence is that which may be affirmed by a judgment of adequacy regarding a construing of a set of empirical data. Subjective existence, on the other hand, as Kierkegaard conceives it, cannot be an object of sense or of intellection or of rational judgment. It is experienced, but not as a datum of sense, nor is it to be found in any respect on the side of the objective pole of consciousness; it is experienced immediately at the subjective pole.
With this distinction clear, it is possible to decipher many paradoxical and initially perplexing statements in Kierkegaard's writings. When Climacus speaks in the Fragments of "the God" as "this Unknown, which does indeed exist, but is unknown, and insofar does not exist" (p. 55), this means that the God, who is present as the wellspring of subjectivity, does indeed exist subjectively, but not objectively. When he says in the same place, "The paradoxical passion of the Reason . . . comes repeatedly into collision with this Unknown" and "The Reason cannot advance beyond this point, and yet it cannot refrain in its paradoxicalness from arriving at this limit and occupying itself therewith," he is describing the intrinsic structure of human intentional consciousness, which is energized by a passion for existence in the subjective sense but which, because it is structured as a relation between subjective and objective poles, must always reach also in the direction of the objective. Wisdom develops as one realizes this, accepts it, and commits oneself faithfully to its demands, which are nothing other than the conditions of incarnate subjectivity. Wisdom, that is, is the realization both that the true goal of human life is subjective existence and that human (i.e., incarnate) subjectivity has the bipolar structure of intentional consciousness.
This is the same meaning Climacus expressed in the Postscript as the idea that "truth is subjectivity": "When subjectivity is the truth, the conceptual determination of the truth must include an expression for the antithesis to objectivity, a memento of the fork in the road where the way swings off; this expression will at the same time serve as an indication of the tension of subjective inwardness. Here is such a definition of truth: An objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness is the truth, the highest truth attainable for an existing individual" (p. 182). If this were taken for a definition of objective truth, the truth of a statement about objective reality, it would be nonsense. The strictly subjective truth of which he is speaking, on the other hand, the "highest truth attainable for an existing individual," is subjective self-presence, conscious existence, the experienced "tension of subjective inwardness." It is "an objective uncertainty" because it can never be grasped as an object. The appropriation-process is intentionality itself, the inherent structure of human consciousness--an "appropriation-process" because human subjective existence takes the form of the intending that reaches from a subjective toward an objective pole; "passionate" because it is tensional through and through; "held fast" since the passionate intention to exist is of the essence of human being--if it ceased, the existing individual would be no more. The "fork in the road" is the realization of the distinction between subjective and objective existence as it pertains to this process--the realization that although the goal is subjective, its analogical images in the objective pole have an essential role to play in human consciousness. To exist in human subjectivity is to live the paradox that in order to become what one is as subjective, one must reach toward what one is not (the objective), but with the realization that while the objective is not itself our goal, to be human is to intend it.17
Paradox, as Climacus explains, is itself a product of intentional consciousness. It develops when one attempts to speak of subjective existence in language designed to describe objects. But that we use such language is not a mere accident, the result of our failure to design a more adequate language. We use it as a necessary instrument--necessary because it is a function of the intentional structure of human consciousness as a relation between subjective and objective poles. Subjective existence cannot itself be a paradox, because it is not an idea or proposition--it is immediately experienced dynamic actuality. It is only cast in the form of paradox when one attempts to speak of the experience of subjective existence as though it were an object of intentional consciousness. As Climacus puts it, "When subjectivity, inwardness, is the truth, the truth becomes objectively a paradox. . . . But the eternal essential truth is by no means in itself a paradox; but it becomes paradoxical by virtue of its relationship to an existing individual" (p. 183). Paradox in its true form is not, therefore, the result of a failure to express thought clearly; for one who realizes inwardly the existential truth that is subjectivity, paradox can be the truly adequate expression, in the language of intentional consciousness--and there can be no other human language--of the absolute difference between subject and object. This is the true wisdom of Socrates for Kierkegaard: he knew the difference between what he did understand and what he did not understand--between what was and what was not for him an object of intellection.17 Subjective existence cannot be contemplated as an intellectual object; it can only be lived: "The Socratic ignorance gives expression to the objective uncertainty attaching to the truth, while his inwardness in existing is the truth" (p. 183).18
Another thing Climacus says in this passage from the Postscript is that his definition of truth as subjectivity, "an objective uncertainty held fast in an appropriation-process of the most passionate inwardness," "is an equivalent expression for faith" (p. 182). To understand what this means we will have to return to a consideration of the argument he unfolded in the Philosophical, where he distinguished between faith "in the ordinary sense" and "in the eminent sense." This will also offer an opportunity to explore further the implications of Kierkegaard's treatment of recollection or anamnesis, another of the major themes he shares with Ricoeur and Voegelin.
As was mentioned earlier, Kierkegaard's "faith in the ordinary sense" is simply the judgment of factual truth, the transition from idea to reality, or from understanding to knowing. To say that faith in this sense is a leap is simply to say that it is a transition from one kind of intentional operation to another quite different one. Far from claiming that Christian faith is a form of ungrounded factual belief (the popular parody of Kierkegaard's "leap"), Kierkegaard's line of thinking points in exactly the opposite direction. Not only does he not value arbitrary judgment, as was mentioned earlier in connection with his dismissal of "subjectivity" in the eccentric sense, he does not even suggest that well-founded rational belief can play more than an accidental role in the life of Christian faith. The leap of faith that is essential to Christianity as Kierkegaard conceives it is of an entirely different kind, and pertains to an entirely different meaning of the word "faith."
This is the point of Climacus's insistence in the latter part of the Fragments that there can be no disciple at second hand, which is exactly what a person who conceived of Christian faith as belief in the factual sense would be trying to be. It is also the point of his claim that the historical in the factual, objectively knowable sense can only be an occasion for the development of Christian faith, not its condition. Even if one believed the objective propositions of the incarnate God himself, this would not make one a disciple. Climacus comments on such a situation: "Wherever the Teacher appears the crowd gathers, curious to see, curious to hear, and eager to tell others that they have seen and heard him. Is this curious multitude the learner? By no means. Or if some one of the authorized teachers of that city sought him out secretly, in order to try his strength with him in arguments--is he the learner? By no means. If this teacher or that multitude learn anything, the God serves merely as an occasion in the strict Socratic sense" (Fragments, p. 71).
It is not just that the multitude or the member of the religious establishment does not properly believe the Teacher and therefore does not learn his objective teaching; rather, as Climacus says, even if those who approach him out of objective curiosity did believe in the factual truth of his teaching, such belief would never be more than incidental to discipleship. The Teacher is the God in the paradox of his incarnation, the eternal existing in time, which is to say, performing the contingent operations of intentional consciousness. An ordinary teacher or "forerunner" who teaches objective information about the Teacher, may "serve to arouse the learner's attention, but nothing more" (Fragments, p. 69). And this is true even of the Teacher himself to the extent that he imparts objective information or presents himself objectively. The Teacher's "merely historical" objective presence is only an occasion, objective and external, whereas what is essentially important about him is the manner in which he transcends the objective to become subjectively present as the animating principle of the concrete life of the believer. It is as the actuality of incarnate subjectivity to the degree that this takes place--wherever, whenever, and in whomever it actually occurs--that the Teacher is not just a "merely historical" occasion that may, as an external sign, arouse one's interest in eternal happiness, but is himself the condition that fulfills that interest. He fulfills it because his inwardly animating presence is precisely the existence for which we long.
Socrates claimed that he did not "beget" knowledge in his listener but only acted as a midwife, assisting externally by his words a process that took place within by a power other than his own. So also, even the Teacher himself, considered as an objective historical figure, is only an occasion whose external presence may assist at but cannot cause the inward begetting by which, as subjective presence, he comes to dwell within the disciple. The reason the Teacher is more than a sign or a midwife is that he is more than objective; he was and is the eternal in time, the incarnate presence of the deep source of all genuine subjectivity. "If this is not so," says Climacus, "then . . . the Teacher is not the God but only a Socrates, and if he does not conduct himself like a Socrates, he is not even a Socrates" (p. 72).
The theme sketched here, therefore, ties in with the question Socrates asks in Plato's dialogues: "Can truth be taught?" or as we saw Climacus phrase it in the opening sentence of the Fragments, "How far does the Truth admit of being learned?" (p. 11). Kierkegaard's answer is that objective truth can be taught but not subjective, that discipleship of the sort Kierkegaard has in mind is not an objective relation to the Teacher but a subjective one, and that faith in the sense of belief regarding factual truth therefore has nothing essential to do with it.
It is in connection with his treatment of the theme of true discipleship that Climacus presents the idea of "Faith" in the eminent sense, which was capitalized in the Swenson-Hong translation of the Fragments in order to distinguish it from ordinary or factual belief. The distinctive characteristic of Faith in this sense is that it is entirely subjective--not a subject's intention of an object, but the experience of subjective presence itself. The Teacher, in whom the disciple has Faith, is present for Faith not as an object of knowledge or speculation, but as subject.
Faith in this eminent sense can develop only after objective intentionality has been pushed to its limit in the thinker's passion for what we earlier saw Climacus refer to as the Unknown, which he also called "the God" and "the Paradox" (pp. 63-67). When this limit has been reached, then and only then may there occur the "leap" that is not a judgment or an act of will, but a cessation of the effort to capture subjective presence as some sort of object. In discussing the true significance of the futile attempt to prove the existence of God, Climacus asks, "And how does the God's existence emerge from the proof? Does it follow straightway, without any breach of continuity?. . . As long as I keep my hold on the proof, i.e., continue to demonstrate, the existence does not come out, if for no other reason than that I am engaged in proving it; but when I let the proof go, the existence is there" (p. 53). As long as one is attempting to prove existence, that is, the existence one intends must be conceived of as objective. When one ceases to aim at subjective existence as though it were an object, on the other hand, then one can discover its subjective presence.
This "act of letting go" Climacus refers to explicitly as "a leap" (p. 53). It is a transition, that is, between qualitatively different conceptions of existence and stances in relation to it. It is not the sort of leap that marks the transition from understanding to judgment (faith in the ordinary sense), but a leap of an entirely different kind, a radical transition from the intention of an object to the experienced presence of transcendent subjectivity. As Climacus analyzes it, the attempt to prove the existence of God is founded on a confusion between objective and subjective existence, and the "letting go" is the acceptance of the gift of subjective existence as such, the discovery of the presence of God within the subjective pole of consciousness.
It is this letting go that constitutes the genuinely Christian leap of faith in Kierkegaard's thought. This is the equivalent in Kierkegaard of what we saw Voegelin refer to as "openness of existence." Far from being an irrational act of belief (which for Voegelin would be a symptom of "closed existence"), Kierkegaard's leap of "Faith" in the eminent sense is the discovery in inwardness of the presence of the living "Paradox" that is the "Moment" of the coming into subjective existence of the eternal in time: "But how does the learner come to realize an understanding with this Paradox? We do not ask that he understand the Paradox but only understand that this is the Paradox. . . . It comes to pass when the Reason and the Paradox encounter one another happily in the Moment, when the Reason sets itself aside and the Paradox bestows itself. The third entity in which this union is realized . . . is that happy passion to which we will now assign a name, though it is not the name that so much matters. We shall call this passion: Faith. This then must be the condition of which we have spoken, which the Paradox contributes" (pp. 72-73).
The last point, the bestowing of the condition for true discipleship and eternal happiness by the Teacher who is the living Paradox of incarnate subjectivity, connects Climacus's treatment of the theme of Faith with the Platonic theme of recollection. As was mentioned earlier, in the Meno Socrates proposes that to learn is actually to remember a truth known from a previous existence before one's life in this world. Climacus pointed out in the Fragments that the Socratic doctrine implies that "the Truth is not introduced into the individual from without, but was within him" so that "one who is ignorant needs only a reminder to help him come to himself in the consciousness of what he knows" (p. 11). Climacus alludes to this idea in the sentences immediately following his later designation of Faith as the condition that the Paradox contributes: "Let us not forget that if the Paradox does not grant this condition the learner must be in possession of it. But if the learner is in possession of the condition he is eo ipso himself the Truth, and the moment is merely the moment of occasion . . ." (p. 73).
The implication extends to the most fundamental issues and can help to bring them to light. It was mentioned earlier that the theme of recollection is connected with that of the immortality of the soul and its preexistence. What is most importantly at issue is whether each individual's subjective existence is actually eternal (and only forgotten or unrealized) or whether human existence is genuinely contingent. For if the Socratic position is correct, our life in time is only an illusion, because what we are in truth is eternal: "That the God has once for all given man the requisite condition [i.e., a subjective existence properly one's own] is the eternal Socratic presupposition, which comes into no hostile collision with time, but is incommensurable with the temporal and its determinations" (p. 77). Climacus's own position, he goes on to say, is that human subjective existence is not an illusion masking our eternal identity but is genuinely historical. It involves the eternal on the side of subjectivity, but it is itself intrinsically a life in relation to time, a life that has not just had a beginning at some point in the past but continues throughout its duration as a radically contingent coming into existence in the paradoxical Moment of incarnation: "The contradiction of our hypothesis is that man receives the condition in the Moment. . . . If the case is otherwise we stand at the Socratic principle of Recollection" (p. 77).
The Socratic principle would set aside the need for the Teacher, and Climacus agrees that insofar as a teacher does not confer the condition for the experience of subjective existence, the Socratic principle defines the proper relation between speaker and hearer. But if man does not possess a subjective existence all his own but receives it from the Teacher, the Teacher is no mere midwife but the actual present source and condition of the existence the disciple discovers as given to him in the Moment: "In order that he may have the power to give the condition the Teacher must be the God; in order that he may be able to put the learner in possession of it he must be Man. This contradiction is again the object of Faith, and is the Paradox, the Moment" (p. 77).
Again it would be easy to fall into an objectifying mode of thought and misinterpret the idea explored here as referring to a relationship of objective causality--as though the divine-human Teacher gives life to the disciple in the way a potter makes a pot, a Dr. Frankenstein his monster, or a Pygmalion his Galatea. This is not at all the idea Climacus is sketching out. What he is trying to account for is the radical subjective contingency of human consciousness, which he suggests stems from and itself manifests the subjective presence of the God. He is not saying that a superhuman individual who 1,800 years earlier was incarnate as the historical Teacher also at some point in our personal pasts objectively created us as human beings. Rather he is suggesting that the actual existence of each human being, in the proper or "subjective" sense, actually is the present human existence of the Teacher himself in the continuous union of time and eternity that is the process of his incarnation. The Teacher, in other words, does not cause our existence objectively but subjectively, constituting us inwardly as human individuals in such a way that he shares with us his own subjective presence and life.
This is why Climacus insists that the truly "contemporary" disciple--as compared with either an "immediate contemporary" or a supposed "disciple at second hand"--receives the condition (i.e., subjective existence) in "the Moment": "How does the learner then become a believer or disciple? When the Reason is set aside and he receives the condition. When does he receive the condition? In the Moment. What does this condition condition? The understanding of the Eternal. But such a condition must be an eternal condition. --He receives accordingly the eternal condition in the Moment, and is aware that he has so received it; for otherwise he merely comes to himself in the consciousness that he had it from eternity" (p. 79).
To understand what this means, one must realize that when Kierkegaard speaks of eternity, he is speaking both of the divine and of the subjective as such.19 As he put it in The Concept of Anxiety (p. 151), "Inwardness is . . . eternity or the constituent of the eternal in man." Time, on the other hand, is objective in the sense of the word explored in earlier chapters of the present study: it is known objectively through intentional operations working upon the data of memory. Subjectivity is eternal precisely because it is not objective and therefore cannot be known as temporal or as an item in the objective scheme of time.
All of this follows from the fundamental principle of Kierkegaard's thought: the absolute difference between subject and object. God, as stated in the Postscript, is purely subject, not an object of any kind, and is known only in "inwardness" (i.e., in subjectivity). God, that is, is the eternal, and the word "eternity" refers to his presence. When God ("the Eternal" in the Fragments) enters into human existence in the Moment, this constitutes a "synthesis," as Climacus phrases it, of the eternal and the temporal, in that human existence is characterized by the intentionality that relates the subjective pole of consciousness (with its source in the eternal) to the objective pole, of which time is a function.
To say that the disciple "receives . . . the eternal condition in the Moment," therefore, and that he "is aware that he has so received it" is to say that his existence is genuinely contingent and that he realizes that in his reality as an historical individual he is not identical with the eternal God but is constituted as a set of contingent intentional operations energized by the "passion" that in human existence is both the image and the incarnation of the love of God. He realizes, that is, that human intentionality is not a possession of one's own but a gift rooted in the subjective presence of God.
The "immediate contemporary" was one who, through his historical situation, was in a position to perceive the Teacher as an object of his senses, but this could not make him a contemporary in the sense Climacus is interested in. To be a contemporary in the truly significant sense is to share the Teacher's present, which is his subjective presence in the Moment.
The Moment to which Climacus refers is not a "moment" in the ordinary sense. It is not a particular segment, one among many, of objective time, a sort of temporal container of the incarnation of the God.20 Rather it is the process of incarnation itself, the coming into historical existence of the Eternal as involved in and with time. As Climacus puts it, "If we posit the Moment the Paradox is there; for the Moment is the Paradox in its most abbreviated form" (Fragments, p. 64).
It is the inward experience of the life of the Moment that is bestowed when Reason (i.e., object-oriented inquiry) yields itself and the Paradox of the God's incarnate subjectivity bestows itself. The "understanding of the Eternal" that this bestowal conditions is the concrete realization of the subjective presence of the Eternal. It is not a form of objective knowledge, but Faith in the eminent sense: " . . . the Reason yielded itself while the Paradox bestowed itself (halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin), and the understanding is consummated in that happy passion . . . " to which Climacus says he gives the name of "Faith" (p. 67).
Exploring the relation of the Paradox to Faith as a sort of "understanding of the Eternal," Climacus suggests that in addition to its paradoxicalness as a synthesis of eternity and time, the Paradox is further paradoxical in that in Faith the disciple's knowledge of the God and of himself as begotten of the God is one with the God's knowledge of himself and of the disciple: "Only the believer, i.e., the non-immediate contemporary, knows the Teacher, since he receives the condition from him and therefore knows him even as he is known. . . . the Teacher must know everyone who knows him, and no one can know the Teacher except through being known by him" (pp. 84-85).21 This paradoxically divine-human knowledge is strictly subjective, a knowledge entirely from within--not objective knowledge of a fact, but the experience of incarnate subjectivity. This is what it means, in Climacus's phrasing, to be "contemporary as a believer, in the autopsy of Faith" (p. 87): "autopsy" in Greek means "self-seeing" and here refers to the fact that in Faith one experiences inwardly the actual presence of the God and in doing so experiences one's own contingent subjective actuality.
Such knowledge is inaccessible to a mere perceiver--the "immediate contemporary"--who only happens, as an accident of his temporal situation, to know the Teacher from without, seeing him with his eyes or hearing him with his ears. It is similarly inaccessible to one who knows about the Teacher only "at second hand," acquiring objective information about him from others. But it is shared by every "real contemporary" in Faith: "When the believer is the believer and knows the God through having received the condition from the God himself, every successor must receive the condition from the God himself in precisely the same sense, and cannot receive it at second hand. . . . But a successor who receives the condition from the God himself is a contemporary, a real contemporary; a privilege enjoyed only by the believer, but also enjoyed by every believer" (p. 85).
How can this happen, however? How can the believer share not only objective information about the Teacher but the inward life and experience of the Teacher himself? It would seem that to do so would require the believer's annihilation and the replacement of his own subjective life with that of the Teacher. Climacus's answer is that in a sense this is indeed what happens. It was to this sense of the issue that we saw him alluding in the lines from the ending of Goethe's "Der Fischer," a poem about an angler enticed to drowning by a nymph: "Halb zog sie ihn, halb sank er hin,/ Und ward nicht mehr gesehen" ("Half drew she him, half sank he down, and never again was seen"). This was also, of course, a New Testament theme as expressed in the imagery of dying to self in order to rise to new life in Christ. There is a sense in which one must die in order to undergo what Climacus refers to as "the New Birth" that makes one a "new creature" (p. 23). But this rebirth, which Climacus also calls "Conversion" and "Repentance," could be a literal annihilation only if the one who underwent it had a prior existence of his own to lose in the process. In that case, however, we would be back once again with the Socratic conception: there could be no new birth, and repentance would be a remembering and rediscovery of one's own eternal being. The Teacher would be no more than the midwife of a rebirth that in none but a metaphorical sense could have any begetter.
The conception advanced in the Fragments is just the opposite. The change that takes place is what Climacus later speaks of, in his commentary on Aristotle's idea of kinesis, as "the coming-into-existence kind of change":
The change that makes one a new creature, therefore, is truly a new birth and a begetting because it is a genuine beginning of existence, a transition not from one kind of being to another, but from nonbeing to being: "In the Moment man becomes conscious that he is born; for his antecedent state, to which he may not cling, was one of non-being. In the Moment man also becomes conscious of the new birth, for his antecedent state was one of non-being. Had his preceding state in either instance been one of being, the moment would not have received decisive significance for him . . . " (pp. 25-26). To understand this kind of change as a version of Platonic recollection, Climacus goes on to say, would be impossible because it would be quite simply inconceivable: "It would certainly be absurd to expect of a man that he should of his own accord discover that he did not exist [new trans.: "that he does not exist"]. But this is precisely the transition of the new birth, from non-being to being" (p. 27). Only one who undergoes this transition is in a position to make--through subjective experience, not objective inquiry--the discovery in question.
This discovery is what Climacus calls repentance. Because it is possible only from the point of view of the transition, repentance is by its very nature retrospective. Insofar as the one who comes into subjective existence looks back, he can look back only on what came before existence. What, however, could it be, if not a former existence, that he looks back upon? Climacus uses two terms to speak of it: the religious term, "Sin," and the more philosophical term, "Error." The two terms are equivalent as he uses them and are linked in meaning by the way they both involve a deviation from "Truth." In the Fragments Climacus had not yet defined "Truth" as "subjectivity," but the meaning was implicit, and it was of course to render this central notion explicit that Kierkegaard had his persona offer a Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments. If we keep that meaning of "Truth" in mind, it is possible to follow the thread of Climacus's discussion of the repentance from sin, the theme with which the present chapter began but which had to wait until this point for a framework for its understanding.
What one discovers when one looks back in repentance is the Error that for Kierkegaard is sin in the theologically significant sense of the word (as compared with a mere violation of objective norms).22 It is an Error that stands directly opposed to the Truth. The Truth, of course, is subjectivity, as is later spelled out in the Postscript, and subjectivity is existence in the proper as compared with the loose sense. When Climacus speaks of the new birth as a coming into existence, he is speaking not of objective but subjective existence--the conscious actuality that is incarnate subjectivity. It is this that was missing from the one who undergoes the change in the Moment. The Truth into which the repentant sinner becomes newly born is subjective existence, and the Error that was his sin was its absence. The "new creature" who makes "the transition from non-being to being" obviously existed already in the objective sense, and it is not impossible that he may have experienced some initial, minimal subjective presence and tension, depending on whether he was in a drunken sleep or perhaps dimly awake.23 But when he undergoes the "Conversion" that is his coming into existence in the proper sense, he experiences a new degree of subjective presence and actuality that makes him realize the difference between Truth and Error. And, in the existential pathos of his experience of the Truth that is the inward presence of "the God," he realizes this difference in such a way that he looks back on his Error with a grief that is the obverse of the love he now experiences:
If the difference between Truth and Error is that between actual subjective existence and its absence, however, what contribution to our understanding does it make to call the latter Error? Why not just call it absence? And why speak of it as guilty? The idea of error, in the ordinary sense of the word implies a cognitive failure, and one that is not simply the absence of an act of correct understanding, but a positive misunderstanding. Also it will be remembered from the beginning of the present chapter that Anti-Climacus spoke of sin in Sickness as something positive, not a mere absence or function of our finitude, and presumably Climacus and Anti-Climacus would not, at least without explanation, hold entirely different conceptions of what can be meant by the term "sin." To understand why Error is not only an absence of understanding but a positive misunderstanding for which the one who repents can take responsibility it will be necessary to consider some aspects of the issue that Kierkegaard does not himself make explicit.
To begin with, it will be helpful to consider what kind of cognitive error might underlie the existential Error that is sin for Climacus. Related to this is the question of what kind of intentional act a misunderstanding can be understood to be or involve--for if no subjective act at all were involved, how could the supposedly guilty one be considered in any sense responsible for it?
First let us consider the mistake itself. If Error is related to Truth as nonexistence to existence, then the error in Error, as one might call it, would have to be the mistaken belief that one did exist. The existence in question, however, is subjective not objective. The nonexistence, therefore, must also be subjective, so that the error would be not the belief in one's objective existence but in one's subjective existence.
A major source of the mistake at the heart of sin, furthermore, must be the confusion of subjective and objective existence that leads us to suppose that if we can reasonably believe ourselves to exist in the objective sense (the way the drunken peasant in the cart did), that implies we also exist in the subjective sense. Climacus would say that one does not come into existence as subjective by coming to know what one is as an object, but by coming to realize what one is not. One comes into existence subjectively, from his point of view, in a movement out of Error into Truth, where Truth is subjective existence and the Error that stands opposed to it is centered in the belief that one possesses a subjective existence of one's own other than that which is the presence in inwardness of the God who redeems us from sin and Error by giving us the new birth that is the Paradox of his life in us.
The latter belief is what we might term "egoism": the belief that one has an independent existence as an entitative subject, or what was referred to in the preceding chapter as an "objective-subject." What Climacus means when he speaks of the "existing individual" as "a subject" is not that he is such an entity, but that he is an individual instance of incarnate subjectivity. At the end of the last chapter I referred to Kierkegaard as exploring the question of what an "existing individual" is and is not. And what an existing individual is not, at least for Johannes Climacus, is a quasi-objective entity. Any human individual is, to be sure, objective in his physical reality; but as "existing" in Kierkegaard's proper sense, he is characterized by the "inwardness" that is irreducibly subjective. The appropriation-process in which one holds fast to subjectivity in inwardness is not a process of becoming an objective entity; it is a process of coming into subjective existence through the life conferred inwardly by the subjective presence of the Teacher. It would be an easy step from thinking in the objectifying egoistic way to thinking that one need not look to the Teacher for anything but objective information about what relates to one's objective reality. One would forget that what one needs and longs for and must seek from the Teacher is not knowledge about objects but subjective actuality.
It is precisely this type of forgetfulness and failure that makes Error not only a cognitive mistake but sin. To be sure, there is a mistake involved: the mistake just referred to as egoism, the illusion that one is an entitative, quasi-objective subject with an existence properly one's own. This is the error of Error. The sin that holds one in Error is something more. The sin to which the egoistic illusion gives rise and to which it clings is not the failure to understand correctly but the failure to seek to understand. The two form a vicious circle: the blurring together of the subjective and the objective is the foundation of belief in egoistic selfhood, and that belief in turn founds the clinging to self that leads one to defend one's selfhood by claiming that existence is a possession of one's own--even if, in perhaps the subtlest of egoistic twists, one acknowledges in supposed humility that one received it at some point in the past as a gift from God. Whatever the twist, "[i]n the Socratic view," as Climacus says, "each individual is his own center, and the entire world centers in him . . . " (p. 14).
In the traditional language of the Christian religion, the claim to autonomous existence is at the core of what was called the sin of Pride. It was such an illusory, egoistic selfhood that Dante depicted in his Purgatorio as a great stone carried on their backs by the Prideful, a burden that they only had to set down to become free from. For Climacus, however, this is not one "sin" among others; in his vocabulary it is sin as such: "But this state, the being in Error by reason of one's own guilt, what shall we call it? Let us call it Sin" (Fragments, p. 19). Kierkegaard's emphasis with regard to sin is characteristically on the subjective factor. Sin in the proper sense is not for him an objective misdeed: it is the root of subjective failure.
Like Ricoeur (and Dante), Kierkegaard images sin as a kind of self-imposed captivity. The passage immediately following the one just quoted reads almost as if it anticipated Ricoeur's discussion of the "servile will." Climacus says of the one in Error by reason of his own guilt, "he might seem to be free; for to be what one is by one's own act is freedom. And yet he is in reality unfree and bound and exiled; for to be free from the Truth is to be exiled from the Truth, and to be exiled by one's own self is to be bound" (p. 19). He also goes on to say soon after this that "no captivity is so terrible and so impossible to break, as that in which the individual keeps himself" (p. 21). It is because the Teacher frees one from this "self-imposed bondage" and its consequent "burden of guilt" that Climacus says he can be called "Saviour," "Redeemer," and "Atonement" (p. 21; new trans.: "savior," "deliverer," "reconciler"). He also says that it is precisely because one is unable to free oneself from this captivity that one needs the Teacher as something more than a teacher of objective knowledge.
Why, however, should this be the case? If the bondage is self-imposed, why can one not simply let it go of one's own accord? Climacus himself asks this very question: "But since he is bound by himself, may he not loose his bonds and set himself free?" (p. 19). All Climacus has to say in this particular passage at the beginning of the Fragments is that "first at any rate he must will it" and that if he were capable of willing it, it would mean he already had the power to do so and need only be reminded of it by the Teacher, which would be a return to the Socratic position that we already possess eternal being and need only remember it.
This hardly seems an answer, however, and taken by itself it would only be begging the question. Climacus's real answer comes later in his discussion of the "offended consciousness" and the "acoustic illusion." This opens with the statement, "If the Paradox and the Reason come together in a mutual understanding of their unlikeness their encounter will be happy, like love's understanding, happy in the passion to which we have not yet assigned a name"--as we saw, he subsequently gives it the name of Faith (p. 61). Translated into the terms of intentionality analysis, this would mean: if the subjective presence of the incarnate God (the Paradox) and the intention of objective knowledge (the Reason) agree in an appreciation of the absolute difference (the unlikeness) between the subjective and objective poles of consciousness, their encounter will be satisfying as a fulfillment of their mutual intention, which is incarnate subjectivity.
Behind this idea lies Climacus's shortly preceding discussion of the mutual love between human intentionality and its eternal source: " . . . the Reason, in its paradoxical passion, precisely desires its own downfall. But this is what the Paradox also desires, and thus they are at bottom linked in understanding . . . " (p. 59). Reason, that is, seeks, as was mentioned earlier, to reach toward that Unknown which is not just relatively unknown (as would be an object not yet apprehended or verified) but which can never be objectively known because it is no object but subjective actuality itself. Reason reaches toward this inherently mysterious Unknown as though it were objective, because it is the nature of intentionality to do so. Doing so, however, it is always in peril of forgetting the metaphorical "as though" and beginning to think of what it reaches toward as literally objective. This is how it can happen that, as Climacus says, "the Reason, in attempting to determine the Unknown as the unlike, at last goes astray, and confounds the unlike with the like" (p. 57)--confusing, that is, the subjective with the objective. "[I]f man is to receive any true knowledge about the Unknown (the God)," he goes on to say, "he must be made to know that it is unlike him, absolutely unlike him," and even this surpasses the capacity of the Reason as such, which as positive knowledge can only know the objective. The entirely negative understanding of absolute unlikeness is possible only as the understanding that the Paradox itself has in the Moment of incarnation. But when one does, by the subjective presence of the Paradox, recognize the absolute unlikeness between subject and object, this intentional reaching that is the life of the Reason is not only harmless but good, since without intentionality there would be no human consciousness, hence no incarnation, which is the goal for which the Paradox bestows itself.
Considered in this light, Reason in the Kierkegaardian sense as the subjective intention of both objective truth and subjective "Truth" can only take place when the "unlikeness" between the two is understood. Otherwise one would be speaking of Reason in a loose or analogous way, as Climacus indicates when he introduces the idea of their possibly unhappy encounter as "Offense": "If the encounter is not in understanding the relationship becomes unhappy, and this unhappy love of the Reason if I may so call it (which it should be noted is analogous only to that particular form of unhappy love which has its root in misunderstood self-love . . . ) may be characterized more specifically as Offense" (p. 61).
"Offense" here is an equivalent term for sin, and Climacus's analysis of it answers at least in part the questions raised earlier as to what kind of intentional act might be involved in sin and why the one who binds himself in sin lacks the power to loose himself from it. Climacus immediately goes on to say: "All offense is in its deepest root passive. In this respect, it is like that form of unhappy love to which we have just alluded. Even when such a self-love (and does it not already seem contradictory that love of self should be passive?) announces itself in deeds of audacious daring, in astounding achievements, it is passive and wounded. It is the pain of its wound which gives it this illusory strength, expressing itself in what looks like self-activity and may easily deceive, since self-love is especially bent on concealing its passivity" (p. 61).
The passivity referred to is lack of genuine subjective actuality. Subjective existence is conscious, intentional activity. The person whose behavior makes him seem active but who lacks subjectivity is in reality active only in an objective, outward sense. The difference is that between an intentional action--"self-activity" as Climacus calls it--and what we might call a "twitch" or "spasm." A spasm is not an intentional action, however vigorous its motion might be objectively. As Climacus describes the spasm in question, it is a reaction to pain, and its energy is the energy of the pain.
What, then, is the pain? The answer is obvious: it is the pain of longing for subjective existence. The longing, however, is actually experienced. It is not an illusion but the beginning, at least, of subjective existence. One might even describe it as the pain of birth; but in the case of Climacus's "Offense," which rejects the idea that one could even need a new birth into Truth, the pain is experienced as though it were the endless labor of a perpetual stillbirth. From the point of view of the unrepentant sinner's pride in his autonomous existence, the ultimate affront is to tell him precisely what he most needs to know: that he does not exist. This liberating truth, however, can only be realized in the past tense--that is, from the point of view of repentance and rebirth, which looks back on what came before with the realization that in actuality he did not yet properly exist in the subjective sense.
There is a clear link here between the thought of Kierkegaard and that of Girard, even if it may involve no direct influence. The point of linkage lies in the idea of "offense," which, as Climacus points out in a footnote, is a translation of the Greek skandalon: "This word comes from skandalon (offense or stumbling-block), and hence means to take offense, or to collide with something" (Fragments, pp. 62-63). Climacus does not mention, since he avoids all direct reference to Christianity, that the meaning he is interested in comes from the term's use in the New Testament in such familiar passages as: " . . . if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out. . . . if thy right hand offend thee, cut it off, and cast it from thee" (Matt. 5:29-30); the words to Peter, "Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offense to me" (Matt. 16:23); or "But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone be hanged about his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matt. 18:6).
In Girard's analysis, the skandalon that causes one to stumble or become blocked or fixated is what we saw him refer to as the model-obstacle, the figure of fascination who captivates us by his aura of power and prestige. The resulting blockage may take numerous forms. It may be that one submits to enchantment by the model and becomes his more or less willing slave. Or in a less obviously servile case, one may become his loyal supporter, share his dreams, and bask in his glory. Or it may be that one attacks the model and tries to wrest for oneself the power that gives him prestige in one's eyes. In any of these or similar cases the dynamics of the process tend to be quite unconscious, so that one emulates the model without even admitting to oneself that one has taken him as a model.
Climacus, as was noted above, describes Offense as rooted in "misunderstood self-love" and in the failure to appreciate the "absolute unlikeness" between the human and the divine and between the objective and subjective poles of consciousness. The same could be said of Girard's skandalon. Its essential quality is fixation upon a symbol of personal power and prestige, and its dynamism is essentially the energy of a longing to become invulnerable like the model, a figure who is always imagined as ontologically secure. This naive belief in the entitative status of the model as an autonomous human-divine objective-subject is founded on a tendency, increased by the power of the enchantment, to blur the subjective and objective together into the notion of an entity who has a subjectivity rooted in his own will alone and who also possesses a rocklike objective solidity. The resulting attitude toward the model, even when it takes on the form of abject submission, is always a form of "misunderstood self-love," in that the enchantment is with an image of oneself as one would like to be: invulnerable, powerful, and immune to fear or reprisal.
Climacus also describes the "offended consciousness" as "always passive" (p. 62) despite its claim to active power. What it wants above all else is to avoid acknowledging its own passivity and its radical dependency on the Paradox for any energy it has, and even for the minimal degree of existence it can be said to enjoy--since, as Climacus puts it, "offense comes into existence with the Paradox; it comes into existence. Here again we have the Moment, on which everything depends" (p. 64). The offended consciousness's claim is that it exists and acts out of its own autonomous energy as an independent objective-subject, and it clings to this status fiercely, even if its fierceness (as Anti-Climacus analyzes it in Sickness) is the mask worn by despair.
From the Girardian point of view, this claim might be spoken of as a sort of spasmic grasping after an image. It is essentially passive in that it takes place not as an expression of genuine intention but as a mechanism of the mimetic drive. Presented with such an image of personal power, whether by an encounter with a rival or through the influence of a misguided culture, the unwary individual is led by the sheer force of the mimetic drive into an unconscious attempt to appropriate that power for himself. Tripped up in this way, the individual comes to orbit about the stumbling-block--like the ass circling endlessly about the millstone in the parable in Matt. 18:6 as analyzed by Girard.24 All of this is obscure to the individual, who in his very bondage believes himself free and powerful. The emulation is an unconscious mechanism of the mimetic drive, despite the fact that the claims it gives rise to are consciously voiced--even howled defiantly--to the world.
This provides the answer to the question asked earlier of what there could be of subjective intention in sin. The sin (Offense) is itself subjectively passive, merely a twitching away from the life that is longed for, but it takes place in a context in which at least a minimum of subjectivity is present--consciousness of the idol that fascinates it, or of its own defiance, or of a pain that may only seem pointless and frustrating. The one who experiences this pain may not understand it, but the longing itself is at least the beginning of subjective existence. As actual subjectivity this existential tension is the presence of the God in the Moment (i.e., in the process of incarnation). From Climacus's point of view, this bare minimum of subjective presence is shared by every person who is conscious at all. This is why he says in the Postscript, as was mentioned earlier, that everyone is at least "a bit of a subject": every person who is not lying like the drunken carter in complete unconsciousness experiences the tension or "passion" that is the necessary condition both for the pain of frustration, in the case of Offense, and for the happiness of satisfaction, in the case of Faith.
Climacus emphasizes that the illusory, egoistically conceived self that Offense clings to has no subjective existence of its own and that the energy of its spasms actually derives from the incarnation process of the God, in whom alone there is genuine subjective life and upon whom the illusory ego can only live parasitically. This is why Climacus refers to our impression of the ego's life as "an acoustic illusion," like that which can give us the feeling that a ventriloquist's dummy has a life of its own: "While therefore the expressions in which offense proclaims itself, of whatever kind they may be, sound as if they came from elsewhere, even from the opposite direction, they are nevertheless echoings of the Paradox. This is what is called an acoustic illusion" (p. 63). Even the offended consciousness's mistaken belief in its own objective selfhood derives its subjective energy from the Paradox: "But precisely because offense is thus passive, the discovery . . . does not derive from the Reason, but from the Paradox; for as the Truth is index sui et falsi [the criterion of itself and of the false], the Paradox is this also, and the offended consciousness [new trans.: "offense"] does not understand itself but is understood by the Paradox" (Fragments, p. 63).25 "Offense," Climacus goes on to say, "is the mistaken reckoning, the invalid consequence, with which the Paradox repels and thrusts aside. The offended individual does not speak from his own resources, but borrows those of the Paradox; just as one who mimics or parodies another does not invent, but merely copies perversely" (p. 63).
This would also be Climacus's answer to Ricoeur's search for a way to discover the evil will. Ricoeur, to phrase his issue in the language being used here, was seeking to trace along a trail of paradoxical symbols toward a vanishing point of objectivity at which, through penetrating the paradox, one might hope to be able to catch a glimpse of the subjective intention of evil as the thing-in-itself at the core of fallen man. Climacus's comment on this quest would be that it is fruitless--and not for the Kantian reason that the thing-in-itself cannot be apprehended, but because the subjective intention of evil, precisely for lack of subjectivity, cannot exist.
Since, as we saw earlier, Kierkegaard also presented, through Anti-Climacus in The Sickness Unto Death, the idea that sin for Christianity is something "positive," not a mere absence, he would probably say also that one could reasonably attribute to the evil will as much objective existence as to the objective "subject" Lonergan argued for. But that, of course, is just the point: it is objective only, not subjective. Except in the loose sense of an "existence so-called," it does not exist. The reality of the evil will is merely that of what was referred to above as a spasm or twitch.
Perhaps the most helpful image in this case would be a cramp. A cramp is objectively real, and one experiences real pain in it, but it is not itself an intentional action, however energetic it may be. In the case of the evil will, the cramp is a grasping after the illusion of egoistic existence. The grasping is real or "positive," but it springs not from apprehension of an actual good but from a failure to understand what is truly desired. This is why Climacus says, in a note on his statement that "the offended consciousness does not understand itself": "In this sense the Socratic principle that sin is ignorance finds justification. Sin does not understand itself in the Truth, but it does not follow that it may not will itself in Error" (Fragments, p. 63). Sin's "willing itself" is the cramp. But its energy is borrowed parasitically from the God. Its only subjective actuality is that of the longing to exist subjectively, a longing that is itself actual but in error is misdirected toward what does not and cannot actually exist: one's supposed self conceived of as an objective-subject. The only subjective existence is that of the God in the Moment, and the only subjective actuality that the existing individual can ever have is that which the God brings into the Moment that is his incarnation.
The point Climacus is making here was later approached from an explicitly Christian angle in the well-known Deer Park episode of the Postscript. It is the absolute existential dependence of each person on the one source of all subjective actuality: every instance of immanent subjectivity is dependent on the transcendent, that which in immanent presence and contingent operations becomes Climacus's "the Paradox." To one who considers things from the point of view of the egoistic illusion, even if he might be trying to believe in his dependence on a transcendent source, it is only too easy to slip into interpreting the dependency in relative terms--as a belief that for some acts, such as "sins," minor good deeds, or morally indifferent actions, one has a "natural" power of one's own, while for special, heroic deeds or saintly virtues one depends on God.
In the Deer Park episode the issue is cast in the form of a question about what it could mean to speak of dependency on God in the case of something as simple as a holiday outing: "We ought always to bear in mind that a human being can do nothing of himself, says the clergyman; hence also when one proposes to take an outing in the Deer Park, he ought to remind himself of this, as for example, that he cannot enjoy himself; and the illusion that he surely is able to enjoy himself at the Deer Park, since he feels such a strong desire for it, is the temptation of his immediacy; and the illusion that he surely can take this outing since he can easily afford it, is the temptation of his immediacy" (Postscript, p. 422). (By "immediacy" here is meant a lack of reflectiveness; Kierkegaard's "immediate man" thinks that what he knows is what he perceives and that what he understands is whatever pattern of thought feels natural to him.)
Climacus then goes on to consider the many ways an individual might turn over in his mind the proposition that of oneself one can do nothing. The task of the individual, as he puts it, is "to understand that he is nothing before God" (p. 412), which is equivalent to his earlier description of the "new birth, from non-being to being" in the Fragments (p. 27) as requiring that the one undergoing it discover "that he did not exist." After considering the forms that a comparatively worldly relativizing of the idea might take, he considers the subtlest version of the error--a religious relativizing: "A man can do nothing of himself, this he should always bear in mind. The religious individual is in this situation--he is thus among other things also unable to take an outing in the Deer Park, and why?. . . It is because he understands hour by hour that he can do nothing. In his sickly condition, the religious individual is unable to bring the God-idea together with such an accidental finitude as the taking a pleasure outing in the Deer Park" (Postscript, p. 434). This, however, is only another version of the claim to independent selfhood, even if one in which the egoistic "offense" that was analyzed in the Fragments wears the disguise of religious humility.
Such humility, from the point of view presented in the Postscript, is one of the most refined and rarefied but also most stubborn forms that resistance to the Truth of the Paradox can take. For a person captivated by his own religious humility, the transition from this illusion into Truth would have to involve a realization that there is no impotent, ontologically separate created life, but only that which is the humanity of the incarnate God.
According to Climacus's analysis of this captivity and the potential liberation from it, the religious person has to be delivered from the illusion that he possesses, and is bound in, a defective egoistic life of his own: "He feels the pain of this [his inability to take an outing in the Deer Park], and it is surely a deeper expression for his impotence that he understands it in relation to something so insignificant. . . . The difficulty is not that he cannot do it, humanly speaking, but the difficulty is first and foremost, to attain to a comprehension of his inability, and so to annul the illusion, since he should always bear in mind that he can do nothing of himself--this difficulty he has conquered, and now there remains the second difficulty: with God to be able to do it" (pp. 434-35).
As Climacus put it in the Fragments, sin and error are parasitically dependent on the subjectivity of the God in the Moment. This is why the Moment is both a "moment" in the temporal sense and also something more: it is "filled with the Eternal" (p. 22), uniting eternity and time. In its eternal aspect the Moment is the subjective presence of what Climacus calls the God. In its temporal aspect the Moment is the process in which, energized by presence of the God, the contingent operations that constitute incarnate subjectivity take place. That sin and error exist at all depends on the incipient divine presence that is experienced, whether one realizes it or not, as a longing for the fulfillment of the movement of incarnation. When this process reaches fulfillment, when the full range of intentional operations on all existential levels is actualized, then the Moment can be called "the Fullness of Time" (p. 22). Sin and error are merely a deflection of the energy that would fulfill this movement. Nothing they can do, however, since they lack any life of their own, can ever reduce the Moment to a mere moment of objective time, even though that is the direction in which they twist.
The Moment, therefore, is always a movement toward the fullness of time in incarnation. Every instance of incarnate subjectivity, however incomplete or distorted, remains at least a beginning. To bring this conception of human existence to full clarity it will help to consider how Climacus represents the movement from lesser to greater actualization of subjectivity as taking place.
It was mentioned above that one of the themes of the Fragments is Aristotle's conception of kinesis as a "coming-into-existence kind of change" (p. 90). In that volume the importance of this theme is emphasized, but it is still treated rather abstractly. One of the values of the Postscript as a supplement to the Fragments is that it fleshes out this theme as a concrete process of transition from one stage of existence to another.
This movement is a process of actualization, of coming into existence in the proper sense. Toward the end of the chapter on Voegelin, I suggested that the Aristotelian idea of a movement from potentiality to actuality might serve to counterbalance the tendency of Voegelin's favored Metaxy metaphor to image human existence as an inevitable deficiency longing for an unattainable sufficiency. The Metaxy image tends to locate "being" at the further pole of a tension or Eros that must always long for it because it must always fall short of it. Inherent in this rather spatialized image--whether it is Plato, Voegelin, or Ricoeur who uses it--is a tendency to cast the matter in static terms: being is imaged as a stasis "beyond" the realm of movement between the poles; man's state of deficiency is essentially static in its inescapability; and time, as the moving image of eternal stasis, is essentially an illusion, a cognitive distortion of the really real. To speak of a movement from potentiality to actuality or from lesser to greater fullness is also to use a metaphoric image, but it may be a less misleading one, and on the whole Kierkegaard tended to favor it. It has the advantage of emphasizing the dynamism of the actual rather than the stasis of the ideal.
Kierkegaard also made frequent use of the similarly metaphoric image of synthesis, as when he had Climacus say in the Postscript: "Existence is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, and the existing individual is both infinite and finite" (p. 350). It is important not to misinterpret his idea of "synthesis" (Greek: "putting with") as that of a fusion; he deliberately used the term with its Greek connotation of a combination of elements that continue to remain distinct and different. Hegel is frequently described as thinking about a fusion of "thesis" and "antithesis" into a "synthesis," but, as was mentioned in the chapter on Lonergan, this was not actually Hegel's language. What Hegel talked about was "mediation," which he conceived of as an overcoming and negation of the sort of genuine difference that Kierkegaard continued to insist upon. Kierkegaard chose to use the term "synthesis" specifically to differentiate from Hegel's his own way of thinking, with its insistence on the absolute difference between the subjective and objective, infinite and finite, eternity and time.26
The implication of the image of synthesis as Kierkegaard used it is that any instance of incarnate subjectivity unites (without annihilation of difference) the subjective (the infinite) and the objective (the finite) in the intentionality that has the subjective as one pole or aspect and the objective as the other. Kierkegaard's term for this synthesis, which I refer to as "intentionality," was "spirit": "Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical; however, a synthesis is unthinkable if the two are not united in a third. This third is spirit" (Concept of Anxiety, p. 43). The same meaning, of course, was expressed in the Fragments as the idea that the Moment is a synthesis of the eternal (the subjective pole) and time (the objective).
The image of synthesis and the image of actualization share the important characteristic that they imply the involvement of both poles in that in which they are united. To speak of a synthesis is to speak of something that may involve distinctions of opposite aspects but that in itself is nevertheless one. And the image of a movement of actualization, though it is in one respect "a transition from not existing to existing" (Fragments, p. 91), encompasses nonetheless the notion of an increase in what is already existential presence. The actualization of a potential adds what might be called new existential content, but it does not have to imply that before the new actuality there was no existential content whatsoever. The development of subjectivity can be described as a process in which the range of subjective operation, hence of actual subjective presence, increases by degrees. This would be the process Lonergan was referring to in his lecture on "The Subject" when he said, "For we are subjects, as it were, by degrees" (Second Collection, p. 80). For Kierkegaard, the process of becoming an existing individual, which is one of coming into subjective existence, is a process of becoming increasingly what to some degree one already is. It is not a change from being one kind of thing to another but an increase in subjectivity--from "a bit of a subject" (Postscript, p. 116) to more of one.
This, then, would be Kierkegaard's answer regarding both the value and the limitations of the Metaxy image, as he himself, speaking through Climacus, made clear in the Postscript: "It is with this view of life as it is with the Platonic interpretation of love as a want; and the principle that not only he is in want who desires something he does not have, but also he who desires the continued possession of what he has" (p. 110). Climacus went on there to say: "One might . . . by way of misunderstanding set up an antithesis between finality and the persistent striving for truth [i.e., subjectivity]. But this is merely a misunderstanding in this sphere" (p. 110). The persistent tension and striving that is essential to human existence is not, as Climacus images it, a matter of deficiency longing for an unattainable sufficiency; it is, in the life of Faith, a continuous subjective striving for an increase of the subjective presence that is already enjoyed.
For one who has not already found his way into Faith, on the other hand, or as Climacus might prefer to say, for one who has not yet been discovered by the Paradox, that incipient, relative plenitude of presence may not be experienced as enjoyment. It may, as in the case of one who flees toward the illusion of egoistic selfhood, be experienced as a torment. Or it may, by one who stumbles along in confusion, be experienced as something like a nagging, elusive question that hints at some other possibility of life. As Climacus describes it concretely, the process of entry into Faith begins as a movement through a sequence of stages of existence, and at various points on the journey the one making it is likely to experience both discomfort and perplexity. The stages themselves, as specified in the Postscript, move from the aesthetic to the ethical, then to "ethico-religious" existence ("religiousness A"), and finally to "paradoxically" or "dialectically" religious existence ("religiousness B").
This schema of the stages of existence--in the simplified form that reduces it to the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious--is probably Kierkegaard's most widely known single theme, even among many who may not have read his actual works. It is the one specifically Kierkegaardian theme to which Lonergan has referred in print, for example.27 I will try to summarize the theory of the stages as simply as possible. The aesthetic and ethical stages are fairly straightforward. The term "aesthetic" in this case refers to feeling and immediacy. For the person thinking in the aesthetic mode, the good, for example, is simply what is immediately pleasing, what feels or seems good to one who asks no further questions. Regarding questions about the real, the aesthetic person tends to assume that reality is the object of perception. Characteristically he tends toward passivity in relation to whatever interests him: the good is what gives him good feelings; the real is what impresses itself on his perceptual faculties; and so on. Ethical existence, in contrast, is more reflective and also makes more demands on itself for active exertion. Regarding his central concern, the question of the good, the ethical person wants to be or do good and approaches this task by way of questions that would carry no force for the aesthetic type, such as whether what is immediately pleasing might or might not be truly satisfying over the longer run or whether it is in accordance with one's obligations.
The emphasis in Kierkegaard's discussion of the ethical is rather on the latter than on the former point. From the Kantian point of view prevalent in Kierkegaard's philosophical milieu, the question of deep and lasting satisfaction would probably have seemed only a refinement of aestheticism, not a truly ethical question. What seemed more urgent and preoccupied Kierkegaard's archetypally ethical figures, such as Judge William in Either/Or or the Knight of Infinite Resignation in Fear and Trembling, was how a fact or action could be located in an intelligible scheme of obligations. The Kantian goal was the transcendence of moral egoism, and Kant interpreted religion as a practical aid to this goal. Kierkegaard, however, had a very different conception of both Christianity and the transcendence of egoism. His Knight of Faith, as sketched in Fear and Trembling, was a person who not only made the infinite resignation of the ethical man but also reverently accepted all possibilities of enjoyment back again as gifts. In this respect religious existence as depicted there combined features of the aesthetic and the ethical in a way that would have scandalized the Kantians, to whom the Knight of Faith would probably have seemed a mere hedonist or, in the words W. H. Auden used in his Kierkegaardian sonnet sequence "The Quest," "too like a grocer for respect."28
The treatment of religious existence in the Postscript is considerably more complex than that in the earlier works, involving as it does Kierkegaard's further distinction between the two levels or types of religiousness referred to above as "religiousness A" and "religiousness B." The religiousness of the earlier Knight of Faith would in the later terminology be a version of religiousness B, which Climacus considers the only type corresponding to genuine Christian faith.29 Religiousness A, on the other hand, is a version of ethical existence, and stands at the point of transition from the ethical to the life of Faith. It is religious in that it is concerned with what it takes to be the relation between man and God. It is ethical in that it is concerned with right action in obedience to God. It falls short of what for Climacus is religiousness in the proper sense, however (that of religiousness B) in that it misconceives both God and man as well as the relation between them. It aims at a self-transcendence in which the self, considered both as transcending and as transcended, is conceived of in the egoistic mode as an independently existing objective-subject, which carries the ironic implication that its concern with self-improvement through moral effort is really only a refinement of egoism. Its misconception of God is similarly egoistic in that the God it thinks of as demanding the ethical is merely another entity not essentially different from itself, even if better and more powerful. The ethico-religious idea of self-transcendence, in other words, amounts to no more than the subordination of one egoistically conceived entity to another.30
A further complication is that these two forms of religiousness as described thus far do not exhaust the picture. Although Climacus does not distinguish any other by name, there is at least an implicit distinction between religiousness A in the genuinely ethical mode and a more naive, basically aesthetic religiousness that he refers to as "immediate": "An immediate religiosity rests in the pious superstition that it can see God directly in everything; the `awakened' individual has impudently made arrangements for God's presence wherever he himself happens to be, so that as soon as you catch sight of him you may be sure that God is there, because the `awakened' individual has Him in his pocket" (Postscript, pp. 451-52). What he means is that such a person believes he has a capacity to sense the presence of God everywhere in the world as though the divine were simply a special aspect of things; he has God "in his pocket" in that he has reduced him to something perceptible or imaginable. "The aesthetic," says Climacus, "always consists in the fact that the individual imagines that he is busy grasping after God and getting hold of Him, and in the conceit that the individual is pretty smart if only he can get hold of God as something external" (p. 498).
Such aestheticism is not limited entirely to those who emphasize feeling. The intellectualizing dogmatist is no more than another version of the aesthetic type in that he too reduces the divine to a form of object--in his case an object of intellection. God, being pure subjectivity, cannot, for Kierkegaard, be in any sense or measure an object of intentional operations. God is not merely difficult to understand, he is absolutely impossible to understand, because he is not an intellectual object at all, and any effort to get an intellectual grasp of him would express only misunderstanding of the divine and a fundamental missing of the point of Christianity. This would be what Climacus calls an attempt "to push Christianity back into the aesthetic sphere (in which unwittingly the hyper-orthodox especially are successful) where the incomprehensible is the relatively incomprehensible . . . " (p. 499).
Humor, which for Climacus marks the boundary between religiousness A and B, protects against such naivet
Humor would also be the most effective antidote to the quasi-tragic notion that human existence is trapped in an inescapable state of unfulfillable longing. What Kierkegaard would probably say of Plato's Metaxy metaphor is that it is not the ultimate symbol of the human condition but rather one that expresses what human existence must seem like when considered from the point of view of the ethico-religious stage of existence and not yet from the point of view of the Paradox.
That both the aesthetic and the ethical are ultimately laughable from Climacus's point of view might make it seem that he would think the movement from the former to the latter involves no truly significant development. It is true that the transition to religiousness B must leave both behind in essentially the same category, that of finitude or object-oriented consciousness. But there is one respect in which the development from the first to the second prepares for the final transition in a way that is absolutely essential. This is that ethico-religiousness is the necessary foundation for repentance, which Climacus says "belongs in the ethico-religious sphere, and is hence so placed as to have only one higher sphere above it, namely, the religious in the strictest sense" (p. 463). Repentance, that is, is the portal into religiousness B, which is the life of the Paradox itself.
What repentance is essentially for Climacus, as was explained earlier in this chapter, is sorrow regarding failure. It looks back with regret on the life one has lived and does so because it also experiences the present love of the true life that in one's egoism one has failed to understand or appreciate. It is an essential step in the preparation for the new birth because it is a function of the letting go of what impedes it.
Nor can repentance ever be left entirely behind. Incarnate subjectivity as we experience it involves, among other things, memory. Even in the perspective of religiousness B, one's life in time is made up of layers corresponding to the existential stages. The individual always discovers himself within a framework of memory and therefore of time. And in proportion as he considers his memories of deeds done or left undone from the point of view of concerned consciousness--or "passion"--he will always find them to fall short. Always the repenter finds a past life as the background of his present, and this past always includes a false beginning: ". . . the task is presented to the individual in existence, and just as he is ready to cut at once a fine figure (which only can be done in abstracto and on paper, because the loose trousers of the abstractor are very different from the strait-jacket of the exister) and wants to begin, it is discovered that a new beginning is necessary, the beginning upon the immense detour of dying from immediacy, and just when the beginning is about to be made at this point, it is discovered that there, since time has meanwhile been passing, an ill beginning is made, and that the beginning must be made by becoming guilty and from that moment increasing the total capital guilt by a new guilt at a usurious rate of interest" (p. 469).
For one who discovers himself as living in time, therefore, repentance is not an accident to be sloughed off, but an essential element in the process by which one comes into subjective actuality. "Repentance," says Climacus, " . . . does not, from the religious point of view, wish to be allotted its duration, and then be past and over, the uncertainty of faith does not have its period, then to be relegated to the past, the consciousness of sin does not have its time, then to be past: for in that case we go back to the aesthetic" (p. 467, note).
Religiousness B, in which one discovers the "forgiveness of sins," takes place on the basis of the development of self-understanding that in its initial expression is consciousness of guilt and subsequently develops into consciousness of sin. Repentance, too, therefore, has its stages. The reason that for Kierkegaard the consciousness of guilt is "the first deep plunge into existence" (p. 473), as was mentioned earlier, is that it develops in the ethical stage as a function of the realization that what one longs for is not some worldly thing or sensation but a life--not an object but subjective actuality. The reason it is only the first plunge is that it remains captive to the illusion that the act required would be that of an autonomously striving ego. With the transition from the idea of guilt to that of sin the emphasis shifts from self-disapprobation to the love of what the self falls short of, from a retrospective focus on one's own failure to an anticipation of the presence of the God. As Climacus puts it, ". . . the consciousness of guilt still lies essentially in immanence, in distinction from the consciousness of sin. In the consciousness of guilt it is the selfsame subject which becomes essentially guilty by keeping guilt in relationship to an eternal happiness, but yet the identity of the subject is such that guilt does not make the subject a new man, which is the characteristic of the breach" (p. 474). This breach, when it comes, is the new birth that is the paradox of religiousness B.
As a point of transition from religiousness A to B, repentance is closely related to humor, which, as was mentioned above, marks the boundary between them. The ability to consider oneself in the light of humor is at the heart of repentance as Kierkegaard conceives it. That is, the process of repentance, as a turning from the seduction of the ego toward the Truth that is the living presence of the Paradox, is not complete until humor regarding the pretensions of the ego penetrates and shatters its defenses. As Climacus puts it, "The different existential stages take rank in accordance with their relationship to the comical, depending on whether they have the comical within themselves or outside themselves . . . " (p. 463). The "immediate" consciousness has the comical outside itself, he goes on to say; irony is the light of humor uncomprehended by its victim. When the victim becomes capable of laughing inwardly at himself, his fascinations, and even his ideals, the egoistic vision that captivates us in both the aesthetic and the ethical stages begins to lose its hold. The new birth into paradoxical religiousness cannot take place until that hold has been broken, and both humor and repentance are thrusts of the force that breaks it.
The force itself is insight. What the insight is an understanding of, however, is not an idea or intelligible form. In its initial stages, in the transition from the aesthetic to the ethical, the liberating insight takes shape as the negative realization that the objects one thought one longed for were not really what one wanted. In the transition from the ethical to the religious, it is the negative understanding referred to in the Fragments as the realization that one "did not exist," that the autonomous ego-entity one believed one was is in actuality a phantasm. It is an understanding, that is, not of what one is, but of what one is not.
If there is anything like a positive intellectual content to this insight it would have to be phrased as the understanding that the only actual incarnate subjectivity is that of what in the Fragments was called "the God in time," that in God alone we live, move, and have our being. Even this, however, must not be misinterpreted as a positive understanding of an idea. God is not an object, but purely subjective and therefore cannot be an element in an objective pattern of relations. The substantive foundation of the realization of existential truth is not an act of intellection, but the experience, unencumbered by egoistic illusion, of subjective actuality. The insight contributes to the realization in the strictly negative way that it frees one from that encumbrance. It does so by bringing to clarity the fact that the subjectivity one experiences as one's only actual conscious life is not one's own creation but a discovery and a gift. One experiences that presence and life in the strictest "inwardness" or subjectivity. One does not sense, feel, understand, or know it objectively, because it is in no way objective. The understanding that emerges from humor and repentance is, therefore, the purely negative understanding of what subjective existence is not. Once one realizes what it is not, one can cease to try to grasp it as though it were some form of experiential, intellectual, or entitative object or, in the Postscript's phrase, a form of "externality." This combination of negative insight with experienced subjective presence that I just referred to as a realization of existential truth is exactly what Climacus meant by Faith, in the eminent sense, in the Fragments.()31
Who, then, if not an entitative subject, has the insight? There are two ways this could be answered. Climacus's way of putting it, drawing on the language of the Christian tradition, is that God has (or one might better say, "does") the insight, but in such a way that it is also fully the act of the human individual. This is what for the Fragments is the Paradox that bestows itself in the Moment: the very life of the God who is present in Faith. The only genuine human subjectivity, that is, is that of the Paradox, the God who enters into existence in the Moment that is his incarnation. "The paradoxical edification," as it is phrased in the Postscript, "corresponds . . . to the determination of God in time as the individual man . . . " (p. 498).
The other way Kierkegaard might have spoken would have been in strictly negative terms: that no entity has the insight; rather insight is a process, not an entity. This way of speaking has been used extensively in the Buddhist tradition, especially in the Madhyamika and Yogacara schools of thought.32 Kierkegaard, of course, could hardly have taken that linguistic option in his milieu. Christians have always spoken of the divine in positive, quasi-entitative terms, even if they have sometimes insisted that such language must be analogical.33
Medieval theologians had a maxim, analogiae claudicant ("analogies limp"), meaning that all analogies, however helpful they might be, carry misleading implications. In this case what is misleading, from the point of view of the Kierkegaardian analysis, would be the implication that God is objective--since as our earlier discussion of cognitional theory made clear, to speak of a real entity is to speak of what must at least in principle be a conceivable and verifiable object of some sort. This is not at all, it should be equally clear, what Kierkegaard's line of analysis moves toward. When his personae use the term "God," they are not referring, as they insistently remind us, to any kind of object at all but to the irreducibly subjective source of all subjective presence.
To speak in such a way, however, borders for most of us on unintelligibility. The language we ordinarily use is so thoroughly involved with an interpretative framework that does not make Kierkegaard's strict distinction between subject and object that we cannot begin to talk about "a subject" without slipping into conceiving of that subject as some sort of entity. To speak of the God's coming into existence in the Moment as identical with that of the individual in his new birth in the Moment precipitates in the imagination a picture of the collision or fusion of two entities.
The major problem of Kierkegaard's work as a writer was to find a way to speak of what has always been the central mystery of the Christian faith: that God is able to become man and in doing so to redeem man from egoistic captivity. Kierkegaard's challenge was to find a language that would enable him to point his reader into this mystery without causing him to fall into one or the other of two traps that seem always to attend any effort to speak of it: the idea that God and man are two different things, or the even more dangerous error that they are the same thing. Kierkegaard's answer to this problem was to insist on the paradoxical character of any language for mystery, as when he had Climacus say regarding the idea of "the determination of God in time as the individual man" that "[t]he fact that it is not possible to think this, is precisely the paradox" and emphasized "Christianity's affirmation that the paradox it talks about cannot be thought, and thus is different from a relative paradox which at the utmost presents difficulty for thought" (Postscript, p. 498). "The characteristic mark of Christianity," he says, "is the paradox, the absolute paradox" (p. 480). To say that the eternal God has come into existence in time and become truly a man is to say what for ordinary language is necessarily a contradiction, a uniting of incompatible categories; and yet to say anything less would be, for Kierkegaard, to reduce Christianity to simply another version of paganism.
This may sound very much like saying that to be a Christian is to believe nonsense. Of course, as we saw, Kierkegaard's personae maintain that the existential Paradox is not a linguistic paradox but rather that linguistic paradox is what happens to language that attempts to treat the existential as though it were objective. But if the only way one can follow Kierkegaard's path is by speaking in language that breaks down into self-contradiction or else by leaving language behind, the attempt to do so might seem at best questionably advisable or even intellectually irresponsible. I have tried to show that Kierkegaard is not in reality the antirationalist he is often taken to be, but it must be admitted that at a certain point he drops the effort to communicate in intelligible language and that there is at least a possibility he does so too early.
There are important questions even a person sympathetic to Kierkegaard's way of thinking might wish to continue to wrestle with before deciding that language can never develop resources with which to address them, and some of these may even have a direct bearing on the existential quest he urges upon us. To speak of realizing that one "did not exist," for example, necessarily gives rise to certain questions that are directly relevant to understanding both what that proposition means and what alternatives of more adequate understanding Kierkegaard might wish us to pursue.
One of these questions, which Kierkegaard never specifically addressed, is that of what we can properly mean by the idea of "a person" and how this relates to that of "a subject." If the central theme of Christianity, as Kierkegaard emphasizes, is that God is the eternal subject who enters history by becoming a human individual or person, then it would seem important to understand what exactly the differences and similarities are between a person and a subject. This could help, for example, to indicate the difference between the God in time and the sinner he redeems while at the same time making clear why and how their real union or mutual involvement in the Moment could be possible. It would also help to clarify the relation between the drunken peasant drawn along in his cart and the other who consciously drives his horses. Would one not wish to say that the unconscious peasant remains in some sense a real human person, even if as subject he does not actually exist? Is not the sinner, who is called to realize that in his unrepentance he "did not exist," nevertheless a sinner and therefore in some psychological sense real in his error?
Another closely related question, therefore, is one that has been raised several times before: that of the relation of existence to reality. In our normal use of language we assume that these terms are directly related or even perhaps identical: that reality exists and that existence is real. Lonergan's way of thinking, as we saw, would be compatible with such a statement. Kierkegaard's, on the other hand, is quite different, but his explanation of just how it differs stops short of full explicitness. The key would seem to be that Kierkegaard's insistence on the absolute difference between subject and object implies a parallel difference between existence and reality: existence as subjective and reality as objective. With that difference in mind, one might meaningfully say what for ordinary usage would seem nonsensical: that reality does not exist and that existence is not real. To make clear that this is indeed the best way to speak of Kierkegaard's issues and to render explicit what such language can mean would be to free his meanings--as well, perhaps, as those of Voegelin, Ricoeur, and other thinkers in the existential tradition--from the trap of linguistic paradox that sometimes makes them seem nonsensical, irrational, or arbitrary. To deal with such questions will be one purpose of the next chapter.
Chapter 6 Notes1. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, pp. 165-67.
2. The Sickness Unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, ed. and trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, p. 98.
3. The name alludes to St. John Climacus, a seventh-century anchorite of Mount Sinai who was famous for his learning and especially for his book, The Ladder of Paradise, a guide to the spiritual life in thirty steps.
4. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments, trans. David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie, p. 540. This volume will subsequently be referred to as Postscript.
5. In The Conflict of Interpretations, pp. 269-86.
6. Cf. Lonergan, Caring About Meaning, pp. 149-50: "If you have the distinction between the intelligible and the unintelligible, the chief instance of the unintelligible, of the surd, is sin. (`Why did Adam sin? why did the angels sin?' If there were a reason it would not be a sin.) It is a pure case of the irrational." Cf. also Insight, pp. 666-67, where Lonergan describes the basic sin as "contraction of consciousness" (with the effect that intelligent deliberation is precluded) and goes on to say that "all that intelligence can grasp with respect to basic sins is that there is no intelligibility to be grasped."
7. The Concept of Anxiety, ed. and trans. Reidar Thomte with the collaboration of Albert B. Anderson, p. 50.
8. The phrase appears in the title of Part 2, Chapter 2, p. 169.
9. Kaufmann, Discovering the Mind, 1:185-86.
10. Regarding the question of the relation between Kierkegaard and Climacus, Niels Thulstrup suggests in his introduction to the Swenson-Hong translation that it definitely expresses Kierkegaard's own views and "cannot be considered a truly pseudonymous work." Philosophical Fragments or A Fragment of Philosophy, trans. David Swenson and Howard V. Hong, p. lxxxv. This volume will subsequently be referred to as Fragments. Thulstrup's suggestion does not necessarily conflict with what was said earlier about the difference between those points on which Kierkegaard did make consistent philosophical claims and those which he treated as ultimately problematic or, to use Marcel's term, mysterious. Climacus may speak a meaning close to Kierkegaard's own views much of the time, but he remains an explorer tentatively probing areas that lie beyond secure knowledge.
12. Professor Howard Hong, the general director of the new Princeton edition of Kierkegaard's Writings kindly allowed me to see the new translation of Philosophical Fragments while it was in proof, and in what follows where the differences in translation seem interesting I will indicate them. The new translation does not follow the earlier one's practice of capitalizing key terms, such as Faith, New Birth, Reason, Repentance, the Teacher, the God, and so on. Since in some cases the device of capitalization may help to keep clear some of the distinctions Kierkegaard seems to have been concerned with, I will follow the old translation's usage in that regard. The distinction between subjective or existential "Truth" as compared with merely objective or informational "truth" is a major example. Another that will be discussed later is that between "faith" and "Faith." Still another is that between "the Moment" and "moments."
12. For extensive treatments of Kierkegaard's relation to Hegel and Hegelians, see Niels Thulstrup, Kierkegaard's Relation to Hegel, and Mark C. Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard.
13. See the translator's footnote, p. 101.
14. The substitution of "the understanding" for "the Reason" in the new translation helps to make clear the link between Climacus's terms and the standard Kantian terminology, in which "understanding" (der Verstand) refers to the grasp and analysis of concepts, which in terms of intentionality analysis are strictly objective, while "reason" (die Vernunft) is associated more with subjectivity and a sense of the transcendent--rather as in Voegelin's discussion of the classical nous in his "Reason: The Classic Experience."
15. 247c, quoted from the translation by R. Hackforth in The Collected Dialogues of Plato Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, p. 494.
16. Cf. Concept of Anxiety, p. 150: "Having become truly earnest about that which is the object of earnestness, a person may very well, if he so wishes, treat various things earnestly, but the question is whether he first became earnest about the object of earnestness. This object every human being has, because it is himself. . . ."
17. See the epigraph of Concept of Anxiety and also Postscript, p. 495.
18. Cf. Concept of Anxiety, p. 143: "The most concrete content that consciousness can have is consciousness of itself, of the individual himself--not the pure self-consciousness [i.e., the self-contemplation aspired to by the Idealists], but the self-consciousness that is so concrete that no author . . . has ever been able to describe a single such self-consciousness, although every single human being is such a one. This self-consciousness is not contemplation. . . because he sees that meanwhile he himself is in the process of becoming, and consequently cannot be something complete for contemplation. The self-consciousness, therefore, is action, and this action is in turn inwardness. . . ." (This passage may well be the direct source of Voegelin's image of man as an actor in a drama he cannot stand outside of in the manner of a spectator, though another source in Kierkegaard for that image may also be Postscript, p. 141, where "world-history" is likened to a stage, with God as both royal spectator and royal actor.)
19. In popular usage, of course, "eternity" is taken to refer to an enormous length of time. It did not mean that for traditional theology but was identified with God's own mode of being and was thought to be beyond time altogether, a qualitatively different conception from time of any length. Cf. Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 10, a. 1.
20. Cf. Concept of Anxiety, p. 152: " . . . just as the road to hell is paved with good intentions, so eternity is best annihilated with mere moments."
21. Voegelin has an echo of this Kierkegaardian, and New Testament, theme in his essay "The Gospel and Culture," in his comment on Paul's warning in 1 Cor. 8:1-3 against the way in which human claims to know God can "puff up" rather than "build up": "The words are addressed to members of the Corinthian community who `possess knowledge' as doctrine and unwisely apply it as a rule of conduct; such possessors of truth are reminded that the knowledge which forms existence without deforming it is God's knowledge of man." In Donald G. Miller and Dikran Y. Hadidian, eds., Jesus and Man's Hope, 2:79.
22. I will continue to follow Climacus's usage in the Swenson-Hong translation and capitalize the terms "Truth" and "Error" as a reminder that he uses them with rather special meanings.
23. This would seem to be what Climacus refers to when he speaks of "the fact that the non-being which precedes the new birth contains more being than the non-being which preceded the first birth" (p. 25). He does not, however, give us enough clues really to know with certainty whether he intends the phrase as a reference to the distinction between objective and subjective existence, or perhaps, as will be discussed shortly, as a reference to the distinction between potential and actual existence.
24. In the French version of the Jerusalem Bible that Girard quotes from, the passage reads: " . . . it would be better for him to have hung about his neck one of those millstones that the asses turn. . . ." Girard relates this image to that of the skandalon in Des choses cach
25. Put in Girardian terms, "offense" (the stumbling block and our stumbling over it) would be mere unconscious mechanism, the opposite of the intentional operations motivated by the appetite for truth, which manifests the only real divine presence, that of the "god of victims." See Des choses cach
26. Cf. Concept of Anxiety, pp. 10-12, and Taylor, Journeys to Selfhood, pp. 170-72.
27. Insight, p. 624. Frederick Crowe, the former director of the Lonergan Center at the University of Toronto, said in his book, The Lonergan Enterprise, p. 90, that an interest in Kierkegaard would be good background for a reading of Lonergan's Method. Lonergan does not himself seem to have read much if anything of him, however. At a conference at the University of Santa Clara in 1984 in honor of Lonergan's eightieth year, Father Crowe talked about sources of evidence for Lonergan's own reading. During the question period following his lecture, I had the opportunity to ask Father Crowe if there is any evidence that Lonergan read Kierkegaard. He answered that he knew of none and that since Kierkegaard was in the air in the 1950s, Lonergan's reference to the Kierkegaardian stages of existence might well be based on what he had heard rather than read.
28. Collected Poetry, p. 260.
29. Cf. Postscript, p. 505, note: ". . . faith belongs essentially in the sphere of the paradoxic-religious. . . . all other faith is only an analogy."
30. In terms of the Girardian framework discussed in the preceding chapter, such subordination would amount to a self-sacrificial abasement before an "external mediator." This might have some social advantages over the war between internal mediators, but from Girard's point of view a religion that interpreted the relation between man and God in such a way would miss the point of the Christian faith and of its conception of God as the "God of victims" rather than one who demands sacrifices. In this respect, despite the lack of direct influence, there is a definite affinity between Girard's critique of what he called "historical Christianity" and Kierkegaard's own "attack upon Christendom."
31. It is also what Voegelin meant by "openness" or "open existence."
32. See, for example, Frederick J. Streng, Emptiness: A Study in Religious Meaning, and Diana Y. Paul, "The Structures of Consciousness in Paramartha's Purported Trilogy," Philosophy East and West 31, no. 3 (July 1981): 231-55. Some other recent works that take up this theme are Robert Magliola, Derrida on the Mend, and Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology.
33. See, for example, St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, I, q. 13.