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Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works
By John W. Elrod PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07204-3
CHAPTER 1
Methodological Foundations
The Systematic Foundation in Kierkegaard's Thought
The last decade witnessed the waning of both Neo-orthodox Theology and Existentialist Philosophy. The fortunes of Søren Kierkegaard's thought were deeply embedded in the dissipation of these two movements. Barth's identification of his notion of the wholly otherness of God with the thought of Kierkegaard, on the one hand, and Heidegger and Sartre's designation of Kierkegaard's concepts of anxiety and existence as the proper subject matter for philosophical reflection, on the other, unfortunately pulled the Kierkegaardian corpus in two opposing directions. These theological and philosophical investments in Kierkegaard's thought molded the two major interpretive approaches to his thought, which were followed in both Continental and English Kierkegaard scholarship from 1930 to 1960. With respect to the pseudonymous corpus, this meant that one was forced into choosing either a theological or a philosophical Kierkegaard. The choice involved not only accepting an already established interpretive perspective but also concentrating on certain of the books and dismissing others. The theologians, for example, turned to Philosophical Fragments and Training in Christianity, the philosophers to Either/Or and The Concept of Dread, while both worked on The Sickness Unto Death and Kierkegaard's greatest work, Concluding Unscientific Postscript.
The philosophers and theologians are not to be faulted for this double interpretation of Kierkegaard, because the structure of the total Kierkegaardian corpus itself suggests this duality. First, there is the sharp division between the aesthetic-philosophical pseudonymous corpus and the more religiously and theologically oriented books, which Kierkegaard, with the major exception of Training in Christianity, published under his own name. Second, the subject matter of the pseudonymous corpus can also be divided along theological and philosophical lines. Theologians naturally gravitated toward Kierkegaard's discussions of subjects like God, Christ, faith, sin, and repentance; and philosophers moved toward his analyses of subjects like existence, self, anxiety, freedom, consciousness, and ethics. Unfortunately, Kierkegaard is less than explicit about the relations between these two subject matters, and, therefore, the division of interest and research in subsequent scholarship was a natural development.
It should not be denied that this division of interest produced two extremely rich and resourceful traditions of thought. But to the extent that Kierkegaard is identified with either of these traditions their dissipation has meant the subsiding of interest in, and the importance of, Kierkegaard himself for contemporary thought. The loss of the momentum of these two movements, then, has produced an unfortunate loss of interest in Kierkegaard as well. But the exhaustion of these two movements has also provided the opportunity for attempting to see him in a new light, and to this end, two new, and not irreconcilable, fronts are developing in Kierkegaard scholarship. The first one is historically oriented and seeks to understand Kierkegaard's relation to German and Danish Idealism.
The second one is attempting to transcend the philosophical-theological division in Kierkegaard's writings in order to see them as unified by an underlying system of some sort within the writings themselves. Until now Kierkegaardians have reacted in horror to the claim that some sort of system is present in Kierkegaard's writings and that it can be disclosed by a discerning and unprejudiced eye. Some still wince at the thought but the idea that a Christology, an ontology, or an anthropology of some sort lies hidden in and unifies this massive corpus is finding increasing acceptance among Kierkegaard scholars. Ultimately those committed to this approach to Kierkegaard argue for either a theological or a philosophical interpretation of his thought, but they are all in agreement that his corpus is characterized fundamentally by a systematic understanding of human existence.
To speak of a system in Kierkegaard's authorship is not to suggest either that the writings themselves have a systematic structure or that Kierkegaard's style has a systematic character. His ideas do not possess a logical and necessary inter-relatedness such that the outcome of his work appears as a massive rational edifice in which each book and each thought finds its appropriate place. On the contrary, his books contain an almost countless number of poetical and imaginative descriptions of the topography of human existence. In open rebellion against the systematizing mindset of the nineteenth century, Kierkegaard flooded Denmark with a wealth of existential reflection which in quantity and in its expression of psychological depth and insight contemptuously defied the systematizer to work his logical sleight of hand on his writings. It seems that Kierkegaard with calculated deliberateness went out of his way to make it impossible to understand his authorship, much less to systematize it. The use of pseudonyms; the maieutic method of communication; the explicit avowal of logically contradictory notions; the attempt to work simultaneously on both theological and philosophical problems; the abrupt abandonment of the pseudonyms and the indirect method of communication for a direct method of communication, only to pick them up and abandon them once again — all this conspires to create a subtle and complex authorship in which there seems to be no final and authoritative pattern or system.
But should we be surprised at this apparent absence of a system in Kierkegaard's writings? Doesn't he argue that it is both inappropriate and impossible to reduce existence to a system? It is true that his original and subtle descriptions of different existential phenomena cannot be conceptually grasped or known. But it is possible, nevertheless, to discover and explain the occurrence and relations of these phenomena. While it is not possible, for example, to grasp conceptually such phenomena as guilt, sin, suffering, choice, faith, repentance, and anxiety, it is possible to explain why they appear when and where they do in the life of the existing individual and to clarify conceptually the structure of existence which makes them possible. Thus, in speaking of a system in Kierkegaard's thought I mean at best only the conceptual clarification of these structures which, on the one hand, makes these existential phenomena possible and, on the other, binds them into an explicit unity of relations.
One of the most explicit references to the presence and importance of such a structure in human existence appears in Stages on Life's Way.
There are three existence-spheres: the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious. The metaphysical is abstraction; there is no man who exists metaphysically. The metaphysical, ontology, is but does not exist; for when it exists it is in the aesthetic, in the ethical, in the religious, and when it is it is the abstraction of or the prius for the aesthetic, the ethical, the religious.
It is true that Kierkegaard is less concerned to delineate this ontological structure than he is to describe the various existential ways of being which it makes possible, but it is, nevertheless, present in his writings and essential to his total project.
It appears that his lack of emphasis on the ontological question can be attributed to his reaction to what he regarded as an overemphasis on the question of being to the exclusion of the question of human existence in Hegelian metaphysics. Kierkegaard reminds us over and again that his writings have primarily an edifying intention. He addresses his books to the existing individual in order to help him to come to terms with his own existence. His writings have an openly therapeutic quality about them in that they are intended to assist his reader to overcome the spiritual sickness of despair, which he refers to as the sickness unto death. Kierkegaard's preeminent concern is not to lead his reader through an ontological maze like Hegel's Logic but to lead him out of despair into the light of a spiritually healthy existence. For this reason alone, then, ontology has a low priority in his writings.
This strategic disagreement with the Hegelians over the relative importance of ontology is supplemented also by a substantive disagreement. Kierkegaard wrote that Hegel's metaphysics would have been one of the most brilliant pieces of philosophical speculation in the history of western philosophy if he had supplemented it with one single footnote claiming that it had nothing to do with human existence. Kierkegaard believed that the individual's pathos and suffering, the ineluctable ought permeating his existence, and the ought's accompanying freedom simply could not be accounted for by Hegel's ontology. In Kierkegaard's mind, Hegelian ontology positively contravened that which essentially characterizes human existence, and he therefore replaces it with an ontology of his own.
Finally, in opposition to the systematizing spirit of the age, Kierkegaard diffuses his ontology throughout his discussion of the three major modes of human existence, which he describes as pleasure, duty, and faith. He chooses to emphasize the issues of how one discovers one's being in these three modes of existing and how this process of discovering and appropriating one's being is constitutive of individual existence. He is more concerned with the ethical task of existing, understood as knowing and actualizing one's being, than he is in abandoning this existential problem for a more detached and objective investigation of the ontological structure which makes human existence possible. Ethics and ontology are inextricably linked in Kierkegaard's thought, and we can therefore speak of his ethicoontological outlook on the problem of human existence.
It may be objected at this point that Kierkegaard is preeminently a religious or Christian thinker and writer and that if there is an ontology in Kierkegaard's pseudonyms it must be regarded as religious, Christian, or theological in nature. By maintaining that Kierkegaard's ontology is philosophical, I do not wish to deny that he is fundamentally concerned with religion. One cannot seriously question Kierkegaard's assertion in A First and Last Declaration that the pseudonymous writings attempt to explore afresh human existence in order to rediscover the meaning of being religious. I shall argue that this exploration of existence gives rise to an ontology, because Kierkegaard is attempting to establish the priority of the self quite apart from any religious beliefs with respect to what the self is qua self. He says that the self is a synthesis of the finite and the infinite which freedom is responsible for actualizing in human existence. This definition emerges simply in the process of trying to take existence seriously apart from any divine revelation concerning the nature and purpose of human existence. We shall see how the individual's attempts to actualize himself as a synthesis gives rise to the possibility of religious existence.
One of Kierkegaard's central questions is: "How is it possible to be religious in any sense, Christian or otherwise?" His doctrine of the self lays the ontological foundation for the possibility of a variety of modes of existence, including Christianity. I do not mean to imply here that given his interest in ontology Kierkegaard is not a thinker who is vitally interested in Christianity. He most certainly is. The only claim which I wish to make here is that his understanding of Christianity and his ontology are formally distinct.
This ontology is most consistently discussed in The Concept of Dread, The Sickness Unto Death, De Omnibus Dubitandum Est, and in parts of Either/Or, Stages on Life's Way, Philosophical Fragments, and Concluding Unscientific Postscript. In the following chapters, I shall attempt to analyze this doctrine of the self and to demonstrate its consequences for Kierkegaard's existential descriptions of the ethical and religious modes of existing as they are described in the pseudonymous writings.
Existence: The Domain of Human Being and Thinking
Kierkegaard says that the individual is an "existing infinite spirit." This is one of Kierkegaard's expressions for the ontological structure by which human existence is constituted. Within this fundamental structure, existence has three different meanings. In the first instance, existence (Tilvaerelse) designates the real, concrete, temporal, contingent being of human existence. In the second sense, existence (Eksistens) refers to the abstract concept of existence. That is to say the idea of existence itself exists but as necessary and ideal.
But the concept, existence, is an ideality, and the difficulty is precisely whether existence is absorbed in the concept. ... In all the relationships of ideality it holds true that essentia is existentia. ... But existence corresponds to the individual as Aristotle has already taught; however, the individual lies outside and is not absorbed in the concept.
This last sentence leads us to the third meaning of the term in Kierkegaard's thought. The individual can be said to exist (eksistere) in the moment that he becomes determinate in the decisive actualization of the idea of existence in the contingent realm of becoming. In this third sense, existence refers to the act by which the ideal is realized in the realm of becoming, thereby producing an existential content which defies conceptual or even aesthetic description. The act of existing is not subject to demonstration, because reason inevitably proceeds away from and not toward existence. The moment existence is defined, it is converted into possibility, essence. A possibility or essence which actually exists is qualitatively different from that same possibility which exists as thought or reflected.
Kierkegaard, then, uses the notion of existence to apply to the nature of man's total being, including his contingency, necessity, and decisive self-determination. The authorization for this general usage lies in the fact that existence is for man his fundamental mode of reality to which all the determinants of his being must be related. In this sense, existence, as Fahrenbach has pointed out, is the scene, the place, of human reality in its entirety, and it can, consequently, stand for the whole of man's being.
Now the third meaning of the term expresses the most frequent sense in which Kierkegaard uses it. His most philosophically cogent discussion of the nature of human existence in the "Interlude" of the Philosophical Fragments exclusively confines the use of the term to its third meaning. Thus, the concept of existence in Kierkegaard's ontology does not primarily refer to the dialectically opposing poles of the self; i.e., to the existence-essence distinction, but to the decisive act by which the existing individual actualizes possibility in the contingent and becoming realm of being. Kierkegaard can say, then, that the single problem confronting the existing individual is to exist.
The existence-essence distinction is more commonly discussed by Kierkegaard in terms of his formal category of the self as a synthesis of dialectically opposing moments which are united by a postive third element which he identifies as spirit. I shall argue that it is this triadic self-structure in Kierkegaard's thought which is the constitutive structure, the ontological principle, of all the successes and failures of the individual's struggle to accept and to realize the challenge to exist.
However, before discussing this triadic definition of the self, it is necessary to analyze the method of thought by which Kierkegaard arrives at this definition of the self as the most cogent expression for this ontology.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Being and Existence in Kierkegaard's Pseudonymous Works by John W. Elrod. Copyright © 1975 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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