The Passion of Possibility: Studies on Kierkegaard's Post-metaphysical Theology 9783111023304, 9783111025544, 9783111025759, 2022949060

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Ingolf U. Dalferth The Passion of Possibility

Kierkegaard Studies

Edited on behalf of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre by Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge in cooperation with Peter Šajda

Monograph Series 48 Edited by Heiko Schulz

Ingolf U. Dalferth

The Passion of Possibility Studies on Kierkegaard‘s Post-metaphysical Theology

ISBN 978-3-11-102330-4 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-102554-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-102575-9 ISSN 1434-2952 Library of Congress Control Number: 2022949060 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2023 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Preface If I were to request an inscription on my grave, I request none other than that single individual. ¹ If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.²

The two quotations express two central convictions of Kierkegaard that anchor his whole thought in concrete life. For him, the most important thing in life is to become a single individual–an individual who fully embraces the thisness of his existence and bases his identity on nothing other than the undeserved gift of being here. This, Kierkegaard is convinced, is impossible without the passion of possibility–a passion that does not despair in the face of the sufferings and temptations of real life, the limitations of an imperfect reality and the constraints and necessities that we have to put up with because we cannot change them. Instead, it sees everywhere possibilities that arise in life unexpectedly and surprisingly, making it an adventure that cannot be calculated or channeled through the past, but for which every present becomes the starting point of a new future. It is a surprising fact to be here, although this might not have been the case, and to be able to live, because there are always chances and possibilities that are played into one’s life and allow one to shape one’s own life story, although this might not be the case either. We are all born not as selves or subjects but as human beings, one among many, members of families, groups, societies, nations, states, one case among many similar ones. We have complex identities because we belong to many different layers, structures, and groupings of our biological, social, and cultural life. But all this makes us only members of a herd, a mass, a crowd, and not unique individuals. We are a multitude of generalities, but that alone does not make us a true self. However, one never is a unique individual and a true self but can only become one. As human beings we are born, but individual selves we must become. Humanity cannot be denied to any human being. Being a self or subject can. We must first become responsible subjects and distinctive individuals. And we will only become this in a permanent process of decentering, of transcending what we are at any given time and of orienting ourselves towards what is possible

 SKS 16, 98 / PV, 118 f; cf. SKS 20, 280, NB3:77 / KJN 4, 280.  SKS 2, 50 / EO1, 41. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-001

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for us here and now. We must move from being to ought, from the present to the future, from actuality to possibility. We must not be content with what we are but strive for what we can and should be. Unique individuals exist only in becoming, they are fragile, and that is their strength. They are not grounded by their own activities, but in an extra se, the flip side of which is a deep passivity that underlies all their activity and allows them to continually leave themselves and move beyond their respective actualities toward the new and the possible. Not many achieve this goal. And not all who do have a guarantee that they will not lose the goal again. To become a single individual and true self, one must not be content with being a member of a group or a case among others, but rather, beyond all comparative views with others, must relate to and orient oneself to the one without whom no other could be: the actuality of the possible, to which all that is possible and real owes itself and which Christians-and not merely Christians-call ‘God’. Only those who direct their identity in the orientation to this origin, primordial ground and unground, who makes being come out of nothing, good out of evil and life out of death, can become unmistakable, unique, single individuals. Without a passion for the possible and the inalienable reality to which everything possible owes itself, there is no truly single individual. No one can say ’I am’ without thereby showing that God is. There is no I (self) without another I (you, he, she, they) from which it differs, and there can be no I nor anything else without God, who differs from everything by giving it the time and the space, the power, and the energy to live as his creation. In this book I have used and revised material from the following publications: “Self-Alienation: Self, Finitude and Estrangement,” in Hermeneutics and Negativism. Existential Ambiguities of Self-Understanding, ed. by Claudia Welz and René Rosfort, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018, pp. 127– 144 (part I, chap. V); “Situated Selves in ‘Webs of Interlocution:’ What Can We Learn from Grammar?” in Self or No-Self? The Debate about Selflessness and the Sense of Self, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Trevor W. Kimball, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2017, pp. 9 – 36 (part I, chaps. II and IV); “Self-Alienation: Self, Finitude and Estrangement,” in Hermeneutics and Negativism. Existential Ambiguities of Self-Understanding, ed. by Claudia Welz and René Rosfort, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2018, pp. 127– 144 (part I, chap. V); “In God We Trust: Trust, Mistrust and Distrust as Modes of Orientation,” in Trust, Sociality, Selfhood, ed. by Arne Grøn and Claudia Welz, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2010, pp. 135 – 152 (part II, chap. II); “Selfless Passion: Kierkegaard on True Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2013, pp. 159 – 179 (part II, chap. IV); “Becoming a Christian according to the Postscript. Kierkegaard’s Christian Hermeneutics of Existence,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2005, pp. 242– 281 (part III, chap. I); “ ’Die Sache ist viel entsetzlicher:’ Religiosität bei Kierkegaard und Schleiermacher,” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard. Subjektivität und

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Wahrheit/Subjectivity and Truth, Akten des Schleiermacher-Kierkegaard-Kongresses in Kopenhagen, Oktober 2003, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Richard Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen, Claus-Dieter Osthöver, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2006, pp. 217– 264 (part III, chap. II); “‘Der Christ muß alles anders verstehen als der Nicht-Christ.’ Kierkegaards Ethik des Unterscheidens. Eine Erinnerung,” in Artibus ingenibus. Beiträge zu Theologie, Philosophie, Jurisprudenz und Ökonomik, ed. by Georg Siebeck, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2001, pp. 1– 33 (part III, chap. III). I am grateful to the publishers for allowing me to use and revise this material. I would like to thank the editors (Heiko Schulz, Jon Stewart and Karl Verstrynge) for including this volume in the Kierkegaard Studies Monograph Series, Dr. Roman Winter and Carl Henrich for additional editorial work, and Dr. Hugh O. Less for reading the proofs. The book was written in connection with my study The Priority of the Possible. ³ It should be read in conjunction with the considerations developed there. Taken together, the two books make clear why I think the category of possibility should be central to the exploration of the grandeur and perils, the beauty and the abyss of human existence. Kierkegaard was right when he wrote: “If I were to wish for something, I would wish not for wealth or power but for the passion of possibility, for the eye, eternally young, eternally ardent, that sees possibility everywhere. Pleasure disappoints; possibility does not.” For every contingent reality passes away, but possibility remains, because all possibility owes itself to God, the actuality of the possible that never perishes. Ingolf U. Dalferth

January 2021

 The Priority of the Possible. Outlines of a Contemplative Philosophy of Orientation, Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2021.

Contents Abbreviations

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Part I: The sense of self  From the anthropological to the existential turn 3 . Pope and Coleridge . Kant and Kierkegaard 4

3

 A synthesis of the finite and the infinite 9 . The ‘self’ as an operator 9 . The ‘self’ as a noun 9 12 . The ‘self’ as a verb and an adverb . The self as Dasein, Sosein, and Wahrsein 12 . The self as the relating of a relation 14 . Relations and distinctions 17 19 . The self as activity and mode of relating  The single individual 22 22 . The problem . The argument 23 . Particularity, individuality, and singularity 27 . The twofold inwardness of the self and its existential dilemma  Situated selves in “webs of interlocution” 33 . Self-interpreting animals 33 . Understanding and interpretation 34 . Changing the world by interpreting it 35 . Interpretation and self-interpretation 36 . Selves and situations 37 . Shared situations 37 . Re-presenting interpretations 38 . Self-interpretations 40 . A sense of self 42 44 . A perennial problem . The ‘self’ as an orienting device 45

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 Self, finitude and estrangement 49 49 . Selves . Becoming a self 52 . Self-alienation as a process and a state 53 . “There is no right life in the wrong one” 54 56 . Alienation under a description . The role of descriptions in accounts of self-alienation 59 . The need to be specific . Disambiguating finitude 60 . The grammar of ‘finitude’ 63 64 . Human finitude as Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein

Part II: Selfless passion  Anxiety and the possibility of being able 71 . Existence . Existence communication 73 . The concept of anxiety 75 . The spirit 78 80 . Sin cannot be explained . The actuality of sin 81 . The moment 83 85 . Faith . The gift of renouncing anxiety 87

71

 Trust and trust in God 89 . The ubiquity of trust 89 . Varieties of trust 91 . Trust and hope 92 . Reciprocity and risk 93 . Trusting persons and trusting organizations . The principle of charity 95 . The principle of distrust 96 . The principle of trust 98 98 . Trust and dignity . The gift of trustworthiness 100 . Trust in God 100 . God as middle term 102

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 Hope for the possibility of the good 105 105 . The hope of love . Love as respect 105 . The hope of Christianity is eternity 110 . Hope as work of love 112 116 . Counting on the possibility of the good . From verb to adverb 118 120 . Living hopefully  True love 122 122 . An orienting distinction . How to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love . True love in Kierkegaard 128 133 . Love as a relation . God as middle term 136 . Mode and modality 137

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Part III: The true self  Becoming a Christian 143 . What is it to become a Christian? 144 . What is it to be a Christian? 149 . The aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes of existing . From religiousness A to religiousness B 159 . Kierkegaard’s method 163 . The stages in the light of Kierkegaard’s method 168 . Negativity and despair 174  Becoming a Christian in Christendom 181 . Kierkegaard’s basic problem 181 . True Christians 186 . Being or becoming 187 . There are Christians—are there? 193 . Being a Christian: Schleiermacher’s analysis . Becoming a Christian: Kierkegaard’s analysis . Becoming a subject 202 . Becoming a true subject 204 . Subjectivity as truth 206 . Absolute decision 209

196 200

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. . .

Contents

The paradox 213 Absolute presence and inwardness The absolute paradox 218

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 Kierkegaard’s ethics of distinction 225 226 . Christians are human beings too . Kierkegaard’s ethical phenomenology 228 231 . To live in a Christian way . Freedom through love 233 . Philosophical and theological anthropology 236 237 . Kierkegaard’s guiding ethical distinction . Self-distinction and self-decision 239 . Plural descriptions of ethical life situations 241 242 . Ethics without foundation . The duty to love 243 . ‘As you do me, so I do you’ 245 246 . The recognizability of Christian life . Change of horizon and new description 248 . The neighbor 249 . Orientation to the relationship with God 251 253 . The humane exercise of freedom Bibliography

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Internet-links

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Index of names Index of subjects

263 266

Abbreviations 1 Kierkegaard KJN

Pap.

SKS

KW

AN

CA CD CUP CUP EO EO FT JC JFY M PC PF

Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vols.  – , ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Alastair Hannay, David Kangas, Bruce H. Kirmmse, George Pattison, Vanessa Rumble, and K. Brian Sö derquist, Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press  ff. Søren Kierkegaards Papirer, vols. I to XI–, ed. by Peter Andreas Heiberg, Victor Kuhr and Einer Torsting, Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag  – ; second, expanded ed., vols. I to XI–, by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XII to XIII supplementary volumes, ed. by Niels Thulstrup, vols. XIV to XVI index by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Copenhagen: Gyldendal  – . Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, vols.  – , K–K, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Joakim Garff, Jette Knudsen, Johnny Kondrup, Alastair McKinnon and Finn Hauberg Mortensen, Copenhagen: Gads Forlag  – . Kierkegaard’s Writings, trans. by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, vols. I–XXVI, Princeton: Princeton University Press  – . Armed Neutrality, KW XXII.

The Concept of Anxiety, trans. by Reidar Thomte in collaboration with Albert B. Anderson, KW VIII. Christian Discourses, KW XVII. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW XII,. Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KWXII,. Either/Or, Part I, KW III. Either/Or, Part II, KW IV. Fear and Trembling, KW VI. Johannes Climacus, or De omnibus dubitandum est, KW VII. Judge for Yourselves, KW XXI. The Moment and Late Writings, KW XXIII Practice in Christianity, KW XX. Philosophical Fragments, KW VII.

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-002

Quoted / referred to by KJN plus vol.– and page-no.: KJN , .

Quoted / referred to by Pap. plus entry-no. (occasionally page-nos. are added): Pap. IV B ; Pap. VII B , p. .

Quoted / referred to either by SKS plus page-no. (SKS , ) or SKS plus page- and entry-no. (SKS , , AA:).

Here and hereafter: quoted / referred to by respective abbreviation plus page-no.: AN, ; CUP,  etc.

XIV

PV

SUD UD WL

Abbreviations

The Point of View including On My Work as an Author and The Point of View for My Work as an Author, KW XXII. The Sickness unto Death, KW XIX. Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, KW XV. Works of Love, KW XVI.

2 Kant AA

KrV A / B

Gesammelte Schriften, vols. I–XXII, ed. by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. XXIII ed. by Deutsche Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin, vol. XXIV ed by. Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen, Berlin  ff. Kritik der reinen Vernunft  (A), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. IV / Kritik der reinen Vernunft  (B), in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. by Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. III.

Quoted / referred to by AA plus vol.– and page-no.: AA XII, .

Quoted / referred to by KrV A / B plus page-no.: KrV A  / B .

3 Schleiermacher KGA

Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed. by Hans-Joachim Birkner and Hermann Fischer, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter  ff.

Quoted / referred to by KGA plus vol.– and page-no.: KGA III, .

Part I: The sense of self

1 From the anthropological to the existential turn 1.1 Pope and Coleridge Between the early 18th and early 19th centuries, two significant reorientations occurred in the philosophical debate about the human being: the turn from theology to anthropology and the turn from anthropology to existence. While the first emerged as an explicit counter to a theological treatment of the question of man (Pope and Kant), the second emphatically stressed the close connection between the question of human existence and the question of God (Coleridge and Kierkegaard). This provided the frame of reference for a philosophical and theological debate that continues to this day, despite the great advances in the empirical study of human life over the past two centuries. In his 1733 – 34 Essay on Man, Alexander Pope summed up the scientific awakening and the new philosophical orientation of the Age of Enlightenment in the famous lines: “Know then thy-self, presume not God to scan; The proper study of mankind is Man.”¹ A hundred years later, Coleridge commented on this project in his poem Self-Knowledge (1832): Γνῶθι σεαυτόν!–and is this the prime And heaven-sprung adage of the olden time!– Say, canst thou make thyself?–Learn first that trade;– Haply thou mayst know what thyself had made. What hast thou, Man, that thou dar’st call thine own?– What is there in thee, Man, that can be known?– Dark fluxion, all unfixable by thought, A phantom dim of past and future wrought, Vain sister of the worm,–life, death, soul, clod– Ignore thyself, and strive to know thy God!²

It is not by studying ourselves that we find out who and what we are, but only by contemplating ourselves from the perspective of the one without whom none of us would exist. We remain caught in the web of our own delusions and fantasies  Alexander Pope, An Essay On Man: Being the First Book of Ethic Epistles. To Henry St. John, L. Bolingbroke, London: John Wright 1734, Epistle II, 1– 2 (https://www.eighteenthcenturypoetry.org/works/o3676-w0010.shtml) (2/25/2022).  Samuel T. Coleridge, Poems, ed. by John Beer, London and New York: Everyman Library 1974, p. 337. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-003

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if we do not step back from ourselves and learn to look at ourselves from another place–and if possible, not from just any other place, because then everyone comes into view differently, but from the place that brings everyone into view in the same way: the place of the Creator. Calvin had already emphasized this in the 16th century by closely linking “the knowledge of God and of ourselves” in such a way that without knowing God you cannot know yourself: “it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself.”³ True self-knowledge consists in knowing ourselves as God knows us. Without this decentering we remain locked in our human self-centeredness and always see ourselves only as we want to see ourselves and not as we really are. Only a decentered view of ourselves shows us who we truly are. Without knowing God, and how God knows us, we will never know ourselves.

1.2 Kant and Kierkegaard Few have followed this maxim as resolutely and consistently as Kierkegaard. In contrast to Kant, who more than anyone else brought Pope’s concerns to bear philosophically, Kierkegaard emphasized the aporias of all attempts to understand human beings only in terms of themselves and their groping in the dark attempts to understand themselves. Kant implemented Pope’s maxim by redesigning all philosophy as anthropology. The whole field of philosophy in the cosmopolitan sense can, in his opinion, be summarized in the following four questions: “1. What can I know? 2. What ought I to do? 3. What may I hope? 4. What is the human being? Metaphysics answers the first question, morals the second, religion the third, and anthropology the fourth. Fundamentally, however, we could reckon all of this to anthropology, because the first three questions refer to the last one.”⁴

What does this “refer” mean? Kant clearly thinks that the fourth question includes the other three in some sense. They are the sub-questions that must be answered to answer the fourth question. But this does not yet capture the core

 Jean Calvin, The Institutes, book 1, chap. 1, sec. 1– 2 (https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/institutes/institutes.iii.ii.html) (2/25/2022).  Kant’s logic lectures, as compiled by his student Jäsche in 1800, AA IX, 25. Cf. Robert B. Louden, Kant’s Human Being. Essays on his Theory of Human Nature, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011; Patrick R. Frierson, Kant’s Questions: What is the Human Being? New York: Routledge 2013.

1.2 Kant and Kierkegaard

5

of his view. If we understand him only in this way, two important aspects are neglected: The grammatical change from modal questions (can, ought, may) to an indicative question (is), and the rhetorical change from first-person language in the first three questions to third-person language in the last question. For Kant it was clear: If one wants to understand what human beings are, as Alexander Pope had urged as the task of enlightened knowledge and research, then it is not enough to plunge into empiricism, to collect data, to formulate hypotheses, and to design theories. If the understanding of human beings is to have practical relevance for the orientation of life, then one must also consider what human beings are not, do not know, cannot, should not, may not do. Not only their capabilities, but also their inabilities must then be explored. For Kant, therefore, research into the possibilities and limits of being human in philosophy–in metaphysics, morality, and religion–has its place alongside research into the reality of human beings in the natural and human sciences. Scientific research aims at knowledge about human beings (human beings are the object of this knowledge), philosophical reflection aims at existential insights that every human being can make in his or her place (human beings are the subjects of these insights). Kant therefore interprets the indicative question in the third person ‘What is the human being?’ by three modal questions in the first person, which thematize all the limits that every thinking human being encounters: ‘What can I know? What shall I do? What may I hope?’ All three questions assume that human beings, as beings capable of self-determination, strive for knowledge, want to act, and in fact hope. But precisely because we always already do this in one way or another, Kant asks about the conditions of possibility, the right, and the limits of our knowing, acting, and hoping. He wants to uncover where we transgress our limits when we want to know, do, or hope something that we cannot know, cannot do, cannot hope. These transgressions are sources of inhumanity. From them spring metaphysical illusions and anti-scientific know-it-all attitudes, moral arrogance and relativistic irresponsibility, religious fanaticism, and ideological traditionalism. They must be avoided if people are to live together in a humane way. Therefore, Kant unfolds not an epistemology, but a critical metaphysics of the knowable in demarcation from the unknowable, not a philosophical morality, but a critical metaphysics of the ought in demarcation of moral from immoral willing and doing, and not a theory of God, but a critical metaphysics of reasonable religious practice in distinction from unreasonable religious enthusiasm, traditionalism, and fanaticism. To be able to answer the fourth question, human beings must be understood not only as knowers and actors, but also as hopers. We need knowledge to be able to act, and we cannot act without hoping. Just as acting is not a form of

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knowledge, so hoping is not a deficient form of human activity according to the motto: Where we can no longer act, we can only hope. On the contrary, hoping is the opening of ourselves to the chance, the appropriation, the gift of the good. A person who hopes doesn’t do anything, but relies on good things happening to him, on being the beneficiary of good things. He is not a doer, but a receiver. When we act, we want to realize something that is not already real (otherwise we would not need to do it), but which is also not impossible for us (otherwise we could not do it), and which should be real because it is good for us (otherwise we would not want to do it). But not everything that is possible is possible for us, not everything that is possible for us is always possible, and not everything that is good for us under one description is so under another. This is a source of permanent ethical conflict. What is good for a scientific career is bad for a family. What would be good for pandemic containment becomes an unbearable burden for working parents with three young children. And much of what is possible and desirable for us is not only not real here and now but will never be real for us. That is why we must clarify again and again who and what we are and what we want to be, what we can and what we cannot do, what is good for us under which description, what we want to privilege, what we can and must rely on, and what we can and must hope for or not hope for. The third question, therefore, is related to the first, which is about the actual, insofar as it is directed to possibility; and it is related to the second question, which is about the good, insofar as it is directed to the possibility of the good. The three modal questions thus go from the actual to the possible and from the good to the possibility of the good. Only by following this movement can the question ‘What is the human being?’ be answered. But what happens to the I that is so central to the first three questions when they are considered as sub-questions of the question about the human being? There are at least two answers one must take into account. The first is that the change from first to third person language in the fourth question indicates that the ‘I’ in the first three questions is not Kant’s private voice, but a placeholder for everyone. All human beings naturally desire to know, Aristotle wrote at the beginning of the Metaphysics. ⁵ All human beings want to make sure that they really know something true, really want something good, really hope for something reasonable and don’t get lost in delusions, is Kant’s restatement of this tradition. Not only Kant is speaking here, but he speaks for every human being. But there is another aspect to the grammatical change. No doubt, knowing, acting, and hoping are essential activities of human life. We all know, act and

 Aristotle, Metaphysics 980a21: πάντες ἄνθρωποι τοῦ εἰδέναι ὀρέγονται φύσει.

1.2 Kant and Kierkegaard

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hope, and we are all well advised to check if we are justified in what we think we know, wish to do, and would like to hope. But what is the I (or we) to which all these activities are attributed? In the anthropological question “What is the human being?” the ‘I’ of the three sub-questions has disappeared and seems to be replaced by ‘the human being’. But while the rhetorical change from first to third person language does not affect the truth value of a statement (‘I am hungry,’ when used by me, can be replaced salva veritate by ‘Dalferth is hungry’), it obscures an important difference between using names and indexicals. The use of indexicals anchors statements in concrete situations, the use of names frees statements from being tied to particular situations. And as with statements, so with questions. I can answer the question whether the sun shines only if I relate it to a particular place and time, that is, understand it to mean ‘Is the sun shining here and now?’ If I ignore this, I can still discuss the meaning of the question, but I cannot answer it. The suppression of the anchoring power of the indexical ‘I’ in the fourth question thus obscures a central aspect of Kant’s philosophical project: it is not about developing a viable concept of humanity. If the question “What is the human being?” raised only a conceptual question, it could not be the integral of the other three questions. For these do not pose conceptual questions but raise substantive normative problems: When can we rightly claim to know something; or really to want something good; or not to deceive ourselves in what we hope for? These are not merely conceptual questions. They only arise in real life, where we actually know, act and hope, and only there can they also be answered. They do not deal with conceptual problems of the definition of humanity, but with real problems of concrete people in actual life. The use of the indexical ‘I’ anchors them in real life. Only someone who actually exists can ask these questions. And no answer to them will be sufficient if it does not take into account the existence of those who thus ask for the right, validity, and legitimacy of their knowledge, actions and hopes. This anchoring in actual reality must not be forgotten if one wants to understand the fourth question correctly. It is about real human beings–beings like those who ask this question. Kant’s anthropological reorientation of philosophy is thus not only concerned in an objectifying way with people in the real world, but self-critically with those who ask these questions. It is about a reality that philosophical reflection does not produce, but finds and makes use of; namely, the reality of those who philosophize about it. The question “What is the human being?” is about those who ask it, and they could not ask it if they did not exist. Thus, Kant’s anthropological question concerns not merely the humanity of humans, but the concrete reality of those who exist as human beings. It is not just a question about humanity but about our existence.

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1 From the anthropological to the existential turn

Therefore, for Kierkegaard, there are always two questions at stake when we ask who and what we are: the question of what it means to be human, and the question of our own existence as a self. The first question can only be answered in relation to other people, by comparing what we have in common and where we differ. It is an empirical, scientific, or historical question, the answers to it can only ever be more or less probable, and they will always be determined by the interests that guide those who ask this question and seek to answer it. The second question, on the other hand, is existential and, according to Kierkegaard, cannot be answered without taking a stance towards the presence of God in the relationship with God. Not necessarily explicitly, but in fact. If the God-relation exists and one ignores or denies it, one is living a false life. If it does not exist, it remains a mystery how one can exist. We owe our existence as selves not to ourselves or to someone else like us. This does not show that we owe it to God. One cannot infer the presence of God from the absence of a better answer. But one cannot speak of God without answering this existential question. Assuming our existence to be a brute fact is not answering the question but refusing to ask it. Kierkegaard asked the question, and he answered it with reference to God. He was convinced that we cannot avoid asking this question, and if there is an answer, it is in relation to God. God is the one to whom we owe our existence. This is what Christians mean by calling God their creator. We cannot understand our humanity if we exclude our existence as selves, and we cannot include it without bringing God into play. Why Kierkegaard thinks so will be explored in this first part.

2 A synthesis of the finite and the infinite 2.1 The ‘self’ as an operator In English the term ‘self’ is neither a noun nor a verb nor a pronoun but an operator “that makes an ordinary pronoun into a reflexive one: ‘her’ into ‘herself’, ‘him’ into ‘himself’ and ‘it’ into ‘itself’. The reflexive pronoun is used when the object of an action or attitude is the same as the subject of that action or attitude.”⁶ In much the same sense the term ‘self’ “is also used as a prefix for names of activities and attitude, identifying the special case where the object is the same as the agent: self-love, self-hatred, self-abuse, self-promotion, selfknowledge.”⁷ Thus, the grammatical operator ‘self’ identifies a relation of sameness or a reflexive self-relation but it does not name or refer to an entity, or to a particular attitude or activity of an entity: It is neither a noun (that refers) nor a verb (that describes) but an operator (that qualifies), that is, a device that allows or facilitates the expression of a pragmatic feature of a communicative situation (it was me and not somebody else who returned the book to the library) at the sematic level of what is communicated (‘I returned the book myself’).⁸

2.2 The ‘self’ as a noun These grammatical observations should have made psychologists and philosophers more careful who widely use the term ‘self’ as a noun that refers to a referent—to somebody, to a material body or (gendered) organism that represents the presence of something distinct from its materiality called ‘the self’; or who use the phrase ‘the self’ “for the set of attributes that a person attaches to himself or herself most firmly, the attributes that the person finds it difficult or im-

 John Perry, “The Self” (1995), Macmillan Encyclopedia of Philosophy, London and New York: Routledge 1998, p. 1 (http://www.john.jperry.net/cv/1996d.pdf) (02/25/2022).  Ibid.  Grammatically operators are defined as auxiliaries that facilitate, for example, the expression of a negation, interrogative, or emphasis. But operators are not restricted to this. Thus, negation can be expressed by an operator ‘not’ because in English a “clause is made negative by adding not or suffixed n’t after its finite auxiliary verb” (Herman Paseru, I Wayan Ana, Dewa Ayu Kadek Claria, “Forms and Functions of Operators Found in Twilight Novel,” kulturistik, vol. 3, 2019, p. 26 (http://www.ejournal.warmadewa.ac.id/index.php/kulturistik/article/download/936/645/) (02/25/2022). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-004

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possible to imagine himself or herself without.”⁹ Thus, the self is contrasted to the other, either in the sense of the body or the corporality or materiality of a human organism (‘body’); or in the sense of other objects and organisms (‘things’), or in the sense of other persons or selves (‘the other’). I call this the agent account of the self. ¹⁰ The self is seen as the human operator, “the agent, the knower and the ultimate locus of personal identity”.¹¹ This view raises at least four issues. First, there is the fallacy of mistaking grammar for description. The self, understood in this way, “is a mythical entity … It is a philosophical muddle to allow the space which differentiates ‘my self’ from ‘myself’ to generate the illusion of a mysterious entity distinct from … the human being.”¹² Grammatical features are not reality-depicting but help to orient speakers in a communicative situation. Still, it may be a bit too rash to conclude, as Kenny does, that a “grammatical error … is the essence of the theory of the self”, or that “‘the self’ is a piece of philosopher’s nonsense consisting in a misunderstanding of the reflexive pronoun.”¹³ Second, there is (what Whitehead called) the fallacy of misplaced concreteness: We notice that we are more than that which others, or we ourselves, perceive when we look at or interact with each other; and we turn this marker of a difference—which is at best a negative limit term (‘self’’ = not a body)—into a description of something (object or substance) that is different from what we perceive by our senses. Third, there is the gender issue. Simone de Beauvoir famously answered the question ‘Who is the self?’ and ‘Who is the other?’ by pointing out that “He is the Subject, he is the Absolute—she is the Other”.¹⁴ ‘Self’ and ‘other’ are contrasted here in terms of ‘male’ and ‘female’ whereas—at least in an ideal world—the contrast applies to every self and every other, whether male or female. The self is an other, and vice versa. Fourth, there is the question: What is meant by ‘personal identity’ here? As Paul Ricoeur has pointed out, we must be careful not to confuse what he called our ipse-identity (what we take to be decisive for us from our own perspective) with our idem-identity (what is taken to be sufficient for identifying us over time from the perspective of others). The first is what we may express in an au-

 Perry, “The Self,” p. 1.  Cf. Galen Strawson, “The Self,” Consciousness Studies, vol. 4, 1997, pp. 405 – 428; Selves: An Essay in Revisionary Metaphysics, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2009.  Perry, “The Self,” p. 1.  Anthony Kenny, The Self, Marquette: Marquette University Press 1988, pp. 3 – 4.  Ibid., 4.  Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, New York: Vintage Books Edition 1989, Introduction.

2.2 The ‘self’ as a noun

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tobiographical account of our life. The second is what a biographer may present as the biography of our life. Things go badly wrong when we confuse these irreducibly different accounts and perspectives. The term ‘the self’ then becomes used interchangeably with ‘person’, and persons are understood as entities which possess certain characteristics, traits or properties such as ‘agency’, ‘self-awareness’, ‘time-consciousness’, ‘rights and duties’ etc. by which they can be marked off from other entities which do not possess those properties. This is a highly problematic view. As many have pointed out, selves are not physically or empirically detectable entities.¹⁵ This is not due to a failure of our empirical methods, including scanning and brain imaging. Idem-characteristics of our personal identity can be directly observed, ipse-characteristics, on the other hand, can only be indirectly inferred from a person’s articulation, manifestation, or communication of his or her self-understanding. In the latter sense the term ‘the self’ does not name a natural entity, nor does it refer to a set of biological, psychological or social facts that are descriptively accessible in a third person perspective. The natural world does not include selves but only biological organisms of different complexity, some with brains, and those with the most complex brains we know we call ‘human beings’. But to restrict the use of the term ‘self’ in the idem-sense of identity to human beings seems to be arbitrary, to say the least. If the self is defined by a set of (necessary and/or sufficient) properties then every entity that shares these properties is a self; and if a human person, for whatever reasons, fails to possess these properties, or fails to possess them to a sufficient degree, then he or she is not (or is no longer) a self, and hence should not be called a person either. The danger of this view of the self is that it drives a wedge between the humanity and the selfhood of human beings so that there can be non-human beings that are selves and human beings who are not selves. Even if we want to defend something like this, we can no longer explain selfhood in terms of humanity, or humanity in terms of selfhood. Instead, we are in danger of collapsing an anthropological distinction with respect to human life—a distinction that allows us to differentiate between humane and inhumane ways of living a human life—into the biological distinction between human and non-human life and hence miss the point of the reflexive grammatical use of the term ‘self’.

 Cf. Patrick Strokes, The Naked Self. Kierkegaard and Personal Identity, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2015, esp. chaps. 1– 3.

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2.3 The ‘self’ as a verb and an adverb A different understanding of the term ‘self’ arises when it is used philosophically not as a noun but as a verb—as a sign not for an entity but for the happening of an event or the performance of an activity. As Antonio Damasio put it a few years ago: “There is indeed a self, but it is a process, not a thing, and the process is present at all times when we are presumed to be conscious.”¹⁶ This process he construes from a neurobiological perspective as a “witness” to that which goes on in the mind that is produced by the brain: “The witness is the something extra that reveals the presence of implicit brain events we call mental.”¹⁷ Yet by identifying “that something extra” in the brain with what we “call self, or me, or I”¹⁸ in communicative contexts, he understands the self within the narrow confines of a neurobiological perspective that construes the self as a mental observer of mental events. Moreover, by construing the difference between “observer” and “knower” perspectives on the self as “two stages of the evolutionary development of the self,”¹⁹ he downplays the difference between being an observer and observing an observer and reduces his knower’s insight into the process character of the self to an observer’s account of the evolutionary process of the self.

2.4 The self as Dasein, Sosein, and Wahrsein Kierkegaard was more radical and more consistent than this as shows his wellknown account of the self in Fear and Trembling (1843). He took seriously that the term ‘self’ signifies a reflexive relation. Human beings, as he put it, are “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”²⁰ This synthesis is not a given but a goal, not, however, in the sense of an external end of a human life but as the internal point of its very living—at least if humans want to live their lives in a humane way. Thus, the key distinction that orients his account is not the biological difference between human beings and other animals made with respect to life (human be-

 Antonio Damasio, The Self Comes to Mind. Constructing the Conscious Mind, New York: Random House 2010, p. 8.  Ibid., p. 17.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 8.  SKS 11, 129 / SUD, 13.

2.4 The self as Dasein, Sosein, and Wahrsein

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ings/animals) but the anthropological difference between humane and inhumane ways of living a human life (humane/inhumane human life). This presupposes a view of human beings as selves or, in short, of human selves whose central idea is that humans are not merely free to live in either a humane or an inhumane way but that they are not free not to do either: Humans can live in a humane or an inhumane way, and they must (that is, will always) do the one or the other. They can choose their mode of existing (in so far as they exist as human beings)²¹ but, at the same time, they cannot not choose (in so far as they exist as human beings); and hence they will always in fact live in a humane or an inhumane way. Thus, Kierkegaard highlights three basic insights about the human self: It owes its Dasein not to itself but to a creative reality beyond itself (it is a finite reality); it owes its Sosein to its own making by living in a humane or an inhumane way (it is a finite reality that is made to make itself); and it becomes a true self, that is, achieves its Wahrsein, by living in the humane way for which it was made (it is a finite reality that has the duty to become a true self, and since it ought to do so, it can do so). For Kierkegaard, therefore, the human self must be analyzed as a two-tier contingent reality: As a contingent Dasein it owes its existence and potential to some other reality (the infinite that relates to us by distinguishing itself from us as finite beings). As a contingent Sosein it owes the way in which it lives and actualizes its potential as a finite being to itself. And since it can determine its Sosein in a true or a false way, depending on how it relates to the truth about its Dasein in its self-determination, it has the duty to become a true self and thus achieve its Wahrsein. That is to say, the human self is contingent in more than one respect. On the one hand it is a reality not of its own making but posited and made by something different from it: It is a finite being that exists through something else. As such it is a contingent Dasein and a potential self. On the other hand, it cannot merely be a Dasein without at the same time being a Sosein. As an actual self it lives in one way or other and exists in either an inhumane or a humane way. It actualizes its potential as a self by living either as an egocentric or sinful self (inhumane life) or as a theocentric or true self (humane life). Just as the Dasein of a self is the change from a merely possible to an actual existence, so the Sosein of a self is the result of actualizing one’s potentials as an actual self in actual situations in one way or another. The distinction between the Dasein and Sosein is not real but merely analytic since an actual self cannot be the one without at the same time being the other: No human self just exists but it always exists in one way or other (Dasein allows for different

 That is to say, they are free and able to exist otherwise than they in fact do.

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modes), and no human self exists without living in one way or another (Sosein also occurs in different modes). However, there is an important difference not only between existing (Dasein) and living as a human self (Sosein) but also between Dasein (the fact that we exist) and the mode of Dasein (the way in which we exist). Whereas our existence is not a result of our own decision, the way we exist is: We always could have existed otherwise, and therefore we are responsible for the way in which we actually exist. For Kierkegaard, this is a moral truth about the self. But there is also a religious one. Just as we cannot be a potential self without having been created as such by the one whom Christians call ‘God,’ so we cannot become true selves without being changed from a sinful self-centeredness to a liberated God-centeredness by the same God. God is the one to whom we owe our existence (as our creator) and to whom we also owe that we exist, if we do, in a true rather than a false way (as our savior). As finite selves we have the task and duty to become true selves. With respect to our Dasein (that we are) we do not make ourselves but with respect to our Sosein (how we are) we cannot avoid doing so because we are made to make ourselves. In short, the fact that we exist is a gift of being posited passively (Dasein); the way how we live our life is a task which we actively carry out in one way or other as long as we live (Sosein); and the way we ought to exist if we want to live in a way that is true to the basic passivity of our existence (Wahrsein) is a duty which faces each of us throughout our life. We know about the contingency of our Dasein by knowing that our life has begun and will end. We know about the responsibility for our Sosein by realizing the changing possibilities of our life from which we choose what we actually become. And we become aware of the responsibility for the mode in which we exist by discovering the real possibility of existing in another way. We discover that we do not achieve what we could when we see how we fail to become the true selves that we can and ought to become. And we begin striving for this when we move—imaginatively and practically—from the negativity of the experience of failure to the positive contrary of it: human life as it ought to be and therefore can be.

2.5 The self as the relating of a relation For Kierkegaard, therefore, the impossible synthesis of the infinite and the finite, which we enact and have to enact in living our life in a humane way, is the paradoxical existential task of human beings to become true selves. For human beings are selves only by becoming selves, and they become selves only by continuously transforming themselves from egocentric sinful selves to God-centered

2.5 The self as the relating of a relation

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true selves They may achieve or fail to achieve this but no human being can live a humane life without striving to become a self-transforming true self. As Kierkegaard put it: “The self is a relation that relates itself to itself or is the relation’s relating itself to itself in the relation: the self is not the relation but is the relation’s relating itself to itself,”²² it is the very activity of relating. However, this activity is not to be attributed to an entity called ‘self’ as the agent-account of the self would construe it. In more than one respect the self is not the agent but the mode and result of different kinds of activities that take place in a human life: the becoming of a potential self (Dasein); the becoming of an actual self by actualizing the potential in one way or another (Sosein); and the becoming of a true self by changing from an inadequate to a full actualization of that potential (Wahrsein) or the failing to become this. Thus, before any activity can be ascribed to a self, there must be a prior activity that constitutes that which is called a ‘self’ (Dasein) and enables human beings to become actually what they can be potentially. This prior activity cannot be attributed to the human self as agent, but rather constitutes the self as an agent. Now an agent is someone who does something. This requires us to distinguish between two activities with respect to actual selves, their existing (enacting their Dasein: ‘I am’) and their acting (performing specific acts: ‘I go for a walk’). Existing is not a state or an action of a self but an activity, namely his or her (as we may say) activity of ‘self-ing’. It occurs in that a human being cannot exist without actually enacting the synthesis he or she has to realize as a human being: We are a synthesis only by becoming it, and we become it only by enacting it. What an individual human being does or can do, on the other hand, are his or her acts of living (Sosein), and these acts can be attributed to the individual as their agent. But nobody can act in this way without existing, and nobody can exist without doing it in a certain way. However, whereas we can choose, within the parameters of a given life, the way we want to live and the mode in which we exist, the activity of existing is not something we do but that without which we couldn’t be agents (Dasein).²³ But why distinguish in this way between acts of living and the activity of existing? It was Kant’s insight that ‘to exist’ is not a determinative predicate but a localizing or positing one: The meaning of the proposition ‘Sarah is the mother of four girls’ does not change if we add ‘and she exists’ for this phrase only indi Ibid.  This is what Husserl may have had in mind when he stated: “The ego continuously constitutes itself as existing.” Edmund Husserl, Cartesian Meditations, trans. by Dorion Cairns, The Hague: Neijhoff 1973, p. 66. But he puts it in a misleading way by making the ego or self the agent of its own making–a view that is at best paradoxical.

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cates that there is indeed a Sarah who is the mother of four girls. Whereas ‘to be the mother of four girls’ is a predicate that can truly or falsely be predicated of somebody, the term ‘to exist’ is not a predicate but a localizing operator ‘There is an x such as …’ that localizes the x in question (in Kant’s view) in the actual world of experience. The first answers the question ‘Who or what is she?’, the second the different question ‘Does she exist?’ Both questions may be answered in terms of activities. But the activity of existing (to be) is different from the acts of being (or living) (to be or to do something). And whereas both the activity of existing and the acts of living can be performed in more than one way, the modes of living (cautiously, courageously, bored etc.) do not coincide with the modes of existing (as a true self or not as a true self). When Kierkegaard speaks of ‘synthesis’ and ‘relation’, he addresses the mode of existing and not the mode of living of a human being. A synthesis is a relation between two. Considered in this way a human being is still not a self … In the relation between two, the relation is the third as a negative unity, and the two relate to the relation and in the relation to the relation; thus under the qualification of the psychical the relation between the psychical and the physical is a relation. If, however, the relation relates itself to itself, this relation is the positive third, and this is the self.²⁴

That is to say, Kierkegaard uses the term ‘self’ not so much as a noun but as a verb (‘selfing’) for the self-reflexive activity of the finite relating to the infinite (which is impossible²⁵) by relating to its own attempts at relating to it (which is possible). This is done in the aporetic, inadequate, or self-centered way of a selfish self if the finite self relates only to her own relating and doesn’t transcend her own horizon. Or it is done in the true, adequate, or selfless way of a selfless self if the finite self, in relating to her own relating, thereby relates to the prior self-relating of the infinite to the finite to which she owes her own being. And just as Kierkegaard uses the term ‘self’ as a verb for the self-reflexive activity of relating to one’s own relating (‘selfing’), so he uses the term ‘true self’ as an adverb for the true and adequate mode of doing this by relating not to the infinite (which is impossible) nor merely to one’s own attempts at relating to it (which is aporetic) but, in relating to one’s own relating, to the way(s) in which the infinite relates to the finite in creation (by positing of the finite) and salvation (by enabling the finite to relate adequately to the relating of the infinite to the finite to which it owes its being).

 Ibid.  There cannot be an external relation between the finite and the infinite but only an internal one; and the internal one is always internal to the infinite and not to the finite.

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2.6 Relations and distinctions Relations between a and b are often represented as ‘aRb.’ But this formula cannot be analyzed as a three-term proposition (a, R, b) representing a three-term state of affairs because this will result in an infinite regress. If we say ‘a and b are related by R,’ then we can always meaningfully ask how a is related to R and how R is related to b. And if we answer something like ‘aSR’ and ‘RTb,’ where S and T are the relations that relate a to R and R to b respectively, then it is obvious that we can continue to ask the same question ad infinitum. This is why Russell and Whitehead in the Principia Mathematica analyzed relational propositions not in this way but as quantified functions of one- or many-place predicates (‘For all x and y: Rx,y’). The problem becomes even more pressing in Kierkegaard’s case, and this for at least two reasons. The first is his realist understanding of actual infinity taken over from Hegel. Whereas “in the Middle Ages,” according to Cantor, “all scholastic philosophers advocate Aristotle’s ‘infinitum actu non datur’ as an irrefutable principle,”²⁶ we find Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers like Galilei²⁷ or Leibniz confessing to be “in favour of the actual infinite.”²⁸ And even though C. F. Gauss protested “against the use of an infinite magnitude as something completed, which is never allowed in mathematics. Infinity is merely a manner of speaking, the true meaning being a limit which certain ratios approach as close as one wishes, while others may be allowed to increase without restriction,”²⁹ the idea of infinite completed sets as actual infinities became  Georg Cantor, in Gesammelte Abhandlungen mathematischen und philosophischen Inhalts, ed. by Ernst Zermelo, Hildesheim: Olms 1966, vol. 3, p. 174.  Galileo Galilei, Dialogues Concerning Two New Sciences (1638), §§130 – 1 argues that the continuum consists of “an infinite number of infinitely small and indivisible parts” (https://oll.libertyfund.org/title/galilei-dialogues-concerning-two-new-sciences) (2/25/2022).  Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Letter to Foucher, Journal de Sçavans, August 3, 1693, GP I, p. 416 (= A II 2, N. 226. Leibniz an Simon Foucher [Wolfenbüttel, Ende Juni 1693], p. 713). Cf. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, The Labyrinth of the Continuum: Writings on the Continuum Problem, 1672– 1686, ed., sel. & trans. by Richard T. W. Arthur, New Haven: Yale University Press 2001; Richard T. W. Arthur, “Leibniz’s Actual Infinite in Relation to his Analysis of Matter,” in G.W. Leibniz, Interrelations Between Mathematics and Philosophy, ed. by David Rabouin, Philip Beeley, Norma B. Goethe, Springer Verlag 2015, pp. 137– 156 (https://urbrick.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/ materiali-fonti-arthur.pdf: “For Leibniz, there are actually infinite aggregates, but—in contrast to Cantor—there are no infinite numbers” [p. 153].) (2/25/2022).  Carl Friedrich Gauss in a letter to Schumacher, July 12, 1831, Werke, vol. 8, Göttingen: Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften 1900, p. 216: “so protestiere ich zuvörderst gegen den Gebrauch einer unendlichen Größe als einer vollendeten, welcher in der Mathematik niemals erlaubt ist. Das Unendliche ist nur eine façon de parler, indem man eigentlich von Grenzen spricht,

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widely accepted in classical set theory. Both traditions were combined by Hegel who distinguished between a ‘bad infinite’ that signifies an endless progress whose impossible completion is an unattainable beyond, and a ‘true infinite’ that is not abstract and unattainable but concrete, actual, and effective, the actual life of the absolute.³⁰ This ‘true infinite’ is “the self-overcoming of all finitude and one-sidedness. It is not opposed to the finite but is the self-mediation and interpenetration of the finite and infinite. It contains the finite within itself and is itself contained within the finite. It is truly infinite and unlimited, because it is not opposed to anything other than itself, but is beyond all opposition, containing the whole process of opposition and limitation within itself.”³¹ Thus, if the infinite is understood in this realist sense, then there cannot be a relation between finite and infinite. And if Kierkegaard speaks of a relation between them, he cannot consistently understand the infinite in the sense he does. However, Kierkegaard’s realist understanding of actual infinity is not the only problem here. The other is his view of the relation between the infinite and the finite. As a long tradition held, the contrast between finite and infinite marks a difference but not a (real) relation. There is no relation between the infinite and the finite that can be represented by a third term: The formula ‘infinite —R—finite’ is not a possible representation of the relationship between the infinite and the finite because there is no third position that does not fall under the infinite or the finite. Everything that is is either finite or infinite, and there is nothing actual or possible that is not either the one or the other. Any possible relation must be an instantiation of either the finite or the infinite and hence cannot be a third term relating the finite and the infinite. Rather, the relationship is either impossible or merely imaginary (a self-negation of the finite that construes the infinite as its negation: negative infinity); or it must be understood as an active relating of the infinite to the finite, that is, a way of opening up the finite towards the infinite or of differentiating the infinite from the infinite by incorporating or encompassing it (positive infinity). In any case, on the basis of an actual infinite and actual finite there can only be two terms, the infinite and the finite, and the infinite is the active part whereas the finite is that on which the infinite operates.

denen gewisse Verhältnisse so nahe kommen als man will, während anderen ohne Einschränkung zu wachsen gestattet ist.”  Cf. David Edward Rose and Simon Skempton, Alienation After Derrida, London and New York: Continuum International Publishing Group 2010, p. 82.  Ibid., p. 83.

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2.7 The self as activity and mode of relating Against this backdrop Kierkegaard describes human beings as a synthesis of the infinite and the finite—understood as different actualities and not merely as an orientational distinction. That is to say, he understands human life as the place or locus of a twofold process: One the one hand, the life of human beings is the place where the finite distinguishes itself from the infinite by negating itself (negative infinity). On the other hand, it is also here where it becomes (or can become) manifest that the infinite (as a positive infinity) relates itself to the finite in such a way that the finite is incorporated into, or encompassed by, the infinite without being destroyed, mixed up or confused with it. In the first case all activity resides in the finite while the infinite is its negative construction: it is that which is not finite. In the second case, the finite can in no way be active but is purely passive (it is that on which the infinite operates), whereas the infinite is the sole center of activity: it is that which distinguishes itself from the finite. However, to be is to be active (esse est operari), and this is true of finite and infinite being. Hence even though the finite is passive in that the infinite operates on it (that is, constitutes the Dasein of the finite), it cannot be merely passive but is also active albeit in a dependent and relative sense (in its Sosein)—dependent on and relative to the prior activity of the infinite. What is this activity of the finite in the synthesis of the infinite and the finite? Kierkegaard’s answer is that the finite cannot actively relate to the infinite but only to the relating activity of the infinite that constitutes the finite, and it does so if it, in relating to itself, relates to the way in which the infinite relates to it by constituting or creating it: The human being is a potential self by being created as a human being, and it becomes an actual self by finitely relating in its relating to itself to the prior relating of the infinite to which it owes its existence. That is to say, there is, first, infinity’s self-distinction from, and self-relating to, the finite. This creates the human being as a potential self, that is, as a finite being that differs from all other finite beings by its potential of relating to infinity’s self-relating and thus become a self. Second, this potential self becomes an actual self by being unable, in relating to itself, not to relate in its own relating to the self-relating of infinity, whether it is aware of this or not. Finally, an actual self becomes a true self when a human being actively relates to that which constitutes it, that is, to the relating of the infinite to the finite; and this it can do only by relating not to the infinite, nor to its relating as such, but rather to the result of its relating—that is to say, by relating to the finite being that comes into existence by the infinite distinguishing itself from it. Only in relating to itself as a finite reality constituted by the infinite can the finite relate to the infinite and its activities: There is no direct way of relating to the infinite but

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only this indirect way. Only in this secondary sense can finite human beings contribute to constituting themselves by becoming a self. But they cannot constitute their potential for becoming a self for in this they are completely and exclusively dependent on the prior activity of the infinite. And they cannot relate to the infinite and its activities without doing it in and through relating to themselves. They have the potential to do so, and they necessarily do it. As a finite reality constituted in this way humans cannot not relate to the relating activity of the infinite. They do this necessarily because they cannot be without relating to it. But they can do this in a way that acknowledges their being constituted by the activity of the infinite (true or selfless self) or by ignoring or denying this (self-centered, selfish, or sinful self). Since every human self starts his or her life in the latter way, to become a true self is the existential task of every human being: As finite human beings we can become true selves; we in fact fail to do so by living in the way we live; and we ought to become true selves by overcoming the way in which we live and change from an inhumane to a humane way of living our human life. Thus, what is an impossible task for finite human beings (to create a synthesis of the infinite and the finite at the level of the infinite relating to the finite) becomes a possible but paradoxical task at the meta-level of finitely relating to the prior self-relating of the infinite: ‘The self’ is Kierkegaard’s term for the self-reflexive mode in which human beings enact the impossible task of relating the infinite and the finite in a reflexive and self-referential way. As finite beings they hover over an abyss between being and nothingness that they cannot bridge but must bridge in order to exist, and they can do so only by stabilizing the impossible attempt at relating to the infinite in a self-referential loop that turns what is essentially impossible for them (to relate to the infinite or to synthesize the infinite and the finite) into a paradoxical existential possibility of relating not to the infinite (which is impossible) but to the relating of the infinite to the finite (which is possible); and they achieve this by relating to themselves as that which is constituted by the relating of the infinite to the finite. In short, becoming a self is to change from being a potential self to being an actual self by actually living as a self, and becoming a true self is tantamount to living one’s life by understanding oneself to be dependent on a prior activity to which one owns one’s existence or, in religious terms, to understand oneself and live as a creature of God the creator.³² Being human, accordingly, is to have been

 The importance of “the discovery and realization of one’s true self” is noted by Merold Westphal, Becoming a Self: A Reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University Press 1996, p. 21. For Climacus, the loss of our true self is “the

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given the potential of understanding oneself and of living one’s life as God’s creature: Only human beings can live as selves because they alone not only can but in fact always do relate to the relating of the infinite to which they owe their existence; and only human beings can become true selves because they alone have been given the potentiality or capacity of understanding themselves as finite creatures of the infinite creator and live accordingly. Nobody must understand himself or herself in this way. It is always possible to live below one’s possibilities, even as a self. But we can become true selves, and by doing so we live up to what we can and ought to be as human beings. For Kierkegaard, then, the term ‘self’ signifies a reflexive relation to a relation that is not constituted by the finite human being but by the infinite creator. It signifies not an entity but, on the one hand, the activity of existing as a human being (Dasein as a potential self that is best expressed as a verb: to exist as a self or, in short, ‘to self’) and, on the other, as ‘true self’, a mode of human existing that is better expressed as an adverb than as verb or a noun (to exist as a self in a truly self-making way). Human beings have the potential of existing as the selves they are not only in a selfish and self-centered way (selfish selves) but in a truly selfless and God-centered way (selfless selves). They can change from living as selves in fact to living as true selves in breaking through the confines of a closed circle of self-relatedness (incurvatus in se) by consciously appropriating the fact that they are grounded, in everything they are and can be, in the creative activity of the infinite. In short, to be human is to have the potential of becoming a true self, that is, of consciously living among all other creatures as a finite creature of the infinite creator. And this is true even though we all fail to live up to this possibility by living as selfish rather than selfless selves.

loss of our humanity” (ibid., p. 83). But this needs to be deepened to the point that we lose our humanity when we lose our relationship with God, or more specifically, our relationship to the relationship that God has with us.

3 The single individual 3.1 The problem In an entry in his journal on the relation between individual and society in 1846, Kierkegaard makes the following threefold distinction: The dialectic of the community or society is the following: (1) The particulars which relate to one another in the relation are individually lower than the relation. The single limb is in this way lower in the bodily organism; in the solar system the individual heavenly bodies. (2) The particulars which relate to one another in the relation are individually equal in respect of the relation. As in earthly love, each is something for itself but the need for the relation is the same for both. (3) The particulars which relate to one another in the relation are individually higher than the relation. As in the religious, highest form. The individual relates first to God and then to the community; but this former relation is the highest, so long as he does not slight the latter.³³

In the first case individuals are only terms of a relation without which they wouldn’t be: They are constituted by the relation which defines what they are. In the second case they are separate and equal entities, which can but need not engage in the relation concerned: With respect to the relation there is no difference between them. In the third case they are constituted independently of the relation by being primarily related to God. This relation differs from all other relations in that it cannot stand on its own but is always accompanied by some other relation(s) to some other individual(s). You cannot be related to God without at the same time being related to someone else and to yourself. But neither can you be related to yourself or any other without being related to God. This is true independent of whether you know it or pay attention to it or not; but since you cannot be without it, you can only be true to what you actually are by taking it into account in the way you live your life. Where this happens, a human individual in the first or the second sense becomes a single indi-

 SKS 18, 283, JJ:430 / KJN 2, 261. He adds: “cf. also Concluding Postscript, p. 327 that the task is not to come from the individual to the race, but, from the individual, to reach the individual through the race. cf. a treatise by Dr Bayer, der Begriff der sittlichen Gemeinschaft (in Fichte’s journal, 13th vol., 1844, p. 80) his threefold division is: Beziehung, Bezug, Einheit. (cf. pp. 80 and 81).” https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-005

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vidual or singular (den Enkelte) in the third sense, “a whole and unified self before God.”³⁴ To understand what that means is the topic of this chapter.

3.2 The argument Kierkegaard’s arguments for the idea of a single individual are complex and scattered over many of his writings, both pseudonymous and in his own name.³⁵ In their barest outline they can briefly be summarized as following: 1. We are all born as human beings. That makes us particular tokens (this being) of a general type (human being). 2. As human beings we are not merely what we are (in the regime of being) but even more so who and what we want and decide to be (in the regime of the ethical): We are human beings meant to become individuals (a self), and we can only become true individuals if we become singular selves (true or selfless as opposed to selfish selves). 3. A singular self is not a self in relation to other selves: such a relation, which is necessary for any self to be a self, makes it merely a finite particular among other finite particulars. Particular selves can act and live in egoistic or altruistic ways, but this doesn’t make them singular selves.³⁶ 4. A particular self is only singular if it is related to the infinite or the eternal, i. e., that is, to that without which there wouldn’t be anything finite, whether particular or general. But we must distinguish here between the relation to the infinite that constitutes a self (the modal change from possibility to ac Sylvia Walsh, Kierkegaard. Thinking Christianly in an Existential Mode, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press 2009, p. 1. See also Vernard Eller, Kierkegaard and Radical Discipleship: A New Perspective, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1968 (http://www.hccentral.com/ eller2/) (2/25/2022).  As Sophie Wennerscheid, “The Passage through Negativity or From Self-Renunciation to Revolution? Kierkegaard and Žižek on the Politics of the Impassioned Individual,” in Kierkegaard and Political Theory: Religion, Aesthetics, Politics and the Intervention of the Single Individual, ed. by Sophie Wennerscheid and Armen Avanessian, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press 2014, p. 147 correctly points out, “Kierkegaard distinguishes between his use of the category of the single individual in his pseudonymous books and his upbuilding books. In his pseudonymous books, that is, in his works of aesthetics, ‘the single individual is pre-dominantly the single individual esthetically, defined in the eminent sense, the outstanding individual.’ In his upbuilding books, by contrast, ‘the single individual is someone every human being is or can be.’” SKS 16, 95 / PV, 115.  A singular is not one among many that can be counted (one, two, three …) but the result of a singularizing process that turns a multitude into an individual totality or world: A singular is a Leibnizian monad.

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tuality that results in the existence of a self) and the relation of a self to its relation to the infinite that defines the existential mode or character of the life of a self (unfaith and faith as existential modes of human life). 5. No self exists that is not related to the infinite: The relation to the infinite constitutes our existence by turning a mere possibility (a possible self) into an actuality (an actual self). 6. Each actual self has the potential of becoming a true self or of failing to do so, of existing in a mode of truth or in a mode of untruth. As a self that exists it can and must exist in either of two ways: either by ignoring the ground of its existence (mode of untruth) or by acknowledging it (mode of truth), of living a life of unfaith or of faith. The difference does not necessarily show in any outward behavior but in the inner orientation of the heart. The “knight of faith” in Fear and Trembling cannot be distinguished from others by any outward sign. Just as a conventionally religious life may be one of untruth and unfaith, so a conventionally non-religious life may be one of truth and faith. To judge it is not the business of humans but only of God: “man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart” (1 Sam 16,7). 7. A self only exists because of its relation to the infinite, but it cannot exist in and through this relation without relating to it or taking a stance on it. Each actual self has both the potential and the need to relate in a finite way to its relation to the infinite. 8. A self is finite precisely because it can do so and must do so, that is to say, it cannot exist and not in fact exist in either a mode of truth or of untruth. In contrast to other finite beings it is a self because it can do so, and in contrast to the infinite it is a finite self because it must do so: It can relate to the ground of its existence (that marks it off from other finite beings that are not and cannot become selves) and it cannot not relate to it (that marks it off as finite from the infinite). Thus, the finite self is both free to exist as a self and not free not to do so. It has the potential of becoming a true self or of failing to become it, but it has not the power to avoid or escape from this task or simply exist without existing in a particular way—a way defined by its relation to the presence of the infinite in its life. 9. The relation of a self to the presence of the infinite in its life (the mode of its existence) can be one of ignorance or self-closure to the infinite (selfish self: mode of unfaith) or of openness to, acceptance of, and orientation towards the infinite (selfless self: mode of faith), and there is no other mode in which it can exist vis-à-vis the presence of the infinite in its life. 10. A self becomes selfless only by changing from being selfish to being selfless: There is no selfless self that has not become so by turning away from its self-

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ishness and by embracing the possibility of selflessness. To live a life of faith is always to stop living a life of unfaith. 11. However, a finite self is only able to relate to the infinite or eternal on two conditions: First, it must be capable of relating not merely to the finite but within finitude to the infinite, that is to say, to that without which a self would be neither possible nor actual (subjective condition of the possibility of becoming a singular self). Second, the infinite must be accessible to the finite within the realm of the finite to which alone finite selves can actively relate (objective condition of the possibility of becoming a singular self). 12. The first condition Kierkegaard explores in his account of the human self as a synthesis of the finite and the infinite: “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short a synthesis.”³⁷ Because a self is such a synthesis, it not only can (is able to) relate to the infinite but must (try to) do so for otherwise it wouldn’t and couldn’t be: As selves we are, by definition, faced with the ethical task of becoming a self by enacting the synthesis of the finite and the infinite in a specific way.³⁸ 13. The second condition is elaborated in Kierkegaard’s account of the infinite becoming accessible within the horizon of the finite in the singular individual Jesus Christ. Let us use the term ‘Jesus’ as the name of the historical figure who is the protagonist of the New Testament gospels, and ‘Christ’ as the term that characterizes Jesus as the single individual before God who enables and empowers others to become single individuals before God. Then Jesus Christ is the paradigm of the single individual because in him the ethical task of every human self to enact the synthesis of the finite and the infinite is actually realized: Jesus, a finite human being, here relates not simply to the infinite (which would be impossible) but rather to the relating of the infinite God as Father to Jesus as his Son, and Jesus does so not of his own accord or by his own powers but enabled, directed, and guided by God’s Spirit. Jesus who is faced by the ethical task of becoming a self just as any other human being is, actually becomes a true (rather than an untrue or false) self by finitely relating to the infinite’s relating to him to which he is enabled by God the Spirit both subjectively (by making Jesus relate to the  SKS 11, 127 / SUD, 13.  As Anti-Climacus explains: “consciousness—that is, self-consciousness—is decisive with regard to the self. The more consciousness, the more self; the more consciousness, the more will; the more will, the more self” (SKS 11, 145 / SUD, 29). Cf. George Price, The Narrow Pass, New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, Inc. 1963, p. 37.

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presence of the infinite God as his Father) and objectively (by the infinite God becoming present as Father to Jesus as the Son); and he does so by orienting his life through the power of the Spirit fully and completely on God as the Father who freely and irreversibly commits and discloses himself to Jesus as the Son who communicates the creative presence of the redeeming love of the Father to all to whom God relates as their Father and neighbor. 14. Thus, a self is able to fulfill the ethical task of becoming a self only by becoming a true self, and it can become a true self only by actively relating to the actuality of Jesus Christ’s finite relating to the self-relating of the infinite to him. Only in actively relating to the paradigmatic singular individual Jesus Christ a self can actually fulfill the ethical task of becoming a self by becoming a true self, that is, by changing from a selfish to a selfless existence before God. A self that does not actively embrace or acknowledge the relation to Jesus Christ is still a self whose task is to become a true self, but it lives a false life and hence is not a true but an untrue self. For just as the existence of a self depends on being constituted by some other actuality beyond itself (God), so the truth or falsity of a self depends on being related to the singular individual Jesus Christ, the paradigm of true selfhood in the horizon of finite existence, time, and history. 15. In this sense, the identity of the self resides not in the self but rather outside the self (extra se) in Jesus Christ; and the identity of Jesus Christ resides not in Jesus but extra se in God’s relating to Jesus who thus becomes the Christ, that is, the one in whom the infinite relates to the finite in such a way that the finite can relate to the relating of the infinite to it and thereby enact the synthesis between the finite and the infinite in its way of existing. 16. From this four things follow. Jesus Christ has his identity as a singular self not in himself but extra se in God’s salvific, relating to him in such a way that he can become who he is by relating to this divine relating that constitutes who he is. Because God relates to him as Father, Jesus can relate to this divine Father as Son. Similarly, selves have their identity as singular selves not in themselves but extra se in Jesus Christ, and hence in a mediated relation to God’s self-relating to Jesus as Father to Son: As selves we are who we are extra nos in Jesus Christ who is who he is extra se in God’s self-communicating self-relation to him. Since the identity of a self resides extra se in the relation to Jesus Christ, it can take one of two forms: Either this identity is ignored or denied, then the self exists in a false way because it misunderstands its identity to be constituted solely by its relations to itself and to others (selfish self). Or this identity is acknowledged and embraced, then the self has a true self-understanding and exists in a true way (selfless self). It then understands its identity to reside not in itself but in Jesus Christ

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and hence lives a life that is not directed at advancing its own interests but follows Christ in living a life of loving God and all others as God’s neighbors. Finally, just as the singular self has its identity extra se in Christ who has his identity extra se in God’s self-relating to the self of Jesus, so God has his identity not in and for himself but in his creative, salvific and perfecting relating to what is different from him in order to enable, help and perfect it to become a singular self: God is the universal self that is a singular self precisely by making other selves in a unique way to become singular selves. God is what he does for us: the one without whom there would be no selves and no singular selves. God is the self that makes other selves make themselves. Or, as Kierkegaard unfolds it in Works of Love, God is the love that makes others love God, their neighbors, and themselves in the right way— as selfless selves who help others to love God, others, and themselves in a selfless way. The argument outlined makes explicit in a summary fashion a view of the singular self that we can find in serveral of Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous and nonpseudonymous writings, especially in Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments (1846); Works of Love (1847); The Single Individual (1846 – 49); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); the Three Discourses at the Communion on Fridays (1849). Kierkegaard there defends a conception of the self that reworks the Romantic distinction between individuality and particularity in a novel way by grounding it in the singularizing relation between self and God and not merely in the totalizing relation between self and world.

3.3 Particularity, individuality, and singularity According to Kierkegaard, all humans have the potential to become true selves or single individuals but not all actually do. We are all part of a crowd, and we become singular only by moving beyond the limitations imposed on us as particulars of the specific crowd or multitude to which we belong. We cannot not strive for becoming true or single selves in this sense but only fail to become so by ignoring or denying that we are constituted by the infinite. As selves we have the duty to become true selves. We do not merely exist but can and must determine ourselves to live a humane rather than an inhumane life, and we do so by acknowledging our finitude to be the place and occasion of the encounter with the infinite. Only by acknowledging this we become true selves who live up to that which human beings can be by realizing the ultimate end and purpose of a human life. In an important respect, therefore, ‘true self’ is an achievement

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term and becoming a true self a possibility and a duty that is not realized by simply existing but by existing in a certain way: the way in which we become in the fullest sense what we have the potential to become as God’s creatures who can know both their creator and that they are created and live accordingly. According to Kierkegaard, therefore, the subjective and objective conditions of becoming a single individual are closely interrelated: On the one hand, we can actively relate to the relating of the creator only at our own place: we must do it ourselves. On the other hand, we can relate to this relating as the creator’s relating only by relating to the place and locus where this becomes manifest and accessible as such: in Jesus Christ. Therefore, we can only become true selves by relating to Jesus Christ who is a true self by relating to the presence of the infinite God to him. Just as a self is always a particular of something general in the world (a crowd), so the single individual is always a self before God whose singularity is due to a twofold mediation: A human being becomes singularized as a member of a crowd by being related to that reality extra se (Jesus Christ) that is constituted by the actuality extra se of the infinite relating to the finite in such a way that the finite is enabled to relate not to the infinite but to the relating of the infinite to the finite. Kierkegaard thus distinguishes between particular and general, individual and universal, and true individual (or singular) and selfish individual. The first marks the difference between one and the many in the sphere of the external relations or the world. The second marks the difference between the finite and the infinite in the sphere of the God-relation. The third marks the difference between living as a self in the world by being true to the God-relation or not. None of these relations and their corresponding distinctions can exist on their own or in isolation from the others. But they must be distinguished to avoid confusion by mistaking the God-relation for a case of the world-relation (as in theistic metaphysics) or of the self-relation (as in transcendental metaphysics), and vice versa. Kierkegaard was not alone in insisting on these distinctions. For Schleiermacher, too, individuality expresses the highest ethical value. But the distinctiveness of an individual cannot be reduced to the particularity of a general essence. It is true that we should be individuals “consistent with the universal laws of humanity,”³⁹ that “each man is meant to represent humanity in his own way, combining its elements uniquely,”⁴⁰ and that what is valuable is a person’s “unique  Schleiermacher’s Soliloquies: An English Translation of the Monologen with a Critical Introduction and Appendix, trans. with introduction by Horace Leland Friess, Chicago: Open Court 1926; Reprint Wipf & Stock, 2002, p. 33.  Ibid., pp. 31 and 124.

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being and its relation to humanity.”⁴¹ But in order to achieve a true individuality we must not merely live as a particular human being but acquire a distinctive individuality—that is to say, become a unique microcosmos of the universe, different from all others and related to all others in a unique way.⁴² Similarly, Charles Hartshorne argues in the following way: Is God then not a ‘particular’ individual? No, certainly not; he is the universal individual. What do I mean here by ‘individual’? I mean the unity of a sequence of concrete states of consciousness each connected with the others in the most truly ideal way by omniscient memory and steadfastness of purpose. This is plainly analogous to ‘individual’ in the everyday sense, except that this individual, being universal in his role, is unique and without competitor. Being non-localized, he occupies no place from which he excludes other beings, as each of us does at every moment. There is no function exercised by God which any other being could take over in his stead. He is the sole non-competitive, non-exclusive, conscious agent—in his necessary essence quite as general as being itself, but in his contingent actuality containing all the exclusive particularity and concreteness of the real.⁴³

Kierkegaard differs from Schleiermacher or Hartshorne by showing the self to be the meeting place of two dimensions of reality characterized by two different sets of modal distinctions: the dimension of actuality (possible/actual), and the dimension of facticity (before/after, past/present/future). The two cannot be separated but must be distinguished because just as the first signifies the metaphysical causality of changing from possibility to actuality in the God-relation, so the second signifies the empirical causality of changing from one actuality into another one in the world-relation. Both types of causality and both kinds of relation are at work in every actual event or thing. But in the case of an actual self they must be distinguished if we want to understand what a self is.

 Ibid., p. 46. See Paul DeHart, “Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard. Absolute Dependence or Infinite Desire? Comparing Soteriological Themes in Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard,” in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard: Subjektivität und Wahrheit / Subjectivity and Truth. Akten des Schleiermacher-Kierkegaard-Kongresses in Kopenhagen Oktober 2003 / Proceedings from the Schleiermacher-Kierkegaard Congress in Copenhagen October, 2003, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, Richard E. Crouter, Theodor Jørgensen, Claus-Dieter Osthövener, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 2006, pp. 561– 576.  Schleiermacher’s individuals are a historized version of Leibniz’s monads.  Charles Hartshorne, “Metaphysics and the Modality of Existential Judgments,” in The Relevance of Whitehead, ed. by Ivor Leclerc, London: George Allen & Unwin 1961, pp. 107– 121 (http:// www.anthonyflood.com/hartshornemodality.htm) (2/25/2022).

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3.4 The twofold inwardness of the self and its existential dilemma This shows clearly in Kierkegaard’s well-known account of the self in The Sickness Unto Death where the term ‘self’ is understood to signify a reflexive relation. Human beings are described as “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.”⁴⁴ This synthesis is not a given but a goal, not, however, in the sense of an external end of a human life but as the internal point of its very living—at least if humans want to live their lives as true selves. Selves are thus faced by the paradoxical task to achieve a synthesis between the infinite and the finite without which they cannot be but which as finite selves they cannot achieve. They are the meeting place of two sets of relations—the relations to other finite beings and the relation to the infinite. This constitutes a twofold inwardness of the self. On the one hand it is the place of an inner/ outer distinction, an inner life (inside) and an outer life (outside), a self-relation and a relation to others, an experiential unity of everything from a first-person perspective (self) and a factual totality of everything from a third-person perspective (world); this is why we have to distinguish between thoughts and words, emotions and their expressions, internal reflections and external communications, first-person and third-person perspectives, self and world. However, both sides of the inner/outer distinction belong to the sphere of the finite: Our inner reflections are just as finite as our external actions, our thoughts and emotions are just finite as our words and expressions, we ourselves are just as finite as our world. Thus, on the other hand, the self is also the place of the finite/infinite distinction, the inner and the outer life of a finite being that is different from God as a finite creature is different from the infinite creator. The infinite does not mark a difference within the sphere of the finite but constitutes it as finite. The difference between the infinite and the finite does not occur anywhere in the sphere of the finite (the empirical, the historical) but this sphere wouldn’t be finite without the contrast to the infinite. This is true of everything finite, but the self is the place where this contrast becomes explicit and manifest and defines the very being of a self: The self is the place where the finite/infinite distinction becomes combined with the inner/outer distinction in such a way that inwardness becomes pluri-determined and thereby not only distinct from the other but transparent to the infinite. The self is not merely contrasted to the world but also to God. It is not merely, within the

 SKS 11, 127 / SUD, 13.

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world, the subjective other of the external world, but also, within the infinite, the finite other of the infinite. As such, it ceaselessly strives towards the infinite and thereby builds an inner world of meaning that is different from the outer causal world of the senses. As a finite self (finite/infinite distinction), it cannot become the self it is without developing an inner world in distinction to the outer world to which it also belongs (inner/outer distinction).⁴⁵ At the place of the self, a free space of inwardness and freedom thus emerges, withdrawn from the constraints of causality and the necessities of the external world. At the same time, the self always remains tied to the world of causality and finitude, so that its striving for the infinite and eternal remains an infinite yearning and unending desire. It never arrives at the infinite because, as a finite being, it always belongs to the sensory world of causality and therefore does not cease to exist temporally and finitely. This makes the self in principle ambiguous and faced with an impossible but at the same time indispensable task. The self is the meeting place of the totality of the relations to the finite (world) and the grounding relation to the infinite (God), and it can only exist as a self by trying to synthesize this duality of the inner/outer distinction and the finite/infinite distinction in a synthesis of the finite and the infinite for which it must always strife and which it will never achieve on its own. It is aware of what it could and should be, and it experiences that it cannot become and achieve that. This is the existential dilemma of the self: as a finite being, it must synthesize the finite and the infinite, and it is impossible for it to succeed because there is no finite relationship between the finite and the infinite. It wants what it cannot do, and it cannot do what it must do as self. It can therefore only exist unhappily and in existential despair.⁴⁶ What it wants, what it must, and what it can

 “God is a subject and hence only for subjectivity in inwardness,” SKS 7, 167 / CUP1, 200. But this does of course not mean that God is a reality only for inwardness and not at the same time also for everything outside the self.  Cf. Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2005; Michelle Kosch, “‘Despair’ in Kierkegaard’s Either/Or,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 44, 2006, pp. 85 – 97. Anoop Gupta, Kierkegaard’s Romantic Legacy: Two Theories of the Self, Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press 2005 develops Kierkegaard’s account of the self from an analysis of despair and rightly sees the core of Kierkegaard’s approach in the crucial importance of the God-relationship (pp. 25 – 38). Klaus Nielsen, “Kierkegaard and the modern search for self,” Theory & Psychology, vol. 28, 2018, pp. 65 – 83 emphasizes Kierkegaard’s dialectical and relational understanding of the self, but he constructs “the other” only as the other person and underestimates the importance of the God-relation. In contrast, Kateřina Kolínská, “Know Yourself in the Mirror of the Word: Kierkegaard on Self-Knowledge,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, vol. 25, 2020, pp. 111– 136, accurately recognizes the importance of this relationship, as do

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never coincide. It cannot be other than in becoming. And becoming is not the path to being for the self, but the only way in which it can avoid not being, at least for a short time.

Charles Stephen Evans, Kierkegaard on Faith and the Self: Collected Essays, Waco: Baylor University Press 2006; Simon D. Podmore, Kierkegaard and the Self before God: Anatomy of the Abyss, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press 2011; and Roe Fremstedal, Kierkegaard on Self, Ethics, and Religion: Purity or Despair, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2022.

4 Situated selves in “webs of interlocution” 4.1 Self-interpreting animals Kierkegaard’s dynamic verbal and adverbial understanding of the self establishes a creative moral tension between being human and becoming a true self: We are born as humans. Humans have not only the potential to live as selves but they in fact always do so. They can do it in ways that are true to their being constituted by the infinite or by ignoring or denying this. However, while it is possible to ignore or deny it, it is better not to do so, and while they actually ignore or deny it, they ought to become what they can be: true selves. In short, they not only live as selves in fact but have the duty to become true selves. They cannot not live as selves, but they can and do miss their point and potential as selves, and therefore have the duty to become true selves. Only as selves do we not merely exist but can determine ourselves to live a humane rather than an inhumane life, and only as true selves do we live up to that which human beings can be by realizing the ultimate end and purpose of a human life. In an important respect, therefore, ‘true self’ is an achievement term, and becoming a true self a possibility and a duty that is not realized by simply existing but by existing in a certain way: the way in which we become in the fullest sense what we have the potential to become as God’s creatures who can know their creator and that they are created and live accordingly. So how do we live our lives if we exist as selves? And how do we have to exist and live in order to become true selves? To the first question the 20th century has suggested answers that go beyond Kierkegaard, but it also has obfuscated Kierkegaard’s basic insight by avoiding to ask the second question. As philosophers from Heidegger to Taylor and from Gadamer to Marion have shown in their different ways: We become selves only by becoming a self in a certain way: the mode of becoming defines who and what we become, not the other way round. To become a self is to exist and to live one’s life in a certain way, and this way or mode determines what ‘becoming a self’ means and amounts to. But whereas this helps to clarify the mode of living that characterizes human selves (the way we live in the world), it does not pay enough attention to the mode of existing that constitutes us as beings with the potential and the need of living as selves (the fact that we exist as beings in the world that both can live as selves and in fact do live as selves and hence have the duty of becoming true selves by living in a way that is true to the structure of our existence).

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-006

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4.2 Understanding and interpretation From a hermeneutical point of view the basic mode of human becoming is understanding. There is no human life without understanding, and the way we understand (misunderstand or don’t understand) determines who and what we become. This modal ingredient in all our acting and experiencing involves at least five aspects: First, understanding is a semiotic process. According to Peirce,⁴⁷ signs are three-dimensional semiotic acts that comprise a signifier or representamen (something that stands for the object to the interpretant), an object (the subject matter of a representamen and an interpretant) and an interpretant (a sign’s meaning or interpretation which is itself a sign of the same semiotic structure). No sign comes on its own but rather all signs proceed and precede from other signs. Because understanding is a semiotic process in this sense, it is necessarily dynamic and continuously changing as long as we live: There is no understanding that is not at the same time a transformation of previous understandings and a contribution to and freeing of new understandings. Second, understanding is always a two-sided process that encompasses not merely a difference between something that is understood (belief) and somebody who understands (believer) but also a difference between the believer’s understanding (object-belief) and the self-understanding of the believer (self-belief): No understanding without a self-understanding of the one who understands. Third, understanding is a mode of human living whose performative mode is interpreting. We understand by interpreting something as something, and by interpreting something as something we understand. And we understand ourselves by interpreting ourselves as someone, and by interpreting ourselves as someone we understand ourselves. Thus, just as understanding something can be more fully expressed as ‘someone understands something as something for something through something’, so ‘someone interprets something as something for something through something for somebody’ is the same structure of understanding read backwards—not from the object of understanding to the subject who understands, but from the subject who understands the object by interpreting what it understands as something: There is no understanding or self-understanding in human life that is not at the same time interpretation, and no interpretation or self-interpretation that is not at the same time understanding.  “I define a sign as anything which is so determined by something else, called its Object, and so determines an effect upon a person, which effect I call its interpretant, that the latter is thereby mediately determined by the former.” The Essential Peirce, vol. 2, ed. by Peirce edition Project, Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press 1998, p. 478.

4.3 Changing the world by interpreting it

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Fourth, what is true of understanding is also true of interpretation: There is no interpretation that does not build on previous interpretation, and no interpretation that doesn’t pave the way towards further interpretations. And there is no interpretation that is not at the same time a self-interpretation: How we interpret (and understand) something always shows how we interpret (and understand) ourselves. Fifth, although there is no understanding without interpreting, the dominant feature of understanding is not the interpretative activity but the passivity of becoming the locus of a disclosure of the meaning of something in the act of interpreting. And although there is no interpreting without understanding, the dominant aspect of interpretation is the interpretative activity that makes what is disclosed to us accessible to us as something: Just as understanding is the mode of being opened up to the meaning disclosed to us, so interpretation is the mode of making what is disclosed to us accessible as a specific meaning.⁴⁸

4.3 Changing the world by interpreting it Thus, interpretation is a meaning-creating operation that establishes a triadic relation between a signifier, an object, and an interpretant by using something (media) as something (sign) for something (object) through something (interpretant) for somebody (the addressee or member of interpretative community in which this interpretative process takes place). At the most basic level interpretative processes are our way of exploring the possibilities of a situation by adapting to it and by creating our own habitat in a dangerous and not very welcoming environment by assimilating it to us. Whereas other animals manage to survive only by accommodating and adapting themselves to the challenges of their ecological niche, that is, to the environmental conditions under which they can exist, humans have largely and importantly taken an anti-ecological approach by assimilating their environment to them, that is, by re-creating their environments in ways that they hope will increase the likelihood of their survival and the quality of their lives. They do not, or not primarily, adapt to their environment but assimilate their environment to themselves.⁴⁹ And they do so not

 Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, A Way to Open the Intellect. An Essay on the Phenomenology of Interpretation, in Interpretation of a Common World. From Antiquity to Modernity. Essays in honour of Jure Zovko, ed. by Evrando Agazzi, Andreas Arndt, Hans-Peter Grosshans, Berlin: Lit 2022, pp. 3 – 25.  Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom, Ada, MI: Baker Academic 2016, chap. 1.

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only by actively changing it, but also by constantly interpreting and re-interpreting it, that is, by exploring the possibilities that may allow them to change their environment in ways that promote their interests and fit their purposes. For before we can meaningfully change the world, we must interpret it. And by interpreting it we begin to change what is the case in the light of what might be the case: The interpretative process of exploring the possibilities of a situation from our perspective is the backdrop to all our decision making and world-creating.

4.4 Interpretation and self-interpretation But this interpretative process is always two-sided. We cannot understand our situation without interpreting it; we cannot understand the way it is interpreted without understanding those who interpret it in this way; and we cannot understand this without interpreting those who interpret it. Thus, to understand human beings, we must understand how they understand themselves, and we cannot do so without thereby understanding ourselves in a certain way. According to Charles Taylor, we are self-interpreting animals who have no self independent from our self-interpretations.⁵⁰ We are not animals who could refrain from interpreting themselves and still be human. On the contrary, we are who we interpret ourselves to be: “our interpretation of ourselves and our experience is constitutive of what we are.”⁵¹ This does not mean that we have “some compulsive tendency to form reflexive views of” ourselves, “but rather that as” we are, we are “always partly constituted by self-interpretation, that is, by” our “understanding of the imports that impinge on” us.⁵² Long before the sense of ourselves is expressed in language and theory, it is embedded in the stream of our experiences and actions that is our life. We have no self independent of our self-interpretations. How we live shows who we are. The dynamics of becoming a self are thus intimately bound up with our interpretative activities both in interpreting our situations and in interpreting ourselves in our situations. And just as our situation is the totality of possible interpretations from our perspective both of what is given to us and of its possibilities, so a self is the totality of possible self-interpretations in the process of interpreting our situations and ourselves in our situations.

 Charles Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” in Human Agency and Language: Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, pp. 45 – 76.  Ibid., p. 47.  Ibid., p. 72.

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4.5 Selves and situations Selves and situations are thus correlates of an interpretative process that permanently differentiates and relates the two and thereby changes them: There is no self that is not a self in a situation, and there is no situation that is not a situation of somebody (a person) or something (an organization or institution like a bank). Two things are important here. On the one hand, situations are always relative to something or somebody whose situations they are: They are not abstract state of affairs but concrete ways of being situated in a context governed by specific interests and concerns. On the other hand, we cannot live without living in a situation. Situations are concrete ways of our being-in-the-world. They function as principles of choice by selecting the set of possibilities relative to the standpoint and horizon of our particular perspective and by making them accessible to us as real possibilities. We explore these possibilities by interpreting our situation in a certain way, and by interpreting ourselves in interpreting our situations in this way. By doing this we not only change the possibilities of the situation but also ourselves. Just as understanding is the mode in which we exist, so interpretation is the operation in and through which we enact our mode of existing; and just as we cannot live without living in concrete situations, so we cannot become selves without becoming selves situated in situations.

4.6 Shared situations Now situations are shared with others, and selves situated in situations are situated in shared situations. Thus, becoming a self is embedded in a process of cobecoming selves in shared interactions: We cannot become selves by distinguishing between us and our situations without at the same time distinguishing between others and ourselves participating in shared situations. That is to say, we are not first selves and then interact in shared situations. Rather, we are born into situations of cooperative breeding,⁵³ and we develop our unique fea-

 Ruth Mace and Rebecca Sear, “Are humans cooperative breeders?” in Grandmotherhood: the Evolutionary Significance of the Second Half of Female Life, ed. by Eckart Voland, Athanasius Chasiotis, Wulf Schiefenhoevel, Piscataway: Rutgers University Press 2005, pp. 143 – 159; Judith M. Burkart, Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Carel P. van Schaik, “Cooperative breeding and human cognitive evolution,” Evolutionary Anthropology, vol. 18, 2009, pp. 175 – 186; Carel P. van Schaik, Judith M. Burkart, “Mind the Gap: Cooperative breeding and the evolution of our unique features,” in Mind the Gap: Tracing the Origins of Human Universals, ed. by Peter M. Kappeler and Joan B.

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tures by participating in cooperative communication and collaborative problem solving. As Michael Tomasello and others have shown, “[u]nderstanding and sharing intentions” are “the “origins of cultural cognition”.⁵⁴ Shared intentionality involves more than one self. Just as there is no self without shared intentionality so there is no sharing of intentionality without shared situations of communication. This is basic for human life. Whereas nonhuman primate (and other animal) culture is essentially individualistic … human culture and cultural transmission are fundamentally cooperative. Synchronically, humans engage in much more cooperative behavior in terms of such things as collaborative problem solving and cooperative (or even conventional) communication. Moreover, human individuals live in a world in which the group expects them to conform to its particular conventions and social norms—or else! The result is a society structured by cooperatively created and enforced conventions and norms for how to behave as one of ‘us,’ resulting ultimately in rule-governed social institutions. Diachronically, this cooperative way of living translates into established members of the group teaching things to youngsters and novitiates, who not only learn but actively conform. Teaching and conformity are main contributors to the stability of cultural practices in a group and—precisely because of this stability—to the unique ways in which human cultural practices ratchet up in complexity over historical time. The result is human artifacts and symbol systems with ‘histories,’ so-called cumulative cultural evolution.⁵⁵

4.7 Re-presenting interpretations It follows that the sense of self will never be merely the neural representation of our bodily processes in and through which we are aware of and react to our environment.⁵⁶ Rather, it represents what is mediated by them, in particular, how in and through these processes we are aware of being situated in shared situations with other human beings; and this necessarily involves interpretative

Silk, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer 2010, pp. 477– 496; Adrian V. Jaeggi, Judith M. Burkart, Carel P. van Schaik, “On the psychology of cooperation in humans and other primates: combining the natural history and experimental evidence of prosociality,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B., vol. 365, 2010, pp. 2723 – 2735.  Michael Tomasello, Malinda Carpenter, Joseph Call, Tanya Behne, Henrike Moll, “Understanding and sharing intentions: The origins of cultural cognition,” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, vol. 28, 2005, pp. 675 – 691; cf. Michael Tomasello, Origins of human communication, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008; Why We Cooperate, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2009.  Michael Tomasello, “Human culture in evolutionary perspective,” in Advances in Culture and Psychology, ed. by Michele Gelfand, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, p. 5.  Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness, London: Vintage 1999.

4.7 Re-presenting interpretations

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processes of understanding our bodily processes mediating the presence of other human selves. Similarly if, as Dawkins argues, “consciousness arises when the brain’s simulation of the world becomes so complete that it must include a model of itself,”⁵⁷ then this is not sufficiently captured by the hypothesis of a hierarchical triad of proto-self, core consciousness, and extended consciousness or autobiographical self.⁵⁸ In the process of becoming a self our mental representations do not merely represent the changing internal states of our body or organism (protoself) nor just the more complex memory capacity and reasoning ability built on this (autobiographical self) but the ways in which we are involved in our interactions with our environment in the interpretative processes of being aware of others and ourselves in our shared situations. As organized records of past experiences our neural structures re-present not facts but interpretations— interpretations of our shared situations, of the selves sharing these situations, and of the shared interpretations and understandings on which most or all of our interactions are based. In interpreting our situations, and ourselves in our situations, we interpret those who interpret themselves, and in an important sense we are who we interpret ourselves to be because “our interpretation of ourselves and our experience is constitutive of what we are”.⁵⁹ We live in meaningful situations and always interpret the already interpreted—whether explicitly or implicitly by being embedded in our stream of actions, our body-practices, social practices, and social institutions. Thus, our interpretations and self-interpretations largely re-present re-presentations, or interpret interpretations. In short, we are always already part of a meaningful culture, and only because of this can we develop and change our interpretations of the ways in which we become aware of others and ourselves in our shared situations.

 Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1976, p. 59.  Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens, chap. 1: “The sense of self which emerges in core consciousness is the core self, a transient entity, ceaselessly recreated for each and every object with which the brain interacts. Our traditional notion of self, however, is linked to the idea of identity and corresponds to a nontranscient collection of unique facts and ways which characterize a person. My term for that entity is the autobiographical self … the autobiographical self arises from the core self.” See Floyd Merrell, Sensing Corporeally. Towards a Posthuman Understanding, Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2004, p. 160; Ethel S. Person, Arnold M. Cooper, Glen O. Gabbard (eds.), The American Psychiatric Publishing Textbook of Psychoanalysis, Arlington VA: American Psychiatric Publishing 2005, p. 139.  Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” p. 47.

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4.8 Self-interpretations In this sense, Charles Taylor, Hubert Dreyfus, Hartmut Rosa⁶⁰ and many others have argued that “[s]elf-interpretations lie at the heart of our social institutions and practices, and of our individual, incorporated habits, long before they become explicit in language and theories”.⁶¹ But they are not interpretations of a pre-given self (objective genitive), or interpretations performed by a pre-given self (subjective genitive). Rather, they are implicitly or pre-reflectively operative in human life situations long before they become articulated as explicit norms and convictions or become attributed to particular selves. Our self-interpretations include a certain sense of what we are as human beings, of what society is, of what our relations in and towards society are like; a sense of what truth, time, and eternity might be, of what a good life consists in etc. These form the backdrop to everything we do and experience explicitly, and while we try to be consistent and coherent in our beliefs (as far as necessary) because we want to succeed in what we do (our actions), the backdrop of social selfinterpretations is nothing of this sort. The underlying social self-interpretations are not a “monolithic, closed, and coherent self-interpretation of a society, but rather a complex, multi-layered, partly self-contradictory, but nevertheless related set of self-interpretations”.⁶² In short, 1. selves are situated in situations in the sense that human life situations are differentiated into (a) the place and condition of human living (situation), (b) those who live at that place and under those conditions (human selves), and (c) the ways in which human beings live at that place and under those conditions (modes). 2. Since ‘somebody lives at a given place and under certain conditions in a particular way’ can be most simply represented as ‘There is an x, and x is/has/ does F in mode G,’ these modes can in turn be differentiated into modes of existing (‘There is an x,…’: selves) and modes of living (‘.. . and x is/has/does F in mode G’: the life of selves): Selves are not objects or entities but ways or modes of (human) existing in specific situations. 3. If we seek to spell out this mode or way of existing, then selves can be said to be self-interpretations, that is, ways of interpreting the situations in which we

 Hartmut Rosa, “Four levels of self-interpretation. A paradigm for interpretive social philosophy and political criticism,” Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 30, 2004, pp. 691– 720 (https:// www.yumpu.com/en/document/read/24157593/four-levels-of-self-interpretation-a-paradigm-forinterpretive-social‐) (2/25/2022).  Ibid., p. 5.  Ibid.

4.8 Self-interpretations

4.

5.

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live to ourselves, and of ourselves in our situations: It is through the interpretative process that distinctions between signs, objects, media, and interpretants are established, and they are the basis for contrasting what is summarily called ‘self’ with what is summarily called ‘situation’: Selves are not the result of biological but of semiotic or interpretative processes. Thus, in order to understand what we mean by ‘selves’ we have to understand the processes of interpretation through which they are constituted. Humans become selves by being affectively aware of their situations (emotional awareness of the import of a situation for them); and by articulating their self-interpretation in the way they behave in the situation (through emotions, body, gestures, actions, language). These articulations can be more or less explicit, and hence more or less prone to misunderstanding. This permanently reinforces the need to communicate in order to critically evaluate and judge the interpretations and self-interpretations articulated in a situation. And this is both possible and necessary because selves are situated in shared situations structured by interaction and communication, that is, self-interpretations always occur in the context of other self-interpretations.

Becoming a self is thus a process of transformation in which human beings are situated betwixt and between, on the one hand, a given common culture that provides the means of articulating their experiences (culture-bound means of articulation) and, on the other, their individual ways of emotionally appropriating and actively changing this cultural repertoire in the light of their individual experiences and the “inarticulate sense of what is important”⁶³ that comes with them (pre- and trans-cultural experiences). If one focuses only on the first point, one can believe that human beings are formed arbitrarily by the language they have accepted. If one focuses only on the second, one can think that we ought to be able to isolate scientifically the pure, uninterpreted basis of human emotion that all these languages are about. But neither of these is true. There is no human emotion which is not embodied in an interpretive language; and yet all interpretations can be judged as more or less adequate, more or less distortive … This is what is involved in seeing man as a self-interpreting animal. It means that he cannot be understood simply as an object among objects, for his life incorporates an interpretation, an expression of what cannot exist unexpressed, because the self that is to be interpreted is essentially that of a being who self-interprets.⁶⁴

 Taylor, “Self-Interpreting Animals,” p. 75.  Ibid.

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4.9 A sense of self If we are beings who self-interpret, our identities must essentially depend on these self-interpretations. But if we self-interpret relative to the affective construal of situations, and if situations permanently change, how can we develop a sense of ourselves, a sense of our own identity? Taylor’s short answer is that we develop second-order interpretations of our first order interpretations: We are not only affected by the import of a situation in a particular way in our wishes and desires, but we also relate to these affections (emotions) in particular ways by taking a stand towards them, that is, by evaluating them. Now valuations are either strong or weak. Persons are essentially strong evaluators—beings that can concern themselves “with the qualitative worth of different desires,”⁶⁵ thereby aspiring “to be a certain kind of person.”⁶⁶ We cannot not chose who we are, and who we want to be (normative values); our values are relative to cultures and societies which define the moral spaces where we live (who we are is defined by where we are); and the moral space opened up by a culture are the values and goods which help us to answer where we are. The answer given to this question is always situation relative and hence changes over time. In keeping track of these changes, we build up a narrative identity, that is, try to safeguard the coherence of our valuations over time. This is the opposite of an ossified identity. By interpreting our experiences of import we change how we feel and consequently change our sense of import, as Taylor points out. Moreover, an interpretation of our sense of import involves elements of both discovery and invention. In deciding whether to make a career change, for example, it is common to lay out the pros and cons on each side, and then use one’s sense of what is more important to guide one’s choice. In doing this, Taylor thinks, one is articulating more fully one’s deepest sense of what is important. However, this sense is never merely of our own making. In any given case, not just any choice is possible, and mistaken choices may leave one feeling unfulfilled. We value in the context of valuations into which we are born, to which we react, or which we try to overcome and to change. The backdrop of these cultural evaluations is decisive for our sense of what is important.

 Charles Taylor, “What is Human Agency?” in Human Agency and Language. Philosophical Papers 1, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1985, p. 16.  Ibid., p. 19.

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Moreover, modern culture does not provide a coherent context of values and meanings. Rather, it incorporates plural horizons of meaning, plural ‘views of the good life’, and plural lifestyles. But then, how exactly do explicit self-interpretations (those which are represented in the semantics of our language, in theories, discourses, dogmas, forming the realm of ideas) and implicit self-interpretations (those constituting our social institutions as a form of objectified or ‘sedimented’ self-interpretation) cooperate in our sense of what is important to us? Rosa has put it forcefully: On the one hand, “subjects are constituted, and develop an identity, with the help of an explicit self-understanding that is represented in their individual language and in the theories, convictions and ideas they hold. To quite a substantial proportion, a human being is what she thinks she is. But on the other hand, subjects are also constituted by a realm of feelings and bodypractices or habitus, to use Bourdieu’s term, which is pre-reflective and incorporated, but which nevertheless carries social meaning and can be understood as a form of implicit, expressive self-interpretation, too.”

And as “with social theories and institutions, individual’s explicit beliefs and the implicit self-understandings incorporated in our feelings and habitus are mutually interdependent as well as partially autonomous.”⁶⁷ In short, “a self exists only within” what Taylor calls “webs of interlocution,” ⁶⁸ that is, not only embedded in a situation but in a situation in which the self emerges from the interactions and communications between those who share in the situation, with their (potentially different) memories of the past and expectations of the future. In this sense, “[e]xplicit individual self-images as well as habits and feelings are influenced by the dominant social ideas as well as institutions and practices—and vice versa.”⁶⁹ “The individual self-understanding is not something prior to social discourse and institutions, but is rather derivative of the norms, values and self-images manifested in social life.”⁷⁰

 Rosa, “Four Levels,” pp. 7– 8.  Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: the making of the modern identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989, p. 36.  Rosa, “Four Levels,” p. 9.  Ibid., p. 20.

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4.10 A perennial problem However, this creates a perennial problem for becoming a self: “there is neither a single, coherent self-interpretation on the level of explicit, constitutive social ideas, nor is there one on the level of social institutions and practices.”⁷¹ “Rather, there are different institutional contexts or fields of practice like the economy, religion, science, politics, art, and law, which embody (i. e., presuppose and support) respective self-images, norms and values that differ to a considerable degree from each other, and there are the corresponding explicit beliefs, convictions and discourses which also differ and are sometimes even incompatible.”⁷²

The same is true for individuals: “individual identities are not constituted by single, coherent sets of reflective and pre-reflective self-images and values, too, but by a variety of context-dependent self-images and practices.”⁷³ At any given time a self is the momentary result of the continuous strife between conflicting selfimages and values in situations of communication with others and (through memory and imagination) with one’s own former and possible future self-images. There is no self beyond this conflict, but rather living in and through this conflict is what makes a human being a self: Each and every self is the momentary intersection of its own past, present, and future interpretations in the process of a critical appropriation, modification, or rejection of the views that others communicate to it. Therefore, without paying close attention to the actual situations in which human beings live, we cannot understand how they become the selves they become. However, not everything in a situation is of the same importance for the becoming of a self. Rather, we must concentrate on those features that are decisive for the ‘web of interlocution’ in a particular case. For if we cannot study selves without studying the situations in which human beings become and live as selves, then we must study above all the schemes of orientation that are operative in those situations.⁷⁴ The self-situation-compound comprises a complex situation and a complex self—not a monolithic self and a complex situation or a complex self and a simple situation. The self is not a single entity but a dynamic and many-leveled process from the organic and biological to the social and per-

 Ibid., p. 23.  Ibid.  Ibid., p. 26.  See for a similar approach William F. Hanks, Referential Practice. Language and Lived Space among the Maya, Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press 1990. I owe this reference to Marlene Block.

4.11 The ‘self’ as an orienting device

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sonal.⁷⁵ And a situation is complex for a self not merely as a multitude of possibilities from which it must choose but, even more importantly, as a multitude of schemes of orientation at different levels, not always compatible, which the self must use in choosing from the possibilities of a situation. This becomes obvious when we pay attention to the different contexts whose interplay constitutes the practical situation of living a human life, e. g., the biological contexts of organisms (here/now); the social contexts of persons (personal pronouns); the political contexts of agents (left/right/middle: political parties); the cultural contexts of traditions and social institutions (new communities and media). Basic to this complex interplay is not the neurobiological foundation but the ’web of interlocutions’ and hence the social dimension of our shared situations. This brings me finally back to the third aspect of the grammatical observations from which I have started.

4.11 The ‘self’ as an orienting device As pointed out earlier, English grammar shows the term ‘self’ to function not primarily as a noun or a verb but as an operator that makes an ordinary object pronoun into a reflexive one. Now pronouns are neither nouns nor verbs but orienting devices which we use in anaphoric or cataphoric ways to relate to antecedent and later expressions: ‘When he arrived at school, John fell asleep;’ ‘This is what I believe: that all men were created equal.’ However, the point of this use of pronouns is not merely to establish a relation of sameness at the semantic level of a proposition (e. g. ‘he’ and ‘John’; ‘this’ and ‘all men were created equal’), but to make the pragmatic point of indicating the position of the speaker or agent in question with respect to what is said or articulated. Pronouns, in particular personal pronouns, are used to structure a communicative situation in such a way that certain relationships in this situation become obvious to all participants. This is why pronouns have been called “words with changeable signification” (Adolf Noreen), “moveable identifiers” (Roman Jakobson), or “indexes” or “indicators” (Peirce). And this is why one cannot use a personal pronoun like ‘I’ without in fact bringing the whole scheme of personal pronouns into play (I, you, he, she, it, we, you, they). When we qualify personal pronouns reflexively by indicat See Thomas Fuchs, Heribert C. Sattel, Peter Henningsen (eds.), The Embodied Self: Dimensions, Coherence and Disorders, Stuttgart: Schattauer 2010; Dan Zahavi, “Complexities of self,” Autism, vol. 14/5, 2010, pp. 547– 551; “The Complex self: Empirical and theoretical perspectives,” in Phenomenology, Cognition, and Neuroscience, ed. by Jeffrey McCurry and Angelle Pryor, Pittsburgh: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center 2012, pp. 40 – 58.

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ing that a person or thing acts on itself, we use self-language: ‘I cut myself’, ‘I did it to myself’ (vs. ‘I did it myself’: intensive use). It is still an orienting usage of the pronoun ‘I’ but with the additional information that the speaker is not only the referent to which the grammatical subject term refers but also the referent of the object of the action or attitude that the grammatical verb expresses. Thus, just as the pronoun always makes a pragmatic and not merely a semantic point, so the use of ‘self’ makes not merely a semantic but a pragmatic point: The term refers to those who can, in principle, actively participate in communicative interactions, that is, who can not only be addressed and described but also address and describe others and themselves. We call everybody a ‘self’ whom we expect to be able (not necessarily in fact but in principle) actively to participate in communications and interactions; and by calling anyone a self, we indicate our expectation that communicative interaction is possible in the same way as we participate actively in such communications and interactions. Just as with personal pronouns, however, the point of the term ‘self’ is that it is an index word, an indicator or an identifier that does not describe anyone or anything but locates or identifies a (potential) communicator who interacts (or can interact) with others in a situation. Just as the pronoun ‘I’ the term ‘self’ cannot be defined semantically (by specifying a context-independent meaning) but its meaning coincides with its pragmatic or situational function. It is used to locate human beings in situations of communication and indicates that we expect them to be able to use the scheme of personal pronouns in communicative interactions in a reflexive and self-referential way. Understood in this sense, we call everybody a self who can use (that is, has in principle the potential to acquire or develop the individual capacity to use) the orientational scheme of personal pronouns (or its equivalent) in communicative situations—not merely in the explicit sense of using the personal pronouns of a particular language but also in the implicit sense of interacting competently with others in communicative situations. It is the performative activity and personal mode of interaction in shared situations of communication that defines a self, not vice versa. We cannot communicate because we are selves, but rather we are selves because we can and do communicate in specific personal ways— through behaviors, actions, gestures, looks, language or any other means of personal interaction. We become a ‘you’ by responding to an address; an ‘I’ by addressing others; a ‘he’ or ‘she’ by being referred to by those who communicate about us; a ‘we’ by addressing our shared communality or by marking us off from others who don’t share it; a (plural) ‘you’ by addressing a group of those who share our situations; and a ‘they’ by referring to those who are not active participants in the actual web of interlocution at the moment. In so far as we can be located at any of these communicative points of reference, we can in prin-

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ciple be located at any of the others as well. For if you can use a scheme of orientation at all, then to use it in one respect necessarily brings the other respects into play as well. They are ways of structuring a situation and using the scheme of personal pronouns is a way of structuring communicative situations shared with others. To be able to do this shows you to be a self; and humans become selves who are able to do this by being actively and passively involved in communicative processes. Thus, a realistic account of selves must start with the communicative situations and webs of interlocutions in which human beings actually exist, live, experience, act, and interact. Before we become true selves, we exist and live as selves in situations of interaction and communication that are contingent, culturally determined, and continuously changing. Only because we have, as human beings, the phylogenetic potential of actively participating in such communicative interactions, we can become selves ontogenetically by actively engaging in such communications and interactions. And since we cannot interact and communicate without doing it in a specific way, we do not become selves simply by living but by living in specific ways. Now all actual and possible situations of all actual and possible selves involve an intrinsic reference to that without which they could not be and would not be possible (in religious terms, a reference to God): God’s creative presence is the condition of the possibility of all actual and possible situations of all actual and possible selves. Thus, we become selves in our situations and communicative interactions not only by choosing, in a weak sense (in fact) or in a strong sense (by intention), our modes of living (with others) but also by choosing, in a weak or a strong sense, our mode of existing (with others before God).⁷⁶ The first involves transforming ourselves from being a particular human being among human beings (a particular of a

 We choose in fact by living in one way rather than another that would have been possible in a given situation; but we can also choose consciously and intentionally to live in this way rather than in another. The first is due to the structure of our situations as disjunctions of alternative real possibilities (possibilities that could become actual under the same conditions). The second results from determining ourselves to actualize this possibility rather than another in a given situation. As humans we do not only choose but determine what we want to choose (the content of our willing), nor do we only determine what we want to choose but we can determine how we want to choose what we want to choose (the mode of our willing) and, indeed, we can determine how we want to determine ourselves with respect to how we want to choose what we seek to choose (the moral mode of our willing). The latter is what Kant calls human autonomy: the capacity and inescapable need to determine ourselves in a moral way (as good or bad) in determining how we want to choose what we want to choose. We not only can act morally but we cannot act without acting in a morally relevant way, that is, a way that allows and requires us to assess everything we do in moral terms.

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shared commonality) to living as a self (an individual of an unique and distinctive individuality in interactions with other selves). The second involves becoming transformed from being an individual human self among others (a distinctive individual) to living as a true self in a humane way together with others before God (an individual who relates to others and to herself, as God’s freely chosen neighbors). Both transformations are free and cannot be enforced because nobody must actually become the self he or she can be, or live in a humane way as a true self: Just because we are selves, we can miss our possibilities and live below our potential as selves. But if we can be selves, why shouldn’t we become so? If we are selves, why shouldn’t we live as such? If we can become true selves, why shouldn’t we at least try to do so? And if we can live in a humane way, shouldn’t we at least want to do it? Kierkegaard thought that ‘can’ implies ‘ought’⁷⁷—at least in this context. We may fail on all accounts. But unless we try, we don’t even notice that we fail.

 Heiko Schulz, “‘Can’ Implies ‘Ought’. Kierkegaard’s Critique of Kant’s Deontic Logic,” Kierkegaardiana, vol. 24, 2007, pp. 198 – 219.

5 Self, finitude and estrangement The ambiguity of human subjectivity has been at the center of Arne Grøn’s philosophy for a long time.⁷⁷ “We tend to construe subjectivity in terms of activity, and activity in terms of self-empowerment.”⁷⁸ This makes it impossible to understand a passivity that we cannot undo or replace by some activity, and this in turn makes it impossible for us to understand ourselves.⁷⁹ As long as we seek to understand ourselves merely in terms of activity, or merely in terms of passivity, we shall miss the existential dialectics of passivity and activity at the very core of our existence. We are, but we have not made ourselves and have no ultimate control over ourselves. We are finite beings in constant danger of misconstruing the very point of our existence: that we live from a gift that we can never supersede by our own doing because it makes that doing possible in the first place. Some take this to manifest our existential self-alienation from a full possession and authority over ourselves (Ernst Bloch). But the contrary is true. We are not estranged from ourselves by living from a passivity beyond all our activity and passivity (Emmanuel Lévinas), but rather by ignoring it or denying to do so. Striving for self-possession is not the overcoming of self-alienation but its very enactment. To show this, let me take a closer look at the debate about self-alienation.

5.1 Selves The standard view takes ‘self-alienation’ to mean “The process of distancing oneself from one’s own feelings or activities, such as may occur in mental illness or  Cf. Arne Grøn, Iben Damgaard, Søren Overgaard (eds.). Subjectivity and Transcendence, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007; “Subjectivity, Passion and Passivity,” in Passion and Passivity, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Michael Rodgers, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 143 – 155; Arne Grøn, “Homo subiectus: Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,” in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2011, pp. 19 – 33; “Time, Courage, Selfhood: Reflections on Kierkegaard’s Discourse ‘To Preserve One’s Soul in Patience’,” in Kierkegaard in Lisbon: Contemporary Readings of Repetition, Fear and Trembling, Philosophical Fragments and the 1843 and 1844 Upbuilding Discourses, ed. by José M. Justo and Elisabete M. de Sousa, Lisbon: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa 2012, pp. 85 – 96.  Grøn, Widerfahrnis und Verstehen, p. 57 (my translation).  “Verstehen beginnt in der Passivität.” Arne Grøn, “Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,” in Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Pierre Bühler, Andreas Hunziker, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2015, p. 56. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-007

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as a symptom of emotional distress.”⁸⁰ This makes sense as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. The definition rightly shies away from speaking of a self and instead uses the reflexive pronoun: “The process of distancing oneself …” It is not a mysterious self but we human beings who get alienated by distancing ourselves from something or somebody or by getting distanced from ourselves in some respect or other. In the first case the self is the center of the alienating activity (whether intentional or not), in the second case it suffers a distancing from itself by or through some other activity (whether in response to its own activities or not). Thus, self-alienation may be the result of something we do (active self-alienation) or of something done to us (passive self-alienation). In the first case we can overcome it by stopping that activity (if we can), in the second case it can only be overcome if the situation changes that alienates us (and we may or may not be able to contribute to this). In both the active and the passive case, the term ‘self’ is used as a reflexive pronoun (myself, yourself) that indicates those who carry out or incur the selfdistancing in question. In those and similar cases the term functions not so much as a noun that signifies an entity but as a way of referring to oneself (I, we) or to some other human being in a certain respect (he, she, them), or it functions as the abbreviation of a verb (‘selfing’, becoming a self) or as (part of) an adjective or adverb (selfish/selfishly, selfless/selflessly). Where it is used as a noun the term ‘self’ is used as a shorthand formula for human beings understood in a certain respect: as centers of activity and passivity, as the originators of doings and the recipients of sufferings, as moral agents, and as religious subjects. In this usage the term does not refer to a special substance or a thing (a self) but to a particular way or mode in which human beings exist. For a human being to be a self is to exist in a particular way—a way that typically comprises three components that build on each other and can each be missed in their own ways: To be a self is to (be able to) understand oneself as a human being among human beings (self-understanding as a human being), to (be able to) seek to live one’s life in a self-determined way (self-determination as a moral agent), to (be able to) orient one’s self-determining on the principle that a good human life aims at living in a selfless and not selfish way together with others (orientation towards selflessness as the mode of a truly human life). In all those respects we can manifest selfhood by degrees: our self-understanding can be more or less adequate or true; our self-determination can be

 UK Dictionary, self-alienation (www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/self-alien ation) (02/22/2022).

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more or less efficient and responsible; our self-orientation can be more or less appropriate and right. To be a self is not to exhibit a stable number of features but to participate in a mode of living that admits of degrees, that is to say, that can be increased or decreased, intensified or mitigated in various respects. To be a self is to become a self and live more or less as a self. Thus, wherever we signify somebody as a self it makes sense to ask about his or her self-understanding and inquire into his or her way of self-determination and self-orientation. How do you see yourself (or would you like to see yourself)? How do you seek to live your life as a human being (whether you manage or fail to do so)? How do you understand the goodness of human life for which you strive (or which you miss)? At least four points are important here: First, modes presuppose being. Without actual human beings there cannot be selves. Only we can be selves, as far as we know, and we become selves by living in a certain way. We do not have to do so to be human beings, and we do not cease to be human if we fail to do so. But we become selves where we begin to understand ourselves as human beings (self-understanding) and seek to determine our life accordingly (self-determination and self-orientation). Second, the term ‘self’ is an existential term. Existential terms do not allow us to describe or define anything but help to locate that to which they refer in a particular situation, universe, or world: the world of actuality. Selves exist only in the actual world, whereas in possible worlds there are at best possible selves but never actual ones. Third, the terms ‘self’ and ‘situation’ are correlative terms. Since human beings live their lives in changing situations, we cannot address concrete human existence as a self without locating it in a situation: A self is always a self-ina-situation, and a situation is always a situation-of-a-self. Of course, these are —potentially oversimplifying—ways of talking about la condition humaine. For just as ‘situation’ is a term that refers to the complex and changing environments in which each of us exists, so the term ‘self’ refers to those who exist in such a way in those situations that they can develop an understanding of their situation and of themselves that guides their way of relating to their situations and to each other in their situations. Fourth, selves exist in situations of conflict. Humans exist in situations, and they can become selves by existing in their situations in a certain way—a way characterized by human self-understanding, free self-determination and moral self-orientation. Situations are always situations of somebody, they are shared with others, and selves are human beings who together with others live in shared situations that they experience and change by interacting with each other and their environment. We cannot do this without understanding ourselves, our situations, and those who share our situations, for we determine ourselves as we

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understand ourselves, everybody else, and everything else in our situations. But different human beings understand differently, determine themselves differently and orient themselves differently, and it is rarely possible to sort all that out clearly and in a way that is acceptable to all. Therefore, we cannot exist as selves without participating in conflicts of understandings (What do we know?), conflicts about determinations (How shall we live?) and conflicts about orientations (How ought we to exist?). And while there may be occasional solutions for some, there will never be an end to those conflicts for all.

5.2 Becoming a self Thus, we are not selves but can become selves, and we can become selves of different intensities, qualities, and degrees (emotional, cognitive, reflexive, moral, religious selves). We are all born as human beings into particular situations in which we co-exist with others. That makes us particular tokens (this being) of a general type (human being). However, as human beings we are not merely what we are and can be (in the regime of being) but even more so who and what we desire and decide to be (in the regime of the will): We are human beings who can become selves if we understand ourselves as human beings (self-understanding), if we determine ourselves through choosing how we want to live our human lives among our fellow human beings and all other beings (self-determination), and if we seek to orient ourselves towards a common human life that takes others and their interests, needs and wellbeing seriously (self-orientation). This is impossible without understanding (1) the situations in which we live (where we are and what is possible and impossible, probable and improbable, necessary and unnecessary in those situations), (2) ourselves (our capacities [what we can do], our desires [what we want to do], our needs and interests [what we need and aspire to], and our orientations [what we ought to do]), and (3) the others who participate in our situations and their capacities, desires, interests, needs and orientations. For those understandings and self-understandings help us to give meaning to our experiences and guide our activities and ways of relating. Our understandings and self-understandings are always mediated through and related to the understanding and self-understanding of others with whom we co-exist in shared situations and to the webs of interlocution that make up human life. We cannot understand our situations or ourselves apart from others and their understandings and self-understandings, and since their views rarely if ever coincide with ours, we are permanently involved in the conflict of interpretations that characterizes the life of the self-interpreting animals that we are.

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Since humans can live in human or inhuman ways in their relations to others and to themselves, we become the sort of subjects we determine ourselves to be—or find ourselves to be determined by others—by living in a human or inhuman way—a way that helps others also to become selves who live in this way (selfless selves) or fails to do so (selfish selves). In short, human beings are not born as selves but have the potential and the duty to become selves by existing in a particular way in their shared situations with others: the way of human self-understanding and self-determination. It is this mode of existing for which we ought to strive as Kierkegaard has pointed out; and we do so in the most appropriate way if we seek to live our lives not as selfish but as selfless or true selves—selves that help others to become true selves as well.

5.3 Self-alienation as a process and a state With this in mind let us return to the definition of self-alienation quoted at the beginning. The view it propounds is clearly too narrow and too one-sided. Selfalienation is not only a process but also a state, a state in which one finds oneself either because of a process of distancing oneself from an earlier state or because one fails to live up to a standard or ideal that one could and ought to actualize. In the first case self-alienation is a change from an earlier state to a later state in time, in the second case it is a failure to live up to a norm or ideal that one shouldn’t miss. In both cases self-alienation indicates a change. But in the first case it is a change that has taken place: we are no longer in line with ourselves (our actual self differs from our original self), and in the second case it is a change that has not taken place: we are not yet in line with ourselves (our actual self differs from our ideal self). In short, we either differ from our first or original self, or from our ideal self. And in either case what we are in fact falls short of what we think we have been or desire to be. Accordingly, there are two ways of overcoming self-alienation. In the first case it is construed as a recovery of what one has lost, in the second as an achievement of what one is lacking. We seek to overcome a state of estrangement by returning to a lost harmony of existence that we were once able to affirm and to live: we are no longer selves in a sense that we can unconditionally and unrestrictedly affirm. Or we seek to achieve a mode of existing that actualizes the potentials we have as selves in the best and fullest way: we are not yet the selves we could and ought to be. In the first case we remember an unrestricted self-affirmation, which we miss, in the second case we strive for a possible self-affirmation for which we hope.

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In either respect self-alienation is different from self-deception. Self-deception is about knowledge, self-alienation about being. It seems to be obvious that perfect knowledge of oneself is impossible. We cannot know everything about ourselves from all possible points of view. My self-knowledge necessarily fails with respect to the beginning and the end of my life. Others may know it, I can’t. On the other hand, they can never know my inner life in the way it is accessible to me. They cannot know everything I know, and I cannot know everything they can know. But there is nobody who can know me both from my own point of view and from the point of view of others in a perfect and complete way. Therefore, even to strive for perfect knowledge of myself is misguided. And there are further limits. Even that which in principle is possible for us to know about ourselves we never know in fact. There is always more to know, and nearly everything we know may be known better. Our self-knowledge is never complete, and it is never completely transparent to us. We cannot know everything that can be known about us, and we cannot know everything that we can know about us in complete transparency. Even to strive for it seems to be misguided. Thus, what we must strive for is not complete transparency, but an adequate understanding of ourselves –an understanding of ourselves that is appropriate to the actual situation in which we live and want to continue to live. But what about deceiving ourselves? Is it possible, and if so how? And even if it is possible because we in fact do so, can we deceive ourselves about the fact that we deceive ourselves? If I distance myself from (some aspects of) myself, how can I not know that I am different from how I experience myself? I know myself under one description, and I refuse to accept or ignore that there is another description of me that may be more appropriate in the given situation or in a certain respect. Self-deception is not a complete failure to understand anything about myself. Rather, it is the failure to understand myself in a given situation under the description that is most appropriate of myself in that situation. And what is appropriate or most appropriate in a given situation depends on the characteristics of that situation, the requirements of relating to others in a adequate way, and the goal I pursue in living in the way I do.

5.4 “There is no right life in the wrong one” But there are further distinctions that need to be taken into account.⁸¹ It is one thing to understand self-alienation as (the result of) a process in which one gets

 Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1951), No.18, in Theo-

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alienated from oneself in certain respects: We are not who and what we can or ought to be as human beings but are estranged from ourselves in some respect or other. The problem here is with us and not primarily with the situation or the world in which we live: How can we live a true life if we are not true to ourselves? It is another thing to see self-alienation as (the result of) a process in which we distinguish ourselves from something else—our feelings and experiences, our body, our environment, our fellow human beings, our situation at large: We are who and what we are but we distance ourselves from something that we cannot or do not want to own or to appropriate as our own. Here the question is: How can we be true to ourselves if we live in a wrong life? In the first case the problem is how we can become truly human beings, in the second case it is our social environment and existential situation that alienates us. It is not we who have to change, but our world and our relation to the world without which we cannot live a truly human life. Now this distinction is clearly somewhat abstract. How can we live a true life without being or becoming proper selves? And how can we be or become proper selves if we live a false life in a wrong world? We become a self only in appropriate situations through interactions with others, and we cannot change our situation without changing ourselves, and our way of relating to it. This is why a long tradition has argued that living in an estranged way in the world is a consequence of being estranged from ourselves: We cannot relate in a right way to others if we do not relate in the right way to ourselves. If we are strangers to ourselves, how can we be good neighbors of others? But the argument also works the other way round: How can we not be estranged from ourselves if we live in a world that is full of evil and wrong? “There is no right life in the wrong one,” as Adorno pointed out.⁸² How can we relate in a right way to ourselves if we cannot relate in right ways to others? If we cannot be true to others, how can we be true to ourselves? Is the meanness of the world the cause of human self-alienation, or is it the other way round (as an important strand in the Christian tradition has long argued)? Is the world evil because we are evil, or are we evil because the world is not as good as it could and ought to be? In short, is human self-alienation the cause or the effect of an alienating world?

dor W. Adorno. Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. by Dennis Redmond 2005 (https://www.marxists. org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm) (2/22/2022).  Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life (1951), No.18, in Theodor W. Adorno. Collected Works, vol. 4, trans. by Dennis Redmond 2005 (https://www.marxists. org/reference/archive/adorno/1951/mm/ch01.htm) (2/22/2022).

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5.5 Alienation under a description There is no general answer to this. Rather, we must be more specific and make distinctions. Obviously, we can be strangers to ourselves in more than one way. We may fail to become a self because we do not have the chance or shy away from becoming it: We are humans, but not selves. We possess human dignity independent of being a self or not being a self. Not all humans become a self, and not all who have become selves remain selves to the end of their lives. So, it is important not to confuse or equate humanity with selfhood. However, where there is no self, there is no self-alienation. We cannot even begin to distance ourselves from anything if we are not or no longer a self. We may be a self but fail to understand our situation and ourselves in an appropriate way. In this case we cannot determine ourselves adequately because we lack a proper understanding of the world and of ourselves. We need to improve our understanding in order to see more clearly where we may have to distance ourselves from something and where not. We may have a proper understanding of our situation and ourselves but find ourselves not in control of our life. We feel helpless, powerless, dependent on something outside our control, forced to do things we did not choose ourselves, and therefore not able to determine ourselves. Some sort of alienation is forced upon us, and we cannot reject or overcome it. This may happen because the world in which we live makes it impossible or because we hold a misguided conception of the self we want to be—a conception that is too shallow and does not demand any efforts of us, or a conception that is too idealized and makes us live in a rigid and restricted way. “We begin to avoid aspects of our own experience that do not conform to our elevated image of ideal personhood … We gradually become a stranger to ourselves. The actual self, consisting of our real feelings and experience, becomes twisted, distorted, and stretched into a mold of the ‘appropriate’ self. This censorship activity has the end result of selfestrangement and ignorance of our real needs, desires and dispositions toward life.”⁸³

We end up being self-alienated because we fail to balance our self-understanding, self-determination, and self-orientation in the right way. Thus, we are or become strangers to ourselves because we fail to develop an adequate understanding of our situation and/or ourselves, because we cannot control our situation, or because we think too little or too high of ourselves.

 Terry D. Cooper, Sin, Pride & Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology & Psychology, Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press 2004, p. 130.

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It is therefore not true that “each conception of ‘alienation’ is underpinned by a normative ontological conception of the preferable, or authentic, self.”⁸⁴ We may have no idea of what we mean by a self or of what we want to be and yet feel distanced from our own feelings and activities or from the world in which we live, and even if we don’t feel so we may be distanced from all this in fact. We may have the experience even though we miss the meaning. What is true, however, is that there is a contrast built into the very term ‘selfalienation:’ Only selves (that is, human beings who exist in a selfing mode) can be alienated and if you are, then you live in a way that ought to be avoided or corrected. But we may be alienated for very different reasons, as we have seen, and the contrast at stake can be conceived very differently. There are those who construe self-alienation in (1) ontological terms: We exist in ways that are untrue to what we essentially are (Tillich’s distinction between essence and existence) (2) ethical terms: We ought to be what—given our actual situation—we cannot be (Kant’s account of the practical law and radical evil) (3) theological terms: We are, by our own doing, cut off from the ground of being and exist in ignorance, blindness, and rebellion (Christian idea of sin) (4) psychological terms: We experience ourselves as not being in control of our life, experience, emotions, passions, and feelings (we feel estranged from ourselves) (5) social terms: We are incompetent to shape our relations to others in our own terms but dependent on others who may abuse us (we lack the power to determine ourselves) (6) economic terms: We are estranged from our humanity because we are depraved of the benefit of our labors by big business and the capitalist mode of industrial production (Marx’s view of alienation) (7) political terms: We are estranged from ourselves as citizens because we are unable to participate in the political decision processes of our state and society (Adorno, Habermas) (8) gender terms: We feel and experience ourselves differently from what we are biologically or how we are identified and construed by others (gender, sex, transgender experience) In each of those and similar cases the character of self-alienation is construed under a different description of the human being: contingent being (ontological

 Gavin Rae, “Alienation, Authenticity, and the Self,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 23, 2010, pp. 21– 36.

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view), moral agent (ethical view), creature and sinner (theological view), split or scattered personality (psychological view), suppressed individual (social view), exploited worker (economic view), marginalized citizen (political view), transgendered person (gender view). Indeed, any description of human beings can be used to construe an account of self-alienation by contrasting the IS of an actual situation with the OUGHT of an ideal.

5.6 The role of descriptions in accounts of self-alienation Now we can see more clearly why it is not “ a normative ontological conception of the preferable, or authentic, self” that is at stake here but the description under which we understand the human beings or ourselves. For each description is tied to a conceptual scheme or frame of reference whose criteria decide on the authentic and inauthentic forms of living a life under that description. And those criteria not only differ between themselves, but they also change over time with the changes and developments of our knowledge, understanding, and orientations. To give only one example: In his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Karl Marx distinguished four types of alienation that occur to workers in the capitalist system of industrial production: (1) the alienation of the worker from the work (the product of his labor), (2) the alienation of the worker from the working (the act of producing), (3) the alienation of the worker from himself as a producer (the Gattungswesen or species-essence) and (4) the alienation of the worker from other workers. Workers in the capitalist system of production are thus judged to be alienated from their humanity in four different ways, but the standard by which that is measured is not a normative conception of the self but an ideal system of industrial production. In the Communist system industrial production will be determined by the collective requirements of society, not by the profit-oriented demands of a capitalist social class who live at the expense of the greater society. Under the collective ownership of the means of production, the relation of each worker to the mode of production will be identical, and will assume the character that corresponds to the universal interests of the communist society. The direct distribution of the fruits of the labour of each worker, to fulfill the interests of the working class—and thus to his and her own interest and benefit—will constitute an un-alienated state of labour conditions, which restores to the worker the fullest exercise and determination of his and her human nature.⁸⁵

 Wikipedia, Marx’s theory of alienation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx’s_theory_of_alienation) (03/08/2021).

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What must be rescued from alienation is the exercise and determination of one’s human nature. But this must be done within the parameters of a particular description of human beings, in this case, by understanding them as workers in a system of industrial production. We cannot understand human beings without understanding them as something or other, and how we understand them determines how we construe selfhood and self-alienation under that description.

5.7 The need to be specific There is a general lesson to be learned from this. We need to view human beings under a specific description if we want to identify their kinds and forms of alienation. But we cannot arrive at a proper understanding of self-alienation in concrete cases if the description does not allow us to make useful distinctions or distinctions at all. Thus, if we view the human situation as such as a state of alienation and estrangement, then it becomes difficult to see what it could mean to overcome that situation. If la condition humaine is a complete and hopeless predicament, a total state of evil and corruption, then talk of alienation and self-alienation is in danger of losing all meaning. The same is true if we talk about society, politics, economics, or religion in this totalizing negative way. There is a tendency among existentialist thinkers to do just that. However, ‘evil’ makes sense only as a contrast term to ‘good’, and if our human situation is a state of lack and deficiency— as it is in many respects—then it is by the same token a state of chance and possibility. We have gotten used to regarding humans as deficient beings, who would have no chance in the struggle for existence if they did not know how to actively compensate for the weaknesses of their biological nature by means of technology, morals, media, religion, and culture. But what if we look at us as creatures of possibility whose lives are not based on their deeds but on what happens to them, and whose destiny does not depend on the differentiation between human and non-human animals (and hence on their differences from and relations to other animals) but rather on the differentiation between humane and inhumane ways of living a human life (and hence on the challenge of understanding ourselves as human beings, of defining what we mean by a truly human life, and of actually living such a life in our contingent situations)? Wouldn’t that open up a very different view of what is at stake in the experience of self-alienation in its many different forms? The crucial challenge for understanding ourselves would then not be biological evolution, sociobiology, and neuroscience and their naturalist implications but rather the ethical, political, and theological question

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of the humanity of human beings and thus a normative and not merely a factual challenge: Not merely ‘What are we?’ and ‘How do we in fact live our lives?’ but ‘Who and what do we want to be?’ and ‘How ought we to live our lives if we want to live a truly human life?’ are the decisive questions to be answered. The answers are to be found not by comparing us to others but by deciding who and what we want to be: What is the form of human life for which we ought to strive? And why ought we to strive for it? We are finite beings, and we are part of process of biological evolution. But what really counts for our self-understanding as human beings is not what relates us to and distinguishes us from the other members of the animal world but rather what helps us to live as human beings among human beings in a human and not an inhuman way. We need a conception of our humanity that helps us to live a truly human life in a world that is not of our making and that we are about to ruin by selfishly exploiting its resources and transforming it into our habitat irrespective of what this means for others. Such a conception of humanity—whatever else we may want to say—must be based on a positive and not a negative account of human finitude because that is what we cannot change or do away with: We are finite beings in a finite world, and we cannot be true to ourselves if we are not true to our finitude. What does this mean?

5.8 Disambiguating finitude There are many answers in the history of thought but let me take one from theology. Human finitude, estrangement and alienation were central topics of Paul Tillich’s existentialist theology. For him the human predicament was the result of our fall from essence to existence, our entanglement into finitude and finiteness, our estrangement from what we essentially could and ought to be, our existence under the threat of nonbeing. Alienation is not a reality only for some but for all, it is the very mark of our human existence, and it shows in our life in the experience of finitude, anxiety, and despair. We are, but we have not always been and shall not be forever. We are finite beings permanently threatened by nonbeing. “[W]here there is nonbeing there is finitude and anxiety,” he writes in The Courage to be. ⁸⁶ “Anxiety is finitude, experienced as one’s own finitude,” it is “the existential awareness of nonbeing,” “the state in which a being is aware of its

 Paul Tillich, The Courage to be (1952), Main Works, vol. 5: Writings on Religion, ed. by Robert P. Scharlemann, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1988, p. 225.

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possible nonbeing.”⁸⁷ This existential anxiety occurs in different forms: as the “Anxiety of Fate and Death” when nonbeing “threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation;”⁸⁸ as the “Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness”⁸⁹ when nonbeing threatens “man’s spiritual self-affirmation”;⁹⁰ and as the “Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation” when nonbeing “threatens man’s moral self-affirmation.”⁹¹ In the extreme case anxiety becomes despair—ontic, moral, and spiritual despair —and there is no escape for us from despair by our own powers. We cannot overturn “the existential situation of finitude and estrangement”⁹² and constitute our own new being. New being is a gift, and we cannot give this gift to ourselves. All we can do in our estranged existence is to hope for salvation. We can know that the gift of new being is a possibility because nonbeing is ontologically dependent on being-itself, created finitude on creative infinity, and estrangement on the presence of the possibility of new being under the conditions of our actual existence. But if it is not impossible not to be estranged from our essence, then it is possible to be what we are not while we exist in finitude and estrangement: new beings. Tillich uses the formula “the existential situation of finitude and estrangement”⁹³ to describe our human predicament disclosed in anxiety and despair. However, the formula is deeply ambiguous. We only have to translate it into more traditional theological language to see this: Whereas ‘finitude’ indicates createdness (a term that invokes the distinction between creature and creator), ‘estrangement’ indicates fallenness (and hence the distinction between existing as human creature in a true or a false way). However, being created is something positive: the gift of being (rather than not being), whereas being fallen is something negative: the sin of missing one’s true potential, of existing in a way that misses the point and end of human life. By blending both into each other, Tillich gives finitude a bad name, the name of our state of sin. Now Tillich was well aware that “in Christian thought” “the essential nature of man and his world is good … because it is a divine creation. But man’s essential or created goodness has been lost.”⁹⁴ The fall and sin have corrupted us, and we all live in a state of alienation. But we live and we experience our self-alien-

       

Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid., Ibid. Ibid.,

p. 157. p. 160. p. 162. p. 160. p. 165. p. 199. p. 200.

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ation, and this is a sign of hope. For only because “the essential structure of man and his world is preserved by the sustaining and directing creativity of God”, is man “able to realize the conflicts of his existential predicament and to expect a restitution of his essential status”.⁹⁵ We are not only sinners, but sinful creatures, beings who are related to God and yet ignore or misunderstand this. Understood against the backdrop of divine creativity, therefore, Tillich’s account of human finitude turns out to be deeply ambiguous. On the one hand finitude is that which distinguishes us from the creator as God’s creation. On the other hand, it reminds us of the fact that we are not as we could and ought to be but are instead in need of salvation. However, what can ‘salvation’ mean here? It cannot mean the overcoming of our finitude (which would amount to abolishing the creator/creature difference). It rather must mean the overcoming of the corruption and imperfection and hence the anxiety and despair of finitude. If we exist in the right way our life will still be the life of a finite creature, but it will be a life in which our finitude does not bar us from being open to the presence of God’s love. Thus, salvation does not dissolve the creator/creature difference but on the contrary restores and discloses its salvific character. In the biblical tradition sin and estrangement occur precisely when this fundamental difference is called into question, when human creatures want to be like God and not God’s creatures anymore. Eritis sicut deus—this is the perennial lure of sin. By ignoring and dismissing the difference between creature and creator we end up being not more but less than we were meant to be: not like the Creator, but fallen creatures. Therefore, to safeguard the fundamental distinction between creature and Creator we must disambiguate finitude and disentangle it from being mixedup with the state of estrangement. Finitude per se is not estrangement but the gift of created existence. We are, even though we might not have been. We have not made ourselves, and we cannot infinitely sustain ourselves in being. Therefore, we should live in a way that is true to the fact that we are not of our own making, that we are finite creatures who owe what we can be and become to our infinite creator.

 Ibid.

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5.9 The grammar of ‘finitude’ If we want to restate this theological insight in non-theological terms, we may say the following. ‘Finitude’ is a contrast term. In all its uses it is the one side of the dual distinction between finite/infinite. To call something ‘finite’ is not merely to mark it off from other things, states, or phenomena that are finite but also from the infinite. The finite-finite distinction presupposes the finite/infinite distinction, and the point of that distinction is not merely that whatever is finite cannot be infinite (if anything is finite, then everything is finite), but also that the infinite cannot be finite so that the infinite/finite distinction can never be construed as a case of the finite/finite distinction. This is true whether we construe the infinite in negative terms as that which is not finite (negative infinity), or in positive terms as that which posits the finite by distinguishing itself from the finite as infinite (positive infinity). The human being is the place where both distinctions can become manifest. But then everything we call ‘finite’ is determined in two respects: It is marked off from the infinite (vertical distinction), and it is marked off from other finite things (horizontal distinction), and the two distinctions cannot be collapsed into one (the infinite is neither an item in the series of finite items nor the totality of that series). If we exclude or ignore the contrast to the infinite, we do not end up living in a finite world but merely in a world that cannot even be called ‘finite’ anymore. But if we keep the contrast and call our world finite, then everything in this finite world is marked off not merely from other finite things but at the same time from the infinite. This is why Tillich spoke of an “absolute tension between the conditional [finite] and the unconditional [infinite]”⁹⁶ when he explicated our human situation of finitude. Finite consciousness is “consciousness of the ‘here and now’”⁹⁷ as he puts it. But the ‘here and now’ is ambiguous: It can mean a conditioned or finite ‘here and now’ that is marked off from other ‘heres and nows’ past and future (finite/finite distinction). Or it can be the ‘here and now’ of the unconditional or infinite breaking into the finite and thereby transforming the temporal ‘here and now’ into the kairos of the transforming presence of the eternal ‘here and now’ (finite/infinite distinction). Now wherever something becomes present it becomes present to someone (a self), and the self is ambiguous in the same way as the ‘here and now’: it is the

 Paul Tillich, “Realism and Faith,” Main Works, vol. 4: Writings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. by John Clayton, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1987, p. 353.  Ibid., p. 352.

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meeting place of two sets of differences between, one the one hand, finite and finite, and, on the other, finite and infinite. Indeed, the human self is distinguished from all other finite beings in that it is here and only here that the contrast between finite and infinite can come to be grasped. Humans can become aware of the finitude of their world and their difference not merely from other finite beings but also from the infinite. But they cannot do so without noting that they have not been aware of it before. They have been finite beings all along, but they have not taken account of it. They have ignored their actual situation and disregarded their finitude. Precisely this is what ‘estrangement’ means: to live a human life oblivious of our actual situation before God. Therefore, one must describe human finitude in a differentiating way, and I do it by distinguishing between our Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein.

5.10 Human finitude as Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein “I am, but I don′t have myself, hence we still will have to become.”⁹⁸ The famous opening line of Ernst Bloch’s Tübingen Introduction in Philosophy echoes an old insight—forcefully restated in the 19th century by Kierkegaard in a theological and by Nietzsche in an atheological manner—that (being-there or Dasein) is not the same as being as we ought to be (Wahrsein), that being an individual is the task and not the fulfillment of living as a human self (‘having oneself’), and that becoming who I can and ought to be is only possible by moving from I to we, from existing in the singular to living in the first person plural. Human beings are not just entities but meant to be selves, and they are not just individuals but social beings. They become truly human only if they live as the selves they can be in the community of the human selves to which they belong. It is one thing to be (Dasein), it is another to live as a human being (Sosein), and it is a third to live as a human being in a truly human way (Wahrsein). The first marks the existential difference between being and nonbeing (actual being/possible being): we are even though we might not have been (contingent existence); the second marks the biological difference between human beings and other animals (human beings/animals): we are humans and not some other form of life; the third marks the anthropological difference between human and inhuman ways of living a human life (human/inhuman human life): as humans we can live in more than one way, we can live in a way that is true to ourselves (human way of living) or fail to do so (inhuman way of living).

 Ernst Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 1970, p. 13.

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In short, “[l]ife is not wholly something that happens to US; it is also something We engage in according to values We follow.” We are “not wholly the product of an alien act, either natural or divine, but in part produce [our] own being. The task of existing is a task precisely because it is not a case of acting according to a permanent nature or essence but rather of producing that nature within the limitations of a situation.”⁹⁹ However, we cannot merely live in one way or another, we can also exist in more than one way—in a way that is true to the fact that we are not wholly of our own making (way of faith), or in a way that misses that truth (way of unfaith). Both are forms of human finitude: we are, and we are (or do) something. We can exist in a certain way (mode of existing), and we can live in a certain way (mode of living). But while we execute the task of human existence by living in a certain way rather than another (mode of living), we cannot ourselves produce the possibility of doing this. We must exist in order to live our lives. But we cannot create our existence in living our lives but only shape it. We depend on a prior gift of being because we cannot produce our own Dasein. At the same time, we cannot live as human beings without producing our own Sosein. And our human predicament is that we can do this in a way that is true to the truth of our Dasein by living in a human way, or not true to it by living in an inhuman way.¹⁰⁰ Thus, we must highlight three basic insights about human finitude: First, we owe our Dasein not to ourselves but to a creative reality beyond ourselves: we are a finite reality not of our own making. Second, we owe our Sosein to our own making by living in a human or an inhuman way: we are a finite reality that is made to make itself, that can will to live in a truly human way, or not will it. Third, we live in a truly human way, that is, achieve our Wahrsein, by willing to live in the human way that takes into account that our Dasein is not of our own making: We are a finite reality that has the duty to become a true human self by living in a way that acknowledges and accepts as true what is true of everybody else as well: that we owe our Dasein not to ourselves, but have received

 Peter Preuss, “Introduction to Friedrich Nietzsche,” On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing 1980, p. 1.  To put the same point in terms of human freedom: As humans we are not merely free to live in either a human or an inhuman way, but we are not free not to do either: Humans can live in a human or an inhuman way, and they always do the one or the other. This is the fundamental predicament of created freedom: You cannot be free without practicing it. Humans can choose their mode of existing (in so far as they exist as human beings) but, at the same time, they cannot refrain from choosing (in so far as they exist as human beings); and hence they always in fact live in a human or an inhuman way.

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it as a gift. Since there is nothing that makes us deserve this gift more than anybody else, it is appropriate to be grateful for it, and the most obvious way of being grateful is to treat others and ourselves as recipients of a gift that we cannot give but only receive. To live in this way, I call a true or selfless life, not to live in this way a false or selfish life. As a contingent Dasein we owe our existence and potential to some other reality, in Kierkegaard’s terms to the infinite that relates to us by distinguishing itself from us as finite beings. As a contingent Sosein we owe the way in which we live and actualize our potential as finite beings to ourselves. And since we can determine our Sosein in a true or a false way, depending on how we relate to the truth about our Dasein in our self-determination, we have the duty to become true selves and thus achieve our Wahrsein. The distinction between the Dasein and Sosein is not real but merely analytic since an actual self cannot be the one without at the same time being the other: No human self just exists but it always exists in one way or other (Dasein allows for different modes), and no human self exists without living in one way or another (Sosein also occurs in different modes). However, there is an important difference not only between existing (Dasein) and living as a human self (Sosein) but also between Dasein (the fact that we exist) and the mode of Dasein (the way in which we exist). In short, whereas our existence is not a result of our own decision, the way we exist is: We always could have existed otherwise, and therefore we are responsible for the way in which we actually exist. The fact that we exist is a gift of being posited passively (Dasein); the way we live our life is a task which we actively carry out in one way or other as long as we live (Sosein); and the way we ought to exist if we want to live in a way that is true to the basic passivity (or gift-character) of our existence (Wahrsein) is a duty which faces each of us throughout our life; and since we ought to do so, we can do so. Whereas our existence is not a result of our own decision, the way we exist is: We always could have existed otherwise, and therefore we are responsible for the way in which we actually exist. In short, the fact that we exist is a gift of being posited passively (Dasein); the way how we live our life is a task which we actively carry out in one way or other as long as we live (Sosein); and the way we ought to exist if we want to live in a way that is true to the basic passivity (or gift-character) of our existence (Wahrsein) is a duty which faces each of us throughout our life. We know about the contingency of our Dasein by knowing that our life has begun and will end. We know about the responsibility for our Sosein by realizing the changing possibilities of our life from which we choose what we actually become. And we become aware of the responsibility for the mode in which we exist by discovering the real possibility of existing in another way. We discover that we do not achieve what we could when we see how we fail

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to become the true selves that we can and ought to become. And we begin striving for this when we move—imaginatively and practically—from the negativity of the experience of failure to the positive contrary of it: human life as it ought to be and therefore can be. However, even human life as it ought to be will still be a finite life or, as Kierkegaard put it in Sickness Unto Death (1849), “a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity”.¹⁰¹ This synthesis is not a given but a goal, not a fact but a task and a duty: the duty to live our human lives in a human way. Thus, the key distinction that orients a positive account of human finitude is not the biological difference between human beings and other animals made with respect to life (human beings/animals) but the anthropological difference between human and inhuman ways of living a human life (human/inhuman human life). The criterion for this difference is whether we pay attention to the existential difference between being and nonbeing (actual/possible being; actual/possible life) in the way we live our lives. But the existential difference is not of our own making but prior to everything we do or can do. We are, but we might not have been; hence the possibility of our being is grounded not in us but in some prior actuality different from us. This is the point, where the analysis of human finitude requires us to talk of the activity and creativity of divine love. And the deepest alienation that can occur is the one that results from not taking that seriously.

 SKS 11, 127 / SUD, 13.

Part II: Selfless passion

1 Anxiety and the possibility of being able 1.1 Existence Kierkegaard had understood Kant: The existence predicate is not a determining predicate. It helps us not to say what something is, but that it is—not somewhere in a fantasy world, but in the actual world in which we live. When we say, “humans are rational beings”, we define a concept of human being. If we add “and they exist”, then we do not specify this concept by a further determination, but claim, that human beings defined like this really exist, that is to say, that there are rational human beings in our world. With the predicate of existence, the concept of human being is not further specified, but it is stated that this concept is instantiated in our reality. Concepts can be defined (‘Humans are capable of reason, two-legged, walking upright’ etc.) and combined in statements (propositions or sentences) (‘Humans are capable of reason and live in villages and cities’).¹ If these are free of contradictions, that is, if they formulate a possible state of affairs, they can be the case in a possible world. If what they say is the case or not in our world, that is, if they express a fact, they are true or false. They make an existential claim that is true or false (existential statements). But statements about concepts and propositions (philosophical statements) are different from statements about something possible (statements of possible states of affairs), and both are different from statements about what exists (existential statements or statements of fact) and about those who exist (statements of existence). If one must distinguish between the concept and the existence of something, then the existence of a thing can never be sublated into the concept of this thing. The proposition ‘There are humans’ is not a part of the proposition ‘Humans are rational beings.’ It says nothing about the people of whom one speaks, but about the world of those who speak here and to whom they speak. If there were no

 Concepts can be expressed by words, sentences or in other ways (pictures, signs). Sentences are the largest grammatical unit of meaning created by the correct combination of words according to the rules of syntax of a given language. Propositions are meaning units of sentences, built up by terms connected without contradiction, by which something is said about something. One can imagine them or state them, assert or deny them, think, or speak, express, or conceal them. In statements they are asserted (assertions) or denied (denials). Even though ’sentence’ means a linguistic-grammatical unit, ’proposition’ the unit of meaning of a sentence, and ’statement’ the positive or negative expression of the proposition of a sentence, I will use these terms interchangeably in the following, because the semiotic difference is not important for the problems at hand. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-008

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human beings, our world would be different, but it would not change the fact that human beings would be rational beings if they existed. Existential statements are something different from definitions and statements of state of affairs. While well-formed propositions formulate states of affairs that can be true in a possible world, even if they are false in our world, existential statements state a state of affairs that is the case or not in the world in which we live. We can combine concepts in propositions and draw conclusions from propositions, but we cannot grasp in this way alone what is claimed in existential statements: that in our world that which is said is actually the case. In order to say something true that is not only an analytical unfolding of a concept (‘human beings are capable of reason’), one must formulate propositions with nonconceptual index terms (indexicals) like ‘here’, ‘there’, ‘today’, ‘yesterday’, ‘I’, ‘you’, ‘we’, ‘you’. I can answer the question ‘Is it raining?’ only if I consider the grammatical present tense as a reference to the situation of the utterance of this question, that is, if I understand it as the question ‘Is it raining now or here or today?’ Truth is concrete and cannot be grasped only by terms that speak of the possible, but not of that which is here and now and for me or for us actual and real. Whoever only links concepts to propositions and propositions to systems of propositions, no matter how detailed and extensive, remains in the abstract and objective and does not achieve the concrete and subjective, as Kierkegaard never tired of objecting to Hegel. Even the most comprehensive unfolding of the possible does not lead from the possible to the actual or real. One can always think, unfold, and link the possible further, but what is thought, unfolded, and linked in this way remains different from real life. It remains a sign and does not become that which it designates. But thinking about $100 is different from having $100, possible truth is different from actual truth, and truth is actual if it holds in the world in which I live. It is not the objective that can be formulated in contradiction-free propositions that is true, but the subjective, which determines whether these propositions are true or not. Not the totality of all propositions that are true and capable of truth is the truth, but (as Climacus puts it in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript) “subjectivity is truth.”² Objective thinking is always only the elaboration of a connection of possibilities, that leaves open, if and where and for whom these possibilities are actual and true. Only that which is subjectively given (to real subjects in real life in the real world) is true or false,  SKS 7, 186 f. / CUP1, 203 f. Chap. II of Section II is entitled “Truth Is Subjectivity” (p. 189), but in the chapter Climacus speaks repeatedly of “subjectivity is truth.” Cf. Westphal, Becoming a Self; Michael Valco and Katarina Valcova, “The Epistemological Challenge of Kierkegaard’s Truth is Subjectivity Principle,” Communications, 2014, pp. 25 – 28 (https://komunikacie.uniza.sk/pdfs/ csl/2014/03/05.pdf) (03/22/2022).

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because it is here that it is decided whether it remains a mere possibility or is an actual reality. Whoever makes existential statements therefore transcends the possibility context of thinking towards the reality context of life. He does not only formulate something possible (which may be true or false) but asserts something true (which may turn out to be false). In thinking something can be possibly (‘It is possible that p’) or necessarily (‘It is necessary that p’) true or false. But only in existence, that is, in the world in which we actually exist, it is really true or false (‘It is the case/not the case that p’). The abstractness of the possible never reaches the concreteness of the actual. Statements about states of affairs unfold the possible, existential statements speak of the real. They are not conceptually abstract, but existentially concrete, because they bring our existence into play with that which they claim to exist. They are only true if they are true for us (in our world), and they can only be true for us if we are there, that is, exist.

1.2 Existence communication This is the starting point of Kierkegaard. He begins not with a conceptual possibility, but with actuality; and not with any actuality, but with our own; and not with the question of what we are, but how we exist. We exist as individuals who communicate with each other. Communications are events in the actual world, not just something possible, but something actual. However, it is precisely here that it becomes apparent that communications of states of affairs are something different from existence communications. Both take place in the actual world and assume the existence of those to whom they are communicated. But the first communicate only a possibility to which one can relate, but does not have to, while the second communicate something to which one cannot not relate, but in fact relates or must relate, because the truth or falsehood of what is communicated changes one’s own world or touches one’s own life.³ Kierkegaard’s critique of Hegel was therefore entirely in line with Kant’s views, only he drew the consequences of what Kant’s specification of the function of the existential predicate had implied: that what is said here is not only about a concept, but about us. Existence communications do not only say that something is the case, but that it is the case in our world and therefore for us.

 Cf. John H. Whittaker, Kierkegaard and Existence Communications, Faith and Philosophy, vol. 5, 1988, pp. 168 – 184; Walsh, Kierkegaard.

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Whoever speaks of existence steps out of the world of thinking into the world of life and suffering, to which all those belong who exist, have existed, or will exist. Experienced suffering, however, is something different from described suffering, and conceptualized life is something different from lived life. All conceptual thought therefore encounters a limit in existence that it cannot cross. Not because one could not speak of existence. But because one can do so only by setting anew the difference between speaking and existing, the realm of the possible and the reality of the actual. Statements of state of affairs thus have a different point than existence statements. Kierkegaard insisted on this point in all his writings and under all pseudonyms. And he used this difference to express his understanding of Christianity in a pointed way: “Christianity is not a doctrine, as Christianity has unchristianly and meaninglessly been made to be,” but “an existence-communication [Existens-Meddelelse],”⁴ something to be lived, not just contemplated in a cognitive and objectifying manner.⁵ “Christianity pertains to existence,”⁶ and understanding it is “to understand that it is to be existed in, to understand the difficulty of existing in it, what a prodigious existence-task this doctrine assigns to the learner.”⁷ “When a believer exists in faith, his existence has enormous content, but not in the sense of a yield in paragraphs.”⁸ Not the “systematic eagerness to arrange the truths of Christianity in paragraphs”⁹ and the conceptually exact unfolding of a doctrinal content in many clearly structured paragraphs is the proof of good theology, but the communication of what matters in life and death. Christianity is about the existence of people, not only about the thinking and conceptual development of Christian life and thought in history. This would make theology a historical discipline, reduce dogmatics to the history of dogma and theology to the history of theology, as Schleiermacher had suggested. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, argues that it is not a matter of understanding the history of doctrine and theological teaching, but rather of human existence here and now. Theology achieves its goal when it explicates the Christian faith in such a way that, as a result of its communication, people’s lives change because they understand their existence in a new way and thus live differently than before.

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 7, 7, 7, 7, 7,

518 / CUP1, 570. 345 f. / CUP1, 379 f. 346 / CUP1, 380. 345 / CUP1, 379. 330 / CUP1, 380. 8 / CUP1, 15.

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All Christian thinking must work towards this, and this cannot be done through direct communication, which tells people how they should think, but only through indirect communication, which helps people to think for themselves. Kierkegaard tried to do this throughout his authorship, both in the writings under his own name and in his many pseudonymous writings. He strives to translate dogmatic concepts and theological arguments into existence communications, thus restoring to them the life and existential significance that they have lost in the systems of thought of theology and philosophy.

1.3 The concept of anxiety This also applies in an exemplary way to his handling of the topic of sin in The Concept of Anxiety (1844). He does not write in his own name, but under the pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis. And Haufniensis deliberately chooses a psychological approach by claiming to present not dogmatic discussions, but rather a “simple psychologically orienting deliberation on the dogmatic issue of hereditary sin.”¹⁰ His aim is to illuminate this dogmatic concept in terms of how it functions in people’s experience and to shed light on their understanding of themselves and their situation in the world. In introductory reflections he clarifies why he chooses a psychological approach and why therefore not the concept of sin but the concept of anxiety is his subject. “Sin … is no subject for psychological concern.”¹¹ It “is the subject of the sermon, in which the single individual speaks as the single individual to the single individual.”¹² Psychology can only concern itself with “the real possibility of sin,” but not explain its actuality.¹³ It “can bring its concern to the point where it seems as if sin were there, but the next thing, that sin is there, is qualitatively different from the first.”¹⁴ No one would talk about sin if it were not reality, and it would not be if it were not possible. Therefore, “[s]in looks back to a time before its actuality, to an imaginary possibility.”¹⁵ But it is not the fictitious solution of a fictitious problem (as Nietzsche thought). Sin is a reality, and an all-encompassing one at that. No one is exempt. Therefore, the possibility of sin, “cannot have the particularity of any empirical actuality …

     

SKS 4, 321 / CA, 14. Ibid. SKS 4, 323 / CA, 16. SKS 4, 330 / CA, 23. SKS 4, 329 / CA, 22. Pap. V B 56:4 / CA, Supplement, p. 201.

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When the possibility of sin appears in one man, it has appeared in all, and only the arena of ideal observation is left for the deliberation of the more and the less. In life, the possibility if sin occurs no more than other possibilities.”¹⁶ If one is a sinner, all are sinners. Thus, to explain how sin can arise never explains that and why it arises. For this would require showing how the possibility of sin can become its actuality.¹⁷ But what is true of freedom is also true of sin: “freedom is never possible; as soon as it is, it is actual,”¹⁸ and in the same way sin is actual, without it being possible to refer ethically to its possibility in order to explain its actuality. Neither psychology nor ethics can explain sin, as Kierkegaard says with a critical side glance at Kant’s attempts. But what is impossible for ethics, psychology and dogmatics can do. Just as psychology “explores the real possibility of sin,” by analyzing anxiety as the anthropological precondition of sin, so “dogmatics explains hereditary sin, that is, the ideal possibility of sin,” by expounding Adam’s first sin as the paradigm of all further sin in the history of humankind.¹⁹ But what psychology illuminates as the anthropological precondition of sin applies not only to us, but also to Adam, if the latter is to be able to function as a type of real human being. Therefore, the reflections of psychology are also fundamental for dogmatics. Accordingly, Haufniensis shows to what extent anxiety is to be understood “as the presupposition of hereditary sin” and as that which explains “hereditary sin retrogressively in terms of its origin.”²⁰ Sin cannot be explained from something else, but “[s]in came into the world by a sin.”²¹ Sin originates from itself, it “presupposes itself … in such a way that by the fact that it is, it is presupposed. Thus sin comes into the world as the sudden, i. e., by a leap.”²² This is explained mythologically in the Genesis narrative of Adam’s first sin. But with this the question arises how Adam could sin, how he could pass over from the state of innocence to that of guilt.²³ For if there had previously been neither sin nor the possibility of sin, because only by “Adam’s first sin, sinfulness entered

       

Pap. V B 49:15 / CA, Supplement, p. 183. Cf. SKS 4, 295 / CA, 22. Ibid. SKS 4, 295 / CA, 23. SKS 4, 297 / CA, 25. SKS 4, 304 / CA, 32. Ibid. SKS 4, 307– 310 / CA, 35 – 38.

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into Adam”²⁴ and thus became a reality and a possibility in the world, how then is the change from the state of innocence to that of guilt to be explained? Haufniensis answers: Not at all. Guilt can never be explained from innocence, but “innocence is always lost only by the qualitative leap of the individual.”²⁵ Guilt exists because one is guilty. For this there is just as little need for a preceding ability to become guilty as my existence presupposes a preceding ability to exist. One comes into being and exists, and one commits a transgression and is guilty. That this is possible is proven by reality. But this possibility is not an ability that one must have in order to exist or to be guilty. I exist, so it is possible to exist. But this does not mean that I have the ability to exist, even if I did not exist. Similarly, I am guilty, so it is possible to be guilty. But this does not mean that I have the ability to be guilty even before I am guilty. That I exist and that I am guilty are possibilities of this world and of this life. But these possibilities are not abilities that I must have had in order to exist in this world and to become guilty in my life. I do not exist because I can, but that I exist shows that it is possible. And I do not make myself guilty because I am able to do so, but my guilt shows that being guilty is not impossible. The same applies to sin. Sin exists because one sins. But it does not presuppose a prior ability to sin. This applies to Adam no less than to any other. When Adam sinned, he did not claim an ability that he inexplicably had. And in our case, too, one cannot refer to a preceding concupiscence to explain the ability to sin, because the talk of concupiscence already presupposes the reality of sin: “Concupiscentia is a determinant of guilt and sin antecedent to guilt and sin, and yet still is not guilt and sin, that is, introduced by it.”²⁶ But “sinfulness is not an epidemic that spreads like cowpox.”²⁷ One does not contract sin like a disease, but neither does one decide for it in an act of free will, because one has the ability to do so. A psychological explanation of sin must take this into account: It “must not talk around the point” and derive sin from something preceding it, but it must describe a state of the soul “from which guilt breaks forth in the qualitative leap.”²⁸

    

Pap. V B 53:5 / CA, Supplement, p. 184. SKS 4, 309 / CA, 37. SKS 4, 312 / CA, 40. SKS 4, 310 / CA, 38. SKS 4, 312 / CA, 41.

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1.4 The spirit This is exactly what psychology does, by talking about anxiety. According to Haufniensis, anxiety is neither an action nor a knowledge nor a feeling of the person, but rather that which characterizes the state of innocence. Anxiety is not a characteristic of human beings, but a feature of their existence, even before they become aware of themselves. One cannot escape it by ignoring it or by resisting it, but it is that which accompanies all my doing and leaving, because it is the adverbial mode of my existence, over which I have no power of disposal. Not I am afraid, but anxiety has me, because I cannot exist without existing in anxiety. Haufniensis explains this with the help of his concept of human beings. “Man is a synthesis of the psychical and the physical,” connected by the spirit, which unites both.²⁹ It is only through the spirit that human beings become human beings; they are not already human because of their bodily and spiritual nature, but only because the spirit synthesizes soul and body into one. But the spirit is an active relation, which cannot relate to others without also relating to itself. Indeed, even more so: it does not relate to itself because it relates to others, but only because it relates to itself can it relate to others. Its relation to itself (the activity of its relating to itself) is the condition of the possibility for its relation to others (its relating to others). It underlies and precedes the external relationship and is not its consequence or implication. The process of becoming human therefore has two moments that must be distinguished: It takes place as a synthesizing of body (the physical) and soul (the spiritual) to the unity of a human being through the spirit, who at the same time also relates to itself in a certain way. Without the spirit there would be no synthesis of body and soul, without the relationship of the spirit to itself this synthesis would not take place. But “[h]ow does spirit relate itself to itself and to its conditionality”³⁰ in this process? Haufniensis’ answer is: “It relates itself as anxiety. Do away with itself, the spirit cannot; lay hold of itself, it cannot, as long as it has itself outside of itself. Nor can man sink down into the vegetative, for he is qualified as spirit; flee away from anxiety, he cannot, for he loves it; really love it, he cannot, for he flees from it.”³¹

 SKS 4, 315 / CA, 43.  SKS 4, 315 / CA, 44.  Ibid.

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This is the torn up basic state of human existence, which Kierkegaard calls ‘anxiety’. Haufniensis develops this analysis of anxiety along the lines of an analysis of the function of the spirit in human life. “In innocence, man is not qualified as spirit but … [the] spirit in man is dreaming.”³² The spirit is there, but its relationship to itself and thus its synthesizing function in human life has not yet become apparent. “In this state there is peace and repose, but there is simultaneously something else that is not contention and strife, for there is indeed nothing against which to strive. What, then, is it? Nothing. But what effect does nothing have? It begets anxiety. This is the profound secret of innocence, that it is at the same time anxiety.”³³

The mere existence of human beings is anxious. Where humans exist, they exist in anxiety. This distinguishes them from all other living beings. This anxiety is “no guilt,” “no troublesome burden, no suffering.”³⁴ It is “a qualification of dreaming spirit,”³⁵ namely, the way in which “the spirit relates to itself and to its conditionality”³⁶. It is not anxiety of anything definite, but anxiety in view of the “infinite possibility of being able.”³⁷ This is the fundamental difference between fear and anxiety. Fear refers “to something definite”, it is always fear of something, and this is also present in animals that can be afraid of others. Anxiety, on the other hand, is “not found in the beast, precisely because by nature the beast is not qualified as spirit.”³⁸ Anxiety is a spirit phenomenon “and the less spirit, the less anxiety.”³⁹ For anxiety is “freedom’s actuality as the possibility of possibility.”⁴⁰ It is nothing else but “the anxious possibility of being able. He [the human being] has no conception of what he is able to do”.⁴¹ One does not know what one is afraid of, but one is afraid because one has the possibility of being able without knowing or having to know what one is able to do. While fear is always fear of something, anxiety is always anxiety of oneself, namely, of one’s own possibility of being able.

         

SKS 4, Ibid. SKS 4, SKS 4, SKS 4, SKS 4, SKS 4, Ibid. SKS 4, SKS 4,

313 / CA, 41. 314 / CA, 42. 313 / CA, 41. 315 / CA, 44. 316 / CA, 45. 314 / CA, 42. 313 / CA, 42. 315 / CA, 44.

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In this sense, Haufniensis understands “anxiety as the presupposition of hereditary sin and as explaining hereditary sin retrogressively in terms of its origin.”⁴² Without anxiety, no freedom, without freedom, no sin. For “freedom’s possibility is not the ability to choose the good or the evil,” but the “possibility is to be able.”⁴³ Just as there is no merely possible freedom, because freedom is always actual or not at all, so there is no actuality of freedom as transition from possibility to actuality. This transition is a qualitative leap. It cannot be explained psychologically but can only be carried out existentially. This leap comes from the state that Haufniensis calls anxiety. For anxiety “is neither a category of necessity nor a category of freedom; it is entangled freedom,”⁴⁴ which is set free when it is unleashed.

1.5 Sin cannot be explained All attempts to explain sin fail at this point. One cannot say that “sin has come into the world by necessity”, because this “is a contradiction”:⁴⁵ Sin is a contingent fact, not a necessary fact. Nor can this fact be explained “by an act of an abstract liberum arbitrium”:⁴⁶ Sin is not in the world because human beings want to sin or decide to sin, but it is there because human beings sin. “To want to give a logical explanation of the coming of sin into the world is a stupidity that can occur only to people who are comically worried about finding an explanation.”⁴⁷ Sin cannot be explained by anything else than by itself, and how “sin came into the world, each man understands solely by himself.”⁴⁸ The reference to anxiety is therefore not an attempt to explain the contingent reality of sin, but to make understandable what Kierkegaard calls the ‘qualitative leap’: the transition from the state of dreaming innocence to the state of guilt in the process of becoming human. For this transition is becoming guilty, because it is at the same time the unleashing of freedom and the release of responsibility for what we do, have done, and have not done, but could and should have done. To be able has thus become the impossibility of not being able: We are free, and only with this reality is also the possibility of freedom given, because one cannot

      

SKS 4, SKS 4, Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 4, SKS 4,

317 / CA, 46. 320 / CA, 49.

320 / CA, 49 f. 321 / CA, 51.

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be free without his freedom to live really. But, in the moment when we have the possibility of freedom, it has also become impossible not to practice it. Never are we only possibly free, but we have the possibility to be able only when we are really free. But if we are really free, then it is impossible not to practice this freedom. That is to say, we cannot be in the state of innocence, but neither can we be neither in the state of guilt nor in the state of innocence. Rather, whoever is free lives in guilt, because he cannot live in innocence (in the state of mere possibility) and it is impossible for us human beings to live neither in the state of innocence nor in the state of guilt.

1.6 The actuality of sin If Haufniensis is right about this, then one must push Kierkegaard’s thought even further. We are guilty because the reality of freedom does not make it possible to have only the possibility of being able but makes it inevitable to live this possibility and not to be able to live differently. But this means that for someone who is truly free, the state of innocence is not only a past state, but an impossible one. Animals live neither in the state of innocence nor in the state of guilt because they are not free but live as they live. God is free but lives neither in the state of innocence nor in the state of guilt. He cannot be guilty without ceasing to be God, but he can also not be innocent, but still have the possibility to become guilty: The very possibility of becoming guilty would be the end of God. But, if human beings are free, then they live in the state of guilt, because the state of innocence, that is, the mere possibility of being able, is incompatible with the reality of their freedom, while it is no self-contradiction that human beings are free and live in guilt. “If a human being were a beast or an angel, he could not be in anxiety. Because he is a synthesis, he can be in anxiety; and the more profoundly he is in anxiety, the greater is the man”.⁴⁹ Animals know neither guilt nor innocence, because they are not free. God knows neither guilt nor innocence because he is free but would cease to be God if he could become guilty. Humans, on the other hand, are free and guilty because they cannot be free and live in innocence. It has never been possible for us to have had the possibility of being able only when we are truly free. Who is free must live free, who lives free has never lived in an innocence where it was only possible to be free. To count on such an innocence is a retrospective dream. Innocence is not only dreaming because everything in it has first been created but not yet realized

 SKS 4, 421 / CA, 155.

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and manifested, but because it is a dream that such innocence exists. Whoever is free can never have lived in innocence if, unlike God, he can live in guilt. Haufniensis takes this up in reverse form when he unfolds the so determined anxiety in human history “as explaining hereditary sin progressively”.⁵⁰ The state of anxiety belongs to every human being, and “the more primitive a man is, the more profound is his anxiety.”⁵¹ Humans, “who never experience any anxiety,” cannot be distinguished from animals.⁵² This does not mean that anxiety could not be overcome. But this overcoming takes place only through salvation. “When salvation is posited, anxiety, together with possibility, is left behind.”⁵³ Then anxiety is not only a past actuality, but an impossibility. If with salvation the possibility of anxiety comes to an end, then with it all forms of anxiety are overcome. But if one looks at its actuality, then one can speak in a differentiated way of anxiety. Haufniensis does this by differentiating between subjective and objective anxiety. Subjective is “the anxiety that is posited in the individual and is the consequence of his sin.”⁵⁴ Objective anxiety, on the other hand, is the “effect of sin in nonhuman existence,” the “reflection of the sinfulness of the generation in the whole world.”⁵⁵ “By coming into the world, sin acquired significance for the whole of creation.”⁵⁶ Haufniensis thus explicitly tries to do justice to the cosmic universality of sin in his psychological analysis of sin as anxiety. Anxiety is not only a phenomenon of the individual life of a person but affects everything. Accordingly, it exists in two forms: as “the objective anxiety in nature” and as “the subjective anxiety in the individual”.⁵⁷ Haufniensis shows this in a series of phenomenological analyses of human life phenomena: “Anxiety may be compared with dizziness. He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss; for suppose he had not looked down [then he would not have become dizzy]. Hence anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, which emerges when the spirit wants to posit the synthesis and freedom looks down into its own possibility, laying hold of finiteness to support itself. Freedom succumbs in this dizziness … In that very mo-

       

SKS 4, SKS 4, Ibid. SKS 4, SKS 4, SKS 4, Ibid. SKS 4,

313 – 349 / CA, 52– 80. 323 / CA, 52. 324 / CA, 53. 327 / CA, 56. 328 / CA, 57. 330 / CA, 60.

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ment everything is changed, and freedom, when it again rises, sees that it is guilty. Between these two moments lies the leap, which no science has explained and which no science can explain.”⁵⁸

The point of this and further analyses of phenomena such as sensuality, sexuality, gender difference, grief, shame, drive, beauty, etc. is the demonstration that it is precisely the “anxiety about sin [that] produces sin”⁵⁹ and that one becomes guilty precisely because one is not afraid of “becoming guilty” but of “being regarded as guilty”.⁶⁰ “Freedom’s possibility announces itself in anxiety.”⁶¹ And, because one cannot become aware of this possibility without actualizing it, one becomes guilty out of anxiety, through anxiety, and in anxiety, before one has even become aware of it.

1.7 The moment Haufniensis deepens this thesis by analyzing “anxiety as the consequence of that sin which is absence of the consciousness of sin.”⁶² Anxiety is not a consciousness of sin but arises precisely from the fact that such a consciousness is not present. The sinner is a sinner before he has a consciousness of his sin. But precisely for this reason he is afraid, without knowing what he is afraid of. Anxiety and consciousness of sin are not on the same line. The consciousness of sin is a life phenomenon, but anxiety is a mode of existence that everyone already has when he becomes a sinner. One can become conscious of sin or not, but one cannot exist without anxiety. Not everyone develops a consciousness of sin during their conscious life, on the contrary: sinners are usually not aware of their sin and deny it. But they all have anxiety. This difference can also be specified in terms of the philosophy of time. The occurrence of the consciousness of sin is a phenomenon in the course of life, which passes through all stages of time, that is, once was in the future, then occurs (when it happens) and finally becomes the past. Anxiety, on the other hand, is “the moment” in which an individual realizes his freedom and passes from the state of innocence to that of guilt.⁶³ Plato calls this moment “the sudden”⁶⁴ and       

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4,

331 / CA, 61. 342 / CA, 73. 344 / CA, 75. 343 / CA, 74. 350 – 378 / CA, 81– 110. 351 f. / CA, 81. 357 / CA, 88.

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Haufniensis “the present”: “The moment signifies the present as that which has no past and no future.”⁶⁵ In the course of life there is “no present,” but only a succession of moments in which the future becomes the past as it passes through the present. “[T]he life that is in time and is only in time has no present … The present is the eternal, or rather, the eternal is the present, and the present the full.”⁶⁶ In the present, time and eternity touch each other in such a way that the eternal presence becomes present in a human life. This is what Kierkegaard calls the moment. This is “not properly an atom of time but an atom of eternity.”⁶⁷ It is the event of the presence of the spirit or the becoming present of the spirit, through which the synthesis of the soul and the body is posited. In this respect the moment belongs to the existence of human beings, not to the course of their lives. Similarly, anxiety belongs to existence and is not a phenomenon of the life process. In the recourse to anxiety, therefore, nothing is explained that happens in life, but rather the mode of existence of a life is described. “Anxiety is the psychological state that precedes sin. It approaches sin as closely as possible, as anxiously as possible, but without explaining sin, which breaks forth only in the qualitative leap.”⁶⁸ Sin exists only in the actual execution or living of life, anxiety, on the other hand, belongs to existence. It shows itself in many things in life, even if one can understand it only retrospectively from sin—in the spiritlessness in Christianity and paganism, in the fateful faith of paganism, in the fear of guilt in Judaism. Everywhere it becomes apparent: “The relation of freedom to guilt is anxiety, because freedom and guilt are still possibilities.”⁶⁹ But even when freedom became actual and one is guilty, the anxiety of possibility remains a reality. For just as one begins to live and practice one’s freedom the moment one enters existence, so one can only realize one’s life and freedom if one exists. Therefore, anxiety is already there when one begins to live, and it does not cease as long as one lives. Adam’s sin is repeated again and again, but “every such repetition is not a simple consequence but a new leap.”⁷⁰

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4,

356 / CA, 87. 356 / CA, 86. 358 / CA, 88. 362 / CA, 92. 377 / CA, 109. 381 / CA, 113.

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1.8 Faith Haufniensis accordingly regards anxiety not only as that which precedes sin, but also as that which accompanies it and follows it. Anxiety sets in motion a cycle of anxiety, since anxiety generates guilt, which in turn generates anxiety. There is no escape from this cycle of anxiety for human beings if they are left to themselves alone. Self-redemption is excluded on principle, because no human being can break this cycle of anxiety or break out of it. Salvation must come from the outside, and it must happen in such a way that anxiety is overcome by anxiety, in that the paralyzing fright at the dizzying possibility of being able is replaced by a grateful amazement at the given possibility of being allowed to do so. Haufniensis therefore expressly asks not only about anxiety as the precondition of all sinfulness in Adam and all subsequent generations, but also about the “anxiety of sin” or the “anxiety as consequence of sin in the single individual.”⁷¹ What changes is that now “the object of anxiety is a determinate something:” “its nothing is an actual something, because the distinction between good and evil is posited in concreto”.⁷² Of course, no “man must sin,” but everyone does it—of one’s own accord.⁷³ The fact that one sins, however, is not only “an annulled possibility,” but at the same time “an unwarranted actuality.”⁷⁴ It is real, but this reality should not really be. Precisely from this arises the anxiety that is the consequence of sin. It is expressed in repentance, but “repentance cannot cancel sin”⁷⁵ or “make [the sinner] free”.⁷⁶ “The only thing that is truly able to disarm the sophistry of sin is faith”.⁷⁷ Not because faith “annihilate[s] anxiety,” but because “it extricates itself from anxiety’s moment of death” and opens life to the fact that it ends not only as a course in time in death, but has its basis in eternal life: “only in faith is the synthesis [of time and eternity] eternal and at every moment possible.”⁷⁸ Faith is thus the right actualization of freedom, whereas “superstition and unbelief are forms of unfreedom.”⁷⁹ Freedom can not only be realized in the

        

SKS 4, 379 – 420 / CA, 112– 154. SKS 4, 379 / CA, 111 f. SKS 4, 380 / CA, 112. SKS 4, 381 / CA, 113. SKS 4, 383 / CA, 115. SKS 4, 384 / CA, 116. SKS 4, 385 / CA, 117. Ibid. SKS 4, 406 / CA, 140.

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wrong way, so that it results in an “unwarranted actuality,” but it can also be lost both “somatically-psychologically” and “pneumatically.”⁸⁰ In the first case it is “anxiety about evil,” in the second “anxiety about the good.”⁸¹ Anxiety expresses itself accordingly in life as “bondage of sin,” which is “an unfree relation to the evil,” and as “the demonic,” which is “an unfree relationship to the good.”⁸² In both cases the actuality of freedom is treated as mere possibility, in the first case as the “annulled possibility” of an “unwarranted actuality,”⁸³ in the second case as “unfreedom, because freedom is lost.”⁸⁴ The first manifests itself in the phenomenon of repentance, the second in the phenomenon of the demonic. For the “demonic is unfreedom that wants to close itself off,”⁸⁵ it “does not want communication,” is “muteness,” which denies itself to language,⁸⁶ and the “inclosing reserve,” which is overcome only in “disclosure.”⁸⁷ It becomes disclosed or revealed in faith that Haufniensis, following Hegel, understands as “the inner certainty that anticipates infinity.”⁸⁸ Faith is a determination of existence, whereas “unbelief and superstition are both anxiety about faith, but unbelief begins in the activity of unfreedom, and superstition begins in the passivity of unfreedom.”⁸⁹ For there is no activity in this sphere that does not “begin … in a passivity”, and no passivity that does not result in “an activity.”⁹⁰ If these come into a disproportion, it comes to the anxiety of evil (and thus to renewed sin) and to the anxiety of the good (and thus to neurotic behavior). But “[a]nxiety is freedom’s possibility, and only such anxiety is through faith absolutely educative, because it consumes all finite ends and discovers all their deceptiveness.”⁹¹ But whoever “is educated by anxiety is educated by possibility, and only he who is educated by possibility is educated according to his infinitude.”⁹² In that anxiety is wholly geared to the possibility of being able, it becomes the precursor of faith, which in its inner certainty withdraws the ground from anxiety by anticipating infinity. “So when the individual through

            

SKS 4, 402 / CA, 136. Ibid. Cf. SKS 4, 381– 386 / CA, 113 – 118. SKS 4, 386 – 402 / CA, 118 – 162. SKS 4, 387 / CA, 119. SKS 4, 381 / CA, 113. SKS 4, 390 / CA, 123. Ibid. SKS 4, 391 / CA, 124. SKS 4, 394 / CA, 126 f. SKS 4, 423 / CA, 157. SKS 4, 410 / CA, 144. Ibid. SKS 4, 422 / CA, 155. SKS 4, 422 / CA, 156.

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anxiety is educated unto faith, anxiety will eradicate precisely what it brings forth itself.”⁹³ Anxiety paves the way to faith and thus to that which it itself overcomes, and therefore is “saving through faith.”⁹⁴ It is that which is overcome by that which it itself causes. As a mode of existence, anxiety precedes not only sin, but also faith. It actualizes itself in the qualitative leap into sin, and it actualizes itself in another way in the qualitative leap into faith. The first results in the life of the sinner, the second in the life of the saved sinner. Therefore, just as sin is overcome in the process of life through salvation, so anxiety as a mode of existence is replaced and annihilated by faith, through which salvation really takes place in the life of an individual, thus proving its possibility for this and every human life. Anxiety is thus the existential education to faith, which has reached its goal when it has made itself superfluous. Both, anxiety (that leads to sin) and faith (that saves from sin), are therefore not specific life phenomena among others, but are to be understood existentially as modes of human existence before God. They are the only modes of this existence (one cannot exist neutrally, that is, neither in anxiety nor in faith), but they are also modes that are indispensably actualized (one cannot exist without living either a life of sin or a life of faith).

1.9 The gift of renouncing anxiety There is no life of faith without renouncing anxiety. This renunciation is not so much an action as a happening to me, not an achievement, but a gift. He who renounces anxiety in faith no longer lives in a state of guilt, but also not in a state of imagined innocence, in which the spirit is present in humans only in dreams, but in a state of salvation, which goes back to the creative work of the spirit. The state of salvation is a gift that is not due to human activity, but to the spirit, which through its activity creatively makes the eternal present in the moment, thereby—as creator spiritus—establishing the existence of human beings against the background of nothingness (so that human beings are, although they could not have been), liberates them—as spiritus salvans—to the right practice of freedom (so that persons use their freedom rightly without becoming guilty) and thus—as spiritus vivificans et refrigerans—makes possible a life of love in faith and hope (so that people, individually and collectively, can and want to live in a way that is appropriate for God’s neighbors).

 SKS 4, 425 / CA, 159.  SKS 4, 421 / CA, 155.

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Haufniensis’ entire psychological analysis is therefore an attempt to trace the workings of the spirit in human life through contemplative reflection. Where the spirit is active, there is a synthesis of the temporal and the eternal, which is the human being. And only where humans understand themselves as the place of this spirit’s activity, do they begin to understand themselves not only as animals among animals, but in the full sense as human beings, because they recognize themselves as the place where and through which God’s Spirit works in God’s creation. The distinction of human beings is that they become the place of God’s presence, and only where they become that, their existential anxiety is overcome. For where this happens, the anxiety about the possibility of ability, on which one can fail, becomes gratitude for the possibility of a given ability, which one cannot acquire for oneself, but on which one cannot fail either, because it is the possibility of an actuality, which one owes to the working of the Spirit. This given possibility is such that it cannot be wrongly actualized or missed, because it has always been actualized by God’s spirit and not by error-prone human beings. This makes an existence possible for humans, who see life serenely as what it is: the place where everyone can become for everyone else the one who reminds them of the presence of God in their lives and everyone‘s lives. The anthropological realism of Haufniensis’ analysis of the existential role of anxiety in human life thus meets the theological realism of Kierkegaard’s sensitivity to the creative work of the Spirit of God in the lives of people. The world and the existence of human beings are thus illuminated as creation, and at the same time central phenomena of human life become more comprehensible than they would be considered in isolation. The view from the perspective of the Spirit not only reveals guilt as a pre-moral basic phenomenon of human existence, but at the same time makes clear that and how the basic structure of human existence can become concrete in human life as sin. In this way, Kierkegaard shows how relationships among creatures can be illuminated when they are critically analyzed in the light of the Creator’s relationship to the creature. This is precisely the point of a theological realism that takes the form of anthropological realism because it illuminates the actuality of human life in the light of the possibilities that are given and granted to it by God’s effective presence.

2 Trust and trust in God In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash—Jean Shepherd’s book of 1966 is a classic of its kind. Its title cites a popular joke, but it also poses a problem—at least for philosophers and theologians. We all know from experience what it means to pay cash. But what does it mean to trust in God? And do we trust in God? Empirical answers are not much help: People mean so different things by ‘God’ that it is hard to say whether those who affirm trusting in God say anything different from those who deny it. Theological answers, on the other hand, tell us that to trust in God is to trust God to be unfailingly trustworthy, and this we all fail to do because we put our trust not in the true God but in a god of our own making. So, before we can meaningfully discuss empirical and theological answers, we must explore the conceptual question: What does it mean to trust in God? The most common way of answering it is to outline a concept of trust, and then describe trust in God to be a particular case of it. But this is wrong. As D. Z. Phillips has rightly emphasized over and over again: “God’s reality is not one of a kind; He is not a being among beings.”⁹⁵ Similarly, trust in God is not one of a kind; trust in God is not a trust among trusts. To show this, I shall describe some aspects of the grammar of trust, and then contrast it to the different grammar of trust in God.

2.1 The ubiquity of trust God, we are told, is a mystery, but trust is a most everyday thing for all of us. In hundreds of ways trust pervades our lives and societies. It “is indispensable in friendship, love, families and organizations, and [it] plays a key role in economic exchange and politics. In the absence of trust among trading partners, market transactions break down. In the absence of trust in a country’s institutions and leaders, political legitimacy breaks down. Much recent evidence indicates that trust contributes to economic, political and social success.”⁹⁶ And now one has even begun to uncover the biological basis and neural mechanisms of trust.

 Dewi Z. Phillips, Wittgenstein and Religion, London: Palgrave Macmillan 1993, p. 62.  Michael Kosefeld, Markus Heinrichs, Paul J. Zak, Urs Fischbacher, Ernst Fehr, “Oxytocin increases trust in humans,” Nature, vol. 435, 2005, pp. 673 – 676. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-009

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However, as trust is a fact of our life, so is the breach of trust. We all know that trust risks abuse and disappointment. This is not a feature of trust that could be overcome or eliminated. Where “we have guarantees or proof, placing trust is redundant”.⁹⁷ Indeed, trust “is needed precisely because guarantees are incomplete”.⁹⁸ In everyday life we often have no alternative to trusting others,⁹⁹ and since we all know from experience what it means to be disappointed, it often takes a conscious effort to trust contrary to our prudent propensity to mistrust and distrust. Just as trust and mistrust are basic modes in which we orient ourselves in social situations, so distrust (a conscious effort not to trust) and a second order trust in spite of everything (a conscious decision to trust despite the possibility or even likelihood of being disappointed) are conscious modes of orienting ourselves against the backdrop of discouraging experience. This, then, is our situation: We all trust—our friends, our families, our colleagues, the laws of nature and the reliability of public transport. “The ubiquity of trusting behaviour is perhaps one of the distinguishing features of the human species.”¹⁰⁰ However, trust is more than trusting behavior. It is not to behave or act in a particular manner, or to have certain feelings towards someone but rather, as J. L. Schellenberg has argued, to be “disposed to perform the relevant actions in the appropriate circumstances”.¹⁰¹ When we trust we have “confidence in the honesty, goodness, skill or safety of a person, organization or thing”.¹⁰² We rely on them to behave and respond in predictable ways when we take decisions in the particular area concerned. Often, we must trust—because we lack expertise in the area concerned or because we lack the time, money or energy to find out for ourselves. But since we must act, and often under conditions of shortage of time and based on insufficient information, we must trust those whom we have reason to believe to be experts in the area concerned. It is always a risk to trust. Our reliance on others can be disappointed. Therefore when we trust, “we make ourselves vulnerable. But we do so in the confidence that the trusted will not exploit this vulnerability” but “will actively take care of what we make vulnera-

 Onora O’Neill, A Question of Trust, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, p. 6.  Ibid.  Samuel Johnson, The Rambler, no. 79, vol. II, ed. by Walter J. Bate and Albrecht B. Strauss, New Haven: Yale University Press 1969.  Kosfeld et al., “Oxytocin,” p. 676.  John L. Schellenberg, Prolegomena to a Philosophy of Religion, Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press 2005, p. 115.  Cambridge Dictionary, trust (dictionary.cambridge.org/de/worterbuch/englisch/trust) (04/ 29/2022).

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ble.”¹⁰³ “Such taking of responsibility is part of being a friend, a lover, or a spouse,”¹⁰⁴ a doctor, a politician, or a teacher. When we trust them, we are confident that they take responsibility for their role in our life so that we can rely on them in making our decisions about our private matters, our security, our health, our property, or our careers. This taking of responsibility is the ‘trustworthiness’ on which I rely in trusting another person. Someone whom I do not believe to take a responsible interest in my interests I cannot trust.

2.2 Varieties of trust However, there is more than one kind of trust, and more than one way of trusting. Sometimes we trust someone in a specific respect but not in others (‘I trust his mathematical competence but he has no idea of good wine’), and sometimes we trust a person absolutely even though we don’t trust her in a particular respect (‘I absolutely trust her but she has no ear for music’). Moreover, we place different levels of trust in different aspects of our lives. First, there is our everyday trust that by and large people around us will follow normal rules of behavior. We trust that other drivers stick to the rules and keep to the right. We trust that when we ask someone for the time the answer will be more or less correct. Of course, he could lie to us, but why should he? We normally assume that people behave honestly and not mischievously. But there is no guarantee for this, and we know it. Second, there is (what may be called) professional trust in those areas in which we have acquired a sufficient competence to judge things. We trust our research methods because we know from experience what they can or cannot deliver. But it would be wrong to place absolute trust in them or forget about double-checking when they produce unexpected results. We trust within clearly defined limits, and we allow reality to correct us. Third, there are deeper levels of trust—trust that what we see is real; that people mean what they say; that the basic normalities of our lives will continue even if in a particular case we have been disappointed. Finally, there are kinds of trust that are constitutive of our very identity, such as those tied up with our deep religious or non-religious convictions. It makes an important difference whether we look at others and ourselves as chance products

 Tom Bailey, “On Trust and Philosophy” (www.open2.net/trust/downloads/docs/ontrust. pdf) (02/25/2022).  Ibid.

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of natural selection, or as biological organisms whose mind is what their brain does, or as God’s creatures who are responsible to their creator and fellow creatures for what they make of their gifts and capacities in life.

2.3 Trust and hope All this shows that ‘trust’ is a rich, suggestive, and elusive term in our language, which regularly confronts us with ambiguity. Grammar can help to sort out some of the difficulties. Thus, we speak of trusting somebody, of trusting in somebody, and of trusting that so-and-so is the case. The first focuses on the subject of trust; the second on the one in whom trust is placed (the object of trust); the third on trust as a propositional attitude (propositional trust). Now the person who trusts in this latter sense bases her trust not on a belief that must be assessed against the data within the parameters of logical consistency, empirical truth or historical probability but on hope. She trusts because she hopes. Hope, however, is not (a kind of) belief, and hope in God is not a belief in God but an attitude of faith in God. Trust in God is ‘hope in action’: the practice of hoping in God contrary to appearances and against all odds. Thus, whereas belief is a cognitive disposition to act, hope is an attitude that determines a whole way of life. Beliefs are propositional, and they come in varying degrees of confidence in the proposition—tentative, quite confident, and fully confident. At one end of the scale beliefs are very weakly held opinions, at the other end beliefs approach certainty and are held with a fairly high degree of confidence. The degree of confidence can be measured by the likelihood of acting on a given belief. And this is where beliefs most significantly differ from faith, trust, or hope. To trust in God is not to believe something about God with a higher or lesser degree of confidence but to attend to the things of God, to put one’s hope in God. In moments of distress, hope is a happy construal of one’s future. In contrast to fear, hope expects something good, and in contrast to despair it posits a good of which we have significant assurance. Not, however, because we construe it as possessing a significant degree of probability. Rather, a life of hope is a way of ‘seeing’ the future through a trusting attitude that goes beyond Bishop Butler’s maxim that “probability is the guide of life”. It is not based on an assessment of facts and on detached calculation but, if necessary, on a counterfactual mood that may entail a stand contrary to the facts: ‘Soyez réaliste, essayez l’impossible.’

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This is not to say that trust in God is blind and hope in God irrational or without its own reasons. Christians ground their hope on “the character of God and the character of faith in him, which is not a calculation but a venture of one’s life.”¹⁰⁵

2.4 Reciprocity and risk However, actual trust always feeds on past experience. We learn to trust from being trusted. We learn that trust can be disappointed. But we also learn that it cannot permanently be a one-sided affair. If I trust you but find out that you check on me, or cheat me, trusting you will become more difficult or even impossible for me. After a point, most people stop trusting. After a certain amount of trust violation, one mistrusts first. When we trust someone, we expect reciprocity. If there is clear evidence to the contrary, we must ask ourselves whether and for how long it is reasonable to trust someone who doesn’t trust us? The answer will vary with context and persons. We may fire a secretary who has repeatedly abused our trust, but normally we wouldn’t throw out our son who has helped himself to money from our purse to which he wasn’t entitled. To be competent in trusting is to be sensitive to differences of situation and occasion and able to attune one’s reactions to what is appropriate in a given situation. However, trust always goes beyond control, and it is more than mere reliance. If I expect my friend not to ruin my car just because I have asked her to leave a deposit, then I may be relying on her not to ruin it, but I do not trust her.

2.5 Trusting persons and trusting organizations Now we not only trust persons but also organizations and things. But trusting a person and trusting an organization are not the same thing. Before we trust a bank, we are well advised to get the relevant information and perform certain checks. But to behave towards friends or family members in this way is a sure way of destroying the very basis for trust. After all, persons are persons but organizations are not. Both may let me down. But whereas I may embrace my son

 Robert R. Roberts, Emotions. An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2003, p. 282.

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to restore a trusting relationship, this would be an odd thing to do with the manager of my bank. However, there is a problematic tendency today to blur the difference between trusting a person and trusting an organization. Both may be construed as putting one’s trust in an individual—a human being or a social entity. But the two kinds of trust are importantly different, and there may even be a biological basis for this. Let me give you an example. It is a well-known fact that “oxytocin, a neuropeptide … plays a key role in social attachment and affiliation in non-human mammals”.¹⁰⁶ It permits “animals to overcome their natural avoidance of proximity and thereby facilitates approach behaviour.”¹⁰⁷ This seems to be true also of humans. Neuropsychological experiments have shown that the “intranasal administration of oxytocin” to participants in social dilemma games “causes a substantial increase in trust among humans.”¹⁰⁸ The experiments used a version of the trust game, played sequentially, in which an investor and a trustee interact anonymously in what they think is a real social interaction because real money is involved.¹⁰⁹ Both players receive an initial endowment of 12 dollars. The investor can send 0, 4, 8, or 12 dollars to the trustee. The experimenter triples the amount the investor transfers. Then the trustee has the option of sending any amount between zero and his total amount available back to the investor. This allows measuring the investor’s trust by the amount she is prepared to risk on getting a fair share in the trustee’s profits. The game was played by an oxytocin and placebo group, and to check the results the two groups had also to play a risk game “in which the investor faced the same choices as in the trust game but a random mechanism, not the trustee’s decision, determined the investor’s risk”. The results of the experiments were striking: Oxytocin had a most significant effect on the trusting behavior of the investors.¹¹⁰ However, the effect of oxytocin on trust is “not due to a general increase in the readiness to bear risks. On the contrary, oxytocin specifically affects an individual’s willingness to accept social risks arising through interpersonal interactions”.¹¹¹ People given oxytocin behave differently with respect to other people but not in other ways.

     

Kosfeld et al., “Oxytocin,” p. 673. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., appendix 1. Ibid., appendix 2. Ibid., p. 673.

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This indicates that there is a biological basis of prosocial approach behavior among humans that can be activated or even manipulated by administering certain drugs. This gives rise to serious moral questions. The presence or lack of trusting behavior in a human life not only influences our readiness to take or avoid risks in social interactions but is intimately bound up with our very identity and dignity as persons who respect others and expect to be respected by others. But it is clear from these experiments that the difference between trusting a person and trusting a mechanism or an organization must not be blurred.

2.6 The principle of charity In social interactions we normally act according to the principle of charity. Thus, in dealing with others it is prudent to understand them to mean what their words suggest and their behavior supports unless there are strong grounds to the contrary. Such grounds regularly arise when, on leaving the house, my friend says ‘It’s raining cats and dogs’ and then puts her umbrella back into the stand before she steps out into the rain. I then begin to wonder whether I have understood her correctly, for what she says and how she acts doesn’t seem to fit. That is to say, the principle of charity is not a surprising sign of human solidarity in a world of mistrust and mischief but based on experience and tied to a practice. I do not trust the other blindly but rather follow the rules of an established practice of communication if I grant her to mean what I understand her to say. But while it is prudent to follow the principle of charity in normal cases, it is not prudent to do so in every case. Where to draw the line is often difficult to decide. It depends on such diverse factors as the importance of the issue at stake, our human obligations and professional duties, or our particular relations to the person concerned. However, there is an important difference between a positive and a negative version of the principle of charity. The positive principle says: Trust everyone until they prove not to be trustworthy. The negative principle holds: Don’t trust anyone until they prove to be trustworthy. The two versions are importantly different. They differ in their views of what constitutes trustworthiness, they suggest different routes in dealing with the breakdown of trust, and they are based on contrary experiences. The first is a principle of trust based on experiences where we confidently rely on others as we do in most of our everyday dealings with our fellow human beings. The second is a principle of distrust derived from experiences of disappointment that have led to mistrust.

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It makes all the difference in our relations to persons and institutions whether we act on the principle of charity in the first or in the second sense. As a rule of thumb, we are well advised, in most cases, to place trust before distrust when dealing with persons, and distrust before trust when dealing with institutions or organizations. It is not a strict either-or in either case but given our everyday experience, our cultural tradition and the biological findings mentioned earlier, we must distinguish between our relations to persons and to organizations, and we must resist our inclination to confuse these different types of relations. For instance, if I expect a tax collector, a bank, or the foreign police to relate to me in the caring and understanding way of a friend or family member I can be pretty sure to be disappointed. Similarly, if I treat a friend in the distrusting and skeptical manner that may be appropriate for my dealings with the tax office, I shall fare no better. The difference is important, so let me briefly elaborate it.

2.7 The principle of distrust Consider the principle of distrust first. Distrust ¹¹² is not the same as mistrust—believing that a particular party is in fact working against me. Rather it is a formal way of not trusting any one party too much in a situation of high risk or deep doubt. Trust but verify is a good advice in such cases for often what can go wrong does go wrong so that it is prudent to guard ourselves against the evil consequences even of our best actions. Since we cannot know or compute all the possible consequences of our actions and interactions, we take recourse to the principle of distrust. Systems based on distrust characteristically divide the responsibility so that checks and balances can operate. The idea of such a ‘balance of powers’ is an accomplishment of modern political theory and practice. Thomas Hobbes, the founding father of modern theories of the state, argued in his famous thought-experiment that in the state of nature, “with no authority to tell us what to do, and no agencies to detect and punish us if we do not do it”, there would be “war … of every man against every man,” and life would be “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”¹¹³ He arrived at this conclusion because he was convinced that human beings are moved only by their own ‘passions,’ their particular desires for, and aversions

 Cf. Wikipedia, Distrust (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrust) (02/22/2022).  Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan. Introduction by Kenneth R. Minogue, Chap. 13, London: Dent, 1914; reprint 1973, pp. 64– 65.

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to, particular things; that no human being is strong enough to be entirely secure from harm by others; and that the things we want are generally either scarce (so that we cannot all get what we want) or relative (so that my getting more of a thing effectively means that others have less of it). Since we cannot trust everyone, and do not know whom to trust and whom not to trust, we must, if rational, trust no one. Any other course of action will be far too risky. Indeed, our fear of death requires us not merely to distrust others but to attack them before they attack us and take what we need. Consequently, to safeguard peace we need a sovereign—not so much to threaten us with punishment if we do wrong but to create safe conditions where we can trust each other and safely act as morality requires. To create a situation where mutual trust is possible, we must renounce an important part of our autonomy as free agents. Once the sovereign is in place to enforce rules of conduct, acting morally is no longer such a risk. We then live in conditions that allow us to do the right thing without exposing ourselves to exploitation by others. The trouble with this solution to Hobbes’ thought experiment is that in order to survive we must place our trust in a sovereign whom we must trust to enforce the necessary conditions for trust. But this is circular and self-defeating for how can we expect of this particular person what we cannot expect of ourselves or of any other? What we need is not an absolute sovereign but a sovereign under the law or, ideally, the moral law as our sole sovereign. We are all equals, as Kant insisted, not because we all have the same rights but because we have all equal moral duties. No one must be treated as an exception to them, in particular not those in power or we ourselves. To safeguard this, we need public checks and balances of power in all public affairs, and this idea is captured by the principle of distrust.¹¹⁴ Thus, a well-designed constitution is deliberately structured in a way to prevent trusting the government too much. The judicial and legislative branches of government have formally defined roles in which they distrust each other’s judgment, have veto power, and exercise their functions strictly independent of each other. On the whole, this has been a rather successful design. Well-designed systems of distrust enable dissent and generate an atmosphere of constructive criticism that helps to keep the system honest and improve its workings. This is as true of political systems as it is of business organizations or universities.

 Cf. Wikipedia, Distrust (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distrust) (02/22/2022).

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2.8 The principle of trust However, distrust is not always the adequate principle to act on. In relating to other persons, we should rather act on trust—and this for pragmatic and for principle reasons. The pragmatic reasons have to do with the reality of our social life. Without trust we could not sustain any social relations with other persons; after all, they might let us down. If we never trusted anyone, we could never learn anything useful from anyone else; after all, they might not be telling us the truth. Nor could we cooperate with other people in common projects and joint ventures; after all, they might fail to honor their side of the deal. If we want to live a social life, learn from others, and cooperate with others (as we must in order to survive), we have no serious alternative to trusting people until they prove themselves not to be trustworthy. The principal reasons, on the other hand, have to do with what we expect of others and ourselves in our social interactions. When we decide what to do, we should act on a principle that others could adopt and act on; and we should not treat ourselves as an exception to the rule. Distrust, cheating or lying fail this test. Trust is a moral principle, distrust isn’t. We cannot act by principally distrusting everybody because we cannot consistently expect everybody, always, everywhere and in every respect to distrust everybody; and similarly we cannot consistently expect everyone always to lie, or to cheat. Moreover, we are absolutely obliged to respect the dignity of other persons and of ourselves, and this implies that we must not use other people in ways to which they could not consent and to which we wouldn’t consent in their place.

2.9 Trust and dignity It is important to see that this tough requirement does not place an obligation on others but on us. We are all moral equals not because we all have the same rights but because we all have equal duties,¹¹⁵ and these duties are not imposed on us by others but by ourselves. Duties or obligations are prior to rights. Indeed, there are no rights without counterpart duties. This is why we should not act on principles that are unfit to be principles for all. “Where violence and coercion, deception and intimidation are common, it is because some people act on principles that cannot be princi-

 Cf. O’Neill, Question of Trust, p. 33.

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ples for all: they breach and neglect fundamental duties and in doing so violate other’s rights, and undermine both democracy and the placing of trust”.¹¹⁶ However, why “should anyone place trust, fulfil fundamental duties or respect other’s rights if they face intimidation and violence, extortion and deception, and at the limit terror? … Won’t those who place trust or meet duties in these conditions face danger and become victims?”¹¹⁷ This is indeed a possibility, and sometimes a sad reality. But we must be careful not to deny our moral duties or question our human dignity in principle because they can be abused and disappointed in fact. What is at stake here is not just a particular course of action but how we want to understand ourselves as human persons. We insist on the unconditional dignity of persons because persons are not the sum of what they have done and what has been done to them. They have a dignity that transcends their particular history of achievements and failures. This dignity is not something that could be read off our actions or be discovered by scanning our brains. To insist on human dignity as an absolute value is to accept that we are absolutely obliged to treat others as persons—absolutely because we do not first wait for them to exhibit certain traits or have certain rights and then decide to treat them as persons. The situation becomes pretty hopeless if we insist that certain behavior is necessary before we are entitled to trust a person. If “we think rights are the preconditions of social and political trust, there is nothing we can do until other people behave in certain ways and start respecting our rights—and nothing they can do until we start respecting their rights.”¹¹⁸ But people’s rights “are the flip side of others’ duties”.¹¹⁹ Thus, before anyone can have rights, someone must act, and before anyone is trustworthy, someone must trust. Trustworthiness is a property that does not precede but results from our trusting each other. That is to say, we trust others not because they are trustworthy but by trusting them, we create a situation in which they inevitably will prove themselves to be trustworthy or not. Nobody has a right to be trusted, and nobody a duty to trust. But in matters of trust, we must act first, not the other. This is as true in politics as it is in personal relations.

   

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 35. Ibid. Ibid.

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2.10 The gift of trustworthiness There is an important asymmetry here that is often overlooked: Trust starts with us, trustworthiness with the other. We all are free to trust and therefore continuously challenged to place our trust reasonably and responsibly, but none of us is free to create his or her own trustworthiness because we cannot make ourselves trustworthy. We become trustworthy only by being trusted and by not disappointing those who trust us. Thus, the first step in building relations of trust is to be made by us. We may hope for reciprocity. But if we want to build our relations on trust, we must make the first move and trust the other without making our trust dependent on conditions that must be fulfilled by the other party, not even on a hypothetical contract with others to trust us if we trust them. Hypothetical agreements are not worth the paper they are not written on. When I trust I risk myself, and there is no hypothetical safety net that could avoid or reduce that risk. However, what is a risk for me is a chance for the others. When I trust I ‘act on hope’ and go beyond what the facts support. In trusting a person, I go beyond what is before my eyes. I open myself to the other and give her a chance to be more than what she appears to be. Similarly, in mistrusting or distrusting others I close myself to them and stick to what they appear to be in the light of past experiences. Mistrust and distrust tie us to the past whereas trust orients us towards the future. In trusting someone I put my stakes on the future because I hope that the other will turn out to be trustworthy rather than not. There is no guarantee that she will, but unless I go beyond what the facts support in trusting her I shall never know. There is no other way to become trustworthy, and no better way to make people freely accept responsibility towards others. Trusting others places them in a situation in which they must exercise their freedom and act as persons because we treat them as persons. Persons, however, should only act on principles that are fit to be principles for all. Trust is such a principle. Mistrust isn’t. And while distrust helps us to check and improve our actions, it plays into the hands of mistrust when we try to base our personal relations on it.

2.11 Trust in God Whenever we trust we go beyond what the facts support. This is particularly true of trust in God. However, trust in God differs from what we have discussed so far in that God does not deceive, and trust in God cannot be disappointed, at least not by God. This is not a curious fact about God but part of the religious grammar of

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God. If you lose trust in God because you feel that God has let you down, then you do not merely change your attitude towards God but rather give up a whole way of life. Trust in God is not a particular kind of trusting behavior that can be marked off from others by a set of behavioral characteristics. It is rather a basic orientation in life that informs and permeates all our behaviors. That is to say, trust in God is not a particular case of trusting someone or something, but a reality in its own right. It cannot be analyzed into an attitude of trust (trust in …) and a particular object in which we trust (God). To analyze trust in God in this way is to idolize God. God is then mistakenly conceived to be one of the things in which we may place our trust: We trust our bank, our friends, our significant others, and (perhaps) God. But to conceive God in this way is to finitize, objectify and idolize God. We then use the term ‘God’ as if God was a being among beings. But God is not a being in the world but its creator, and the creator is not part of creation, or an aspect of it, but essentially different from it. Without God there wouldn’t be a world and no truth in calling it creation. Just as the predicate ‘—is created’ cannot be used to mark a difference between phenomena in the world but only a distinction between the world and God, so the term ‘God’ cannot be used to mark a difference in the world of experience but highlights a certain way of seeing and relating to it: to see the world and relate to it as creation. Trust in God, therefore, is not an ordinary kind of trust in an extraordinary object (trust in God) but a unique kind of trust. To predicate this unique trust of someone is not to say that among all the other things in which she trusts there is also a deity but rather that whatever she is, feels, thinks, and does is felt, thought, and done in an attitude of trust in God. She orients her life in all its aspects by trusting in God but trusting in God is not a particular aspect of her life among others. Rather, to trust in God is to trust that there is more to life than we can see and experience, and the ‘more’ at stake here is not a vague beyond that has not yet been properly explored and mapped out by science. It is not a further feature of our world, but rather a specific way of perceiving and understanding the world and all its features in the light of God’s relation to it. In short, to trust in God is to understand oneself as God’s creature, the world as God’s creation, life as God’s gift, and God as the one who cares for his creatures in the best possible way for each creature. Understood in this sense, God is not part of the furniture of the world, or the totality of all there is. No inventory of the world includes God as an item, and no theory of everything is a theory also of God. God is not a being among beings in or beyond the world but the fountainhead of possibilities without which there would be no world, no way of seeing the world as creation, and no way of living a human life aware or ignorant of this.

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2.12 God as middle term Kierkegaard had something like this in mind when he called God the actuality of the possible and the middle term ¹²⁰ of all there is. Both metaphors point beyond what the facts support and make a similar point about our world of experience: God is neither a fact to be explained nor an explanation of facts. Rather, to trust in God is to live in the world in a way that goes beyond what the facts support— not as a blind trust that is based on insufficient evidence but as a confident risk that there is more to the world than what it appears to be. Thus, to cut a long story short, whatever is, is the effect of a cause, and to identify its cause or causes is to explain it. But only what is actual can be a cause, and only an actual cause can have actual effects. However, nothing is actual that isn’t possible, and whatever is possible, is the possibility of something actual. There is no possibility without some actuality in which it is grounded, and the ultimate actuality without which there wouldn’t be anything possible, and hence nothing actual, is God: God is the actuality of the possible—that is, not a cause of anything actual, but the source of everything possible: Without God, there wouldn’t be any possibility, and hence no actuality. Thus, nothing we can experience is God, but neither can we experience anything apart from God: There wouldn’t be anything to experience, or anyone to make an experience, without God. This is why Kierkegaard calls God the middle term of all there is. “One would think”, he writes in Works of Love, “that love between human beings is a relationship between two. This is indeed true, but untrue, inasmuch as the relationship is also a relationship among three”:¹²¹ “the lover, the beloved, the love— but the love is God”.¹²² Kierkegaard is commonly understood to suggest a realist and relational analysis of love, that is, to analyze the relation of love as involving three terms a R b, where a is the lover, b is the loved one and R the love (or God) that unites them. But as Russell has shown a century ago, such an analysis is futile because we can always ask how the two terms are related to the third, thus reiterate the problem ad infinitum. ¹²³ However, to understand what Kierkegaard is up to one must construe his proposal not in a realist and relational but a logical and hermeneutical sense: He elucidates what it means to orient oneself by trust in God by drawing an ana Ibid., p. 107.  SKS 9, 287 / WL, 301.  SKS 9, 117 / WL, 121.  Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Mehr als Zwei. Von der Logik der Relation zur Hermeneutik des Dritten,” Archivio di Filosophia/ Archives of Philosophy, vol. 74, 2006, pp. 123 – 137.

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logy between the Christian view of God’s role in the world and the function of the middle term in syllogistic arguments. The middle term is the term that occurs in both premises (but not in the conclusion) of a categorical syllogism. For example, man is the middle term in the schoolbook syllogism: “Major premise: All men are mortal. Minor premise: Socrates is a man. Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.” In exactly the same way God functions as middle term in such syllogisms as “All human creatures of God are mortal. Socrates is a human creature of God. Socrates is mortal.” The conclusion states a fact that is in principle open to empirical investigation. However, that God is the creator of Socrates and all other human beings does not show in the conclusion, yet its truth is decisive for the conclusion to be true. It determines that the person we have before our eyes is not merely a fact of the world but an act of creation; and this in turn determines how we ought to relate to this person: not merely as a chance product of natural evolution but as a creature of God. In this sense, Kierkegaard suggests that every empirical fact may be understood in a dual perspective: not merely as the effect of an empirical cause in terms of which it can be explained, but at the same time as the conclusion of a syllogistic argument in which God is the middle term. The first explains what is the case, the second uncovers what it truly is and thus determines the attitude, which is appropriate for us to have towards it. The term ‘God’, on the other hand, functions exclusively as middle term when we talk about our life and experience. It never occurs in the conclusion of an argument that states a fact about the world, and it never names a cause that could explain such a fact. God is neither a fact of the world nor the fact that the world is, but that without which there wouldn’t be any facts at all, nor a possibility of knowing the true nature of the world, nor a human life informed by this truth. According to Kierkegaard, therefore, the term ‘God’ refers not to a being in or beyond the world, but functions as index and indicator of the creative point of view that discloses the truth of the world as creation and thus orients human life by distinguishing not only between a ‘worldly’ and Christian perspective on the world, as Kierkegaard calls it, but also, within the Christian perspective, between what is new and old, true and untrue, good and evil, doomed to annihilation or destined to become part of a future to come. Thus, to trust in God is to see our world from the point of view of a life of hope that discerns God’s differentiating and transforming presence at work in everything that occurs— not as a factual reality but as the actuality of the possible. Understood in this sense, Kierkegaard’s middle term metaphor for God is not a misleading metaphysical analogy of a logical idea but a hermeneutical advice

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of how to live a human life worthy that name: by trusting in God as the middle term of everything that can truly be said to be, and by living a life of hope that knows how to make a difference—in the way it perceives the world, and in the way it lives in it. Without God human life would not only be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’, but there would be no life at all. Yet there is human life, and if God is the middle term, then even though there is nothing to point to, there is much to hope for—by trusting in God.

3 Hope for the possibility of the good 3.1 The hope of love We understand backwards what is or has been actual, and we live forwards towards the possible. Nowhere is this clearer than in human hopes. Hope changes those who hope from a restriction to the actual and its effects to an orientation towards the possible and its chances. But this is still too vague. Hope always aims at a good, that is, at something that one desires for oneself or for others because one considers it a good. In this one may be mistaken, but if one did not consider it a good, one would not hope for it. In the existentially urgent cases in which one’s own identity and one’s own life, being or not being, life or death are at stake, this hoped-for good is not only externally connected with hope, so that it would also exist or be accessible independently of it. One cannot refer to it without hoping for it, and it becomes effective in life precisely by hoping for it. It is therefore the object of a legitimate hope when it determines the mode of hope. We rightly hope for a good when we hope for it in a good way, and this happens when the mode of hoping corresponds to the character of the good that is hoped for. Those who hope to get well despite serious illness do not hope in the right way, if they ignore reality, refuse the help of doctors, listen to charlatans, or try to get into the appropriate state with medication or alcohol. The reorientation from the real to the possible in the hope of a good remains mere wishful thinking, if it is not done in a mode that can be understood as a manifestation of the good one hopes for. Hope is justified when, in the mode of hope, what hope is directed at is already present. Then the act of hoping in the present becomes a sign of what is hoped for in the future as a possibility of good. That it was such a sign will only be understood backwards. But one must live it so forward, if it is to be true in retrospect that it was such a sign.

3.2 Love as respect Few have seen the risks and opportunities involved as clearly as Kierkegaard. He determined the mode of justified hope by trying to understand the hope of people from the point of view of embedding it in the process of love. This reference to love seems to contradict Kant’s binding of justified hope to the morality of moral law. But Kierkegaard’s connection between hope and love not only specifies the understanding of justified hope, but also of love. As long as one underhttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-010

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stands love as a sensual passion, this is hardly possible. Then one must indeed say with Kant that love cannot be demanded or commanded because emotions cannot be deliberately provoked. “Love is a matter of feeling, not of willing, and I cannot love because I will to, still less because I ought to (I cannot be constrained to love); so a duty to love is an absurdity.”¹²⁴ Everything that lovers want, do, and hope must therefore be critically examined by means of the moral principle. Otherwise, there is the danger of letting oneself be seduced by subjective wishes and unreasonable desires, of placing the pleasant above the good, and of letting oneself be led by passions and not by good will. Accordingly, Kant interprets the commandment of love in such a way that it agrees with his interpretation and is protected from misunderstanding love as passion and thus from asking for nonsense. The commandment “Love God above all things and your neighbor as yourself” does not demand to have certain friendly feelings toward God and neighbor. Rather, it requires respect for a law which commands love and does not leave it to our own arbitrary choice to make this our principle. Love to God, however, considered as an inclination (pathological love), is impossible, for He is not an object of the senses. The same affection towards men is possible no doubt, but cannot be commanded, for it is not in the power of any man to love anyone at command; therefore it is only practical love that is meant in that pith of all laws. To love God means, in this sense, to like to do His commandments; to love one’s neighbour means to like to practise all duties towards him. But the command that makes this a rule cannot command us to have this disposition in actions conformed to duty, but only to endeavour after it. For a command to like to do a thing is in itself contradictory, because if we already know of ourselves what we are bound to do, and if further we are conscious of liking to do it, a command would be quite needless; and if we do it not willingly, but only out of respect for the law, a command that makes this respect the motive of our maxim would directly counteract the disposition commanded. That law of all laws, therefore, like all the moral precepts of the Gospel, exhibits the moral disposition in all its perfection, in which, viewed as an Ideal of holiness, it is not attainable by any creature, but yet is the pattern which we should strive to approach, and in an uninterrupted but infinite progress become like to. In fact, if a rational creature could ever reach this point, that he thoroughly likes to do all moral laws, this would mean that there does not exist in him even the possibility of a desire that would tempt him to deviate from them; for to overcome such a desire always costs the subject some sacrifice, and therefore requires self-compulsion, that is, inward

 Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. by Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1996, p. 161; Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. by Herbert J. Paton, New York: Harper & Row 1964, p. 67. Cf. S. Matthew Liao, “The Idea of a duty to love,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, vol. 40, 2006, pp. 1– 22.

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constraint to something that one does not quite like to do; and no creature can ever reach this stage of moral disposition.¹²⁵

God cannot be loved “pathologically,” that is, sensually, because God is not an “object of the senses” given in experience. Humans, on the contrary, can be loved pathologically, but this cannot be commanded for the reasons mentioned. A commandment of love, which links the love of God with love of neighbor and self-love, cannot therefore be meant sensually-pathologically. It must mean a “practical love,” which applies to the practical law that determines the will. “To love God means, in this sense, to like to do His commandments; to love one’s neighbour means to like to practise all duties towards him.” However, one cannot command to like to do something: The mode in which something is done can only be chosen and lived by oneself, but not prescribed. To like to do something, however, is not the relevant mode in this case, but to do it “only out of respect for the law.” The decisive moral question is not whether we like doing something or not, but whether we do it out of duty and thus out of respect for the practical law before which we are all equal as persons. This duty is at issue in the commandment of love, if one understands it rightly, and from it what is meant here by ‘love’: Love and respect are the emotions which go hand in hand with our discharge of these two kinds of duties. These emotions may be considered separately, and in practice they may subsist, each for itself and apart from the other. Love of our neighbour may take place even while he deserves but little respect; as, on the contrary, respect is due to every man, although deemed hardly worth our love. But, properly speaking, they are at bottom inseparably united by the law, in every duty owed by us, to our neighbour; but this in such a manner, that sometimes the one emotion is the leading principle of the duty of the person, along with which the other follows as its accessory.¹²⁶

Duty demands that the moral law be obeyed under all circumstances, and what this means must be critically clarified on a case-by-case basis. To like to do the moral law, however, is too much to ask of us. Not only no one else, but not even I myself can make me like doing what I have to do to act morally. We are no saints,  Immanuel Kant, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason and Other Works on the Theory of Ethics, trans. by Thomas Kingsmill Abbott, B.D., Fellow and Tutor of Trinity College, Dublin, 4th revised ed., London: Kongmans, Green and Co. 1889 (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/360#Kant_0212_ 460) (09/24/2020).  Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics by Immanuel Kant, trans. by John W. Semple, ed. with introduction by Rev. Henry Calderwood, Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark 31886. (https://oll.lib ertyfund.org/titles/1443#Kant_0332_597 (I have exchanged respect for reverence and duty for office) (09/24/2020).

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as Kant emphasizes, and can never do “all the moral precepts of the Gospel” entirely according to this ideal, but can strive for the aimed-for perfection at best in an “infinite progress.” As long as we are bodily beings, we can never act completely free of desire, and can therefore never orient ourselves completely and exclusively to the moral law. Our self-love with its particular interests will always be in play. As rational bodily beings, there is therefore no true freedom for us without “self-compulsion” and thus no true love of God and neighbor. Both are always to be enforced against self-love, which is fed by our needs and pursues its own interests. The basic conflict between self-love on the one hand and love of God and neighbor on the other hand determines human life throughout. One does not have to command self-love to anyone. Even if we do the opposite and our life shows all the symptoms of a lack of self-love or even pathological self-hate, our body resists as long as it can: Without self-love and the self-preservation strategies of our organism we could not even be against our self-love. This is different in the case of the commandment of love. We do not always do what this commandment demands of us. That is why the demand for love of God and neighbor appears in the form of a commanded to do, which is not already realized in the being of our life, but is to become reality, again and again. For only if we manage to sufficiently determine our self-love through love of God and neighbor will we be on the way to becoming worthy of bliss, and thus, despite all our imperfections, can we rightly hope to achieve it. Love in this context, then, does not mean passion, but the respect we owe to God and our neighbor, because and in so far as they represent or embody the principle of good will. Kant does not reject the concept of love in its application to God and neighbor, but expressly states it, indeed places it almost at the center: The end of the Godhead in creating, and His providence of man, we can only depicture to ourselves as an end of love, i. e., that He wills their happiness; but the principle of His will in regard of the respect (awe) we owe Him, which limits the operations of the principle pointing to the end willed, i. e., the principle of His divine rights, can be no more than that of justice; we might, speaking as we must do after the fashion of men, lay down this position, that God created His intelligent universe that He might have somewhat to love or be loved by in turn.¹²⁷

 Ibid. (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/1443#Kant_0332_701) (respect for reverence) (02/22/ 2022).

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God is here understood—“after the fashion of men”—as he who loves what he creates, so that the creature loves him, even if it does not. God’s love is, so to speak, the given space in which the life of creatures takes place. This also applies to human life. This cannot be carried out without actually taking a stand on the love of God, even if people hide, ignore or deny this fact. In contrast to other creatures, humans are able to become aware of their situation coram deo and to live their lives accordingly. Because they are able to do so, they must be held accountable for the way they live (Sosein) and exist (Dasein). They are not accountable for the ‘that,’ but for the ‘how’ of their life. Precisely this is what the commandment of love undeniably puts before our eyes, by confronting human beings with a “shall”: “Love God above everything, and thy neighbour as thyself,” and Kant adds the footnote: “This law is in striking contrast with the principle of private happiness which some make the supreme principle of morality. This would be expressed thus: Love thyself above everything, and God and thy neighbour for thine own sake.”¹²⁸ The tendency of modernity to look at the relationship of a human being to others and to God solely from the functional point of view of what they benefit one is aptly addressed here. But we are not the yardstick by which relationships with others are measured. The decisive yardstick by which we must always critically measure our relations to others and to ourselves is rather—spoken “after the fashion of men”—God’s preceding love as Creator, which creates God’s counterpart as addressee of his love and makes not only possible a reciprocal behavior of the creature towards the Creator (Gospel), but in the case of human beings also expects it (law). Thus, we and the others stand likewise under the viewpoint of a third party, from whom we can be addressed as equals despite all differences among ourselves, without our differences being cancelled or denied. The expression ‘God’ is the keyword for this third party, before whom all human beings are equal with regard to their Dasein and their Wahrsein, and whose attitude and behavior toward human beings (’love’) is the norm for their behavior toward others, toward themselves, and toward God: Love as you are loved and as everyone else is loved. The standard or ideal of love is therefore not to be taken from an analysis of human life but becomes evident when one understands it in all its facets as a life made possible by God’s love. It owes its Dasein to this love and truly realizes its Sosein, when it corresponds to this love in relation to others and to itself.

 Kant, Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason (https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/360#Kant_0212_ 460) (02/22/2022).

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Kant therefore conceives the idea of God as an ideal of good will, which is the only one that is perfectly and unreservedly good. It strives for the happiness of humankind by enabling and demanding their worthiness to be happy and, for this purpose places itself under the principle of justice to give everyone his happiness in proportion to his worthiness to be happy and to treat no one differently from another. As love, God is unrestrictedly good because he makes good, free because he makes free, just because he makes just. Only he who hopes in this love hopes in the true good. And only he rightly hopes in this love, who lets himself be determined by the good will of this love, by orienting himself freely to it, and making it the categorical maxim of his will and action, thus wanting nothing that it does not want, and wanting everything that it wants.

3.3 The hope of Christianity is eternity Kierkegaard ties in with this elementary connection of hope and love. Earthly hope, according to him, is directed to many things, Christian hope, on the other hand, to the eternal or eternity: “Christianity’s hope is the eternity.”¹²⁹ Earthly life and eternity do not stand side by side in isolation. Rather, Christianity speaks “metaphorically of this earthly life as the time of sowing and of eternity as the time of harvest.”¹³⁰ The imperfection and the becoming here are thus laid on the perfection and the being there. This is something different from the progress into the future of a better time. This temporal life is not only designed for a future in time, but as earthly and finite life it is oriented toward eternity and infinity. This being designed and directed toward eternity must not be misunderstood as gradual progress into the future. This would remain entirely within the horizon of the temporality of past, present, and future. But “Christianity does not lead you up to some loftier place from which you can still only survey a somewhat wider circuit”.¹³¹ It does not aim at a mere “earthly hope” and a better “worldly prospect” in the future. “Christianity’s hope is eternity, and Christ is the Way; his debasement is the Way, but he was also the Way when he ascended into heaven.”¹³² That is, he is the way not as an event in time, but as an opening of the earthly finite to the eternal and as a sublation of the temporal into the eternity of infinity. Eternity is thus not simply the other of the earthly; it is rather the presence of the eternal in the earthly, which reveals it as finite and temporal and    

SKS 9, 237 / WL, 248. SKS 9, 236 / WL, 247. SKS 9, 237 / WL, 248. Ibid.

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shows that it is designed for the infinite and eternal. The finite does not of itself come into view as finite, and the temporal does not of itself come into view as temporal. Both are only disclosed in contrast to the eternal and infinite. But as long as this contrast is only understood as a better or deeper ‘worldly view,’ which conceives the infinite as negation of the finite and the temporal as negation of the eternal, it remains underdetermined. Rather, the finite and temporal must be understood the other way round as that, which is revealed and uncovered in its finiteness and temporality by the active breaking in of the infinite and eternal in the first place. Only eternity and infinity bring the earthly into view as finite and temporal, in that they open and align it toward the eternal and infinite. This is not self-evident and goes beyond the merely negative construction of the infinite and eternal as a negation of the finite and temporal from the standpoint of finitude. The center of activity is now on the side of the eternal and infinite and not the temporal and finite. The becoming present of eternity in the earthly makes it temporal, and the becoming present of infinity makes it finite. This is not a negative, but a positive distinction of the temporal and finite. This becomes clear when one pays attention to the place where, according to Kierkegaard, this is manifest: Jesus Christ. In his life it is shown that temporality and finiteness do not obstruct the eternal and infinite. Rather, they let it come into view precisely when they are understood in the right way as finite and temporal. This is the case, when they are understood from the history of Jesus Christ as a work of love, that is, of God. The whole life of Jesus, whatever else one might say about him, was an act of love. “Christ’s life was sheer love,”¹³³ and “[i]n him love was sheer action; there was no moment, not a single on in his life, when love in him was merely the inactivity of a feeling that hunts for words while it lets time slip by, or a mood that is its own gratification, dwells on itself while there is no task—no, his love was sheer action.”¹³⁴

There is no love where love is not practized. An idle love is a self-contradiction. Therefore, love is not a potency that can or cannot be activated, nor a possibility that must first be realized. Love exists only as actuality, and therefore all love always comes from love. It presupposes what it does, so that loving always means presupposing love: “Love is to presuppose love; to have love is to presuppose love in others; to be loving is to presuppose that others are loving.”¹³⁵ This

 SKS 9, 99 / WL, 100.  SKS 9, 98 / WL, 99 f.  SKS 9, 214 / WL, 223.

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presupposed love can be that of another, to whom one owes one’ s love, or it can be one’ s own love, which as past loving works the present loving. But the one who never presupposes another love in the act of love, but always only his own and thus himself, is love. And the one who is himself the love he presupposes in his loving, that is, the one who always and exclusively does what he is and is what he does, is the one Christians call ‘God.’ We know what ‘to love’ means, rudimentary and diffuse from human beings and clear and determined from Jesus Christ. “But no human being is love”, but all those who love draw from a preceding reality of love—not only from one that is hypothetically or abductively presupposed by them—without which no one could love and which does not coincide with any human reality. Only “God is love,”¹³⁶ as Kierkegaard emphasizes in accordance with the Johannine and Pauline tradition. God not only loves, but he is the one whom all loving presupposes and claims as the ground of its possibility and reality: the eternal reality of creative love. That is why Kierkegaard begins his reflections on the work of love with a prayer in which God is addressed in a trinitarian way as “God of love.”¹³⁷ God’s love is the divine process of creation, in which everything finite becomes a moment of the infinite and is what it is only in this embedding. Everyone “who loves is what he is only by being in you” (Father); God “revealed what love is” by giving himself “in order to save all”, to redeem them from their self-centeredness and to free them to true love (Son); and God as the “Spirit of love … remind[s] the believer to love as he is loved and his neighbor as himself.”¹³⁸

3.4 Hope as work of love Divine love is thus the creative context in which all other distinctions of human and Christian life gain their meaning in the first place. For this reason Kierkegaard interprets the Pauline statement of 1 Cor 8,7 “So faith, hope, and love abide, these three, but the greatest among these is love”¹³⁹ in such a way that he understands faith and hope as concrete forms of the activity of love: “Love believes all things—and yet is never deceived,”¹⁴⁰ and “Love hopes all things— and yet is never put to shame.”¹⁴¹ Faith and hope are works of love and must

     

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 181 / WL, 190. 9, 8 / WL, 3. 9, 8 / WL, 3 f. 9, 216 / WL, 225. 9, 216 – 234 / WL, 225 – 245. 9, 235 – 251 / WL, 246 – 263.

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be unfolded as such. Hope is not a mere attitude or outlook, but an action, but not simply an action of hoping people, but of love, which lets them hope and in which they hope. Only he hopes truly, who hopes lovingly. “[N]ot everyone who hopes all things is therefore the loving one, nor is everyone who hopes all things therefore secured against never being put to shame.”¹⁴² Human hope fails easily and often. But he who lovingly hopes for everything cannot fail, according to Kierkegaard, because “lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairingly to hope nothing at all, either for oneself or for others.”¹⁴³ Hope proves to be the work of love when love is the mode of hope, that is, when the hoping person hopes lovingly or, which is the same thing, loves hopefully. He who hopes can despair, he who hopes lovingly never gives up hoping, neither in regard to himself nor in regard to others. For to hope lovingly means “at every moment always to hope all things,”¹⁴⁴ that is, not to stop hoping in time, and to have nothing in eternity that would not be hoped for as good for oneself and others by the work of love that is God. The person who lovingly hopes expects all good from God, and he expects it for everyone, at any time and in any place.¹⁴⁵ Kierkegaard substantiates this view with a train of thought that begins in a very traditional way. “To hope relates to the future, to possibility,” that is, not to that which is present and already real, but to that which is not yet, but is not impossible. But this possibility is immediately determined as “a duality:” It is “the possibility of advance or of regression, of rising or falling, of good or of evil.”¹⁴⁶ So it is not the reference to the future, but the reference to possibility that is decisive in hoping, but this reference to possibility is ambiguous because it includes alternative options. “In ordinary speech we often call something hope that is not hope at all but a wish, a longing, a longing expectation now of one thing, now of another, in short, an expectant person’s relationship to the possibility of multiplicity.”¹⁴⁷ In the Christian sense, however, hope is always directed at the same thing, namely the eternal, as Kierkegaard emphasizes. One does not hope for this or that, but one always hopes for the one eternal. If this is thought in the scheme

 SKS 9, 237 / WL, 248.  Ibid.  SKS 9, 238 / WL, 249.  Because love expects all good from God, there “is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear”, as John writes (1 John 4:18). Fear “is an obstacle to love, and love overcomes fear,” as Michael Strawser, Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Love, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books 2015, p. 182, rightly observes.  SKS 9, 238 / WL, 249. In this sense love overcomes fear and anxiety.  SKS 9, 239 / WL, 250.

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of the temporal, then it is found “in the future”, if it is thought in the scheme of the real or actual, then it is found “in possibility.”¹⁴⁸ For the “past is the actual, the future is the possible; eternally the eternal is the eternal; in time, the eternal is the possible, the future.”¹⁴⁹ Hope is thus not simply directed towards the future, but towards future things that manifest the presence of the eternal. And it is also not simply directed at what is possible, but at what is possible that presents the eternity of the eternal. Therefore, one cannot simply equate hope with expectation. Whoever expects something, relates “himself equally to the duality of the possible,” and thus directs himself to the “possible purely and simply as such.”¹⁵⁰ This expectation becomes concrete when one considers the alternatives of the possible. “To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope … To relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear.”¹⁵¹ Hope and fear are thus both ways of expectation, but hope is always oriented to the possibility of good and “for that very reason cannot be any temporal expectancy but is an eternal hope.”¹⁵² Not hoping, then, refers expectantly to the alternative between possible good and possible evil, but by hoping, one hopes for the possibility of good. But by this very thing one counts expectantly on eternity, which is always present, and not on something temporal and finite in the future, which cannot become present without also becoming past. By directing their hope exclusively to the possibility of the good, Christians therefore expose the apparent equilibrium of the possibility of good and evil in the future as misleading. The hope in the possibility of the good is directed not merely to something possible (something not yet real and not impossible) or to something only future (something not yet present), but to the eternal. For “to hope is to expect the possibility of the good, but the possibility of the good is the eternal.”¹⁵³ Only as “the sense for the possible”¹⁵⁴ hope is thus under-determined. Only when this possibility is determined as “possibility of the good,” does it come into view as the sense of the eternal, which can never diminish or fail. The sense of the possible is the sense of the possibility of the good when it is sense of the eternal. For “possibility … appears in this way, that in time the eternal touches the

      

SKS 9, 238 / WL, 249. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 9, 239 / WL, 250. Ibid.

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eternal in a human being”.¹⁵⁵ Only a possibility that has arisen in this way is a possibility of good for which one can rightly hope, because it is not there and then, but already present here and now. This is not the usual understanding of hope. In the everyday sense, one may have hopes in youth that diminish or disappear in old age, as Kierkegaard explains with arguments already found in Aristotle.¹⁵⁶ This is impossible if one hopes for the eternal: “Surely the eternal extends over the whole of life and there is and should be hope to the end; then there is no period that is the age of hope, but a person’s whole life should be the time of hope!”¹⁵⁷ If human life is understood only as a process in time, then it ends in despair: “a score years devoted to development, then ten years to the complication; then the knot is tightened for a few years, and then the denouement follows. Undeniably death is also a denouement, and then it is over, one is buried—yet not before the denouement of decomposition has begun. But anyone who refuses to understand that the whole of one’s life should be the time of hope is veritable in despair, no matter, absolutely no matter, whether he is conscious of it or not, whether he counts himself fortunate in his presumed well-being or wears himself out in tedium and trouble. Anyone who gives up the possibility that his existence could be forfeited in the next moment—provided he does not give up this possibility because he hopes for the possibility of the good—anyone who lives without possibility is in despair. He breaks with the eternal and arbitrarily puts an end to possibility; without the consent of eternity, he ends where the end is not, instead of, like someone who is taking dictation, continually having his pen poised for what comes next, so that he does not presume meaninglessly to place a period before the meaning is complete or rebelliously to throw away his pen.”¹⁵⁸

When one sees no more possibilities in temporal life and expects no more future, despair sets in. This is different if one understands the possible and the future as a possibility of the good. Then the mode of the possible and the future changes from an indifferent option to a hoped-for good that is not unreachable. “The eternal, in the proper sense, continually assigns in possibility just a small part at a time. By means of the possible, eternity is continually near enough to be available and yet distant enough to keep the human being in motion forward toward the eternal, to keep him going, going forward. This is how eternity lures and draws a person, in possibility, from the cradle to the grave—provided he chooses to hope.”¹⁵⁹

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 9, 9, 9, 9,

246 / WL, 258. 239 / WL, 250 f. 240 / WL, 251. 240 / WL, 251 f. 241 / WL, 253.

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3.5 Counting on the possibility of the good One cannot count on the possibility of the good only for oneself and one’s own life. Those who live the sense of the eternal cannot hope for the possibility of good only for themselves. The eternal is not only that from which I can hope for all good, but also that from which all good is to be hoped for every other. To hope like this is to hope lovingly, and to love like this is to love hopefully. Such hoping and loving transcends the border between I and others, without removing the difference between them, and it transcends the reality context of the temporal towards the possibility dynamics of the eternal, without leaving the communication context with others in the present. One lives in this world, but in a certain way, by hoping in a certain mode (namely lovingly), by loving in a certain mode (namely hopingly) and thus living in a certain mode (namely creaturely). In relation to eternity, it is never only about me, but always also about the others, namely all the others who, like me, live in this temporal world. I may hope for something for myself alone. “But lovingly to hope all things signifies the relationship of the loving one to other people, so in relation to them, hoping for them, he continually holds possibility open with an infinite partiality for the possibility of the good. That is, he lovingly hopes that at every moment there is possibility, the possibility of the good for the other person.”¹⁶⁰ Just as the desperate person assumes that the good is impossible, so the lovingly hoping person assumes that the good is possible for the other. He relies entirely on the possibility of the good, the desperate person, on the contrary, relies entirely on its impossibility. Love and despair are therefore contrary attitudes. “[D]espair hopes nothing at all for others and love hopes all things.”¹⁶¹ But love cannot hope everything only for itself but will always do it for the other person as well. “No one can hope unless he is also loving; he cannot hope for himself without also being loving, because the good has an infinite connectedness; but if he is loving, he also hopes for others.”¹⁶² He who “lovingly chooses the possibility of the good” therefore “hopes for the other person.”¹⁶³ Only he who hopes lovingly has the right “sense of possibility” for himself and for others, for with such hope he does good for others by giving them hope. “Even if the one who loves was unable to do the slightest additional thing for others, was unable to bring any other gift at all, he still brings

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 9, 9, 9,

242 / WL, 253. 242 / WL, 254. 243 / WL, 255. 244 / WL, 256.

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the best gift, he brings hope.”¹⁶⁴ He gives them courage to hope, and he gives them the hope to hope rightly. But he cannot cause them to do so. If they hope, it is not his work, but that of love. One cannot hope for others without love, and without love, one is not moved to hope by the hope of others. One must always do this oneself and cannot let another do it. In this sense, too, the greatest gift that one who hopes can give to another is the gift that he is enabled to hope himself. It “is the greatest beneficence”, and this is true for Kierkegaard in principle, “in love to help someone … to become himself, free, independent, his own master, to help him stand alone.”¹⁶⁵ Conversely, it is the greatest lack of love to take away hope from a person and to give him up as hopeless. To take the “possibility away from him” of hoping himself means “murdering him spiritually, hurling him spiritually into the abyss.”¹⁶⁶ It is the opposite of love to take away hope and deny a person the right to love and be loved. True love helps the other person to hope and love in the right way, not making him dependent on himself, but setting him free to love and hope out of his own freedom. And true hope does not make the other an object of one’s own hope. It makes the other person not despair, but helps him to hope himself for the possibility of good. Love is therefore the fundamental thing, hope the thing that is made possible by it. One must hope again and again, but love, without which there would be no hope, abides. “[E]very morning, yes, every moment, he renews his hope and refreshes possibility, while love abides and he in it.”¹⁶⁷ Therefore he who loves hopes, and he who hopes for the possibility of good for the other hopes lovingly. “If there is no love, hope would not exist either; it would just remain lying there like a letter waiting to be picked up.”¹⁶⁸ In this sense, hoping is a work of love, and this work is only then properly carried out when there is loving hope and hoping love—hoping for the possibility of the good not only for oneself, but for the other. That “the loving one hopes all things for himself” and “that the loving one lovingly hopes all things for others […] are indeed one and the same; and this obscurity is the clarity of the eternal”.¹⁶⁹ This “love is by no means a separate third thing” besides the hope for oneself and the hope for others “but is the middle term: without love, no hope for oneself; with love, hope for all others—and to the same degree one hopes for oneself, to the same degree one hopes for others, since to the same degree one is lov-

     

SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9, Ibid.

246 / WL, 258. 261 / WL, 274. 245 / WL, 257. 246 / WL, 258. 247 / WL, 259.

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ing.”¹⁷⁰ He who hopes, loves, and he who loves, hopes. But he who loves hopes for the possibility of good for others, and that cannot be disappointed. To “hope relates essentially and eternally to the good,” and because the good is eternal and the eternal good, “one can never be put to shame by hoping.”¹⁷¹ Whoever is brought to shame, whose hope is thus disappointed, has not hoped for the eternal, but for the temporal. But such a hope is “not hoping […]—it is wishing, craving, expecting, and therefore one can be put to shame.”¹⁷² Only where the sense of the possible is the sense of the possibility of the good, and thus the sense of the eternal, is there real hope. And this hope is never directed solely at me, but always at the others, and indeed at all the others. For good in the sense of the eternal is only that which is good always and everywhere and for all. And only that can be rightly hoped for, for itself and for all others.

3.6 From verb to adverb Kierkegaard analyzes hope not in an unspecified way as an activity, but concretely as an activity of love. This is what happens when one lovingly hopes and hopefully loves. For then it is directed not only toward the possible, but toward the possibility of the good, and not only the good for me, but also the good for every other person, which is good for each of us not only at one point or another in life, but in every moment of life. Kierkegaard calls this good, which is good for everyone always and everywhere, the eternal, and the orientation towards the possibility of this eternal good in time hope. The focus of Kierkegaard’s analysis thus shifts from hoping as a verb (to hope) to hoping as an adverb (hopingly love), and accordingly shifts from loving as a verb (to love) to loving as an adverb (lovingly hope). The embedding of hope in loving is thus grammatically caught up by the transformation of the verb into an adverb of loving. Those who hope lovingly, and thus love hopefully, rely on the possibility of good for themselves and others not only in the future, but already here and now in the present. Hoping does not intervene in the temporal course of the world in a changing manner, but rather brings the present of the eternal to bear in the temporal. This leaves traces, not in what is hoped for, but in the one who hopes. Hoping does not change what is hoped for, but rather the one who hopes, by making him sensitive to the presence of the eternal in the

 SKS 9, 247 f. / WL, 260.  SKS 9, 249 / WL, 261.  SKS 9, 249 / WL, 262.

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course of the temporal, and thus realigning his life from the temporal to the eternal. Hope, thus understood, points beyond time and reality into the eternity of possibility. True, that is, loving hope is not future-related, but eternity-related. It proves the finiteness of the hoping by relating it to the infinity of the eternal and distinguishing it from it. Precisely in this way, however, hope opens up a view of a state of affairs that does not reveal itself by itself: That we are finite, and that precisely this is our good chance. For as finite we are not only different from the infinite, but the infinite makes us finite, in that it continually provides us with possibilities that are not exhausted in what is conceived and implemented as possible in the reality of the temporal world of our life. Life consists in more than what it has actually become. It is the sum of the possibilities that have been given to a person in their life. It therefore always includes the unrealized, missed, ignored, and lost possibilities that have not shaped actual life, but could have. If one understands life only from the perspective of finiteness (temporality) as a contingent process in time, this does not come into view, but a human life adds up in its reality, which has passed or will have passed. If, on the other hand, one understands it from the perspective of infinity (eternity), then, with the realized possibilities, all the unrealized possibilities that could have been realized in the time process of life but were not realized are also taken into consideration, and then a human life sub specie aeternitatis comes into view not only as the sum of its past reality, but in a more comprehensive sense as the sum of both the possibilities of its past reality, which as possibilities are not past but remain present, and as the sum of those possibilities which never became actual in this life but could have become so. From the standpoint of eternity, then, a life is not only the totality of what it has become in fact, but the totality of all that together with all that it has not become but could have become. Similarly, from the standpoint of eternity the good of a life is never to be measured only by what has been achieved in this life as good, but also by what could have been achieved in it as good but was not. Even the counterfactual good belongs to the wholeness of life, and therefore every life is more than it actually became. Loving hope is directed toward this comprehensive possibility of good. It focuses on the possibility of the good not only for me, but for everyone, and it does not limit the good to that which really was or is and as such remains possible, but it also looks at that which would have been possible, even if it never became reality. Loving hope never directs a life only to the realized possibilities of a life, but always also to its (still) unrealized and missed possibilities. It opens up a life in a fuller and more comprehensive sense than real life ever was, is, and will be. It focuses on the fullness of life, which is not exhausted sub specie aeternitatis in

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the factual but includes the counterfactual of this life. In this respect, a sense of eternity manifests itself in the loving hope for the possibility of good, which points beyond every state of the temporal reality of a life in the past, present, or future to a good that does not merge with it.

3.7 Living hopefully Kierkegaard’s analysis of hope not only changes the understanding of human life, but also shifts the point of hope from its use as a verb to the adverb, from a particular doing to the mode of a doing. Understood as a mode, hope no longer differs as a particular kind of mental action from other physical and mental actions, but can be applied to all actions: There is nothing that cannot be done hopefully, and there is nothing human that cannot be done with loving hope and hopeful love. In this adverbial version there is no need to search for that which distinguishes hoping from other mental activities. Instead, we must ask what distinguishes a practice that is done in hope from a corresponding practice that is not done in hope. A possible answer is that it leads to a higher sensitivity for the concrete requirements of life situations as well as to serenity and attention in dealing with different life situations. Whoever lives and acts hopefully makes it clear that there is more at stake than is obvious, but also that it is not only or primarily up to him to make the hoped-for possibility of good come true, but that others and other things are necessary for it. Those who live in hope are aware of their fundamental dependence on others, without which the hoped-for good cannot be achieved. Dependence thus loses its negative tone and can be experienced as an opportunity for enrichment by others: He who lives hopingly, eagerly awaits good from others, which he is not able to obtain for himself, and he who lives lovingly hoping, shows his willingness to give good to others, which they are not able to achieve without him. He who lives hopingly therefore also knows that he is not able to realize all good himself, neither for himself nor for others, but that it cannot be done without the attention and help of others. This is no reason to stop or weaken one’s own efforts. But it lends composure when these do not achieve the good aimed at, because this cannot be achieved by one alone and without others anyway. And it is precisely for this reason that he who lives hopefully also increases his attention to the difference between what he can and should achieve of himself and that in which he is and remains dependent on others. To live hopefully teaches, in the orientation towards the possibility of the good in concrete life situations, to make practical distinctions

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again and again between what one can and must expect of oneself and what one cannot and must not expect of oneself. This is precisely why hope is a contribution to making life realistic, that is, not to ignore what the situation demands, but to perceive it in a way that does equal justice to one’s own abilities and inabilities. The sense of the possibility of the good is a sense of reality for the realities of life. Those who live hopefully do not delude themselves about the realities of life, but practice situation-sensitive phronesis and discernment.

4 True love 4.1 An orienting distinction “Love,” Kierkegaard writes in Works of Love, “has been called a feeling, a mood, a life, a passion; yet since this is such a general definition, attempts have been made to define it more precisely. Love has been called a want, but, note well, such a want that the lover continually wants what he actually possesses—a longing, but, note well, continually for what the lover actually has—since otherwise it is indeed unhappy love that is described.” ¹⁷³ Now description is not definition, and Kierkegaard seems to oscillate between the two. But he does so with reason. What he mentions are all descriptions of love taken from experience. They are what we answer, or how we explain what we answer, when asked what we mean by ‘love’ in everyday life. However, our answers may be wrong and confused, and by describing, comparing, classifying, and generalizing actual cases of love from erotic love through friendship to love of sports or wisdom we shall never arrive at a proper definition of love. At best we end up describing something paradoxical: that we want what we have, and long for what we possess. This is not a definition of love but a warning that we are on the wrong track to understanding what love truly is. But what is it? If true love is the truth about love, then an account of true love must tell us what love truly is. So, what is it? To answer ‘not a feeling but action’ is true but not the whole truth. In Works of Love Kierkegaard does not describe what love is and how it is in fact experienced and practiced but explores what love ought to be and how it should be practiced. To think about love is to think about a human practice, and to explain true love is to explain a way of living that is true not merely to what we are but to who we can and ought to be: selfless selves in a world that is not of our making. Love is indeed an activity (rather than a mere feeling or mood or particular kind of action); an activity must be practiced in order to exist (you cannot love and do nothing); but as a human activity it can be practiced in appropriate or inappropriate or—to use Heidegger’s terms—authentic or inauthentic ways. We can be true to its end or miss its point. Now the distinction between authentic and inauthentic practices of love is not descriptive or conceptual (authenticity is not a real property in Kant’s sense) but an orienting distinction such as left/right, above/below, before/behind in space or yesterday/today/tomorrow or past/present/future in time or ob-

 SKS 9, 175 / WL, 175. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-011

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ject/subject (self) in the social world.¹⁷⁴ Orienting distinctions do not describe anything but locate something relative to somebody—in space (left/right), in time (yesterday/today/tomorrow), in the social world (object/self), in the world of human persons who live as God’s neighbors among God’s neighbors (love/ true love). This is why this distinction cannot be clarified by starting from facts about human life such as the “innate need for companionship”¹⁷⁵ or “that every person loves himself”¹⁷⁶ or that everybody loves somebody, but only by looking at what is the case in the light of what ought to be the case. If ought implies can,¹⁷⁷ then what ought to be the case—that we love in a way that is true to what love truly is—can be the case, and if we can love in this way then we ought to do so. This is what Kierkegaard seeks to show in Works of Love. It is a discourse not about what love is but what love ought to be, not about what we do when we love but about what we ought to do, “not about love but about works of love.”¹⁷⁸ More precisely, it is a discourse about the orienting distinction between loving and loving truly, between love and true love. Neither the one nor the other is or can fruitfully be treated in isolation. Just as we cannot think about the past without marking it off from the present and the future (and vice versa) so we cannot think about love without marking it off from true love (and vice versa). This is why Kierkegaard focuses neither on love nor on true love but on the works of love by showing in detail how a life of authentic human love depends on the orienting distinction between love and true love. His Works of Love is the most profound account of this fundamental orienting distinction of human life to date. I shall explain this by exploring three questions: How to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love? What is true love according to Kierkegaard? How does Kierkegaard argue for his account of true love?

 This is not seen by Jude Ifeanyi Ebelendu and Ignatius Nnaemeka Onwuatuegw, “The Idea of Authenticity and Inauthenticity of Existence in the Existential Philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard,” Philosophy Study, vol. 11, 2021, pp. 37– 41 (https://www.davidpublisher.com/Public/up loads/Contribute/601b9e4821386.pdf) (02/26/2021).  SKS 9, 155 / WL, 154.  SKS 9, 24 / WL, 17.  Cf. Heiko Schulz, “Du sollst, denn du kannst, Zur Selbstunterscheidung der christlichen Ethik bei Sören Kierkegaard,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaard’s “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002, pp. 47– 70.  SKS 9, 11 / WL, 3.

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4.2 How to read Kierkegaard’s Works of Love What is the question that Kierkegaard’s Works of Love seeks to answer? The book has been read as an autobiographical apology of an unhappy love-relationship; or as a devotional book for pious meditations on love; or as a philosophical inquiry concerning human love; or as a theological discourse on the practice of love in Christian life. All this is true—to some extent. But the question it pursues from the first to the last page is ‘How do we have to love in order truly to love,’ and it answers by outlining in detailed and highly differentiated ways how human loving and, indeed, living must change in order to be true to true love. This presupposes an understanding of true love, and Kierkegaard reads this off from the paradigm of true love, the love of Christ. Therefore, his book is addressed primarily to Christians, not to non-Christians, and it presents “Christian deliberations” precisely because his discourses are “not about love but about works of love.”¹⁷⁹ Kierkegaard writes from a Christian point of view, within a Christian horizon, and for a Christian audience. In the Christian view of love Kierkegaard finds the resources for distinguishing between mere Romantic idealizations of love and true love—a love that is true because orienting human life to it makes actual loves true. However, the Christian view of love is not a particular kind of love (agape) alongside erotic love (eros) and friendship (philia), and it is not a view Christians actually hold but rather one which they ought to hold. Therefore, Kierkegaard addresses his deliberations primarily to them in order to help them to learn what they have largely forgotten or never really known: How we have to love in order truly to love. Consider the subtitle of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses by Søren Kierkegaard. It is telling because it combines several features that Kierkegaard is careful to distinguish in other writings.¹⁸⁰ 1. Deliberation vs. Edifying (Upbuilding) Discourse: In an entry in his diary from 1847 (pp. 469 – 470) Kierkegaard distinguishes between deliberations and discourses in the following way: “A deliberation does not presuppose the definitions as given and understood; therefore it must not so much move, mollify, reassure, persuade, as awaken and provoke people and sharpen thought.”¹⁸¹ Whereas an edifying (upbuilding) Discourse about love “presup-

 SKS 9, 11 / WL, 6.  Cf. M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving. A commentary on Kierkegaard’s ’Works of Love’, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, pp. 13 – 17.  SKS 20, 211, NB2:176 / WL, Supplement, p. 469.

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2.

3.

4.

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poses that people know essentially what love is,” a deliberation “must first fetch them up out of the cellar” and “turn their comfortable way of thinking topsy-turvy with the dialectic of truth.”¹⁸² Direct authorship vs. Pseudonym: Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous writings are directed ad extra. They provide indirect communication to an audience of those who are either straightforwardly aesthetes or are under the illusion that they live in Christian categories when they really live in aesthetic ones. The signed writings, by contrast, are said to be religious writings ad intra, a form of direct communication addressed to those who profess Christianity and know what it is but need to be encouraged or reassured. Direct vs. Indirect Communication: ¹⁸³ Direct communication seeks to impart information or knowledge whereas indirect communication seeks to communicate a capability. But the point of ethical reflection is not to explore the principles and forms of human morality but rather to capacitate or enable humans to live a moral life. It aims at action, and the way to bring the hearer or reader to act is to communicate one’s reflections to them in such a way that they can only understand them by seeking out for themselves what is communicated to them. Ad Intra vs. ad Extra: An upbuilding Christian discourse is directed ad intra. It presumes an audience that already knows essentially what love is. As a discourse it requires more of reader than merely understanding the discourse. It requires a “decisive self-activity” ¹⁸⁴ of the reader. The discourse seeks to change the reader by making her change herself. A deliberation on the other hand is directed ad extra. It intends to awaken people from their comfortable but confused ways of thinking, and the strategy used by Kierkegaard to achieve this is the awakening strategy of the Socratic method of maieutics, of playing the midwife.

According to Kierkegaard’s idiolect, therefore, we have the following two sets of features: On the one hand, there are communications ad extra that are indirect, pseudonymous and take the form of deliberations. On the other hand, there are communications ad intra that are direct, signed, and take the form of upbuilding Christian discourses.

 SKS 20, 211, NB2:176 / WL, Supplement, p. 469 f.  Cf. Pierre Bühler, “Liebe und Dialektik der Mitteilung,” in Ethik der Liebe, ed. by Dalferth, pp. 71– 87.  Søren Kierkegaard, Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing, Feather Trail Press 2009, p. 97. SKS 8, 223 / UD, 122.

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The subtitle of Works of Love combines the two perspectives by speaking of Christian deliberations in the form of discourses signed by Kierkegaard himself: They are addressed ad intra to Christians in Kierkegaard’s own name. That is to say, they presuppose, just as a discourse does, that those addressed know love but also that they don’t know what love truly is. Without the first they could not meaningfully be addressed, without the second there would be no need to address them. These deliberations do not presuppose the definition of love as given or understood but are meant to awaken Christians to find out about true love by changing their comfortable ways of thinking topsy-turvy with the dialectic of truth. If we take this seriously, as we should, then Works of Love must be read as a dialectical treatise.¹⁸⁵ The mode of communication seems to be direct but in fact it is indirect. Simply to understand his Christian deliberations in a straightforward sense is to miss their point. As he warns readers in the Preface his deliberations “will be understood slowly but then also easily, whereas they will surely become very difficult if someone by hasty and curious reading makes them very difficult for himself.”¹⁸⁶ That is to say, in order to understand what Kierkegaard is up to we must not stop with his phenomenological descriptions and insights but unearth the underlying arguments about that which never shows up as such and yet is presupposed in everything that can be seen and experienced. This is clearly exemplified by the structure of the book, especially in the first series of deliberations. Kierkegaard starts not with the facts of human life but with an analysis of the divine commandment “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” Only if we read the phenomena of life in its light can we recognize our human ways of loving as fruits of the hidden life of love (I). In order to be able to do so, we must understand the divine commandment, that is, know what is meant by shall (II,A), by neighbor (II,B), and by you (II,C). From the detailed analysis of the commandment Kierkegaard then turns to an analysis of those to whom it is addressed (III). He shows that the proper way of response to God’s commandment is not a promise or a confession but an action or a doing. The law is not fulfilled by promising something (‘I shall do it’) but by doing what it commands, that is, by actually loving the neighbor (III,A). But

 In his Lectures on Communication (SKS 27, 389 – 434, Papir 364– 371 / KJN 11.2, 90 – 138) Kierkegaard distinguishes aesthetic, ethical, and ethico-religious kinds of indirect communication. Whereas the ethical is the general-human (SKS 27, 402, Papir 366:3 / KJN 11.2, 104), the ethico-religious presupposes a point of view that is not naturally given: “the hum. being as such is not knowledgeable about the religious in the Christian sense” (SKS 27, 402, Papir 366:3 / KJN 11.2, 104).  SKS 9, 11 / WL, 3.

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for this love to be true love it must be enacted as a response to God’s commandment and not merely to an ethical imperative of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Therefore Kierkegaard stresses, following the Lutheran tradition, that the place where we receive and understand what is communicated to us as God’s commandment is not the verbum externum of the human communication but the verbum internum of the Spirit received and understood in the human conscience (III,B). But inwardness is an ambiguous term that combines two sets of distinctions—the inner/outer-distinction of the self-world-relationship and the creature/ creator-distinction of the self-God-relationship.¹⁸⁷ In the latter sense inwardness is the true outwardness of being grounded in the creative source and norm of all existence. Understood in this sense, the turn towards inwardness in the selfworld-relationship is not a turning away from the world but rather a being opened up for the world in a specific way: We cannot love God in separation or seclusion from the world but only by loving the people we see (IV), and by loving them in such a way that this love never comes to an end: The more we practice it, the more we see that there is infinitely more to love than we do, both in an extensive and intensive sense. “Therefore we can say that this is the distinctive characteristic of love: that the one who loves by giving, infinitely, runs into infinite debt.” ¹⁸⁸ True love is not only essentially active but also infinite: nobody is excluded; it never comes to an end; there is always more to be done and to be discovered in loving the neighbor and oneself. In “its total richness” this love “is essentially inexhaustible […] because essentially it is totally present everywhere and essentially cannot be described.”¹⁸⁹ Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, therefore, is not so much a phenomenology or ethics of human love but rather a sustained and detailed attempt to communicate a capability to the reader: the capability of seeing one’s life and one’s world as the place where God’s creative love is at work everywhere and in everything. Unless we learn how to see our life and world in this way, we shall not see the point of the difference between what is and what ought to be the case, or why we ought to change from what we all do in one way or other (that is, love) to doing it in a way that is true to what love truly is. The point of Kierkegaard’s book is not to discourse about love but to change our ways of seeing and understanding ourselves and our world. We cannot live differently unless we see ourselves differently; and how we ought to see others and ourselves in order to live adequately is what Kierkegaard seeks to show in Works of Love.  Cf. Stephen Northrup Dunning, Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Inwardness: A Structural Analysis of the Theory of Stages, Princeton: Princeton University Press 1985.  SKS 9, 177 / WL, 155.  SKS 9, 11 / WL, 3.

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This is why he advises the reader to read slowly. One must move beyond the richness and insights of the phenomena described to the underlying argument, which is dialectically rigorous and formal. True love must be understood not as a particular emotion, feeling, or activity but as a specific mode of human activity. Not what we do when we love is Kierkegaard’s question but how we do what we do when we do it lovingly. True love is not a particular activity but a specific mode of activity and passivity, acting and suffering, a specific mode of living a human life. Let me show this by looking at Kierkegaard’s account of true love in more detail.

4.3 True love in Kierkegaard First, all the descriptions of love stated by Kierkegaard in the passage cited at the beginning of the last deliberation of the 1st series are taken from experience. They describe something in the world of actuality where true love is not to be found. Not because it is not real or a mere chimera, but because it is more real than any passing actuality of the world. True love is eternal, enduring, unchanging. Actual love may be lived and practiced in a multitude of different ways, but they are only ways of love if they exemplify that which is perfected in true love. Every actual love presupposes true love in order to be love, but no actual love is identical with true love. True love is that which is true about love—any love or anything that is rightly called ‘love.’ It is the answer to the question “how love must be so it can be love,”¹⁹⁰ and nothing that is in fact the case, no actual love can provide the answer to this. True love, we may say, is the norm, not a case to be measured by the norm, the operator before the series, not a member of the series. Think of all the circles you have seen in your life; none is such that it really matches the mathematical definition of a circle. Or take all the points you can make on a board or a piece of paper; none is a point in its true mathematical sense. Similarly with love. In the world of actuality, we find many forms, versions and varieties of love, erotic love, friendship love, family love, brother and sister love, love of money, love of wisdom, or love of truth. But unless we know what love ought to be as love, we cannot even be sure if what we name and describe as instances of love is actually love; and what love ought to be as love is what true love is. Thus, in discussing true love we must distinguish between two problems: It is one thing to understand something as love, quite another to understand love as

 SKS 9, 159 / WL, 159.

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something. The first presupposes a conception of love that cannot be derived from comparing instances of love because it is a condition of the possibility of doing so. The second, on the other hand, requires a criterion for distinguishing between proper and improper understandings of love. Not just any understanding of love will do. We need an idea of how love ought to be as love in order to be able to decide whether a given understanding of love is adequate or not. True love is this idea and criterion. This has two important implications. First, in order to understand what love truly is we must turn from is to ought, from fact to norm, from description to commandment, indeed, from human description to divine commandment as it informs human life. Exactly this is the topic of Kierkegaard’s Works of Love. Second, the idea of true love—indeed any understanding of love—does not come on its own or in isolation. The way we understand love shows the point of view from which we understand it. Throughout Works of Love Kierkegaard stresses that we must pay attention to a basic alternative in understanding love: the worldly or non-Christian way and the Christian way. The “Christian must understand everything differently than the non-Christian does, must be conscious that he knows how to make distinctions.”¹⁹¹ The distinctions concern how we see human life, for how we see determines what we see, and what we see depends on the standpoint from which we see and on the horizon within which we see. Arne Grøn’s important project of an ‘Ethics of Vision’ is based on this insight.¹⁹² What true love is, therefore, cannot be answered empirically or inductively: To love and to be loved is a basic human need and reality. There is nobody who wouldn’t strive for love, depend on love, need love, or seek love. However, descriptions of actual love in all its variety will never provide a way to arrive at a proper account of true love. But neither is true love just a romantic ideal, which we conjure up by idealizing the passions, feelings, moods, wants, or longings we have. Poetic idealization is no help in understanding true love. On the contrary, true love is the opposite to any poetic idealization of actual or possible human love. It is not an ideal of love but the truth about love as love. Third, while it is not to be denied that love is a feeling, a mood, a life, a passion, a want, and a longing, it is all this only by being concretely enacted, that is, by actually feeling, suffering, practicing love, by feeling the feeling, by experiencing the mood, by living the life, by suffering the passion, by wanting what

 SKS 9, 47 / WL, 47.  Arne Grøn, “Ethics of Vision,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tü bingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002, pp. 111– 112.

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one possesses and by longing for what one has. Love is an activity that gets perverted if it is not practiced in a self-referential way: Truly to love is to love lovingly. Thus, the grammar of love is not merely the grammar of a verb nor of a noun but of an adverb. Love is a doing, an acting, a living, it is “sheer action,”¹⁹³ as Kierkegaard shows from the paradigm case of true love, the love of Christ: “In him love was sheer action; there was no moment, not a single one in his life, when love in him was merely the inactivity of a feeling that hunts for words while it lets time slip by, or a mood that is its own gratification, dwells on itself while there is no task—no, his love was sheer action.”¹⁹⁴ It was present in and with everything he did, transforming it, changing it from the temporal to the eternal, making it true and thus enacting true love. Thus, true love is sheer action or activity, unceasing, “everywhere present and never without witness,”¹⁹⁵ an activity that pervades, informs, and transforms all other activities not by adding anything to them but by making them true, that is, by making them become enacted in a specific mode, the mode of love. Love, therefore, is not an action alongside others. There is no action or behavior to which we can point and say, ‘This is love.’ But neither is there a behavior to which we can point that could not be or become an instance of the practice of love. The activity of love can be marked off from other activities not in terms of what is done but only in terms of how it is done. Kierkegaard’s question is not what we do when we love in the multitude of ways in which we love but how we do it or rather how we ought to do it. True love is not a particular activity alongside others but a special mode of doing whatever we do, or rather, the mode in which we should or ought to do what we do if we want to do it in the spirit of love. The grammatical indicator of this is the adverbial use of the term ‘love’ throughout Kierkegaard’s Works of Love: act lovingly, suffer lovingly, deliberate lovingly,¹⁹⁶ remember lovingly, hide lovingly, believe lovingly, hope lovingly, love lovingly. True love is an activity, or a verb applied to itself, that is to say, not merely a verb but an adverb. We all do what we do when we do anything at all, and while we are alive, we cannot stop acting and suffering, changing the world around us, and being changed by it. That is to say, to love is not a specific activity alongside others but a specific way of doing whatever we do (activity) and suffer (receptivity, passivity): To love is to do whatever we do, and to suffer whatever we suffer, in the mode of love.

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 103 / WL, 98. 9, 104 / WL, 99 f. 9, 12 / WL, 4. 9, 11 / WL, 3.

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What is this mode? What does it mean to love lovingly? The short answer is that it means to do what we do in a way that brings out the truth about us and others, that helps to make us true by making the other true, and vice versa. Only if we are true to who we truly are can we truly love, and only if we truly love are we true to who we are. True love brings out the truth about those who love and those who are loved. True love makes lovers true: It is the truthmaker of those who love.¹⁹⁷ There are no actions without someone who performs these actions: actions have agents. Agents, however, can act lovingly or not lovingly, they can be selfish or selfless, they can behave in a human way towards others and themselves or in inhuman ways. This is also true when agents are lovers: there are selfish lovers who pursue only their own interests in how they relate to others; and there are selfless lovers who act lovingly towards the other because they put the good and interests of the other first and not their own. To be able to do so they must learn to make a distinction, with respect to others and to themselves, between, on the one hand, that which they are in the eyes of the world and in their own eyes and, on the other, that which they ought to be because of who they are in the eyes of God. Not what they in fact are (is) but what they ought to be (ought) is decisive here, and what they ought to be is not an arbitrary decision but depends on who they are coram deo, namely God’s freely chosen neighbors. Everything in human life can be distorted and perverted, and there are truly sick and dehumanizing forms not only of selfishness but also of selflessness, as Kierkegaard was well aware. But this is not what he champions. Not selflessness in the sense of self-humiliation, abjection, abasement or self-annihilation is the good to strive for but the selflessness disclosed in the light of God’s way of relating to our human situation and predicament. Only if we see others and ourselves as God’s neighbors can we relate as God’s neighbors to God’s neighbors, and only then we love in a truly selfless way.¹⁹⁸ Thus, although there is no love without somebody who loves, a love is true only if it is enacted lovingly, that is, not

 This goes beyond the view that “[t]rue loves require true selves.” Deidre Nicole Green, “A Self That Is Not One: Kierkegaard, Niebuhr, and Saiving on the Sin of Selflessness,” The Journal of Religion, vol. 97, 2017, p. 174. True love makes true selves: cf. John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2013, and George Pattison, “Review of John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and the Problem of Self-Love,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2022 (https://ndpr.nd.edu/reviews/kierkegaard-and-the-problem-of-self-love/) (03/31/2022).  Only from this perspective we can talk of a self that is not one as Deidre Green, “A Self That Is Not One,” pp. 151– 180 does. Cf. Greg P. Marcar, “Hope, Self-Denial and the Love of God: Towards a Kierkegaardian Perspective on Self-Condemnation-Unto-Death,” Colloquium, vol. 51, 2019, pp. 40 – 59.

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selfishly but selflessly. True lovers are selfless selves, true love is selfless passion, and true selflessness depends on being able to distinguish between, on the one hand, who and what we and others are in our own eyes and in the eyes of the world and, on the other, who we are in the eyes of God, between a worldly or non-Christian view of our human situation, and a Christian understanding of our human life. Thus, we may summarize Kierkegaard’s view of true love in four points: 1. True love is not an empirical reality accessible to empirical observation and research but a way of seeing all human life, and indeed all reality, in the light of God’s creative activity as the field of the creative and transforming workings of eternal love. Epistemically it functions as the norm in terms of which all actual love is to be measured, ontologically it is the fundamental reality without which no actual love would be possible, ethically it presents itself as the ‘ought’ which we should follow in order to bring out the eternal truth in all finite and temporal forms of love, and religiously it was enacted in a paradigmatic way in the life of Christ. 2. Kierkegaard describes this love as sheer activity in a twofold sense: As true love it grounds and enables all temporal or actual love, and as true love it is the power to transform and change all temporal love into its eternal truth. In theological terms, this is the difference between a creation-theological and a soteriological account of love. True love in the fullest sense is the creative love of God without which there is no other love. True love from a soteriological perspective is that which makes all love true, that is, brings out its eternal perfection. 3. This transforming and perfecting activity of true love effects in human life a twofold distinction: With respect to the loving self, it requires differentiating between a selfish and a selfless self, an egoistic and self-centered way of loving in erotic and friendship love and a selfless way of loving in Christian love of neighbor. Similarly with respect to the one who is loved it requires differentiating between the other as a particular human being different from all other human beings and the other as God’s neighbor, which he or she shares with everybody else, including the one who loves. 4. The distinctions between selfish and selfless selves or others and neighbors are not so much ontological as hermeneutical distinctions that indicate different perspectives, different points of view and different horizons for understanding the human reality of love. The first Kierkegaard calls the perspective of the world or the non-Christian view, the second the Christian view.¹⁹⁹

 This is not clearly seen by Sharon Krishek, Kierkegaard on Faith and Love, Cambridge: Cam-

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However, the Christian view must not be confused with the view of actual Christendom. As is well known, Kierkegaard critically distinguishes between Christendom as a cultural reality and Christianity as that to which Christendom ought to aspire but which it has long ago departed from and forgotten. His account of true love is thus not marked off as the Christian view from non-Christian views but rather as a Christian critique of Christian views that are as worldly as all others, because they seek to find true love in empirical and historical human life and identify it with the actual practice of compassion or diakonia of a given form of Christendom. However, wherever the difference between creative and created love (true love and human love) is mistaken for a difference between Christian forms of love (agape) and non-Christian forms of love (erotic love, friendship, love of wisdom), the vertical (theological) difference between Creator and creation becomes confused with a horizontal (cultural or religious) difference between Christian and non-Christian love and thereby gets distorted or destroyed. Kierkegaard’s hermeneutical advice that the “Christian must understand everything differently than the non-Christian does, must be conscious that he knows how to make distinctions”²⁰⁰ does not mean that Christians have to insist on their differences from non-Christians but rather that they have to view others and themselves in the light of the orienting distinction between creative and created love, true love and actual love: True love is that which marks a difference not only with respect to non-Christian forms and practices of love but also with respect to Christian ones. It is that which, if followed, makes all human practices of love true, whether Christian or non-Christian.

4.4 Love as a relation This is not merely a claim but a thesis for which Kierkegaard offers several rigorous arguments. I shall concentrate only on a few. First, I analyze the relation of love (A loves B), then the logic of love (God as middle term), and then the modality of love (A lives lovingly). Love, for Kierkegaard, is a relation—a relation of sheer activity. The relation relates a lover (A) and an object of love (B), and this is true of erotic love

bridge University Press 2009, p. 116 who distinguishes between selfish selflove, proper qualified self-love and proper unqualified self-love that includes desires and inclinations as long as they do not impinge in a negative way on others. All these distinctions are made in the horizon of interpersonal relationships in creation, but true self-love has its ground in the relationship with God, the Creator.  SKS 9, 54 / WL, 47.

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(eros) as much as of friendship love (philia) or Christian love (agape):²⁰¹ “Without a you and an I, there is no love.”²⁰² There are at least three possible ways of construing this relation: 1. The predicative analysis: A (loves B) = A LB(predicative account) 2. The relational analysis: A LOVES B = A L B(relational account) 3. The transcendental analysis: LOVE (A, B) = L (A, B)(transcendental account) There are traces of all three readings in Kierkegaard’s text. Most interpreters think that the relational analysis is what he defends. But this is not the case. It is true that Kierkegaard analyzes ‘A loves B’ into ‘A loves B’ and ‘B loves A’ (reciprocal or mutual love) or ‘A loves B’ and ‘B is loved by A’ (one-sided love). But it is clear that he thinks that what makes the lover a lover and the object of love an object of love is a third, namely love: Without love A would not be a lover and B would not be loved. However, how are we to understand this? “One would think, and probably most often does, that love between human beings is a relationship between two. This is indeed true, but untrue, inasmuch as this relationship is also a relationship among three. First there is the one who loves, next the one or the ones who are the object; but love itself is present as the third.”²⁰³ If Kierkegaard were arguing that ‘A loves B’ must be understood as a conjunction of three terms ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘L,’ he would be opening the door to an infinite regress. For how is A related to L and B related to L? If the answer is ‘in terms of a third, e. g. M,’ then we can repeat the question: How is A related to M and L related to M etc., and it is easy to see why we would end up in an infinite regress. But this is not Kierkegaard’s view. Therefore, we must read it in the transcendental sense, that is to say, without love there would neither be a lover nor an object of love. But how are we to understand this transcendental account L (A, B)? There are two possible ways of interpreting it. The ontological or Platonist reading is that the universal love is the true reality, whereas the terms of the relation are contingent so that the propositions ‘A loves B’ and ‘B loves A’ may or may not be true. The third (that is, love) is the true reality, the terms of the relation are at best contingent instantiations of the true reality of love. Since this reading assumes the prior reality of universals over particulars, those of a more Aristotelian vein will rejected it. But if we start from the terms of the relation rather than from the relation without walking into the trap of the relational account, then we must

 Not a third kind of love but a mode of loving in the eros and philia way.  SKS 9, 265 / WL, 266.  SKS 9, 299 / WL, 301.

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go for a hermeneutical account as I think Kierkegaard is suggesting. Whatever A and B are or may be, they can only truly be called lovers if they actually love, that is, if they are related through the activity of loving. There is no lover where love is not enacted, and there is no object of love where love is not actively practiced. To be a lover is to be involved in this activity, and to be an object of love also. That is to say, the third which Kierkegaard postulates as a necessary feature of a relationship of love is not a third term such as A and B but the actuality of the activity that allows us truly to identify A as lover and B as the object of his or her love. ‘Without love no lover’ is not an ontological but a hermeneutical statement: We can only truly call A a lover if A actually loves, and we can only call B truly an object of love if B is actually loved. This is not by itself a truth that points beyond itself to a divine reality as the ‘Everybody loves somebody’-fallacy shows. Even if it were true that ‘everybody loves somebody,’ it does not follow that there is somebody whom everybody loves. Kierkegaard’s argument is more subtle. He begins by looking at the situation from the perspective of the one who loves, and he describes what he sees as a case of “redoubling:” If you look at the other as you look at yourself, then the other “is actually the redoubling of your own self.”²⁰⁴ The relation is an I-you-relation but the you is just another I so that the love in this case is a case of selflove: two selves related by love. “For this reason the beloved and friend are called, remarkably and profoundly, to be sure, the other self, the other I—since the neighbor is the other you, or, quite precisely, the third party of equality.”²⁰⁵ If we construe the relation as a reciprocal relation between two, we never get beyond the contingencies of erotic love and friendship love to neighbor love. “Whether we speak of the first I or of the other I, we do not come a step closer to the neighbor, because the neighbor is the first you. The one whom self-love, in the strictest sense, loves is basically the other I, because the other I is he himself. Yet this certainly is still self-love. But in the same sense it is self-love to love the other I, who is the beloved or the friend.”²⁰⁶

Neighbor love, on the other hand, is different. If the neighbor is not the other self but the other you, then this implies that the lover relates to ‘the other you’ as a you and not as an I: a relation of true love is not an I-you-relation of a self relating to another self but rather a you-you-relation of two selves both of which are a

 SKS 9, 29 / WL, 21.  SKS 9, 61 / WL, 53.  SKS 9, 65 / WL, 57.

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you. But they cannot be you in a reciprocal I-you-relationship but only with respect to a third relative to whom they are both you. Kierkegaard’s careful use of personal pronouns makes an important point. A person is a you always in relation to an I. But if you are a you relative to me, and if I am a you relative to you as an I, then we cannot move beyond a first-person perspective when we move from the singular (I) to the plural (we) because we simply reiterate the problem. Only insofar as there is somebody who distinguishes himself from both I and you as an I for whom we are a you is it possible for us to relate in a you-you-relationship. This means, on the one hand, that I have to see myself not only as I see myself (from a first-person perspective) or as others see me (from a third person perspective) but in a second person perspective which I can only have on myself if I see me in the way a specific I sees me. And this means on the other hand, that I have to see the other not merely as a you from my second person perspective (that is, relative to myself) but also, and more importantly, as a you from the second person perspective of the one from whose perspective I see myself as a you. In short, Kierkegaard’s analysis makes it clear that we can move from an I-you-relationship of love to a you-you-relationship of love only if there is a Third from whose perspective we both are a you in the sense relevant here. Only if I see myself as God’s neighbor can I relate to you as God’s neighbor, and vice versa. And only where this is the case can I begin to distinguish, on my side of the relationship of love, between selfish and selfless ways of loving and, on the other side, between the other as an object of my love (preferential love) or as an object of divine love (neighbor love).

4.5 God as middle term In the sense of such a Third Kierkegaard calls God the middle term. This is not to be understood in the relational sense that there is a third term between the lover and the beloved. Some have understood Kierkegaard in this way. “Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person—God—a person, that is, that God is the middle term.”²⁰⁷ And he goes on to explain “that God in this way not only becomes the third party in every relationship of love but really becomes the sole object of love, so that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God, and it is the wife who is helped by the husband to love God,

 SKS 9, 110 / WL, 106 f.

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and conversely, and so on.”²⁰⁸ This looks as if Kierkegaard argued for the morally absurd view that a husband should not love his wife but God, and a wife should not love her husband but God. But this is not what he is saying. “The merely human view of love can never go beyond mutuality: the lover is the beloved, and the beloved is the lover. Christianity teaches that such a love has not yet found its true object—God. The love relationship requires threeness: the lover, the beloved, the love—but the love is God. Therefore, to love another person is to help that person to love God, and to be loved is to be helped.”²⁰⁹ God is not a third party in the relationship of love at the level of the lover and the beloved (that would make God a finite phenomenon) but rather the one from whose perspective the lover becomes differentiated into a selfish and a selfless self, and the beloved into a particular human being (other) and a selfless self (neighbor). Reference to God helps us, and indeed allows us, to see the other and ourselves as selves in the mode of you, that is, in the mode of being addressed by God as God’s neighbors. Without reference to God, we cannot make that distinction in a way that is open in the same sense to everybody. God alone guarantees this universal equality, and since there cannot be any universal human quality that is based on a generalization of a particular feature or factor X common to all people, a universal account of human equality can only be construed in terms of God relating to everybody as a you or a neighbor.

4.6 Mode and modality To love is to practice love: Only actual love is true—or false, as the case may be. For love to be love, love must be. Now whatever is, is either necessary (that is, always the case: eternal or infinite reality) or actual (that is, the case but could not have been the case or could have been otherwise: temporal or finite reality), and nothing is actual that is not possible. Kierkegaard fully subscribes to the old principle ab esse ad posse (but not vice versa), but he also holds—in contrast to today’s views about modality—that we cannot move a necesse ad posse: Necessity is not a case of possibility, only actuality is. Rather, necessity is a necessary condition of all possibility: Without necessity there would be no possibility. Nothing is actual that cannot be possible, and nothing is possible unless it is grounded in the necessary. Thus, if there is love in the world of actuality, there must be the pos-

 SKS 9, 124 / WL, 120 f.  SKS 9, 124 / WL, 121.

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sibility of love, and if there is the possibility of love, there must be something or somebody whose love it is or for whom it is love. For love to be possible, there must be an actuality in which it is grounded. But all actuality is either the actualizing of something possible or the actuality of the possible. For nothing can be actual that is not possible, and nothing can be possible in a more than merely logical sense (non-contradictory possibility) that is not grounded in actuality. Since all actuality can be traced back to the possible, and all possibility to the actuality of that without which it would not be a real possibility, the actuality of the possibility is the cornerstone of Kierkegaard’s view of modality and that is what he calls ‘God.’ Since God is the actuality of the possible, and God’s actuality is the actuality of true love, the possibility of actual love is grounded in the actuality of true love: Without true love, no possibility of love; without the possibility of love, no actual love. This is Kierkegaard’s thesis on true love. Kierkegaard explains his thesis in the existential terms of hope and despair. Love hopes all things, but hope is more than mere expectation. To “expect is to relate oneself to the possible purely and simply as such.”²¹⁰ But to “relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope,” and to “relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of evil is to fear. But both the one who hopes and the one who fears are expecting. As soon, however, as the choice is made, the possible is changed, because the possibility of the good is the eternal.”²¹¹ Expectation pertains to “the possibility of multiplicity,”²¹² and “hope pertains to the possibility of the good, and thereby to the eternal.”²¹³ However, “lovingly to hope all things is the opposite of despairing to hope nothing at all, either for oneself or for others.”²¹⁴ Thus, for Kierkegaard, hope is not merely “the sense for the possible” but the sense for the “possibility of good.”²¹⁵ Possibility, unlike actuality, “is always a duality, the possibility of advance or of retrogression, of rising or falling, of good or of evil.”²¹⁶ More fully, the ‘sense of the possible’ comprises the following possibilities: Let

      

SKS 9, Ibid. SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9, SKS 9,

p non-p M

249 / WL, 249. 250 / WL, 250. 252 / WL, 251. 248 / WL, 248. 250 / WL, 250. 249 / WL, 249.

= = =

It is good It is not good It is possible that …

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Then we have the following possibilities: Mp (It is possible that p)/ M non-p (It is possible that non-p) /non-M p (It is not possible that p) / non-M non-p (It is not possible that non-p). If we negate these four possibilities, we get the following ones: non-M p (It is not possible that p) / non-M non-p (It is not possible that non-p) / non non-Mp (It is not not possible that p) / non non-M non-p (It is not not possible that non-p). But since (in a system of bivalence) non non-Mp is the same as Mp and non non-M non-p the same as M non-p, we have the following square of possibilities: Mp –M–p–

M–p Mp

That is to say, Possibility Necessity (or eternal)

Contingency (or temporal) Impossibility.

According to Kierkegaard, everything possible is the contradictory to the impossible, and all contingency (every contingent or temporal actuality) is a contrary and at the same time an actualization of a possibility (of something possible). But the necessary is not a case of the possible but the subcontrary of the impossible, the contradictory of the contingent, and subalternate to the possible; the impossible is subalternate to the contingent, the contradictory of the possible and the subcontrary of the necessary; and the contingent is the contrary of the possible, the contradictory of the necessary, and subalternate to the impossible. That is to say, the eternal is not a case of the possible (as modern modal logic holds by understanding ‘necessary’ as ‘true in all possible worlds’) nor can it be something temporal (because it is the contradictory of everything temporal). From the perspective of the temporal, the necessary cannot be located in that which is actual (the actual present or past) but only in the future—in what is not yet present—, or in the possible—in what is not yet actual; or in the ought —in what is not without being nothing. Whatever becomes present is not the necessary, whatever becomes actual is not the necessary, and whatever is the case is not the necessary. From the point of view of the contingent or temporal the necessary or eternal can only be spoken of in terms of the future, the possible, or the normative, and in no other way: it will always be in the mode of the future (that is, neither past nor present), or in the mode of the possible (that is, not actual), or in the mode of what ought to be (that is, not what is). “Therefore, when the eternal is in the temporal, it is in the future … or in possibility. The past is the actual, the future is the possible; eternally, the eternal is the eternal; in time,

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the eternal is the possible, the future.”²¹⁷ There exists, then, a modal and ontological gap between the necessary on the one hand, and the possible and actual on the other. This is the basis for Kierkegaard’s criticism of (as he sees it) Hegel’s confusion of necessity and actual past. And it is also the basis for his claim that God (or true love) is the middle term of all that is and can be actual or temporal: Without it nothing temporal would be possible. However, if God (or true love) is the middle term of all there is, then God can never be something actual, or temporal, or existent but only that without whom nothing could or would be actual, temporal, or existent. True love is not a phenomenon in the world but that without which there would be no world of phenomena. If there is an actual world, then there is a possible world, and if there is a possible world, then there must be a necessary world. True or eternal love cannot be for itself but must be the middle term of something actual or possible. Or as Kierkegaard puts it in the introductory prayer of Works of Love: “O Eternal Love, you who are everywhere present and never without witness where you are called upon.”²¹⁸ True love is a love that makes true—that operates on something that is different from it (the temporal or actual) in order to transform it from what it is in fact to what it ought to be. Therefore, to orient one’s life on true love is to live in a loving way, that is, to do everything that one does lovingly—whether one lives, or thinks, or acts, or deliberates with oneself: this and everything else ought to be done lovingly if it is to be true to true love.²¹⁹ Existentially, the presence of true love in a human life is shown in the mode of living, not in any particular actions or kind of actions. The grammar of that mode of living, that is, of living lovingly, is worked out in the Works of Love. Its basic insight is that we must learn how to make distinctions —between who and what we are (selfish selves) and who and what we ought to be (selfless selves), and who and what others are (people under a description) and how we should relate to them (as neighbors). Both these distinctions we can only make by reference to the true love which God is because only in relation to God can I come to be seen as a you in exactly the same way as the other is seen as a you: not by being subordinated to my construal of him but by placing him and myself in contrast to the one who construes us such as we truly are: neighbors of God.

 SKS 9, 249 / WL, 249.  SKS 9, 12 / WL, 4.  SKS 9, 11 / WL, 3.

Part III: The true self

1 Becoming a Christian In the Postscript and the writings leading up to it—in particular Either/Or and Fear and Trembling in 1843, Philosophical Fragments and The Concept of Anxiety in 1844, and Stages on Life’s Way in 1845—Kierkegaard¹ outlines a particular view of human life and existence that is not about what we are (human beings) or who we want to be (particular human beings), but about how we exist (our mode of existence); and not just about how we actually exist (Dasein) or how we would like to exist (Sosein), but about how we succeed to exist in the best possible way in which we can exist (Wahrsein). Kierkegaard is not concerned with the concept of the human being (the difference between humans and other beings), but with the possibility of true human existence (the difference between humans who exist as singular selves and humans who do not). He is interested in the existence, not the essence or nature of the human being. And his guiding question is not what distinguishes humans from other living beings, but how a human being can become a true self. His answer is: The true self is neither the concrete self we are (how we exist in fact) nor the ideal self we would like to be (how we would like to exist), but the self God wants us to be (how we exist if we orient us to how God works in us).² Those who are only what they are in fact ignore or underestimate their possibilities. Those who strive only to become what they would like to be overestimate their capabilities. The first is an unimaginative realism, the second an idealistic self-deception. Both can be overcome by paying attention to how God works in a person’s life. This opens up possibilities for the concrete self that are not contained in its factual situation. And it saves the orientation towards the possible from being only the egocentric dream of an idealized self. Only when the self becomes transparent to the presence of God in its life does it become the true self. Only then can it distance itself from itself and its own fabrications in such a way that it becomes open to others without forcing them under its own

 All these works were published under pseudonyms. Any interpretation of them must pay attention to this. On the other hand, they have been authored by a variety of characters all created by Kierkegaard, and for this reason they are rightly catalogued in libraries under ‘K’. (Cf. M. Jamie Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving. A Commentary on Kierkegaard’s Works of Love, Oxford: Oxford University Press 2001, p. 14.) Since I shall concentrate on a particular topic (‘Becoming a Christian’) and not on whether and, if so, how the views of Johannes Climacus and Kierkegaard do or do not differ, or on why Kierkegaard has chosen to communicate under this and other pseudonyms, I shall refer to him, the creator of Climacus, as the author of the Postscript.  See Gordon Marino, The Existentialist’s Survival Guide: How to Live Authentically in an Inauthentic Age, San Francisco: HarperOne 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-012

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view. Only then does it become possible to behave in the right way towards itself and others, because it sees itself and others as they are seen by God. Only then can the Dasein and Sosein of the self be brought to the fullness of its possibilities in its Wahrsein. This view is far from self-evident but depends on the point of view from which it is undertaken: It is a Christian view of human life and selfhood. Its point is not so much to outline a disinterested view of human beings, but to elucidate the meaning of human existence from the Christian faith. Ironically this account is given by Climacus, a self-confessed non-Christian. But what he outlines is the means not the end of Kierkegaard’s argument in the Postscript. Its focus of interest is not human life, but the existential significance of the Christian faith. Not only are the phenomena of human life described and analyzed in the light of a Christian view of human existence, but they are also discussed not for their own sake but to help to clear away confusions about what it is to be a Christian. For Kierkegaard, the question of how to become a true self and the question of how to become a Christian are two sides of the same coin. Therefore, one cannot answer the one without also answering the other.

1.1 What is it to become a Christian? For Climacus to be a Christian is to become a Christian. Climacus is obsessed with becoming. But what does he mean by it? Put in a nutshell his answer can be summarized as follows: Traditionally, becoming or change has been analyzed in either of two ways, viz. as substantive becoming (‘a becomes’) or attributive becoming (‘a becomes F’). In the first case the becoming at stake is a new entity coming into existence, and it is the world that changes from a state without a to a state with a. In the second case the becoming is an entity acquiring a new attribute or determination, and it is the entity that changes from not being F to being F. When ‘a’ refers to a human being A whose life proceeds through conscious and pre-conscious choice and decisions, ‘a becomes F’ is to be spelt out more fully as ‘A decides to become F (rather than G).’³ If it succeeds, ‘A becomes F’ results in ‘A is F,’ that is, A then has changed from not being to being F. For example, Peter who is a baker, decides to become a sailor. He goes to the local recruiting office of

 It is important to keep in mind that although my examples in what follows are acts of intentional and conscious choice the terms ‘decision’ and ‘deciding’ in Climacus/Kierkegaard cover not only conscious and willful decision but also pre-conscious choice.

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the Royal Navy, signs a contract, gets the necessary instruction and practical training on HMS Down Under, passes his exams and receives a diploma that states that Peter now is what he desired to become: a sailor. If becoming a Christian is understood along these lines, then A becomes a Christian by deciding to become a Christian, that is, by acquiring the attribute ‘being a Christian,’ and if A succeeds, then ‘A becomes a Christian’ results in ‘A is a Christian’. Thus, Peter who decides to become a Christian goes to see the pastor of the local church Way to Heaven, joins the baptism preparation course, receives the relevant instruction, agrees to be baptized on the basis of what he has learned about the Christian faith, gets baptized and receives a certificate that states that Peter now is what he desired to become: a Christian.⁴ But all this, according to Climacus, is misconceived. The result to be aimed for is not being a Christian coram mundo but coram deo, and coram mundo being a Christian coram deo takes the form not of being but of becoming a Christian. That is to say, ‘A becomes a Christian’ is to be analyzed not as ‘A becomes [a Christian]’ but as ‘A [becomes a Christian],’ for the property to be acquired is not ‘being a Christian’ but the pseudo-property⁵ ‘becoming a Christian.’ Peter may decide and do everything to become a Christian. But whereas he may arrive at becoming [a Christian], that is, will be grouped or classified as a Christian rather than a Moslem or Buddhist coram mundo, he will never arrive at [becoming a Christian] coram deo in this way. There is a gulf between ‘Peter becomes [a Christian]’ and ‘Peter [becomes a Christian]’ that cannot be bridged by any decisions or doings of Peter. Peter cannot become [a Christian] without deciding to become one, and he cannot [become a Christian] by deciding to become it. Rather, both ways of becoming must coincide in such a way that in Peter’s deciding to become [a Christian] coram mundo Peter [becomes a Christian] coram deo by what is decided for and done to him. That is to say, whereas Peter may or may not succeed in becoming [a Christian] coram mundo by what he decides and does, he cannot [become a Christian] coram deo in this way. If he does, it is not he who has achieved that he [becomes a Christian] by what he decides and does. The center of activity here shifts from Peter to becoming a Christian. In ‘Peter becomes [a Christian]’ the subject of activity is Peter, in ‘Peter [becomes a Christian]’ it is the becoming that makes Peter

 I choose this example rather than infant baptism as Climacus does. The problem is not infant baptism, but any kind of activity that results in being a Christian coram mundo based on what is documented about one’s own or one’s parents’ decision. Being a Christian coram mundo is not as such also being a Christian coram deo: this is Climacus’ problem, and therefore he insists that not being a Christian (coram mundo) but becoming a Christian (coram deo) is what counts.  I call it a pseudo-property for reasons to be explained presently.

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become a Christian. Both activities must take place for Peter to become a Christian not only coram mundo but coram deo: the becoming that is authored by Peter (‘Peter becomes [a Christian]’), and the becoming that in principle cannot be authored by Peter because it makes him rather than is made by him (‘Peter [becomes a Christian]’). In the first respect Peter changes from not being to being a Christian, and while his attributes change over time, Peter’s identity doesn’t: It is the same Peter who first isn’t and then is a Christian. In the second respect the sameness necessary for identifying change over time is not the identity of Peter but the continuity of becoming: It is not Peter who becomes a Christian, but it is Peter the Christian who becomes. What does this difference amount to? To answer this, it may help to recall Kant’s insight that existence is a ‘logical’ but not ‘a real predicate.’⁶ That is to say, ‘exists’ occurs grammatically as a predicate in subject-predicate sentences of the type ‘a exists’ but it is not a real predicate that determines what a is. ‘a is F’ and ‘a is F and exists’ do not differ in that the second proposition gives us a further determining attribute of a but claims the predicate F to have an application, i. e., that there exists an a such that a is F. The logical predicate ‘exists’ does not determine a (or our concept or ‘thought’ of a, as Kant puts it) but posits a in reality, i. e., in the totality of what can be experienced by us who also exist in this reality. It is precisely this type of analysis that Kierkegaard applies to ‘becoming a Christian.’ If Peter is a sailor (F) then to say ‘Peter is F and exists’ is to state no further determination of Peter but claim that this sailor actually exists in reality. But for Kierkegaard ‘Peter is a Christian’ is a token not of ‘Peter is F’ but of ‘Peter exists:’ It does not tell us what Peter is (‘Peter is F’) nor simply that Peter exists (‘Peter exists’) but how Peter exists in reality, namely in such a way that he lives his human life as it should be lived coram deo (‘Peter exists as a Christian’). Whereas propositions of the type ‘a is F’ must be coherent in order to signify something possible, propositions of the type ‘a exists’ claim that ‘a’ is not only a possible but an actual entity so that ‘a is F’ is not only a possible truth but actually true or false. They refer not merely to a coherent and com-possible set of predicates but to a transition from possibility to actuality. This change from non-existence to existence cannot be added as another determining predicate to the set of predicates that are claimed to be instantiated by a without reiterating the problem: If ‘a exists’ is understood as a token of ‘a is F,’ then it is always meaningful to ask whether a actually exists, that is, whether ‘a exists’ is true.

 KrV A 598 f. / B 626 f.

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The same is true of ‘A is a Christian:’ If it is understood in the sense of ‘A is F,’ it makes always sense to ask whether it is true, and it can only be true if the predicate ‘being a Christian’ is compatible with all the other predicates truly applied to A. If, on the other hand, it is understood as a token of ‘A exists,’ it can only be true if the change from not being to being a Christian is not a case of enlarging the set of A’s predicates by a further one (‘is a Christian’) but of positing A and of claiming the whole set of A’s predicates to be instantiated in a particular way in reality. ‘A is a Christian’ then refers to a becoming that cannot be an activity of A since it is that which makes A actual in the first place. Put differently, ‘A becomes a Christian’ can be understood and analyzed in two different ways. Either it says that A acquires a new attribute or property which she didn’t have before; then the set of predicates in terms of which A is described is enlarged by ‘being a Christian.’ Or it says that A exists in a particular way, that is, as a Christian; then what changes is not A’s set of predicates but her mode of existence, that is, the fact that she now actually exists in a Christian way. The first analysis understands A’s becoming a Christian as her or his ‘becoming [a Christian],’ the second as her or his ‘[becoming a Christian].’ Now for Kierkegaard, becoming a Christian is not merely acquiring a new attribute or determination but changing to a new mode of existence; and just as I cannot make myself exist coram mundo by my own decision, so I cannot bring about my Christian way of existing coram deo by my own decision. In everything I decide or do my existence is presupposed, and in everything I decide or do as a Christian, my existing in a Christian way is presupposed. Just as the change from ‘A does not exist’ to ‘A exists’ cannot be performed by A, so the change from ‘A is not a Christian’ to ‘A is a Christian’ cannot be one of A’s activities. These changes make me but are not of my making. There is, however, an important difference between the two kinds of becoming in that the latter but not the former presupposes A’s existence: Only if you exist, you can become a Christian. But no one who exists must become a Christian, and no one who exists can become a Christian by anything he or she can do by himself or herself. Coming into existence and changing one’s mode of existence coram deo are not my own decisions or doings; but existing in time is a process that proceeds through my choices and decisions. Thus whereas becoming a Christian coram mundo is my own decision (that may or may not depend on the decision of others), becoming a Christian coram deo is a change that has to be described in a more complex way: As far as my existence is concerned, which proceeds through choice and decision, it is never without my deciding and doing (for otherwise I wouldn’t be existing); but as far as the mode of my existence is concerned, my way of existing is changed not by what I decide and do but by

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what is done to me (for otherwise it would merely be a change of my way of existing coram mundo but not coram deo). In his analysis of becoming a Christian Kierkegaard is therefore at pains of holding these two lines of thought together without either confusing or separating them: In order to become a Christian, one must exist, and since for human beings to exist is to live by choice and decision, nobody can become a Christian independent of his or her choosing and deciding. On the other hand, no choosing or deciding can make you a Christian since becoming a Christian is a case of change akin to the change from non-existence to existence rather than to that of acquiring a new attribute or determination. It is one thing for A to become [a Christian] by what she decides and does coram mundo, another to [become a Christian] by what is done or happens to her coram deo. My existence and my Christian mode of existing are not of my own making. Nothing of what I decide, choose, or do makes me a Christian (in the sense of ‘[becoming a Christian] coram deo’). But even though I cannot become a Christian by deciding to become one, I cannot become a Christian without existing and living a life of choice and decision. Therefore, if I [become a Christian], it is not due to me or anything I could have done but solely due to the one who alone deserves to be thanked for it: God. But I cannot thank God for making me become a Christian without also thanking him for making me: It is precisely my acknowledging God as my ‘savior’ that makes me also acknowledge him as my ‘creator.’ If God is the one to whom I owe my mode of existence he is also the one to whom I owe my existence. And just as I cannot acknowledge God to be the source of my new mode of existence without contrasting it to an old mode that is thereby overcome, so I cannot acknowledge God to be the source of my existence without contrasting it to the possibility of my non-existence. Without God I wouldn’t exist (God is my creator), and I wouldn’t exist as a Christian (God is my savior). However, [becoming a Christian] is more than affirming to be created. I cannot acknowledge God to be my creator without acknowledging myself to be his creature; and I cannot do this without admitting that I have failed to live as God’s creature and to thank God for being my creator. But then just as I cannot acknowledge myself to be God’s creature without realizing to be a sinner, I cannot thank God for my new mode of existence without thanking him for overcoming my sinful negligence of my creator. Acknowledging God to be the source of my new mode of existence is not only to acknowledge him to be the source also of my existence, that is, my creator, but also to acknowledge him to be the source of overcoming my ignorance of him, that is, my sin, by opening my eyes to the presence of my creator in my life.

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Thus ‘I [become a Christian] coram deo’ not only presupposes that I exist but also that I exist as a sinner; and while my [becoming a Christian] continues and affirms my created existence, it discontinues and overcomes my existing in sin. Similarly, ‘I become [a Christian] coram mundo’ not only presupposes a subject that exists but also is a sinner or—in the case of a Christian coram deo—a justified sinner. But this only shows for the one who becomes a Christian coram deo, not for the one who in fact exists as a sinner. It is not the sinner who becomes [a Christian] but the justified sinner who [becomes a Christian] who is faced with a problem of ‘appropriation.’ A human subject does not simply exist, it always exists in a particular mode, and the two modes relevant for becoming a Christian are the modes of existing as a sinner or as a justified sinner. For the sinner there is no problem of appropriation because he does not know of any becoming that is not a case of either ‘a becomes’ or ‘a becomes F.’ It is the justified sinner who acknowledges that he has been made [becoming a Christian] coram deo who appropriates his discontinued life as a sinner as his life: He accepts as his responsibility that he has ignored his creator, even though he was not aware of this while he was doing so. In short, it is the new self of the justified sinner who appropriates his identity with the old self of the sinner, and not the self of the sinner who appropriates what God has done to and for him.⁷ So much for a brief summary of Kierkegaard’s account of becoming a Christian. In the light of this summary, we can now turn to a more detailed account of how the becoming a Christian is described and discussed in the Postscript.

1.2 What is it to be a Christian? Becoming a Christian, according to the Postscript, is not a cognitive or intellectual affair. You do not become a Christian by knowing what Christianity is. Not only because “one can know what Christianity is without being a Christian” but also because one can become a Christian without knowing beforehand what Christianity is.⁸ You may know as much as you like about Christianity, you can be as certain as you may about its truth, it does not make you a Christian. To be or not to be a Christian, therefore, does not depend on any sort of knowledge, neither on the objective knowledge of the tenets of Christianity nor on the subjective certainty of their truth. No belief that Christianity is true, however certain, actually shows it to be true or is to be confused with faith.

 It is not nature that appropriates grace but grace that perfects nature.  SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372.

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Just as “[f]aith does not result from straightforward scholarly deliberation, nor does it come directly,” so faith has “a beneficial taskmaster in uncertainty,” but “its worst enemy in […] certainty.”⁹ I am not a Christian because I am certain that Christianity is true, rather I am certain that it is true because I am a Christian. Similarly, no descriptive third-person-knowledge, however detailed and comprehensive, ever results in existential first-person-knowledge. One “can know what Christianity is without being a Christian.”¹⁰ ‘I know everything about Christianity’ does not entail ‘I am a Christian.’ It not even entails that I know “what it is to be a Christian.”¹¹ According to the Postscript, one cannot “know what it is to be a Christian without being one […] On the other hand, the Christian must indeed also know what Christianity is and be able to tell us—provided he himself has become one.”¹² So, the situation presented in the Postscript is somewhat complicated. The most important aspects can be summarized in six points: First, anyone who is able to know at all can know about Christianity: Christianity is not an inscrutable mystery but a possible object of knowledge, that is, of philosophical insight (necessary truth) and empirical or historical study (contingent truths). Second, to know about Christianity does not make you a Christian: Knowledge, even in the strong sense in which ‘I know p’ entails ‘p is true,’ is neither sufficient nor necessary for a Christian to be a Christian. I do not become a Christian by knowing about Christianity: ‘I know about Christianity’ does not entail ‘I am a Christian;’ and I do not have to know about Christianity to become a Christian: ‘I am not a Christian because (of what) I know about Christianity.’ It is one thing to know about Christianity, another to be a Christian. Third, to know about Christianity is not to know what it is to be a Christian: There is not only a difference between third-person knowledge (‘X knows about Christianity’) and first-person knowledge (‘I know about Christianity’) but also between descriptive knowledge (‘I know about Christianity’) and existential knowledge (‘I know that I am a Christian’ or ‘I know myself to be a Christian’). The important thing about existential knowledge is not that it is 1st-person knowledge (‘I know …’) but that it is first-hand knowledge based not on second-hand reports but on my own first-hand experience of being a Christian (‘I know of myself that …’ or ‘I know myself as …’).

 SKS 7, 18 / CUP1, 29.  SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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Climacus’ (and Kierkegaard’s further) arguments emphasize six distinctions that cannot be reduced to one another or to anything else: (1) the epistemic difference between being a Christian and knowing (about) it; (2) the cognitive difference between knowing it from a third- or first-person perspective; (3) the Christian difference between knowing it from the point of view of one who is or is not a Christian; (4) the ontological difference between Christians and non-Christians; (5) the existential difference between being a Christian and becoming a Christian; and (6) the theological difference between giving an account of this becoming coram mundo and coram deo. Fourth, only a Christian can know what it is to be a Christian: Someone who isn’t a Christian cannot know that to be a Christian is to become a Christian because coram mundo nobody is a Christian who doesn’t become one, and coram deo nobody becomes a Christian who doesn’t become it through God’s presence and love. The point is not merely the negative one that someone who isn’t a Christian cannot know what it is to be a Christian. Rather, it is the positive one that one knows from one’s own experience about the change from a nonChristian life to a Christian existence. Existential knowledge is first-hand knowledge based on one’s own experience. This knowledge is inaccessible to those who lack the experience but also to those who have the experience but miss its meaning. For even if it were true that everyone who experiences at all has the experience in question, not everyone has this experience under the same description or understands it in the way in which Christians understand what they are based on what they experience themselves to be. However, Climacus is importantly unclear here. Do non-Christians lack an experience, which Christians have; or do they miss the meaning of an experience, which they have just as everyone else does? And how, if at all, can we distinguish between the two cases? It is not obviously true that ‘I am a Christian’ is just a particular case of the general ‘I am a human being’ so that it must be understood more fully as ‘I am a Christian human being;’ nor is it obviously true that to be a Christian is to have a general human experience in a particular way. To be a Christian is not just a particular way of being a human being; to know to be a Christian is not just a particular case of knowing to be a human being; and to know what it is to be a Christian not just a more specific knowledge of what it is to be a human being. Even if it is true that every human being can become a Christian, it does not follow that all humans have a capacity for becoming Christians. The term ‘can’ here is ambiguous, and we must not confuse logical or factual possibility with anthropological capacity. ‘I am a Christian’ entails ‘I am a human being’ because it is not incoherent or incompatible that I am both a Christian and a human being. But the possibility of becoming a Christian is not one of my human ca-

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pacities, neither in the active sense of being able to bring it about nor in the passive sense of allowing it to happen. Peter may become a Christian, but Peter cannot make himself a Christian nor does becoming a Christian leave Peter fundamentally untouched. It is not Peter who decides for or against it but Peter, as it were, becomes who he is in the decision. Becoming a Christian, therefore, is not a superficial or outward change in attributes, as Climacus is at pains at making clear, but a change in substance or mode of existing: Peter before and after becoming a Christian is a different person and not merely the same person determined differently. He has died to his former self and lives a new life. Or as Climacus puts it: “To become a Christian […] becomes the most terrible of all decisions in a person’s life, since it is a matter of winning faith through despair and offense (the Cerberus pair who guard the entry to becoming a Christian).”¹³ Unless you die to yourself, you cannot become a Christian. This is “the most terrible examination in [one’s] life,”¹⁴ for it means dying to oneself and to the world. (The Pauline overtones can hardly be missed!). Although Climacus speaks in terms of ‘decision,’ he makes it quite clear that it is not a decision whose subject is Peter: Peter did not become a Christian by deciding to be a Christian. He may have wished it and “resolved to relate himself to Christianity.”¹⁵ But this didn’t make him a Christian “until the wonderful thing happened to him, that he became a Christian (if we want to express it this way) or until he chose to become that.”¹⁶ Only this decision anchors what one knows about Christianity in one’s own life, that is, appropriates the knowledge in the practical execution of one’ s life. It is a ‘decision’ dependent on a prior gift, a decision that accepts and appropriates what has happened to him, a choice he did not have before but only has because of “the wonderful thing that happened to him.” Without the gift, no decision, and without the decision no knowledge of what it is to be a Christian. Hence only a Christian can know what it is to be a Christian. Five, not everyone called a Christian knows what it is to be a Christian, for not every baptized ‘Christian’ is a true Christian. Those who have been made Christians “at the age of two weeks […] have not yet become Christians.”¹⁷ They have been given “a name” and are Christians “de nomine,” but not in actual truth.¹⁸ “An infant two weeks old cannot have passed the most terrible examina-

     

Ibid. SKS 7, 323 / CUP1, 373. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372. SKS 7, 323 / CUP1, 373.

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tion in this life, one in which eternity is the examiner, even if it has ever so many Baptism certificates from the parish clerk.”¹⁹ So, one has to become a Christian in the first-hand sense just outlined before one can gain that knowledge. Only a Christian who has become a Christian knows what it is to be a Christian. Existential knowledge is not only first-hand but also necessarily a posteriori: One first is a Christian, and then comes to know it. But just as I cannot decide to become a Christian before I become it, so I cannot decide not to know (of) it after I have become it. Six, a Christian who knows what it is to be a Christian, must also know what Christianity is and be able to tell others. Climacus here makes several points: (1) Knowledge is always general in nature. I cannot know something unless others could also know what I know. This is also true of existential knowledge. It is first-hand, a posteriori, and unavoidable for the one who has the experience. But it wouldn’t be knowledge if it couldn’t be communicated to and known by others. (2) What we communicate to others is always in danger of being misunderstood. We communicate through signs, but signs do not communicate presences and are always open to misunderstandings and different understandings. Therefore, when we tell others what we know we try to safeguard what we say against misunderstandings. The way this is done depends on the knowledge communicated. Mathematical knowledge is open to verification by everyone competent to perform the necessary calculations. Historical knowledge is secured by making the sources available on which it is based. Empirical knowledge is checked by experiments that others can perform as well. But how can we safeguard that the existential knowledge that we communicate to others is not misunderstood? Kierkegaard answers this by his theory and practice of indirect communication: Existential knowledge can only be communicated adequately if it is understood and appropriated as existential knowledge. But given the indexical nature of our pronouns, my knowledge of what it is to be a Christian that is based on my experience (‘I know …’), will be understood by others to whom I communicate it only in the reciprocal third-person-mode (‘He knows …’, or rather, ‘He claims to know …’), that is, not as knowledge but only as a claim to knowledge. This amounts to a twofold failure of my communication. You do not know what I know if all you know is that I know it. What I communicate is received not as knowledge but only as a claim to knowledge. Moreover, to receive it as existential knowledge requires it to be first-hand, a posteriori, and based on the receiver’s

 SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372 f.

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own experience: We cannot appropriate the first-hand knowledge of others second-hand through communication. So, the point of communicating my existential knowledge of what it is to be a Christian to you is not to tell you something about me, or about God, or about what I have experienced and think to know, but to create, by the very way I communicate with you, a situation in which you come to experience for yourself what it is to be a Christian, that is, in which you become a Christian yourself. But just as this is not something you can induce by what you do, it is not something I can induce by what I do. Therefore, I must communicate my existential knowledge not directly by telling you something about me, or my experience, but indirectly by provoking you to make the relevant experience yourself. This requires a mode of communication that turns your attention away from what I say, or that I say it, to what is at stake about you in what is being said. Indirect communication keeps the gap wide open between what is said and how it is said and thus opens a space that allows others to make their own experiences with what is being communicated. It does not enforce a particular understanding of what is said but enables and provokes an individual self-understanding in those to whom it is addressed. There is no guarantee that it works, but if it works at all, it works in this indirect way. (3) What Christianity is will thus only be known and communicated in the myriad of ways in which individual Christians know and tell others about what it is to be a Christian. But this existential knowledge has a specific pattern, and this pattern is to be safeguarded in communicating it to others. Thus “a person who actually has become a Christian must certainly have had a period when he was not a Christian; he must in turn have had a period when he found out what Christianity is; then, in turn, if he has not totally forgotten how he himself existed before he became a Christian, he must be able for his part to say what Christianity is by comparing his earlier life with his Christian life.”²⁰

What Climacus outlines here is a three-stage process: By comparing your life before you became a Christian with your life after you became a Christian you find out about the differences between before and after, and the knowledge of these differences constitutes your knowledge of what Christianity is. Note that this knowledge is itself indirect and that it is how you for your part see and say what Christianity is. You do not present the unchanging ‘essence of Christianity,’ but your view of what Christianity is in the light of the before and after in your life. For you cannot, as it were, inspect Christianity or faith directly but only

 SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372.

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find out about it by comparing your life uninformed by faith with your life informed by faith. Not only is your life the medium which shows what it is to be a Christian, you cannot have any existential knowledge of this without the memory of what your life was like before ‘the wonderful thing happened to you,’ and the experience or perception of what it is like now. Knowledge of Christianity is only possible by contrasting my memory of the past with my perception of the present, for only then I can discover what is old and what is new. There is no general or common answer to this. Since it is always my memory and my perception, the contrast will have to be worked out in terms of my past life and my present life; and this makes our knowledge of what Christianity is an endless variety of contingent manifestations and communications of individual experiences and existential knowledge couched in the contingent terms of a given time and an individual life. However, whereas the content and symbolic expression of the contrast differs between lives, the fact that there is a contrast doesn’t. Therefore, understanding Christianity must concentrate not on individual confessions or the Church’s creed as Grundtvig thought but on the recurrent fact of the contrast between before and after, and on the question of how this contrast actually occurs in a human life: The way in which we become Christians cannot vary through history but must repeat the same pattern if Christianity is to be identified as the same across time and history. The pattern of becoming a Christian is what counts when we try to identify what Christianity is, and if we look at human life in all its variety in the light of this pattern we can discover, according to Kierkegaard, a basic pattern that characterizes all human life in history.

1.3 The aesthetic, ethical, and religious modes of existing Human life exists in time. We are born, we live, and we die in time. Temporality is a defining feature of our life. But as far as we know, we are the only creatures who can know this. We know that we are born, live, and die in time. Our knowing is temporal as well, but the truth of what we know is not. When we die, we stop knowing or thinking it but what we know doesn’t cease to be true when we stop thinking or knowing it. There is a difference between knowing and knowledge, thinking and content of thought, the order of being and the order of thought, temporal existence and eternal truth, and we participate in both sides of the divide. This is why, for Kierkegaard, human beings are subject to an existential division of being and thought, temporal existence and eternal truth, temporality and eternity. The human self exists in this division, so that “the existing person

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[…] must simultaneously be eternal and temporal.”²¹ The ‘must’ here signifies both an existential necessity and a permanent task. A person ceases to exist, when it stops living in time; and it ceases to be a person when it fails to live up to being simultaneously eternal and temporal. Human selves are human precisely in that they are permanently faced with the infinite task of integrating the fundamental divide between the temporal and the eternal in their way of living. “A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis.”²² It is a synthesis, however, which never is but always must be achieved by living a human life. No existing person can avoid or escape this task, and none can settle it once and for all. However, we can go about it in more than one way, and Kierkegaard’s theory of ‘stages of existence’ or ‘spheres of life’ outlines a basic typology of an aesthetic (or esthetic), ethical, and religious mode of existing in facing up to this task. The three modes or ways are derived from the structure of the individual self that is faced with the task of integrating the temporal and the eternal, or freedom and necessity, into a synthesis. For Kierkegaard, as for the modern tradition since Descartes, the self is determined by consciousness. But there can be three basic ways in which consciousness can relate to the task outlined: We can ignore it and stick to what is immediately given and what we know to be the case here and now (aesthetic life); we can be aware of it and know what ought to be the case even though we cannot achieve it ourselves (ethical life); we can turn from the realities of the external to the possibilities of the internal life and seek to find what we cannot achieve in our external life in the “inward deepening” of “the relation to an eternal happiness that is not conditioned by a something” but only by itself (religiousness A).²³ The rationale of Kierkegaard’s distinction between the aesthetic, ethical and religious life is the threefold relation of human consciousness to the fundamental task of human existence, its existential challenge to integrate the temporal and the eternal in the temporal process of a finite human life. Let me briefly elaborate this and give a fuller description of the three stages or spheres: First, we can live our life in a way that ignores or is unaware of the division between finite and temporal existence and infinite and eternal self. We stick to what is immediately given or lacking, to our physical and psychological needs, emotions, urges, wishes, beliefs, and the corresponding activities that

 Pap. VI B 40:26, p. 128 / CUP2, Supplement, p. 48.  SKS 11, 127 f / SUD, 13.  SKS 7, 485 / CUP1, 556. See SKS 7, 204– 209 / CUP1, 243 – 248.

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constitute our immediate, pre-theoretical or ‘primitive’ reactions to the world. The focus is here on the individual and his or her continuous search for satisfaction and happiness, and the world is seen as the means to provide and enable this. This is what Kierkegaard calls the aesthetic stage or sphere. The “esthetic individual,” who lives in this way, “never has the dialectical within himself.”²⁴ Since he is not aware of the existential division of finite and infinite, he “finds no contradiction in existing; to exist is one thing, contradiction is something else that comes from without.”²⁵ He lives his life unaware of his true situation, that is, is hidden from himself (because he does not know or pay attention to who he truly is) and from others (because he ignores them to be selves as he is and lives only for his own interests and needs and without respect for common norms shared by others). Second, this is different with one who lives in the ethical sphere. The ethical individual has become aware that there is more to life then the satisfaction of immediate needs. Immediate needs need to be satisfied immediately, but any satisfaction is quickly replaced by other immediate needs and never leads to a permanent state of happiness. So, the life of the aesthete becomes an endless craving for happiness, a series of momentary and transient moments of satisfaction, which in the light of human finitude casts the individual into despair. This is the starting point of the ethical individual. She is aware that there is more to life than the immediately given or lacking. Life could be different, not merely an endless movement from immediate needs through satisfactions to other immediate needs but an achievement of happiness that lasts; and if it could, it should. The ethical individual is aware of the difference between what is the case and what could and should be the case, between the actual and the ideal. In the ethical sphere the focus is also on the individual but on the ideal individual, or rather the individual in the difference between her actual and ideal self: “What he wants to actualise is certainly himself, but it is his ideal self, which he cannot acquire anywhere but within himself.”²⁶ This is why ethics, according to Kierkegaard, “points to ideality as a task and assumes that every man possesses the requisite conditions.”²⁷ The ideal is not the ideal of just my way of living but of every human existence lived out in the face of the difference between what it is and what it could and should be. The ideal is linked to the rational and universal as well as to the others who live under the same duty

   

See SKS 7, 376 / CUP1, 433 f. SKS 7, 499 / CUP1, 572. SKS 3, 247 / EO2, 233. SKS 4, 324 / CA, 16.

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to transform their actual lives by realizing their ideal self. Thus, the ideality of ethics “never becomes so inhuman as to lose sight of actuality but corresponds to actuality by presenting itself as the task for every man in such a way that it will make him the true and the whole man”²⁸—true and whole precisely by overcoming and integrating the universal with the particular, the ideal with the actual, the infinite with the finite. But the duty of the individual to choose himself, that is, to choose his ideal self and become what he could and should be in the way he actually is, is doomed to failure. All he achieves is to work himself deeper into despair. He cannot be what he could and should be given the actualities of actual bourgeois society. So, the ethical individual ends up in an even worse situation than the aesthete: He knows about the alternative to his actual life, he knows his duty towards himself and others, but he cannot put it into practice. He fails to achieve the true and whole self that he has before his mind. He is aware of the tension between the finite and infinite, the temporal and eternal, the actual and the ideal in his life. But he fails to overcome the contradiction, he finds it even “within self-assertion,”²⁹ and hence he ends up even deeper in despair. Third, this is where the religious individual seems to know a way out. In the religious sphere the focus is not on the individual in the physical world of means, or on the ideal individual who should become real in the social community with others, but on the individual in his or her inward relationship to God. The relationship to God is now no longer understood as mediated through the norms of society. Rather the individual turns to God as the one who can help him to overcome the despair about existential contradiction between actual and ideal self, finite existence and infinite self, the temporal and eternal in human life. Without this despair nobody will really turn to God for help and seek a personal relationship that is free of all ethical intermediaries: Only if God truly becomes my God, I truly become God’s creature and my neighbor’s neighbor, that is, I become a true self vis-à-vis God and for this reason, and this reason alone, also visà-vis the world of others. The way to become this is to turn away from everything finite, external, and temporal and concentrate on the infinite, inward, and eternal,³⁰ more exactly, on the infinite telos which is God. This is a classical Augustinian maneuver, for the telos is not to be found and experienced in the actual world of sensual experience, and hence inaccessible in the aesthetic sphere of life. But neither is it

 SKS 4, 329 / CA, 18.  SKS 7, 499 / CUP1, 572.  SKS 7, 497 / CUP1, 570.

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found in the ethical duty and the ideal world of universal ethics, and hence also inaccessible to the ethical individual. Even the Kantian move that all our moral duties are to be regarded as divine obligations is not enough, as Kierkegaard points out in Fear and Trembling (Problema II): “The ethical is the universal, and as such it is also the divine. Thus it is proper to say that every duty is essentially a duty to God, but if no more can be said than this, then it is also said that I actually have no duty to God. The duty becomes duty by being traced back to God, but in the duty itself I do not enter into relation to God.”³¹ The relationship to God is not established via the duty, but unless we have an existential relationship to God, we cannot trace back our moral duties to God.

1.4 From religiousness A to religiousness B But how can we establish such a religious relation to God in our life? Kierkegaard describes it in terms of a twofold movement: a process of breaking away from the finite through an infinite movement of resignation,³² and a movement of faith by which “the individual is saved from the despair of the first movement and is reconstituted as a whole self by virtue of his relation to God.”³³ The first process is an infinite movement of resignation in which the individual gives up all hope of ever achieving by himself the synthesis for which he strives. The point is not that he gives up hope for the synthesis, but for achieving it by himself in his finite life; but he gives it up by himself, without outside help and by his own will. He strives for a true and whole life, but he knows that he cannot achieve it himself and so, by his own “strength and energy and spiritual freedom”³⁴ he renounces his striving for it and expects it from the absolute telos: “resignation is convinced that the individual has the absolute orientation toward the absolute telos […] He lives in the finite, but he does not have his life in it.”³⁵ In this sense, resignation is a ‘turning way from’ and a ‘turning to’: it is a turning away from immediacy, a “dying to immediacy”, a process of “becoming nothing,”³⁶ a “suffering in self-annihilation, yet within immanence.”³⁷ “Immediacy

 SKS 4, 160 / FT, 68.  Cf. SKS 7, 348 / CUP1, 401.  David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, p. 131.  SKS 4, 142 / FT, 47; cf. John Lippitt, Kierkegaard and Fear and Trembling, London and New York: Routledge 2004, p. 48.  SKS 7, 356 / CUP1, 410.  SKS 7, 401 / CUP1, 460 f. SKS 7, 403 / CUP1, 463 f.

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expires in misfortune; in suffering the religious begins to breathe.”³⁸ Suffering is, as it were, the negative way of becoming conscious of the eternal by dying away from the world within immanence, and in this sense it paves the way for a positive God-relationship. This is even more so with guilt. Just because it is “the expression for the strongest self-assertion of existence,”³⁹ it is at the same time the negative form of the relationship to God: while “guilt is the most concrete expression of existence, the consciousness of guilt is the expression for the relation.”⁴⁰ Consciousness of guilt arises where the individual becomes aware of missing and having missed the God-relationship in his way of living. He becomes aware of not having it. And in this negative way he opens or is opened up for it.⁴¹ This is also true of the other movement, the movement of faith. This is not a movement in which I do the moving but in which I am moved. It is the movement through which the individual “is rescued from his resignation and restored as a whole person.”⁴² It wouldn’t be a way out of the dilemma, as Kierkegaard saw clearly, if faith was something we did, one of our human activities, if it was a kind of belief, a volition, or an emotion. Whereas resignation is something I can achieve by myself “and if I do not make it, it is because I am too cowardly and soft,”⁴³ faith is not something the self can do by itself but “a sphere of its own, and the immediate identifying mark of every misunderstanding of Christianity is that it changes it into a doctrine and draws it into the range of intellectuality.”⁴⁴ However, faith is neither a kind of belief, nor any other intellectual, volitional or emotional reality or possibility of human life. It is neither a cogni-

 SKS 7, 498 / CUP1, 572.  SKS 7, 379 / CUP1, 436.  SKS 7, 460 / CUP1, 528.  SKS 7, 461 / CUP1, 528.  Consciousness of guilt is not yet consciousness of sin. Sin-consciousness “is the expression for the paradoxical transformation of existence” (SKS 7, 509 / CUP1, 583.), it is “a change of the subject itself, which shows that outside the individual there must be the power that makes clear to him that he has become a person other than he was by coming into existence, that he has become a sinner. This power is the god in time.” (SKS 7, 510 / CUP1, 584.) But the “guilt-consciousness that still lies essentially in immanence is different from the consciousness of sin. In guilt-consciousness, it is the same subject, who by holding the guilt together with the relation to an eternal happiness becomes essentially guilty, but the identity of the subject is such that the guilt does not make the subject into something else, which is the expression for a break” (SKS 7, 464 / CUP1, 532.). Guilt-consciousness is still a consciousness of the ‘old’ self, not—as consciousness of sin—a consciousness of the ‘new’ self, the self that is aware of his relation to God in the light of God’s relation to him.  Law, Kierkegaard, p. 131.  SKS 4, 142 / FT, 48.  SKS 7, 282 / CUP1, 327.

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tive activity, nor an act of will, nor a human capacity at all. It is not a cognitive activity in that it is neither knowledge of the eternal (speculative knowledge) nor of the historical (empirical knowledge) but the subjective appropriation of the eternal in time, “and no knowledge can have as its object this absurdity that the eternal is the historical.”⁴⁵ It is not an act of will⁴⁶ but, if at all, an act of hope: The believer does not will but rather gives up willing anything, he “leaves it entirely to God how he is to be helped, but he believes that for God everything is possible.”⁴⁷ “Faith is rlly this: to hold fast to possibility,”⁴⁸ to the possibility that for God even the impossible (that which is impossible for us) is possible; and “to relate oneself expectantly to the possibility of the good is to hope.”⁴⁹ Finally, faith is not a human capacity or something we can or are able ‘to do,’ but “faith, sensu strictissimo […] refers to coming into existence.”⁵⁰ It is not that we who are have or do not have faith, but those who have faith are, as it were, ‘made by faith.’ Faith ‘is self-active,’ it creates the believer and is not something the believer does or can do, and for this reason “faith always thanks God”⁵¹ who is the creative source of the creativity of faith. This is why, from the believer’s point of view, faith is not more or less probable⁵² or certain but the absolute “risk” in which “I must see to it that I hold fast the objective uncertainty.”⁵³ Thus in our perspective and from our side, faith “continually uses the negative as the essential form,”⁵⁴ “the positive is continually in the negative, and the negative is the distinctive mark,”⁵⁵ for in the sphere of existence negativity is “the sign of the relationship with God.”⁵⁶ This is just as true of suffering as it is of faith: “for an existing person the existence-relation to the absolute good can be defined only by the negative—the relation to an eternal happiness by suffering, just as the certitude of faith that relates itself to an eternal happiness is defined by uncertainty.”⁵⁷ Just as suffering and guilt are nega-

            

SKS 4, 264 / PF, 62. See ibid. SKS 11, 154 / SUD, 39. SKS 21, 101, NB7:54 / KJN 5, 106. SKS 9, 238 / WL, 249. Cf. Ferreira, Love’s Grateful Striving, pp. 147– 148. SKS 7, 176 / CUP1, 210. SKS 7, 196 / CUP1, 233. Cf. SKS 7, 195 f. / CUP1, 232 f. SKS 7, 176 – 178 / CUP1, 210 – 212. SKS 7, 171 / CUP1, 204. SKS 7, 175 – 177 / CUP1, 209 f. SKS 7, 524 / CUP1, 524. Ibid. SKS 7, 395 – 405 / CUP1, 453 – 466. SKS 7, 396 / CUP1, 455.

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tive indications of the God-relationship, so uncertainty is the negative indication of faith. Both movements proceed thus through negativity, and both result in characteristic existential paradoxes: The process of suffering and guilt leads to the Socratic paradox that I know both that a relationship to the eternal and infinite has to be established in the temporal and finite, and that it is impossible to achieve this because the eternal and the temporal are incompatible; so all I can do is to practice Socratic ignorance.⁵⁸ Similarly the process of faith results in the paradox of faith in the possibility of the impossible: What I cannot achieve is achieved by God in the form of an absolute paradox of the eternal becoming present in time, and repeated in an equally paradoxical form in faith, the subjective appropriation of the objective paradox in which not I appropriate the eternal in time but the eternal in time creates me as subject of its appropriation. Faith is paradoxical not only because it cannot be rationally explained or justified but also and primarily because it is the subjective appropriation and repetition of the objective paradox in history. This repetition is experienced in the life of the individual not as absolute certainty but as uncertainty: “Uncertainty is the sign, and certainty without it is the sign that one does not relate oneself to God.”⁵⁹ Negativity is the form in which we become aware of the God-relationship in our life both in its turning away from wrong orientation towards the immediately given in suffering and guilt and in its turning towards God in faith. However, to describe suffering, guilt, and religious uncertainty in this way as negative indications of the God-relationship is to say more than they manifest by themselves to a disinterested (psycho)analyst or to those who suffer, have guilt, or lack certainty. Taken as such, suffering, guilt, and uncertainty do not point beyond themselves in the way Kierkegaard presents them. The phenomena do not ask for this interpretation. It rather is the other way round: the interpretation refers to and uses these phenomena to make a point about Christianity. Kierkegaard’s whole phenomenology of human existence depends on a Christian perspective and unfolds a—not the!—Christian view of human existence. Kierkegaard is very much aware of this. This is why he moves on beyond religiousness A to religiousness B. “The religiousness that has been discussed up until now and that for the sake of brevity will from now on be termed Religiousness A is not the specifically Christian religiousness.”⁶⁰ It “can be present in paganism, and in Christianity it can be the religiousness of everyone who is

 SKS 7, 169 / CUP1, 202. SKS 7, 171– 175 / CUP1, 204– 208.  SKS 7, 396 / CUP1, 455.  SKS 7, 485 / CUP1, 555.

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not decisively Christian, whether baptized or not.”⁶¹ It is a necessary stage, for “Religiousness A must first be present in the individual before there can be any consideration of becoming aware of the dialectical B.”⁶² But one must move beyond religiousness A to make the decisive step from a religious to a Christian life. However, this move is neither natural nor necessary. “Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to the god.”⁶³ But neither is it necessary since religiousness A “is so strenuous for a human being that there is always a sufficient task in it.”⁶⁴ It does not by itself point beyond itself but only when described from the point of view of religiousness B, that is, in a Christian perspective. This perspective is available only if we move beyond the natural and the necessary: it is neither written into human nature, nor a necessary postulate of human existence. Living within the bounds of the natural and necessary never gets us beyond religiousness A. But to call it religiousness A is to describe it from the point of view of religiousness B, that is, of Christianity. And since to get there is neither natural nor necessary, to attain this point of view is a gift, not something we achieve by what we do but (if at all) by what happens to us. Becoming a Christian is to exist in a mode that is not a possibility of our human existence. So, the decisive break that needs to be understood when we try to make sense of what it is to become a Christian is not between aesthetic, ethical and religious existence but between all of them on the one hand, and Christianity or religiousness B on the other. There are ‘Three Stages and yet one Either/Or’.⁶⁵ And it is this Either/Or on which everything else depends.

1.5 Kierkegaard’s method The Postscript is a rich and complex book that touches on many issues. But from the first to the last page, it is written from a Christian perspective, and whatever it discusses has its point in being an elucidation of the Christian faith. As D. Z. Phillips has rightly noted: “Kierkegaard is a religious thinker whose main con-

    

SKS 7, 486 / CUP1, 557. SKS 7, 486 / CUP1, 556. Ibid. SKS 7, 486 / CUP1, 557. Pap. VI B 41:10, p. 139 / CUP2, Supplement, p. 68.

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cern is with clearing away confusions about Christianity.”⁶⁶ Indeed, it is his only concern. This must be kept in mind when we try to understand what Kierkegaard does in the Postscript in analyzing the stages of existence or spheres of life. It is not the case, as Phillips thinks, that Kierkegaard takes “the categories of the aesthetic, the ethical and religious for granted.”⁶⁷ He does not use or refer to them independent of his overall concern. On the contrary, they are introduced and unfolded as part of his attempt to clear away confusions about Christianity. Christianity is not a self-evident way of human life. Not everyone is a Christian; not every baptized Christian is a true Christian; but every Christian, true or not, has begun his or her life as a non-Christian. We are not born Christians, we become (or fail to become) Christians in the course of our life, visibly but insufficiently by receiving the baptism certificate and invisibly but sufficiently realized by being moved from religiousness A to religiousness B. This actual change in life is the key to Kierkegaard’s existential hermeneutics as we have seen. It exemplifies a general hermeneutical method that can be summarized as follows: First, to understand Christianity, one must understand it against the backdrop of what it modifies, corrects, transforms, overcomes, deepens, continues or replaces. Christian life contrasts to pre-Christian life, and this contrast is the key to understand the point of Christianity. Second, hermeneutically this involves a twofold movement of interpretation from Christian life to its pre-Christian background, and vice versa. On the one hand, we can only identify the background against which Christianity is to be understood relative to the Christian life that contrasts with it: Since it is the background of Christianity, we must identify it relative to or with respect to Christianity and not independently of it; and this requires that we argue from Christianity towards its background. For unless you know the goal, you cannot identify the process leading up to it. On the other hand, we can only know and understand a given reality to be the goal of a particular process, if we understand it in the light of the process leading up to it: The point of Christianity will remain opaque to us if we do not understand it in the light of what it overcomes, modifies, continues etc. To understand Christianity, we have to understand it against the background of Christianity; and this requires that we argue from the background towards Christianity.

 Dewi Z. Phillips, Religion and the Hermeneutics of Contemplation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2001, p. 318.  Ibid.

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Any attempt to understand Christianity will thus involve a backward reading from Christian life to pre-Christian life, and a forward reading from pre-Christian life to Christian life. And just as the second movement will always manifest a basic negativity since pre-Christian life is not (yet) Christian whatever else is to be said about it, so the first movement can always be criticized as an over-interpretation of pre-Christian life since it reads back into the phenomena what makes them pre-Christian and thus tells us more about them than will be manifest when they are not placed and understood in this contrast. Both features, the tendency to present a negative view of pre-Christian life, and to over-interpret it in a, as some will say, misleading Christian way, are clearly exemplified by the Postscript. Third, but there is a further point to be considered. Even if we agree that Christian life is to be understood against the backdrop of pre-Christian life, and that this involves a twofold movement of interpretation, it is still an open question what this backdrop is and what is to be elucidated by the interpretative movement. What is the question we seek to answer? Is it a question of fact (quaestio facti) or a question of validity (quaestio iuris)? Why do we ask what we ask and what is it that we seek to clarify? Do we want to learn about Christianity as a historical or social or religious phenomenon? Or test the validity of its claims to salvation in terms of the canons of neutral and impartial reason? Or do we want to compare its claims, or insights, with those of other religions? Or because we want to find out whether and how to participate in Christian life? Or how to convince others of its truth? Is it a theoretical interest we pursue, or a practical, or an existential one? In each case the contrast between Christian life and pre- or non-Christian life will be drawn differently because a contrast is a three-term relation in which something differs from something else with respect to something, and we are interested in different aspects of that contrast by concentrating on different respects in which we compare the one with the other. For example, if we pursue historical questions and conceive the hermeneutical task to be a historical task, we shall trace the historical developments that have led to the parting of ways between Judaism and Christianity in antiquity, and to the formation of a religious movement in the Roman Empire that was identified and distinguished from others as Christianity. This is not what Kierkegaard is interested in. The problem with which he struggles in the Postscript is not the difficulty “to understand what Christianity is but to become and to be a Christian.”⁶⁸ He presents and examines Christianity not as a historical but as

 SKS 7, 488 / CUP1, 560.

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an existential phenomenon, a phenomenon that elucidates human existence coram deo. This is his way of dealing with the quaestio iuris: Christianity is valid not as a system of beliefs that are true, or more likely true than not,⁶⁹ but only as mode of existence or way of living that is significant to all human life and not merely to Christians in Jerusalem, Galatia, Rome or Copenhagen, because it is the way in which a human self is what it should and could be and become coram deo: a true subject. That is, Kierkegaard seeks to understand Christian life not as a historical phenomenon against the background of Jewish, Hellenistic, Roman, or whatever history, but as a human phenomenon of universal significance against the background of life lived by human beings wherever human life is lived at all. This is why “one does not prepare oneself to become aware of Christianity by reading books or by world-history surveys, but by immersing oneself in existing. Any other preliminary study is bound eo ipso to end in a misunderstanding, because Christianity is an existence-communication.”⁷⁰ Not history or particular historical developments are the backdrop against which Christianity is to be understood but human life and existence. Now human life is always lived in a particular way, and the ways differ widely across cultures and times. But Kierkegaard assumes that as human life it is always lived in a specific way, namely as a life of a self seeking true subjectivity; and as such it is always lived in certain typical ways that Kierkegaard describes as the “three existence-spheres: the esthetic, the ethical, the religious”⁷¹ each of which signifies and summarizes particular challenges and dangers for a human self on its way to true subjectivity. In short, Kierkegaard is interested not “in what Christianity is” but in what it is “to become and to be a Christian,”⁷² for this decides on the validity of Christian life and existence. Hence, he describes Christianity not as a system of beliefs or a cultural movement in history but as Christian life, and he explores Christian life against this background of human life in general and not against the background of the contingent history of Christianity. This leaves its stamp on everything said in the Postscript. All the biblical, historical, and everyday examples that are discussed in the course of the argument are presented as types of human life and existence that are universally valid or shed a revealing light on universally valid aspects or structures of human existence. They are presented as types, or elucidations of aspects, of human existence on its way to true subjectivity or, what for  Note the scathing way in which Climacus ridicules all attempts to prove the probability of faith or “to say of Christianity that it is true to a certain degree” (SKS 7, 197– 211 / CUP1, 234– 251).  SKS 7, 488 / CUP1, 560.  SKS 7, 436 / CUP1, 501.  SKS 7, 488 / CUP1, 560.

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Kierkegaard amounts to the same, of human existence coram deo, and as such they are adduced and discussed to elucidate and clarify our own situation coram deo in the light of them. Kierkegaard’s interpretative moves from Christian to pre-Christian life and vice versa are not motivated by an interest in the differences between Christian and, say, Jewish, Greek, Roman, or Danish life, but in the contrast between a life lived outside the Christian faith and a life of faith. And his arguments become so acrimonious, bitter, and biting at times because this contrast does not agree with the religious and cultural differences between Christians and non-Christians but occurs within established Christendom itself and hence is used to castigate the failures of the Christian church and culture of his and indeed of any time to be truly Christian. Understood in this sense the distinction of different stages of existence or spheres of life gives an account of pre-Christian life in the light of Christian life or, more precisely, of what Kierkegaard assumes to be the point of true human existence coram deo according to the Christian faith. If what he outlines is truly a Christian view of life, if it truly shows what the point of human life before God really is, and if all this is true, then this view of pre-Christian life from his Christian perspective must be universally valid, that is, true of anybody who lives a human life at all. Thus, the Postscript presents human life as unfolding through various stages towards an ultimate goal. This is not a self-evident or self-imposing description of human life, common as such a picture may be in many cultures. It presupposes a point of view from which human life can be seen and described in this progressive way; and unless one looks at life from the point of view of this goal, it does not present itself as such. That is to say, Kierkegaard’s description of the stages of existence depends on the point of view of (his view of the point of) a Christian life for this is the life which he seeks to elucidate and about which he seeks to clear away confusions: The point of human life coram deo as seen and understood in Christian life is the goal, and pre-Christian life is described from there as it proceeds towards this goal. Thus, to put it as succinctly as possible, Kierkegaard describes and analyses Christian life as Christian religious life; religious life as a reaction to the despair about the contradictions of ethical life; ethical life as a result of the despair of aesthetic life and its failure to reach the goal of permanent happiness; aesthetic life as the ‘primitive’ or basic form of human life; human life as the form of life in which life becomes self-reflective, that is, turns on itself to know and elucidate itself. The whole account is not a bottom-up but a top-down argument: It starts from the Christian goal of human life and analytically unfolds the structure and the decisive phases of the process leading towards this goal. From beginning to end the analysis is couched in terms that are intrinsically tied to a Christian per-

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spective and the Christian view (as understood by Kierkegaard) that the goal of human existence is to become a true subject before God.

1.6 The stages in the light of Kierkegaard’s method If understood in this sense, we can see that and why Kierkegaard’s stages are not abstract aspects of human existence but coherent and potentially comprehensive ways of coming to terms with the world and one’s life in it. What is not an internally coherent way of living cannot be a “stage of life.”⁷³ Each stage or sphere is an independent form of life which embodies some highest good “valued for the sake of itself and for all it makes possible.”⁷⁴ This does not entail that all actual goods or ends aggregate, or that the summum bonum is to be understood as a compound good. Whether and in which sense they do, if at all, depends on the relationship between the spheres. Are they mutually exclusive? Do all imply each other? Or do some integrate others? To claim, as some do, that each sphere presupposes the others so that it is either none or all of them, is not true at the level of the individual forms of life but only if they are understood as specific manifestations of the human quest for true subjectivity. An aesthetic life does not presuppose an ethical or religious life, and vice versa. But the pattern of these forms of life is only complete if human life proceeds in these ways and no others. Kierkegaard does not offer an open description of spheres but distinguishes three forms of life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious.⁷⁵ He believes these spheres to be necessary both in the sense that we couldn’t live a human life without living in either of these ways, and in the sense that the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious are irreducible to each other: the ethical is not a modification of the aesthetic, and the religious not a version of the ethical. Therefore, he believes this threefold description of human life to be complete: There are no further or other forms of life to be taken into account, for whatever else could be named or adduced will be a specific modification of the aesthetic, the ethical or the religious forms of life.

 SKS 7, 446 / CUP1, 513.  Johannes Corrodi, God and Passion in Kierkegaard’s Climacus, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2007, p. 98.  Cf. Hermann Deuser, Kierkegaard. Die Philosophie des religiösen Schriftstellers, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1985, p. 15, who employs the terms “Situationsarten” and “Lebensformen.” Cf. Stanley Cavell, Must we mean what we say? A Book of Essays, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1976, p. 172, who uses Wittgenstein’s term “form of life.”

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Kierkegaard does not only distinguish these three forms of life, but his distinction also entails a ranking of the aesthetic, ethical, and religious spheres. The ranking is due to the relationship he conceives between the three spheres. For him the ethical form of life is defined by the way it reacts to problems that arise but cannot be solved in the aesthetic sphere, and in a similar way the religious form of life is defined by the way it reacts to problems that arise and cannot be solved in the ethical sphere. We need not to be religious in order to be ethical, nor ethical in order to live an aesthetic life. But we cannot live a religious life without being involved in the ethical, and no ethical life without being involved in the aesthetic life: Climacus, as his name suggests, proposes a ‘ladder of divine ascent.’ Human life has a common goal in the true subjectivity of the self, a common pattern of forms of life in which it moves and a common beginning in our ‘primitive’ reactions to the world immediately given and surrounding us. To mention just a few central aspects: We all seek happiness in the fulfilment of our immediate needs. But we cannot hold fast to the happiness we achieve momentarily but find ourselves cast back into the endless circle of need and fulfilment. Because of this “fundamental inconsistency it is impossible for the human being to remain in the aesthetic sphere. The structure of the human self is such that it is inescapable of sustaining long-term an aesthetic mode of existence […] The dissolution of the aesthetic mode of existence that this entails casts the individual into despair.”⁷⁶ Awareness of this despair is the beginning of an ethical life, a life explicitly oriented towards the ideal, the normative, the true, the rational, and the universal. But the despair is not overcome by this orientation but deepened when we discover in the ethical sphere that we are unable to live in the way in which we could and should live. Our actual life never lives up to the expectations of the ideal life of the ideal self. We have, as it were, ‘God’s good law’ but we cannot live up to it. Instead of building us up it drives us even deeper into despair. So, we turn to God for help, and this is the beginning of the religious form of life. For God is not to be found in the outside world but only, as Kierkegaard holds in the wake of a highly problematic Augustinian tradition, inwardly in the inner life of the subject. “Nature, the totality of creation, is God’s work, and yet God is not there, but within the individual human being there is a possibility (he is spirit according to his possibility) that in inwardness is awakened to a God-relationship, and then it is possible to see God everywhere.”⁷⁷ However, this inward move does not free from the outside world but remains within imma-

 Law, Kierkegaard, p. 126.  SKS 7, 207 f. / CUP1, 246 f.

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nence. It leaves everything as it is but places it in a new perspective in which it can come to be seen as God’s creation. So, in the religious sphere the aesthetic and ethical spheres are not simply overcome or replaced by something else. We still have our basic human needs, and we still know what we could and should ideally be and do. But we expect the realization of the ideal and the actualization of the possible not from what we do ourselves but from what God does in and through our doing. Kierkegaard’s point is not that “there is nothing incongruous in the simultaneous presence of conflicting life-views in which persons move and have their being.”⁷⁸ On the contrary, there is indeed something deeply incongruous in that. It not only accounts for the conflict between the ‘views of the world’ and the ‘Christian view of life,’ which Kierkegaard continuously emphasizes as contrastive, incompatible, and contradictory. It also accounts for the existential dynamics in human life that cannot settle in the aesthetic or ethical sphere without being driven beyond it by the despair, which results from trying to live in this way alone. There is no continuous development from one stage to the other, but a break that can only be bridged by a ‘leap’ of the individual. This is posited against Hegel’s view that one sphere must give rise to the next ‘higher’ ‘just by itself’ through its own negation. While Kierkegaard agrees that each stage results in a negative insight and hence existentially in despair, he does not claim any existential necessity to move from the aesthetic through the ethical to the religious life. You may live as an aesthete all your life, and never find a way out of the despair that comes with it. You may feel that something is lacking without having an inkling of what is lacking. To identify this becomes only possible from the ‘higher’ point of view of the ethical life, and what is lacking there only from the point of view of the religious life. So, the individual may not know what goes on in her life even where she suffers and finds herself in despair. But Kierkegaard knows or claims to know because he diagnosis and describes the situation from a Christian point of view, which allows him to identify the shortcomings of the various forms of human life in the way he does. Just as in the aesthetic sphere “the individual is unaware of the contradiction between an infinite and eternal self placed in finite and temporal existence,”⁷⁹ so in the ethical sphere the individual is unaware of how the contradiction could be overcome by turning to God. But the same is true of the religious sphere. For the individual may wish to turn to God but is unable to do so in the right way because he or she is unaware who the God is to whom he or she should turn. Turning to

 Corrodi, God and Passion, p. 85.  Law, Kierkegaard, p. 124.

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God is one thing, turning to the true God another. Similarly, having a God-relationship is one thing, having a true relationship to God another. A true relationship to God presupposes to be related to the true God, and this distinction is not available in the religious sphere as such. This is why Kierkegaard’s analysis cannot stop at religiousness A. It has to move on because that is the point of the whole exercise: to elucidate not what it is to live an aesthetic, ethical or religious life, but what it is “to become and to be a Christian.”⁸⁰ However, to become and to be a Christian is to become and to be a true subject before God, and this is not something we can achieve by what we do but only by what is done to us. So, religiousness B does not enlarge the circle of human modes of existence. It is not a further way of living alongside the aesthetic, ethical or religious ways of life. It is rather a particular way of living these three ways of life, a way that results from being made something to which we cannot make ourselves: What has to occur is not merely a change in the way in which a subject lives his or her life, but a change of subject. I may decide to turn from a life tied to the passing moments of immediacy to an ethical life, and from the failures to achieve my ethical goals to a religious life. But I cannot decide to become a Christian unless—to quote it again—“the wonderful thing happens to me that I become a Christian:”⁸¹ Unless I am made a ‘new person’, a ‘new self’, a ‘true subject’ by what happens to me I cannot become someone “who is truly a Christian.”⁸² Where “there is no break, and no suffering of a break,”⁸³ there is no truly Christian life. It is true that there is no continuous development between living an aesthetic, ethical and religious life. The spheres are divided by gaps that need to be crossed. However, it is the same self that moves from the aesthetic through the ethical to the religious way of life. But the gap between religiousness A and B is different in kind. If it requires a ‘leap of faith’, it is not a leap that I (or anyone else) can perform at all. No leaping, however enthusiastic, will ever get me from a religious life to a truly Christian life. A person may be “enthusiastically sacrificing himself, enthusiastically choosing strenuousness instead of comfort, indeed, a strenuousness that is rewarded only with ingratitude and loss, instead of a comfortableness that would be rewarded with admiration and advantage”⁸⁴—nothing of this sort will ever make him a true Christian. The individual who exists in time may try as hard as he wishes to relate to the eternal, it never gets him beyond religiousness A, a reli    

SKS 7, 488 / CUP1, 560. See SKS 7, 323 / CUP1, 373. SKS 7, 494 / CUP1, 567. SKS 7, 496 / CUP1, 569. SKS 7, 496 / CUP1, 568 f.

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giousness tied to inwardness and practiced in immanence. Religiousness B occurs only if and when the existing individual does not seek to withdraw from time and to collect himself inwardly in his relation to the eternal but “in time comes to relate himself to the eternal in time.”⁸⁵ He must not leave the sphere of existence for the eternal, but relate in the existence-sphere, that is in time, to the eternal in time, that is, to the coming into existence and hence into history, finitude and temporality of the eternal. “Consequently, the relation is within time, a relation that runs directly counter to all thinking, whether one reflects upon the individual or upon the god.”⁸⁶ That is to say, it requires a fundamental change in our understanding of both what it is to be a human person or individual and what it is to be (a) god. The concept of ‘god’ is defined not by the infinite difference between the eternal, infinite, and divine and the temporal, finite, and human, but on the contrary by the very fact of the eternal becoming temporal, the infinite becoming finite, the divine becoming human without thereby diminishing or dissolving the difference between the eternal, infinite and divine and the temporal, finite and human. Similarly the understanding of the human self must be changed from the view of a continuous existing self that takes on different determinations or predicates in the course of his or her life to a view of the human self that has his or her true identity outside himself or herself in his or her relation not just to anything but to the coming of the eternal into the temporal: Who I am is not decided by what I do, whether in the sense of my ‘active’ activities (spontaneity, actions, doings) or my more ‘passive’ activities (receptivity, sufferings, passivity), but by what is done to me in such a way that my self and not merely something about me is changed. I am who I become through the way in which the eternal in time and history becomes present in my life. It is a more passive passivity than anything that I can suffer because it changes me, and not merely something of or about me. To become a Christian is to become a new person, a new self, a true subject. This is why Kierkegaard insists “that Christianity is not a doctrine but an existence-communication.”⁸⁷ It does not merely increase my knowledge, change my habits or give my way of living a new direction and orientation. All this could occur as a modification of my way of living without the break and the suffering of the break that makes me a new self. But to become a Christian is to be-

 SKS 7, 497 / CUP1, 570.  Ibid.  Ibid.

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come a new self and not merely continue one’s pre-Christian self determined in a new way. This does not entail that all continuities across the break between before and after are denied. On the contrary, “There is nothing so new in Christianity that it may not appear to have been in the world before, and yet everything is new.”⁸⁸ Christianity does not fill a gap or add anything to pre-Christian life but sheds a new light on everything. “If Christianity had only added something new to the old, it would have been able to cause offense only relatively, but just because it wanted to take all the old and make it new, offense was close at hand.”⁸⁹ There wouldn’t have been any offence without Christianity, and what its offence is can only be seen now that it has actually occurred. Similarly with the continuities between pre-Christian and Christian life: We do not and cannot know what they are before the event but only a posteriori. The new self discovers what it continues in new ways of the life of the former self, and what it does not and cannot continue without being untrue to the true subject that it has become in faith. This has ontological and ethical implications. Ontologically it is only from the position of the new self that I can distinguish between what in my life relates to creation and what to sin, what is due to my being a creature of God and what is due to my ignorance of and rebellion against my creator. The criteria for distinguishing between what belongs to creation and what to sin in my life are not available to me before I have become a new self. Only from this point of view it makes sense to see, as Kierkegaard believes it does, the continuity between the pre-Christian and the Christian life in the task and duty to become a true self and to attain true subjectivity. Only then it makes sense to hold “that every human being is … a spirit existing for himself;”⁹⁰ to claim the point of human existence to be “to immerse oneself, existing, in subjectivity;”⁹¹ to identify becoming a true subject to be the end of human existence pursued in aesthetic, ethical, and religious ways of life; and to argue that this end can only be achieved through “appropriation,”⁹² that is, by appropriating the gift of becoming a true subject by what happens to us when the eternal in time breaks in time into our life and makes us a new self. And this has ethical implications as well. It is precisely the retrospective judgement about my pre-Christian life from the point of view of my new Christian life that demands of me to distinguish and decide between that which is to be     

SKS 7, 470 f. / CUP1, 539 f. SKS 7, 470 / CUP1, 539. SKS 7, 158 / CUP1, 189. SKS 7, 160 / CUP1, 192. Ibid.

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continued and improved on the one hand, and that which is to be overcome and negated on the other. Because the Christian self knows that it exists by being differentiated into a new and an old self, it can only live by continuously differentiating with respect to his or her life and history between what can be continued in the new life and what must be discontinued as old life. Christians have continuously to re-evaluate their pre-Christian and their actual Christian life; for not only their pre-Christian but also their actual Christian life is never wholly what it could and should be (simul iustus et peccator) and hence has continuously to be judged, corrected, improved, and re-oriented in the light of true subjectivity (cf. the rule of love). Kierkegaard’s theory of stages provides a pattern in terms of which this re-evaluation can be carried out. It is a pattern that characterizes pre-Christian life when described in the light of the goal of human existence as realized in faith. Christian life is no exemption to this pattern because existing in these ways is the only way of existing open to us. Christians live the same sort of life as everyone else. But they live it differently, and the difference is due not to what they do but to how they relate to what is done to them.

1.7 Negativity and despair Kierkegaard’s account of what it is to become a Christian is in many ways closer to traditional Lutheran thinking than is sometimes noted.⁹³ But for reasons rooted in his biography and his existential adaptation of Hegel’s dialectics, he opts for a version of it that indulges in negativity, suffering and despair. This is problematic for both philosophical and theological reasons. For him, negativity and despair are the driving forces of human life on its way to true subjectivity. One must die to immediacy and despair of ever attaining the happiness one seeks in order to move on from the aesthetic to the ethical and to the religious sphere. Immediacy expires in misfortune and in suffering and guilt the religious begins to breathe.⁹⁴ But is that true as a general rule? I may go on all my life to live happily as an aesthete. I may live a more or less ethical life without ever feeling the pressure to face the paradox that the relationship to eternal truth must but cannot be enacted in temporal life. Or I may continue all my life to enjoy my inward relationship with God, see God everywhere in flowers, trees, and mountains (though perhaps not so clearly in floods, bomb attacks and  See for a balanced account Hermann Deuser, “Kierkegaard und Luther,” in Theologie und Kirchenleitung. Festschrift für Peter Steinacker zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. by Hermann Deuser, Gesche Linde, Sigurd Rink, Marburg: Elwert 2003, pp. 79 – 88.  See SKS 7, 379 / CUP1, 436.

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incurable illness), or live the decent and respectable life of a Christian gentleman in Copenhagen. That these spheres of life are linked as stages, and that the earlier ones are importantly deficient with respect to the later ones, is not self-evident. It only comes to the fore when we look back from the later stages to the earlier ones. Then the ethicist sees what takes her beyond the aesthete, and the religious bourgeois what takes him beyond the ethicist. But here we must be careful that our change of perspective is not read into the phenomena. If B is better than A, and C better than B, then A must lack something compared to B, and B must lack something compared to C. But A may be perfectly good in its own way, even if B is better than A in some respect or other; and the same is true for B and C. I only get a scale of stages A, B and C if I compare and relate them relative to the same respect. If I choose another respect the order of stages may be reversed, or there may be no order at all. If I compare the aesthetic, ethical and religious life with respect to the intensity of momentary feelings of happiness, or with respect to their impact and influence in society, or with respect to their importance to a market economy, I may well value them differently. Kierkegaard’s ordering clearly depends on comparing them with respect to the way they allow us to attain what he calls true subjectivity. Take this away, and the whole picture falls apart. But this governing respect is basically a Christian idea, or rather Kierkegaard’s idea of the point of Christian existence. To become a Christian is to become, exist and live as a true subject before God. This idea is deeply rooted in the Lutheran experience of justification. But it is not an idea immediately accessible to a secular mind. Yet without it, Kierkegaard’s whole analysis of human existence loses its point, or becomes accessible only by being re-interpreted beyond recognition. Moreover, becoming a true subject before God, as Kierkegaard makes clear, is a gift to be received but not something we can achieve ourselves by living an aesthetic, ethical, or religious life. It is neither natural nor necessary nor a possibility open to our natural human faculties. It must happen to us ‘from the outside,’ and it only happens where and when the eternal in time breaks into our life and turns us into a living paradox by re-creating our self, differentiating the old from the new, and making us remake our life in the light of this. However, to argue like this is to argue from the point of view of this actually having happened: Kierkegaard’s whole argument does not merely outline a possibility of human existence—indeed he spends all his energy in the Postscript on showing that it is not a possibility but sheer paradox—but a possibility based on and derived from an inscrutable paradoxical and yet actual reality: the fact of faith in history, the fact of persons being overwhelmed by what is done to

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them in faith. Kierkegaard does not argue from possibility to (a desired) actuality but the other way round. He does not show (1) that being a true subject is a coherent idea and hence possible, and then (2) ask whether it exists in reality, that is, is actual. On the contrary, he makes it quite clear that it can be described as a paradoxical possibility only because it is in fact a reality. The whole argument is “a transfer ab esse ad posse:”⁹⁵ If true subjectivity had not been an actual reality in history, it wouldn’t have been possible to perceive and present it as the point and goal of human existence. It would have remained an impossible possibility, not the possibility of the actuality of the impossible, of the absolute paradox in life and history. But then, if the whole argument starts from the fact of having been renewed, re-created, made a true self, a justified sinner etc., then why describe the former life in purely negative terms? Why is the new that happens to me presented as degrading my former life rather than as enhancing it? Why is pre-Christian life described as being deficient rather than as being intensified, overwhelmed, or enhanced by the unexpected good and unhoped-for luck that has broken into it? The Lutheran dialectic of sin and justification neither implies nor demands this. If both the evil and the good deeds of the sinner are called sin then not because there is no distinction between good and evil or because the whole life of the sinner is a life of evil, negativity and despair, but because neither our good nor our bad deeds can change us in any way from being sinners to being justified. The overcoming of sin in justification is a gift from God, gratuitously given, and not a merit or a consequence of our good deeds. “Amor Dei non invenit sed creat suum diligibile,”⁹⁶ as Luther put it in a way dear to Kierkegaard: We are loved not because we are lovable but by being loved we are made lovable. But that we cannot justify ourselves or make ourselves lovable to God by what we do, in no way implies that there is not difference between good and evil deeds or that to ascribe both to sinners is to paint everything in the uniform colors of negativity and to blur or dissolve the distinction between what is good and what is bad in human life. The sinner is bad but not necessarily his or her life or everything he or she does: If an action is sinful, it need not be (morally) bad, for to call it sinful is not to qualify it as morally bad but to ascribe it to a sinner and sinners perform good and bad actions. (This is why we cannot infer from morally good actions that their agents are not sinners.) Moreover, we may and do not know us as sinners in the full sense apart from the forgiveness of sin, but this  SKS 7, 369 / CUP1, 325.  Martin Luther “Disputatio Heidelbergae habita (1518),” in D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe), vols. 1– 68, Weimar 1883 – 1999, vol. 1, 1966 [1883], prop. 28 (WA 1, p. 354,35).

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doesn’t imply that we were no sinners before we became aware of it, or that everything we did was evil, or that we experienced our life as sinful, broken and full of despair and hence longed to be freed of sin, or that we have to re-describe our former life in this negative way after God’s love has broken into our life, even though at the time we did not experience it in this way. The arrival of God’s love in a life would be a very perverse event indeed if it required us to degrade and negatively re-describe everything that was good and experienced as good in the life before. The overcoming of sin is the justification of the sinner, not of his ways of living and acting, and it is not necessarily experienced and to be described as a matter of a bad and unhappy life becoming good but also, and perhaps even more importantly so, as a matter of a good and happy life becoming overwhelmed by unexpected riches of goodness. All this is true not only with respect to Kierkegaard’s Lutheran tradition but also with other Christian patterns of thought. The principle that grace perfects nature, for example, becomes very dubious indeed if it is taken to mean that nature needs to be perfected because it is deficient. It may be so, but it need not.⁹⁷ If life becomes better, it need not have been bad. There are changes from evil to good and from sadness to happiness, but also from happiness to bliss and from good to better and best. Recipients of a gift do not necessarily lack something, or are deficient, or need something. They may be grateful for the gift without thereby implying that they have always been striving for it, or that this was precisely what they needed without ever having been aware of it. Not everything we receive corresponds to a need, fills a gap, or removes a deficiency; not everything that we become actualizes a capacity or potentiality that we have always had; and not everything that is given to us satisfies a need or answers to a want. Many if not most parables of Jesus in the New Testament do not describe a remedy of a deficiency or a cure of evil but a phenomenon of abundance—the abundance of the unexpected break-in of God’s presence in a life, the abundance of divine grace. It is not, at least not primarily, presented as an answer to questions posed by human life but left open by it. Rather it refers to the overwhelming experiences of something utterly new and totally unexpected, the excess of incredibly good, unhoped-for happiness, surprising discoveries, unforeseen riches, and undreamed-of possibilities that have broken into a human life and have changed it radically into a new life of faith. In the New Testament faith stands for everything new and unexpected that the gospel effects in human life. Its point is

 It is not deficient as such or in all respects but only with respect to something very specific, namely securing our salvation. Nature is deficient only with respect to that which grace adds, and not in any sense intrinsic to nature itself.

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not so much the overcoming of human defects and deficiencies but the inclusion and incorporation of human life into the abundance of God’s presence and grace. This includes but goes beyond the healing of human suffering and pain. But—and this is the important thing here—it is not the human deficiency that defines the answer to it, and it is not the human situation that determines the character and content of God’s grace. On the contrary, what is received goes far beyond anything missed or hoped for. This is to what faith responds. It originates not from the overcoming of our existential deficiencies but from the occurrence of goods that were not even thought of as missing before they occurred and from the unexpected discovery of possibilities and chances in and for life, which nobody had hoped for, or imagined, or even missed before they were discovered. In an important sense, then, to have faith is to have something that goes far beyond anything needed in human life. Faith does not fill a gap but adds a surplus. It is not human life and its deficiencies that define what faith is, but faith is or responds to a gift that was neither missed nor expected but exceeds anything hoped for, longed for, needed, wanted, wished for, imagined or dreamt of. Faith is always more than anything needed, wanted, or missed in human life. It manifests the excess or abundance of God’s grace and does not merely answer to a human deficiency. It is a misleading attempt to show this abundance to be necessary by presenting it as the divine answer to our human quest, or as that for which we have all along been longing or striving, consciously or unconsciously. We have not longed for it, and we have not missed it, and not merely because we haven’t paid much or any attention to it. But then it is a mistake to present it as such and to claim to be an anthropological necessity what we do not need in order to live a good, humane, and happy human life. A theology worth its name should not argue from allegedly biological and metaphysical deficiencies of human life to God’s amending grace but rather from the contingent fact of God’s grace arriving in and breaking into a human life, of God becoming present in it and playing more into our way than anything we would ever have expected, hoped for, or indeed needed. The gift of God’s grace is gratuitous not only because we need not and cannot pay for it (true as this is as well) but above all because it goes far beyond anything we needed or missed in our life before it occurred. We had no inkling that something was missing before it occurred, and it is only in retrospect that we can describe our life as having been poor without it. Kierkegaard has grasped this point. He starts from the unfathomable and inscrutable fact of grace. But then he falls into the trap of getting overexcited with negativity instead of magnifying the gratuity and abundance of grace. Instead of delineating the prior actuality and creative force of grace in all areas of life and experience he presents human life as being unable to grasp the gift of God’s

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grace without having run through all the stages of despair to religiousness A. We must prepare ourselves or at least become prepared for the workings of grace or we shall miss it. “Religiousness A must first be present in the individual before becoming aware of the dialectical B.”⁹⁸ It is the “terminus a quo”⁹⁹ for religiousness B for it prepares the way on which alone the human individual can grasp what happens to him or her in faith. But this is putting the cart before the horse: Not grace here defines how it is received but our human receiving is presented as defining how grace is received, when it can be received and what is received as grace. “The decision rests in the subject,”¹⁰⁰ Kierkegaard writes. But if this is true at all, it is true only after the subject has been made true in faith by grace. There is a deep ambiguity and unresolved tension in Climacus’ way of arguing here. Although the argument of the Postscript depends from the first to the last page on the priority of God’s creative grace over our ways of receiving it, it presents nonetheless the spheres of existence as defining what we can see and grasp and understand as God’s presence and grace. Thus, to mention but one example, Climacus knows only one sort of immediacy—the immediacy of aesthetic life. He cannot imagine a direct relationship with God that is not aesthetic and hence is “essentially not any relationship with God” at all.¹⁰¹ “The direct relationship with God is simply paganism, and only when the break has taken place, only then can there be a true God-relationship.”¹⁰² “Nature” he holds, “is certainly the work of God, but only the work is directly present, not God.”¹⁰³ He offers the traditional reasons for this: “is it not the case that God is so unnoticeable, so hidden yet present in his work, that a person might very well live on, marry, be respected and esteemed as husband, father, and captain of the popinjay shooting club, without discovering God in his work?”¹⁰⁴ It is the aesthetic absence of God that makes Climacus deny a presence that can be lived as a direct relationship. But how can one claim that God is ‘hidden’, or ‘hidden yet present in his work’? If it “is really the God-relationship that makes a human being a human being,”¹⁰⁵ why exclude any direct relationship with God as sheer paganism? The answer is, on the one hand, that Climacus

 SKS 7, 485 / CUP1, 556.  SKS 7, 487 / CUP1, 558.  SKS 7, 531 / CUP1, 610.  SKS 7, 489 / CUP1, 560.  SKS 7, 204 / CUP1, 243.  Ibid.  SKS 7, 205 / CUP1, 244.  Ibid.

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does not distinguish between ‘direct’ and ‘immediate’ or ‘immediate’ and ‘aesthetic’. On the other hand, he not only holds that the relation with God has to be mediated through existence, which is always lived in an aesthetic, ethical or religious way, but also that the eternal in time cannot be mediated through the aesthetic or ethical or religious even though the relationship with it has to be lived in this and no other way—and precisely this is the source of the fundamentally paradoxical nature of Christian life. However, drop the premise that the relationship with God, which must be mediated through the forms of human existence, can be mediated in only one way, namely, after we have become sensitive to the eternal in ethical life and have gone beyond it to the point where the failure of even religious life has become evident; and describe the irruption of grace as the arrival of a gift that enriches our lives in unforeseen and unpredictable ways at all levels of our aesthetic, ethical, religious or whatever existence, and the whole picture changes. One need not “first of all exist in Religiousness A”¹⁰⁶ before one can become aware of God’s grace. It may come in all sorts of ways, not only in the one way that makes me become a true subject. Kierkegaard’s whole argument is tied to a particular Christian view of human life before God that is at best a possible Christian view among others, not the only acceptable or defensible one, and certainly not without problems: There are not many, if any at all, who could ever become Christians if the only way to heaven was first to reach the ethico-religious climax of Climacus in a life of growing despair, guilt and failure. A view of Christianity that in the end fails to see any true Christians any more is not very convincing—not even as a critique of present-day Christianity. This cannot be the whole truth if Christian faith is to be true. There must be more to God’s grace than making next to none of us true subjects. However much we may cherish the Kierkegaardian vision of true subjectivity, it cannot be the whole story or the only right way of telling it.

 SKS 7, 486 / CUP1, 557.

2 Becoming a Christian in Christendom To better understand the strengths and weaknesses of Kierkegaard’s view of the true self, it is worthwhile to compare his approach with that of Schleiermacher, which is similar in some respects and different in many others.¹⁰⁷

2.1 Kierkegaard’s basic problem Schleiermacher was a theologian who loved the profession of preacher “almost enthusiastically.”¹⁰⁸ Kierkegaard was a religious writer who never became the village priest that he should actually have become, according to his own insight.¹⁰⁹ Schleiermacher saw his life’s task in holding together Christian faith and scientific culture, in order not to let “the tangle of history so unravel that Christianity becomes identified with barbarism and science with unbelief.” ¹¹⁰

 See the contributions and discussions in Schleiermacher und Kierkegaard, ed. by Cappelørn et al.  Schleiermacher to Brinkmann on November 26, 1803, from Stolp (in Heinrich Meisner, Schleiermacher als Mensch. Sein Werden und Wirken. Familien- und Freundesbriefe, vol. 1– 2, Gotha: Perthes 1922– 2, vol. 1, pp. 332– 33).  In March 1849 he writes in his journal: “But this I know, that both originally and continually without change it has been my thought to be an author for not many years and then to take a position as country pastor.” (Pap. X-5 B 211, p. 397 / PV, Supplement, p. 231); cf. Pap. X-5 B 217, p. 406 / PV, Supplement, p. 233 and Pap. X-5 B 191, p. 378 / PV, Supplement, p. 259: “it was my wish from the beginning eventually to step into the modest position of a rural pastor—something I have also still considered as my life‘s finite destination.” “Then for a time my thought was to break off with Concluding Postscript—and then rural pastor. That did not happen, but then too, the authorship became decidedly religious.” (Pap. X-5 B 217, p. 405 / PV, Supplement, p. 232). For even though his authorship “has been decisively marked by reflection,” he “has willed only one thing.” The “insightful person” will know “that this one thing is the religious, but the religious completely cast into reflection, yet in such a way that it is completely taken back out of reflection into simplicity—that is, he will see that the traversed path is: to reach, to arrive at simplicity. And this is also (in reflection, as it in fact was originally) the Christian movement.” (SKS 13, 13 / PV, 6 f.). “Consequently, the task of the entire authorship was: to arrive at the simple, to become simple, simplification [Eenfoldiggjørelse]. In this regard it would then be a consistency in my personal life if I, the author, [deleted: now] became a rural pastor.” (Pap. X-5 B 191, p. 377 / PV, Supplement, p. 259). “I do not, however, mean to say by what is stated here that I intend today or tomorrow to seek to become a rural pastor or that it is decided” (Pap. X-5 B 208, p. 393 / PV, Supplement, p. 266).  Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre: Two Letters to Dr. Lücke, trans. by James Duke and Francis Fiorenza, Atlanta: Scholars Press 1981, p. 61. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-013

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Kierkegaard doubted whether Christianity still existed at all. In an expressly direct communication, he emphasizes that his “whole authorship pertains to Christianity, to the issue: becoming a Christian.”¹¹¹ Not merely in the sense of the obvious answer: by baptism, but in the much more radical sense of “becoming a Christian in Christendom”¹¹² or ‘How does a Christian become a Christian?’¹¹³ This question was not new, and neither were the usual answers to it. Pietism had responded by referring to repentance and conversion, rebirth, and sanctification, thus concretizing and correcting the doctrinal reference of Orthodox theology to baptism and the church. Many are baptized, but only a few are true Christians. Schleiermacher knew this answer and its religious consequences from his own experience and critically commented on and reworked it in The Christian Faith. But for all his distance to the pietistic distinction between baptized and true Christians, there was no question in his mind that Christians and Christianity really do exist, that they not only once existed, but that they exist here and now. His entire theological program is based on this, and it is precisely this that Kierkegaard questions. He did so in the knowledge of Schleiermacher’s answers. Kierkegaard knew Schleiermacher’s theology, at least he had read the Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers and The Christian Faith carefully. For Emanuel Hirsch, he was even “the only true student of Schleiermacher in his generation.”¹¹⁴ To justify this, Hirsch not only refers to Kierkegaard’s agreement to Schleiermacher’s “elimination of all metaphysical material from dogmatics, the rejection of the  SKS 16, 11 / PV, 23 That the explicit “direct communication” as a “report to history” has a punch line for its part, which makes it an indirect communication, may only be hinted at here: Kierkegaard says ’directly’ from himself what he had communicated ’indirectly’ through the pseudonym of Johannes Climacus and the other pseudonyms. In this way, he rhetorically establishes a situation in which he directly informs his reader about the indirectness of his authorial communications, that is, he makes them explicitly recognizable as indirect. This does not abolish this indirectness, but reinforces it: Kierkegaard’s direct communication does not cancel the indirectness of the communication of (among others) Climacus, but takes over this indirectness for itself. Even Kierkegaard, who writes explicitly directly, breaks the directness of his communication by referring to his indirect point of his writing and transforms it into an indirect communication.  SKS 13, 14 / PV, 8.  Cf. SKS 7, 317 / CUP1, 366: “it is easier to become a Christian if I am not a Christian than to become a Christian if I am one, and this decision is reserved for the person who has been baptized as an infant.”  Emanuel Hirsch, Geschichte der neueren evangelischen Theologie: im Zusammenhang mit den allgemeinen Bewegungen des europäischen Denkens, vols. 1– 5, Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn 41986 [1964]), vol. 5, p. 454.

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proofs of God and the statement that we are objectively absolutely ignorant about God.”¹¹⁵ According to him, Kierkegaard had taken up and developed further “Schleiermacher’s basic idea about the relationship of religion to knowledge, of piety to dogmatic statement” in the most pointed form imaginable “with his proposition that subjectivity is the truth.”¹¹⁶ In Hirsch’s view, Kierkegaard was not only the only true student of Schleiermacher in his generation, he was a Schleiermacher redivivus. Hirsch makes this clear above all with the thesis that subjectivity is the truth. But this, undialectically taken for itself, is not yet Kierkegaard’s actual point at all, but only the position that Johannes Climacus calls ‘religiousness A.’ This is, like the aesthetic and the ethical, a purely human possibility. But the problem that occupied Kierkegaard was precisely how to get beyond it. Climacus knew very well that one cannot exist “Christianly-religiously” without also existing religiously and humanly.¹¹⁷ But how can one exist in a Christian-religious way if there is no seamless transition from the human via the religious to the Christian? People can exist religiously, but even religious people cannot exist Christianly by themselves. Kierkegaard’s central question is therefore not only how to become religious, but how to become Christian-religious. Knowing what it means to be a Christian is not enough. Knowing how to become a Christian is not either: you have to become a Christian. Even the humorist John Climacus, who explicitly declares that he is not a Christian, knows not only what being a Christian means, but also very well what it means to become a Christian: One must not stop at the Socratic formula of religiousness A ‘subjectivity is truth,’ but must put it into a dialectical relation to the Christian formula of religiousness B: “Subjectivity is untruth.”¹¹⁸ But as little as one becomes a Christian by knowing what it means to be a Christian, so little is one a Christian if one knows how to become a Christian. To know what one should be and become is not enough. You must become it yourself. But how can one do that, when one knows that Christian-religious practice is, humanly speaking, an impossible possibility? This is Kierkegaard’s basic problem, and it is not an epistemic one, but an existential question, not a question that can be answered by the development of theological knowledge, but one that can only be answered, if at all, in the de-

 Ibid., p. 453.  Ibid., pp. 453 – 454.  See SKS 7, 210 / CUP1, 249.  SKS 7, 174 / CUP1, 207. Cf. Kersten Lundsgaard-Leth, “‘Subjectivity as Untruth:’ Kierkegaard and the Paradoxality of Subjective Truth,” in Truth and Experience: Between Phenomenology and Hermeneutics, ed. by Dorthe Jørgensen, Gaetano Chiurazzi, Søren Tinning, Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press 2015, pp. 81– 96.

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cisions of personal life. For how do you become a Christian yourself if you cannot become a Christian by yourself? Kierkegaard’s answer is well known: Not on the Socratic path of recollection, by living backwards and becoming what one is, but solely on the path of Christian repetition, by living forwards and being what one becomes. Here, at the latest, the paths of Kierkegaard and Schleiermacher part ways. Schleiermacher’s interest is to describe Christianity theologically, that is, to explain what Christianity consists of and what is involved in being Christian.¹¹⁹ Those who do not know this cannot live consciously and responsibly as Christians. Not without reason is the Augustinian-Anselmian credo ut intelligam the motto of his The Christian Faith. Dogmatics would have nothing to say “unless piety were already present.”¹²⁰ It would also be a fundamental error to think that “piety should consist in knowing,”¹²¹ For then “the best master of Christian faith-doctrine would, at the same time, also unexceptionably be the most pious Christian.”¹²² Moreover, the Christian faith community cannot live and act responsibly without getting theologically to the root of its piety and reflecting on it scientifically in relation to the whole cosmos of knowledge and science of its time. Schleiermacher was

 Kierkegaard saw this fundamental point of difference clearly: “The error in Schleiermacher’s dogmatics is really that for him religiousness is always a condition: it is—he presents everything in the sphere of being. Spinozistically. How it becomes, in the sense of coming into being and in the sense of being preserved, does not rlly concern him.” (SKS 23, 58, NB15:83 / KJN 7, 55). Religiousness as a “Christian category is marked by the ethical in the direction of striving. Hence the fear and trembling and that [“]though shalt[“]; hence also the possibility of offense etc. All such things are of little concern to S[ch]leiermacher. He treats religiosity in being. This actlly is also the source of his principle that feeling is always true. On closer inspection its truth is rlly that it is. The whole battle arises only with becoming. Seen in ‘becoming,’ the question emerges: But then, is that which is—the truth[?] Within being, the truth is that it is. This also explains why S. defines the feeling of absolute dependence as the principle of all religion. For this, too, is a condition, or is religiosity in being. As soon as the question becomes an ethical one, that is, one concerning the becoming of this condition, how it comes into being, what I must do in order that it can come into being, and how it can be preserved or how I can be preserved in it—which also is becoming—then the depiction of religiosity is changed. I believe it could be said that it is precisely in this way that S. has failed Christianity, because he understands it aesthetically-metaphysically merely as a condition, while Christianity, ethically wants to be understood essentially as striving” (ibid., p. 56).  Schleiermacher, On the Glaubenslehre, p. 42; cf. KGA I/10, 320.  Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, vol. 1 and 2, trans. by Terrence N. Tice, Catherine L. Kelsey, Edwina Lawler, ed. by Catherine L. Kelsey and Terrence N. Tice, Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster Press 2016, p. 14.  Ibid.

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convinced that only if one knows what it is and means to be a Christian can one live consciously and in a life-shaping way as a Christian. Kierkegaard on the other hand is convinced that knowing this is neither necessary nor sufficient: One is not a Christian if one knows what being a Christian involves, and one does not have to know this either to become a Christian. The path of knowledge and reflection not only does not lead into Christianity, it does not lead further into Christianity, but it can almost prevent one from becoming a Christian. Those who only want to believe when they know that Christianity is true never come to believe, as Climacus makes clear, because if they knew, they would no longer need to believe, and as long as they do not know, they do not want to believe. On the path of theological reflection, historical science, or philosophical speculation, one does not come one step closer to the truth of Christianity, and this also applies to the cognitive process of Schleiermacher’s dialectics. The truth of Christianity cannot be demonstrated to people, but one can only—and especially also the alleged Christians themselves—“deceive a person into what is true,”¹²³ as Kierkegaard characterizes his own efforts. For it is not a matter of a higher insight, but of a greater simplicity.¹²⁴ The “Christian movement” does not lead from simple-minded faith to profound and comprehensive theological knowledge, but, according to Kierkegaard, proceeds exactly the other way around: “Christianly, one does not proceed from the simple in order then to become interesting, witty, profound, a poet, a philosopher, etc. No, it is just the opposite; here one begins and then becomes more and more simple, arrives at the simple. This, in ‘Christendom,’ is Christianly the movement of reflection; one does not reflect oneself into Christianity but reflects oneself out of something else and becomes more and more simple, a Christian.”¹²⁵

The task is therefore not the theological unfolding of Christianity and its understanding of reality in the horizon of contemporary knowledge and science, for this always presupposes that there are Christians. But it is precisely here that Kierkegaard, quite unlike Schleiermacher, has fundamental doubts. He is thus —to put it pointedly against Hirsch—perhaps the only one in his generation who is certainly not a student of Schleiermacher. Being a Christian could only be described and unfolded if there really were Christians. But exactly this is questionable to Kierkegaard. This is why he sees the more fundamental task in

 SKS 16, 35 / PV, 53.  Ibid.  SKS 13, 13 / PV, 7.

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exploring the becoming of Christians, that is, like Climacus, to show hypothetically what it would be like if there were Christians, and how it is possible to be what one is not and cannot become of oneself but can only become by being what one becomes.

2.2 True Christians The conviction that Christianity had abandoned Christianity was the motivating concern of Kierkegaard for his entire authorship, and it became an ever-increasing certainty in the course of his life. Up and down the country there were people who called themselves Christians. But which of them was really a Christian? Kierkegaard posed this question in an almost penetrating manner. The usual theological references to baptism, church membership, and Christian education were not convincing. And rightly so. At best, this could only explain and justify the difference between non-Christians and Christians, but not between pseudoChristians and true Christians. But this was the question that occupied Kierkegaard. To missionize, to baptize, and to make people members of a church means to integrate them into Christendom. But how do Christians become true Christians; how does one arrive at Christianity in Christendom? Kierkegaard formulates the problem in ever new approaches and variations. One can grow into Christendom or be educated into it. In contrast, as Johannes Climacus emphasizes, there is “no direct and immediate transition to Christianity.”¹²⁶ This applies not only to the unbaptized, but also to the baptized, not only to people who do not belong to the church, but also to church members. It is one thing to be a Christian, another to become a Christian; indeed, one is a true Christian only if one becomes a Christian, by becoming a Christian, and as long as one continues to become a Christian No one is born a Christian, everyone has to become one. But not the result (being a Christian), but the way (becoming a Christian) is the truth, as Climacus emphasizes.¹²⁷ A true Christian is only who is becoming a Christian, and a Christian only becomes who does not cease becoming a Christian. Therefore, one does not first become a Christian from being a nonChristian and then become something as a Christian, but rather one only becomes a Christian at all if one, also as a Christian, incessantly becomes a Christian. Being a Christian therefore means becoming a Christian, and this becoming always takes place in the present. Those who speak of having become a Christian

 SKS 7, 36 / CUP1, 49.  SKS 7, 326 / CUP1, 377.

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in the past tense expose themselves as pseudo-Christians. Where being Christian is not understood and lived as becoming Christian but as its result, appearance takes the place of reality, Christendom takes the place of Christianity, and the certainty of existing takes the place of the objective uncertainty of faith. Just as for Climacus becoming a Christian means existing as an individual in unsecured singularity before God, so being a Christian distinct from this always amounts to settling down in one way or another in the bourgeois comfort of a common Christendom. One is a Christian and neglects to become a Christian. The distinction between being and becoming a Christian has a guiding function in Kierkegaard’s thinking. It throws an illuminating light on important similarities and serious differences between him and Schleiermacher, both philosophically and theologically. I concentrate on two aspects, first on becoming, then on becoming a Christian.

2.3 Being or becoming Becoming is the ontologically fundamental category for Kierkegaard. Other than in the Aristotelian tradition, it is not understood as a change, neither, as in accidental becoming, as a becoming different of something that remains the same in one respect and becomes different in another, nor, as in substantial becoming, as the becoming of another being, in which something numerically different arises from what is. Unlike Schleiermacher, however, it is also not traced back to a being that underlies it and is contained in it or co-posited with it, as whose change in time it can be determined and understood according to the logic of concept and judgment. For Kierkegaard, becoming in the existentially relevant sense is not a different, but a new becoming, not the continuity of the nature or existence of human beings in the change of times, but the discontinuity of the mode of their existence in time:¹²⁸ Human beings, who become in the sense relevant here, do not acquire new qualities, but change in their mode of existence: they go from being individuals to becoming subjects. This becoming, however, is not a process of immanent transitions, as Climacus criticizes Hegel, in which something from one “standpoint on its own necessarily determined its transition over to another power passes over into the other,” because in view of “the existing subject” “the category of transition is itself a break in immanence, is

 It is not what humans are or that they are that changes, but how they are: this is the existential becoming that Kierkegaard is concerned with.

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a leap.”¹²⁹ “Existence without motion is unthinkable,”¹³⁰ to exist means to become, and indeed to become another. Of course, Schleiermacher also knew about becoming, not only about the becoming of knowledge, whose methodology he set out in his lectures on dialectics,¹³¹ but also about the becoming of the world, whose processuality is reflected in the process of knowledge or cognition. Between God, who as a unity without multiplicity does not become but is timeless, and the world, which as a totality of opposites is never entirely present in time but which can always only be approximated, there is a permanent process of becoming. Both exist only correlatively, but both correlates are for opposite reasons no possible objects of our knowledge. The “world is space- and time-filling, the deity space- and timeless,”¹³² therefore no object in the world is without God, but also no object is given to us in the totality of its relations, because we never really have them completely but only in a process of “infinite approximation.”¹³³ All phenomena in the world are therefore understood as processes, in nature (physics) no less than in culture (ethics). But these processes exist only because they are founded in a being different from them, which itself does not become but is. It is “the absolute presupposition of all that is given,” the utterly “unconditioned” which “has to be presupposed as a condition of all that is given and … is the basis of everything else, but which we never have before us as an actual being and given reality”¹³⁴ because it does not appear as such, but only in its effects. This unconditional and infinite being, as Schleiermacher describes it in reference to Spinoza, “has no other essence than existence. Extension and thinking … are its attributes,” it is one, and its what (essence) is nothing other than its that (existence):

 SKS 7, 253 / CUP1, 295.  SKS 7, 264 / CUP1, 308.  See Christian Berner, “Das Werden des Wissens. Zur Aufgabe des Denkens in Schleiermachers Dialektik,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik. Die Liebe zum Wissen in Philosophie und Theologie, ed. by Christine Helmer, Christiane Kranich, Birgit Rehme-Iffert, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2003, pp. 118 – 131; Jan Rohls, “Wahrheit, Dialog und Sprache in Schleiermachers Dialektik,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed by Helmer et al., pp. 181– 206.  Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, vol. 1, ed. by Andreas Arndt, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2002, p. 147.  Ibid., p. 165.  Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, vol. 2, ed. by Andreas Arndt, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2002, pp. 530 – 531. See Hans-Peter Großhans “Denken und Wirklichkeit. Zu den ontologischen Bedingungen von Begriff und Urteil in theologischer Perspektive,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed. by Helmer et al., pp. 162– 178, esp. pp. 170 – 178.

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“It is existence.”¹³⁵ This being is not a being but absolutely unique and truly infinite. It knows no time and no change, it is the transcendent ground of all being and becoming, which as such only exists and is or does nothing else.¹³⁶ All becoming is therefore conditioned by and embedded in a being, which itself does not become and never has become, but simply is. It is the transcendental boundary and real condition of all thinking and knowing. As a boundary concept, it cannot itself be thought either as a possibility or as a reality, but as a real condition of all that is possible and real, nothing can be thought without it. It can no more be thought and known through concepts and judgements than the spaceless and timeless deity or divinity or the space- and time-filling totality of the world. “As the idea of the divinity is the transcendental terminus a quo … so is the idea of the world the transcendental terminus ad quem.”¹³⁷ Both are not possible objects of thought and knowledge. The world is not, because, as the totality of all that is possibly real, it is never fully given (we always recognize only worldly things, but not the world). And God is not, because he is always and everywhere given as an inconceivable unity in and with everything. For this very reason, he can never be discerned and known as such, but can only ever be made conscious as the unthinkable precondition of all thinking and the unfathomable ground of all being and becoming (we can only know that we could not know anything if there were no God). Schleiermacher thus emphatically assumes that we are becoming, but at all decisive points he traces it back to a being that underlies all phenomena as the highest creative and causative force and thus transcends both the organic and the intellectual function of thought into the inconceivable. In relation to the world of becoming, this is the actual being. Although it cannot be thematized for itself and as such, but always only in and with the becoming, it is precisely this that makes it clear that one finds oneself ontologically “in a thoroughly Platonic world.”¹³⁸ This is different with Kierkegaard, and not only because he understands existence as the existence of human subjects and thus as something different from Schleiermacher’s “It is existence.” He concentrates entirely on concrete becom-

 “Es ist Existenz”: Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, “Kurze Darstellung des Spinozistischen Systems,” in Günter Meckenstock (ed.), Jugendschriften 1787 – 1796, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1984; cf. KGA I/1, 572 f. Cf. Christiane Kranich, “Selbstbewusstsein—Nähe zum und Mangel an Sein,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed. by Helmer et. al., pp. 275 – 293, esp. pp. 280 – 284.  Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, vol. 2, pp. 568 – 571.  Schleiermacher, Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, vol. 1, p. 149.  Frederico Vercellone “Bemerkungen über Gott, Welt und Wissen,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed. by Helmer et al., p. 215.

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ing and does not ground it metaphysically in the continuity of a being or transcendentally in an unconditional being that conditions and determines this becoming. Of course, he too knows: “Inasmuch as existence is motion, it holds true that there is indeed a continuity that holds the motion together, because otherwise there is no motion.”¹³⁹ But this continuity is not something on which the motion takes place (a constant substratum of a particular essence) or which makes it possible (an existence that is in some way determined), rather it is what characterizes the motion as motion: that it is in motion, that it is motion in time. “The eternal [that which always and necessarily characterizes every motion] is the continuity of motion,”¹⁴⁰ its continuation in time. The decisive thing, however, is not that it continues, but how it continues: this mode shows the continuity or discontinuity of a motion. For existence this means: Not that one exists, but how one exists, is decisive and must be taken into account. For “the existing of the existing person [that of existence] essentially prevents continuity, whereas passion [the how of existence] is the momentary continuity.”¹⁴¹ Therefore, for those who exist, who are always in the process of becoming, “the goal of motion is decision and repetition.”¹⁴² Not because the same decision would be made again and again in the execution of existence, but because only through decisions an execution of existence takes place. The how that gives continuity to existing is deciding, and the how that gives continuity to deciding is repetition. Without deciding, one does not exist any longer, and without repeating oneself in deciding, one does not continue to exist in the same way. Only by decisions there is an execution of existence, and only by the fact that decisions have the same character again and again, an execution of existence gets a peculiar determination, thus becomes an aesthetic, ethical or religious existence. The continuous, without which there is indeed no motion and no becoming, is thus not to be found in any being that underlies or precedes becoming, but in the mode of the concrete becoming in each case. Only in this way, but also precisely through this, can the forms of aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence be distinguished. But precisely for this reason there are no continuous transitions from the aesthetic to the ethical and further to the religious, but only qualitative leaps into another kind of becoming, another mode of determining existence and thus another kind of existence. One cannot, therefore, “quantify” oneself into a Christian religious existence by moving step by step from another form of human    

SKS 7, 267 / CUP1, 312. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.

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existence to a Christian existence, but one can only become a Christian through a fundamental change of the mode of one’s entire life. It is related to this different version and significance of becoming that Kierkegaard, unlike Schleiermacher, is not primarily concerned with the epistemic problem of how one can know what (something) is, but with the ethical-existential problem of how one can become what one is not (yet). All problems that he considers relevant are not determined by the cognitive distance between subject and object (problems of knowledge), but by the existential distance between how a subject actually exists and how it could or should exist (problems of existence). Not scientific, speculative (metaphysical) and epistemic, but existential (aesthetic, ethical, and religious) problems are accordingly the most important questions for him. “All essential cognition concerns existence,” emphasizes Climacus. “Therefore, only ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essential knowing. But all ethical and ethical-religious knowing is essentially a relating to the existing [the actual existence] the knower.”¹⁴³ Kierkegaard associated this change of problem with Greek philosophy and especially with Socrates.¹⁴⁴ The latter, according to Plato’s account, is said to have turned away disappointedly from the investigation of basic principles in Ionian philosophy of nature and to have taken the “second-best path” to investigating causes, the path of self-knowledge. Kierkegaard saw this turn from the scientific exploration of the world to the philosophical exploration of existence as prefiguring his own efforts, and thus he made Socrates and the Socratic the foil of his own thinking. In Schleiermacher’s work, this function is not assigned to Socrates, but to Plato. This is not only true with respect to his conception of dialectics, which, according to Schleiermacher, did not only comprise a doctrine of the principles of ethics and physics, but also the formal rules of the construction of science and the metaphysical principles of the real, the true, and the good.¹⁴⁵ For Schleiermacher, the harmonious wholeness of Plato’s philosophy is not only the ancient counter-model to the modern “disintegration of the unity of philosophy” but also to the modern fragmentation of life and the world of knowledge in general.¹⁴⁶ Schleiermacher consciously places himself in this tradition and wants to realize Plato’s program, as he understood it, anew under the changed conditions of the modern age.  Ibid., 198.  Cf. ibid., 309: “The Greek philosopher was an existing person, and he did not forget this.”  Cf. Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher, “Notizen zur Dialektik (1811),” in Vorlesungen über die Dialektik, vol. 1, pp. 5 – 30; cf. Rohls, Wahrheit, pp. 182– 185.  Vercellone, Bemerkungen, pp. 207– 208.

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In contrast to Schleiermacher, Kierkegaard, despite his recourse to Socrates, does not belong to the history of Platonism, but rather marks a counterprogram to it. Not the ideas, not the general, not the objective, not unchanging being are the actual reality, in which the changeable particular only participates derivatively and always precariously and endangered, but just the other way round, the concrete, individual, becoming being is the fundamentally real, while the general and objective are nothing but abstractions and possibilities deducted from the real. Here Schleiermacher and Kierkegaard part ways. Both are interested in the concrete, individual real, Schleiermacher, by focusing on individual life phenomena, and Kierkegaard, by concentrating on the individual existence. But unlike Kierkegaard, Schleiermacher remains decisively rooted in the Platonic tradition of conceptualizing becoming as a deficient mode of being and being as a fully defined concept.¹⁴⁷ If one starts out from the conceptual duality of that and what, existence and essence, then the fading out of existence does not seem to represent a loss of knowledge, if everything decisive is to be sought and found on the side of the essence. ¹⁴⁸ According to Kant, existence is not a real predicate, but merely the positing of a what whose determination does not change if it is or is not. In order to understand this what, it seems to suffice “to consider an object independently of its existence in a nature, in the world, in time. Being is always what remains when existence has been subtracted from a thing.”¹⁴⁹ And not only in Husserl one can study how the fading out of existence entails the loss of the world and the loss of God. Schleiermacher does not go that far, but he insists on a critical correlation of speculation and empiricism, what-question and that-question, conceptual determination and what is given by sensory stimuli. The how-question, on the other hand, does not play a special role. Thus, he never focuses on the individual as such, but always asks about the specificity of the individual as a particular within the horizon of a general: Nothing is actual that would not be placed in the horizon of the generally actual in the one world, nothing is possible that would not be the possibility of a generally determinable actual, and nothing

 Manfred Frank saw this and rightly connected it with Schleiermacher’s link to Leibniz: “Identität, Korrespondenz und Urteil. Fragen an Schleiermachers Dialektik,” in Schleiermachers Dialektik, ed. by Helmer et al., pp. 3 – 22, esp. pp. 18 – 20. He also correctly notes that Schleiermacher’s understanding of being rests “on curiously Leibnizian bases” (p. 20). But he overlooks that it is precisely this that owes itself to Schleiermacher’s ‘Platonism,’ which here becomes abundantly clear.  Cf. Hans Blumenberg Zu den Sachen und zurück, ed. by Manfred Sommer, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp 2002, pp. 239 – 274.  Ibid., p. 240. Blumenberg comments on Husserl’s program of phenomenological reduction.

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can become that could not be conceived as a modification of a given being and as a change of determination to another being. Hence, all becoming does not only depend on preceding being (Where nothing is, nothing can become), but results again in being (What is, has become). But precisely because for Schleiermacher nothing is worldly, of which it is not true that it has become and enables others to become and to be, it is not becoming but being that is the guiding ontological basic category in his thought.

2.4 There are Christians—are there? All this has also theological consequences. While the Berlin theologian tries to understand contemporary Christianity theoretically and to educate it practically to a better Christianity with the help of all available scientific knowledge, the Copenhagen writer asks in a completely ’unscientific’ existential interest about being a Christian, namely in view of the present situation of a Christianity which for him is not only not a complete Christianity or one that exists only in rudiments or is still capable of improvement, but strictly speaking does not deserve this predicate at all. Therefore, for Kierkegaard, the problem cannot be solved scientifically by a ‘better’ theology, nor practically by church reform à la Grundtvig, or by liberating of religion from morality, or by ending to the state instrumentalization of the church à la Schleiermacher. The Christianity of real existing Christendom needs improvement in more than one respect. “The matter is far more terrible,” as Kierkegaard noted in 1855, the year of his death. “The Christianity of the New Testament does not exist at all.”¹⁵⁰ It is terrible not only because it does not exist, but because it could be different. It would not be terrible if something that cannot be at all were not. But it is not like that. Kierkegaard does not deny the possibility of Christianity but doubts its present reality. Thus, Johannes Climacus denies for himself to be a Christian, but “concedes it to the others.”¹⁵¹ But if it is possible to be a Christian, if New Testament Christianity once existed, why is it then no longer real or what would have to be the case so that it would become real again? That is Kierkegaard’s question, not Schleiermacher’s. Schleiermacher’s aim is to improve the existing state of Christendom, whereas Kierkegaard does not see anything Christian that could be improved in the present state of Christen Søren Kierkegaard, “A Thesis—Just one Single One” (January 26, 1855; published March 28, 1855), SKS 14, 169 / M, 39 f. Cf. Elmer Daniel Klemke, “Kierkegaard’s Views on Christianity,” in Studies in the Philosophy of Kierkegaard, Dordrecht: Springer 1976, pp.74– 79.  SKS 13, 14 / PV, 8.

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dom. Schleiermacher represents (one could say) a Christian reform program of improving civic or bourgeois religion, which is based on extensively making more and more people into Christians and intensively making them better and better Christians. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, represents a Christian skepticism that appeals to the institution-critical difference of all civic religious forms and reforms and to the infinite existential interest and subjectivity of faith vis-àvis all objective science. The question that moves him is not how more people become Christians and how Christians become better and better Christians, but whether there are still Christians at all. Schleiermacher’s entire theological program assumes that there are Christians. Kierkegaard’s entire religious authorship is driven by the concern that there may no longer be any Christians at all. Both thinkers agree in their appreciation of the Christian faith. Both agree that the Christian faith is something good, indeed the best of all. Above all, however, both meet in the insight that Christian faith is lived faith and therefore is to be sought in the concrete life process (Schleiermacher) or in the concrete human existence (Kierkegaard). But where Schleiermacher confidently states: “It is good that there is faith,” Kierkegaard can only skeptically express the wish “It would be good if there were Christian faith.” Accordingly, their way of addressing Christianity is quite different. While Schleiermacher starts out from the fact that Christian faith exists and theologically explores what must be the case if this reality is to be possible, Climacus does not venture beyond hypothetical considerations such as how faith, assuming it existed, must be if it were really faith. Both therefore explicitly propagate a merely descriptive and non-normative approach to the phenomenon of faith. But whereas Schleiermacher’s descriptions are analytical, that is, assume that Christian faith exists and unfold what it contains and what is entailed by it, Kierkegaard’s descriptions are hypothetical and explore what Christian existence would be like if people existed not only in human or religious terms but in Christian-religious terms. Thus, both follow a very similar explicative method of argumentation. But Schleiermacher begins with being a Christian and asks analytically and explicatively about what is included and presupposed in it (thus argues from the historical reality of Christian life under the determinateness of sin and grace to the creatureliness always already implied therein and to the absolute dependence always presupposed and claimed in it). Kierkegaard, on the other hand, begins with becoming a Christian, which he does not take as reality and think through, but only hypothetically accepts as a possibility, and explores how this possibility could become reality. Both do not say normatively what should be or must be. But while Schleiermacher describes what is the case and to what extent it can

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be the case, Kierkegaard describes what could be the case and what would have to happen for it to be the case. This also characterizes their style of writing. The theologian of life is a thinker of reality who systematically, even if only in fragments, develops the world view of the Christian faith and claims to pursue objective science even in his edifying writings. The existential philosopher, on the other hand, is an explorer of possibilities who, as a real author, imagines himself in the many forms of his pseudonyms and, in this refraction of possibilities, as an ironist and humorist, makes his opinion, which he has expressly declared to be irrelevant, available to his readers in philosophical fragments and unscientific postscripts without any obligation. Because he doubts the factual reality of faith, Kierkegaard cannot pursue scientific or academic theology like Schleiermacher, but as a religious writer must imagine the reality of faith as a possibility. And because this seems somewhat strange in view of the obtrusive empirical reality of Christendom, he can only raise it as a possibility in the indirect manner of the humorist and—of course—the provocateur, who in this rhetorically refined way holds up the mirror to the church and Christendom of his time. On the other hand, Schleiermacher can scientifically explore the preconditions of possibility and the consequences of reality of faith precisely because the reality of faith is not at all questionable to him in view of the reality of the Christian churches, but he obviously reaches his limits with his writing skills, where he tries to imagine the reality of faith in his Monologues in the mode of possibility. The differences between the academic theologian of reality and the writerphilosopher of possibility can be illustrated at every point. Both agree that people become true human beings by becoming Christians, and that the point of being Christian is to be truly human. For Schleiermacher, this means that they become aware of what they are as human beings; for Kierkegaard, on the other hand, it means that they must become something that they are not and cannot become by themselves: concrete human beings. Those who only become what they somehow already are will never become Christians. A Christian is only the one who actually becomes one, even if he cannot become one by himself. Therefore, one cannot ‘quantify’ oneself into Christianity, as Climacus never tires of emphasizing: “one does not reflect oneself into Christianity but reflects oneself out of something else,”¹⁵² especially “when the situation is Christendom where one must reflect oneself out of the appearance of being a Christian.”¹⁵³ People may be brought up Christian, but they can never be brought up to be

 SKS 13, 13 / PV, 7.  SKS 16, 72 / PV, 93.

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Christians. They may grow into Christendom, but they can never be raised to Christianity. “Christianity will not be content to be an evolution within the total category of human nature; an engagement such as that is too little to offer to god.”¹⁵⁴

2.5 Being a Christian: Schleiermacher’s analysis But this is exactly how Schleiermacher saw it, or at least very similar: The Christian is a determination of the human, the Christian church a determination of pious community, Christian piety a determination of piety, piety a “determination of self-consciousness,”¹⁵⁵ that is, a “distinct formation of feeling, or immediate self-consciousness,”¹⁵⁶ and this an “essential feature of human nature,”¹⁵⁷ which together with knowledge and action forms “the very nature of the subject itself.”¹⁵⁸ According to Schleiermacher, human beings are distinguished from all other beings by the fact that they have an ‘immediate self-consciousness’ that precedes and underlies all their knowledge and actions.¹⁵⁹ At the highest level, this immediate self-consciousness is “pious self-consciousness” or the “piety” in which the relationship of human beings to God and the world is expressed.¹⁶⁰ But the “nature of piety is this: that we are conscious of ourselves as absolutely dependent or, which intends the same meaning, as being in relation with God.”¹⁶¹ This dependence, the “not-having-positioned-[oneself‐]as-[a-self],”¹⁶² is the basis of the freedom of human beings in their relationship to the world, with which they are in a reciprocal relationship of determining and being determined. Human life is therefore always a “being and a somehow-having-come-to-be.”¹⁶³ It takes place

 SKS 7, 488 / CUP1, 559.  Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, vol. 1, §3, 18.  Ibid., p. 8.  §6, ibid., p. 38.  §3,3, ibid., p. 13.  Ibid.  §4, ibid., p. 18.  Ibid. Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Glaubenslehre als System christlicher Lebensorientierung. Schleiermachers hermeneutischer Entwurf der Dogmatik” (in print); “Mehr als nur denkbar und anders als alles andere: Der Gottesgedanke bei Kant und Schleiermacher” (in: Kaus Viertbauer / Stefan Lang (eds.), Gott nach Kant?, Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 2022, pp. 230 – 253. ).  Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §4,1, ibid., p. 19.  Ibid.

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as a “receptive and self-initiated active existence,” and in both the reference to a “whence” distinguished from it is always included.¹⁶⁴ This absolute dependence relation, symbolized as a relationship to God, is more closely defined and concretized in Christianity by the relation to Christ. This does not posit a new relationship to God, but rather signals that in relation “to the redemption accomplished through Jesus of Nazareth”¹⁶⁵ the factual “obliviousness as to God” of humans (sin) is overcome by bringing the relationship to God powerfully to consciousness and by re-introducing and establishing the “God-consciousness into the interconnected process of the real elements of life.”¹⁶⁶ Through the “Communion of Life with Christ” the constitutive communion of God with every human being becomes conscious, thus life-determining and so effective in the life process of the individual human being as well as of all humanity that “God’s perfect revelation … corresponds perfectly with the redemption of the human race:”¹⁶⁷ “History of salvation, process of consciousness and world process enter into one another.”¹⁶⁸ This is the horizon in which Schleiermacher also analyses becoming a Christian: It is the process whereby, referring to the “redemption accomplished by Jesus of Nazareth,” one tries to “introduce and establish God-consciousness” in the life of a person who has ignored and forgotten God.¹⁶⁹ The first Schleiermacher calls rebirth, the second sanctification. Both do not form a life-historical sequence as in the ordo salutis tradition and in Pietism, but rather address the same subject from different perspectives. Thus, rebirth focuses on the moment of transition from the old to the new life as a whole, which Schleiermacher depicts with the pair of terms justification and conversion, while from the point of view of sanctification it is a matter of depicting the process of becoming constant in the new life. In the one case the transition (christologically speaking: the unitio), in the other the process (christologically speaking: the unio) is in the center of consideration. In criticizing pietistic conceptions Schleiermacher explicitly does not attach importance to the fixing of a date of conversion. Although for him, too, rebirth is the decisive turning point of individual life, this turning point cannot be fixed, but is something “that repeats itself, so to speak, in

 §4,4, ibid., p. 24.  §11, ibid., p. 79.  §11, 2, ibid., p. 83.  Kurt Nowak, Schleiermacher: Leben, Werk und Wirkung, Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht 2001, p. 278.  Ibid.  Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §11, 2, p. 83.

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every moment.”¹⁷⁰ The distinction between rebirth and sanctification does not denote two different phases of life, but is to be understood relative to different perspectives on the same thing: “every moment of sanctification is also a moment of rebirth” and vice versa, because every moment of sanctification is “a renewed act of union with Christ.”¹⁷¹ “With rebirth and sanctification, therefore, the same saving event of God is expressed, but from different perspectives.”¹⁷² It is not a matter of a temporal succession, but of a “simultaneity,” one time seen as a moment of transition, the other time as a process. Now “every moment,” as Schleiermacher states in anticipating Husserl’s retention and retention analysis, “consists only in the duality of referring to the past and pointing to the future,” and thus cannot be understood without the time horizons of the past and the future. Correspondingly, regeneration cannot be understood either without taking two horizons into account, namely, the end of the individual’s belonging to the total life of sin and the beginning of his belonging to the Christian total life of grace. The same applies to the concepts of justification and conversion, which are also oriented to the perspective of the moment: “Justification is the statement of a changed relationship with God,” which on the one hand (seen as the end of the old time) is described as the forgiveness of sin, and on the other hand (seen as the beginning of the new time) as the “acceptance into the adoption as a child of God.”¹⁷³ Correspondingly, the change from old to new in conversion is expressed by the counterpart of repentance (in view of the old) and faith (in view of the new). And this structural analogy is also continued in repentance, which is carried out in view of its time horizon of the old as repentance and the time horizon of the new as a change of heart. At every point, the relationship with God, which is always presupposed and included, represents the axis, so to speak, on which the transition between moment and process takes place. Regeneration, for example, is the turning point at which “the continuity of the ‘old life’ would have stopped and the ‘new life’ would have begun the process of becoming.”¹⁷⁴ The relationship of influences of the sensual self-consciousness and influences of the God-consciousness on the determination of the moments of life is reversed in the moment of regeneration, in that the hitherto subsequent influence of the God-consciousness be-

 Juliane Müller, Wiedergeburt und Heiligung: Die Bedeutung der Struktur von Zeit für Schleiermachers Rechtfertigungslehre, Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2005, p. 129.  Ibid., pp. 141– 142.  Ibid., p. 165.  Ibid., p. 89.  Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §106, 1.

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comes the preceding one. Thus, regeneration can be thematized not only as a break or turning point, but also under the aspect of continuity. And it is evident that Schleiermacher’s analysis has Kant’s model of the reordering of maxims in mind, according to which the misorientation of ‘radical evil’ is corrected and overcome by granting the categorical imperative of practical reason the authoritative function it is entitled to in the maxims structure of a person:¹⁷⁵ One becomes a Christian by ordering the influences of sensual self-consciousness and God-consciousness on the determination of the life process in a different and correct way. But one does not become a different person through this but corrects a confusion by newly and correctly arranging the ensemble of determining conditions in which one always exists as a human being. Becoming a Christian means becoming properly what one has always been as a human being. The fact that all this is within the horizon of the given destiny of human nature does not mean that one could undertake this reorganization of life oneself and become a Christian by oneself. To this end, the person who ignores God lacks both the insight into his own need for redemption and the ability to redeem himself. It is not by chance that Schleiermacher treats the doctrines of regeneration and sanctification in connection with Christology. It is precisely the soteriological concretization of the relationship with God as the continued work of Christ in “the common spirit of the new collective life founded by Christ”¹⁷⁶ which makes the transition from old to new in regeneration and the perpetuation of the new in sanctification both conditional and possible. From the point of view of justification, regeneration is thus seen “as a human being’s changed relationship to God,” while from the point of view of conversion it is seen “as a changed form of life.”¹⁷⁷ And as sanctification factually presupposes rebirth, so conversion presupposes justification, that is, the activity of God that creates the new. Thus, the point of the solus Deus (solus Christus, sola fide) in Schleiermacher is clearly preserved and brought to bear despite of all mediations with the activities of human life. The differences to the Reformation doctrine are thus at this point “marginal.”¹⁷⁸

 Cf. Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Autonomy and Radical Evil: Kant’s Ethical Transformation of Sin,” The Monist, vol. 105, 2022, pp. 350 – 368.  Ibid. §121.  Ibid. §107.  Müller, Wiedergeburt und Heiligung, p. 168.

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2.6 Becoming a Christian: Kierkegaard’s analysis In relation to Kierkegaard, on the other hand, they are all the greater. With regard to becoming a Christian, Kierkegaard does not emphasize the continuity of the what (essence or nature) of human beings but the discontinuity of the how (mode of existence) in the turn from the existence of the sinner to the existence of the justified sinner. Schleiermacher’s analysis of becoming a Christian is well Reformed. It is oriented to the transformation of Calvin’s sensus divinitatis into the feeling of absolute dependence and relies entirely on the continuity of human God-consciousness in the change from the state of sin to that of grace. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, emphasizes in a good Lutheran way the absolute discontinuity between the existence of the sinner and the justified sinner, between old and new life, between being actually human and becoming a Christian. For him there is a more fundamental difference between Christianity and Christendom than between Christianity and aesthetic or ethical existence. People can exist aesthetically, ethically, or religiously, and between these modes of existence there are no continuous transitions, but only qualitative leaps. But they are all human possibilities of existence, and this distinguishes them from Christian-religious existence. In Christendom, people exist religiously in a conventional way and not Christian as in Christianity. Christian-religious existence is not just further determination of religious existence. There is no direct path from religious existence to Christian-religious existence, even though no one can exist in a Christian way without existing religiously and humanly, as Kierkegaard emphasizes. At first glance, one could confuse this with Schleiermacher’s explicative argumentation from being a Christian to being created, which is always included in it, and to the absolute dependence always presupposed by it. But appearances are deceptive. For Schleiermacher one cannot live only as a creature or merely as absolutely dependent, but these are always only co-present moments in the concrete Christian life, which is determined by the difference between sin and grace. For Kierkegaard, on the other hand, it is quite possible to exist in each of the stages separately. One can exist only aesthetically without also existing ethically; one can exist ethically without also having to exist religiously; and one can exist religiously without existing Christian-religiously. This applies not only to the relations between these different stages in actual reality but also in possibility. People have always had the possibility to exist religiously. But to exist in a Christian-religious way has only become possible since Jesus Christ, that is, since God became really present in history. Kierkegaard’s stages are therefore not to be understood as dependent general abstract elements of the concrete reality of Christian existence, but as different

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concrete forms of human existence.¹⁷⁹ People can only exist aesthetically, or ethically, or religiously. Between this possibility, called religiousness A by Climacus, which characterizes the human being as a human being, and the reality of becoming a Christian, called religiousness B, there is no direct transition, no relationship of more or less, no possibility of a continuous development, but an unbridgeable gulf. A person reaches the religious form of life of religiousness A when they turn ‘inward’ to the general nature of human beings and there find their relationship to the eternal or to God.¹⁸⁰ “Religiousness A can be present in paganism, and in Christianity it can be the religiousness of everyone who is not decidedly Christian, whether baptized or not.”¹⁸¹ Religiousness B, on the other hand, is a form of life that occurs only as contingent edification ‘from without’, in which the relationship to God can thus be found only in and through a relationship of the individual to something outside himself. Therefore, just as religiousness A, according to Climacus, is characterized by the “dialectic of internalization,” so religiousness B is characterized by the external reference to the paradox in history and is therefore also called “paradoxical religiousness” or “religiousness that has the dialectical in second place.”¹⁸² That there is no direct and immediate transition between these two religious forms of existence is, of course, not asserted as a fact by Climacus, but only considered hypothetically: Whether the paradoxical religiousness B even exists is not at all certain. But if it were to be assumed that it does exist, then it cannot be achieved by a continuation of religiousness A and thus on the path of the existential turn ‘inwards.’ But why is it then called ‘religiousness’ at all? What is it that allows or justifies us to define Christian existence as religious existence, that is, to call both religiousness B and religiousness A religiousness? Climacus answers this question by pointing out that religiousness A is about “human existence,” and that religiousness B is ultimately nothing more than a clarification of how one truly exists as a human being. “If people had forgotten what it means to exist religiously, they had probably also forgotten what it means to exist humanly; therefore this would have to be brought out.”¹⁸³ But this is uncovered not by recollecting what one was and is as human being, but by repeat-

 Cf. Deuser, Kierkegaard, p. 153, who speaks of types of situations or forms of life. Cavell, Must we mean what we say, p. 172, rightly interprets them as a ‘form of life’ in the sense of Wittgenstein.  Cf. Ulrich Knappe, Theory and Practice in Kant and Kierkegaard, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2004, pp. 139 – 144.  SKS 7, 486 / CUP1, 557.  SKS 7, 485 / CUP1, 556.  SKS 7, 210 / CUP1, 249.

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ing how one becomes a true human being. This is precisely what paradoxical religiousness B presents: It demonstrates to the eyes and ears how to truly become a human being. The point by which religiousness A and religiousness B can be related to each other is therefore the “human existence” that is at stake in both. But both try to determine this in opposite ways, either backwards through recollection or forwards through repetition. Religiousness A turns inward and seeks to regain the truth that was originally peculiar to human beings on the path of recollection in the turn to the eternal. Religiousness B, on the other hand, does not think in terms of the Greek category of recollection, but proceeds according to the Christian category of repetition, seeking to realize true humanity as the repetition of the reality of the existence of the true human being in one’s own existence. On the path of religiousness A, one seeks backwards to become what one is. On the path of religiousness B, one seeks forwards to be what one becomes. Between becoming what you are and being what you become, the truth about human existence is decided. If by one’s own decision one can get from the aesthetic to the ethical and from the ethical to the religious existence, but not from the religious to the Christian existence, how does one get from the factual existence as a human being to the truly human existence?

2.7 Becoming a subject “Christianity teaches that the way is to become subjective, that is, truly to become a subject,” as Climacus answers.¹⁸⁴ Thus Christianity not only enters into a permanent opposition to science, which teaches that “the subject’s task is to strip away more and more of its subjectivity and become more and more objective.”¹⁸⁵ It underlines above all that to become a Christian is nothing else than truly to become human, “that is, truly to become a subject.”¹⁸⁶ But how does one become this? Not by scientific research and knowledge, nor by a life limited to the aesthetic-sensuous, but by ethical-religious existence: “The ethical is and remains the highest task assigned to every human being.”¹⁸⁷ For the ethical is “not only a knowing; it is also a doing that related to a knowing,” that is, manifests itself as a certain way of existing.¹⁸⁸ One becomes truly human only by living in a certain way, namely by existing ethic-religiously.     

SKS 7, 106 / CUP1, 131. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 7, 124 / CUP1, 151. SKS 7, 132 / CUP1, 160.

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You don’t do that on your own; it’s a task that you must fulfill, but you can miss. One must fulfill it because no human being can escape this task. People can exist ethically or not ethically, but no human being can live as a human being without concretely doing one or the other. Therefore, not only Anti-Climacus understands the ethical and thus duty as the universally human: The “universally human” is “that which every human being, unconditionally every human being, is capable of, that which is not linked to any condition save that which is in everyone’s power, the universally human, that is, the ethical, that which every human being shall and therefore also presumably can do.”¹⁸⁹ Human beings are determined by the task of existing ethically. They should be something they are not on their own or by themselves but become by their own decision. They can be so because they cannot live without making ethical decisions. But these ethical decisions can very well be such that they do not exist ethically, that they do not become what they could and should be. People can fail to become truly human, but only because they could become so, that is, they could be what they should be. This is not only true for every human being, but for every human being during their whole life. Unlike a crocodile, which is what it is and therefore—as far as we know—has no major identity problems, humans are not a fixed being, because they are defined by a task, and this task is set with the fact that humans exist. “Existence is composed of the infinite and the finite; the existing person is infinite and finite.”¹⁹⁰ Therefore, it never is, but is always in the process of becoming, thus concerned with integrating the finite and the infinite concretely. One is human only by becoming so, and one never truly became human, but is human only by becoming so incessantly. This is true for every human being in his own way, and for this reason everyone becomes a subject in his own way or simply misses it: “even though individuals are as innumerable as the sands at the sea, the task of becoming subjective is indeed assigned to every person.”¹⁹¹ This is not only the “highest task assigned to every human being,” but also a “task that can indeed be sufficient for even the longest life, since it has the singular quality that it is not over until life is over.”¹⁹² One never is a subject, one only ever becomes one.

 SKS 12, 229 / PC, 242. See Heiko Schulz, “Du sollst, denn du kannst. Zur Selbstunterscheidung der christlichen Ethik bei Sören Kierkegaard,” in Ethik der Liebe, ed. by Dalferth, pp. 47– 70.  SKS 7, 339 / CUP1, 391.  SKS 7, 131 / CUP1, 159.  SKS 7, 130 / CUP1, 158.

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For this very reason, however, there is a permanent danger that you will not become it or no longer become it. If one is to become a subject, then this does not only mean that one “presumably can do”¹⁹³ this but above all that one doesn’t become it on one’s own. As a human being, one is not inexorably set on the path of becoming a subject but is confronted with an ethical task to become one. If this task were always already fulfilled or if it were inevitably solved positively, it would not be a real task. Nor would it be if it could not be solved at all. Kierkegaard therefore emphasizes both: It is not impossible to live ethically, but it is not readily the case either. If people are to become subjects, this means that they are not so ipso facto, but also that it is not impossible to be so.

2.8 Becoming a true subject But how do you become what you are not, although it would not be impossible? Here comes Kierkegaard’s second and decisive step of the argument. That it is possible to fulfill the ethical task does not mean that people can fulfill it on their own. If that were the case, there would be no need for Christianity. Christianity would not have to teach to become a subject in truth if people would or could become that even without Christianity. But the crucial point is not to know what one should become, but to become it. People should become subjects—that is the ethical task of every human being. In fact, however, they will just not become that and cannot become subjects in truth by themselves—that is the insight into the real situation of every human being. Christianity is therefore not said to teach that one should become a subject, but how one becomes a subject in truth. In truth, however, one does not become a subject by knowing how to become what one should become, but by becoming what one should become, but cannot become by oneself. As answer to the question, how humans can fulfill their ethical task, Christianity is therefore not yet sufficiently understood. It is about the way in which this task is fulfilled. The first thing can be known even by those who are not Christians.¹⁹⁴ The second becomes clear only to the one who lives as a Christian. “That one can know what Christianity is without being a Christian,”¹⁹⁵ is obvious to Kierkegaard: “there is an enormous difference between knowing what Chris SKS 12, 229 / PC, 242.  Kierkegaard is right in emphasizing that the “question about what Christianity is must not be confused with the objective question about the truth of Christianity” (SKS 7, 321 / CUP1, 371), One can know what Christianity is without being a Christian or having to know that it is true.  SKS 7, 322 / CUP1, 372.

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tianity is and being a Christian.”¹⁹⁶ The real difficulty is not to understand what Christianity, but “to become a Christian and to be a Christian.”¹⁹⁷ This is difficult because it requires an “absolute decision,”¹⁹⁸ which not only cannot be made by oneself, but which never lies behind one: “The beginning of the absolute decision in the existence-medium is least of all once and for all, something accomplished, because the existing person is not an abstract X who accomplishes something and then goes further, goes through life, if I may put it this way, undigested; but the existing person becomes concrete in what has been experienced, and as he proceeds he has it with him and can lose it at any moment.”¹⁹⁹

One is a Christian only by becoming a Christian, and one becomes a Christian only by becoming something that one cannot become by oneself. Christianity is therefore, according to Kierkegaard, “not a doctrine, but it expresses an existence-contradiction and is an existence-communication”²⁰⁰—an existence-contradiction, because it is simply incompatible with a person’s nonChristian mode of existence, and can neither be reached out of it nor lived as its continuation and intensification, but only as its departure and overcoming; and an existence-communication, because one must get this mode of existence communicated from elsewhere, if one wants to reach it at all, because one cannot reach it by oneself. Christianity is therefore not simply the solution of the task of existence that is given to human beings. That would be a much too harmless understanding. Christianity solves this task by making existence paradoxical, that is, by clarifying that human beings only become what they should be when they are told what they themselves cannot become: true subjects. Human beings should be subjects, that is, they should exist ethically through their own decisions, and they will only be able to do this through the decisions of others and not through their own decisions. Only who is made a subject becomes a subject, and only who is made a subject in every act of life or existence by foreign decision becomes a subject. Human beings can solve their existential task only by not solving it themselves, but by allowing themselves to be redeemed or liberated from the devious effort to solve it. This is exactly what happens when one becomes a Christian, and that is why Christianity is not the solution of the existential task of human beings, but a communication of existence

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 329 / CUP1, 380. 7, 328 / CUP1, 379. 7, 333 / CUP1, 384. 7, 425 / CUP1, 488 f. 7, 329 / CUP1, 379 f.

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“that makes existing paradoxical, which is why it remains the paradox as long as there is existing.”²⁰¹

2.9 Subjectivity as truth Just as from the point of view of religiosity A, “subjectivity is the truth,”²⁰² so from the point of view of religiosity B, “subjectivity is untruth.”²⁰³ This must not be understood as Climacus immediately makes clear that subjectivity is not the truth. The reasoning expressed in B does not negate subjectivity, but the untruth of subjectivity, and thus does not deny that subjectivity is the truth but emphasizes that it is so only by becoming it, and only becomes so by changing from untruth to truth. Subjectivity is indeed the truth, but it can only become it if one does not exist untrue, but true. What does this mean? That subjectivity is truth does not mean that it is left to subjectivist arbitrariness to decide what one wants to consider true and what not. On the contrary, it says that only that deserves to be called true—in the existential sense—which makes human beings in truth a subject. It is not about the constative (epistemic) truth of knowledge as agreement of thinking and being, of what one knows or thinks to know, with what actually is the case, but about the creative (existential) truth of life as agreement of the one who lives with the way he lives. Not the epistemic correspondence of what and that, but the existential correspondence of who and how is at issue when we ask how human beings become subjects in truth. Not ‘What must be the case for p to be true?’ is the question occupying Kierkegaard, but ‘How must one live in order to become a subject in truth?’ Kierkegaard’s dialectical answer is: By not remaining in the untruth in which one lives. If one calls, with Climacus, “the individual’s untruth sin,”²⁰⁴ and if subjectivity is the truth, then the individual can only truly become a subject by overcoming sin: Only through liberation from sin does the individual become a true subject. Even if this were to be understood only in the tautological sense that ‘to be a sinner’ is not to be a true subject, it would be obvious that the individual cannot free himself from it. No increase of untruth will lead to truth, no intensification of sin will result in its overcoming. There is, as Adorno will say, “no right life in the wrong.”²⁰⁵     

SKS 7, 491 / CUP1, 562. SKS 7, 170 / CUP1, 203. SKS 7, 174 / CUP1, 207. SKS 7, 174 / CUP1, 208. Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 43.

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If it should be possible at all to become free from sin—and this is the great hypothetical ‘if’ or ‘supposing’ on which the whole argument of Climacus rests— then only if one is freed from it. For supposing one becomes a true subject, then only because one does not become one by one’s own decision but by someone else’s decision. This cannot happen in advance or externally but must happen in the concrete execution of a person’s existence. One is not first freed from untruth in order then to exist as subject, but one becomes a true subject by being freed from sin, and one is freed from sin by becoming a true subject. Just as there is no before or after here, there is no time in life when there would be one but not the other: One is subject only by becoming it; one becomes it only by existing not untrue but true; but because one never lives neutrally but always finds oneself in untruth from which one cannot find one’s way out oneself, one becomes a true subject only by being freed from untruth in one’s own decision by the decision of another. If it did not happen in the medium of one’s own decision, it would not be one’s own existence that would become true, and one would not become a subject oneself; if it did not happen through someone else’s decision, one’s own existence would not become true, but would remain entangled in untruth. But if the human being should become a subject because that is his essential ethical task, and if he cannot become it by himself, because he lives in the untruth of sin, then he can only become what he should by another relating to him in such a way that he no longer exists in untruth but in truth. Not in relation to themselves, but only through a certain relation of another to them, human beings therefore turn from being untrue individuals into becoming true subjects. But everyone else would also be in the situation of having to become what they themselves and from themselves cannot become: a true subject. So if one can become that at all, then only through the only other, who is always and exclusively nothing else but subject: God. ²⁰⁶ This other, however, must relate to a human being in the concrete execution of his or her existence in such a way that he or she can become a subject, and this means, conversely, that a human being in the execution of his or her life must be able to relate to something that happens in his or her life in such a way that God thereby relates to him or her as a subject. It would not be enough to postulate and introduce the relationship with God only as a condition of the possibility of human existence. This would establish, if at all, the existence of the sinner no less than that of the justified sinner, but it would fail to make comprehensible how the sinner could become a justified sinner, how a human being could become a true subject. The God-relation must play a concrete role in the execution of existence and not only

 Ibid., p. 199.

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function in principle as an enabling condition of the execution of existence; it must be responsible for the change of the how and not merely for the fact of the that of a human life, if the ‘supposing’ of Climacus’ argument is not to lose its point. There is no objective knowledge of God, that is, no knowledge “that this is the true God,” that does not subjectively mean “that the individual relates himself to a something in such a way that his relation is in truth a God-relation.”²⁰⁷ To truly know God means to relate to something in such a way that it becomes a relation to God because it relates to God’s relating to the one who relates. We can relate to something, but we do not have the power to determine or control the way or the how of our relating, because this is due to the fact that and how God relates to us. An individual’s relating to something does not become a relation to God because he relates to something that is God, but only because of God’s prior relation to the one who so relates and to that to which he so relates. Therefore, the relation to God is never direct, but always indirect, insofar as it relates to something that is there only because God relates to it and can relate to it only because God relates first to the one who relates to God through relating to it. “The direct relationship with God is simply paganism, and only when the break has taken place, only then can there be a true God-relationship.”²⁰⁸ We can directly relate only to that which is present as a present among presents. But God is never so present, but his presence is that without which no other presence would be possible and actual. A relation to God does not exist as a separate or distinct relation alongside relations to others, but it can occur in and with any relation to others or to oneself, because these relations become a relation to God only when God relates in them to those who thus relate to themselves or to others. No human relation to anything is by itself a relation to God, but any human relation can become a relation to God if and insofar as God relates to the one who relates in such a way that his relation is turned into a God-relation. Thus, for Kierkegaard the God-relation is not, as with Schleiermacher, that which is always co-posited and always assumed and presupposed in all we are, experience and do. Rather, God relates to human beings in the living of their lives in such a way that they become true, are freed from sin, and thus become true subjects. God’s relating is always the first, human relating the second. What matters is not whether someone relates to God or not, but that God relates to everyone in such a way that they are enabled to carry out their lives as true

 Ibid.  Ibid., p. 243.

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subjects and singular individuals. This is why, as Climacus puts it, it is “really the God-relationship that makes a human being a human being.”²⁰⁹ This is neither an anthropological nor a transcendental philosophical thesis, that is, it neither says that humans qua humans have a relationship to God, nor that the relationship to God is the condition for the possibility that humans exist. Rather, it must be read as a version of Luther’s definition of the human being as homo iustificatur fide: A human being is one who becomes a true human being (a singular individual) in the course of his life because God relates to him or her in such a way that they can become one. It is not what human being are that changes, but how they are what they are. A human being becomes a subject because God relates to them as a subject. This becoming a subject is not an abstract possibility but takes place concretely in the life process of a human being or is missed there, and therefore God’s relation to the human being as a subject is to be looked for concretely in the execution of human existence in living one’s life and is not only its founding and enabling condition. It is not true that all people are the same, on the contrary, we are all different from each other. But we have an obligation to treat all people equally, that is, not to treat them as human beings differently and other than ourselves. It is also not the case that all people are subjects, but God relates to all people as a subject, so that they can become subjects. One may agree with Adorno: “With many people it is already an impertinence when they say ‘I’.”²¹⁰ But one can also insist with Climacus that every person should be able to say this without restriction, because God says “you” to each and every one.

2.10 Absolute decision According to Kierkegaard, humans become subjects in truth by making an absolute decision for the decision of the Absolute just for them. This decision is absolute because it does not take place within the horizon of a person’s previous decisions in life but opens a new horizon of life and thus distinguishes the old one from it. An absolute decision cannot be made by humans on their own because that could always only mean that they decide for a possibility in their own life horizon. If an absolute decision is to be possible at all, something must be played into human life and communicated to humans from elsewhere, which opens a new horizon of life for them. In the horizon of the old life, how-

 Ibid., p. 244.  Ibid., p. 55.

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ever, the horizon of the new life cannot even be a possibility, but only an impossible possibility, a paradox. In the absolute decision, therefore, human beings do not refer to the epitome of the possible, which is set with their actual life, but to the impossible possibility, which cannot be discovered in their actual life, but only by changing it to a new actual life: There is an absolute decision only if human beings do not remain as they are, but become a new human being, a true subject. But if this becoming occurs at all, then it never lies in the past, but always takes place in the present. One is only a new person by becoming new; one becomes new only by appropriating in the present God’s absolute decision for oneself in an absolute decision for God’s decision, that is, by becoming the one to whom God’s decision makes one: a subject in truth. Therefore, a subject in truth is the individual only as the single because the individual is not single in relation to other people (there we are always only one among others), but only in relation to God (there we are exactly those to whom God relates in such a way that he distinguishes each of us from all others). God makes humans individual subjects by relating to them as subjects and enabling them to relate to his relating as subjects. God relates to each one in an absolutely individualizing way. But each one relates to God in their own way, and can only do so themselves, and thus as a single individual. This is the eternal good that “Christianity wants to give to the single individual,” and it is “a good that is not distributed in bulk but only to one, and to one at a time.”²¹¹ Because it is a matter of giving “the single individual an eternal happiness,”²¹² the “course of development of the religious subject has the peculiar quality that the pathway comes into existence for the single individual and closes up behind him.”²¹³ Correspondingly, a human being becomes a single individual or true subject by appropriating this relation of God precisely to him in the course of his life or existence: By existing as the one to whom God relates, he becomes what he is through God’s relating. Accordingly, a human being becomes a single individual or a true subject by appropriating God’s individualizing attitude towards him in the course of his life or existence: By existing in the way in which God relates to him, he becomes what he is through God’s relationship to him. God, therefore, is always the Other through whom a person becomes an individual. On the one hand, God “can never become a third party,”²¹⁴ that is, an-

   

SKS 7, 105 / CUP1, 130. Ibid. SKS 7, 51 / CUP1, 67. SKS 7, 50 / CUP1, 66.

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other like any other, or “permit … a direct relationship,”²¹⁵ that is, be the same for different people from a general point of view, because each person is and becomes a single individual only because God is his Other. On the other hand, God becomes just that only in the concrete life history and historical existence of a human being. A person comes to himself by discovering himself in his inner being as a relation to the eternal. Through this, however, he discovers only what each person is, not what he is as a singular individual. He becomes a single individual only by relating to that unique Other who is only and exclusively subject and never ‘object’ or ‘third party’ and who precisely makes him the individual he becomes in his life history by relating to him as subject and thus making him a subject: “God does not think, he creates.”²¹⁶ This divine creation becomes concrete in the execution of life as ‘existencecontradiction’ and ‘existence-communication’—as a contradiction against the existence of human beings in untruth and as a communication of the ability to exist in truth. Therefore, becoming a subject always takes place in the present, but in every present in view of the past as leaving the common order of sin and in view of the future as appropriating the truth that has been played out to all. On the one hand, therefore, sin “is the crucial point of departure for the religious existence, is not a factor within something else, within another order of things, but is itself the beginning of the religious order of things.”²¹⁷ It is what one leaves behind at every moment when one becomes a subject by choosing what is never possible in the order of sin, but is communicated and supplied from God as a possibility of existence in a new and different order. On the other hand, it is also true: “existence-actuality cannot be communicated,”²¹⁸ but a corresponding possibility becomes actual only by being realized in the execution of existence of human beings in their own decisions. Kierkegaard calls the decision for this possibility ‘appropriation’ and ‘absolute decision.’ It is not appropriation in the sense that something that is seen as true is accepted and taken over by someone. It is appropriation rather in the radical sense that what is appropriated only becomes true through being appropriated: The subjective appropriation is the truth, not the truth is subjectively appropriated. It is not a matter of recognizing and therefore accepting the objective truth of Christianity. This is exactly how the “inquiring, speculating, knowing subject” proceeds, but it is interested precisely only in truth, and not

   

SKS SKS SKS SKS

7, 7, 7, 7,

206 / CUP1, 245. 287 / CUP1, 332. 227 / CUP1, 268. 310 / CUP1, 358.

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in its relationship to it:²¹⁹ the cognitive subject decides here on truth, but this does not change the how of her existence. Appropriation, however, is not about what is appropriated, but about how the one who appropriates is changed by it. And only that appropriation by which the appropriator becomes a true subject is subjective appropriation—not the arbitrary adoption of anything, whether it is true or not. The whole point of the thesis of the subjectivity of truth is that it is a truth that makes the subject a subject in truth: one is not subject and decides according to one’s own arbitrariness or insight whether one can or does not accept or want this truth, but by appropriating it one becomes a subject in truth— namely, the single individual coram deo. And only that which makes one so through appropriation is true. In appropriation, therefore, one does not remain as one is, but becomes another. There comes a “development or remaking of the subjectivity” that helps a person to his true subjectivity; and “the truth of Christianity, if it is at all, is only in this; objectively, it is not at all.”²²⁰ Precisely for this reason Climacus also speaks of absolute decision. It is absolute because it is not a decision within an existing order of existence, but for a new order of existence: one does not continue to exist in the same order differently, but one begins to exist as a new subject in another order, which was not an option in the old order of life and existence. Because existence is always in the process of becoming, there is never a past tense for this beginning of a new life: one has never become a subject and now exists as such, but only by becoming a subject does one exist as a subject. One is it only by becoming it, and one is not it anymore if one thinks to have become it. The appropriation emphasized by Kierkegaard is thus not an acceptance by a human being of a given and previously recognized truth (then he would already be subject and would not become so through the appropriation), but in and through the appropriation, the human being becomes subject: it is not the human subject that appropriates something, but the appropriation that makes a human being a subject. This appropriation takes place concretely as an absolute decision, in which a person does not decide for what he knows to be true or probable, or considers plausible or certain, but in which he risks himself completely, “by absolutely venturing everything”²²¹ without reservation, and decides, precisely for that which is not certain, improbable, unbelievable, absurd in his life’s horizon, that God relates precisely to him as subject: Appropriation is an

 SKS 7, 11 / CUP1, 21.  SKS 7, 105 / CUP1, 130.  SKS 7, 371 / CUP1, 427.

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absolute self-risking, without which one does not become a subject in truth. And an absolute decision is a decision for the preceding decision of the Absolute for the human being concerned, which breaks the familiar human order of life and leads into a new order of life. A human being decides for the decision of the Absolute for him for no reason, without any epistemic certainty, existential certainty, or certainty of existence, in the free fall a total self-risking so to speak.

2.11 The paradox That there really is a decision of the Absolute for us, can in no way be made plausible or proven to third parties as true or probable. But Climacus does not stop at this negative statement but tries to positively address the risk and describe it as a risk of a certain kind—and that is where the problems begin. Those who decide to orient and reorient their lives to the decision of the Absolute are aligning their lives with what is said to be an absolute paradox—the paradox that the eternal God became truly present in the existence of a particular person at a particular point in time. “The object of faith, then, is the actuality of the god in existence, that is, as a particular individual, that is, that the god has existed as an individual human being.”²²² Christian faith believes this paradox of God’s presence in time (the real presence of the eternal in time) as reality, and according to Climacus it is precisely this that must be appropriated in absolute decision. Of course, as Climacus never tires of pointing out, one cannot do this by recognizing it as true and therefore accepting it, because given its nature as a paradox it cannot even be thought of as possible and recognized as actual and true. This can only be done by living as those do who believe in it, that is, by existing in a strict analogy of faith. True faith is always lived faith, and the truth of faith can only be assured against all probable knowledge and critical thinking if one lives as one would do if it were true. This means nothing else than that one does not take the way of recollection but of repetition. One does not remember the hypothetical truth of this impossible possibility but repeats it in one’s own existence by living in such a way that one completely and permanently surrenders oneself to the decision of the Absolute for oneself and lives out of it. Only in this way does one become a true subject—not because one has become it at some point or could have become it, but because one is it only by becoming it.

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 326.

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But how is that possible? How can one actually live, through repetition, that which is impossible to think because it is absurd? Can one repeat what is absurd? Or can it be absurd if one can repeat it? That one relates to the eternal in time is comprehensible and characterizes the human possibility of religious existence in the sense of religiousness A. But to relate “in time … to the eternal in time,”²²³ as it characterizes religiousness B, makes existence paradoxical: To relate in time to the eternal is one thing; to relate in time to the eternal in time is quite another. The second presupposes an unthinkable contradiction: that the eternal, which is the absolute opposition to temporal existence, has become actual in a certain temporal existence by becoming “present at a specific moment in time.”²²⁴ To exist in relation to this “makes existing the absolute contradiction—not within immanence but in opposition to immanence.”²²⁵ One does not relate in time to the eternal (that would be an immanent possibility of human existence), but to the real presence of the eternal “at a specific point” in the temporal, “and this is the break with immanence.”²²⁶ A contradiction, then, is not the Christian mode of existence (otherwise no one could become a Christian and live as a Christian), but that to which it refers in the determination of existence: the concrete presence of the eternal at a certain place in time. Is this contradiction as irresolvable, inconceivable, and thus unthinkable as Kierkegaard suggests? One way to make it conceivable would be the process-philosophical attempt to think of God as eternal in one respect, and temporal in another. Attempts of this kind were familiar to Kierkegaard from Schelling. But he does not allow this possibility, insisting that God is eternal and temporal in the same respect. This is absurd and a logical contradiction if one defines the eternal and temporal with Kierkegaard in such a way that the eternal is not temporal, and the temporal is not eternal. The absurdity is precisely that the eternal truth became actual in time, and because it is indissolubly related to this absurdity, religiousness B can only exist as paradoxical religiousness. But there is also a second way to avoid the absurdity. According to Kierkegaard, the paradox arises from the fact that Jesus, as “the individual, who was not eternal, now becomes eternal,”²²⁷ that this temporally existing one becomes the eternal God. “What is inaccessible to all thinking is: that one can become eternal although one was not eternal.”²²⁸ “The paradox is primarily that God,

     

SKS 7, 497 / CUP1, 570. SKS 7, 498 / CUP1, 571. SKS 7, 499 / CUP1, 573. SKS 7, 498 / CUP1, 571. SKS 7, 500 / CUP1, 573. Ibid.

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the eternal, has entered into time as an individual human being.”²²⁹ But this becomes a paradox of the simultaneity of the eternal and the temporal in time only because of a striking trinitarian deficit of Kierkegaard’s argumentation: With good reason the tradition insisted that not God, but God’s Son became human. Kierkegaard, however, works himself to exhaustion on a problem that owes itself to the theologically inadequate version in which he poses it: Jesus is not God, but the Son of God. The eternal is not really in a certain place in time, but in a certain place in time it becomes clear who and what the eternal really is. Despite the reticence he shared toward the doctrine of the Trinity, Schleiermacher was more precise and clear-sighted here. “As divine revelation, the appearance of the Redeemer in history is neither something absolutely supernatural nor something absolutely superrational.”²³⁰ There is no reason to assume a paradoxical simultaneity of a contrast, intensified to a contradiction, between the natural and the supernatural, reason and over-reason, temporal and eternal, in order to take the reality of Christian revelation seriously. It is not necessary to adopt Schleiermacher’s interpretation that there is no paradoxical contradiction, if only because with Jesus “reason would be entirely at one with the divine Spirit,” so that “the divine Spirit could itself be conceived of as the greatest height to be reached by human reason.”²³¹ In rejecting this problematic blurring of the difference between the human and the divine, one does not have to operate like Kierkegaard with an understanding of the doctrine of two natures that increases the difference of both natures to an irreconcilable contradiction and fixes it on the paradoxical simultaneity of the eternal and the temporal in time. This falls behind the Trinitarian and Christological attempts of clarification in the tradition and is dogmatically wrong: Jesus is not God but the place of God’s revelation through God the Son. He is the place where it becomes clear and recognizable for us who and what God really is for us, not only by the fact that Jesus as a human being reveals this to us and we have to believe it, but by the fact, as Logos Christology has made clear, that God the Son himself in Jesus and through his Spirit has revealed God to us as a good Father and God for us and continues to do so. The “object of faith” is precisely not “that the god has existed as an individual human being,”²³² but the object of faith is God as he reveals himself to us as God for us in a very specific relationship (God the Son) to a specific human being (Jesus). Only because it is always direct   

SKS 7, 520 / CUP1, 596. Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, §13; p. 93. Ibid., §13,2, p. 98. SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 326.

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ed to this present and not to a past, Christian existence can be repeated again and again in faith: it takes place in every present in such a way that it is directed to God’s presence, as he has determined and revealed himself as God for us in Jesus. One does not become a Christian by believing, against all reason, in “the fact that the god has existed,”²³³ but by being oriented toward and opened to God’s presence through God’s presence.

2.12 Absolute presence and inwardness God’s presence is not one of the presences we encounter in our lives in the world. There would be no life and no world without God’s presence. God is present to every presence that occurs. We are therefore related to his presence differently than to the presence of the present, which comes and goes and could not occur without God’s presence. Kierkegaard describes our relationship to the multiplicity of the ever-changing present under the heading of outwardness, and our relationship to the always co-present of what is present to every present under the heading of inwardness. Outwardness and inwardness are both relations to reality, but they cannot be reduced to each other or to something third. Without inwardness there is no outwardness, and vice versa. But while the correlate of outwardness is the ever-changing external world, the correlate of inwardness is the unchanging absolute presence of God. By distinguishing outwardness and inwardness in this way, Kierkegaard locates human beings in two different relationships to reality, which can be distinguished but not separated. On the one hand, human beings are something worldly (finite) among the worldly (finite). On the other hand, they are something created (finite) in relation to the Creator (infinite). We must consider both kinds of distinctions if we want to understand the reality of human existence. There are two points to keep in mind. First, the difference between inwardness and outwardness must be understood against the background of the distinction between finitude and infinity, otherwise it becomes only a case of the functional distinction between inside and outside. Secondly, the difference between the finite and the infinite must not be understood in such a way that the infinite is the negation of the finite (negative infinity), but the infinite is the very reason that the finite exists at all (positive infinity). Without the infinite nothing finite, and without the finite no distinction between inwardness and outwardness.

 Ibid.

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Kierkegaard does not work that out with the necessary clarity. His reconstruction is problematic in two respects. On the one hand, he calls the relation of a person to the actual world outward or external, the relation to the divine or infinite inward or internal, thus provoking the misunderstanding that inwardness is merely the internal operations of understanding, will, feeling, and imagination (inner life), which are fundamentally different from the relations to the external world in action and reception (life in the world). On the other hand, he tries to counteract this in the case of Christianity by distinguishing between two relations to reality in the case of the Christian faith, the historical relation to the past reality of Jesus (recollection) and the existential relation to the presence of the infinite in Jesus and the believer (repetition). Jesus Christ is the paradoxical historical reality in which the infinite became present in the finite in such a way that, by relating to this historical reality, we can come into a real relationship with the presence of the infinite revealed there. Christianity thus becomes the proof of the reality and actuality of the relation to God. The relation to the infinite and eternal in the inwardness of every human being is not ’merely’ inward and imaginary, but real precisely because in Christianity we encounter it as the reality that constitutes the historical reality not merely of Jesus (finite reality) but of the presence of the infinite to this finite reality (Christ). The fact that Christianity exists allows us to reject the skeptical objection that the relation to God is ‘only internal’, imaginary and not real. However, this proof cannot be given theoretically, because Christianity itself is accessible only as a paradoxical reality, which proves to be real only by determining concrete life in such a way that the relation to the infinite in inwardness becomes transparent as a relation to reality. Kierkegaard’s whole construction would have gained considerably in clarity, if he had not couched it in terms the misleading alternative of inwardness and outwardness combined with the asymmetry that outwardness relations are distinguished from inwardness relations as reality relations and thus are decisive for determining what is to count as real. The consequence is that the real paradox in history becomes the criterion of the reality of the God-relationship—and with it the skeptical suspicion is not eliminated, but even intensified. If one wants to avoid this, one must not appeal to inwardness to distinguish the God-relationship from the world-relationship but must understand both relationships from beginning to end as real external relationships. Human beings with all their inner and outer relations live constitutively in two publics: coram mundo and coram deo. These are related to each other in such a way that each can become thematic in the other, the world coram deo as creation, God coram mundo as the idea of the one, without whom there would be neither human beings nor the world and thus neither anything real nor anything possible, and who coram mundo

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can therefore only be determined as the idea of the one who as one and the same is the quo maius cogitari nequit and at the same time the maius est quam cogitari possit. Just as the world before God is creation, so God in the world can only become thematic as the limiting thought of the one to whom all actuality and possibility of the world is due and who therefore is to be determined, with Kierkegaard, as the “actuality of the possible.”²³⁴

2.13 The absolute paradox This explains why Kierkegaard puts the absolute paradox so emphatically at the center of his analysis of becoming a Christian. First, it is his answer to the question of how one can be certain that one is dealing with God and not with something else in a certain experience. It cannot be known precisely because everything that can be known is something possible, and everything that can be experienced is something more or less probable. What is experienced in the world and in history is always something possible and probable and precisely therefore something other than God. Conversely, however, God can then be, if at all, only that which is encountered as not possible, not probable, absurd, something that does not appear as a worldly and historical reality, but always only as distinct from such a reality. God cannot be experienced, otherwise he would be something worldly. But, if ‘God’ were merely a sign of something that cannot be experienced, then it would designate nothing with which one could have a real relationship. For us, therefore, God can be reality only insofar as he is that which is distinct from all that can be experienced, but in such a way that everything experienceable cannot be without God, whereas God can very well be without the experienceable. Therefore, to make clear how and what God is, one must make clear what God is not,²³⁵ but also that nothing is or can be without God. This cannot be shown if there is no cause and reason in the experiential to speak of God at all. Therefore, Kierkegaard argues that in the actual world (in history) there must be something by which the actuality of that which is non-actual in the world (God) is disclosed and mediated; and this he calls the absolute paradox. According to him, the relationship to the creative actuality of God, which is fundamentally different from us and from everything else, can only  SKS 17, 42 / KJN 1, 35.  In this sense, Kierkegaard is indeed advocating a negative or apophatic theology. Cf. David R. Law, Kierkegaard as Negative Theologian, Oxford: Oxford University Press 1993, esp. pp. 162– 170.

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have the character of a relationship to a worldly (historical) reality other than myself, in, with, and through which God relates to me. If it were not a relationship to a historical reality in my world, it would not be a real relationship, and if it were not a historical fact constituted by the difference of God from it as that through which God relates to me, it would not be a real relationship to God. Both together constitute what Kierkegaard calls the absolute paradox in history. His emphatic talk of the absolute paradox thus serves centrally to preserve the difference between God and the world in the description of the reality relations of human beings. On the other hand, his talk of the absolute paradox has a provocative didactic point. As Kierkegaard emphasizes again and again, he wants to make what is actually quite simple as difficult as possible. In order to criticize the frivolity of being a Christian in contemporary Christendom, he underlines as emphatically as possible how difficult, risky, unsettling, and dislocating it is to become a Christian. One doesn’t just have to give up some superficial comforts and familiar behaviors but change one’s whole life. Becoming a Christian is not a mere intellectual problem, but an existential challenge and re-orientation. One cannot expect to be able to secure and ‘justify’ this radical change in one’s mode of existence by reason, argument, or evidence to oneself or to others. It is absolutely groundless, not only because it has no rational reason, but because it consists in the appropriation of a real paradox, which is not conceivable as such at all and whose appropriation can therefore not be justified by knowledge, reason, and reflection. One can only live or exist in this way, but one cannot secure or justify one’s decision and mode of existence in a theoretical way by offering reasonable reasons for it. In this sense, the recourse to the absolute paradox has an important rhetorical function: It underlines the impossibility of backing up the existential decision to become a Christian with theoretical reasons, of rationally justifying the change of one’s mode of existence, or of making it argumentatively plausible on the basis of actual life shared with others. Thirdly, Kierkegaard gives the absolute paradox a specific theological content by using it as a short formula for the central conviction of the Christian faith “that the god has existed as an individual human being.”²³⁶ With this theological version of the absolute paradox, however, Kierkegaard remains uncritically attached to the doctrinal conception that he criticizes existentially. He pleads with all the literary and rhetorical emphasis available to him that becoming a Christian is not an epistemic, but an existential theme, that one must see it

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 326.

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not as a problem of doctrine, but as a challenge to life. But with the change from the epistemic to the ethical and existential, he remains completely within the horizon of human life and thus theologically does not go far enough. He rightly says: One does not become a Christian through knowledge, but through faith, and faith is always lived faith, i. e., not the theoretical attitude of an objectively insufficient hypothesis or assumption, but an actual realization of existence based on an absolute risk. But this mode of existence and practice of faith is not presented as a human possibility and human option. It is a possibility and reality that is impossible and inaccessible to us humans, and that is only made available and accessible to us from elsewhere. Exactly this would have required to go beyond the classical anthropological horizon of traditional Christology and soteriology even more decisively than Kierkegaard does and to shift the focus not only from theoretical knowledge to the practical existence of human beings, but to move on to the divine origin and impetus for this change of mode of existence, i. e., to shift everything from human beings to God. God relates to us—that is the basis of becoming and existing as a Christian, and because God relates and is not only said to relate, one can only truly correspond to God’s relating existentially and ethically through actual living and becoming, but not epistemically and cognitively through talking and reflecting about how to live one’s life. The crucial thing is not to think and talk rightly about God, but to live rightly in the presence of God. This does not mean that Kierkegaard did not speak of God, on the contrary. But God is for him a reality that is never really questioned or seriously doubted, but at best a cause for annoyance.²³⁷ He speaks of God in a way that blends remarkably smoothly with the traditional doctrinal structure of theology. Kierkegaard’s whole problem results from a basic aporia of traditional incarnational Christology, which he took at its word and carried to an extreme. For good soteriological reasons, the Christological dogma sought to think of God’s real presence with human beings in a very concrete way by thinking of it as a real, undivided, and unmixed simultaneous presence of God and humanity in the GodMan Jesus Christ. But how can God be completely close to us if he is completely close to Jesus, how can God’s real presence with Jesus be his saving presence with us? The more concretely God’s saving presence was tied to the particular person of Jesus, the more distant it seemed to become to all other people. The dogmatic tradition has essentially given a twofold answer to this. On the one hand, it referred to our common human nature with Jesus, on the other

 According to Hirsch, Geschichte, p. 488, Kierkegaard never “succeeded in ever seeing Christianity with the eye of the genuine, unbiased doubter.” (my translation)

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hand, it emphasized Jesus’ real communion with God. God’s real presence in Jesus is our salvation because Jesus is human like us (anthropological answer) and because he is included in such a community with God that wherever God is, Jesus is also (theological answer). Thus, we participate in God’s presence in Jesus through our common humanity, and Jesus participates in God’s presence with us through his unique fellowship with God. Because God is really present in Jesus, God is present to all people as human beings, whether they know or want to know this or not. And because Jesus is really present to God, he is together with God present to each human being, so that each one can know God’s saving presence in his or her life and actually gets to know it through the work of the common Spirit of God and Christ. Through God’s real presence in the God-Man, every person is saved because God is present to everyone as he was present to Jesus. God is present to all people as the Spirit, and since it is the common Spirit of God and Christ, the presence of the Spirit makes the God-Man truly present to all people so that they can become aware and certain of their salvation through God’s presence. Both answers are based on each other, both assume a certain relationship between God, Jesus, and us, but both determine this relationship differently. The anthropological answer sees the commonality between Jesus and us in the commonality of being human, while the difference is seen in God’s special relationship to Jesus: Jesus is a human being like us, but only he is God-Man, we are not. The theological answer, on the other hand, sees the common ground between Jesus and us in the saving presence of God, the difference in the singular being of Jesus: We are all different human beings from Jesus, but God is present to him and to us as saving creator and creative savior. Jesus existed his humanity in an unmistakably singular way, and each one of us does the same. But God is just as real and savingly present to us as he is to him, and we know this because Jesus, for our sake, is taken into such an immediate community of God that God cannot be present to us without Jesus being present to us. Both answers raise obvious problems: The first operates with an abstract conception of the nature of human beings, the second underestimates the theological weight of the historical existence of Jesus. Thus, the anthropological answer in the Platonic-Aristotelian tradition presupposes a difference that Schleiermacher, but not Kierkegaard, shares: the real difference between human nature (humanity) and the individual human being, between the species and the individual, between generic consciousness and individual self-consciousness: God’s closeness with Jesus is his closeness with us, because God is thus close to the humanity that we also share, and this is made accessible to us as individuals by God’s Spirit opening our eyes to God’s real presence in our humanity. God is close to all people qua people, even if not (yet) everyone is aware of it.

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If, like Kierkegaard, one determines the ethically relevant common ground of human beings not as a common what, but as the same ought, not as common humanity, but as the shared duty to become subject in truth, then it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to think of God’s presence to Jesus as presence to us as human beings. The traditional anthropological answer can then at best be reformulated in such a way that what is the same ethical task for Jesus and us (namely to become a subject in truth) was realized by Jesus but is to be realized by us and—as Jesus shows—can also be realized by us: What humans should become, they can become, as the God-Man Jesus proves. Jesus thus becomes an example and exemplar of the fact that we can become what we ought to become. The same applies to Kierkegaard’s reception of the theological response. Especially in the Lutheran tradition, this had led to thinking God’s real presence with us as the presence also of the human Jesus because of the real community of God with Jesus: There is no real presence of God with us that would not be the presence of the God-Man. This view of Luther, which was propagated above all in the debates on the Lord’s Supper, became problematic, however, to the extent that the historical then and there of the life of Jesus gained theological weight in comparison to the present here and now of the sacramentally present Christ: The more historical Jesus was thought, the ‘nastier’ became the gulf between the historical reality of the real life of Jesus in the past and the dogmatic real presence of the God-Man for today’s faith. Kierkegaard radicalizes this line of tradition in several ways. On the one hand, he understands the existence of the God-Man quite historically: In Jesus “the god has existed as an individual human being.”²³⁸ On the other hand and in contrast to the Lutheran tradition, he does not dogmatically advocate a finitum capax infiniti, but an irreconcilable opposition between infinity and finitude, eternity and temporality. Jesus too was, like every existing human being, “composed of the infinite and the finite,”²³⁹ unmixed and undivided, a living paradox. From the point of view of ethical existence, Kierkegaard can only think of individuals, even the God-Man existed in his historical reality as a single individual. However, there is no common “human nature” that unites the individuals in an ethically relevant respect because everyone must become a responsible subject in his or her own history of existence and life. This applies in an even more pointed way to the development of the true self beyond all human possibilities, because each one must realize for themselves and in their lives the change from the old to the new way of existing before God. The soteriological

 SKS 7, 281 / CUP1, 326.  SKS 7, 339 / CUP1, 391.

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relationship between the God-Man, who existed as an individual at that time, and the believers in the present, who exist as individuals today, can therefore only be determined as a real repetition: What became real then and there, in the individual existence of the God-Man, must also become real here and now, in the individual existence of the believers. Not by making present again per impossibile the God-Man of that time here and now: then only he would be present as an individual, and not we would become true individuals. Nor by per possibile referring back to the past life of the God-Man, either remembering or imitating it: then we would only act epistemically or morally as human individuals, but not become true selves, because we would only realize a human possibility and would not have changed to a new way of existing. In order for what was real with Jesus to become real with us, Jesus does not have to become present to us and we do not have to recall the past history of the God-Man and try to realize something similar in our lives ethically. This will only become real if God relates to us here and now in the same way as he related to Jesus there and then: if he also decides for us as subjects, so that we, in absolute decision for this decision of the Absolute, change from the way of our old life to the way of a new life with and before God and thus become true selves from human beings. But if we put everything on God’s conduct towards us, then the decisive analogy of faith, which Kierkegaard describes with the category of repetition, is not to repeat the paradox of the God-Man in the past in the unsecured paradoxical existence of faith today, but to put everything on God’s conduct towards us in our present, as Jesus did then. Kierkegaard’s paradox results from his existential interpretation of the realistically understood incarnational Christology and two-nature doctrine. But this does not describe the reality of the God-Man but confesses God’s real presence with the singular human being Jesus. The category of the God-Man is not a description, but a confession; it does not describe the paradoxical reality of the eternal that has become historical in this singular individual, but confesses the historical reality of Jesus as the place where God discloses his salvific commitment to all people, not only to the individual person of Jesus. But if this is what the story of Jesus reveals, then it is not necessary to repeat an ethical paradox in real terms in order not to squander the soteriological point of the Christian faith. Rather, one can rely entirely on God’s conduct toward us, whose character has been revealed in the story of Jesus in a definitive and binding eschatological way as God’s creative love for his creatures. In order to preserve the soteriological point of the Christian faith in the face of its ethical, ecclesiastical and cultural trivialization, no absolute paradox is necessary, which demands that the real presence of the eternal in history, which has become absurdly impossible, be repeated in the life of each individual here and now. The decisive factor is rather that God relates to every human being

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in the same way as he did to Jesus according to the New Testament: as a loving Father. The Christian faith does not refer to Jesus because he was the unique case of an absolute paradox in history, but because it is directed to God and sees in the story of Jesus the character of God’s creative activity on and for us unfolded in a decisive and definitive way. Kierkegaard’s demarcation of faith and becoming a Christian from science and speculation must therefore be maintained. But this does not require an existential meta-interpretation of a realistic interpretation of the classical incarnation Christology sharpened to paradox. One must rather hold on to its soteriological point as a Christology of revelation: In Jesus God reveals how he relates to human beings, that is, to each one of us. Therefore, one is indeed a Christian only by becoming a Christian, and one becomes a Christian only by not only existing factually as a human being coram deo, but by practically orienting one’s life toward that which becomes possible only through God and would not be possible without God, because it is in principle more than everything that one thinks one can be and become even without God. But if one trusts in this God-given more, in the possibilities that God gives us, and in the resulting change of perspective and horizon of a life, through which it becomes fundamentally different and new, then perhaps things are not quite so bad as Kierkegaard thought. For then the presence of God’s lifechanging love does not stand or fall with the almost zero number of paradoxical existences in Kierkegaard’s sense, which he did not find in his time because they cannot be found at any time.

3 Kierkegaard’s ethics of distinction At the end of April 1847, Kierkegaard completed his supposedly last manuscript. For years he had expected not to live to see his 34th birthday on May 5, 1847. When the day went by without the expected event and he began to regain his composure—Kierkegaard even had the baptismal register looked up because he thought there must be a mistake—he set to work again and delivered his book on The Works of Love to the printer on August 17, 1847. This book, written not out of disappointed love, but in deceived expectation of death, became one of his most popular books in Denmark. It is one of the rare philosophical and theological books about love, of which one can certainly say that it does not fill a gap that would have been better left open. However, Kierkegaard knew what he was asking of the audience with this book. “These Christian deliberations,” he writes in the preface, “which are the fruit of much deliberation, will be understood slowly but then also easily, whereas they will surely become very difficult if someone by hasty and curious reading makes them very difficult for himself.”²⁴⁰ Even then, this was an outmoded demand for an audience whose reading habits, as Kierkegaard had learned in the Corsair controversy, had been thoroughly spoiled by the sensational reporting of the newspapers. Where books are merely leafed through like newspapers for current affairs and are no longer studied, authors and publishers have a hard time bringing not only the popularity of a particular subject to an audience, but also the “fruit of much deliberation.” This is what Kierkegaard’s book claims to be and therefore requires a slow reading. It is too complex to be understood by fast browsing. Nor should one be deceived by his edifying rhetoric about the sophistication and complexity of his theological and philosophical argumentation. Above all, it makes Kierkegaard’s ethics of love a challenge for philosophy and theology, even today. I will show this by concentrating not on its edifying rhetorical surface, but on its argumentative depth structure, by first sketching its problem, then explaining its guiding distinction and its methodological approach, and finally discussing some basic lines of his argument.

 SKS 9, 7 / WL, 3. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-014

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3.1 Christians are human beings too Christians are human beings. Who would deny that? But it is equally undisputed that not all humans are Christians. ‘Christian’ is not just another word for ‘human being’, and the differences in the use of the two words mark more than just semantic differences. What are these differences? Not, as Kierkegaard emphasizes in tracing the differences between poets and Christians, that Christians would “not eat ordinary food with others” or “live apart from other people in the inclosure of separateness.”²⁴¹ Christians cannot be distinguished from other people based on eating habits, place of residence, or the reading of poets. Even those “works that in a particular sense are called works of love,” are not suitable for this: “giving to charity, visiting the widow, and clothing the naked do not truly demonstrate or make known” one’s Christianity. All this can and should actually be done by every reasonably decent human being, and it can be done in a quite un-Christian, “unloving, yes, even in a self-loving way.”²⁴² And as in these cases, so in all others: Whatever life phenomena can be named does not help to distinguish Christians clearly from other humans. Christians, too, eat what others eat, live where others live, read what others read, act as others can act. Christians are human beings too. Nevertheless, there are differences, because not all people are Christians. Anyone who wants to understand being a Christian must pay attention to these differences. But does the reverse also apply? Are these differences also relevant if one tries to understand being a human being? Philosophical anthropology in the wake of Kant has denied this. “What is the human being?”²⁴³ is a question that must be able to be answered without a recourse to being a Christian. Otherwise, we would content ourselves with a religious answer, but not give a philosophical one that applies to Christians and non-Christians alike. It must be possible to say what humans are, what they can know, what they ought to do and what they can legitimately hope for, without speaking of what is true only of some. It is true that all Christians are human beings and only human beings are Christians, but no human being must become a Christian, and any human being who is a Christian might not be one either. Whoever wants to understand being human can therefore ignore Christians. It only distracts from the essential.

 SKS 9, 50 / WL, 47.  SKS 9, 17 / WL, 13.  Kant’s logic lectures (Jäsche), AA IX, p. 25.

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Theological anthropology, especially that of the Lutheran tradition in which Kierkegaard was brought up, disagrees. It is precisely being a Christian that shows the decisive characteristics of being human—in negative respects (sin) as well as in positive ones (being a creature and being destined to be an image of God). At least in the negative respect even the critics of religion agree. There is probably no evil caused by humans that has not also occurred in the history of Christianity: Christians are not better human beings. In what they do, Christians have nothing ahead of other human beings. But what distinguishes them from other people? According to Kierkegaard, not any work they do, but alone “how the work is done:” Is it done in a Christian way or non-Christian way? The question is not what Christians do, but whether what they do is done in a Christian way. The point of this question is crucial. Because Kierkegaard is asking this question, a cultural history or social doctrine of Christianity, an account of the ecclesiastical, social, and charitable institutions and organizations of Christianity in its history, does not offer an answer to his question. All these things have been done by Christians over the centuries, but is what has been done by Christians, really been done in a Christian way? Because he doubts it, Kierkegaard remains eminently critical of his own Christian tradition. He distinguishes between Christendom and Christianity, the secular forms of Christian life and culture through the centuries, and the faith, hope, and love that define the Christian attitude to life.²⁴⁴ The first is the external forms of a Christian culture, which can be described and studied by everyone, the other is the internal formation of Christian life through faith, hope and love, which cannot be pointed to and identified with any external activities and actions of Christians. Christians too must be criticized for their un-Christian actions and their non-Christian lives. Without attention to the distinction between the actions of Christians and Christian actions, between what Christians do and whether it is done by them in a Christian or non-Christian way, Kierkegaard’s criticism of the church and Christendom remains incomprehensible. Reference to church membership or belonging to the culture of Christendom is therefore not an answer to Kierkegaard’s question, but rather raises it. When is a Christian a Christian? Kierkegaard’s answer is: Only if they live a Christian life, or rather, live their lives ‘Christianly,’ that is, in a Christian way. The modal adverb ‘Christianly’ (to live or act in a Christian way) marks the decisive difference not only between Christians and other people, but also between Christians by

 SKS 9, 140 / WL, 146.

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convention and Christians by conviction because it indicates not only the outward belonging to a cultural tradition, but also a basic difference in the understanding of reality and the relationship to reality, which characterizes all life and action of the respective persons. In what way?

3.2 Kierkegaard’s ethical phenomenology In both cases humans act. In both cases they do or can do the same thing. The difference lies not in what they do but in how they do it. This ‘how’ is not just an irrelevant subjective feature of an action that can be ignored philosophically, ethically, or theologically without harm. Rather, this ‘how’ indicates the situation and horizon of meaning in which an action is located and therefore according to which grammar it is to be understood and judged. Kierkegaard’s ethics—at least his ethics at the end of the 1840s²⁴⁵—does not focus on the moral subject, it is not directed at virtues or duties, nor at moral goals, values and goods or the moral quality of institutions, but rather at the ethical qualification of the situation of action or life. At the center of Kierkegaard’s interest is not the who (the subject) or the what (the goods) or the why (the reasons) or the wherefore (the goals) or the wherewith (the institutions) of moral action, but the how of life or, more precisely, the ethical determination of the concrete situations in which people live their lives. For Kierkegaard, this ethical determination is not a consequence of what is done in these situations, but rather of the horizon of meaning of these situations, which makes what is done in them understandable and morally assessable in the first place. Actions are not carried out in vacuo, but in situations. Situations have horizons, and if this horizon changes, then the character of the situation and the ethical quality of the action carried out in it also changes.²⁴⁶ A son helping his father is usually considered good. On the other hand, helping him to  Arne Grøn speaks in view of this of a ’second ethics‘ of Kierkegaard: “Kierkegaards ‘zweite’ Ethik,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 358 – 368. Unlike the ‘first ethics,’ it presupposes not metaphysics but dogmatics (p. 359), more precisely: the “Wirklichkeit der Sünde (reality of sin)” (p. 364) und die “Gabe (gift)” of love and forgiveness (p. 368).  The importance of the situation for ethics is emphatically underlined by Kierkegaard in the notes on “some lectures on the dialectic of ethical and ethicoreligious communication” (SKS 20, 142, NB2:13 / KJN 4, 140; cf. SKS 27, 389, Papir 364 / KJN 11.2, 90), begun between the two episodes of the Works of Love and soon abandoned. Thus, §1 is supposed to be “About the ‘situation’ and the essential belonging of a situation to ethical communication,” and §3 “On the situation of ‘actuality’ as essential, as the real conditio sine qua non for the ethical communication.” (SKS 27, 410, Papir 368:7 / KJN 11.2, 112).

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break down a front door is not good in all situations, but only if it is his own house and not someone else’s house to which he has no right of access. But when flames are blazing from this house and help is called for, the common breaking open of the other’s front door has a different character, because the situation is to be understood differently and judged in a different light and horizon of meaning. People always act in concrete situations. These include horizons of meaning that determine the character of these situations and the meaning of the actions performed in them. Because the moral quality of human life cannot be judged without considering these concrete situations and their horizons, Kierkegaard’s ethical interest is directed not primarily at the morality of actors or the moral character of institutions, but at the horizons that ethically determine life situations and morally qualify human lifestyles and lives. His ethics is therefore not an ethics of subjectivity, nor a virtue or duty ethics, nor an ethics of values, goods, or institutions, but rather a phenomenology of the ethical modality of the horizons of life, in which people carry out their lives in specific situations in specific ways.²⁴⁷ The Works of Love are Kierkegaard’s attempt to work this out concretely for the case of Christian life²⁴⁸ by unfolding the Christian how of human life as life

 This seems to me to fit the descriptive-constructive character of Kierkegaard’s ethics of the Works of Love better than Hermann Deuser’s proposal (“Die Taten der Liebe: Kierkegaards wirkliche Ethik,” Marburger Jahrbuch Theologie, vol. 5, 1993, pp. 117– 132) to characterize it as “Fall einer (deontologischen) Pflichtenlehre aufgrund eines idealen und bewußten Sollens verbunden mit dem Insistieren auf spezifischen Handlungssituationen / a special case of a (deontological) doctrine of duties on the basis of an ideal and conscious ought combined with an insistence on specific situations of action” (p. 117).  In the Dialectic of Ethical and Ethical-Religious Communication (SKS 27, 389 – 434, Papir 364– 371 / KJN 11.2, 89 – 138) Kierkegaard gives, without explicit reference, a precise characterization of his Works of Love as “ethical-religious communication.” He describes this as a “Direct-indirect communication,” which is not only a direct “communication of knowledge” nor only an indirect “communication of being-able,” but a “Direct-indirect communication” of a “religious being-able.” As ethical communication, it is essentially communication of a skill, not of knowledge; it has “‘a knowledge within itself, it is ‘self-knowledge‘; but this is knowledge in an inauthentic sense.” As religious communication, on the other hand, it also contains “an element of knowledge,” since “there is a moment of knowledge [that applies] specifically in regard to Christianity for a knowledge of Christianity must, after all, be communicated in advance. But this is only something preliminary” which is to stimulate one’s own appropriation. And this communicated knowledge is appropriated in the way it is to be understood, if it is understood as a “being-able” or “supposed-to-be-able” and leads to the formation of a corresponding “selfknowledge.” (SKS 27, 412, Papir 368:13 / KJN 11.2, 116) And he stresses “That the fundamental confusion of modernity is not merely to have forgotten that there is something called communi-

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according to the grammar of love.²⁴⁹ This attempt is grouped methodically around the central points of action (the free, self-responsible way of life), action situation, action horizon, and grammar of love and explicates the Christian modality of life in the unfolding of the rules that determine or allow to determine human life and action as Christian. For actions are always situated; they stand through their situation in a horizon in which they are linked and linkable with other actions; this horizon can be explored by describing the grammar according to whose rules actions are determined, understood and performed in this horizon; and Kierkegaard’s ethical project is to do this for the Christian horizon of human life by describing and exploring the grammar of love that is decisive for it on the basis of exemplary life phenomena. If one accepts his focus on actions (and not on subjects who act), the program is plausible.²⁵⁰ Actions, including speech acts, only exist concretely situated in specific contexts and situations, and subjects, agents, or people only exist concretely in specific “webs of interlocution” (Taylor), situations of practice and contexts of life. Every action and every subject that is not merely possible but actual carries explicitly or suppressed an index that indicates its location, anchorage, or embeddedness in a certain life situation and which we express linguistically with index terms like ‘here,’ ‘there,’ ‘today,’ ‘I,’ ‘you’ etc. We always talk, act, and live concretely. However, we do not talk, act, and live atomistically, discreetly, or discontinuously. Each concrete life situation is rather located in a horizon which limits it in an open (that is, changeable) way and connects it with other situations in such a way that in the continuity of acting in different situations life continuities are formed, whose rules and deviations, normalities and irregularities can be explored and described. The modal adverb ‘Christianly’ indicates such a horizon that constitutes the continuity of a life. It does not denote one situation among others, but a horizon that determines all situations in which Christians talk, act, and live as Christians: ‘Christianly,’ so one could say, is that adverb which must be able to accompany

cation of being-able, but that it has meaninglessly transformed communication of being-able and being-supposed-to-be-able into communication of knowledge. The existential has vanished.” (SKS 27, 414, Papir 368:14 / KJN 11.2, 116).  Sylvia Walsh, “Forming the Heart: The Role of Love in Kierkegaard’s Thought,” in The Grammar of the Heart. New Essays in Moral Philosophy and Theology, ed. by Richard H. Bell, San Francisco: Harper & Row 1988, pp. 234– 256, has clearly seen this ‘grammatical’ aspect.  An important contribution to this view of Kierkegaard is made by Ulrich Lincoln, Äußerung, Studien zum Handlungsbegriff in Søren Kierkegaard’s The Acts of Love, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 2000.

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all talking, acting, and living of Christians, because it marks the decisive perspective for understanding and judging these acts of life. The adverb assigns actions to the horizon of a way of life whose grammar Kierkegaard explores by describing the grammar of Christian love.

3.3 To live in a Christian way Christians are people who live differently from others, in a different horizon of life and according to a different grammar of reality—more precisely: who should live like this if they really want to live according to the principle of orientation that is expressed in their designation as Christians. Christians are people who live a Christian life, and only to the extent that they do so are they truly Christians. From this one can conclude the following: First, if people can live as Christians or as non-Christians, but not as neither of the two, then the concept of human being is to be understood as enabling these different possibilities, and every human being lives in fact either in a Christian or a non-Christian way. Second, if Christians are people who live in a Christian way, then as human beings they can always also live in a non-Christian way: Being a Christian exists only as an active decision against the possibility of not living a Christian life. Third, since people are not born Christians, but become Christians in the course of their lives (if they do), all Christians are Christians only by having changed from a non-Christian to a Christian life: Since they are human beings as Christians and the possibilities of a non-Christian life still exist, Christians must become Christians again and again in order to be and remain Christians. Fourth, the decision to be a Christian is therefore never a free choice between equally available options but is always a decision not only against the possibility, but against the actuality of a non-Christian life, for which one has always already decided. The decision to be a Christian is always made by nonChristians, who are so by their own decision, documented in the actual way they live their lives. No one must be a non-Christian, but anyone who does not lead a Christian life does so at their own discretion, either by deciding against it or by not deciding for it. Five, to decide under these conditions to live a Christian life, and thus to be a Christian, is only possible with the help of God, who—as Kierkegaard writes in the opening prayer of the book—is love, has made himself manifest in Christ as love for us, and as a spirit of love “remind[s] the believer to love as he is

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loved and his neighbor as himself.”²⁵¹ Only when one abandons oneself to this “Eternal Love,” which is “everywhere present and never without witness where [it is] called upon,”²⁵² can there be a change from a non-Christian to a Christian life: The ‘decision’ of a non-Christian to be a Christian is not his or her own action based on deliberate deliberation of the pros and cons, but the “work of love” itself, which, against a person’s decision to live a non-Christian life, brings God’s decision for that person to the fore and into effect, which has taken place and been revealed in Christ, and which the Spirit of love reminds us of.²⁵³ Six, Christianity is therefore a specific way of human life, to which one is enabled by God’s love, not a doctrinal body of revealed truths. Or as Kierkegaard noted again and again: “Christianity is no doctrine. Christianity is a believing and a correspondingly quite definite kind of existing, imitation.”²⁵⁴ “Christianity pertains to existence, to existing, but existence and existing are the very opposite of speculation.”²⁵⁵ There is “an enormous difference between knowing what Christianity is and being a Christian.”²⁵⁶ The key point is not to know what Christianity is, but to live Christianly. Christianity is a faith and a corresponding very specific way of existing and living. This faith and the life shaped by it is not a practical conclusion from the theoretical foundation of a doctrine or the deliberate consideration of hypothetical possibilities of life, but rather the consequence of a “situation of acting,” “a deed of daring” in concrete life, “in which the decision of belief [better: faith] can come into being … It is not then … first the proof, then the daring …; no, first the daring and then comes the proof afterward—you will experience that the teaching is truth. But people do not want to take a risk; they have therefore made Xnty into a doctrine that one can sit down and prove without there occurring any essential change in one’s personal existence.”²⁵⁷

 SKS 9, 8 / WL, 4.  Ibid.  Ibid. See Timothy P. Jackson, “Arminian edification: Kierkegaard on grace and free will,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Alastair Hannay and Gordon Daniel Marino, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 235 – 256.  SKS 24, 20, NB21:16 / KJN 8, 16. Cf. SKS 7, 328 / CUP1, 379. SKS 7, 497 / CUP1, 570. Cf. JFY, 127– 131. SKS 16, 11 / AN, 129. SKS 10, 214 f / CD, 214 f.  Ibid. See Russell Johnson, “The Ministering Critic: Kierkegaard’s Theology of Communication,” Religions, vol. 2020, pp. 11, 35 (file:///Users/dalferth/Downloads/religions-11– 00035.pdf) (2/22/2022).  SKS 7, 329 / CUP1, 380.  SKS 24, 20, NB21:16 / KJN 8, 16. See Deuser, Kierkegaard, p. 104. In this sense Wittgenstein also emphasizes: “Christianity is not a doctrine, not, I mean, a theory about what has happened & will happen to the human soul, but a description of something that actually takes place in human life. For ‘consciousness of sin’ is a real event and so are despair and salvation through

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But this is absurd. One becomes a Christian without any reason, or one does not become one at all. If one has become it or has not become it, then one knows and finds reasons for it or against it. Christianity exists therefore only where there is Christian life, and according to Kierkegaard that is the case only where human beings actually become witnesses of the eternal love as which God has been made manifest by Jesus Christ “who revealed what love is.”²⁵⁸ Revelation therefore is not a doctrinal communication, but a communication of life, a sharing in the eternal love that God is, as his “Spirit of love” reminds the believers.²⁵⁹ For as God is semper actuosus, so this love too is essentially effective, “everywhere present” and “never without witness,” where one orients oneself by it.²⁶⁰

3.4 Freedom through love However: No one must be a Christian. Those who live Christian lives do so of their own free will because they want it. Is this an irrational personal religious decision, the opposite of which is equally morally defensible? Not according to Kierkegaard. Whoever freely decides for a Christian life decides to orientate his life freely on the ground and source of his own freedom. He chooses not only to live freely (so does every other person), but to orient the use of his freedom on the one to whom he owes this freedom. For it is not self-evident that there is the freedom to live in this or another way. This is true in everyday life (we cannot always live as we want to, just because we want to), but also

faith. Those who speak of such things (Bunyan for instance) are simply describing what has happened to them, whatever gloss anyone may want to put on it.” (Culture and Value, ed. by Georg H. von Wright, Oxford: Blackwell 1977, p. 28e).  SKS 9, 8 / WL, 3. This reference marks the right and the limit of K. Hansen’s dictum: “There is only one criterion for real Christianity: suffering” (Knud Hansen, “Der andere Kierkegaard. Zu Søren Kierkegaards Christentumsverständnis,” in Søren Kierkegaard, ed. by Heinz-Horst Schrey, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1971, p. 133). Cf. the criticism by Anna Paulsen, “Noch einmal der andere Kierkegaard,” ibid., pp. 141– 154, who rightly points out that Kierkegaard thinks and argues from the “mystery of the incarnation” and thus from the love of God, which is not only always prior, but has become real in the human life and suffering of Christ (pp. 143 – 146). On the other hand, Knud Ejler Løgstrup’s thesis that for Kierkegaard “to be a Christian … means to become a martyr, and only the martyr is a Christian” (“Critique and Betrayal of Kierkegaard,” ibid., p. 457), ignores the foundation of Kierkegaard’s recourse to suffering in the suffering of Christ and thus in the love of God that enters into suffering and death.  Ibid.  SKS 9, 8 / WL, 3 f.

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in principle (it is only possible under very special conditions that we, unlike other living creatures, do not have to live as we live, but “can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does”).²⁶¹ The very possibility of freedom is improbable, and it is even more improbable that freedom actually exists. The fact of freedom is neither self-evident nor self-explanatory. But it is also not simply incomprehensible if one places this fact itself in the horizon of freedom and understands it as the result of practicing freedom. Freedom exists where and only where it is actually lived. One does not have it, if one does not live it. This is true for people, and this is true for God. According to Kierkegaard, both can therefore only be understood together. The human practice of freedom does not take place in vacuo, but in the horizon of the divine practice of freedom. This however is the enactment of what God is in truth: groundless love of the other. If one understands human freedom from here, then it exists only because and in so far as God’s love makes this freedom possible, and this in a very pointed sense, which almost identifies human beings with their freedom. Whoever lives, lives before God. Whoever lives freely before God can love or not love God. If he loves God, then he loves God freely, because otherwise it would not be love. But no one could and would love God freely if he was not first already loved by God. He who loves God freely therefore loves exactly the one who makes possible his own life, freedom, and love, but also the life, freedom, and love of every other person. On the other hand, he who does not love God, but ignores or rejects him, lives nonetheless from the very conditions which he ignores or rejects. God’s love therefore has ontological or transcendental priority: God loves first, and so releases human beings into freedom. The reason is love itself. On the one hand, God’s love does not force anybody to love God: it would not be love if it did. On the other hand, it would not be love either if it did not aim at reciprocal love. Of course, this too must be free, and therefore God cannot effect it either. Only free love is love, but freedom exists only where it is freely practiced, and that must be done by everyone themselves. Kierkegaard therefore concludes that the working of God’s love is to be understood differently: It does not bring about God′s free love of humans, because that is impossible, but it brings about “deed situations” in which humans decide freely for or against God by their concrete enactment of life.²⁶² God’s work does not change humans, but creates the life situations, in which humans change

 SKS 9, 220 / WL, 230.  See M. Jamie Ferreira, “Faith and the Kierkegaardian Leap,” in The Cambridge Companion to Kierkegaard, ed. by Hannay and Marino, pp. 207– 234.

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themselves: God is creator by providing for life situations in which humans must practice their freedom. This applies in two ways. On the one hand, God creates the conditions and prerequisites of human practice of freedom, on the other hand, he creates the historical opportunities and concrete occasions for the exercise of this freedom. By loving human beings, God places them in an existential situation in which they can only live their lives by freely loving God, or by freely not loving God. Every human being has the freedom to do one or the other, but no one has the freedom to abstain from practicing this freedom. So, there is no one who does not actually live in such a way that he either loves or does not love God freely. In order not to love God, one must know nothing of God: It is enough to live as one lives. On the other hand, to love God freely, or not to love God freely, one must know about God’s love, therefore know that one can and should love God, because God loves one. Human beings do not possess the knowledge of this, as Kierkegaard says, “religious being-able”²⁶³ of their own accord. It is acquired not with life, but (if at all) only in life; thus, it is communicated to persons in historical processes and acquired by them in the course of their own lives.²⁶⁴ But then everyone lives initially or permanently without knowledge of this supposed ability, and consequently in fact in such a way that they do not love God, although they only live at all because God loves them. Christians differ from other people in that they know this and try to live accordingly: Like everyone else, they live through God’s love and in God’s love, but unlike others, they live God’s love by orienting themselves to the one in whom, according to Christian conviction, this love has made its decisive appearance: Jesus Christ. According to Kierkegaard, the difference between Christians and Christ is therefore constitutive for becoming a Christian: There is “an eternal difference between Christ and every Christian.”²⁶⁵ Christians do not orient themselves to themselves, but to Christ and thus to the presence of God’s love in their lives. Only in this way do they gain and maintain the distance to themselves that allows them to break through their self-centeredness, not always seeing only themselves and declaring their own life to be the measure of all things. And only then can they live in such a way that their lives are determined at every point by God’s

 SKS 27, 405, Papir 367 / KJN 11.2, 107.  Cf. Joachim Ringleben, Aneignung. Die spekulative Theologie Søren Kierkegaards, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1983.  SKS 9, 99 / WL, 101.

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love, which does not relate indifferently to everyone in the same way, but in an individually differentiating way to each person in the way that is best for him or her. God loves “each one individually but no one exceptionally.”²⁶⁶ Thus, just as being human is understood from being Christian, being Christian is understood from Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ from being different from God and yet fully oriented toward God and open to God. In each case, therefore, a critical difference is emphasized. Christian anthropology does not fit with the modern alternative, to define the humanity of humans either in a general philosophical (anthropological) or a particular religious way. It answers the question “What is the human being?” neither by forgetting nor by starting from the historical facts of Christian life, but decisively from Jesus Christ and thus from the life-orienting difference between Jesus’ history and God’s presence to it, in which this is revealed as the presence of God’s love with every human being.

3.5 Philosophical and theological anthropology Philosophical and theological anthropology in Kierkegaard therefore do not relate to each other like the general and the particular. Their different answers to the question “What is the human being?” start from different points of view, pursue different questions, and move in different contexts of contrast. Thus, from the perspective of a particular human being, the philosophical anthropology of the Kantian tradition asks what is common to all human beings. It hopes to find what distinguishes human beings as human beings from other living beings in what is common to all human beings despite their different peculiarities, because they are all human beings. In contrast, theological anthropology in a Christian perspective asks what comes into view as what all human beings could and should be, even if they are not, in view of the concrete realization of being human through Jesus Christ. In one case, the answer to the question of the humanity of humans is given by distinguishing between humanity and its concrete manifestations and by looking for something that is anthropologically general and distinguishes all humans as such from everything else. In the other case, a distinction is made between different concrete manifestations of humanity and a particular manifestation is identified as the anthropologically relevant one that could and should represent the paradigm for each individual human being. The question is not what enables people to live as human beings as they actually do, but how they could and should live as human beings even

 SKS 9, 68 / WL, 67.

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though they actually do not. The focus is not on general humanity, but on concrete human existence, not on how people actually live, but on how they should live if they really want to live humanly.

3.6 Kierkegaard’s guiding ethical distinction Kierkegaard’s guiding distinction is not between Christians and human beings, but between human beings who are Christians and those who are not. Humans are either Christians or non-Christians, no human being is neither, but Christians are human beings only because and in so far as they do not want to live as nonChristians, even though they could live that way, have in fact lived that way, and will continue to live that way unless they decide against it.²⁶⁷ The difference between Christians and non-Christians is based on the way in which they realize their humanity concretely, that is, live it as a series of decisions in the context of other decisions, their own and others’. The difference between them is therefore ethical for Kierkegaard: Christians live and act differently from non-Christians, not only here and there, but in principle and in everything. They don’t necessarily do things differently from non-Christians, but they necessarily do everything differently from them. Because he is interested in this concretion, Kierkegaard writes not an anthropology, but an ethics, and because he is interested in the concretion of Christian life in distinction to non-Christian life, he writes an ethics of discernment. Methodologically, it is distinguished by the fact that it is not designed from a neutral position. It thematizes distinctions that only come into view when one places oneself on one or the other side of the distinction. This is in fact always the case and has fundamental significance. There is no point of view beyond this distinction from which one or the other position could be judged; rather, every judgment itself is bound to a point of view that is on one side or the other of the distinction. The non-Christian does not have a more ‘objective’ view of the world than the Christian, but the Christian too has no privileged access to the true view of its reality, which could be shown to all with arguments that are everywhere equally convincing. Christians too can only take their Christian stand-

 That the difference between Christian and non-Christian perspectives cannot be resolved in “some allegedly neutral (non)perspective” but that Kierkegaard insists on the “non-negotiable difference between the two” is rightly emphasized by Merold Westphal, “Commanded Love and Moral Autonomy: The Kierkegaard-Habermas Debate,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, p. 18.

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point, but not God’s.²⁶⁸ No view of the world is so beyond dispute with other views of the world, and no proof can be given for any one of them that is general, neutral, and convincing from every standpoint. That “does not preclude a concern for truth.”²⁶⁹ But truth can in each case be perceived, grasped, and judged only in one perspective, from one point of view and in one horizon. This is the epistemological reason for Kierkegaard’s talk of ‘choice’ and ‘decision:’ One can only perceive the world from a certain point of view in a certain perspective and a certain horizon. No viewpoints, perspectives and horizons are such that they are without alternatives. But if every point of view is contingent, in so far as another could be taken in its place, then every point of view which one takes is in fact a decision against other possibilities. And even if I must see the world from my historical, cultural, social, religious point of view, because I cannot take another, others can, must and will take different viewpoints in their historical, social, cultural, religious situations. Only on the basis of contingent standpoints is there truth and falsehood, and the decision for or against a standpoint is not made on neutral ground beyond all perspectives and standpoints. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s maxim applies: First the risk, then the proof. This means for his ethics of discernment: No distinction can be made between Christians and non-Christians without taking a Christian or non-Christian standpoint. Kierkegaard’s ethics of discernment is not a neutral, but a committed ethics of discernment. However, the ethical distinction between Christians and non-Christians only comes into the world through Christians. Only where there are Christians does it become apparent that there are non-Christians. Since Kierkegaard speaks from a Christian perspective, his ethics is not only a committed ethics of discernment, but a Christianly committed ethics of discernment. But in order to take a Christian standpoint, Christians must distinguish themselves not only from others, but above all from themselves as non-Christians; that is, they must distinguish in their own lives between Christian and non-Christian doings. Kierkegaard’s ethics is therefore not only a Christianly engaged ethics of discernment, but an engaged ethics of Christian self-differentiation. Accordingly, Kierkegaard does not develop the distinction between Christians and non-Christians in a descriptive-neutral way, but in a committed-explicative way, that is, as a distinction in the understanding or self-understanding of those who try to live as Christians. This is not a narrow view of the philosophy  “The individual who is seeking religious truth does not see the world sub specie aeternitatis but stands at a particular historical spot,” as Charles Stephen Evans, “Kierkegaard on Religious Authority: The Problem of the Criterion,” Faith and Philosophy, vol. 17, 2000, p. 65 rightly emphasized.  Ibid.

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of consciousness, but the consequence of the insight that life-guiding distinctions are always hermeneutical in nature: Christians understand and live their humanity differently than non-Christians, and vice versa. Or, as Kierkegaard says, “the Christian must understand everything differently than the non-Christian does.”²⁷⁰ Christians must understand everything differently, because the difference between Christian and non-Christian does not manifest itself in any external characteristics that are suitable for classifying phenomena, but in a different understanding of self, world and God, a different horizon of understanding of life as a whole. They must understand everything differently because the difference between Christians and non-Christians, as a fundamental difference of understanding, is not just a subordinate distinction to a superordinate commonality but comes into play at every point and in every aspect of life. And they must understand everything differently, because this difference is not self-evident, but must be carried out again and again at every point in life by each individual Christian themselves.

3.7 Self-distinction and self-decision This last point is important. No human being as such is already a Christian. One must become one, and one becomes one only if one wants to become one: being a Christian is the expression and result of a history of free self-determination. Therefore, Kierkegaard emphasizes: The Christian—every Christian for himself! —“must be conscious that he knows how to make distinctions.”²⁷¹ No one can leave this to others in his own case, and no one can take it from others; everyone must do it themselves in their own lives.²⁷² How can one make this self-distinction? Not by differentiating oneself as Christian from others as non-Christians in the manner of religious or cultural fundamentalism, because one must make this distinction not in distinction to others (I/they), but primarily in relation to oneself, one’s own understanding and self-understanding (I as a Christian/I as a non-Christian). According to Kierkegaard, this requires not only to refer to another (you), but in the relationship between oneself and others to a third party (he/she/it),²⁷³ from which I understand myself under two determinations, as a Christian and as a non-Christian. Such a third party, and not just another other, is someone precisely insofar as    

SKS 9, 50 / WL, 47. Ibid. That is why there is no vicarious faith and no vicarious baptism. Cf. Kierkegaard’s remarks on the third party, SKS 9, 322 f. / WL, 339 f.

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he is so present to both sides of the contrast between me and the others that, as my other, he is at the same time the other of my others, so that from his point of view both the contrast and the connection between me and the others become clear. Thus, for both of us he must not only be a you, but at the same time a he/she/it, that is, for me and the others, he must be equally present in the mode of the second and the third person. The one who is the third party for every I and every other, and never just another, is God according to Kierkegaard. God—the opening prayer of the Works of Love indicates this for the whole text that follows—is always and simultaneously to be spoken of in the second person (my/our God) and in the third person (my/ our God), because God would not be spoken of if he were not present in the life of each one as personal You (my God) and universal He/She/It (my God). The reference to God thus functions in Kierkegaard’s ethics as a criterion of anti-subjectivism and at the same time as a guarantee of universal validity. Only distinctions that are to be made in my own life from the standpoint of this third party, such as between that which owes itself to God’s love and is therefore to be preserved, and that which contradicts this love and is therefore to be rejected, are also relevant to the life of others, without it being necessary to deny their otherness or to reshape them in the image of one’s own life. It is not the Christians who are the measure of all things, but only those live in a Christian way, who are guided by the rule that God’s love is the measure of all things. For, according to Kierkegaard, only the “equality of a human being before God”²⁷⁴ does not conceal the difference between them but preserves it.²⁷⁵ No one is like the other, but all are equal before God. Exactly the same applies to the difference between Christians and non-Christians. It would ultimately not be “earnest” (in Kierkegaard’s sense²⁷⁶) if that difference were only historically and culturally constructed and not to be understood in terms of the relationship with God. But it is founded precisely in their different relation to the relation to God, and that is just why it has universal significance: Everyone lives in a Christian way or not, no one can do neither or live in both ways at the same time. Everyone can live as a Christian or as a nonChristian, and therefore not only must everyone decide for themselves in which way they want to live, but they have always already done so by living as they do. The problem of the ethical distinction between Christian and non-Christian life is thus aggravated to the problem of an inevitable fundamental ethical deci-

 SKS 9, 62 / WL, 60.  SKS 9, 70 – 80 / WL, 69 – 89.  SKS 9, 181 / WL, 190.

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sion between two incompatible life orientations. Everyone is confronted with this decision because one is confronted with it through God’s presence. But since the possibility of living one way or another remains as long as one lives, the decision cannot be made once and for all, but is made anew with every act of life. It is not our decision that we exist as human beings; but it is our decision how we live as human beings. No one can escape this decision, but it would not be a decision either if it could only be made in one way. God’s relationship to us does not depend on our decisions, but our relationship to God’s relationship is one of freedom.

3.8 Plural descriptions of ethical life situations This is ontologically informative. Since people can understand and structure the situations in which they live in different ways, there are no life situations that can be determined unambiguously and only in one way. Depending on our point of view, insight, self-understanding, and horizon, we understand the situations in which we live and act in different ways. Christians understand them in one way, non-Christians in another. This creates problems especially where Christians and non-Christians live and act together. Of course, no one is a Christian who has not become one in the course of his life and continues to become one in the course of his life. Every Christian therefore knows from their own experience what it means not to live a Christian life. But to live a Christian life, one must be able to distinguish between a Christian and a non-Christian view of life situations. Therefore, Kierkegaard’s ethics of self-distinction implies an ethics of differentiating seeing.²⁷⁷ This ethics distinguishes two different perspectives on life, each of which is comprehensive, but not mutually exclusive, and can occur in the same situation. In a Christian life, being a non-Christian is always included as past, background and current possibility, and its accessibility is thus given from the outset: There is no point at which there is no difference and no possible transition between the two perspectives, but there is also no point at which the difference between them can be eliminated: it is a difference of horizons, not a difference in a common horizon, and therefore the two perspectives cannot in principle be ignored or

 Arne Grøn has elaborated this as Kierkegaard’s ‘ethics of seeing:’ “The Dialectics of Recognition in Works of Love,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, vol. 3, 1998, pp. 147– 157; “Kierkegaards ‘zweite’ Ethik,” ibid., pp. 358 – 368.

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eliminated: “Christianity and worldliness will never come to a mutual understanding.”²⁷⁸ However, Christians lead a more complicated life than non-Christians because they know both perspectives from their own experience. Accordingly, Kierkegaard sees the primary ethical task of Christians in making distinctions: The Christian “must be conscious that he knows how to make distinctions.”²⁷⁹ The difference from the non-Christian—and this means once more the difference from themselves as a non-Christians—is not simply there but must be made again and again by living in a Christian way. Whether this is the case is not clear from the actions and lives of Christians as such. The categories of the Christian and the non-Christian are not suitable for the classification of life phenomena but mark alternative horizons of life. What does this mean?

3.9 Ethics without foundation Kierkegaard answers this question by designing his ethics not as a manual of Christian virtues, but as an ethical phenomenology of human life in a Christian perspective, in which the acts of human life are described, illuminated, and judged from a Christian perspective. Thus, his ethics does not single out any particular area of action or life phenomena on which it focuses. Their demarcations are not at the level of the what, but of the how of life phenomena, and the contrast that determines them is not that between the particular and the general, but between the own and the foreign, between the description and evaluation of the phenomena of life from a Christian and from a non-Christian perspective. The peculiarity of this ethical phenomenology is that it has no foundation. It is based neither on a certain normative conception of human nature nor on the transcendental conditions of possibility of factual human existence (and is therefore not anthropologically and not transcendently founded); nor on natural ([moral] feeling, compassion) or cultural (contractualism, utilitarianism) conditions of the empirical co-existence of human beings (and is thus neither sensualistically nor rationalistically founded); nor is it derived from a concept of absolutely autonomous reason à la Kant, nor is it merely traditionalist, propagating only the group morality of a particular religious community, which cannot be reasonably universalized.

 SKS 9, 72 / WL, 71.  SKS 9, 50 / WL, 47.

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Rather, it takes seriously the fact that answers to ethical questions, including those concerning the validity of ethical answers, can only be given within the horizon of concrete, historically shaped common life practice. For Kierkegaard this follows from the practical character of freedom. An answer to ethical questions that is exhausted in the elucidation of transcendental conditions of the possibility of freedom (or responsibility or justice or the good life) and does not lead to specific concretions of life that are lived in one’s own responsibility cannot claim validity: What matters is not what one says or wishes or wants or can or should do, but how one actually lives. While what one does and experiences can be entirely determined by circumstances, the way one lives is never. Even if one cannot live differently than one lives because of the circumstances, one can lead, perceive, understand, and judge one’s life in one way or another, Christian or non-Christian, under these circumstances.

3.10 The duty to love One can see this in Kierkegaard’s critical reference to Kant’s concept of duty. If good is what you can want from the point of view of anyone as that which everyone should do, then a good will is nothing other than the will to want only that of which I can want everyone else to want what I want. To want freely that others want freely that others want freely, is the point of good will. Thus, on the one hand, it is true for the good will that the willing of the good cannot be linked to the condition of reciprocity, that is, to the condition that the other also wants the good, but that it is considered categorically (as Kant says) as a duty: If my good will depended on others or even all people having a good will, I could only be ethically good if all people were good—and then I would never be. On the other hand, this is not a license for arbitrariness in wanting: A will that does not want that others also want the good is not good. But to want others to be morally good is something else than to make one’s own good will depend on the fact that others also want to be good. The first respects the freedom of the other, the second squanders one’s own; he who wants others to be morally good also wants them to want that themselves. This cannot be forced, but only expected and hoped for. But for this very reason one cannot want to be morally good oneself only when others also want that, but has the duty to be good, even if nobody else is and wants it. One’s own freedom is always to be practiced on one’s own responsibility and not in dependence on the actual exercise of freedom by others. In this sense, the realization of freedom and the moral good always starts

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with oneself. Only in this way does it begin at all, and that is precisely why it can begin at any time. Kierkegaard picks up on this very point by emphasizing the concept of duty. It is precisely the non-conditional duty to love that secures the freedom of the individual from all life-historical dependencies, fluctuations, changes, and despairs: “Only when it is a duty to love, only then is love eternally made free in blessed independence.”²⁸⁰ For this very reason, one cannot impose this obligation on others, but must fully rely on their free acceptance: “Christianity begins immediately with what every person should become … if he himself wants” it.²⁸¹ That one should love means that one loves at all only when one wants to love oneself, and that quite independently of whether the other also loves and how the situation in which one lives is concretely constituted. Love exists only where it is lived concretely. But love knows no conditions, and who lives according to the motto ‘I love you, if …’ or ‘I love you, if … as long as …’ has already stopped or not yet begun to love. Only free love is love, and love is only free if I categorically and concretely and not only conditionally decide to work for the good of the other. This does not mean that sympathy or antipathy did not matter, that the attraction or repulsion of the other should or could be ignored: In one’s relationships with other people one cannot step out of the concrete contingencies of life. Only the reference to them is not good as an answer to the question ‘Why do you (not) love him or her?’, if love is to be more than a dependent variable of the changeable qualities of the beloved. It would then merely be a function of certain life situations, but not the freely chosen principle and the decisive horizon of all situations in my life. For Kierkegaard this marks the decisive difference between worldly and Christian love: The latter loves without regard for the person, not out of inclination, but only out of duty, and for this very reason alone it is truly free. He thus understands the commandment of love as a symbol of their freedom. Love is not a function of mutual sympathy, but of a one-sided determination of will, which— this becomes particularly clear in the behavior toward the dead²⁸²—does not in any way depend on the other person’s determination to do the same.²⁸³ That

 SKS 9, 41 / WL, 37.  SKS 9, 172 / WL, 180.  Cf. SKS 9, 327– 339 / WL, 345 – 358.  Cf. M. Jamie Ferreira, “Asymmetry and Self-Love: The Challenge to Reciprocity and Equality,” Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, vol. 3, 1998, pp. 41– 59; Arne Grøn, “Gegenseitigkeit in Der Liebe Tun?,” in Kierkegaard Revisited, ed. by Niels Jørgen Cappelørn and Jon Stewart, Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter 1997, pp. 223 – 237.

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does not mean that it is without reasons. But its reasons are not the qualities, not even the actuality, of a certain other whom I love, but God’s preceding love for me and all others. I love because I am loved—but precisely not necessarily by the person whom I love, but by the one who loves me as much as the other—by God. Christians love others not because of their lovable qualities, but because they know they are loved by God, and not because of their own lovable qualities. Correspondingly, the Christian commandment to love one’s neighbor commands to love everyone as one is loved by God—completely gratuitous and without reason. This love alone is completely free and completely liberating because it does not stand or fall with what I am or what the other person is. To put it pointedly, only God, not the neighbor offers a reason for loving one’s neighbor. For God loves us without offering a reason for it. The same is true for love of neighbor: the reason for it is not to be found on the side of the neighbor. Precisely that is its strength and makes it so reliable for neighbors. And only those who live in such a way that they love themselves and all others just as freely and gratuitously as they are loved by God live in a Christian way.

3.11 ‘As you do me, so I do you’ Thus, one could summarize Kierkegaard’s arguments in the Works of Love that those who live according to the maxim of “as you do me, so I do you” understood in a Christian way, live a Christian life. Four points are important here: First, the you of this formula is not addressed to another human being, but to God, to whom Kierkegaard addresses himself in the introductory prayer: “you who are love, so that one who loves is what he is only by being in you!”²⁸⁴ To live in a Christian way means to live as one who is loved by God. Second, the to you in this formula too means first and foremost the God who loves me: To live in a Christian way means to love the love by which one is loved. Third, this love, like all love, is real only in its concrete enactment. To love it therefore means to love the loving of this love. But love is enacted only where someone is actually loving or being loved by someone. To live in a Christian way therefore means to love those who are loved by God, and to love God who loves them. And that means: To live a Christian life is to love God as one who is loved by God, by loving those whom God loves—namely, oneself and all others; oneself by allowing oneself to be loved by God; others by loving

 SKS 9, 8 / WL, 3.

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them as groundlessly as they and oneself are loved by God; and God by loving oneself and others as those who are loved by God. Fourth, those who love themselves and others as those whom God loves, love them—as Kierkegaard says—as God’s neighbors, and love themselves as neighbors of God’s neighbors. For a neighbor is one to whom God is so close that he would not be and could not be without him, and those who love their neighbors behave as neighbors to their neighbors, that is, regard and treat themselves and others as those to whom God is closer than they are to themselves. Only those who in this way allow the love that comes from God to become effective in their own actions and behaviors toward themselves and toward all others who are also loved by God live in a Christian way.

3.12 The recognizability of Christian life Whether someone lives like this cannot be inferred from what Christians do, because nothing they do could not be done by non-Christians. “The difference in life is not what is said, but how. With respect to [‘] what,[’] the same thing has been said before, perhaps many times before—so that the old saying, [‘]There is nothing new under the sun,[’] holds true, this old saying that nonetheless always remains new. But how it is said: this is what is new … This is the intellectual difference: what and how. Again, the ethical-religious difference: what is said and how it is said.”²⁸⁵

So in order to identify the Christian as Christian, one must pay more attention to how something is said or done than to what is said or done. But how and by what can we recognize unequivocally how something is said or done? Not by external action: there is “no ‘thus and so’” as Kierkegaard says, “that can unconditionally be said to demonstrate unconditionally the presence of love, or to demonstrate unconditionally its absence.”²⁸⁶ But neither is it the inner attitude of the perpetrators to their actions: Kierkegaard does indeed refer to conscience, but only in order to interpret it anti-internally as the place of the relationship with God: In conscience I am not completely with myself, but stand completely before God. Without recourse to God there is no certainty about how one’s own actions or those of others are carried out, and without respect

 SKS 23, 91, NB15:128 / KJN 7, 90.  SKS 9, 17 / WL, 14.

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for one’s relationship to God there is no certainty in one’s relationship to oneself and to the world.²⁸⁷ Why? Because, so Kierkegaard, love cannot be read off from life’s accomplishments, “we must believe in love—otherwise we simply will not notice that it exists.”²⁸⁸ Only those who know it can believe in it, and only those who know they are loved can recognize love. But doesn’t everyone know that, because everyone loves at least himself, even if no one else loved him? Yes and no, says Kierkegaard. Self-love could be pure egoism and thus the opposite of love, and that could also apply to what I think I experience as love from others. Only those who know themselves loved by God can really be certain that they are loved, because there it becomes clear what love really is: a completely gratuitous devotion to other persons and a purposeless working for their well-being. Because this love is not conditioned by anything to which it is directed, and because there is nothing that does not owe itself to this love, it can be applied to everything that we think to know as love; we must only not stop at what we know as love in each case, but must deepen and penetrate it to that to which it owes itself: the love of God Christianity knows this love. But according to Kierkegaard, it is “by no means … without presuppositions.”²⁸⁹ It assumes “that every person loves himself.”²⁹⁰ But self-love is essentially ambiguous. Therefore Christianity, in the light of its knowledge of the love of God, criticizes and corrects self-love in such a way

 For whoever declares the God-relationship in a ‘worldly’ or ‘merely human’ way to be a mere “delusion,” or is entirely “silent” about it (SKS 9, 111 / WL, 114.), or seeks to replace it with a “freedom” “that is ‘without God in the world’” (SKS 9, 111 / WL, 115.) and celebrates it as liberation that it “is for people to decide” (SKS 9, 112 / WL, 115.) must face the question of who the “people” are who are to decide that or “How large a number is necessary?” (ibid.) for that to be a valid decision. He can thus never get out of “pure arbitrariness” (SKS 9, 112 / WL, 116.). There are then only opinions, probabilities and majorities, but no truth and no certainty. “For when a great number do what is wrong, or we all do it, then this wrong is the right?” (SKS 9, 113 / WL, 117.)? The very fact that one can ask such a question shows that other criteria are brought into play. (Ibid.) According to Kierkegaard, in any case “[o]nly when all of us, each one separately, receive our orders at one place, if I may put it this way, and then each one separately unconditionally obeys the same orders, only then are there substance and purpose and truth and actuality in existence.” (SKS 9, 114 / WL, 117.). Only in this way can “certainty” and “equality” be guaranteed (SKS 9, 114 / WL, 118.). For “the judgment of people has validity only insofar as it harmonizes with God’s requirement” (SKS 9, 124 / WL, 129.). One must therefore start with it, because if one does not “begin … with the God-relationship” (SKS 9, 114 / WL, 118.), then one will not reach it at all, but will sink in the sea of human opinions.  SKS 9, 19 / WL, 16.  SKS 9, 21 / WL, 17.  Ibid.

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that, by the commandment to love one’s neighbor, it wrenches open “as with a pick … the lock of self-love and wrests it away from a person.”²⁹¹ It opens them toward God.

3.13 Change of horizon and new description This is how it always works: Christianity evolves as a transformation, continuation, and new determination of human life in the light of God’s love. It does not bring a new content but a new mode of life into the world, does not occur out of the blue alongside or in addition to the worldly, but is realized as its specific modification in criticism and correction of the worldly given in the light of the love that is God. This modification is not merely a determination of some phenomena but not others, but a fundamental change of frame for determining all phenomena: “Christianity … has not added a little or subtracted something, but it has changed everything, has changed love as a whole.”²⁹² It places everything, the whole of life, in a different light, a different framework and a new horizon, so that the phenomena of life are understood in a new and different way. Christianity does not bring new phenomena into the world, but a new horizon, a new understanding, and a new way of dealing with the phenomena of human life. Christian agape, for example, is not a different kind of love alongside eros and friendship. It is not an additional love phenomenon, but a different way of dealing with the phenomena of love and life, because it opens up a different horizon for their understanding. Kierkegaard shows this by taking the worldly phenomena “to the bath” (as Luther put it), that is to say, by elaborating their different meaning in a Christian horizon. Thus, he does not negate or ignore erotic love or friendship, but points to the danger that, as “another form of self-love,”²⁹³ they may become expressions of egoistic self-love and thus bar the view of love of God and neighbor. It is precisely this hermeneutic operation that Kierkegaard applies to all the phenomena of human life that he analyses in this work. They are not supplemented or replaced by something Christian but are described and judged anew within the horizon of a Christian understanding of love, in order to enable to a different way of dealing with them.

 SKS 9, 22 / WL, 17.  SKS 9, 141 / WL, 147.  SKS 9, 55 / WL, 53.

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3.14 The neighbor The best example of this critical Christian re-description of human life is Kierkegaard’s analysis of the neighbor. In the Christian horizon, this term takes on the function of ‘human being:’ Christians know no people, but only neighbors, because they know neither themselves nor others without considering the relationship to God. “The neighbor is one who is equal … since with your neighbor you have the equality of a human being before God.”²⁹⁴ Kierkegaard is very precise in his explanation of this new description: The expression ‘neighbor’ is a modification of a noun, the noun ‘human being:’ It always means a close or neighboring human being. It signifies a closer determination, a modification of existing humanity. However, it is not a quality or characteristic of humans, which would characterize them differently. One can paint people, but one cannot paint that they are neighbors—as little as one can paint, according to Kierkegaard, that “a poor woman … gives another the only bread she has—… You can express that it is one piece of bread but not that it is the only one she has.”²⁹⁵ The determinations ‘neighbor’ or ‘neighboring’ therefore do not select special phenomena and do not allow to classify people in a certain way. The do not refer to physical proximity or social closeness, spatial environment, or familial intimacy. There are no humans, who are neighbors, and those, who are not: “no human being exists or has existed who is the neighbor in the sense that the king is the king, the scholar the scholar, your relative your relative—that is, in the sense of exceptionality or, what amounts to the same thing, in the sense of dissimilarity—no, every human being is the neighbor.”²⁹⁶ The determination ‘neighbor’ is not a determining or classifying, but a localizing predicate. It puts humans into an ethical horizon, in which a certain behavior towards neighbors is natural and should be expected without any further grounds. Kierkegaard is concerned with tracing the grammar of this localizing predicate and the associated behaviors in his remarks about the neighbor—not with an analysis of concrete life phenomena. If it were otherwise, one would have to wonder with Adorno²⁹⁷, Løgstrup²⁹⁸, D. Z. Phillips²⁹⁹ and others about the ab-

    furt:

SKS 9, 62 / WL, 60. SKS 9, 309 / WL, 324 f. SKS 9, 87 f / WL, 89. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaards Lehre von der Liebe, Gesammelte Schriften vol. 3, FrankSuhrkamp, 1998, pp. 217– 236, esp. pp. 219 – 224.

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stractness and non-phenomenality of his “loveless love doctrine,” in which “the preference for a certain person is transformed into the generality of love at a distance:”³⁰⁰ Isn’t every person an unmistakable other and unique individual? How can one say that “Christian love … has only one single object, the neighbor, but the neighbor is as far as possible from being a one and only person, infinitely far from it, because the neighbor is all people?”³⁰¹ Can one love other than concretely? Can one love everyone indiscriminately? Can one love anyone at all without thereby not loving others? And isn’t it decisive whether the person you love is present or absent, really present or not present at all? Such and similar questions arise when Kierkegaard is misunderstood, as if he analyzed certain life and love phenomena. But he does not do that, rather he describes the grammar of Christian love of neighbor using certain examples: His analyses are descriptions of horizons, descriptions of the horizon in which one understands oneself, one’s life, one’s fellow men, one’s world, if one lives in Christianity in concrete dealings with concrete other people. It is about a clarification of the Christian way of life, of the attitude towards life, through which the execution of life becomes a Christian execution of life. This is the case when we live according to the rule that, in spite of all the differences between human beings, we should not make any distinction between them, but “love the whole human race, all people, even the enemy, and not to make exceptions, neither of preference nor of aversion:”³⁰² The neighbor is everyone for whom one becomes the neighbor oneself by “showing oneself to be a neighbor.”³⁰³ Of course, in the concrete enactment of life one always becomes a neighbor to concrete persons, only in such a way that it does not depend on their qualities whether I understand myself as their neighbor or treat them as my neighbor.³⁰⁴ But just as little does it depend on my subjective preferences

 Knud E. Løgstrup, Opgør med Kierkegaard, Kopenhagen: Gyldendal 1968. Cf. Pia Søltoft, “The Presence of the Absent Neighbor,” in Works of Love, Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook, 1998, pp. 113 – 128.  Dewi Z. Phillips, “Kierkegaard and Loves that Blossom,” in Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards “Taten der Liebe,” ed. by Ingolf U. Dalferth, Tü bingen: Mohr Siebeck 2002, pp. 155 – 166.  Michael Theunissen, “Das Kierkegaardbild in der neueren Forschung und Deutung (1945 – 1957),” in Sören Kierkegaard, ed. by Heinz-Horst Schrey, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 1971, pp. 357– 358.  SKS 9, 57 / WL, 55.  SKS 9, 23 / WL, 19.  SKS 9, 26 / WL, 22.  Love for one’s neighbor “is unchanged, no matter how the object becomes changed” (SKS 9, 13 / WL, 9. SKS 9, 153 / WL, 160. SKS 9, 159 / WL, 167.), because it does not depend in any way on certain qualities or characteristics of the other person.

3.15 Orientation to the relationship with God

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and inclinations, but only on the fact that, because I know myself loved by God without reason, I regard and treat all others as God’s and my neighbors without reason.

3.15 Orientation to the relationship with God This does not eliminate the differences between people, but neither does it eliminate the differences between the worldly (non-Christian) and Christian understanding of human life. There is no gradual transition from the worldly to the Christian, from worldly to Christian life and love. Christians are not better lovers than others, because “by way of comparison to love more than all other people is —not to love.”³⁰⁵ What is required is a fundamental change of horizon, which comes about through paying attention to a previously neglected relationship: the relationship with God. It is true that God is not a topic that came into the world with the Christians, but here too, Christianity takes place as a modification of the worldly (pre-Christian and non-Christian) understanding of God: “The world at best has nothing but a very remote high-festival conception that the God-relationship exists, not to mention that it should daily determine a person’s life.”³⁰⁶ The Christian modification consists accordingly in the clarification that the relationship with God is not only a secondary matter or holiday matter, but the decisive thing in human life: “Christianity teaches that God has first priority,”³⁰⁷ because “[o]nly the Godrelationship is earnestness.”³⁰⁸ Kierkegaard expresses the difference between Christian and worldly understanding of love in the misleading formula: “Worldly wisdom is of the opinion that love is a relationship between persons; Christianity teaches that love is a relationship between: a person-God-a person, that is, that God is the middle term.”³⁰⁹ The formula is misunderstood if one thinks that Kierkegaard’s point is that the worldly view of love as a two-place relation is to be extended in Christian terms to a three-place relation, and every love relationship between two people is to be understood as a three-place relation. His point is precisely that the relation God-human is not a case of the series formed by person-person rela-

    

SKS SKS SKS SKS SKS

9, 167 / WL, 175. 9, 192 / WL, 202. 9, 142 / WL, 149. 9, 181 / WL, 190. 9, 104 / WL, 106 f.

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tions, because God is “not any object, since he is Love itself.”³¹⁰ Rather, the Godhuman relationship is about that singular relationship without which the whole series of person-person relationships could not be, according to Christian insight, and cannot be understood in a way that is appropriate to reality. This is not an arbitrary religious view of interpersonal reality. As Kierkegaard shows, it is a mistake to think that the relations between people are only then grasped as they ‘really’ are when the relation to God is suppressed. They would then be understood not in an ethically neutral way, but just the reverse, in the light of other ‘intermediate determinations,’ in which the “self-willfulness of drives and inclination”³¹¹ dominates and not the fundamental equality of human beings gives the measure for dealing with them. People are essentially different, and all their relationships are shaped by these differences. Although every human being has certain things in common with some others, no one has everything in common with others, and there is nothing that everyone has in common. It is precisely the nature of human beings not to have a common, fixed nature. Kierkegaard therefore sees the real advantage that distinguishes humans from animals not already in their membership of the human species, but in the fact “that within the species each individual is the essentially different or distinctive.”³¹² No one is like another, everyone “can under the same circumstances do the very opposite of what another human being does.”³¹³ If the equality of human beings is postulated on the basis of these differences, by constructing a “universally given criterion” of the “universally human”³¹⁴ this leads de facto only to the fact that the powerful ones enforce their drives and inclinations against the others and force them under their view of equality. Kierkegaard considers these self-important things avoidable only by accepting the essential difference of humans and by not seeking to found their equality in the construction of a general-human nature, but rather by focusing on the only equality common to all humans, the “universal divine likeness of all people” is “eternity’s equality,”³¹⁵ that is, that in which God is the authoritative “middle term” from which the relationship of all humans to one another is understood and judged. Kierkegaard expresses this by the misleading example that one must discover “that it is not the husband who is the wife’s beloved, but it is God” and vice

     

SKS 9, 253 / WL, 265. SKS 9, 135 / WL, 140. SKS 9, 220 / WL, 230. Ibid. Ibid. SKS 9, 120 f. / WL, 125.

3.16 The humane exercise of freedom

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versa, because “in every relationship of love” God is actually “the sole object of love.”³¹⁶ But God is not the sword that Siegfried lays between himself and Brunhild, so as not to come too close to her, not that which pushes itself between lovers and keeps them apart, but precisely that which determines them as lovers and relates them to each other in a very specific way: “Love itself.”³¹⁷ One always loves the other and not love,³¹⁸ for instance, but only when one orients love for the other to the relationship with God does the unchanging equality of lovers come into view, in spite of all irrevocable individual differences in which they are neighbors to themselves and to all other people because God becomes neighbor to each of them.

3.16 The humane exercise of freedom Kierkegaard’s Works of Love unfold an ethics of human life in the Christian horizon as life according to the grammar of love by describing and analyzing elementary phenomena of life from that perspective. The plausibility of this grammar stands and falls with the phenomena of life that it makes critically intelligible. It does not present new phenomena, but a new view of phenomena already known. It is not a metaphysics that states what is the case, but a practical orientation of life that indicates how one would have to live in order to find out for oneself what is the case. It focuses in form and content on freedom—on the freedom to see, form and shape one’s own life out of insight into the relationship with God as an original love relationship. This God-relationship

 SKS 9, 117 / WL, 121. A look at Erasmus makes it clear that Kierkegaard here takes up a traditional topos in his own way: “Amas uxorem hoc tantum nomine, quod uxor est. Nihil magni facis. Nam istud quidem est tibi cum ethnicis commune. At amas non ob aliud, nisi quia tibi voluptati est. Ad carnem tendit amor tuus. Sed amas ob hoc potissimum, quod in ea perspexeris imaginem Christi, puta pietatem, modestiam, sobrietatem, puticiam, iamque non illam in ipsa, sed in Christo, immo in ea Christum amas; ita demum spiritualiter amas./You love your wife only because she is your wife. You do nothing great with that, because you have that in common with the pagans. You love only because of your own lust. Your love is aimed at the flesh. But if you love her first of all because you see in her the image of Christ in piety, modesty, temperance, and shamefacedness, you already love her no longer for her own sake, but in Christ, yes, precisely in her you love Christ, and that, after all, is spiritual love.” Erasmus von Rotterdam, Enchiridion Militis Christiani / Handbüchlein eines christlichen Streiters, Ausgewählte Schriften, vol. 1, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft 21990, pp. 146 – 147.  SKS 9, 253 / WL, 265.  And when it is said that one ‘loves love,’ it means that one loves the loving of that love, that is, those who are loved by the one who is love.

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is an active operation of divine love in people’s lives. It challenges people’s freedom and makes it impossible for them not to respond to the presence of God in their lives in one way other. It creates opportunities for them to use their freedom, it again and again plays in unexpected and surprising ways improbable chances of freedom into their lives by treating them without reasons as neighbors of God’s love, and it thereby opens an inexhaustible field of the humane exercise of human freedom in seeing, imagining, dreaming, acting, loving together with others in a joint effort of boundless humanity and Mitmenschlichkeit. ³¹⁹

 See Ingolf U. Dalferth, “Mitmenschlichkeit. Das christliche Ideal der Humanität,” NZSTh, vol. 62, 2020, pp. 149 – 166.

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Index of names Abbott, Thomas Kingsmill 107 Adam 76 f., 84 f. Adorno, Theodor W. 54 f., 57, 206, 209, 249 Aristotle 6, 115 Arndt, Andreas 35, 188 Arthur, Richard T. W. 17 Avanessian, Armen 23 Bailey, Tom 91 Bate, Walter J. 90 Beauvoir, Simon de 10 Beeley, Philip 17 Beer, John 3 Behne, Tanya 38 Bell, Richard H. 230 Berner, Christian 188 Block, Marlene 44 Blumenberg, Hans 192 Bloch, Ernst 49, 64 Bourdieu, Pierre 43 Brunhild 253 Bühler, Pierre 49, 125 Bunyan, John 233 Burkart, Judith M. 37 f. Cairns, Dorion 15 Calderwood, Henry 107 Call, Joseph 38 Calvin, Jean 4 Cantor, Georg 17 Cappelørn, Niels Jørgen 29, 181, 244 Carpenter, Malinda 38 Cavell, Stanley 168, 201 Chasiotis, Athanasius 37 Chiurazzi, Gaetano 183 Clayton, John 63 Climacus, Johannes 20, 25, 72, 143 – 145, 151 – 154, 166, 168 f., 179 f., 182 f., 185 – 187, 191, 193 – 195, 201 – 203, 206 f., 209, 212 f. Coleridge, Samuel T. 3 Cooper, Arnold M. 39 Cooper, Terry D. 56 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-016

Corrodi, Johannes 168, 170 Crouter, Richard 29 Damasio, Antonio 12, 38 f. Damgaard, Iben 49 Dawkins, Richard 39 DeHart, Pau 29 Derrida, Jacques 18 Deuser, Hermann 168, 174, 201, 232 Dewa Ayu Kadek, Claria 9 Dreyfus, Hubert 40 Dunning, Stephen Northrup 127 Ebelendu, Jude Ifeanyi 123 Eller, Vernard 23 Erasmus of Rotterdam 253 Evans, Charles Stephen 32, 238 Fehr, Ernst 89 Ferreira, M. Jamie 124, 143, 161, 234, 244 Fischbacher, Urs 89 Frank, Manfred 192 Fremstedal, Roe 32 Frierson, Patrick R. 4 Friess, Horace Leland 28 Fuchs, Thomas 45 Gabbard, Glen O. 39 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 33 Galilei, Galileo 17 Gauss, Car Friedrich 17 Goethe, Norma B. 17 Green, Deidre Nicole 107, 131 Gregor, Mary 106 Grøn, Arne 49, 129, 228, 241, 244 Großhans, Hans-Peter 188 Grundtvig, Nikolai Frederik Severin 155, 193 Gupta, Anoop 31 Habermas, Jürgen 57, 237 Hanks, William F. 44 Hannay, Alastair 232, 234 Hansen, Knud 233

264

Index of names

Hartshorne, Charles 29 Haufniensis, Vigilius 75 – 86, 88 Hegel, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 17 f., 72 f., 86, 140, 170, 174, 187 Heidegger, Martin 33, 122 Heinrichs, Markus 89 Helmer, Christine 188 f., 192 Henningsen, Peter 45 Hirsch, Emanuel 182 f., 185, 220 Hobbes, Thomas 96 f. Hrdy, Sarah Blaffeer 37 Hunziker, Andreas 49 Husserl, Edmund 15, 192

Law, David R. 159 f., 169 f., 218 Lawler, Edwina 184 Leclerc, Ivor 29 Leibniz, Georg Friedrich Wilhelm 17, 29, 192 Lévinas, Emmanuel 49 Liao, S. Matthew 106 Lincoln, Ulrich 230 Linde, Gesche 174 Lippitt, John 131, 159 Løgstrup, Knud Ejler 249 f. Louden, Robert B. 4 Lundsgaard-Leth, Kersten 183 Luther, Martin 174, 176, 222, 248

I Wayan, Ana

Mace, Ruth 37 Marcar, Greg P. 131 Marino, Gordon 143, 232, 234 Marion, Jean 33 Marx, Karl 57 f. McCurry, Jeffrey 45 Meckenstock, Günter 189 Meisner, Heinrich 181 Merrell, Floyd 39 Minogue, Kenneth R. 96 Moll, Henrike 38 Müller, Juliane 198 f.

9

Jackson, Timothy P. 232 Jaeggi, Adrian V. 38 Jakobson, Roman 45 Jesus 25 – 28, 111 f., 177, 197, 200, 214 – 217, 220 – 224, 233, 235 f. Johnson, Russell 232 Johnson, Samuel 90 Jørgensen, Dorthe 29, 183 Justo, José M. 49 Kant, Immanuel 3 – 6, 15 f., 47, 57, 71, 73, 97, 106 – 110, 122, 146, 192, 196, 201, 226, 242 f. Kappeler, Peter M. 37 Kelsey, Catherine L. 184 Kenny, Anthony 10 Kierkegaard, Søren 3 f., 8, 11 – 23, 25, 27 – 33, 48 f., 53, 64, 66 f., 71 – 76, 79 – 81, 84, 88, 102 f., 105, 110 – 113, 115, 117 f., 122 – 140, 143 f., 146 – 149, 153, 155 – 157, 159 f., 162 – 187, 189, 191 – 195, 200 f., 203 – 206, 208 f., 211 f., 214 – 253 Kimball, Trevor VI Klemke, Elmer Daniel 193 Knappe, Ulrich 201 Kolínská, Kateřina 31 Kosch, Michelle 31 Kosefeld, Michael 89 Kranich, Christiane 188 f. Krishek, Sharon 132

Nielsen, Klaus 31 Nietzsche, Friederich Noreen, Adolf 45 Nowak, Kurt 197

64 f., 75

O’Neill, Onora 90, 98 Onwuatuegw, Ignatius Nnaemeka Osthöver, Claus-Dieter VII Overgaard, Søren 49 Paseru, Herman 9 Paton, Herbert J. 106 Pattison, George 131 Paulsen, Anna 233 Peirce, Charles Sanders 34, 45 Perry, John 9 f. Person, Ethel S. 39, 42, 100 Phillips, Dewy Z. 89, 163 f., 249 f. Plato 83, 191 Podmore, Simon D. 32

123

Index of names

Pope, Alexander 3, 5 Preuss, Peter 65 Price, George 25 Pryor, Angelle 45 Rabouin, David 17 Rae, Gavin 57 Redmond, Dennis 55 Rehme-Iffert, Birgit 188 Ricoeur, Paul 10 Ringleben, Joachim 235 Rink, Sigurd 174 Roberts, Robert R. 93 Rodgers, Michael 49 Rohls, Jan 188, 191 Rosa, Hartmut 40, 43 Rose, David Edwaard 18 Rosfort, Réne VI Russell, Bertrand 17, 102 Sattel, Heribert C. 45 Schaik, Carel P. van 37 f. Scharlemann, Robert P. 60 Schellenberg, John L. 90 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 214 Schiefenhoevel, Wulf 37 Schleiermacher, Daniel Friedrich Ernst 28 f., 74, 181 – 185, 187 – 189, 191 – 200, 208, 215, 221 Schrey, Heinz-Horst 233, 250 Schulz, Heiko 48, 123, 203 Sear, Rebecca 37 Semple, John W. 107 Shepherd, Jean 89 Siebeck, Georg 49, 123, 129, 168, 188, 250 Siegfried 253

Silk, Joan B. 38 Skempton, Simon 18 Socrates 103, 191 f. Søltoft, Pia 250 Sommer, Manfred 192 Sousa, Elisabete M. de 49 Stewart, Jon 244 Strauss, Albrecht B. 90 Strawser, Michael 113 Strawson, Galen 10 Strokes, Patrick 11 Taylor, Charles 33, 36, 39 – 43, 230 Theunissen, Michael 31, 250 Tice, Terrence N. 184 Tillich, Paul 57, 60 – 63 Tinning, Søren 183 Tomasello, Michael 38 Valco, Michael 72 Valcova, Katarina 72 Vercellone, Frederico 189, 191 Voland, Eckart 37 Walsh, Sylvia 23, 73, 230 Welz, Claudia VI Wennerscheid, Sophie 23 Westphal, Merold 20, 72, 237 Whitehead, Alfred North 10, 17, 29 Whittaker, John H. 73 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 89, 168, 201, 232 Wright, Georg H. von 3, 233 Zahavi, Dan 45 Zak, Paul J. 89 Zermelo, Ernst 17

265

Index of subjects Activity 6, 9, 12, 15 f., 19 – 21, 35, 46, 49 f., 56, 67, 78, 86 – 88, 111 f., 118, 122, 125, 128, 130, 132 f., 135, 145, 147, 161, 199, 224 Actual/Actuality 6 f., 13, 15, 17 – 19, 24 – 26, 29, 46 f., 51, 56, 58, 61, 64, 67, 72 – 76, 80 – 88, 93, 102 – 103, 105, 111, 114, 122, 128, 130 – 133, 135, 137 – 140, 146 f., 157 f., 174, 176, 188, 191 f., 195, 200, 208, 210 – 214, 217 – 220, 228, 231, 245, 247 Adverb 12, 16, 21, 50, 118, 120, 130, 227, 230 f. Aesthetic 23, 125 f., 155 – 158, 163 f., 167 – 171, 173 – 175, 179 f., 183, 190 f., 200, 202 Alienation 18, 49 f., 53 – 62, 67 Anxiety 60 – 62, 71, 75 f., 78 – 88, 113, 143

Christianity 74, 84, 110, 125, 133, 136 f., 149 f., 152 – 155, 160, 162 – 166, 172 f., 180 – 182, 184 – 187, 193 – 197, 200 – 202, 204 f., 210 – 212, 217, 220, 226 f., 229, 232 f., 242, 244, 247 f., 250 f. Christian life 74, 112, 124, 151, 154, 163 – 167, 171, 173 f., 176, 180, 194, 200, 227, 229, 231 – 233, 236 f., 240 f., 245 f., 251 Communication 11, 30, 38, 41, 43 f., 46 f., 72 – 75, 86, 95, 116, 125 – 127, 153 – 155, 166, 172, 182, 205, 211, 228 – 230, 232 f. – Existence communication 73, 75 – Indirect Communication 75, 125 f., 153 f., 182, 229 Community 22, 35, 64, 158, 184, 196, 221 f., 242 Contradiction 71 f., 80 f., 111, 157 f., 167, 170, 205, 211, 214 f.

Becoming 14 f., 20 f., 24 – 28, 32 – 37, 39, 41, 44, 48, 50, 52, 55 f., 64, 72, 78, 80 f., 83 f., 87, 108, 110 f., 114, 143 – 149, 151 f., 155, 159 f., 162 f., 172 f., 175, 177 – 179, 181 f., 184 – 195, 197 – 207, 209 – 214, 218 – 220, 224, 235 Being 3 – 7, 10 – 17, 19 – 33, 35 – 44, 46 – 67, 71 f., 76 – 91, 93 – 97, 100 – 103, 105, 108 – 110, 112 f., 115 f., 126 f., 129 f., 132, 134, 137, 139 f., 143 – 156, 159, 163 f., 166, 169 – 171, 173 – 176, 178 f., 183 – 190, 192 – 197, 199 – 213, 215 – 217, 219 – 224, 226 f., 229 – 237, 239 – 242, 245, 247, 249 f., 252

Dasein 12 – 15, 19, 21, 64 – 66, 109, 143 f. Decision 14, 36, 57, 66, 90 f., 94, 131, 144 f., 147 f., 152, 179, 182, 184, 190, 202 f., 205, 207, 209 – 213, 219, 223, 231 – 233, 237 – 239, 241, 247 – Absolute decision 205, 209 – 213, 223 Despair 31 f., 60 – 62, 92, 113, 115 – 117, 138, 152, 157 – 159, 167, 169 f., 174, 176 f., 179 f., 232, 244 Dialectics 49, 174, 185, 188, 191, 241 Difference 7, 10, 12 – 14, 18, 22, 24, 28, 30, 34, 59, 62, 64, 66 f., 71, 74, 79, 83, 91, 93 – 96, 101, 104, 109, 116, 120, 127, 132 f., 143, 146 f., 150 f., 154 f., 157, 167, 172, 174, 176, 184, 186 f., 194 f., 199 f., 204, 215 f., 219, 221, 226 – 228, 232, 235 – 237, 239 – 242, 244, 246, 250 – 253 Dignity 56, 95, 98 f. Distinction 5, 11 – 13, 17, 19, 22, 27 – 31, 41, 54 – 57, 59, 61 – 63, 66 f., 85, 88, 101, 111 f., 120, 122 f., 127, 129, 131 – 133, 137, 140, 151, 156, 167, 169, 171, 176, 182, 187, 198, 216, 225, 227, 236 – 242, 250

Charity 95 f., 226 Christendom 133, 167, 181 f., 185 – 187, 193 – 196, 200, 219, 227 Christian 8, 14, 55, 57, 61, 74 f., 93, 103, 110, 112 – 114, 124 – 127, 129, 132 – 134, 143 – 155, 162 – 168, 170 – 175, 177, 180 – 187, 190 f., 193 – 202, 204 f., 213 – 220, 223 – 233, 235 – 246, 248 – 253

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111025544-017

Index of subjects

Duty

13 f., 27 f., 33, 53, 65 – 67, 99, 106 f., 157 – 159, 173, 203, 222, 229, 243 f.

Estrangement 49, 53, 56, 59 – 62, 64 Eternal 12, 23, 25, 30 f., 63, 67, 84 f., 87 f., 110 – 119, 128, 130, 132, 137 – 140, 155 f., 158, 160 – 162, 170 – 175, 180, 190, 201 f., 210 f., 213 – 215, 217, 223, 232 f., 235 Ethical 6, 23, 25 f., 28, 57 – 59, 125 – 127, 155 – 159, 163 f., 166 – 171, 173 – 175, 180, 183 f., 190 f., 199 f., 202 – 204, 207, 220, 222 f., 228 – 230, 237 f., 240 – 243, 246, 249 Ethics 32, 76, 107, 127, 129, 157 – 159, 188, 191, 225, 228 f., 237 f., 240 – 242, 253 Existence 3, 7 f., 13 f., 19 – 21, 24, 26, 33, 49, 51, 53, 57, 59 – 62, 64 – 66, 71, 73 f., 77 – 79, 82 – 84, 86 – 88, 115, 123, 127, 143 f., 146 – 149, 151, 155 – 158, 160 – 164, 166 – 176, 179 f., 187 – 192, 194, 197, 200 – 203, 205, 207 – 214, 216, 219 – 224, 232, 237, 242, 247 Faith

24 f., 32, 63, 65, 73 f., 84 – 87, 92 f., 112, 132, 144 f., 149 f., 152, 154 f., 159 – 163, 166 f., 171, 173 – 182, 184 f., 187, 194 – 198, 213, 215 – 217, 219 f., 222 – 224, 227, 232 – 234, 238 f. Fear 12, 24, 49, 79, 84, 92, 97, 113 f., 138, 143, 159, 184 Finite 9, 12 – 14, 16, 18 – 21, 23 – 26, 28, 30 f., 49, 60, 62 – 67, 86, 110 – 112, 114, 119, 132, 137, 156 – 159, 162, 170, 172, 181, 203, 216 f., 222 Finitude 18, 25, 27, 31, 49, 60 – 65, 67, 111, 157, 172, 216, 222 Freedom 12, 25, 30 f., 35, 65, 67, 76, 79 – 87, 100, 108, 117, 156, 159, 196, 233 – 235, 241, 243 f., 247, 253 f. God

3 – 5, 8, 14, 20 – 33, 47 f., 62, 64, 81 f., 87 – 89, 92 f., 100 – 104, 106 – 113, 123, 126 f., 131 – 133, 136 – 138, 140, 143 f., 148 f., 154, 158 – 163, 167 – 180, 183, 187 – 189, 192, 196 – 201, 207 – 224, 227, 231, 233 – 236, 239 f., 245 – 249, 251 – 254

267

Grammar 10, 45, 63, 89, 92, 100, 130, 140, 228, 230 f., 249 f., 253 Hope 4 – 7, 35, 53, 61 f., 87, 92 f., 100, 103 – 106, 108, 110, 112 – 121, 130 f., 138, 159, 161, 226 f., 236 Humanity 7 f., 11, 21, 28 f., 56 – 58, 60, 197, 202, 220 – 222, 236 f., 239, 249, 254 Identity 10 f., 26 f., 39, 42 f., 56, 91, 95, 105, 146, 149, 160, 172, 203 – idem-identity 10 – ipse-identity 10 Immanence 159 f., 170, 172, 187, 214 Index / Indexical 7, 46, 72, 103, 230 Individual 15, 22 f., 25 f., 28 f., 38, 40 f., 43 f., 46, 48, 58, 64, 73, 77, 82 f., 86 f., 94, 154 – 160, 162 f., 168 – 172, 179, 187, 192, 197, 201, 203, 206 – 211, 213 – 215, 219, 221 – 223, 236, 238 f., 244, 250, 252 f. – Single individual 22 f., 25, 27 f., 75, 85, 210 – 212, 222 Individuality 27 – 29, 48 Infinite 9, 12 – 14, 16 – 21, 23 – 31, 33, 62 – 64, 66 f., 79, 106, 108, 111 f., 116, 119, 127, 134, 137, 156 – 159, 162, 170, 172, 188 f., 194, 203, 216 f., 222 – Actual infinite 17 f. Interpretation 34 – 42, 44, 52, 106, 143, 162, 164 f., 215, 223 f. – Self-interpretation 34 – 36, 39 – 44 Inwardness 30 f., 127, 169, 172, 216 f. Justification Life

175 – 177, 197 – 199

3, 5 – 8, 11 – 15, 18 – 22, 24 – 27, 30, 33 f., 36 – 38, 40 f., 43, 45, 50 – 52, 54 – 62, 64 – 67, 72 – 77, 79, 82 – 88, 90 – 93, 95 f., 98, 101, 103 – 105, 108 – 111, 115 f., 118 – 133, 140, 143 f., 146, 148 f., 152 – 160, 162, 164, 166 – 181, 184 – 186, 191 f., 194 – 203, 205 – 213, 216 f., 219 – 224, 226 – 236, 239 – 244, 246, 248 – 251, 253

268

Index of subjects

– Christian life 74, 112, 124, 151, 154, 163 – 167, 171, 173 f., 176, 180, 194, 200, 227, 229, 231 – 233, 236 f., 240 f., 245 f., 251 – Forms of life 168 f., 201 Love 9, 22, 26 f., 62, 67, 78, 87, 89, 91, 102, 105 – 113, 116 – 118, 120, 122 – 138, 140, 143, 151, 161, 174, 177, 223 – 237, 240 f., 243 – 248, 250 – 254 – True love 108, 112, 117, 122 – 124, 126 – 133, 135, 138, 140 Middle term 102 – 104, 117, 133, 136, 140, 251 f. Modality 29, 133, 137 f., 229 f. Mode 13 – 16, 19 – 21, 23 f., 33 – 35, 37, 40, 46 f., 50 f., 53, 57 f., 65 f., 78, 83 f., 87, 90, 105, 107, 113, 115 f., 120, 126, 128, 130 f., 134, 137, 139 f., 143, 147 – 149, 152 – 156, 163, 166, 169, 171, 187, 190 – 192, 195, 200, 205, 214, 219 f., 240, 248 Moment 29, 81, 83 – 85, 87, 111, 113, 115 – 118, 130, 197 f., 205, 211, 214, 229 Necessity 12, 25, 30, 67, 80, 137, 139 f., 156, 170, 178 Negativity 14, 23, 67, 161 f., 165, 174, 176, 178 Neighbor 26 f., 48, 55, 87, 106 – 108, 112, 123, 126 f., 131 f., 135 – 137, 140, 158, 232, 245 f., 248 – 251, 253 f. Orientation 3, 5, 24, 44 f., 47, 50, 52, 58, 101, 105, 118, 120, 143, 159, 162, 169, 172, 219, 231, 241, 251, 253 – Self-orientation 51 f., 56 Outwardness 127, 216 f. Paradox 162, 174 – 176, 201, 206, 210, 213 – 215, 217 – 219, 222 – 224 Particularity 27 – 29, 75 Passivity 14, 35, 49 f., 66, 86, 128, 130, 172 Phenomenology 35, 45, 127, 162, 183, 228 f., 242 Possibility 5 f., 14, 20 f., 23 – 25, 28 f., 33, 35, 47, 59, 61, 65 – 67, 71, 73, 75 – 88, 90, 99, 102 f., 105 f., 111 – 121, 129, 137 – 139, 143, 146, 148, 151, 160 – 163, 169,

175 f., 183 f., 189, 192 – 195, 200 f., 207, 209 – 211, 213 f., 218, 220, 223, 231, 234, 241 – 243 Presence 8 f., 12, 24, 26, 28, 39, 47, 61 – 63, 84, 88, 95, 103, 110, 114, 118, 140, 143, 148, 151, 153, 170, 177 – 179, 208, 213 f., 216 f., 220 – 224, 235 f., 241, 246, 250, 254 Recollection 184, 202, 213, 217, Relation 8 f., 12, 14 – 18, 21 – 24, 26 – 31, 35, 40, 45, 53, 55, 57 – 59, 78, 84, 86, 95 f., 98 – 102, 109, 116, 133 – 136, 140, 156, 159 – 161, 165, 172, 180, 183 f., 188 f., 196 f., 200, 207 – 211, 214, 216 f., 219, 239 f., 251 f. – God-relation 8, 28 f., 31, 207 f. Religion 4 f., 23, 32, 44, 59 f., 63, 89 f., 131, 164 f., 182 – 184, 193 f., 227, 232 Religiousness A 156, 159, 162 – 164, 171, 179 f., 183, 201 f., 214 Religiousness B 159, 162 – 164, 171 f., 179, 183, 201 f., 214 Repetition 49, 84, 162, 184, 190, 202, 213 f., 217, 223 Respect 11 – 15, 22, 27, 33, 45, 47, 50 f., 54 f., 59, 63, 67, 84, 91, 94 f., 98 f., 105 – 108, 120, 131 – 133, 136, 146, 157, 164 f., 17 f., 4 f., 177, 181, 187, 191, 193, 214, 217, 222, 227, 243, 246 Self

3 – 5, 7 – 16, 18 – 21, 23 – 34, 36 – 61, 63 – 66, 72, 81, 85, 97, 106 – 108, 111, 123, 125, 127, 130 – 133, 135, 137, 143 f., 149, 152, 154 – 161, 164, 166 f., 169 – 176, 181, 191, 196 – 199, 213, 221 f., 226, 229 f., 233 f., 238 f., 241, 244, 247 f., 252 Self-alienation 49 f., 53 – 59 Self-centeredness 4, 14, 112, 235 Self-deception 54, 143, Selfish 16, 20 f., 23 f., 26, 28, 39, 50, 53, 66, 131 – 133, 136 f., 140 Selfless 16, 20 f., 23 f., 26 f., 50, 53, 66, 122, 131 f., 136 f., 140 Sense 4, 9 – 12, 18 – 20, 22 f., 26 – 31, 33 f., 36, 38 – 43, 46 f., 50 f., 53, 59, 74, 80, 88, 92, 96, 101 – 103, 106 f., 113 – 122,

Index of subjects

126 – 128, 131 f., 134 – 138, 147 f., 150, 152 f., 159 f., 163, 167 f., 172 f., 176 – 178, 182, 184, 187, 201, 206, 211, 214, 218 f., 224, 226, 229, 232, 234, 238, 240, 243, 249 Sin 56 f., 61 f., 75 – 77, 80 – 88, 131, 148 f., 160, 173, 176 f., 194, 197 – 200, 206 – 208, 211, 227 f., 232 Singular 23, 25 – 28, 64, 136, 143, 203, 209, 211, 221, 223, 252 Singularity 27 f., 187 Situation 7, 9 f., 13, 35 – 47, 50 – 59, 61, 63 – 65, 72, 75, 90, 93, 96 f., 99 f., 109, 120 f., 131 f., 135, 143, 150, 154, 157 f., 167, 170, 178, 182, 193, 195, 201, 204, 207, 228 – 230, 232, 234 f., 238, 241, 244 Sosein 12 – 15, 19, 64 – 66, 109, 143 f. Sphere 28, 30, 86, 156 – 158, 160 f., 164, 166 – 172, 174 f., 179, 184 Spirit 25 f., 78 f., 82, 84, 87 f., 112, 127, 130, 169, 173, 199, 215, 221, 231 – 233 Stages 12, 83, 127, 143, 156, 163 f., 167 f., 174 f., 179, 200 Subject 9 f., 31, 34, 46, 75, 92, 106, 123, 145 f., 149, 152, 155, 160, 162, 166, 168 f., 171 – 173, 175 f., 179 f., 187, 191, 196 f., 202 – 207, 209 – 213, 222, 225, 228, 230

269

Subjectivity 29, 31, 49, 72, 166, 168 f., 173 – 176, 180, 183, 194, 202, 206, 212, 229 Subject 9 f., 31, 34, 46 f., 106, 123, 145,149, 152, 160, 162, 166, 168 – 176, 179 f., 187, 191, 196, 202 – 213, 222, 228 Synthesis 9, 12, 14 – 16, 19 f., 25 f., 30 f., 67, 78, 81 f., 84 f., 88, 156, 159 Third party 109, 135 – 137, 210 f., 239 f. Time 3, 7, 10 – 13, 22, 26, 31 f., 34 f., 37 f., 40, 42, 44, 49, 53, 58, 63, 65 f., 75, 78 – 80, 83 – 85, 88, 90 f., 103, 110 f., 113 – 115, 118 f., 122 f., 130, 139, 146 f., 155 f., 160 – 162, 166 f., 171 – 173, 175, 177, 180 f., 184, 187 – 190, 192, 195, 198, 207, 210, 213 – 215, 218, 223 – 225, 240, 244, 246 Trust 89 – 103, 224 – distrust 90, 95 – 98, 100 – mistrust 90, 93, 95 f., 100 Truth 7, 13 f., 24, 26, 29, 40, 65 f., 72 – 74, 92, 98, 101, 103, 122, 125 f., 128 f., 131 f., 135, 146, 149 f., 152, 155, 165, 174, 180, 183 – 186, 202, 204, 206 – 214, 222, 232, 234, 238, 247 – Untruth 24, 183, 206 f., 211 Wahrsein

12 – 15, 64 – 66, 109, 143 f.