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Kierkegaard and Consciousness
By Adi Shmuëli, Naomi Handelman PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07143-5
CHAPTER 1
About Consciousness 1n General
By the term consciousness we mean what Kierkegaard called "immanence." This is a general term applying to all conscious human activity, including thoughts, feelings, desires, passions, etc. In Kierkegaard's philosophy, these distinctions lose the independent character they have in ordinary discourse and other philosophies, such as Descartes', for instance. This chapter proposes an independent analysis of the nature of consciousness. It will be seen as we proceed that the confirmation of its correctness can be found in Kierkegaard's works.
In order to describe the features of consciousness, let us consider perception as an analogue of man's conscious thought. Let us imagine a black dot on a white surface. Looking at them, one sees them spatially together and at the same time; and when one concentrates on the black dot, the white surface is relegated to the periphery of the visual field. Conversely, when attention is concentrated on the adjacent surface, it is the black dot that recedes to the periphery. Furthermore, one cannot look steadily for very long at either the dot or the surface, for one's attention alternates involuntarily between the dot and the background, each of which recedes in turn to the periphery of the visual field. This is a fact which Gestalt psychology has pointed out, and which each of us can prove to his own satisfaction. Perception is structured psychological process which provides evidence of the tension that develops between two components, one of them a particular phenomenon, and the other the background upon which the phenomenon appears. This same tension or interplay characterizes every activity of human consciousness.
According to Kierkegaard, man is "a synthesis of the infinite and the finite," or, as he says in The Concept of Dread, a synthesis of the body (that is, of sensuality) and the soul. Human consciousness has two facets which are connected in a dialectical relationship. The finite and the infinite — sensual matter and the soul — are clearly distinguishable in it, negating each other and yet relating to each other. Consciousness is something like the general background upon which a particular phenomenon looms up at any instant. The particular phenomenon is like an item of which one can be conscious; but it is also distinguishable from that context or background of which one is less particularly aware and against which the isolated phenomenon gets its locus and meaning, pertinence and scope. But the self-assertion of the particular phenomenon is also its own negation, for it is consciousness as a background, as a frame of reference, which gives the phenomenon its meaning, by making it appear as one specific phenomenon or another. However, for the phenomenon to have a specific meaning, while standing out it must allow consciousness to assert itself as background. It must not pervade the entire breadth of consciousness, or it will lose the frame of reference provided, and one would no longer be aware of a specific thing that has meaning. Now consciousness seizes a particular phenomenon through a reflective act which is both affirmative and negative, which is carried out and retracted simultaneously, and thus allows itself to be glimpsed at the same time as the background. This act operates so that the emergence of the phenomenon and its self-assertion as a particular phenomenon is at the same time its own negation, the retraction which permits the appearance of consciousness as the background against which the phenomenon acquires its meaning. A human consciousness, or immanence, is precisely this dialectical tension between the general and the particular, between the infinite and the finite.
The particular phenomenon emerges through the action of a particular and transcendent existence which attacks consciousness from the outside. But existence withdraws and hides at the same time as it gives rise to the particular phenomenon. One is never conscious of it, for the phenomenon whose emergence it causes is always the veil which hides it. When one is conscious of something, that thing as a real being has already disappeared, and the phenomenon is no more than a possibility.
Real and particular existence, or being qua being, can never be attained by reflective consciousness, as "being" is always beyond it. Consequently, the phenomenon is a double negation — the negation of consciousness as background, and the negation of transcendent existence. The first negation is not a logical contradiction, but rather a relationship between two dialectical contraries. On the other hand, the second negation is the expression of a purely logical contradiction, for the emergence of the phenomenon is the negation and the disappearance of transcendent existence. From the moment of its birth, the phenomenon proves to be the absence or negation of existence. That is why Kierkegaard is opposed to any philosophy which purports to have demonstrated the identification of being and thought. Such an identification would be a logical contradiction, for being and thought, transcendent reality and the domain of the possible, contradict each other logically. The conscious rational transition from consciousness to being qua being is a logical impossibility, i.e., a paradox. One cannot therefore identify being with thinking, and according to Kierkegaard the attempts of Descartes and Hegel in this connection only led to the making of tautologies. The being that is thought about is not the actual being, but merely its possible, in other words, a mental being. Saying that being and thinking are identical would be saying that thinking and thinking are identical. As regards the actual being, Kierkegaard's attitude can be summarized as follows: I think, therefore I do not exist. Thought cannot know that an existing thing exists, nor can it prove it. Kierkegaard writes:
Thus I always reason from existence, not toward existence, whether I move in the sphere of palpable sensible fact or in the realm of thought. I do not for example prove that a stone exists, but that some existing thing is a stone. The procedure in a court of justice does not prove that a criminal exists, but that the accused, whose existence is given, is a criminal. Whether we call existence an accessorium or the eternal prius it is never subject to demonstration.
Transcendent existence is created by God, and the particular existence of Jesus is its supreme expression. As consciousness cannot know this existence, man needs a religious "leap" with which to clear the fence of consciousness and attain being qua being. Only in faith is transcendent reality revealed; no philosophical contemplation and no metaphysics can achieve this reality. The moment of faith reveals that consciousness is a structure that really has three dimensions, namely the two immanent dimensions (the finite and the infinite) on the one hand, and on the other, the transcendent dimension (particular existence) which is the very origin of consciousness. In the religious stage of life, man becomes a spirit which is "a relation which relates itself to its own self, and in relating itself to its own self relates itself to Another." Consciousness is thus a tripartite relationship joining three dimensions.
However, this chapter has described the structure of consciousness only in its reflective state. Furthermore, consciousness is not such a circumspect and obvious human characteristic as thus far described. For actual people do not always conform to the models that we propose to use in trying to understand them. Kierkegaard has proposed that men, in fact, are usually characterized as behaving esthetically, ethically, and religiously. In these instances, consciousness does not always demonstrate the same structure and characteristics. On the contrary, here we will find actual consciousness sometimes nonreftective, sometimes not aware of itself, and sometimes even alienated from its own nature.
This is why we must turn to his esthetical stage. Here we will begin to discern a more concrete and specific form of consciousness, congruent with a certain manner and style of life. A distinction to be noted later, namely, that between the "how" and the "what" will be delicately appropriate also to the study of consciousness itself.
CHAPTER 2
The Esthetic Consciousness
During the romantic or the esthetic stage of life, man is attracted by esthetic ideas. In moments of passion, in heavy moods of melancholy, or the sorrow of nostalgia, the estheticist is caught in a state of mind that resembles a dream. He looks forward to the realization of his poetic ideas, while deep down the sadness of disappointment hovers. He experiences alternately the dizziness of ephemeral enthusiasm, and an undefined lassitude and nonchalance. The estheticist substitutes fantasy for reality. Referring to the pseudonymous author of Diary of a Seducer, Kierkegaard writes:
... His poetic temperament ... is not rich enough, or, perhaps, not poor enough, to distinguish poetry and reality from one another.
In Either/Or Judge William provides several descriptions of the estheticist. The structure of consciousness already referred to comes through clearly:
When an individual regards his self aesthetically he becomes conscious of this self as a manifold concretion very variously characterized; but in spite of the inward diversity, all of it taken together is, nevertheless, his nature, each component has just as much right to assert itself, just as much right to demand satisfaction. His soul is like a plot of ground in which all sorts of herbs are planted, all with the same claim to thrive; his self consists of this multifariousness, and he has no self which is higher than this.
The mind of the estheticist is no more than the tension between consciousness as background and a particular phenomenon, both of which seek to express themselves at the same time. This is shown even more clearly in a description given by Constantius, the pseudonymous author of Repetition, who says:
Surely there is no young man with any imagination who has not at one time been captivated by the enchantment of the theater, and desired to be himself carried away into the midst of that fictitious reality in order to see and hear himself as an alter ego, to disperse himself among the innumerable possibilities which diverge from himself, and yet in such a way that every diversity is in turn a single self. Of course it is only at a very early age such a desire can express itself. Only the imagination is awake to this dream of personality, all the other faculties are still sound asleep. In such a dream of imagination the individual is not a real figure but a shadow, or rather the real figure is invisibly present and therefore is not content with casting one shadow, but the individual has a multiplicity of shadows, all of which resemble him and for the moment have an equal claim to be accounted himself. The personality is not yet discovered, its energy announces itself only in the passion of possibility; for it is true in the life of the spirit as it is in the case of many plants that the germinal sprout comes last.
The estheticist is a multiplicity of possibilities and at the same time a single possibility. But the ego as actual existence is "invisibly present," and "not yet discovered." Transcendent existence hides behind "the shadow," behind the particular phenomenon which it projects. We therefore know only the particular phenomenon, the projected thing, and never the agent who projects. Transcendent and particular existence is the "germinal sprout" which must come last, or "the real figure" which is not the limited projection of one shadow, but rather "a multiplicity of shadows." Transcendent existence cannot be reduced to phenomena; the particular phenomenon and our entire consciousness will always be a diminution and impoverishment of its vigor. Any identification of consciousness and existence, of thinking and being, which rationalists (be they Hegel, Descartes, or Spinoza) maintain, is no more than an empty abstraction according to Kierkegaard.
As a matter of fact, the words of Constantius that have been cited are an expression of the central philosophical problem that concerned Kierkegaard and motivated his philosophical writings. In consciousness, which contends only with the ephemeral, the changing, and the relative, Kierkegaard also sought the permanent and absolute. Like Pascal, he sought the fixed "persona" beyond man's ephemeral qualities, namely the "seed in the onion" or, as he says, "the germinal sprout that comes last." In his books, he apparently wants to tell the reader that reflective consciousness will never reach this "seed," and that man's real ego can only be achieved through the religious movement that he calls "leap" or "repetition."
Each particular phenomenon is, as has been seen, a double negation of consciousness as a whole and of transcendent existence. The first negation demarcates the impossibility of realizing the totality of consciousness in a single phenomenon, and the second marks the impossibility of the transition from the phenomenon to existence. Thus, being only a negation, the particular phenomenon has no substantiality, and consciousness appears to be a constant evanescence. Man therefore experiences a painful feeling of failure, as described in Repetition. Constantius tells the story of a young man tormented by the fact that the whole of his love and his romantic dreams cannot be realized in the particular image of the young woman he loves. The young man seeks "repetition," which can lead him to transcendent existence. Constantius, too, seeks this repetition, but naturally, does not find it. No immanent activity, whether it be romantic dreaming or philosophical contemplation like that of Constantius, can ever attain transcendent existence. Let us examine the words of Constantius:
The dialectic of repetition is easy; for what is repeated has been, otherwise it could not be repeated, but precisely the fact that it has been gives to repetition the character of novelty. When the Greeks said that all knowledge is recollection they affirmed that all that is has been; when one says that life is repetition one affirms that existence which has been now becomes. When one does not possess the categories of recollection or of repetition the whole of life is resolved into a void and empty noise. Recollection is the pagan life-view, repetition is the modern life-view; repetition is the interest of metaphysics, and at the same time the interest upon which metaphysics founders; repetition is the solution contained in every ethical view, repetition is a conditio sine qua non of every dogmatic problem.
Repetition and recollection are the same movement, only in opposite directions; for what is recollected has been, is repeated backwards, whereas repetition properly so called is recollected forwards.
Kierkegaard deals with repetition by comparing it to the Platonic theory of recollection. Repetition should lead us to the ontological basis of the phenomena, just as recollection purports to do. It is a question then of being qua being, since Constantius states explicitly: "If God himself had not willed repetition, the world would never have come into existence."
Nevertheless, Constantius does not believe, nor does Kierkegaard, that being can be attained by recollection:
Hope is a charming maiden but slips through the fingers, recollection is a beautiful old woman but of no use at the instant, repetition is a beloved wife of whom one never tires. ... It requires youth to hope, and youth to recollect, but it requires courage to will repetition.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kierkegaard and Consciousness by Adi Shmuëli, Naomi Handelman. Copyright © 1971 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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