Hermeneutics and negativism : existential ambiguities of self-understanding 9783161559495, 9783161557514

Citation preview

Religion in Philosophy and Theology Editor Ingolf U. Dalferth (Claremont) Advisory Board Hermann Deuser (Erfurt / Frankfurt a.M.) Jean-Luc Marion (Paris / Chicago) Thomas Rentsch (Dresden) Eleonore Stump (St. Louis)

95

Hermeneutics and Negativism Existential Ambiguities of Self-Understanding

Edited by

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

Mohr Siebeck

Claudia Welz, born 1974; studied theology and philosophy in Tübingen, Jerusalem, Munich and Heidelberg; PhD and habilitation at the Institute for Hermeneutics and Philosophy of Religion, University of Zurich; since 2010 Professor of Systematic Theology with special responsibilities in Ethics and Philosophy and Religion, and since 2014 Director of the Center for the Study of Jewish Thought in Modern Culture at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. René Rosfort, born 1975; studied theology in Copenhagen and Florence; 2008 PhD; currently Associate Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen.

e-ISBN PDF 978-3-16-155949-5 ISBN 978‑3‑16‑155751‑4 ISSN 1616‑346X (Religion in Philosophy and Theology) Die Deutsche Bibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2018  by Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen, Germany.  www.mohr.de This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to reproductions, translations, microfilms and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was typeset and printed on non-aging paper by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany.

Acknowledgments With this book, we wish to celebrate Arne Grøn’s 65th birthday on October 1, 2017. The book is both a gesture of appreciation of his work and a contribution to its cross-disciplinary continuation. As one of his colleagues and friends expressed it, our project is a kind of substitution and intercession1 performed by the scientific community while one of its members is sorely missed due to serious illness. Together with this volume, we also send our best wishes for recovery to the jubilarian. We are grateful to Faber Ltd for permission to quote from Edwin Muir, Collected Poems in George Pattison’s contribution, and to the Prinzhorn Collection, Universitätsklinikum Heidelberg, for permission to print five paintings in Sonja Frohoff ’s contribution. At Mohr Siebeck we would like to thank all those who have been involved in the publication of this volume, in particular Henning Ziebritzki and Klaus Hermannstädter. Moreover, we would like to thank two people who were indispensable in finalizing the manuscript: Elin Simonson for her skillful, elegant, and thorough English language corrections in all parts of the book written by non-native speakers, and P. Johan Lose for his meticulous work as editorial assistant, formatting the manuscript according to the RPT series guidelines, and making the indexes. The publication of this volume would not have been possible without financial support. Fortunately, we could cover the costs thanks to the Elite Research Prize awarded to Claudia Welz by the Danish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Higher Education, to the Department of Systematic Theology, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, and to the Velux Foundation via the research project »Self-Understanding and Self-Alienation: Existential Hermeneutics and Psychopathology.« Copenhagen, August 2017

1

René Rosfort and Claudia Welz

  »Eine Art aktiven Platzhaltens für eine denkerische Persönlichkeit während der schmerzlichen Zeit ihrer Passivität! Eine Art nach außen tretender innerlichster Fürbitte!« (Günter Bader in an email to Claudia Welz, September 8, 2016).

Table of Contents Claudia Welz and René Rosfort Introduction: A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics . . .

1

Existential Ambiguities: Anxiety, Despair, Freedom Stefano Micali Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

13

René Rosfort Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

33

Mads Peter Karlsen The Past ›Has‹ Us Before We ›Have‹ It: Inheriting Hereditary Sin? . . . .

53

Emil Angehrn Self-Understanding and Self-Deception: Between Existential Hermeneutics and Negativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

69

Existential Hermeneutics: Self-Understanding between Transparency and Opacity Carsten Pallesen The Single Individual as the Single Individual: A Response to Subjektivitet og negativitet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

85

Hans-Christoph Askani In Quest for Identity: The Self as (a) Stranger to Himself . . . . . . . . .

109

Ingolf U. Dalferth Self-Alienation: Self, Finitude and Estrangement . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

127

George Pattison The Grace of Time: Towards a Kataphatic Theology of Time . . . . . . .

145

VIII

Table of Contents

Ettore Rocca Analogy and Negativism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

161

Günter Bader From Alphabet to Poem: On a Parenthesis in Sigmund Freud’s On Aphasia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

177

Existential Psycho(patho)logy: Selfhood and Self-Alienation Sonja Frohoff Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery: Artworks of the Prinzhorn Collection . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

191

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas Schizophrenia, Subjectivity and Self-Alienation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

211

Borut Škodlar Anxiety and Despair: Experiences from the Negativity of Disturbed Selfhood in Schizophrenia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

225

Claudia Welz Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception: Existential Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

237

Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Names . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Subjects . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

257 263 265

Introduction A Negativistic Approach to Existential Hermeneutics Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

1. Theme, aim, and background of this volume This volume is a thematically focused exploration of existential questions that concern the ambiguities of self-understanding. It explores the following three thematic fields: first, experiences of anxiety and despair as related to the question of what these ambiguous phenomena show about freedom and its difficulties; second, hermeneutical theories as related to the question of how we can develop an existential hermeneutics that can account for the ambiguities of self-understanding between transparency and opacity; and, third, selfhood between self-understanding and self-alienation as a focal point of existential psycho(patho)logy. This research agenda originates in the open endings of a conference that took place at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, in September 2015. The conference was organized as part of an interdisciplinary research project on »Self-Understanding and Self-Alienation: Existential Hermeneutics and Psychopathology« (2014 – 2017).1 The project’s principal investigator, Arne Grøn, intended to organize a follow-up workshop in order to reinvestigate which notions of selfhood and alterity are at play when human beings experience themselves as others, and in order to examine whether it is possible to differentiate the concept of self-alienation into a structural, an existential, and a normative form, and experiences of self-alienation into non-pathological and pathological experiences. Furthermore, in his capacity as director of the Søren Kierkegaard Research Centre at the University of Copenhagen, Arne Grøn wanted to rearticulate the Kierkegaardian core of Michael Theunissen’s negativistic approach to subjectivity via experiences of self-alienation. 1   The project is funded by the Velux Foundation and co-financed by the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen, and Psychiatric Center Hvidovre / Glostrup. The project offers an empirical and philosophical investigation into the role of self-understanding for personal identity and into the relation between self-understanding and self-alienation. With this double approach, the project not only seeks to clarify in what sense radical forms of self-alienation characterize schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, anorexia nervosa, and traumatic conditions following torture, but it also seeks to contribute to an improved basis for psychotherapeutic practice. For more information, see http://teol.ku.dk / skc / selfunderstanding / english / (accessed August 10, 2017).

2

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

Both of these planned projects deal with the interplay between empirical and philosophical questions and draw upon resources from the distinct but interconnected fields of existential thinking, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and psychopathology (especially Jaspers, Heidegger, Levinas, Binswanger, Blankenburg, and Tellenbach). However, due to serious illness, he could not implement these plans. The idea of this monograph is therefore to pick up on the aforementioned existential questions and to contribute to the discussion in written form. Our aim is not to provide general answers to inescapable existential questions, but to convert them dialogically and dialectically into new questions that can shed light on the complexity of human existence.

2. Methodology As indicated by the title, the contributions to Hermeneutics and Negativism combine two methodological paths: 1. The papers aim to develop various forms of existential hermeneutics. In this sense, they explore the leading idea of Arne Grøn’s work that, if we want to understand ourselves and, more generally, human existence we cannot draw sharp distinctions between contingent and transcendental aspects of the self, but must, rather, make sense of and deal with the continuously changing ambiguities of experiential life. This implies that the basic »structures« of selfhood and self-transformation are neither given as immediate conditions nor as historically contingent constructs, but are accessible only in mediated forms. Yet language as mediator is itself a double-edged sword: it functions both as a means to establish relevant distinctions and as a means to deconstruct them in case that they seem inappropriate in relation to the phenomena in question. It is here decisive to consider that the ways in which phenomena appear depend on the perspectives of those to whom they manifest themselves. The perspectival givenness of anything manifesting itself to someone in a certain way is central to existential ambiguities of self-understanding, in particular when we consider the relations between impression and expression; activity and passivity; being formed and forming oneself. 2. Furthermore, the papers adopt or examine a negative approach to selfhood by focusing on experiences of anxiety, despair, or other forms of more radical self-alienation in which self-understanding is lost or radically altered. Such experiences of negativity challenge our sense of self, making it difficult to understand oneself, regardless of whether one tries to understand oneself through emotions, thoughts, or interactions with others. The crucial question in this context is what disturbances to or breakdowns in self-understanding

Introduction

3

can teach us about selfhood. As mentioned, this approach was pioneered by Michael Theunissen, whose negativism draws heavily upon Kierkegaard, both methodologically and anthropologically.2 Grøn’s study on subjectivity and negativity in Kierkegaard develops this approach.3 A prime example of self-alienation, which can be approached by combining negativism and existential hermeneutics, is how time can estrange persons from themselves to the point at which they can no longer recognize or identify with who they were at an earlier stage of life. Considering the conditions of human finitude, Theunissen, in his book Negative Theologie der Zeit, correlates philosophy and psychopathology. He discusses how human existence can fail when we experience the estranging effect of time, and, conversely, he asks how happiness is possible and how one’s life as a self can turn out well (gelingendes Selbstsein) – in and despite our temporality and our more or less »healthy« ways of relating to time. Theunissen developed his philosophy in constant exchange with the immeasurable wealth of the lived world, the Lebenswelt. The lived world is conceived as temporally determined reality, which precedes the individual and his or her experience of time, and Theunissen examined it to uncover dimensions of experienced time that had often remained – and still often remain – untouched by contemporary psychological and psychiatric investigations.4 According to Theunissen, today philosophy can only be serious in the mode of its negation,5 that is, philosophy must be denied the possibility of pure thought. Philosophy can only be conducted in and through a reality that is »earlier« than all thinking and that informs thinking in virtue of being a historically »grown« reality. In this denial of pure thought, philosophy becomes re-search in searching that which precedes and instructs it. Thus, Nachdenken, or after-thought, is philosophy’s true nature. In this context, Theunissen emphasizes how philosophical thinking is always late.6 Philosophy does not, on his view, ground anything in or through its activity of thinking, but comes after the fact – as a conscientious, critical reflection upon the historical reality that shapes and conditions human existence.

2

 See M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 8; Idem, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung: Kierkegaards negativistische Methode (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991); Idem, Der Begriff Verzweiflung: Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993). 3  See A. Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. J. B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008 [the original Danish edition is from 1994]); Idem, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997). 4   Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, 14 – 15. 5   See ibid., 22: »Seriös ist Philosophie heute nur noch im Modus ihrer Negation« (our translation). 6   See ibid., 24.

4

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

Arne Grøn shares this view of philosophy as related to life,7 and has in numerous articles examined different ways of relating to and dealing with time – be it in hopeful courage or despair, in faith and love that can wait for and anticipate the good, or in impatience and mistrust that clings to what seems to be a clear reason for relinquishing hope.8 Furthermore, the existential aspects of the relation between time and history, finitude and transcendence, and death and the preciousness of time and human (co‑)existence are all topics at the heart of his philo­ sophical reflections. He has in his own way explored how human beings suffer under the futility of time and how they can resist its overwhelming power and bring out positive aspects from the passing of time and from the constant threat of being »too late« to mend our shortcomings, omissions, and miscarriages. In his essay on melancholy, which is based on vignettes and statements by patients, Theunissen discusses the methodological difficulty at the core of psychopathology: that one can speak of the »sick soul« (or self) only by negating certain determinations of the »healthy« self, for instance by describing the lack of self-continuity experienced by depressive patients as an »obstruction« or »disempowerment« of the future, as its being »non-given« or given only in an »improper« or »inauthentic« fashion.9 As co-founder of The Danish National Research Foundation’s Center for Subjectivity Research,10 Arne Grøn has contributed to the center’s interdisciplinary research agenda, not least with his negativistic approach to subjectivity and selfhood. His principal argument is that the interdisciplinary investigation of selfhood and self-disorders conducted between psychiatry and various philo­ sophical and theological traditions needs to take into consideration the various forms of negations of what is regarded as »normal« or non-alienated states of mind. In a time of rapidly advancing scientific knowledge, groundbreaking technological innovation, and instantaneous access to seemingly limitless information, a negativistic approach to the human condition is not immediately obvious. Why focus on what goes wrong when so much is going well? What is the point of reformulating old questions when the frontiers of knowledge are constantly expanding? Is the long detour through negativity necessary in a time abounding with shortcuts? These are more than rhetorical questions. When trying to making sense  7   See, for example, A. Grøn and Th. Brudholm, »Nachdenken,« in On Jean Améry: Philosophy of Catastrophe, ed. M. Zolkos (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2001), 193 – 215.  8  See A. Grøn, »Time, Courage, Selfhood,« in Kierkegaard in Lisbon, ed. J. M. Justo and E. M. de Sousa (Lisbon: Centro de Filosofia de Universidade de Lisboa, 2012), 85 – 96; Idem, »Time and History,« in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, ed. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 273 – 291; Idem, »Zeit und Transzendenz,« in Der Sinn der Zeit, ed. E. Angehrn et al. (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002), 40 – 54; Idem, »Unanschaulich: Tod, Zeit, Antlitz,« in Bild und Tod: Grundfragen der Bildanthropologie, ed. Ph. Stoellger and J. Wolff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 727 – 744; Idem, »The Concept of Existence,« in Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, ed. A. Grøn et al. (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2017), 71 – 90.  9   Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit, 228. 10   See www.cfs.ku.dk (accessed August 10, 2017).

Introduction

5

of human existence it does undeniably seem more obvious to turn to the successful accomplishments of the human intellect rather than mistakes or shortcomings. In other words, a contemporary, updated version of existential hermeneutics might be better off taking advantage of the positive results of science and technology rather than delving into the manifestations and forms of negativity. The texts in this book argue, in various ways, that the strength of the negativistic approach basically consists in the development of a sense of the ambiguities – and at times outright paradoxes – more or less explicitly involved in our scientific answers, technologies, and access to information. This is not to say that a negativistic approach to existential hermeneutics does not acknowledge technological innovation. As also evidenced by the contributions in this book, a negativistic approach is not adverse to empirical knowledge or interdisciplinary dialogue. The exploration of ambiguities and paradoxes is, on the contrary, meant to disclose or at least articulate the normative problems involved in the resources that we use in our existential hermeneutics. We never simply use scientific results, technological innovations, or readily accessible information. We incorporate these into our existence in terms of interpretations. A systematic focus on the normative problems of our interpretative engagement with reality can be understood as a critique of normativity, that is, a persistent critique of our ideal representations of how to live our lives – and often also of how others should live theirs. As Arne Grøn argues: »A human being can use its ideal representations to not acknowledge itself. The moral self-consciousness can make one blind to that which one does.«11 Making visible one’s own blindness by articulating the shadows of our knowledge and our abilities is at the core of the negativistic approach.

3.  Structure and contents of the volume The present volume is structured into three main parts. All of them discuss how selfhood is to be understood if taken together with various forms of self-alienation. While the first part is dedicated to existential ambiguities as they surface in anxiety, despair, and freedom,12 the second part concentrates on existential hermeneutics,13 and the third on existential psycho(patho)logy.14 11

  Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 284.  See A. Grøn, »Frihed i religionsfilosofisk perspektiv,« in Frihed  – idé og virkelighed, ed. A. Grøn and H. C. Wind (Frederiksberg: Anis, 1989), 9 – 30; Idem, »Zweideutigkeiten der Angst,« in Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Zugänge, ed. S. Micali and Th. Fuchs (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2016), 56 – 69; Idem, »Phenomenology of Despair – Phenomenology of Spirit,« in Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus, ed. A. Hutter and A. M. Rasmussen (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2014), 241 – 257. 13  See A. Grøn, »Homo subiectus: Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,« in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. I. U. Dalferth and A. Hunziker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 19 – 33; Idem, »Subjectivity, Passion and Passivity,« in Passion 12

6

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

Part I (Existential Ambiguities: Anxiety, Despair, Freedom) opens with Stefano Micali, who presents three different notions of negativism  – methodical, content-related, and normative – and analyzes Kierkegaard’s notions of despair and anxiety through a critical discussion of Michael Theunissen’s and Arne Grøn’s contributions to the research on subjectivity. Micali reveals difficulties linked to the full re-appropriation of Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety and despair in the context of a contemporary post-Husserlian phenomenology. Both anxiety and despair are essentially related to faith. Micali first investigates the relation between faith and despair by focusing on Theunissen’s interpretation of The Sickness Unto Death, and then he investigates the complex connection between faith and anxiety in Grøn’s reading of Kierkegaard’s Concept of Anxiety. René Rosfort sets out to show that the problem of ethics is a key issue in Kierkegaard’s thought, where it is understood as the challenge to make sense of universal ethical demands in a time that has become sensitive to the voices of individuality. Against the background of Theunissen’s and Grøn’s seminal negativistic readings of Kierkegaard’s authorship, Rosfort argues that ethics can function as a prism through which to read this multifarious authorship. Rosfort finds that the strength of Kierkegaard’s ethical thought lies in his careful exploration of the ambivalence of irony and seriousness. He understands Kierkegaard’s ethics as an »anxious ethics« that works with the existential destabilization of normativity experienced through the affective complexity of irony and seriousness, complicating our attempts to make sense of ethical demands. Tying up ethics and history by taking his lead from Grøn’s phrase that »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it,« Mads Peter Karlsen discusses the question of what it means to continue to inherit the doctrine of hereditary sin today. Grøn’s phrase brings into focus diverse facets of inheritance combined with questions of temporality, identity, freedom, and responsibility. The first part of the essay outlines how Kierkegaard’s revision of the traditional doctrine of hereditary sin brings into view inheritance as a problem, and thus enables us to ask anew what it means to inherit. Elaborating on this question, the second part of the essay examines Derrida’s thoughts on inheritance, which confirm that inheriting is a profoundly ambiguous task.

and Passivity, ed. I. U. Dalferth and M. Rodgers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 143 – 155; Idem, »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« in Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. I. U. Dalferth et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 47 – 59; Idem, »Self and Identity,« in Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. D. Zahavi et al. (Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004), 123 – 156; Idem, »Subjectivity and Transcendence: Problems and Perspectives,« in Subjectivity and Transcendence, ed. A. Grøn et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007), 9 – 36. 14  See A. Grøn, »Eindruck – Ausdruck,« in Fremde Spiegelungen: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn, ed. S. Frohoff et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 11 – 20.

Introduction

7

Emil Angehrn explores self-understanding and self-deception between existential hermeneutics and negativism. Self-deception is not primarily seen as a cognitive fallacy, but rather as an existential failure. Self-deception does not only consist of holding false beliefs about oneself or about the world, but is also a fundamental deficiency in the way we understand and – ultimately – in the way we are ourselves. If we, as self-interpreting animals, fail to understand ourselves, we also fail to be ourselves. Self-deception can result both from the opacity of human existence and from akrasia: a weakness of the will to understand and to be oneself. In this way, self-deception points to the existential ambiguity of freedom. The contributions in Part II (Existential Hermeneutics: Self-Understanding between Transparency and Opacity) develop the questions of self-understanding that have already been touched upon in Part I. Carsten Pallesen zooms in on Kierkegaard’s category of hiin Enkelte – the single individual – and the concept of spirit as outlined in Grøn’s habilitation thesis Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard. Pallesen links the particle »as« in Paul Ricœur’s expression »oneself as another« to Kierkegaard’s redoubling of the single individual as the single individual and argues that the latter indicates a dialectic of recognition that dates back to Hegel and has its theological model in the homoousios of the Nicene Creed. Self-determination and dependence on the other are, in his view, constitutive yet conflicting moments that a theory of subjectivity should be able to account for. In the same vein, Hans-Christoph Askani describes how the encounter with the stranger disturbs the »I« in its feigned stability and homogeneity. The reflex of meeting the stranger with resistance and fear might, indeed, stem from this shocking disturbance, yet the latter cannot be avoided. Giving up the idea of the self-contained »I« that is identical with itself, Askani instead probes the notion of a self that always remains in a quest for identity – a self that is a stranger to itself. According to Askani, the experience of inner and outer strangeness adheres to the constitution of personal identity exactly because the »I« is not yet what it is supposed to be, but exists only in becoming itself – in alignment with what it is not. Shifting the focus from the finite to the infinite Other, Ingolf U. Dalferth maintains that we, as finite beings, are 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. As long as we seek to understand ourselves merely in terms of activity or passivity, we 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. In contrast to Ernst Bloch and Emmanuel Levinas, who take this lack of authority over ourselves to manifest our existential self-alienation, Dalferth holds that the contrary is true: striving for self-possession is not the overcoming of self-estrangement but its very enactment. Theological aspects are central also to the next contribution. Responding to Theunissen’s account of the transformation of time in Pindar, and to Grøn’s argu-

8

Claudia Welz and René Rosfort

ment that a similar structure is to be found also in Kierkegaard, George Pattison takes issue with Grøn’s view that the »blessing«-aspect of time can only be discerned by a negative approach. Pattison takes up Grøn’s own hint that Kierkegaard also offers an account of time as having »infinite worth.« Following the themes of suddenness and analogy with the help of Erich Przywara, Pattison endorses the role of poetic and religious discourse in articulating the meaning of time. The testimony of poetry draws on the work of the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir whilst Kierkegaard is taken as spokesperson for the religious perspective. Together they point to an experience in which »the grace of time« may be experienced in its fullness. Ettore Rocca turns to the concept of »analogy« as one of the means by which human thought has sought to express the unknown and the divine. In a first step, he reconstructs this concept from Aristotle to Kant and Trendelenburg, and then examines Kierkegaard’s contribution to analogical thinking, which can be summarized as follows: the very nature of analogy consists in finding likenesses of relations and revoking them at the same time. In other words, analogy defines our understanding of the incomprehensible by letting us understand in what sense we cannot understand. Finally, Rocca brings Grøn’s negativism into dialogue with analogical thinking of transcendence. According to Grøn, it is in the negative experience of thought thrown back upon itself and its limits that we encounter ourselves and face the never-ending task of understanding ourselves. The hermeneutical problems of understanding others and oneself; of receiving impressions »from outside« and expressing one’s own »inner thoughts« in speech culminate in aphasia, a condition in which one or several of the four communication modalities – auditory comprehension, verbal expression, reading, and writing – are impaired due to brain injury. In a close reading of Sigmund Freud’s early writing On Aphasia, Günter Bader interprets an erratic parenthesis that, strikingly, does not fit into the context of this text. Bader’s interpretation of Freud’s parenthesis results in the following thesis: if the brain relates to the periphery of the body as a poem relates to the alphabet, then a comparison of the incomparable becomes possible, which not merely leaves aphasia to nature and fate, but also prompts its re-description in the sign of freedom. This involves hope for patients who have lost their ability to speak, while their intelligence remains unaffected. The contributions in Part III (Existential Psycho(patho)logy: Selfhood and Self-Alienation) concentrate on the transition from everyday experiences of failed understanding to clinically significant cases of self-alienation. Sonja Frohoff’s essay deals with artworks of the famous Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, which contains art brut from German psychiatric institutions around 1900. After commenting on different contexts of and approaches to these works, three case studies build the starting point for further questions about their meaning as expressions of self-alienation or self-recovery. Do such artworks mirror the self-alienation that their creators were probably experiencing? Or should they, by contrast, be under-

Introduction

9

stood as expressions of self-recovery? Following an indirect path elucidating the relations between expression and impression, Frohoff makes self-alienation and self-recovery apparent as moments of one single process of self-communication. Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas clarify how subjectivity and radical experiences of self-alienation in schizophrenia implicate each other. The authors show that a Kierkegaardian account of subjectivity provides a fruitful framework for this investigation because it emphasizes subjectivity as a dynamic, ongoing process of differentiation and re-integration. Furthermore, Kierkegaard’s account avoids the controversial dichotomy between simply being oneself and not being oneself. From this perspective, it becomes possible to understand self-alienation in schizophrenia as an exaggeration and radicalization of the constitutive structures of subjectivity. To illustrate the emergence of this self-alienation in schizophrenia, they present and discuss clinical and phenomenological features of self-disorders, and the full-blown articulation of schizophrenic psychosis. Borut Škodlar follows Ronald D. Laing’s insight that schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair. He argues that schizophrenia patients live extreme forms of disturbed selfhood and analyzes statements by two patients in the light of Kierkegaard’s differentiation between the despair of weakness (desperately unwilling to be oneself) and the despair of defiance (desperately willing to be oneself) in The Sickness Unto Death. Inspired by Grøn, Škodlar detects in the despair of potentially suicidal schizophrenia patients a dialectics at work between weakness and defiance, and passivity and activity. He concludes that if therapists enlarge their understanding of their patients’ experiences, they are in a better position to (re)instate hope and love in their patients’ lives. With regard to existential hermeneutics and psychoanalysis, Claudia Welz explores the psycho(patho)logy of everyday life by focusing on self-alienating tours and detours of thought. In particular, she investigates the relation between self-knowledge and self-deception by bringing Kierkegaard into dialogue with Nietzsche, Freud, and Primo Levi. These thinkers have called special attention to the more or less willful self-obscuration and manipulation of memory in view of unwanted self-knowledge. Yet how can one’s conscience become a false witness to oneself, and how is it possible to deceive oneself about oneself? If we approach the negativity with which we nolens volens are confronted via negativa, may this counter-move enable us to transform that negativity so that we can finally face our own fallibility and take upon ourselves not just guilt and despair, but also our own responsibility?

Existential Ambiguities Anxiety, Despair, Freedom

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology Stefano Micali

This paper intends to analyze Kierkegaard’s notions of despair and anxiety through a critical discussion of Michael Theunissen’s and Arne Grøn’s contributions to the research on subjectivity. Its aim is to show how Theunissen’s and Grøn’s respective interpretations bring several tensions between phenomenological description and dialectical method to the fore. Both anxiety and despair are essentially related to faith, and this will be at the core of the present investigation. The first part investigates the relation between faith and despair with focus on Theunissen’s interpretation of The Sickness Unto Death.1 The second part analyzes the complex connection between faith and anxiety in Grøn’s reading of The Concept of Anxiety.2 The paper intends to highlight how a full re-appropriation of the insightful Kierkegaardian analysis of these fundamental moods faces difficulties in a contemporary post-Husserlian phenomenological context.

1. Negative anthropology Michael Theunissen develops an approach he refers to as »negative anthropology,« growing out of in a critical confrontation with the concept of self that Kierkegaard elaborates on in The Sickness Unto Death (henceforth Sickness).3 In Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung, Theunissen investigates the productivity and relevance of Kierkegaard’s concept of »self« to the fields of psychol1   S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19), ed. and trans. H. Hong and E. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 2   S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 8), ed. and trans. R. Thomte and B. A. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 3   M. Theunissen and Wilfried Greve, eds., Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979); Idem, Das Selbst auf dem Grund der Verzweiflung. Kierkegaards negativistische Methode (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991); Idem, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991); Idem, Der Begriff Verzweiflung. Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993); Idem, »Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 61 – 90; Idem, »Anthropologie und Theologie bei Kierkegaard,« in Kierkegaard Revisited: Proceedings from the Conference, ed. N. J. Cappelørn and J. Stewart (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1997), 177 – 190.

14

Stefano Micali

ogy, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. The relevance of the conceptualization of the self in Kierkegaard’s work essentially depends on his definition of the relation between anomaly and normality. His anthropology refuses to establish »a certain notion of health as the norm in order to judge the disease as an anomaly.«4 Instead, Kierkegaard develops an idea of health from sickness, positing that health – not disease – is the exception: Self-relation is originally and directly a misrelation, and anomaly and pathology form the unavoidable starting point. Kierkegaard’s negativistic program is clearly shown in the following passage: Anti-Climacus, the pseudonymous author of Sickness, »merely describes the sickness by simultaneously defining on and on what faith is.«5 Theunissen notes how Anti-Climacus, »Instead of departing from faith and then moving towards its opposite – to the despair known as sin – he holds despair directly in front of him in such a way that he defines faith only in the analysis of its own negation.«6 Only by negation of the negative is it possible to gain the positive. Kierkegaard defines faith in terms of annihilation of despair. Faith has, then, no positive mode of appearance, independent from anomaly, but is defined »only in the analysis of its negation.«7 It is only the negation of despair as a sickness unto death. Theunissen distinguishes content-related negativism – in the form of a deficiency of human life – from methodical negativism. The former concerns the concrete negative phenomena of affective life, such as anxiety and despair, while the latter describes a systematic procedure that takes its departure in negative phenomena in its strife towards a healthy form of life. Taking anomaly as a starting point has also an historical dimension: the negativist method presupposes the distortion of the successful form of life in »Christendom« as well as in modernity.8 To summarize, we distinguish between three aspects of negativism: 1. Methodical-formal negativism. Here, the essential characteristics of the self are not immediately accessible, but may only be evinced on the basis of human anomalies and deformations. Research on the self takes its departure in anomaly rather than normality. 2. Content-related negativism concerning the phenomena of anxiety and despair. When a negative anthropology identifies the particular properties of the self, it does not assume an already set or fixed definition but starts, rather, from concrete, specific experiences such as despair or anxiety in order to disclose and unravel the structure of the self, e. g.: »How must the self be constituted for despair to appear in the forms in which it actually shows itself?«9 The concept 4

  Theunissen, Selbst, 16. All translations of Theunissen’s texts are mine.   S. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaards Papirer X 5, ed. P. A. Heiberg et al. (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1932), B 23. 6   Theunissen, Selbst, 18 (note 2). 7  Ibid. 8  Ibid. 9   Theunissen, Negative, 353. 5

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

15

of self must be thought from the experience of despair. Theunissen recognizes a mutual dependence between self and despair.10 3. Normative negativism, regarding the historical modern situation in which authentic life has become impossible. These three aspects are closely intertwined11 and together they underlie Theunissen’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s work, notably highlighted in his Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, seen as the culmination of his lifelong confrontation with Kierkegaard’s anthropology.12 The text gives a twofold critique – both internal and external – of the structure of Sickness. The immanent critique stresses the implicit guiding presupposition of Kierkegaard’s inquiries into despair, namely that we do not want to be immediately what we are. The external critique, in Theunissen’s terminology »the transcending critique,« argues for the introduction of a corrective element to the concept of despair, and to the way in which this concept is depicted in Sickness. According to Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair includes elements that do not belong to despair, and excluding elements constitutive of it.13 In Sickness, the basic mistake consists in its one-sided tracing back of despair to a discrepancy in self-relation. Yet is it really necessary to comprehend despair on the basis of a »deficiency in relating oneself to oneself?«14 We find, in Kierkegaard’s analysis of so-called »despair of weakness« an indication of a point of view that no longer relies on either the paradigm of self-relation, or on the willing (or not willing) to be oneself, that may also shed light on a deeper understanding of this phenomenon: »Here there is no infinite consciousness of the self, of what despair is, or of the conditions as one of despair. The despair is only suffering, a succumbing to the pressure of external factors; in no way does it come from within as an act.«15 At the stage of immediacy, despair is something that befalls me from the outside: »Now something happens to him, something occurs abruptly to the immediate self and makes it despair. [. . .] There must be an external motivation for the despair, and the despair is nothing more than a suffering.«16 According to Theunissen, in the despair of weakness, an alternative, promising paradigm of despair emerges, no longer understood on the basis of self-relation, but as an 10   However, it should not be overlooked that Theunissen ultimately tends to affirm the primacy of the self over despair, due to the prevalence of a Hegel-inspired dialectical paradigm. A phenomenological post-Husserlian approach would reverse this relation. 11   The differences between the three forms of negativism are particularly apparent in Theunissen and Greve, Materialien, 71. 12   In 1955, a twenty-three year old Theunissen wrote his PhD thesis on the concept of »earnestness« in Kierkegaard (M. Theunissen, Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1958)). 13   Theunissen, Begriff, 63. 14   Ibid., 119. 15   Kierkegaard, Sickness, 50. 16  Ibid.

16

Stefano Micali

event. Kierkegaard failed to recognize the asymmetrical relation between despair of weakness – which has this event-like structure – and despair of defiance, which derives from a failure of self-realization. Sickness contains a vain attempt to reverse the despair of weakness into its opposite, that is, into the despair of defiance in the form of an absolute and unrestrained willingness to be oneself. Theunissen views this transformation as bound to fail due to the seeming ambiguity in the key concept of weakness. The concept of weakness is here related to two heterogeneous phenomena: on the hand, it refers to the experience of suffering; of being affected by an external event. On the other hand, it relates to the lack of a positive will to be oneself. In his analysis, Kierkegaard overlooks the difference between these two completely different components: suffering and unwillingness to be oneself are treated as identical terms. A clear differentiation between these two forms of weakness, however, sheds light on the specific character of suffering: In the despair of weakness, the despairing one suffers from »both that which provokes his despair and his own being-in-despair.«17 Kierkegaard differentiates between »affective« despair concerning that which befalls the subject, and the »subjective« conditio of being-in-despair, which takes the form of one’s relation to oneself: »It expresses the first suffering as an event that precipitates us into despair, and marks the second suffering by the turn after which despair itself overcomes us.«18 In the latter, we would have responsibility for our own being-in-despair, since this state would depend upon a deficiency or discrepancy in our self-relation. Theunissen argues that despair as being affected by an event (Widerfahrnis) is prior to this deficiency in self-relation, and finds that Kierkegaard himself confirms this primacy, at least indirectly: he begins with the former in order to argue for a missing form in one’s relation to oneself.19 Theunissen’s use of the term »phenomenology« bears a fundamental methodological ambiguity, particularly visible in his transcending critique. Aiming at describing the phenomenon of despair as such, he presupposes a Heideggerian phenomenological hermeneutics that tries to return to an original sense of experience set within a certain historical context. In this case, it is despair in the first sense set in the nihilist context that results from the history of Christianity. Thus, »we can understand Kierkegaard’s interpretation provided that we also have nihilistic experiences, and we can criticize his interpretation in a way that is not just extrinsic, provided that we are, in principle, able to question its adequacy in our own experiences.«20 Theunissen’s confrontation with Kierkegaard is driven by the »thing itself« (despair), which must always be interpreted historically. Theunissen takes Kierkegaard seriously by examining his contribution to the phenom17

  Theunissen, Begriff, 71.  Ibid. 19  Ibid. 20   Ibid., 70. 18

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

17

enon itself.21 This questioning of the adequacy of Kierkegaard’s analysis to our experiences, as well as the reference to the »thing itself,« demonstrates a hermeneutic-phenomenological approach in a post-Husserlian sense. However, as mentioned above, Theunissen also remains committed to Hegel’s dialectical phenomenology. Both critiques – immanent / internal and transcending / external – remain within a dialectical perspective that views the truth only in the whole. He writes about Kierkegaard that: His version of phenomenological dialectics is open to criticism not because it endorses a Hegelianism that takes for its beginning the wrapped end, and the end as the unwrapped beginning. Both the immanent and the transcending critique were based on the completely Hegelian presupposition according to which the beginning represents the origin only insofar as the whole accomplishes itself in it.22

If the whole is the only truth, the beginning necessarily admits to a certain one-sidedness. Theunissen remains faithful to the Hegelian idea according to which the beginning is the origin that accomplishes itself in the course of the process. Nevertheless, in order to grasp the phenomenon of despair he starts from a different origin, that is, from a being affected by an event (Widerfahrnis) – in order to be able to grasp the phenomenon of despair: That someone distances himself from the idea that the original appearance is that of being affected by an event [Widerfahrnis] does not imply that he thereby negate the fundamental insight that, in general, there is a constraint [Befangenheit] in the appearance [Schein] which prevents what is original from showing itself in its truth at the beginning.23

Theunissen thus denies Kierkegaard’s fundamental claim that despair is to be understood as a failed self-relation. However, he shares Kierkegaard’s dialectical assumption that the beginning cannot display the truth. Although Theunissen himself is right to stress some similarities between Heideggerian hermeneutical phenomenology and Hegelian dialectics,24 a more precise analysis of the despair of weakness as suffering can show how the phenomenological method (as an original reference to the »thing itself«) and Hegelian dialectics stand – from a methodological point of view – in a difficult relation. From a post-Husserlian perspective, being affected by an event is defined by a radical facticity and contingency that is not immediately in accord with Hegelian dialectics. Theunissen does not consider these tensions to a sufficient degree. Theunissen’s sophisticated critique poses two elements of despair  – that of being affected by an event and that of a discrepancy in one’s relation to oneself – against each other, when really they belong together. His transcending critique misunderstands a decisive aspect of Kierkegaard’s analysis of the phenomenon of 21

 Ibid., 9.   Ibid., 154. 23  Ibid. 24   Ibid., 27 – 30. 22

18

Stefano Micali

despair, since his considerations have an ethical-edifying character. Kierkegaard aims at expounding a »hidden« and implicit presupposition that constitutes the condition of possibility of every form of despair. In order to expose this presupposition, Kierkegaard carries out a still unrivaled phenomenological analysis (also in the post-Husserlian sense) of the experience of despair. From a systematic point of view, Kierkegaard, however, does not aim at describing despair in its specific mode of manifestation – in the »how« of its appearance. His intention is primarily »therapeutic.« Theunissen’s transcending critique fails to recognize this decisive aspect of Kierkegaard’s investigations. Kierkegaard’s aim is to indicate, by referring back to faith, the necessary conditions for the impossibility of despair. Despair cannot exercise its power over the human being when the self, in its relation to itself, and in willing to be itself, »rests transparently in the power that established it.«25 Faith can be characterized as that countervailing power that hinders our immediate consent to despair. In the very moment in which a negative event unexpectedly occurs to us, human beings tend to consent to the pathos of despair, as if everything were already lost. Despair stands on the verge of an outbreak. This tendency toward despair is closely connected to the internal logic of desire: one identifies oneself in one’s own totality with that which is desired. In Kierkegaard’s own language one could say that, thanks to the infinite passion of imagination, something earthly becomes the earthly in its totality.26 From Kierkegaard’s perspective, the indispensable task lies in opening up the possibility of a definitive immunization against despair, as the following passage from Works of Love attests: I do not have the right to become insensitive to life’s pain, because I shall sorrow; but neither do I have the right to despair, because I shall sorrow; and neither do I have the right to stop sorrowing, because I shall sorrow. So it is with love. You do not have the right to become insensitive to this feeling, because you shall love; but neither do you have the right to love despairingly, because you shall love; and just as little do you have the right to warp this feeling in you, because you shall love. You shall preserve love, and you shall preserve yourself and by and in preserving yourself preserve love.27

My interpretation has much in common with the one developed by Arne Grøn in his critical confrontation with Theunissen: Kierkegaard does not need to deny that there are situations of despair. His point of view is ethical, based on the idea that, precisely in such situations, one shall not allow oneself to despair. The hope one cannot give up is a hope despite the situation. When Kierkegaard stresses the fundamental self-relation in despair, so he is implicitly claiming that this self-relation opens up the possibility to resist despair.28 25

  Kierkegaard, Sickness, 14.   Ibid., 59. 27   S. Kierkegaard, Works of Love (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 16), ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 43. 28   A. Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 33 – 60, 50 (my translation). 26

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

19

Kierkegaard’s should be interpreted as an ethical-edifying point of view:29 Despair is related to one’s self-relation, since it presupposes an acceptance of despair: Despairing is to give up hope and to lose courage – the courage to carry oneself in leading one’s life. Only in this sense is Kierkegaard’s claim to be defended: that despair comes ›from within‹ in that despairing is something the one despairing ›does‹. He does it to himself, by himself: he gives himself up.30

The most important point relates to the question how not to consent to despair. Such a perspective does not implicate a moralization of despair as Theunissen suggests in his reply to Grøn’s critique: »Kierkegaard carries his moralism to extremes precisely at the moment when he forbids despair at all costs.«31 The point is neither to judge the one despairing nor to forbid despair for moral reasons. Rather, the point is to identify the moment of despair in order to find an escape from it. Only when one finds the extraordinary perspective of faith and is thereby able to truly relate to the power on which one depends, does it become possible to avoid approving of despair. Approval of despair presupposes that one forgets that one stands before God. The feeling according to which everything is possible in God is inherent to the experience of praying: »For prayer there must be a God, a self – and possibility – or a self and possibility in a pregnant sense, because the being of God means that everything is possible, or that everything is possible means the being of God.«32 Faith entails a transformation in the sense of a correction of the immediate discrepancy in one’s relation to oneself. Kierkegaard accepts that we are constantly responsible for our despair since despair always involves an instance of freedom in the form of approval, directly related to our relationship with ourselves. Despair evolves in the temporal form of a continuous »actualization.«33 Kierkegaard’s concept of despair is disturbing as it confounds heterogeneous phenomena: How can we judge the life of a happy father or a successful manager as one of despair? Inauthentic despair, where one is unaware of one’s eternal self, poses serious difficulties, because the moment of being affected by an event (Widerfahrnis) is here absent or present only in the remote background. With what authority can Kierkegaard claim that such a life is desperate? It is crucial to keep in mind that Kierkegaard describes the whole phe29   I think it is more appropriate to use the expression »ethical-edifying« point of view, rather than to speak, as Grøn does, of an ethical point of view, since faith is the anchor of Kierkegaard’s whole investigation into despair. 30   A. Grøn, »Phenomenology of despair – phenomenology of spirit,« in Kierkegaard im Kontext des deutschen Idealismus, ed. A. Hutter and A. M. Rasmussen (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2014), 256. 31   M. Theunissen, »Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1998), 61 – 90, here 78. 32   Kierkegaard, Sickness, 40. Theunissen calls Kierkegaard’s definition of God unorthodox. A critique of this idea would go beyond the limits of the present paper. 33   Ibid., 12.

20

Stefano Micali

nomenon of despair from the extraordinary point of view of eternity. It is this that affords some plausibility to Kierkegaard’s claim that unconscious despair exists; a claim that would be problematic from a post-Husserlian point of view: This is the state in despair. No matter how much the despairing person avoids it, no matter how successfully he has completely lost himself (especially the case in the form of despair that is ignorance of being in despair) and lost himself in such a manner that the loss is not at all detectable – eternity nevertheless will make it manifest that his condition was despair and will nail him to himself so that his torment will still be that he cannot rid himself of his self, and it will become obvious that he was just imagining that he had succeeded in doing so.34

For Kierkegaard, despair not only presupposes God’s revelation, but it also has an eschatological character. Despair, then, is not primarily provoked by outside events, but rather a conditio linked to the original discrepancy in one’s relation to oneself. It is only for this reason that ignorance of one’s own being-in-despair can be a form of despair. The healthy self must be conceived as starting from its disease: »The formula that describes the state of the self when despair is completely rooted out is this: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power that established it.«35 Although the starting point is sickness, the whole process is viewed from the perspective of health understood as a solution to contradictions. The inversion of the relation between the order of knowledge and the order of presentation presupposes a point of view by which the whole process can be systematically judged and determined. In this sense, it is appropriate to return to the quote above, where a normative idea of the human being is expressed according to the negativity of despair. All negative phenomena, including despair and fear, »are related to states in which the human being still is not, or is not anymore, what it should be.«36 The healthy self is therefore always taken into account, »since the self is what it is only in its realization.«37 We must start with sickness in order to describe the healthy life. Yet, conversely, the whole process is led by the normative idea of self-realization: the negativism presupposes an immanent finality of the process, which can bring about the resolution of contradictions and is connected to the methodological moment of a totalization of experience.38 It is interesting to note how faith – the result of the inquiry into despair – takes on an ambiguous position in the whole architectonic of research: 34

  Ibid., 21.   Ibid., 14. 36   Ibid., 17. 37   See also Theunissen, Selbst, 34: »The necessity of dissolving the self into being-oneself, which Kierkegaard, in turn, dissolves, in a never-ending becoming-oneself, is also the reason that he does not first treat the self as such and in a second moment – separately – the healthy self. Actually, when he speaks about the self, he is already considering the healthy self, because the self is what it is only in its realization. But if the self is healthy only by resisting the danger of despair, then it must be interpreted as starting from sickness, because it reaches health only by combatting it.« 38   Theunissen rightly emphasizes that faith is not subjected to the »automatism« of Hegel’s dialectics. It is not necessary to pursue all negative steps of despair in order to reach faith. 35

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

21

It is the point of culmination of the entire process – it is the truth as a whole in Hegel’s sense. Meanwhile, it paradoxically falls outside of the process, because it incarnates a state of exception that presupposes the process of totalization: the conditio of despair is indeed considered a general condition. All human beings are in despair. Only who is able to find faith can escape despair. To summarize, Theunissen’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of despair, albeit sophisticated, does not do justice to the tensions between the two different »phenomenological« traditions. Kierkegaard’s analysis does not primarily aim to describe the phenomenon of despair, but to find immunity against it through faith. Only faith is capable of radically annihilating despair. Theunissen’s emphasis on this shows how the normative idea of self-realization in (and through) faith dominates Kierkegaard’s analysis of despair from the outset. The question here is whether it is possible to explore alternative interpretations. Would it be possible to accept Kierkegaard’s assumption that faith undermines the very conditions for the possibility of despair while simultaneously rejecting the normative idea of self-realization, which is not compatible with a (post-Husserlian) phenomenological perspective? In what follows, I intend to retrace a similar tension between a dialectical method and a (post-Husserlian) phenomenological description of anxiety, with special focus on the relation between anxiety and faith. I will discuss this question primarily focusing on Grøn’s interpretation of Kierkegaard’s notion of anxiety.

2. Negative phenomenology The paper »Self-understanding and self-givenness« plays a key-role in Grøn’s philosophical work, as it openly addresses underlying methodological presuppositions that remained more implicit in other texts.39 One may be tempted to affirm that Grøn here develops a negative phenomenology that shares several traits with Theunissen’s negative anthropology. However, it should be noted that Grøn would find the adjective negative pleonastic since, in his view, phenomenology can never accomplish direct description of phenomena. Rather, he considers it a »countermove« against the negativity that makes it impossible for us to have immediate access to the Sachen selbst (»the things themselves«).40 Phenomenology as a radical »search for the beginning«41 can only establish itself against negative counterforces. This relation to negativity should be investigated in light of two mutually integrated perspectives: 39   A. Grøn, »Self-understanding and self-givenness,« in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist, ed. by J. Hanson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010). 40   Ibid., 80. 41   Ibid., 79; 84.

22

Stefano Micali

1. Phenomenology aims at radically questioning the naïve self-evidentiality of our preconceived assumptions and interpretations through contact with the phenomena in their primary ways of appearing. Our preconceived interpretations guide our understanding of the world and make us blind to significant features of the given phenomena. The phenomena’s essential traits tend to appear in disguise: the Sachen selbst never show themselves without simultaneously withdrawing. Furthermore, human beings have an almost »natural« lack of attention and focus; a tendency »to overlook, ignore, or forget that which we see or know.«42 2. Contact with the Sachen selbst forces us to find adequate expression of them and leads us to re-appropriate different hermeneutic traditions in order to do justice to the specificity of our different experiences. The search for a new radical beginning requires mobilization of the resources of our tradition: »In order for us to come to ask the questions where philosophy begins, we have to critically appropriate traditions that both disclose and close these questions.«43 Heidegger’s influence is clear and explicit in Grøn’s analysis of the nature of a hermeneutical phenomenology.44 Still, Grøn’s phenomenological approach focuses on the notion of subjectivity. Although Husserl is not mentioned, we can see here how Grøn’s approach is, in this regard, closer to the founder of phenomenology than to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology. One of the basic problems of phenomenology is to understand the self-manifestation of consciousness. This focus on the immense field of subjective life is guided by Kierkegaard’s pivotal idea that what is closest to us is what we know least about: ourselves. The difficulty in accessing ourselves confirms the negative nature of phenomenology as a countermove: »The critical motive of negativity (in the form of forgetting and overlooking or ignoring) inheres in the project of phenomenology itself. Phenomenology is a sort of remainder. It is about seeing once more, because we can, and indeed tend to, overlook and forget what we know.«45 3. As mentioned above, Grøn’s intention here is to develop a hermeneutical phenomenology. Human subjectivity is always embedded and situated in a specific historical web of different traditions and cultural patterns that precede and form personal experience. Meanwhile, human subjectivity is given to itself: Self-givenness is open in the sense that »one is given to oneself as a self, that is, one is to live as oneself, also when one changes.«46 The self then manifests itself as self-relation. Our identity is a task. We are defined by the decisions (and hesitations) we make (and have). We can see that Grøn develops a genuine hermeneutical negative phenomenology especially in this regard. The adjective nega42

  Ibid., 83.   Ibid., 80. 44   Ibid., 81. 45  Ibid. 46   Ibid., 87. 43

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

23

tive is all but pleonastic here. The confrontation with the negative experiences of anxiety and despair is, instead, essential to our becoming ourselves, as the possibility of freedom is principally interrelated with all different forms of becoming unfree. We cannot become ourselves without the suffering (or pathos) of negativity experienced in anxiety and despair; without passing through the different forms of misrelations in our self-relation. The radical possibility of giving up hope »accentuates the existential character of the process of (self)-consciousness described and interpreted in a negative phenomenology.«47 In this regard, Grøn remains faithful to Kierkegaard and Theunissen: subjectivity comes as selfhood through the negative phenomena such as anxiety and despair. Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety is a paradigmatic example of how we can read his writings from a post-Husserlian perspective. Grøn holds that we can, in this text, retrace a phenomenology of subjectivity. More precisely, it investigates how the subject appears to itself: In my relating to what is given to me, I also relate to myself. In order to account for my experiences as mine, I must take into account that I am the one relating to what is given to me. Anxiety reveals human being as unstable synthesis. Anxiety shows how we must find a balance between different poles and tensions. Being a self is not a state – it is a task. Grøn highlights the common ground between Hegel’s phenomenology and post-Husserlian hermeneutic phenomenology. In both cases, the central aim is understanding of the self-manifestation of consciousness in its relation to the other. The question that emerges in this respect is to what extent a dialectical approach is compatible with a hermeneutic phenomenology. Grøn submits that »Kierkegaard’s approach to the phenomenon of anxiety is phenomenological in the sense that it seeks to give an account for what is to be seen in this phenomenon.«48 In order to answer the question about the phenomenological character of Kierkegaard’s analysis, we cannot elude the problem of the nature of phenomenology in post-Husserlian terms. Certainly, phenomenology is difficult to define. Very schematically, we can identify a broad and a narrow use of the term »phenomenology.« In a more general respect, it is an open attitude that is ready to welcome all phenomena by doing justice to their specific modes of appearance. This is the sense in which Merleau-Ponty calls Proust, Freud, Marx, Nietzsche and Valéry phenomenologists. Phenomenology is here conceived in terms of an accurate style of a precise description. In a more narrow respect, phenomenology has ambitions to be considered first philosophy. It intends to offer a philosophical method that requires specific pro47

  Grøn, »Phenomenology of despair,« 256.   Grøn, »Self-understanding,« 86.

48

24

Stefano Micali

cedural steps. Considering Husserl’s understanding of phenomenology, it is only possible to carry out phenomenological analyses under conditions that fulfill specific methodological requirements. These requirements famously consist in the transcendental epoché, in the eidetic reduction, and in a systematic analysis of the correlation between noesis and noema. These steps are carried out in order to allow the phenomena to show themselves. We may here recall the phenomenological principle of all phenomenological principles, »that every originary presentive intuition is a legitimizing source of cognition, that everything originarily (so to speak in its personal actuality) offered to us in intuition is to be accepted simply as what it is presented as being, also within the limits in which it is presented.«49 Any originary intuition can open a new beginning. It also implies the possibility of a radical questioning of all preconceived assumptions and interpretations. Husserlian phenomenology has a vitality linked to a renewal of truth. In this sense one must understand Husserl’s statement that he was only a beginner of phenomenology. There is a hidden tendency towards a permanent revolution in phenomenology. The question is to what extent this sketched phenomenological approach is compatible with dialectical thought.50 It is with this in mind that I intend to show the limits of a phenomenological reading of Kierkegaard with regard to the relation between faith and anxiety. Before doing so, I shall highlight the relevance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety as regards phenomenology, primarily focusing on its ambiguity. In the second section I will critically discuss the thesis that sees in anxiety a revelatory force that shows the inconsistency of established identities. 2.1.  Kierkegaard’s contribution to a phenomenology of anxiety One of the most provocative claims in The Concept of Anxiety (henceforth Anxiety) is that in learning to be anxious in the right way one learns something ultimate. One must learn to neither avoid nor succumb to anxiety. But how is it possible to find the right balance? The full passage reads: In one of Grimm’s fairy tales there is a story of a young man who goes in search of adventure in order to learn what it is to be in anxiety. [. . .] We will let the adventurer pursue his journey without concerning ourselves about whether he encountered the terrible on his way. However, I will say that this is an adventure that every human being must go through – to learn

49   E. Husserl, Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie. Erstes Buch. Allgemeine Einführung in die reine Phänomenologie (Husserliana 3, 1 – 2) (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1976), 44; Idem, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy. First Book. General Introduction to a Pure Phenomenology, trans. F. Kersten (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 44. 50   One interesting attempt to unify the two different traditions is to be found in E. Paci’s work, Fenomenologia e dialettica (Milano: Feltrinelli, 1974).

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

25

to be anxious in order that he may not perish either by never having been in anxiety or by succumbing to anxiety. Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.51

What does it mean to learn to be anxious in the right way? How to be anxious without succumbing to anxiety? Furthermore, how is it possible to assess that our relation to anxiety is balanced? On what criteria is this assessment based? Moreover, how can we withstand anxiety? Before addressing these questions, I will first note three forms of ambiguity that characterize anxiety. 1. The first ambiguity of anxiety is brilliantly expressed by Arne Grøn: »What does anxiety mean when it is both that from which one should free oneself and, at the same time, that which one has to go through to be free?«52 If we want to become ourselves, we cannot avoid anxiety, since we can become ourselves only by facing anxiety. Anxiety is not just a threat; a good relation to anxiety is also a necessary condition for a healthy self-relation. It is not a salvation but it is required when finding a balanced self-relation. We have go through anxiety in order to get rid of it. 2. The second ambiguity regards the difficulty of going through anxiety: Our freedom emerges in and through anxiety. We fear anxiety and are attracted by it. The imagination – the faculty of projection of infinite possibilities – forges our identities in the fires of anxiety. Meanwhile, the spell of anxiety tends to exert its (almost irresistible) force of attraction, absorbing us. We cannot immediately get out of it; it is very easy to remain burning in that fire. In Kierkegaard’s words: »When we consider the dialectical determinations of anxiety, it appears that exactly these have psychological ambiguity. Anxiety is a sympathetic antipathy and an antipathetic sympathy.«53 3. The third ambiguity of anxiety concerns the projection of possibility that always involves a sense of impossibility: In anxiety we experience the powerlessness of our own power. We face the double possibility of becoming ourselves, and of our estrangement. Anxiety is anxiety before situations in which decisions could radically transform one’s identity. Each change entails the risk of losing oneself – of becoming alien to oneself – as if it were a journey without return: »In anxiety we step and where we can come to see ourselves as a stranger.«54 In a recent paper, Grøn shows in what sense it is possible to develop a theory of subjectivity from Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety. The ambiguity of anxiety as 51

  Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 155.   A. Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. J. B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 2. 53   Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 42. 54   Grøn, Anxiety, 8. 52

26

Stefano Micali

sympathetic antipathy and antipathetic sympathy already signifies a self affected by anxiety.55 Kierkegaard’s research illustrates how, through anxiety, subjectivity forms itself by finding (and inventing) new forms of balance between the will to reveal itself and the will to contain itself; between radical passivity and activity. Grøn illustrates Kierkegaard’s famous distinction between fear and anxiety with a concrete example: When facing an important exam, we may fear that we will not know the answers to some of the questions. This is a (understandable) fear before something specific and determinate. However, we may also fear how we will react under the given circumstances: »Maybe we fear that we will be paralyzed. [. . .] Even if we have prepared, it is possible that we will become nervous when we are actually in the situation. Do we talk about fear then? It is difficult to say what makes us nervous. But that which we are really relating to is how we are reacting.«56 Anxiety concerns self-relation. This interpretation points out that fear focuses on a negative future event, while anxiety primarily deals with anticipation of our (inadequate) response.57 In my view, it is important to underline that the anticipation of our inadequate responses (in terms of a self-relation) always presupposes the (vague) anticipation of events that already have a negative connotation. The above-mentioned aspects are always interrelated, but it is possible to attribute a more proleptic attitude that focuses on self-relation and anxiety: After my inadequate response (my failure) to this terrible event, who will I be? Grøn is unsure whether the above example is appropriate for a full understanding of the phenomenon of anxiety, since with an exam situation, we know it will soon be over. An exam is a delimited event and as such it allows us to achieve distance from it. In order to experience real anxiety, we need a more indeterminate situation, which is more threatening to our identity.58 If our relation to a situation is unclear, we have to relate to ourselves.59 A concrete example of such an indeterminate situation is the phenomenon of growing up. Growing up is comparable to a journey where our destination is unknown as well as dependent on our decisions. Growing up is a threatening process, as it entails the risk of losing oneself. Anxiety is anxiety about becoming radically different from oneself: 55   A. Grøn, »Zweideutigkeit der Angst,« in Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Zugänge, ed. S. Micali and T. Fuchs (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2016), 59. 56   Grøn, Anxiety, 9. 57   Grøn’s interpretation of the relation between fear and anxiety fundamentally agrees with Sartre’s analysis of anxiety in Being and Nothingness; see. J.‑P. Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. H. E. Barnes (New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1984), 56 – 86. 58  Grøn, Anxiety, 6: »Maybe we even relate to a previous experience where we made ourselves nervous or where we paralyzed ourselves; it sounds strange here to talk about fearing ourselves. The question is whether to call it anxiety, because we can say to ourselves ›Don’t worry, it is just an exam. Fortunately life goes on.‹ In order for it to be anxiety, ›the test‹ we are put to must be more difficult to define or to keep ourselves outside of. The question becomes who we are.« 59   Ibid., 7: »In a sense, we relate to ourselves in anxiety because the question put before us is how we relate to the situation.«

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

27

»A coherent whole means how we are coherent with ourselves. Anxiety enters here in between since it manifests the possibility that the coherence that holds us together dissolves.«60 I am not sure if it is legitimate to use the category »coherent whole« to describe subjective life. Still, anxiety certainly betrays a preoccupation with becoming radically estranged from oneself, detached from the core (to use a different metaphor) of one’s own symbolic, social, affective identity. I think it is important to insist on this interrelation between the possible loss of one’s identity, the contingency of time, and anxiety. One can fail in the task of »cohering« with oneself: »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.«61 Being a synthesis signifies being a task to oneself. Becoming ourselves signifies becoming concrete in the etymological sense: concrescere – to grow together with oneself.62 To unify our life in a coherent way is not an easy task, if one keeps in mind that our self-relation is a misrelation from the very onset: a health of the spirit is not naturally given. Self-relation is initially out of balance. The two polar ends – finitude in the form of conformism and blind attachment to something concrete experienced as a totality, and infinity in the form of losing oneself to selfishness and unlimited realms of fantastic possibilities – struggle for domination.63 Kierkegaard holds that the spirit begins as dreaming. Anxiety is comparable to a dream-like condition. Dreaming is similar to imagining. The imagined phantasms of our possibilities are nothing real, but they affect us – they are sketches of existential directions that we could take, although they appear and disappear so quickly that they remain almost ungraspable.64 They are evanescent ghostly appearances that generate anxiety. Subjectivity cannot find itself in the kaleidoscopic variations of possibilities, which are usually – I would argue – negatively connoted. We are concerned with the fact that we cannot escape choice: »The possibility of freedom manifested in anxiety thus demands that we choose or define ourselves. It is a persistent possibility because we cannot escape the choice. In this sense, it is the choice or the necessity of choosing that manifests itself in anxiety, that is, in the possibility of freedom.«65 60

 Ibid., 8.   Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 156. 62   Grøn, Anxiety, 10. 63   The healthy relation has to be found in an open (double) movement towards the infinity of our possibilities that returns to a particular task. 64   Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 41 – 42: »Dreamily the spirit projects its own actuality, but this actuality is nothing, and innocence always sees this nothing outside itself. Anxiety is a qualification of dreaming spirit, and as such it has its place in psychology. Awake, the difference between myself and my other is posited; sleeping, it is suspended; reaming, it is an intimated nothing. The actuality of the spirit constantly shows itself as a form that tempts its possibility but disappears as soon as it seeks to grasp for it, and it is a nothing that can only bring anxiety.« 65   Grøn, Anxiety, 65. Sartre famously develops and radicalizes Kierkegaard’s approach. For Sartre, absolute freedom has neither limit nor boundary. 61

28

Stefano Micali

The question here is whether anxiety is primarily to be understood in terms of a relation between the inability to choose, and the inevitability of deciding: we do not know which path to take, but we have to choose it now – the path is our identity. This description of anxiety certainly highlights a crucial element in human existence. Nevertheless, if we want to carry out a Husserlian phenomenological analysis, it must be integrated with a further aspect. When, in and through anxiety, we project ourselves into different possibilities we experience the most negative and indeterminate possibilities as inevitable – as if their coming will be imminent; as if there will be no way out. Anxiety is characterized by the doxastic modality of certainty, and this distinguishes anxiety from mere imagination.66 For no plausible reason, we firmly believe that this negative situation – together with my negative, inappropriate responses to it – will imminently take place. Here occurs an undue transference regarding the doxastic modality: the certainty concerning the inevitability of making the decision is transferred to the projection of the objective event. The inevitable moment of freedom – we cannot not choose – would flow into the threatening event. Furthermore, it is impossible to relate to anxiety without experiencing anxiety. What Kierkegaard said about anxiety before sin is valid for anxiety as such: In anxiety, we become anxious before the negative possibilities that we project – we become prisoners of our own constructions. »The mood of psychology is that of a discovering anxiety, and in its anxiety psychology portrays sin, while again and again it is in anxiety over the portrayal that it itself brings forth.«67 Until now we have accentuated Kierkegaard’s contribution to a phenomenological understanding of anxiety. There are, of course, further aspects of Kierkegaard’s research into anxiety, e. g. his brilliant depiction of anxiety as a foreign force with which we interact.68 However, my intention here is not just to highlight the relevance of Kierkegaard’s investigation for phenomenological research on anxiety, but also the limits of such appropriation. In this regard, I will analyze the relation between anxiety and faith. 2.2. Anxiety and Faith Grøn points out that Anxiety contains a disappointing lack of information on the relation of anxiety to God and faith.69 The question is whether faith annuls anxiety? In a famous passage Kierkegaard writes: »Faith does not thereby annihilate anxiety, but, itself eternally young, it extricates itself from anxiety’s moment of 66   S. Micali, »Die Macht der Angst,« in Feeling and Value, Willing and Action, ed. M. Wehrle and M. Ubiali (Berlin: Springer, 2015), 237 – 243. 67   Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 15. 68   Micali, Macht, 229 – 243. 69   Grøn, Anxiety, 148.

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

29

death. Only faith is able to do this, for only in faith is the synthesis eternal and at every moment possible.«70 Faith does not annihilate anxiety as it annihilates despair. Faith here seems to counter the spiral of the negative (im‑)possibility defining anxiety. Still, anxiety is subordinated to faith. This is the key point. Anxiety has the positive function of wanting to save the individual by detachment from finitude. Anxiety teaches us a lesson. It has a symptomatic value, as if it said to us: too intense an attachment to something concrete has taken place. Anxiety would disappear by achieving distance from over-identification with the concrete situation, or with a determinate social role; anxiety always refers to finite attachment and over-identification. This over-identification shows oblivion of our (infinite) task: What anxiety is supposed to reveal is that the individual himself is more than what he is determined or viewed to be. Anxiety detaches the individual from the context by which he would otherwise be absorbed. This consciousness of being something other and more than what we are determined to be is the consciousness of being a person.71

Is it legitimate to affirm, from a phenomenological perspective, that anxiety leads to faith? Or does this assumption imply a dialectical method that presupposes the result (faith as a solution to contradictions)? Does this method do justice to the appearances of anxiety? Do the two approaches – dialectical and phenomenological – enter into a tension here? As mentioned above, in the last part of Anxiety Kierkegaard underlines the positive function of anxiety for faith. Anxiety acts like a fire that burns all the inconsistencies of our symbolic identities and social roles. It questions and compromises our natural identification with that which we possess, with our performances, and with social recognition. We can thus understand Kierkegaard’s statement that one ought to be glad to be »searched« by anxiety. Anxiety disturbs and interrupts our identification with finitude, and thus helps us to open up to infinity. In my view, this consequence – »thus« – is all but obvious. Why must or should anxiety lead to faith? Can anxiety be treated as a goad of the flesh that reminds us that our natural being is out of balance concerning the synthesis between finite and infinite; possibility and necessity? Can awareness of this imbalance lead to faith? Is a positive function inherent in the dynamic of anxiety? In other words: Does anxiety entail a positive teleology? I submit – against Kierkegaard – that it is not possible to retrace any positive teleology in anxiety.72 Before addressing my own doubts as regards the positive teleology in anxiety, it is necessary to understand Kierkegaard’s own position. The implicit link between anxiety and faith in Anxiety is made explicit in the later Sickness. There, 70

  Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 117.   Grøn, Anxiety, 71 – 72. 72   S. Micali, »Angst als Erschütterung,« in Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoanalytische Zugänge, ed. S. Micali and T. Fuchs (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 2016), 28 – 55. 71

30

Stefano Micali

God is defined as everything being possible: »For God is everything possible and that everything is possible is God.«73 Faith consists in this openness to unlimited possibilities – to the possibility of the impossible. We can, from this perspective, see that anxiety may enhance our sense of unlimited possibilities by detaching us from our attachment to finite and inconsistent identities. Still, it is crucial to ask whether anxiety is capable of sharpening and improving our openness to possibility in terms of faith. I am inclined to believe that the teleology of anxiety goes toward the negative; the terrible, which goes in the exact opposite direction of the positive. Anxiety tends to lead us to where we do not want to go – to different forms of self-negation. Anxiety »tries« in highly sophisticated ways to persuade the self to give his / her consent to fall into the vortex of impossibility. It is not by chance that Schelling, speaking of the notion of »generality of evil«, compares anxiety to siren song, calling human freedom »as he who is seized by dizziness on a high and steep summit seems to be beckoned to plunge downward by a hidden voice; or, according to the ancient legend, the irresistible song of the sirens reverberates from the depths in order to drag the passing sailor into the maelstrom.«74 If there is an inherent immanent teleology of anxiety, it is that of self-negation.75 One of the most inspired passages in Anxiety reads: And no Grand Inquisitor has such dreadful torments in readiness as anxiety has, and no secret agent knows as cunningly as anxiety how to attack his suspect in his weakest moment or to make alluring the trap in which he will be caught, and no discerning judge understands how to interrogate and examine the accused as does anxiety, which never lets the accused escape, neither through amusement, nor by noise, nor during work, neither by day nor by night.76

However, Kierkegaard holds that this negative modality is subordinated to a positive function leading to faith. We must also recall that we can, in our confrontation with anxiety, also succumb. We cannot be certain that anxiety can help us find the healthy relation to ourselves of faith. In other words, anxiety could disturb the subjective homeostasis in such an invasive way that it creates the condition for losing ourselves (i. e. perdition). Kierkegaard highlights, without any hesitation, the dangers inherent in a confrontation with anxiety: However, I will not deny that whoever is educated by possibility is exposed to danger, not that of getting into bad company and going astray in various ways as are those educated by the finite, but he danger of a fall, namely, suicide. If at the beginning of his education he mis73

  Kierkegaard, Sickness, 40.   F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into The Essence of Human Freedom, trans. J. Love and J. Schmidt (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2006), 47. 75   Micali, Macht, 233 – 240. 76   Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 155 – 156. 74

Anxiety between Dialectics and Phenomenology

31

understands the anxiety, so that it does not lead him to faith but away from faith, then he is lost. On the other hand, whoever is educated [by possibility] remains with anxiety; he does not permit himself to be deceived by its countless falsifications and accurately remembers the past. Then the assaults of anxiety, even though they be terrifying, will not be such that he flees from them. For him, anxiety becomes a serving spirit that against its will leads him where he wishes to go.77

The use of »misunderstanding,« above, betrays Kierkegaard’s position that anxiety entails a teleological tendency towards faith. On the other hand, it also shows the ambiguous power of anxiety; that it can always mislead us. One who suffers from anxiety can misunderstand its function. However, if we do not misunderstand anxiety – if we are ready to undergo its scrutiny – we become its master, and can bend its will. Anxiety has its own will, almost as if it were an interlocutor. It also tends to lead us to where we do not want to go. Kierkegaard intends to teach us a strategy for gaining control over this foreign power. It is important to note the process by which we should undergo its scrutiny: Then, when it announces itself, when it cunningly pretends to have invented a new instrument of torture, far more terrible than anything before, he does not shrink back, and still less does he attempt to hold it off with noise and confusion; but he bids it welcome, greets it festively, and like Socrates who raised the poisoned cup, he shuts himself up with it and says as a patient would say to the surgeon when the painful operation is about to begin: Now I am ready. Then anxiety enters into his soul and searches out everything and anxiously torments everything finite and petty out of him, and then it leads him where he wants to go.78

The human being here resembles a snake charmer, practising the best taming tactics. This passage awakens mixed feelings: – It brilliantly describes how we should deal with anxiety: We should not avoid it, but must rather welcome it. We have to say: »Here I am.« We have to keep in mind that avoidance behaviors only increase long-term anxiety. Pessoa says: »I bear the wounds of all the battles I avoided.«79 Each act of avoidance has to be considered a wound. With repeated avoidance, the wound becomes more profound. Avoidance is not a neutral act. Rather, it is our active contribution to strengthen anxiety. One must learn to be patient with its invasive visits, and welcome it as a guest. Avoiding the avoidance behavior, then, would free us from anxiety’s terrible power of attraction. It seems to act as a counter-measure, disenchanting us from its spell. In other words, this welcoming attitude favors the disappearance of anxiety. – However, it seems that Kierkegaard exaggerates the possibility of thus becoming master of anxiety. To welcome anxiety as a guest is a requirement for treating anxiety, yet this change seems insufficient as escape from its spell. 77

  Kierkegaard, Anxiety, 159.  Ibid. 79   F. Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, trans. R. Zenith (London: Penguin, 2002), § 373, 314. 78

32

Stefano Micali

It is not the purpose of the present paper to investigate the best strategy for dealing with anxiety. My primary goal is to investigate the relation between the concept of faith and the notion of anxiety with focus on methodological proceedings. Concerning this point, we witness also in Grøn’s approach to anxiety a tension between a phenomenological investigation and a systematic-dialectical method. Over-identification with a determinate social role provokes anxiety, as if it were a rebellion against a claustrophobic self-determination in a concrete being-so. Grøn shares Kierkegaard’s assumption according to which anxiety has an educative function: »The individual through anxiety is educated unto faith.«80 Anxiety anticipates the threatening possibility of the loss of that which we love,81 introducing the moment of separation from what we are most attached to: Anxiety is even educative by bringing out the threat of nothingness. The point is this: an individual can be absorbed by the circumstances in his life, and maybe even by the things with which he surrounds himself. Thus the individual must learn not to identify himself with the ›finite relations‹ of life that are mutable. In anxiety, the individual breaks loose from what he otherwise can be absorbed by or lose himself in. In other words, the individual learns in anxiety that he is something other than what he identifies himself with.82

»Anxiety can be misunderstood so that it does not lead us to faith but away from faith.«83 Hegel’s influence on Kierkegaard is particularly visible in his dialectic approach to the development and the formation (Bildung) of the self. Kierkegaard’s Anxiety can be seen as a miniature Phenomenology of Spirit. The end of the process (faith as solution to contradictions) serves as a guiding thread for the adventurous development of the self, in which different steps are necessary for reaching a specifically mature and healthy form of self-relation before the Other. Anxiety fulfills here a specific function leading to faith. To the contrary, a phenomenological analysis of anxiety tends to insist on its negative character, by which no trace of a positive teleology leading to faith is to be found. I have here attempted to show the significance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety for contemporary (phenomenological) research through a confrontation with Theunissen’s and Grøn’s work. However, each form of appropriation contains inner limits and dangers.

80

 Ibid.   Grøn, Anxiety, 148. 82   Ibid., 148 – 149. 83   Ibid., 150. 81

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics René Rosfort

1.  The problem of ethics Interpretations of Kierkegaard often use his ethics to make sense of the authorship and to argue for the contemporary relevance of his thought. Ethics is an obvious place to start when trying to understand the contemporary relevance of a thinker. The ethical aspect of a philosopher seems to be less firmly rooted in or bound to a specific historical period than, for example, that thinker’s metaphysics or ontology. The current interest in Aristotle’s cosmological arguments or in Kant’s biological speculations is primarily historical in nature, but their ethical works are still used as crisp templates for present-day attempts to systematically understand and change human behavior. This is not to say that we cannot learn anything about causality or biology from engaging with Aristotle and Kant, but it seems undeniable that their ethical arguments have a more immediate existential impact. Another reason for why ethics is an obvious approach to Kierkegaard’s work is that ethics does seem to play a fundamental role in Kierkegaard’s thinking. In fact, one could argue that ethics is the prism through which Kierkegaard’s multifarious writings are refracted. Making sense of how to live one’s life and how to treat other people are persistent themes throughout the authorship. Accordingly, the attempt to make sense of Kierkegaard’s work through his thoughts on ethics seems to be both an intuitively sound and potentially fruitful endeavour. As with most philosophical issues, however, the strength of an approach cannot be reduced to the intuitive allure of its presuppositions or to the fruitfulness of the results. To resort to a hackneyed Kierkegaardian trope, the strength of a philosophical approach depends not only on what it produces, but also on how it is produced. Most interpreters seem to agree that Kierkegaard’s ethics is a religious or, more precisely, a Christian ethics, but the agreement does not go beyond this rather trivial categorization. One problem that continues to divide interpreters is how to situate and make sense of his ethical thought in the midst of the aesthetic and the religious character of his works. In what follows, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s conception of ethics is interlaced with the aesthetic and the religious character of his writings. The particularity and, I will argue, strength of his ethical thought relies on this peculiar character of his writings in the sense that the aesthetic character of his writings and the religious foundation of his thought at the same time

34

René Rosfort

ground and destabilize his conception of ethics. The interplay of aesthetic and religious interests produces an affective dialectics of irony and seriousness that makes Kierkegaard’s ethical thought a challenging contribution to the way we frame and discuss ethics today. It is a dialectics that goes to the heart of a fundamental ethical problem that became particularly urgent in the twentieth century, and which continues to unsettle our ethical discussions in the twenty-first century. This ethical problem can also be called the problem of ethics. How are we to make sense of ethical principles, norms, and values in a time that, fortunately, has grown sensitive to the irreplaceable voices of individuality? Intellectual currents in the twentieth century such as critical theory, poststructuralism, gender studies, postcolonialism, and minority studies have taught us about the serious problems of universalizing norms and values. Moreover, how can we justify universal ethical demands amidst the ruins of political and epistemic authority? The world seems out of its ethical joint, and perhaps – or most probably – it has always been so. Some twenty years ago the British philosopher Simon Blackburn framed the problem of ethics in the following way: »[W]e nearly all want to be naturalists and we want a theory of ethics. So the problem is one of finding room for ethics, or of placing ethics within the disenchanted, non-ethical order which we inhabit, and of which we are part.«1 Whether we really want to be naturalists is, of course, an open question. But it seems indisputable that we want to find room for ethics in our life-view. Only few of us want the world of unimaginable suffering in which we live now, and almost all of us claim to be looking for ideas that can become workable ideals for a less appalling future. At the same time, though, most of us are naturalists enough to contribute to the suffering of other people. Our ideals are constantly fractured by our material needs, and our notions of good and evil seem to shipwreck on our own hunger. These questions are not foreign to Kierkegaard’s work, nor is the question of ethics an anachronistic frame that I want to force Kierkegaard’s thought into. In fact, my argument is that the problem of ethics is at the core of not only Kierkegaard’s ethics, but of his work in general, and that this problem is a catalyst for Kierkegaard’s existential transformation of recurrent ethical discussions in the Western tradition of moral philosophy. As Michael Theunissen once argued, Kierkegaard’s major contribution to philosophy is to be found in his existentialization of the categories of the philosophical and theological tradition of which he is a part.2 I read Kierkegaard’s ethics as an existential transformation of the transcendental foundation of Kant’s deontological ethics into what we could call 1   S. Blackburn, Ruling passion: A Theory of Practical Reasoning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 49. 2   M. Theunissen, »Das Menschbild in der ›Krankheit zum Tode‹,« in Materialien zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. M. Theunissen and W. Greve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979), 497.

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

35

a phenomenology of the problem of ethics; or, to put it more succinctly, it is a reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics as an anxious ethics. An anxious ethics is an ethics that works with the existential destabilization of normativity experienced through the affective complexity of irony and seriousness that complicate our attempts to make sense of ethical demands. I will construct my argument in four steps. My reading of Kierkegaard stands firmly in the negativistic approach to the authorship pioneered by Michael Theunissen and critically developed by Arne Grøn. I will therefore start with an outline of Theunissen’s negativistic reading of Kierkegaard. This reading is groundbreaking in many respects, and I will here only focus on two aspects of Theunissen’s interpretation, namely his argument that fragility is fundamental to Kierkegaard’s conception of being human, and his criticism of Kierkegaard’s normative conception of selfhood. Theunissen criticizes Kierkegaard for working with an abstract norm of selfhood as a persistent self-relation that destroys his exploration of human fragility and makes him blind to the concrete reality of human suffering. Theunissen goes on to connect this problem to Kierkegaard’s ambivalent approach to ethics. Following Arne Grøn’s critical development of Theunissen’s negativistic approach, I will argue that Kierkegaard’s ethical ambivalence is a strength rather than a weakness. In order to bring out this strength, the third section will look at two alternative interpretations of Kierkegaard’s ethics that, in my opinion, present a skewed, or at least amputated, account of Kierkegaard’s ethics. These are the readings of C. Stephen Evans and Steven Shakespeare. For all of their significant differences, the two readings share the methodological approach of trying to root Kierkegaard’s ethics on an ontological foundation. I criticize this ontological approach and argue that the aim of Kierkegaard’s ethics is not to bring order to a certain conception of reality, but rather to bring into question our – more or less articulate – representations of reality. In the fourth section, I argue that the point of Grøn’s negativistic reading of Kierkegaard is to articulate and discuss the normative problems involved in our representations of reality. While Theunissen criticizes Kierkegaard’s normative conception of selfhood, Arne Grøn’s critical development of the negativistic approach argues that the strength of Kierkegaard’s theory is exactly this emphasis on normativity. In the fifth and final section, against the backdrop of Grøn’s reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics as a critique of our (normative) representations of reality, I will outline my proposal of reading Kierkegaard’s ethics as a phenomenology of the problem of ethics, that is, as an anxious ethics. This proposal is a critical development of the negativistic readings of Theunissen and Grøn. Two aspects of my account in particular mark a difference with respect to these two seminal approaches to Kierkegaard’s authorship. First of all, I read Kierkegaard in connection with Kant, rather than with Hegel, and secondly, I give more theoretical significance to Kierkegaard’s ironic distortions and aesthetic playfulness than either Theunissen or Grøn. I argue that Kierkegaard’s ethics is an

36

René Rosfort

anxious ethics because of his insistence on the inescapable ambiguity of seriousness and irony that accompany all our ethical considerations. Our experience of norms and values is, in other words, accompanied by an anxiety that constantly destabilizes our categorical distinctions between right and wrong, good and bad, appropriate and inappropriate.

2. The tyranny of normativity Human fragility is at the core of Michael Theunissen’s reading of Kierkegaard. To be human is to exist with the troubling experience of being a »human being that is to become human [Menschwerdung des Menschen]« only through opposition to that which it merely is.3 In other words, we are not what we are. We are what we are through our struggle with who we are. The identity of a human being is not a substantial fact or a question of being. We worry about being the self that we are due to our not being the self that we want to be. Being a self is to exist with and through an inescapable experience of fragility that, according to Theunissen, is rooted in the fact that for Kierkegaard »being oneself – and therein lies the negativity – succeeds exclusively in constant carrying out of the annihilation of the possibility of despair.«4 We only become ourselves through the troubling – and in many cases despairing – experience of not being who we are. The human being »has a broken relationship to his own structure,« which is experienced as the fact that »we do not immediately want to be that which we are [wir wollen unmittelbar nicht sein, was wir sind].«5 Theunissen calls this approach Kierkegaard’s »negativistic-dialectic method,« and he uses it to meticulously work out the structure and dynamics of Kierkegaard’s conception of human despair that, on his reading, is nourished by our »worry about the effort of being human« and by »our yearning for the nonhuman [Unmenschliche].«6 We are constitutionally incapable of being at ease with ourselves, and our primary task is to »hold ourselves together« in the sense that we are intermediary beings whose existence is a dialectical entanglement of finitude and infinitude, necessity and possibility, past and future.7 This task of being human, of holding ourselves together, requires a constant »effort [Anstrengung]« that makes self-understanding primary in Kierkegaard’s anthropology. To be human is to become the self that one is through the effort of self-un3

  Ibid., 499.   M. Theunissen, »Kierkegaard’s negativistic method,« trans. C. Baumann, in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. J. H. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 416. 5   M. Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, trans. B. Harshav and H. Illbruck (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5. 6   Ibid., 107, 110. 7   M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 358 – 360 (all translations of texts not available in English are by the author). 4

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

37

derstanding, that is, by constantly »relating oneself to oneself [Sich-zu-sich-Verhalten].«8 Theunissen’s negativistic approach in this way uncovers an inescapable fragility at the core of human experience. Making sense of what and who we are is only possible through the experience of a basic fragility that it is our task to constantly cope with. Theunissen’s reading of Kierkegaard is seminal not merely by virtue of its original and meticulous articulation of the intricate conceptual engineering at work in Kierkegaard’s examination of human fragility. This interpretative account is accompanied by a no less important critique of Kierkegaard’s normative conception of what it means to be human, which Theunissen connects with Kierke­gaard’s particular Christian theology. Theunissen’s critique of Kierkegaard is not new. It is, in many ways, a reiteration of Adorno’s influential critique of Kierkegaard’s »radical theological subjectivism«9 that, on Adorno’s account, makes his notion of selfhood an »objectless inwardness« and turns his ethics into abstract mysticism.10 The novelty of Theunissen’s critique is that while Adorno directs his critique at Kierkegaard’s escapist subjectivism and the consequent lack of social engagement, Theunissen criticizes Kierkegaard for not acknowledging the radical character of negativity, that is, for neglecting the fact that suffering is sometimes unliveable and despair thus inevitable. Kierkegaard’s insistence on the primacy of self-understanding, Theunissen argues, ultimately destroys his otherwise delicate account of human fragility because of the untenable »premise that all despair is enclosed within the circle of self-relation.«11 Kierkegaard’s conception of human selfhood as a constant self-relation makes him put the weight of despair entirely upon the shoulders of the suffering self by arguing that »despair presupposes the self-activity of the person in despair.«12 It is the self who despairs and it is therefore the self who is ultimately responsible for despair. Theunissen finds this understanding of despair not only philosophically problematic, but also fundamentally cruel and inhuman.13 Theunissen argues that for all its philosophical richness and psychological depth, Kierkegaard’s exploration of human fragility ultimately rests upon a »moralizing conception of despair« that is rooted in the Christian foundation of Kierkegaard’s thought.14 There are several aspects of Theunissen’s critique of

 8

 Ibid.   Th. W. Adorno, »On Kierkegaard’s doctrine of love,« Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung / Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 8 (1939 – 1940), 421. 10   Th. W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. R. Hullot-Kontor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 24 – 32. 11   M. Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, 39 (translation slightly modified). 12   Ibid., 62. 13   M. Theunissen, »Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard. Zu Einwänden von Arne Grøn und Alastair Hannay,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 78. 14  Ibid.  9

38

René Rosfort

Kierkegaard’s theology that deserve careful attention, but what is of importance in this context is the way Theunissen connects his critique of Kierkegaard’s understanding of despair with what he considers to be Kierkegaard’s uneasy approach to ethics. It is here that Theunissen reformulates Adorno’s critique of Kierkegaard by arguing that Kierkegaard’s conception of selfhood as self-relation is constructed upon an empty ideal of human existence. This emptiness is brought about by »the reduction of willing to the willing of one’s own being.«15 Kierkegaard’s reductive understanding of willing stems from his basic »postulate of willing to be oneself [Postulat des Selbstseinwollens]« that »refers everyone back to himself, insofar as it commits [verpflichtet] us to nothing but what is, in each case, one’s own.«16 Just as Adorno before him, Theunissen’s critique is uncompromising, and he ends up characterizing Kierkegaard’s notion of being »as absolutely empty.«17 Kierkegaard depletes reality of concrete content in order to arrive at »an empty ideal of existence« constructed upon the abstract demand of self-relation.18 Theunissen explains what he considers to be the fundamental problem with this conception of selfhood: The restriction of the Kierkegaardian self lies not in its solitude, but in its emptiness, that is, in the poor result of mere self-realization. Kierkegaard shares the blame for the rampant ideology of self-realization and for the emptying of the normative representation of the human being [Entleerung des normativen Menschenbildes]. He has given philosophies of the self free rein to increasingly reduce projects of a good life worthy of human beings to the tautology of the proposition: ›I am what I am.‹ In this respect, he has not broadened our horizon, but driven us into a narrow confinement.19

Theunissen locates the reason for Kierkegaard’s depletion of the normative idea of what it means to be human in Kierkegaard’s ambivalent approach to ethics. On the one hand, Kierkegaard is one of the most vociferous critics of normative life-views and, on the other hand, his entire work is grounded in an unmitigated normative idea of what it means to be a human self. This ambivalence is, on Theunissen’s account, responsible for Kierkegaard’s coinage of a new understanding of ethics, a second ethics, to replace the first ethics, that is, the antique conception of ethics as an explicit set of normative guidelines for a good life. Kierkegaard’s uneasy approach to ethics is a mark of his modernity or, more precisely, his transitional role between modernity and postmodernity.20 Theunissen explains: 15

  Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, 43.   Ibid. (translation slightly modified). 17  Ibid. 18   Theunissen, »Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,« 79. 19   M. Theunissen, »Kierkegaards Philosophische Profil,« Kierkegaardiana 18 (1996), 26; see also Idem, Selbstverwirklichung und Allgemeinheit. Zur Kritik des gegenwärtigen Bewußtseins (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1982). 20   Ibid., 16. 16

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

39

Ethics becomes problematic whenever modernity steps into the horizon of philosophy. All truly great philosophers that are thinkers of modernity in the precise meaning of the word, that is, not only belonging to the formation of modernity between 1800 and 1850, but who have also reflected upon modernity, as Hegel and Heidegger, have either not developed an ethics or have presented themselves as critics of ethics. The ethicist Kierkegaard, who proves his modernity not least through the fact that ethics for him breaks up into a first and a second ethics, is with his critique of the first ethics almost as good an example of the latter category as the anti-ethicist Nietzsche.21

Theunissen develops his account of the historical background for Kierkegaard’s uneasy approach to ethics by arguing that while Kierkegaard’s thought is firmly grounded in a solid Lutheran Christian foundation with all the religious absolutes that this entails, these absolutes are constantly destabilized by the »historically determined nihilism« that saturates his writings.22 This particular historical situation is, on Theunissen’s account, responsible for the perhaps most peculiar feature of Kierkegaard’s thought, namely that while his philosophical ideal of existence is empty, his theology more than compensates for this emptiness by offering an eternally secured meaning through belief in God as »the living source of all meaning.«23 It is exactly this fundamental ambivalence of philosophical nihilism and a radical theological concept of faith that makes Kierkegaard’s ethical thought complicated, and according to Theunissen deeply problematic. Kierkegaard spends most of his intellectual energy on destroying, and even ridiculing, the traditional normative guidelines for a good life in order to liberate the individual from what he considers to be habitual virtues and asinine precepts. A human being has to become a self by relating itself to itself rather than following normative guidelines in the shape of laws, precepts, rules, virtues, habits, and tastes sanctioned by the establishment (no matter whether it is grounded in theology, philosophy, or science). Human fragility stems from the lack of the existential relief of such solid normative guidelines. We cannot structure and fortify our existence in terms of universal virtues or objective rules. Kierkegaard’s insistence on the fact that we are individual selves means that we have to constantly relate ourselves to ourselves in our relation to the norms and values that orient our existence. This normative priority of self-relation is at the core of both Kierkegaard’s critique of traditional ethics – what he calls first ethics – and his proposal for a new, second ethics. According to Theunissen, it is the insistence on self-relation that makes Kierkegaard’s idea of a second ethics philosophically empty, that is, an ethics without »a philosophy to educate human beings to the overflowing of freedom beyond good and evil.«24 21   M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 30 – 31. 22   Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, 43 – 47. 23   Ibid., 86. 24   Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 35.

40

René Rosfort

Theunissen’s primary argument is that Kierkegaard’s attempt to compensate for this normative emptiness with a radical theological conception of faith is, as already mentioned, not only philosophically problematic, but also inhumane because of the radical conception of responsibility involved in this theologically grounded ethics. The inhumane aspect of Kierkegaard’s second ethics becomes most obvious in his conception of despair. As outlined at the beginning of this section, Theunissen’s reading of Kierkegaard is structured by his critique of Kierkegaard’s basic argument that despair is the result of an unsuccessful self-relation and his consequent neglect of the fact that despair is sometimes inevitable. While Kierkegaard argues that the person is always responsible for her despair and that it is ethically wrong to despair, on Theunissen’s account despair is sometimes the only human reaction to that which happens to us, e. g. the loss of a loved one, a terminal disease, or the horror of human cruelty.25 Kierkegaard’s otherwise fragile dialectics of passivity and activity, suffering and action, is ultimately destroyed by »the tyranny of the ethical ban on despair [Tyrannei des ethischen Verzweiflungsverbots].«26 The reality of despair, of unliveable human suffering, is neglected in Kierkegaard’s understanding of what it means to be human for the sake of an inhuman theological conception of faith that totalizes all kinds of despair as a lack of faith in the eternally meaningful work of God. The importance of Theunissen’s reading of Kierkegaard lies, in my view, in his combination of a critical reformulation of Kierkegaard’s exploration of the existential fragility of human beings with a careful critique of what he considers to be Kierkegaard’s normative encroachment upon the concrete suffering of the individual. This combination brings out the problem of ethics as one of the fundamental features of Kierkegaard’s thought. How can we demand complete responsibility of creatures so constitutionally fragile as human beings? How can we ask individually particular selves to subjugate themselves to universal rules? And how do we orient ourselves in an existence constituted by both universal norms and individual values? Theunissen’s reading is strengthened by the way he situates Kierkegaard’s work in the historical context of both traditional Christian theology and modern nihilism. Kierkegaard’s work is without doubt permeated by both these historical traditions, and his ethics carries the mark of both religiously absolute claims (e. g. human being is created by God, is both finite and infinite, is mortal yet has an eternal spirit) and nihilistic destabilizations of our human conceptions of these same absolutes. While Theunissen considers this ambivalence a weakness of Kierkegaard’s thought, I will argue that it is, in fact, one of the most fertile aspects of Kierkegaard’s work. My understanding of Kierkegaard’s ethics as

25

  Theunissen’s technical term for that which simply happens to us is Widerfahrnis.   M. Theunissen, »Für einen rationaleren Kierkegaard,« 78. See also Idem, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, 61 – 73. 26

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

41

an anxious ethics relies, as mentioned, precisely on the ambivalent interplay of the religious and the aesthetic, of serious absolutes and ironic destabilisation. My argument relies heavily on Arne Grøn’s critical development of Theunissen’s negativistic reading, but before making this debt explicit I will first look at two alternative approaches to Kierkegaard’s ethics that can help to bring out the strength of the negativistic approach.

3.  Destablizing ontology The interpretations in question are C. Stephen Evans’ reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics as a divine command theory,27 and Steven Shakespeare’s recent proposal to read Kierkegaard’s ethics as an ethics of immanence.28 Evans’ approach is characterized by a strong notion of transcendence, an emphasis on the seriousness of God’s commands, and a firm belief in the authority of Kierkegaard’s non-pseudonymous words. This interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ethics can be seen as an attempt to interpret Kierkegaard as a stern critic of modernity, arguing that the contemporary relevance of his ethics lies in the help it can provide us with in our struggle against the shallow emptiness of our postmodern condition. It is a reading of the authorship through an uncompromising Christian perspective that considers the polyphony and multivocity of the authorship an insubstantial foil covering Kierkegaard’s real intention. Shakespeare’s approach, on the other hand, is construed as a refusal of transcendence, a deconstructive approach to the divine, and a predilection for the imaginative, playful, and reconfigurative character of Kierkegaard’s pseudonyms. It interprets Kierkegaard as a modern, if not postmodern, thinker who is well aware of the monstrosities committed in the name of a merciful God, who is critical of the subjugation of the individual to societal conventions, and not least as a thinker who is attentive to the individual suffering produced by universal normative demands. Shakespeare deconstructs the Christian character of the authorship through an aesthetic reading sensitive to the paradoxical materiality of Kierkegaard’s language. This reading is construed as an attempt to liberate Kierkegaard’s texts from the obscurity of Christian dogmatics and from the ossified structures of the metaphysical tradition in and by means of which they were conceived. Reading the two approaches together is instructive. They propose two radically different ways of using Kierkegaard’s ethical thought to make sense of his thinking, and they use ethics as an argument for the relevance of Kierkegaard for the 27   C. S. Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love: Divine Commands and Moral Obligations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 28   S. Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

42

René Rosfort

contemporary reader. Both accounts acknowledge the glaringly obvious religious character of Kierkegaard’s ethics, but their accounts differ with respect to how they situate and make sense of the ethical in relation to the aesthetic and the religious aspects of the texts. Whereas Evans’ transcendent approach reads Kierkegaard’s ethics through the religious aspect, constructing a Christian ethics that is meant to introduce a stern normative challenge to what he terms our postmodern times, Shakespeare’s immanent ethics uses primarily the aesthetic aspect to introduce a playful ethics that can produce genuine possibilities within the materiality of our fluctuating human world. While both approaches bring out crucial aspects of Kierkegaard’s ethical thought, they end up with amputated accounts of his ethics. On Evans’ account, Kierkegaard’s ethics is constructed with the solid bricks of Christian earnestness and fortified by the true words of Kierkegaard. It is an ethics of seriousness undisturbed by the irony of Kierkegaard’s many voices. Shakespeare, on the other hand, argues for an ethics whose norms and values are deflated by the paradoxical irony at work in Kierkegaard’s heterogeneous writing. It is an ironic ethics without demands or prescriptions, that is, an ethics aimed at liberating human autonomy from the restriction of its subjugated condition. Here is not the place to give the two interpretations the careful attention that they both deserve, so I will focus on what I consider to be a fundamental methodological problem that these two readings have in common. The problem concerns the explicitly ontological foundation of their interpretations of Kierkegaard’s ethics. Both Evans and Shakespeare mistake Kierkegaard’s existential approach to ethics for an ontologically grounded ethics. The point of Kierkegaard’s existential approach to ethics is to destabilize the ontological foundation of ethics and thus make evident the problems of constructing and justifying normative guidelines for human behavior. This existential approach makes problematic both the transcendent reality of divine commands in Evans’ account, and the immanent reality of radically new possibilities proffered by Shakespeare’s reading. The question of how to understand reality is a fundamental theme throughout Kierkegaard’s authorship. There is no escaping this question whether one chooses to read the authorship following Kierkegaard’s own declared point of view – that is, as a carefully engineered systematic path to becoming a Christian – or as a kaleidoscopic literary and philosophical exploration of human existence. Evans and Shakespeare construct their interpretations of Kierkegaard’s ethics as ontologies or, to use one of Kierkegaard’s favourite terms, as life-views. On Evans’ account, the true happiness and flourishing of human beings »cannot be defined purely or even mainly in terms of such natural goods as health and prosperity.«29 In fact, human happiness in this world depends essentially on »a God who is truly transcendent.«30 This God is the Christian God whose infinite and immutable 29

  Evans, Kierkegaard’s Ethics of Love, 22.   Ibid., 331.

30

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

43

demands originate in a realm radically separated from this world. If the individual does not subject herself to the divine commands of the Christian God, this world is doomed to remain the austere and miserable reality of fallen creatures. Shakespeare’s account presents us with a life-view in which »any determinate form is a contingent expression of unconditioned immanence.«31 The human world is a world of infinite possibilities that is not »grounded upon a transcendent precomprehension« of duty or commands, but realized through a dynamic materiality of individual activity. We do not need a transcendent authority to arrive at happiness but, following a Spinozist alternative, Shakespeare argues that Kierkegaard is developing an ontology or a life-view in the image of Christ, but it is »a Christ without Christianity, which is also a Christ without the illusory transcendence in the name of which the individual is crushed.«32

4.  Ethics as the challenge of freedom The two diverging ontologies presented here can be categorised as an ethics of necessity or of transcendent heteronomy versus an ethics of possibility or of immanent autonomy. Both Evans and Shakespeare argue skilfully for their respective reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics by means of a logic informed and oriented by the ontological foundation upon which the interpretations work. The problem is that, for Kierkegaard, reality is not a question of logic. That is to say that reality cannot be contained or disclosed through an analytic procedure or ordered into a systematically consistent whole. The ontologized or hypostasized logical approach that Evans and Shakespeare argue for substitutes the question of reality at work in Kierkegaard’s writings with an explanation of reality. Reality is, in Kierkegaard’s writings, an ethical task, not an explanatory foundation from which we can extrapolate an ethics. As Vigilius Haufniensis argues in The Concept of Anxiety,33 the reality in which we live is »an unwarranted reality«34 posited in and perpetuated through sin, and our ethical task is not to make sense of the ontological or – as Haufniensis would say – abstract meaning of good and evil,35 but to work towards a warranted reality through the concrete existential challenge of human suffering. This is what I call Kierkegaard’s existential transformation of the ontological approach to ethics. Normative guidelines, on this understanding of ethics, 31

  Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence, 123.   Ibid., 195. 33   S. Kierkegaard’s writings are quoted with the following abbreviations: KW: Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, vol. 1 – 26 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978 – 98). SKS: Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., vol. 1 – 55 (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997 – 2012). 34   S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, KW 8, 111 / SKS 4, 413. 35   Ibid., 413 / 112. 32

44

René Rosfort

are neither eternally stable nor entirely reliant on the tumultuous fluctuations of temporality. We cannot find peace by following universal demands, nor can we make up our norms and values. Every individual is, on the contrary, faced with the problem of making sense of and living with norms and value that put our particular life-view into question. In other words, for Kierkegaard, ethics is the challenge of human freedom. Ethics as the challenge of freedom is at the core of Arne Grøn’s critical development of Theunissen’s negativistic reading of Kierkegaard. One of the principal differences between Theunissen and Grøn is that Grøn’s reading gives more systematic importance to the concept of anxiety in Kierkegaard’s authorship than does Theunissen’s. In fact, Grøn’s first book is an introduction to Kierkegaard via Vigilius Haufniensis’s book on anxiety.36 Grøn reads The Concept of Anxiety »as a treatise on ›difficult freedom‹ (to use a title taken from Emmanuel Levinas),« against the backdrop of the underlying argument that »[t]he difficulty of human freedom is basically what Kierkegaard’s thought is about.«37 Grøn’s choosing this early book of Kierkegaard’s as the prism through which to read his entire authorship is not accidental, but due to the intimate relation between anxiety and freedom in Kierkegaard’s thought: The concept of anxiety leads us directly to the concept of freedom, but what freedom means is encircled negatively by examining forms of unfreedom. In anxiety the possibility of freedom presents itself, but in anxiety a human being also becomes unfree. Anxiety is an ambiguous power in the human being. Moreover, the meaning of anxiety is ambiguous since anxiety is not just what a human being must free himself from. A human being also has to learn to be anxious [lære at ængstes].38

This interest in the concept of anxiety as the ambiguous phenomenon of freedom is fundamental to Grøn’s reading of Kierkegaard, and to his rejection of Theunissen’s critique of Kierkegaard’s normative conception of selfhood. Anxiety is not merely an ambiguous phenomenon in itself. Anxiety also – and more basically – reveals ambiguity as the fundamental feature of our being human. Grøn’s reading of Kierkegaard – and, one could argue, Grøn’s extensive authorship – is a multifaceted exploration of this ambiguity constitutive of being human. This ambiguity is rooted in Kierkegaard’s fragile ontological conception of the human being that Theunissen also points to, namely that human beings are intermediary creatures whose existence depends upon and is shaped by the task of holding themselves together.39 36   A. Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. J. B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008). 37   Ibid., xiv. 38   Ibid., ix (translation modified). 39   See also S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW 12, 1, 329 / SKS 7, 301. For a concise clarification of the complex notion of »intermediate creature« and its relation to the notion of »existence,« see A. Grøn, »The embodied self: reformulating the existential difference in Kierkegaard,« Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004), 31 – 32.

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

45

Now, Theunissen’s criticism of Kierkegaard is levelled at Kierkegaard’s unrelenting normative demand of self-relation that  – according to Theunissen  – involves a rejection of the reality of suffering. Grøn’s argument, however, is that the strength of Kierkegaard’s thought lies exactly in this normative approach to human selfhood. Rather than rejecting the reality of suffering, Kierkegaard, on Grøn’s account, brings out the constitutive fragility at the core of human suffering. This fragility consists in the fact that human beings never merely suffer. They always relate themselves to their suffering.40 While Theunissen argues that there are kinds of human suffering that are unambiguously painful and thus make despair inescapable, Grøn insists that human suffering is always accompanied by the ambiguity of anxiety.41 Human suffering is never simple, but always saturated with the challenge of freedom. Suffering may indeed be so excruciating that we lose ourselves in the torment of utter pain. But this loss of self is in itself a challenge to our freedom. As Grøn explains, »[t]o lose ourselves is to wound our soul, and this means to harden ourselves so that we give up courage and hope. We do something with ourselves – we give up (on) ourselves.«42 What Theunissen sees as a normative tyranny that neglects the reality of suffering, Grøn understands as an articulation of the strength of human fragility, namely that we are never merely passive victims of despair. Human suffering is always saturated with anxiety, and as such the possibility of freedom is engrained in even the most helpless suffering. This does not mean that we can or should neglect the brute impact of what happens to us (Widerfahrnis). On the contrary, the challenge of suffering consists in the reality of the pain that we are confronted with. Kierkegaard’s normative demand of selfhood as self-relation is on Grøn’s account a question of appropriating one’s identity in and through the challenge of reality: The normative identity is not an ideal requirement that a human being has to realize to become oneself. On the contrary, a human being must become itself by acknowledging itself. In this sense, the given reality does not merely stand on one side and the normative requirement on the other. Reality is not just that to which the requirement is applied. The normative requirement points back to the reality that a human being does not want to acknowledge. It is a demand in itself that the human being is bended back on this reality. This means that the normative requirement itself is qualified by this ›bending backward.‹ A human being only becomes itself through the breakdown of its own self-representation. To become oneself is in this sense to recover oneself [At blive sig selv er i denne forstand at komme til sig selv].43

Kierkegaard’s normative demand of self-relation is connected with the ambiguity of human freedom. Human freedom is a fact that is also a task. This means that ethics is both the challenge of freedom and the challenge to freedom, that is, the 40   A. Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,«, trans. E. Harbsmeier, Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 55 – 58. 41   Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety, 109 – 110. 42   Ibid., 112. 43   A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997), 29.

46

René Rosfort

fact that we are free is an ethical challenge (that is, we have to acknowledge our freedom), and ethics is a challenge to our (use of) freedom (that is, we cannot use our freedom in any way we want).44 Grøn’s insistence on this ambiguity of the facticity and normativity of human freedom allows him to develop an account of Kierkegaard’s ethics that does not fall prey to Theunissen’s critique of being a normative tyranny of pure activity and empty self-realization. At the same time, Grøn’s account avoids the allure of the simplified ontological accounts of Evans and Shakespeare, that is, either an ethics of transcendent heteronomy or an ethics of immanent autonomy. Grøn follows Theunissen’s suggestion to look for Kierkegaard’s second ethics in the analysis of despair in The Sickness Unto Death,45 but instead of accepting Theunissen’s qualification of the second ethics as an empty ethics of self-centred responsibility, Grøn argues that we need to complement our reading of The Sickness Unto Death with The Works of Love to fully understand the complexity of Kierkegaard’s ethical thought.46 Grøn argues that the joint reading of these two major works reveals that Kierkegaard’s normative emphasis on pure activity and self-realisation is not a rejection of the reality of suffering, but an insistence on the possibility of hope in what is experienced as the most hopeless suffering.47 It is an ethics that allows us to articulate the possibilities of action in the experience of passivity that accompanies our suffering. Grøn writes: »The dialectics of passivity and activity does not mean a negation of passivity. Rather, it allows us to understand activity and passivity as dimensions that cannot be reduced to one another, but only understood together.«48 The reality of suffering is, in other words, not neglected in Kierkegaard’s second ethics. On the contrary, the reality of suffering is accentuated by being put into relation with the self-understanding of the human being. We cannot neglect or simply put aside our own suffering or the suffering of other human beings. We are situated in a world that we share with other human beings, and we are as such implicated in the concrete reality of suffering to the extent that we are responsible, if not always for what we or other people suffer, then for how we deal with this suffering. Moreover, Kierkegaard’s second ethics is not empty, as Theunissen criticizes it for being. Rather, Grøn argues that Kierkegaard’s ethics is an ethics of vision that »directs our attention to how we see when we act,«49 and 44

  Ibid., 178.   Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair, 5 – 6. 46   A. Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,« 54; see also Idem, »›Anden‹ etik,« Studier i Stadier. Søren Kierkegaard Selskabets 50-års Jubilæum, ed. J. Garff et al. (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1998); Idem, »Kierkegaards ›zweite‹ Ethik,« trans. H. Schmid, Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1998 (Berlin / New York, NY: de  Gruyter, 1998), 55 – 58; Idem, »Ethics of vision,« Ethik der Liebe. Studien zu Kierkegaards ›Taten der Liebe‹, ed. I. U. Dalferth (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002). 47   Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,« 56. 48   A. Grøn, »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. I. U. Dalferth et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 57. 49   Grøn, »Ethics of vision,« 121. 45

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

47

as such it is an ethics that relies on the ambiguity of visibility and invisibility in our experience of reality. Human reality is, in a sense, simply there. We are situated creatures who find ourselves in a world that we have not created. In another sense, however, reality is not simply there. As individuals we experience the world differently. In this sense, we create reality through our individual understanding of the world in which we find ourselves. Human reality is therefore an ambiguous experience of passivity and activity, heteronomy and autonomy. Grøn puts it concisely: »A human being is the being which experiences and acts, but it is also the being to whom something happens when it experiences and acts.«50 The seminal contribution of Grøn’s authorship to Kierkegaard research consists primarily, I would argue, in his careful exploration of anxiety as the fundamental experience of our ambiguous freedom, combined with his reading of Kierke­ gaard’s ethics as an ethics of vision through which our normative representations of reality is put into question. My reading of Kierkegaard’s ethics as an anxious ethics that explores the problem of ethics is constructed upon the foundation of Grøn’s reading, and I will use the following and final section to outline this interpretation of Kierkegaard’s ethics.

5. Anxious ethics Reality is an ethical task in the sense that the question of reality is inextricable from what we do with what we feel and think as real. The entanglement of thinking and feeling is crucial to Kierkegaard’s existential approach. Reality is, as Climacus argues in the Postscript, »an inter-esse between thinking and being in the hypothetical unity of abstraction,«51 and is thus something different from mediated reflection or immediate sensation. This is not to say that reality is not a product of reflection or of sensation. The point is that we cannot think or feel ourselves into reality; or rather, when we do that, we end up with unwarranted conceptions of reality. The ethical challenge that Kierkegaard’s existential approach discloses is the individuating and even isolating character of our experience of reality. We cannot arrive at a disinterested understanding of reality because the reality that we try to make sense of is ineradicably entangled with our own existence that is or, according to Climacus, at least should be our »absolute interest.« In fact, Climacus goes even further with his radical proposal, arguing that, »[t]he only reality there is for an existing person is his own ethical reality.«52 50   A. Grøn, »Homo Subiectus. Zur Zweideutigen Subjectivität des Menschen,« in Seinkönnen. Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. I. U. Dalferth and A. Hunziker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 33. 51   S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW 12, 316 / SKS 7, 286. 52   Ibid., KW 12, 316 / SKS 7, 288.

48

René Rosfort

We are, in other words, so implicated in reality that the ethical challenge is to understand that reality as we experience it cannot be but an unwarranted reality because it is a reality informed by our subjective needs and shaped by our personal interests. This existential transformation of the question of ethics is not to be understood as an attenuation of norms or as a subtle way to detract from the urgency of ethical demands. It is, on the contrary, an intensification of the ethical in the sense that ethics cannot be regarded as a particular life-view or as something we have to fit into our own conception of reality. The ethical challenge cannot be domesticated or fulfilled by developing the proper virtues, cultivating the right intentions or securing the appropriate consequences. Virtues, intentions, and consequences are, of course, vital elements in any ethical considerations, but Kierkegaard’s writings show us the complacent and often deceitful character of the existential stability procured by these features. Ethics challenges every aspect of a person’s experience of reality by putting into question a person’s existential interests and making the person aware of her or his unwarranted understanding of reality. Following Grøn’s lead, I would argue that this conception of ethics as an ineradicable challenge or an inescapable restlessness at the most intimate texture of our existence is what Haufniensis in the dense introduction to The Concept of Anxiety hints at with his famous outline of »a new« or »a second ethics.« This ethics is »a struggle to realize the task of ethics,« not by bringing ideality into reality with a movement »from above and downward« but as a task that moves »from below and upward.« This movement from below and upward is not to be understood as a movement from an ontologically ratified ground, but as an existential movement from the intimate texture of the concrete experiences of an individual person. Moreover, this ethics does not have »its ideality in making ideal demands; rather it has its ideality in the penetrating consciousness of reality, of the reality of sin.«53 Haufniensis’ qualification of reality as reality of sin is of fundamental significance to the existential transformation of ethics at work in Kierkegaard’s writings. The reality of sin saturates our experience of reality, making ontological explanations of reality unwarranted, thus destabilizing the foundation of the norms and values that inform and orient our existence. This does not mean that Kierkegaard’s new ethics is an ethics without ontology, as Hilary Putnam recently proposed in his pragmatist dissolution of fact – value distinctions.54 There is, as mentioned, no escaping the radicality of ontology when dealing with Kierkegaard’s ethics, nor, I would argue, with ethics in general. What this means is that ontological questions concerning, for example, human nature; the facticity of norms; the nature of love; the pleasure of evil, and the often self-indulgent character of our passions cannot 53

  Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, KW 8, 19 – 20 / SKS 4, 325 – 328.   H. Putnam, Ethics Without Ontology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

54

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

49

be understood in isolation from the subjective complications of our experience of reality. Responsible for these complications, and at the heart of Kierkegaard’s new ethics, is the phenomenon of anxiety. Anxiety instils an ambiguity into the ethical norms and values that we use to orient ourselves by in our existence. Indeed, one of the most critical features of Kierkegaard’s ethics is the »sympathetic antipathy« and the »antipathetic sympathy«55 uncovered in his multifaceted exploration of the ways we human beings attempt to realize our ethical ideals. Few thinkers have demonstrated a more developed sense for the irony involved in the seriousness with which we treat and discuss ethical challenges. The irony of seriousness in Kierkegaard’s works stems from the dialectics of seriousness that is at work in his writings. To become serious is the challenge of reality, and it is a – or perhaps the – persistent theme of the authorship, as Michael Theunissen argues in his first seminal book on Kierkegaard. I would argue that ethics is, for Kierkegaard, the practice of existing with the inescapable ambiguity of seriousness, or with what Theunissen calls the »dialectics of fun and seriousness« that is at the heart of Kierkegaard’s »peculiar view of reality.«56 The irony of seriousness is that seriousness is not a virtue in the sense of something we can learn or educate ourselves to become. Nor is seriousness something that can be introduced undiluted from above in the form of God’s commands. Indeed, when we think ourselves serious, we are constantly at risk of being victims of the irony of seriousness, namely that what we take to be serious is insignificant or even ridiculous in the eyes of another person or – even more radically – in the eyes of God. Seriousness is an existential category that cannot be ratified in terms of objective or subjective measures. Seriousness, like irony, is characterized by a negativity that makes evident the ridiculousness, as Kierkegaard never tires of pointing out, of our attempts to define, categorize, and proclaim some kinds of actions, feelings, and thoughts as serious and other kinds as unserious. All actions, all feelings, and all thoughts can be serious or unserious, and the irony at work in Kierkegaard’s writings is animated by the anxious character of his ethics and functions as a critique of the normativity that comes unbidden in human existence. This critique of human norms, values, and life-views is articulated through Kierkegaard’s constant reconsiderations of our normative outlook, that is, our habits, thinking, actions, and affective dispositions. This is not to say that Kierkegaard does not present us with a serious ethical outlook that involves radical divine commands and their capacity to transform human existence. My point is that the seriousness of Kierkegaard’s ethics can only be appreciated through a reading that takes seriously the irony with which he criticizes the inescapable sinfulness of our life-views, that is, the unwarranted character of our subjective understanding of 55

  Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, KW 8, 42 / SKS 4, 348.   M. Theunissen, Der Begriff Ernst bei Søren Kierkegaard (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1958),

56

74.

50

René Rosfort

reality. In this sense, Kierkegaard’s ethics is anxious because it works through the phenomenological challenges involved in the categorical ethical demands that the authorship revolves around. At the beginning of this paper, I claimed that I read this as an existential transformation of the transcendental foundation of Kant’s deontology. The existential transformation consists in articulating the dialectics of heteronomy and autonomy at the core of Kant’s categorical imperative. Kierkegaard’s ethics, I would argue, can be read as anxious Kantian ethics in the sense that his existential approach problematizes the strict transcendental distinctions in Kant’s argument between, for example, the theoretical and the practical, or between categorical and hypothetical imperatives without reducing the radicality of the categorical imperative itself. Kant himself began this work in his anthropological writings, whose complex dialectics of irony and seriousness make them perhaps the most Kierkegaardian in the Kantian corpus. In these writings, he presents what he calls »Apology for sensibility,« which explores the constitutive passivity involved in human autonomy. Interestingly, in these writings Kant argues subtly for the need for a kind of strategic deception or indirect procedure when dealing with ossified norms and values that most people follow in their everyday lives. In the published version of his anthropology – Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View – he writes: »Nothing is accomplished by using force against sensibility in the inclinations; one must outwit them, and, as Swift says, surrender a barrel for the whale to play with in order to save the ship.«57 Kant’s understanding of deception is, however, built on his firm transcendental distinction between the objectively valid theoretical representation of the world and the practical postulate of a world of freedom. His notion of deception thus functions as a pragmatic tool that allows us to inject pure ethical norms into a theoretical and normatively neutral world of causality. On Kierkegaard’s account, this distinction between a theoretically valid world and the practical world is destabilized or rather it becomes an anxious distinction, making the question of deception more radical. While recent interpretations of Kant’s ethics use his anthropological writings to argue for a pragmatic deflation of his radical ethics, rendering it a so-called impure ethics,58 my proposal is to use Kierkegaard’s existential transformation of Kant’s ethics to argue for an even more radical version of Kant’s deontology. By radical, I mean an ethics that goes to the root or radix of the problem of ethics, making evident that what is at stake in ethics is the question of reality refracted through our experience of reality. 57   I. Kant, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, trans. R. B. Louden, in Immanuel Kant: Anthropology, History, and Education, ed. G. Zöller and R. B. Louden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 264. 58   E. g. C. M. Korsgaard, Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); R. B. Louden, Kant’s Impure Ethics: From Rational Beings to Human Beings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); P. R. Frierson, Freedom and Anthropology in Kant’s Moral Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 2003).

Kierkegaard and the Problem of Ethics

51

What Kierkegaard’s ethics teaches us is, among other things, that Simon Blackburn’s conception that we have to find »room for ethics« in a naturalist life-view is a problematic way to pose the question of ethics. Ethics is not something that we have to find room for in our particular ontology, be that a scientifically ratified or a theologically grounded life-view. Ethics, on the contrary, discloses the fragility of our understanding of reality, and as such it cannot but be affected by our anxiety about the world we want. This means that the anxiety of a Kierkegaardian ethics is inseparable from the irony of seriousness that is at the heart of our experience of norms and values. It is, then, an ethics that is developed through the anxiety by which we make sense of the radical transcendence of Christian duties in a world nourished by our immanent needs and desires.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it« Inheriting Hereditary Sin? Mads Peter Karlsen »Man is individuum and as such simultaneously himself and the whole race« S. Kierkegaard1 »We inherit nothing except the ability to inherit« J. Derrida2

1. Exordium The title of my essay is a phrase that has been roaming around my head, distracting me like an inconvenient guest. At one point it literally kept me awake at night, provoking the familiar, uncanny experience of knowing that somewhere in the back of your mind there is something that you know, but cannot recall. As if your memory purposely disobeys you. I knew that I knew the title and author of the text where I had read this phrase, but I couldn’t remember it. Finally, after going over piles of paper and scrolling through several books I stumbled upon the phrase in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, in a chapter on time and history. The author of the chapter was Arne Grøn. A few weeks later I was kindly invited to contribute to this volume. I accepted, I must admit, without any thought-through idea for a topic, but I instantly knew the title. »The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it.« The phrase appears in a part of the chapter where Grøn deliberates on the phenomena of »concern,« »memory,« and »forgetting« as different, yet interconnected, ways in which we experience and reflect upon the temporal character of human existence. Let me quote the phrase in its immediate context, which is a section on memory: 1   S. Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 8), trans. R. Thomte and B. A. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 28. In Danish: »Mennesket er Individuum og som saadant paa eengang sig selv og hele Slægten«. 2   J. Derrida and B. Stiegler, Echographies of Television – Filmed Interviews, trans. J. Bajorek (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), 132. In French: »Nous n’héritons de rien, sauf de la capacité à hériter.«

54

Mads Peter Karlsen

But remembering is not only a matter of effort. The past can return against our effort to let it be. This suggests that the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it. Although it is past, it still means something to us, but not simply in the sense that we give meaning to it. Rather, we may ourselves be called into question.3

This is a passage that, without doubt, deserves a lengthy unfolding. I will, however, limit myself to two points. Firstly, I want to suggest, very simplistically, that several of the major themes that imbue Grøn’s work are condensed in and can be indicated by the phrase »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it.«4 Time, for instance. Or rather, the particular temporality of human existence, and more precisely a crucial characteristic of this temporality: the non-synchronicity, lack of temporal succession, and retroactivity implied in the experience of our past as something that is at once ahead of and looping back to us. Identity, or more precisely the problem of identity in time: If time separates us from ourselves, dividing us between our past and our future, how can we be ourselves – become coherent with ourselves – in time? Insofar as time in this way challenges who we are or may be, it indeed »has« us (in its sway) before we have it. We are exposed to time. Who we are is exposed to time. It is in time that we are exposed to the experience of being someone other than who we once were and who we might later become. Time exposes us to the experience of not being ourselves, and thereby normatively indicates that it is our task to become ourselves. Another major theme: Subjectivity. In relating to the past as something that has us before we have it, we also relate to ourselves. This might, further, lead us to relate to ourselves as someone who relates to oneself, that is, to relate to ourselves as being a self-relation. In light of this, the task of becoming oneself becomes the task of determining oneself in relation to oneself. Then there is also the theme of freedom, or more correctly, the problem of autonomy. If »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it,« then are we not determined by the past? On the other hand, if it is not only the past that has us, but also we who have the past, does this then not imply that we – at least to some degree – can determine ourselves in relation to the past? Perhaps we could say that »freedom« here has to do with the task of having the past (and the future) in such a way that it is not only the past (and the future) that has us. Finally, a theme that has already been indicated: Negativity. It is through the experience of being another and of not yet being oneself that we come to understand ourselves as beings that are defined by the task of trying, over time, to become ourselves. It would be as desperate an undertaking to consider all of these individually complex themes in a single paper as it would be problematic to consider them 3   A. Grøn, »Time and History,« in The Oxford Handbook of Theology and Modern European Thought, ed. N. Adams et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 441. 4   The following themes are all carefully and thoroughly laid out in A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997). See also A. Grøn, »Self and Identity,« in The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness. Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. D. Zahavi et al. (Amsterdam / Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004), 123 – 156.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

55

separately. Hence, while I cannot offer an in-depth examination of each of these themes, they will nevertheless resonate in what follows. Secondly, I want to emphasize how Grøn’s phrase, by short-circuiting linear chronology, problematizes our common-sense understanding of the past, not just in terms of our own preceding lifetime, but also as the historical heritage that has been passed down to us by previous generations. In other words, »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it« presents the problem of tradition, or, rather, it presents tradition as a problem.5 How are we to relate to our past, our history and inheritance, if we take seriously that it has us before we have it? Is it possible for a past that in a certain sense is ahead of us to hand over anything to us? Does not the notion that »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it« interrupt the idea of inheritance as an order of succession by apparently reversing its direction? Are we not forced by this phrase to reconsider what it means to inherit? If so, how are we to understand the aspect of trans-generational transmission at the heart of our notion of tradition and inheritance? These difficulties seem to be further reinforced when dealing with a tradition and an inheritance that is in itself considered problematic, such as the Christian theological tradition with which I will be concerned in this essay: How are we to relate to something, which from our secular and modern perspective (must) seem obsolete and unbefitting? In relation to these questions, I want to point out a distinct feature characteristic of Grøn’s approach to the problems assigned to us by the philosophical and theological tradition that occupy his thinking. Although this approach is in a way already indicated by the phrase that I have chosen as my title, what I want to stress may be better specified by the last part of the passage quoted above: »Although it is past, it still means something to us, but not simply in the sense that we give meaning to it. Rather, we may ourselves be called into question.« I think the willingness to let oneself be called into question by the past is precisely what is at stake when Grøn in his writings recurrently demonstrates how crucial it is that we, in our approach to the handed-down texts with which we work, maintain that thinking is above all about keeping open the questions that these texts pose to us, rather than providing answers to them. I believe that Grøn’s position in this regard 5   Grøn’s phrase brings to mind the following sentence from § 6 in Being and Time: »Its own past [. . .] does not follow after Dasein but rather always already goes ahead of it.« (M. Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. J. Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1996), 18). The context in which Heidegger writes this is the point when he engages with the issue of tradition, pointing out that when tradition is understood as a straightforward transmission of the past, it actually ends up blocking its productive appropriation. To prevent this we must maintain tradition as a problem. Grøn reflects explicitly (and with reference to Heidegger) on this problem in an essay from 2011, where he emphasizes that »[t]he gaze must be reversed to see what we otherwise see through. But this requires that we in a ›destruction‹ tries to take on the traditions, through which our gaze has been shaped.« (A. Grøn, »Krop og selv – om inkarneret fejlbarlighed,« in Kroppens teologi – Teologiens krop, ed. K. B. Nielsen and J. S. Teglbjærg (Frederiksberg: Anis, 2011), 64 – 65 (my translation)).

56

Mads Peter Karlsen

is somewhat similar to the following description of Walter Benjamin’s approach to Kafka: »Allowing oneself to be led ever more deeply into a problem rather than wishing to be guided out of it would then figure as a particular mode of inheriting a textual legacy in which the relation to what is inherited remains open and free, that is, unforeclosed by an heir’s premature sense of ownership and seamless appropriation.«6 In what follows, I can only hope to be able to comply with this attitude in my own approach to Grøn’s legacy. Taking the phrase »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it« as my lead, I will allow myself to be led ever more deeply into the problem of inheritance by engaging with some passages in Grøn’s work that might help us reflect once more on what Paul Ricœur has called »the cornerstone of Christian anthropology,« that is, the doctrine of hereditary sin.7 My basic questions will be: How are we to inherit this doctrine? What conception of inheritance could make it possible for us to inherit this doctrine? What is it that we inherit with this doctrine?

2.  The problem of inheriting the problem of hereditary sin One could perhaps say that nowadays the problem – or at least the most immediate problem – regarding our relation to the doctrine of hereditary sin is that it no longer poses a problem for us. More precisely, the problem is that the problematic status of hereditary sin, its unacceptability, has become so self-evident that it blocks us from seeing that the doctrine of hereditary sin does in effect hand over to us a pertinent problem concerning our understanding of ourselves as human beings. As Grøn notes, we do not see the problem that the doctrine of hereditary sin poses because we are still under the sway of a long tradition that has reduced sin to a matter of nature, associating it with corporality and especially sexuality, which has led to a moralization and renunciation of the body. Thus, we could say, to use Grøn’s words, that »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it,« but this in a way that weakens our sense for the questions that the past passes on to us.8 Unsurprisingly, the result of this weakening has been a discrediting of the doctrine of hereditary sin so that today most people regard this doctrine either with indignation, as an offence, or with indifference, as an archaism not worth the candle. Thus, ironically, it is in a sense the doctrine of hereditarily sin itself – or rather the traditional account of it – that has made us blind to the problem it poses, which we will nevertheless not get rid of just because we no longer care to hear about sin, and especially hereditary sin. To be able to begin to see this problem entails that 6   G. Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin (London / New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academics, 2016), 18. 7   P. Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, trans. E. Buchanan (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1986), 4. 8   Grøn, »Krop og selv,« 66, 81.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

57

we see that »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«, but precisely in such a way that »we may ourselves be called into question.«9 However, the problem concerning seeing, or rather not being able to see, the problem of hereditary sin is not only that we are today reluctant to talk about sin, because sin has traditionally been associated with degradation of sexuality and the body, it also has something to do with our understanding of the word »hereditary« and thus with the concept of inheritance, which in relation to the doctrine of hereditary sin has (primarily) been understood in natural and biological terms as something that is passed down from parents to offspring through the act of reproduction. This understanding of course goes back to the Augustinian conception of hereditary sin (peccatum hereditarium) as an original sin (peccatum originale) transmitted (ex traduce) from Adam to the succeeding generations through sexual intercourse. Since the age of the Enlightenment this notion of a biologically transferred sin has been object to radical criticism, also from within the discipline of theology, first of all because it so blatantly contests the idea of human freedom that is crucial to the self-understanding of modern man. One exceptional example of this is Kierkegaard’s deliberation on the dogmatic problem of hereditary sin in The Concept of Anxiety.10 As part of his critical engagement with the theological tradition on this issue, Kierkegaard considers from the very outset of the book the question of whether or not »the concept of hereditary sin [is] identical with the concept of the first sin, Adam’s sin, the Fall of Man?«11 In his response, Kierkegaard initially criticizes the tradition for asserting a difference between Adam’s first sin and the first sin of every other man – does this mean, then, that he affirms, against the tradition, that the first sin and heredity sin are identical? Yet if hereditary sin is actually identical to the first sin, Adam’s sin, the Fall of Man – suggesting that what heredity sin means is really just that every human being commits the first sin, falls, like Adam did – why do we need a concept of hereditary sin at all? Would it not be more accurate to use the term »original sin« rather than »hereditary sin«? And more appropriate? It would certainly be a way to get rid of the biological connotations adhering to the notion of heredity, so unpleasant to the modern ear. Then again, is not something crucial lost by using the term »original« instead of »hereditary« sin? If hereditary sin can be replaced with the term original  9   Or, in other words, we need to see – as Grøn puts it – that: »Problems are not just mistakes that disappear if we arrive at a better understanding of ourselves, but they contain questions through which we must understand ourselves.« (Grøn, »Krop og selv,« 91 (my translation)) 10   For an elaborated examination of Kierkegaard’s critique of the conception of hereditary sin in the Augustinian (and Lutheran) dogmatic tradition, see N. J. Cappelørn, »The Interpretation of Hereditary Sin in The Concept of Anxiety by Kierkegaard’s Pseudonym Vigilius Haufniensis,« Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 72 (2010), 131 – 146. On the problem of freedom, see A. Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, trans. J. B. L. Knox (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008), 13 – 50, 64 – 86. 11   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 25.

58

Mads Peter Karlsen

sin, meaning the individual act of the first sin that every human being commits – the Fall – then what about the inter-generational aspect, the element of continuity and transferal, that the concept of hereditary sin accentuates?12 However, Kierkegaard does not confirm that the concept of hereditary sin is identical with the first sin (original sin); in fact he explicitly states that if »hereditary sin signify the same for Adam as for everyone in the race [. . .] the concept is canceled.«13 His conclusion is that any attempt to separate the one from the other will obscure both terms, therefore: »no explanation that explains Adam but not hereditary sin, or explains hereditary sin but not Adam, is of any help.«14 Hence, the two concepts, the first sin and hereditary sin, cannot be understood separately. Separating the two concepts would mean either that the race (slægten) would be »numerically resolved« into isolated individuals or that the individual and the race would be absolutely apart, which would violate Kierkegaard’s claim about what is essential to human existence, namely: »that man is individuum and as such simultaneously himself and the whole race, and in such a way that the whole race participates in the individual and the individual in the whole race.«15 Neither Adam nor any other human being can be placed outside the »historical nexus in which it begins« (the human race) or be reduced in its individuality to this historical context. Every human being is part of the history of the race, but every human being will also (in a qualitative leap) be apart from this history as a separate individual, which is how it will come to have its own history in the history of the race.16 Still, the severe critique that Kierkegaard directs against the traditional understanding of the notion of hereditary sin by arguing that the first sin only ever comes into the world as the singular individual’s own qualitative leap and not through decent, which, by contrast, always moves by quantitative determinations, can give the impression that he downplays the hereditary aspect, and thus the role of the race, in the concept of hereditary sin.17 Yet Kierkegaard explicitly, and more 12   The issue at stake here is highlighted by Gerhard Richter when he contrasts Benjamin’s use of the terms Sündenfall and Erbsünde: »The linguistic particularity of the German term [. . .] Erb-sünde, shifts the emphasis from an originary act itself to the transmission and legacy of that act.« (Richter, Inheriting Walter Benjamin, 22) 13   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 28. 14   Ibid., 28. 15   Ibid., 28. The Danish word »slægt« is difficult to translate. Depending on the context it can be translated as »relations«, »relatives«, »kin«, »family«, »stock«, »lineage«, »generation«, »age«, »genus«, »race«, or »human race«. The principal meaning of the word in The Concept of Anxiety seems to be »human race«. 16   This is a crucial point formulated in Kierkegaard’s critical revision of the doctrine of hereditary sin. As Grøn puts it: »A human being is at once the human race [slægten] and itself. It is itself race [slægt]: It is itself defined by its context, it becomes itself in a history, which has already begun, and which itself carries on, but in this history it must itself begin.« (A. Grøn, »At forstå – og at forstå,« in At være sig selv nærværende: Festskrift til Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ed. J. Garff et al. (Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, 2010), 107 (my translation)). 17   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 33 – 34.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

59

than once, assures his reader that this is not the case. Summarizing his position he puts it as follows: In the foregoing, it has been said several times that the view presented in this work does not deny the propagation of sinfulness through generation, or, in other words, that sinfulness has its history through generation. Yet it is said only that sinfulness moves in quantitative categories, whereas sin constantly enters by the qualitative leap of the individual.18

Through this key distinction between (the first) sin, as a qualitative category, and the quantitative category of sinfulness, and the other revisions that he introduces in The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard can at once distance himself from and remain true to the concept of hereditary sin, which he inherits from the theological tradition. That is to say, he can at once be part of the tradition and be himself – as an individual thinker – apart from it. While dismissing the notion that Adam’s sin has automatically been physically transmitted to every succeeding generation, which would turn (the first) sin into a necessity and thus render the idea of freedom and guilt meaningless, Kierkegaard nevertheless also insist that we do inherit something from the generations that precede us. As he puts it in the passage following the above quotation: Here already one can see one significant aspect of the quantitation that takes place in generation. Eve is a derived creature. To be sure, she is created like Adam, but she is created out of a previous creature. To be sure, she is innocent like Adam, but there is, as it were, a presentiment of a disposition that indeed is not sinfulness but may seem like a hint of the sinfulness that is posited by propagation. It is the fact of being derived that predisposes the particular individual, yet without making him guilty.19

What every individual inherits from Adam, according to the account of hereditary sin that we are inheriting from Kierkegaard, is therefore not the first sin, which always comes into the world through the individual’s own qualitative leap, but sinfulness, which (quantitatively) increases through the succeeding generations. This does not mean that the sinfulness of the individual precedes his or her first sin; rather, it is introduced when, through this first sin, the sensuous is turned into sinfulness. Still, the sinfulness of the race exists prior to the individual’s first sin, as a predisposition to (the first) sin. Specifically, sinfulness subsists in the form of anxiety, which is what is inherited from previous generations or, as Kierkegaard puts it: »[T]he presence of hereditary sin in the single individual is anxiety, which differs only quantitatively from that of Adam.«20 Kierkegaard describes this anxiety, which is »obscurely present in history of the race« and which is the state in which »the individual posits sin« as »ambiguous« in the sense that »anxiety ›happens‹ to 18

  Ibid., 47.   Ibid., 47. 20   Ibid., 52. In his reading of The Concept of Anxiety, Grøn elegantly formulates it thus: »The sinfulness that the individual inherits is carried in her anxiety.« (Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 33 (translation slightly modified)). 19

60

Mads Peter Karlsen

us but, at the same time, we ›ourselves‹ are anxious since we relate to ourselves in anxiety.«21 We both are and are not the cause of our anxiety, which is why Kierkegaard points out that »he who becomes guilty in anxiety becomes as ambiguously guilty as it is possible to become.«22 However, the psychological concept of anxiety does not explain the first sin that comes into the world in »the leap, which [. . .] no science can explain.« It only explains its predisposition. Kierkegaard insists on this inexplicability of sin: »sin presupposes itself, obviously not before it is posited (which is predestination), but in that it is posited.«23 Hence, affirming sin as a problem concerns first of all the existence of the concrete individual human being. In taking on his inherited theological legacy, Kierkegaard has nevertheless radically displaced the traditional concept of hereditary sin, and by this displacement the problem concerning human existence, which this concept poses, becomes visible to us as a problem. This problem arises from the fact that human beings as human beings already have a history, which they belatedly have to make into their own history. This problem can, as Grøn proposes, be formulated in the following way – calling ourselves into question: »Are we what we are made to be or are we what we do?«24 Are we our past, since »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it,« or are we that which we do with this past? Despite Kierkegaard’s radical rejection of any idea of a natural predestination to sin, however, one could ask if his theory about the inheritance of anxiety in the end still exposes itself as »a bit of hereditary biological speculation« as one Kierkegaard-scholar has phrased it.25 In other words, how are we to understand the concept of »inheritance« that we inherit from Kierkegaard’s revision of the doctrine of hereditary sin? Does Kierkegaard really understand the inheritance of anxiety unambiguously, in biological terms? Even though he mentions that »sinfulness is not an epidemic that spreads like cowpox,« he also undeniably writes that »sinfulness is posited by propagation [forplantning].«26 However, it seems that to understand inheritance in term of propagation would risk reintroducing an element of predestination. Thus, in order to preserve our fidelity to Kierkegaard’s revision of hereditary sin, and the problem it poses, we might have to be a little unfaithful and look somewhere else for a supplementary conception of inheritance.

21

  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 22.   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 61. 23   Ibid., 62, 61. 24   Grøn, »At forstå – og at forstå,« 109 (my translation). In The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard Grøn puts it like this: »This problem [of hereditary sin] concerns the relationship between what the individual has been given (inheritance) and what he himself does (guilt and sin),« (Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 20 (translation modified)). 25   K. Nordentoft, Kierkegaard’s Psychology, trans. B. H. Kirmmse (Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press, 1978), 66. 26   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, 38, 47. 22

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

61

3. The ambiguous task of inheritance The concept of hereditary sin is a contradictory concept. Grøn reminds us of this in his fine book on Kierkegaard’s concept of anxiety. Here he points out, with reference to a well-known entry in Kierkegaard’s journals, that: »Hereditary sin is formed by combining categories that conflict with one another, a category of nature (natural inheritance) and an ethical category (guilt or sin).« This conflict of categories consists in that the concept is at once claiming, as he puts it, that: »We cannot be blamed for our inheritance. And what we can be blamed for, we cannot excuse by what we have inherited.«27 In this passage Grøn plays on the double meaning of the Danish expression »skyld i« which can mean both »to be the cause of or occasion to« and »to be guilty of.«28 This double meaning cannot be reproduced in English and is thus lost in the translation. This is unfortunate, because it indicates something important about the concept of hereditary sin, namely its ambiguity. The term indicates a twofold ambiguity, since the ambiguous expression »skyld i« is implied, as Grøn makes clear, in both the concept of inheritance (heredity) and the concept of sin. One could thus argue that what makes hereditary sin an ambiguous concept is not merely its specific composition of contradictory categories, but also the fact that the individual concepts of inheritance and sin are ambiguous in themselves. The remainder of this essay will try to elucidate the ambiguous character of inheritance. But first just a few words on the ambiguity of sin. In a paper in which he discusses the meaning of understanding in Kierkegaard Grøn gives an indication of how we might better understand the ambiguous character of sin. Having defined sin as failing in such a decisive way that we are ourselves marked by it,29 Grøn emphasizes that when a human being fails in this way, »[i]t is something that it does accidentally, it is almost something that happens to it, and it is something, that it does itself.«30 The italics accentuate the ambiguity that Grøn wants to highlight, namely that when we fail we are doing something that we would not have done, something that we did not intend to do, yet it is still our own doing, but a doing against ourselves, and a doing with which we are also doing something to ourselves. This indicates a basic tension between the involuntary and the voluntary, the unmerited and the self-inflicted. When we fail, we are on the one hand – of course – respon27

  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 17 (translation slightly modified).   The Danish text reads as follows: »Først må vi hæfte os ved den måde, begrebet arvesynd er sat sammen på. Begrebet er dannet ved en sammensætning af kategorier, der ikke passer sammen, en natur-kategori (arv) og en etisk kategori (skyld eller synd). Det, man har fået i arv, er man selv uden skyld i. Og det, man selv er skyld i, kan man ikke undskylde ved, hvad man har fået i arve.« (A. Grøn, Begrebet angst hos Søren Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1993), 27). 29   »At forstå – og at forstå,« 103, 109. See also Idem, »Krop og selv,«, 80. 30   Grøn, »At forstå – og at forstå,« 107 (my translation). The Danish text reads: »Det er noget, som det kommer til, det er nærmest noget, som sker med det, og det er noget, som det selv gør.« 28

62

Mads Peter Karlsen

sible for our failures (otherwise it is not our failure), but on the other hand nobody fails on purpose (otherwise it would not be a failure). Thus, in failing we experience ourselves as at once active and passive, guilty and innocent, free and unfree. In this sense not only the concept of hereditary sin, but already the concept of sin itself, is ambiguous. Now let us turn to the ambiguous character of inheritance. Although we cannot locate something like a complete and clear theorization of inheritance in Jacques Derrida’s work, in many of his texts words like »heir«, »heritage«, »legacy«, »debt«, and »inheritance« turn up, often operating in various ways in the margins, but at times also as central to the text. His work therefore provides a useful resource for thinking about the problem of inheritance. One of Derrida’s most sustained engagements with this problem appears in his 1993 book Specters of Marx, in which he discusses – among other things – the legacy of Marx in the wake of the so-called collapse of socialism after the fall of the Berlin wall. In an interview from the same year, Derrida offers a compiled summary of what he says on inheritance in this book. He begins by stressing that, »[t]o inherit is not essentially to receive something, a given that one may then have. It is an active affirmation, it answers an injunction, but it also presupposes initiative, it presupposes the signature or countersignature of a critical selection.«31 There are several things worth noting in this short passage. First, Derrida points out – as he has also done elsewhere – that an inheritance is not a given. He wants to stress – as it is evident from the context – that inheritance is not just a passive relationship to the past in which an heir simply receives something, but that inheriting always also entails an active aspect. Inheritance involves active affirmation of a heritage. An inheritance is something that is assigned to us, an injunction, but also something we must assume and respond to, and it thus assigns a task.32 This is the first sense in which inheritance is an ambiguous concept: it implies at once passivity in reception, and activity in affirmation. Moreover, the fact that inheritance demands affirmation does not imply that to inherit is necessarily to approve of the given, it is not an automatic validation of tradition. On the contrary, the active affirmation of inheritance »presupposes a critical selection,« as Derrida puts it, and it thus potentially entails a radical transformation of what is handed down. Inheritance is neither something determined nor something determining, which is also what Derrida indicates in his use of the expression »to inherit is not a given« in the quote above. In another interview, also from 1993, Derrida formulates this same point as follows: »That we are inheritors through and through does not mean that the past dictates something to us.«33 What we thus might call the non-dictating status of 31   J. Derrida, Negotiations: Interventions and Interviews 1971 – 2001, trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 110. 32   J. Derrida, Specters of Marx, trans. P. Kamuf (London: Routledge, 2006), 67. 33   Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 69.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

63

inheritance has to do, as he explains in the following sentence, with the openended temporal structure of the past. The injunction of an inheritance always »come[s] from a certain past as future, as still to come [un certain passé comme à venir].«34 Inheritance is as much concerned with the future, what is still to come, as with the past, what has been. In Specters of Marx Derrida further clarifies this temporal structure by describing it as marking »a time that doubtless precedes us, but so as to be as in front of us as before us.«35 This suggests a temporal structure in which what comes to be in front of us (the present) is at once what precedes us (the past) and what is before (which in this cases means »ahead of«) us (the future).36 The temporality of inheritance is thus one of non-linearity, discordance, and anachronism – we are always behind and ahead of ourselves, and never on time – »time is out of joint« as Derrida recurrently notes with allusion to Hamlet.37 That is: even if »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it,« it is simultaneously before us, in front of us, to come, and therefore something through which »we may ourselves be called into question.« It is also against the backdrop of this non-linear and open-ended temporal structure that we should understand Derrida’s reference, in Specters of Marx, to »the radical and necessary heterogeneity of inheritance.«38 This heterogeneity is precisely the reason why an inheritance always calls for choices, selections, and interpretations, but in addition it makes inheritance an endless task, and thus in a certain sense impossible. Yet radical heterogeneity is in another sense also what makes inheritance possible: »If the readability of a legacy were given, natural, transparent, univocal, if it did not call for and at the same time defy interpretation, we would never have anything to inherit from it. We would be affected by it as by a cause – natural or genetic.«39 Thus, in this sense, and this is a crucial point, although inheritance, as we shall see, involves an element of necessity, it cannot be 34

 Ibid.   Derrida, Specters of Marx, 19. See especially 19 – 25. 36   Derrida also indicates this temporal structure by playing on the various meanings of »before« (avant and devant): »One is responsible before what comes before one but also before what is to come, and therefore before oneself.« (J. Derrida and E. Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow . . . A Dialogue, trans. J. Fort (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004), 5 – 6). The French text reads: »On est responsible devant ce qui vient avant soi mais aussi devant ce qui est à veni, et donc encore devant soi.« (J. Derrida and E. Roudinesco, De quoi demain . . . Dialogue (Paris: Fayard / Galilée, 2001), 18). 37   For more on the temporality of inheritance, see Rebecca Comay, »›Our heritage was left to us without testament‹ – or is other way around« to which I am deeply indebted, in & teologi – Festskrift til Carsten Pallesen, ed. M. P. Karlsen and L. Sandbeck, (Frederiksberg: Eksistensen, 2016), 235 – 248. 38   Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18. 39   Ibid. In other words, the radical and necessary heterogeneity of inheritance is at once the condition of the possibility and the impossibility of inheriting: »Inheritance would only be possible at the point where it becomes the im-possible.« Idem, Paper Machine, trans. R. Bowlby (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), 81. 35

64

Mads Peter Karlsen

something of complete inevitability, something that happens automatically and without deviations, beyond our influence, like a natural cause. In other words, even if the past has us, this does not mean that it determines us, and likewise, although we do have the past, we do not determine it. It is not without reason that Grøn uses quotation marks when he writes that »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it.« The past and what we inherit from it is not our possession and we are not possessed by it. Rather, »having« a past – inheriting it – is a way of being. In Specters of Marx Derrida formulates it thus: »That we are heirs does not mean that we have or that we receive this or that, some inheritance that enriches us one day with this or that, but that the being of what we are is first of all inheritance, whether we like it or know it or not.«40 This also why Derrida claims that: »We inherit nothing except the ability to inherit.«41 The second thing in the above quotation of Derrida’s summary that I would like to elaborate on is the designation of inheritance – also stated in Specters of Marx – as an answer to an injunction. This definition is repeated in a conversation between Derrida and Elisabeth Roudinesco, published in 2001, where they discuss the matter of inheritance. Replying to Roudinesco’s depiction of Derrida as the last heir to the major works of French post-war philosophy, he begins the conversation by outlining what he calls »a few generalities on the notion of heritage,« which is worth quoting at length: The heir must always respond to a sort of double injunction, a contradictory assignation: It is necessary first of all to know and to know how to reaffirm what comes ›before us‹, which we therefore receive even before choosing it and to behave in this respect as a free subject. Yes, it is necessary [il faut] (and this it is necessary is inscribed directly on and within the received inheritance), it is necessary to do everything to appropriate a past even though we know that it remains fundamentally inappropriable, whether it is a question of philosophical memory or the precedence of a language, a culture, and a filiation in general.42

In this passage, Derrida explicates the twofold and contradictory character of the injunction to which any heir has to respond. The first thing to note is that this double injunction of having to receive and to choose an inheritance is not only contradictory or ambiguous because the heir is at once both passive and active, as already noted, but also because it entails both necessity and freedom. We are not free to choose to inherit, we must inherit, there is an »it is necessary« (il faut), as Derrida puts it, »inscribed directly on and within the received inheritance« in the sense that »what comes ›before us‹ we receive even before choosing it.« Hence, to return once more to Grøn’s phrase, »the past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it.« But we are neither free not to choose, nor are we unfree; the necessity inscribed within inheritance is also the necessity of a certain freedom, it is necessary »to behave 40

  Derrida, Specters of Marx, 68.   Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies of Television, 132. 42   Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 3. 41

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

65

in this respect as a free subject,« or, as Derrida formulates it in Specters of Marx, »›One must‹ [il faut] means one must filter, sift, criticize, one must sort out several different possibilities that inhabit the same injunction.«43 Thus, through the experience of being called to consider and choose among the different possibilities of the injunction of inheritance »we may ourselves be called into question.« This description of inheritance as involving a contradictory combination of necessity and freedom brings to mind Kierkegaard’s characterization of the anxiety related to the first sin (hereditary sin), which could be summed up the following way, in Grøn’s words: »That sin enters the world in anxiety means that it is not caused by a free, arbitrary decision, nor is it out of necessity.«44 Like the ambiguity of anxiety, the ambiguity of inheritance tends to blur the boundaries between opposites, between receiving and choosing, passivity and activity, past and future, continuation and rupture, necessity and freedom. The issue of responsibility is another important aspect of Derrida’s understanding of inheritance that we have not yet considered, though it is indicated in his designation of inheritance as a response to an injunction. In Specters of Marx, Derrida emphasizes that: »There is no inheritance without a call to responsibility.«45 The point is, as we have already touched upon, that inheritance is not just the passing down of something, not just a given, but it assigns a task to the heir, the task of responding to what came before her by »not simply accepting this heritage but relaunching it otherwise and keeping it alive.«46 Only what we are called by and what we respond to, not just by accepting it, but also by critically choosing from it, can be inherited. Furthermore, only through the experience of an inheritance in this sense can we be responsible.47 Derrida associates both the experience of inheritance and its call for responsibility with singularity, and more precisely, with becoming a singular self.48 While in Specters of Marx he emphasizes that inheritance demands responsibility, and indicates the link between responsibility and singularity, Derrida develops the relationship between responsibility, singularity, and subjectivity much more explicitly in The Gift of Death, in his discussion of Heidegger’s analysis of Dasein’s being-towards-death and the voice for conscience. In the second essay of this book, in which he compares Jan Patočka and Heidegger, Derrida argues through a close reading of some central passages from the first two chapter of part two of 43   Derrida, Specters of Marx, 18. The combination of necessity and freedom implied in inheritance is in a sense already at stake in the ambiguous meaning of the phrase »one must« (il faut), which in both French and English can signal both a necessary imperative and an advised recommendation. 44   Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 22. 45   Derrida, Specters of Marx, 114. 46   Derrida and Roudinesco, For What Tomorrow, 3. 47  Ibid., 5. 48   Grøn discusses this relationship between responsibility and the singularity and subjectivity of the subject in his dissertation; see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 275 – 278.

66

Mads Peter Karlsen

Being and Time, that »responsibility demands irreplaceable singularity.«49 He elaborates this claim by clarifying that: »Yet only death or rather the apprehension of death can give this irreplaceability, and it is only on basis of it that one can speak of a responsible subject, of the soul as conscience of the self, of myself, etc.«50 As is explained, following Heidegger, a few pages prior to this passage, one only becomes what one is as oneself, that is, that which is the same about oneself, when one – in one’s relation to oneself – relates to one’s own death as irreplaceable. This »sameness of the self« is the gift of death, which is given to all, but must nevertheless, like an inheritance, be actively assumed as mine: »The identity of oneself is given by death.«51 Moreover, it is only, as Derrida clarifies, through this identity, and only when this identity is understood as »irreducibly different singularity« that »the death of the other can make sense.«52 Thus the mortal self »is indeed the place in which the call (Ruf) is heard and in which responsibility comes into play.«53 Or, as Derrida summarizes in the beginning of his reading: »It is from the site of death as the place of my irreplaceability, that is, my singularity, that I feel called to responsibility. In this sense only a mortal can be responsible.«54 Derrida further qualifies the call to responsibility that we experience as mortal and finite beings through the voice of conscience as a responsibility in which we are concerned »not only with an objective Good but a gift of infinite love.«55 49

  J. Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. D. Wills (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 51. In this comparative reading (41 – 52) Derrida draws in particular on § 47, 56, 57, 58 of Being and Time. 50   Derrida, The Gift of Death, 51. In his book on The Concept of Anxiety Grøn presents a similar argument. He states it in the following way: »The basic consciousness in man is [. . .] the consciousness of being a single individual.« This consciousness of one’s singularity »already manifests itself in anxiety.« And more precisely in anxiety for nothing, which as Grøn notes earlier in the book, »refers back to an underlying anxiety for death« However, »this consciousness appears most distinctly«, as Grøn emphasizes, »when we separate ourselves from ourselves [. . .] and this is what happens in con-science. Or rather, conscience is actually the basic consciousness of being a singular individual.« (Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 128, 3); see also Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 196. 51   Ibid., 45. Let me just note that although Derrida adopts Heidegger’s notion that death is what gives the individual her irreplaceable singularity, he also stresses that since this gift is given to all, death is also what makes the irreplaceable singularity universal. This point is made more explicit in his discussion on the expression »my death« in Aporias: »If death (we will return to this point later) names the very irreplaceability of absolute singularity (no one can die in my place or in the place of the other), then all the examples in the world can precisely illustrate this singularity. Everyone’s death, the death of all who can say ›my death,‹ is irreplaceable. So is ›my life.‹ Every other is completely other. [Tout autre est tout autre.] Whence comes an exemplary complication of exemplarity: nothing is more substitutable and yet nothing is less so than the syntagm ›my death‹.« (J. Derrida, Aporias, trans. T. Dutoit (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 22). In this way, Derrida problematizes any attempt to link death to a notion of an authentic self. 52   Derrida, The Gift of Death, 45. 53   Ibid., 46. 54   Ibid., 41. 55   Ibid., 51.

»The past ›has‹ us before we ›have‹ it«

67

Accordingly, Derrida remarks, the call for responsibility entails a »structural disproportion« between the finitude of the responsible subject and the infinite character of the call to which this subject must respond, leaving the subject in a situation in which it is never and never can be sufficiently responsible. Thus, this structural disproportion »inevitably transforms the experience of responsibility into one of guilt.« And not just any form of guilt: »This guilt is,« Derrida writes, »originary, like original sin [péché originel]« in the sense that »before any fault is determined, I am guilty inasmuch as I am responsible.« The reason is, as he explicates, precisely that »[w]hat gives me my singularity, namely death and finitude, is what makes me unequal to the infinite goodness of the gift that is also the first appeal to responsibility. Guilt is inherent in responsibility because responsibility is always unequal to itself: one is never responsible enough.«56 On the other hand this means that in a certain sense one cannot be responsible (to the other) without failing ones responsibility (towards others), or as Derrida notes in the third essay of the book: »I am responsible to anyone (that is to say, to any other) only by failing in my responsibility to all the others.«57 This is also why the conscience that calls upon us to be responsible is per definition bad conscience,58 and why – as Derrida puts is in another context – »one must avoid good conscience at all costs.«59 Good conscience is incompatible with responsibility, not only because of the inevitable (original) guilt that accompanies the experience of (failing one’s) responsibility, but also because the subjective certainty that good conscience entails is incompatible with the element of risk involved in any responsible decision.60 Now, granted that there is no inheritance without responsibility, as Derrida claims, and granted that responsibility due to its infinite character always implies an experience of an original guilt, of failing one’s responsibility, one could per56

  Ibid., 51.   Ibid., 70. 58   At a roundtable discussion in 1999, Derrida offered the following example of what he means by this: »I, of course, have preferences. I am one of the common people who prefer their cat to their neighbor’s cat and my family to others. But I do not have a good conscience about that. I know that if I transform this [preference] into a general rule it would be the ruin of ethics. If I put as a principle that I will feed first of all my cat, my family, my nation, that would be the end of any ethical politics. So when I give a preference to my cat, which I do, that will not prevent me from having some remorse for the cat dying or starving next door, or, to change the example, for all the people on earth who are starving and dying today. So you cannot prevent me from having a bad conscience, and that is the main motivation of my ethics and my politics.« J. Derrida, »On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida moderated by Richard Kearney,« in Questioning God, ed. J. D. Caputo et al. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), 69. 59   Derrida, Aporias, 19; see also Derrida, Specters of Marx, xiv. 60   Ibid., 19. In his discussion on conscience in Kierkegaard’s work, Grøn defines conscience in its twofold character of the knowledge one has with oneself and the fact that one cannot evade this knowledge that one already has with oneself. He also notes that »It is not accidental that conscience appears first and foremost as ›bad‹ conscience. It occurs as a problem inasmuch as a human being can also try to rid itself of itself by evading the knowledge it has with itself.« (Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 190 (my translation)). 57

68

Mads Peter Karlsen

haps – without pushing it too far – say that the concept of inheritance is already in a certain sense itself a concept of hereditary sin. And what is more: that any inheritance, in which we really inherit nothing except the ability to inherit, is in a certain sense a hereditary sin.61

61

  This work was supported by Carlsbergfondet.

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception Between Existential Hermeneutics and Negativism Emil Angehrn

1.  The question of self-deception 1.1.  The paradox of self-deception Self-deception is a paradoxical matter.1 It seems impossible in principle and yet it presents an undeniable fact of human life. Classical figures such as Alexey Karenin and Homo Faber demonstrate the phenomenon of self-deception. The challenge to philosophical discussion lies in clarifying whether and how we are able to consistently conceive of self-deception, and how and why it arises. None of these questions has an obvious answer. One may even doubt whether there exist genuine cases of self-deception at all. Jean-Paul Sartre emphasized this challenge by interpreting the phenomenon of bad faith (mauvaise foi) in terms of lying to oneself. He maintained that we are, in self-deception, confronted with an »evanescent phenomenon«, and that, despite its elusive nature, in practice self-deception takes a definite shape and is for many people a normal part of life; it is, Sartre concludes, a phenomenon that we can neither comprehend nor dismiss.2 But what exactly is the puzzle of self-deception? Philosophy and psychology mostly treats self-deception as an intentional act. However, it makes a difference if one is deceived by another or by oneself, or whether one is wrong about oneself. Deceiving seems related to the act of lying: just like the liar, the deceiver must know the truth that he conceals. Even in the case of unconscious dissembling, Sartre says, »I must know the truth very exactly in order to conceal it more carefully.«3 He who lies to himself, then, must first know what he denies or conceals. Lying to oneself exemplifies the peculiar state in which, according to Allen Wood,

1   A part of this essay has been published in German in: E. Angehrn, »Selbstverständigung und Selbsttäuschung. Zwischen Selbstsein und Selbstverfehlung,« in Selbsttäuschung: Eine Herausforderung für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse, ed. E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhoff (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2017), 36 – 50. 2   J.‑P. Sartre, L’être et le néant (Paris: Gallimard, 1943), 88. 3   Ibid., 87 (my translation).

70

Emil Angehrn

»I must believe something as victim of the lie which as liar I disbelieve.«4 The task of philosophical reflection consists in describing the phenomenon of self-deception without being taken in by its apparent conceptual contradictoriness, in a description that renders its factum consistent, comprehensive, and – not least – interesting. 1.2.  How is self-deception possible? Given the apparent contradiction of self-deception, the most immediate question tends to concern its very possibility. The most plausible way to tackle this question is to distinguish between different dimensions in self-deceptive behavior. The psychoanalytical response refers to the unconscious. The assumption is that there exist, within the subject, non-conscious parts that conceal certain insights and give rise to false beliefs. In this way deceiver and deceived, and liar and belied become separate subjects. Other approaches to the problem replace the idea of a central, unified subject with one of a set of more or less mutually independent subsystems, thus dissolving the puzzling reflexivity of deceiving oneself. Still other conceptions deny Sartre’s presumption that the deceiver really has to be clear about what he conceals, or even go as far as to argue that being a rational subject does not necessarily require being conscious of one’s own mental or cognitive states.5 Self-deception often originates in our unconscious wishes and unintentional biases. Self-deception can arise from wishful thinking, and result in »honest lies.« 1.3.  Sense and function of self-deception However, none of the aforementioned conceptions seem to adequately cope with the dilemma resulting from the paradoxical nature of self-deception in that they fail to provide a rational explanation for it. In order to understand the phenomenon, then, it seems necessary to change perspective and revise the original question. I suggest a shift in focus from the question of how self-deception is possible, to that of how it arises, and what function it has. This question is one pertaining to the sense of self-deception, that is, the question of what purpose it serves, and what place and significance it has in human life. Obviously, self-deception has an important and often ambivalent role to play in our lives. In many situations, it is helpful and beneficial to deceive oneself – be it about the world, about others, or oneself. One can be interested in holding false beliefs without being able to acknowledge or – possibly – even be conscious of it. Illusions can facilitate life, lib4

  A. W. Wood, »Self-Deception and Bad Faith,« in Perspectives on Self-Deception, ed. B. P. McLaughlin and A. O. Rorty (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 207. 5   McLaughlin and Rorty, »Introduction,« in Perspectives on Self-Deception, 2 – 7.

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

71

erate the self from guilt and worries, and simplify complex situations. Self-deception not only presents an obstacle or a fallacy, but it also presents a means to make one’s life endurable. Even if attaining a logical grasp of the phenomenon is impossible, it can nevertheless prove a successful problem-solving strategy. Self-deception can relieve (excessive) cognitive and moral demands, and – last but not least ‑can be useful, practically reasonable, and even kind and humane, despite remaining irrational, psychologically dysfunctional, and perhaps morally problematic.6 1.4. What is at issue in self-deception? The above way of characterising self-deception changes the perspective on what is actually at issue here. At first, it seemed that self-deception was an instance of ordinary deception, and thus mainly concerned generating false beliefs or preventing the subject from acquiring true insights. It now becomes obvious that this approach is inadequate for recognizing what it is that makes self-deception a theoretical and practical problem. This is not to deny that some instances of self-deception follow this scheme. We might give in to illusions about our social status, our personal abilities or our real feelings. Seen from a more comprehensive viewpoint, however, it seems there is something else influencing the phenomenon and its typical manifestations; something that might turn out to be very important for the problem of self-deception. For the phenomenon of self-deception is not exhausted by generating and holding false beliefs about oneself, others, and the state of things. Indeed, errors of this kind can usually be corrected by reference to relevant facts, counter-evidence, or – sometimes – by showing how the errors came about. Self-deception, by contrast, appears to be a fundamental failure in the way we understand ourselves or the world. It presents a more basic deficiency in that it concerns not just our cognitive capacities, but our very selves. Distinguished from lying, self-deception comes closer to what existential philosophers refer to as inauthenticity, or existential self-deficiency. If we describe self-deception as a kind of privation,7 it not only amounts to a shortcoming of cognition but to a failure of understanding; more precisely, to a failure of one’s own strife towards understanding as such, to understanding oneself, and – finally – towards being oneself. In order to understand to what extent this kind of privation makes up an existential deficit, and thus presents a philosophical challenge, I first want to elucidate in what sense being is interwoven with understanding.

6

  M. Löw-Beer, Selbsttäuschung (Freiburg: Verlag Karl Alber, 1990), 257.   K. Beier, Selbsttäuschung (Grundthemen Philosophie) (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2010), 98. 7

72

Emil Angehrn

2.  Being Oneself and Self-Deception 2.1.  Human beings: (self‑)understanding animals In philosophy, »what is human being?« is not simply one question among others. For Kant, it is the main philosophical question, to which all key questions of philosophy – what can I know? What ought I to do? What may I hope? – return, such that one can, as Kant says, »in principle, count all this to anthropology.«8 Remarkably, in modern philosophy, major schools of thought – particularly hermeneutics and phenomenology – refuse to simply adopt the anthropological definition of the human being. They distance themselves both from so-called philosophical anthropology (Scheler, Plessner, Gehlen, Cassirer), which they perceive as built on empirical research in the humanities and social sciences, and from traditional metaphysics, which presupposes the existence of an invariable essence of human beings. They, instead, conceive of the human being as the »undetermined animal«9 that gives itself its determination. Sartre and Heidegger radicalize this perspective so as to revert the relation of essence and existence.10 Sartre justifies this move by referring to the freedom of human beings to project themselves onto who they will be. Another motif of phenomenological thought complements this pivotal idea of modern thought: that of understanding. According to Heidegger, humans are essentially understanding beings, who develop a certain understanding of themselves and the world. Human beings yield self-descriptions by means of which they are what they are. Charles Taylor refers to the human being as the self-interpreting animal, thus emphasizing the essential nature of this feature.11 Self-interpretation can thus be understood neither as a particular characteristic (such as upright walking or tool use), nor in terms of a metaphysical specific difference (such as reason or freedom) that defines the human being, but as a specific kind of relating to oneself by coming to an understanding of oneself. It is through a hermeneutics of the self that human beings accomplish the task of becoming who they are.12

 8   I. Kant, Logik, in Kant’s gesammelte Schriften, vol. 9, ed. Königlich Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften (Berlin / Leipzig: Walter de Gruyter & Co., 1923), 25 (my translation).  9   F. Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse, in Sämtliche Werke, vol. 5 (Kritische Studienausgabe in 15 Bänden), ed. G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin / New York, NY: dtv / de Gruyter, 1980), 81 (my translation). 10   »L’existence précède l’essence« (J.‑P. Sartre, L’existentialisme est un humanisme (Paris: Nagel, 1946), 21); see also M. Heidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 42. 11   C. Taylor, »Self-interpreting animals,« in C. Taylor, Philosophical Papers 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 45 – 76. 12  See E. Angehrn, »Selbstsein und Selbstverständigung. Zur Hermeneutik des Selbst,« in Die Vermessung der Seele. Konzepte des Selbst in Philosophie und Psychoanalyse, ed. E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhoff (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2009), 163 – 183.

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

73

The cognitive relation at issue here exceeds that of the subject’s immediate self-awareness, which we describe as self-consciousness. It encompasses self-knowledge in the sense of factual knowledge of bodily characteristics, biographic data, and subjective attitudes as well as covert character traits, secret inclinations, and suppressed wishes. It encompasses everything, that is, that may become subject to spontaneous or methodical self-investigation. Self-knowledge in this sense is not restricted to making observations and giving causal explanations. It aims at genuine understanding, at disclosing the meaning of one’s own biography, actions, and qualities; at grasping their significance for one’s being oneself. The transition from cognition to understanding and interpretation is characterized by two things. First, reflexivity: We are concerned with a kind of knowledge that differs from the objectifying cognition of external facts. This is not simply to say that, from an internal perspective, we have privileged access to our own mental states and our subjective experience. Rather, it means that we possess a first-person perspective from which to search, self-interpret, and self-describe. This genuinely first-personal perspective is related to what Taylor calls the »radical reflexivity« of the modern self.13 It is a kind of self-understanding that concerns a person in his very essence as a human being, as well as in his irreplaceable individuality; it is an attitude of understanding that no one except for himself can seek, acquire, and maintain. Secondly, this kind of understanding comprises both a theoretical and a practical relation to the self, and can be an instance of theoretical or practical self-ascription, self-knowledge, or self-determination. In particular instances, self-description unites forms of self-analysis and self-criticism; interpretation and projection; introspection and expression. All of these aspects contribute to a kind of self-reflection by means of which I become aware of myself and – first and foremost – by means of which I become (or fail to become) myself. These considerations confirm that self-understanding aims not only at a cognitive understanding of oneself. Rather, self-understanding strives for being, as contrasted with knowing: it is a way of finding and becoming oneself. 2.2.  Limits of understanding: Hermeneutic negativism It is, however, fully possible to embark on this route to self-knowledge and fail to reach it. The twofold aim of self-transparency and becoming oneself can be realized, or it can be missed. Just like understanding in general, self-understanding is concerned with opaque and unintelligible matters; with the fragility of sense. Facing the usual problem of hermeneutics, hermeneutics of the self is always con13   C. Taylor, Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989).

74

Emil Angehrn

cerned with the limits of sense; with understanding in tension with non-understanding.14 We can distinguish four ways in which we, as humans, are confronted with the boundaries of sense and the problems of understanding. Firstly, not all objects are accessible to the understanding and available for interpretation. There is an ontological distinction between beings that are in principle understandable and beings that are not. We access the world in two fundamentally different ways. On the one hand, we encounter things and states of affairs in the realm of nature, which we describe from the outside and try to explain by reference to external causes. On the other hand, we deal with objects in the human world (tools, actions, traditions, historical events), which we try to understand by their signification. The 19th – 20th century neo-Kantian tradition used the ontological distinction between two types of being (nature and culture; matter and mind) as conceptual basis for the separation between the natural sciences and the humanities. We understand a conference, but we do not understand – at least not in the same sense – the structure of a crystal. In special cases, there are interferences between these realms, where the senseful and the senseless permeate one another. In the last decades, phenomenologists, deconstructivists, and cultural theorists have focused on the exteriority of sense and the materiality of communication. Meaningful phenomena are embedded in a context that we cannot make sense of in the same way but which may still affect their signification. Generally, however, we deal with external borders of the hermeneutic space, which do not interfere with our will to understand in any particular way. Secondly, we deal with objects that in principle carry certain meaning, which, however, we are unable to understand in the concrete situation. Ancient texts, exotic cultures, and pathological behavior are all objects whose meaning we find difficult to grasp. In such cases, there exists a temporal, cultural, or social distance between production and reception of sense, which stands in the way of our understanding. The hermeneutic work aims to mediate between the production and the reception of sense by way of explications, translations, and interpretations. This is, so to speak, the normal condition of hermeneutics. An ideal comprehension would consist of a convergence between the sense as it was originally intended, and its reconstruction by the reader or observer. In what respect and by what means a complete understanding can be reached depends on the topic at hand as well as on the methodical orientation with which it is approached. One may raise the question of how far we are capable of achieving a clear and full understanding at all. Many theorists hold that sense cannot be universalized, and that every interpretation encounters an undissolved remainder. Human behavior, histories, and emotions are too complex to be analyzed in their entirety. Classical hermeneutics, 14  See E. Angehern, Sinn und Nicht-Sinn: Das Verstehen des Menschen (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010).

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

75

as well as critical conceptions – e. g. deconstruction – insist on the openness and infiniteness of interpretation. But even if understanding remains open and incomplete, the discussion concerns something that is in principle intelligible, i. e. something that is »not yet« understood by the reader or observer, but which decipherment, contextualization, and interpretation shall gradually help transfer into sense. Thirdly, the limits of sense concern an expression that is unintelligible even to the subject who expresses it. The hermeneutic problem does not, in this case, concern the distance between reader and author, but the latter’s distance from himself. Paul Ricœur’s paradigmatic »hermeneutics of suspicion« deals with precisely this. There, Ricœur talks about utterances that appear obscure and incomprehensible to the speaking and acting subjects themselves. Examples of such distorted and obfuscated expression include pathological symptoms, ideological beliefs, and demonstrations of the will to power, as described by Freud, Marx, and Nietzsche – a trio Ricœur refers to as the »masters of suspicion.« Meanwhile, these types of expression indicate a more general issue in hermeneutics, namely that we are strangers to ourselves; that utterances are opaque in themselves. To a certain extent, this defines the normal condition of speaking and understanding. We encounter problems not only in our communication with others, but also in self-reflection, and in trying to understand our own feelings and intentions. For Gadamer, the gap between meaning and saying, the speaker’s search for the right words, and our failure to completely express our intentions constitute the innermost core of the hermeneutic problem. In concrete situations, both limits of sense, not understanding oneself, and not understanding the other, can interfere with and reinforce one another. A lack of transparency can occur in the communication between subjects, but also on the speaker’s side, or the hearer’s, and it is obvious that this manifold opacity aggravates the difficulty of understanding. Someone who is unclear about themselves will have even more difficulty unravelling the alienness of the other. Finally, there is a fourth negation of sense, where an utterance is not only unintelligible to others or in itself, but where it directly opposes understanding and meaning as such. Examples of this include manifest nonsense, absurd sentences, and contradictions in speech or action. However, from the perspective of hermeneutics, the problem concerns not only, nor primarily, linguistic inconsistencies and theoretical rule violations. The negation of sense as addressed here refers, rather, to a practical negation. There are states of affairs that – due to their intrinsic negativity – can be neither justified, rationalized, or even understood. Ever since its conception, this problem has continued to pose a crucial challenge and provocation to rational thinking in theology, anthropology, and metaphysics. Every attempt to rationally explain the origin of evil, be it malum physicum or malum morale, as suffering, or as sin, seemed to result into an insolvable aporia. The limits of sense, however, appear more radical than the pure impossibility of a rational explanation or justification of evil. The limits already occur as a limit of lan-

76

Emil Angehrn

guage; in the inability to express anxiety and shame, to remember, and to articulate extreme suffering. Victims of violence fall silent, and traumatic experiences are expulsed from consciousness. The most basic hermeneutic challenge consists in regaining speech, and the most urgent task of negative dialectics is, according to Adorno, to »lend a voice to suffering.«15 Now, all these limitations of speech and understanding are lodged in self-understanding. They indicate deficiencies that are not just cognitive in nature. For the subject, being situated on a continuum between the poles of understanding and non-understanding means being affected in their very state of being. The limits of self-understanding originate partly in the subject’s constitutive limitedness, partly in contingent restraints, and partly in fundamental problems of existence. There exists in us a fundamental structural inability to achieve encompassing transparency and rational comprehension of the self; a blind spot of (self‑)knowledge that precludes full self-transparency. This structural boundary is reinforced by our human dependency on historical and social conditions, as well as by our particular physical and psychological constitutions. No one is capable of becoming (fully) aware of his or her own specific existence. We have only partial access to our biography, our cultural condition, and our affective moods. What we are and what we feel, how we became what we are, and even what we really mean and want is never entirely available to us. At the same time, our efforts to understand ourselves may fail due to negative experiences or repressed parts of our character that we refuse to assimilate into our self-image. Finally, the problem of self-understanding is radicalised when we expand the concern beyond the subject matter and into the understanding as such. That is, apart from the obscurity of the subject matter, also the subject’s own constitution resists understanding. We are here concerned with a kind of self-inhibition for which the subject bears responsibility – whether it derives from inertia, internal resistance, or self-made inability. This is, after all, not a deficit in the capacity for self-understanding, but in one’s striving for understanding oneself, which – in extreme cases – turns into a denial of even trying to understand oneself. In such cases, self-understanding is not endangered by the withdrawal of the subject-matter from understanding, but by the internal ambivalence of self-understanding. What is endangered here is not only the subject’s (self‑)knowledge, but the subject’s very being. The denial of understanding itself stands for the denial of being oneself.

15   Th. W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 17; see also ibid., 362.

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

77

3.  Self-deception and self-deficiency 3.1.  Self-deception and akrasia The above aspects of self-deception reveal its relation to another traditional problem of philosophy: the problem of akrasia, or weakness of the will. This relationship is not confined to the two phenomena sharing a nearly unintelligible paradoxical structure while presenting a contrasting familiarity in everyday life. More importantly, the relation becomes visible when we analyze self-deception against the background of the failure to understand oneself and when we find this failure to be rooted in a weakness or denial of the will. So far, my analysis has gradually developed the failure of understanding from not understanding to being unwilling to understand and, finally, to being unwilling to understand oneself. The failure of understanding thus leads to a kind of reflective unwillingness, more precisely to a contradictoriness within the subject’s will, whereby the subject simultaneously does and does not will. Practical contradictoriness may seem less problematic than its theoretical counterpart since it makes more sense to have contradicting desires and intentions16 than to make contradicting judgments and assertions. On second glance, however, contradictoriness of the will presents a point of existential distress as much as a conceptual paradox. Akrasia is not about a tension between intentions with mutually incompatible content, but about a dissociation of the will. In a sense, it concerns a performative contradiction within one and the same disposition of the will.17 The same goes for self-deception: it, too, is not primarily concerned with contradictory contents, i. e. with our meaning or wanting something whilst making ourselves believe something else, but with an internal dissonance of the will, the inconsistency of which is aggravated in the case of self-understanding. For in this case, one’s (un)willingness concerns not a contingent aim, like quitting smoking, but something fundamental to our very existence. Willingness to understand and willingness to be are forms of willing that constitute the essence of human being. Nietzsche’s suspicion that man is not at all interested in truth, and Heidegger’s remark that the refusal to know complies with our everyday way of being both refer to counter-tendencies to the fundamental tendency of life, which is directed at truth and knowledge.18 16   A. W. Wood refers to Zerlina’s aria »Vorrei e non vorrei« in Mozart’s Don Giovanni (Wood, »Self-Deception and Bad Faith,« 216). 17   An analogous figure is Hegel’s conception of the criminal whose deed is the basis of equally negating and not negating, or acknowledging and not acknowledging, respectively, a particular person’s legal status. Accordingly, the function of punishment consists in dissolving this contradiction (apart from restitution and retribution). See G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. by A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), §§ 82 – 83, 97 – 100. 18  See B. Merker, Selbsttäuschung und Selbsterkenntnis. Zu Heideggers Transformation der Phänomenologie Husserls (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1988).

78

Emil Angehrn

3.2.  Existential deficiency and self-alienation Having traced self-deception back to a basic reversion of the will, it seems less like a cognitive deficit, and more like an existential weakness; a fundamental failure of the human being. The reversion sees the subject becoming at odds with himself, eventually resulting in self-alienation. In this state, the subject approximates what existentialists have called inauthenticity, and what philosophers in related fields refer to as a subject’s disagreement with himself; a fundamental self-deficiency. The questions are what does this deficiency consist in, where does it originate, and what does it mean for human life? According to Heidegger, inauthenticity is the normal condition of the human being, a condition, he says, that obtains »proximally and for the most part.« Although Heidegger insists that his talk of everydayness and inauthenticity does not carry a pejorative sense, the negative connotations are obvious in that this state is the opposite of the ideal of existing »authentically.«19 The reason that we do not meet this ideal is either that authenticity is a constitutive or, alternatively, a contingent feature of human life. Inauthenticity is an essential feature of human existence inasmuch as it reflects the finiteness of human beings, and their dependency on physical and mental, historical and social conditions. The imperfection and inauthenticity of human existence is constitutive of its anthropological nature. In contrast, self-deception seems contingent whenever it derives from additional, contingent circumstances. Critics of ideology interpret the delusion of consciousness as an effect of being mastered by another, while psychoanalysts investigate it as an effect of internal pathologies of the mind. Experiences of the reality of negativity, of illness, violence, and injustice can deprive the subject of the possibility of coming to terms with himself and of making sense of the world. Philosophers of history and culture understand the disintegration of the individual in the context of a social crisis or an encompassing decline of civilisation. Nonetheless, the question remains how far the grounds for the inadequacy and inherent falsity of existence lie within the subject himself. 3.3.  The origin of self-alienation Basically, this is the case if non-identity is regarded part of the ontology of the subject. Kathi Beier maintains that the phenomenon of self-deception can be adequately explicated only in ontological, rather than epistemological or psychological, terms.20 Sartre trenchantly points to self-deception being a matter of ontology 19

  Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, §§  27, 35 – 38.   Beier, Selbsttäuschung, 5. The key to her explication is the concept of privation, specifically that the phenomenon of self-deception logically, explanatorily, and normatively depends on another one, namely the concept of self-determination. 20

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

79

when he proceeds from the question »what Man must be in his being if it ought to be possible for him to deny himself«21 and responds that the necessary condition of inauthenticity consists in »that, primordially, I am and am not what I am.«22 His classical and obstinately repeated thesis reads that the human being is a being »that is what it is not, and is not what it is.«23 In how far such an answer satisfactorily elucidates the phenomenon is open to doubt. The paradoxical behavior at hand is traced to a paradoxical essence. Importantly, Sartre interprets the implicit negation not only as a constative, but also a performative one that is present in inauthenticity as self-denial, or as flight from one’s own being.24 The ontological structure of the subject ensures that (self‑)consciousness is not only inauthentic, but also in perpetual danger of falling prey to inauthenticity.25 We are concerned with a tendency that is due not just to an ontological weakness, but to a tendency that has ethical implications, and presents a danger to what human beings want and ought to be, and not merely to their projects. In a sense, Heidegger apprehends the ontological-ethical perspective against a religious background and paraphrases it in religious terms. Instead of speaking simply of a human danger or a constitutive »inclination« to fall into inauthenticity, he speaks of temptation.26 Although Heidegger explicitly emphasizes that this must not be understood in a religious sense, the question concerning the grounds of inauthenticity is associated with the question concerning the origin of evil.27 The danger is replaced with the »continuous temptation« to fall: the human being, says Heidegger, is essentially »temptable,« that is, susceptible to the propensity for evil as Kant describes it.28 The Christian tradition’s cycle of temptation, falling, and redemption is inscribed in the deep structure of subjectivity; in the contrasts between falling and authenticity, concealment and truth. In a certain analogy to Sartre’s paradoxical formula, The Epistle to the Romans describes the contradictoriness of the will and locates its origin in evil: »For what I would, that do I not; but what I hate, that do I;« »Now then it is no more I that do it, but sin that dwelleth in me.«29

21

  Sartre, L’être et le néant, 85 (my translation).   Ibid., 106 (my translation). 23   Ibid., 97 (my translation). 24   Ibid., 85. 25   Ibid., 111. 26   M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2002), 22

20.

27   M. Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles: Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung (Wintersemester 1921 / 22), in Gesamtausgabe, vol. 61, ed. W. Bröcker and K. Bröcker-Oltmanns (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1985), 154. 28   Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 177 (my translation). 29   Epistle to the Romans 7:15, 7:17.

80

Emil Angehrn

3.4. Anxiety (Angst) as the origin of self-deficiency – the challenge to freedom These and other dogmatic descriptions remain conceptually unsatisfactory insofar as they derive the negative from the negative. Temptation refers to the devil as the principle and instigator of evil. The same goes for considerations that, referring to the later Freud’s drive theory, declare the death instinct or the destructive drive the core of the willing subject’s self-inversion. Such conceptions are supposed to fill the explanatory gap that opens up when we speak of anthropological weakness and finiteness, which can only explain the possibility – not the actuality – of evil and self-destructive behavior. Ricœur finds a similar gap in the anthropology of fallibility, which comprehends only the disposition, not the act, of evil. The act remains theoretically unexplainable and can only be explicated by way of narratives of the Fall of Man and the symbols of evil.30 It is possible to carry out an analogous hermeneutic reflection on the basis of Kierkegaard’s and Heidegger’s respective theories of angst. Angst is here inextricably intertwined with the problem of freedom while simultaneously entangled with the origin of (self‑)deficiency.31 Angst originates in the experience of freedom, the confrontation with indeterminacy, and the unfixedness of the possibilities onto which human beings project themselves. Generally associated with a lack of determinacy and diffusion of boundaries, angst is in its core directed towards insecurity. The temptation consists in escaping this fundamental uncertainty by means of determination. The attempt to escape from freedom is the primordial ground of self-deficiency, and leads to inauthenticity. The original temptation aims at our arranging ourselves within the actual world in order to escape from that basic fear. Authentic existence thus requires that we withstand this fear and take responsibility in the face of contingency, confusion, and instability. The relation between fear and freedom refers back to self-deception. It is obvious that self-deception is often rooted in fear. Phenomenally, self-deception appears as a motivated, though unintentional, disguise of unpleasant facts. Experiences of pain, shame, and fear can lead us to close our eyes to facts and soothe ourselves with false assumptions. This suppression and cultivation of illusion brings reassurance, relief, and release. Heidegger holds that the general »burden« of Dasein, who is responsible for itself and »has to be,« causes Dasein to for the most part avoid self-disclosure.32 Dasein has even more reason to do so if it has to cope with suffering and guilt, or has to find orientation in a meaningless world. This picture 30   P. Ricœur, Finitude et culpabilité I: L’homme faillible, II: La symbolique du mal (Paris: Aubier, 1960). 31  S.  Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 8), ed. and trans. R. Thomte and B. A. Anderson (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). The subtitle of this work of Kierkegaard explicitly anxiety to the problem of original sin: A Simple Psychologically Orienting Deliberation on the Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin. 32  See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 134.

Self-Understanding and Self-Deception

81

presents self-deception as the paradigmatic manifestation of inauthenticity. It not only waives the challenge of negativity but denies it, replacing it with a false image of the world and the self. Still, there is more at issue here than surmounting particular instances of suffering and contradiction. The deep structure of the phenomenon is framed by fear less of this or that particular danger or lack of sense than of the chasm of one’s own freedom. The most fundamental kind of self-alienation threatening human beings consists in alienation from their own freedom. This is not overcome by Marx’s or Hegel’s suggested removal of objectification, and undoing of externalisation. This kind of self-alienation takes place within the boundaries of the self, before any kind of externalisation can occur; it represents a kind of deficiency that resides at the very heart of subjectivity. Let me try to draw a conclusion. The train of thought I have developed here has led us from self-deception to self-understanding and its failure, to unwillingness, and finally to the fear of freedom. Along this road, I have laid out a fundament and a core element of self-alienation, both in a double sense. On the one hand, the burden and fear of freedom was shown to be the problem that actuates human self-alienation. Fear of freedom is the foundation of all self-estrangement, since it defines the deepest ground of a subject’s fear of itself. On the other hand, the problem of understanding and self-deception brought me to consider self-estrangement. Although self-alienation could consist in alienation from one’s primary needs, duties, and own nature, its core still lies in alienation from self-understanding and – ultimately – from the willingness to understand oneself. This kind of self-understanding forms the basis for all other dimensions of self-relatedness, self-projection, as well as acceptance of one’s own biography, characteristics, feelings, and inclinations. Whenever a human being’s fear threatens their willingness to understand themselves, a kind of estrangement takes effect that is prior to all other kinds of self-alienation. Self-deception presents not only a paradigmatic case, but a core of self-alienation.

Existential Hermeneutics Self-Understanding between Transparency and Opacity

The Single Individual as the Single Individual A Response to Subjektivitet og negativitet Carsten Pallesen

1. Introduction This contribution seeks to lay out the scope of the question of the single individual as the single individual, posed throughout Arne Grøn’s works. In the book Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard,1 the question about »den Enkelte som den Enkelte« in Kierkegaard is elaborated as an emphatic double determination »as,« and at the same time, as the call to become aware of oneself as a self-determined, self-transparent, single-minded will, conscience, and heart.2 The essay at hand has a double aim: (1) to outline what Grøn takes to be an underdeveloped theoretical problem in Kierkegaard’s concept of subjectivity, and, in a more explorative mode, (2) to suggest how the category of the single individual can be clarified from the vantage point of the conceptual and semantic field of the term homoousion homoousia, homoousios developed by the Nicene Fathers to express the identity of the Father and the incarnated word, the Son.3 The essay proposes a structural analogy of repetition between the internal trinitarian relations and movements on the one hand, and the concept of spirit entailed in Kierkegaard’s concept of the self on the other.4 Oneself as another suggests not only ontological implications, but also the theological emphasis of being the singular individual »directly before God,«5 giving the theory of subjectivity an accent of infinity neglected in less theoretical accounts of existential relations. The theological »language of the gods« is not equivalent to Kierkegaard’s negative phenomenology, psychology, or poetry.6 Anti-Climacus is a »poet of the reli1

  A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997).   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 402 – 406. 3   C. Pallesen, »Homoousia – sprog, krop, trinitet i mediefilosofisk perspektiv,« Dansk Teologisk Tidsskrift 79 (2016), 82 – 104. 4   S. Kierkegaard’s writings are quoted with the following abbreviations: KW: Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, vol. 1 – 26 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978 – 98). SKS: Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., vol. 1 – 55 (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997 – 2012). 5   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 79 / SKS 11, 193. 6   Ibid., KW 19, 127 / SKS 11, 238. 2

86

Carsten Pallesen

gious«7 who refers to the apostle and the fathers from the position of a »wounded self,« not a called one; a self with a »thorn in the flesh.«8 By contrast, Anti-Climacus introduces »the theological self« as the self »directly before God.«9 These and similar indications prompt an interpretation of the particle »as« in the formula of the self and in the vocabulary of reduplication, repetition. In the closing words of the Postscript, Climacus summarizes the pseudonymous authors’ endeavor to read »the original text of individual human existence relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers.«10 Whatever the »old familiar text« may mean, the reference to »the fathers« suggests the patristic authors, in particular the Nicene fathers, and hence, on the reading proposed in this essay, the homoousion as the key to the theological self; the concept of concepts that Grøn wants to rehabilitate in Kierkegaard. The Kierkegaardian call of conscience to acquire the purity of heart to will only the good is equivalent to the call to become aware of existing as a single individual, with the theological, ethical, and ontological implications of this. The self is opaque or broken (brudt) in various experiences of negativity, double-mindedness, self-deception, self-evasion, and despair. The task is to become what one – in a broken and opaque way – already is. Theologically, the single individual is articulated on the internal stage of conscience directly before God. Inwardness does not exclude, but accentuates the external historical and corporal determinations of the self, which complicates the category of the single individual. On Grøn’s reading, the self remains indelibly marked as »spirit;« a creature in the image of God, which – Grøn holds – implies social, epochal, corporeal, sexual, and external otherness that is indispensable and constitutive of the single individual.11 Spirit, then, is not a formula of harmony and withdrawal, but rather of a fragile totality or synthesis torn by conflictual passions and pathologies that are always simultaneously inward and outward: existence-relations are perceived as communicative categories. Catchwords like »determination« and »redoubling« indicate the thematic centers of gravity and their inner coherence and ruptures, which the book Subjektivitet og negativitet displays on a large scale. The following is an attempt to convey the idea and argument of Grøn’s book as a challenge to contemporary existential thinking and to theology in the strict sense of the Nicene homoousion. Two early journal entries from 1838 corroborates that Kierkegaard owned and studied J. A. Möhler’s six 1827 volumes on Athanasius the Great, the one who developed the notion of homoousion in his struggle with Arius.12 Here one should  7

  Ibid., KW 19, 78 / SKS 11, 192.  Ibid.  9   Ibid., KW 79 / SKS 11, 193. 10   CUP 630 / SKS 7, 573. 11   Depending on the context, the Danish »ånd« and German »Geist« are translated into »Spirit« or »spirit«. 12   Kierkegaard, »KK:5,« SKS 18, 353 – 359.  8

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

87

also look for the impulses to the concept of spirit and the theory of subjectivity in Kierkegaard, which Grøn takes to be underdeveloped. On this reading, homoousion is implied in Grøn’s programmatic paragraph on the movement from substance to subjectivity (and back again) as a (broken) Hegelian movement in Kierkegaard’s concept of Spirit.13 The wager, then, is that the category of the single individual in Kierkegaard has its theological background in early Christian Greek Theology.

2.  The problem of the particle »as« The particle »as« (som) or qua in Kierkegaard’s formulas »to exist as the single individual« and »to exist qua spirit« indicates the problem of subjectivity and dialectical negativity.14 It is not only a particle of comparison and analogical unity but also an existential affirmation of self-determined identity »as« or »with« oneself. Further, it indicates repetition in terms of the second-order observation implied in self-relation. Grøn’s ambition is to spell out the theoretical insight in Kierkegaard’s »existence-communication [Existents Meddelelse]« in order to highlight the underlying concept and structure of subjectivity against the grain of a merely imaginative and figurative evocation of existential negativity. The intertwinement of »existence-communication« and dialectics is pervasive in Kierkegaard’s authorship. The concept of despair, or the concept of anxiety indicate a sort of dialectics, whereas existential phenomena are developed in what may be called a »poetics of existence.« Kierkegaard’s practice of »existence-communication« employs both.15 »Negativity« is, for Grøn, also a question of exploring the logic and dialectics of positions, movements, and propositions of passions such as despair, hope, love, tragic conflict, and faith. The »either or« of decision (Afgjørelse) stresses the logical implication of the theory of subjectivity; »the issue is rooted specifically in decision.«16 Paul Ricœur writes: [T]he selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought without the other, that instead one passes into the other, as we might say in Hegelian terms. To ›as,‹ I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of comparison (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other).17

We find here an indication of the ontological implication of the notion of the single individual. From the perspective of the concept of spirit that Grøn outlines 13

  Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 15 – 20.   Ibid., 391. 15   P. Ricœur, »Philosopher après Kierkegaard,« in P. Ricœur, Lectures 2. La contrée des philosophes (Paris: Seuil, 1992), 29 – 45. 16   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW  12, 21 / SKS 7, 29 – 30. 17   P. Ricœur, Oneself as Another (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1992), 3. 14

88

Carsten Pallesen

throughout the book, oneself as another, and the single individual as the single individual are two unmodified and equally justified moments that the theory of subjectivity should be able to account for. The ontological weight of the particle »as« can be considered parallel to the ancient theological quarrel over »similarity« and »sameness,« homoiosis and homoousios in Athanasius and the Nicene Fathers.18 Homo-ousios entails a transformation of philosophical concepts of »ousia,« and is recognized as the most original and important intellectual contribution of the early Church. Christopher Stead notes: »Examining the early uses of homoousios, one is struck by the extraordinary flexibility of the term.«19 The Trinitarian homoousion, then, indicates indetermination as well as determination as relations of unmodified self-determination, freedom, and unmodified dependence, love, and mutual recognition. According to Heinrich Dörrie, the formula »homo-ousion« »marks the end of the Christian Platonism.«20 Homoousion opposes Platonism in a dialectical sublation similar to what Climacus undertakes in Philosophical Fragments. Platonism and German Idealism on the one hand, and the paradox of »God in time« on the other, are dramatized as dialectical oppositions. Disguised as anti-Hegelian, the logical infrastructure of the paradox is spelled out in a thoroughly Hegelian manner, i. e. as the movement of the Spirit from substance to subjectivity in the Christ event. In Christ God becomes the single individual, and thus overcomes abstract transcendence in the concrete universality of the »absolute fact,« the intertwinement of the eternal and the historical in the moment.21 Hegel’s philosophy of religion, which is the presupposition for Climacus’s exposition of knowledge and faith, is conceived as a struggle between the manifold and colorful figures, practices, and representations of religion on the one hand, and the philosophical »concept« on the other.22 The sublation of representations in the concept of the absolute has its model in the Trinitarian Creed in which homoousion is key. Homoousion, then, in Hegel and Kierkegaard, is not just a complex trope, a figure of thinking, or ecumenical formula of compromise, but the defining concept of Christianity. In line with Ricœur and Michael Theunissen, Grøn points to the systematic relevance of the Hegelian dialectics of representation and concept in Kierkegaard’s anti- Hegelianism. The rhetorical and dialectical implications of the »as« can be further elaborated in Jean-Luc Nancy’s interpretation of homoousion. The Greek neologism indicates 18

  T. F. Torrance, The Trinitarian Faith (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1995), 116 – 145.   C. Stead, Philosophy in Christian Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994),

19

167.

20   H. Dörrie, »Gregors Theologie auf dem Hintergrunde der neuplatonischen Metaphysik,« in Gregor von Nyssa und die Philosophie, ed. H. Dörrie et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1976), 27. Quoted in N. H. Gregersen, Den generøse ortodoksi (Copenhagen: Anis, 2015), 111 (my translation). 21   Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, KW 7, 99 – 100 / SKS 4, 297. 22   P. Ricœur, »The Status of ›Vorstellung‹ in Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion«, in Meaning Truth, God, ed. L. S. Rouner (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982), 70 – 90.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

89

subjectivity, i. e. the incarnation, as the self-deconstructive moment of Christianity. Nancy points to the conceptual heart of Christology, which is the only truly original contribution of theology, however a »completely unprecedented« and decisive one: It is well known that the heart of Christian theology is obviously Christology, that the heart of Christology is the doctrine of the incarnation, and the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation is that of homoousia, consubstantiality, the identity or community of being and substance between the Father and the Son. This is what is completely unprecedented about Christianity.23

The term homoousia is a gesture of deconstruction, a process of mutual opening and distending of itself, which on Nancy’s reading is the signature of Western philosophy.24 Homoousion (consubstantial) characterizes the unity and nature of the relations between the three divine persons. Nancy uses the noun homoousia to imply the auto-deconstructive gesture implied in Christianity, not, however, to introduce reification. The concept of the concept implied in the Nicene formula transforms a theory of knowing as adequation of understanding to a priori ideas and forms. In Philosophical Fragments the term »absolute fact« is the intertwinement of the eternal and the historical in the moment.25 Climacus’s theological conceptualization of the event similarly anticipates the radical constructivism implied in the term »an absolute fact [et absolut Faktum],« explained as the eternal that has been constructed in the historical event »come into existence.«26

3. The concept of spirit This theological background is relevant inasmuch as the concept of Spirit in Hegel and Kierkegaard is Trinitarian and biblical. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit describes the movement »from substance to subjectivity«27 which on Grøn’s reading of the concept of spirit in Kierkegaard implies a »re-substantialization [re-substantivering]«28 of the social and ethical substance. Spirit is not only to be conceived of as social substance (ousia) but also as subjectivity. Grøn sets out to rehabilitate the suppressed Hegelian dialectics of recognition, including a social critique implied in Kierkegaard.29 This richer structure of relations and movements of mutual recognition in Kierkegaard’s concept of spirit is lost in the Heid­ eggerian existential ontology of facticity and finitude. What is lost is the indeter23  J.‑L. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. B. Bergo et al. (New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2008), 151. 24   Ibid., 149. 25   Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, KW 7, 99 – 100 / SKS 4, 297. 26   Ibid., KW 7, 87 / SKS 4 285 – 86. 27   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 230. 28   Ibid., 19. 29   Ibid., 232.

90

Carsten Pallesen

minate or infinite aspect of the divine spirit as well as the radical understanding of otherness not only as similarity (etwas als etwas) but as identity received in the movement of mutual recognition that in Hegel is accomplished exclusively in the Christian confession and forgiveness, and is expressed as the Trinitarian homoousion: the internal relation between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.30 Grøn calls attention to a similar double-movement in Kierkegaard, implied in the concept of spirit,31 which is the program and paradigm for the theory of subjectivity. For Grøn, Kierkegaard’s rhetorical formula »to exist as spirit« implies the Trinitarian understanding of Spirit as the Holy Spirit, of the same divine essence as the Father and the Son. Homoousion (consubstantial) builds on ousia (substance) and homoiosis (similarity). The particle »homo« (»con«) expresses »ousia as ousia« as difference and identity in order to claim that the Father, Son, and Spirit are of the same divine essence, yet distinct and different in their internal relations. Accordingly, Grøn’s existential interpretation of Spirit locates the problem of the single individual in the movements and relations between the self and the other in concrete life. Concrete ethical life as the substance or ousia is transcended and transformed. The account of the theological self in The Sickness Unto Death (henceforth Sickness) contains this movement, when the ethical self is reshaped by the dogmatic determination of sin and faith: The antithesis sin / faith is the Christian one that Christianly reshapes all ethical concepts and gives them one additional range. At the root of the antithesis lies the crucial Christian qualification: before God, a qualification that in turn has Christianity’s crucial criterion: the absurd, the paradox, the possibility of offense.32

Kierkegaard’s account of the movement of Spirit from substance to subjectivity is the theological reshaping of the substantial ethical self. The via negativa (sin and despair) indicates the dialectical method of Grøn’s theory of selfhood and otherness.

4.  The ethical and the wound of negativity Becoming concrete, on Grøn’s reading, represents a task and a gift of receiving oneself from the other.33 We miss the indispensable meaning of the other for the single individual in Kierkegaard without a genuine theory and concept of subjec30   C. Malabou, »Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition? Rousseau and the Unthought of Religion in the Phenomenology of Spirit,« in Hegel & the Infinite. Religion, Politics, and Dialectics, ed. S. Žižek et al. (New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2011), 19 – 30. Hegel’s Phenomenology’s section on Spirit concludes with confession and forgiveness. 31   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 15 – 20. 32   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 83 / SKS 11, 196. 33   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 61.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

91

tivity.34 Accordingly, Grøn sets out to strengthen the consciousness of the other of the self implied in the notion of self-consciousness, i. e. the concept of Spirit in Hegel and Kierkegaard. Grøn emphasizes the moment of the single individual’s return to substantial life with the other. Hence ousia as ousia (homoousion) is at the same time deconstructed and re-substantialized in (mis‑)relations of otherness in love and recognition.35 The triune God is the normative and cognitive model for how the single individual is to be understood in Kierkegaard. She or he is no monadic existence, but a corporally and socially embedded individual who is called forth as a self-relating individual in-between the two moments that homoousion distinguishes in the godhead. In Fear and Trembling, Abraham is called by God to give up his immediate substantial identity: Isaak.36 Faith implies the giving up of ethical substance and at the same time the return to the substantial as a gift. The passion of faith, then, is conveyed dialectically in its intertwinement with the passion of love (the ethical) played through in the dissonant key of offense (forargelse), which is the aesthetic »absurd.« The resonances of offence from the lyrical and playful in Fear and Trembling and Philosophical Fragments to the more strictly diagnostic and dogmatic tone in Sickness are what Kierkegaard sets out to articulate poetically and simultaneously comprehend in thought. The dissonant chords are pervasive and indicate the tuning of the various discourses, predominantly in the key of the absurd, distorted harmonies of offense, despair, and the demonic. Kierkegaard’s journal entry from September 25, 1855, refers to a particular tone of thanksgiving produced by someone deeply tired of life (Livslede), and that pleases God: »God says to himself: Here is the tone.«37 The voice of the despaired one, Kierkegaard writes, who in his thanksgiving attributes everything to God, moves God as if God was surprised by a discovery. But God was prepared, Kierkegaard adds, because he already was present with this individual, »helping him insofar as God can do what only freedom can do.« Kierkegaard elaborates on the joy and surprise of the free to be able to give thanks to God as if it was God who did it: In his joy to be able to express [his misery] he is so happy, that he wishes to hear nothing, nothing about it being his own doing, but in giving thanks he refers everything to God, and prays to God, that it will remain the case that God is the one who does it, because he does not have faith in himself, but in God.38

34

  Ibid., 22 – 23.   Ibid., 230 – 236. 36   Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling, KW 6 / SKS 4. 37   Kierkegaard, »P:591,« SKS 27, 698 (my translation). 38  Ibid. 35

92

Carsten Pallesen

5.  The religious categories and the theory of subjectivity Today, the single individual may be characterized as a question of whether the concept of the single individual is a Protestant childhood disease that the postmodern world has recovered from, or whether – as Climacus prescribes – this question should remain a »wound of negativity.«39 Despair and spiritlessness are by Anti-Climacus diagnosed as symptoms of this wound of the spirit, which the theory of the self should be able to account for. Ignorance of the sickness and its frequency, intensity, and danger implies a new negativity. Knowledge of negativity (sin) is necessary for theology to stick to the point – the dialectics of sin and faith. If theology loses its philosophical roots of self-knowledge, it is in danger of forgetting its cause and wander off into history or rhetoric. This intertwinement of the philosophical-religious and the human or ethical is the home of the problem that Grøn has developed in his comprehensive international and Danish authorship. Kierkegaard explores modern self-consciousness and its connection to the biblical idea of God’s infinite transcendence alongside the inevitable influence of the Christian revelation, the paradox of the eternal contained in the finite self-consciousness and life of Jesus Christ, and its liturgical and speculative elaboration in the patristic literature. Grøn’s task is thus the Kierkegaardian one of understanding how »the religious categories« belong to »the theory of subjectivity.«40 The task at hand is thus to trace the decision (Afgjørelsen) as more than a rhetorical ploy in the authorship, emphasizing the infinite interestedness of the single individual while grasping the dialectical character of appropriation, passion, and inwardness elaborated in contradistinction to Hegel and others. Grøn particularly emphasizes the dialectics for bringing out the existential significance of subjectivity and not let it disappear in thoughts on solutions. Climacus and other pseudonymous authors make the exploration of the dialectics of subjectivity difficult, suspecting that the dialectical is a way to avoid the problem, but – and this is Grøn’s reading – the dialectical does not disappear by a rhetorical spell. Rather, we have to do with an »anti-dialectical dialectics.«41 The subject, who is defined by his infinite, passionate interest in his own eternal bliss, can volatilize himself, lose the sense of this problem and become lost for passion.42 If the God-relation, faith, sin, and eternal bliss are what make a human being a human being, as Climacus seems to imply, then this loss is equivalent to a loss of humanity. It is possible to be a human being without actually being one: »a person might very well live on, marry, be respected and esteemed as husband, father, 39

  Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 98.   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW  12, 45 / SKS 7, 50; see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 287. 41   P. Ricœur, »Philosopher après Kierkegaard.« 42   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 290. 40

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

93

and captain of the popinjay shooting club, without discovering God in his work.«43 Decision and self-determination, as a bloody-minded effort to become the single individual, also seem to miss the target. How, then, can the sense of humanity be regained? That is the dialectical problem of self-determination vis à vis the desire for eternal bliss in the Postscript. In Sickness, Anti-Climacus reformulates the problem in theological terms of sin versus faith, defining sin as »before God in despair not to will to be oneself, or before God to will in despair to be oneself,« while »Faith is: that the self in being itself and in willing to be itself rests transparently in God.«44

6.  The criteriology of the self Chapter 4 of Subjektivitet og negativitet, »Self-Determination [Selvbestemthed],« opens with a quote from Sickness: »The self must be broken in order to become itself.«45 Our ideas about ourselves and others must be »broken« and face the criteria (norms, ideals, others, or God) by which we assess ourselves. In this breaking, the self-relation is intensified. Subjectivity is experienced as a tangible problem through the resistance towards and the interplay between becoming oneself and the self that one already is and can try to escape – in weakness or defiance – by way of self-determination. Chapter 5, »Determination by the Other [Anden bestemthed],« plays out the dialectics of self-relation in relation to the other, whom the self determines against negatively in individuation. The question that Grøn here brings forward is whether or not this self-determination implies a devaluation of the world and others, as critiques of subjectivity – especially Kierkegaard’s – have claimed.46 Grøn answers with the opposite thesis: »The thesis I wish to track in Kierkegaard is the dialectical one that a person is only herself in relation to the other self.«47 Grøn’s thesis has a subdued polemical turn against mainstream theologically-inspired social philosophy one finds in Danish Lutheran theologians like K. E. Løgstrup, Jakob Knudsen, and N. F. S. Grundtvig, who direct their critique of modernity against Kantian autonomy and freedom.48 Grøn sides with Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Bukdahl in maintaining that the autonomy and freedom of the single individual should not be compromised in a »petit bourgeois« utopian perception of freedom as always modified and conditioned by a concrete social substance: family, gender, phenomenological lifeworld, body, worklife, market, etc.49 43   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW 12, 244 / SKS 7, 222; see A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 291. 44   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 81 – 82 / SKS 11, 130. 45   Ibid., KW 19, 51 / SKS 11, 179. 46   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 83 – 84. 47   Ibid., 229 (my translation). 48   J. K. Bukhdal, »Hegel’s aktualitet,« Fønix 2 (1978), 272 – 286. 49   Ibid., 285.

94

Carsten Pallesen

To be determined by oneself as the single individual, the unmodified freedom and the unmodified dependence on others evolve around the holding together of a complex of seemingly incompatible and even opposed moments. This is the problem and normative criterion of modernity that Grøn addresses as its Christian signature: in love and in recognition to receive oneself from the other and in that way to be determined by the other, and in this very dependence to be the single individual as the single individual »right before God.«50 The break between the ethical definitions and the religious categories – to want to be oneself before God – is a critical test of the ideas the single individual holds about herself, the other, and God. The evasion of oneself and God through the figures of despair shown in the first part of Sickness, reveals the inevitability of the religious in self-relation, and vice versa. The difficult and confusing thing about Kierkegaard is that it seems that he uses redoubling as a means of rhetorical amplification, e. g. the expression »the single individual as the single individual.« The double reflection is infinitely unlimited and indefinite, while the dialectics demand »intermediary terms [Mellembestemmelser],« which determine and limit the unrestricted redoubling in actual phenomenological representation. These can be imitated and thus used to reveal the inherent structures and claims of reason, which the single individual recognizes as the unavoidable, real, and normative character of self-determination. The interplay between the general indeterminate redoubling and the redoubling that is limited or determined by the category turns the formula »the single individual as the single individual« into a philosophical task of appropriation contrary to a rhetorical spell that would cover up the problem. In Grøn’s voice: »The single one is not a magic spell but a statement of a problem.«51 In the prelude to the section about »the single individual as the single individual« in the closing chapter of the book, »Double Determination [Dobbeltbestemmelse],« Grøn writes that the »double figure« is equivalent to the Postscript’s idea of »the existing one as the existing one« and Sickness’s idea »to exist as Spirit.« Having had the leading role in previous chapters, in this section, the figure is treated thematically. The task is to conceptualize that which the rhetorical formula contains. According to Grøn, scholars have generally downplayed the radical theoretical character of the problem, inasmuch as Kierkegaard’s texts are not considered to be »equipped for theory.«52 A theory of subjectivity is required that Kierkegaard himself can appear to throw down the gauntlet to.53 The concept of subjectivity should not only work with but also against Kierkegaard’s rhetoric.54 50

  Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 230 – 232.   Ibid., 393 (my translation); see also ibid., 391. 52   Ibid., 316 – 317. 53   Ibid., 22 – 23; see also ibid., 55. 54   Ibid., 398. 51

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

95

7. Dialectical phenomenology and the concept of the concept Subjektivitet og negativitet’s section on »Phenomenology« expounds on the interaction between dialectics and phenomenology in Kierkegaard. Figures of consciousness are three-dimensional and often outlined, erased, and redrawn. Abraham, the Merman, and Socrates present self-relations that change by what they do, say, and think. Figures of consciousness are magnifying glasses or megaphones for developing existential concepts. Hegel’s world historical events and epochs mark progressive manifestations of Spirit as a process of partial achievements, self-realisation, and fulfillment in a presupposed totality. The concept of self-consciousness here indicates the endpoint as well as the process in which the self is recognized by another self-consciousness. The movement between the concept and the figurative articulations is a dialectical process that holds together extreme oppositions in what Hegel calls a »multi-faceted many-sided intertwinement.« The Hegelian concept of »concept« is a movement of identity and otherness contained in a phrase that loses its speculative quality in the English translation: The Notion of this its unity in its duplication embraces many and varied meanings. Its moments, then, must on the one hand be held strictly apart, and on the other hand must in this differentiation at the same time also be taken and known as not distinct [. . .] The detailed exposition of the Notion of this spiritual unity in its duplication will present us with the process of Recognition.55

This passage marks the scope of Grøn’s strong theoretical interpretation of Kierkegaard’s category of the single individual and its reduplication. The effort of the concept as the movement of recognition is what Kierkegaard neglects, yet parenthetically, in the Postscript, admits to be the task, »the religious categories« belong to »the theory of subjectivity.«56 »Categories« and »theory,« then, are what is needed for religion and subjectivity to be established as a philosophical challenge intertwined in conceptual structures similar to the Hegelian concept of the movement of recognition as the unity of Spirit. In his account of his method for the thesis, Grøn quotes Vigilius Haufniensis’s presentation of his method of inventing and thinking with examples. According to Haufniensis, self-observation is the main road to observation of what happens in 55   G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 127 – 128: Idem, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1977), § 178, 111. In German: »Der Begriff dieser seiner Einheit in seiner Verdopplung, der sich im Selbstbewusstsein sich realisierende Unendlichkeit ist eine vielseitige und vieldeutige Verschränkung [. . .] Die Auseinanderlegung des Begriffs dieser geistigen Einheit in ihrer Verdopplung stellt uns die Bewegung des Anerkennens dar.« (G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988)), 127 – 128). 56   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW 12, 50 / SKS 7, 50; see A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 55, 287.

96

Carsten Pallesen

the various negative shapes of consciousness of anxiety, despair, and the demonic: »If an observer will only pay attention to himself, he will have enough with five men, five women, and ten children for the discovery of all possible states of the human soul.«57 The psychologist is advised to emulate the positions he observes in his clinic in order to extract the generic from the particular. When the observer is thus well trained, he or she is able to bring »his observations entirely fresh from the water, wriggling and sparkling in the play of their colors.«58 The observer should impersonate those moods, conditions, or passions that he has taken note of in his practice to set up a mirror for the observed individual. Thus, the single individual is redoubled in the mirror as the single individual in order to bring forth self-awareness by recognition. Seeing oneself as if from the outside should lure one out of withdrawal and despair: the actor / observer thus lures »the carp of truth by the bait of falsehood.«59 The next task is to imitate the individual in order to »delude« the person in question: Then he must practice what he has learned until he is able to delude the individual. Thereupon he fictitiously invents the passion and appears to the individual in a preternatural magnitude of the passion. If it is done correctly, the individual will feel an indescribable relief and satisfaction, such as an insane person will feel when someone has uncovered and poetically grasped his fixation and then proceeds to develop it further.60

8.  The category of the authorship: The single individual Grøn calls attention to a note where Kierkegaard writes that for him as a thinker »this matter of the single individual is the most decisive.«61 He elaborates: »the single individual, an idea, (the single individual versus the public) in which a whole life- and worldview is concentrated.«62 In the view of speculative thinking, the single individual (den Enkelte) is the most despised category, polemically exposed in Sickness where singularity is defined as sin: The earnestness of sin is its actuality in the single individual, be it you or I. Speculatively, we are supposed to look away from the single individual; therefore, speculatively, we can speak only superficially about sin. The dialectic of sin is diametrically contrary to that of speculation [. . .] Christianity begins here – with the teaching about sin, and thereby the single individ-

57   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, KW 8, 91 / SKS 4, 427; see Grøn: Subjektivitet og negativitet, 42. 58   Ibid., KW 8, 48 / SKS 4, 359; see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 40. 59   W. Shakespeare, Hamlet (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 2.1.62, 199. 60   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety, KW 8, 49 / SKS 4, 360; see A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 40. 61   Kierkegaard, The Point of View, KW 22, 114 / SKS 16, 94; see A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 391. 62   Ibid., KW 22, PV 37 / SKS 16, 22

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

97

ual [. . .] for God in Christ there live only single individuals (sinners). Yet, God can very well encompass the whole; he can take care of the sparrows to boot.63

The emphasis on »sin« as the Christian individuation of the single individual does not mean that the world-historical, epochal meaning of the category that Hegel points to is irrelevant to Kierkegaard. Grøn adds that the epochal significance of Kierkegaard lies in his concept of the single individual as a category of thinking and not just as »that single individual.« In retrospect, Kierkegaard notes that it was considered »peculiar,« an »invention of eccentricity,« but adds: »I would not trade having brought it forth decisively at the time, I would not trade it for a kingdom. If the crowd is the evil, if it is chaos that threatens, there is rescue in one thing only, in becoming the single individual, in that rescuing thought: that single individual.«64The point Grøn emphasizes is that Kierkegaard’s diagnosis of the wretchedness of his time has a presupposition that »shakes his distinction between inner and outer history,« which the formula otherwise seems to consolidate. The world historical is now no longer only external, but »touch upon the innermost, the personal, which is the truth.«65 The movement of return to the world, the ethical substance, marks the difference between resignation (withdrawal) and faith. Grøn points out how »the single individual« is the category par excellence of the authorship. The principle of subjectivity is the Copernican turn that touches upon the outer history of the time, the kin, and the era. The category calls on the theory of subjectivity so as to obviate that the single individual is reduced in a dualistic understanding of inner and outer and, hence, as a pretense of retraction and social withdrawal. The latter, according to Grøn, is an undialectical reduction of Kierkegaardian concepts like appropriation, inwardness, and redoubling. Grøn quotes once more from The Point of View: »The single individual is then not a category among others, but ›the category through which, in a religious sense, the age, history, the human race must go‹.«66 Grøn opposes the tendency in Kierkegaard and Kierkegaardians to rhetorically downplay the theoretical scope of the category in terms of liberation, self-knowledge, and reconciliation in the external world as well as in the inner history of the single individual. The single individual is the category through which everything must go – including the single individual herself. The redoubling is a Kantian universalization: the »I think,« or rather, »I exist« that should be able to accompany all of my acts, passions, intentions, thoughts, and ideas. The redoubling is the play between the transcendental and the empirical or phenomenological »I« that Kierkegaard transposes from the concepts 63   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 120 – 121 / SKS 11, 124 – 125: Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 282. 64   Kierkegaard, The Point of View, KW 22, 69 / SKS 16, 49. 65   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 392 (my translation). 66   Kierkegaard, The Point of View, KW 22, 118 / SKS 16, 98; see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 392.

98

Carsten Pallesen

of epistemology to the concepts of existence-relation, an »existentialization« of Kant’s Copernican turn, as Theunissen has put it, for which Kierkegaard develops new categories and concepts.67

9.  Self-representation and the criteria In another passage, Anti-Climacus, determines »spirit« by the degree of self-consciousness, which can indeed be very poor.68 The Danish term »forestilling« alludes to both representation and normative criteria, which is also the case in Hegel’s »Vorstellung« (and »Darstellung«). In Sickness, self-consciousness in the face of something other is the criterion by which the religious determines »sin before God.« Sin is negatively intensified self-awareness, which is a theological qualification of the concept of negativity in the title Subjektivitet og negativitet. The passage reads as follows: A self directly before Christ is a self intensified by the inordinate concession from God, intensified by the inordinate accent that falls upon it because God allowed himself to be born, become man, suffer, and die also for the sake of this self.69

The preface of Sickness elaborates the »inordinate concession« that accentuates the single individual as the single individual: »to venture wholly to become oneself, an individual human being, this specific individual human being, alone before God.«70 The absolute criterion of the negativity of sin »before God« eliminates other criteria by which a self assesses herself. The various self-representations where we compare and disclaim ourselves and others must be broken: a person must appropriate herself through decision and will, but in this there is no powerful bloody-minded self-possessing, but a reversal, articulated paradoxically as, »a person can only become herself by winning herself, but she only wins herself by losing herself.«71 The consciousness of sin and its experience of how the self does not know or »have« itself, the »inordinate concession« conveys that identity isn’t something the individual »can or ought to produce, [. . . rather,] identity is to be given.«72 The dogmatic concept of sin in Kierkegaard is interpreted psychologically as the phenomena of despair as »intensified despair«73 and, accordingly, »to 67   M. Theunissen, »Das Menschbild in der Krankheit zum Tode,« in Materialen zur Philosophie Søren Kierkegaards, ed. M. Theunissen and W. Greve (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1978), 497. 68   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 342. 69   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 83 / SKS 11, 225; see Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 342. 70   Ibid., KW 19, 17 / SKS 11, 117: Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 342. 71   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 389. 72   Ibid., 324. 73   Ibid., 326.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

99

despair is the sin instar omnium.«74 Sin is an active doing and simultaneously a suffering that happens to you.

10.  The »change of eternity« The single individual is individuated in order for its self-representation to be broken and for its relation to others to undergo »the change of eternity,« as Works of Love phrases it.75 This change is an unconditional obligation: »You shall love.«76 The love commandment is the point where the inner turns outwards, and the neighbor becomes oneself. »If one is to love the neighbor as oneself, then the commandment, as with a pick, wrenches open the lock of self-love and wrests it away from a person.«77 Self-love, then, is broken by the commandment to love the neighbor by the addition as yourself. »The concept ›neighbor‹ is actually the redoubling of your own self; ›the neighbor‹ is what thinkers call ›the other‹.«78 Self-love is sublated but not eliminated into love of the neighbor by Kierkegaard’s explicit reference to the Hegelian notion of »redoubling:« »[W]hat self-love unconditionally cannot endure is redoubling and the commandment’s as yourself is a redoubling.«79 This is evident in Kierkegaard’s reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan. Here, the Hegelian redoubling is contained in the reversal of the question »Who was the neighbor to the man who has fallen among robbers?«80 The neighbor is the one who performs the duty, not exclusively the one who is in distress. Works of Love reveals the Hegelian dialectics of recognition as the social ontological presupposition for Kierkegaard’s interpretation of the commandment of love, which Grøn has often pointed out. With the distinction introduced above between the homoiosious and homoousios, Kierkegaard expounds the ethical implication of the homoousios. The »change of eternity« changes the perception of the other as a relation of comparison to a relation of identity.

11.  On self-presence and conscience: Upbuilding discourses Kierkegaard’s upbuilding discourses articulate the concept of the single individual as the addressee and reader in the hypothetical and examining style of representation. The discourses serve as a guiding thread for Grøn’s exposition of the thesis 74

  Ibid., 336. EO II, 185 / SKS 3, 183.   Kierkegaard, Works of Love, KW 16, 18 / SKS 9, 26. 76   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 235. 77   Kierkegaard, Works of Love, KW 16, 17 / SKS 9, 25. 78   Ibid., KW 16, 21 / SKS 9, 29. 79   Ibid.; see also Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111. 80   Ibid., KW 16, 22 / SKS 9, 30. 75

100

Carsten Pallesen

that »the religious categories« belong to »the theory of subjectivity.«81 The 1846 discourse »The Lily of the Field and the Bird of the Air« revolves around self-presence and the topic of »the occasion« that is the present. The reader is to learn from the bird and the flower how to become present to oneself today, through silence, obedience, and joy, and thus not worry about tomorrow. The immediacy of man is, contrary to that of nature, an »acquired« originality: This acquired originality in the lily and the bird is in turn simplicity [. . .] But their teaching of joy, which their lives in turn express, is quite briefly as follows: There is a today; it is indeed, an infinite emphasis falls upon this is. There is a today and there is no worry, none whatever, about tomorrow or about the day after tomorrow. This is not light-mindedness on the part of the lily and the bird but is the joy of silence and obedience.82

This passage articulates the simplicity and self-awareness of the single individual »right before God« as a second immediacy, beyond the worldly worry for tomorrow, but without poetic illusions about nature. The human being’s determination is to exist as spirit. Of particular interest for the topic of the single individual in Grøn are the passages in the grand »On the Occasion of a Confession« from Upbuilding Discourses in Diverse Spirits.83 Kierkegaard here talks about »becoming oneself the single individual.« To become present to oneself is a question of (wanting a) conscience and hence of the will to know. The question is: »Are you living in such a way that you are conscious of being a single individual?«84 Grøn comments that the difference is a difference in consciousness, but that consciousness again is a difference in the way of life. This consciousness is conscience, i. e. the fundamental consciousness in a person. Conscience »captures the ambiguity in being and becoming the single individual.«85 In the preface to the unpublished Judge for Yourself! Kierkegaard writes: »What does it mean to be and to will to be the single individual? It means to have and to will to have a conscience.«86 »On the Occasion of a Confession« is dedicated to the single individual. It starts with a preface, a call to the reader the discourse hopes to find: an implicit reader who renders the speaker superfluous. The reader is instructed to read the discourse as if she was speaking to herself. As the whisper of a prompter at a theater, the reader is supposed to hear the voice of her own conscience. Thus, and in similar tropes, Kierkegaard describes the relation between the one who writes and the one who reads.87 In the upbuilding discourses, the singular individual is evoked and staged as a theatrum internum.

81

  Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW 12, 45 / SKS 7, 68.   Kierkegaard, »The Lily in the Field and The Bird of the Air,« KW 18, 38 / SKS 11, 42. 83   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 196, 396, 403 – 404. 84   Kierkegaard, »On the Occasion of a Confession,« KW 15, 127 / SKS 8, 229. 85   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 396. 86   Kierkegaard, Judge for Yourself!, KW 21, 91 / SKS 16, 149 87   Kierkegaard, »On the Occasion,« KW 15 120 / SKS 8, 221. 82

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

101

The discourse, as the writer states, is without authority and occasion: a preparation for a confession that never takes place. Confession was legally mandatory for all citizens, and the required preparation for the annual Communion. The upbuilding discourses hence represent a withdrawal in the face of Kierkegaard’s contemporary political and religious authorities. The officially prescribed ritual of confession is replaced by a virtual – and potentially subversive – space of reading: [This book] seeks that single individual, to whom it gives itself wholly, by whom it wishes to be received as if it had arisen in his own heart, that single individual whom I with joy and gratitude call my reader, that single individual, who willingly reads slowly, reads repeatedly, and who reads aloud – for his own sake. If it finds him, then in the remoteness of separation the understanding is complete when he keeps the book and the understanding to himself in the inwardness of appropriation.88

With Kierkegaard’s staged, inauthentic, upbuilding discourses we no longer find ourselves in the in »real terms existing« realm of Christendom, but in the sphere of a contemplated and virtual Christianity experimentally played like »a dream during daytime« in the reader’s theatrum internum.89 In German theology and philosophy around the year 1800, the cultured people perceived religion on the basis of the farewell discourses of the Gospel of John, chapters 14 – 16.90 The dialectics of »Vorstellung« and concept in Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit announces the staged or anachronistic character of religion at the time. Consequently Schleiermacher’s Reden from 1799 invokes the »spoken« religion; a »religion without God« that is supposed to fill in for the dead religion of the book, the bourgeois establishement, and the state.91 With Schleiermacher and Hegel’s departure from religion as letter, text, cult, dogma, morality, and civil chastity, religion transfers to the »spoken« (but still read) religion. In the wake of Hegel and Schleiermacher, the upbuilding discourses invoke religion as a new practice in Christianity yet to be explored, after the departure from the statuesque religion, and, hence, Derrida’s »religion without religion.«92 The upbuilding discourses are no less ironic or dialectical than the works from the pseudonymous authorship, quite the opposite: only in the discourses does Kierkegaard specifically expand on that which is advertised in the theoretical sketches as the method of indirect communication. In the face of e. g. Heidegger’s elimination of dialectics and irony in Kierke88

  Ibid., KW 15, 5 / SKS 8, 121.   Ibid., KW 15, 5 / SKS 8, 121. 90   D. Weidner, »Geist, Wort, Liebe. Das Johannesevangeliums um 1800,« in Das Buch der Bücher – gelesen. Lesarten der Bibel in den Wissenschaften und Künsten, eds. S. Martus and A. Polaschegg (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 435 – 470. 91   G. Bader, »Spirit and Letter – Letter and Spirit in Schleiermacher’s Speeches ›On Religion‹,« in The Spirit and The Letter. A Tradition and a Reversal, eds. P. S. Fiddes and G. Bader (London: T&T Clark Bloomsbury, 2013), 131 – 155. 92   Ibid., 149 – 151. 89

102

Carsten Pallesen

gaard, Theunissen points out that dialectics follow through, and are intensified, in Kierkegaard’s upbuilding authorship.93

12. The soliloquies of the single individual In his self-effacing preface to »On the Occasion of a Confession« the speaker /  author of the discourse perceives his task to be an anonymous seamstress94 or prompter.95 The reader, thus, is given the role of reciter or actor, who is to imitate the movements presented in the text in his inward stage. The single individual is the protagonist and the discourses are his or her soliloquies addressed to him- or herself like the great monologues in Hamlet. The upbuilding monologue offers a sonic space for the single individual as a persona who speaks and listens to the voice of her conscience, or prefers not to.96 Silence here plays an important role as a call of conscience and a metaphor of the eternal.97 Grøn argues that Kierkegaard’s diagnostical method in Sickness is not monological, but rather dialogical and dialectical.98 Dedicating some of his upbuilding discourses to the single individual with the careful instruction that the text is to be read aloud, Kierkegaard renders the reader both reader and protagonist in an act that blends appropriation of ideas with the own voice.99 Upbuilding soliloquy is a Socratic art that prompts the self-activity of an inward appropriation in order that one may become aware of oneself as a single individual. The subject of Kierkegaard’s upbuilding theatrum internum is the single individual that articulates herself in soliloquies. These discourses of the »inner wo / man« are explorations of what Harold Bloom takes to be revolutionary in Shakespeare’s art of monologue. Bloom claims that the great monologues are the »royal road to individuation.« The characters develop not so much through the plot as by overhearing themselves talking to others and to themselves: Self-overhearing is their royal road to individuation, and no other writer, before or since Shakespeare, has accomplished so well the virtual miracle of creating utterly different yet self-consistent voices for his more than one hundred major characters and many hundreds of highly distinctive minor personages.100

 93   M. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung, Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993), 45 – 52; see also Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 232.  94   Kierkegaard, »On the Occasion,« KW 15, 5 / SKS 8, 121.  95   Ibid., KW 15, 120 / SKS 8, 221.  96   Ibid., KW 15, 128 – 129 / SKS 8, 228 – 229.  97  Ibid.  98   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 30 – 35.  99   E. g. Kierkegaard, »On the Occasion,« KW 15, 5 / SKS 8, 121. 100   H. Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human (New York, NY: Riverhead Books, 1998), xvii.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

103

The articulation of the ideas of a self to the self in the voice of a particular fictive figure, presents to the reader ambiguous shapes of consciousness such as concern and fickleness, indignation, despair, and anxiety, through which a self can cut him- or herself off from being present and attentive towards herself. According to Bloom, the »inward theater« in the modern drama since Shakespeare is a non-religious development of the »inner man« invented by Luther in his 1520 discourse on »Christian Freedom.«101 Kierkegaaard’s upbuilding discourses represent a further »unpacking of this heart« in the soliloquies of the »inner man.«102

13.  The soliloquies of absolute Spirit Hegel’s concept of representation (Vorstellung) with its theatrical implication pervades his philosophy of Spirit.103 Here, various historical shapes of self-consciousness are presented from the point of view by which they relate to and articulate themselves on the inner as well as the outer scene. Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit has been perceived as a »theater of memory.«104 Monologues, figures, and positions are pictured as personified moments in the overall movement of Spirit from substance to subject.105 This movement is propelled by Hegel’s speculative and dialectical method of monological »self-overhearing.« In the self-presentation of the figures of consciousness (e. g. stoicism, skepticism, the beautiful soul, etc.) they become present to themselves as concrete criteria and limitations to be superseded by more satisfying historical forms and shapes. »Vorstellung« (representation) is the dramatic catchword of Hegel’s philosophy of religion. This philosophical concept is the movement of unity and sublation of phenomenological and historical representation.106 The world-historical drama of the philosophy of Spirit plays out in the struggle between representation and concept. Absolute Spirit recollects and internalizes outer representation, whereby subjectivity becomes a figure on the outer scene as well as in the single individual’s inward appropriation of self. The spiritual driver and telos of the struggle is the elaboration of the consciousness of freedom and its social and communicative contexts. The task of philosophy and theology is to interpret the contradictions of the modern world in adequate thoughts and theories. The turning point of the Hegelian philosophy of Spirit is the passion of Christ, where substance »in the night it was betrayed« made itself into subject.107 Sub101

  Ibid., 741.   W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, 2. 2. l 575, 235. 103   J. A. Bates, Hegel and Shakespeare on Moral Imagination (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2010). 104   S. Critchley, Memory Theater (London: Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2014), 29 – 32. 105   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 15 – 20, 230. 106   Ricœur, »The Status of ›Vorstellung‹,« 70 – 90. 107   Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §§  703 – 4, 426 – 427. 102

104

Carsten Pallesen

jectivity then becomes an indispensible moment in the absolute and vice versa, and substance is appropriated as subjectivity. Finite subjectivity – the human as such – is charged with infinite meaning and truth that overturns the representational model, i. e. the dualistic perception of objectivity and subjectivity. Representational thinking is replaced by the model of Spirit, i. e. a dynamic structure of self-relation and otherness that has its theological paradigm in the patristic concept of homoousion. Here, the criterion is the relation of God to the single individual as the single individual. Hegel calls this farewell to representation »speculative Good Friday.« The agony of the God-man is simultaneously the agony of representational thinking.108 The deconstruction of representational thinking in the Passion of Christ announces the sending / departing of the Holy Spirit from the Father and the Son. The representation of the end – the Christian Passover – is the end of representation, and the breakthrough of the single individual as an indispensible moment of the Absolute. Following this, the category of the self-determined single individual is ratified as a category above the common. Accordingly, Hegel thinks of the Christian passion as the last, irrevocable representation, wherein the moments of tragedy and comedy are staged and sublated into the new shape of the Absolute, i. e. the model of Spirit. The Holy Spirit, then, is the ongoing interiorization, interpretation, and actualization of this event and its absolute significance in the midst of the confessing congregation.109 Absolute religion exceeds the ethical, substantial religion of art of Greek tragedy. The movement of the concept of revealed religion accentuates forgiveness, confession, and recognition. Following this theory, subjectivity and the religious categories are inextricably related in that both are intensified by negativity, passion, death, sin, and forgiveness. The shattering of representational thinking results from existential and speculative reduplication. Redoubling and »double-reflection«, then, are central to Grøn’s oeuvre. Kierkegaard’s concepts are marked by the already partly outlived paradigms of German idealism and romanticism. Infinite reduplication is pervasive in Kierkegaard, for whom this brief epoch in the history of philosophy already belongs in the archives, introducing himself as a »campus«-romanticist / idealist. The pregiven intellectual context and horizon, which Kant instigated and Hegel ends, is the frame or scene in which Kierkegaard places his definitive accents and counter moves. However, on Rebecca Comay’s reading, this »anachronistic« situation also applies to Hegel’s account of the end of philosophy at the end of the Phenomenology. Hegel here recapitulates the history of Spirit and the results exposed by the previous seven chapters. In the inner and outer theater of memory, Spirit mirrors 108   P. Ricœur, »Philosopher après Kierkegaard,« 42; see also G. W. F. Hegel, Glauben und Wissen, in Werke 2, ed. E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michels (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), 432. 109   Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §  753, §§  784 – 787, 455, 475 – 478.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

105

itself in a »gallery of images,«110 and by the time of the arrival at »absolute knowledge« Spirit will have »missed its own moment.«111 The failure of Absolute Idealism unleashes the existential dialectics and deconstructive hermeneutics as an unthought Hegelian heritage to be explored in Kierkegaard and contemporary thought. The negativity of Absolute Spirit is a self-inflicted wound modeled on the Lutheran theology of the cross. It interiorizes shortcomings and missed revolutions. Its memory, and hence Hegel’s philosophical interpretation of world history, consist in an account of what Spirit has endured, lost, and missed, including its memory.112 Only what still hurts spurs the memory. Hegel announces this philosophy as the »way of despair.«113 Chapter 8 – »Absolute knowing« – intensifies the Christian concession and confession of sin that Hegel had just introduced as a counter to Kantian morality, the terror of the French Revolution, and Rousseau’s and Goethe’s confessions of the beautiful soul. Divine forgiveness and mutual recognition remain in the internal movement of Absolute Spirit. Grøn interprets Kierkegaard’s criteriology of the Absolute as the self ’s ideas and criteria of herself being broken or interrupted. The ideals and criteria are measured according to the absolute: whether or not the single individual is conscious of him- or herself as, or wanting to be, a self »directly before God.« The ultimate theological criterion reveals whether the self is determined by oneself, by others, before God, or spiritlessly does not even wish to be aware of being a single individual.

14. Dialectics of spirit On Grøn’s account, self-relation is articulated in the medium of representation by reference to the underlying conceptual structure and movement of the spirit. The concept here is the philosophical effort to hold together the opposing moments of the self in its temporal existence. The criterion of the concept is the inherent rationality of reality as a historical process seen from the perspective of eternity that itself has become historicized in the Christ event, and has hence undergone the »change of eternity.« This change is already accomplished in the faith, representation, and feeling of the congregation. Meanwhile, Hegel’s concept of Spirit is articulated in its movement from substance to subject as an ongoing process towards concreteness in terms of love, freedom, and mutual recognition in the 110

  Ibid., § 808.   R. Comay, Mourning Sickness. Hegel and the French Revolution (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011), 127. 112   Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, § 32, 19. 113   Ibid., Introduction § 78, 49. 111

106

Carsten Pallesen

realm of world history, states, and institutions. The philosophy of spirit elaborates and articulates the social, economic, and political contradictions and paradoxes that the normative claim discloses in the emerging modern world. Contradictions are perceived as challenges to be met and developed with relevant institutional responses. Spirit, then, is a diagnostic and critical concept. The wounds of negativity have not healed, Climacus claims. Hegel notoriously claimed the opposite: »the wounds of Spirit heal and leave no scars behind.«114 Faith, hope, and love are dialectical passions in the life of the spirit; the same goes for Kierkegaard’s perception of wounds, scars, sickness and health. »In the life of the spirit, everything is dialectical« and dialectics is a way of »holding together opposites.«115 Grøn emphasizes the interchange of passivity and activity, suffering and joy, as the dialectics of faith. For Kierkegaard, passion and dialectics are interwoven. Faith and love are passions in which the human basic condition emerges through social and sexual differences. The negative passions – sufferings – are determined by what they suffer from, e. g. offense, despair, spiritlessness. Insofar as the passions are determinations of the spirit, wholesomeness and sickness are dialectical. Wholesomeness is the ability to absolve oppositions.116 Grøn makes this argument with a non-dialectical understanding of decision and appropriation as an unrelenting heroism or a non-dialectical being.117 In Kierkegaard, decision and humiliation, faith and indignation, hope and despair remain dialectical. Faith is the most intensive form of self-activity, but passivity and receptivity are fundamental to faith.118 Hope is »hope against hopelessness;«119 faith is faith against reason. Kierkegaard extravasates a non-dialectical distinction between creation and revelation, natural theology and revelation.120

15. Conclusion Arne Grøn’s thesis inspires anew to read not only Kierkegaard but the text Climacus calls »the original text of human existence-relationships.«121 The significance of the authorship is »to have no importance:«

114

  Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, § 669, 407; see also Comay, Mourning Sickness, 129 – 130; C. Malabou, »Again: ›The wounds of Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind‹,« Mosaic 40 (2007), 27 – 37. 115   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 94 / SKS 11, 228. 116   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 360. 117   Ibid., 352 – 370. 118   Ibid., 357. 119   Ibid., 364 – 370. 120   Ibid., 297. 121   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW  12, 630 / SKS 7, 573.

The Single Individual as the Single Individual

107

[I]n the opposite, in wanting to have no importance, in wanting, at a remove that is the distance of double-reflection, once again to read through solo, if possible in a more inward way, the original text of individual human existence-relationships, the old familiar text handed down from the fathers.122

This response to Grøn’s Subjektivitet og negativitet has focused on the dialectics of recognition implied in the concept of spirit. Kierkegaard distinguishes between a theological self (credo) and a metaphysical self (cogito).123 The dogmatic determination of sin and faith is the line of demarcation between philosophy and theology, whereas the concept of Spirit is used in both. This interpretation of the spirit is a legitimate unfolding of the Nicene Creed as a simultaneously deconstructive and radical constructive destabilization of representational thinking. The latter is entailed in Climacus’s definition of the incarnation as an »absolute Fact.«124 I propose that we should interpret the theological emphasis in Grøn’s interpretation of the singular individual »directly before God,« and the equally unmodified claim that the self in the commandment to love the neighbour is »only a self in relation to the other self«125 as an appropriation of »the old familiar text handed down from the fathers.« The internal relations and movements between the divine persons expressed in the patristic formula are the theological eqvivalents to the particle »as« in Kierkegaard’s category of the single individual.126 In his phrase »at a remove that is the distance of double-reflection, once again,« Climacus invites a radical reduction of the biblical testimony to the Nicene formula – a more inward re-reading of the patristic text, i. e. the homoousion. The particle »as« and the Nicene homoousion serve as a guideline to identify the repetition and reduplication as the pervasive biblical and theological signature of Kierkegaard’s theory of subjectivity. Re-reading and re-writing are signatures of the biblical text and of the theological concepts of God, Spirit, and subjectivity as structures of self-relating systems. This quote about the arche-writing, »Urskrift,« which Kierkegaard repeats in the preface to Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays,127 complies not only with the repetitive formulas of the Nicene con-substantiality such as »light of light,« »God of God,« but also with what Erich L. Santner identifies as a stylistic device of »ibidity« and »ex-citation« in the Hebrew Bible.128 Grøn points to the lack of conceptual and theoretical unfolding in Kierkegaard’s central thesis that the »religious categories belong to the theory of subjectiv122

 Ibid.   Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 93 / SKS 11, 206. 124   Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, KW 7, 99 – 100 / SKS 4, 297. 125   Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet, 129. 126   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW  12, 630 / SKS 7, 573. 127   Kierkegaard, Two Discourses at the Communion on Fridays, KW 18, 161 / SKS 12, 281. 128   E. L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life. Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2001), 50. 123

108

Carsten Pallesen

ity.«129 The present response is an exploration of the categorical, or at least hermeneutical and auto-deconstructive implication of the homoousia.130 The application of this quasi-concept to Grøn’s theory of subjectivity is a wager that invites further elaboration.

129

  Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW  12, 45 / SKS 7, 68. 130   Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 151.

In Quest for Identity The Self as (a) Stranger to Himself* Hans-Christoph Askani »Esteem it a great matter, to play but one man.«1 »It is all about understanding oneself – yet differently.«2

1. Introduction Even though we understand, when we understand, this does not mean that we are capable of staging our understanding. When self-understanding is implicit in understanding it seems that we can manage ourselves. The idea is that we are at home in self-understanding, since it is us who understand – ourselves. Self-understanding then appears as a kind of immanence that we establish through understanding (with) ourselves. Perhaps we should put into question this presupposition of the immanence of (self‑)understanding.3

These are the words of Danish Kierkegaardian and philosopher of subjectivity Arne Grøn, published in his article Eindruck – Ausdruck. A central theme in his work concerns the unlimited demand for, and coinciding limits of, our understanding, that is, the persistence and resistance of the foreign against which our

*  This essay is a modified and elaborated version of a lecture given at the symposium »Politiques des frontières: tracer, traverser, effacer« organised by the Association des théologiens pour l’étude de la morale (ATEM) in Sète, September 1st to 3rd, 2016. I am very grateful to Evelyne de Mevius for her diligent work in translating this essay from French to English. 1   »Magnam rem puta unum hominem agere.« (Seneca, Ep, 120; quoted in M. de Montaigne, Essays, II.I, in Œuvres complètes (Bibliothèque de la Pléiade), ed. A. Thibaudet and M. Rat (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 321: »Songe que ce n’est pas rien d’être toujours le même.« For the English version: Idem, Essays, II.I, 2nd, trans. J. Florio (London: David Nutt, 1603). 2   A. Grøn, »Eindruck – Ausdruck,« in Fremde Spiegelungen. Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn, ed. S. Frohoff et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 11 – 20, 20 (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz): »Es geht darum, sich anders zu verstehen.« 3   Ibid., 17 (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz). In German: »Obwohl wir verstehen, wenn wir verstehen, können wir unser Verstehen nicht inszenieren. Wenn Selbst-Verstehen im Verstehen impliziert ist, scheinen wir uns im Griff zu haben. Die Unterstellung dabei ist, dass wir im Selbst-Verstehen zu Hause sind. Denn wir sind es ja, die – uns – verstehen. Selbst-Verstehen kommt uns dann als eine Art Immanenz vor, die wir (mit) uns durch das Verstehen etablieren. Vielleicht sollten wir aber diese Voraussetzung – die Immanenz des (Selbst‑) Verstehens – in Frage stellen.«

110

Hans-Christoph Askani

understanding thrusts. Grøn turns this theme into an object of careful reflection in a lecture held in 2012 and published in 2015 under the title »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen.«4 Is Widerfahrnis on one end and understanding on the other, clearly separated from each another? If this were the case, human beings, who cannot but understand themselves, would inevitably attempt to comprehend and integrate Widerfahrnis in their understanding. That incomprehensible events do take place must, according to this perspective, be acknowledged as inevitable – even as »evident« – and thereby accepted as a »side effect,« while the concept of the understanding is left unaffected. Grøn, however, is not satisfied with this picture. He wants to bring Widerfahrnis not just into the realm of understanding, but also into the very concept of understanding. If Widerfahrnis, with all its resistance, foreignness, unpredictability, and incomprehensibility, so intimately belongs to our humanness and self-understanding that it inevitably affects the structure of our understanding, then the intelligibility of our self-understanding would require Widerfahrnis, which is and remains foreign. Grøn’s statement that »it remains an open question whether or not we actually understand what we think we understand«5 is not a sober and resigned conclusion of philosophical reflection, but rather an invitation to consider how to position and orient our questioning. If Widerfahrnis both does and does not belong to it, then how are we to interpret »understanding«? How are we to make sense of this concept if Widerfahrnis, which transcends »understanding,« not only resides beyond, but is localized »in« it? Does this not produce a tension that we need to endure and interpret, and that stems from the fact that the self is neither completely given to, nor completely withdrawn from, itself? The human being is kept in this openness, where activity and passivity,6 immanence and transcendence7 are entangled. 4   A. Grøn, »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« in Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. I. U. Dalferth et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 47 – 59. The meaning of Widerfahrnis is particularly difficult to translate into English, so the German word is maintained in the rest of the text. The concept means »that which happens to a person beyond that person’s control.« 5   Ibid., 57 (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz). In German: »Es bleibt offen, ob wir das verstehen, was wir zu verstehen meinen.« 6   In the second and third sections of »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« Grøn, in a discussion on Levinas, engages in a thorough examination of »passivity« – a theme to which he constantly returns throughout his authorship, for instance in the article »Eindruck – Ausdruck« (13, 17, 18). Referring to Augustine’s Confessions, he writes: »The self cannot include the ›otherwise,‹ this otherness [Anderheit] of understanding, into its self-understanding. Thereby the passivity of the self becomes more manifest: as the passivity of self-understanding. In self-understanding, we try to avoid that we just suffer from that which happens to us; in fact, we try to relate ourselves actively to that which happens to us. And yet, one must also ›suffer‹ in self-understanding in having to carry oneself.« (Grøn, »Eindruck – Ausdruck,« 19 (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz)) In German: »Das Selbst kann dieses ›anders‹, diese Anderheit des Verstehens nicht ins Selbst-Verstehen einbringen. Damit tritt die Passivität des Selbst noch stärker hervor, und zwar als Passivität des Selbst-Verstehens. Im

In Quest for Identity

111

Grøn argues that »self-understanding is [. . .] in itself already a question of understanding-otherwise and of understanding-the-other [eine Frage des Andersverstehens und des Verstehens des Anderen].«8 Understanding is thus something other than an epistemological movement originating in the subject, and can be illustrated with the figure of a – possibly expanding – circle, the end of which joins the beginning. When trying to understand my »own« self, I enter an openness that is not arbitrary but constitutive, in the sense that it cannot be disregarded. In self-understanding, one’s own is not given without the foreign, and the foreign is not given without one’s own. What this actually means and how we are to conceptualize the relation between being-oneself and being-foreign [Selbstsein und Fremdsein] is the topic of this essay. I will begin with the concrete experience of encountering strangers, as it has always taken place in the history of mankind, but which has recently become urgent in the current situation of refugees and migrants seeking shelter in foreign lands. The aim of this investigation is to see how far the encounter with the stranger and »the other« reaches into our self-understanding: not only into the understanding of the self, but also in the self that tries to understand itself.

2.  The stranger outside of me: excitement, irritation, fear A few years ago in Germany, one would sometimes encounter the following antifear slogan: »We are all foreigners – almost everywhere!«9 These words are both liberating and irritating in that they open up an unexpected horizon: Not only are the others foreigners to us, but we, too, are foreigners to »them.« If this was all there was to it, that first shock would quickly ease off. Indeed we are foreigners, and in many more countries than those we could call our homeSelbst-Verstehen versuchen wir zu vermeiden, dass wir nur unter dem leiden, was uns zustößt; wir versuchen vielmehr, uns auch aktiv zu dem zu verhalten, was uns zustößt. Dennoch muss man sich im Selbst-Verstehen ›leiden‹: d. h. sich ertragen.« (Ibid., 19) In »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« Grøn argues pointedly: »We also find a Widerfahrnis [i. e. something that happens to us, befalls us] in (self‑)understanding, and that which is at stake in what befalls us in the Widerfahrnis (of other people) is understanding. Understanding begins in passivity (Grøn,«Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,» 58 (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz). In German:«Im (Selbst‑)Verstehen liegt also ein Widerfahrnis, und im Widerfahrnis (des Anderen) geht es um Verstehen. Verstehen beginnt in der Passivität.« 7   See also A. Grøn, »Beyond? Horizon, Immanence, and Transcendence,« in Phenomenology and Religion: New Frontiers, ed. I. Bornemark and H. Ruin (Huddinge: Södertörn University, 2010), 223 – 241. 8   »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« 51. See also »Eindruck – Ausdruck,« 17: »In self-understanding there always lurks something other as well [. . .] We have to understand ourselves. This is a way of having-oneself, while it is questionable whether or how we › have‹ ourselves.« (trans. R. Rosfort and C. Welz) In German: »Im Selbst-Verstehen steckt immer auch etwas Anderes. [. . .] Wir haben uns zu verstehen. Dies ist eine Weise des Sich-Habens, wobei in Frage steht, wie und ob wir uns ›haben‹.« 9   »Wir sind alle Ausländer – fast überall!«

112

Hans-Christoph Askani

lands, but luckily this applies to everyone. To be a stranger is equally distributed: it affects everyone in his or her own way, and somehow things are equalled out – or so it seems. However, is the statement »We are all foreigners – almost everywhere!« really the whole truth? Does the reassuring generalization and the generalizing reassurance that arises after the first surprise correspond to our experience; our self-understanding? Do we not have to acknowledge that, contrary to our first impression, the slogan is also false in that its claim fails to correspond to our attitude toward our fellow human beings? The slogan is true if one looks at the earth from above. Only then do I see that the countries that are not »mine« are much more numerous than »mine.« But one has to consider the other side as well: that in everyday life, this perspective does not interest me. As a French, German, Danish citizen, I am at home here (in Europe), and if I am home, I am no foreigner. By contrast, if someone enters the field of my »home,« he is a foreigner, a stranger – and not me! »What does he want here? Why did he come? Why did he not stay home? How long will he stay? Does he want to feel at home the same way I feel home when at home?« Questions follow each other at such a speed that there is no time to search for or to listen to a possible answer. Is this not already a phenomenon of strangeness: the foreigner is too foreign for me to (want to) hear his answers. What is more, he is so foreign to me that I am unable or unwilling to hear the questions that could be his. For a better understanding of this mechanism, I indicated three key words in the title of this paragraph: 1. Excitement: We all know that strangeness is not only negative. We may travel because we love what is strange. Do we not need what is not like us? Do we not long for it? Otherwise our »world« would be too tight, too limited. We love what is strange, and admire its exoticism, on one condition, however: that we get to discover the foreign regions, not that the foreigner comes to us to impose his otherness upon us. 2. Irritation: What is strange (with an artificial yet precise word: »strangeness«) also irritates us, shakes us, »attacks« us. The stranger is other – he does, he manages, otherwise. Being at home means »at home, it is like this!« For instance, we eat in a certain way . . . »Here, this is the way it’s done!« I could have said, »This is the way we do it.« But this would not have been the exact formulation: Not only do we do it this way; at home, that’s the way it is! If guests come to our home, we let them do it their own way. We hold back. After all we invited them. They will leave . . . at midnight at the latest. The refugee was not invited, and we did not expect he would do otherwise. Besides, when will he leave? When will we again proceed as we have always done – without asking questions, just because »this is how we do it«? – When? Maybe never again. I call this »irritation,« in a sense that encompasses the broad semantic spectrum of the word »irritation.«

In Quest for Identity

113

3. Fear: We have just seen that there is a threshold, but also a shift, between excitement and irritation. Similarly, there is a shift that goes from irritation to something else: fear. The moment of this slippery transition is easily identifiable. It lies in the »perhaps never again« that unavoidably follows our »when will we again proceed as we have always done?« The fear of the stranger has to do with a self-evidentness we had, that was lost in the encounter with the stranger, and that may never return. It is therefore a challenge to ourselves that concerns our personal identity. And yet even if we can say when this fear begins, I am not sure that we can say exactly where it comes from. Strangeness »attacks us,« but how? It attacks us in its strangeness, by its strangeness. In ancient Greece, those who did not speak the Greek language were called βάρβαροι – »barbarians«. βάρβαροι is onomatopoeic, and denotes an incomprehensible, meaningless »br-br« (»blah blah«). They were barbarians because they did not speak a language in the full meaning of the word.10 Herodotus11 and Plato12 reveal that this (mis)understanding of the stranger, which is not only derogatory but radically exclusive, could not be sustained in the long run. But is the deprecating gesture imbued with the etymological sense of the word βάρβαροι merely inept? Is it not true that in experiencing the stranger, something incompatible is encountered? What does this mean for the question at hand?13 Strangeness is strange. I do not really understand the stranger, and – what is more – I have the right not to understand him. Is this in-comprehension not, so to speak, the meaning of strangeness: to not let itself be understood? If so, the category of »meaning« begins to dissolve (a meaning whose meaning would be to not let itself be understood!). Rimbaud spoke of a »derangement of all senses« in poetry, »un dérèglement de tous les sens.«14 I think of a derangement of our coordinates of understanding. This »derangement« takes place here – in the encounter with the strangeness of the stranger. 10   In the second song of the Iliad, Homer describes »Carians« as »men of a strange speech« (βαρβαραφώνων). The English translation of βαρβαραφώνων is quoted from The Iliad of Homer, ed. S. Butler (London / New York, NY: Longmans, Green and Co., 1898). 11   Herodotus, The Histories, trans. R. Waterfield (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), [Prooimion], 3. 12   Plato, Phaedo, trans. H. Tredennick, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), [109B], 90. 13   See R. Kosellek’s asymmetrische Gegenbegriffe: In certain situations a concrete group raises an exclusive claim to universality by linking a universal linguistic concept exclusively to itself, thereby rejecting any comparison. Such forms of self-determination produce asymmetric counter-concepts that discriminate against the excluded (R. Koselleck, Vergangene Zukunft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1979), 211 – 259, here 212). 14   »Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.« (A. Rimbaud, »Lettre à Paul Demeny 15 mai 1871,« in A. Rimbaud, La lettre du voyant (Paris: Presses du livre français, 1950)).

114

Hans-Christoph Askani

If strangeness is defined [. . .] by its inaccessibility, then the stranger is not incomparable, for that would still be a comparative qualification; he is rather subtracted from comparison, he is beyond any comparison.15

The Greek word βάρβαροι expresses precisely this intention to reject and exclude the threat of this type of otherness: »With them [the barbarians], we have nothing to do!« However, if in the encounter with strangeness the comparison no longer works, is this only due to the one we would like to compare (i. e. the stranger), or is it also due to the one we automatically compare him to (i. e. ourselves – our manners, convictions, culture . . .)? If the stranger is different from me to a degree of incompatibility (of radical inadequacy), is it only he who is profoundly strange? Is it not I as well? In other words: do I not prove myself to be different from myself? Does not this »bastion« – the me, my home, my »at home« – begin to move, to be undermined?

3. Attempts to think the »I« We can approach the »problem« of strangeness from several perspectives, because it concerns us in many ways. Beyond or below sociology, politics, etc., psychology – especially psychoanalysis – has its say. Strangeness is not only one of the themes of psychoanalysis. Rather, the strange, which unexpectedly interrupts or breaks into one’s own, is its central object of investigation. Freud’s discovery of the »unconscious« can thus be understood, and his famous statement »the ego is not master in its own house«16 does not invoke the metaphor of the »house« in vain. Often used to separate the strange or foreign from the familiar, this time it is positioned in a way that undermines this apparently self-evident delimitation. We are, then, dealing with the »uncanny« in our »own house« – at »home« – and this carves out the challenge for psychoanalysis.17 The main thesis of Freud’s »Das Unheimliche« (1919) revolves around Schelling’s idea that the uncanny is that which should remain secret and hidden, but has appeared.18 Freud extracts the fundamental insight that the uncanny is the frightening that can be traced back to the familiar.19 Referring to both clinical studies 15

  B. Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden. Studien zur Phänomenologie des Fremden  I (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1997), 50 (my translation). 16   S. Freud, Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12, ed. A. Freud et al. (London: Imago, 1947), 1 – 12, here 11 (my translation). 17   J.‑B. Pontalis, »Advertissement de l’éditeur,« in S. Freud, L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), 7: »[. . .] ce qui n’appartient pas à la maison et pourtant y demeure,« »c’est l’objet même de la psychanalyse: das Unheimliche.« 18   Freud, Eine Schwierigkeit der Psychoanalyse, 248: »Unheimlich nennt man alles, was im Geheimnis, im Verborgenen [. . .] bleiben sollte und hervorgetreten ist.« 19   Ibid., 244: »das Unheimliche sei jene Art des Schreckhaften, welche auf das Altbekannte, Längstvertraute zurückgeht.«

In Quest for Identity

115

and literary works, Freud then reveals the decisive role that »repression« plays in the »constitution« of the uncanny: the repressed »homely« becomes uncanny when it reappears.20 The Freudian theory of repression raises the question whether the psychoanalytical insight that the strange or alien can come from the outside to occupy space within one’s »own,« while at the same time undermining »ownness« is not just a gain but also a loss, since the strange or alien is, in the end, one’s own; an »old acquaintance.« Would it not be more fruitful to scale down the expectations of this theory and – instead of placing all strangeness in the inner life of the psyche – point out that the fear of the foreign is huge exactly because it corresponds to a fear of the foreign within ourselves?21 However, leaving science and psychoanalysis behind for now, to access the uncanny it is enough to think of ordinary everyday experiences that are not quite ordinary – situations, events, phenomena that lead us to experience a discrepancy with what seemed to be an identity resting in itself; a discrepancy that opens a space, a split, a void that does not close: The dreams that come without my having asked them to come; dreams that are mine and not mine. My body that sometimes wants what I want, and sometimes doesn’t, or that causes me pain. But how can it hurt me? Isn’t my body me? Or age: I look at myself in the mirror. If I have not seen this image recently, it starts to talk, »Is it me, these wrinkles? Is it me, the grey area below the eyes?« Who asks? And who is looking? Is it me, looking at my image in the mirror? Or is it my image looking at me? The I is not simply an I; the I. In former times, people used to talk about the ghosts that inhabit us. We now think ourselves too »enlightened« to believe in ghosts, but nightmares still exist. And tonight is yet to come. I talk about dreams, about the body, about age. We might as well speak of desire; of anxiety; of guilt, etc. Desire that always desires more; desire that ends up desiring its »own« desire. Why? Perhaps to fill a void that will never be filled. Why not? Because this void is perhaps me, or »in me« – a discrepancy in myself? Anxiety for which no reason can be identified yet cannot be persuaded to go away for lack of reasons; anxiety that, on the contrary, intensifies precisely because of this lack, because of the impossibility to be circumscribed; limited. Or guilt. Guilt that gnaws at me; guilt that gnaws at »my me . . .« 20   Ibid., 268: »daß das Unheimliche das Heimlich-Heimische ist, das eine Verdrängung erfahren hat und aus ihr wiedergekehrt ist, und daß alles Unheimliche diese Bedingung erfüllt.« 21   It is noteworthy that in the reception of Freud, the alterity of the stranger, which cannot be reduced to the inner life of the psyche, is again emphasized in relation to one’s own, as for example when Lacan says: »L’inconscient, c’est le discours de l’Autre.« (J. Lacan, Séminaire XIV, May 10, 1967), and J. Kristeva: »Étranger: rage étranglée au fond de ma gorge, ange noir troublant la transparence, trace opaque, insondable [. . .] Étrangement, l’étranger nous habite: il est la face cachée de notre identité, l’espace qui ruine notre demeure« (J. Kristeva, Etranges à nous-mêmes (Paris: Fayard, 1988), 9).

116

Hans-Christoph Askani

However, I do not want to follow this somewhat dramatic path of the bursting ego or I. I suggest a more serene track that I would like to open with a simple question: Where do I start, and where are the limits of my I? We usually have a very clear idea of this: I am me, you are an other, the world around us is another still. I know very well, maybe not who I am, but at least where I am, and where the limits of who I am are drawn. I would like to formulate the contrasting hypothesis that the I is a fragile and complex balance between extension and contraction. Against common assumption, I therefore claim that the I is not a stable but a flexible entity, which extends and contracts. Let us try to approach this idea with a few observations. I defend and affirm my I otherwise during an argument with my wife than in a dispute between our family and the one next door. Why? Because in the second case, I am committed to my family? Of course. However, is that all? Do I really remain the same restricted I, or does my I extend? Is there not a real transition between my individual I and the I – the We – of »my« (!) family? Once this kind of transition is initiated, it becomes highly flexible and applicable to different levels: I come from the city of Gex – I am Gexois. I was born in Germany – I am German. »We won the World Cup!« »We won fourteen gold medals.« »The Islamic State is attacking us!« Are all these formulations merely a metonymic discourse at the bottom of which lies the true I (pure and authentic), or do I need these enlargements to really talk about myself and to really conceive myself as who I am? If such extensions were avoidable, where would the need or the will (or both) come from to go beyond ourselves in order to become ourselves? In psychology, we know the patterns of identification and their importance for the evolution of the child and the adolescent. The child must transcend itself in order to become itself. But is this only a matter located at a psychological and pedagogical level, well framed because pedagogy pursues a goal in view of which concepts and strategies are conceived? Are we not dealing, in this specific context, with a level (that we could call »philosophical«) on which questions arise in a much more open way? I try to summarize, to assemble these possible questions in one: Don’t I need, in order to be what I am, to be what I am not? What I am may be described in terms of relationships. I am the child of x, a brother of y, a European, a Christian, a man, I am single or married . . . I am – my nationality. What is the purpose of this »game« of identifications and enlargements? Is it not the question of what place I should occupy, and must fill, so that I become – so that I am – an I? I am »ontologically« (in my being) unsettled if I am not more than what I am, but I am also »ontologically« unsettled if I am not very close to myself. I am an I in a reciprocity by which I belong to the world and the world belongs to me; by which I give and receive, yet if my I extends and ultimately embraces all the relationships that determine me, where is the centre of this I, my »true« I?

In Quest for Identity

117

It is easy enough to give a rudimentary description of a person. Looking at my passport, it gives my name, date of birth, nationality, gender, picture, fingerprint . . . I can affirm all this information, but do I recognize myself in it? Yes and no. The elements are accurate, but I also know that they are not I – not even my picture, nor my fingerprint. Not even the sum of all these elements. Where do I find the I that I really am? Is it not my body that circumscribes it? I am hungry – incontestably it is I! I am tired – of course it is I! I identical to my body! On the other hand, I still carry on with my lecture despite the itch; I read another page despite being tired. Could there, then, be an I that is even more mine than the one that is bound to my body? An I that, on the one hand, is infinitely wider because its thoughts, dreams, and aspirations carry it beyond the limits of the body, and that is simultaneously narrower than my body. As if whoever touched my body, saw it, and thought he knew it, would have never actually touched it, seen it, grasped it . . . Even if I do not play a role, and I am simply who I am, am I not another all the same, other than the one I claim to be; other than the one I present and represent; other than the one I know? As if »my true I« (what a peculiar expression: »my true I!«) were buried deep within me. (Here, one realizes that language struggles to follow and reach the reality it wants to reflect . . .) But am I hidden only to others? Am I not hidden also to myself? I know that I am I, but where is this I? In a distant past, there was an expression for this: the soul. The soul was – incontestably – the I. We became hesitant about this word. As if it said too much, and was inevitably carrying a too-broad imaginary: a metaphysical one, perhaps, or theological. However, as a notion of research – as a term that puts us on the path of research, of the search for the true I – this word may still be the most precise one we have. Somewhere the I must be, somewhere I must be – in an ultimate sense – truly I!

4.  The I and its specific openings Ernst Bloch opens his famous Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie with three sentences: »I am. But I do not own myself. Therefore we first become. [Ich bin. Aber ich habe mich nicht. Darum werden wir erst.]«22 This passage initiates a philosophy of hope, which – at odds with a long philosophical tradition – does not find its categories in the past or in the present, but in the future. It is the passage’s transitions that are interesting: between the first sentence and the second, and between the second and the third. The third sentence’s change from the first person singular to the plural allows the impasse of the juxtaposition of the first two sentences to become an opening. The same opening is due to the irruption 22   E. Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1963), vol. 1, 11 (my translation).

118

Hans-Christoph Askani

of a future that gives itself to man, and that gives man to himself in a new horizon. Thanks to this openness and utopian potential, Bloch manages to convey the possibility of a future that is not (at least not completely) determined by the consequences of what has already taken place, but also the commitment it calls for. However, it is interesting to stop after the second sentence: »But I don’t own myself.« What if I never possessed myself, even in the most promising future? What if the I never coincided with itself? If so, the question of the I would remain open and needs to be considered an open question, perhaps even more so – or in a different way – than Bloch thought. Montaigne writes, We are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapelesse and diverse a contexture that every peece and every moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference found betweene us and our selves as there is betweene ourselves and other.23

This reflection carries the critical thought in a different direction than that envisaged by Bloch. The »I« that Bloch – despite everything – presupposes is here subjected to radical suspicion. I wonder, however, if we should stop here, or if we may push Montaigne’s reflection somewhat further? In other words, does the »shapelesse and diverse [. . .] contexture« have the final say on the I? I deem it incontestable that Montaigne’s statement represents both a progression and an opening as compared to those conceptions that understand the I as an entity resting in itself within an unswerving, yet opaque, identity. The question remains, however, whether the opposite understanding, which recognizes diversity at the expense of identity, does justice to the complexity of an I that, despite its diversity, is and represents a point of reference. We would thus be dealing with an I that does not contradict its own diversity but that is conceived from, and faces, this diversity. Many twentieth and twenty-first century philosophers have envisioned and tried to think precisely this, e. g., Paul Ricœur’s »narrative identity;« Martin Buber’s relationship between »I and You,« and Bernhard Waldenfels’s »responsive identity.«24 4.1.  Paul Ricœur In both Time and Narrative III and Oneself as Another, Ricœur speaks of a »narrative identity.« At the beginning of Oneself as Another, he writes: »Our thesis throughout will be that identity in the sense of ipse implies no assertion concern23   Montaigne, Essays II.I. (see http://www.luminarium.org / renascence-editions / montaigne /  2i.htm): »Our matters are but parcels hudled up and peeces patched together, and we endevour to acquire honour by false meanes and untrue tokens.« (Ibid.). In French: »Nous sommes tous de lopins et d’une contexture si informe et diverse, que chaque pièce, chaque momant, faict son jeu. Et se trouve autant de différence de nous à nous mesmes, que de nous à autruy.« (Montaigne, Essais II.I., 321). 24   The order in which I present these »examples« might as well be the reverse. Aspects highlighted in the thought of one author can be recognized – under different light and weight – in others.

In Quest for Identity

119

ing some unchanging core of the personality.«25 To understand this statement, it is necessary to refer to the fundamental distinction he makes between idem and ipse identities: »[O]n one side, identity as sameness (Latin idem, German Gleichheit, French mêmeté); on the other, identity as selfhood (Latin ipse, German Selbstheit, French ipséité).«26 These two uses of the concept of identity are often misunderstood or intermingled. This is not simply because they both rest on the same word (»identity«) but also because of a certain tendency to conceive each identity as based on a substratum. Indeed, reflecting on an identity that does not refer to a self-identical substance of any kind, previously presupposed as a reference point (»some unchanging core of the personality«), is a complex undertaking. If one concedes to an original diversity taking the place of a substantial identity, the risk of completely abandoning the idea of identity is high. In order to take this risk seriously, without giving in to it, Ricœur turns to »narrative identity.« The concept of »narrative identity« is not self-evident, especially if the task is to contribute to thinking of personal identity. As far as classical narratives are concerned, each narrative claims a certain unity on the basis of there being a beginning and an end. Human life knows neither its beginning nor its end. Nevertheless, it requires a certain unity in order to conceive itself in its identity and in the constancy of time that it claims to possess. According to Ricœur, it is precisely in the »narration« of the self that a »permanence in time« is established; a permanence that »is not reducible to the determination of a substratum,«27 but that nevertheless founds what Dilthey called a »connectedness of life.«28 It is true that to reflect on this »connectedness of life« – in other words, on ipse-identity – one cannot presuppose a pre-existing »permanence,« because this would belong to idem-identity. It is also true that we never dispose of this »permanence,« since the narration of our own identity is intertwined with that of others, and is never accomplished, as we will never be able to recount our own deaths. This fragile and open form of identity nevertheless better represents the stakes of human existence than the two extreme solutions (1) to base personal identity on the idea of a substance that would always already be what it is and remain so through time, or (2) to simply abandon this idea of identity with regard to personal life. Ricœur writes: As credence without any guarantee, but also as trust greater than any suspicion, the hermeneutics of the self can claim to hold itself at an equal distance from the cogito exalted by Descartes and from the cogito that Nietzsche proclaimed forfeit.29

25   P. Ricœur, Oneself as Another, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 2. 26   Ibid., 116. 27   Ibid., 118. 28   Ibid., 115. 29   Ibid., 123.

120

Hans-Christoph Askani

We must note, here, the consciously designed fragility of the two supporting points introduced by Ricœur. Who will grant a loan without a guarantee, and who will rely on a trust that has no other basis than its being the antithesis to mistrust? This fragility is however the – not only negative! – characteristic of a narration that constitutes, rather than presupposes, identity. Unable to form a whole, it is prompted to anticipate an end that will never be reached. It is here that fiction comes into play, and assumes its unavoidable and precarious role. Fiction is neither a misleading element nor reducible to embellishment and counterbalance to the seriousness of life, but is part of life, and in a fundamental way. The I needs a fiction of itself in order to constitute itself. As for the notion of the narrative unity of a life, it must be seen as an unstable mixture of fabulation and actual experience. It is precisely because of the elusive character of real life that we need the help of fiction to organize life retrospectively.30

The organization of life into coherence, then, requires fiction. This fiction is linked to retrospection, for without it no unity of life would appear. The point from which this retrospection would be possible is unreachable, and yet human life is told. In telling itself, it snatches scraps of meaning from the fleetingness of its own time. 4.2.  Martin Buber Philosophers have long undermined the idea of an I that is an indisputable authority. Buber’s I and Thou introduces »the dialogical principle.«31 The word »principle« already indicates the basic claim of Buber’s approach. Is every act of knowledge and relation to the world meant to take as a starting point – as first and ultimate reference – the I that builds its own world around itself? Is there no radical distinction to be made between the relationship that an I can have with the world of objects, and the relationship this same I (does it even remain the same?) with a You? According to Buber, the answer is clearly negative: The world is twofold for man in accordance with his twofold attitude. The attitude of man is twofold in accordance with the two basic words he can speak. The basic words are not single words but word pairs. One basic word is the word pair I‑You. The other basic word is the word pair I‑It [. . .]. For the I of the basic word I‑You is different from that in the basic word I‑It.32

30

  Ibid., 162; see also 147, where Ricœur talks about a »concordant-discordant synthesis.«   As we know, M. Buber was not the only representative of dialogical thinking. We can refer to other thinkers like F. Rosenzweig, E. Rosenstock-Huessy, F. Ebner, E. Grisebach. Buber, in his article Zur Geschichte des dialogischen Prinzips, also mentioned philosophers form the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, namely F. H. Jacobi and L. Feuerbach. (See M. Buber, Schriften zur Philosophie, in Werke, vol. 1 (München / Heidelberg: Kösel / Lambert Schneider, 1962), 291 – 305, 293). 32   M. Buber, I and Thou, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1996), 53 – 54. 31

In Quest for Identity

121

The relationship between the I and the You has, then, its own status. It is not a particular case subordinated to the pattern I‑It (Ich-Es), but has a status of its own that differs ontologically from any other type of relationship. As Buber puts it: »The basic words are not single words but word pairs.«33 The I is always I in relationship to or with. The I becomes I, and what it becomes depends on the relationship it is in, the relationship it engages, or lets itself engage in, so that Buber can say: »I require a You to become; becoming I, I say You.«34 This idea has been recorded and classified as one of the key phrases of a philosophy of dialogue. It is not inaccurate. However, the innovative potential of this idea is here in danger of being neutralized: »I accomplish myself in contact with the You« is not simply another way of constituting myself as an I (in contrast, e. g. to the self-constituting subject). No, it still means something else, namely that I will never be entirely constituted as an I because I will never rest within myself. I will always – in my being (and not solely accidentally) – be in relation and dependence (interdependence!) with others. I am, paradoxically, always I by situating and constituting myself between the I and the You. I am at once »in« and »outside« of myself, and my I receives and forms itself from the You whom I address and who addresses me. What we can retain from Buber’s reflections is that the I is formed in the relationship with a vis-à-vis whose specificity consists in the fact that it can never be absorbed by the ego, which can never be reduced to a pure complement of the identity of this I. Emmanuel Levinas and Bernhard Waldenfels elaborated on this structure in French and German, respectively, with the latter devoting several books to the phenomenon of »responsiveness.«35 4.3.  Bernhard Waldenfels We usually assume that any reasoning begins with our having questions. Waldenfels considers this assumption – and its underlying configuration of a pre-established relationship between questions and answers – with careful suspicion: »Would it not be possible that the questioning (though apparently so open) had its own dialogical warmth and security?«36 As if we were able to completely determine the beginning, the starting point, but also the direction of our thoughts. But did it not start long before? Are we not confronted with a claim »of exteriority that 33

 Ibid.   Ibid., 62; see also 54: »There is no I as such but only the I of the basic word I‑You and the I of the basic word I‑It. When a man says I, he means one or the other. The I he means is present when he says I. And when he says You or It, the I of one or the other basic word is also present. Being I and saying I are the same. Saying I and saying one of the two basic words are the same.« 35   The most important one is B. Waldenfels, Antwortregister (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994). 36   Ibid., 13 (my translation). 34

122

Hans-Christoph Askani

has burst the circles of our [well-formulated and well-controlled] questions?«37 This claim radically precedes us, and we must respond despite the fact that it does not let itself be framed, foreseen, or circumscribed completely, »as if we had to respond to a letter without a sender.«38 Waldenfels calls this structure »responsiveness.« Responsiveness is not about giving this or that answer to a question. Rather, it refers to the situation of having to respond even before the configuration between the question and the answer has been established. In this context, Waldenfels surprisingly uses the German word Antwortlichkeit to indicate a dimension in which »our answers are not immediately subjected to an order in which the strangeness of the claim39 would be condemned to silence.«40 As Kierkegaard writes: »Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here?«41 So I am here, and I must respond to the question of my being – a question that fundamentally surpasses me and of which I am not the author. We might be too influenced by the scheme (marked by the academic or scientific setting) that posits questions on one side and answers on the other, and – linking both – a relationship in which the two (are meant to) correspond. On the level that is of interest here – that of the constitution of the I – this pattern is insufficient. In a human context untarnished by a scientific framework, it happens differently. As human beings, we always already respond. Even if we did not explicitly make a decision, we must respond and we respond – more precisely, we have always already started to respond – to multiple situations. Waldenfels develops the double implication of this: 1. »That to which we respond always goes beyond our response.«42 The challenge we react to – not only with our intellect, but with our being, and our humanity – is wider and more diffuse than what we will be able to face in our reaction. This, however, implies a second aspect that seems – only in appearance – to go in the opposite direction. 37   Ibid., 319 (my translation). In German: »ein Draußen, das alle Fragekreise sprengt und in dessen Bann wir bereits stehen, wenn wir nach ihm fragen.« 38   Ibid., 319 (my translation). In German: »als hätten wir einen Brief zu beantworten, dessen Absender fehlt.« 39   What type of claim? One can never tell! 40   Ibid., 320 (my translation). In German: »Um das Antworten nicht von vornherein einer Ordnung zu unterwerfen, in der die Fremdheit des Anspruchs zum Schweigen gebracht wird.« 41   S. Kierkegaard, Repetition (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 6), ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 286. The whole passage reads: »One sticks a finger into the ground to smell what country one is in; I stick my finger into the world – it has no smell. Where am I? What does it mean to say: the world? What is the meaning of that word? Who tricked me into this whole thing and leaves me standing here? Who am I? How did I get into the world? Why was I not asked about it?« 42   Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden, 52 (my translation). In German: »Das, worauf wir antworten, übersteigt stets das, was wir zu Antwort geben.«

In Quest for Identity

123

2. By responding, we give a »creative response in which we give what we do not have.«43 Our response goes beyond our ability to respond. It surpasses itself, and, in giving it, we go beyond ourselves. This has significant consequences for our problem of understanding the I. It is in principle – not only in extreme or exceptional cases – in a discrepancy with itself. The I is not an opaque, substantial entity resting in itself. The I can be very close to itself and very far from itself. To put it more precisely, (the) I is at the same time very close to itself and very far away from itself; it is close to itself by being distant, and it is distant by becoming – and by being (!) – very close.

5. Concretisations Let us look at three examples so as to better understand the stakes of what has just been said. I committed a fault. I offended another man, or behaved cowardly. Am I the one who behaved this way? Indeed it was me (and this is precisely what the problem of my remorse »consists« in). It is therefore not by accident that I approach myself so closely in acknowledgement of my guilt. I would like to escape. I wish I had not done it, or – more precisely – I wish it were not I who did it. – But it was! I cannot escape. This is me and my history. On the other hand, I am also the one who regrets his deeds, is ashamed, and who wishes he was not the author of the act. So, who am I: one or the other? I cannot tell. However, I know that I am now – in my guilt – very close to myself. What if the one I offended forgave me, if I were forgiven, would I then not be even closer to myself: not only the one who hurt, not only the one who regrets, but – thanks to this forgiveness – me anew? I would be closest to myself by being at the greatest distance from myself. For does not a word – in this case, a word of forgiveness – that I could never tell myself, denote the greatest distance from myself? This consideration inspired Ricœur to introduce the category of »height [hauteur]«44 in relation to the event and the word 43   Ibid., 53 (my translation). In German: »eine kreative Antwort, in der wir geben, was wir nicht haben«. Waldenfels distinguishes two types of response: one in which the sense of the response is completely predetermined by the question, and another in which the response exceeds, »by principle«, any predetermination by the question, because the question itself does not measure its scope. »Wir [. . .] berücksichtigen [. . .] die Möglichkeit, daß im Antworten nicht bloß ein bereits existierender Sinn wiedergegeben, weitergegeben oder vervollständigt wird, sondern daß im Gegenteil Sinn im Antworten selbst entsteht.« (Ibid.). 44   »The tie between fault and self, guilt and selfhood seems indissoluble. The proclamation summed up in the simple sentence: ›There is forgiveness‹ resonates like an opposing challenge. [. . .] This is why I speak of this voice as a voice from above. It is from above, in the way that the admission of fault proceeds from the unfathomable depths of selfhood.« (P. Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, trans. K. Blamey (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 466 – 467)

124

Hans-Christoph Askani

of forgiveness. Ricœur’s height is not greater or lesser in distance: it is an always greater distance; an origin and starting point that is always elsewhere, and is never incorporated into its continuation. A second example: I say »I love you.« Who am I when I say this? Where am I when I say this? Am I able to measure and to circumscribe what I say? When I say »I love you,« do I not say more than what I will ever be able to measure? Am I in my decision to say it? If this were the case, I would be I in the exact moment that precedes my speaking, in the moment when I think about whether I want to say it or not . . . But am I not I not before, but in, the word that I say? »I – love you.« Do I not let myself be carried in and with the word I say, so that I am now – outside of myself – in this word »love you«? We can clarify. In saying »I love you,« I say what I will not be able to host in words, but only in my (unpredictable) life. I do not know, nor can I know, if I will I have ever kept this promise. Would it be a solution to renounce these words because I am incapable of knowing this? Would I then be closer to myself? Would I then be truly I; truly who I am? Or would I have abandoned me? It seems incontestable: in saying »I love you«, I say more than what I know. However, if I do not say it, not only will I have renounced love, but also the risk of being myself; of being what I could be. I will have opted for a reduction of myself in order to avoid the audacity of never being I without exceeding my I. Third and last example: We have touched upon the question of whether the name for the I in its innermost, most authentic, dimension – the I where it is the I and nothing else – would be the »soul.« Today, we are very reluctant to use this word; this name. It seems too big, too ambitious, too full of implications of all kinds for which we have no guarantees, no measures, and perhaps no sensitivity . . . Indeed, to pronounce this word requires an effort and immense expense. It is an unparalleled investment to believe in something like the soul. This effort is translated in the overflowing imaginary that has always accompanied the »use« of this word. The Christian Last Judgment is part of this imaginary. Is this a coincidence, or does the configuration of soul and judgment suggest itself due to the fact that, in order to contemplate the identity of the »I«, it must be taken into account that the I »contracts« to its innermost core, but also vice versa: that it embraces in itself its relations to that which is outside of it? If we understand the »soul« as a search keyword signifying the »I« in its immutable truth or unquestionable authenticity, the Last Judgement is the radical outside that the soul is unable to catch up with. What happens to the soul on the day of the Last Judgment? It will be weighed. There is something astonishing about this weighing: no mistakes will be made. The Judgment is always just. Why? Is it because God weighs? No. It is because the soul is weighed. Before the Last Judgment, the soul appears in its truth. And the soul is meant – one could even say that the soul is made (this is its meaning and nothing else) – to appear in its truth. This truth appears with, in, and as the soul.

In Quest for Identity

125

The biblical message is that in the Last Judgement the soul is what the Judgement pronounces it to be, and conversely, the Last Judgement will weigh nothing else than the soul, because nothing else is determined to appear in its full truth. It is as if the two were made for each other: the soul for the Judgment and the Judgment for the soul. I wrote that the »soul« could be understood as a concept of research; a concept that indicates a direction in which we must and can search in order to find what the I truly is (or would be). It is in the soul that the greatest extension and the strongest contraction unite, and nowhere do they unite as profoundly and authentically as before the Judgement. Here, where the soul is the only matter that deserves to be weighed, flawlessly and according to its truth, we can say: the Last Judgment is nothing but the place where the soul appears, and the soul is exactly what the Judgement takes place for. In former times, this seemed to be quite clear – perhaps nothing else was as clear as that.

6. Conclusion Now, the aim of our reflections was not to produce a theory of the Last Judgment. What we sought to think was the precarious identity of the I within, and facing, diversity. To reflect on the identity and the intimacy indicated by this »I,« we referred to three philosophers of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, each with their own interpretation of the intimacy of the I‑identity as openness. Paul Ricœur: The I that knows that it is more than a sum of patches cannot rely on an already given or foreseen identity. It will thus be led to search for the identity of its being through a never-ending narration that is nevertheless not told in vain. Paradoxically, I am who I am in a narration that does not end. At the very end of his great work Memory, History, Forgetting, he writes »Incompletion [Inachèvement],«45 a word that, despite its negative form, contains the idea, promise, and memory of completion: An uncompleted completion. Martin Buber: The other breaks up the opacity of the I to »reveal« that the true stake of my identity is not intimacy with myself, but the opening to a call. This call finds its most accurate and profound expression in the »You« (»You!,« »You?«) that I address to the other, and in the »You« (»You!,« »You?«) the other addresses to me. Bernhard Waldenfels: Responsiveness is a structure that goes beyond any specific question and any particular response, for the human being must respond and is always already responding to a questioning that requires more from him than he can give. This more of the demand is – at the same time – the more of a gift (and 45

  Ibid., 506.

126

Hans-Christoph Askani

the gift of more!) to which, in an unsurpassable inadequacy, corresponds the fact that where I am closest to myself I give more than what I have. At the end, we spoke of the Last Judgement. We spoke of it because we followed the trajectory of what the word »soul« means as an indication of what the identity of the I would or could be. Indeed, in its relation to the Last Judgement, »the soul« is the name that speaks the truest in me. However, in this theological understanding, the soul itself does not speak its truth. It does not own it, nor even incorporates it; it receives it. It receives it as its truth. In this understanding, are we not led to ask: Is the Last Judgement not the symbol – the most profoundly speaking symbol – of the structure of alterity; an alterity that is constitutive of the I; an I that precisely is what it is when it comes to itself from afar – from far away?

Self-Alienation Self, Finitude, and Estrangement Ingolf U. Dalferth »Understanding begins in passivity.«1

1. Introduction The ambiguity of human subjectivity has long been at the center of Arne Grøn’s philosophy.2 Pointing to the fact that »[we] tend to construe subjectivity in terms of activity, and activity in terms of self-empowerment,«3 Grøn argues that this makes it impossible to understand a passivity that we cannot undo or replace by some activity, and that this, in turn, makes it impossible for us to understand ourselves. As long as we seek to understand ourselves merely in terms of activity or passivity, we will overlook the existential dialectics of passivity and activity that reside at the very core of our existence. We exist, but we have not made ourselves, and we 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 the full possession and authority over ourselves (Ernst Bloch). However, the contrary is true. We are not estranged from ourselves because we live by a passiv1   A. Grøn, »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« in Hermeneutik der Transzendenz, ed. Ingolf U. Dalferth et al. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 47 – 59, 56 (my translation). In German: »Verstehen beginnt in der Passivität.« 2  See A. Grøn et al., Subjectivity and Transcendence (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2007); A. Grøn, »Subjectivity, passion and passivity,« in Passion and Passivity: Claremont Studies in the Philosophy of Religion, Conference 2009, ed. I. U. Dalferth and M. Rodgers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 143 – 155; idem, »Homo subiectus: Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,« in Seinkönnen: Der Mensch zwischen Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit, ed. I. U. Dalferth and A. Hunziker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 19 – 33; idem, »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. J. M. Justo and E. M. de Sousa (Lisbon: Centro de Filosofia da Universidade de Lisboa, 2012), 85 – 96. 3   Grøn, »Widerfahrnis und Verstehen,« 57 (my translation).

128

Ingolf U. Dalferth

ity beyond all activity and passivity (Emmanuel Levinas), but rather because we ignore it or refuse to live by it. The strife 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 surrounding self-alienation.

2. Selves The standard view takes »self-alienation« to mean »[t]he process of distancing oneself from one’s own feelings or activities, such as may occur in mental illness or as a symptom of emotional distress.«4 This makes sense as far as it goes, but it does not go far enough. 2.1. Active and passive self-alienation The above definition rightly shies away from speaking of a self and uses instead the reflexive pronoun oneself. It is not a mysterious self but us human beings who are alienated by distancing ourselves from something or somebody, or by growing distant from certain aspects of ourselves. In the former, the self is the center of the alienating activity (whether intentional or not); in the latter 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 former we may, if we are able, overcome it by ending the distancing activity; in the latter it can only be overcome by a change in the situation that alienates us (we may or may not be able to contribute to this). 2.2.  Self and situation 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 self-distancing in question. In these and similar cases the term functions not so much as a noun signifying 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 used as a noun the term »self« is a shorthand formula for human beings understood as centers of activity and passivity; as the originators of doings and the 4   English, Oxford Living Dictionaries, »self-alienation,« Oxford University Press, http://www. oxforddictionaries.com / definition / english / self-alienation (accessed June 12, 2017).

Self-Alienation

129

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 that can be missed each in their own way. Thus, to be a self is: 1. to (be able to) understand oneself as a human being among human beings (self-understanding as a human being), 2. to (be able to) seek to live one’s life in a self-determined way (self-determination as a moral agent), 3. to (be able to) orient one’s self-determining to the principle that a good human life aims at living in a selfless way together with others (orientation towards selflessness as the mode of a truly human life). We can, in the above respects, manifest selfhood by degrees: our self-understanding can be more or less adequate or true, our self-determination more or less efficient and responsible, and our self-orientation 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 to degrees, that is to say, that can, in various respects, be increased or decreased, intensified or mitigated. To be a self is to become a self and to 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 mode of self-determination and self-orientation. How do or would you like to see yourself? How do you seek to live your life as a human being (whether you manage to or not)? 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. As far as we know, only us humans can be selves, and we become selves by living in a certain way. We do not, however, cease to be human if we fail to do this. But it is when we begin to understand ourselves as human beings (self-understanding) and seek to determine our life accordingly (self-determination and self-orientation) that we become selves. Second, »self« is an existential term, and as such it does not allow us to describe or define, but helps us to locate that to which it refers in a particular situation, universe, or world, and always in the world of actuality. Selves exist only in the actual world, never in possible worlds, which may, at best, entail possible selves. Third, the terms »self« and »situation« are correlative. Since the situations in which human beings live their lives are changeable, we must, if we are to address concrete human existence in terms of a self, locate this self in its situation: a self is always a self-within-a-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 we all exist, so the term »self« refers to those who exist in

130

Ingolf U. Dalferth

such a way that they can develop an understanding of their situation and of themselves, which guides their way of relating to their situations, and to themselves and others 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 somebody’s situations; 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 with whom we share those situations. But different human beings understand, determine, and orient themselves differently, and it is rarely possible to sort all that out in a way that is clear and acceptable to all. This is why we cannot exist as selves without participating in conflicts of understanding (what do we know?), conflicts of determination (how shall we live?), and conflicts of orientation (how ought we to exist?). While there may be occasional solutions to some of these conflicts there will never be a universal end to all. 2.3.  Becoming a self We may say that we are not, but can become, selves, and that we can become selves of different intensity, quality, and degree (emotional, cognitive, reflexive, moral, religious selves). We are all born as human beings into particular situations in which we coexist with others. This 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 scheme of being, but even more so who and what we desire and decide to be in the scheme of the will. We 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 seriously other humans and their interests, needs, and wellbeing (self-orientation). This is impossible without understanding (1) the situations in which we live (where we are and what, given our situations, is possible and impossible, probable and improbable, necessary and unnecessary); (2) ourselves (our capacities [what we can do], desires [what we want to do], needs, interests [what we aspire to], and orientations [what we ought to do]), and (3) the other participants in our situations, with their capacities, desires, interests, needs, and orientations. Such forms of (self‑)understanding help give meaning to our experiences and guide our activities and ways of relating. Our (self‑)understanding is always mediated through and related to the understanding and self-understanding of others with whom we co-exist and share a situation, as well as to the webs of interlocution that make up human life. We cannot

Self-Alienation

131

understand our situations or ourselves in separation from others and their (self‑) understanding, and since our views rarely – if ever – coincide, we are permanently involved in the conflict of interpretations that characterizes the life of the self-interpreting animals that we are. Since humans can relate in human or inhuman ways to others and to themselves, we become the sort of subjects we determine ourselves to be, or find ourselves determined by others, by living in human or inhuman ways – ways that help others also to live as selfless selves or do not help them to do so. 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 together with others in their shared situations. As Kierkegaard points out, we ought to strive for an existence defined by human self-understanding and self-determination, and the most appropriate way to do so is to seek to live our lives not as selfish but as selfless, or true, selves – selves that help others to become true selves as well.

3. Self-alienation 3.1.  Self-alienation as a process and a state Let us now return to the standard view of self-alienation quoted at the start. In light of our investigation above, it appears narrow and one-sided. Self-alienation is not only a process but also 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 former, self-alienation is a change from a temporally earlier to a temporally later state, while in the latter it is a failure to live up to a norm or ideal that one shouldn’t be without. Both cases indicate alienation as change. In the former it is a change that has taken place: we are no longer in line with ourselves, in the sense that our actual self differs from our original self. In the latter it is a change that has not taken place: we are not yet in line with ourselves, that is, our actual self differs from our ideal self. In short, we either differ from our first or original self, or from our ideal self. In either case, that which we in fact are falls short of what we think we have been, or what we desire to be. The above two modes of alienation have two corresponding ways of overcoming. In the case of distance from an earlier state it is construed as a recovery of what one has lost, while the self-alienation that comes from the failure to live up to an ideal may be remedied by achievement of what one is lacking. When we are no longer selves in a sense that we can unconditionally and unrestrictedly affirm we seek to overcome this state of estrangement by returning to a lost harmony of existence that we were once able to live and affirm. Conversely, when we are not yet the selves we could and ought to be we seek to achieve a mode of exist-

132

Ingolf U. Dalferth

ing that best actualizes our potential. In the former we remember and miss our unrestricted self-affirmation, in the latter we strive and hope for the possibility of self-affirmation. Self-alienation is in both cases different from self-deception. Self-deception is about knowledge, self-alienation about being. Perfect self-knowledge seems obviously impossible. We cannot know everything about ourselves from all possible points of view, and our self-knowledge necessarily fails with respect to the beginning and the end of our lives. However, we do have a unique access to our inner lives: Others cannot know everything I can know; I cannot know everything they can know, and no person exists who has perfect and complete knowledge from all points of view. Striving for perfect self-knowledge is therefore misguided. And there are further limits. Even that which is in principle 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 aim for is not complete transparency, but proper self-understanding – an understanding of ourselves that is true to the actual situation in which we live and seek to continue to live. But what about self-deception? Is it possible for us to deceive ourselves and, if so, how? If it is possible – because we in fact do – 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 given the situation, or in a certain respect. Self-deception does not denote a complete failure to understand anything about myself. Rather, it is the failure to understand myself in a given situation under the description most appropriate in that situation. What is appropriate or most appropriate in a given situation depends on the characteristics of that situation, the requirements of relating to others in an adequate way, and the goal I pursue in living the way I do. 3.2.  There is no right life in the wrong one5 However, further distinctions need to be taken into account. It is one thing to understand self-alienation as (the result of) a process in which one grows alienated from oneself in certain respects; where we are not who and what we can or 5

  Th. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. D. Redmond (Marxists Internet Archive, 2005), https://www.marxists.org / reference / archive / adorno / 1951 / mm / ch01. htm (accessed on June 9, 2017).

Self-Alienation

133

ought to be as human beings. 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 bodies, environment, fellow human beings, and 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; in the second, it is our social environment and existential situation that alienates us: It is not I who have to change but my world and my relation to the world, without which I cannot live a truly human life. Now this distinction is clearly somewhat abstract. How can we live a true life without being or becoming true selves? And how can we be or become true selves if we live a false life in a world that is wrong? We only become selves in appropriate situations through interactions with others, and we cannot change our situations without changing ourselves and our way of relating to our situation. This is why it has long been argued that world-estrangement is a consequence of self-estrangement: We cannot relate to others in the right way if we do not relate to ourselves in the right way. If we are strangers to ourselves, how can we be good neighbors to others? But the argument also works the other way around: How can we not be estranged from ourselves if we live in a world that is full of evil and wrongdoing? How can we relate to ourselves in the right way if we cannot relate to others in the right way? 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 around (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 ought to be? In short, is human self-alienation the cause or the effect of an alienating world? 3.3. Alienation under a description There is no general answer to this. Rather, we must be more specific and draw distinctions. Obviously, we can be strangers to ourselves in more than one way. We may fail to become selves because we never had the chance, or because we shy away from it. We are always humans, but not always selves. We possess human dignity independently of being selves. Not all humans become selves, and not all who have become selves remain selves. It is therefore important not to confuse or equate humanity with selfhood. However, where there is no self, there is no self-alienation: I cannot even begin to distance myself from anything if I am not – or am no longer – a self.

134

Ingolf U. Dalferth

We may be selves that fail to have appropriate understanding of our situations and ourselves, which, in turn, prevents appropriate self-determination. To be able to see where distancing is right and where it is not we need a good understanding of the world and ourselves. We may not be in control of our lives even with proper understanding of our situations and ourselves. We feel helpless; powerless; dependent on something outside our control; forced to do things we did not choose ourselves, and therefore unable to determine ourselves. Some sort of alienation is forced upon us, which we cannot reject or overcome. This may be the case because of the world in which we live or because we hold a misguided conception of the self we want to be – a conception that is too shallow and effortless, or too idealized, making our lives rigid and restricted. 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 self-estrangement and ignorance of our real needs, desires and dispositions toward life.6 We end up self-alienated because we fail to properly balance our self-understanding, self-determination, and self-orientation. 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 highly of ourselves. It is therefore not true that »each conception of ›alienation‹ is underpinned by a normative ontological conception of the preferable, or authentic, self.«7 We may have no idea what we mean by a self or what we want to be, and yet feel distanced from our own feelings and activities or from the world in which we live. Indeed, even if we do not feel it, we may be thus distanced in fact: We may have the experience even if we miss the meaning. There is a contrast built into the very term »self-alienation«: only selves (i. e. 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. As we have seen, we may be alienated for very different reasons, 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). 6

  T. D. Cooper, Sin, Pride & Self-Acceptance: The Problem of Identity in Theology & Psychology (Downers Grove, IL: Iinter Varsity Press, 2003) 130. 7   G. Rae, »Alienation, authenticity, and the self,« History of the Human Sciences 23 (2010) 21 – 36.

Self-Alienation

135

3. theological terms: We are, by our own doing, cut off from the foundations of being and exist in ignorance, blindness, and rebellion (Christian conception of sin). 4. psychological terms: We experience ourselves as not in control of our life; experience; emotions; passions, and feelings (we feel estranged from ourselves). 5. social terms: We are incapable of shaping our relations to others on our own terms but are 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 deprived 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-making processes that determine our state and society (Adorno; Habermas). 8. gender terms: We feel and experience ourselves differently from our biological make-up or how we are identified and construed by others (gender; sex; transgender experience). Each of these cases construe the character of self-alienation according to different descriptions of the human being: contingent being (ontological 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), and transgender person (gender view). Indeed, contrasting the is of an actual situation with the ought of an ideal can generate any possible description of human alienation. 3.4.  The role of descriptions in accounts of self-alienation Now we can see more clearly why what is at stake is not »a normative ontological conception of the preferable, or authentic, self,« but the description by which we understand human beings or ourselves. Each description is tied to a conceptual scheme or frame of reference the criteria of which determine the corresponding authentic and inauthentic forms of living. The criteria differ, and they change over time along with changes and developments in our knowledge, understanding, and orientation. To give just one example, in his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Karl Marx distinguished four types of alienation of workers in the capitalist system of industrial production: (1) alienation of the worker from the work (the product of his labor); (2) alienation of the worker from working (the act of producing); (3) alienation of the worker from himself as a producer (the Gattungswesen or species-essence), and (4) alienation of the worker from other workers. Workers in the capitalist system of production are thus judged to be alienated

136

Ingolf U. Dalferth

from their humanity in four different ways. The standard by which this is measured, however, 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.8 What has to be rescued from alienation is the exercise and determination of one’s human nature, and this has to be done within the parameters of a particular description of human beings, in this case 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 our construal of selfhood and self-alienation. 3.5.  The need to be specific There is a general lesson to be learned from this. If we want to identify relevant kinds or forms of alienation, we must view the alienated human according to their description. However, 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 and negative way. There is a tendency among existentialist thinkers to do just that. However, »evil« makes sense only in contrast to »good,« and if our human situation is in a state of lack and deficiency – as it is in many respects – then by the same token, it is also in a state of chance and possibility. We have grown used to regard ourselves as deficient beings who would have no chance in the struggle for existence if we did not know how to actively compensate for the weaknesses of our biological nature by means of 8   Wikipedia, »Marx’s theory of alienation,« https://en.wikipedia.org / wiki / Marx’s_theory_of_ alienation (accessed August 30, 2015).

Self-Alienation

137

technology, morals, media, religion, and culture. But what if we look at ourselves as creatures of possibility whose lives are not based on our deeds but on what happens to us, and whose destinies do not depend on the differentiation between human and non-human animals (and hence on our difference and relation to other animals) but rather on the differentiation between humane and inhumane ways of living (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 given 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 self-understanding would not be biological evolution, sociobiology, and neuroscience – along with their naturalist implications – but the ethical, political, and theological question of the humanity of human beings. It would be a normative, not merely 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 if we want to live a truly human life?« The challenge is met not by comparing ourselves with 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 the 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 ruining by selfishly exploiting its resources and transforming it into our habitat irrespective of what this means for others. Such a conception of humanity must be based on a positive, not a negative, account of human finitude, because we cannot change or do away with the fact that we are finite beings in a finite world. We cannot be true to ourselves if we are not true to our finitude. Now, what does this mean?

4. Finitude 4.1.  Disambiguating finitude The history of thought contains a wealth of responses to this question. I will turn to one from theology. Human finitude, estrangement, and alienation are central topics in 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, and our existence under the threat of nonbeing. Alienation is not a reality for some, but for all, it is the very mark of human existence, revealed in the experience

138

Ingolf U. Dalferth

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.9 »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 possible nonbeing.«10 This existential anxiety occurs in different forms: as the »Anxiety of Fate and Death« where nonbeing »threatens man’s ontic self-affirmation;«11 as the »Anxiety of Emptiness and Meaninglessness«12 where nonbeing threatens »man’s spiritual self-affirmation,«13 and as the »Anxiety of Guilt and Condemnation« where nonbeing »threatens man’s moral self-affirmation.«14 In extreme cases, anxiety becomes despair – ontic, moral, and spiritual – which we cannot escape by our own powers. We cannot overturn »the existential situation of finitude and estrangement«15 and constitute our own new being. New being is a gift, and we cannot give it 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 possible to not be estranged from our essence, then it is possible to be what we are not when existing in finitude and estrangement: new beings. Tillich uses the formula »the existential situation of finitude and estrangement«16 to describe the 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 that whereas »finitude« indicates createdness – a term that invokes the distinction between creature and creator – »estrangement« indicates fallenness, and hence the distinction between existing as a 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, namely the sin of missing one’s true potential, and of existing in ways that miss the point and end of human life. By blending the two, Tillich gives finitude a bad name, that 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  9   P. Tillich, The Courage to Be, in Main Works, vol. 5, ed. R. P. Scharlemann (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1988), 225. 10   Ibid., 157. 11   Ibid., 160. 12   Ibid., 162. 13   Ibid., 160. 14   Ibid., 165. 15   Ibid., 199. 16  Ibid.

Self-Alienation

139

or created goodness has been lost.«17 The Fall and sin have corrupted us and we all live in a state of alienation. However, we experience our self-alienation, 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.«18 We are not only sinners, but sinful creatures, beings who are related to God but ignore or misunderstand this. Tillich’s account of human finitude, then, turns out to be deeply ambiguous when understood against the backdrop of divine creativity. On the one hand, finitude is what distinguishes us, as God’s creation, from the Creator. 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). Rather, it 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 any more. 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. In order to safeguard the fundamental distinction between creature and creator we must disambiguate finitude and disentangle it from 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 but finite creatures, who owe what we can be and become to our infinite creator. 4.2.  The grammar of »finitude« To restate this theological insight in non-theological terms, we may turn to the grammar of »finitude.« »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 17

  Ibid., 200.  Ibid.

18

140

Ingolf U. Dalferth

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. However, everything we call »finite« is then 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« any more. 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 also from the infinite. This is why Tillich spoke of an »absolute tension between the conditional [finite] and the unconditional [infinite]«19 when he explicated our human situation of finitude. Finite consciousness, he says, is »consciousness of the ›here and now‹.«20 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 meeting place of two sets of differences between, on 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 obliv19

  P. Tillich, Realism and Faith, in Main Works, vol. 4: Writings in the Philosophy of Religion, ed. J. Clayton (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1987), 353. 20   Ibid., 352.

Self-Alienation

141

ious of our actual situation before God. This is why differentiation is necessary when describing human finitude, and I do it by distinguishing between our Dasein, Sosein, and Wahrsein. 4.3.  Human finitude as Dasein, Sosein and Wahrsein »I am, but I do not have myself, hence we will still have to become.«21 The famous opening line of Ernst Bloch’s Tübingen Introduction in Philosophy echoes an old insight – forcefully stated in the 19th century by Kierkegaard in a theological and by Nietzsche in an atheological manner – that being (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 are 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). Dasein marks the existential difference between being and nonbeing (actual being / possible being): we are even though we might not have been (contingent existence); Sosein marks the biological difference between human beings and other animals (human beings / animals): we are humans and not some other form of life, and Wahrsein 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). 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.«22 However, apart from our ability to 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 21   E. Bloch, Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 13 (my translation). 22   P. Preuss, »Introduction,« in F. Nietzsche, On the Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1980), 1.

142

Ingolf U. Dalferth

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 to do so. We must exist in order to live our lives. However, we cannot create our existence in living our lives, only shape it. Since we cannot produce our own Dasein, we depend on a prior gift of being. Meanwhile we cannot live as human beings without producing our own Sosein. 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.23 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, i. e. that can will or not will to live in a truly human way. Third, we live in a truly human way, i. e. achieve our Wahrsein, by willing to live in a 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 it as a gift. Since nothing makes me more deserving of this gift 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. For Kierkegaard this reality is 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. 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 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 another (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). 23   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 must do so: Humans can live in either a human or an inhuman way, and they always do so. This is the fundamental predicament of created freedom: you cannot be free without practicing it. Humans can choose their mode of existing (insofar as they exist as human beings) but they also cannot refrain from choosing (insofar as they exist as human beings). Hence they always in fact live in either a human or an inhuman way.

Self-Alienation

143

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 passively posited (Dasein); the way we live our life is a task that we actively carry out in one way or another for as long as we live (Sosein); and the way we ought to – and thus can – 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 that we all face throughout our lives. The contingency of our Dasein is given by the fact that our life has begun and will end. We find our responsibility for our Sosein when recognizing 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 a different 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 to strive towards this when we move – imaginatively and practically – from the negativity of the experience of failure to its positive counterpart: human life as it ought to – and therefore can – be. However, even human life as it ought to be will still be a finite life or, as Kierkegaard puts it in Sickness Unto Death (1849), »a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity.«24 This synthesis is not a given but a goal, not a fact but a task and a duty, that of living 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 our way of living attends to the existential difference between being and nonbeing (actual / possible being; actual / possible life). However, 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 that we talk of the activity and creativity of divine love. The basic alienation that can occur is the one that results from not taking this seriously.

24   S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19), ed. and trans. H. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), 13.

144

Ingolf U. Dalferth

5. Summary I have argued (1) that philosophical accounts should construe self-alienation as a discourse about a certain mode of the human condition; (2) that the terms »self« and »situation« are not names for entities but simplifying abbreviations by which to address the human condition; (3) that the central feature of the human condition is its finitude, and (4) that finitude per se is not to be understood as self-alienation or estrangement but rather in a threefold sense as the gift of Dasein, the task of Sosein, and the duty of Wahrsein. Alienation can occur in all three respects. But just as mis-construals of our Dasein result in a false determinations of our Sosein, so the false determinations of our Sosein become manifest when judged against the backdrop of our conception of Wahrsein, which serves as our touchstone. We are. We do not know who we are. We must therefore become true to ourselves by following the Delphic injunction γνῶθι σεαυτόν, and the Christian advice to live accordingly. Or, in Coleridge’s words: 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! Self-Knowledge (1832)

The Grace of Time Towards a Kataphatic Theology of Time George Pattison

Religion and philosophy have addressed the mystery of time since as far back as the written record goes. This is unsurprising insofar as what Michael Theunissen has called the tyranny of time over human lives seems unavoidable. When have human beings not experienced time as the agent of change, decay, sickness, and, in the end, death and oblivion? Yet, as Theunissen argues in a monumental study of the Greek poet Pindar, there has from early on been a current of thinking that envisages what he calls a transformation or turning in time focussed in the hope of a better time, a new age of sweetness and light.1 In the article Zeit und Transzendenz (Time and Transcendence) Arne Grøn reflects on this idea of a transformation of time and further deepens Theunissen’s argument by showing how key elements of the structure of time that Theunissen finds in the Greek poet are also evident in Kierkegaard, especially in the Kierkegaardian notions of the moment (Øjeblik or Augenblick) and repetition, the latter also incorporating the theme of the double-movement.2 For both Pindar and Kierkegaard the interpretation of time hinges on the possibility of an irruption into temporal experience of change, decay, and death of a new kind of time, a time of blessing and »sweetness« (Pindar’s expression). In Pindar’s own work, this time of blessing does not arrive as a new order, an »eon« in the modern sense of the word, but as an action of divine grace that remains in tension with the negative aspects of time experience. It never becomes a fact of history nor can it ever be seized as a possession but can only be known through daily renewal. Mortals remain mortals and, as such, vulnerable to all of life’s vicissitudes. Nevertheless, the experience of another kind of time, gracious time, gives us the possibility of hope, even when we are engulfed in the vortices of time’s seemingly all-destroying storms. Thus Theunissen can describe Pindar as, essentially, a poet of hope. 1  See M. Theunissen, Pindar. Menschenlos und Wende der Zeit (München: C. H. Beck, 2000); a good summary of Theunissen’s interpretation can be found in the paper M. Theunissen, »Experience of the Divine: Philosophy and Theology in Early Greek Poetry,« in The Return of God, ed. N. Grønkjær (Odense: Odense University Press, 1998), 21 – 48. 2  See A. Grøn, »Zeit und Transzendenz,« in Der Sinn der Zeit, ed. E. Angehrn et al. (Weilers­ wist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002).

146

George Pattison

All of this has important implications for how we see the relationship between ancient Greek culture and the transformation of the ancient world by Christianity. Acknowledging that there was a tendency in Greek thought towards a negative view of time, a view epitomized in the idea of human affairs being governed by a relentless and unyielding fate, the example of Pindar shows that this cannot be used as a blanket characterization of the Greek outlook. The proto-philosophy that can be extracted from his poetic work offers a vision that stands in a quite different relation to biblical thought from the line of development that, following Parmenides, leads to an understanding of time as chronos, that is, as necessary and unalterable sequential change, from which the only possible liberation would be liberation into a timeless eternity. This would not only become the more characteristic line of development of later Greek culture but also, through its incorporation into Christian philosophy, become determinative for Christianity itself. For Augustine and his medieval heirs salvation is salvation from time and the optimum form of our God-relationship regarding the experience of time is not the transformation of negative time into saving time of which Theunissen (interpreting Pindar) speaks, but the timeless contemplation of the timeless God. In this perspective it is not only a matter of Kierkegaard offering a strikingly parallel approach to the teaching that Theunissen elicits from Pindar but also of Kierkegaard marking a point of radical transition in Christianity’s general approach to temporality. This transition is still far from completed. The timeless God continues to find many advocates and the case for such a God continues to receive support from daily experience of the negative power of time. Nevertheless, it is no longer self-evident that we have to make a simple choice between a philosophy that accepts the negative experience of time as the all-encompassing horizon of human existence and a theology that posits and promises the transcendence of time. We return to Theunissen’s notion of a transformation of time, a turning within time in which the negative experience of time is overcome not by recourse to a timeless eternity but by the discovery of that in time itself that goes beyond time, what in his Negative Theologie der Zeit (Negative Theology of Time), Theunissen calls time’s »depth dimension.«3 It is therefore in time itself that we are to find that other time, the time of salvation. And, as Theunissen writes: »The other time, its own other hidden within time, is eternity as future, future as eternity.«4 Again we find an essentially similar point in Kierkegaard, whose notion of the moment is defined not only in terms of the »sudden« irruption into time of another time, a notion we find both in an archaic poet such as Sappho and in Plato (and Kierkegaard himself refers to Plato’s notion of the sudden, the exaiphnēs), but also the 3   M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 62 (my translation). 4   Ibid., 65 (my translation). In German: »Die andere Zeit, das in der Zeit verborgene Andere ihrer selbst, ist die Ewigkeit als Zukunft, die Zukunft der Ewigkeit.«

The Grace of Time

147

presence in time, in the »now«, of the eschatological future of salvation. As Kierkegaard makes clear, the very term the »moment« glosses 1 Corinthians 15:51 – 2, where, in expounding his doctrine of the resurrection, Paul comments that »We shall all be changed, in a moment (en atomō), in the twinkling of an eye.« It is on this basis that Kierkegaard will describe the future as the incognito of the eternal. Heidegger would, notoriously, criticize Kierkegaard’s idea of the moment on the grounds that it involved interpreting time by reference to a non-temporal eternity, an eternity that stands as the negation of time. However, if we take seriously the analogy between Kierkegaard and Theunissen’s Pindar, we might suspect that Heidegger is mistaken in identifying Kierkegaard’s notion of the eternal with the eternity of the timeless God that Christian metaphysics inherited from Parmenides; if Kierkegaard’s eternity is in fact an eternity that we know only in and through the depth of time-experience itself, Heidegger’s criticism is misplaced. Of course, there are many passages in Kierkegaard that might easily be read as supposing a contrastive view of time and eternity. Such passages make it plausible to see Barth’s rhetorically heightened opposing of time and eternity in the commentary on Romans as Kierkegaardian, a connection that may not be without significance for Heidegger’s understanding of what Kierkegaard is saying.5 In this regard, I believe a more adequate view is that set out by Arne Grøn in his contribution to the Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, »Time and History.« As he writes in the concluding sentence of the article, a sentence that may be taken as epitomizing his view of Kierkegaard’s understanding of time as a whole, »Time receives infinite worth.«6 I am not clear as to the extent to which the thrust of »Time and History« involves a revision of Grøn’s earlier insistence on the primacy of negativity in the interpretation of time. As he argues in the article Zeit und Transzendenz, the double movement of repetition implies the »decisiveness« of the negative moment, since repetition is necessary precisely and solely because as long as we live in time we continue to be exposed to the possibility that the salvific transformation of time may not arrive or may in one way or another fail or fall away.7 The possibilities of such mischances are, it seems, infinite. Even if we have experienced that one moment in time when we were all we thought we could be we cannot exclude the possibility of a relapse into the mediocre or even vicious, let alone falling victim to what is (theologically misleadingly) called in UK law an »act of God.« Nor is it only on the individual level that such negativity makes itself felt. The history of the Church provides ample evidence of how the tyranny of time can re-assert its 5   As when he states »Time is nothing when measured by the standard of eternity« or »We confound time with eternity. That is our unrighteousness.« (K. Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. E. Hoskyns (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 43, 44). 6   A. Grøn, »Time and History,« in The Oxford Handbook of Kierkegaard, eds. J. Lippitt and G. Pattison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 290. 7   Grøn, »Zeit und Transzendenz,« 50.

148

George Pattison

power as the hope-filled embrace of a coming Kingdom of God yields to the reign of history’s Grand Inquisitors. It would certainly be foolish to deny all the evidence for the negative element of human time-experience. Modern human beings may rarely find themselves as utterly abandoned to time as, say, Philoctetes, Job, or Lear, cast out to suffer the misery of mortality in entire isolation on the island, the dung-heap, or the heath. For most in the advanced world general affluence and highly-developed systems of medical, social, and psychological support provide some buffering between time’s worst ravages and our sense of self. Nevertheless, modern history has provided many examples of prosperous and seemingly stable societies collapsing into war, chaos, and poverty, as is vividly exemplified in the world’s continuing refugee crises. At the same time, even the best support systems can only do so much. Our security is never entirely secure and, like Pindar’s contemporaries, we are never fully protected from the tyranny of time. Illness, accident, ageing, and death remain the most salient forms of this tyranny, as they did for the ancients, but there are many other subtler forms in which this tyranny reveals itself. In a time of ever-accelerating technological change cultural values, ethical norms, and even intimate relationships are all exposed to rapid obsolescence, leaving communities, institutions, and individuals uncertain about the fundamental values that have sustained them in the past. There are no few moments when we are only too aware of T. S. Eliot’s insight that time remains what it always was, a »destroyer.«8 Nevertheless, whilst simply denying the negativity of our time experience would be an exercise in fantasy, we may question whether this should be our primary point of reference in articulating a philosophical understanding of time. Is it not time for a positive philosophy of time or, to the extent that the point at issue is human salvation, a positive theology of time? This has been a long preamble, but it has been necessary to provide the context for stating the primary aim of this paper, namely, to make a preliminary venture in just such a theology. However, caution is necessary, not least because very term »positive« has unfortunate connotations, ranging from the scientific positivism that is philosophically unquestioning regarding its basic assumptions to the »positive thinking« that relentlessly insists on sticking to the sunny side of the street and refuses even to take notice of what is happening in the shadows. In our context, to speak of a positive theology of time might suggest that we no longer encounter God, time, or ourselves as involving any element of mystery, as if everything could be made clear and all problems and uncertainties eliminated. H. L. Martensen, we may say parenthetically, was in this sense a positive theologian, dismissing the idea of mystery as having been made redundant by divine revelation.9 This is certainly not the kind 8

 See T. S. Eliot, »The Dry Salvages,« in Four Quartets (Part 1) (London: Faber and Faber, 1944).  See H. L. Martensen, Christian Dogmatics, trans. W. Urwick (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898), 88 – 89 (§  44). 9

The Grace of Time

149

of positivity I would wish to endorse. Rather than the pairing negative-positive, then, we might be better to resort to the Greek apophatic-kataphatic. An apophatic theology is not one that simply denies what is said of God but speaks »away from« (apo) what is customarily said whilst, correspondingly, a kataphatic theology does not simply affirm certain propositions or names of God but takes what is said of God as speaking towards God. In this sense, a kataphatic theology need not necessarily be committed to a strong version of the principle of identity, as if what is said of God states what God is without further qualification. Rather, it claims only that what is said in this way from our human standpoint is appropriately directed towards God, that is, is said in such a way as to bring into view that aspect of God which is being addressed in what is said. A kataphatic theology of time, then, is not going to turn either God or time into objects about which we can utter definitive propositions, but it is going to – or, to put it more modestly, hopes to – say something that brings into view that which is being spoken about. In this connection it is worth noting a more or less passing comment by Erik Przywara that he himself does not fully develop but that has rich implications for a theological reflection on time. Przywara draws attention to how the Aristotelian notion of analogy as a middle term between antitheses is developed in response to the Platonic exaiphnēs (the sudden), the sudden conjunction of opposites such as mortal and immortal in their antithetic play. Both terms (analogy and the sudden) indicate the union of elements that are essentially opposed, though doing so in different ways. One of the specific differences is precisely that whereas the Aristotelian term emphasizes the aspect of proportion in the relation of the terms to each other the Platonic term emphasizes the temporal aspect of their coincidence.10 We have seen that Pindar, followed by Theunissen, characterizes the gracious irruption of divine time into history as having the character of »suddenness«. This relates not only to how a poet such as Sappho actually experiences the sudden intervention of the god, but also to the fact that such a divine irruption cannot be the outcome of any causal development within historical time. Even if the »outside« of historical time may also (as we have seen) be described as the »depth« of time, its appearance in the full concreteness of lived time is as such unforeseeable. It is the future arriving in the now by overleaping all intermediate lines of causality and predictability. It is a new thing (Isaiah 43:19). Yet, if we take the connection between suddenness and analogy seriously, we might not exclude the possibility of finding analogy even in the unpredictable new thing. Now at first glance it might seem that the suddenness of the god’s irruption into human time forces us into a strictly negative way of speaking, as (again) in Barth’s commentary on Romans. A language that is burdened by history and past experience will not be able to contain the new thing that bursts in upon it. The 10  See E. Przywara, Analogia Entis: Metaphysics: Original Structure and Universal Rhythm, trans. J. R. Betz and D. B. Hart (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 421 – 422.

150

George Pattison

suddenness of this bursting stamps it with the quality of uniqueness. It is what eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived (1 Corinthians 2:9). And yet we do speak of it. Heidegger writes of »the poetry of a poet or the treatise of a thinker« that it »stands within its own proper unique word. It compels us to perceive this word again and again as if we were hearing it for the first time. These newborn words transpose us in every case to a new shore.«11 This suggests (if we accept it) how, in contrast to the necessarily universalizable language of scholarship, poetry might be able to speak what has never been heard before and what is essentially unrepeatable but must be newborn in each repetition in such a way as to make the listener or reader understand. In these terms, the poet is precisely the one qualified to speak to us of what irrupts from »beyond« the orbit of our present experience. But – to return to Pryzwara’s comment – what the poet him- or herself speaks will nevertheless be spoken only as analogy, which, as every good Thomist knows, involves both similarity and dissimilarity. To speak of God in poetic analogies is therefore not to be producing a »science« or proper language of God, but it is nevertheless to speak of God. Thomism itself – this, at least, is the suspicion nurtured by its opponents – uses analogy precisely as leverage for constructing just such a science (and for Barth, his friend Przywara was the worst offender in this regard, »the giant goliath incarnate«12). However, it is not only because the poetic word has a unique quality that resists incorporation into science, summa, or system but also because, in the present context, we are attempting to think the God-relationship precisely in the perspective of time and time-experience. In this case, analogy is held open and prevented from congealing into positive knowledge not only by the general reminder that God is creator and we are creatures but also by the tension specific to the desire for or advent of another kind of time, the time of salvation, a future that is not yet. It is of course integral to Theunissen’s whole project that his reflections on time are guided by a writer who is not a philosopher or theologian but a poet, although, as he also comments, Pindar is a poet whose work presents us with something we might call a proto-philosophy. As Arne Grøn writes: »In poetry and in religion experiences are set forth that give [us] something to think [about].«13 In what follows I shall attempt to extend Theunissen’s and Grøn’s account of time in such a way as to bring to the fore the kataphatic possibilities their work opens up, arguing for the primacy of a positive rather than a negative method. In keeping with their general approach, however, I shall take a religious thinker and a poet to guide our 11   M. Heidegger, Parmenides, trans. A. Schuwer and R. Rojcewicz (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1992), 12. 12   For the relationship between Barth and Przywara, see The Analogy of Being: Invention of the Antichrist or the Wisdom of God?, ed. T. J. White (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2011), especially 1 – 19 and 70 – 87. 13   Grøn, »Zeit und Transzendenz,« 44 (my translation). In German: »In Dichtung und Religion werden Erfahrungen freigelegt, die zu denken geben.«

The Grace of Time

151

first steps towards such a kataphatic theology of time, that is, a reflection on time capable of bringing into view that aspect of God who, in time, saves time and even, in saving time, makes time itself saving. The thinker is Søren Kierkegaard and the poet Edwin Muir. Kierkegaard, as I have already indicated, has played a pivotal role in reorienting the direction of Western philosophy and theology with regard to time. Here I am in full agreement with Arne Grøn and hope that what I shall argue here continues the work begun by Grøn in making good the relative and perhaps surprising neglect of the themes of time and history in much secondary Kierkegaard literature.14 For reasons that will become clear, I shall come to Kierkegaard second, but turn first to the British or, more precisely, Orcadian poet Edwin Muir.

1. Edwin Muir Kierkegaard probably needs no introduction to students of modern philosophical and theological hermeneutics, but I cannot count on Edwin Muir being as well-known, even though Gabriel Marcel dedicated a lecture to his work. Muir (1887 – 1959, and thus a near contemporary of Heidegger, Barth and Tillich) was born on the island of Deerness in the Orkneys, a group of islands to the north of Scotland. As he himself often wrote, this meant experiencing at first-hand a world far-removed from modern urban civilization, an Edenic world in which the atmosphere of archaic mythology was almost palpable. However, in Muir’s youth the family relocated to Glasgow, at that time a powerhouse of Britain’s industrial power and a city embracing the extremes of wealth and poverty. While Muir took on a series of clerical jobs (he was deemed unfit for military service in the First World War), he also nurtured literary ambitions, as well as being drawn simultaneously to socialism and to Nietzsche, whose works were at that time appearing in English translation. Even before the war he had begun contributing to a leading modernist journal The New Age, and in 1919 married and relocated to London. Also living for a while in several European countries, he and his wife Willa translated a number of key works of modern German literature into English, including 14

  It may seem contradictory to say both that Kierkegaard has played a pivotal role in the history of thinking about time and that the themes of time and history have been relatively neglected in secondary literature. However, his role in changing the way we think about human temporality has been substantially mediated by Heidegger – despite Heidegger’s own reservations about Kierkegaard’s invocation of »the Eternal« – and by that same token simultaneously concealed. At the same time, more specialist Kierkegaard-literature has, as Grøn says, been largely focussed on other themes. At some point in their work most Kierkegaard scholars will, of course, say something about »the moment« or about the contrast between the temporal and the eternal, but the issue here is that this is relatively weakly thematized vis-à-vis, e. g., the problem of the pseudonyms, Christology, the nature of the ethical, etc. However, as Grøn’s article shows, time and history are not just themes alongside others but run through all aspects of Kierkegaard’s work, including his teaching on love.

152

George Pattison

the major works of Kafka and Hermann Broch’s Die Schlafwandler (The Sleepwalkers)15 and would later help Broch emigrate to Britain. Muir’s own poems reveal an often explicit engagement with Nietzsche, Kafka, and Hölderlin, and there is a sense in which his work belongs as much to the milieu of German existential thinking as it does to more British traditions. He is, I would even suggest, Britain’s European poet. Central to his preoccupation with Nietzsche was Nietzsche’s own obsession with questions of time, an obsession culminating in the doctrine of eternal recurrence. At first drawn to this idea, Muir came to see that eternal recurrence entailed denying the meaningfulness of time’s lived fullness. If all things recur eternally, then it would seem that Christ’s death loses all significance. As Muir writes: »the Actor on the Tree / Would loll at ease, miming pain, / And counterfeit mortality« (»The Recurrence«).16 At a personal level, eternal recurrence would mean denying the meaningfulness of Muir’s own experience of love for his wife, his friends, and, importantly, for the generations subject to the world wars, genocides, and mass migrations of his time. Muir was not ignorant of the annihilating power of time, yet, equally, he regarded time as the necessary condition of meaningful life. In the poem »Love in Time’s Despite« from the 1949 collection The Labyrinth, Muir writes of the lovers’ relation to time that »we who love and love again can dare / To keep in his despite our summer still, / Which flowered, but shall not wither, at his will.« Time, in this perspective, is the ultimate test of love. In »Love’s Remorse,« the poem immediately preceding »Love in Time’s Despite,« Muir writes of »the old saw still by the heart retold« that »Love is exempt from time.« »And that is true,« he adds, although immediately qualifying this with the further comment that it is »only the truth« that is »always new,« whilst »we, the loved and the lover, we grow old.« In other words, whilst lovers must indeed succumb to the corrosive power of time, it does not follow that, as pessimists have maintained, that there is no truth in love. Here, then, is a complex interplay of time as effecting the irreversible and inevitable decay and annihilation of our human powers whilst nevertheless revealing the truth of love and, in that sense – perhaps – bringing love to its highest fruition. But time does not just test our loves, it is also time that, in quite a straightforward sense, constitutes the condition for the possibility of love. »Love in Time’s Despite« opens by addressing the beloved as »You who are given to me to time were given / Before through time I stretched my hand to catch / Yours in the flying race.« The beloved who is given is one who has already been given to and given over to time and not only the test of time but the giving also occurs ad can only occur as a temporal event.

15

  H. Broch, The Sleepwalkers, trans. W. Muir and E. Muir (London: Quartet, 1986).   All poems are quoted from E. Muir, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960).

16

The Grace of Time

153

Time – and this is certainly no new thought – is therefore essentially ambiguous, a Janus-faced phenomenon that reveals a basic choice at the heart of human existence. Perhaps Muir’s sharpest statement of the paradox at issue here is in the closing lines of the posthumously-published poem »The Heart Could Never Speak«: »Time, merciful lord, / Grant us to learn your word.« We may read these lines either as addressed to the »merciful lord« of Christian faith and as praying for time in which to learn the divine word or as lines addressed to Lord Time, praying for the word that Time alone can bestow. This seem to pinpoint the exact tension between saving time as rising out of the depth of time and saving time as occurring as the irruption of another, divine time. In either case, the context of Muir’s work as a whole allows us to say that this word is, simply, the word of love, God’s gift and time’s. Here, then, we have a vision of time in which time’s truth is not that it reveals the emptiness of all worldly concerns and all worldly loves but that it reveals what endures in such concerns and loves, what is of most value and what is truly essential in them. In this perspective, poetry becomes testimony, active memory, a declaration of faithfulness to all that has been, is, and will be lived. It is the positive affirmation of time’s irrevocability, about which Jankélévitch wrote so eloquently.17 And it is also the affirmation of our solidarity with all who stand under the rule of time. In the poem »The Journey Back« Muir undertakes journey back through successive layers of his psychic existence, setting out (as he puts it) to »Seek the beginnings, learn from whence you came, / And know the various earth of which you are made.« This takes him through the embedded memories of his father’s world and back to an archaic, prehistoric world. So too in »The Fathers« where he connects the »panics and furies« that torment us in the present to the »archaic fevers« originating in »The fathers’ anger and ache« that »Will not, will not away / And leave the living alone.« But there is more to such an inner journey back than simply tracking one’s own inner identity. Muir confessed to an abiding »socialism« and an important aspect of that has to do with his sense of solidarity with the many generations of poor Orkney farmers from whom he was descended. The ancient dead are remembered not merely in filial duty, as in a form of »respectful solicitude,« nor yet that they might be exorcised and leave the present self free to pursue its autonomous devices. For Muir the self is what it is as a part of and in solidarity with the larger human community, the tribe, the people, »all we« (as the opening words of one poem have it). It did not choose this history or this descent, but it is an essential element in its journey to itself that it learns its identity with all who have gone before.

17

 See V. Jankélévitch, L’irréversible et la nostalgie (Paris: Flammarion, 1974).

154

George Pattison

In the first section of Variations on a Time Theme, Muir poses a series of questions on behalf – once more – of a »we«, a »we« that is figured as having reached a point of middle-aged indifference to life, a kind of convalescent self, »waiting for life, / Turning away from hope, too dull for speculation.« So, he asks, »How did we come here [. . .] Where did the road branch? / Where did the path turn [. . .] Or did we choose [. . .] Did we come here through darkness or inexplicable light / Was it truth that lured us here, or falsehood? Virtue itself / Or weakness [. . .]?« It is, we may say, a powerful exposition of what Heideggerian »thrownness«, the sense of having been thrown into a world that we neither designed nor chose and also, as we have several times seen, a world we are fated to lose, thrown as it is towards its own ultimate annihilation in death. But – here we are! So who are we, and what are we to do here? »Can we build a house here,« Muir asks; »Can we sing our songs here, / Pray, lift a shrine to some god?« The question is left unanswered, but is followed by a further specification of who the »we« he is talking about are. »We«, he says, are »nameless,« »between the impotent dead / And the unborn, cut off from both, fateless, / Yet ruled by fate.« Implicit here, I suggest, is the following thought: that we ourselves will be nameless, unable, as he puts it, to »till these nameless fields,« sing our songs, worship our gods, or build our houses, until we cease to be cut off from the »impotent dead / And the unborn,« that is, until we understand ourselves in our deepest solidarity and identity with all our race. In Broch’s essay on »The Disintegration of Values« interspersed into the pages of The Sleepwalkers (which, as mentioned, the Muirs translated) gave a powerful literary testimony to the intertwining of call, promise, and universal solidarity. Broch sees the dominance of reason and autonomy in modern society as leading to »the unaccented vacuum of a ruthless absoluteness, in which the abstract Spirit of God is enthroned [. . .] reigning in sorrow amid the terror of dreamless, unbroken silence that constitutes the pure [i. e. abstract, formless] Logos.«18 Yet, Broch adds, no matter how far we go in the direction of the »muteness of the abstract,« there remains: the voice that binds our loneliness to all other lonelinesses, and it is not the voice of dread and doom; it falters in the silence of the Logos and yet is borne by it, raised over the clamour of the non-existent. It is the voice of man and of the tribes of men, the voice of comfort and hope and immediate love: ›Do thyself no harm! for we are all here!‹.19

This, then, is an experience of time that, interwoven with a fundamental experience of solidarity with the human other, all human others, offers potential redemption from the tyranny of time. But does such a possibility require us also to suppose the possible intervention of a God? Muir, as we have seen, connects the saving possibilities of time to the revelation, in time, of a word. For Muir, as 18

  Broch, The Sleepwalkers, 639 – 40.   Ibid., 648.

19

The Grace of Time

155

a poet, this is proximately the poetic word, the word that he as poet is called to speak: »The heart could never speak / But that the Word was spoken« and it is the Word spoken in time, the word of time itself, that, in the timed rhythm of poetic discourse, brings this utopian possibility to view. But, precisely as a poetic word, it is not a word of knowledge but of promise, the promise that we shall be faithful; it is not a word of teaching – he laments the Calvinist creed that makes God »three angry letters in a book« – but of prayer. That is the word of a poet. We turn now to the words of a religious thinker who was also, in his way, »a kind of poet« but who, precisely as a religious thinker, can help us say more of what this kataphatic theology of time means for speaking about God.

2. Kierkegaard Arne Grøn has shown that the question of time is a salient feature of many of Kierkegaard’s key writings.20 Here I shall focus on just one relatively short work, the text known as The Unchangeability of God. This is the title of the published version of a sermon delivered in Copenhagen’s Citadel Church on 18th May 1851 and published in September 1855. It was the last sermon Kierkegaard preached, one of the few upbuilding works that he allowed himself to call a sermon, and published deliberately in the midst of the final attack on the Church in order to emphasize that he was nevertheless still remaining true to his earlier upbuilding re-reading of Christianity. For all these reasons, we may say that it can be taken as having a special place amongst Kierkegaard’s writings on time, summing up and stating with condensed force the central theological thrust of all that he has said in many other places. The title takes its cue from the Letter of James, which speaks of »the Father of Lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.« (James 1:17) It contains a remarkable passage about the unchangeability of God that might plausibly be read as offering a figurative or parabolic representation of the classical theistic idea of God as non-temporally eternal. However, I shall argue that a careful reading of the sermon in fact shows Kierkegaard arguing for God as the truth, ground, and giver of time and therefore also for time as the mode in which we are to learn the truth about God and ourselves and as such a gift for which we are to be grateful without limit. It begins with a prayer in which God is addressed as »Du«, which, following Dorothea Glöckner, I take to show Kierkegaard’s understanding of the God-relationship as a relationship of call and promise, a relationship that is already implicitly temporal. This direct address to God is repeated at several points in the body 20

 See Grøn, »Time and History.«

156

George Pattison

of the sermon, emphasizing that this is not just exposition but a lived performance of what it means to engage with the unchangeable God.21 Following the prayer, the discourse considers but (perhaps surprisingly) rejects the religious attitude that whilst lamenting the tyranny of time finds consolation in the thought that one day it will all come to an end. Such an attitude, Kierkegaard says, speaks only of human changeability and not of God’s unchangeability – but it is precisely this and the joy of this of which the text speaks. He then offers a remarkable parable that sets out his own understanding of what divine unchangeability means. »Imagine a traveller,« he writes, who has been brought to a halt at the foot of a great mountain he cannot scale. Yet . . . everything he wishes and longs for, everything he desires is on the other side. All that is needed is that he gets to the other side. 70 years pass, but the mountain remains unchanged, impassable. Let him live another 70 years and the mountain will remain unaltered, still blocking his path, unchanged, impassable. Perhaps he himself will be altered, and what he once wished and longed for, what he once desired, will no longer matter and perhaps he scarcely knows himself any more. A new generation finds him there, altered, sitting at the foot of the mountain that is itself unchanged, impassable. 1000 years pass, and all that is left of this so alterable man is his legend, but the mountain remains unchanged, impassable. And now imagine the one who is eternally unchangeable, for whom 1000 years are as a day [. . .] as a mere ›Now‹, really as if they didn’t exist at all – if you want to make progress by any other way than the one he allows – woe betide you!22

The contrast between human changeability and divine unchangeability and the implicit further contrast between human temporality and divine eternity could scarcely be more strongly stated. But is what Kierkegaard is calling the unchangeability of God the same as the timeless immutability stipulated by classical theism? This seems challenged by a significant comment Kierkegaard makes shortly afterwards: »He gives time, and He can do that because he has eternity, and he is eternally unchangeable.«23 In other words, God’s eternal unchangeableness is not the negation of time but, precisely, the condition for God being able to give time and in giving time to enter into relation to what is temporal. Human beings are, of course, inconstant and it is tempting to see the human heart as »a graveyard of forgotten promises, resolutions, decisions, great plans and little bits of plans and ›God knows what‹ – Yes, that’s how we human beings talk, for we rarely think about what we are saying.«24 But, of course, Kierkegaard thinks that God does indeed »know what:« »What has become changed in your memory,

21   D. Glöckner, Das Versprechen: Studien zur Verbindlichkeit menschlichen Sagens in Søren Kierkegaards Werk Die Taten der Liebe (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009), 2. 22   S. Kierkegaard, Guds Uforanderlighed, in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (SKS), vol. 13, eds. N. J. Cappelørn et al. (Copenhagen: Gad, 2009), 332 (all translations of Kierkegaard’s texts are by the author). 23   Ibid., 333. The Hongs’ translation has »he takes his time,« which seems mistaken. 24   Ibid., 335.

The Grace of Time

157

He knows as unchanged – no, He knows it as if it was today« since He has »an all-knowing memory, an eternally unchangeable memory from which you cannot escape, least of all in eternity.«25 Everything is »eternally equally present« and neither the shifting shadows of forgetfulness or excuse-making change Him. No, nothing is in the shadows for Him. And if we, as it is said, are shadows, He is eternal clarity in its eternal unchangeability. If we are like shadows that flee, then, my soul, take care, for whether you wish it or no, you are fleeing towards eternity, to Him, and He is eternal clarity.26

This suggests that God’s eternity is precisely the luminosity in which our lives in time are revealed as meaningful, if or to the extent that they are meaningful. But because it is God who is this light and because God is the Father, the giver of every good and perfect gift, this illumination is not merely a static non-or extra-temporal illumination, a last judgement made when everything is finished. Rather, it is an illumination that is to redeem human beings from a shadow-life and bring them into the light of a true life. Earlier in the discourse Kierkegaard commented that »In every moment [God] holds everything actual in His almighty hand as possibility; in every moment He has everything in readiness, in a flash he can change everything, human beings’ opinions and judgments, human greatness and even lowliness, He changes everything – Himself unchanged.«27 God’s knowledge of all that is not the knowledge of Minerva’s owl that, as Hegel remarked, flies only at dusk, at the ending of the day.28 Rather, it is knowledge of the world as a field of open possibilities, including the possibility of human life being transformed from darkness to light, from despair to hope. God gives time and knows time, the world of time, as a field of open possibilities and it is as such that life in this temporal world is a good and perfect gift that is in turn the condition of a God-relationship worthy of being called a relationship of love. It is God-given time that gives us the possibility of experiencing our lives otherwise than we experience them under the tyranny of time and possibility, the possibility of freely turning towards God in gratitude for this good and perfect gist that is the means by which, in, with and under the limitations of temporal life, we can relate to the eternal. Time and possibility work combine together to produce hope. As Kierkegaard puts it in Works of Love: By means of possibility, eternity is always sufficiently near to be at hand and yet sufficiently distant to keep a person moving forwards, towards the Eternal, in motion, progressing. Using possibility in this way is how eternity entices and attracts a person onwards, from the cradle to the grave – if only we choose to hope.29

25

  Ibid., 336.   Ibid., 336. 27   Ibid., 330. 28   G. W. F. Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970), 28. 29   S. Kierkegaard, Kjerlighedens Gjerninger, SKS 9, 252. 26

158

George Pattison

We will not perhaps so easily find in Kierkegaard the same emphasis on human solidarity as in Muir, yet the discourse from which this last citation is drawn (entitled »Love hopes all things and is never put to shame«), emphasizes that the hope in question is not just hope for our own individual salvation but, in the first instance, hope for the other, that those seemingly lost to God, those knowing the tyranny of time in the corruption of their own hearts, may still be transformed so as to know and practice the truth and joy of divine love. The transformation of time is never a private good alone.30 The discourse on the unchangeability of God ends with another parable, again illustrating the relationship between time and eternity. A traveller in the desert is refreshed by a cooling spring. When he revisits the spot years later, he finds the spring dried up. The spring served its purpose once, in the past, but does so no more. God, however, was a source of comfort in the past and still is in the present, whatever our circumstances. In the figure of the parable, God is therefore like a refreshing spring that accompanies us throughout our journey through life and even when what once gave us comfort is no longer there, we can still be grateful to God for what, in this new present, God is giving us now. Such loyalty in gratitude to God shows »that there is something unchangeable in a human heart;«31 it does not need the more or less accidental occasion of (in this case) the refreshing spring to be grateful for the gift of life which we are given in every moment. But Kierkegaard gives the parable a further twist. »You,« he says, addressing God, »You are like a spring that itself seeks those who thirst and who are lost, something that has never been said of any other spring.«32 In other words, God is not standing outside of time nor even merely accompanying us on our journey in time. Rather, God is active within time, constantly opening up new horizons of possibility. In this way we learn that the open space of temporal possibility is itself the gift, the continually renewed and constant gift, of being able to come into relation to the eternal. But what is the root and justification of this »more«? Is this Kierkegaardian turn simply the imposition of a theological prejudice (as Heidegger thought) or is it phenomenologically grounded in time-experience itself? Fully to answer this last question we must take into account that time-experience is not something that occurs in a vacuum. We only ever experience time as one dimension of lived human life and time as such is only experienced in terms of its relation to life’s other fundamental dimensions, eminently our relation to other human beings. Thus, the experience of time as empty succession – »the days of man are but as grass« – is not simply a response to our own sense of being 30   In this connection we might also consider Kierkegaard’s claim that he wrote for »the common man« and his discourse on remembering the dead as further contributing to a Kierkegaardian notion of solidarity in both sin and hope. 31   Ibid., 338. 32   Ibid., 339.

The Grace of Time

159

individually thrown towards death, as Heidegger would have it. The issue is not just that I must die, I must pass away and my world with me, including everything that makes life worth living: all that we love best and those we love best; the places, objects, events, causes, and people who co-constitute the framework of meaningfulness in which we live and move and have our being – all are marked by radical transiency. The sting of oblivion is that it is not just the oblivion of individual self-consciousness but oblivion of the entire world to which self-consciousness belongs. But the obverse of this vision of universal oblivion is that hope can never just be hope for myself alone, but is necessarily hope in solidarity with and in love to others. We return to Theunissen and to Pindar and to Arne Grøn’s comment that in appealing to Pindar’s poetic testimony the philosopher is also allowing his philosophical reflection to take into consideration the experiences and movements of which the poet speaks and that are set forth in his poetic work.33 That time can break into the time of human life as sweetness, blessing, and light is neither a philosophical hypothesis not a religious prejudice. It is an experience to which the poet bears witness and a movement that he shows as real existential possibility.

33

  Grøn, »Zeit und Tranzendenz,« 44.

Analogy and Negativism Ettore Rocca

In the Timaeus, Plato calls analogy »the most beautiful bond [. . .] which makes itself and the terms it connects a unity in the fullest sense.«1 The concept of analogy has repeatedly been a topic of debate in the history of philosophy and theology. Analogy is one of the main means by which human thought has sought to express the unknown and the divine. In this essay I will briefly reconstruct this concept from Aristotle to Kant and Trendelenburg. The aim of this reconstruction is to examine Kierkegaard’s contribution to the concept of analogy, and to what could be called analogical thinking. Finally, I will discuss whether Arne Grøn’s negativism can be brought into dialogue with analogical thinking.

1. Tá hómoia synorán Analogy is not a likeness of two terms, but of two relations. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics defines analogy as follows: »analogy [analogía] is equality of relations [lógōn], and involves four terms at least, [. . .] the relation between one pair is the same as that between the other pair [. . .]. As the term A, then, is to B, so will C be to D.«2 If likeness holds between numerical terms, analogy concerns mathematical proportion; a quantitative likeness of ratios between homogeneous terms. If one term is unknown, the rules of analogy allow me to calculate it. Analogy can also be qualitative. It is then a likeness of relations between heterogeneous terms. The relations will in some respects also be heterogeneous. I may discover a likeness between heterogeneous relations, as in the example in the Poetics where, »a cup (B) is in relation to Dionysus (A) what a shield (D) is to Ares (C). The cup accordingly will be metaphorically described as the ›the shield of Dionysus‹ (D + A), and the shield as the ›cup of Ares‹ (B + C).«3

1   Plato, Timaeus, 31c, trans. F. M. Cornford, in Plato’s Cosmology: The »Timaeus« of Plato translated with a running commentary (London: Kegan, 1937), 44 (translation modified). 2   Aristotle, Ethica nicomachea, V.3, 1131a – 1131b, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 9, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966) (translation modified). 3   Aristotle, De poetica, 21, 1457b, trans. I. Bywater, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 11, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966).

162

Ettore Rocca

According to Aristotle, this is an example of metaphor by analogy. »Metaphor – argues Aristotle – consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.«4 However, as Umberto Eco argues, the first two types of metaphor – from species to genus and from genus to species – are »in fact synecdoches.«5 The first substitutes the whole for the part; the second the part for the whole. The third type – species to species – is closer to a metaphor by analogy than to a synecdoche.6 Thus, metaphor by analogy is indeed not only one of the four forms of metaphor, but the condition for the possibility of every metaphor. An analogy hides behind every metaphorical transfer. The primacy of metaphor by analogy is mainly found in the pages of the Rhetoric where Aristotle discusses metaphor, as in the following quotation: »Metaphors must be drawn, as has been said already, from things that are related to the original thing, and yet not obviously so related – just as in philosophy also an acute mind will perceive resemblances even in things far apart.«7 On the one hand, analogical thought is the condition for metaphorical language; on the other, metaphorical language is the expression of analogical thought. Analogy is also a particular type of unit. Aristotle mentions four kinds of unit: numerical, specific, generic, and analogous: »Again, some things are one in number, others in species, others in genus, others by analogy; in number those whose matter is one, in species those whose definition is one, in genus those to which the same figure of predication applies, by analogy those which are related as a third thing is to a fourth.«8 For example, we have a numerical unit between two identical squares; a specific unit between two cats, and a generic unit between a cat and a human being. In the case of analogy, we do not have a given and determinate unit between two things, but try to find an analogical likeness between different relations that constitute two things. Aristotle does not mention »it directly, it is in fact by analogy that likeness of different genera are discovered.«9 Analogy is a tool for discovering this likeness of different genera. As Trendelenburg puts it in his Logische Untersuchungen: »The

4

 Ibid.   U. Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1984), 91. See also Idem, »Metafora e conoscenza nel Medioevo,« in Scritti sul pensiero medievale (Milano: Bompiani, 2012), 661. 6  See Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language, 92 – 94. 7   Aristotle, Rhetorica, III.11, 1412a, trans. W. Rhys Roberts, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 11, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 8   Aristotle, Metaphysica, V.6, 1016b, trans. W. D. Ross, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 8, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 9   H. Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World. An Investigation of its Background and Interpretation of its Use by Thomas of Aquino (Uppsala: Almquist & Wiksells Boktryckeri AB, 1952), 39. 5

Analogy and Negativism

163

analogy is indeterminate, because it experiments with the universal.«10 A unit of analogy is the widest and most indeterminate kind of unit. We use analogy in order to find relations »in regard to terms that are far apart [málista d’en tóis polý diestō΄si].«11 Is there a rule for finding analogies between terms that are far apart? Aristotle provides no rules; he says that »practice is more especially needed [gymnázesthai déi].« Through practice »we shall be more easily able to see in one glance the points of likeness [tá hómoia synorán].«12 Analogy is something that you synorá, literally, something that you ›are able to see together,‹ or ›to have within your range of vision;‹ something that you suddenly discover being able to see at once. »It is from metaphor that we can best get hold of something fresh,« writes Aristotle in the Rhetoric.13 And in his Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der aristotelischen Logik, Trendelenburg comments that »analogy is tacitly the guiding principle for extending our knowledge. [. . .] Amid the prose of science, analogy still has the magical power of the poetic metaphor, until it relinquishes the magical, just as the blossom must relinquish its color for the fruit of the concept to ripen.«14 Even the logician Trendelenburg cannot avoid describing the power of analogy analogically. He uses similar terms in his Logische Untersuchungen, when he writes that analogy »wants to extend positively our knowledge to an unknown region.«15 It is notable that when Aristotle discusses the three fundamental metaphysical principles (i. e. matter, form, and privation) and the two other fundamental principles (i. e. actuality and potentiality), he does not define them. According to Aristotle, »the definition consists of genus and differentiae [ho horismós ek genous kai diaphorôn estin].«16 However, concepts like form, matter, potentiality, and actuality cannot be defined, because they cannot be included in a higher given genus. »Aristotle therefore resorts to analogy as a means of explaining the import of actuality« and of the other metaphysical principles.17 10   A. Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1 – 2 (Berlin: Bethge, 1840), vol. 2, 267 (my translation). In German: »Die Analogie ist unbestimmt, da sie eigentlich mit dem Allgemeinen experimentirt.«. 11   Aristotle, Topica, I.17, 108a, trans. W. A. Pickard-Cambridge, in The Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, ed. W. D. Ross (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966). 12  Ibid. 13   Aristotle, Rhetorica, III.10, 1410b. 14   A. Trendelenburg, Erläuterungen zu den Elementen der aristotelischen Logik. Zunächst für den Unterricht in Gymnasien, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Bethge, 1861), 86 (my translation). In German: »Die Analogie ist stillschweigend der Leitfaden unserer sich erweiternden Erkenntniß. [. . .] Die Analogie hat noch mitten in der Prosa der Wissenschaft den Zauber der poetischen Metapher, bis sie ihn, wie die Blüte ihre Farben, an die reife Frucht des Begriffs abgiebt.« 15   Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 2, 263 (my translation). In German: »[D]ie Analogie [will] die Erkenntniß in eine unbekannte Gegend hinein positiv erweitern.« 16   Aristotle, Topica, I.8, 103b. 17   Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World, 48.

164

Ettore Rocca

As for form, privation, matter, actuality, and potentiality »we must not seek a definition of everything but must be content to grasp the analogy [to análogon synorán] [. . .] But all things are not said in the same sense to exist actually, but only by analogy – as A is in B or to B, C is in D or to D.«18 Note the same verb as in the above-mentioned quotation: when we are unable to give a definition we must to análogon synorán – we must grasp the analogy – to be able to see relations together at once. To summarize: Analogy as likeness of heterogeneous relations is a principle for extending our knowledge into the unknown. Analogy is an indeterminate kind of unit that experiments with the universal. All understanding of metaphysical principles is analogical. Through analogy we are able to see relations together at once.

2. Prós hén statements The concept of analogy so far presented is strikingly different from the medieval concept of analogy of being, which Aristotle could never have understood as analogy. In a well-known section of the Metaphysics, Aristotle states that ›being‹ must not be understood in one sense only, but that it must be understood in many senses. Being is not univocal, but multivocal. However, this multivocality is not sheer ambiguity: »There are many senses in which a thing may be said to ›be,‹ but all that ›is‹ is related to one central point [prós hén], one definite kind of thing, and is not said to ›be‹ by a mere ambiguity.«19 This one central point which all that »is« is related to is »substance.« »While ›being‹ has all these senses, obviously that which ›is‹ primarily is the ›what,‹ which indicates the substance of the thing.«20 Aristotle gives the famous example of the term ›healthy.‹ ›Healthy‹ is always used with regard to the substance ›health.‹ However, it can be used in many ways. It can be used in the sense of preserving health (healthy exercise), of producing health (healthy food), of being a sign of health (healthy complexion), or of being capable of having health (healthy body). Different things can be healthy because they have different relations to the substance ›health,‹ though these relations can be quite different. In Aristotle’s understanding of analogy, we have a likeness of two relations (A is to B as C is to D). In prós hén statements, however, we have likeness of two things (A is like B, complexion is like food) because they relate to a third term (C, health), even though the two things have a different sort of relationship to the third term (A is not to C as B is to C, complexion is not to health what food is to health).

18

  Aristotle, Metaphysica, IX.6, 1048 a.   Ibid., IV.2, 1003a. 20   Ibid.,VII.1, 1028a. 19

Analogy and Negativism

165

For Aristotle, prós hén statements are never ›analogous.‹ However, prós hén statements later become the source of the Thomistic ›analogy of being‹: God and human beings are analogous because they have different relations to the same term. For instance, being or goodness can be said of God in a proper sense (per prius), because he is the source of being and goodness, but they can be said of human beings only in a secondary and derived sense (per posterius). As Lyttkens consistently argues, the key element of Thomas’ conception of analogy is the causal relation between God and creation. »All St. Thomas’ analogies between God and the world are ultimately based on the relation of cause to effect.«21 The main epistemological difference between the analogy of proportionality and the analogy of being is that through the former we have the possibility of enlarging our comprehension by finding the likeness of given relations; in the latter we apprehend nothing new. Consider the example of ›God.‹ Through analogy of proportionality I try to understand God taking my point of departure from relations within my experience. By contrast, the analogy of being (the prós hén statements) only tells us something about God that we already know through faith or revelation. As Umberto Eco puts it: the analogy of being »has less cognitive value than a good metaphor.«22

3. Thinking of the dissimilarity of things I now turn to Kant. Kant’s concept of analogy is based exclusively on the Aristotelian concept rather than on the medieval analogy of being. It is not even a combination of the two concepts – as Eberhard Jüngel argues.23 In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant defines analogy in the following way: In philosophy analogies signify something very different from what they represent in mathematics. In the latter they are formulas that assert the identity of two relations of magnitude, and are always constitutive, so that if three members of the proportion are given the forth is also thereby given, i. e., can be constructed. In philosophy, however, analogy is not the identity of two quantitative but of two qualitative relations, where from three given members I can cognize and give a priori only the relation to a fourth member but not this fourth member itself, although I have a rule for seeking it in experience and a mark for discovering it there.24

Qualitative analogy does not give a constitutive rule, but only a regulative rule, claims Kant. Analogy does not give me the rule for constructing the fourth member, but only the relation through which I can seek it in experience. To find the 21

  Lyttkens, The Analogy between God and the World, 244.   Eco, »Metafora e conoscenza nel Medioevo,« 662 (my translation). In Italian: »L’analogia entis ha minor valore cognitivo di una buona metafora.« 23  See E. Jüngel, Gott als Geheimnis der Welt, 7th ed. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 363. 24   I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, B222, trans. P. Guyer and A. W. Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 297 – 298. 22

166

Ettore Rocca

likeness of relations is my regulative rule in order to build a meaningful experience. Despite the role that analogy plays in the Critique of Pure Reason, it is not until the Critique of the Power of Judgment that the conditions for the possibility of analogy are analyzed. As Emilio Garroni and Hansmichael Hohenegger have argued: »In the third Critique, the very problem of the possibility of analogy itself is discussed.«25 According to them the question of analogy is »the very form of the issue (at the same time unitary and complex)« that is at stake in the third Critique.26 In § 59, Kant explains how analogical thinking arises. We begin with a concept (or better yet, the relations that constitute a concept) that we cannot explain. We then use another known concept (or better yet, the relations that constitute this known concept) in order to understand the unknown concept. We apply »the mere rule of reflection« on a known object to an entirely different and unknown object, of which the first is only the symbol.27 We use analogy when we want to understand something about which we are ignorant. What kind of rule do we apply when we use analogy? The rule is the a priori principle of the aesthetic faculty of judgment. This principle is »a universal rule that one cannot produce.«28 The rule exists; it is universally human, but I cannot give an account of it, I cannot show it. Because I cannot account for the rule, I cannot be sure that the rule has been applied correctly. It is impossible to distinguish with certitude the correct use of the rule from the incorrect use of it. What Kant writes about the judgment of taste can be repeated about building analogies: »One solicits assent from everyone else because one has a ground for it that is common to all; one could even count on this assent if only one were always sure that the case were correctly subsumed under that ground as the rule of approval.«29 But we can never be sure the case has been correctly subsumed under the rule, because the rule cannot be produced. To think analogically is to apply a rule that one cannot give an account of. To think analogically means synorán – seeing relations together, at once – and that, as Aristotle claims, requires practice; it requires aesthetic practice, Kant adds. Another point is crucial in Kant’s analysis of analogy. Through analogy we think the similarity of the relations that two dissimilar terms have to other terms. In this way we think the analogy of two things »even on the very point of their 25   E. Garroni, and H. Hohenegger, »Genesi, struttura e senso della terza Critica kantiana,« in E. Garroni, L’arte e l’altro dell’arte. Saggi di estetica e di critica (Roma / Bari: Laterza, 2003), 41 (my translation). In Italian: »Nella terza Critica si pone precisamente il problema della possibilità stessa [. . .] dell’analogia.«. 26   Ibid., 39 (my translation): »la forma stessa del tema insieme unitario e complesso della terza Critica.« 27   I. Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 59, B256, trans. P. Guyer and E. Matthews (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 226. 28   Ibid., § 18, B63, 121. 29   Ibid., §  18, B63 – 64, 121 – 122.

Analogy and Negativism

167

dissimilarity.« »One can [. . .] think of one of two dissimilar things, even on the very point of their dissimilarity, by means of an analogy with the other.«30 By thinking about similarity, a good analogy sheds light even on the very point of the dissimilarity of the two terms, and on the dissimilarity of the relations that constitute these terms. Thinking analogically is a way of thinking both likeness and difference. I think similarity through dissimilarity, and dissimilarity through similarity. A complete dissimilarity would mean no relation, and therefore the dissimilarity could not be grasped. I need to find some similarity in order to think the dissimilarity. According to Kant, all human cognition about God is analogical  – in the Aristotelian, rather than the Thomistic sense. This cognition, however, is only ›thought‹ and not ›knowledge‹ about God. It does not allow us to ›infer‹ anything about God.31 According to Aristotle and Trendelenburg, analogy is a tool for knowing new things. According to Kant, analogy gives no knowledge, but triggers our imagination and our thought; it »occasions much thinking.« Kant’s definition of aesthetic ideas can be applied to analogy: »by an aesthetic idea, however, I mean that representation of the imagination that occasions much thinking though without it being possible for any determinate thought, i. e. concept, to be adequate to it.«32 Every good analogy is the expression of an aesthetic idea; it »sets the mental powers into motion, i. e. into a play that is self-maintaining and even strengthens the powers to that end.«33 Kant follows Hume in his critique of analogy as a tool for extending our knowledge. In fact, Hume’s critique of analogy did not want to ban analogy, but only to deny that analogy can be a source of cognitive inference: »Wisdom, Thought, Design, Knowledge; these we justly ascribe to him,« in analogy with our powers, because »we have no other language or other conceptions by which we can express our adoration of him. But let us beware, lest we think that our ideas anywise correspond to his perfections, or that his attributes have any resemblance to these qualities among men. He is infinitely superior to our limited view and comprehension; and is more the object of worship in the temple, than of disputation in the schools.«34 Analogy serves to show God’s infinite difference from the human. Analogy can essentially only be »very weak [. . .] confessedly liable to error and uncertainty.« It is but »a guess, a conjecture, a presumption,« since between the divine and the human »the dissimilitude is so striking.«35 Paradoxically, analogy allows showing precisely the dissimilitude. 30

  Ibid., § 90, B448, 328 – 329.   Ibid.: »from that respect in which they [i. e. two dissimilar things] are dissimilar we cannot draw an inference by means of the analogy.« 32   Ibid., § 49, B192 – 193, 192. 33  Ibid. 34   D. Hume, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (London: Hafner Press, 1948), Part 2, 16. 35   Ibid., 18. 31

168

Ettore Rocca

To summarize: According to Kant, through analogy we apply a rule that we cannot account for. This rule is the universal human principle of the aesthetic power of judgment. Through analogy we think similarity of relations even on the very point of their dissimilarity. All understanding about God is analogical.

4.  Revoked analogy At first glance it does not seem that analogy plays a central role in Kierkegaard’s authorship. However, I would like to highlight two books that bring Kierkegaard in connection with analogy: Anders Kingo’s Analogiens teologi. En dogmatisk studie over dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab (1995)36 and Steven Shakespeare’s Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (2015).37 They hold opposite theses: the former that the whole authorship of Kierkegaard is to be interpreted through a peculiar concept of analogy; the latter that Kierkegaard totally rejects the concept of analogy. In this context, I must be content with saying that the two books, despite their opposite theses, share the same point of departure, namely, the Thomistic concept of analogy, that is, analogy of being. Kingo does this in order to show how Kierkegaard modifies the concept; Shakespeare in order to prove how Kierkegaard rejects it. My thesis is that Aquinas’ analogy of being plays no role in Kierkegaard’s thinking on analogy. Rather, Kierkegaard’s use of analogy is related to the tradition I have briefly sketched here, from Aristotle to Kant to Trendelenburg. In an analysis of Kierkegaard’s use of the concept of analogy,38 we may be content to quote the first of the 15 theses of The Concept of Irony: »Similitudo Christum inter et Socratem in dissimilitudine praecipue est posita [The similarity between Christ and Socrates consists essentially in their dissimilarity].«39 Kierkegaard is aware that this thesis has to do with analogy. It is confirmed in a footnote, where he writes: »the similarity consists in dissimilarity and that there is an analogy only because there is an opposition [Modsætning].«40 We know that this thesis is the only one that was not developed in the book itself. We might say, however, that Kierkegaard’s entire authorship is nothing but an attempt to develop this thesis. 36   A. Kingo, Analogiens teologi. En dogmatisk studie over dialektikken i Søren Kierkegaards opbyggelige og pseudonyme forfatterskab (Copenhagen: Gad, 1995). 37   S. Shakespeare, Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 38   S. Kierkegaard’s writings are quoted with the following abbreviations: KW: Kierkegaard’s Writings, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, vol. 1 – 26 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978 – 98). SKS: Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al., vol. 1 – 55 (Copenhagen: Gad, 1997 – 2012). 39   Kierkegaard, The Concept of Irony with Continual Reference to Socrates, KW 2, 23 / SKS 1, 65. 40   Ibid., KW 2, 30 / SKS 1, 72 (translation modified).

Analogy and Negativism

169

Let us analyze this thesis. To say that the similarity between Socrates and Christ consists essentially in dissimilarity means at first sight that there is no similarity between them, and therefore no analogy. But Kierkegaard does not say that there is no analogy, he says that similarity consists of dissimilarity. Is it then a logical contradiction; nonsense? No, not if we remember Kant’s definition: an analogy can even shed light on a point of dissimilarity between two terms. This is indeed Kierkegaard’s point in a footnote in The Concept of Irony: »there is an analogy [between Socrates and Christ] only because there is an opposition.« Analogy has the purpose of showing the dissimilarity. This has been the fundamental point of analogy since Aristotle. We revert to analogy when there is no numerical unity, no unity of species, or no unity of genus. Analogy exists only between heterogeneous things. Analogy is used when one attempts to find a relation between things that do not seem to have a relation. Analogy is an attempt to create relations between things that cannot be related to each other through a definition. Kierkegaard uses the concept of analogy in a central place of the Postscript. Climacus is discussing the question of truth for an existing human being; a finite, temporal human being that tries to relate in a passionate way to something infinite and outside time. Here, it is impossible for a human being to reach certainty about whether the infinite being she relates to is objectively true. This infinite is objectively uncertain. The question of truth therefore concerns not the object of the relation, but the relation itself: »[T]ruth is precisely the daring venture of choosing the objective uncertainty with the passion of the infinite.«41 This relation is »the highest truth for an existing person.«42 Climacus claims that this subjective truth, which consists in the passionate relation to an objective uncertainty, is a paradox, and this is the Socratic truth. In Christian faith, however, subjectivity does not relate to something objectively uncertain (God as eternity), but to something that is an objective impossibility – a God that comes into existence: »Existence can never be accentuated more sharply than it has been here.«43 However, Socratic subjective truth is an analogon of Christian faith, the faith of the absurd. This is Climacus’s thesis. The analogy is between two relations. On the one hand, we have the relation of an existing finite person to an infinite, eternal, but objectively uncertain being. On the other hand, we have the relation of an existing finite person to something that is impossible. From objective uncertainty »held fast in the passion of inwardness«44 to objective impossibility held fast in the passion of inwardness. From a relation that seems to be the highest accentuation of existence, to a relation that is an even higher accentuation of existence. Between 41   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments,« KW 12, 203 /  SKS 7, 186. 42  Ibid. 43   Ibid., KW 12, 209 / SKS 7, 192. 44   Ibid., KW 12, 210 / SKS 7, 192.

170

Ettore Rocca

these two relations, there is an analogy, claims Climacus, even if »the difference is nevertheless infinite.«45 After several pages, Climacus seems to change his mind: »Faith belongs essentially in the sphere of the paradoxical-religious [. . .] All other faith is only an analogy that is no [analogy], an analogy that can serve to make aware, but no more, the understanding of which is therefore a revocation.«46 So there is no analogy of the paradoxical-religious. Does Climacus contradict himself in the same work? And what does it mean that »all other faith is only an analogy that is no analogy«? This sentence also seems to be contradictory. On the one hand, Climacus legitimizes analogy; on the other hand, every analogy we use must be revoked. Analogy is legitimized in order to be revoked. This is not only the case when we use Socratic faith as an analogy to Christian faith. This is also the case when we use examples from daily life, something that Kierkegaard does time and again in order to understand Christian faith. Recall, for instance, Anti-Climacus’s analogy in Sickness unto Death when he compares the Christian message to an emperor telling a poor manual laborer that he is to become his sonin-law.47 Nevertheless, Climacus writes in the Postscript: »Let us take a few examples from minor situations in life, though we must constantly keep in mind that when we use these examples, there is an absolute difference, there is no analogy to the sphere of the paradoxically religious, and thus we must constantly keep in mind that when the analogy is understood, its use is a revocation.«48 He then offers some examples. After giving examples from daily life, however, Climacus concludes: »It is the same also with the person who is truly a Christian – if we bear in mind that there is no analogy.«49 Analogies must be used in order to be revoked. The right application of the analogy is its revocation. Analogy is necessary in order to understand the paradox. However, analogy is a »deception,« and if the analogy is not immediately revoked it will annihilate the paradox: »Instead of using the analogy in order to define the paradox [. . .] he mistakenly revokes the paradox by means of the analogy, which is really a deceptive analogy, the use of which is a revocation of the analogy, not the paradox.«50 Analogies are like sand castles: they must be built in order to be destroyed. As Friedrich Schiller wrote in his elegy Nänie: »Even the beautiful must die! [Auch das Schöne muß sterben!].«51 45

  Ibid., KW 12, 206, footnote / SKS 7, 190.   Ibid., KW 12, 569, footnote / SKS 7, 517. 47  See Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 84 – 85 / SKS 11, 197 – 198. 48   Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, KW 12, 567 / SKS 7, 515 (translation modified). 49   Ibid., KW 12, 567 / SKS 7, 516. 50   Ibid., KW 12, 580 / SKS 7, 527 (translation modified). 51   F. Schiller, »Nänie,« Werke und Briefe in zwölf Bänden, vol. 1, ed. G. Kurscheidt (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1992), 182 – 183 (my translation). 46

Analogy and Negativism

171

In an entry in Journal JJ from 1844 Kierkegaard discusses Trendelenburg’s idea that »the highest principles can be demonstrated only indirectly (negatively).« He speaks here of analogy as a leap from a logical point of view: »From analogy and induction one can only reach a conclusion by a leap.«52 I have mentioned the significant role that the concept of analogy plays in Trendelenburg’s logical writings. Even more interesting is the fact that Kierkegaard links analogy to his category of the leap. I noted earlier that for Kant the condition for the possibility of building analogies is the aesthetic faculty of judgment. Kierkegaard is fully aware that analogy is related to the aesthetic and the poetic. I quote from an entry from 1849, where Kierkegaard reflects on the first of the Two Ethical-Religious Essays. The didactic treatment of the life of Christ [. . .] is nonsense. A new path may be, and must be, blazed [. . .] To that end, I’ve thought it best to use the poetic. I think that human analogies – when, please note, the qualitative difference between God-Man and human being is respected – can help illustrate it, can help give a more vital impression of the gospel again. Christianity, or the gospel, has become trivial to people because it’s been familiar to them for such a long time and they’ve learned it by rote [. . .] It’s really a matter of doing something to make the life of Christ present and intimate. This, I think, is the merit of the little essay [i. e. the first of Two Ethical-Religious Essays]. Artistically, and with the help of human analogies, possibility has replaced facticity. And possibility is precisely what awakens.53

The poetic can serve the religious. The poetic means human analogies. On the one hand, »possibility is precisely what awakens.« On the other hand, through analogy, possibility replaces facticity, and replacing facticity with possibility is the very flaw of the aesthetic. As we read at the beginning of the second part of The Sickness unto Death, poetry of Christianity is sin: »Christianly understood, every poet-existence (aesthetics notwithstanding) is sin, the sin of poetizing instead of being, of relating to the good and the true through the imagination instead of being that – that is, existentially striving to be that.«54 Analogy is the category of making aware; of awakening; of understanding that we cannot understand. If making aware of Christianity is the key category in Kierkegaard’s authorship, then so is analogy. Continuing and radicalizing the sketched tradition from Aristotle to Kant, Kierkegaard’s contribution to the concept of analogy can be thus summarized: The very nature of analogy consists in finding likenesses of relations and revoking them at the same time. Analogy defines our understanding of the incomprehensible by letting us understand in which sense we cannot understand.

52   Kierkegaard, »JJ: 266,« in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. 2, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 206 / SKS 18, 225. 53   Kierkegaard, »NB11: 33,« in Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks, vol. 6, ed. N. J. Cappelørn et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 22 / SKS 22, 26. 54   Kierkegaard, Sickness unto Death, KW 19, 77 / SKS 11, 191.

172

Ettore Rocca

5. Analogy and negativism »How [do] we relate to that which we do not understand or even cannot understand?« This is the crucial question the Danish philosopher Arne Grøn faces in his reading of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments.55 Is it possible to bring into dialogue Grøn’s enquiry of understanding that we cannot understand with my analysis of analogy in Kierkegaard? It should be if, in accordance with the result I arrived at, analogical thinking is a tool for understanding the incomprehensible by letting us understand in which sense we cannot understand. In his essay »Transcendence of Thought« Grøn analyzes the »thought-project« contained in Philosophical Fragments, a work signed by the pseudonym Johannes Climacus. First, Climacus describes the Socratic position (called position A), where the human being has access to the truth. Even if the human being does not know the truth, she knows that she can seek the truth and that she can come to it through introspection. The truth is already in her. She must just remember it, as the slave does in Plato’s Meno. Another human being can only help her, in a maieutic way, to go back to herself. This position is understandable. Is it possible for human thought to construct another position? In this second position, called B, human being is »outside the truth,« is »untruth and [is] that through one’s own fault.«56 Human being is untruth and – furthermore – lacks »the condition for understanding the truth.«57 In this position, no human being, but only God, can be the one »who gives the condition and gives the truth.«58 The two positions seem to sketch an alternative between immanence and transcendence; »between a natural theology and a theology of transcendence;«59 between understanding and impossibility of understanding. On the one hand, immanent understanding; on the other, a paradox that is not to be understood. In Grøn’s view, however, the alternative cannot be a simple one: The project of the book [. . .] is not straightforward, but awkward. It turns things upside down. The project deals with that which a human being cannot think of or imagine: that which ›did not arise in any human heart,‹ to quote Climacus paraphrasing I Corinthians 2:9 [. . .] Consequently, Climacus presents as a thought-project that which is not thought of or conceived. The project is about a radical transcendence of thought – conceived of as a thought-project.60

55   A. Grøn, »Transcendence of Thought. The Project of ›Philosophical Fragments‹,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 2004 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2004), 80 – 99. See also Idem, Subjektivitet og negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997), 357 – 362, and Idem, »At forstå – og at forstå,« in At være sig selv nærværende: Festskrift til Niels Jørgen Cappelørn, ed. J. Garff et al. (Copenhagen: Kristeligt Dagblads Forlag, 2010), 100 – 115. 56   Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, KW 7, 15 / SKS 4, 224. 57   Ibid., KW 7, 14 / SKS 4, 223. 58   Ibid., KW 7, 15 / SKS 4, 224. 59   Grøn, »Transcendence of Thought,« 83. 60   Ibid., 82.

Analogy and Negativism

173

In fact, the very problem is that »we will have to understand that we cannot understand.«61 But if we will have to understand the paradox as the non-understandable, this means – continues Grøn – that it is possible to misunderstand that which we cannot understand. »The very possibility of misunderstanding (e. g., in trying to explain the paradox) shows that we cannot escape the condition of understanding.«62 We are called to understand even that which we cannot understand. However, how can we understand that we cannot understand? Can this understanding be comprehended as analogical understanding? Before answering this question, we must accentuate a second element crucial to Grøn’s thought: Understanding that we cannot understand also involves a peculiar understanding of ourselves: »To understand the paradox as paradox is a reflective understanding in the following sense: we come to understand that we cannot understand the paradox (in the sense of explaining it), and we come to understand ourselves in this relation, precisely because we are ourselves in understanding.«63 I draw attention to the words »reflective understanding«: Can this reflective understanding be comprehended in line with the Kantian reflective faculty of judgment? According to Kant, the judgment of taste is not only a judgment on something we experience, but in it »the subject feels itself as it is affected by the representation.«64 Feeling something means feeling ourselves in feeling something; understanding something means understanding ourselves in understanding something. How do we understand ourselves, when we come to understand that we cannot understand? Chapter III of Philosophical Fragments is devoted to »the absolute paradox,«65 as that unknown we cannot understand. Climacus calls this unknown »the god.«66 It is the frontier that is continually arrived at, and therefore [. . .] it is the different, the absolutely different. But it is the absolutely different in which there is no distinguishing mark. Defined as the absolutely different, it seems to be at the point of being disclosed, but not so, because the understanding cannot even think the absolutely different; it cannot absolutely negate itself but uses itself for that purpose and consequently thinks the difference in itself, which it thinks by itself.67

We can observe the same double movement of using and revoking analogy described in the Postscript: Thought tries to think by itself the absolutely different, but must at the same time revoke the understanding it arrived at. In fact, in thinking by itself the absolutely different, thought makes absolute difference like itself, and thus destroys absolute difference as difference. On the other hand, even 61

  Ibid., 84.  Ibid. 63   Ibid., 88. 64   Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 1, B4, 89 (my italics). 65   Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, KW 7, 37 – 54 / SKS 4, 242 – 252. 66   Ibid., KW 7, 39 / SKS 4, 245. 67   Ibid., KW 7, 45 / SKS 4, 249 – 50. 62

174

Ettore Rocca

if thought revokes its understanding of the absolutely different, it »cannot absolutely negate itself,« and it is therefore obliged to think somehow the absolutely different by itself. According to Grøn, what Climacus presents in this section is an intensified dialectic of the limit. It has often been argued that »to draw a limit presupposes that we have an idea of what is beyond the limit.«68 Climacus, however, intensifies this dialectic: »the thought, that seeks to think the absolute as that which is absolutely other than thought itself, encounters itself. This thought uses itself in order to think that which is absolutely different from itself. [. . .] In the transcendence of thought, thought encounters itself.«69 What does it mean that thought encounters itself? On the one hand, in seeking to transcend itself thought makes a »negative experience«: »Thought’s movement of transcendence does not yield transcendence of thought. In this sense, the project of transcendence of thought fails. [. . .] Immanence is where we are, and we are not able to go beyond ourselves in a sphere of transcendence. [. . .] Transcendence is not a position we can take.«70 We cannot leave immanence; we cannot leave our human condition. Still, »transcendence announces itself in a rupture or in the limit where our thinking and imagination break down and are turned upside down, and where we ourselves become the addressee.«71 On the one hand, we can relate to transcendence only by thinking and imagining it; on the other hand »our imagination [is] broken and reversed«72 in the attempt to think transcendence. This corresponds to thinking transcendence analogically. We have nothing other than human analogies for thinking transcendence; at the same time every analogy must be revoked and reversed. Here Grøn takes a further step: »[. . .] that our imagination itself is broken and inverted [. . .] opens the possibility of the inversion of perspective.«73 We see ourselves with the eyes of the other. »Through the medium of imagination one seeks to place oneself in the situation of the other.«74 Here, in my opinion, Grøn 68

  Grøn, »Transcendence of Thought,« 93.   Ibid., 93 – 94. See also Idem, »Menneskelig selvforståelse og frigørelsens dialektik: Kierkegaard og Sokrates – og Platon,« in Platon – værk og virkning, ed. J. K. Larsen and J. L. Fink (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 2016), 574 – 602, here, 598: »Med begrebet om det absolutte paradoks spørger [Kierke­ gaard] efter grænsen for menneskelig forståelse, men en sådan grænse kræver selv forståelse – menneskelig selvforståelse.« (»Through the concept of the absolute paradox raises Kierkegaard the question of the limit of human understanding, but such a limit demands itself understanding – human self-understanding,« (my translation)). 70   Grøn, »Transcendence of Thought,« 96. 71   Ibid. (my italics). 72  Ibid. 73   A. Grøn, »Imagination and Subjectivity,« Ars Disputandi 2 (2002), 27 – 36, here, 34. 74   Ibid. See also Idem, »Kærlighedens sakramente – Kierkegaard og nadveren,« in Nadver og folkekirke, ed. K. Busch Nielsen (Copenhagen: Anis, 2002), 67 – 78, here, 74: »Perspektivet vendes om, idet den, der ser, selv bliver set, eller rettere ser sig selv som set af den ›Anden.‹« (»The perspective is inverted, in so far as the one who sees is herself seen, or better sees herself as seen by the ›Other,‹« (my translation)). 69

Analogy and Negativism

175

again encounters Kant’s third Critique. Discussing judgment as a sensus communis, Kant claims that judgment yields one of the three maxims of the »common human understanding«: »To think in the position of everyone else.«75 This maxim »reveals a man of a broad-minded way of thinking if he sets himself apart from the subjective private conditions of the judgment, within which so many others are as if bracketed, and reflects on his own judgment from a universal standpoint (which he can only determine by putting himself into the standpoint of others).«76 The principle of the power of judgment is the condition both for the possibility of analogical thinking and for the possibility of an understanding through which we put ourselves in the standpoint of the other. To summarize, Arne Grøn’s peculiar contribution to the analogical thinking of transcendence is that in this negative experience of thought we encounter ourselves; we understand ourselves: »Transcendence of thought is only possible in thinking, however, not in the sense that thought transcends itself, performing a movement of transcendence, but, on the contrary, in the sense that fails to think that which is absolutely different and thus encounters itself in its own limit [. . .] we will have to understand ourselves in not understanding the paradox.«77 Facing transcendence is an experience of thought and imagination – in Kantian terms, an experience of »free play of the imagination and the understanding«78 – and an experience of lack of thought and imagination. In it, we face the never-ending task of understanding ourselves.

75

  Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 40, B158, 174.   Ibid., § 40, B159, 175. 77   Grøn, »Transcendence of Thought,« 99 (my italics). 78   Kant, Critique of the Power of Judgment, § 9, B29, 103. 76

From Alphabet to Poem On a Parenthesis in Sigmund Freud’s On Aphasia Günter Bader

Whether Freud’s work on aphasia alone would have given the German Academy for Language and Literature enough incentive to found the Sigmund Freud Preis für wissenschaftliche Prosa (Sigmund Freud Prize For Scientific Prose) is a question we will have to leave unanswered. This 1891 piece on findings and interpretations in the field of cerebral anatomy seems a long way from the undeniable elegance of his later writings. The reader may toil in vain when attempting to grasp the sense of its six sections marked with Roman numerals, containing prospective and retrospective reflections on the text, or dealing with the running heads. However, there is one passage in the text that turns this hardship into happiness: Suddenly, a sentence springs out of the bleak scientific prose. It is singular because it is within parenthesis; more precisely, because of the extravagant side leap prepared by the insertion of this parenthesis. It goes like this: [The fibre tracts that reach the cerebral cortex] contain the body periphery in the same way – to borrow an example from the subject with which we are concerned here – the poem contains the alphabet, i. e. in a completely different arrangement serving other purposes.1

This phrase, being but an excerpt of a wider context, shall now be carefully examined, indeed put under the microscope. I want to see how it – borrowing an expression from Freud’s neighbor Hugo von Hofmannsthal – falls into »parts, those parts again into parts.«2 I want to see what happens to subclauses, words, elements, punctuation, and even orthographic aid marks if you look at them very closely; how they comply, how they contest. Since my profession calls upon me to busy myself mostly with other subjects than anatomy, I take refuge at the wide rooftop of the general principle of solve et coagula sheltering both me and the 1   S. Freud, On Aphasia: A Critical Study, trans. E. Stengel (Madison, CT: International Universities Press, 1953), 53. German edition: Zur Auffassung der Aphasien: Eine kritische Studie [1891], ed. P. Vogel (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), 95. 2   H. v. Hofmannsthal, »Ein Brief,« in Hugo von Hofmannsthal: Sämtliche Werke, vol. 31: Erfundene Gespräche und Briefe, ed. E. Ritter (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1991), 49, 32 – 33. For the English translation confer http://depts.washington.edu / vienna / documents / Hofmannsthal / Hofmannsthal_Chandos.htm (accessed December 22, 2016).

178

Günter Bader

anatomist, and apply it not to the brain or parts of the brain, but to the phrase and parts of the phrase. Freud admits that his work on aphasia does not present any new anatomical observations. As indicated by the title and the first sentence, it is absolutely not about aphasia, but rather about the concepts of aphasia, which had gained wide attention in the thirty years following Paul Broca’s 1861 publications on the matter. It addresses texts about the brain, but not so much on the brain itself, stiff and ready for dissection. Freud intends to write a text on texts about the brain. This is obviously not very exceptional. However, what is exceptional is that at one point the word poem (Gedicht) emerges in place of the omnipresent brain (Gehirn). The reader does not trust his ears, bewitched by stave rhymes; all too inclined to melt anyway. Yet the author does not trust himself either. He is only able to continue the sentence after having interjected a parenthesis, thus presaging his later mastership of scientific prose. Today, we read Freud’s phrase as the cooled-down document of a heated debate. His parenthesis, and what it points at, stands out so clearly, it not only suggests that, on the level of objective categorical speech, the poem is taken to be illuminative of the brain – at least for as long as the parenthesis lasts. It takes effect also on the level of subjective transcendental speech, troubling and shocking the scientific prose with this poetic element, which Freud tries to absorb by giving it the form of a parenthesis. The parenthesis is like an insertion; an incursion from another world. Because I am a reader who is easily startled, always alert to something that could interrupt and even disrupt my reading – God beware! – the meteoric quality of this parenthesis forces me to stand still and go deeper into detail, and into the detail of the detail. »God is in the detail.« Not only Hofmannsthal, but also Warburg, is not far off. This means that, if I am to consider the dimensions of this one passage, I will resume my endeavor to illuminate Freud’s work on aphasia as one written piece with the help of indications found solely in this small text. This calls for something like an excess of close reading. What is at the heart in the afore-cited sentence is a comparison, indicated by »in the same way as«. The comparison puts two equally visible things on a scale: a neurological issue on one side and a poetological one on the other. As always – ever since Adolf Jülicher – the comparison contains a factual (Sachhälfte) and a figurative side (Bildhälfte). Had the factual side been clear we would not have needed a comparison. However, that poetology should be clearer than neurology such that the poem can help to explain the brain is nothing but an utmost disgrace. It causes a reversal of our normal expectations. According to the common neurological understanding, poetology at best grants comparisons with things like a Bible of the Poor for medical laymen in need of imaginative aid. I submit that, here, it is the other way around. We are, at least according to the state of knowledge around 1891, confronted with neurological obscurity, which, I would say, calls for poetologically perspicuous illumination. That is what makes this extraordinary sentence scandalous within its context.

From Alphabet to Poem

179

Now, people may try to pour oil on the troubled text by pointing to the situation Freud finds himself in at the time; he is on a long journey from brain anatomy to psychoanalysis and his work on aphasia is one of the milestones upon that path. In 1891 he used the subtitle »a critical study,« while in his 1925 »An autobiographical study« Freud called it a »small critical and speculative book.«3 A displacement of the burden of proof may well have occurred along this way from »critical« to »critical and speculative,« from – one might argue – neurology to poetology. Well, correlations such as these, that take into account the wider and even widest contexts, are of no use here. What we are looking for is the precise understanding of a phrase en détail. One might further object that Freud himself refers to this parenthesis as no more than an »example:« The poetologically relevant figurative side correlates to the factual side of neurology only as an illustration for the wider public. The explanatory burden is therefore on the figurative side, but only insofar as it is used to exemplify an absolutely clear neurological fact to the uninitiated, like a theologian such as myself. Moreover, Freud’s wording suggests that the example was not farfetched, but taken from the field most manifest in »the subject with which we are concerned here.« Though not stemming directly from aphasia – the inability to speak – it does stem from its lock-step marching partner alexia – inability to read – because reading is what poems and the alphabet are about. However, the parenthesis could in no way be, as I suggest here, a sign of a meteorological enclosure, insertion, or incursion. To this I reply that it is puzzling that Freud, as he evinces himself, must borrow from another field in order to solve a neurological problem. »Poem« and »alphabet« belong in the field of literature, here dealt with from the perspective of poetology. It appears again four years later, in »Studies on hysteria,« but is then labeled »short story.«4 In the writing on aphasia, »alphabet« and »poem« remain hapax legomena, just like the formatting terms »example,« and »to borrow.« In order to answer the question what explains what, i. e. is the factual side explaining the figurative one (as is mostly presumed, and indicated by the counterarguments) or the other way around (as I suggest), I will first explicate the side of neurology, and then the side of poetology. Due to the unfortunate fact that I am pretty much incompetent in the former field, and only slightly more competent in the latter, I will proceed by completely relying on Freud for matters of neu3   S. Freud, An Autobiographical Study, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 20, ed. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1959, repr. 1978), 18. German edition: Selbstdarstellung, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 14, 3rd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1963) (London: Imago, 1948), 42. 4   J. Breuer and S. Freud, Studies on Hysteria, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 2, ed. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1955, repr. 1978), 160. German edition: Studien über Hysterie, in Gesammelte Werke, vol. 1, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1964), (London: Imago, 1952), 227.

180

Günter Bader

rology; as far as poetology is concerned I will have to bring forth my arguments at my own expense, for lack of statements from Freud that go beyond the mere entry of the words »poem« and »alphabet«. Anyone can verse. And finally I will have to bring to light the matrix of the comparison conducted in this parenthesis, which is a presumption Odo Marquard probably would have called incompetence-compensating competence (Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz).5 Freud calls this matrix a »completely different arrangement serving other purposes« (Umordnung), or »transcription« (Umschrift).6 Regardless, Freud is here clearly addressing – by a different arrangement – the issue that Wilhelm Wundt called »heterogony of purposes« (Heterogonie der Zwecke).7

1. The factual side: neurology The contradistinction between physiology and psychology is a little surprising when dealing with concepts of aphasia. It is also little surprising to see that Freud’s contradistinction between neurology and poetology is only one possible version of it. After all, we find ourselves in the domain of Gustav Theodor Fechner’s »Psychophysics« (Psychophysik) (1860), and Wilhelm Wundt’s »Physiological Psychology« (Physiologische Psychologie) (1874), both of which elaborate on a contradistinction that inspires a 19th century movement that sways between dualism and monism. There is no notion of aphasia that does not move within this field. As far as we can see, Freud’s shift from anatomy to psychoanalysis is nothing but yet another variation of this well-known centennial contradistinction, which, if it is amplified by »Weltanschauung,« easily grows into an ideology. We would have quickly put down the book on aphasia had Freud not overcome the lacking differentiation of this opposition and replaced it with a more sublime one. Neurology and psychology only enter into opposition after neurology has been put into opposition with itself. Wolfgang Leuschner observes that Freud »undermines [neurology] quasi neurologically.«8 This is the linchpin for understanding the citation around which the present paper centers. The phrase appears in part V. of the book, at the end of 5   O. Marquard, »Inkompetenzkompensationskompetenz? Über Kompetenz und Inkompetenz der Philosophie,« in Philosophie – Gesellschaft – Planung. Kolloquium, Hermann Krings zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. H. M. Baumgartner et al. (München: BSHH, 1974), 114 – 125. 6   S. Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis. Letters to Wilhelm Fliess. Drafts and Notes: 1887 – 1902, ed. M. Bonaparte et al., trans. E. Mosbacher and J. Strache (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1954), 173. German edition: »Brief an Wilhelm Fließ 6.12.1896,« in Aus den Anfängen der Psychoanalyse 1887 – 1902. Briefe an Wilhelm Fließ (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1962), 151; Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 95 – 96 / On Aphasia, 53. 7   W. Wundt, Grundzüge der physiologischen Psychologie, vol. 3, 5th ed. (Leipzig: Wilhelm Engelmann-Verlag, 1903), 747 – 748, 787 – 788. 8   W. Leuschner, Introduction to Zur Auffassung der Aphasien. Eine kritische Studie, by S. Freud (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992), 13 (translation by the the translators of this chapter).

From Alphabet to Poem

181

a passage that elaborates on the doctrine of the organization of the brain, which Freud had studied with Theodor Meynert.9 He twice referred to this passage as a »digression.«10 I maintain: we gain access to our phrase only through the digression of which it forms a part.11 Again, our expectations are reversed. Excursion and digression – usually subordinate to the surrounding context – here (thanks to their insubordination) turn out to be the central point of interpretation. What is this all about? I can say only a few words about the inner neurological conflict in aphasia. Meynert’s thesis is that the cortex, due to its location and expansion, is suited to receive and retain sensory stimuli from the body. A great vision takes hold of the anatomist, which we have to let sink in for a moment. The cortex works in a manner I would like to call eschatoplasmic. In the same way that protoplasm incorporates a body by assuming the shape of a cavity, enfolding the object, the cortex not only retains in its cavity the rest of the brain as appendix and auxiliary organ, but incorporates the rest of the body by way of an »armour of feelers and tentacles,«12 which receive impressions of the world while simultaneously influencing it with expressions of its own.13 To put it more simply: neurology is about the relation of center and periphery, and Meynart’s school of thought claims that this relation consists in the exact representation14 of the periphery in the center, i. e. »point by point,« 1 : 1.15 Indeed what is more or less being propagated is »the concept of a complete and topographically exact representation of the body in the cerebral cortex.«16 We usually call this kind of representation »projection:« a term coined in Freud’s time and still used today. Here we even have, as Freud does not forget to add, a projection »in the strict sense.«17 This is exactly the claim Freud argues against: only 365,814 out of 807,738 nerve root fibers arrive at the upper cervical cord; through the tract that runs from the periphery to the center a grey matter reduction of fibers takes place; in the end, one central unit will have to correlate to several peripheric ones. In short, representation is still going on, but not in the way of a projection, neither directly nor »point by point,« but in the way of indirect representation of the whole by a few selected fibers. Put even shorter: »represent« takes the place of »contain.«18

 9

  Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 86 – 96 / On Aphasia, 45 – 54.   Ibid., 96, 147 / 54, 102. 11   Ibid., 95 / 53. 12   Ibid., 87 / 46. 13   Ibid., 87 – 88 / 46. 14   »Abbildung.« We stick to the terminology used in the English edition which has »representation« for »Abbildung« and »image« for »Bild.« 15   Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 89 / On Aphasia, 47. 16   Ibid., 90 / 48. 17   Ibid., 89, 92 / 47, 50. 18   Ibid., 92 – 93 / 50 – 51. 10

182

Günter Bader

Something groundbreaking happened with this critique of Meynert’s »doctrine.«19 Not only does neurology step into opposition with neurology, which would have been remarkable in itself, since it undermines the barren opposition of neurology and poetology. It shows that only neurology can argue against neurology or, in other words, only neurology helps against neurology. Also, the neurological object – the central vegetative system – proves to be something we cannot relate to though knowledge, but rather a matter of a self-relating relation between center and periphery. As uncontroversial as this may be, the question of what kind of relation this is, exactly, is surely contentious. However, it is also uncontroversial that the relation is one of »representation« of the periphery in the center. But this only transfers the dispute to the level of representation, which dissociates into two »types« for which Freud finds it appropriate »to use different terms.«20 Henceforth »projection« designates an »image that is complete and topographically similar,«21 whereas »reduction« − and now it gets difficult, Freud cannot find the words − is a »reduced,« »selective,« and – we do have to dare the contrast – »dissimilar« representation. This leads us to perceive that the way Freud opens the dispute between neurology and neurology is as a dispute between two models of representation (or two models of relation): a relation of abstention or of representation; a relation of ever greater similarity or of ever greater dissimilarity; a relation in the actual or the non-actual sense of the word, or − to use Freud’s preferred choice of words − a relation in a topical or a functional sense only.22 When we were under the spell of the psychophysical opposition we thought neurology would make up half of the world. But now we can see, because it has gotten into a dispute with itself, that neurology is a world of its own. We are not relating to neurology, but only observe how it relates to itself in the way of an opposition of two contradistinctive models of relation swinging between similarity and dissimilarity.

2. The figurative side: poetology Coming from the field of neurology, we will likely keep in mind the fact that neurological questions are to be solved neurologically. This means that Freud’s insertion of »in the same way as« between neurology and poetology, bears as a consequence for the poetological side that poetological questions have to be solved poetologically. As Freud does not even give a single hint on how to proceed along these lines, we will have to valiantly step in for him. Let’s do it this way: Neurology showed that it is far from being one, but is rather divided in itself, and relates to 19

    21   22   20

Ibid., 86 / 45. Ibid., 93 / 51. Ibid., 92 / 50. Ibid., 96 / 54.

From Alphabet to Poem

183

itself such that we have to compare neurology with neurology. This is so because neurology has an inherent relation as its core topic: the relation of the body’s periphery to the cortex. We have to discern between false and true interpretations using as our leveling board a growing similarity on the one hand and a growing dissimilarity on the other. Now, if this is so – to make the apodosis short after this long protasis − things will be similar with poetology. Thus, having been instructed and guided thus far, I take a deep breath and approach poetology. Concerning the fundamental issue, I maintain that indeed, in the same way that neurology is about a relation, so is poetology. Freud explicitly states this in our sentence: in the same way that the cortex relates to the periphery of the body, a poem relates to the alphabet. It is a complete – not an elliptic – comparison. What is more, the exact same verb that governs the relation on the side of neurology also governs the relation on the side of poetology. On both sides, the relation is a way of containing. Put shortly: relating here means containing. Though we should keep in mind that »containing« can be understood in a strong (misleading) sense, and in a weak, even very weak, sense − referring to »representing« much more than »containing.« Indeed, I could make containing ever more similar to itself, but then we will finally end up driving ourselves around the bend. Or I can make it ever more dissimilar, and alienate it from itself until it is almost not »containing« anymore at all, but has become »representing,« and then – according to Freud – I will have landed on the more acceptable side of the discussion. Now that we have reached this point in exploring the fundamentals of the figurative side, we see that thus far it conforms to the factual side point by point. Speaking of »point by point« again, let me set up a reminder: while when we were working internally within neurology it was all about not lapsing into the »point-by-point«-simplicism, in the external relationship between neurology and poetology it is obviously necessary to care for a certain »point by point« accuracy. But let us now proceed with the poetological concerns. A first observation: Obviously, I cannot say that the poem contains the alphabet point by point. But I can say that the poem contains the alphabet in such a weak sense that we can claim it is contained in the poem. How is that? Only the poem knows. It works in a way that the alphabet is acquiescing, rhyming, etc. This is exactly the way Freud is alluding to: The alphabet as a certain order of letters must undergo a specific, major change of arrangement. One might want to say that »the greater the change of arrangement the more likely a poem will emerge from the alphabet,« and one might be just in saying that. But after a short moment rejoicing in this putative plausibility we bite our tongue and ask ourselves: Aren’t there the psalmi abecedarii, i. e. psalms 25, 34, 37, 111, 112, 119, 145? Moreover, think of all the different types of stich rhymes – meso- and telestich, the acrostics – whose arrangement of letters and sounds cannot be easily changed. And think of the first letter of the Lamentationes Ieremiae, which is also the first letter of the alphabet, ‫א‬ – does it not seem as if the whole book would pour forth from this one letter? If I follow Freud’s

184

Günter Bader

layout, I cannot say that a poem contains the alphabet point by point. But now we not only encounter poems in Hebraic poetry, which do work exactly that way. Maybe it was somewhat negligent of Freud to be seduced by the similar sound of the factual term »brain« (Gehirn), to talk of the figurative »poem« (Gedicht). Actually, every piece of prose probably comes closer to what Freud called a different arrangement of the alphabetic order. We are confronted with the fact that something may be defying our best efforts precisely by reconstructing the poetological side point by point in accordance with the neurological one. But what could it be? A second observation follows the first one. However watered down, the containing belongs both on the factual and the figurative side. This makes it evident that the brain retains the periphery in the same way that the poem retains the alphabet. In order to reinforce this statement, we would like to add: »and not the other way around.« There is a one-way-street between the retaining and the retained. The factual side and the figurative side can be summarised in one sentence: The centre retains the periphery and not the other way around. Yet there is poesia ambigua. It contrasts Freud’s preferred direction of the comparison »from poem to alphabet« with the reversed direction »from alphabet to poem.«23 But if ambiguity replaces the one-way-street, then obscuritas replaces the ideal of perspicuitas. We can clearly see that the generally acknowledged history of writing with letters reports the irreversible unambiguousness in the enormous achievement of the abstracting principle of phonography, which, in turn, means that we do not have to think of a cow when seeing an Aleph, nor of a house when seeing a Beth. The poem Freud talks of here is created according to the same principle. He is probably referring to abstract poetry. But the minute a mannerist and arabesque letter replaces the ideal classical letter − which has no meaning in itself, and therefore seems meaningless, even though it is decisive in generating meaning through differentiation − as soon as that happens and the decorated letter becomes wholly involved in its own meaning and its own enigma, something like letter poetry evolves; letter play; concrete poetry. Does this necessarily derail Freud’s comparison?

3.  Comparison: different arrangement / transcription If we look back to the factual and the figurative; to neurology and poetology, we are able to state that each already consists of a relation; we are not dealing with something closed and self-identical, which purposely needs to be compared, but fact and figure are already differentiated in themselves. The difference lies between 23

  G. Febel, Poesia ambigua oder Vom Alphabet zum Gedicht. Aspekte der Entwicklung der modernen französischen Lyrik bei den Grands Rhétoriqueurs (Analecta Romanica 62) (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001).

From Alphabet to Poem

185

centre and periphery; brain and body; poem and alphabet. This means that Freud’s phrase not only introduces a comparison, but a comparison between relations: a »relation of relations,« as Boethius puts it,24 or – along with Thomas Aquinas – an analogia proportionalitatis, and not just an analogia proportionis.25 As is well known, Kant has described cognition (Erkenntnis) according to analogy − and obviously Freud’s phrase belongs to this type − as something that »surely does not signify, as the word is usually taken, an imperfect similarity between two things,« i. e. neurology on one side and poetology on the other, which would give us permission to poke around in the psychophysical dark or in the semi-clarity of physiological psychology, »but rather [signifies] a perfect similarity between two relations in wholly dissimilar things.«26 Although Kant’s reference to knowledge by analogy concerns the problem of transcendental theology – which surely is not the case for Freud – Freud draws on the dualism of neurology and poetology to introduce the relation of relations as Kant draws on the dualism of nature and freedom. Here we end our fundamental study, which has helped us to consider the full scope of Freud’s phrase while tracing its origin. Two contradistinctions to Kant stand out. First, if everything is the way we described it, we face the question: why have any parenthesis at all? We do not find it in Kant, only in Freud. Put another way: the comparison, the »in-the-sameway-as« that Freud’s phrase hinges on, comes in the form of a parenthesis. This should be considered. The subject matter of the phrase is as verbal as the running sentence in which it is embedded. We can simply read it: there is the poem and there is the alphabet. Yet the act by which it has been embedded has the character of something non-verbal; gestural; marked by two dashes. The double-paired dash within the writing signalizes a text within the text, an addition and supplement. Within living speech it is a voice within the voice that flows against the main flow of the speech, fixed in writing by exclamation or question marks. But not to worry, Freud’s phrase is not a dramatic monologue presenting a voice from another world or from off-stage; it is a piece of scientific prose that talks of poetry per parenthesin. We have to look closely. Parentheses can also stand within commas, in which case they are dumbed-down to a mere sub-clause. They can also stand within brackets, in which case the matter in the brackets is in subordinate relation to the ruling main clause. However, Freud talks neither of apposition nor of subordination. In contrast, he speaks of a »different arrangement.«27 That is 24

  Boethius, De institutione arithmetica, II, 40.   Th. Aquinas, De veritate, qu. 2 art. 11 resp. 26   I. Kant, Prolegomena To Any Future Metaphysics That will be Able to Come Forward as Science, trans. G. Hatfield, in Immanuel Kant: Theoretical Philosophy After 1781, ed. H. Allison and P. Heath (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 146 – 147. German: Idem, Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaft wird auftreten können [1783], ed. Konstantin Pollok (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2001), § 58, A 176, 146. 27   Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 95 – 96 / On Aphasia, 53. 25

186

Günter Bader

why his parenthesis needs the dashes. They do not mark any sort of sub-clause, but entrances, sentences within a sentence, whose calibre is likely to explode the context of the ruling main clause. Parentheses do appear verbally as well, but they are characterized by a non-verbal gesture: a pause that signifies more than an interrupting incident, but interruption per se. An abyss opens up, over which the verbal content of the parenthesis is spread like it was solid ground. This is the reason for the impression that there is something meteoric in this sentence of Freud’s that has not faded, but has, rather, been intensified. It is a matter of incursion more than one of impression. There is yet another contradistinction to Kant. Both Kant and Freud agree to having to make use of Dionysius the Areopagite’s old terms, i. e. similar similarity vs. dissimilar similarity: ὅμοιος ὁμοιότης vs. ἀνόμοιος ὁμοιότης. However, these terms are plagued by the difference that dissimilar similarity is more oriented towards theology than similar similarity. Kant’s formula becomes thrilling when we let go of this back-and-forth in similarity, and let similarity drive and even dash into complete similarity, and dissimilarity into complete dissimilarity. At first sight it also accentuates the »perfect similarity between two relations in wholly dissimilar things.« To put it plainly, the point-by-point-correspondence between neurology and poetology, which relate to each other like the relation between brain and body on the one hand, and the relation between poem and alphabet on the other. Yet we recall that brain and poem are entirely different and dissimilar, as are sentence and entrance, earthly rock and meteoric rock. But already in these relations themselves, comparatively connected, it is presumed that the greater dissimilarity comes closer to the truth than does the ever-greater similarity. In other words: the greater the similarity of brain and the periphery of the body − or of the poem and alphabet − the more a disturbance of speech becomes inevitable, be it aphasia in speech, or alexia in writing and reading. In the case of ever-greater dissimilarity, the reverse applies. But if the emphasis is on dissimilarity and not on similarity already on the level of the simple comparisons that underlie the general comparison, how much more so will this be the case on the level of the comparison of comparisons, which is where Freud’s phrase resides. But why »different arrangement« or, as he puts it later on, referring explicitly to his text on aphasia, »transcription?«28 Evidently, the first of these parallel terms 28   Freud, The Origins of Psychoanalysis, 173: »I am working on the assumption that our psychical mechanism has come about by a process of stratification: the material present in the shape of memory-traces is from time to time subjected to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances ‒ is, as it were, transcribed. [. . .] (I postulated a similar rearrangement some time ago, in my study of aphasia, for the paths leading from the periphery).« German edition: »Brief an Wilhelm Fließ 6.12.1896,« 151: »ich arbeite mit der Annahme, daß unser psychischer Mechanismus durch Aufeinanderschichtung entstanden ist, indem von Zeit zu Zeit das vorhandene Material von Erinnerungsspuren eine Umordnung nach neuen Beziehungen, eine Umschrift erfährt [. . .] Eine ähnliche Umordnung habe ich seinerzeit (Aphasie) für die von der Peripherie kommenden Bahnen behauptet.«

From Alphabet to Poem

187

belongs to the field of neurology from where it originates, and the second belongs to the field of poetology, because it has its home between the poem and alphabet. »Different arrangement« pertains to the side of nature / physics and is already here an expression of a dissimilarity that transcends all similarity. »Transcription« pertains, on the contrary, to freedom / psyche and serves the same purpose. However, a similarity does exist between »different arrangement« and »transcription,« announced by the consonance of »different arrangement« (Umordnung) and »transcription« (Umschrift) just as in the consonance of »brain« (Gehirn) and »poem« (Gedicht) (which I would like to call the rod and staff of our enquiry). There is, indeed, even a point-by-point-accordance, albeit »in wholly dissimilar things.« »Different arrangement« and »transcription« do »serve other purposes,«29 but in two separate domains. If this is the multidimensional space that Freud spans in his phrase, then expressions like »aphasia« and »alexia« partake in all these dimensions. They range from the pole of fate to the pole of freedom. Aphasia is not only a neurological term by origin, swaying already within neurology between an order defined by similarity, and a different arrangement defined by dissimilarity. Similarly, alexia is not only a poetological term by origin, swaying already within poetology between writing defined by similarity and transcription defined by dissimilarity, and – as we have seen – the first direction was concrete poetry and the second (preferred by Freud) abstract poetry. While the theorist of systems Peter Fuchs thinks of transcription as the ideal graphical re-concretion of the abstract set of letters,30 Freud thinks of it as a remodelling of abstract letters into poetry, such that no stone will be left unturned regarding the primary order of the alphabet. So, aphasia is not only a phenomenon of necessity, fate, and destiny, but also of freedom and poetology. Aphasia is also a poetological term. That way, it becomes the kind of aphasia that the poem not only stems from, but is freely heading to. Aphasia, clamped between fate and freedom, thus becomes as estranged and dissimilar to itself as it possibly can be, even if it still looks the same, or is similar to the aphasic core. And all of this is hidden beneath the specular surface of the same word. It is just the same with alexia. Originally a term of poetology, it is doubtlessly also a term of neurology. This is because in neurology writing seeks to »inscribe into the brain«31 all the single letters that are unreadable by themselves, and through this inscription still do not make up a readable script. Thus alexia also splits in two: One side of fate and one of freedom, as dissimilar to each other as is possible. And they, too, are hidden beneath the glossy surface of the same word.

29

  Freud, Zur Auffassung der Aphasien, 95 / On Aphasia, 53.   P. Fuchs, Die Umschrift. Zwei kommunikationstheoretische Studien: »Japanische Kommunikation« und »Autismus« (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1995). 31   Ibid., 47 / 8; see also 43 / 4 – 5. 30

188

Günter Bader

The poem is that which not only comes from alphabet, this object of mere spelling, i. e. not being able to read, but is also directed towards the alphabet, alphabet now in the sense of ΑΩ, Alpha and Omega. Different arrangement, transcription. »We shall all be changed / πάντες δὲ ἀλλαγησόμεθα. [. . .] And we shall be changed / καὶ ἡμεῖς ἀλλαγησόμεθα.«32 Translated from German by Johanna Breidenbach and Kiera Englefield

32

  1  Corinthians 15:51 – 52.

Existential Psycho(patho)logy Selfhood and Self-Alienation

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery Artworks of the Prinzhorn Collection Sonja Frohoff

1. Preface The famous Prinzhorn Collection in Heidelberg, Germany, holds unique and extraordinary artworks produced in psychiatric institutions between 1880 and 1920. Psychiatrist and art historian Hans Prinzhorn (1886 – 1933) collected approximately 6000 heterogenous drawings, paintings, collages, textiles, sculptures, and texts by about 450 »cases« between 1919 and 1921, greatly expanding a small existing collection. His famous and significant Artistry of the Mentally Ill (1922) changed the view on the thus far disregarded »art of the insane« and influenced various debates in different fields of research. The National Socialists used single pieces in their infamous 1937 exhibition Degenerated Art, aimed at discrediting avant-garde art. Temporarily forgotten, the collection was rediscovered in the 1960s and has been continuously restored and researched since the 1980s. Since 2001, a small museum hosts alternating exhibitions on various aspects of the collection. The artworks have provided inspiration to artists and provoked discussions in scholarly fields, e. g. cultural studies, art history, medical history, and philosophy.1 At a time when psychiatry was still a fairly new and heterogeneous field of research, many of the artists were diagnosed with dementia praecox – later known as schizophrenia – in a society shaped by a conservative and restrictive Wilhelminian zeitgeist, and a class-system evolving at the peak of industrialization. Patients received only little medication and no psychotherapy, and were instead treated with brutal physical and mental interventions (from today’s perspective), such as lock-up and isolation; forceful restraint; disciplining; swivel chairs; lobotomy; hysterectomy; hydrotherapy; electrotherapy, among other now shocking methods. In many cases, we can therefore assume that additional defects occurred due to long periods of hospitalization. The histories of the artworks vary in several respects: Some  – not many  – of the artists had previous artistic experience; they came from different social backgrounds; the environment and social status of the institutions varied; some 1

  For further information, see www.prinzhorn.ukl-hd.de.

192

Sonja Frohoff

patients were supplied with materials, while others had to find their own; some of the patient records still exist, while others do not; the artists viewed themselves and their artwork differently; the works reflect societal processes more or less strongly; the doctors engaged with the cases to varying degrees, and so on. Despite these many differences, however, most of the works were produced in or after experiences of inner or outer borderline situations. Many pieces astonish us because of their surprising artistic ideas as well as their intensity and radical expression of willfulness. In many works, perplexing and touching moments invite further questions, not only about background and specific meaning, but also about what they imply regarding subjectivity in general. How do we value the unsettling moments that we often experience when observing these artworks? Historically, the works have often been either primarily understood as symptoms of decay – and therefore devaluated – or used as illustrations of diseases. Or, by contrast, they have been romantically viewed as expressions of freedom in an unfree society, or singled out as particular inspiring, edgy, and critical art.2 A closer look at these very different judgments shows that they are based on different conceptions of »art« and »mental disorder,« which change in accordance with historical and social circumstances, and depend on differing perspectives on humans and their relations to norms and the uncommon. When emphasizing the works as art, for example, they highlight the human capacity for phantasy and freedom, and value the uncommon as a broadening perspective. Considering the works as indicators of mental disorders, however, they foreground the limitations and suffering of the patients, their need of help and as well the protection of society. Correspondingly, in a clinical context, the uncommon is valued as something abnormal. Phenomenological approaches have recently focused on the embodied experience of the artwork and the intertwining of creation and reception processes of art, to help arbitrate and mediate between these two positions.3 Within this field, the idea developed to let terms of self-alienation and self-recovery describe the uncanny in general, and the effect and potential of these artworks in particular. Instead of determining the works from the outside, with the strong labels of »art« or »disease,« this angle might help to view them in terms of individual encounters, and as attempts at self-understanding and communication. 2   Compare e. g. the tone and judgments of doctors in the files of the time and perspectives on the insane since romanticism. For a good overview on positions between 1900 – 1970, see A. Bader, ed., Geisteskrankheit, bildnerischer Ausdruck und Kunst. Eine Sammlung von Texten zur Psychopathologie des Schöpferischen (Bern: Hans Huber, 1975). Today, multiple catalogues of the museum refer to cultural studies and art historical approaches to position the works of the Prinzhorn Collection within the artistic, cultural, and societal movements of the time. 3   S. Frohoff et al., eds., Bilderfahrung und Psychopathologie. Phänomenologische Annäherungen an die Sammlung Prinzhorn (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014); S. Frohoff et al., eds., Fremde Spiegelungen, Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017).

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

193

But can the Prinzhorn Collection really be understood as works of self-reflection? Do they mirror the self-alienation that the artists / patients were probably experiencing? Does this self-alienation maybe even become manifest in or through the works? Or are they, rather, attempts at self-understanding, or even self-recovery? In what follows, I will give brief sketches of three examples from the collection, to give an impression of the variety of the artworks and their context. I will then return to these questions. After reflecting on the connections between impression and expression, creation and reception, and self-alienation and self-recovery, I end with possible interpretations and thoughts on processes of self-communication.

2. Works of the Prinzhorn Collection In many pieces of the collection we find creations that more or less map, cross, and transform reflection on personal situations and societal contexts – such as the Wilhelminian empire, new inventions, the First World War, and so on. The pieces

Fig. 1:  Photography of Katha­ rina Detzel with a self-made figure, 1914

194

Sonja Frohoff

and their backgrounds frequently confront us with touching expressions of the extreme life situations of people in psychiatric institutions around the year 1900. In April 1914, for example, Katharina Detzel (1872–ca. 1941) created a life-size male puppet out of seaweed and sailcloth – materials she produced by tearing up the mattress of her isolation cell.4 A photograph shows Katharina proudly presenting the figure, which has surprisingly short arms, a long nose, beard, spectacles, and a prominent penis. What does this figure mean to her? Does it represent something? Detzel was institutionalized in 1907 for forgery, abortions, and attempted arson. She suffered continuous sanctions in the psychiatric institution, such as complete isolation, continuous bathing, wrapping, and searching. She made several attempts at escape using self-made picklocks and keys. She also tore up clothing, sewed new garments then tore them up again. She dressed herself as a devil with a huge penis, made robes from seaweed, constantly created small figures out of bread, and designed a model of a human being with natural wings. She successfully escaped after nineteen years in the institution, went to her daughter, managed to take care of herself for a while, but was caught for thievery in 1939. The exact date of her death is unknown.5 According to her doctors, Detzel suffered from hallucinations and fear of poisoning, harassed everybody around, cried loudly at night, became violent, and occasionally had to be diapered due to smearing excrements. She strongly and energetically resisted her institutionalization and repression, but she also told her sister in a letter about concerts, theatre plays, and the wonderful environment and forests around the institute. On an envelope, she drew the gentle biblical scene of a merciful Samaritan with a horse, with the lines: »arrived here sick to death 1908, 24 / 8, dismissed 1919 as cured.« In this drawing we sense the need for restored health and the desperate longing for freedom. Detzel obviously saw the need for medical treatment, but asked for participation and integration of her own self-evaluation. We feel her urge and plea to finally leave this place where her actions were mostly interpreted as lack of compliance, disobedience, and resistance to rules. The doctors noted down in her file how she explained that she had hung the puppet up in her isolation cell after »these fellows had visited her at night; they had made the thing and would soon return to hang her. It would be best if she would hang herself. If one wants to protect her from herself, one should put her in the observation room.«6 We can see 4   V. Michely, »Katharina Detzel,« in Irren ist weiblich. Künstlerische Interventionen von Frauen in der Psychiatrie um 1900, ed. B. Brand-Claussen and B. Bernet (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2004), 178. 5   For a while, researchers of the museum suspected that she was a victim of the Nazi euthanasia programme (Ibid., 255), but the most recent research denied this assumption. See the correspondance of Maike Rotzoll with the LVR Viersen in May 2010 in the file of Katharina Detzel, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, which states that Detzel was transferred to a different institution in 1948. 6   Note of April 20th, 1914, Katharina Detzel’s file, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg. All quotes in this text are translated by the author.

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

195

Fig. 2:  Katharina Detzel, Enveloppe, undated

both sexual connotations and fear in her statement. The doctors, however, viewed it as a strategy to be transferred to the observation area, where she could flee more easily than from the isolation cell. In consequence, Detzel’s clothes were taken from her, and she was repressed even more. Gustav Röhrig (1858 – 1932) produced self-portraits of himself as captain and gymnast. Starting in 1919, he drew himself in proud and powerful poses – often in profile – on wrinkled brown paper. Curiously, skin and clothes are covered in hooks and check marks. Only the collar remains blank. What do these tattoo-like signs mean? Before being hospitalized in 1898, Röhrig lived as a vagabond for seventeen years, nine of which were spent in prison. From early on, his life was marked by struggles for work, home, and survival. He grew up poor, was forced into compulsory labor, and suffered various punishments in prisons throughout his youth. Only the two years spent as a recruit with the Royal Saxon Army offered temporary relief from existential distress and integrated him into a community. In the psychiatric institute he viewed himself as divine – as God’s son; a poet; inventor, and artist – and stood out with his constant preaching and declamatory speeches,

196

Sonja Frohoff

Fig. 3:  Gustav Röhrig, Hauptmann (captain), 1919

hand snapping, and tongue clicking. According to Röhrig himself, he was constantly working on the mental salvation of other patients, and therefore refused to undertake physical work. Carl Lange (1852 – 1916) wanted to fixate the wonder of the faces that appeared in the patches of sweat on the soles of his shoes. Since the institution prohibited the use of cameras, he drew the figures he saw. His very complex drawings show multiple entwined heads, animals, numbers, items, and symbols, especially – but not exclusively – from the Christian tradition, framed by shoe sole aureoles and supplemented by text and long titles, such as: »Worth multiple millions. These photographically verifiable, interleaved images of wonder uncover a fifteen-year old crime on the sole of the sacrificed.«7 Lange combined several different meanings, interweaving political, cultural, and biographical references and traces to highly dense configurations and picture puzzles that carry an atmosphere of tearfulness, severity, and tenderness. What motivated these drawings? Carl Lange came from a bourgeois West Prussian fam7

  My translation. In German: »Ein mehrfacher Millionenwerth. Die photographisch nachweisbaren, ineinanderliegenden, ein fünfzehnjähriges Verbrechen enthüllenden Wunderbilder in der Schuheinlegesohle des Geopferten.«

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

197

Fig. 4:  Carl Lange, Ein mehrfacher Millionenwerth. Die photographisch nachweisbaren, ­ineinanderliegenden, ein fünfzehnjähriges Verbrechen enthüllenden Wunderbilder in der Schuheinlegesohle des Geopferten (Worth multiple millions. The photographically verifiable, interleaved images of wonder uncover a fifteen-year old crime on the sole of the sacrificed), around 1900

ily and emigrated in 1876 to the United States, where his brothers were famous doctors. He dashed around the country with a laterna magica and was involved in railway businesses in Texas and Mexico. His brothers brought him to an asylum after he reported having a vision of himself as a religious scout and said he was planning the murder the Mexican dictator Porfivio Diaz. He was also becoming increasingly violent and inaccessible. He continued to resist his hospitalization for the remainder of his life, viewed surrounding persons as insane, and incessantly wrote letters to newspapers and authorities to induce his dismissal. The violence of the context conveyed in the writings and his personal file contrasts with the tenderness of the drawings. After this first look at these three artists of the Prinzhorn Collection that let us dive into complex circumstances of one hundred years ago, one could ask – above and beyond questions about meaning and interpretations – if the works mirrored or even fostered an existing self-alienation? Should they be viewed as manifestations of self-alienation, or symptoms of abnormal states? The expe-

198

Sonja Frohoff

Fig. 5:  Carl Lange, Zum heiligen Wunder im Brod. Das heilige Schweisswunder in der Einlege­ sohle (On the holy wonder of bread. The holy wonder of sweat on the inserted sole), around 1900

riences behind the creations were supposedly determined by alienated contact with the world, shaped by a perception altered by psychological illness as well as specific life circumstances and repressive surroundings. Maybe they depict Carl Lange’s increasing withdrawal from the outside world and into his convoluted world of ideas? Maybe Gustav Röhrig’s self-portraits fostered a tendency to lose himself in imaginary identities? And does Katharina Detzel’s figure express her continuous tendency to cross boundaries, both her own and those of others? On first approach, the artworks’ moments of alienation may be described as deformations and transformations of the organization of time and space, of self-relation, and of the intersubjective dimension per se, so essential for our footing in the lifeworld. As Wolfgang Blankenburg has pointed out, the works might express an experienced loss of naturalness (Selbstverständlichkeit) regarding the subjec-

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

199

tive and intersubjective contact with the world.8 Detzel’s figure is threatening in dimension and rudeness; in Röhrig’s drawings, the dominating structure on skin and clothes evokes uncanny feelings, and Lange’s infinite intertwinement of heads confrontates the observer repeatedly with the impossibility to combine details to a narrative understanding. Or should we rather view the creations in the Prinzhorn Collection as attempts at self-recovery? Detzel made a supporting figure for herself, possibly of a doctor, within an atmosphere of isolation, repression, and fear in which she seemed to combine continuous and desperate resistance to and overestimation of her own capabilities. Röhrig presented self-portraits in which he incorporated his past at the military – an ideal so lofty, perhaps, that he first had to perceive himself as divine. Carl Lange drew intertwined images – perhaps to protect and maintain them and thus his hope for redemption – within a distinct realm at a stage in his life when nobody seemed trustworthy anymore. The strengthened or regained identity, self-coherence, and self-narration in an image might, then, capture moments of self-recovery in the creative process and the resulting artwork. The art might have fostered in the artist feelings of calm, reassurance, protection, of belonging to a counterpart, or helped as a stabilizing phantasy. To further elucidate the meaning and relation of self-alienation and self-recovery, it is helpful to envisage the process of creation and reception. In these borderline situations, what does it mean to express oneself in products of creativity? How can we understand the relation between impression and expression here? What are our (receptive) impressions of these (creative) expressions by people that were probably suffering under strong impressions?

3. Mirror, trace, and leap Impression and expression are strongly connected and interwoven. Arne Grøn is right when he writes: We do not stand between impression and expression in such a way that we first perceive an impression and then give ourselves an expression [. . .] the expression already starts when we are under the impression. While being under an impression, the attempt to express oneself already begins.9 8   W. Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1971). 9   A. Grøn, »Eindruck – Ausdruck,« in Fremde Spiegelungen. Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn, ed. S. Frohoff et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 14 (my translation). In German: »Wir stehen nicht dergestalt zwischen Eindruck und Ausdruck, dass wir erst einen Eindruck wahrnehmen und dann uns selbst Ausdruck verleihen würden. [. . .] noch während wir unter Eindruck stehen, beginnt der Ausdruck. Schon im Eindruck beginnt der Versuch, sich auszudrücken.«

200

Sonja Frohoff

While making these attempts it is still unclear if we will indeed reach expression. Grøn describes the ambiguity of how readily we reach expression on the one hand, while on the other hand we struggle to find expression and are committed to the possibility of failure. Impressions, Grøn remarks, can overwhelm us and precisely thereby demand our capability as subjects to find a new balance. He marks this as the possibility to center oneself by expressing. According to him, this process of centering has the character of outlining one’s own self. Grøn holds that we can, in this expressing and outlining of the self, also put up resistance to our own subordination to impressions. Maurice Merleau-Ponty expresses similar thoughts, with focus on the lived body and its relation to the process of painting. Instead of »centering« he uses the notion of »balance.« Merleau-Ponty illustrates how impression and expression are part of the same essential movement of perception: we perceive something and are required to perceive it. We express ourselves when we carry out our lives and we are – to a certain extent – committed to be visible in our expressions. We seek to establish a balance in perceiving and being required to perceive. This accompanies the usual flow of life, but is especially noticeable when this self-evident flow of life is disturbed, e. g. when confronted with physical limitations, illness, or when we learn something new, like a new dance step or riding a bike. Until it becomes a natural skill, integrated in a habitual flow, the actions of the body are brought to explicit attention. Merleau-Ponty elucidates how, in the creation of art, the painter makes visible the texture of being – the intertwinement with the world – by picking up what has formed inside. At the same time, the painter himself is »born« in the artwork. This process is »like a focussing and returning to itself of the visible.«10 Activity and passivity are intertwined in the creative process between impression and expression. Creations show a view-of-the-world and a being-to-the-world, since the process to express oneself thus intercorporated shows how one is interwoven with the world. According to Merleau-Ponty, the being-in and being-to-the-world is especially visible in artworks. Or, as Gottfried Boehm puts it: »Instead of translating an inner conception into the external of colors, the painter works between the stains, lines, and forms, arranges himself, rebuilds them and is as much author as medium of the action.«11 The production of an expression can thus be viewed as a rescuing of the self, since the lived body realizes itself as a balance-seeking whole of experienced and

10   M. Merleau-Ponty, Das Auge und der Geist. Philosophische Essays, ed. C. Bermes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003), 305. 11   »Der Maler übersetzt deshalb keine innere Vorstellung ins Äußere der Farben, sondern er arbeitet zwischen den Flecken, Linien und Formen, richtet sich ein, baut sie um, ist so sehr Autor wie Medium seines Tuns.« G. Boehm, Was ist ein Bild? (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006), 21 (my translation).

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

201

lived meanings.12 Dealing with the situation and diving into the process of expression; almost being on and in the created thing for a moment, actualizes a relation of resonance between subject and developing object and thereby a moment of presence and balance or, as Karl Genzel – another artist of the Prinzhorn Collection – once stated: »If I have a piece of wood in front of me, there is a hypnosis in there. If I follow it, something comes out, otherwise there is a conflict.«13 The balance one constantly has to find is a complex process of reciprocities, dealing with resistances, limitations of skills, physical conditions, and materials. The creative process fosters the attempt to come to an expression as well as finding narrative coherence, which appears at that important moment when the artist feels that the expression is ready (for now). This moment could be precisely momentary, but it has a presence. The coherence is viewable in the created object. The process has no predictable start and can surprise the creator him- or herself, and it includes the possibility of failure. If this moment of coherence does not occur at all, the creating subject may feel that (s)he failed to express herself even though it nevertheless leaves an impression on the perceiver, which may or may not convey this felt failure. There are at least four further aspects of the creative process that one should bear in mind, namely 1. its moment of freedom, 2. its bodily base, 3. the role of interpretation, and 4. the inherent searching movement: 1. A blank sheet of paper confers a certain realm for gestures of freedom: a partial freedom from real conditions (aside from the limitations of the material, of course) that allows space for seemingly unreal ideas and phantasies. It is only in art that things can be made visible or appear in any possible form. The artist Antonin Artaud once described the process of drawing in terms of bodily gestures against objective facts of time and space: »But what I draw [. . .] are gestures [. . .] bodily, ruthless fulmination against the restraints of the spatial form, the perspective, proportion, the balance.«14 2. The second important term, here, is »gesture,« since it calls attention to the bodily movement in the creative process. Although Artaud mentions gesture in relation to an attempt to release the objective limits of existence, the realm of gestures encompasses also pre-reflective, unconscious, embodied, and habitual movements. Gestures express individual rhythms and existential orientation. When observing, the recipient can get in touch with the creative gestures that might indirectly have led to the specific expression. Detzel’s figure, for example, 12   M. Merleau-Ponty, Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2005), 184. 13   »Wenn ich ein Stück Holz vor mir habe, dann ist da drin eine Hypnose. Folge ich der, so wird etwas daraus; sonst aber gibt es Streit.« H. Prinzhorn, Bildnerei der Geisteskranken: Ein Beitrag zur Psychologie und Psychopathologie der Gestaltung (Berlin: Springer, 1922), 167. 14   As cited in P. Gorsen, »Der Dialog zwischen Kunst und Psychiatrie heute,« in Von Chaos und Ordnung der Seele. Ein interdisziplinärer Dialog über Psychiatrie und moderne Kunst, ed. O. Benkert and P. Gorsen (Berlin: Springer, 1990), 5 (my translation).

202

Sonja Frohoff

transports movements of ripping, compression, heavy lifting, and dealing with rough materials. It forcefully demands space, and affects its surrounding environment. Perhaps it helped Detzel to increase her own presence in space; let her, too, appear larger, thus mirroring her need for and existential orientation towards gaining space, and to be seen and heard. To better understand such gestures of the creative process one may focus on the relation between figure and ground; on the formation of bodies, or on the creative treatment of time and space. With this in mind, Carl Lange’s endless knotted heads and symbols reveal layers imploding from within. An observer is incapable of grasping the width of association entailed in these works. The only thing holding the figure(s) together is the clear separation of inside (plentifulness) and outside (emptiness), keeping in place that which has a tendency to float above ground. He incorporates them into the sole of his foot, and binds them to the idea of his wondrous sweat. The symbols are tightly bound to his own body, which becomes symbolic as well: the foot carries the truth; the sweat is a matter of wonder. The holy is bound to the physical ground of the own foot and to social connections marked by discourses of honor, good, and evil. 3. The struggle for expression is further indication that the final expression of a creative product is not just a copy of experience, but must be understood as an interpretation. It is a result of experiences, ideas, and existential orientations transformed in the process of creating expressions. Rudolf Bernet has argued that the meaning of the expression unfolds as the material is formed. The meaning, then, is immanent and not transcendent or something the artist puts in the work. It therefore makes no sense to seek a meaning behind the creations. Rather, we have to understand them as being the meaning. Also creations by artists with psychotic experiences must be understood as an interpretive, rather than a representative, display of personal experience.15 That is not to say that the interpretation is arbitrary or could easily be substituted by a different one. Rather, the interpretation present in a creation is bound to an existential orientation expressing the artist’s starting-point and mode of expression. Röhrig’s self-portrait, for example, is obviously an idealized interpretation of the artist as a captain, but marked by cracks, ruptures, and scratches. 4. The creative process also contains the search for the appropriate expression / interpretation, in which the feeling of coherence, mentioned above, is decisive. As an observer, this searching movement becomes clearer when one is in touch with both the interpretation and the supposed existential orientation in the work. Carl Lange’s drawings show this repetitive attempt to find the appropriate form, visible e. g. in the lower part of the series (fig. 3). His interpretation of the images he traces in the sweat on his sole in terms of a wonder; 15   R. Bernet, »Die Eigenheit der«Bildnerei der Geisteskranken,« in Bilderfahrung und Psychopathologie, ed. S. Frohoff et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014), 11 – 31.

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

203

the strong connection to his own body, as well as the creative gesture of demarcation, all serves to make sense of his need for protection and preservation of a personal space. The resulting creation remains – perhaps strongly – connected to the creator, but is at the same detached and set apart from the expressive experience, while at the same time containing it. It then gains its own history, first in the artist’s own reception of the work, and then in the impressions it makes on perceiving others, which vary depending on the perspective of the individual observer. All of a sudden, the artwork stands face to face with the creator or as a third position between creator and recipient along with those differing perspectives. It offers an infinity of its own, only partially graspable and approachable in the reception process both for the creator and the recipient. They are, so to speak, different individual experts in a dialogue about the work. The creator had the original intention and the experience of creating the piece, but also blind spots or lack of distance to the creation. The recipient has a here-and-now perception, from an individual perspective. How, then, do we experience the images, and what determines my perspective? Every frame of interpretation builds on resonance, which is the starting point. Waldenfels introduced the term »iconic epoché«16 to argue that it is important to persist in the moment of receptive resonance for as long as possible, as this fosters understanding. Reaching a judgment too soon may hinder the »silver-tongued silence«17 of the images, as Melanie Obraz puts it. Disturbances of our perception demand interpretation and let us struggle to achieve understanding. We are thus able to adjoin the limits of language not only when finding expressions for our impressions, but also by translating immediate impressions of an image into the logic of language, which is different from that of images. Although the border between linguistic expressions and expressions in images might not be as sharp as one might think, the logos of images does have a specific character that cannot be subsumed under the logic of propositions. Rather, its basic act is the »deixis«: a showing or pointing to. This might be an advantage, especially in experienced borderline situations such as those encountered in psychiatric disorders, which often lead to situations where language is insufficient as a means of expression. The language of images fosters the creation of coherence, or manages to banish experiences, since images offer a space of productive lack of definition. This lack permits for what Gottfried Boehm calls a surplus (Überschuss) of sense.18 It allows for areas of fuzziness that support movements towards 16   B. Waldenfels, »Die Anomalität von Kunstbildern und Patientenbildern,« in Bilderfahrung und Psychopathologie, 33 – 51. 17   M. Obraz, »Bildliches Sprechen,« in Ich seh dich so gern sprechen – Sprache im Bezugsfeld von Praxis und Dokumentation künstlerischer Therapien, ed. M. Ganss et al. (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 94. 18   G. Boehm, »Jenseits der Sprache? Anmerkungen zur Logik der Bilder,« in Iconic Turn: Die Neue Macht der Bilder, ed. C. Maar and H. Burda (Köln: DuMont, 2004), 28 – 43.

204

Sonja Frohoff

the search for new coherence. The language of images offers pre-reflective processes and in-between zones, atmospheres, and individual corporeal spatio-temporal rhythms. Merleau-Ponty’s ideas invite us to compare images with inhabited and inhabitable spaces. Following this view, artistic expressions might be considered spaces that an observer could try to inhabit, and thus get in touch with the atmospheres, tensions, and energies that influenced and brought about the expressions in the first place. To summarize these considerations on creative and receptive processes: Creating is a process of expressing, leading to a product that acts as a field of different elements, and could be viewed as mirror, trace, and leap. What might sound contradictory is unified and unifiable in a created artwork. A leap lies in the idea and the gesture of creating something new in this particular realm of freedom, and may or may not contain a wish or imagined solution. Meanwhile, a creation contains traces of the context and the creative process from out of which it arose. Additionally, a creation is a mirror not only in the sense of being a counterpart to the creator, but also as mirroring the gestures of creation for the recipient. In other words: in a creation, realms of possibilities and realms of reality merge into new forms. The observer can try to inhabit the image and thus come in contact with these aspects of the creative process. Again, this process is one in which activity and passivity are intertwined. Already in our first encounter with an image, we are touched and respond in something akin to an incident. Of course, our questions regarding why we have been touched and by what point to aspects of the image as well as to ourselves. A tension always remains between understanding the creation and understanding ourselves. Respecting the foreignness of the image is an important part of this dialogue, since it reminds us that our interpretation and understanding could always be different.

4.  Self-alienation and self-recovery Most of the works in the Prinzhorn Collection indirectly mirror the self-alienation experienced by their creators, but they are also interwoven and superposed with attempts of self-recovery. When taking into consideration the experiential processes of creation and reception our views on the works changes. When we go beyond judgments and definitions of art or mental disorder we can regard the works as expressions of a persistent struggle with tensions between self-alienation and self-recovery. To further elucidate, let us briefly return to our three artists and highlight aspects of the backgrounds to their works, thus fostering directions of interpretation as well as understanding of the above-mentioned struggle. It is striking that building the huge puppet was more important to Katharina Detzel than having a blanket and a mattress in the isolation room. Was this cre-

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

205

ation meant to support and protect against real and / or imagined nightly visitors, like a strong male alter ego, a buddy, a counterpart and partner, while simultaneously mirroring her identification with the doctor? Does it express her wish for an efficient and helpful doctor? Katharina Detzel’s life-sized puppet has similarities in physical appearance with her doctor, Director of the Psychiatric Unit in Klingenmünster, Dr. Ferdinand Karrer.19 She occasionally referred to Dr. Karrer as »Mr. Colleague,« and claimed that she was faster than he to determine whether somebody was sick or not. The huge figure, demonstrating also her own physical strength, might reflect this idea of the real / wished-for setting: The doctor as the / her puppet. Might we then understand the work as ironical, as Viola Michely suggests?20 Would irony even be possible in this extreme situation of fear and despair? Detzel’s unremitting impulse to make small figures – her talent for modeling is also noted in her personal file – might also have been an attempt to banish the devils that she claimed paid her frequent visits, especially at night, like an apotropaic act or self-therapeutic impulse to avert the ghosts by expressing them.21 It is recorded that she would repeatedly tear mattresses and clothes with »unquestionable certainty.«22 The process of giving form to something (e. g. clothes or bread figures) and to then dissolve it again might also have had a meditative and calming function, and served to center the artist and bestow her with a sense of control – however small – in space and time. The signs on the clothes and skins of the figures in Röhrig’s drawings are the vagabond code of communication. Left on walls and houses, they conveyed messages such as, »you will be helped here,« or »be careful« or – as in Röhrig’s drawing – »sick people get something here.«23 Röhrig thus incorporated two stigmatized groups (vagabonds and the mentally ill) into his self-portraits, and made this identification visible for others. He demonstrated empathy with those suffering from the associated stigmas, and avowed himself as part of disreputable and often criminalized groups, in which cooperation was possible. He often used collages made from journals as backgrounds to his drawings and depicted images demonstrating solidarity, perseverance, as well as strong military communities. He was not enthusiastic about the First World War, and thought about founding a 19

  See the photo of the doctors in: C. Beyer, Von der Kreis-Irrensanstalt zum Pfalzklinikum. Eine Geschichte der Psychiatrie in Klingenmünster (Kaiserslautern: Institut für Pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde, 2009), 67. 20   Michely, »Katharina Detzel,« 178. 21   E. Schürmann and S. Spanknebel, »Die apotropäischen Kräfte des Bildermachens,« in Fremde Spiegelungen. Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn, ed. S. Frohoff et al. (Paderborn: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017), 55 – 76. 22   File of Katharina Detzel, note from August 12, 1916. 23   K. Maijer-Barke, »Der Vagabund als Hauptmann,« in Krieg und Wahnsinn. Kunst aus der zivilen Psychiatrie zu Militär und 1. Weltkrieg, ed. S. Hohnholz et al. (Heidelberg: Wunderhorn, 2014), 110.

206

Sonja Frohoff

world peace association. However, he obviously admired and conveyed traditionally military values like loyalty, bravery, and willpower, as well as the guidelines of the popular contemporary German gymnast movement, which he worshipped and reflected in his drawings. The combination of the stigmatized sign language and the proud figure of the captain reveals Röhrig’s idealization of his time at the military, of which he spoke often and with pride, as noted in his file. These traces from his past – which remained strongly connected to his identity – together with a phantasy of a socially honored position he never achieved, expresses a longing for social acknowledgement. The check marks thus lead us to an understanding of the artist’s search for integration into society that was incongruous with his manifest incapacity to act. Intensive study of Carl Lange’s knotted figures and texts reveals how he combined facts from his own history and suffering with ideas of resurrection, and disclosure of crimes he perceived himself a victim of. All references to Christian iconography refer to topics of rescue, cure, salvation, and protection as well as divine intervention and resurrection. Like St Veronica’s cloth retained the image of Christ, the sole of Lange’s shoe preserves the truth in sweat, revealing his suffering and guarding his hope for resurrection and rescue from unbearable conditions. It is his foot that makes visible his truth, thus enhancing his body’s holiness and capacity to create wonders; the wonders originate in him, but are simultaneously understood as signs of divine rescue. The wonder protects the personal images and allows for self-ascertainment. In his view, the images show facts that he stands for – in the truest sense of the word – and insists on.24 Nobody can take this away from him. The gesture and arrangement of his drawings demonstrate realms of protection with clearly defined borders between inside and outside. All three examples show how seemingly perplexing aspects that, on a first encounter, point to alienating experiences start to blur if we dive more deeply into the contexts. Instead of emphasizing aspects of either self-alienation or self-recovery we find that both are immediately graspable in the creations, although not, of course, as fixed states of being. Rather, the creations indirectly transport aspects of both sides by coming in contact with the context and the creative process behind the results regarded by the observer. These become concrete when the observer attends to the own resonance, and keeping in mind the knowledge of the backgrounds of the works. Our impressions, perceptions, and perspectives are important starting points when dealing with these pieces of art. Of course, the artifacts themselves are not sick, but they do confront us with details that might evoke questions about the background of the creation, and that mirror self-alienating experiences. Using the term »self-alienation« instead of »disease« has the advantage of acknowledging the processual character of the phenomenon, as well as the 24   Carl Lange several times used the old German expression auf der Wahrheit fuszen (to stand with the feet on the truth) in his texts (my translation).

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

207

fragility of subjectivity per se. Despite demarcating supposedly mentally disturbed others, it also allows for respect and openness – and not just simple consternation – towards the possibilities and abysses of humankind. The own subjective bewilderment, surprise, or astonishment are thereby initial steps for getting to know the specific world view of the artist, as well as one’s own limits and habits of looking. As Blankenburg suggests, these works challenge and offend the natural self-evidence of the observer. In the process, they open fields of directions, gaps, and breaks by which to approach interpretations: How is this shown? The form of the overall context is at least as important as what is shown. How and by what does it affect us? Especially ambiguous figures, or equivocal and confusing moments in the presentation, could be seen as points of culmination in the struggle between self-alienation and self-recovery. What develops in the creative process might often be something like a personal visual metaphor, oscillating between image, thing, and word; exploiting the possibilities of image-language, metaphors born out of misery, and the search for understanding and sense-making. Pointing in different directions, they frequently bring supposedly contradictory associations into one existing form. Carl Lange’s multiple picture puzzles, for example, often hold several meanings in one configuration, such as a peace dove on a head that might also be understood as a symbol of the Holy Spirit, but which also resembles a reinforced eagle, representing the Wilhelminian empire. The wish for freedom, salvation, and a felt need for continuous defense thus merge into one form. Conversely, Katharina Detzel’s life-sized puppet can be seen as doctor, devil, and lover in one, evoking in the observer a sense of depressive alienation and / or amusement.

5. Self-communication Instead of solving puzzlements too quickly and in one clear direction, it seems more productive to understand them as tensions belonging, in some sense, to the works. We can thus view the works of the Prinzhorn Collection as attempts at self-understanding in an already marked struggle between self-alienation and self-recovery. Arne Grøn has pointed to the indirect character of self-understanding, which is neither immanent or naturally given. Real understanding, in the strong sense, cannot be staged, although it can be staged in retrospect.25 The pieces were created within borderline situations, which already shows such an indirect path. The developed object achieves a distance, and can serve as a counterpart in an inner personal dialogue. The object brings the own foreignness and existential orientation into sight, fostering a bodily anchoring in the creator, who puts himself and his worldview into the work. On the other hand, creations 25

  Grøn, »Eindruck – Ausdruck« 19.

208

Sonja Frohoff

offer a level of staging and self-profiling that could possibly interfere with processes of self-understanding, and reinforce a sense of alienation. All of our three artists – Lange, Röhrig, and Detzel – use their creations in different manners to display power in a situation of real powerlessness. They reinterpreted their actual helplessness in imagined strength and salvation. But even if this expresses a wish or displays self-empowerment, does that necessarily entail an impulse for self-understanding? Additionally, would self-understanding not involve a willingness to be transformed by the process of reaching this understanding? We do not know if or what changed for our artists as they created their works. The impossibility to ask them face-to-face precludes our judgment on this matter. However, the contexts of their origins – which we partially know from their personal files – allows us to adumbrate situations of stress, despair, and disregard, evoking radical movements for expression. The character of the pieces often lets us feel the responding character of the pieces, answering to a fundamental disruption in the human being in question. We can sense and assume the comfort and consolation the creations probably presented the artist with. The attempt at self-understanding (Selbst-Verstehen) might thus be sensible indirectly, through the moments of staging. However, the term self-communication (Selbst-Verständigung) might more precisely capture the meaning and function of the expressions and their tensions and in-between characteristics, e. g. between creator and observer, self-alienation and self-recovery, idea and existential orientation. In the end, the question whether the creations in the Prinzhorn Collection are manifestations of self-alienation or self-recovery boils down to the question whether expressing oneself in artifacts is already an expression of transcendence, whether it might foster a possibility for transcendence, despite all the limitations presented by a disrupted and transformed subjectivity. Emphasizing the potential for self-recovery in the creations in the Prinzhorn Collection requires us to worship the possibilities for transcendence as present in the creative process, and the freedom it entails. It is crucial to understand the degree of exceedance involved in taking one’s existential orientation as starting-point for such a search. Arne Grøn also remarked how the range of subjectivity falls between the span of possibilities it depends upon: »Without possibilities one cannot breathe.«26 The spaces of images offer realms of possibilities. To explore them could be considered a self-therapeutic impulse in itself, as well as an invitation to communication about the creation. To show oneself in a creation also means to make oneself visible in one’s own self-alienation, both for oneself and others. It thus harbors the potential for dealing with it, and for a dialogue that could eventually foster further self-recovery. 26   A. Grøn, »Homo subiectus. Zur zweideutigen Subjektivität des Menschen,« in Seinkönnen, ed. I. U. Dalferth and A. Hunziker (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 24 (my translation).

Between Self-Alienation and Self-Recovery

209

List of figures 1. Photography of Katharina Detzel with a self-made figure, 1914, 16 u 11 cm, Inv. Nr. 2713a, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany. 2. Katharina Detzel, Enveloppe, undated, 9,9 u 15 cm, pencil on envelope, Inv. Nr. 2710a, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany. 3. Gustav Röhrig, Hauptmann (captain), 1919, 34,8 u 22 cm, pencil on brown paper, Inv. Nr. 778 recto, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany. 4. Carl Lange, Ein mehrfacher Millionenwerth. Die photographisch nachweisbaren, ineinanderliegenden, ein fünfzehnjähriges Verbrechen enthüllenden Wunderbilder in der Schuheinlegesohle des Geopferten (Worth multiple millions. The photographically verifiable, interleaved images of wonder uncovering a fifteen-year old crime on the sole of the sacrificed), around 1900, 51,2 u 65,2 cm, pencil on drawing paper, Inv. Nr. 99, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany. 5. Carl Lange, Zum heiligen Wunder im Brod. Das heilige Schweisswunder in der Einlegesohle (On the holy wonder of bread. The holy wonder of sweat in the inserted sole), around 1900, 49,2 u 35,5 cm, pencil on drawing paper, Inv. Nr. 98 recto, Prinzhorn Collection, Heidelberg, Germany.

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

1. Introduction In this paper we will try to articulate the possible mutual elucidation of the notion of subjectivity and the radical experiences of self-alienation that occur in schizophrenia. We propose that the structure of subjectivity involves a constitutive alterity that conditions the possibility of the profound self-alienation experienced in schizophrenia. Characteristic complaints from patients with schizophrenia traversing the course of the disease revolve around pronounced experiences of »not being oneself,« »not having a core,« or »not being in contact with oneself.« The following vignette may help to elucidate the radical nature of these experiences: I feel like I’m not a natural human being or a proper human being or something like that. I have always tried so much to be a real human being, but I have the feeling that I’m not [. . .] I don’t feel like I have a core or a substance . . . Increasingly, I began to feel that I sort of fused with the surroundings . . . And I had a hard time recognizing myself from hour to hour, day to day [. . .] I must have been 4 or 5 years old. I was starting dance class and I was looking in the mirror. I was standing next to the other kids and I remember that I looked alien. I felt like I sort of stuck out from that large wall mirror. As if I wasn’t a real child. This feeling has been very persistent from very early on.1

It seems that it is almost impossible for the patient to describe the character of self-alienation; it is a feeling of lacking something so profound that the patient feels inhuman. The experience of »lacking« a core or a self, however, does not imply a simple distinction between not being oneself on the one hand, and merely being oneself on the other. In dealing with reports of self-alienation we wish to emphasize the importance of not making such an oversimplified distinction. As Arne Grøn puts it, because subjectivity is given to itself in and as relating, »we are not simply what we are.«2 This means that one should be careful not to understand schizophrenia in 1   M. G. Henriksen and J. Nordgaard, »Self-disorders in schizophrenia,« in An Experiential Approach to Psychopathology: What is it Like to Suffer from Mental Disorders, ed. G. Stanghellini and M. Aragona (Berlin: Springer, 2016), 266. 2   A. Grøn, »Self-givenness and self-understanding: Kierkegaard and the question of phenomenology,« in Kierkegaard as Phenomenologist: An Experiment, ed. J. Hanson (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2010), 89.

212

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

terms of a »lack,« »deficit,« or »absence« of subjectivity. Eugène Minkowski states that psychopathology should be concerned with exploring the global modifications »of the structure of psychic life« (that is, phenomenological psychopathology), rather than focusing on »deficits« of demarcated psychic functions. In this context, he proposes we replace the notion of »lack« (moins) with the notion of »difference.«3 To our understanding, schizophrenia is, in its core structure of alienation, a variant of human experience, which means that it is an intrinsic possibility of human existence. This does not imply that the painful experiences involved in schizophrenia are reduced to everyday experiences, nor does it mean that a simple dichotomy is at work between being oneself and not being oneself, which would potentially lead to further stigmatization of the illness. The question of what it means to be oneself is a central theme in the existential tradition initiated by Søren Kierkegaard. Although presenting an analysis of the existentialist conception of what it involves to be oneself exceeds the scope of this paper, it will nonetheless provide a fruitful framework for our exploration of self-alienation in schizophrenia, and serve to emphasize the ambiguity involved in the experience. How is it possible to understand this identification of oneself as alien or not-oneself? There is, so to speak, a self here that relates to itself as alien. In order to illustrate how, in schizophrenia, this alienation or alterity emerges within the self, and in order to consider its conditions of possibility, we will present the clinical and phenomenological features of the schizophrenic disorder of the self and its ultimate articulation in schizophrenic psychosis.

2. A negative detour Freud famously proclaimed that »in order to arrive at an understanding of what seems so simple in normal phenomena, we shall have to turn to the field of pathology with its distortions and exaggerations.«4 The method of exploring what it means to be oneself against the background of what it means not to be oneself is not new. One of the perhaps most vigorous examples of this approach is to be found in Kierkegaard’s The Sickness Unto Death, written under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus. Anti-Climacus investigates what it means to be oneself through analyses of despair, that is, of ways in which one is not, or is alienated from, oneself.5 According to Michael Theunissen, Kierkegaard’s method is »negativistic« because the negative phenomena, reflecting ways in which individuals are not 3   E. Minkowski, Lived Time: Phenomenological and Psychopathological Studies, trans. N. Metzel (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1970), 248. 4   S. Freud, On Narcissism: An Introduction, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 14, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 1957), 82. 5   S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard’s Writings 19), ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980).

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

213

themselves, form the material for the analyses.6 Grøn argues,7 that it is through negativity that human existence comes to be experienced as such, or as Anti-Climacus puts it »to reach the truth, one must go through every negativity.«8 In other words, the conception of the self is only realized through the via negativa, and, following Grøn, this points to the impossibility of a straightforward description of the self, and how it can only be described by the problem it proves to be.9 In this respect, the negative approach reflects the negativity of existence. The latter refers to negative phenomena such as despair and anxiety, as well as – perhaps most importantly for the present purpose – to a structural aspect of subjectivity, which Grøn terms »structural otherness.«10 Briefly put, this structural otherness means that subjectivity is simultaneously a »process of self-relating« and a self »before« or in relation »to« something other than itself.11 Grøn holds12 that this relational and processual character of subjectivity implies that it is differentiated or displaced in relation to itself. In other words, this otherness or alterity is constitutive of subjectivity, and it implies that we can never simply, or once and for all, »be ourselves.« It is precisely this aspect of subjectivity that renders possible the phenomenon of despair. It should be remarked that we are not interested in comparing schizophrenia to a form of despair, but want, rather, to emphasize how the complicated relation between self and not-self is reflected in Anti-Climacus’s method. Kierkegaard’s analyses imply that the structure of subjectivity must be able to make possible various forms of not being oneself. Inspired by this line of thinking, we propose that schizophrenic experiences of self-alienation have implications for a discussion of the notion of subjectivity. We do not wish to argue that subjectivity can only be elucidated by way of pathological experiences, but we nonetheless maintain that a conception of subjectivity must include the possibility of profound experiences of self-alienation.

3.  Self-disorders in schizophrenia It is, first of all, important to note that despite the existence of international classifications such as ICD‑10 and DSM‑IV, clinicians differ in their use of the term ›schizophrenia‹.13 Eugen Bleuler, who coined the term in 1908, stated that no sin 6

  M. Theunissen, »Kierkegaard’s negativistic method,« in Kierkegaard’s Truth: The Disclosure of the Self, ed. J. H. Smith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981), 388.  7  See Grøn, »Self-givenness and self-understanding.«  8   Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 40.  9   A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet: Kierkegaard (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997), 24. 10   Ibid., 74. 11   A. Grøn, »The embodied self: reformulating the existential difference in Kierkegaard,« Journal of Consciousness Studies 11 (2004), 36. 12   Grøn, Subjektivitet og Negativitet. 13   L. B. Jansson and J. Parnas, »Competing definitions of schizophrenia: what can be learned from polydiagnostic studies?,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 33 (2007), 1178 – 1200.

214

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

gle symptom or sign is specific to schizophrenia, and that the common symptoms of schizophrenia manifest themselves in »extremely varied« clinical pictures.14 Nonetheless, Bleuler considered these various manifestations to be unified by a specific Gestalt; a Gestalt of profoundly changed subjectivity.15 In our view, contemporary psychiatry has lost sight of this Gestalt due to its behaviorist approach based on checklists and simple questionnaires – a product of the development and dominance of the psychiatric operational diagnostic systems (i. e. DSM‑5 and ICD‑10), which have gradually abandoned the focus on the actual lived world of patients.16 As a counter movement, the last couple of decades have witnessed an increased interest in the phenomenological approach to schizophrenia. This approach emphasizes the patients’ modes of experiencing themselves, others, and the world from a first-person perspective. Phenomenologically informed empirical research carried out over the last two decades attests to a global alteration of subjective life in schizophrenia.17 Schizophrenia is fundamentally considered a self-disorder, or ipseity disturbance (i. e. disturbance of the sense of existing as a vital and self-same being).18 This account finds support in the foundational texts on schizophrenia, where references to a disordered self or ego play a crucial part (e. g. Kraepelin; Bleuler; Jaspers; Schneider).19 In what follows, we will present some of the central aspects of the altered subjective life characteristic of schizophrenia. Louis Sass and Josef Parnas present two complementary facets of self-disorders in schizophrenia, namely »hyperreflexivity« – referring to a certain kind of exaggerated self-awareness where transient 14   E. Bleuler, Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, trans. J. Zinkin and N. D. C.  Lewis (New York, NY: International University Press, 1950), 4. 15   J. Parnas, »Disappearing heritage: the clinical core of schizophrenia,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 37 (2011), 1121 – 1130. 16   J. Parnas and P. Bovet, »Psychiatry made easy: operation(al)ism and some of its consequences,« in Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry III: The Nature and Sources of historical change, ed. K. Kendler and J. Parnas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 190 – 212. 17   J. Parnas et al., »Self-experience in the prodromal phases of schizophrenia: A pilot study of first admissions,« Neurology, Psychiatry, and Brain Research 6 (1998), 107 – 116; P. Møller and R. Husby, »The initial prodrome in schizophrenia: searching for naturalistic core dimensions of experience and behaviour,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 26 (2000), 217 – 232; J. Parnas et al., »EASE: Examination of anomalous self-experience,« Psychopathology 38 (2005), 236 – 258; J. Nordgaard et al., »The psychiatric interview: validity, structure, and subjectivity,« European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 263 (2013), 353 – 64; J. Parnas and M. G. Henriksen, »Disordered self in the schizophrenia spectrum: A clinical and research perspective,« Harvard Review of Psychiatry 22 (2014), 251 – 265. 18   L. A. Sass and J. Parnas, »Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the self,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 29 (2003), 427 – 444. 19   E. Kraepelin, Psychiatrie. Ein Lehrbuch für Studierende und Ärzte. Auflage 8, vollständig umgearbeitet (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1913); E. Bleuler, Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias; K. Jaspers, General psychopathology, trans. J. Hoenig and M. W. Hamilton (London: John Hopkins University Press, 1997); K. Schneider, Clinical psychopathology, trans. M. W. Hamilton and E. W. Anderson (New York, NY: Grune & Stratton, 1959).

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

215

aspects of self-awareness appear alien – and »diminished self-affection,« which refers to a diminished sense of existing as a dynamic center of experience and action.20 The latter is expressed in complaints of not feeling truly alive or fully present, or feelings of a lack of substance or inner core. In the pre-onset stages of schizophrenia, patients often suffer from a feeling of inner change that is almost impossible for them to formulate. Reports from this stage include statements such as, »I am losing contact with myself,« »I am turning inhuman,« and »I have a strange ghostly feeling as if I was from another planet. I am almost nonexistent.«21 This diminished sense of existing as a self concerns basic and immediate self-acquaintance rather than explicit self-reflection or self-knowledge. Patients often suffer from an experiential distance to their own thoughts, feelings, and actions, sometimes leading to feelings of being constructed, mechanical, or automaton-like. A patient of Japanese psychiatrist Mari Nagai expressed this experience: Words spontaneously come out of me. As if someone was making me talk. As if someone sends out symbols like A, B, or C, and these quickly pop up in my head, and these symbols combine and become words that naturally come out of my mouth. That is to say, I’m like an antenna.22

This experience of severe estrangement from one’s own experiential life and actions is typically accompanied by the feeling of being fundamentally different from other people (i. e. Anderssein). The feeling of being different has typically been present since childhood, and it is often difficult for patients to verbalize it except in general terms of just being »wrong.«23 This is illustrated in the following report from a patient: »I’m somehow in all respects different from others. My facial features, the feeling I express, the environment I was born in [. . .] anyway, it’s all different.«24 It is important to emphasize that although patients identify particular areas where they feel different, as in the case of Nagai’s patient (e. g. facial features), this seems to be a way of making sense of a more basic and pervasive sense of difference. The feeling of being different is usually connected to feelings of lacking something that appears natural and obvious to others (that is, a disturbance of »com20

 Ibid.   J. Parnas and P. Handest, »Phenomenology of anomalous self-experience in early schizophrenia,« Comprehensive Psychiatry 44 (2003), 121 – 134. 22   M. Nagai, Naisei no kôzô: Seishin byôrigakuteki kôsatsu [The Structure of Introspection: A Psychopathological Consideration], ed. B. Kimura (Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1991). We quote from an unpublished translation of a chapter in Nagai, The Structure: »The structure of introspection: on the pathological ›excess of introspection‹,« trans. A. L. Sevilla et al. 23   Parnas and Henriksen, »Disordered self in the schizophrenia spectrum.« 24   M. Nagai, Bunretsubyōsha no jikoishiki niokeru ›bunretsubyōsei‹ [The ›schizophrenic‹ in the self-consciousness of schizophrenic patients], ed. B. Kimura et al. (Tokyo: Asakura Shoten, 1990), 361 – 368. We quote from a recently published English translation of this text (Motobayashi et al., »The ›schizophrenic‹ in the self-consciousness of schizophrenic patients,« History of Psychiatry 27 (2016), 493 – 503). 21

216

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

mon sense« or »a loss of natural evidence«).25 This is illustrated in the following vignette, where the patient suffers from not being able to engage with the world with ease and naturalness: Even when talking with people, I just listen. Words don’t come out of me. I can’t organize my thoughts and put them into words. I have a mind that’s different from ordinary people. I’m completely incapable of doing the common-sense everyday things, which normal people do. For example, outside of studying, I have no idea how to spend my time. Other people naturally spend time shopping or playing sports, but it is as if I don’t know how time is to be spent.26

These experiences of self-alienation are interconnected with alterations in the experience of the world that the patient is part of. As Karl Jaspers puts it, the patients often do not think that the world has really changed, rather they feel as if everything is ineffably different, strange, or »somehow altered.«27 This may develop into a sense of unreality where the world and other people seem unfamiliar, staged, meaningless, or, as one patient expressed it, »All objects appear so new and startling I say their names over to myself and touch them several times to convince myself they are real.«28 Finally, in schizophrenia these alienating experiences are often accompanied by the tendency to excessive reflection or exaggerated self-awareness. Wolfgang Blankenburg29 regards the latter as a compensatory mechanism, that is, a way of dealing with the primary pathological changes (i. e. lack of natural evidence). Nagai, however, suggests that reflectivity or introspection is not merely compensatory. Rather, a certain form of introspection or self-reflection is, in schizophrenia, itself an aspect of the generative disorder.30 This excessive self-awareness involves a specific alterity emerging within the self, which we will now take a closer look at.31

4.  Involuntary self-witnessing and self-redoubling In the posthumously published anthology (1991) The Structure of Introspection: A Psychopathological Consideration (Naisei no kôzô: Seishin byôrigakuteki kôsatsu), Nagai determines excessive reflection as a prominent feature of schizophrenia. She introduces the term »simultaneous introspection« to signify the ceaseless and intrusive self-observation or self-monitoring that occurs even when the patient is

25   W. Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit: Ein Beitrag zur Psychopathologie symptomarmer Schizophrenien (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1971). 26   Nagai, Naisei no kôzô. 27   Jaspers, General Psychopathology, 62. 28  Ibid. 29   Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit. 30   Nagai, Naisei no kôzô. 31   See also Sass and Parnas, »Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the self.«

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

217

engaged in everyday doings.32 As Nagai puts it »even in simple, everyday experiences wherein ordinarily, one would ›forget oneself,‹ our patients never quite forget themselves.«33 We have suggested elsewhere34 that the notion »simultaneous introspection« be replaced with »involuntary self-witnessing« to emphasize the involuntary nature of the experience. Nagai presents the following prototypical case: When I’m with others, there are two I’s: the I who is among them, and the I who objectively looks at this I. No matter how much I am absorbed in something, there is always an I that looks on from the outside dispassionately. This latter, outer self is always managing and controlling me. Even when I talk with others, the outer self listens to their words and tells them to the inner self. After listening to this, the inner self starts to talk. The inner self speaks what the outer self commands it to do.35

It is important to remark that far from all patients suffering from schizophrenia have this acute awareness of the »inner workings« of the pathological changes they suffer from, and may therefore be unable to articulate these disturbing experience as clearly or in the same way as the vignettes presented here. However, their pathological experiences will often bear an imprint of these underlying disturbances, which, in our view, reflect central mechanisms of the illness. The difficulty in articulating these experiences also concerns the fact that it is far more difficult to verbalize how one is introspecting than to report on the content of one’s introspections.36 However, the following vignette vividly illustrates such an acute awareness of continuous self-monitoring, or what Nagai calls simultaneous introspection. I’m too self-conscious. I’m constantly watching, staring at myself. Because I’m staring at myself so intensely, when I watch TV, it doesn’t get inside my head. Even while talking with someone, all I do is watch myself. So I can’t really get what the other person is talking about . . . I don’t feel at ease when I’m in a place where there are many people. I constantly feel that I’m being watched.37

The two vignettes above illustrate how the constant self-observation prevents the patients from becoming fully immersed in their surroundings. This becomes particularly problematic in interpersonal situations, and patients often describe how exhausting it is for them to engage in social interactions due to their relentless self-monitoring.

32

  Nagai, Bunretsubyōsha no jikoishiki niokeru ›bunretsubyōsei‹.   Nagai, Naisei no kôzô. 34  See H. Stephensen and J. Parnas, »Schizophrénie, Soi, et Altérité,« in Le sens de Soi et ses perturbations (forthcoming); Idem, »What can self-disorders in schizophrenia tell us about the nature of subjectivity? A psychopathological investigation« (forthcoming). 35   Nagai, Bunretsubyōsha no jikoishiki niokeru ›bunretsubyōsei‹. 36   Nagai, Naisei no kôzô. 37  Ibid. 33

218

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

We can now specify the self-alienation involved in schizophrenia as a certain gap or alterity articulated in the midst of the patients’ self-awareness. This alterity involves a characteristic self-fragmentation or – to use Nagai’s term – a »simultaneous formation« of two quasi-subjects.38 The formation of two quasi-subjects designates the experience of being at the same time someone who is engaged in worldly matters, and someone who is observing the former. We call them »quasi« because neither of the »subjects« can be considered separate or autonomous. Nonetheless, there is an experience of non-coincidence between the two quasi-subjects. In the first vignette this gap or distance between the two quasi-subjects is reflected in the patient’s description of how the observing »I« had to listen to other people and then transmit it to the engaged »I.« This is perhaps even more explicit in the second vignette, where the observing »I« is externalized or estranged to such a degree that it feels like the watching »I« is other people. Nagai distinguishes involuntary self-witnessing in schizophrenia from normal forms of introspection, which she terms »post-facto introspection.«39 It is not uncommon to find an increase of ordinary introspection in schizophrenia, which Nagai suggests can be regarded as a compensatory mechanism.40 In ordinary introspection or self-reflection we find an articulated relation between the moment carrying out the introspection, and the moment being the »object« of the introspection (that is, a reflecting and reflected moment). The notion »postfacto« emphasizes the delayed nature of introspection, meaning that the reflecting moment can never grasp itself. Gilbert Ryle famously illustrates this elusiveness with someone trying to jump up to the head of their own shadow.41 In Husserlian terms, self-reflection is always grasping the retentional moments of the stream of consciousness.42 Contrary to the ordinary form of introspection, involuntary self-witnessing in schizophrenia involves the impossible movement of the elusive moment attempting to grasp itself.43 This simultaneity, however, is by no means equivalent to a fusion of the reflecting and reflected moment. As the vignettes presented above demonstrate, rather than an unproblematic self-coincidence, the patients experience a disturbing gap or alterity in the midst of self-awareness. According to Nagai, the link between the reflecting and reflected moment is unstable in invol-

38

  Nagai, Bunretsubyōsha no jikoishiki niokeru ›bunretsubyōsei‹.   Nagai, Naisei no kôzô. 40   L. A. Sass, »Self-disturbance in schizophrenia: hyperreflexivity and diminished self-affection,« in The Self in Neuroscience and Psychiatry, ed. T. Kircher and A. S. David (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 242 – 271. Sass operates with a similar distinction between an operative and reflective form of hyperreflexivity, where the latter according to Sass tend to be compensatory in nature. 41   G. Ryle, The Concept of Mind (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1949), 196. 42   E. Husserl, Zur Phänomenologie der Intersubjektivität (Den Haag: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973). 43   Nagai, Bunretsubyōsha no jikoishiki niokeru ›bunretsubyōsei‹. 39

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

219

untary self-witnessing.44 To illustrate this experience, Nagai provides the analogy of looking at oneself in the mirror. Briefly put, when we normally look in the mirror, the two moments of »looking at« and »being looked at« might present themselves as two distinct moments, but – significantly – they remain parts of one and the same experience. In schizophrenia, however, these two moments come to the fore as unattached. This has the potential of developing into a confusion regarding »who watches who« so to speak. In a comment on Nagai’s text, Bin Kimura suggests that it is one and the same reflecting moment that divides itself into two simultaneous moments.45 Returning to experiences of self-redoubling in schizophrenia, we therefore propose that the formation of two quasi-subjects may be a reification of a more basic level of differentiation implicit in the structure of subjectivity. One of our patients vividly accounted for a similar experience suggesting such a process: I think it’s strange that you can experience something that you then at the same time register, as if you have . . . as if there is a difference between the one who experiences something, and the one who experiences that one experiences something . . . I feel like that about my own thoughts . . . It is as if there is a true inner me who knows what I think, feel, and ought to do, but is hidden. Who I am and act according to is the ›outside person‹ who interacts with others and . . . It’s difficult to explain. I’m sometimes in contact with the true me, actually every day, but it is only because of distrust in the ›outside person‹. . . There is a tension between the two . . . I don’t feel I’m any of them. Actually, I am afraid that if the ›outside person‹ were peeled off, then there would be nothing.

The patient articulates a continuous and involuntary monitoring of the self, involving a formation of two quasi-subjects as in the two previous cases. Crucially, he furthermore articulates some sort of fissure or distance implicit within experience itself. This implicit fissure is implied in the conception of subjectivity, as given in its relation to itself and the shared world or, as Grøn puts it, subjectivity »comes to experience itself in experiencing the world.«46 Ultimately, it seems to be a thickening or reification of this differentiation that becomes articulated as a redoubling of the self. This reified differentiation may ultimately articulate itself in schizophrenic psychosis. The patient quoted above explained that the ­constant self-observation was accompanied by a fear of being monitored by a system, which is similar to what we saw in the second vignette, where the constant self-monitoring ultimately led to feelings of being watched by others. We will now turn to this process.

44

 Ibid.   B. Kimura, Écrits de psychopathologie phénomenologique (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1992), 118. 46   Grøn, »Self-givenness and self-understanding,« 84 (our italics). 45

220

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

5.  The hallucinatory Other and constitutive alterity To briefly summarize, the phenomenon of involuntary self-witnessing and self-redoubling in schizophrenia seems to be a congealing of an implicit differentiation within self-experience. This phenomenon is furthermore crucial for understanding the development of psychotic symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia, namely auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH), such as voices commenting or discussing the patient’s ongoing behavior (e. g. »now she is walking into the kitchen«), and influence or passivity phenomena (e. g. delusions of having one’s thoughts or actions controlled by an external force or otherworldly creature).47 The French psychiatrist Henry Ey describes these pathological phenomena in terms of a global alteration of experience, where an increasing sense of alterity articulates itself at the centre of self-experience (i. e. »alterization«).48 This alterity may be reflected as a growing sense of difference or distance to one’s own thoughts, which transforms into the thoughts of an anonymous Other, or as Ey puts it: What I think becomes an object that detaches itself from me. What I say to myself becomes what someone says to me. I talk to myself becomes it talks in me. Generally speaking, my thinking is experienced as that of another.49

This experience involves a redoubling within self-experience, which Ey called »the experience of duplication [l’expérience de dédoublement].«50 Aspects of the patient’s self-awareness is externalized and experienced as that of an Other, and it thus becomes manifest how this alterization may lead to the phenomenon of hearing one’s thoughts aloud (Gedankenlautwerden), and ultimately to AVH. The experiential gap within self-experience may afford the patient to »listen« to their own thoughts, which takes the form of quasi-spatial entities. It is here noteworthy that the acoustic or auditive quality of these phenomena is of a different nature than that of ordinary perceptual phenomena.51 The notion of the »hallucinatory Other,« as introduced by Toyoaki Ogawa and Jean Naudin,52 seems to capture the experience of an intrusive and foreign oth47   J. Parnas and A. Urfer-Parnas, »The ontology and epistemology of symptoms: The case of auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia,« in Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry IV: Classification of Psychiatric Illness, ed. K. S. Kendler and J. Parnas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 201 – 216. 48   H. Ey, Traité des hallucinations, Tome I (Paris: Masson, 1973). 49   Ibid., 420 (our translation and italics). 50   Ibid., 419 (our translation). 51   Ey, Traité des hallucinations; Parnas and Urfer-Parnas, »The ontology and epistemology of symptoms.« 52   T. Ogawa and J. Naudin, »La phénoménologie des hallucinations auditives: Du dernier Binswanger à Derrida,« in Phénoménologie, Psychiatrie, Psychanalyse, ed. P. Fédida and M. Wolf-Fédida (Paris: Editions GREUPP, 1986), 179 – 187.

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

221

erness in schizophrenic self-awareness. This »hallucinatory Other« differs from the ordinary mode of the appearance of the Other in that it is not given in a perspectival manner, and it appears in the perfect tense as always already there behind the hallucinating subject.53 One patient said, »It seems to me as if someone always thinks a little bit ahead of me.« Another described how, »Someone is behind me who always spies on me and knows everything about me.«54 As Naudin and Jean-Michel Azorin put it, the hallucinating person may believe she saw »the Other in an anonymous passerby, a neighbor, or even a relative, but its essentially furtive character is what constitutes its foreignness.«55 In other words, the hallucinatory Other is of an impermeable or unseizable nature, and is at the same time all-knowing regarding the hallucinator’s inner life. In the development of psychosis, the patients may explain the presence of the alien Other in different manners – e. g. as a chip inserted in the patient’s brain, monitoring or controlling their every movement and thought – in the attempt to ascribe meaning to these perplexing experiences (that is, »psychotic work«).56 Important for our purpose, the nature of the hallucinatory Other is haunting and exposing, since patients have no way of protecting themselves against it. One patient stated: »I know that my thoughts are known [connues] as if I were completely naked.«57 The hallucinating person becomes subjected to this Other, as this Other, in Ey’s terms, intrudes on the most intimate, secret, and private aspects of her being.58 The patient quoted above, who distinguished between an »inner I« and an »outside person,« could not grasp this inner »I« as it was »hidden« and »unavailable« to him. He seemed to define it above all as not himself, for example when he stated that he was only in contact with this inner self because of distrust of the »outside« person. This points to the paradoxical or ambiguous nature of the hallucinatory Other, while it is an experience of oneself as an Other. On the basis of these developments, we will finally turn to the condition for such self-alienating experiences. We have already indicated that the experiences of involuntary self-witnessing, self-redoubling, and alterization in schizophrenia could be understood as a congealing or concretization of a basic level of differentiation or openness involved in self-experience. In our view, it is this very differentiation that renders subjectivity vulnerable. Kimura argues in a similar vein when he questions the possibility of understanding the alienating experiences of internal 53

 Ibid.   Ibid., 180 (our translation). 55   J. Naudin and J.‑M. Azorin, »The hallucinatory ephoché,« Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 28 (1997), 171 – 195. 56   Ey, Traité des hallucinations; J. Parnas and M. G. Henriksen, »Mysticism and schizophrenia: a phenomenological exploration of the structure of consciousness in the schizophrenia spectrum disorders,« Conscious Cognition 43 (2016), 75 – 88. 57   Ogawa and Naudin, »La phénoménologie des hallucinations auditives,« 180 (our translation). 58   Ey, Traité des hallucinations. 54

222

Helene Stephensen and Josef Parnas

alterity in schizophrenia with a notion of subjectivity as an uninterrupted self-coincidence.59 Inspired by Kierkegaard and the Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida, Kimura understands subjectivity as fundamentally constituted by a double »in-between« (aïda), i. e. the »in-between« of self-relating, and the »in-between« of the self in relating to the world and others.60 In Kimura’s understanding, the notion of »in-between« designates a dynamic movement that differentiates one thing from the other, rather than a static relationship between two different things. In other words, subjectivity presupposes a certain differentiation or »internal difference.«61 With reference to Kierkegaard, Kimura writes that subjectivity ultimately is nothing other than a relation that relates itself to itself.62 We propose that schizophrenia should be understood as a particularly vulnerable form of existence, where the fissure or differentiation implicit in the constitution of subjectivity has become congealed and obtrusive, allowing for the process of alterization and a formation of quasi-subjects. Furthermore, the exposed or non-integrated alterity seems to initiate a vicious circle, where the patients, seeking to protect themselves against this vulnerability, work themselves into the very opposite. In other words, the search for a non-exposed or non-relational »self« is destined to fail, or, to cite Kierkegaard, »The I – I is a mathematical point that does not exist at all.«63 As we saw in the case of the patient quoted above, who experienced having an »inner I« and an »outside person,« his search for an independent »inner« self not affected by anything in the »outside« world increased his self-estrangement. It should be noted, that we do not argue that this »search« occurs in a voluntary or conscious manner in schizophrenia; rather it could be understood as an aspect of a process preventing the self from disintegrating completely (that is, phenomenological compensation).64

6. Concluding remarks To sum up, we underline how the Kierkegaardian negative detour may elucidate the self-alienating phenomena in schizophrenia such as involuntary self-witnessing, self-redoubling, and the hallucinatory Other. The Kierkegaardian analysis of 59   B. Kimura, »Cogito and I: a biological approach,« Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 8 (2011), 331 – 336. 60   Kimura, Écrits de psychopathologie phénomenologique, 121. 61   Ibid., 122. 62   Ibid., 121. 63   S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments« (Kierkegaard’s Writings 12), ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 197. 64   Minkowski, Lived Time.

Schizophrenia, Subjectivity, and Self-Alienation

223

selfhood from the perspective of not being oneself points to a dynamic notion of subjectivity where one is never able to simply be oneself. The structure of subjectivity is an ongoing process of differentiation and re-integration, which is exactly what renders the phenomenon of self-alienation possible. As such it becomes possible to understand self-alienation in schizophrenia in terms of exaggerations and radicalizations within the universal structure of subjectivity.65

65

  We are grateful for the helpful suggestions from the anonymous reviewer.

Anxiety and Despair Experiences from the Negativity of Disturbed Selfhood in Schizophrenia Borut Škodlar Neskončnost mojega obupa ni nič v primerjavi s tvojim stvarstvom, Gospod. (The infinity of my despair is nothing compared to your creation, Lord.) Veronika Dintinjana1

1. Introduction I would like to start with a question, which I do not intend to explore further in the present text. The question I wish to raise is: what do Kierkegaard’s profound psychological insights tell us about the nature of psychological and psychiatric investigations in general? If self-enquiry, self-observation, and attempts at self-understanding – conducted on the streets of Copenhagen within the solitary boundaries of one individual life – can reach such depth and universal validity, why is his work neglected, considered unscientific, and left on the margins of the field? This is not the place to go into these considerations and their intricacies, but allow me to mirror what I am trying to convey with the words of Thornton Wilder,2 an American playwright and novelist recognized for novels like The Bridge of San Luis Rey and The Eighth Day, as well as plays like Our Town and The Skin of Our Teeth: If Queen Elizabeth or Frederick the Great or Ernest Hemingway were to read their biographies, they would exclaim, ›Ah – my secret is still safe!‹ But if Natasha Rostov were to read War and Peace she would cry out as she covered her face with her hands, ›How did he know? How did he know?‹

For many of us, inner exclamations like Natasha’s are part of reading Kierkegaard.

1

  V. Dintinjana, V suhem doku (Ljubljana: LUD Literatura, 2016), 76 (my translation).   Th. Wilder, Rider’s Digest (January 1978), 133. (Cited in I. D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1980), 21). 2

226

Borut Škodlar

2.  Kierkegaard and schizophrenia What are those Kierkegaardian insights that would make a schizophrenia patient exclaim, »How did he know? How did he know?« Ludwig Binswanger, a Swiss psychiatrist and pioneer in the field of existential psychiatry and psychotherapy, stated in his paper on Ellen West – the most famous of his five schizophrenia cases, published in the monograph entitled Schizophrenia – that she (Ellen West) »suffered from that sickness of the mind which Kierkegaard, with the keen insight of a genius, described and illuminated from all possible aspects under the name of ›Sickness Unto Death‹. I know of no document which could more greatly advance the existential-analytic interpretation of schizophrenia.«3 Binswanger’s statement indicates that he believed despair or »sickness unto death« to be one of the central experiences of schizophrenia patients. He is in full agreement with Ronald D. Laing, a Scottish pioneer of existential psychiatry, who in his famous monograph The Divided Self wrote that, »schizophrenia cannot be understood without understanding despair.«4 Kierkegaardian analyses of despair, sometimes called »existential despair,« have also been fruitful for understanding suicide.5 Psychoanalyst Leslie H. Farber writes in a seminal paper: »Suicide finds no more fertile soil for its intrigues than despair – that ›sickness unto death‹ in which, as Kierkegaard observed, we long to die and cannot.«6 We find another expression of Kierkegaard’s – and Nietzsche’s – influence on analyses of experience in schizophrenia in Karl Jaspers, who in his (unfortunately yet to be translated into English) Psychology of World-Views names its radical form »absolute nihilism.« Jaspers writes that absolute nihilism is psychologically speaking not possible, but psychotic states are its nearest approximation. He continues: In nihilism, the human being remains capable of living [lebensfähig] so long as there is still something to hold on to [Haltepunkte]. The most terrible shock happens, however, when the self-evident things are pulled away from under the feet of the human being – in our case by the process of illness – and we search for something to hold on to, but nothing can be found.7 3   L. Binswanger, »The Case of Ellen West,« in Existence, ed. R. May et al. (Northvale, NJ: Jason Aronson Inc., 1994), 297. 4   R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 38. 5   D. A. Schwartz et al., »Treatment of the Suicidal Character,« Essential Papers on Suicide, ed. J. T. Maltsberger and M. J. Goldblatt (New York, NY: New York University Press, 1996), 314 – 330. 6   L. H. Farber, »Despair and the Life of Suicide,« in Readings in Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, ed. K. Hoeller (A Special Issue from the Review of Existential Psychology & Psychiatry, 1990), 219 – 233. 7   K. Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen (Berlin: Springer, 1954), 300. In German: »In dem Nihilismus bleibt der Mensch doch lebensfähig, so lange einer jener Haltepunkte noch da ist. Die furchtbarste Erschütterung tritt aber ein, wenn die Selbstverständlichkeiten dem Menschen gleichsam unter den Füßen weggezogen werden – in unserem Falle durch den Krankheitsprozeß –, und nun doch ein Halt gesucht wird und nicht gefunden werden kann« (my translation).

Anxiety and Despair

227

Without the hold on one’s life, of which Jaspers writes, there is no basis for hope. Hopelessness and despair ensue. In other words, we can understand schizophrenia patients as living the »sickness unto death« to the fullest. Kierkegaard’s analysis in his unparalleled Sickness Unto Death finds that the basic formula for all forms of despair is despair over oneself, and we can thus argue that schizophrenia patients endure extreme forms of disturbed selfhood. These have been thoroughly explored within phenomenological psychiatry by the pioneers to the contemporary researchers in the field. As we shall see below, disturbed selfhood refers not only to disturbance on the level of the minimal self, or ipseity, but also to a disturbed relation of oneself to one’s self, i. e. disturbance on the level of Kierkegaard’s notion of the self. Many schizophrenia patients suffer from extreme forms of dread and anxiety: insecurity; guilt; shame; isolation; hopelessness, and fear of death. In a qualitative study of the basic subjective experiences of a schizophrenia patient (single-case study), I and my co-authors explored the patient’s experiences with the help of Heidegger’s exhaustive account of the fundamental situation of the self in the world, which he called »care« (Sorge). We found that the basic self – world relation and ­situation of a schizophrenia patient is pervaded by all-encompassing anxiety, constant feelings of estrangement and alienation, and persistent unease in all forms of exposure.8 All these experiences – most of them are also part of Kierkegaard’s central vocabulary – are, like their prototype, i. e. anxiety, closely related to one’s self, or rather, to the self as self-relation. Phenomenological psychiatry conceptualizes the disturbance of the minimal self or minimal self-awareness in the case of schizophrenia. It is also called ipseity disturbance,9 which means a disturbance of the pre-reflective sense of self, and entails a diminished sense of mineness, and a weakened sense of existing as a subject of awareness.10 Patients face »a problem to appropriate, acknowledge, or recognize oneself,«11 and find themselves profoundly and pervasively ambiguous, and hovering between losing and finding, or gaining, oneself. The disturbances of the self on such a basic and foundational level of selfhood push our patients to the disturbance-driven limit situations (Grenzsituationen) of selfhood12 – to use a concept meticulously developed by Jaspers. So we can say that they by via negativa illuminate selfhood and are part of self-illumination (Selbst­ erhellung, if we may juxtapose this concept with Jaspers’s concept of Existenz­  8   M. G. Henriksen et al., »Autism and Perplexity: A Qualitative and Theoretical Study of Basic Subjective Experiences in Schizophrenia,« Psychopathology 43:6 (2010), 357 – 368.  9   B. Nelson et al., »Disturbance of Minimal Self (Ipseity) in Schizophrenia: Clarification and Current Status,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 40:3 (2014), 479 – 482. 10   M. G. Henriksen and J. Parnas, »Clinical manifestations of self-disorders and the Gestalt of schizophrenia,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 38:4 (2012), 657 – 660. 11   A. Grøn, »Self and identity,« in The Structure and Development of Self-Consciousness, ed. D. Zahavi and T. Grünbaum (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004), 151. 12   B. Škodlar and J. Ciglenečki, »Multiple Orientations within the Worldviews in Psychosis and Mysticism: Relevance for Psychotherapy,« Discipline Filosofiche 27:1 (2017), 189 – 200.

228

Borut Škodlar

erhellung). Schizophrenia patients experience fragility and instability at all levels of self-experience, and this leads to profound disturbance of the natural flow of experience.13 It is reflected in the loss or collapse of common sense14 or »natural self-evidence« (natürliche Selbstverständlichkeit), as the prominent German psychopathologist Wolfgang Blankenburg called the core disturbance in schizophrenia.15 Blankenburg’s patient Anne said that lacking common sense means lacking something small without which one cannot live. Lacking common sense means a lack of naturalness and spontaneity in all experience. Patients cannot avoid questioning and analysing everything, especially interactions with other people. They constantly hyper-reflect.16 They are philosophers who cannot close their books in the evening to have a drink with a friend. One of the reasons – and, simultaneously, consequences – of hyper-reflexivity is a feeling of uprootedness. It is expressed in two forms: (a) as a feeling of not being fully present and emotionally moved or touched by outer events or other people, and (b) as an inability to spontaneously and firmly adopt a perspective, attitude, or position but floating amongst many. One of our patients said: »I can always change my character, since I can look at every situation from many different points of view.« There is no tranquilizing effect of feeling at home and secure in this world. Ambivalence is another – closely related – expression of these emotional distances and cognitive dispersions. Emotionality is generally very disturbing for schizophrenia patients. It is experienced as a lack of stability – even as foreign – and as profoundly unsettling,17 thus contributing to the feelings of ambivalence, perplexity, and hopelessness. One major emotional problem for schizophrenia patients is their inability to experience and express emotions in the embodied and socially immersed form. They experience so-called »non-emotional affectivity,«18 i. e. the embodied and interpersonal emotionality is diminished, while other forms of affective responses are preserved or even heightened. These other forms of affectivity are numbness, irritability, free-floating tension, disconnectedness, alienation, crude euphoria, exhaustion, etc. Patients experience a profound lack of proper emotions, accompanied by very unpleasant, irritating, and confusing feelings. One of the patients said: »If I could experience at least one emo13

  L. Binswanger, Schizophrenie (Pfullingen: Neske, 1957), 13.   G. Stanghellini, Disembodied spirits and deanimated bodies. The psychopathology of common sense (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 111 – 132. 15   W. Blankenburg, Der Verlust der natürlichen Selbstverständlichkeit (Stuttgart: Enke Verlag, 1971). 16   Hyper-reflexivity is, phenomenologically speaking, a key component of a schizophrenic world. It is equiprimordial to the central weakening of the pre-reflective sense of self, or self-affection. See L. A. Sass and Parnas, »Schizophrenia, consciousness, and the self,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 29:3 (2003), 427 – 444. 17   V. V. Vodušek et al., »The Phenomenology of Emotion Experience in First-Episode Psychosis,« Psychopathology 47:4 (2014), 252 – 260. 18   L. A. Sass, »Contradictions of emotion in schizophrenia,« Cognition and Emotion 21:2 (2007), 351 – 390. 14

Anxiety and Despair

229

tion, even if it is of the most unpleasant kind, I would feel that I have a history and that I belong to the human race.« These words give a sense of the profound feelings of alienation and inadequacy associated with emotional expression while clearly communicating the understanding that emotions are basic building blocks of personal history, and of overall personhood.19 They also imply a deeply rooted feeling of aloneness and of being of a different kind – almost of a different species – from others. This fundamentally implies a certain degree of hopelessness and despair, since it is hard to hope that one will be transformed into another species. In a study on suicidality in schizophrenia patients we found that two major reasons for suicidality were feelings of inferiority and inability to interact with other people.20 Despair and hopelessness – together with nihilistic and suicidal inclinations – and anxiety and selfhood are thus intimately related in schizophrenia. In what follows, I will draw a sketch of the specificities of this relatedness as experienced – in accordance with clinical experience and research – in the multifaceted world of a schizophrenia patient.

3.  Two cases, two forms of despair I will analyze two descriptions made by schizophrenia patients, and try to see how these could be further scrutinized through Kierkegaardian optics. 3.1.  First case First patient: »Everywhere you go, there are these people! They remind me all the time of what I’m not. I really don’t want to be what I am. I would need to be a much better person.« This description is reminiscent of Michael Theunissen’s illuminating analyses of Kierkegaardian despair in his monograph Kierkegaard’s Concept of Despair.21 In this book, Theunissen argues that the core feature of despair is that the self does not want »to be what it is« but instead wants to be what it is not. To analyze our patient’s statement, I shall first apply clinical phenomenology, and then Kierkegaardian phenomenology, as Arne Grøn22 called it. When the patient says, »Everywhere you go, there are these people!« she expresses her profound anxiety and unease about meeting other people. It expresses what 19   G. Stanghellini and R. Rosfort, Emotions and Personhood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). 20   B. Škodlar et al., »Subjective experience and suicidal ideation in schizophrenia,« Comprehensive Psychiatry 49:5 (2008), 482 – 488. 21   M. Theunissen, Der Begriff Verzweiflung: Korrekturen an Kierkegaard (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1993). 22   A. Grøn, »Kierkegaards Phänomenologie?,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 91 – 116.

230

Borut Škodlar

German psychiatrist Hans Burkhardt would call »feelings of defenselessness [schizophrene Wehrlosigkeit],«23 accompanied by feelings of inferiority and a weakened capacity to establish mutual relationships with other people – what German psychiatrist Walter von Baeyer refers to as »a disturbed capacity to meet other people [Störung der Begegnungsfähigkeit].«24 The same patient once said: »I feel that I would need to be a better person in order to start relationships with others. I would need to know much more and have learned some skills. I am without any shield in this world.« Patients also frequently report the experience of being paralyzed or frozen as a direct consequence of this basic weakness and defenselessness in front of other people.25 These experiences of paralyzing anxiety – when patients feel that they cannot even move – are a source of social withdrawal and may be followed by demoralization and despair. To return to Kierkegaard, the awareness of this weakness, as part of passively suffering (Erleiden) from the mental disorder, is followed by the patient’s active attribution of enormous significance to this weakness or incapacity (Handeln).26 For Kierkegaard, despair is a misrelation in the self-relation. Through repetitive negative experiences in human interactions and / or worldly affairs due to this perceived weakness, despair over oneself ensues. What we have just described is despair of weakness, or despair not to will to be oneself. Our patient expressed it almost precisely like this: »I really don’t want to be what I am.« What follows for many patients is the already mentioned social withdrawal, »inclosing reserve« (in Kierkegaard’s terms), and inaccessibility, as well as other self-encircling phenomena,27 which can be partly conceptualized as negative symptoms of schizophrenia.28 In the most difficult cases, suicidal tendencies – the loss of self and hope (desperatio) – reach full expression. Suicidality in schizophrenia is closely related to precisely the aforementioned feelings of solitude, inferiority, and inability to interact with others. The three main sources of suicidality are significantly correlated to a disturbed basic sense of self, as was established in a follow-up study.29 This was one of the first studies employing Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE): an instrument for assess23   H. Burkhardt, »Die schizophrene Wehrlosigkeit,« Nervenarzt 33 (1962), 306 – 312 (my translation). 24   W. v. Baeyer, »Der Begriff der Begegnung in der Psychiatrie,« Nervenarzt 26 (1955), 369 – 376 (my translation). 25   S. Resnik, Glacial Times. A Journey through the World of Madness (London: Routledge, 2005). 26   Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,« Kierkegaard Studies: Yearbook 1996 (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 1996), 34 – 60. 27   A. Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 2008). 28   G. Foussias and G. Remington, »Negative Symptoms in Schizophrenia: Avolition and Occam’s Razor,« Schizophrenia Bulletin 36:2 (2010), 359 – 369. 29   B. Škodlar and J. Parnas, »Self-disorder and subjective dimensions of suicidality in schizophrenia,« Comprehensive Psychiatry 51:4 (2010), 363 – 366.

Anxiety and Despair

231

ing basic self-experiences constructed by prominent phenomenological psychiatrist Josef Parnas, University of Copenhagen, and collaborators.30 In this vein, we have made a Kierkegaardian arc: from weakness in the self, to a self-encircling activity leading to despair as a misrelation in the self-relation, to hopelessness, social withdrawal, and suicidality, which are, in turn, reflections of disturbed selfhood. These studies, besides presenting mechanisms at play in the suicidality of schizophrenia patients, simultaneously represent a mutual confirmation of the most important contemporary phenomenological model of schizophrenia. Known as the »ipseity disturbance model« or »minimal self-disorder model,« put forward by Louis A. Sass and Josef Parnas, it consists of (a) diminished self-affection or sense of self, (b) hyperreflexivity, and (c) perplexity or a disturbed perceptual and conceptual »grip« or »hold« on the world, along with a variety of defense mechanisms and compensations that are due to these profound disturbances, all of which results in very diverse and troublesome lifestyles.31 3.2.  Second case The second patient states that: »It is so paradoxical. On the one hand, I have such a limited space of motility. I am so anxious that I cannot even go to a nearby shop. Meanwhile, on the other hand, I need to be the Messiah.« From a clinical phenomenological perspective, the patient feels constricted and limited in his functioning and social interactions due to anxiety and his fear of meeting others – similar to our first patient – as well as the fear of being seen by others, which is manifested in an important, almost pathognomonic symptom of schizophrenia: unease with the gaze. The gaze of the other is perceived as penetrating, which provokes anxiety and perplexity (what German neuropsychiatrist Gustav E. Störring calls Ratlosigkeit).32 The problems with the gaze are included in EAWE (Examination of Anomalous World Experience), a comprehensive instrument to assess disturbances of patients on the schizophrenia spectrum in world experience.33 EAWE represents the world-pole of experience, while the above-mentioned EASE represents the self-pole of experience. They can be seen as complementing one another and may be used together to comprehensively assess the full range of patients’ basic experiences.

30   J. Parnas et al., »EASE: Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience,« Psychopathology 38:5 (2005), 236 – 258. 31   L. A. Sass and J. Parnas, »Explaining schizophrenia: the relevance of phenomenology,« in Reconceiving Schizophrenia, ed. M. C. Chung et al. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 63 – 95. 32   G. E. Störring, Wesen und Bedeutung des Symptoms der Ratlosigkeit bei psychischen Erkrankungen (Leipzig: Georg Thieme Verlag, 1939). 33   L. A. Sass et al., »EAWE: Examination of Anomalous World Experience,« Psychopathology 50:1 (2017), 10 – 54.

232

Borut Škodlar

The constrictions and anxieties in the interpersonal space and in the global functioning in the world, experienced by our second patient, can lead to different stages of delusional moods, or Wahnstimmung, as Jaspers called it.34 A patient feels pervasive unease and anxiety without knowing why or what is wrong; having just a bare feeling that something is fundamentally wrong or different. In the further development, the feeling of uncertain certainty, or Gewissheitsbewusstsein, appears.35 It is a feeling that there must certainly be something specifically wrong and that there is tension in the air, even if one doesn’t know precisely what it is. If the basic tone of this uncertain certainty is anxious or threatening, end-of-theworld experiences or the apocalyptic mood (Weltuntergangsstimmung) described by Alfred Storch and Caspar Kulenkampff, may develop.36 Delusions are likely to grow from the soil of such solipsistic world-views, and messianic delusions – like those of the second patient – are frequent among them. How would Kierkegaard’s phenomenology interpret our patient’s paradoxical position; his extravagance? We may use Ludwig Binswanger’s term, here, and refer to it as Verstiegenheit. This German word invokes the feeling of being trapped while climbing – the inability to go either forward or back. Binswanger used this term in his monograph Drei Formen missglückten Daseins, to denote one of the three main forms of failed existence in schizophrenia, the other two being perverseness and manneristic behavior.37 The basic formula of despair is the same: a person encounters some profound difficulties, stemming from a basic defect in himself, which he does not want to acknowledge, while simultaneously attributing great significance to the things he cannot achieve due to it. As a reaction, he wants to defiantly assert himself in spite of the basic defect. He finds himself despairing to will to be himself; to find resolution in an impossible solution. A delusional world might appear as such a resolution. I do not claim that delusions are simple willful decisions. However, we are clinically aware of different levels of willful eccentricity, defiance, and negativism – also known as idionomia and antagonomia – in the reactions and behaviors of these patients. There are at least three experiential itineraries to the defiance or despair to will to be oneself. The first is curiosity and interest in unusual experiences and other worlds. One patient, who was in search of a certain secret, felt that he had gone too far in his search and was too exhausted, but was not willing to stop. This epistemic drive may lead to full-blown psychosis. The second mechanism is revolt against or repulsion by all human interactions due to the unease and anxiety that 34

  K. Jaspers, Allgemeine Psychopathologie (Berlin: Springer, 1953), 82.   H. Müller-Suur, »Das Gewissheitsproblem beim schizophrenen und beim paranoischen Wahnerleben,« Fortschritte der Neurologie, Psychiatrie, und ihrer Grenzgebiete 18 (1950), 44 – 51. 36   A. Storch and C. Kulenkampff, »Zum Verständnis des Weltuntergangs bei den Schizophrenen,« Der Nervenarzt 21 (1950), 102 – 108. 37   L. Binswanger, Drei Formen missglückten Daseins. Verstiegenheit, Verschrobenheit, Maniriertheit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1956). 35

Anxiety and Despair

233

they provoke. The third mechanism is a need for closure, a need for resolution, and relief at arriving at delusional interpretations. Klaus Conrad’s The Onset of Schizophrenia from 1958 has reported the latter.38 This is also where Conrad describes the transition from Trema (delusional mood) to Apophänie (revelatory finding of meaning in previously meaningless anxiety), which is accompanied by relief. From a diversity of possibilities, one jumps to a conclusion, to choosing one among many and to firmly adhere to it. We can thus detect the co-existence and dialectics between weakness and defiance, passivity and activity, in all forms of despair. The despair of weakness and the despair of defiance are two forms of despair that dialectically stem and develop from one another.39

4.  Remedies for despair – and what’s love got to do with them? I can now turn to the last part of this paper with the question: What’s love got to do with it? I will try to explain the reason behind this application of Tina Turner’s song title from 1984. Kierkegaard’s analyses of anxiety, despair, and selfhood are very pregnant for psychotherapeutic approaches to schizophrenia. They teach us how to distinguish the passively experienced afflictions – e. g., symptoms of schizophrenia – from active reactions, defenses, compensations, and escape strategies. They reveal the mechanisms at play in the development of these very important and very dangerous self-encircling and inaccessibility phenomena: despair, hopelessness, and the seeking of a last refuge in withdrawal, psychosis, or suicidality.40 This latter is »the most serious of all symptoms in schizophrenia,« as Eugen Bleuler – one of the fathers of psychiatry and the one who coined the term »schizophrenia« – wrote in his groundbreaking 1911 work Dementia praecox or the group of schizophrenias.41 Understanding the processes in the development of all of the manifestations of the mental disorder in question – i. e. schizophrenia – helps us to establish a relationship with the person who suffers from it. The relationship is the common ground for proceeding to more detailed diagnostic explorations and psychotherapeutic endeavors. When my colleagues and I have explored the experiences of schizophrenia patients using the above-mentioned instruments EASE and EAWE, many patients asked a similar question to the opening one: »How did you know that I have experienced all that?« Some patients commented that 38   K. Conrad, Die beginnende Schizophrenie. Versuch einer Gestaltanalyse des Wahns (Bonn: Edition Das Narrenschiff im Psychiatrie-Verlag, 2002). 39   Grøn, »Der Begriff Verzweiflung,« 34 – 60. 40   Binswanger, Schizophrenie, 15. 41   E. Bleuler, Dementia praecox oder Gruppe der Schizophrenien (Leipzig / Vienna: Franz Deuticke, 1911).

234

Borut Škodlar

the interview questions are very intelligent. By this they certainly meant that they experienced the questions to be relevant to them. In addition, many patients asked if it would be possible to continue these explorations and if we would be able to help them overcome the discussed disturbances. Answering the latter question has never been easy. We can be sure that we are much better equipped to accompany them on their path to resilience and adjustment to living with schizophrenia than we used to be. We can also, together with the patients, search for more appropriate psychotherapeutic tools, i. e. tools that will help them to gain a better understanding of what they are going through. The presence of the other – in this case the therapist – and the feeling that the therapist is interested in and understands their experiences is a remedy in its own right. However, the lives of patients with schizophrenia teach us to be humble and not to expect too much. There are times of joy and there are times of sorrow. There are times of clarity and times of abysmal darkness. We can never be sure and we can never sit quietly in our psychotherapeutic chairs. A colleague’s patient told him that he is not sure that the psychotherapy really helped him, but he is definitely sure that it was one of the most precious things that he has experienced in his life. Kierkegaard himself suggests that there are several ways out of despair, ways that save a person from the inclosing reserve, from the self-encircling phenomena. First is the word, or language;42 the communication (dialogue), all of which are fundamental elements of psychotherapy. The word is a window out of the self-created and self-enclosed worlds of the patient, or of any human being for that matter. Words are there to express the pain and the sorrow, and are bridges to other human beings. Many of our patients have long ago lost their trust in words and in their healing potential. We need to accompany them back to the roots of their potential, which can take place only through authentic meeting, as advocated by e. g. Martin Buber.43 The second aspect of the way out of despair is simple-mindedness, or simplicity, i. e. wanting only one thing: to be of one mind in what we do. Simplicity means tranquility and reconciliation with the human condition in order to see its existential roots. The existential root of the relationships we have with others resides in love. Love is an impulse that already exists in every one of us and which, as Kierkegaard writes, God has »bestowed upon« us. We have to rediscover it. In a similar vein, Viktor E. Frankl, the Viennese psychiatrist and psychotherapist, survivor of a concentration camp, and founder of logotherapy, speaks about a meaning or purpose in life that needs to be rediscovered.44 This means not only rediscovery of one’s life orientation – i. e. meaningful relationship(s) and activi42

  Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 106.   C. Goldberg, »Healing Madness and Despair through Meeting,« American Journal of Psychotherapy 54 (2000), 560 – 573. 44   V. E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006). 43

Anxiety and Despair

235

ties – but also rediscovery of one’s potential for self-transcendence. Potential for self-transcendence is a precondition for the installation of hope – the only true cure for despair. We find the third aspect of the way out of despair and anxiety in faith, which is a direct counterpart to anxiety and despair, and again the mother of hope against hopelessness (which is another name for despair). Kierkegaard sees faith as a miracle; a gift from God; a gift of eternal truth entering time in an instant (Øieblikket). Psychotherapy has long taken an interest in and researched the transformational power of the present moment. It ranges from aha-experiences (Aha-Erlebnisse) and experiences of kairos45 to microanalysis in developmental psychology and psychotherapy.46 Faith is, from the Kierkegaardian perspective, also a cure for the self. If the self wants to remain or become itself, it needs to constantly recover itself as a relation that relates itself to itself.47 In order to do so, the self must see itself in »the power which established it.«48 In other words, Kierkegaard’s treasury of ideas can inspire strategies for recovery of the self. It can thus inspire also the recovery of the most fragile forms of self encountered, as we have seen, in schizophrenia. As has been acknowledged by several leading phenomenological psychiatrists like Binswanger, Laing, and others, earnest confrontation with despair is a path towards the understanding of the limits of human selfhood. Only through understanding the most dangerous edges of human existence is it possible via negativa – or through »negative phenomenology,« as Grøn calls it49 – to conceive of its full recovery. »The self must be broken in order to become itself,« writes Kierkegaard in Sickness Unto Death.50 Jaspers similarly wrote about nihilism that it is a necessary step on the path of the development of life to self-awareness.51 To put it more figuratively, in the words of the poet – and Martin Buber’s close friend – Margarete Susman, the spark of light can only be seen in utter darkness.52 All the three remedies for despair that Kierkegaard proposes are thus in accordance with the main premises of any good psychotherapy. They have had a strong influence, especially in the long and rich tradition of existential psychotherapy, 45

  L. Milčinski, »Aha, kairos in razsvetljenje,« Psihiatrija danas 1 – 2 (1985), 133 – 136.   D. N. Stern, The Present Moment in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life (New York, NY: W. W. Norton, 2004). 47   S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death (Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. 19), ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). 48   Ibid., 14. 49   Grøn, The Concept of Anxiety in Søren Kierkegaard, 107. 50   Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, 65. 51   Jaspers, Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, 302. 52  See C. Welz, »Healing through Hope? Trauma, Memory, and Mental Imaging,« in Hope, ed. I. U. Dalferth and M. A. Block (Tübingen, Mohr Siebeck, 2016), 401 – 435, with reference to M. Susman, Das Buch Hiob und das Schicksal des jüdischen Volkes (Frankfurt am Main: Jüdischer Verlag, 1996). 46

236

Borut Škodlar

which is one of the main paradigms in psychotherapy and part of the existential-phenomenological tradition in psychiatry in general.53 It takes the ultimate concerns of human existence – death, freedom and responsibility, existential isolation and meaning(lessness) – to be the basic sources of anxiety and of the great variety of defense mechanisms, which constitute the world of a human being. These themes are a necessary part of all psychotherapeutic practice, and corrective to all forms of psychotherapy, which are selectively inattentive to them. Binswanger, one of the main proponents of this tradition, wrote in his profound analysis of schizophrenia that patients experience a profound »coming to an end [An-ein-Ende-gelangen],« »being stuck [Steckenbleiben],« and »being paralyzed [Erstarrung]« with their inability to »be together with others in love and friendship [Nichtseinkönnen im Miteinander der Liebe und Freundschaft].«54 These are not only existential-anthropological descriptions of schizophrenia, but also cries for help from people suffering from it. We need to address these cries in our (psychotherapeutic) endeavors to help those who suffer to come back to us in love and friendship. We started with Thornton Wilder, and we can conclude with him, with a quote from his novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey: »There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.« That’s what love’s got to do with it!

53

  I. D. Yalom, Existential Psychotherapy (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1980).   Binswanger, Drei Formen missglückten Daseins, 188.

54

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception Existential Hermeneutics and Psychoanalysis* Claudia Welz »Kun i Bevægelse er Sundheden og Frelsen at finde. [. . .] Naar man saaledes bliver ved at gaae, saa gaaer det nok«1 »Thinking is itself a movement and yet it is not absorbed into movement. On the contrary, thinking in its existential import is about not being consumed by what we are undergoing in the movements we are subjected to, but it is about being able to stop, reflect, and resist.«2

Introduction: Thinking as movement and respite Visitors to patients hospitalized at Copenhagen’s Rigshospital, who do not take the elevator, can read a number of quotes by Søren Kierkegaard on the walls of the staircase, for instance the one I have chosen as a motto text to this paper: »Only in motion can health and salvation be found.«3 Kierkegaard confessed in a letter *  Parts 1 – 3 include a revised and extended version of my lecture »Conscience, Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception in Kierkegaard and Freud« that was presented at the conference »Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Psychology: The Sickness unto Death« at the University of Iceland, Reykjavík, on May 22, 2013. 1   S. Kierkegaard, Letter no. 36 to Henriette Kierkegaard (October 1847) in Søren Kierkegaards Skrifter (= SKS), vol. 28: Brev 1‑42 Familien Kierkegaard, ed. Søren Kierkegaard Forskningscenteret 2012, see http://www.sks.dk / b1 / txt.xml (accessed August 13, 2017): SKS 28, 60 – 61. 2   A. Grøn, »The Concept of Existence,« in Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach, ed. A. Grøn et al. (Berlin / New York, NY: de Gruyter, 2017), 71 – 90, 76. 3  My translation. Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Letters and Documents in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XXV, ed. and trans. H. Rosenmeier (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), letter 150, 214 – 215: »Above all, do not lose your desire to walk: every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it. Even if one were to walk for one’s health and it were constantly one station ahead – I would still say: Walk! Besides, it is also apparent that in walking one constantly gets as close to well-being as possible, even if one does not quite reach it – but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill. Health and salvation can be found only in motion. If anyone denies that motion exists, I do as Diogenes did, I walk. If anyone denies that health resides in motion, then I walk away from all morbid objections. Thus, if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.«

238

Claudia Welz

that he knew no thought that was too heavy to walk away from, and he believed that everything goes well if only one keeps going. But what can we do if this has become impossible? Climbing upstairs in order to visit someone who had become seriously ill despite a healthy lifestyle, I was annoyed at the precocious quotes. I was suddenly reminded of them when I, many months later, read the second quote above in an article by Arne Grøn on Kierkegaard’s concept of existence. There is talk of thinking as a movement that differs from physical motion. Thinking transcends and interrupts the existential movements in which we are entangled. Thinking emerges as a liberating move because it can distance us from anything that restricts our lives in threatening ways: we can »stop, reflect, and resist.« Interestingly, the freedom of thought involves rest and respite. Why is it necessary to pause for reflection in such a paradoxical way: to take a break from thinking – in order to think afresh? The negation of the movement of thinking can be employed as an antidote to negative ways of moving forward in thought. Regardless of whether the negativity is formal (concerning how we think) or content-related (concerning what we think), it has normative implications. It reacts upon the existence of the thinker who becomes determined by the movements he or she performs. Grøn mentions a variety of different forms of negativity: (1) Generally speaking, we only understand what human existence means through »the difficulty of existence.«4 This difficulty is fleshed out with reference to the possibility »of losing oneself, of not preserving oneself, in the life one leads.«5 We do not lose ourselves in any specific act, for »existing is not a specific act but rather something we do in what we are doing« or »may be an underlying suffering in what we do.«6 This formulation shows that we can impose suffering onto ourselves through the ways in which we act. (2) In concrete terms, this can be the case when we fail as thinking creatures by failing »to think on our own«7 or even »being thoughtless in thinking« when ignoring the difficulty of existence and being captured in »abstraction and distraction.«8 Instead of collecting ourselves in thinking, we can come to forget what it means to exist or become indifferent to it. Then we can come to resemble the figure of the abstract thinker portrayed by Kierkegaard’s Climacus, who is so absentminded that he does not see that his »own existence contradicts his thinking.«9 In this context, existential thinking is »a counter-move to oblivion,«10 to forgetting what it is to be human, which may result in becoming inhuman.  4   A. Grøn, »The Concept of Existence,« 71, quoting S. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to »Philosophical Fragments«, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XII.1, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992) = KW XII.1, 302 / SKS 7, 275.  5   Grøn, »The Concept of Existence,« 77.  6   Ibid., 84.  7   Ibid., 78.  8   Ibid., 79.  9   Ibid., 86, quoting KW XII.1, 304 / SKS 7, 276. 10   Ibid., 89.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

239

(3)  Grøn elaborates on this problem when considering mass atrocity. How can human beings come to violate the inviolable – the sanctity of life – even though this might come »at the cost of losing their human dignity and maybe having their world go to pieces«?11 The guilt that follows one’s own actions can entail the loss of self-respect. While »the ethical implies that one has to account and to answer for oneself,« it is possible for human beings »to be blind, or to blind themselves, to what they do.«12 In such self-deceptive movements, activity and passivity intertwine. What comes to the fore is the »ambiguity of subjectivity,« both in its structural and its dynamic sense: that »one is not only the subject of relating, but also subjected to one’s way of relating« in having to endure oneself.13 Insofar as it concerns the conditions and limits of human action, this third form of negativity may be termed ethical. (4) This inclusion of the human being’s will to obscure him- or herself by excluding self-knowledge also implies a fourth form of negativity that can be called hermeneutic. What is excluded is a »disturbance of meaning which sets thought in motion« – and since strange and enigmatic meaning is ruled out, one cannot come to understand that there is something one does not understand.14 That its meaning is strange does not mean that it is meaningless. Grøn emphasizes Kierkegaard’s fundamental thesis that the affirmative can only be reached through the negative by referring to »the negativity of despair, which has itself two radically different meanings: perdition and merit.«15 Existential hermeneutics concerns the self-understanding of the persons living and thinking about their lives. Most people do not dare to face themselves entirely, but also evade themselves. (5) In contradistinction to the first, most general, existential form of negativity (1), which can be specified in the ways human beings think about themselves (2), a fifth, aesthetic, form of negativity can be distinguished, which has to do with the performative self-contradictions that arise when a thinker’s life clashes with the manner in which it is presented to others. Aesthetic negativity concerns the misrelation between existing, saying, and showing.16 Grøn argues that aesthetic negativity is rooted in existential negativity: »Poetological reflections have as their turning point the writer’s experience of non-sovereignty in the writing process, but this experience only becomes understandable through the existential experience of the loss of sovereignty.«17 In expressing ourselves, we can come to 11   A. Grøn, »The Limit of Ethics – The Ethics of the Limit,« in The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, ed. Th. Brudholm and Th. Cushman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 38 – 59, 44. 12   Ibid., 40. 13   A. Grøn, »Subjectivity, Passion and Passivity,« in Passion and Passivity, ed. I. U. Dalferth and M. Rodgers (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011), 143 – 155, 146. 14   A. Grøn, »Strange Meaning,« Kierkegaardiana 20 (1999), 159 – 166, 162. 15   Ibid., 161. 16   Cf. ibid., 160. 17   Ibid., 164.

240

Claudia Welz

pretend something that is not the case, thereby misleading others, and at times also ourselves. If we approach the negativity with which we nolens volens are confronted, via negativa, can this countermove enable us to transform that negativity? This is the question that I wish to explore in this paper by focusing on the self-alienating tours and detours of thought entailed in the psycho(patho)logy of everyday life. In particular, I will investigate the relation between self-knowledge and self-deception. If conscience is indeed, as its etymology suggests, a knowing-with-oneself (con-scientia, syn-eidesis), an inner witness of everything one thinks, feels, and does, how can it become a source of self-deception rather than a medium for self-disclosure? Or, in other words, how can conscience become a false witness to oneself, and how can we in this case face our fallibility and take upon ourselves not just guilt and despair, but also the responsibility for what we have done, felt, and thought? I will discuss these issues by bringing Kierkegaard into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Primo Levi. These thinkers have at least one thing in common: they call special attention to the more or less willful self-obscuration and manipulation of memory in view of unwanted self-knowledge.

1.  Conscience – a false witness to oneself? Let us first consider the experiences of one of the most prominent Holocaust survivors: the Jewish-Italian chemist Primo Levi. Levi was part of a partisan group and was arrested and deported to Auschwitz in 1943. Relatively soon after his liberation in 1945, he gave his testimony in two classic autobiographical works: Se questo è un uomo (If This is a Man) (1947) and La Tregua (The Truce: A Survivor’s Journey Home from Auschwitz) (1963). In these works Levi also speaks in stead of those who ›drowned‹ and disappeared. In his »Afterword« to an edition containing both books, Levi responds to some frequently asked questions. His readers asked, for example, whether he had forgiven the Germans. Levi had deliberately assumed the calm, sober language of the witness, neither the lamenting tones of the victim nor the irate voice of someone who seeks revenge. All the same, this was not, in his eyes, an indiscriminate pardon. No, I have not forgiven any of the culprits, nor am I willing to forgive a single one of them, unless he has shown (with deeds, not words, and not too long afterward) that he has become conscious of the crimes and errors of Italian and foreign Fascism and is determined to condemn them, uproot them, from his conscience and from that of others.18

18   P. Levi, »Afterword: The Author’s Answers to His Readers’ Questions,« in Idem, If This is a Man; The Truce, trans. S. Woolf (London: Everyman’s Library, 2000), 456 – 480, here 458.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

241

Levi’s response raises more questions than it answers, but one thing is certain: to Levi, conscience is not infallible, but erroneous. It can be terribly mistaken in its judgment about right and wrong, but it is corrigible. Yet how can one person uproot the crimes and errors of another from this other person’s conscience? Is conscience not the most private, innermost instance of self-criticism to which only one single person has access, namely the one who ›has‹ this conscience? Levi seems to disagree. Suggesting the possibility of mutual correction of one another’s consciences presupposes at least that one’s conscience can be affected or even afflicted by the judgment of others. In any case, we learn that conscience is not neutral but subjective in a promising and a problematic sense: it can be self-directing, but also self-confusing, and its subjectivity is infused with sociality. That socially shared norms have a say in one’s individual conscience is a view that Levi might have adopted from Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis. Already in his 1914 text on narcissism (»Zur Einführung des Narzissmus«), Freud depicted conscience as a »watchman« acting on behalf of the ego ideal, which arises from the critical influence of one’s parents, teachers, and public opinion.19 On September 9, 1920, Freud gave an address to the International Psycho-Analytical Congress at The Hague, entitled »Supplements to the Theory of Dreams,« where he assumed »the existence of a special self-observing and critical agency in the ego (the ego ideal, the censor, conscience).«20 Later, in the book Das Ich und das Es (The Ego and the Id) of 1923, he presented his view on how morality develops over a person’s life: As a child grows up, the role of father is carried on by teachers and others in authority; their injunctions and prohibitions remain powerful in the ego ideal and continue, in the form of conscience, to exercise the moral censorship. The tension between the demands of conscience and the actual performances of the ego is experienced as a sense of guilt.21

As Jonathan Lear has delineated Freud’s view, the moral sense emerges in human beings in line with an internal differentiation of the psyche.22 Freud structured it into ego, id, and super-ego (Ich, Es, Über-Ich). Accordingly, he saw the ego in a doubly conflicted position. The first conflict is in relation to the id – the repository of unconscious wishes and angers. The second conflict is in relation to the superego, which has internalized society’s values and confronts the ego for falling in too much with the id’s wishes. For Freud, there are hidden, dynamic relations between the forbidden id-impulses, and the forbidding super-ego commands. Surprisingly, the super-ego can also act as the id’s representative vis-à-vis the ego. Thus, 19   S. Freud, »On Narcissism: An Introduction,« in S.E. XIV, 96. All references to Freud’s writings are to: S. Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (London: The Hogarth Press, 2001) = S.E. 20   Cf. the author’s abstract to »Ergänzungen zur Traumlehre,« in S.E. XVIII, 4. 21   S. Freud, The Ego and the Id, S.E. XIX, 37. 22   For this paragraph, see J. Lear, Freud (London: Routledge, 2005), 183 – 186, 257.

242

Claudia Welz

when functioning as the punishing voice of conscience, the super-ego’s ›voice‹ is sometimes consciously ›heard,‹ but it often works unconsciously. It can also dominate in the form of »an unconscious sense of guilt.«23 The anger felt towards others, for instance one’s parents, is redirected unto the ego: »the more a man controls his aggressiveness, the more intense becomes his ideal’s inclination to aggressiveness against his ego.«24 Nothing can be hidden from conscience, which observes, judges, and condemns actions, censors thoughts, inhibits impulses, and feels pained when one does not refrain from doing what is bad by the standards of one’s internalized authorities. Kierkegaard, too, understands conscience as one’s inner witness and judge25 – yet on religious grounds. Following Romans 2:14 – 15, he assumes that the Law is written in all people’s hearts. In this sense, the orienting norms are innate. Nonetheless, this does not mean that everyone agrees upon the criteria of moral judgment. Kierkegaard equates wanting to have conscience to wanting to be den Enkelte – the single individual.26 If one tries to ease the task for oneself by entering a crowd with ›its‹ own conscience that decides for everyone, this ends with everyone losing his or her conscience, i. e., with a communal lack of conscience.27 In The Sickness unto Death (1849), we find the following famous passage: But before God they [i. e. human beings] were and are continually single individuals; the person sitting in a showcase is not as embarrassed as every human being is in his transparency before God. This is the relationship of conscience. The arrangement is such that through the conscience the report promptly follows each guilt, and the guilty one himself must write it. But it is written with invisible ink and therefore first becomes clearly legible only when it is held up to the light in eternity while eternity is auditing the consciences. Essentially, everyone arrives in eternity bringing along with him and delivering his own absolutely accurate record of every least trifle he has committed or omitted.28

23

  Freud, The Ego and the Id, S.E. XIX, 35.   Ibid., 54. 25   I’ll be brief, since I have elswhere addressed Kierkegaard’s concept of conscience in depth, see C. Welz, »Keeping the Secret of Subjectivity: Kierkegaard and Levinas on Conscience, Love, and the Limits of Self-Understanding,« in Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas, ed. C. Welz and K. Verstrynge (London: Turnshare, 2008), 153 – 225; C. Welz, »Samvittighed, selvbedrag og autenticitet hos Kierkegaard,« in Kierkegaard som eksistentiel fænomenolog, ed. M. Pahuus et al. (Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2015), 101 – 123. 26   Cf. SKS 16, 149 / KW XXI, 91. 27   Cf. NB 24 : 119 in SKS 24, 396 / Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Journals NB21 – NB25, ed. and trans. B. Kirmmse et al. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015), 401: »One could say that ›conscience‹ is one of life’s greatest inconveniences. Therefore let us form a group – for with a group it is good-bye to conscience: when it comes to conscience, one cannot be 2 or 3, or Møller Brothers and Company. And let us safeguard all this convenience of having abolished conscience by saying that wanting to be a single individual is egotism, sickly vanity, etc.« 28   S. Kierkegaard, The Sickness unto Death: A Christian Psychological Exposition for Upbuilding and Awakening, in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XIX, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Prince­ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980) = KW XIX, 124 / SKS 11, 235. 24

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

243

Here one brings one’s own denunciation along with oneself. Punishment follows a causative principle reacting to one’s deeds. Interestingly, the quote does not advocate human self-transparency. While we neither can see through each other nor through ourselves, nothing can be hidden from God’s eye. At the point of time when things will be disclosed, the perpetrator might already have forgotten his crimes. It is unclear when exactly the ›invisible ink‹ will become clearly legible. Yet Kierkegaard leaves no doubt that this will happen sooner or later. Then one’s knowledge with oneself (Danish: samviden) that is kept in one’s conscience (Danish: samvittighed) might turn against oneself. Still, the voice of one’s conscience is not decretory, not deciding one’s fate once and for all. In the sixth of his »Discourses at the Communion on Fridays« (1848), Kierkegaard consoled those who condemned themselves with the words from 1 John 3:20: »If our hearts condemn us, we know that God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.«29 Elsewhere Kierkegaard criticizes what he calls en spidsfindig Samvittighed, that is, a pedantic, overly subtle, quirky conscience, which drives itself into performative self-contradictions. In Chapter V of Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1846) we read that just as »one rarely sees a downright hypocrite, so likewise rarely a downright unscrupulous person; but a subtle conscience is not rare,« and this conscience lives »in the agonizing self-contradiction of simultaneously having to explain away a responsibility and remaining unaware of doing it,«30 which indicates that bad conscience can maneuver a person right into a double bind. Similarly, the second essay of Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) – which can be regarded as a history of ethics31 – emphasizes the ambiguity of bad conscience and the relativity of historically contingent sets of values and social conventions. As the origin of responsibility, conscience is a cultural phenomenon of which humankind can be proud: the consciousness of guilt is turned in upon an individual who is forced to mastery of self and circumstances, thereby becoming sovereign and reliable – an individual entitled to make promises.32 However, a high price has been paid for human mastery over the emotions: »how much blood and horror is at the bottom of all ›good things‹!«33 Nietzsche puts forward the hypothesis that bad conscience originates in the internalization and inhibition of cruel and destructive instincts dating back to a time when human beings were half-animals. In turning these »instincts of the wild, free, nomadic man [. . .] backwards against man himself,« the human being became »a place of torture« due 29   Quoted from the New International Version (NIV). Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Christian Discourses in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. XVII, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1997) = KW XVII, 293 – 294 / SKS 10, 315 – 316. 30   KW XII.1, 604 / SKS 7, 549. 31  Cf. D. Smith, »Introduction,« in F. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: A Polemic, trans. D. Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), vii – xxxi, here vii. 32  Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, II, § 2 [quoted according to standard divisions]. 33   Cf. ibid., II, § 3, cf. § 6.

244

Claudia Welz

to self-imposed suffering.34 According to Nietzsche, bad conscience leads right into self-division and self-contradiction, for instance in the ideals of selflessness, self-denial, and self-sacrifice, which entail a pleasure that belongs to cruelty.35 Nonetheless, while »only bad conscience, only the will to mistreat the self supplies the condition for the value of the unegoistic,«36 these negative self-denying tendencies are not just pathological. In Nietzsche’s view, bad conscience is an illness »in the same way that pregnancy is an illness.«37 Pregnancy is, in any case, a life-affirming and immensely fertile ›sickness‹ that one must succumb to if one wants to give birth to the baby whose arrival is awaited. The negativity implied in this sickness seems necessary in regard to the future to come – or is it? In the very last two paragraphs of his essay, Nietzsche performs a remarkable thought experiment that both approves of and negates the negativity inherent in bad conscience: what if the history of the denial of natural inclinations could be reversed and bad conscience would instead be interwoven with the unnatural inclinations, with ideals that are hostile to life and defame the world?38 For Nietzsche, this would be »great health itself« and the redemption of reality.39 As we cannot be cured from the illness of bad conscience, we can only turn its aggression against the negative ideals it contains – and use the power of negation as an engine supporting greater self-insight. Instead of remaining in the service of sanctified lies in view of unattainable ascetic ideals, conscience would then orient itself towards milder, more clement ideals that can bear us from the past of uninhibited instincts through the self-doubting present to a ›better‹ (at once more ›natural‹ and more ›cultured‹) future of humanity. Nietzsche envisaged the possibility that conscience becomes a false witness to oneself in that it denies what would enhance one’s self; as a remedy against this self-degrading disease he suggested we be suspicious of the self-attestation acquired through conscientious self-examination. The situation he had in mind was the scrupulous performance of duties, which leaves no room for inner freedom in relation to the internalized rules of society. Nietzsche’s thoughts about repression and sublimation anticipate concepts later developed by Freud.40 This brings us to the next section. How shall we conceive of self-deception in regard to our feelings, thoughts, and actions?

34

  Ibid., II, § 16.   Cf. ibid., II, § 18. 36  Ibid. 37   Ibid., II, § 19. 38   Cf. ibid., II, § 24. 39  Ibid. 40  Cf. Smith, »Introduction,« xxv – xxvi. 35

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

245

2. Self-deception, memory, and forgetfulness In the third essay of his Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche describes the so-called ›slave morality‹ of the weak and sick, of those who regard themselves as victims and thereby poison everyone else’s trust in life and in humanity. According to Nietzsche, they are dishonest insofar as they wish to escape from themselves, but do not admit their own self-contempt: »Here the worms of vindictive feeling and reaction squirm; here the air stinks of things kept secret and unacknowledged; [. . .] here the sight of the victor is the object of hatred. And what deceitfulness is required in order not to acknowledge this hatred as hatred!«41 While the self-proclaimed victims hate the victorious, they manage to make their hatred invisible to themselves by eloquently presenting themselves as those who represent love, justice, and other virtues that they in reality do not possess. Nietzsche criticizes their mendacity and hypocrisy: »the golden sound of virtue is faked here.«42 The apparent »purity of heart« of these self-righteous »Pharisees« hides their resentment against the healthy and strong. Nietzsche reveals their »subterranean revenge« and its »masquerades«43 by exposing that they are not true to their feelings, but deny them. They deceive themselves and others by reinterpreting their incapability of living their feelings as a manifestation of culture, while for Nietzsche this only shows »the foul smell of inner corruption.«44 In order to transform their own emotions and self-images, they misuse their language skills and manipulate their memories. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), Nietzsche characterized this process as follows: »›I have done that,‹ says my memory. I cannot have done that – says my pride and remains unshakeable. Finally – memory yields.«45 One can belie one’s own feelings and distance oneself from one’s past acts by means of inward concealment and an outward self-presentation that does not express, but further suppress one’s experiences. Thus, the intellectual and moral integrity of one’s thinking becomes compromised as well: instead of constituting a liberating move, the inner dialogue of thought confirms one’s self-evasion. In the end one’s self-deception results in lies towards others – or in twisted excuses for self-justification. Levi has done an excellent job explaining how self-deception works for perpetrators and their traumatized victims. Both groups need shelter from haunting memories, though in different ways and on other grounds. Interested in the motivations of war criminals as to why they did what they did, and whether they were aware of committing crimes, Levi analyzed their answers. He found that Speer, 41

  Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, III, § 14.  Ibid. 43  Ibid. 44  Ibid. 45   F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. and trans. M. Faber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), Aphorism no. 68. 42

246

Claudia Welz

Eichmann, Stangl, Höss, Boger, and Kaduk essentially said the same things: »I did it because I was ordered to; others (my superiors) have committed acts worse than mine; in view of the upbringing I received, and the environment in which I lived, I could not have acted differently; if I had not done it, another would have done it even more harshly in my place.«46 But were they sincere in explaining their actions? Levi thinks that for anyone reading these justifications, the first reaction is revulsion: »They lie knowing that they are lying: they are in bad faith.«47 Yet, he concedes that the distinction between good and bad faith presupposes a mental clarity that few have and that even those few immediately lose when past or pre­ sent realities arouse anxiety or discomfort: Under such conditions there are, it is true, those who lie consciously, coldly falsifying reality itself, but more numerous are those who weigh anchor, move off, momentarily or forever, from genuine memories, and fabricate for themselves a convenient reality. The past is a burden to them; they feel repugnance for the things done or suffered, and tend to replace them with others. The substitution may begin in full awareness, with an invented scenario, mendacious, restored, but less painful than the real one; in repeating its description to others but also to themselves, the distinction between true and false progressively loses its contours, and man ends by fully believing the story he has told so many times and still continues to tell, polishing and retouching here and there the details which are least credible or incongruous or incompatible with the acquired picture of the historically accepted events: initial bad faith has become good faith. The silent transition from falsehood to self-deception is useful: anyone who lies in good faith is better off, he recites his part better, is more easily believed by the judge, the historian, the reader, his wife and his children.48

Levi calls attention to the fact that memory distortion is obvious in all cases where the perpetrators were born and raised long before the Reich became totalitarian. The re-elaboration of their pasts was a later work, slow and probably not methodical.49 The memory of a guilty act can also be suppressed, for the best way to defend oneself against the invasion of burdensome memories is to impede their entry: »It is easier to deny entry to a memory than to free oneself from it after it has been recorded.«50 Levi describes how the Nazi commanders protected the consciences of those assigned to do the dirty work: partly by giving them all the liquor they wanted so that they could drown their memories, partly by euphemisms like ›special treatment‹ or ›final solution‹ that disguised a frightful reality. Levi’s analysis shows that it is not necessary to enter the minds of the perpetrators in order to detect their self-deception. Their own words reveal that they are trying to explain something away that is getting to them. Their self-deception might have been unintentional, but their verbose self-defenses must be regarded 46   P. Levi, »The Memory of the Offense,« in The Drowned and the Saved, trans. R. Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 1989), 11 – 21, here 13 – 14. 47   Ibid., 14. 48   Ibid., 14. 49   Cf. ibid., 16. 50   Ibid., 19.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

247

as voluntary. Even the one claiming ›I have only internalized others’ norms‹ is obliged by this insight and has become responsible for the appropriation of these norms. Levi’s readers asked him whether he believed that the Germans knew about the genocide. In If This is a Man, Levi quotes Eugen Kogon, a former Buchenwald prisoner, later Professor of Political Science at the University of Munich, who had written a book on the National Socialist state and the system of concentration camps, Der SS Staat: Das System der deutschen Konzentrationslager (1946). Kogon’s point is that, despite the various possibilities of finding information, most Germans did not know what happened to the Jews because they did not want to know: Because, indeed, they wanted not to know. It is certainly true that State terrorism is a very strong weapon, very difficult to resist. But it is also true that the German people, as a whole, did not even try to resist. In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: those who knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions; those who did ask questions received no answers. In this way the typical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door. Knowing and making things known was one way (basically then not all that dangerous) of keeping one’s distance from Nazism. I think the German people, on the whole, did not seek this recourse, and I hold them fully culpable of this deliberate omission.51

Kogon’s observations go well with Kierkegaard’s description of self-deception in The Sickness unto Death. According to Kierkegaard, human beings can betray themselves for their self-knowledge. If it is true that despair is a universal illness, how is it possible that so many people are unaware they are afflicted? In Part One, section C.B.a of the book, Kierkegaard discusses »The Despair That Is Ignorant of Being Despair, or the Despairing Ignorance of Having a Self and an Eternal Self.« Here we are informed that, very often, »the person in despair probably has a dim idea of his own state, although here again the nuances are myriad. [. . .] Or he may try to keep himself in the dark about his state« – for instance through diversions, work, and busyness – or he may »even realize that he is working this way in order to sink his soul in darkness,« but he is »not, in a deeper sense, clearly conscious of what he is doing [. . .]. There is indeed in all darkness and ignorance a dialectical interplay between knowing and willing.«52 It is noteworthy that Kierkegaard uses active verb forms, indicating that the self-deceiver himself creates the darkness or opacity that blocks self-knowledge. The person deceiving himself allows some time to elapse and accepts that whatever he knows about himself becomes increasingly obscure, until knowing and willing agree completely. 51

  Quoted in Levi, If This is a Man, 463.   KW XIX, 48 / SKS 11, 163.

52

248

Claudia Welz

Provided that self-deceiving action is intentional, self-deceivers are morally responsible for self-deception. As Grøn has astutely argued in his treatise on subjectivity and negativity, the ignorance about oneself is an ignorance that one brings forth and preserves willingly: one makes oneself ignorant, and in this ignorance there’s a will to unknowingness, or an aversion against self-knowledge, which is not innocent. On the contrary, this reluctance is due to one’s turning away from possible insight: one’s unknowingness follows from one’s unwillingness.53 For this reason, Kierkegaard was skeptical of Socratic ignorance, for Socrates could not account for the ambiguity of the will. Socrates could not explain »a person’s efforts to obscure his knowing«54 and Socrates did not grasp »that anyone could knowingly not do the good« or, »knowing what is right, do wrong.«55 Kierkegaard, like Luther, saw the »corruption of willing,«56 its sinful self-deception, in legitimizing and excusing the eclipse of »ethical-religious comprehension.«57 Correspondingly, Anton Hügli called self-deception in Kierkegaard »an intentional not-wanting-to-know-that-one’s-will-is-in-conflict« – which presupposes insincerity or double-mindedness.58 In the end, the self-deceiver admits that whatever (s)he wants is alright.59 Philosophers of psychology are divided on this point: do self-deceivers really know what they are doing, and is the main problem the strength or the weakness of the will? Emil Angehrn and Joachim Küchenhoff – editors of a recent volume on self-deception as a challenge to philosophy and psychoanalysis – point out that the human being is not only a victim in being deceived, but also an agent of self-deception, and that the latter is linked to dishonesty and self-concealment.60 Even if one assumes that self-deception does not entail intentional self-deception, but only being influenced by biased beliefs, desires, and akrasia, self-deception doubtlessly »represents an obstacle to self-knowledge, both individually and collectively,« and insofar it is, as Ian DeWeese-Boyd rightly states, »a problem of existential concern, since it suggests that there is a distinct possibility that we live with

53

 Cf. A. Grøn, Subjektivitet og negativitet (Copenhagen: Gyldendal, 1997), 129 – 132 and 218 – 219.   KW XIX, 88 / SKS 11, 201. 55   KW XIX, 90 / SKS 11, 204. 56   KW XIX, 95 / SKS 11, 208. 57   KW XIX, 94 / SKS 11, 207. 58   A. Hügli, »Pseudonymity, Sincerity and Self-Deception,« in Kierkegaard – Poet of Existence, ed. B. Bertung (Copenhagen: C. A. Reitzel, 1989), 59 – 74, here 69. 59   Elsewhere I have elaborated more detailed on the concept of self-deception in Kierkegaard’s writings, therefore I make it short in the present paper. See C. Welz, »Puzzles of Self-Deception and Problems of Orientation: Kierkegaard and the Current Debate in the Philosophy of Psychology,« Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2011, 157 – 180; »Self-Deception,« in Kierkegaard Research: Sources, Reception and Resources (KRSRR), vol. 15, tome VI: Kierkegaard’s Concepts: Salvation to Writing, ed. S. M. Emmanuel et al. (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 29 – 34. 60   E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhoff, eds., »Einleitung,« in Selbsttäuschung: Eine Herausforderung für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2017), 7. 54

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

249

distorted views of our selves, others and the world that may make us strangers to ourselves and blind to the nature of our significant moral engagements.«61 Since self-deception can show itself in the seemingly harmless form of oblivion, we may again turn to Freud, and especially his writings on repression. Already in his 1898 paper »The Psychical Mechanism of Forgetfulness« (»Zum psychischen Mechanismus der Vergesslichkeit«), Freud admonished that among the various factors that contribute to a failure in recollection or a loss of memory, the part played by repression must not be overlooked.62 In a state of repression, trains of thought meet with a resistance that keeps them from becoming conscious – despite the intensity of the interest taken in them.63 Freud concludes: »Thus the function of memory, which we like to regard as an archive open to anyone who is curious, is in this way subjected to restriction by a trend of the will, just as is any part of our activity directed to the external world.«64 Pathological amnesia is due to the fact that the patients »do not know what they do not want to know« – and psycho-analytic treatment leads to the discovery »that the bringing back of those lost memories is opposed by a certain resistance.«65 This description of the intertwinement of knowing and willing and their mutual dependency comes very close to Kierkegaard’s. In Freud’s eyes, not only remembering, but also forgetting, has a tendentious nature. Forgetting might be due to an »unconscious hiding« of the forgotten thing.66 Or, as he points out in his essay »Über Deckerinnerungen« (1899), an early memory might be used as a screen for a later event, which is thereby concealed: »instead of the mnemic image which would have been justified by the original event, another is produced which has been to some degree associatively displaced from the former one.«67 Such a ›screen memory‹ owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to its relation to some other content that has been suppressed.68 A particularly vivid, but fake memory might have become a filter or emblem for a number of genuine memories, which are hidden behind phantasies used as psychical facades. How, then, is it possible to face oneself and to remember what one would prefer to forget forever?

61   Introductory paragraph of I. DeWeese-Boyd, »Self-Deception,« The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2017 Edition), ed. E. N. Zalta, URL = https://plato.stanford.edu / archives /  fall2017 / entries / self-deception / , whose article contains an updated overview of the current debate and a variety of different approaches within analytical and continental philosophy, including references to relevant literature. 62   Freud, S.E. III, 295. 63   Cf. ibid., 293. 64   Ibid., 296. 65   Ibid., 296. 66   Ibid., 297. 67   S.E. III, 307. 68   Cf. ibid., 320.

250

Claudia Welz

3. Facing or blinding oneself Already in 1835, when he was twenty-two years old, Kierkegaard wrote in a letter from Gilleleje that a person must »first learn to know himself before learning anything else (γνωϑι σεαυτον).«69 Yet, it is one thing to proclaim that one must gain clarity about oneself, another to bear grievous discoveries about oneself. In The Antichrist (1895), Nietzsche stated pessimistically that the most common lie is lying to oneself: not wanting to see what one actually sees, or not wanting to see it precisely as one is seeing it.70 Lying to oneself in the sense of deceiving oneself implies that one has to make invisible what one does see and envision something else instead. Seeing something as something involves a certain view of the situation in which one is placed as well as a certain self-understanding that ›colors‹ one’s vision of the past, the present, and the future. Knowing oneself means remembering what one has committed or omitted, as well as minding who one will become if one is not ready to do what one should do. Self-deception, by contrast, means ignoring or whitewashing crucial details of one’s character and biography. Pondering ways to explain the Nazis’ fanatical hatred of the Jews, Levi came to the conclusion that this hatred contained no rationality and that perhaps one must not understand what happened because to understand is almost to justify. However, »we can and must understand from where it [their hatred] springs, and we must be on our guard. If understanding is impossible, knowing is imperative, because what happened could happen again. Conscience can be seduced and obscured again – even our conscience.«71 Levi grants that self-obscuration is not just the flaw of others, but rather a universal problem that concerns everyone. As self-deceivers, we typically refrain from meditation on past wrongs. Since the possibility of deceiving oneself belongs to the conditio humana, our self-knowledge must include reminders of shared human fallibility, imperfection, and – last but not least – an idea of how one can blind oneself and thereby eliminate the sight of what one does not want to see. In his »History of the Psycho-Analytic Movement« (1914), Freud declared that »the theory of repression is the corner-stone on which the whole structure of psycho-analysis rests.«72 In »Die Verdrängung« (1915), repression is described as a 69   S. Kierkegaard, Søren Kierkegaard’s Journals and Papers, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong, assisted by G. Malantschuk (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1978), vol. 5 = JP V 5100 / Pap. I A 75 / SKS 17, 27 (Journal AA). 70   F. Nietzsche, Der Antichrist in: Werke in drei Bänden, vol. 2, ed. K. Schlechta (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1997), no. 55: »Ich nenne Lüge: etwas nicht sehn wollen, das man sieht, etwas nicht so sehn wollen, wie man es sieht [. . .]. Die gewöhnlichste Lüge ist die, mit der man sich selbst belügt; das Belügen andrer ist relativ der Ausnahmefall.« 71   Levi, If This is a Man, 476. 72   S.E. XIV, 16.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

251

»defensive mechanism« whose essence lies »in turning something away, and keeping it at a distance, from the conscious.«73 In a first phase, which Freud calls primal repression, the entrance into the conscious is denied; in a second phase, repression proper, all ideas that have come into associative connection with the repressed representative meet the same fate as what was primally repressed.74 While Kierke­ gaard tied self-deception to self-produced ›half-darkness‹ of the mind, Freud wrote that the repressed »proliferates in the dark« and acquires a »deceptive strength of instinct« resulting from »an uninhibited development in phantasy«75 and the attempted »avoidance of unpleasure.«76 Yet the repressed returns. »The vanished affect comes back in its transformed shape as social anxiety, moral anxiety and unlimited self-reproaches.«77 Marcia Cavell calls repression »the dynamic unconscious, the activity of willfully banishing a thought from conscious awareness« – an activity that »generates anxiety« and attempts »to avoid greater anxiety by somehow blinding oneself to the situation that occasions it, or blurring or disguising it, or attributing it to something less fearful.«78 This leads to a paradoxical duplicity, which, again, reminds us of Kierkegaardian dialectics: one ›knows‹ (unconsciously), and therefore one represses, so that one comes (consciously) ›not to know.‹ In the process, one typically acquires a belief that is itself psychically painful, yet less painful than the one against which it is a defense.79 For Cavell, the question is how these acts of self-blinding, of imaginative recreation of the world ›in the service of defense‹ take place. Is she right in assuming that, if we were trying to force repression to reason’s bed, we would construe repression »as a fully intentional process«?80 If this is the case, then wanting not to think about something and instead focusing on something else might do the trick. However, there is no model to fit all cases of repression: At one end of a spectrum will be intentional attempts to distract oneself, to turn one’s attention to something else, or to deny one’s own feelings or agency, and fully-formed recognitions that are the object of such attempts; at the other, processes that go on below the level of recoverable mental contents.81

Psychoanalytic interpretation opts for the ›in-between.‹ Freud himself explains in The Ego and the Id that the ego is »a frontier creature« that owes service to three 73

  Ibid., 147.   Cf. ibid., 148. 75   Ibid., 149. 76   Ibid., 153. 77   Ibid., 157. 78   M. Cavell, The Psychoanalytic Mind: From Freud to Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 180 and 183. 79   Cf. ibid., 183. 80   Ibid., 184. 81   Ibid., 186. 74

252

Claudia Welz

masters: the external world, the libido of the id, and the super-ego. In its mediating position between the three, »it only too often yields to the temptation to become [. . .] opportunist and lying, like a politician who sees the truth but wants to keep his place in popular favour.«82 The ego not only deceives extra-psychical agents, but succumbs to a sort of self-deception, for it ends up with conduct and convictions that do not correspond to its own insight in the true character of its situation. It is as if the ego had to convince itself that things are different than they in fact are. In Freud’s words, »it clothes« the id’s commands with »rationalizations«; »it pretends that the id is showing obedience to the admonitions of reality,« even when it is »remaining obstinate and unyielding«; and »it disguises the id’s conflicts with reality and, if possible, its conflicts with the super-ego too.«83 Hence self-deception is a complicated process that cannot be ascribed to one single ›agent‹ or ›culprit‹ alone; rather, it involves the mind as a whole and takes place across the boundaries of mental partitioning. Moreover, self-deception can neither be conceived as a fully conscious undertaking nor as an unconscious occurrence that befalls us without us being co-responsible in any way. Yet again, given this condition and these circumstances, how can we face ourselves? Michael Theunissen has argued that mental health presupposes acts of repetition, of homecoming, and of returning to oneself, through which the past is repeated or fetched home in the sense of being included in the present.84 If the past is repressed, it haunts the present and returns unwantedly.85 The past needs to be remembered and appropriated as belonging to one’s personal life story; otherwise it remains alienated from the present and is acted out in the manner of a Freudian return of the repressed.86 Often the most significant aspects of a person’s life are contained in what he or she withholds, denies, or avoids: in narrative omissions, memory deformations, and resistances. In one of his most important theoretical writings entitled »Das Unbewusste« (1915), Freud asks: »How are we to arrive at a knowledge of the unconscious? It is of course only as something conscious that we know it, after it has undergone transformation or translation into something conscious.«87 For that purpose, the person under analysis must overcome certain resistances. Some acts are merely latent, i. e. temporarily unconscious, others are repressed and as such in contrast to conscious processes.88 As Freud sees it, »there is no lifting of the repression until the conscious idea, after the resistances have been overcome, has entered 82

  S.E. XIX, 56.  Ibid. 84  Cf. M. Theunissen, Negative Theologie der Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1991), 258 – 259. 85   Cf. ibid., 259. 86   Cf. ibid., 260 – 261. 87   S.E. XIV, 166. 88   Cf. ibid., 172. 83

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

253

into connection with the unconscious memory-trace.«89 Overcoming these resistances means circumventing the frontier of inner censorship. As a consequence, reconnecting with repressed memory traces requires that the disavowal of the past implied in self-deception is itself undone. Now, if Donald Woods Winnicott is right in claiming that »[i]t is only in splitoff intellect that one can be 100 % honest; as soon as living processes come in, then there is self-deception and deception and compromise and ambivalence« – the ›true self‹ can only be deduced ex negativo, proceeding from the experience of false and inauthentic modes of being oneself.90 It follows that facing or blinding oneself is not an exclusive ›either / or‹ but rather a muddled ›both . . . and.‹ We have to struggle with existential ambiguities for a whole lifetime. Provided that self-knowledge is dearly bought by experiences of losing touch with ourselves and betraying what is best in ourselves, what can we do to ›wake up‹ from the slumber of irresponsible self-forgetfulness? If we forget ourselves in relation to others and deceive ourselves about our failures just as we fall asleep, how can we regain the control over ourselves that gets lost in non-conscious or pre-reflective states of mind? Let us follow the lead of the epigraph above, which speaks of a movement of thought that enables us to »stop, reflect, and resist.«

Conclusion: Thinking the thought of the end – as a new beginning So far, we have seen that thinking can itself become a part of the ›game‹ of self-deception in which everyone is involved – at least sometimes, to some extent.91 Fully-fledged self-deception displays all five forms of negativity outlined in the beginning: (1) existential negativity ignoring the difficulty of existence, concretized in (2) the self-forgetfulness of the one who thinks thoughtlessly or does not reflect upon him- or herself at all, (3) the ethical negativity of the one who blinds himor herself to what he or she has done to others, (4) the hermeneutic negativity that prevents or obfuscates self-insight, and (5) the aesthetic negativity showing externally what is not the case internally, thus ending in a pretense where thinking itself is ›staged.‹ 89

  Ibid., 175 – 176.  Cf. E. Löchel, »Lässt sich dem klinischen Konzept des ›falschen Selbst‹ etwas abgewinnen für eine interdisziplinäre Konzeption der ›Selbsttäuschung‹?,« in Selbsttäuschung: Eine Herausforderung für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse, ed. E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhoff (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2017), 99 – 119, here 107, quoting D. Woods Winnicott, The Spontaneous Gesture, ed. F. R. Rodman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 192. 91   For this reason, the role of other persons is ambiguous as well: others have the power to oppose one’s self-deceptive moves, but self-deception can also become collective, cf. T. Wesche, »Gleich­ gültigkeit: Eine Sozialphilosophie der Selbsttäuschung,« in Selbsttäuschung: Eine Herausforderung für Philosophie und Psychoanalyse, ed. E. Angehrn and J. Küchenhoff (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2017), 179 – 222, and S. Dietz, »Selbsttäuschung als sozialer Prozess« (Ibid., 223 – 239). 90

254

Claudia Welz

This negative outlook provokes the question of whether we can correct these crooked paths of thought if we ourselves tread on them when thinking about life. Can we regain the freedom of thought so that self-reflection becomes a liberating move which, ultimately, leads us out of self-deception – and if so, how? In conclusion, let us evaluate the hypothesis that has guided our consideration of existential ambiguities of self-understanding and self-alienation: if we approach the negativity, with which we nolens volens are confronted, via negativa, this counter-move may enable us to transform that negativity. Transferred to the above-mentioned forms of negativity, this means that we need to find a thought that can disrupt us in easygoing thoughtlessness, that can stop us in sidestepping our responsibility, and help us to resist our own resistances against the recollection through which we remember who we are, what we have done, and what matters in life when it comes to the point. It is not a coincidence that both Theunissen92 and Grøn93 have intensely discussed Kierkegaard’s discourse »At a Graveside« (1845). This discourse turns to the thought of death as an antidote to existential self-forgetfulness. In presenting death as the schoolmaster of earnestness who leaves the task of self-searching to the single individual,94 it sharpens the recipient’s mind to focus on the essential. Kierkegaard emphasizes that the perceived earnestness of life still allows one to deceive oneself, whereas the earnestness of death – »to think of oneself as dead«95 – is without deception. Grøn underlines that thinking about life and death in front of a grave makes us aware of the fact that we are mortal beings and that there comes the time when there is no more time.96 In procrastination, we can try to blank out this thought; but to be serious in the face of death means to understand how precious time is: a day or an hour can acquire infinite worth. According to Kierkegaard, the thought of death can give us new life force and make us alert, so that we can grasp the pre­ sent this very day; in addition, the thought of death can give us the right goal or direction and the right pace or momentum in life.97 Grøn accentuates that thinking about death is an active movement of thought in which we have to deal with our own passivity: we are dependent upon time ›approaching‹ us, ›coming to‹ us, or ›being given‹ to us anew on each day. As subjects of this movement of thought, 92

 Cf. M. Theunissen, »Das Erbauliche im Gedanken an den Tod: Traditionelle Elemente, innovative Ideen und unausgeschöpfte Potentiale in Kierkegaards Rede An einem Grabe,« Kierkegaard Studies Yearbook 2000, 40 – 73. 93  Cf. A. Grøn, »Unanschaulich: Tod, Zeit, Antlitz,« in Bild und Tod: Grundfragen der Bildanthropologie, ed. Ph. Stoellger and J. Wolff (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2015), 727 – 744. 94  Cf. S. Kierkegaard, Three Discourses on Imagined Occasions in Kierkegaard’s Writings, vol. X, ed. and trans. H. V. Hong and E. H. Hong (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993)  = KW X, 75 – 76 / SKS 5, 446. 95   KW X, 75 / SKS 5, 445. 96   For this paragraph, see Grøn, »Unanschaulich: Tod, Zeit, Antlitz,« 728 – 730. 97   KW X, 83 / SKS 5, 453.

Self-Knowledge and Self-Deception

255

we are ourselves being moved in being subjected to the passing of time. If we regard time as a disposable resource, we can become hit by our blindness and come to understand that time is a gift and that we can anticipate death only in the paradoxical way of anticipating the impossibility of anticipation. While Hei­ degger’s idea of Vorlaufen zum Tode turns impossibility into possibility, thereby reducing passivity to activity, Kierkegaard does the opposite, reminding us of the end of all our possibilities. In this vein, Grøn stresses the affective character of thinking.98 Our thinking can be called forth or be brought to a halt by something that happens to us. In being given something to think about, we are ourselves affected; yet we can blind ourselves to the very passivity that plays into our activity. Taking seriously the possibility of death means living our life otherwise than before. We must not forget that we can only ›take‹ our time if time has already ›come‹ to us. Time arrives, and time disappears together with us. We cannot think the moment of death. It will happen to us without us. Our planning and imagining the future can transition into the illusion that we can have a handle on it and master it, yet this illusion makes it even more likely that we will be taken by surprise. We are confronted with the question of how we can preserve ourselves in the time that betides us without us being able to control it. In his personal answer, Grøn propounds that the thought of death can take us out of time and place us in it again in new ways, thereby providing some distance from time in time. An image can remind us of that which we might have overlooked or forgotten. The vanitas motif, for instance, reminds us of our common human condition, of our mortality, and our limitations.99 Thus, one way of transforming negativity via negativa is keeping death in mind, the negative par excellence, which may prompt us to »stop, reflect, and resist.« As no other thought, the thought of death can indicate the existential import of thinking. Thinking the thought of the end may become a new beginning that changes our view of life. We cannot walk away from death, but can take seriously the memento mori and cherish the preciousness of the time we have together.

98

 Cf. Grøn, »Unanschaulich: Tod, Zeit, Antlitz,« 731 – 733, 735 – 736 (my summary).   Cf. ibid., 740, 743.

99

Notes on Contributors Emil Angehrn is Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of Basel. He is the author of numerous books, among them Die Überwindung des Chaos: Zur Philosophie des Mythos (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1996); Der Weg zur Metaphysik: Vorsokratik – Platon – Aristoteles (Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000); Interpretation und Dekonstruktion: Untersuchungen zur Hermeneutik (Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2003); Die Frage nach dem Ursprung: Philosophie zwischen Ursprungsdenken und Ursprungskritik (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007); Sinn und Nicht-Sinn: Das Verstehen des Menschen (Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Die Herausforderung des Negativen: Zwischen Sinnverlangen und Sinnentzug (Schwabe, 2015), and most recently Sein Leben ­schreiben: Wege der Erinnerung (Klostermann, 2017). His main fields of research are ancient philosophy, 19th and 20th century continental philosophy, metaphysics, philosophy of history, and hermeneutics. Hans-Christoph Askani is Professor of Systematic Theology at the University of Geneva. He is the author of Das Problem der Übersetzung – dargestellt an Franz Rosenzweig (Mohr Siebeck, 1997) and Schöpfung als Bekenntnis (Mohr Siebeck, 2006), as well as the editor of Où est la vérité? La théologie aux défis de la Radical Orthodoxy et de la déconstruction (Labor et Fides, 2012) and La sagesse et la folie de Dieu (Labor et Fides, 2017). He has published a vast number of articles on theology and philosophy. His research interests revolve around the relations between Judaism and Christianity, philosophy and theology, theology and anthropology, and – last but not least – ecumenical theology. Günter Bader is Emeritus Professor in Systematic Theology at the University of Bonn. He is the author of many books, for example Symbolik des Todes Jesu (Mohr Siebeck, 1988); Melancholie und Metapher: Eine Skizze (Mohr Siebeck, 1990); Die Abendmahlsfeier: Liturgik – Ökonomik – Symbolik (Mohr Siebeck, 1993); Psalterium affectuum palaestra: Prolegomena zu einer Theologie des Psalters (Mohr Siebeck, 1996); Die Emergenz des Namens: Amnesie – Aphasie – Theologie (Mohr Siebeck, 2006), and Psalterspiel: Skizze einer Theologie des Psalters (Mohr Siebeck, 2009). He has published extensively on hermeneutics, self-relation, structuralism, and post-structuralism. He is currently working on a book project entitled Lesekunst: Eine Theologie des Lesens. Ingolf U. Dalferth is the Danforth Professor of Philosophy of Religion at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. He has authored more than

258

Notes on Contributors

twenty-five books, most recently Creatures of Possibility: The Theological Basis of Human Freedom (Baker Academic, 2016); Radical Theology: An Essay on Faith and Theology in the Twenty-First Century (Fortress Press, 2016); Hoffnung (de Gruyter, 2016); Crucified and Resurrected: Restructuring the Grammar of Christology (Baker Academic, 2015); Transzendenz und säkulare Welt (Mohr Siebeck, 2015), and Selbstlose Leidenschaften: Christlicher Glaube und menschliche Passionen (Mohr Siebeck, 2013). He is currently engaged in research projects on Die Kunst des Verstehens: Eine orientierungsphilosophische Hermeneutik and Modalities, Philosophy of Religion, and Theology. Sonja Frohoff is Postdoctoral Fellow at Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences in Mannheim, and affiliated with the Section of Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy at the Clinic for General Psychiatry in Heidelberg. Her publications include the book Leibliche Bilderfahrung: Phänomenologische Annäherungen an Werke der Sammlung Prinzhorn (in print) and co-edited works such as Bilderfahrung und Psychopathologie: Phänomenologische Annäherungen an die Sammlung Prinzhorn (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014) and Fremde Spiegelungen: Interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur Sammlung Prinzhorn (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2017). Her research focuses on the lived body and sensemaking, identity and the lifeworld, the works of the Prinzhorn Collection, phenomenology in art therapy, unconscious and creativity. Mads Peter Karlsen is Assistant Professor at the Department of Management, Politics and Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. He has published numerous articles and is co-editor of Religionskritik efter Guds død (Forlaget Anis, 2009); Kristendom og engagement: Peter Kemps teologi til debat (Forlaget Anis, 2014), and & teologi: Festskrift til Carsten Pallesen (Eksistensen, 2016). He is also the author of two books that will be published in 2018: Fra dødsdrift til næstekærlighed: Seks kapitler om teologi og psykoanalyse and Alain Badiou: At tænke det umuliges mulighed. Karlsen’s main research areas are continental philosophy of religion, philosophical ethics, and the relationship between Christian theology and psychoanalysis. Stefano Micali is Assistent Professor of Philosophical Anthropology at the Husserl Archives (Center for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy) at the University of Leuven. He is the author of Überschüsse der Erfahrung: Grenzdimensionen des Ich nach Husserl (Springer, 2008); Esperienze temporali: Un’analisi fenomenolo­gica della pluralità dei tempi (Pendragon, 2008), and the forthcoming book Phenomenology of Anxiety (Springer, 2018). He has co-edited the volumes Bild­erfahrung und Psychopathologie: Phänomenologische Annäherungen an die Samm­lung Prinzhorn (Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2014); Wolfgang Blankenburg – Psychiatrie und Phänomeno­ lo­gie (Alber, 2014), and Angst: Philosophische, psychopathologische und psychoana­

Notes on Contributors

259

lytische Zugänge (Verlag Karl Alber, 2016). His work concentrates on the fields of phenomenology, psychiatry, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. Carsten Pallesen is Associate Professor in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Handlen og væren: Paul Ricœurs polytetiske refleksionsteori (University of Copenhagen, 2009) and co-author of Paulus Plus – Fire prismer på den nye Paulus (University of Copenhagen, 2012). Moreover, he has published numerous articles on post-Kantian philosophy of religion, questions of personal identity, the self and the Other, among other things. He is currently working on two projects: one on biblical hermeneutics (Paul Ricœur and Günter Bader) and another on existential dialectics and phenomenology (Hegel and Kierkegaard). Josef Parnas is Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Copenhagen, and Consultant Psychiatrist and Research Director at Mental Health Centre Glostrup, Copenhagen University Hospital. He is co-founder – together with Dan Zahavi and Arne Grøn – of the Center for Subjectivity Research. His list of publications contains more than 200 international peer-reviewed articles. He has co-edited Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry II: Nosology (Oxford University Press, 2012); Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry III: The Nature and Sources of Historical Change (Oxford University Press, 2014); EASE: Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience / Undersökning av störningar i självupplevelsen (Lund Universitet, 2015); and Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry IV: Classification of Psychiatric Illness in the Aftermath of DSM‑5 (Oxford University Press, 2017). His main research domain is the psychopathology of schizophrenia with special focus on the issue of selfhood. He directs several empirical and theoretical projects related to that issue. George Pattison is 1640 Professor of Divinity at the University of Glasgow and Affiliated Professor at the University of Copenhagen. He has published extensively in the area of modern philosophy of religion, especially on Kierkegaard and existentialism. His recent work includes God and Being (Oxford University Press, 2011); Kierkegaard and the Quest for the Unambiguous Life (Oxford University Press, 2013); Heidegger on Death: A Critical Theological Essay (Ashgate, 2013); Eternal God / Saving Time (Oxford University Press, 2015), and Paul Tillich’s Philosophical Theology (Palgrave, 2015). He is currently working on a co-authored book on existentialism and mysticism and a three-part Philosophy of Christian Life. The first part, entitled Phenomenology of the Devout Life, will be published by Oxford University Press in 2018. Other research interests include existentialism and religious life, especially in Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Heidegger. Ettore Rocca is Associate Professor of Aesthetics at the Department of Architecture and Territory, University of Reggio Calabria, and Affiliated Professor at the

260

Notes on Contributors

Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. His recent book publications include Kierkegaard (in Italian: Carocci, 2012; in Danish: Gyldendal, 2016); Længsel: Lundbye og Kierkegaard, co-authored with Bente Bramming and Hans Edvard Nørregård-Nielsen (Aarhus University Press, 2013), and At se Abraham, co-authored with Peter Brandes (Wunderbuch, 2014). His research focuses on 19th and 20th century continental philosophy (especially Kierkegaard and Merleau-Ponty), and aesthetics (especially the visual arts and their relation to philosophy of religion). He is currently writing a book on the philosophy of architecture. René Rosfort is Associate Professor of Ethics and Philosophy of Religion at the Søren Kierkegaard Research Center, Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. He has published numerous articles and is the author of Subjectivity and Ethics: Ricoeur and the Question of Naturalizing Personhood (University of Copenhagen, 2008) and Emotions and Personhood: Exploring Fragility – Making Sense of Vulnerability, co-authored with Giovanni Stanghellini (Oxford University Press, 2013). He is co-editor of Kierkegaard and the Challenges of Infinitude: Philosophy and Literature in Dialogue (University of Lisbon, 2013) and, most recently, Kierkegaard’s Existential Approach (de Gruyter, 2017). His research interests include ethics, philosophy of emotion, naturalism, and psychiatry. Borut Škodlar is Head of the Center for Mental Health and Unity for Psychotherapy at the University Psychiatric Clinic Ljubljana, and Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Phenomenological Analysis of Reasons for Suicide in Schizophrenia Patients (PhD thesis, University of Ljubljana, 2008). His recent publications include »Applications of Mindfulness in Psychotherapy – Contemporary Dilemmas« (Asian Studies, 2016) and »EAWE: Examination of Anomalous World Experience« (Psychopathology, 2017). His clinical and academic interests center on phenomenological psychopathology and psychotherapy of psychoses, phenomenological analysis of emotional processes, and interconnections between spiritual quests and mental disorders, particularly psychotic and mystical states. Helene Stephensen is Research Assistant at Mental Health Center Glostrup / Hvidovre, Copenhagen University Hospital, and affiliated with the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. Her recent publications include »Not Being Oneself: A Critical Perspective on ›Inauthenticity‹ in Schizophrenia,« co-written with Mads Gram Henriksen (Journal of Phenomenological Psychology, 2017). She also has other publications on the topic of subjectivity and schizophrenia forthcoming. Her primary research interests include phenomenology, existential philosophy, psychopathology, and psychoanalysis. She is currently involved in a research project concerning the question of rationality in schizophrenia (in collaboration with Josef Parnas).

Notes on Contributors

261

Claudia Welz is Professor of Systematic Theology with special responsibilities in Ethics and Philosophy of Religion, and Founding Director of CJMC: Center for the Study of Jewish Thought in Modern Culture, at the University of Copenhagen. She is the author of Love’s Transcendence and the Problem of Theodicy (Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Vertrauen und Versuchung (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and Humanity in God’s Image: An Interdisciplinary Exploration (Oxford University Press, 2016). She has co-authored and edited the anthologies Despite Oneself: Subjectivity and Its Secret in Kierkegaard and Levinas (Turnshare, 2008); Trust, Sociality, Selfhood (Mohr Siebeck, 2010), and Ethics of In-Visibility: Imago Dei, Memory, and Human Dignity in Jewish and Christian Thought (Mohr Siebeck, 2015). Her research also embraces trauma and memory studies, phenomenology, philosophy of language and of emotion, as well as psycho(patho)logy.

Index of Names Adorno, Theodor W.  37 – 38, 76, 132, 135 Améry, Jean  4 Angehrn, Emil  4, 7, 69 – 81, 145, 248, 253, 257 Aristotle  8, 33, 161 – 169, 171 Aquinas, Thomas  168, 185 Augustine  57, 110, 146 Azorin, Jean-Michel  221 Barth, Karl  147, 149 – 151, 214 Baeyer, Walter von  230 Beier, Kathi  71, 78 Bernet, Rudolf  202 Binswanger, Ludwig  2, 226, 228, 232 – 233, 235 – 236 Blankenburg, Wolfgang  2, 198 – 199, 207, 216, 228, 258 Bleuler, Eugen  213 – 214, 233 Bloch, Ernst  7, 117 – 118, 127, 141 Boehm, Gottfried  200, 203 Boethius  185 Breuer, Josef  179 Broca, Paul  178 Broch, Hermann  152, 154 Buber, Martin  118, 120 – 121, 125, 234 – 235 Burkhardt, Hans  230

Eichmann, Adolf  246 Eliot, T. S.  148 Ey, Henry  220 – 221 Farber, Leslie H.  226 Fechner, Gustav Theodor  180 Feuerbach, Ludwig  120 Frankl, Viktor E.  234 Freud, Sigmund  8, 9, 23, 75, 80, 114 – 115, 177 – 187, 212, 237, 240 – 242, 244, 249 – 252 Gadamer, Hans-Georg  75 Garroni, Emilio  166 Glöckner, Dorothea  155 – 156 Grisebach, Eberhard  120 Grøn, Arne  1 – 9, 13, 18 – 19, 21 – 23, 25 – 29, 32, 35 – 37, 41, 44 – 48, 53 – 61, 64 – 67, 85 – 100, 102 – 108, 109 – 111, 127, 145, 147, 150 – 151, 155, 159, 161, 172 – 175, 199 – 200, 207 – 208, 211, 213, 219, 227, 229 – 230, 233 – 235, 237 – 239, 248, 254 – 255

Dionysius the Areopagite  186 Derrida, Jacques  6, 53, 62 – 67, 220 Detzel, Katharina  193 – 195, 198 – 199, 201 – 202, 204 – 205, 207 – 208 DeWeese-Boyd, Ian  248 – 249 Dietz, Simone  253 Dilthey, Wilhelm  119 Dintinjana, Veronika  225

Habermas, Jürgen  135 Hegel, George Wilhelm Friedrich  7, 17, 20 – 21, 23, 32, 35, 39, 77, 81, 87 – 93, 95, 97 – 99, 101, 103 – 106, 157 Heidegger, Martin  2, 16 – 17, 22, 39, 55, 65 – 66, 72, 77 – 80, 101, 147, 150 – 151, 154, 158 – 159, 227 Henriksen, Mads Gram  211, 214 – 215, 221, 227 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von  177 – 178 Hohenegger, Hansmichael  166 Hölderlin, Friedrich  152 Hügli, Anton  248 Hume, David  167 Husserl, Edmund  6, 13, 15, 17 – 18, 20 – 24, 28, 218

Ebner, Ferdinand  120 Eco, Umberto  162, 165

Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich  120 Jankélévitch, Vladimir  153

Cavell, Marcia  251 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor  144 Conrad, Klaus  233 Cooper, Terry D.  134

264

Index of Names

Jaspers, Karl  2, 214, 216, 226 – 227, 232, 235 Jüngel, Eberhard  165 Kafka, Franz  56, 152 Kant, Immanuel  8, 33, 35, 50, 72, 79, 93, 97 – 98, 104 – 105, 134, 161, 165 – 169, 171, 173, 175, 185 – 186 Karenin, Alexey  69 Karrer, Ferdinand  205 Kierkegaard, Søren  1, 3 – 9, 13 – 32, 33 – 51, 53 – 54, 57 – 61, 65 – 67, 80, 85 – 102, 104 – 117, 109, 122, 131, 141 – 143, 145 – 147, 151, 155 – 158, 161, 168 – 174, 212 – 213, 222, 225 – 227, 229 – 235, 237 – 240, 242 – 243, 247 – 251, 254 – 255 – Anti-Climacus  14, 85 – 86, 92 – 93, 98, 170, 212 – 213 – Johannes Climacus  172, 47, 86, 88 – 89, 92, 106 – 107, 169 – 170, 172 – 174, 238 – Vigilius Haufniensis  43 – 44, 48, 95 Kimura, Bin  215, 219, 221 – 222 Kingo, Anders  168 Kogon, Eugen  247 Küchenhoff, Joachim  69, 72, 248, 253 Kulenkampff, Caspar  232 Laing, Ronald D.  9, 226, 235 Lange, Carl  196 – 199, 202, 206 – 208 Lear, Jonathan  241 Leuschner, Wolfgang  180 Levi, Primo  9, 240 – 241, 245 – 247, 250 Levinas, Emmanuel  2, 7, 44, 110, 121, 128 Luther, Martin  103, 248 Lyttkens, Hampus  162, 163, 165 Marcel, Gabriel  151 Marquard, Odo  180 Martensen, H. L.  148 Marx, Karl  23, 62, 75, 81, 135 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice  23, 200 – 201, 204 Meynert, Theodor  181 – 182 Minkowski, Eugène  212, 222 Montaigne, Michel de  109, 118 Muir, Edwin  8, 151 – 154, 158 Nagai, Mari  215 – 219 Naudin, Jean  220 – 221 Nietzsche, Friedrich  9, 23, 39, 72, 75, 77, 119, 141, 151 – 152, 226, 240, 243 – 245, 250

Ogawa, Toyoaki  220 – 221 Patočka, Jan  65 Parmenides  146 Paul  147 Pindar  7, 145 – 150, 159 Plato  113, 146, 149, 161, 172 Proust, Marcel  23 Przywara, Erik  8, 149 – 150 Ricœur, Paul  7, 56, 75, 80, 87 – 88, 92, 103 – 104, 118 – 120, 123 – 125 Rosenstock-Huessy, Eugen  120 Rosenzweig, Franz  120 Roudinesco, Elisabeth  63 – 65 Röhrig, Gustav  195 – 196, 198 – 199, 202, 205 – 206, 208 Ryle, Gilbert  218 Sappho  146, 149 Sartre, Jean-Paul  26, 69 – 70, 72, 78 – 79 Schelling, F. W. J.  30 Schiller, Friedrich  170 Schneider, Kurt  214 Shakespeare, Steven  35, 41 – 43, 46, 168 Socrates  31, 95, 168 – 169, 248 Speer, Albert  245 Storch, Alfred  232 Störring, Gustav E.  231 Susman, Margarete  235 Taylor, Charles  72 – 73 Theunissen, Michael  1, 3 – 4, 6 – 7, 13 – 21, 23, 32, 34 – 40, 44 – 46, 49, 88, 98, 102, 145 – 147, 149 – 150, 159, 212 – 213, 229, 252, 254 Tillich, Paul  134, 137 – 140, 151 Trendelenburg, Friedrich Adolf  8, 161 – 163, 167 – 168, 171 Valéry, Paul  23 Waldenfels, Bernhard  114, 118, 121 – 123, 125, 203 Wilder, Thornton  236 Winnicott, Donald Woods  253 Wood, Allen W.  69 – 70, 77

Index of Subjects Act, action, agency  15, 31, 46, 69, 75, 185, 200, 206, 238, 239, 248, 251 Activity  2, 7, 9, 26, 40, 43, 46 – 47, 62, 65, 106, 110, 127 – 128, 204, 233, 239, 249, 251, 255 Aesthetic  33 – 35, 41 – 42, 166 – 168, 171, 239, 253 Affectivity, affective  16, 34, 49, 76, 228, 255 Akrasia  7, 77, 248 Alterity  1, 115, 126, 212 – 213, 216, 218, 220 – 222 Alienation  134, 136, 198, 212, 227 – 229 Analogy  149 – 150, 170 – 174, 185 Animal  72, 137 Anxiety / Angst  1 – 2, 5 – 6, 13 – 14, 23 – 32, 36, 44 – 45, 47 – 49, 51, 60 – 61, 65 – 66, 76, 80, 87, 96, 103, 115, 138 – 139, 213, 230, 232 – 233, 235 – 236, 246, 251 – phenomenology of anxiety  24 Aphasia  8, 177 – 181, 186 – 187 Auschwitz  240 Authentic and inauthentic  4, 15, 19, 66, 79, 80, 101, 116, 124, 134, 135, 234, 253 Bad faith  69, 246 Barbarian (βάρβαροι)  113 – 114 Belief  39, 41 Bildung  32 Body  8, 56 – 57, 93, 115, 117, 164, 181, 183, 185 – 186, 200, 202 – 203 Care (Sorge)  227 Christianity, Christendom, Christian  14, 16, 33, 37, 39 – 43, 51, 55 – 56, 79, 87 – 90, 92, 96 – 97, 101, 103 – 105, 116, 124, 133, 135, 138, 144, 146 – 147, 153, 155, 169 – 171, 196, 206 Cognition, cognitive  24, 70, 71, 73, 76, 78, 91, 130, 167, 185, 228 Communication  74 – 75, 192, 208, 234 – existence-communication  87 Connectedness of life (Dilthey)  119

Conscience, consciousness  9, 65 – 67, 85 – 86, 99 – 100, 102, 240 – 244, 250 Createdness (Tillich)  138 Cultural  22, 76, 148 – cultural theory / studies  74, 191 Dasein (being-there)  80, 141, 142 – 144 Death  4, 14, 29, 65 – 67, 80, 145, 148, 154, 159, 194, 226 – 227, 236, 254 – 255 Decay  145, 192 Deconstruction  75, 89 Degenerated Art  191 Dependency, dependent  76, 134 – 135, 249 Derangement (Rimbaud)  113 Desire  18, 115 Despair  1, 5 – 6, 9, 13 – 21, 23, 29, 36 – 40, 45 – 46, 86 – 87, 90 – 94, 96, 98 – 99, 103, 105 – 106, 138 – 139, 157, 205, 212 – 213, 226 – 227, 229 – 235, 239 – 240, 247 Dialectical method  13, 21, 29, 32, 90, 103 Dialectics  87 – 88, 94 – 95, 101 – 102, 105 – 107, 251 Dialogue  121, 203 – 204, 207, 209, 234, 245 Dignity  133, 239 Eidetic reduction  24 Emotion, emotional  128, 228 Epoché  24, 203 Epistemology, epistemological, epistemic  34, 98, 79, 111, 165, 232 Eschatology, eschatological  20, 147 Estrangement  25, 81, 131, 133 – 134, 136 – 140, 144, 215, 227 Eternity  20, 99, 105, 146 – 147, 156 – 158, 169, 242 Ethics, ethical  6, 18 – 19, 33 – 51, 61, 67, 79, 86, 90 – 92, 94, 97, 99, 104, 134, 137, 239, 248, 253 – Anxious ethics  6, 35 – 36, 40, 47 – 51 European  116, 151, 152 Event  16 – 19, 26, 28, 88 – 89, 104 – 105, 123, 152

266

Index of Subjects

Everydayness  78 Evil  30, 34, 39, 48, 75, 79 – 80, 133 – 134, 136, 202 Exaiphnēs  146, 149 Examination of Anomalous World ­Experience (EAWE)  231, 233 Examination of Anomalous Self-Experience (EASE)  230 Existence, existential  2 – 7, 9, 27 – 28, 34 – 35, 36, 38 – 40, 42 – 43, 47 – 49, 50, 53 – 54, 58, 60, 71 – 72, 76 – 78, 80, 86 – 87, 89, 90, 95, 98, 105 – 107, 127, 129, 131, 134, 137 – 139, 142 – 143, 146, 152, 153, 169, 201 – 202, 207 – 208, 212 – 213, 222, 226, 232 – 236, 238 – 239, 253 – 255 – existential hermeneutics  2 – 3, 5, 9, 239 Experience  22, 37, 66, 73, 112, 134, 135, 165, 173, 191, 202 – 203, 212, 215, 217, 231 Expression  2, 9, 73, 193, 199 – 203, 208 Failure, fail  26, 62, 71, 75, 77 – 78, 81, 105, 131 – 132, 200 – 201 Faith  4, 6, 13, 14, 18 – 21, 24, 28 – 32, 39 – 40, 87 – 88, 90 – 93, 97, 105 – 107, 141, 153, 165, 169 – 170, 235 – bad faith  69, 246 Fallenness (Tillich)  138 Fear  7, 20, 26, 80 – 81, 111, 113, 115, 194 – 195, 199, 205, 119, 227, 231 Feeling  18 – 19, 47, 173, 211, 215 Finitude, finite  3, 4, 27, 29, 36, 67, 89, 137 – 144 Foreigner  112 Forgetfulness  157, 249, 253, 254 Forgiveness  90, 104 – 105, 123 – 124 Freedom, free  1, 7, 8, 19, 23, 25, 27 – 28, 30, 39, 43 – 47, 50, 54, 56, 57, 59, 62, 64 – 65, 72, 80 – 81, 88, 91, 93 – 94, 103, 105, 130, 142, 143, 153, 185, 187, 192, 194, 201, 204, 207, 208, 236, 238, 243, 246, 254 French  64, 105, 112, 121, 220 Friendship, friend  150, 228, 235, 236 Future  26, 34, 54, 63, 65, 117 – 118, 140, 144, 146 – 147, 149 – 150, 244, 250, 255 German  8, 88, 101, 104, 112, 116, 121, 151 – 152, 177, 206, 228, 230, 231, 232, 247 Gift  7, 66 – 67, 90 – 91, 125 – 126, 127, 138 –  139, 142 – 144, 153, 155, 157 – 158, 235, 255

Givenness  2 God  19, 20, 28, 30, 39, 40, 41, 42 – 43, 49, 85 – 88, 90, 91, 92 – 94, 97, 98, 100 – 101, 104 – 105, 107, 124, 139, 141, 144, 146 – 151, 154 – 158, 165, 167 – 169, 171 – 173, 178, 234 – 235, 242 – 243 Good, goodness  4, 34, 36, 43, 66 – 67, 86, 99, 129, 133, 136, 138, 157 – 158, 171, 202, 243, 246, 248 Guilt  9, 59, 61, 67, 71, 80, 115, 123, 227, 239, 242, 243 Hereditary sin  6, 56 – 62, 65, 68 Hermeneutics, hermeneutical  1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 9, 16, 17, 22, 72, 73 – 75, 105, 151, 239 History  4, 6, 53, 55, 58 – 60, 78, 92, 97, 104 – 106, 111, 145, 147, 148 – 149, 151, 153 Holocaust  240 Home  112, 114, 195, 228 Homo Faber  69 Homoiosis  88, 90 Hope  9, 18 – 19, 23, 45 – 46, 72, 87, 106, 117, 139, 157 – 159, 227, 230, 235 Human being  5, 18, 20, 23, 36, 31, 36, 38, 39, 44, 45, 46, 47, 57 – 58, 60, 61, 72 – 73, 77, 78, 79, 92, 98, 125, 128 – 129, 130, 135, 140, 141, 162, 169, 172, 211, 226, 236, 242, 243, 248 Human condition  4, 144, 174, 234, 255 Human fragility  35, 36 – 37, 39, 45 Human life  69, 70, 78, 119 – 120, 129, 130, 133, 137, 138, 140, 141, 143, 157, 158, 159 Hyperreflexivity  231 »I«  7, 97, 114, 118, 124, 218, 221 Id  241, 252 Identity  6, 7, 22, 25, 27, 36, 45, 54, 66, 78, 87, 90, 91, 95, 98, 99, 109, 113, 115, 118, 119 –  120, 121, 125 – 126, 153 – 154, 165, 199, 206 – idem / ipse-identity  118 – 119 – narrative identity  118 – 119 Idionomia and antagonomia  232 Infinite  7, 8, 15, 18, 25, 29, 40, 42 – 43, 66 – 67, 90, 92, 139 – 140, 142, 143, 147, 167, 169 – 170, 254 Inheritance  6, 55 – 56, 57, 60, 61 – 68 Inhumane  40, 137 Institution  194, 196 Interpersonal  217, 228, 232 Intersubjectivity, intersubjective  198 – 199

Index of Subjects

Intuition  24 Involuntary self-witnessing  216 – 218, 220, 221 Irony  6, 34 – 36, 42, 49 – 51, 101, 205 Judgment, judging  173, 175, 203, 208, 241, 242 – aesthetic judgement  168, 171 – the Last Judgment  124, 125 Kairos  140 Kataphatic  145, 149 – 151, 155 Knowledge  4, 5, 20, 73, 88, 92, 120, 132, 135, 150, 157, 163 – 164, 167, 178, 182, 185, 206, 252 Knowing-with-oneself (con-scientia, syn-­ eidesis)  240 Language  2, 113, 149 – 150, 162, 203 – 204, 234 Logos  154, 203 Logotherapy  234 Love, loving  4, 9, 18, 48, 87, 88, 91, 94, 99, 105 – 107, 112, 124, 139, 143, 152 – 153, 157 – 159, 233 – 234, 236, 245 Lying  69, 71, 246, 250, 252 Meaning  54, 55, 74, 75, 104, 113, 197, 202, 234, 236, 239 Memory  9, 53, 103 – 105, 125, 153, 157, 240, 245, 249, 252 – 253 Mental  70, 73, 78, 100, 128, 191, 192, 196, 204, 230, 234, 251 – 252 Metaphor  162, 163, 165, 207 Metaphysics, metaphysical  33, 41, 72, 75, 107, 117, 147, 163, 164 Mind  4, 74, 78, 162, 251 – 254 Mineness  227 Modernity  38 – 39, 41, 93, 94 Morality, moral  5, 19, 34, 71, 101, 105, 129, 130, 135, 138, 241, 242, 245, 249, 251 Mortal, mortality  40, 66, 148, 149, 152, 254, 255 Naïve  22 Narration  119 – 120, 125 – narrative identity  118 Negativity, negativism  2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 20, 21, 37, 49, 54, 75, 81, 86, 87, 90, 92,

267

98, 104, 105, 147 – 148, 213, 232, 238 – 240, 244, 248, 253 – 255 – content-related negativism  14 – methodical negativism  14 – negative anthropology  13, 14, 21 – negative dialectics  76 – negative phenomenology  21 – 23 – normative negativism  15 Neurology  178, 179, 180 – 187 Nihilism  39, 40, 226, 235 Noesis and noema  24 Norm, normativity, normative  1, 5, 6, 14, 15, 20 – 21, 35, 36 – 41, 43 – 47, 49, 91, 94, 98, 106, 131, 134, 135 – 136, 137, 238 Oblivion  29, 145, 159, 238, 249 Ontology, ontological  22, 34 – 35, 41, 42 – 44, 46, 48, 51, 74, 78 – 79, 85 – 86, 88 89, 99, 134 – 135 Openness  30, 75, 110, 118, 125, 207, 221 Orientation, (re‑)orientation  80, 130, 135, 201 – 202, 207 – 208, 234 Other, otherness  7, 23, 33 – 34, 46, 57 – 59, 66 – 67, 75, 86, 87, 90 – 91, 93 – 94, 95 – 96, 99, 104, 111 – 114, 123, 136, 142, 154, 158, 174, 177, 211, 213, 215 – 216, 218, 220 – 222, 228 – 229, 230, 231, 234, 241 – hallucinatory Other  220 – 222 Ousia  88 – 91 Paradox, paradoxical  41 – 42, 69, 70, 79, 88, 92, 153, 169 – 170, 172 – 173, 221, 231 – 232, 238, 251, 255 Passion  18, 91, 92, 96, 103 – 104, 106, 169 Passivity  7, 9, 26, 40, 46 – 47, 50, 62, 65, 106, 110, 127 – 128, 143, 200, 204, 220, 233, 239, 254 – 255 Past  6, 36, 53 – 57, 60, 62 – 65, 117, 140, 148 – 149, 158, 245 – 246, 250, 252 – 253 Pathos  18, 23 Pathology  2, 4, 14 Perception, perceptual  198, 200, 203, 220, 231 Person, personhood  40, 48, 73, 96, 98, 99, 117, 134 – 135, 141, 169, 222, 229, 232 Phenomenology  2, 6, 13, 16 – 17, 21 – 24, 32, 35, 72, 85, 89, 95, 229, 232, 235 – dialectical phenomenology  95 – phenomenological description  13, 21

268

Index of Subjects

– phenomenological hermeneutics  16 – phenomenology of anxiety  24 Philosophy, philosophical  2, 3, 4, 21, 22, 23, 33 – 34, 37, 39, 42, 55, 64, 69, 70, 71, 72, 77, 88, 92, 93 – 94, 101, 103 – 105, 106, 107, 110, 116, 117, 127, 144, 145 – 146, 148, 150 – 151, 159, 161, 162, 165, 248 – philosophical anthropology  72 Pleasure  48, 244 Politics, political  34, 101, 106, 114, 135 – 136, 137, 196, 247 Poetry, poem, poetology  8, 113, 150, 152 – 153, 153, 171, 177 – 188 Positivism  148 Power  18 – 20, 25, 31, 75, 135, 148, 208, 235 Powerless  134 Pre-reflective  201, 204, 253 Prinzhorn Collection  8, 191, 193, 197, 199, 201, 204, 207 – 208 Promise  154 – 155 Protestant  92 Psychiatry  4, 14, 191, 226 – 227, 233, 236 Psychoanalysis  9, 14, 114 – 115, 179, 180, 237, 241, 248 Psychology, psychological  3, 25, 28, 60, 69, 76, 85, 116, 135, 148, 180, 185, 198, 225, 235, 248 Reason, reasoning  72, 94, 106, 121, 154 Recognition  7, 29, 88, 89 – 90, 94, 95 – 96, 99, 104 – 105, 107 Reflection, reflective  3, 47, 70, 80, 94, 104, 107, 110, 149, 151, 159, 166, 173, 193, 216 Religion, religious  8, 33 – 34, 39, 41, 42, 79, 88, 92, 94, 95, 98, 101, 103 – 104, 129, 136 – 137, 145, 150, 155, 156, 159, 170 – 171, 197, 242 Responsibility  6, 9, 40, 46, 65 – 68, 76, 143, 236, 240, 243, 254 Responsiveness  121 – 122, 125 Salvation  25, 138 – 139, 146 – 150, 158, 196, 206 – 207, 208 Sameness  66, 88, 119 Science, scientific  4, 5, 60, 115, 122, 150, 177 – 178, 185 Schizophrenia  9, 191, 211 – 223, 225 – 236 Self  2, 4, 14 – 15, 18 – 20, 22, 36 – 39, 66, 86, 90, 91, 92, 103, 107, 109 – 113, 140,

141 – 142, 144, 148, 153 – 154, 212, 214, 229 – 230 – self-affirmation  132, 138 – self-alienation  1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9, 78, 81, 127 – 128, 131 – 137, 139, 144, 191 – 193, 197, 199, 204, 206 – 207, 208 – 209, 211 – 213, 222 – 223 – self-conscious­ness  5, 73, 91, 92, 95 – self-deception  7, 9, 69 – 71, 77, 78, 80 – 81, 86, 132, 237, 240, 244, 245 – 249, 250 – 253, 254 – self-deficiency  71, 77, 78, 80 – self-deter­mination  7, 32, 73, 93 – 94 – self-disorders  4, 9, 213 – 214 – self-estrangement  81, 134, 222 – self-givenness  21 – 22 – self-interpreting  7, 72 – self-investigation  73 – self-knowledge  9, 73, 92, 97, 132, 144, 215, 237, 239 – 240, 247 – 248, 250, 253 – self-orientation  129 – 130, 134 – self-redoubling  216, 219, 221, 222 – self-relation  14 – 19, 22 – 23, 25 – 27, 32, 35, 37 – 40, 45, 54, 87, 93 – 94, 104, 105, 227, 230 – 231 – self-realization  16, 20 – 21, 38, 46 – self-transparency  73, 76, 243 – self-understanding  1, 2, 7, 21, 36 – 37, 46, 57, 69, 73, 76, 77, 81, 109 – 111, 112, 129 – 130, 131, 132, 137, 192 – 193, 207 – 208, 239, 250, 254 – self-witnessing  216 – 218, 220 – 221 – selfing  128, 134 – sense of self  2, 70, 148, 227, 230 – 213 – becoming a self  128, 130 Selfhood  1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 8, 9, 23, 35, 37 – 38, 44 – 45, 90, 119, 129, 133, 136, 223, 225, 227 – 229, 231, 233, 235 Shame  76, 80, 227 Sickness  14, 20, 92, 106, 145, 226, 244 Sin  6, 14, 28, 43, 48, 53, 56 – 60, 61 – 62, 65, 67 – 68, 75, 79, 90, 92 – 93, 96 – 97, 98 – 99, 104 – 105, 107, 135, 138 – 139, 171 Skepticism  103 Social, sociality  27, 29, 32, 37, 71, 72, 74, 76, 78, 86, 89, 93, 97, 99, 103, 106, 133, 135, 136, 141, 148, 191 – 192, 202, 206, 217, 230 – 231, 241, 243, 251 Society  135 – 136, 154, 192, 206, 244

Index of Subjects

Sociology  114 Solidarity  153 – 154, 158 – 159, 205 Sosein  141 – 144 Soul  4, 66, 103, 105, 117, 124 – 125, 126 Sovereign, sovereignty  239, 243 Speech, speaking  75 – 76, 101, 124, 126, 178, 185 Spiritual  103, 138 Stranger, strangeness  7, 109, 111 – 114, 115, 122, 134 Subject  16, 23, 66 – 67, 70, 71, 75, 76, 77, 78, 79, 92, 102, 105, 111, 121, 201 Subjectivity  1, 3, 6, 7, 9, 13, 22 – 23, 25 – 27, 54, 65, 79, 81, 85, 87 – 90, 92 – 95, 97, 103 – 104, 107 – 108, 109, 127, 169, 192, 207, 208, 211 – 212, 213, 214, 219, 221 – 223, 239, 241 Sublime  180 Sudden, suddenness  8, 146, 149 – 150 Suffering  15 – 17, 23, 34, 35, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45 – 46, 75 – 76, 80, 99, 106, 192, 199, 206, 217, 230, 236, 238 Suicide, suicidality  30, 226, 229, 230 – 231 Taste  166, 173 Temporality, temporal  3, 19, 44, 53 – 54, 63, 74, 105, 140, 143, 145, 146 – 147, 149, 152, 155 – 158, 169 Things themselves  21 Theology, theological  37 – 40, 57, 75, 86 – 87, 89, 92, 101, 103, 105, 106, 137, 145 – 146, 148 – 149, 151, 155, 172, 185 – 186 – apophatic theology  149 – kataphatic theology  145, 149, 151, 155

269

– theology of time  145, 146, 148 – 149, 151, 155 Thinking  2, 3, 8, 33, 47, 49, 55, 62, 70, 75, 86, 88, 96 – 97, 104, 107, 145, 148, 152, 161, 165 – 168, 172 – 175, 237 – 239, 245, 253 – 255 Thomism  150 Time  3, 4, 6, 7 – 8, 25, 27, 53 – 54, 63, 97, 119, 145 – 151, 152 – 159, 169, 198, 201, 202, 203, 205, 235, 254 – 255 – kataphatic theology of time  145, 149, 151, 155 – negative theology of time  146 – positive theology of time  148 Transcendence  4, 8, 41 – 43, 51, 92, 145 – 146, 172, 174 – 175, 208, 235 Traumatic  76 Trust  120, 178, 234, 245 Truth  17, 21, 24, 69, 77, 79, 96, 97, 104, 112, 124 – 125, 126, 141 – 142, 152 – 155, 158, 169, 172, 186, 202, 206, 213, 235 Uncertainty  80, 169 Understanding  8, 9, 74 – 76, 77, 81, 89, 90, 109 – 111, 113, 127, 130, 131, 134, 135, 136, 137, 170, 172 – 175, 207, 235, 250 Value  29, 44, 48 Violence, violent  76, 78, 194, 197 Virtue  3, 154, 245 Vulnerability, vulnerable  145, 221 – 222 Will  7, 16, 26, 75, 77, 78, 79, 85, 93, 100, 116, 142, 232, 244, 248 – 249