This highly original book concentrates on the claim that Kierkegaard focuses in part on ontological questions and on issues pertaining to the nature of being as a whole. Alison Assiter asserts that Being, for Kierkegaard, following Schelling, can be read in terms of conceptions of birthing—the capacity to give birth as well as the notion of a birthing body. She goes on to argue that the story offered by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety about the origin of freedom connects with a birthing body, and that Kierkegaard offers a speculative hypothesis, in terms of metaphors of birthing, about the nature of Being.
This highly original book concentrates on the claim that Kierkegaard focuses in part on ontological questions and on issues pertaining to the nature of being as a whole. Alison Assiter asserts that Being, for Kierkegaard, following Schelling, can be read in terms of conceptions of birthing—the capacity to give birth as well as the notion of a birthing body. She goes on to argue that the story offered by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety about the origin of freedom connects with a birthing body, and that Kierkegaard offers a speculative hypothesis, in terms of metaphors of birthing, about the nature of Being.
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This highly original book concentrates on the claim that Kierkegaard focuses in part on ontological questions and on issues pertaining to the nature of being as a whole. Alison Assiter asserts that Being, for Kierkegaard, following Schelling, can be read in terms of conceptions of birthing—the capacity to give birth as well as the notion of a birthing body. She goes on to argue that the story offered by Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety about the origin of freedom connects with a birthing body, and that Kierkegaard offers a speculative hypothesis, in terms of metaphors of birthing, about the nature of Being.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781783483266 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 04/29/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 224 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Kierkegaard, Eve, and Metaphors of Birth
By Alison Assiter
Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd.
Copyright © 2015 Alison AssiterAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-78348-326-6
CHAPTER 1
Contingent and Chaotic Reality
This book sets out, as noted in the introduction, partially to defend the bold claim that there is evidence in Søren Kierkegaard's corpus for the view that the Absolute, or the whole of Being, might be conceptualized in terms, following Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, both of a body that can birth and, using the language of Schelling, of a force that 'longs' to give birth to itself. Schelling notes, 'The first beginning for the creation is the yearning of the One to give birth to itself or the will of the ground'. These conceptions of birthing are natural — birth is a natural process. But they are also metaphors of activity, of a process that is not dead and static.
In addition to being metaphors of activity, the claims are metaphysical; they concern the whole of reality. I will suggest that they are also statements about nature. Nature, I will suggest, constitutes the backdrop against which any claim to know anything, expressed by a knowing subject, is made. Both Schelling and Kierkegaard challenge any assumption that some 'I' can gain direct access to a knowable reality either through pure intuition or through some form of direct sensory experience, or indeed through some combination of these two. In Philosophical Fragments, Kierkegaard, through Climacus, represents doubt as inherent in thought. There is no foundation to thought in the sense Descartes sought; there will always be something that cannot be captured by a thinking or a reasoning self. This something Schelling conceives of as nature, but nature as active and living and as itself grounded in what he calls an 'unprethinkable' process that cannot be comprehended in the terms that reason normally deploys. This process he depicts in terms of conceptions of birth. I will suggest, in this book, that Kierkegaard adopts something from Schelling's view of nature and that he conceives of the whole of nature in terms of a birthing body and, in turn, the ground of this nature in terms of metaphors of processes of birth. These claims are clearly speculative hypotheses. I will attempt, in the course of the book, to give reasons why it is plausible to adopt them.
I would like, in the first couple of chapters, however, to examine an alternative perspective that has been recently attributed to Kierkegaard by those who have an interest in Kierkegaard's place in the German Idealist tradition, and in the topic of the nature of ultimate Being. These recent thinkers, it is important to note, have revived a concern with metaphysics, following a relative decline in interest in this domain in much philosophy in both the analytical and the continental traditions. I would like to read at least some of Kierkegaard's brilliant and enigmatic works, alongside the interpretations of these recent thinkers, as providing evidence that he engaged in deeply metaphysical questions.
I consider these recent engagements because, like mine, their views represent something of a change in interpretation of Kierkegaard, who has, until recently, been seen as a thinker who is concerned primarily with human existence in relation to a transcendent God. Until the recent focus of interest, Kierkegaard has been read, to reiterate, as focusing on existential 'actuality' and on an ethical and religious reaction against the German Idealist metaphysical tradition. He has been seen by some, then, as the 'father' of the existential tradition and by others as not a philosopher at all. Specifically, as noted in the introduction, his work has been seen to stand against the philosophical idealism of his predecessors. As Reidar Thomte has put it, in the introduction to CA, Kierkegaard 'stands in direct opposition to the philosophical idealism of his day'. The recent interpreters of Kierkegaard, however, stand in opposition to Thomte's reading.
My own intention is not to negate some of the earlier readings, many of which are very important and clearly express something of Kierkegaard's enigmatic and brilliant insights. The new readings, including my own, it is to be hoped, will add to these a dimension of Kierkegaard's thought that may have been neglected in the work of some previous commentators.
In this opening chapter, I will examine a specific component of a view that has been attributed recently to Kierkegaard. This perspective stems in part from a challenge to the ontology that characterizes the perspective of a substantial number of philosophers in the Western tradition, although by no means all, which is that reality is made up of substances with properties. I also would like to challenge this particular metaphysical perspective and to suggest that Kierkegaard, although he does have a metaphysical outlook, does not uphold this one. Perhaps the clearest statement of the position that reality is made up of substances with properties is that of Aristotle, although it is also important to note that in De Anima, as well as in Book Theta of the Metaphysics, he is concerned with movement — kinesis — and life. In Book Theta of the Metaphysics, he famously discusses movement, or kinesis, and he distinguishes between potentiality, dynamis, and 'actuality', energeia. However, the perspective for which he is widely known is that 'being qua being' is the study of 'substance'. He writes: 'The question which, both now and of old, has always been raised, and always been the subject of doubt, viz. what being is, is just the question what is substance?' Aristotelian metaphysics, his view of being (ousia), followed from his research in the natural sciences (physica). Among the categories he outlines in his work on that subject, the primary one is 'substance'. 'Substances', as he writes in his Metaphysics, are independent things; the contents of other categories depend upon these. Substance is, for him, both the ultimate substratum of reality and, in the form of both particular and general things, the core component of his ontology. The essence of a thing is its form, and the latter is that which persists through change. The 'essence', then, does not itself come into being. Unlike Plato, however, he does not see this 'form' as separable from matter. He is said to have inaugurated the view that, for many philosophers in the tradition, constitutes metaphysical common sense.
The reading of Kierkegaard proposed by the metaphysicians mentioned in the introduction to this work challenges this Aristotelian commonplace. Like Aristotle, but arriving at very different conclusions, these metaphysicians partially derive their perspective from their contemporary science at the same time that they question an over-reliance on science. A further important component of their views, however, is that they uphold a challenge, first put forward in the post-Kantian German Idealist tradition, to the Kantian phenomenal/noumenal distinction. There is additionally, also within this tradition, as noted in the introduction, a strong regard for Immanuel Kant's proof that it is not possible to prove God's existence, and therefore that the notion of a knowable Absolute grounding meaning in the world is no longer open to us. Rather than deriving the conclusion adopted by some philosophers, however, that we cannot any longer be concerned with metaphysical questions at all, some of them focus, in Slavoj Zizek's words, on 'the primacy of Becoming in human life'. They are concerned with the impossibility, for us limited beings, of 'assuming the point of view of finality'. Interestingly, both those who deny that we can any longer concern ourselves with ultimate reality at all and the recent metaphysicians claim Kierkegaard as their own.
The particular focus, broadly, on the priority of 'Becoming', or of process, over static Being, seems to me to be tremendously important. Indeed, two recent prominent commentators on Kierkegaard's work, both of whom deny that he is a philosopher, emphasize the importance of movement or process in Kierkegaard's writings. As George Pattison has put it, 'Now Kierkegaard too, as we will see, will also seize on temporality as a decisive and characteristic dimension of human existence and provide a strategy whereby to make temporality meaningful'.
However, there are two further aspects of the thought of some of these recent interpreters of Kierkegaard with which I would like to take issue. I will argue that some of the recent commentators have gone too far in the following respects: one is their claim that Being is radically contingent and the other is the further assumption, namely that it is chaotic at its core.
Partial inspiration for the view held by recent philosophers that reality at its heart is contingent can be found in Martin Heidegger. In Being and Time and in 'The Origin of a Work of Art' he writes that metaphysicians ask questions about the ground of the world that we experience. This, in turn, presupposes probing the totality of beings, investigating the whole that underlies the world we experience. Metaphysics then appears to assume a God's-eye view of the whole. Humans pretend to become Gods, in order to survey the whole. But this is impossible for perspectival, temporal, and limited beings like us. So the meaning of being becomes an abyss — something lacking. A human perspective on the world is precisely this — a perspective, a finite field of vision bounded by a horizon. Beyond the limits of a person's birth and death is non-being or nothingness, a void.
A related perspective is evident in Jean-Paul Sartre's view that the world and our existence are without reason and therefore in some sense absurd and also, famously, in Friedrich Nietzsche's insistence, in The Birth of Tragedy, that there is no meaning to anything.
CONTINGENT REALITY
A significant recent philosopher of contingency, one who has referred in some detail to Kierkegaard for inspiration, is Slavoj Zizek. Referring to Kierkegaard, he suggests that '"God" is the name for the Absolute Other against which we can measure the thorough contingency of reality — as such it cannot be conceived as any kind of Substance, as the supreme thing'. As Michael Burns puts it, '[Zizek's] interpretation allows us to read Kierkegaard's conception of God in a properly ontological light as signifying the primacy of contingency in any attempt to articulate a picture of metaphysical totality'. Zizek claims further, 'What Kierkegaardian "infinite resignation" confronts us with is pure Meaning ... yet unconditional meaning can occur (and has to appear) only as nonsense. The content of pure Meaning can only be negative: the Void, the absence of Meaning'.
Zizek, then, importantly, it seems to me, suggests that Kierkegaard sees ultimate reality as comprising processes as opposed to things. Moreover, Kierkegaard's conception of movement, he suggests, differs from that of Aristotle. As Zizek puts it, 'This is why German Idealism explodes the co-ordinates of the standard Aristotelian ontology which is structured around the vector from possibility to actuality. In contrast to the idea that every possibility strives fully to actualise itself, we should conceive of progress as a move of restoring the dimension of potentiality in mere actuality, of unearthing at the very heart of actuality, a secret striving toward potentiality'. This may indeed be one important component of Kierkegaard's view of process. On the other hand, as Claire Carlisle has pointed out, Kierkegaard began, in 1844, to study Trendelburg, who uses Aristotelian modal categories to criticize G. W. F. Hegel. Whichever view is right, the suggestion that ontology involves processes rather than static beings seems to be important both as a thesis about Kierkegaard and also as a claim in its own right.
In his recent magnum opus, The Parallax View, Slavoj Zizek suggests that Kierkegaard continues tropes articulated in the German Idealist tradition but also deepens and radicalizes some of them. By 'parallax' he means the view that there is an 'insurmountable gap between two closely linked perspectives between which no neutral common ground is possible'. One key articulation, for Zizek, of this 'parallax' is Kant's transcendental illusion. Kant's transcendental illusion — the illusion of being able to use apparently common language to discuss phenomena that are mutually untranslatable — is an exemplification of the notion. An illustration of this would be the conception of the 'world as a whole', which is, for Kant, both phenomenal and noumenal. In the gap, for Zizek's Kant, between phenomena and noumena is the 'ultimate parallax', the transcendental self, which itself is neither phenomenal nor noumenal. While it was Kant, writes Zizek, who 'laid the foundations', it was Kierkegaard who noticed that the most 'radical authentic core of being-human is perceived as a concrete practico-ethical engagement and/or choice which precedes and grounds every "theory", every theoretical account of itself, and is, in this radical sense, contingent'.
Kant, others recognize, argued that theoretical reason presupposes practical reason. But it is Kierkegaard, according to Zizek, who recognizes both the depth of the challenge presented by these Kantian questions and also the existential despair they might lead to, concerning the point and purpose of one's life. It is the very connection between these notions that, for Zizek's Kierkegaard, rather than indicating a break with the German Idealist tradition, in fact suggests Kierkegaard's continuity with that tradition. One reason for this is that Hegel, he argues, radicalizes Kant. Zizek reads Hegel as moving from the Kantian view that there is no access to the Absolute, to the claim that the Absolute itself is 'negativity'. Hegel, according to this reading articulated by Zizek, moves on from Kant by introducing a gap into the very texture of reality. In this reading, then, while Kant posits an unknowable Absolute — the noumenal — which may be complete, Hegel radicalizes Being itself by suggesting a gap in this Absolute. The contradictions Kant articulates in the Antinomies, in CPR, do not merely concern our inability to know the whole; rather, they indicate something about the whole itself.
Zizek, then, argues that there is a fissure in the very heart of Being, and he attributes such a view to Hegel. I do not propose to investigate the accuracy of his view of Hegel, but I would like to engage with his view of Kierkegaard's work, and his claim, which he attributes to Kierkegaard, that reality is ultimately contingent.
ZIZEK ON KIERKEGAARD
Zizek notes that Kierkegaard, in Concluding Unscientific Postscript, distinguishes 'objective' from 'subjective' thought. The former, which designates a certain type of 'Hegelian' thinking, 'translates everything into results'. 'Subjective thought', by contrast, 'puts everything into process and omits results'. Hegel, Kierkegaard writes in CUP, does not understand history from the point of view of becoming, but rather views it as a 'finality that excludes all becoming'. Zizek claims both that for Kierkegaard, only subjective experience is 'in becoming' and also that Hegel might be construed as engaging in the exact opposite of what Kierkegaard represents him as doing. Zizek suggests that Hegel can be read as noting the contingent process that generated existing necessity. Zizek accepts that such a reading of Hegel may be counterintuitive, but he draws the distinction between viewing history retroactively, from the point of view of finality, and looking at it from the existential position of active engagement with it, where we perceive it as full of possibilities and ourselves as free to engage with it.
He describes this as a contrast between the position of the idealist and that of the materialist. For the former, the situation appears open from the perspective of our own engagement with it and closed from the point of view of finality. For the latter, however, 'openness' goes all the way down; it is 'the All itself which is non-All, inconsistent, marked by an irreducible contingency'. Kierkegaard's theology 'represents the extreme point of idealism: he admits the radical open-ness and contingency of the entire field of reality, which is why the closed Whole can appear only as a radical Beyond, in the guise of a totally transcendent God'. But Kierkegaard is also a materialist, since the above characterization of this position is precisely his view. Kierkegaard's God is not a knowable Absolute. Instead, we have to make a leap of faith, which, to an external observer, can only look like madness. Humans are required, according to Zizek's Kierkegaard, to make the ultimate sacrifice, to dedicate their whole lives to God. There is no guarantee that their sacrifices will be rewarded and they might well be carried out for nothing. Zizek uses Kierkegaard's trope of 'infinite resignation' to characterize this gesture of the ultimate sacrifice that, he suggests, might be a purely empty gesture.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Kierkegaard, Eve, and Metaphors of Birth by Alison Assiter. Copyright © 2015 Alison Assiter. Excerpted by permission of Rowman & Littlefield International, Ltd..
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